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Joke's on you, I just tied lances to my feet, now I can have the biggest dick shoes around and not worry about the toes flipping back! Now come outside to see them, I can't exactly bring them in to show you.
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Dec 4, 2016 22:59
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Dec 4, 2016 23:32
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Hostile V posted:Joke's on you, I just tied lances to my feet, now I can have the biggest dick shoes around and not worry about the toes flipping back! Now come outside to see them, I can't exactly bring them in to show you. In the real world the solution to this problem was to put little chains on the tips of the shoes so they could be tied back.
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Dec 5, 2016 00:18
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I have no direct sources but the idea of an entire band being used to tell everybody the time just sounds wrong. Especially because the issue then becomes how does anybody even remotely far away even hear them.
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Dec 5, 2016 00:25
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Hunt11 posted:I have no direct sources but the idea of an entire band being used to tell everybody the time just sounds wrong. Especially because the issue then becomes how does anybody even remotely far away even hear them.
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Dec 5, 2016 00:31
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Hostile V posted:Every Monday I make the hike to the apothecary for all of the beeswax suppositories I can carry for my mother in law who got a fever from losing both of her legs but getting an infection before she got her new prosthetics. I can't tell if the apothecary is undercharging or overcharging me; I can't read and I don't know if a songbird is actually capable of writing by dipping its beak in ink. I just keep giving it money until it stops looking angry and starts nodding. This may be the best thing I have ever read. I would roleplay in this setting if if was taken to this logical extreme
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Dec 5, 2016 02:19
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 Previous post Get A Job Already! The Classes of Slayers! He grunted in admiration. “So… you’re some kind of sorceress, then?” Gah! Now it was my jaw’s turn to drop. “Some kind of sorceress? Yes, I am some kind of sorceress! What did you think?” I’d like to explain that from the moment that Gourry first laid eyes on me, I have been dressed like SOME KIND OF SORCERESS. Slayers classes! Pretty much all of these classes are derived from at least one character who appeared in the series and are accompanied by pictures of those characters. Here we go! Bandit  It's days like this that make me glad I'm a bandit! Bandits are a very common foe for Lina and Co. to face during their adventures. You know what these are, it's like a rogue, but in the woods. And mechanically, that's pretty much what a bandit is. One of their main level bonuses is Sneak Attack, just like a rogue. Their other key feature is the ability to gain a group of followers. At level 8, a bandit can form a band as if they had Leadership and gain a bonus in such. The band becomes a gang, mob, clan, and finally a ravening horde at level 20 with stacking Leadership bonuses. Bounty Hunter  I've worked hard up till now following them all over creation for that money you promised me, but from here on out I'm fighting for my own reasons! Zangulus the bounty hunter was a constant nemesis in the first season of Slayers and is the entire basis for the class. Bounty hunters are kinda duelist types, with their main class features being tracking people and being fast/good at dodging. Their progression is a bit more varied than the bandit's. Loremaster  As long as he has wisdom and fighting spirit, nothing is impossible for a man! Loremasters are keepers of secrets. Basically specialists, Loremasters just know poo poo. Loremasters can make a special knowledge check with a bonus equal to their level + INT to see if they know about notable people, items, or places. As for level progression...Well, here's the table.  Yeah, that looks kinda weird, right? Loremasters are weird in that their class progression is pretty much freeform. See, the book gives a list of secrets that loremasters can learn, some can be taken once, some can be taken as many times as you want. They range from a new feat or additional skill points, to the ability to sense magic items, to special combat abilities. 