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Honestly, I have never seen getting a party to work together as difficult in RPGs. Indeed, it is much harder to get PCs to not work together, in my experience.
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Feb 22, 2017 19:05
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Eating aside, the Farm feels very reminiscent of Colonia Dignidad (or any other camp for political prisoners, which I'm sure was the point).
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Feb 22, 2017 19:08
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Fight! - Challengers Power Level 5 Desdemona  She's not a Terminator. The gauntlet's just really tight. Fighting Style: Demonic Necrofear Control Win Quote: "Now you know that fear is the strongest emotion of all." Desdemona is a bit of Darkstalkers mixed with Beauty and the Beast: An undead monster once terrorized the landscape. In hopes of appeasing the beast, a local noble sent his own daughter into its castle. This plan backfired a little bit: The monster left, but not before transforming the daughter to fill its place. Her old self is all but gone, and now she lives to bring fear and terror into the hearts of mortals. Desdemona is the first all-out villain, a dragon-vampire-demon-thing. She even has the fitting weakness of being doomed to be defeated at the height of her power. Her stats are balanced, and she's really big on building up Super Energy fast and dishing out the hurt: Vampiric Soul Leech is a customized Taunt that charges her Super Bar by drainig life force out of the opponent, and Necrofear Battery is a counter Move that absorbs the force of the enemy attack and turns it into Super Energy. What can she do with all that energy? Well, she has three Supers: Phobos Awakes! is a super throw that temporarily let's her use her other Supers for free (so keep that time counter low). This is really handy since her Angel of Death (essentially a SNK Boss Super that summons homing demons to attack the opponent) is a lot more expensive than the defaul Super Move. She also has Necrofear Annihilation, which is like a purple laser beam she can power up with her own Life Bar. You know these moments in Smash Bros. when one character picks up a hammer and everyone's trying their best to stay as far away from them as possible till the hammer vanishes? It's a bit like that, minus the complete invulnerability. Jack Sage  Eye see you. Fighting Style: North Storm Wing Chun. Win Quote: "Do you see your error now?" Jack is an orphan that spent his entire life in a monastery. His love for combat (he tended to get carried away during sparring matches) eventually caused the monks to send him out into the world to get rid of hi... err, I mean to spread their words of peace and wisdom. And apparently he's only now wondering whether or not beating people up is a good way to teach the values of peace. Jack's a psychic, and not only a Fighter form the Lord of Battle tournament, but also its winner. Apparently the other contenders weren't prepared for someone who can fill the screen with projectiles like Dizzy from Guilty Gear or Magaki from KoF. Really, dude has a lot of projectiles: Brainwave is a short range blast that staggers, Mind Magnum stuns very good and can be charged, Cosmic Wave is a stronger but slower Brainwave, Golden Thought Bolt is like Sakura's Hadoken, and Mega Mind Magnum is of course a stringer Mind Magnum. Thankfully he doesn't have anything movement-related, and as long as you stay out of his throw range he can't knock you back too far. Shirokura Akemi  It's Haiku time again. Fighting Style: Void Walker Win Quote: "I'm sorry that I had to beat you so badly." Akemi is part of the hero team of the Twin Strike campaign, with a tiny bit of Ryu. You see, just like how Ryu has to deal with the dark side of his fighting style, the Shirokura family has to deal with a darkness in their soul. While her brother (who we'll get to in a minute for more backstory) embraced this dark side, Akemi suppressed it for the most part, living a peaceful life in a mountain monastery where she learned a fighting style harnessing the five elements. Akemi is a nother well-rounded character with very high Ki and Accuracy, but somewhat limited defense options. A good combo starter is the Tumultous Waterfall, a series of rising somersault kicks that end with her smashing the opponent to the ground. Another good one is Spinning Whirlwind, which has her quickly dash towards the enemy with a flury of kicks and punches. Her main ranged options are Phoenix Fire (basically a ricochetting Hadoken) and Thrashing Vortex, which generates a tornado that she can also use to move away from the opponent. A neat gimmick of hers is Channel Ki with which she can temporarily boost the damage of her Phoenix Fire and Thrashing Vortex. She's like Jam from Guilty Gear in that regard, especially since she can decide when to make use of this boost. Her other ranged attack is Screaming Sand Storm, which combines earth and wind into a sand tornado that juggles the opponent like crazy. Reminds me of Goenitz. Her two Supers are Dragon's Breath, which combines Phoenix Fire and Thrashing Vortex, and Spiral Dragon's Whip, which