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Nuns with Guns posted:drat hippogriffgryphs need to pick a side already do they go in the hippogriff bathroom or the gryphon bathroom
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Jul 6, 2016 03:49
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Wouldn't it just be a hippogryphon?
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Jul 6, 2016 05:04
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I vote for a Requiem 2e review because it's a good game, but it has some of the most laughable art I've seen in a long time. (The Lancea Et Sanctum group pic  )
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Jul 6, 2016 05:10
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 CRESCENT CITY INTRODUCTION Ah yes, Crescent City, the central setting for the entire game. Logically this should be the 7th book in the entire chain instead of the third or fourth. Welcome back to Brave New World where the bad decisions and boring writing keeps coming. The book is 131 pages long and the first 61 are all setting details. The rest contains new power sets, a premade adventure and a buttload of NPCs it’s going to take far too long for me to doctor into lists through MS Paint. For this update, we’ll be looking at the layout and culture and buildings of Crescent City and the entire thing is presented by The Truth in her civilian identity: Marta Alonso, investigative reporter for the Crescent City Star writing a guidebook to the city for a local publisher.  From the makers of Baywatch and Baywatch Nights comes Crescent City: Nights. Here’s one of the big things to keep in mind: in the entire series, this is Jeri Ryan. We have seen what happened to Crescent City and Chicago again and again. There is going to be repetition in places and I will do my best to skirt over it in this whole section. THE BUILDING OF CRESCENT CITY Before we get into that, let’s take a quick detour for a heartwarming story about a man who perseveres and survives and follows his dreams to success. Except he’s a Nazi and his dream is to kill the guy who killed his dad and his success involves a doomsday device. That’s right, it’s time for the secret origin story of The Devastator.  "FOOLS! Now is Devastator's time to shine!" Once upon a time there was a monstrous human being named Josef Mengele and yes I see you heading towards the door because you know what’s coming. Mengele was responsible for Nazi Germany’s Delta research program, using his not-science on innocent people to try and figure out how Deltas were made. Any people who actually manifested were promptly killed. Why any of this? Because it’s low-hanging fruit and lazy, bad writing. At any rate, this resulted in a lot of dead people and a lot of dead Germans who Mengele tried to apply his “scientific” “research” to in order to make them Deltas. There were successes, but there was no time for more “successes”. He flees to Brazil when WWII ends and nobody is able to find him and bring him to justice. Then one day someone does find him: Heinrich Brecht, the son of Kapitan Krieg. Little Heinrich got to watch his father die by Superior’s hands, hung from the gates of a concentration camp by his own cape. Since that day he vowed to kill Superior and avenge his father. Of course, as the son of a literal Nazi superman, people really didn’t like him and he ended up clinging to his identity as a Nazi. He ended up looking for the man who turned his dad into a superman and that brought him to Mengele’s door. He agreed to perform experiments on Heinrich (thinking if he dies, he dies and he won’t have told anyone else where he is). So Mengele experiments on him and succeeds in turning him into a Delta…before shooting him in the heart and throwing him into his house’s furnace to get rid of him. After the ensuing explosion, Mengele was dead and Heinrich was quickly propelled past Deltahood to Alphahood as the Devastator. And as we all know what happened, he was ultimately successful in “killing” Superior along with transporting Chicago to another dimension. Blech. What a waste of words.  "Oh no, now is Devastator's time to activate his doomsday weapon he got from JFK!" "Wait wha-" THE BUILDING OF CRESCENT CITY Triumph Inc, owned by one Rex Shepherd, is the biggest employer of Deltas in the USA. Shepherd used his buttloads of money to snatch up all the land around the water-filled crater and by 1977 Crescent City was built. Shepherd hand-picked one of his VPs, Ben Archer, to mastermind the construction and Crescent City is still owned and run by Triumph Inc as the first corporate-run city. The city’s first mayor, Alan Jefferson, was picked by the Illinois governor to run the whole shebang and Jefferson broke the city into 50 wards. These 50 wards are divided into five districts: Downtown, Near Southside, Lower Southside, Near Northside, Far Northside.  Crescent City: home of super-powered property damage. Jefferson’s three helpers are Police Commissioner Stuart Fleming, AFL-CIO President Jimmy Flagonte and Deputy Mayor Paul Keaton. Two other big sources of power: god-drat Ronald Reagan kicking it in the Delta Prime headquarters in the city and Ben Archer as the controller of Triumph Inc. after Shepherd stepped down. Big Bill Macy and Marita Suarez are mentioned as existing again.  Tootin' for the government. NEW ALCATRAZ The famous New Alcatraz is literally built on a mound of garbage. The process of cleaning up the wreckage around the crater left a lot of wreckage and a lot of metal and general junk. Ben Archer and Triumph Inc. decided to use the cleanest of the trash and wreckage to create an artificial island in the middle of the Chicago bay. It was given a few years to settle and then they put New Alcatraz on top of it when the trash on top of the whole thing was condensed further.  A map of New Alcatraz, AKA The Heap, AKA Garbage Island. New Alcatraz is a quarter mile across and surrounded by fencing. The easiest way in and out is to take the boat to the dock and go in through the main door. Solid stone walls reinforced with iron bars, guard towers and gun batteries for shooting boats and airplanes all protect the prison. The prison has its own cold fusion reactor which is used to help power the Delta inhibitor keeping powers off in a sphere that ranges 250 yards above, below and around the whole island. If you want to visit, you can visit for a max 30 minutes every two weeks by applying for a pass and taking a boat. The main buildings are cell blocks, operation offices and administrative offices. Cell Blocks A-C are for regular prisoners. D Block is for death row inmates and solitary confinement. The prison is big on executions with most death row Deltas getting the electric chair or firing squad (for high profile prisoners) 72 hours after sentencing. Administration is home to the Warden’s office and white collar workers. Nobody lives on the island, they just commute and switch shifts. Operations has the mess hall, laundry, machine shops, the cold fusion reactor, backup natural gas generators and the two computers that run the prison (named Rocky and Bullwinkle).  Food for thought: the existence of the dampening field turning off powers just proves that the story of Patriot's "execution" is horseshit. If his powers were off, they could just shoot him, none of that "heroic rising to his feet, unblemished until the next salvo" nonsense. DOWNTOWN So Crescent City is a gigantic C around the bay. Downtown is the middle of that C, between Near Northside and Near Southside. Downtown is open 24/7; the bars don’t have to close and the lights rarely go out. The shops of Downtown tend to be high end for retail and other goodies. Important places in Downtown:
