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 Pathfinder Bestiary 2: Lamia Matriarch to Mu Spore  Lamia Matriarch (CR 8 Monstrous Humanoid [Shapechanger]) An upgraded version of the lamia, with a snake body rather than a lion body below her human half. I'd like to say that this might be a reference to how the history of the mythological figure Lamia – or the lamiae, as even the singularity versus plurality varies across various tellings and reimaginings – is so convoluted and her appearance frequently varies from serpentine to generically beast-like to just humanoid. Of course, the actual reason they exist is probably because of the lamia noble, the serpentine lamia leaders that have been in Dungeons and Dragons since the 1981 Fiend Folio. Also, unfortunately, the lamia matriarch really doesn't have much going for her. Other than a few buffed numbers, she really isn't all that different at all from a regular lamia, with the same Wisdom drain attack, almost the same spell-like abilities, and no really snake-related powers. Not even a constrict! What a shame. Leng Spider (CR 14 Huge Magical Beast [Extraplanar]) Another one of the monsters of Lovecraft's Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, the spiders of Leng are bloated purple arachnids that fought with the Plateau's "almost-men". In Pathfinders, they are similarly the enemies of the denizens of Leng, fighting against them as well as life on other planes in search of more and more slaves. Thankfully for everyone else, they are one of the very few extraplanar creatures out there that have no Dimension Door or Planeshift whatsoever, forcing them to rely on the portals of others for transport. Once they actually do get where they want to go, though, leng spiders are a terror to behold. On top of having massive spell resistance and fast healing 10, they have a venom that deals 1d4 Constitution damage plus the confusion status ailment every round for 6 rounds, can craft masterwork bolas and masterwork flails out of their webbing, and can cast spell-like abilities that include Charm Monster, Dispel Magic, Freedom of Movement, Insanity, Invisibility, and Mirage Arcana.  Leprechaun (CR 2 Small Fey) I'm fairly sure leprechauns don't need much introduction. These short and solitary trickster fairies have become more or less synonymous with Ireland and caricatured into oblivion, and have been around in Dungeons and Dragons for the majority of its history. And surprise, surprise, they show up again here. Leprechauns epitomize the obnoxious little Chaotic Neutral poo poo-goblins that so many non-Evil D&D fey are, with pastimes that include intentionally stealing objects specifically to lead the object's owner on a chase before throwing the object back to them, spreading false rumors about being able to cast Wish in exchange for gold in order to accumulate vast hoards of wealth in their hovels, and making forests seem haunted. Their spell-like abilities unsurprisingly include spells like Dancing Lights, Ghost Sound, Invisibility, and Prestidigitation to facilitate these tricks, as well as a constantly active Shillelagh spell on the clubs they carry. Leprechauns also get a +4 boost to their caster level on all spells if they specifically cast them with the intent to deceive, humiliate, or trick someone. Leucrotta (CR 5 Large Magical Beast) A monster of Roman and Medieval bestiaries, the leucrotta (sometimes spelled with just one T) was first described by our old buddy Pliny the Elder, who stated it was a beast with the body and tail of a lion, the head of a badger, cloven hooves, and bone ridges rather than teeth, which was capable of miming human speech. This is all true in Pathfinder, but on top of that it is also said that leucrottas are hyena-demon hybrids, which I guess would explain why they are Chaotic Evil. Well, that and the fact that they were Chaotic Evil in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. The two main things the leucrotta has on its side are a bite that ignores 5 hardness of any object and has Improved Crit, as well as Mass Suggestion on its sound mimicry. Leucrottas sometimes lead packs of gnolls or crocottas, the latter of which are stated to be dire hyenas with the Advanced Creature simple template added on. Locathah (CR ½ Medium Humanoid [Aquatic]) The locathah have been around since the beginning. Like, "the old-rear end OD&D white box" beginning. Specifically, they were part of the Blackmoor supplement, which also introduced the Assassin and Monk classes and rules for swimming and other underwater activities. They've always been gillmen, but their appearance has evolved somewhat over time: a stereotypical Creature from the Black Lagoon look back in OD&D, this sort of weird codfish look in AD&D, and a face and ornamentation clearly based on the lionfish from Third Edition onward. Unsurprisingly, the Pathfinder locathah looks a lot like the 3E Monster Manual's locathah, but with the neat added flair of having the weird knobbly chest and belly plating you see on a lot of seahorse species. Pathfinders's locathah have a rather  life: surface dwellers often loathe them because they can't tell the difference between the locathah and any of the myriad of evil fish people such as the sahuagin, so the locathah try to overcompensate by being ridiculously generous in their aid of air-breathing humanoids. Locathah clans will point out any local water hazards to passing ships, and some even lead you to sunken treasure for the nominal fee of some nice ceramic ware, metal weapons, or their favorite land snack of tubers. They are also extremely communical, going to almost suicidal lengths to save members of their clan if they are captured or attacked. The clan leader is a matriarch who acts as both chieftain and the only egg layer. Each adult locathah raises one of the matriarch's spawn at a time as their own. When not gathering or hunting for fish, crustaceans, shellfish, and seaweed with the aid of domesticated moray eels, locathah typically spend their time with their extended family or crafting tools and art with bone, coral, and stone. Some particularly assholish Evil seafarers are known to exploit the communalism of these fishfolk, capturing a matriarch in order to both lure in her whole clan for capture and have an ever-breeding source of new slaves. On the mechanics side, locathahs are far less interesting than they are on the fluff end of the spectrum, having slightly higher stats than humans in everything but Strength and Constitution, +2 natural armor to AC, 10 feet land speed but 60 feet swim speed, and no real special attacks or strange abilities to speak of. Most locathah don't have class levels, but they can indeed take them, and a tribe is stated to usually have two level 1 to 3 Fighters and a level 3 to 6 Cleric for the matriarch. It's a shame that after they got so much flavor spent on them, they ended up not even appearing in the "here are some Pathfinder Bestiary series monsters, now as player races!" book that was the Advanced Race Guide; the fishy role there was instead taken by the gillmen of The Inner Sea World Guide, which I find far less interesting since they are just humans with gills and webbed digits that come from not-Atlantis and typically serve either the aboleths or the Great Old Ones. Lurker in Light (CR 5 Small Fey [Extraplanar]) While they might resemble glowing pixies, lurkers in light aren't your typical D&D fey. Instead, these guys are horribly sadistic and violent, to a point that even some of the cruel fae of old Celtic mythology might be a bit skeeved out. These guys actually engage in humanoid sacrifice to open portals either for themselves or something they wish to summon. Lurkers have an abject hatred for anything that is connected to shadows or even just found in dark places, so subterranean species such as dwarves and gnomes get the vast brunt of their murderous rage, but their inscrutable methods are never truly predictable enough that anyone can claim to be safe. The lurker in light has a special poison dealing 1 Strength drain followed by 5 rounds of 1d3 Strength damage that it applies to weapons it wields, has the same light invisibility that hellcats have, a 1/day use of Dimension Door between and two locations that are in areas of bright light, spell-like abilities that include Blindness/Deafness, Dancing Lights, and Daylights, and the aforementioned ritual sacrifice. The ritual sacrifice must have humanoid victims, casting a Gate spell if the right number of bodies hit the floor. It takes five sacrifices just to open a Gate specifically for traveling through for a minute, while attempting to summon creatures requires a sacrifice for every hit die that the creature or creatures would have in total. Oh, and if you kill one its body turns to special dust that counts as 2d6 flasks of holy water.  Lycanthropes Lycanthropes are back, and they're not really better than ever because these are just the ones from the 3E Monster Manual that the first Pathfinder Bestiary didn't cover – there won't be any fully new lycanthropes until Pathfinder Bestiary 4. All of these are technically templates, but instead of actually showing a template they instead have a sample character and assume you're going to go back and read the lycanthrope rules from the Pathfinder Bestiary/SRD/wherever. Werebear (CR +0 Template) These guys hulk out into big ol' grizzly bears and are the only naturally Good lycanthrope. I've heard it said many a time that this is because of Beorn the bear shapeshifter from Tolkien's The Hobbit, and I'll assume that's correct rather than wrack my brains trying to figure it out otherwise (though, admittedly, lycanthrope alignment choices are usually arbitrary anyway). They are big, strapping musclefolk with red or brown hair in their humanoid form and tend to be isolationists. Most werebears will only actively engage in combat against Evil creatures in their territories, but some particularly ill-tempered ones will attack any aggressive trespasser, the most animalistic even eating transgressors.  The sample werebear is a level 4 Ranger. Wereboar (CR +0 Template) Crazy Chaotic Neutral pig people. They are fat and stocky in humanoid form, have large families, are so exceedingly bad-tempered and violent that even werewolves and weretigers tend to avoid them, and that's pretty much it as far as information given about them goes. The example wereboar's a level 2 Barbarian, and the stat block given already has the alterations for being in a Barbarian rage state because it's assumed that if you're fighting a wereboar they are definitely going to be activating that class feature immediately. Weretiger (CR +0 Template) Pathfinder Bestiary 2 posted:Weretigers in humanoid form have large eyes, long noses, and sharp cheekbones. Most have brown or red hair, though a few have white, black, or even blue-gray. Their movements appear careful yet casual, and a person observing one could easily assume he’s watching a skilled pickpocket, graceful dancer, or sultry courtesan. The only other things we're told about weretigers is that they are solitary and only meet to mate, and that they love to stalk and kill sapient beings because hey they're Neutral Evil. The sample one's a level 4 Rogue with a masterwork dagger, the better to gracefully dance into your spine with. Magma Ooze (CR 7 Large Ooze [Fire]) It's an ooze, but fiery! Any weapon touching these guys needs to make a DC 19 Fortitude save or take 4d6 damage, but they're weak to cold damage and are temporarily petrified by water, so presumably the best method of dealing with one is to just dump it in a pond or something. There are a few minor variants based on what type of rock the magma ooze spawned from: brimstone magma oozes are made from fiendish energy-tainted rock and get the Fiendish Creature simple template, crystalline magma oozes are made from heavy mineral-laced rock and have bubbles in them that pop on a melee attack to deal 1d6 fire damage to the attacker, and poisonous magma oozes are made from toxic metals and have a contact poison that deals 1d2 Constitution damage per round for 6 rounds. Mandragora (CR 4 Small Plant) The mandragora, or mandrake, is a plant in the genus Mandrogara or the species Bryonia alba. Unsurprisingly, its vaguely humanoid-looking root with hallucinogenic properties upon consumption happens to have inspired a lot of weird folk healing and occult lore around it. Probably the most well known is the idea that it screams when pulled out of the ground, and this scream can be dangerous or even deadly. Pathfinder's mandragora a horrid little fat tree-baby that has a 2% chance of being born if a demon's corpse or ichor provides nutrients to a mundane mandrake root. It is a violent Chaotic Evil monster that spends most of its time rooted in place but viciously attacks anything that gets close to its lair. The mandragora can indeed shriek, but only once per day, and it merely forces a DC 15 Will save to avoid 1d4 rounds of being nauseated. Its root-fingers also deliver a poison that induces confusion and fatigue for 4 rounds. This poison and the mandagora's