combines Tumultous Waterfall and Spinning Whirlwind. And just to troll stunned opponents, she can heal herself with Restore Balance. Shirokura Genji  That's a fancy vest. Fighting Style: Brawling and Break Platoon Combat Training Win Quote: "It's just business." And here's her brother. As mentioned, he has spend a lot more time with living with the dark side of his soul, which ironically makes him able to control it better than her sister. While she was goofing off at the monastery, Genji became a mercenary for the criminal Break Platoon. He left the platoon and reunited with his sister when one of his commanders named Deacon beat the crap out of him and accused him of having no passion. Genji plays a lot differently than Akemi. He's a slow tank and turtler, with several charge-back Moves like Guile built to take advantage of situations where the opponent goes first and has his attack blocked by Genji. His taunt might as well be "Come at me, bro." One of his best moves to cover distance is Sudden Impact, a shoulder tackle that juggles and combos right into Curb Stomp, which has him kick the opponent back to the ground, or Cover Your Tracks, which has him go behind the opponent first. Clashing Sabers is a nice hand slash to annoy counter-heavy opponents thanks to its temporariy invulnerability. His ranged options are Phoenix Talon for short range and Magnum Instinct for longer range. The latter can only be used a limited number of times and inclides "drawing" a pistol made out of ki. Now Invisiblity in Fight! is handled quite abstractly by debuffing the opponents Initiative and/or Control. Why am I telling this? Because Genji's Dossier uses the Invisibility Element and reskins it has him taking a picture from his opponent and calling for a fighting style analysis, Solid-Snake-style. Genji also has a Move that's basically a flashback of sorts: Akemi Tenshi is a healing move he can only use while knocked down. It involves him getting taunted by an image of Genji before getting lift up by an image of his sister Akemi. His Supers are Frenzied Reincarnation, which has him beat the crap out of the opponent with an onslaught of hits, and Relentless Impact Intercept which is a Super juggle. Power Level 6 Deacon  "Get me the Ikari Warriors. Now!" Fighting Style: Break Platoon Commando Style and Warrior of the Earth King Kung Fu. Win Quote: "You don't have what it takes to win in battle." It's a backstory trilogy, for here we have the Break Platoon commander that beat up Genji. He was also a "sub-boss". Deacon is a tall American, though his family originally came from Egypt. He was sent to the military to build his character and found a liking to it. He joined the Break Platoon after becoming some sort of non-religious terrorist: he sees Western culture as weak, being all talk and no passion. Another well-rounded Fighter, Deacon uses his size and several Moves with reach to pummel his enemies at a distance. Due to him being build as a sub-boss, he has Moves for all kinds of occasions. Ranged Fighters will especially hate his "Spirit of Battle!", which has him summon ki from the ground to yank the opponent closer to him. His nastiest attacks are probably Rapid Assault (a flying kick that can probably hit you from across the "screen" and is quite accurate) and Smart Bomb (a flying knee and fist combo that doesn't quite reach as far as Rapid Assault, but makes up for it by being unblockable). His Supers are Annihilation (a kick combo that juggles the opponent real good) and Lightning Assault (since of course does he have a stronger version of Rapid Assault). Helene Matisse  I think she broke her ankle. Fighting Style: Custom Savate Win Quote: "Mmmm! Well, this all looks familiar, especially with me winning." Another French Fighter, this time from present day. While others struggle tournament after tournament to become the world's strongest Fighter, Helene actually accomplished this 15 years ago. Though seeing how many of her contenders were so obsessed with fighting that there seemed nothing else in their life, she decided to retire at the height of her career. She settled down, married and got kids, but she always made sure to keep her body in shape so she'd stay like she was all those years ago. Recently however, she has received an invitation to a tournament, as a "fighter of honor"... If you want a veteran Fighter to act as a potential mentor, she's a pretty good choice. Helene is overall balanced, but has no Ranged options at all, relying solely on getting close and wrecking opponents with long Combos. Any close-range Fighter worth its salt needs Moves to close the distance, and she has two of those: Battering Ram is a lunging kick (that unfortunately knocks the opponent back qutie a bit), and Kiss the Ceiling is a fun dash that has her launch the opponent for a juggle. For your daily dose of Shoryuken, she has Down to Earth, which actually includes both fist for a 2-hit strike. To further annoy the opponent, she can use Block Buster (an overhead kick that has both Always Does Damage and Temporary Invulnerability) and Debilitating Riposte (a pretty good counter Move). Helene is also the first Fighter here with four Super Moves: Crash Rave combines her Shoryuken with a few kick