 Buddy what the gently caress kind of vehicle are you lifting. NEAR SOUTHSIDE The “bad side of town” up until Lower Southside. The majority of impoverished citizens live in Near Southside by design. In the design of the city, Ben Archer picked Near Southside as the center for all of the affordable housing meant to attract cheap labor to work in Downtown’s shops and Lower Southside’s industrial facilities. People moved in looking for work and gangs and criminals followed to prey on them and prey on the city. There are a lot of gangs in Near Southside but the two biggest are the Blood Angels and the Crows. The Crows are lead by Latasha Pinson, a cool and calculating leader. The Blood Angels are lead by  This is on the same page that talks about the major neighborhood gangs. Take from that what you will. Near Southside is home to the ethnic neighborhoods and a lot of churches. The Catholics have St. Jude’s Cathedral, run by Archbishop Stephen Desmond who is trying to calm down gang violence in the area and isn’t afraid to shoot the Covenant a call for help (normally answered by Sister Mary Victoria). Our Savior’s Baptist Church is run by Rev. Charles Tubbs who also wants to stop the violence. Finally, the 67th Street Mosque is run by Brother Lincoln Free, ex-Crows gangbanger and former Nation of Islam disciple. Near Southside doesn’t have nearly as much in attractions as Downtown. There’s Crescent City Memorial Hospital, described as a great place for medical students to learn how to perform trauma surgeries when a gang conflict spills into violence. There’s Battery Park, which is like NYC’s Central Park back in the day: lovely during the day and full of entertainers, dangerous at night and full of the homeless. Finally there’s the local Delta vigilante, a Gunner who goes by the name of Buckshot because he likes dual-wielding sawed-off shotguns and runs around in a trench coat and bandanna mask stopping gang conflicts for Defiance. The people of Near Southside generally like Buckshot, even if he’s a white masked vigilante shooting the local ethnic gangbangers to stop conflicts. LOWER SOUTHSIDE Lower Southside is pure Rust Belt. There’s a lot of bars and a lot of people pounding back beer, there are shitloads of industrial facilities polluting or pouring smoke into the sky and a lot of the neighborhoods are insular. While Near Southside has the ethnic neighborhoods (Chinatown, Black Neighborhoods), Lower Southside has the white ethnic neighborhoods (Little Italy, Irishtown). Jesus Christ I’m not making any of this up, what the gently caress. There are also a lot of bars that host blues musicians. Irishtown is full of bars oh come the gently caress on. There’s even a joke about how Irish cuisine is terrible and everything is boiled and they make up for poo poo food with liquor. *sighs* Irishtown’s big claim to fame is McGinty’s, the oldest bar in Crescent City. It was a Chicago joint from 1923 that was literally swept on a tidal wave in the aftermath of 1976 and landed completely intact with everyone alive inside until the owner had a heart attack upon realizing what happened and that he survived it. His son Paddy McGinty runs the place now.  What the gently caress is even happening besides her trying to make this guy eat an entire half of a loaf of garlic bread in one go. Little Italy is full of restaurants and delis. It’s well known for being bayside and for one restaurant in question: Nanni’s, started by Giovanni “Nanni” Marta who moved to America to marry an American girl and open a restaurant. Nanni’s is famous for its wine and also for the fact that it’s a neutral meeting ground for the entire Italian mob because Little Italy is full of the mafia. Don Vito Gabriel runs the Crescent City mob. If you don’t remember him, he’s the guy who killed his father and got Patriot framed for the murder that he got put on trial and sentenced to “death” for. But now Vito is trying to retire and step down and the other mobs are trying to take control over Crescent City. The Ferraras and the Distefanos are the big players in the war. The Ferraras, run by Francesco Ferrara, is business-oriented and prefers negotiating. The Distefanos, run by Luigi Mercado, is working on accumulating Delta firepower and likes having people whacked. There are some Deltas in Lower Southside. The Tuxedo Squad is a group of well-dressed vigilantes in masks and classy clothes. They are: Shamrock (Hot Shot) whose defining personality traits are “female”, “Irish” and “spits flame”, Americano (Charmer) who has a silver tongue, Beretta (Gunner) who dual-wields pistols and shoots when Americano’s words fail and Legerdemain (Bargainer) whose flying carpet acts as transportation for the group. There’s also The Wiseguy, aka Lorenzo Matas of the extinct Dombrino family, who has been blatantly killed multiple times but always returned because he’s a Lazarus. Lorenzo is planning on killing the people who killed the family he worked for. God there’s a shitload of cliché stuff in this part of the book, ugh. NEAR NORTHSIDE Near Northside is noted for having zero personality besides the businesses and locations within it. So it’s like Downtown but with less stuff to share. Crushertown is 25 blocks of sportsball. The Crescent City Crushers come in the form of a baseball team, a football team, a hockey team and a basketball team that have three different stadiums (hockey and basketball share the same stadium). There is also a gigantic parking zone that the subway runs directly to and the entire place is full of restaurants, bars, tourist shops, entertainment centers and apartments. Crushertown is also home to Webhead, a web browser production company and overall tech company. Webhead is run by Oliver Megopolus, a 32 year old CEO and one of the 25 richest people in the world. He has turned the Webhead building into an arcology, full of stores and living quarters that even he resides in. There is also an internet museum. Webhead is totally not sinister. The Playground is the part of town full of bars and clubs. Pub is the most famous of them, the music mixed by the imaginatively-named DJ DJ and allowing anyone in as long as they check their weapons at the door. Pub is open 24/7 except for Monday mornings and full of people pretty much constantly. The area around the Playground is full of beer vendors and general hooch-sellers because there’s no law on open intoxicants.  