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Evil Mastermind posted:In order to actually defeat a Reckoner once and for all, you need to know its specific Death Blow. Doing this involves a lot of research, hints from NPCs, and travelling back in time. If you "kill" a Reckoner but don't deliver its specific Death Blow, it'll reform in 24 hours. So, literally, the best action would be take the Unity without activating the Hell Hole, throw the ghost trap into the Sun, and return back to Earth? Reckoners aren't truly killed but they're basically stuck at the bottom of the gravity well of the most massive thing in the solar system, burning alive and reforming for the next five billion years or so.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:38
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Good lord this entire adventure is terrible. I don't even know how multiple people, much less one, sat down and was like this both fun to play and fun to read. Beyond just insulting the players at each turn, this story isn't even fit shine the shoes of a 10 cent pulp novel. Also, chalk me up as a person who had no idea Deadlands eventually went to outserspace and completely abandoned the weird west aesthetic in favor of really, really bad Phantasy Star.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:38
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Young Freud posted:So, literally, the best action would be take the Unity without activating the Hell Hole, throw the ghost trap into the Sun, and return back to Earth? Reckoners aren't truly killed but they're basically stuck at the bottom of the gravity well of the most massive thing in the solar system, burning alive and reforming for the next five billion years or so.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:41
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I got Deadlands confused with another game where Ragnarok happens during WWII and Jormungand's corpse is lying across several states and poisoning everything after the Little Boy bomb was set off in its eye.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:43
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Hell on Earth as a setting is perfectly alright if you're down for Fallout with a supernatural explanation for 1950s-styled radiation and psychic powers and all that. The old rules are as dodgy as they ever were but thankfully it's gotten a Savage Worlds update. The metaplot is, as detailed here, utterly horseshit, and one might argue that's too derivative of Deadlands, but as far as post-apocalypse games go the Savage Worlds version is probably one of the better ones on a broad-strokes level. Getting into the 1990s-published setting lore is a decidedly mixed bag, but the basic concepts from the current corebook are pretty solid, as are most of the Reloaded versions of the games. I ended up picking up Deadlands Noir on mega-discount recently with zero expectations and was pleasantly surprised by what I read when I finally cracked it open, it had some pretty interesting ideas. It's nothing that utterly transcends the source material, but it does feel like Hensley has at least learned from his worst mistakes.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:44
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Evil Mastermind posted:Either that or just point the ship into deep space, yes. I mean they won't be killed, but they'll be out of humanity's hair. Exactly. If, for some reason, they needed to be dumped on another planet, why does it have to be Banshee? Why not Mars, or even the moon? It's like during Deadlands they
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Jan 30, 2017 05:46
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Oh god I just realized something: remember how at the end of The Unity, they say Raven will follow the Reckoners to planet Banshee to kill them? In Lost Colony, they completely forgot about that. No matter how long it takes to kill the Reckoners, Raven never shows up. Kavak posted:I got Deadlands confused with another game where Ragnarok happens during WWII and Jormungand's corpse is lying across several states and poisoning everything after the Little Boy bomb was set off in its eye. quote:Mighty-thewed barbarians and grim mercenaries roam the desolate plains of Ohio. Giant snakes, and those who worship them, prowl the ruins of St. Louis. Pirates battle the Japanese invaders in the South China Sea. Bold British agents, equipped with experimental bio-technology, thwart the insidious infiltration of Stalin's humanzees. Sky-raiders strike from hidden bases in the Sahara, deros skulk in South American caverns, and the Texas Rangers fight electrical death worms to save Los Alamos.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:47
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Kavak posted:Hell on Earth seems really weird and unappealing overall. What made them decide that their game of wild west horror should evolve into Fallout meets Doom, and then go to space? Most other metaplots at least stayed in the same genre throughout. Fallout came out in 1997 and Hell on Earth came out in 1998. I think that's best answer. It kind of shares the quality of having a stupid backstory in terms of how they got there too. Kavak posted:I got Deadlands confused with another game where Ragnarok happens during WWII and Jormungand's corpse is lying across several states and poisoning everything after the Little Boy bomb was set off in its eye. That's a Ken Hite joint so it's genius regardless of how batshit the premise is. EDIT: All the Deadlands Reloaded settings are much improved but I think they're doing Lost Colony so there's still a chance to ruin everything.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:47
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Kavak posted:Exactly. If, for some reason, they needed to be dumped on another planet, why does it have to be Banshee? Why not Mars, or even the moon?