's weird. Noble  A prince is dignified, refined, and really handsome too! You know, I actually really like the concept of this class. Nobility in Slayers are no strangers to the life of an adventurer. Main character Amelia is a princess of the kingdom of Seyruun son of Prince Philionel, and recurring antagonist Martina is the princess of the kingdom of Xoana. Nobles are leaders through and through. Their features include bonuses to social situations, the abilitiy to inspire courage and greatness in your allies, and interestingly, a line of credit to your kingdom that you can use to buy stuff. Reasonable expenses are of course up to the GM, and every tab must be paid off eventually. Priest  Rezo, the Red Priest, who clothes himself in the robes of the priesthood and bears with him the respect of the Great Shrine. He travels through all lands helping people, one of the five Wise Men of the Age. Priests are the servants of the gods, which makes it weird that they can be any alignment. First season antagonist Rezo the Red and season 2 & 3 frenemy Xellos form the basis of this class. Priests are kinda cleric-y, with the abilitiy to sense and smite evil plus removing disease. Plus, they become spellcasters at 11th level, so there's that. Also they have a staff and they can't do priest stuff if they lose it, so get a wrist strap. Rogue I don't really care if anyone steals the jewels on my shoulders since they're fakes, but it's not my fault if they explode when you remove them. Rogues....are rogues. They are pretty much exactly as in PHB. There's not even a picture of a character to justify its inclusion. It's a remarkable and glaring lack of effort in a book that has otherwise been nothing but effort, despite any flaws. N....Next. Warrior  Look out, sea dragon! I will slay you in one blow! Warriors are sword guys and you probably shouldn't be playing one in 3.5, but who am I to judge? The two main things a warrior has progression-wise are a bonus to a particular style that they choose during chargen, be it one-handed, two-handed, double weapon, weapon and shield etc, and the ability to choose bonus feats from a list of feats. It's all quite boring. Witch/Wizard  Even an idiot can learn one trick. You can't be the best without knowing the big and small spells. Now we're talking. Witches and wizards are your basic spellcasters. It's basically being a magic intern. This is what you wanna be if you wanna be like a sorcerer or a shaman or one of the actually good prestige classes. Outside of spellcasting ability, all you really get is feats and a defensive barrier. Whatever! That's all very basic, so join me next time when we get to some of the weirder classes! On the Next Episode: Moving on up! Prestige Classes!
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Dec 5, 2016 03:14
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How does S20 handle the fact that most spellcasters have at least some ability with all three types of magic? As in, Lina can cast healing spells even if she isn't very good at them and priests are quite capable of learning black magic.
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Dec 5, 2016 03:43
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The Lone Badger posted:How does S20 handle the fact that most spellcasters have at least some ability with all three types of magic? As in, Lina can cast healing spells even if she isn't very good at them and priests are quite capable of learning black magic. The chapter specifically on magic goes more in-depth, but I believe spellcasters can learn common spells of any school of magic, but advanced spells require you to specialize in it.
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Dec 5, 2016 03:56
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LongDarkNight posted:Acts 2 & 3 establishes one of my favorite things about this AP, a sense of time elapsing. In the other Pathfinder APs I’ve done you go from zero to hero in a few months. This AP takes place over 5-6 years which feels more reasonable and reflects the earlier conceit that villains need to execute plans that take time to develop while heroes react to threats. I do think most of the encounters sailing north are filler of the sort that infests Pathfinder APs. At most, they establish that Captain Kargeld is an rear end in a top hat and you shouldn't feel guilty about backstabbing him (if you even would, since you're evil). The Kargeld fight is pretty dull, though. It's just one big guy and a handful of mooks. I wrestled with ways to make it more interesting but finally decided screw it, these are just ordinary sailors, the PCs should be able to exterminate them with any reasonable-sounding plan. Fire-Axe is a fun character. I wish the PCs interacted with him a bit more, but my players always enjoyed hearing news of his exploits through the rest of the campaign.
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Dec 5, 2016 06:48
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Selachian posted:I do think most of the encounters sailing north are filler of the sort that infests Pathfinder APs. At most, they establish that Captain Kargeld is an rear end in a top hat and you shouldn't feel guilty about backstabbing him (if you even would, since. I think it's quite telling that all the APs (For 3rd, 4e and 5E) that I have tried that feel the need to shackle themselves to the XP chart have broken pacing when run as is.
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Dec 5, 2016 09:06
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If you're doing a specific pre-planned path anyway, couldn't you ditch adding up XP and just have specific points along the path where "OK, all of the PCs level up now" ?