sap-blood can be mixed with 1,000GP of alchemical ingredients to buff a casting of the Scrying spell, forcing a -4 penalty on the save to resist the spell. Megafauna Dinosaurs not your deal? Well, no worries, there's some prehistoric mammals here for your lost world perusal as well. Arsinoitherium (CR 7 Large Animal) While it looks vaguely like a rhinoceros with two huge horns side-by-side on the front of its face, Arsinoitherium was in fact closer to elephants, dugongs, and manatees. They're sadly not really much different than rhinos from a game mechanics perspective, dwelling on warm plains and having the combo of powerful charge and trample special attacks. That's a shame, as the Fayum and Aydim formations that Arsinoitherium fossils are known from would have been tropical forest and coastal swamps, and the species' legs seem to be built for a semi-aquatic lifestyle. A weird hippo-rhino living on the mangroves near the beach would definitely fill a less occupied niche in Pathfinder as far as I can tell. Glyptodon (CR 6 Large Animal) If I had started doing this review last year, I would have said that Glyptodon is one of the most famous of the glyptodonts, a group of creatures that were superficially armadillo-like but not actually that directly related. Good thing I'm in 2016, where we now know that glyptodontines were in fact armadillos. That makes describing them much easier. So yeah, Glypdoton was a cow-sized armadillo with a weird stubby pinecone tail. It is described here as being ill-tempered and often hunted to use its shell as armor. It defends itself with +12 natural armor and a pretty vicious (1d10 damage) pair of claw attacks. Megaloceros (CR 4 Large Animal) Megaloceros, also known as the Irish elk, was a large deer with ridiculously huge antlers that existed in northern Europe alongside woolly mammoths and other Pleistocene standbys. We aren't told anything about them besides their name and size by the absolutely miniscule flavor text provided, but I'd like to think that they are ridden into battle for no real reason other than that it looks cool and I remember the Megaloceros being a combat unit in some prehistoric animal-themed RTS whose name I forget. Megatherium (CR 5 Huge Animal) The largest of the ground sloths, Megatherium lived in Pleistocene South America alongside our previous page buddy Glyptodon. In spite of its impressive 20 foot length, huge front claws, and general potential for being interesting, all we get once again are its weight, length, and a single sentence on something else (this time that it can use its tail as part of a tripod stance, like a kangaroo). This is probably why it's a bad idea to dictate that you need to keep all of a monster's entry on one page and then shove two longform 3E/Pathfinder style stat blocks, two animal companion stat blocks, and art all on that same page. Turns out that ends up nixing how much space you have for flavorful things.  Mercane (CR 5 Large Outsider [Extraplanar]) Back in AD&D, there was a species of giant blue space elf merchants called the arcanes who were introduced in Spelljammer and later also appeared in Planescape. They returned in Third Edition, now with a new name of mercane as a presumed precaution against confusing "arcane" the race and "arcane" the magic type. Fast forward to Pathfinder, and the mercane are back, now with a new and more alien coat of paint on their physical design. Flavor-wise, though, they're still enigmatic interplanar magic item dealers. Mercanes have 3/day Dimension Door and Invisibility and 1/day Plane Shift for spell-like abilities, can make any one chest into a Secret Chest indefinitely (but it has to de-enchant the last one to enchant a new one), and wield masterwork falchions for self-defense. Merrow, Freshwater (CR 3 Large Humanoid [Giant]) and Saltwater (CR 6 Huge Humanoid [Giant]) The name of the merrows comes from a type of merfolk from Celtic mythology, which had beautiful mermaid women and horrendous fish-ogre men. In Dungeons and Dragons, they were merely amphibious ogres. And now, in the Pathfinder Bestiary 2, they have graduated to being close relatives of ogres that actually have superior stats. They also have no mentions of rape or incest in their entry at all, which makes them superior from Pathfinder's ogres in that way as well. Merrows are communal predators that attack in packs and share their loot and food equally, raiding villages on the shoreline in the dead of night. They're also ridiculously limber compared to ogres, with Dexterity 19 on the ogre-sized freshwater merrow and Dexterity 16 on the massive 20 foot tall whale-hunting saltwater merrow. Mihstu (CR 8 Medium Outsider [Air, Elemental, Extraplanar]) An Evil gas cloud from AD&D's Monster Cards series and the AD&D Monster Manual II, the mihstu popped up in the Tome of Horrors and thus made its way here. Mihstus seek engage in violence with misty made from their smoky bodies, rending at foes while lapping up 1d2 Constitution worth of blood every turn it has a foe pinned. The mihstu actually has no nourishnment gained from this and even spits the blood out a few rounds afterward, so it is written off as yet another case of Evil creatures doing Evil things in the flavor text. Mihstus will sometimes give information in exchange for interesting murder victims, so rakshasas, evil cloud giants, and other villanous Outsiders and extraplanar beings will sometimes team up with them.  Mongrelman (CR 1 Medum Monstrous Humanoid) Ah yes, the mongrelmen. Believe it or not, these guys were strangely popular back in the day. They first appeared in Zeb Cook's adventure Dwellers in the Forbidden City, which also gave us the yuan-ti and aboleth amongst other things, and then kept popping up in things like the Monstrous Compendium, Monstrous Manual, and even The Complete Book of Humanoids. Mongrelmen were outcast weirdos that resulted when a ton of different sapient species got down to loving and eventually created...these things. They even showed up briefly in the early 3.0 days of Third Edition thanks to the books Fiend Folio and Races of Destiny, and they were of course part of the Tome of Horrors otherwise they wouldn't be here. These days, though, I can't really think of anyone who nostalgically sighs and goes "man, remember the mongrelmen?" outside of a certain webcomic creator and Paizo. Mongrelmen in Pathfinder, like those that came before them, are weirdos that look like a patchwork of numerous races and live deep underground in order to avoid the numerous surface races that all shun them for being gross and ugly and maybe part of an enemy race even though they clearly look nothing at all like any single thing out there. While they live only around 35 years, mongrelmen are extremely hardy, hardworking, and docile, which makes many underground Evil races attracted to them as perfect slave labor. The mongrelmen almost never attempt to escape slavery, either, as they take a "this too shall pass" attitude to bondage. Mechanically, mongrelmen are extremely uninteresting as they have sound mimicry and nothing else to differentiate their stat block from any other number of hardy but uncharismatic Monstrous Humanoids. The Tome of Horrors actually provided a table of randomly rolled bonuses from a mongrelman's freaky features, and the only reason I can think of for excluding it in Pathfinder Bestiary 2 is someone freaking out that it would have broken the all-sacred one page per monster at max rule. Moonflower (CR 8 Huge Plant) A massive Audrey II-looking plant that is typically found in small clusters. While they are True Neutral rather than any flavor or Evil, moonflowers actively refuse to speak to those that can speak with plants, even Druids, but constantly telepathically broadcast mysterious signals to each other. Attempting to crash their weird telepath party results in one's mind receiving "an assault of horrible visions of terrifying junles filled with ancient, sentient, and malign plants". Plot hook or just a weird monster plant's way of punking eavesdroppers? You decide! The moonflower's big mechanic gimmick is that it has a special variant of Swallow Whole called Plant Prison. After swallowing someone, the moonflower pops them out as a large cocoon of vegetable matter that restricts movement and deals 2d6 bludgeoning and 2d6 acid damage per round and has a combo of 25 hit points and AC 15. If the creature inside the pod is size Small or larger and dies, 1d4 hours later a fully grown moonflower pops out thanks to the nourishment of pulped up flesh. Moonflowers can also trundle along at the speed of a halfling and release a 50 foot radius burst of light that forces a DC 20 Fortitude save to avoid 1d4 rounds of blindness. Mosquitos Few animals are as maligned and loathed as the mosquito: being loudly buzzing, blood-drinking (in the females, specifically), and potentially disease-carrying tends to do that. The giant mosquito (CR 6 Medium Vermin) ramps this up to an eleven by being a human-sized blood siphoning hellbeast that can murder a commoner in a round. Its 1d8 piercing damage bite attack simultaneously also deals 2d4 bleed damage, 1d2 Constitution of blood drain, a grab attack, and transmits malaria, which here is statted up as 1d3 Constitution and 1d3 Wisdom damage every day. These things are stated to naturally go after dinosaurs, dragons, and other particularly massive wildlife, but in civilized regions will lay waste to livestock and villagers. While they don't have full size range variants like some other giant invertebrates, there are two variants mentioned: the goblin mosquito (a giant mosquito with the Young Creature simple template) and the giant jungle mosquito (one with the Advanced Creature and Giant simple templates). Mosquito swarms (CR 3 Diminutive Vermin [Swarm]) have 2d6 swarm damage, 1d6 bleed damage, and malaria transmission, so just regular ol' mosquitos aren't necessarily pushovers either in the D&Dverse.  This art is from Pathfinder Presents: Mystery Monsters Revisited, not the Bestiary 2, but it seemed like a shame not to use it. Mothman (CR 6 Medium Monstrous Humanoid) When you think big name mystery monsters of the United States, you probably think of Bigfoot first, but for most Mothman probably isn't far behind. This frightful flying fiend supposedly menaced the sleepy West Virginia town of Point Pleasant during 1966 and 1967. While initial reports described it as a giant bird or a winged man – in both cases, the most striking feature was said to be glowing red eyes – pop culture evolution has turned it into a literal moth humanoid in a lot of depictions, and Pathfinder isn't the exception. The Chaotic Neutral mothmen here are just as mysterious as the supposed real life enigma, seeing themselves as agents of some mysterious higher fate that deliberately act out an unknowable agenda, often to catastrophic ends. What is the end goal? Who knows, it's possible that even the mothmen really know for sure. They can very easily veer wildly from a great ally to a terrible foe depending on what the circumstances at hand happen to be. The mothman has an array of natural spell-like abilities such as Detect Thoughts, Ghost Sound, Misdirection, Nightmare, Phantasmal Killer, and Project Image, but also has a unique spell-like ability called Agent of Fate. This is a 1/day special power that allows it to create any level 5 or lower spell of any sort as an SLA, but only so long as it is deemed to steer the flow of fate. Some specific examples given include using Rusting Grasp to weaken and destroy a structure that needed to cause a catastrophe (presumably referencing the Silver Bridge Collapse on December 15, 1967, after which the Mothman was supposedly never seen again) or cast Raise Dead to bring back someone with an important destiny. It also has a 30 foot gaze attack that forces a DC 18 Will save to avoid being shaken for 1d4 rounds; if you are already suffering from a fear effect, including the one this gaze attack brings, it instead deals 1d4 Wisdom damage. Mu Spore (CR 21 Colossal Plant) A monster from the Epic Level Handbook and thus the SRD, the mu spore is a rare, titanic, and extremely powerful plant 100 feet in length at the very least and coated in numerous tentacles that flail around its bloated gas-filled body. These massive fungal blimps only very seldomly venture forth from their cavern lairs to rain down death and consume all in their path. And when I say rain down death, I do mean rain it: every 1d4 rounds, they can send out an eruption of spores in a 100 foot cone that rip apart any non-plant in their path with 20d8 damage. Strangely enough, mu spores also have ridiculously high mental scores of 18 Intelligence, 28 Wisdom, and 29 Charisma, and since they are Chaotic Neutral they might actually be willing to discuss matters civilly and even share their huge ranks in Knowledge (Dungeoneering, Geography, and Nature) if you can figure out how to make first contact and convince them to stop being all apocalyptic and monstery. Next Time in Pathfinder Bestiary: We'll take a journey from N up to Q, with friends like the the qlippoth and old neh-thalggu.