moves, Reign of Terror has her hit the opponent with all of her Basic Moves, Between Two Trees is a throw that has her crush the opponent's torso with her tighs, and Joie de Combat is a devastating kick combo similar to King from KoF. Hiroto  "It was thiiis wide!" Fighting Style: Dragon Breath School of Archery. Win Quote: "I'm sure that fight was important - why were we fighting again?" Hiroto's a historical Fighter, this time around from a more orthodox era (unspecified mythic Japan). He's a not particularly bright samurai how one day stumbled upon a small shrine holding the Bow of the Thundering Heavens. Ever since, he has roamed Japan to where the bow subconciously lead him, beating up whatever bad guys he comes across. Hiroto's main gimmick is similar to a Samurai Shodown character, with a bit of Cody and Vega: All of his ranged Moves have the Prop Liabilty. They are tied to his bow, which he loses whenever he gets knocked down, reducing his move set until he picks it up again. But don't think he's useless without his bow. He's slow (Initiative -1), but pretty darn strong (Strength 2) and overall very offense-oriented. His katana hurts a lot. His bow Moves include Yumi Mastery (basically Sakura's Hadoken), Kami Shot (a fast projectile) and Breath of Inexorable Doom (a knockdown projectile) and Dragon Claw (an anti-air projectile). His most important katana Moves are Master of the Blade Stance (which lets him move all over the place), Dragon Wing Ascent (a nice combo starter that juggles the opponent) and Cut of a Thousand Blades (which knocks down and back). Hiroto also has a bit of Street Fighter 3 going because he has to pick which of his three Supers to use for the fight: Shin Kami Shot is a suped-up Kami Shot, Ascent of the Dragon God is a more powerful Dragon Wing Ascent, and Yumi Perfect Technique is naturally a better Yumi Mastery. Next Time: The rest. The strongest Fighters. Tanks. And catgirls.
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Feb 22, 2017 19:10
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I'm afraid I take one look at the Farm and I see an RPG tailor-made for psychotic wanking adversarial GMs. Scenarios like this need game mechanics and precise descriptions of the problem space to avoid GM fiat being used as a weapon. As-is, The Farm looks like an open ticket for abusive GMing precisely because it's such a wide-open space with so few rules beyond "authority controls all with an iron fist". I understand that the idea is to set up a prison system and invite the players to attack it, but I don't see any mechanics to make the attack fun. On the other hand I see a whole heaping pile of mechanics intended to either punish the players or force them to turn on each other like the Murder-Fuelled Starship back in Unity. In fact not only would I flatly refuse to play it, the game is so wide-open to abusive GMing that I would look askance at anyone proposing a game of it.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:03
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Mors Rattus posted:Honestly, I have never seen getting a party to work together as difficult in RPGs. Indeed, it is much harder to get PCs to not work together, in my experience. Yeah, I'm not really sure who has a hard time getting their players to stick by one another and cooperate, because I've never seen my PCs do otherwise. It may be because my main group have been friends for like 8 years now and so camaraderie is just a reflexive part of the equation.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:16
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Loxbourne posted:I'm afraid I take one look at the Farm and I see an RPG tailor-made for psychotic wanking adversarial GMs. Scenarios like this need game mechanics and precise descriptions of the problem space to avoid GM fiat being used as a weapon. As-is, The Farm looks like an open ticket for abusive GMing precisely because it's such a wide-open space with so few rules beyond "authority controls all with an iron fist". Agreed, this game just seems ripe to go into "DARE YOU ENTER MY MAGICAL REALM?" territory. The only way I could possibly see doing a game like this is to ensure that there's a player/GM discussion on "hard limits/topics not allowed. I'd also play down the brutality and play up the camp to give the setting a more Logan's Run/Soylent Green/Parts: The Clonus Horror vibe.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:22
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Doresh posted:Especially with John Wick as the GM. I want Keanu Reeves to GM my games.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:24
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Honestly, up until the bit where it said "the Headmasters eat the Residents", I thought the intended vibe was The Prisoner, but I admit I'm really dense when it comes to metaphors.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:25
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Davin Valkri posted:Honestly, up until the bit where it said "the Headmasters eat the Residents", I thought the intended vibe was The Prisoner, but I admit I'm really dense when it comes to metaphors. "You were the real DM all along!"
