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That's one of the reasons I tend to pay closer attention to flavor than crunch, I'm sort of a fan of Gygaxian naturalism, if that's the right term. Otyughs, gelatinous cubes, and rat kings as vital parts of a sewer's ecosystem. A sewer worker's guild training its members to use soulmelds because one of them provides immunity to disease and nausea. Wizards destabilizing the economy with Fabricated Wall of Iron, not realizing that it's more work than just looting a dragon hoard and destabilizing the economy that way. That sort of thing.
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Mar 28, 2017 06:17
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Dareon posted:That's one of the reasons I tend to pay closer attention to flavor than crunch, I'm sort of a fan of Gygaxian naturalism, if that's the right term. Otyughs, gelatinous cubes, and rat kings as vital parts of a sewer's ecosystem. A sewer worker's guild training its members to use soulmelds because one of them provides immunity to disease and nausea. Wizards destabilizing the economy with Fabricated Wall of Iron, not realizing that it's more work than just looting a dragon hoard and destabilizing the economy that way. That sort of thing. I think there's a limit to "Gygaxian naturalism," i.e. at some point trying to make everything coherent comes at the expense of the players being able to have fun. But I like the idea of things not just existing in a vacuum, which is why I feel like one of the biggest losses from 3e D&D going onwards was the habitat/society and ecology entries for each monster, because those did a lot to make each creature more than just a pile of HP and the occasional weird attack power.
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Mar 28, 2017 10:26
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"Gygaxian naturalism" is something that Gygax himself cared about only when it was fun or engrossing, which is the way it should be.
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Mar 28, 2017 14:23
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Halloween Jack posted:"Gygaxian naturalism" is something that Gygax himself cared about only when it was fun or engrossing, which is the way it should be. I think that is something often lost in grog revisionism of older D&D: it was about having fun on a Thursday night with beers and friends. He had a habit of getting up his own rear end in a top hat on some issues because he was a nerd who played tabletop games so he had his pet issues (almost everyone in the TG board is guilty of that), but it was a game to him. Well, when it came to game stuff. I did also hear he had an 80s "sell, sell, sell" mentality in the office and was serious about getting this company off the ground, sometimes to the chagrin of his employees, but that's not relevant to my point.
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Mar 28, 2017 15:36
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Covok posted:He had a habit of getting up his own rear end in a top hat on some issues because he was a nerd who played tabletop games so he had his pet issues (almost everyone in the TG board is guilty of that) I would bet that one or a couple of particular players in Gygax's home game had a thing for poisons, which is why AD&D is hilariously specific about poisons.
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Mar 28, 2017 15:49
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I always find it funny when nerds complain about weird races in D&D, when early D&D stuff had the advice "if your players want to be a balrog, go for it. Just take off some HD and have fun" and "If you want to play a vampire, start off as a zombie and climb up this undead HD chart, spontaneously morphing when you reach the appropriate levels" because Gygax was all about just gently caress It Have Fun most of the time
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Mar 28, 2017 16:02
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Covok posted:I think that is something often lost in grog revisionism of older D&D: it was about having fun on a Thursday night with beers and friends. He had a habit of getting up his own rear end in a top hat on some issues because he was a nerd who played tabletop games so he had his pet issues (almost everyone in the TG board is guilty of that), but it was a game to him. Well, when it came to game stuff. I did also hear he had an 80s "sell, sell, sell" mentality in the office and was serious about getting this company off the ground, sometimes to the chagrin of his employees, but that's not relevant to my point. Kaza42 posted:I always find it funny when nerds complain about weird races in D&D, when early D&D stuff had the advice "if your players want to be a balrog, go for it. Just take off some HD and have fun" and "If you want to play a vampire, start off as a zombie and climb up this undead HD chart, spontaneously morphing when you reach the appropriate levels" because Gygax was all about just gently caress It Have Fun most of the time
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Mar 28, 2017 16:21
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System Mastery 91 - The Whispering Vault. I think it's just whispering a repeated prayer that Clive Barker never googles Cenobite roleplaying game.
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Mar 29, 2017 05:52
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What would Cenobite vitamin gummies look like? Just gobbets of torn flesh?
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Mar 29, 2017 14:07
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Hellbound cinnamon hearts.
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Mar 29, 2017 14:32
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Halloween Jack posted:What would Cenobite vitamin gummies look like? Just gobbets of torn flesh? Can't say, no one's ever gotten them out of the packaging.