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Jun 28, 2016 08:50
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Nessus posted:Can the servant things create similar creatures of their kind independently? Like ol' Frankenstein's original monster, mebbe? Theoretically...but the thing about the Unspeakable Servant ritual is that it requires the caster to pluck out their eye and place it into the mass to be transformed. This eye then becomes the sole eye of the Unspeakable Servant, so creating a "child" would require the original Servant donate their only eye (which, notably, was the original eye of the human creator). So theoretically you could get several "generations" of unspeakable servants passing along an eye to their children, but they're not likely to be motivated to.
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Jun 28, 2016 11:37
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Dark•Matter The default player organization had a group of demon-fighting kung-fu bigfoots. It was pretty awesome.
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Jun 28, 2016 14:05
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Fossilized Rappy posted:Megaloceros (CR 4 Large Animal) For no reason beyond that it's kind of awesome, these things popped up in the 3.5E Frostburn splat specifically to be the favored holy mounts of the Knights of the Iron Glacier, an order of paladins and like-minded fellows who seek to bring order and civilization to the wild and dangerous north.
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Jun 28, 2016 14:38
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Count Chocula posted:Which also fits into the X-Files. Apparently you can create strong AI in a trailer. You can store a strong AI in a subway car.
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Jun 28, 2016 15:17
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If I read the consensus right, the biggest strike against Monster of the Week was that it had no consistent, inherent theme or tone. That most people seemed to want to use it to run a monster-hunting agency seemed to confirm that for me. It's also funny to me that that Mortal Kombat: Generic Subtitle I Can't Remember spec trailer (with Michael Jai White!) reimagined the franchise with all the bad guys as X-Files villains.
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Jun 28, 2016 16:23
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Fossilized Rappy posted:Megaloceros (CR 4 Large Animal) Paraworld, by chance?
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Jun 28, 2016 17:19
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Drakyn posted:Paraworld, by chance? Hey, I'm not the only one who remembers that one. Isn't that also the one with the gatling T-Rex?
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Jun 28, 2016 18:13
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Demon: the Descent The Southeast Quadrant of Seattle is probably the hardest to define. Its history has always been of diversity and minority communities, with nearly 60 languages spoken within just a few square miles. The Capitol Hill neighborhood is famous as an LGBT area, while Central District is the home of the traditional African-American community of Seattle, the International District is heavy in Asian population, there is a now small and dingy Little Italy, and there's a strong Jewish community, among other things. Thanks to the language barriers and cultural conflict, it's not always the safest area, however, and there is a thriving set of gangs, too.  The International District, in addition to holding the above pillar and being a booming Asian-American community, is home to an angel named Dizang. Or Jizo. Or Ksitigarbha. It doesn't really matter - he'll accept any of them. He knows this is not his first incarnation, buit he knows it will be his last. He remains behind until all souls leave Hell. And only then will he return to the Machine, freed from this earth. Until that time, he educates others, enlightening them back to the service of the Machine, to cleanse them of illusion and send them on to nirvana. With each soul converted and recovered, he is one step closer. Dizang is an Exile, serving the God-Machine with a deep humility and encouraging others to reject maya and embrace nirvana. In Seattle, he is served by a number of Buddhist monks, who offer him devotions at their monasteries. He educates them - as he will anyone who comes to him - but his constant goal is to find demons and reintegrate them into the oneness of the God-Machine. He appears a humble monk with shaved head, plain robes and a staff. In angelic form, he is similar, but larger than any normal human, with a glowing light from his body and a halo around his head. He has a third eye in the forehead and the staff takes on jewels, while his other hand blooms with a metallic lotus. Dizang has no defined mission - he has chosen to see his personal goal to be convincing demons to willingly rejoin with the Mahcine. He is pretty much entirely nonviolent - he'll defend himself, but he will only try to hurt others if an innocent is harmed in his presence, and then only to protect the innocent and punish the person that harmed them. 1932 Seattle, meanwhile, is a vibrant small city with a flourishing Japanese community and a growing arts culture. The Depression is a problem, and there's a large Hooverville camp, but in Seattle the problem is only moderate compared to other places, not last thanks to the gigantic bootlegging operations that distill local alcohol and smuggle it in from Canada. The town is segregated, with the north end forbidden to sell or rent property to blacks, so they've settled mostly in the south end. 1932 splinter runs from March to October - the dedication of the George Washington Bridge to the dedication of the U.S. Marine Hospital in Beacon Hill. The bridge is free of Infrastructure; the hospital is not. The underground floors are full of labs and pistons and strange tubes, and its power practically hums to those in the know. The origins of the other splinters are disputed at best, but 1932 seems to have come into being due to the dedication of the hospital Infrastructure. It's a powerful construction, working in both the splitner and the dominant timeline. It's the most significant piece of Infrastructure in 1932, and also the largest and most ambitious piece anywhere in the city. Several demons have tried to suborn or destroy it, but no one has succeeded yet...partially because no one is sure what will happen to the splinter if the hospital gets disabled. While the building was finished in 1932, the hospital was not officially opened until the following year. It was designed to serve veterans, merchant marine crewmen, Coast Guard, Light House Service members and 'federal compensation cases' - read, the poor and people who wouldn't be missed. The facility's goal, for the Machine, is simple: make more functional humans that are both more capable of service and less resistant to Machine control. Experiments, implantation and drug treatments are all performed, despite the hospital's 'closed' status, under the guise of controlled environments and efficiency. The doctors believe they are doing good work, and certainly the people that leave are healthier...but the doctors are all former patients themselves, so...that's that. 1932's fracture points are strangely synched. There are two, and both will appear or disappear at random for days at a time...but there's always at least one open at any point. The intervals are random, though none shorter than five minutes. No one knows what happens if the fracture disappears while crossing, but demons who use them report a tension, as if the rift is being forced open or squeezed shut, causing brief claustrophobia. The first rift is in Seward Park. On top of the hill there, there's a small old-growth forest and a trail leading to an ampitheatre used in the summer. The fracture is invisible, hidden in the woods behind the ampitheater, and you either have to accidentally find it or have a guide. The second is in the employee breakroom of HomeBound Hardware on Rainier Avenue. The door to the rift is locked and has no sign advertising what it does. Anyone that opens it and goes through ends up in the old Dugdale Baseball Park next to a mural of a painted door in a hallway leading to the bleachers. Dugdale is the home of the Seattle Indians of the Pacific Coast League, and it and the hardware store stand on the same plot of land. The Dugdale rift functions regardless of crowd or time of die. The stadium burns down in July of 1932 due to arson, perhaps an effort to close the fracture off. Once the stadium is burned, there is nothing to mark the inner side of the rift until the timeline resets. Efforts have been made to prevent the fire, but none so far have worked. If you are in the rift when the fire hits, you take 4A damag - 2 from being caught in the rift as it closes and 2 from being on fire while in the rift. Next time: Southwest Quadrant, 1962 and the Demons' Republic of Seattle
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Jun 28, 2016 18:22
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Drakyn posted:Paraworld, by chance? Ego Trip posted:The default player organization had a group of demon-fighting kung-fu bigfoots.
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Jun 29, 2016 03:17
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Count Chocula posted:A Vince Gilligan/Darin Morgan Unknown Armies...anything would be so perfect. Isn't that basically Millenium?
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Jun 29, 2016 05:48
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MonsieurChoc posted:Isn't that basically Millenium? Millennium is modernist, UA is postmodernist.
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Jun 29, 2016 07:13
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Mors Rattus posted:Demon: the Descent Don't normally post in here, but this is good. I admittedly at times have skimmed your stuff due to sheer volume, but that's due to the specific games I think, as the Demon stuff has been fantastic. I know you write like a machine to fill time, and even if not everything hits off for me, it's cool when it does, so, thanks! Also I wanna know about this Demon's Republic 
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Jun 29, 2016 07:18
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Kemper Boyd posted:Millennium is modernist, UA is postmodernist. Yeah, I think that's because of Chris Carter's influence, at least judging by the AVC recaps. Darin Morgan is pure po-mo, at least judging by his X-Files episode. Gilligan's solo stuff seems like it fits perfectly into the humanistic universe of Unknown Armies, at least judging by Breaking Bad and what I've seen of Better Call Saul.