What the gently caress is this and why is on the page that talks about the hottest clubs in Near Northside. There’s no explicit info on Deltas in the area but there are two big groups that employ Deltas: Full Moon Detective Agency and Evil Unlimited. The FMDA is run by Mick and Mara Shaughnessy, a Charmer and an Interrogator, and they use Deltas to solve crimes and find people and catch cheaters. Evil Unlimited is super evil and super powerful you guys you don’t even know. Ignore the fact that they have had literally zero explanation or lore up until now. Evil Unlimited sells goods and services to the crooks of Crescent City and the world, spanning the globe with their business. They generally take half of the profit of the crime as payment and have not been caught yet because of paranoia and safety. The only thing really known about them is that their leader is known as Mr. C. That’s all you get, stay tuned until next book~. FAR NORTHSIDE Far Northside is full of the rich people. The most prestigious part of the neighborhood is called La Dolce Vita, Italian for "gently caress Originality". The subways don't pass through the area, which takes up a good chunk of space (running at least 50 space) with designated entrances and exits and parking lots for the residents. The whole place reeks of conspicuous consumption (meals upwards of a hundred a head!) and is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped with razor wire. The place is secure and kept secure for the rich residents and the Primers that live there, down to the entire area being designated a no-fly zone and a beach patrol monitoring the area's sole beach 24/7 when it's open because it's residents only.  What the gently caress is this and what does it have to do with security for rich people. Bayshore Country Club is where the rich go to play golf and talk poo poo. The best way in is to live in LDV because otherwise it could take five years to get in. It's home to the Crescent City Open (a golf tournament every July), two Olympic pools, waterslides and sports courts. It's also home to $50 entrees and anyone invited as a guest has to pass a background check. Shepherd's Palace belongs to Rex Shepherd. It's the biggest house in this side of town and home to Shepherd, his wife and his three kids. The entire place gets a writeup of a few paragraphs and basically it's hard to get into to protect Shepherd's family but it's super nice. The other famous resident is one Lisa Stein, an Aquarian and swimsuit supermodel who got her powers after being kidnapped by pirates and thrown into the ocean when the boat sank. She signed the DRA, did her time and retired to LDV to continue to model swimsuits. Remember how I said it's bullshit that Aquarians have to have the Ugly trait because someone's going to find them attractive? Yup! THOUGHTS: I have never been so actively resistant to giving a poo poo about a location in a tabletop RPG until now. I'm no stranger to setting sourcebooks or that chunk of the core book. I love how SLA Industries paints the megacity of Mort, Over the Edge's Al Amarja is one of my favorite settings because they get into how the place has its own culture and personality. This is just a list of stuff. A list of uninteresting stuff that doesn't really hook me or indicate what exactly is supposed to be a hook. Can you guess which of these people I mention in the book get NPC writeups in case you want/need to fight them? Of course you can't, you can't tell the set dressing from the important NPCs. The atmosphere of the South districts is written awfully with stereotypes in line with 90s writing, only Far Northside really has any atmosphere or personality compared to Near and six of the points of interest in Downtown are rehashed beat-for-beat from Ravaged Planet. Also who the hell was interested in the origin story of Devastator? It sure as hell wasn't me. In all, Crescent City is probably one of the most lazily written, least-engaging sourcebooks I've seen in a good long while. Even a bad sourcebook has some sort of je ne sais quoi that makes you keep reading. This is somehow less interesting than last book which was literally just "here's who has superpowers in World War II and how superpowers are doing stuff". It's reheated, lukewarm, unflavored oatmeal, thick and unpalatable and gloppy, hard for me to read and even harder to try and make entertaining. That's why this is mostly full of hot-takes and my reactions; everything is given equal weighting and importance and as a result none of it is interesting. I know some of you guys are having trouble reading these reviews because the subject matter is turning you off and I will be honest: I am losing steam in these lore parts. Everything else I can power through. I actually enjoy the powersets because they actually make me question if they're functional, I'm interested in the setting secrets and the premade missions because they're entertainingly bad to me. But when the book is half fluff on the level of this? I just have to plow through it to get to the rest because if I divide it up into anything less than two chunks, I will lose motivation and momentum and interest. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to continue writing these summaries. But it's definitely starting to become less a fun thing to do to entertain people and more of a slog. We're seven books in and it's really starting to weigh me down before I get done with this series. I won't bear you any ill will for tuning out. Just know that it's wearing on me too. NEXT TIME: new powersets! Hot drat! I hope you're ready for one of the worst animal-control superheroes I've seen in a while.
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Jul 6, 2016 06:41
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Simian_Prime posted:I vote for a Requiem 2e review because it's a good game, but it has some of the most laughable art I've seen in a long time. I vote for Requiem 2e as well, but mine is because of the text swinging between actually good and laughably terrible (Daeva Clan).