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Feb 22, 2017 20:29
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Josef bugman posted:I want Keanu Reeves to GM my games. Hes a pretty good dm, allows a lot of flexibilty in character design and doesnt force too much in character roleplay. Only real negative is in combat he makes you roll to confirm hits twice, but at least when you do it instantly kills the foe you are fighting.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:30
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I feel like any game where the players have a clear goal and endgame, and incentive to work together, is necessarily less Magical Realm than some more "traditional" settings where the PCs theoretically have agency, but the setting is defined by godlike NPCs and events beyond the PCs' ability to influence at all. SLA Industries, for example, even though that setting has a strong juvenile appeal for me.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:31
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Simian_Prime posted:Agreed, this game just seems ripe to go into "DARE YOU ENTER MY MAGICAL REALM?" territory.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:32
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Davin Valkri posted:Honestly, up until the bit where it said "the Headmasters eat the Residents", I thought the intended vibe was The Prisoner, but I admit I'm really dense when it comes to metaphors. Well, his other game in the same genre, Lacuna (or in full, Lacuna: The Creation Of The Mystery And The Girl From Blue City) basically goes for that kind of surrealist vibe. It has a pretty intriguing premise: we've discovered that there's a shared dreamworld that everyone's connected to, which is the titular Blue City. When a criminal is caught, rather than putting them in prison, they have Mystery Agents - that's you guys - enter the Blue City through the criminal's consciousness. Their job is to find the "hostile personality" in Blue City that represents that criminal, whereupon it turns into a weird gribbly monster and the Agents kick its rear end and then stick it with a little twisty button thing called a Lacuna Device, which deletes it from shared consciousness. When the Agents get back to the real world, the criminal will be completely reformed. Unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of weird stuff in Blue City that doesn't like people messing with it, including for some reason some human-sized spiders wearing Soviet uniforms who scare the crap out of anyone who sees them - and being scared for a Mystery Agent is bad, because it drives your heart rate through the roof (the game system actually tracks your heart rate) and either snaps you out of Blue City or leaves you in an unrousable coma. To me it always sounds very anime (I wonder if it actually was an anime premise at some point) Oh, there's also The Girl. They never explain if she's the only woman in Blue City (but since everyone has a reflection there she presumably wouldn't be) or what's special about her. She seems to be helpful, but nobody knows why. It's another empty mystery. It would be great if it wasn't for the fact there's absolutely no details, everything is GM fiat, there's no rules at all for fighting the Hostile Personalities, a whole bunch of rules that just screw the PCs over including an advancement system that inevitably destroys the PC after a certain amount of time, and the introduction of the first edition didn't include the snooty statement "There is simply a great deal about this game that I do not wish to share with you." And that you've definitely written, Jared. I believe you. Chinny-chin-chin.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:06
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I've had players that will work a cross-purposes, and with a game like this it'd clearly lead to a bad ending for everyone involved. Really, the game seems to expect you to run though it multiple times until you know how to metagame it. It's interesting how that narrows the roleplaying options. Since only a few roles you can take on lead to an ideal ending for everyone
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Feb 22, 2017 21:08
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That sounds like an author with his head firmly up his own rear end.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:09
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That's an awful lot of Vague Proper Nouns. Never a good sign, those.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:12
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The premise of Lacuna sounds like that of Warren Ellis' Dark Blue. The game reminds me of Noumenon and Insylum, both games where the actual mystery at the center of all the goings-on is up to the GM to create.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:21
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Hostile V posted:Yeah that's kind of the general problem I have with Sorenson's work (cough Inspecters cough). There are some hard settings details, then a disconnect between the details and enforcement that puts all control in the GM's hands and that's really it. Sometimes it does read a lot like "I have no idea what to do with this, I guess I'm just building the framework for the right person to come along to use it" and admittedly that's a designer standpoint I kinda prefer as opposed to when the designer is so far up their own rear end with plot and world details that they can't even see the player anymore. It's a hard line to balance. I did a review of Inspecters, and I've run the drat thing, and I still don't understand if the Gear Up phase before tackling the actual ghost/whatever itself actually does anything mechanically. Also, the Stress Dice mechanic is horribly punishing.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:22
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hyphz posted:It would be great if it wasn't for the fact there's absolutely no details, everything is GM fiat, there's no rules at all for fighting the Hostile Personalities, a whole bunch of rules that just screw the PCs over including an advancement system that inevitably destroys the PC after a certain amount of time, and the introduction of the first edition didn't include the snooty statement "There is simply a great deal about this game that I do not wish to share with you." And that you've definitely written, Jared. I believe you. Chinny-chin-chin. That's not a very good sales pitch.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:29
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hyphz posted:(I wonder if it actually was an anime premise at some point) It sounds vaguely psycho-pass-y for some reason?