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Jan 30, 2017 05:48
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Evil Mastermind posted:Oh god I just realized something: remember how at the end of The Unity, they say Raven will follow the Reckoners to planet Banshee to kill them? Thankfully, while the current game has a cautionary warning against killing Raven since it breaks the metaplot and says if it happens mayyybe it was just a imitation Raven *wink*, it then mercifully details how you can go and off him. They later published an adventure that goes and just encourages the PCs to go and defeat Raven once and for all. Hellstromme continues to be a big bag of gently caress everyone, though.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:59
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Fallout came out in 1997 and Hell on Earth came out in 1998. I think that's best answer. It kind of shares the quality of having a stupid backstory in terms of how they got there too.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:There's no AI, just the demon. That's just Hellstrome lying to get the PCs to where they need to be, probably because they wouldn't be okay with "you have to murder someone in cold blood". Okay so the new Doom's main antagonist is a genius scientist who built a giant decaying cyborg body for herself and keeps leading ill-advised expeditions into Hell. Any relation? And Fallout is cool and all, but the first Dark Tower book came out in 1982. It had Wild West gunslingers, radiation mutants, demons, cosmic horror, AI, forced PC sacrifice, etc. In a short book. And then things got REALLY weird. Jonah Hex feels like he should show up in Deadlands too. I like the idea of the Weird Western/Post Apocalypse Western/Space Western progression. They're all fun subgenres. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 06:13
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Hellstromme continues to be a big bag of gently caress everyone, though. Yeah gently caress Hellstromme, in any other setting he'd be a villain, if not the main villain. His way is the only way cause his way is the best way even if it involves torturing 1d100 puppies a day to power a lamp.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:25
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So, to activate the jump drive you have to murder someone. Ok, I can see Hellstrome doing that in secret on the way out, but when the colonists basically hijacked the ship to come back to Earth, how could they have known they needed to murder someone? They shouldn't have ever been able to come back. I mean, there's a dozen other stupid plot holes and the entire adventure/metaplot is super dumb, but for some reason this one thing in particular really annoys me.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:27
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If you go to the engine room and say the "AI's" name, it tells you what you need to do.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:30
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Anfauglir posted:So, to activate the jump drive you have to murder someone. Ok, I can see Hellstrome doing that in secret on the way out, but when the colonists basically hijacked the ship to come back to Earth, how could they have known they needed to murder someone? They shouldn't have ever been able to come back. I mean, there's a dozen other stupid plot holes and the entire adventure/metaplot is super dumb, but for some reason this one thing in particular really annoys me. Hits Anfauglir over the back of the head, running feet noise, car door slam, screeching tires
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Jan 30, 2017 06:32
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Kurieg posted:If you go to the engine room and say the "AI's" name, it tells you what you need to do. Would they know the AIs name though? And even if they did, you'd think a giant evil glowing box whispering "murder" to you would send up some red flags when you found it.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:33
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Kurieg posted:If you go to the engine room and say the "AI's" name, it tells you what you need to do. yeah, but then you need to know the demon's name to wake it up e- drat, beaten to death like a Deadland's PC
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Jan 30, 2017 06:33
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I have a sudden urge to watch Trigun. Or play Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. The game that dared to ask 'if there are Four Horsemen, and you're a cowboy, why can't you just steal their horses?'
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Jan 30, 2017 06:35
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Well, if the "AI" is still "on" you don't need to murder anyone. We don't know the sleep timer for that thing.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:36
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Anfauglir posted:Would they know the AIs name though? And even if they did, you'd think a giant evil glowing box whispering "murder" to you would send up some red flags when you found it. You can't leave the room until you do it or you're all dead from starvation. Hellstromme Enterprises: Railroading by Design
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Jan 30, 2017 07:00
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I'm actually kind of looking forward to Lost Colony. They've been a lot better about metaplot in the last few years. They've figured out that the job of PCs is to bust up NPCs poo poo on the regular, and made peace with that.