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Jul 6, 2016 08:01
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Hostile V posted:
Full stop: Mengele likely wouldn't have become "The Angel of Death" if Superior ended the World War 2 in 1943, again, depending on when it happened. He was a combat medic on the Eastern Front who won an Iron cross in 1942 for rescuing two soldiers from a burning tank. He was injured and spent some time recovering from his injuries, declared unfit for military service, and went back to his job at Race and Resettlement, inspecting immigrants for "Germaness". He wouldn't get transferred to Auschwitz until May-June of 1943 at the urging of his mentor, Dr. Freiherr von Verschuer/, because it gave them ample opportunity of conducting genetic research with human subjects. He was a shitbag of a human being and I'm not going to defend a war criminal but he likely wouldn't have the chance to be responsible for the Nazi's Delta program because 1) he likely never had the opportunity to do so, 2) there were people more capable than Mengele like von Verschuer, who supervised Mengele's work at Auschwitz after he transferred there on his recommendation; or Karin Magnussen, who identified a family with heterochromia and had Mengele experiment and harvest their eyes for use in her studies; or any of the other leading eugenicists at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, who would largely escape persecution after World War 2. Goddamn, I feel dirty trying to explain that.
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Jul 6, 2016 09:43
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I'm just gonna say that in general, sometimes you can make using Nazis work for the backstory of things. But if at any point you have Mengele's tortures be used for any sort of research and he actually gets results, you have gone too far in a tastelessly stupid direction and should reconsider this. Does it acknowledge that what he did was monstrous? Yeah. Did they still go along with him being responsible for the nation's force of offensive and defensive Deltas? Yes and that's where things start going south in the "hold the gently caress up" sense.
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Jul 6, 2016 11:18
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Hostile V posted:I'm just gonna say that in general, sometimes you can make using Nazis work for the backstory of things. But if at any point you have Mengele's tortures be used for any sort of research and he actually gets results, you have gone too far in a tastelessly stupid direction and should reconsider this. Does it acknowledge that what he did was monstrous? Yeah. Did they still go along with him being responsible for the nation's force of offensive and defensive Deltas? Yes and that's where things start going south in the "hold the gently caress up" sense. Forbeck really should have just made someone up. That's how the more recent Castle Wolfenstein games handled it. The Nazis had done plenty human experimentation that you don't even have to reference a single historical individual, everyone knows they did it, you don't have to go any further than just making up a mad scientist employed by them.
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Jul 6, 2016 12:19
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I've generally become soured of the whole notion of Nazi super-science, especially since in many ways the Nazi regime actually did a lot to hobble German scientific process, not accelerate it. That's not to say Germany didn't make some real innovations during that time, but a lot of it had to do with the existing German scientific community already being very impressive (at least when the Nazis weren't driving off or imprisoning some of their most brilliant minds) and the willingness (and desperation) of the Nazis to throw any idea at the wall to see if it stuck. A lot of the wunderwaffen was innovative, but not actually effective. And the less said about their human "experimentation", the better- it belongs in a discussion about torture, not science. A lot of it to me just demonstrates that Nazi propaganda was so effective than even today it's become ingrained in our pop culture and parroted without consideration. That's not to say you can't ever do stories with Nazis gaining access to advanced science, but it should be done with a historical awareness that these pulp stories almost universally lack.
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Jul 6, 2016 12:20
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I've generally become soured of the whole notion of Nazi super-science, especially since in many ways the Nazi regime actually did a lot to hobble German scientific process, not accelerate it. That's not to say Germany didn't make some real innovations during that time, but a lot of it had to do with the existing German scientific community already being very impressive (at least when the Nazis weren't driving off or imprisoning some of their most brilliant minds) and the willingness (and desperation) of the Nazis to throw any idea at the wall to see if it stuck. A lot of the wunderwaffen was innovative, but not actually effective. And the less said about their human "experimentation", the better- it belongs in a discussion about torture, not science. A lot of their military prowess was also lacking. As much as poo poo they gave the Poles about fielding lancers against Panzers, the Germans' own logistics lines relied heavily on horse-drawn carts. The Germans lost a quarter of it's air force, a full division, and thousands of soldiers two weeks into the September campaign and they were facing a protracted military campaign with guerrilla combat and the bulk of the Polish army assembling for a massive counterattack through if it wasn't for Stalin buttfucking Poland midway through the campaign. I'd imagine if Stalin kept the Red Army pressing on, they'd probably could have made it to Berlin within a year.
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Jul 6, 2016 13:09
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I've generally become soured of the whole notion of Nazi super-science, especially since in many ways the Nazi regime actually did a lot to hobble German scientific process, not accelerate it. That's not to say Germany didn't make some real innovations during that time, but a lot of it had to do with the existing German scientific community already being very impressive (at least when the Nazis weren't driving off or imprisoning some of their most brilliant minds) and the willingness (and desperation) of the Nazis to throw any idea at the wall to see if it stuck. A lot of the wunderwaffen was innovative, but not actually effective. And the less said about their human "experimentation", the better- it belongs in a discussion about torture, not science. One of the reasons it worked so well in Wolfenstein is You discover the Nazis weren't really responsible for poo poo and stole all their supertech from jews. Spoilered in case anyone hasn't played The New Order and wants to, because holy poo poo that game is good.
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Jul 6, 2016 13:44
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Given what horrorshows that Mengele put people through especially if you're unlucky enough to be a twin in Auschwitz, it's loving appalling to go 'hey, we'll use him in our Superhero Elf Games'. That and the Gasser powers shows an astounding level of tone-deafness.