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Dec 5, 2016 10:32
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The one good thing about most of the Paizo-published adventures is that they have a paragraph at the beginning of them that says "Players start at this level, should be -this- level by X point, this level by Y point, and this level at the end. Which means you can skip boring filler fights and have them level up at appropriate breakpoints, but for some reason instead this is taken as 'give them more fights if they aren't at that point yet'
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Dec 5, 2016 10:59
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Selachian posted:I do think most of the encounters sailing north are filler of the sort that infests Pathfinder APs. At most, they establish that Captain Kargeld is an rear end in a top hat and you shouldn't feel guilty about backstabbing him (if you even would, since you're evil). I'm not a fan of this seafaring bit, because it seems like there's very little for the PCs to really do beyond random encounters. That's fine for break sessions or if a player or two couldn't make it, but the voyage is uninteresting and the PCs have nothing to do beyond backstab Kargeld at the end. If I were running this AP, I'd save the trip for one of those off nights or just gloss over the voyage and give everyone XP at the end. Or invent an interesting encounter like finding a creepy abandoned island castle that could make a good supervillain lair later in the campaign.
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Dec 5, 2016 14:34
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Cythereal posted:I'm not a fan of this seafaring bit, because it seems like there's very little for the PCs to really do beyond random encounters. That's fine for break sessions or if a player or two couldn't make it, but the voyage is uninteresting and the PCs have nothing to do beyond backstab Kargeld at the end. If I were running this AP, I'd save the trip for one of those off nights or just gloss over the voyage and give everyone XP at the end. Or invent an interesting encounter like finding a creepy abandoned island castle that could make a good supervillain lair later in the campaign. The triton attack has potential to be an interesting fight (how often do you fight tritons?), but the rest is forgettable.
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Dec 5, 2016 17:34
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Selachian posted:I do think most of the encounters sailing north are filler of the sort that infests Pathfinder APs. At most, they establish that Captain Kargeld is an rear end in a top hat and you shouldn't feel guilty about backstabbing him (if you even would, since you're evil). It's definitely one of the least interesting sections of the AP but it does do a few things. The encounter with the Blade reminds the PCs that Talingarde is still out to get them, the encounter with the Tritons introduces Sir Richard albeit cryptically and meeting the Fire-Axe is cool. My players loved Fire-Axe and bro'd down with him at every opportunity. Cthulhu Dreams posted:I think it's quite telling that all the APs (For 3rd, 4e and 5E) that I have tried that feel the need to shackle themselves to the XP chart have broken pacing when run as is. Because it's part of the system and it's tradition.  My group tends not to mess around with side quests so we've run into trouble a few times with being under leveled by the end of the AP and struggling with encounters. For this AP I ended up doing what The Lone Badger suggested and just leveling up when appropriate based on the Act. Not tracking experience improved the flow of sessions and changed how we play D&D type games. I don't think we'll ever track experience again.
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Dec 5, 2016 17:51
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That's the spirit!Selachian posted:The Kargeld fight is pretty dull, though. It's just one big guy and a handful of mooks. I wrestled with ways to make it more interesting but finally decided screw it, these are just ordinary sailors, the PCs should be able to exterminate them with any reasonable-sounding plan. Definitely leaning more towards that myself. Nothing is worse than running a fight for the sake of running a fight.
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Dec 5, 2016 19:05
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Doresh posted:This is starting to turn into Princess Tutu. A world of contradictions thrown together in an attempt to make stories in a medieval setting, where you can win by overthrowing the GM? Sounds great to me.