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Mar 29, 2017 14:32
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 13th Age part 5: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles 13th Age classes are based chiefly on 4th edition classes: everyone rolls to hit for everything based on a single stat (all but bards and clerics are "A classes" in 4e charop terms), and all damage scales based on level. (There are exceptions to these rules, of course.) Hit points, defenses, initiative, and recoveries (which are 4e-style healing surges) are all fixed and based on level. Whether you use strength or dexterity for melee attacks is based on your class (although some classes can choose either), and everyone's basic melee attack always does at least their level in damage on a miss (except wizards'). Your class also determines which weapons and armor you can use without a penalty, as well as your weapon damage - although all classes do the same amount of damage with a given sort of weapon in the core book. Your class also gives you a +2 boost to one of two primary stats, and as mentioned before this doesn't stack with racial boosts. As a result, there isn't the 4e-style pressure to play the Right Race For This Class. You're not permanently behind the curve as a fighter if your race didn't give you +2 STR, for example. It's a good patch on the wonkiness of racial ability scores while retaining them as one of the D&D sacred cows, but it does further contributes to the meaninglessness of ability scores (something I'll discuss in greater detail later). 13th Age only has 10 levels, broken up into Adventurer (1-4), Champion (5-7), and Epic (8-10). I don't have a good place to point this out in a clear way, and neither does this rather poorly-organized book. Feats are mostly interspersed in the class writeups, reflecting their role in 13th Age. With a few exceptions, 13A has completely abandoned the original D&D 3e design idea that each feat is a particular feat of strength or skill. Rather almost all feats are modifiers to other abilities: broadening them in scope, boosting their effectiveness, or adding additional themed uses for that ability. Many abilities - including individual spells - have their own feat chains, with adventurer/champion/epic feats that must be taken in sequence. From Each According To Their Abilities Class abilities are broken up into three categories. (Class abilities isn't an actual term 13th Age uses, but it's a good catchall for "crap you get from your class that isn't a feat or a stat".) Features are things every member of a class has. All barbarians have Barbarian Rage, all fighters are Extra Tough. Class features also often provide a framework to slot their talents or powers into. "Bardic Songs" describes the basics to understand how to use bards' level-based powers. Talents work much like Pathfinder talents: they're selectable class options, similar to most D20 games' feats, but class-specific and generally more impactful. Rather than the 3e-style fixed schedule of new abilities at certain levels, everything you'd normally see on a level-up list is part of the pool of talents. Players can choose three at level one. Rangers, paladins, and barbarians - the classes that don't normally get spells or powers - get two more from level up, and fighters get one more from level up for some reason. Talents can be as broad as a kit of themed passive and active abilities, or narrow as an X/day power or a modifier for core ability/spell. There's no attempt to balance them internally, either: oftentimes there are clearly "main" talents and "fluff" talents. A Wizard Did It Powers are abilities tiered based on (odd) levels, and are written up similarly to 3e spells or 4e powers. In general, magical powers are called spells, can generally only be used once per "full heal-up" (basically daily), and work like 3e cleric spells in that everyone knows all of them and is mainly limited by how many spell slots they have. (If a spell is somehow limited, it's usually tied to a talent.) Spell slot tables look like 3e spell tables but work like 4e power schedules: most classes only have around a half-dozen spell slots, as low-level slots are replaced with higher-level ones. If you want to cast a lower-level spell, you slot it in whatever slots you have and get a scaling effect based on the slot's level.  This is the sorcerer's spell progression table. Non-magical classes mostly don't have spellcaster-style power progression. When they do, it works in a way particular to that class. Usually, martial powers are at-will but have some sort of conditional trigger or limitation. Mundanes can't choose different powers every full heal-up, but they can switch their powerset around completely with every levelup and whenever they can justify it to the GM with a training montage or something. Get A Good Night's Rest An important topic that we won't find out about for another 100 pages is the recharge schedule for powers and recoveries. Things you can do once per fight are recovered after a quick rest, and "unless the GM is being a stick, you can always get a quick rest between battles." If you have a power that recharges on an X+, you can roll to recharge it during every quick rest. You refill your HP, recoveries, and "daily" abilities with a "full heal-up," which happens approximately every four battles. Despite the fact that this may or may not be daily, abilities are still described as "daily." There's no explicit way to game full heal-ups for a 15-minute working day: spells aren't recovered after a strictly-described amount of sleep, for example. Instead, if the party really can't carry on, they can accept a "campaign loss" for an early full heal-up; some story setback happens because they took too much time recovering from wounds and waste. ("Campaign loss" is a term introduced another dozen pages after the rules for full heal-up, of course.) This Is How We Do There are three informal categories of 13A classes, based on their main combat action: Basic Mundane classes who mainly use their basic attack and modify it with talents, Spellcasters who mainly cast a spell on their turn, and Power Mundane classes who primarily rely on their power trees. (These