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Jul 6, 2016 16:48
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Robindaybird posted:Given what horrorshows that Mengele put people through especially if you're unlucky enough to be a twin in Auschwitz, it's loving appalling to go 'hey, we'll use him in our Superhero Elf Games'. A walking war crime can't save people from a bus wreck. Hell, he probably can't stop a bank robbery without slaughtering innocent bystanders. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 17:28
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taichara posted:Some weird melding of hippogriff and gryphon, really, what with lion's forepaws instead of eagle claws ... needed to get lion bits in there somewhere, I guess?
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Jul 6, 2016 17:44
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Hostile V posted:I'm just gonna say that in general, sometimes you can make using Nazis work for the backstory of things. But if at any point you have Mengele's tortures be used for any sort of research and he actually gets results, you have gone too far in a tastelessly stupid direction and should reconsider this. Does it acknowledge that what he did was monstrous? Yeah. Did they still go along with him being responsible for the nation's force of offensive and defensive Deltas? Yes and that's where things start going south in the "hold the gently caress up" sense. The thing for me, for that, is that it's mentioned that Deltas get their powers from, basically, lovely things happening to them. So I can believe Mengele could create Deltas. I'd just also assume he'd create Deltas who would massacre the entire facility. Besides, the cynical part of me kind of assumes that, if he was any good at things, he'd just be Paperclipped rather than run off to South America.
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Jul 6, 2016 18:28
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Halloween Jack posted:Stuff like the Gasser is, besides being in poor taste, an indication of what happens when people play superhero games and only think of them as settings where people with powers fight each other. So I guess you're right he technically can't. chiasaur11 posted:The thing for me, for that, is that it's mentioned that Deltas get their powers from, basically, lovely things happening to them. So I can believe Mengele could create Deltas. I'd just also assume he'd create Deltas who would massacre the entire facility. Unfortunately it's explicitly stated that any Deltas he made from torturing innocent people were immediately killed because they didn't want them to be any kind of a threat, they just wanted to figure out a process that worked for making Deltas. If a process was reliable, they would then use it on Aryan-style German soldiers to try and make loyal Deltas. It's an unfortunately realistic way of going about it because it robs the entire scenario of an interesting plot hook. Also the entire thing is nonsense because Delta possibility is a genetic thing and as a result the methods ended up killing the German subjects more often than not. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 18:28
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chiasaur11 posted:The thing for me, for that, is that it's mentioned that Deltas get their powers from, basically, lovely things happening to them. So I can believe Mengele could create Deltas. I'd just also assume he'd create Deltas who would massacre the entire facility. "This process will create someone with the power to kill everyone in this facility. It requires us to make the subject as pissed off, confused, angry, and hateful towards us as possible." "GENIUS!" This is a trope that needs to die.
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Jul 6, 2016 18:30
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Night10194 posted:"This process will create someone with the power to kill everyone in this facility. It requires us to make the subject as pissed off, confused, angry, and hateful towards us as possible." "GENIUS!" So either he created one Delta, who then killed everyone, or he became the head of a Nazi version of the Umbrella Corporation, continuously doing the same experiments that have already gloriously backfired in the past.
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Jul 6, 2016 18:50
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnVl9oPW2so Here I go again, biting off more than I can chew…  Godlike is a roleplaying game by Dennis Detwiller, with mechanics written by Greg Stolze. The premise is superficially simple: what if superhumans started appearing before and during World War II? Stolze’s One Roll Engine--which would go on to power Wild Talents, Reign, and a number of other games--was originally developed for Godlike. I’ll be giving the mechanics relatively short shrift in this review, as many of you will already be familiar with them from reviews of other ORE games. Godlike’s rules are a prototype for what would eventually become a more universal superhero system in Wild Talents. The rules are also very focused on WWII--there are fiddly bits (if sensible ones) for handling things like machineguns, cover fire, grenades, flamethrowers, and other weapons and tactics of the era. Detwiller says that Godlike was inspired by asking himself a simple question: what would a world with superheroes really be like? It didn’t make sense to him that they would rule the world, nor that they’d be hunted down and persecuted. More likely, he thought, they’d be the subject of fascination and eventually be accepted, like cars and computers. Powers could make history, but not control history. As a roleplaying game, Godlike is the expression of some ideas I’m going to reproduce here verbatim, because I think you’ll all appreciate them so much: quote:This book was written in a very specific manner, to avoid pitfalls commonly found in gaming books these days: metaplots and highly stylized text. Metaplots frankly sicken me. The idea of selling a single idea, spread across a dozen different books, is just plain wrong. It either means the publisher is too lazy or too bent on profit to make a comprehensive book. They might sell books in the long run, but they also upset their customers. I mean, who wouldn’t rather have all the information in one book? To avoid the “splatbook syndrome,” I did my best to squeeze as much in to this one book as possible. There will be supplements, but you’ll never find yourself forced to buy additional books just to play the game you already bought. Godlike makes good on these promises. Each chapter opens with about a page of in-character fiction, following a squad of American “Talents,” as superhumans come to be called. But it’s not the core content of the books.  I was unsure how to review this game because it teases the premise, but it totally front-loads the rules and character creation before it goes into detail about the setting. So I’ll tease you a little more here. This is a game about superhumans in an alternate-history WWII. But unlike the “Golden Age” of DC and Marvel (then Timely) Comics, the history of WWII isn’t different because gods, aliens, robots, and mutants have appeared in our world. The superhumans of Godlike are all Talents--rare individuals who, for reasons unknown, manifest the ability to manipulate reality in fixed and limited ways. They bleed like the rest of us, and while some of them may be bulletproof, none of them are truly invincible. Next time: Basic mechanics.