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Jan 30, 2017 07:08
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Doresh posted:Wonderful. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if all these 90s metaplots were actually failed novel pitches. An important thing to keep in mind that in the late 80s you saw TSR release the Dragonlance novels, and then not long after that the assorted Forgotten Realms series (Drizzt, Elminster, et al), and basically all of these fiction lines were suddenly making them an order of magnitude more money than they were making on RPG sales since you could get schlocky paperbacks into way more retail venues than games. The various game lines started to basically become testing grounds for new crappy fantasy fiction, and other publishers started to take notice. Now there was a general push for metaplot-heavy stuff as the 90s went along anyway due to RPG buying habits, but almost every major game line started putting out related novels in hope of capturing some of those sweet Waldenbooks dollars. Some did alright (FASA's Battletech novels were pretty big at the time and a large part of why they got cartoon and video game licenses, for example), but most didn't. TORG itself got I... think a trilogy of novels that tied into the game metaplot in obnoxious ways. Maybe there were some more too? But it didn't really take off, and obviously wasn't enough to save WEG in the long run. So yeah, that statement is literally true. 
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Jan 30, 2017 07:52
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Kavak posted:Exactly. If, for some reason, they needed to be dumped on another planet, why does it have to be Banshee? Why not Mars, or even the moon? Banshee is full of crystallised Good. By exposing the Reckoners to it they can be weakened enough to superdie.
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Jan 30, 2017 09:03
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Why didn't the Deadlands guys just buy up a bunch of old Weird Western stories cheap and sell them as 'Tales from Deadlands' or whatever?
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Jan 30, 2017 09:52
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The way the boxed text excitedly talks up the arrival of group after group of important setting NPCs to save the PCs' bacon, which as a non-fan I've never heard of, really underscores how dumb that first chapter is. It seems about as fun as listening to your friend talk about a movie you haven't seen. Also, it's interesting how pretty much all the women mentioned in this book full of heroic last stands instead die in gruesome and horrific ways (Dove, psyker during flashback, the NPC who presumably joins the party to be sacrificed). Can you imagine a male character being described in the same way Dove is? Torture in this genre makes male characters badass and grizzled, if it happens at all. e: more politically correct obervations about this intelligent and mature roleplaying experience: Before the defense of Junkyard, Calvin Ellis (folksy human good guy) gives an inspirational speech that centers around gay sex jokes. Silas Rasmussen (evil mutant bad guy)'s speech has him state (twice!) that the mutant army contains "men, women, and others." I have no idea why the writer thought this was a good use of word count. I also want to highlight that in the Deadlands blending of sci-fi and Western genres, native people are cast as twisted mutants or mysterious aliens while colonizers are just regular humans. That's not at all unique to Deadlands but it bears mentioning. Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 10:06
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After that Unity review, I now have a theory that 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars was half conceived when Gregor Hutton read the quick combat rules, read the adventure, tossed the book against the wall and yelled something about writing a game where that poo poo was meaningful.
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Jan 30, 2017 13:12
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Asimo posted:TORG itself got I... think a trilogy of novels that tied into the game metaplot in obnoxious ways. Maybe there were some more too? But it didn't really take off, and obviously wasn't enough to save WEG in the long run.
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Jan 30, 2017 15:43
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I have all three novels actually...also, I played in a Hell On Earth campaign and the GM ran Unity. When it came to that scene all six of us players just looked at him like he was insane and started asking if that was a misprint . He was all 'this is a tough moral choice and it requires mature thought'. One of the other players started asking him if he was on crack and finally we all got up and left. That was the last time I played Deadlands.
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Jan 30, 2017 16:00
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Evil Mastermind posted:The Torg novel trilogy actually takes place before the core boxed set. So Torg actually has three novels' worth of backstory before the game even starts. There were other novels after that, but I don't think they were tied to the metaplot.  Semi-relatedly, I'm still bitter over the lovely, lovely Dark Sun novels and the even shittier revised edition of the setting based off them.