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Dec 5, 2016 19:40
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 Part the Last: Final Thoughts Here ends the tale of Exodus: Post-Apocalyptic Roleplaying. At this final step, I want to step back and give my brief earnest (if not necessarily deep) opinions on what Exodus changed and what stayed the same, for good and for ill. It was a bit hard to write this, because when I first started this set of overviews several years back, I had went into it with a full "gawk at the spectacle" carnie mentality, and never planned to actually think about it. How times change, eh? An Altered Apocalypse: The Two Big Attempted Transformations of Exodus Perhaps the most profound of all the changes Exodus made from its original draft as Fallout d20 was its timeline of the end of the world. In Fallout, the Great War beset a future America of the year 2077, and the first game takes place a hefty eight decades later; Exodus crunches this into the Great War of 2012 and the vaults opening a mere twenty years later. The opposition in the Great War is changed from Red China alone in Fallout to a conjoined force of China and Iran, perhaps not so subtly reflecting on the fact that Exodus was a product of the Bush years. In concept, this could have been a way for Exodus to truly differentiate itself as its own post-apocalyptic setting, free and unfettered from the license it no longer held. In practice, we ended up getting the Fallout world of fusion cars, laser weapons, power armor, secret experiments to create giant green mutants, and a society simultaneously nostalgic for the past yet distant enough from it to only create an effigy of it, all squeezed into what is effectively our world. I'm not a huge purist when it comes to alternate weird history poo poo. Hell, urban fantasy's one of my favorite genres and GURPS Technomancer is my favorite book I've covered for this thread so far. Where it becomes a problem is that the original core triad of Exodus titles can't escape the fact that they are a few streaks of paint haphazardly thrown over the still very recognizable Fallout framework. Two decades are still treated as if they were nearly a century, and the events of the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the invasion of Iraq don't really change the Fallout-based "better dead than Red" nature of propaganda and society. I almost wish I could have found a way to read this series of books before I even knew about the Fallout series, just to see it from a totally objective point of view, but as things are everything about it just stick out like a sore thumb. The other big change was that a lot of the pop culture nostalgia and retrofuturism in the world of Exodus has been moved forward to the 80s. You have the idolization of Walker: Texas Ranger and Dukes of Hazzard by the natives of Texas, most drawn characters looking like they shopped at either the Mad Max emporium or the nearby 80s action movie retail outlet. The only places where the early Cold War aesthetic is at the fore are in the propaganda, sales ads, the cars (I guess because big bubbles and tailfins are more fun to draw than sports cars), and art pieces that were probably commissioned back when Exodus was still officially licensed as Fallout d20. And, of course, in between these two are various minor changes such as adding a few more mutants and the valiant effort of Exodus: Texas to be a free bird. It is what it is. My Suggestions for a Freer Exodus So, what exactly do we do with these observations, combined with the observations we've had about all Exodus kept the same? Through my prestigious credentials of being some nobody on the internet, here's a few of the ways I feel Exodus could have managed to reach escape velocity of its product license planet of origin.
What Story Does Exodus Tell? Exodus: Post-Apocalyptic Roleplaying is a story of adapt-or-die on a small corporate scale. Fallout d20 was Glutton Creeper Games, so I can empathize with the fact that they decided salvaging the nearly complete script for it was the best way to survive. Still, the end result was merely a slow death rather than a more immediate one. Can this just be written off as just another case of the d20 bubble that hobbled to its death later than the others? I'm not really sure; groups like Chris Fields's Skorched Urf Studios kept trucking along well into the 2010s with d20 Modern shovelware, after all. My suspicion would have to fall on a combination of no backup plans for settings besides Fallout d20/Exodus and a death from the thousand cuts of two prolonged legal battles with Interplay. Perhaps more importantly than why Exodus died, however, is the question of "did it deserve to die?". My perhaps shocking answer would have to be no. On top of all the ways it could have innovated at the starting gate, the person writing Exodus: Texas seemed to have some genuine passion for his project and a desire to move away from the Fallout shell he had originally been tethered to, looking like he truly wished to create something more than just a serial number filing job. Were it not for the financial troubles that beset Glutton Creeper Games, Exodus truly could have been something. Would that something have been perfect? No, certainly not. But I would have loved to have seen the author/s who took it as a passionate project go for the gold and continue to find their footing in something that wasn't just the decaying husk of Fallout d20. Ultimately, we'll never know how that would have gone, ignoring the possibility of 4 Hour Games continuing to expand on the license they bought out. Thus our saga ends here: a domain of broken dreams. Fossilized Rappy fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Dec 5, 2016 |
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Dec 5, 2016 20:44
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Doresh posted:That's the spirit! It's been almost 5 years since I started the AP with my group so it's hard to remember but I think we did Acts 1-3 each in single sessions. The fight with Kargeld was quick since they alpha striked him during the surprise round then mopped up the crew.
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Dec 5, 2016 20:58
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The only woman in the photo has the smallest shoes. Checks out.
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Dec 5, 2016 23:08
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Champions: The Super RPG! is next on System Mastery, and lemme tell you, getting it read in a week was a lot harder than writing that stupid weapons of the world song.