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Jun 29, 2016 08:26
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So we put an Afterthought episode out on Monday, and it included the listener question of "What's the dumbest thing in RPGs you see people arguing about?" I went with people arguing over fictional characters alignments. Jon went for the jugular and said "people arguing over what HP represents." We both agreed that it's a bullshit argument that no one should care about anymore. It's gone on long enough. The answer depends on the players and the edition, etc. Whatever. So far the comment thread argument about what HP is is the largest bulk of comments we've ever had. Of course.
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Jun 30, 2016 06:41
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 GADGETS, EQUIPMENT AND SETTING SECRETS Gadgets Let’s get it started. I’m going to link a picture of the page about playing Gadgeteers out in the world but just remember: new rules for the Gadgeteers mean that even with a schematic, you still have to spend a maximum of 6 weeks to build it by testing it over and over.  Aerial Carrier: An aerial carrier is a flying aircraft carrier suspended in the air with four blimps with helicopter rotors to help keep it hovering and move it. It has four decks, holds up to 25 planes at once and the blimps are incredibly susceptible to being popped by AA flak. It can barely move with three blimps and it will crash with just two. The carrier requires four Gadgeteers to maintain (one per blimp) and they also like to include other gadgets so aerial carriers are hotbeds of Gadgeteers. There are currently three in existence. The Liberty flies for the US and it’s the flying headquarters of Delta Squadron. The Genki flies for the Japanese and is the fastest (40 MPH) and is mostly just a mobile launch platform for planes. It’s the home to Japan’s Ace Deltas and was also used in Pearl Harbor. The Uberkrieg flies for Germany and is the home of Kapitan Krieg and is used in the bombing of Britain.   SHOOT THE BALLOONS Amphibious Tank: The amphibious tank is also known as the Platypus. It’s a submarine with retractable tank treads and mounted guns, designed for taking German beaches with stealth and for Pacific use. You can’t use the guns underwater so it requires stealth to drive but on land it can trundle around guns blazing. It seats four, three gunners and a driver, hopefully with the Gadgeteer as a gunner, a Delta Gunner on the turret and an Ace driving.   GLUB GLUB I'M A SUB Ferry Maker: A Ferry Maker is an amphibious mobile platform used to replace bridges or cross rivers. The ferry maker has four mounted harpoons (two on the front, two on the back) and uses the harpoons as anchors on the different sides. Imagine a 35 foot long, 15 feet wide platform on treads with a tower in the back with a mounted gun and six-foot-high armored walls on the platform. That’s a ferry maker and it’s used to move tanks, troops or vehicles across the river by propeller and treads churning water as it follows the harpoon’s wires.   Not a picture of a Ferry Maker, just a picture of something that can't happen without the Phaser becoming solid and getting hosed up being half-melded into a tank. Frequency Scrambler: It scrambles frequency using a receiver and transmitter attached to separate radios. Each part needs a Gadgeteer to make and maintain and they only use certain frequencies to keep them interconnected. The main purpose is to defeat Translators and encrypt the radio frequency you’re calling on. Of course, if it’s compromised, the whole system could go down because the different countries use the same frequencies internally over and over for simplicity. Infrared Goggles: See in the dark and see heat signatures. Yep. They’re really only here because they didn’t actually exist in WWII. Jetbike: Before it’s refined in the future into the hoverbike, the jetbike is a motorcycle’s body on top of two jet engines. This is exactly as safe as you think it is. They can’t hold more than three people max (including driver) and the device is best described as “volatile”.   Yeah I have no loving clue what this is but there's no jetbikes involved. Mobile Fortress: Also known as the Supertank, it’s a big loving machine on treads covered with guns and boasting at least one 127 mm gun (which is a lightweight gun…for naval artillery). There are only four currently in existence and they’re generally slow machines surrounded by troops and other vehicles supporting them. Germany’s Essen crews 20 and is in Germany somewhere. The Hadrian is Britain’s, crews 12 and is in Africa. The Knox is America’s, crews 17 and is also in North Africa. The Mischa crews 20 and is protecting Moscow for Russia.   Honk honk, here I come at 20 MPH! Tanksuit: Developed in Germany and originally called a Panzerklage, the Tanksuit is bigger than a man and only requires one pilot to operate. It walks on two legs and is operated by a driver climbing into the center of the suit (a cockpit with a chair) and is manipulated by two motivator arms and pedals beneath the chair for the feet. They have guns mounted on their shoulders (operated by a trigger in the manipulators) and boast 10d6 Strength, their hands containing fingers and the suit is dexterous enough to climb and jump. Their big weakness is a loud diesel engine mounted in the back behind the chair and it’s real loud. As a result, most pilots use headphones that relay commands from base to ignore the loud engine, making them susceptible to missing things they can’t hear. Also the engine is in the back so any rear ambushers could try and shoot through the armor at it.   Dude you're trying to fight this thing from the wrong end. Thoughts: Oh that’s cool I’ve literally heard of none of these but the Tanksuit until now. You’re not gonna share these with the rest of the class before you give me this section? No? Okay. So the Aerial Carrier is a horrifically bad idea, it’s slow and destroying one blimp can severely hinder the carrier. The Amphibious Tank? Not the worst idea but heavily susceptible to an angry Wereshark or RADAR and a torpedo. Ferry Maker? Actually a pretty sound idea from a war standpoint. Frequency Scrambler? Necessary but not fun. Infrared Goggles? Helpful but not necessary. Jetbike? Not the best idea. Mobile Fortress? Really situational and pretty susceptible to certain kinds of Deltas (a Teleporter and a Phaser, for example). Tanksuit? The fact that it generally has just one gun is okay but it’s got some pretty clear design flaws. Let’s not count the infrared goggles and frequency scrambler in the following criticism: none of these inventions are particularly worthwhile. None of them sound like they’re anything worth building towards or making period. They all sound like they should be lovely inventions by the Nazis and it’s really dumb that the other countries think these are a good idea. Of course they’re willing to field Gasser Deltas, so everyone’s mental. NEW MECHANICS  Vehicle Rules
   
 I can't explain why this looks so goofy but it does. New Weapons
 This is just awful. I managed to transform five pages of equipment and weapons and poo poo into one picture here, check it out.  Look at all this poo poo I feel compelled to share. Thoughts: None of this is really good or useful or interesting. I gave up giving a poo poo halfway through the part on vehicles when it got all anal about how planes work. Those critical hit tables are absolute rear end and that’s a terrible addition to the vehicle rules in a game about superheroes doing wacky poo poo. gently caress this. SETTING SECRETS There are none. Pretty much everything that’s happening doesn’t have anything below the surface. Instead we get game ideas and NPCs. I’ll be including all of the NPC blurbs and their stats below and Jesus it took forever to format 23 pages of NPCs.  On The Home Front: The game recommends playing Deltas who couldn’t hack it in the army and are protecting the US from Nazi spies and subversive elements and help keep the war effort going. Know what I have to say to that? gently caress that, play as Ladies of Liberty and take no poo poo.  Against the Desert Fox: Espionage and sabotage adventures in the deserts of Africa. Ride a tank around and shoot Nazis, blow up fuel depots, Casablanca spy junk or even play as a native Libyan/Egyptian/nomadic person fighting against the Italians and Nazis.  With the Resistance: Cloak and dagger business in occupied France. The game says “if you want to play an actual Brave New World game with people you can’t trust and an oppressive government, play this”.  Red Pride: Play as Red Brigade Deltas and kill Nazis in the snow.  Island Hopping: Hang out on a destroyer or cruiser, fly planes and pilot boats or subs, play as islander natives resisting the Japanese or turn evicting the Japanese from each island into a dungeon crawl but with American Deltas.  Also don’t be afraid to change the timeline even further or use the Glory Days book later in the war.  Thoughts: All of these are pretty obvious plot hooks and judging by that tagline I would never play a game set in occupied France. It’s also an incredibly weird typo that Patriot I and The Yankee share the same name, unless that’s intentional in which case that’s pretty stupid. The Landshark is still awful and I really don’t have much to say about these premade characters besides that Nazi Bargainers are an incredibly low hanging fruit for them to engage in atrocities for power and their lovely totems reflect it. So yeah, come up with your own stuff, it will probably be better because the majority of all these named people suck rear end. NEXT TIME: the first premade adventure not attached to a GM screen, a tale of desert adventure called ”FOILING DER FURHER”. Spoilers: you’re not actually foiling Hitler or any of Hitler’s plans and this whole thing is lower down the food chain.
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Jun 30, 2016 07:05
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theironjef posted:Jon went for the jugular and said "people arguing over what HP represents." We both agreed that it's a bullshit argument that no one should care about anymore. It's gone on long enough. The answer depends on the players and the edition, etc. Whatever. So far the comment thread argument about what HP is is the largest bulk of comments we've ever had. Of course. I don't get cure light wounds. Maybe it's healing wounds? Or not? And the higher your level, the less it heals? Unless it's not healing at all? 
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Jun 30, 2016 07:52
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theironjef posted:So we put an Afterthought episode out on Monday, and it included the listener question of "What's the dumbest thing in RPGs you see people arguing about?" I went with people arguing over fictional characters alignments. Jon went for the jugular and said "people arguing over what HP represents." We both agreed that it's a bullshit argument that no one should care about anymore. It's gone on long enough. The answer depends on the players and the edition, etc. Whatever. So far the comment thread argument about what HP is is the largest bulk of comments we've ever had. Of course. Recently I feel like a lot of grog has popped up on the comments under your recent installments; like you have a lot of listeners who get the subject matter, but are completely humorless. That sucks. 