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Jan 30, 2017 16:03
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As a side note, the fun part of all of the killer worms and the worm cult and etc from Deadlands is that it is literally a plot point that Shane Hensley swiped from himself. It goes back as least as far as the "Wilderness" book for Bloodshadows by West End Games, which he also happened to have the sole writing credit for. I guess Graboids that are also Lovecraftian horrors are his thing. (IIRC the leaders of the Bloodshadows cult and the Deadlands Worm cult even have the same name.)
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Jan 30, 2017 16:06
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I have all three novels actually... quote:also, I played in a Hell On Earth campaign and the GM ran Unity. When it came to that scene all six of us players just looked at him like he was insane and started asking if that was a misprint . He was all 'this is a tough moral choice and it requires mature thought'. One of the other players started asking him if he was on crack and finally we all got up and left. That was the last time I played Deadlands.
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Jan 30, 2017 16:26
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Asimo posted:Semi-relatedly, I'm still bitter over the lovely, lovely Dark Sun novels and the even shittier revised edition of the setting based off them. Preach it.
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Jan 30, 2017 16:33
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Is that 4e dark sun? or one of the earlier ones, cause 4e was my first real exposure to it.
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Jan 30, 2017 16:40
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4E Dark sun rewound most of the goofy metaplot stuff except for "one of the Dragon Kings is dead, his city-state is now free" and then changed that to "And no one's really sure how it happened, oh poo poo"
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Jan 30, 2017 16:49
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Kurieg posted:Is that 4e dark sun? or one of the earlier ones, cause 4e was my first real exposure to it. Back in the twilight of D&D2e, TSR did a crappy triology of Dark Sun novels that kind of ignored the core themes of the setting, introduced a lot of really dumb elements, and killed/destroyed a lot of the main antagonists and plot threads. A little while after this they release a "Revised" box set of the setting to include all these elements, which sounds good right? Well, nope! The writing was way worse, the books were laid out in ways to blatantly pad page counts and save money (cheap paper, enormous margins that literally took up half the page, wide spacing between lines, etc), all the great Brom and Baxa art was nowhere in sight and given sparse and horrible replacements, and so on. It was a complete travesty compared to the original setting. And the supplements weren't any better, and- well I won't say they were the worst 2e supplements since wow there's a lot of competition, but they were universally pretty bad and continued to completely miss the point of the setting. It was a goddamn mess and didn't last very long, thankfully. EDIT: Actually lemme quote my own post from 200ish pages back on this: Asimo posted:I dug the core revised box set out of the box I shoved it in to forget about it and took a lovely phone photo of a random page. Quality isn't intended to be good, but it'll give you the idea of the layout...
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Jan 30, 2017 16:56
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Yeah that's... pretty bad. One thing I liked about 4e dark sun is that it explicitly went "So you want to be a wizard and don't want to deal with all that metaplot baggage? They're psychic powers now, who gives a poo poo."
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Jan 30, 2017 17:01
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They sold this... twenty page booklet adventure/guide to changing your campaign to fit the revised setting, too. It was basically a short synopsis of the novels, a list of how city-states X, Y and Z were screwed by Not Your Party, and a short, metaplotty 'adventure' starring some character from the novels who became her very own brand new kind of wizard*! * That is simply too powerful to be in the hands of any player, so don't bother asking for advancement tables because we're just pulling her stats out of our asses. Remember spellfire? Yeah, like that.
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Jan 30, 2017 17:30
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Doresh posted:Did I mention that I've found at least one WEG Star Wars adventure where the GM is actually supposed to hand the players a script with lines to say? Which serves no other purpose than the PCs explaining their mission to themselves? The saving grace of that, of course, is that it took place at the start of the adventure. For real, I am pretty okay with doing whatever it takes to set the scene at the beginning. Also, these 'quick combat' rolls are, by far, the most absurd mechanic I've seen in an adventure. There's not even a goal as such, like "They need to drop 50 zombies." It's just rolling for slightly different flavor text and maybe an injury of some kind.
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Jan 30, 2017 17:45
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I think the most weaksause RPG metaplot goes to the early editions of L5R, because the RPG materials were set a few years before card game, in particular a setting shake up that makes anything you're doing in the RPG irrelevant. Here's all these cool NPCs in Ryoko Owari-they're going to get loving killed in less than a year! Play an Akodo Samurai, but no matter what you do your family gets hosed when the emperor throws a hissy fit.
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