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Dec 6, 2016 04:27
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theironjef posted:Champions: The Super RPG! is next on System Mastery, and lemme tell you, getting it read in a week was a lot harder than writing that stupid weapons of the world song. I was one of the playtesters for Champions/Hero System back in the early 80s and I still love it. Absolute best generic system ever.
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Dec 6, 2016 04:30
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I'm just grateful that I'm pretty sure Champions is where RPG fandom said "You can have this much math, but no more than this."
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Dec 6, 2016 04:37
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I have a couple of earlier editions of Champions on a shelf behind me, and the latest one is so big by comparison I'm afraid it would eat them both.
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Dec 6, 2016 04:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'm just grateful that I'm pretty sure Champions is where RPG fandom said "You can have this much math, but no more than this." Phoenix Command, MARS, and Star Legion would disagree.
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Dec 6, 2016 04:52
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'm just grateful that I'm pretty sure Champions is where RPG fandom said "You can have this much math, but no more than this." yea Champions is just at the limit of crunch to still be 'accessible' to most fans it seems. It has a lot of clunk, especially as splats were added, but I still love it.
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Dec 6, 2016 07:07
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LongDarkNight posted:Because it's part of the system and it's tradition. Oh yeah definitely but if it's broken literally 100% of the time across three/four editions how did it survive playtesting? Jokes aside I actually think because most post 2e D&D games are about the transformational journey of the heros that narrative pacing is more thematic than XP tracking as well as a lot easier and should be the default recommendation in the book.
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Dec 6, 2016 09:07
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Phoenix Command, MARS, and Star Legion would disagree. Games people don't generally play don't count. I'm pretty sure more people voted Prohibition Party in the last election than have played those games in sum total.
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Dec 6, 2016 12:54
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Games people don't generally play don't count. I'm pretty sure more people voted Prohibition Party in the last election than have played those games in sum total. As someone who thinks Phoenix Command is the best thing ever, it's also the prime example everyone always brings up when talking about there being too much math. It's the game that goes beyond the limit of "but no more than this", and consequently is only spoken of in hushed voices as an example of what simulation excess leads to.
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Dec 6, 2016 13:41
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After listening to the Bonus Content, Champions seems like the kind of game that creating characters would be incredible but actually playing it not so much.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:45
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SirPhoebos posted:After listening to the Bonus Content, Champions seems like the kind of game that creating characters would be incredible but actually playing it not so much. That was pretty much my experience when I tried the game out back in the Champions III days. Hunted was a particular pain in my rear end as the GM -- I'd sit down to plan the week's adventure, make my rolls, and suddenly I'd have to work three or four different groups into the storyline. And keeping track of Endurance was so, so tiresome.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:49
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:Oh yeah definitely but if it's broken literally 100% of the time across three/four editions how did it survive playtesting? It survived specifically because of how long its been there. It's about those warm and fuzzy feelings you get from nostalgia. (Also something WotC was pushing heavily as their playtesting mostly revolved around the question "Does it feel like D&D?") quote:Jokes aside I actually think because most post 2e D&D games are about the transformational journey of the heros that narrative pacing is more thematic than XP tracking as well as a lot easier and should be the default recommendation in the book. But then there wouldn't be quite as many numbers in the book. Selachian posted:That was pretty much my experience when I tried the game out back in the Champions III days. Not to mention running larger battles where almost everyone had a different Speed score. I would wager that making that one static for all characters is a very popular house rule. That's certainly the first thing I would do as a GM. Doresh fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 18:07
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Selachian posted:That was pretty much my experience when I tried the game out back in the Champions III days. Champions, much like the other big universal system GURPS, is actually two interlocked games: character creation and character play. Each one informs the other, but the skills used are quite different and the latter is arguably much harder and less appealing than the former. But at least for GURPS, the play only works because of the heavy lifting done during character creation. I found it worked well to let people who enjoy character creation do it on behalf of those who don't. This also applied to GURPS Vehicles, where the only one who liked working with it (me) ended up designing the spaceship that was the group's home for the campaign. Everyone wins, more or less.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:11
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I asked this in the Palladium thread, but I doubt that anyone checks it: Why does Erin Tarn get so much flak in the RIFTS reviews? Compared to other author inserts she seems pretty harmless.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:19
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Doresh posted:Not to mention running larger battles where almost everyone had a different Speed score. I would wager that making that one static for all characters is a very popular house rule. That's certainly the first thing I would do as a GM. What does Speed do in Champions? Number of actions?