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Jul 6, 2016 19:30
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I'm definitely interested in Godlike. I own a whole mess of ORE games that I haven't really looked at so I'm looking forward to this.
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Jul 7, 2016 00:12
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We also are sitting on copies of Godlike and a few supplements so I'd love to see some summaries before we get to it.
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Jul 7, 2016 00:36
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Does that break the no research rule?
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Jul 7, 2016 00:56
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NEW POWER PACKAGES AQUARIAN Aquarians showed up as NPCs in the first book and haven’t really done much besides exist and help fight WWII. They’re visibly amphibious with gills, webbed digits and big black eyes. For powers, they get +20 Pace to swimming and can use Swimming instead of Dodge in the water. They also get perma-nightvision, water-breathing and immunity to hypothermia. Side effects include Obvious -3 (you can hide your appearance with clothing) and Ugly -1 (you look funny). For Tricks, they get: Aquabatics: An extra success for Swimming can let you do stunts. What stunts? gently caress me if I know. Breathing Buddy: An extra success on a Spirit roll can let you pump oxygen into someone’s mouth underwater.  His trenchcoat is screaming "Some motherfucker's always trying to swim upstream" to me. Go watch Blade! It's good and it still holds up. Thoughts on the Aquarian: The Aquarian wasn’t anything special in the core book. It still isn’t. They’re pretty limited with what they can do on land and it’s doubtful you’re ever going to do a water-based campaign, making them pretty useless. There’s only one example under Aquabatics (Breaching) and it’s just a hot fat shrug of an idea. Forcing people to take downsides is still rear end. There’s just not much you can do with an Aquarian in a combat sense, which is pretty much the point of this whole series at this point. If they can’t do much in combat, they’re not worth much fighting the government unless you want to stab a drowning sailor at sea. This even applies to the premade character. Dude just wants to be left alone and I can’t blame him. He’s alright, he’s nothing special except for his new weapon that appears in no other books. LAZARUS The Lazarus is a Delta who can’t die unless the job is incredibly thorough. They get no real powers besides that and there’s nothing making any damage hurt less. Resurrection is a tricky thing. The brain/head of a Lazarus is the thing that keeps them going. They can take up to double their Strength before dying. When a Lazarus dies, take note of how many wounds they’ve sustained beyond the normal total. The body will lay inert and regenerate one wound every 12 hours, slowly pulling together and regenerating any missing pieces. When the body is completely healed, the Lazarus wakes back up and goes about their business. You can speed up the process with medical attention or keep lopping things off to keep them incapacitated. But let’s say we’re not talking about getting gunned down. Remember my comment about cutting off the head of that Nazi last book? Yeah, they can survive that. Cut the head off a Lazarus and they will grow a new body from the neck while their old one rots. Put their brain in a blender and a new brain and body will regrow from the biggest intact piece while the rest rots. The only way to kill a Lazarus is to completely incinerate the head and brain (or I guess you could argue that a tub of acid would do the job). Also they have absolutely no memory of what happened or where they went while they were dead. For Tricks, they get:  *Thriller chord* Sacrifice: Gain a spare Delta Point on an extra success on a Bravery roll. This point can only be used perform an action to help someone directly in a way that risk the Delta’s life. You can just sit around accumulating these points and can have unlimited points but they disappear at the end of the play session. Dying Act: An extra success on a Spirit roll at the moment of death lets the Delta perform one last action next round before immediately dying. If you were stunned, you’re unstunned for this last act.  Laundromats and tailors hate him! This one Delta learned one weird trick to making their jobs so much worse! Thoughts on the Lazarus: The big killer is how long it takes for you to come back to death and there’s no clear indication as to how well regeneration works. There is no mechanical explanation for what happens if you’re reduced to a brain, so how many wounds does that count as? How long does it take to regrow a limb, is it just “count it as pulped and count backwards”? Is it just one wound per 12 hours? The book says “one wound level” per hours and that’s not entirely clear. Either way you’re going to be dead for a minimum of three days and the other PCs are going to get bored of sitting around for you or get annoyed at the time skips every time you die. I do like the Tricks, they’re appropriate even if the only use for Delta Points otherwise is to reduce your wounds or give you another dice to roll. Being able to use it for something practical isn’t that bad. The premade is middle of the road and average and I can’t fault him for that. He’s nothing special. I wouldn’t give him Fast Learner but that’s me. RATMASTER A Ratmaster is a Delta that can talk to and command rodents. You have to get in the mindset of a rodent but you can actually talk to them even though what they have to say is limited by their sense of language and sense of concepts.  A Ratmaster can control one rodent for every point of Spirit they have, no rolls required. Rodents will do anything commanded within physical reason but not mental reason, so you can tell a hamster to run into a room with a primed hand grenade and it will. The big issue is finding rodents so you just have to look for them or carry some with you. Also if two Ratmasters find the same critter, they have to have a Spirit contest to control them. The other explicit power is speaking to rodents by speaking in squeaks. For Tricks, they get: Call Rodents: Extra success on a Spirit roll can summon one rodent per success from up to 100 yards away. You can also call more rodents than you can control to ask them questions. Speak with Animal: Stretch the definition of your ability to speak with rodents to chat with any animal. An extra success on a Spirit roll will let you talk to another animal for three rounds.  