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Jun 30, 2016 08:06
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Oh man, the Aerial Carrier is like a poor man's Helicarrier. I've got no idea why they have all these 127mm guns on them, the German one should at least be festooned with 88s because that was a good multi-purpose gun used for both artillery, direct-fire anti-tank, and anti-aircraft roles. Liberty should be using 90mm AA guns as well. The blimps are largely a really bad design flaw, especially when destroying two of them basically dooms everyone. If you want to hear something hilarious, the Germans would likely be using hydrogen, since helium was a strategic resource the U.S. refused to sell to them, so their carrier would likely be destroyed fairly quickly with tracer rounds from aircraft guns. If I had to do a redesign, I would make a flying aircraft carrier suspended between two airships. You would still lose the whole carrier if you lost half your suspension but you could field more of them and that's what wins wars. Also, the Mobile Fortresses are pretty underwhelming compared to the Ratte and the Monster, stuff that Germans actually designed. They seem to be little more than multi-gun Maus tanks. Ratte theoretically could move it's 1000ton weight at 25mph thanks to eight repurposed marine engines and had two 11" naval guns and eight 88mm guns. Actually, the Ratte's design was finished sometime in 1942, so a German land battleship rampaging through Russia or North Africa would be possible. I'm sure Stalingrad or Kursk would have turned out differently if something like that broke threw enemy encirclements or encountered large groups of enemy armor at range. Really, everything seems kinda lame considering that the mid-war period and WW2 produced some really interesting stuff like the aforementioned German land battleships, France's underwater battle cruiser or Japan's submersible aircraft carrier, stuff that was not just designed but built. Also, jetbikes look like they should be in something else. Edit:  when reading the various nations' grunts. Jesus, not all Japanese soldiers had a loving katana. Also, they give every German soldier a FG42,  . They should have given the Russians PPsh-41s, considering that's what mostly happened. Wait, where is the Shpagin? There's a M1941 listed as a Russian submachinegun, but those stats are all wrong.
Young Freud fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Jun 30, 2016 |
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Jun 30, 2016 08:46
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I don't get cure light wounds. What a loss of HP represents (and a gain) is 100% contextual at time of loss or gain. From 1e to 5e, the books are clear that HP represent some mixture of luck, willpower, stamina, 'sixth sense', dodging, and flesh wounds in the form of bruises and cuts (the 'bloodied' condition in several editions). Perhaps the best way to think about HP is that every attack roll that beats your AC is fatal - you 'spend' HP to describe how it wasn't fatal. Cure Wounds spells presumably both heal those minor bruises and scratches, and also restore some of that fighting spirit. Naturally, a higher level character has so much fighting spirit in them that a little bit of cure light wounds is barely noticeable unless they're almost out of HP. This is actually 100% explicit in the 1e ADnD DMG, but even in 5e you can see the same explanation.   Of course, this is all only true for DnD - other games have their own explanations. In WoD/ChroD, for example, health levels really are wounds. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Jun 30, 2016 |
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Jun 30, 2016 08:56
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Demon: the Descent The Northwest Quadrant of Seattle is a strange place. It is separated north and south by a large chasm. It's also home to many of Seattle's iconic features, though not all. It's got Pike Place Market, the Space Needle and the Troll, and so it is a common tourist destination. Pike Place Market is in Downtown, which is easily the wealthiest part of the quadrant, home of tourists, clubs and tech start-ups. The place is home to the EMP Restoration Facility, now a museum. Within it is a room called the Sky Church, an immense open room designed as a concert and meeting space. Once, it was Infrastructure, though no one remembers what it was supposed to do or if it worked. Whatever purpose it once had, it has none now - the entire place has been suborned and turned into an Aether generator. Comrade West claims it belongs to the Demons' Republic of Seattle, and he takes care of the place. He makes access to it available to anyone that contributes to the Republic. He may or may not have been the one to suborn it himself, but he refuses to tell anyone about it if so - he says it's not important.  Who is Comrade West? Well, he's a demon. He likes 'Comrade' as a title because it prevents power imbalance. While demons tend to be mobile as a lifestyle, or at least ready to move, West has been in Fremont for a long time...though it's hard to tell how many Covers he has or has had in the past. He's set himself up as the demonic welcoming committee in Fremont, and he watches out for other demons. He finds homes and pacts for them in need, but never for free - Comrade West is a strict communist. If he helps you, he expects you to help the group according to your abilities, whatever they are. Comrade West has worn just about every kind of Cover at some point or other, but in his demonic form he appears as a man with oiled, reddish metal skin and steel plates welded to him, with an arm that shoots metallic slugs. He is the main force behind the construction of the Demons' Republic of Seattle. Technically speaking, the Republic is an Agency. It was started a while back, drawing on the local tradition of the labor movement and the IWW chapter in the area, whose members were frequently accused of having ties to communism. Comrade West is a Marxist, and the DRS is a Marxist Agency. They aspire to create a more fair, just and equal world than that of the Machine. The Agency consists of humans, stigmatics and demons that aspire to a cooperative social contract of sharing, joint effort and joint reward, placing all members as equal and respected. Anyone with an interest can join, though newcomers are always watched for a while. Humans with interest in collective life and Marxism join without knowing that supernatural entities are involved - they take the name 'demon' to be an effort to recognize the stigma that Communism faces in the USA. Humans are generally respected for their resources and labor but are not told the larger truth without a good reason. Stigmatics make up much of the middle leadership of the group - not all of its officers are stigmatic, but anyone that deals heavily with the demonic members is. They work as security for the agency and day-to-day administrators. Demons can also join, and Comrade West loves to recruit them, focusing on the resources and knowledge they have. Demons can choose to take part in the day-to-day work, but few do so, as their skills are more useful elsewhere. All members are expected to perform at least one act of service to the Republic each week, which can take any form - cahs, goods, time spent working for the cause, recruiting, whatever. When possible, members pay dues of 10% of their salary, as well. Mariah Selnick, a human member, runs a communal living space in Fremont for anyone of the Republic to use, and the Republic also runs a food pantry and garden that any member can draw on. They will partially subsidize any needs for transportation, security, childcare or even minor legal or medical needs. As long as your efforts on some level equate to your needs, you maintain good status. For dem,ons and stiagmatics, benefits can also include pacts, as long as you can pay in what you take out, and access to limited boltholes and safe spaces. Comrade West is the founder and leader of the group, but he prefers to keep things informal. Mark Wellford is a stigmatic that works to handle legal issues and keep the Republic going, and Karen Danvers is a glass artist with a shop in Fremont who heads most recruiting and makes the red glass pendants the Republic uses as a membership token. Members of the Republic are generally happy to openly discuss it as a political and economic group, in private if not working as recruiters, and will urge others to join when possible. The revolution, after all, is now. So, how about 1962? In 1962, Seattle was all about futurism, thanks to the Century 21 World's Fair. It ran from May to October and dominated the entire city. Even Elvis showed up, and JFK would've, if he hadn't canceled due to a 'cold' (which, in the dominant timeline, was the Cuban Missile Crisis). It is believed that the sheer importance of the event may be why 1962 splinter split off - the focus on technologies that'd change the world, the weight of all the Infrastructure hidden within. It is a bright and colorful splinter, forever on the cusp of change, and highly attractive to most demons. It's not perfect, however. Segregation remains in effect, and civil rights is something few people want to discuss. Spies and fear of Russia are all over. The economy's good, but te cold war has gone atomic. The Machine has a moderate presence in the splinter, and the fairgrounsd are full of Infrastructure. Some believe that the World's Fair was actually a set of interconnected Infrastructures that resulted in a significant and powerful occult matrix, though what it did is a matter of some debate. The splintering has kept only some of that Infrastructure intact and working properly, with other pieces breaking down or stalling out periodically. Should the splinter be rejoined to the mainstream timeline, the Machine could take control back of all of it, restoring whatever matrix they were meant to cause. 1962's fractures have a number of coincidences that lead many to believe they were made intentionally. They are largely unguarded and accessible, though one of the two requires you to be able to fly or survive a hard fall. The first fracture can be found at the Fremont Troll, a public sculpture under the Aurora/George Washington Bridge that was put in in 1990 to replace a drug-ridden industrial area. It is a large troll emerging from the ground, clutching an old VW bug - real and built in to the sculpture. If you climb through the window in the bug at night, when no one else is around, it empties out into a burnt-out car of the same model, left under the bridge in 1972. This works only at night and only if no one is around the Troll. In 1962, it doesn't seem to matter if people are there, but the homeless will warn you away because they believe the car is haunted, as they can hear voices from it at times. The second fracture is on the observation deck of the Space Needle. No one is sure how anyone found it, but it's there. Day or night, any time, though it's difficult to access when crowds are around - which is any time the Needle is open. This is largely due to the means of access - one window on the lower deck can open, but not easily or subtly. It's only ever opened when the Needle deck is closed for maintenance. But if you open the window and step through, either in 1962 or the mainline timeline, you land in the other timeline. This also works if fly up to it and enter the deck from outside via the window - you can cross over from either direction. Next time: Northeast Quadrant, 1999 and Y2K
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Jun 30, 2016 16:51
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theironjef posted:So we put an Afterthought episode out on Monday, and it included the listener question of "What's the dumbest thing in RPGs you see people arguing about?" I went with people arguing over fictional characters alignments. Jon went for the jugular and said "people arguing over what HP represents." We both agreed that it's a bullshit argument that no one should care about anymore. It's gone on long enough. The answer depends on the players and the edition, etc. Whatever. So far the comment thread argument about what HP is is the largest bulk of comments we've ever had. Of course. I hadn't thought about Real Men of Genius in a long time, thanks for that. And the "D&D doesn't actually have rules for your hand getting taken off in the first place" is really the crux of the issue. Yes, Warlords can't "shout a hand back on", but that's okay because nobody ever loses their hands in D&D! Compare this to something like Rolemaster, where Spell Law's healing magics are split into five different and separate spell lists: blood/bleeding, nerve damage, muscle damage, organ damage, and bone fractures, but that's also because Arm Law's critical hit tables can produce results like "Strike foe in shield arm. Tear muscle and tendons. For takes 3 hits per round, fights at -25. Foe is stunned 6 rounds" Or "Strike through both of foe's lungs. Foe drops and passes out. Foe dies in 6 rounds. Add +10 to your next attack"