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Dec 6, 2016 18:22
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Prism posted:What does Speed do in Champions? Number of actions? Yes. What makes this complex is that you also have to reference a Speed chart to know in which of the 12 phases/segments/whatever you can take your actions. Setting this as a universal constant helps speed things up. Speedster-type character may feel a bit gimped, but at least later editions offer other ways to make multiple attacks (mainlx doing some multi-tasking with several different attacks or doing a kind of Full Attack with one). Doresh fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 18:32
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition More of the Gods, and the inexplicable white supremicist overtones of Ulric Alright, last time we covered Sigmar and a bunch of other gods. This time, we have to deal with Ulric. I don't like Ulric. I've never liked Ulric. Ulric is the God of Wolves, Winter, and War. He's the god of the stupider kind of war, though, where he grumbles about you using a 'cheap' musket when you should just take up a sword the size of a toothpick and charge that 9 foot plate-clad hellviking. With no helmet. Ulric was the generic chief god of the pre-Imperial barbarian peoples, and was the God the actual man Sigmar paid tribute to above all others. Ulricans believe this means that maybe he ought to still be King of the Gods in the Imperial pantheon and from their city of Middenheim, they often cause major religious schisms with the Sigmarite south of the Empire. This is the part where I actively started to dislike him; the way the conflict between the cults is described, plenty of Ulrican priests seem to claim that Sigmar isn't a god. The idea of two major, important cultural centers in a sprawling empire fighting over which religious cult should be dominant is fine, but in a polytheistic society (and especially one where chosen SIgmarite priests can demonstrably throw fireballs or cause miraculous healings by invoking their God, same as Ulricans calling down blizzards) you generally wouldn't get people outright claiming the main deity of the Empire is not even divine. Admittedly, from his signs, Ulric basically seems to think his followers are idiots for pulling this; a few centuries ago, when a great Emperor named Magnus the Pious was putting an end to a 400 year interregnum to gather the provinces and fight off one of the periodic apocalyptic hordes of Chaos, he was argued against by the entire Ulrican faith. He proceeded to their holy city and walked into the ever-burning flame of their God to show them Ulric was backing him as well as Sigmar, and was completely unharmed, a sign Ulric was sick of the idiots who worship him dithering about when there were hellvikings to hit in the face with axes. The other reason I don't like Ulric, and I'm going to diverge a little from the review here, is that if you know what to look for there are definitely some weird white supremacist overtones in parts of Warhammer fantasy. The game actually had a larger neo-nazi following than 40k, the game about catholic space nazis, to the point that GW had to demand players who painted their armies with swastika banners couldn't attend official tournies. Ulric is the god of railing against the soft merchants and scholars of the south and calling for a return to the time of the pure, nordic Teutegen tribe, who will recover their ancient heritage and shake off corruption to triumph in a world of blood, strife, and strength. His writeups are clear on that part: He is the Old God and doesn't like the new ways, and his followers rail against the corruption of urbanization and worthless pursuits like art or study. Intentional or not, in a game with the baggage Warhammer can have, Ulric makes me pretty goddamn uncomfortable and in my personal games I generally mostly ignore him. I will be pointing out any of this stuff as it comes, because Fantasy has the interesting position of being both weirdly fascist and anti-fascist that comes of being conceived in the 70s and 80s in England. Well, that out of the way, next we get to Ranald! Ranald is interesting; he's the God of Luck, Tricks, and the Oppressed. According to myth, Ranald used to be human, and made Shallya fall in love with him. When she got her father's grudging permission to marry him, she raised him to Godhood, at which point Ranald, being a dick, scurried off into the night never to be seen again. He's not particularly well liked by Morr, Shallya, Verena, or Myrmidia for that. Ranald sees the entire world as a great and amazing joke, something full of beauty and strangeness whose contradictions and illogical nature make it awesome. He loves to help the poor and oppressed humiliate the powerful in ironic fashion, because that's the classic story, yeah? His priesthood isn't organized, but many of them are actually more akin to social workers than thieves. They run charities, bring down powerful corrupt officials, and yes, some of them are just thieves. Other cults tend to dislike Ranaldins, since they cause mischief wherever they go, but they can't deny his divinity. In