I'm not gonna lie, now I'm imagining this lady just running around with a pack of capybara. She could make a lot of money getting them to do tricks. Thoughts on the Ratmaster: So you can control rats in the most limited form possible. Granted, you’re explicitly said to control rodents and the book does mention that a guinea pig is a socially acceptable critter to see poking around as a scout. So you could control a squirrel army if you set your mind to it or buy a bunch of capybaras. Regardless, someone statted out the rear end from chargen to control rodents could only control five at one time. That’s not really a lot and it’s not really that good. The rodents themselves are limited to doing stuff for you or running recon. Their stats aren’t particularly good and you don’t have them in enough numbers to gang-rush enemies under a tidal wave of mice. The ability to call them is good and speaking with other animals isn’t bad but really the Jungler and their armies of killer bees and insects kind of have you beat. The premade is a homeless woman who controls rats. Sure, why the hell not. There’s not much to her. PARALYZER The Paralyzer can freeze people with a look. It just causes the higher functions of the brain to freeze up and let everything else keep going. As a result, there’s a new skill for Paralyzers: Look (Spirit) which focuses the paralytic abilities at a target. Paralyzation (sic) requires direct eye contact with the target, the Delta’s Look roll vs. raw Spirit for the Target. If you get hit, there’s another contested Spirit roll where a success means the target is paralyzed. The target is paralyzed for the difference between the Spirit rolls. When the target is released, the Paralyzer can attempt another Spirit roll to lock them up, no Look roll required. For Tricks, they get: Good Look: Extra successes on the Look roll can be turned into +1 on the Spirit contest. Penetrating Glare: Freeze people indirectly through mirrors or reflective surfaces using three extra successes on a Look. Quick Look: An extra success on a Look can be used to try and paralyze another target as part of the attack. This can be used on up to five people max and can’t be used with Good Look.  The lack of coloring on this makes her top incredibly confusing. Thoughts on the Paralyzer: Ugh, okay. So you have to make an attack and then you have to make a contested roll. That’s not good. You could have one or the other, you don’t need both. You’re never going to get that reflection freeze either. It’s just bad for a non-lethal combat option. There’s nothing to this character besides their powers. They’re pretty much a nonentity. STRETCH The Stretch is a Delta capable of treating their own body like rubber to elongate, grow or slip through small spaces. It’s the Mr. Fantastic powerset.  Why is this in the section for the Stretch? Look I'll level with you: I attach the art where it appears in the book to break up these posts. This book is kind of full of out-of-place art. Your limbs can stretch up to 30 feet. You can squish yourself and slip through a hole as small as an inch wide. You can also increase your height or width or both if you really stretch up to 5 times your size. A Stretch also gets natural body armor: 10/- against Piercing attacks, 20/- against Blunt attacks. Everything else goes through. They also get fast healing rolls every eight hours, on par with the Tough. For Tricks, they get: Pliable Face: Extra successes on a Spirit roll add +1 to Disguise rolls. Superstretch: Every extra success on a Spirit roll gives +1 yard to a single limb’s stretch. Wrap Attack: Extra successes on a barehanded roll can be used to grapple a target. Make a hit location roll for every extra success and then make a single Strength roll that applies damage to all locations at once. The grapple is automatic and requires a close combat roll to get loose from the grapple.  Here, have a scene I hate from a movie I hate:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAXa1iZbILI Thoughts on the Stretch: You’re a weakened Tough with some other abilities tacked on and it’s honestly surprising this doesn’t have any downsides. The ability to slip through cracks isn’t that bad, stretching isn’t awful. I would rather be a Tough, though. I would rather have that flat 20 armor for everything. The big seller is the grappling but even then it’s nothing special. She’s an American Indian with Stretch powers and I don’t have much more to say. She doesn’t have much to her stats and doesn’t have much to her quirks and there’s not much to her period. TIMETRIPPER The Timetripper has limited time control powers. Specifically, a Timetripper can rewind time, at will, up to a minute back. Rewinding costs a Delta Point and only the Timetripper knows what happens. Time and history will continue as normal unless the Delta is able to convince people to do something different or does something to change it. The actions of the Delta are counted as new actions and as such get new rolls. If the Timetripper changes someone else’s actions (pushing them, yelling at them) then they too get new rolls. You can also rewind reflexively by giving up a later action and a Delta Point and might need to make a Speed roll to activate the power before an opponent can act. The Delta can also spend Delta Points to get premonitions for the effects of a single one-action task (opening a door, shooting a gun, cutting a bomb’s wire). The premonition only says what will happen if you do one thing; it will not dictate the best course of action. They can involve anyone’s actions though. For Tricks, they get: Rewind Further: Extra successes on a Spirit roll can let the Delta go back an extra round (by default the power goes back 12 rounds or 1 minute, so it’s 6 seconds). Out of Sync: An extra success on a Spirit roll can knock the Delta loose from time and space for a round, disappearing until the end of the next round where they reappear back where they were. This requires a Stun check, but if you fail you just miss the next action to recover so the stun lasts one action.  He owns a license plate that reads "OUTADP" and gets lots of confused looks from people. Thoughts on the Timetripper: Okay, this is a pretty good use of Delta Points. Rewinding time is a pain in the butt because you’re basically undoing everything that happened, but it’s handy to be able to redo things for the other players if it’s within the last minute. It’s very slight though, it’s a very small window but I do kind of like it. I don’t have much to say about the Timetripper. It’s one of the better Delta ideas in this book. The big downside is that you’d only have so many Delta Points per session so you have to make it count. This premade too is just some guy with a cocky demeanor. He’s missing a Trick. Oh well. AWARDS Most Likely To Kill A Room Full Of People Without Breaking A Sweat: For the first time, I would have to say none of these. Maybe the Stretch for the only one with offensive combat capability by grappling. Strictly speaking? Nobody. Best Battlefield Control/Exploitation: The Timetripper is a pretty good way to rewrite the outcome of a fight, so I’d say them. Most Pigeonholed Into One Job: Everyone. Specifically, though? The Paralyzer. The other Deltas get options to do things creatively with their core power (talk to animals, premonitions, slipping through holes). The Paralyzer just gets the paralytic look. Melee Class Most Affected By Dex-Focus in Game Engine: The Stretch by sheer virtue of nobody else getting a melee range ability. Peak 90s: Hmm. The Ratmaster and the Lazarus are tied. The Ratmaster gives me Willard vibes and the Lazarus reminds me of the Great Lakes Avengers. If I had to pick? The Ratmaster. Most Cribbed Directly From Deadlands: Still not applicable, thank god. Best Optional Combat Rule Shenanigans: The Stretch for AUTOGRAPPLE. Most Broken Class (Not In A Good Way): I’m going to have to say the Ratmaster because you’re pretty limited to how many rat buddies you have at once. Alternately, there’s being trapped in death as a Lazarus because someone keeps cutting your limbs while you regenerate. There’s also the Paralyzer needing two separate rolls to do anything. NEXT TIME: setting secrets, NPCs and the premade adventure for this book, a tale of bad decisions called THE TELETERRORISTS. Full disclosure: does not involve teleportation. Different kind of tele.