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Feb 22, 2017 21:29
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I read Lacuna. I don't remember Lacuna. The only thing I remember is that it distinctly felt weird and unfinished, very very unfinished.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:30
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You don't remember Lacuna because someone entered the city inside your brain and put a button on your memories of it.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:33
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Hostile V posted:I read Lacuna. I don't remember Lacuna. The only thing I remember is that it distinctly felt weird and unfinished, very very unfinished. Yes, absolutely. The second edition is really artistically typeset but still really incomplete. It could almost be an interesting alternate premise for Don't Rest Your Head..
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Feb 22, 2017 23:43
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Kurieg posted:You don't remember Lacuna because someone entered the city inside your brain and put a button on your memories of it. For real though it's a product that has Part One in the name and a Part Two is probably never coming and the core product itself is unfinished and...yeah as a whole my eyes just slid right over it.
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Feb 22, 2017 23:51
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Mors Rattus posted:Honestly, I have never seen getting a party to work together as difficult in RPGs. Indeed, it is much harder to get PCs to not work together, in my experience. I've had some experiences with hard to get to work together parties as a GM. The solution was to get rid of a bad player and get a better one.
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Feb 23, 2017 00:28
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gourdcaptain posted:I've had some experiences with hard to get to work together parties as a GM. The solution was to get rid of a bad player and get a better one. I mean, okay, the atomization of late capitalist society, fine... but you're doing this as an exercise in a group which has an implicit social contract and are willingly gathering to engage in a recreational activity for several hours at a time.
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Feb 23, 2017 02:03
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I like the Farm a lot of as a concept of a game, as the kind of game that exists inside my head but I don't know if I'd ever want to play it or how I'd even go about running it. EDIT: tbh I think I like it way better as some kind of single player game where the other Residents are NPCs that you have to actively befriend and bring into line to make sure they don't betray you. Turning them over to other players just means, at least in my group, people are probably going to figure out they should be working together quickly and then do so without incident. The horror and desperation that would drive you to betray a friend doesn't really exist for any PC after all. ZeroCount fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Feb 23, 2017 |
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Feb 23, 2017 02:03
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I don't think any of the disruptive players I knew would sit still for this. It's the quarterback style players who would probably be the fatigue point.