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Jun 30, 2016 17:05
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FOILING DER FURHER  Preface Things aren’t going well for the Nazis in North Africa and as a result Rommel has been turning to weird science and magic to get results for Hitler. The weird science in question is the Graberpanzer, which you might know better as a Drill Tank. The tank has a drill on the front and a drill on the back and pretty easily burrows through the sand. The Gadgeteer behind it is a Libyan man named Muhammed el-Abin who is basically offering his inventions and services to the highest bidder. It just so happens that his new employer is the Nazis. Rommel likes the idea behind the Drill Tank, but he wants it to take some test runs to prove its worthiness to Hitler. The big plan is to have el-Abin do something impressive: find an ancient Egyptian artifact rumored to have magical powers known as… *sighs* The Scarab of Shazbatt. God drat it.  Don't you make that face at me, el-Abin. So yeah if Rommel is able to bring the Scarab of Shazbatt to Hitler’s Bargainer buddy The Negotiator, he believes that Hitler will be impressed enough to give the African front more soldiers and tanks to help him. El-Abin has been hauling rear end all around Libya, making his way to Egypt to get to Giza to look for the Scarab with the help of his panzer crew. Three major problems: a Nazi Drill Tank will piss off the British if they find it in Egyptian land, they have no idea where the Scarab is and the Drill Tank actually can’t see underground. To rectify the last two problems, el-Abin and his Nazi crew have been kidnapping British scientists and archaeologists and have been successful in kidnapping the Belgian grad student Melissa Stalhart, assistant to British archeologist Cal Longstrom (expert on the Scarab/general Egyptian archaeology). Now that the Drill Tank has Melissa to help them figure out where to dig, el-Abin is pretty close to getting the Scarab. If the PCs don’t intervene, they will recover the Scarab, drive the Drill Tank back to the Libyan R&D base of al-Kufrah and turn the tank over to Rommel. Rommel will then use the tank to assault Tobruk and hopefully destroy the Allied forces. If he succeeds, there will be more Gadgeteers sent to North Africa and they’ll have more soldiers and more Drill Tanks and more Deltas. In theory. In execution, the other NPCs involved in this story will complicate things. El-Abin has recruited a Bargainer friend to help him by the name of Ali Karin. Karin will have a gigantic erection for the Scarab and will immediately try to use it if he gets access to it. In addition, there is more than one Drill Tank already in existence as a backup at al-Kufrah, maintained by a nameless NPC. Using the Scarab (Because You Are An Idiot): The Scarab is actually a Hellcaster Totem attuned to Shazbatt (from the Bargainers sourcebook). It can be used to communicate directly with him to broker Bargains. If Karin gets the Scarab, the first thing he’ll ask for is to augment el-Abin’s Gadgeteer abilities so his inventions can go up to a week without needing to be maintained. Shazbatt will automatically agree for the hell of it: for every Gadget affected, the Bargainer has to use the dull edge of the Scarab to cut off one of the Gadgeteer’s toes with no anesthesia. The moment Karin gets the Scarab, el-Abin loses two toes, one per Drill Tank. And if you get the Scarab and know a Gadgeteer and a Bargainer, they can do this too (WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS)!  The major NPCs and the Drill Tank. PART ONE: WELCOME TO NORTH AFRICA Introduction: The PCs are in North Africa to fight the Nazis for Whatever Reason. Recent rumblings have caused the bosses (be they army generals or whoever) of the PCs to tell them to seek out Captain Durghart to help with something. The office is outside of Cairo in a trailer normally pulled by a halftrack or a tank. The PCs can make a TN 5 Perception roll to realize that Durghart is constantly levitating, which he will admit is a security measure (due to Flight Armor/people can’t hear his footsteps). And now we get a briefing!  The PCs can get supplies from Corporal Pierce who will refuse to give them anything more than Reasonable Stuff (no tanks or heavy weapons). Then they’re off to the bar in Giza. How do they get there from Cairo? Hell if I know!  Dr. Longstrom: The bar is described as being Rick’s from Casablanca but lovely and dusty. Longstrom is trashed on whisky and he’ll describe what happened: he and Melissa were in his tent until there was an earthquake and German yelling. He tried to run from the dig site with her but they got separated. When he made his way back to camp, the whole thing was being eaten by a sinkhole of sand. He’ll tell the PCs he was looking for the Scarab and he’s pretty sure he knows where it is. If he’s pressed, he’ll also admit that he was fooling around with Melissa when the Nazis attacked. Get him sober and he’ll take the PCs to the tomb. The GM is recommended to play up the Pulp/Supernatural/Mummy angle.  The Tomb: The Tomb is just a large stone set into the desert sands that has to be moved to get access to the halls. The first room contains a mummy of the Pharoah’s first wife in excellent condition (Longstrom will be psyched about this find) and some hieroglyphics and dusty knick-knacks. In the northeast corner of the room, there’s a half-rotten tapestry covering a doorway and fresh footprints in the dust.  There’s a fork in the tunnel. Go either way and there are two Nazis in each tunnel walking around. The Nazis are from the Drill Tank, which has gotten stuck in a crevasse (formed in the corridor from tectonic shifting) it fell into as it drilled through the ceiling. The other two will run to the Drill Tank to try and get it loose and escape. Once the two in the halls are dealt with, the other two will be in the Tank and trying to escape. The Drill Tank is 20 feet off the bottom of the crevasse and the guns still work and the Nazis will shoot at the PCs with the guns. Anyone who is visible to the Tank for more than two rounds will get shot at by the main gun and the recoil will cause the Tank to fall into the ravine. If they don’t die, the Tank is stuck and the rear drill is broken. If any of the Nazis are caught alive, they won’t talk without being intimidated. If pressed, they’ll tell the PCs where el-Abin’s lab is and where the Gadgeteer and Bargainer are in the tomb. From here are two unimportant rooms, one full of mummified cats and an antique chariot that can’t be used and the other full of mummies that requires a TN 5 Bravery roll to walk through. The Pharaoh’s room is normally blocked off by a stone slab, but el-Abin and Karin used the guards to pull it down. The room is full of innumerable riches and the pharaoh’s sarcophagus is ajar with a prone woman lying on it. That woman is Melissa, who is near death after opening it and getting a face full of poison gas. She has enough life to tell the PCs and Longstrom that el-Abin grabbed the Scarab after she got gassed. She will also tell the PCs the rough location of el-Abin’s lab and when she’s done expositing she’ll die. You can try and use a Healer to save her but they need five successes on a Heal Poison roll so basically she’s doomed any way you shake it.  This never happens. So now el-Abin and Karin will try and make their getaway. They have either stuck around in the room for some reason or they’ve managed to sneak past the PCs somehow. The Bargainer will use his Phaser totem to pull el-Abin through walls and sand until they’re outside where they’ll use the flying carpet to escape. Perhaps they’ve just spawned in lazily like a bad videogame. Regardless, if they make it to the air it’ll be hard to catch them without good shooting or another Flyer. The PCs are supposed to have a slim chance to stop them (with much more of an emphasis on their failure) but you should permit them to try lest you piss them off with railroading. You’re encouraged to play dirty with the NPCs: fly too high for them to see if nobody can fly, park the carpet and shoot them with the power staff if they can. Should the PCs stop them, good job! They still have to stop the second Drill Tank but they have the two masterminds in custody/killed and they have the Totem. Note: if they get away, this is when Karin uses the Totem to cut off two of el-Abin’s toes. Defeating the Nazis: 1 experience point. Finding out about el-Abin’s research base: 1 experience point. Actually stopping el-Abin and Karin: 2 experience points. Max possible points: 4. PART TWO: THE NAZI BASE The PCs can go back to Durghart for a brief “congrats, now go” and they can ask Pierce for transportation to Libya (he can give them two Range Rovers to drive out). There’s no danger in Libya until they get near the secret lab, but it’s 1500 miles and the whole trip will take 19 hours of non-stop driving. Fun! If the duo escape in the last chapter, they’ll fly straight there without stopping, cut off his toes and tell Rommel about their success. Braun will start prepping the tank for the assault on Tobruk but everyone will take their time because they have no idea that the PCs are after them still (they actually have no idea who they are, really). To actually find the lab, the PCs have to ask around in the biggest town around, al-Jawf. If the PCs are openly anti-Nazi, the locals will gladly point them in the right direction: an old Sanusi Muslim stronghold that the Nazis chased them out of and took over. Alternately they can spend 1d6 hours and find it by plane. The base is two miles out of town into the desert.  There are 24 Nazi guards total. There are two guards on each tower, they switch out every eight hours and if they’re off duty they’re in the barracks or drinking beer and playing cards in the prison (there are no prisoners). The bottom right building is not in fact Captain Durghart’s office, that’s a hilarious misprint. That’s el-Abin’s three assistants live, plus Lt. Lars Schmidt, the officer in charge of the camp who reports el-Abin’s progress to Braun and Rommel. The garage in the middle has a Tank Suit and the second Drill Tank, each under a tarp. No matter what time of day the PCs show up, Braun is preparing to leave the next morning in the tank on a truck to attack Tobruk. There are a few ways into the camp. The PCs can sneak in on a truck that goes between Rommel’s troops and the facility a few times a day. The PCs can ambush some guards and steal their uniforms, either in the camp or the ones driving the trucks. The PCs can just murder their ways in or bust through the gates in their Range Rovers. The PCs can also wait until the next morning and ambush the convoy pulling the tank or sneak on and surprise the drivers. The convoy has 12 Nazi guards spread out through three trucks (two escorts, one hauling the tank) and a staff car for Braun. So say the PCs are insufficiently sneaky and the alarm is raised. if el-Abin and Karin got away in part one, they show up here and react to the alarm. Otherwise it's just Braun in the base. El-Abin will jump into his Tank Suit, open the garage and stomp around looking for PCs to fight. Karin will put on his Phaser bracers and try and break into Braun's quarters to steal the Scarab back, run for the hills and then try to fly to Cairo for his own interests. Braun will run to the Drill Tank, fire it up and abandon everyone to protect the tank and get it out of the area. Because he's the only person driving the tank, he has +5 to using the machine guns and driving at the same time and he can't fire the main gun at all. All things considered, el-Abin is a distraction. If Braun gets away, the Drill Tank still has a few more days before it breaks down thanks to the deal with Shazbatt which is enough time to assault Tobruk, possibly win and convince Hitler to allow more Drill Tanks to be made. If Karin escapes, a third party is now in possession of an ancient Totem and has a direct line to more power in exchange for sacrifice. Capture/destroy the Drill Tank: 2 experience. Defeat Lt. Braun: 1 experience. Defeat el-Abin: 1 experience. Retrieve the Scarab: unknown due to bad formatting and a printing error cutting off the bottom of this section. The next page is a full-page picture and whatever was supposed to be here is lost permanently. HYPOTHETICAL PLAY SCENARIO Cast of Characters