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Jul 7, 2016 01:50
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LongDarkNight posted:Does that break the no research rule? That rule exists so that we can be wrong about stuff without going all Simpsons quote on our comment feed every episode. We don't mind incidental contact with book content before we record.
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Jul 7, 2016 02:39
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LongDarkNight posted:Does that break the no research rule? I think the RIFTS review pretty much blew that rule out of the water
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Jul 7, 2016 02:43
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Hostile V posted:STRETCH I feel like a Stretcher Spy would be pretty good? Octo-Bond, with the ability to disguise his face, wriggle through tight places, and is tough and good at melee combat. EDIT: Between Octobond and Splodehog we're 2 deltas into a bizarre gimmick team of animal-codename deltas. Crasical fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Jul 7, 2016 |
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Jul 7, 2016 02:47
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Hostile V posted:NEXT TIME: setting secrets, NPCs and the premade adventure for this book, a tale of bad decisions called THE TELETERRORISTS. Full disclosure: does not involve teleportation. Different kind of tele.
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Jul 7, 2016 02:49
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Robindaybird posted:Given what horrorshows that Mengele put people through especially if you're unlucky enough to be a twin in Auschwitz, it's loving appalling to go 'hey, we'll use him in our Superhero Elf Games'. Get the gently caress outta here. Gasser powers? They really did that?
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Jul 7, 2016 02:59
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Crasical posted:I feel like a Stretcher Spy would be pretty good? Octo-Bond, with the ability to disguise his face, wriggle through tight places, and is tough and good at melee combat. Between The Patriot and Timetripper, we've got 2 members of Overwatch almost exactly. Did they make a comic book of Godlike? I remember reading a very well-reviewed 'supers in WW2' comic with the same vibe. Kieron Gillian maybe wrote it?
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Jul 7, 2016 03:53
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Midjack posted:Get the gently caress outta here. Gasser powers? They really did that? Yep, people who got exposed to toxic gases (like WWI's Mustard gas) can now emit lethal poisonous vapor, guy didn't think about the other usage of toxic gas during this time period during the write up.
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Jul 7, 2016 03:59
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Count Chocula posted:Did they make a comic book of Godlike? I remember reading a very well-reviewed 'supers in WW2' comic with the same vibe. Kieron Gillian maybe wrote it?
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Jul 7, 2016 05:05
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Alien Rope Burn posted:A lot of it to me just demonstrates that Nazi propaganda was so effective than even today it's become ingrained in our pop culture and parroted without consideration. That's not to say you can't ever do stories with Nazis gaining access to advanced science, but it should be done with a historical awareness that these pulp stories almost universally lack. Nazi superscience in elfgames is probably because elfgames are more or less designed by cargo cult anyway.
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Jul 7, 2016 08:17
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Can't we stick to Nazi occult stuff like Delta Green? It killed a lot fewer people than their scientists, and it's more interesting.
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Jul 7, 2016 08:20
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Kavak posted:Can't we stick to Nazi occult stuff like Delta Green? It killed a lot fewer people than their scientists, and it's more interesting. The Ahnenerbe actually did kill people for racial studies.
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Jul 7, 2016 08:23
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Kemper Boyd posted:The Ahnenerbe actually did kill people for racial studies. Still a smaller number! 
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Jul 7, 2016 08:29
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One reason not to put the Nazis in anything is that there's really no way to have them in without either directly confronting or deliberately avoiding the very large number of people the murdered in cold blood. Honestly this holds for both theaters, the Japanese were pretty awful too.
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Jul 7, 2016 08:33
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wiegieman posted:One reason not to put the Nazis in anything is that there's really no way to have them in without either directly confronting or deliberately avoiding the very large number of people the murdered in cold blood. Turns out war kind of sucks.
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Jul 7, 2016 09:00
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theironjef posted:That rule exists so that we can be wrong about stuff without going all Simpsons quote on our comment feed every episode. We don't mind incidental contact with book content before we record. That's fair. What's the best way to send you questions for Afterthoughts?
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Jul 7, 2016 13:24
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I just email at systemmastery@gmail.com and they always answer my dumb questions about D&D but with.... and why podcasts always talk about ghosts jacking off.
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Jul 7, 2016 13:47
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I just can't get over how terrible those character "quotes" are.
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Jul 7, 2016 14:29
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