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Feb 23, 2017 02:12
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 Update 5 (War (But not WAR!)) Apologies for covering the timeline in such a disjointed fashion, but I’m trying to loop things into thematic groups so that it’s easier to get a big view of the state the world was in before the Big Event late 2011-2012. So, in a beautiful segue between the toxic pollutants and nuclear meltdowns of last update and the military conflict of this one, we have the Ten Minute War. On September 10th, 2004, political tensions in the Middle East hit a boiling point, and Libya attacked Israel. Israel responded to the exchange by launching their missiles, leading to a ten minute exchange of fire. However while Libya’s weapons where chemical in nature, the Israeli missiles are armed with nuclear warheads. Libya is gone in a puff of nuclear smoke, ceasing to exist as a state in less time than your lunch break. Millions are killed or displaced by the exchange.  I regret using the ‘I swear to god I’ll kill us all’ flag earlier now, it would have been more appropriate here To the north, in Europe, Belarus mobilizes its armies and invades, seizing territory in both Poland and the Ukraine. When Russia steps in to ‘stabilize’ the region, it sparks fears of Russian Expansionism. These minor sparks of war seem inconsequential now aside from continuing a long Polish history of suffering, but bear important fruit thirty years down the line. At the time a much meatier, more pressing conflict was going on in Asia. On September, 2005, the President of the Republic of Korea was assassinated. General Kyung Han Yoon, the head of their military, takes power and publicly accuses the Democratic People’s Public of sponsoring the assassin. Tensions rise, and when Japan steps in to support Yoon’s actions, it’s all the backing he needs to launch the Second Korean War. A year into the campaign, North Korea makes a terrible, history-shaping mistake. They opened fire with their nuclear arsenal, targeting not just South Korea, but Japan, as well. By fortune or fate, the warheads fail to detonate, and Japan, who’s support of South Korea had mostly been economic and political, was pushed on a wave of outrage into entering the war proper.  WHY WOULD YOU PUT YOUR FLAG ON IT?! This presented certain problems. Japan was still bound by the old WWII treaties that prevented it from fielding a military, something that they’d been chafing under as North Korea had become increasingly aggressive. Now, with their fears completely justified by the attack, something had to be done. Nationalist elements pushed hard on the idea of the glory days of Japan, back when they had been a tiny island of big dreams, when they had sought to be an empire, before they had had their backs broken in the second World War. In the end, Japan remakes their nation as the Japanese Imperial State, reinstating the sovereignty of the Emperor and claiming that this new identity freed them from their old political bonds so they can field an army and take part in the war with North Korea. With the influx of Japanese troops, the Republic of Korea crushed the opposing forces and reunited the peninsula in under a year with Japan installing several military bases to ‘guard’ the old nuclear sites in the Republic’s new territory. Most of the business and economic concerns are quickly gobbled up by growing Japanese megacorps or South Korean interests, but a few of the newly-privatized North Korean assets merge together to form the a large corporate body of their own, Kwonsham Industries.  Speaking of putting your flag on things, I wanted to add the flags of new nations as they pop into existence in the timeline, but it seems like Japan didn’t update their flag at all. Bonus Update: Technology So, we now have the big three pieces on the board: The increasing power of megacorps, ecological disasters and plague culling the population and war breaking out with Japan refounding itself as the Japanese Imperial State (JIS). Before we move on to the next big chapter in Shadowrun History, I want to include another bonus update. Because you can’t have Cyberpunk without the Cyber, the past 10 years of fictional history have had some impressive technological advances. The earliest of these comes in 2001, when P4MO, a synthetic blood substitute, is approved for medical use. Being able to manufacture a Type-O substitute is huge, as just the US needs 36,000 units of blood every single day. A year later electronics advance with new optical chips being put into production that are more efficient and not affected by magnetic fields. A new suborbital plane is announced by BAE systems and the Japanese Aerospace Corporation. The Ghost is capable of crossing the Atlantic in 26 minutes and the world shrinks a little bit more. Boeing scrambles to compete with their High Speed Civil Transport which completes its first test flight a year later. Biotech continues to run rampant, with the pollutant in Europe resulting in a breed of bioluminescent fish used to test for contaminated water that soon become popular aquarium pets. Soon the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization announces the healthy birth of a Tasmanian Tiger that has been cloned from frozen DNA samples. Up above, the Wheelchair (The Harris 3M Space Station, formerly the Russian Mir) is struck by a meteorite and suffers catastrophic decompression. The astronauts onboard are mourned and NASA’s Freedom remains the only manned space station in orbit above earth. This empty orbit is quickly occupied by the Japanese Imperial State’s newest venture: solar collection satellites. Beaming energy to earth via microwave, they could cheaply and easily provide power to isolated regions, allowing them a virtual economic takeover of Third World nations as well as jump-starting their own economy. This is the key to Imperial Japan re-emerging as a real economic and military power in their own right.
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Feb 23, 2017 03:45
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quote:Libya attacked Israel quote:To the north, in Europe, Belarus mobilizes its armies and invades, seizing territory in both Poland and the Ukraine. ...why? Like, the Second Korean War seems to mostly make sense, but there's an actual cause presented for the war. Then we get to Japan going full Fascist instead of the simple route of just tearing up Article IX and citing their crazy neighbor. I don't think anyone would have a problem, and I just realized they're fighting alongside South Korea. Also, where're the Chinese?