The team heads off to Durghart's office and proceed to all groan at his speech. Rough Rider does in fact notice that Durghart is floating but so what, he's a Delta, who gives a poo poo. Plus Ultra asks Durghart why they couldn't just be briefed about this on the plane and Jeep ride over and why they had to come here when they could just start at the bar in Giza. Durghart tells the PCs to get out and talk to Corporal Pierce for supplies. Pierce refuses to give Flak any heavy equipment and the other players have to intervene to stop Dan from badgering the NPC for things they don't need (like heavy explosives). Plus Ultra turns on a little charm to get the Range Rovers to go to Giza. The ride to Giza is long and uneventful and proves to be a boring round of roleplaying that goes on a bit too long. Brian asks why they couldn't just time skip to get to Giza. Jeremy waffles for an answer and Amanda says it's because otherwise what they just did was pointless and railroady. Jeremy grumbles. Everyone hangs back and rummages through the empty bar as Plus Ultra talks to Longstrom and gets the info they need. Slippery Pete has fun teleporting Longstrom's passed-out drunk body to the car. Everyone is now pretty bored that all they've done so far is go to two places and drive around a bunch with no real payout. This time Jeremy skips to the tomb and everyone gladly gets a gun from the backs of the cars to prepare for combat. Using some muscle, they get the door off the tomb and spend far too much time exploring the first room and poking at the pharaoh's wife's sarcophagus. Rough Rider finds the exit relatively easily but they take their time exploring before they leave (with some urging from Jeremy-as-Longstrom). Nazi Combat Time! Wonderbolt immediately obliterates one Nazi, turning them into a fine smear. Slippery Pete teleports the other into the chasm. The other Nazis immediately flee for the Drill Tank in a hail of gunfire which suspiciously misses despite everyone having at least 5 Shooting. The group comes up with a plan: Slippery Pete teleports Rough Rider into the path of the tank's guns as a distraction. While this is happening, Plus Ultra boosts Wonderbolt's damage and Wonderbolt starts powering up a Superblast. Flak holds up the rear by keeping an eye out for the other Nazis. Rough Rider runs around in circles, drawing gunfire, before Wonderbolt unleashes a 10d6+40 (Amanda argues it should be+60 for +30 x2 but reluctantly accepts it) Superblast. A ten minute argument ensues about whether or not a Blast bypasses the armor of the tank and because it's a Gadgeteer's invention but it's a vehicle it's hard to tell. Jeremy compromises by saying that it bypasses the vehicle's armor but it eats the damage and the passengers are safe. However, the damage ends up inflicting three wounds, forcing a critical hit...and the tank's engine is destroyed and everything shuts down. Amanda is satisfied with this outcome. Jeremy grumbles. The Nazis inside the tank surrender and everyone has to stop Flak from trying to execute them because they surrendered. The team finds out about the secret lab and tie up the Nazis (with Flak shooting them death glares the whole time) and keep exploring the tomb. The rest of the rooms are generally ignored because nobody wants to gently caress around with the mummies. They find the pharaoh's tomb and everyone is annoyed they have to ignore the numerous riches in exchange for a dying girl leaking exposition like a sinking submarine. Brian asks just where the hell el-Abin and Karin are if they didn't pass them at any point and they're not in the room. Jeremy says that SUDDENLY, they're OUTSIDE and GETTING AWAY! Slippery Pete grabs Wonderbolt and starts teleporting the two of them after the two bad guys until they get outside and Wonderbolt starts shooting at them as they fly away. Unfortunately, the fly speed of the carpet really does make it hard to shoot them and everyone complains about railroading and cliffhangers. They load up the Range Rovers with as much gold as they can carry and drag a distraught Longstrom back to the cars. Slippery Pete makes a Navigation roll to figure out where to go and they decide to just drive straight there. Jeremy skips over the 19 hours it takes to get there and it turns into longer because he insists the PCs need to sleep. By the time they get to the lab, it's night and by the morning of the next day Braun will be taking the Drill Tank to join Rommel's troops. Slippery Pete blinks around the camp and scopes things out, pin-pointing where the tank is, finding out that Braun is there and is unable to just see the Scarab. They split up into two teams. Team Exploder (Wonderbolt and Plus Ultra) go to the tank to destroy it with grenades from the inside. Team Mage Killer go to Karin's lodgings to shake him down for the Scarab. Unfortunately, Team Exploder isn't the stealthiest and the Nazis open fire. El-Abin gets in the Tank Suit, Braun runs for the tank and Karin runs past Team Mage Killer towards Braun's. Upon seeing a guy run towards the tank, Plus Ultra pokes Wonderbolt and Wonderbolt reflexively explodes Braun's torso with an energy blast. Rough Rider starts shooting angry guards, Flak helps her shoot the guards (using her as a shield) and Slippery Pete blinks after Karin. While Karin is rummaging through Braun's things, Pete teleports Karin into the floor. Repeatedly. Until he stops moving. Rough Rider and Flak continue to have a grand time killing Nazis as the rest go after Wonderbolt and Plus Ultra with the help of el-Abin. Still power-boosted, Wonderbolt one-shots el-Abin with an explosion because his armor does not protect because it does not count as a defensive power. The Nazis left standing run for their lives into the desert as the others try to stop Flak from shooting them in the back. They realize they have Braun's body in their possession and, knowing of his powers, they reluctantly cut Braun's head off his shoulders and carry it back to Cairo, knowing he'll be just fine and that they have a Nazi lieutenant in their care. Everyone gets experience but are generally annoyed at how uneven the plotting and action was, how it went from being incredibly linear and rail-roady to a sandbox up until it went back to railroad. Rough Rider and Flak aren't happy they didn't get to do much until they got to just shoot Nazis. Wonderbolt is pretty satisfied with herself. Slippery Pete is glad that he got some fun with his powers. Plus Ultra considers this to be a successful mission and a job well done. Nobody is particularly interested in continuing fighting World War II and would rather try playing a vanilla game set in the "present". AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD   FINAL THOUGHTS ON GLORY DAYS: It's...yeah, it's not really good. It's not as relentlessly bad as Bargainers. It's a boring kind of bad, a "we have all of these NPCs for you to use and somewhat rigid plots, you should use what we made" bad. The equipment and those rules don't add anything useful, the new Deltas don't add anything useful, the premade mission is relentlessly meh and there's just not worth recommending, period. Would I recommend this book? No and I wouldn't recommend using anything from it. It's kind of odd how this book is pretty optimistic and hopeful and yet it comes off way more boring than when it's fighting the government as a rebel bogged down with metaplot. It says a lot when the War Sourcebook is just bland and boring and worthless. Fighting Nazis isn't even fun because most of them are regular people and there's nothing that's going to stop Sparky from burning and altering the path of everything by becoming Superior. Six down, three to go. The downward spiral continues next time in BRAVE NEW WORLD: CRESCENT CITY. 
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 09:43
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Hostile V posted:Shazbatt will automatically agree for the hell of it: for every Gadget affected, the Bargainer has to use the dull edge of the Scarab to cut off one of the Gadgeteer’s toes with no anesthesia. The demons continue to demand poo poo like this, but they're not very good at verifying it. So you don't need to cut off somebody's toes to use this: You need to convince the demon you've cut off somebody's toes. Stage magic trickery is the order of the day here. ... It still wouldn't really fit in with the rest of the superhero setting, but...
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Jul 1, 2016 09:59
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Zereth posted:You know I just thought of a good way to salvage Bargainers as a playable character option. Congratulations, you just re-invented the premise of Better Angels! So I'm going to try and review a thing again, soon, probably, for two reasons: 1: I get a kick out of Retrofuture stuff, like the previously reviewed Rocket Age. 2: The system used for it, apparently, is going to be the system for the "Rules Light" official Shadowrun hack, Shadowrun: Anarchy. That's right: Coming soon to a thread near you, it's:  unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 10:43
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Hostile V posted:Cast of Characters[/b][list] Nice to see I'm not the only one who names my example players in alphabetical order.
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Jul 1, 2016 10:45
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You know, this is kind of small in comparison to the many, many other issues with Glory days, but it stands out to how loving boring they play Rommel. Like, this is an interesting historical figure, both for what he did himself, and how he was used for propaganda by both sides, both during and after the war. Brilliant tank commander, lead from the front, picked up a reputation for decency and chivalry while also being, oh yeah. One of loving ADOLF HITLER'S closest pals! You could do a lot with him. Guy lead from the front, and already was Germany's golden boy. So why not go for the obvious, give him a standard brick package? It means he's going to be able to better support his units in skirmishing, playing to his strengths, while also letting you highlight his weaker large scale planning. Powers work great with the guy's tendency to go off on his own and ignore the chain of command, and with his whole "I am just a regular Joe Nazi Germany, doing my part to help the working class with my natural abilities and charm." shtick. Hell, you can get a lot of good comedy out of him, if you're willing to go with bleak humor. This is the guy who sent a letter to Hitler suggesting how to best counteract the obviously spurious allied propaganda about the whole anti antisemitism thing. He thought they should find a capable Jewish fellow, and give him a high ranking political office. (Hitler did not think it was a good idea.) If it wasn't a remarkably elaborate bit of rear end covering on his part, there's a political naivete there that borders on the absurd. Works for comedy, works for tragedy as someone who wants to think of himself as a decent person keeps going deeper into self delusion and atrocity to convince himself that no, one of the most evil regimes in human history really just has a few bad eggs, and everything will be fine as soon as they win. The classic Super, only he doesn't seem to get he's working for the guys setting up death camps. But no. He's "Generic Nazi Commander who is Good At Tanks (Because Superpowers)". Way to be creative, Brave New World! Really playing with the vast canvas of history.
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Jul 1, 2016 11:30
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Outside of some bad webcomics, that was the least exciting thing involving superheroes, robots and fighting Nazis I ever read. Quite an accomplishment really.
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Jul 1, 2016 12:05
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I can't hold back anymore. I have to do Godlike.