are names I made up, for what it's worth. It's just a way to organize these classes into future posts.) Basic Mundanes - barbarians, paladins, and rangers - are mainly playing 3e. They don't have a list of powers at all: their main combat action is to use their basic attack, buffed by their features and talents. Barbarians are extremely simple by design and thus extremely boring - two of their talents are identifiably Cleave and Whirlwind Attack, for example. Rangers break the action economy by making double attacks and having an animal companion. Paladins are more or less recognizably the 3e paladin, and have a salad of random abilities that don't come together into any coherent theme other than "doing stuff paladins have done in previous editions of D&D". Spellcasters - sorcerers, wizards, and to a lesser extent clerics and bards - cast spells. Most of them can only be used once daily, although some have a chance to recharge after every fight and other are at-will powers. All spellcasters have at least one at-will ranged attack, even clerics and bards, who can also rely on their mundane basic attacks. Clerics have spells that consume their standard action for a big effect, but most of their spells are quick actions or involve "make a basic attack, and [additional thing happens]." Power Mundanes - fighters and rogues, and to a lesser extent bards and clerics - rely on basic attacks, but those basic attacks in turn trigger powers from their power tree. Fighters and bards have "flexible attacks" - when they make a mundane attack and roll a certain result, like "odd miss" or "hit on a natural 15+", they can trigger one of their flexible attack powers as an additional rider. Rogues rely on momentum: a rogue gains momentum when they hit with an attack and loses it when they are hit or use an ability that expends their momentum, and most of their abilities can only be used when they have momentum. Next: I Waste It With My Crossbow Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Apr 2, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 17:27
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Rogues are also notable for being monumentally, incredibly boring despite being the intended 'complex' martial class. Bards, however, are loving rock stars and amazing.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:50
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Night10194 posted:Rogues are also notable for being monumentally, incredibly boring despite being the intended 'complex' martial class. my favorite part is how their core mechanic is fundamentally incompatible with ambushing people one of their two capstone powers is "prevent yourself from being ambushed by a hidden or invisible enemy" but you can only use it when you already have momentum Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 18:00
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And Fighters have this weird thing we're they're almost on auto-pilot, since the die will tell you what options you have. I'm okay with a game pointing out whether or not a class is good for beginning characters, but I don't believe this should cause said classes to be "beginner mode" only. Halloween Jack posted:What would Cenobite vitamin gummies look like? Just gobbets of torn flesh? Cenobite Vitamin Gummies! We have such flavors to taste!
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Mar 29, 2017 18:05
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Night10194 posted:Rogues are also notable for being monumentally, incredibly boring despite being the intended 'complex' martial class. After having played a Rogue in a 13A campaign that lasted for a while all I can say is: Yeeeaaaah, they kinda are. The rogue power selection as you level decrease rapidly and after a while I just kinda forgot to pick a power whenever we got an increase because there really wasn't much I found worth picking. Did some hilarious damage at times though which was fun. But the lacking range of options was a source of frustration.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:19
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Cooked Auto posted:After having played a Rogue in a 13A campaign that lasted for a while all I can say is: I'm going to steal Cease To Hope's thunder and pretty much say what will likely be his conclusion on why 13th Age's popularity saw a big turnaround: in terms of combat, it doesn't fully appeal to either 3rd edition, 4th edition, or story gamers due to have too many options for 3rd edition players, too few options for 4th edition players, and story gamers likely felt it was all too overdone. In short, it is likely what the writers like to play and is a unique, functional game, but, by being a mix of three things, it never fully appealed to any of the three audiences, due to their conflicting views. 3rd edition guys would bemoan miss damage and fighter maneuvers/rogue powers for breaking verimilitude while a 4th edition player bemoans how boring and limited the options are for martials while the story gamer wonders why so much time is being devoted to a combat subsystem at all.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:28
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It's actually more that the game just gets kinda boring quickly, with combat that is still too complex to breeze through. It really doesn't help that they completely run out of ideas for powers as you level.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:32
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Night10194 posted:It's actually more that the game just gets kinda boring quickly, with combat that is still too complex to breeze through. It really doesn't help that they completely run out of ideas for powers as you level. Yeah this is more my main issue in this case. I enjoyed 13A combat because it's neat and simple and because I'm an absolute moron when it comes to remembering rules. It was just the lack of options later on that was frustrating. The rogue felt very front loaded with powers and options but then it just turned into very generic sounding powers. Can't really say much for the other classes in this case though as I've only played one 13A campaign so far.