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Feb 23, 2017 03:56
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Kavak posted:...why? Like, the Second Korean War seems to mostly make sense, but there's an actual cause presented for the war. Then we get to Japan going full Fascist instead of the simple route of just tearing up Article IX and citing their crazy neighbor. I don't think anyone would have a problem, and I just realized they're fighting alongside South Korea. Belarus was undergoing a period of ethnic and social conflict. They had problems, and everyone underestimated them: Because they didn't HAVE to go to war, it was assumed that they WOULDN'T go to war. However, the leaders in Belarus thought differently: They believed that the only way they could cling to their crumbling power was by uniting the nation and bringing in new resources through conquest. The world sanctioning and decrying them didn't matter, they suspected (correctly) that those distant superpowers would not actually go to war with them over attacking their neighbors. They didn't mind being villains on the global scale as long as their country survived. Considering they got nuked the hell out of minutes later, I'm not sure anyone knows why the LIbyans chose to do what they did. I personally chalked it up to 'Middle eastern tensions' and didn't think too much further about it, but I'll scan my books a little more closely and see what I can dig up. The Chinese got hit really hard by VITAS, so they're going to be struggling to do anything for a while.
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Feb 23, 2017 05:04
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Crasical posted:The Chinese got hit really hard by VITAS, so they're going to be struggling to do anything for a while. This makes sense, don't know enough about Belarus to comment on the others. And I don't think the writers thought much further than "Middle-eastern tensions". Like, were Libyan forces going to cross the eastern Mediterranean around a neutral Egypt to get to Israel? I don't think they'd like that.
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Feb 23, 2017 05:18
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Gaddafi was still in power when it was written.
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Feb 23, 2017 05:29
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Bieeardo posted:Gaddafi was still in power when it was written. 1980's Gadaffi, right.
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Feb 23, 2017 05:30
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Bieeardo posted:Gaddafi was still in power when it was written. Military coups were also common in South Korea during that time period as well. South Korea was very unstable until the 1990's.
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Feb 23, 2017 06:30
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Military coups were also common in South Korea during that time period as well. South Korea was very unstable until the 1990's. South Korea was/is very unstable last year/still with a president (daughter of the former dictator) and political party in thrall to a cult led by the daughter of the cult leader who corrupted the previous dictator, prompting the head of their intelligence service to make an assassination attempt that killed the president's mother. And political and financial favors were being traded to ensure communication with her ghost. Yes that is crazy and difficult to explain.
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Feb 23, 2017 07:46
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Cinnamon Bear posted:South Korea was/is very unstable last year/still with a president (daughter of the former dictator) and political party in thrall to a cult led by the daughter of the cult leader who corrupted the previous dictator, prompting the head of their intelligence service to make an assassination attempt that killed the president's mother. And political and financial favors were being traded to ensure communication with her ghost.
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Feb 23, 2017 08:13
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Cinnamon Bear posted:South Korea was/is very unstable last year/still with a president (daughter of the former dictator) and political party in thrall to a cult led by the daughter of the cult leader who corrupted the previous dictator, prompting the head of their intelligence service to make an assassination attempt that killed the president's mother. And political and financial favors were being traded to ensure communication with her ghost. You could've included that in the timeline for Shadowrun and no one would be any wiser.
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Feb 23, 2017 08:21
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The real world has gotten weird enough that Shadowrun feels distressingly plausible a lot of the time.
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Feb 23, 2017 08:36
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 07:31 |
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Crasical posted:The real world has gotten weird enough that Shadowrun feels distressingly plausible a lot of the time. I said it in the Trump thread in D&D but I disagree and here's why: Lightning Lord posted:Everyone was expecting to get the Sprawl Trilogy or Shadowrun out of all this but the horrible literary future we're getting is Jack Vance's the Dying Earth. I for one can't wait to be killed in the hills by twisted creatures while ultrarich, bored wizards gently caress with each other fruitlessly and laugh while the planet slowly turns into a cinder, and everyone knows there's no tomorrow and acts like it.
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Feb 23, 2017 08:44
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