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Jul 1, 2016 13:55
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Demon: the Descent The Northeast Quadrant is primarily high-income, except for the University District. The rich and the poor have very little in common, and the tension of town and gown is managed largely by them ignoring each other. The northeastern part of the Capitol Hill area is full of large, beautiful houses, and was once home to Kurt Cobain, and the Lake View Cemetary is the final resting place of several ntoables, including Bruce Lee and the daughter of Chief Seattle, Princess Angeline. At the north end of Union Bay is a large garden and park, the Arboretum. It's been allowed to grow mostly freeform, but has a strange precision to it anyway, a subtle control. It's beautiful and beloved, but has a nagging sense of the unnatural - for good reason.  University District, meanwhile, is one of the grungiest and most low-rent areas in the NE Quadrant, with a lot of bars, bookstores and other shops catering to the student body and the lower class. The main quad of campus is home to Red Square, a red brick plaza between the campus' two libraries and the administration building. It has three brick monoliths standing together, and a broken obelisk balanced atop a pyramid off on one side. It's about the size of two football fields put next to each other, and the paving seems to draw people to it. Underneath Red Square is a parking garage, at least for a few levels, but there is a locked room on the bottom floor containing an elevator with 16 unmarked buttons. It heads down to a series of catwalks and walkways over an immense space. The space is full of massive storage containers, made of something like mostly opaque glass or stone, suspended on conveyor systems and stacked in arrangements of extreme precision. Strong enough light will turn the blocks translucent, revealing that their contents are vaguelyh human in shape, but indeterminate in size and unclear as to what's actually casting the shadows. The three monoliths of Red Square hum constantly. One of them is a ventilation shaft for the parking garage. Another is full of machinery that controls block storage and retrieval in the facility. And the third is a dummy tower, but if it were removed, the entire facility would stop working immediately. So, let's talk about 1999. The world expected disaster, in part because of a natural human anxiety about mathematical milestones, but also because of the rush of technology over the course of the century. People expected the world's computers to cascade into failure due to shortsighted inability to swap from 1900s to 2000s. In Seattle, it seemed even more liekly. The tech companies there went nuts trying to patch and update everything before it was too late, and an earthquake in the north part of the city that July made everyone really nervous. The meeting of the World Trade Organization there in the fall came with riots and fear that the world was going to fall to chaos. Survivalists stocked up and even skeptics bought some canned goods and water, just in case. But...well, the collapse never came. 1999 Seattle is full of late-nineties grunge music and a sense that the revolution is coming, since the world is ending anyway. The splinter timeline runs from July 1, 1999 - the day before the earthquake and two weeks before the opening of Safeco Field - to January 7, 2000. This is the six months prior to the world's end, and one week of watching it fall. To a very great extent, the dominant timeline and the pslinter run in parallel. The difference is what happens at midnight, January 1. In the main timeline, the world does not end, because the Machine will not let it. The angel made to handle the problem does so, and the world continues. In the splinter timeline, this angel Fell. No one was there to save the Earth. The errors multiply and escalate very quickly, system by system. Everything shuts down, and the Industrial Age ends overnight. Electronics shut down across the globe, a cascading failure that moves time zone by time zone. On January 7th, the timeline does a hard reset back to July 1st and the whole thing starts over. In the mainstream timeline, the angel's name is Y2K. People figured that the date error couldn't really be much of a problem...but they never bothered to really fix it, and the early software persisted, either in original form or as descendants based on it that used the same decisions to save computational space. With the prospect of such disruptive chaos, the Machine began planning decades before the shift, ensuring that the disaster would not happen. An angel was sent to fix the problem, designation Y2K. It appears as a scrolling string of amber text and code across an otherwise invisible humanoid form of indeterminate gender. When it speaks, its voice comes grom everywhere around you at once, as if it were in many places. It speaks slowly and deliberately, as if distracted by something else. It came into existence 30 minutes before midnight, December 31, 1999. It appeared, walked into a control room, stepped into a tube and plugged its hands into a command console tying it into every computer system on the planet. Even the ones that aren't networked. It has been there ever since, largely unaware of the world around it as it filters date requests and programs for date-related processes that would shut down systems, correcting them by adding itself as a called subroutine. The angel is the patch, and if it were ever removed, the underlying problem would resurge. It cannot leave or unplug, as its presence keeps the world going. If Y2K were ever removed, computer systems would immediately begin falling apart - the subroutine they called to fix the date problem would no longer be available. They'd hang, waiting for an answer that would never arrive without the angel's presence. If Y2K is removed, it will do anything it can to get back into the system. In the splinter, Y2K does not do its job. It - he, this time - rejects his purpose and Falls. For a few horrible days, the splinter crashes, burns and then terminates and resets. Y2K does not. He stays on, knowing what is coming but unable or unwilling to prevent it. He works at the University of Washington as an adjunct computer science professor in the evenings, Carson thunder. When he isn't teaching, he is out around the city, drinking in the culture. He vanishes the week before Christmas and is unavailble by any means until the next semester - which never starts. In his demonic form, he has a nearly transparent humanoid shapp, like slick and partially opaque glass. His eyes are solid white and while he has no obvious weapons, lines of blue and green etching fade in and out of view under the surface of his 'skin.' He has invested time and willpower into getting a comfortable apartment, and he has friends that he makes each loop and a coffee shop he's ensured always knows his order. Because he's present, no angel will ever stop the crash. He was the angel, and so there can't be a second version of hime appearing, so the crash will always happen. He also can't leave 1999 - his angelic form exists in the dominant timeline, you see, and for some reason, unlike most things, he can't coexist with that angel. If the angel Y2K were to die, he might be able to escape, but he can't do it himself. If he died, his angelic self might appear at the right time and not Fall, saving the world of 1999 and possibly even reintegrating the splinters. The demon Y2K is well aware that there are people that want to kill him to find out if that's true. The fractures for 1999 are the hardest of any to find, because they're mobile for reasons that remain unclear. One theory holds that the Machine has been trying to close them off for fear of contamination from the 1999 splinter, though there is little evidence to support this. The fractures have no set location and can, in theory, appear anywhere in the quadrant. However, they show up in some places more often than others, and often look quite similar on either side of the rift. However, once the clock hits January 1, 2000, the rifts all close until the cycle resets. Anyone on either side will be unable to cross until the reset happens, assuming they survive the week...which can't be assumed in 1999, thanks to the riots and police crackdowns. There are two locations where the fractures show up most often. First, there's the Fin Project in Magnuson Park. It seems to skip along the former plane tailfins that stick out of hte ground there. Something about the installation seems to draw the fracture to it, though rarely the exact same spot twice. The second is the Suzzalo Library Stacks. The staff does not entirely discourage students from going to the stacks alone, but it's definitely true that they'll find what you want if you reserve it and let you pick it up. In part, this is due to the occasional disappearances in the stacks when a student wanders through an open fracture somewhere in the Reading Room. The time and place of these fractures opening is unpredictable, but something about overcast days and thunderstorms dramatically increases the risk. All that's left is the standard CofD rules appendix and a canned adventure. So... The End I'm not sure where to go next. Our options are: Vampire: The Requiem 2e, Werewolf 2e: The Pack (focus on pack setup, dynamics and crossover), Demon 2e: Flowers of Hell (the Player's Guide), Demon 2e: Heirs to Hell (what happens to the children of demons?) or Demon 2e: Splintered City: Seattle (expansion of the Seattle setting).
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Jul 1, 2016 14:42
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Seattle, we're already here.
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Jul 1, 2016 15:27
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chiasaur11 posted:But no. He's "Generic Nazi Commander who is Good At Tanks (Because Superpowers)". Way to be creative, Brave New World! Really playing with the vast canvas of history. I should remember to do an update for Rocket Age, Cosmic Patrol sounds neat.
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Jul 1, 2016 16:45
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Demon 2e: Heirs to Hell sounds the most interesting to me with where it might go.
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Jul 1, 2016 18:09
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Outside of some bad webcomics, that was the least exciting thing involving superheroes, robots and fighting Nazis I ever read. Yes, a time when everyone was drawing up supertanks and land battleships, nations actually fielded submersible battle cruiser and aircraft carriers, American and England were going to make a giant iceberg ocean fortress, the Germans shooting off first-generation cruise missiles and ballistic missiles and flying wings, rocket fighter aircraft, rocket machine guns, super-guns, suborbital bombers, etc. and that's the best they could do. Holy poo poo, the German aerial carrier shouldn't have been suspended by blimps, it should have been a giant flying wing. And the Germans Deltas should have rideable V1's as their jetbikes. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 19:40
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My favourite part in the Captain america movie was the crazy superweapons that took inspiration from real designs
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Jul 1, 2016 19:48
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:My favourite part in the Captain america movie was the crazy superweapons that took inspiration from real designs No kidding. It's why the appearance of the flying wing in Raiders Of The Last Ark doesn't break the suspension of disbelief. Or why I believed the hoax of the Soviet KV-VI Behemoth land battleship, because even the Russians were prone to that level of experimentation, not just the Germans.  Supposedly, the only source of this was a doctored photo of Russian T-28 tank column. Even the guy who made that illustration believed in it up until he was half way done when he heard that it was a lie. It's not even hard to imagine, because it looks like an armored railcar gun carriage just given a motor and some treads. Edit: and just a little more digging revealed Colonel Osokin's "tank cruiser", which never left the paper stage but was about as formidable as the German's Ratte. https://thearmoredpatrol.com/2016/01/13/bizarre-armor-projects-of-the-40s-land-cruisers/ Young Freud fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 20:05
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WWII was such a massive conflict that a lot of the combatants were willing to consider or try almost anything.
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Jul 1, 2016 20:12
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Even a Drill Tank is just so boring and banal for the god drat Nazis.
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Jul 1, 2016 20:17
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Night10194 posted:WWII was such a massive conflict that a lot of the combatants were willing to consider or try almost anything. America was generally pretty restrained in that regard, though. Except for a few things like Project Habakkuk.
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Jul 1, 2016 20:22
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Cythereal posted:America was generally pretty restrained in that regard, though. Except for a few things like Project Habakkuk. I see someone's never seen the XP55 Ascender.  Admittedly much less insane than most of the wunderwaffen of the war, but that was probably a function of the US itself never actually being under a lot of threat.
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Jul 1, 2016 20:31
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