his capacity as the God of Luck, he can help anyone out at any time, but while you're never amiss offering a prayer to the trickster, you should never rely on him. Finally, we get another Old God. Taal and Rhya are two Gods, but worshiped as one. They're the God and Goddess of Nature, the mighty and predatory hunter and the caring mother of earth. Scholars believe that in the old days, Taal, Rhya, and Ulric were all worshipped as a single triune figure, a great god that watched over all of nature. Somehow, over the millennia they split off, with Ulric becoming seperate but Taal and Rhya remaining a single cult even as they became two gods. The two are generally fairly generic nature gods, but what's interesting is the dual nature of the cult. Taal and Rhya are never worshiped separately, but sometimes an individual will favor one over the other. Amber Wizards, rangers, and woodsmen tend to favor Taal, the more active and warlike of the two, while Rhya is favored by both farmers and hunters. Agriculture is acknowledged as a perfectly normal part of the natural cycle in Taal and Rhya worship. As a divine couple, they are also strongly associated with fertility; almost every peasant village will have at least a small shrine to Taal and Rhya to watch over the crops and the children, even if they don't have a priest. Taalite and Rhyan priests and priestesses tend to be experts in woodcraft and agriculture, wandering about and helping to ensure good harvests or guiding the charcoal burners and woodsmen who work the Empire's vast forests. Considering how much of the country is a forest, they're pretty important folk-gods. The reason I like Warhammer Fantasy's religious element is that unwittingly or not, it gets the basis of polytheistic worship down pretty well. A priest in the Empire is not a crazed partisan of their God or Goddess, usually. They feel called to that deity, and they study that deity's ways, but they are a specialist, an important member of the community who reminds the community how to honor their God and serves the community through that God's precepts, rather than a missionary. A priest is devoted to Morr or Sigmar because it takes years to learn the proper rites and ways to keep Morr or Sigmar happy. People who show impiety are considered a legitimate threat to the community, much like they tended to be in polytheistic societies, because to the people of the Empire the Gods are very, very real (and this being a fantasy setting they really are, even if they don't communicate directly often and act in strange and temperamental ways). Next Time: GM Advice And How To Structure A Campaign Night10194 fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Aug 4, 2017 |
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Dec 6, 2016 18:44
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I like Ulric in the "Wolfgod don't got time for your poo poo when there's demons to be fought" sense, I don't like him in the "Please take the Stormfront pamphlets on your way out" sense. The one time I was in a Warfan game, I played someone trying to get into the Fangs of Ulric or Wolves of Ulric or whatever, basically the biggest baddest rear end kickers in Ulric's hierarchy that go around wielding huge loving maces with giant wolf pelts hanging from their backs. He was mostly just okay to competent but when it came to staving off a demon invasion of the Ulric Holy City (With said giant flame) I proceeded to Kick in the front door with an automatic success ("You do what?" "Kick in the door." "The door is 18 feet tall and made of stone." "I rolled 01" "...you kick in the door.") Then killed a bloodletter so hard it killed the 3 cultists surrounding him (Got fury of Ulric 4 times on the same damage roll). You're drat right I got my loving wolf pelt.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:52
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A friend of mine who has run almost every Warhams Fantasy game I've played in rather than run (and he's run more of them than I have!) plays Ulric as a God who knows he's sort of fading from the world and is content to do so. Sitting back and letting Sigmar take over and quietly letting things change so his children can kick the poo poo out of the hellvikings, while tut-tutting about all the craziness. Basically, the God is chill, the followers are not, and Ulric doesn't give enough of a poo poo anymore to actually correct them much. Figures someone will give them the asskicking they're cruising for if they keep it up. E: Also, Ulric's Fury and Fate Points and things are one of the places I really like the game. I usually hate exploding dice, but the idea of an exploding die critical hit rule THAT ONLY APPLIES FOR THE PCS is actually a pretty solid way to create memorable moments. It's a little bit of a heroic edge for the protagonists, making those moments when they go beyond Unlikely Hero and pull off something astounding. Having an outside chance of enormous success with no corresponding massive critical failure rule is a neat bit of player-facing randomness. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 19:03
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