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Mar 29, 2017 20:01
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What I found when I started writing up my notes for a 13A game was that the combat was crunchy enough to require some thought when designing enemies, but not crunchy enough to provide more than a few levers to pull. A sort of weird, unsatisfying middle ground.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:19
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potatocubed posted:What I found when I started writing up my notes for a 13A game was that the combat was crunchy enough to require some thought when designing enemies, but not crunchy enough to provide more than a few levers to pull. A sort of weird, unsatisfying middle ground. From the GMing side, 13th Age combat basically runs on procedural autopilot other than sometimes "which PC does this monster attack" which can be a good thing or bad thing depending.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:50
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 I'm not going to do a full write-up right now but I'm currently translating enough of a Japanese game called Card Ranker to do a test PbP game with it here. It's a trading card game anime RPG. The players are all main characters in a card game anime like Cardfight Vanguard or Yu-gi-oh. They can have crazy backgrounds like 'two souls dwell in your body', 'you can hear the voice of the cards' or straight up 'you are the human form of a monster from one of the cards'. The setting is anime as hell in the awesomest possible way and the guy who wrote it actively encourages players to make crap up about the lore and setting as they play. Also there are literally no rules for any kind of skill check that doesn't involve cards. As befits the characters in a card game anime, you must accomplish everything you want to do with the cards your character has in their deck. Anyway, again not doing a full write-up tonight but I wanted to call out some especially interesting/bizarre things from the book. Card Cops It is pointed out in the replay that begins the book that card cops exist and go around arresting people for card crimes. And by that I don't mean cheating, I mean using your Zombie Legion card to rob a bank. Card Terminator At one point in the replay a player jokes about making a deck so strong it defeats his opponents before he fights them, which turns into a joke about a card cyborg getting sent back in time to destroy the man who created the ultimate deck in the future (with an added note that this is something that actually happened in America). Your Card is Straight Up Gone Fumbling in this game sucks. Anytime you want to use a card you roll 2d6 and if you get 2 that's a Fumble. Fumbles straight up destroy a non-common non-Legend card from your deck. Players start the game with all of 4 cards (1 common, 1 Legend and 2 normal monster cards). This means if your rolls are bad you'll get to the session boss with nothing but your common and Legend (Legends being a one-use-per-battle ultra card). Incidentally if you use up all your cards in battle you lose due to Library Out. So you better use that Legend card very carefully and hope nothing kills your common. Oh but hey you get your Fumbled cards back at the end of the session. Hope your team didn't need you to contribute much during the big fight with the villain of the session or anything. You Can Die At first I thought the whole 'Life Point' thing in the game was just for card duels and had no bearing on the real world but I was mistaken. If you get taken down to 0 LP in a card battle and then take even a single further point of damage you have to roll to stay alive. Even if you survive you sacrifice all your Bonds with other characters (special in-character connections that you can burn for cool effects during battle) and, in fact, you can go into the negatives in Bonds. How you can have negative Bonds with someone is beyond me. Anyway if you fail your character straight up dies and you make a new one. You got killed by a children's card game. The Villains have Plot Armor Befitting a typical anime setting, you legit can't take out the big bad until you've seen the requisite plot stuff. In order to take down the big bad's 'plot armor' you have to figure out what turned them to the Dark Side of the cards (bad guys in the game are 'Dark Rankers', people possessed by Dark Cards due to some character flaw or other). Also you have to fight them with everyone in your party together because their decks are broken as hell and they can wipe the floor with any single character no matter what kind of stupid ridiculous card combo you think you have. Anyway I'll do a full write-up and post the translated material once I get done. I'm just translating character creation, the cards and the basic rules for how combat and gameplay work. I also want to try a big sandboxy PbP game of it to play around with the setting and system (though I'm going to house-rule the hell out of stuff like the whole 'session' layout because it's dumb and meant for short Japanese TRPG convention play, not full campaigns).
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Mar 30, 2017 02:34
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Getsuya posted:Anyway if you fail your character straight up dies and you make a new one. You got killed by a children's card game.
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Mar 30, 2017 03:33
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Had your ankles sent to the Shadow Realm by Shadow Blades.
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Mar 30, 2017 04:06
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Anybody got a handy link to the Beast rundown? I have the burning desire to learn from some other sucker's misfortune
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Mar 30, 2017 05:02
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Basic Chunnel posted:Anybody got a handy link to the Beast rundown? I have the burning desire to learn from some other sucker's misfortune The full write up of the main book might be up on inklesspen's archive. Otherwise Kurieg starts covering the main book here. Later, he covers the fiction anthology and the baddie splat about heroes/antagonists beasts/super-beasts. Sin of Onan covered the hunter/beast tie-in thing here at about the same time the baddie splat was being reviewed.
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Mar 30, 2017 05:21
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I know Unknown Armies already exists, but could you reskin the anime card game to be Last Call: literally everything is settled by being good at magical Poker? The powerful characters all carry around fancy Tarot decks with magic powers dating back centuries, so you're halfway to Yu Gi Oh anyway.
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Mar 30, 2017 05:56
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 CHAPTER ONE PART FOUR THE CONCLUSION Shawn Crane  "Excuse me, sir, have you ever considered donating blood? We don’t need much. Just a little drop! Don’t be loving selfish. Get on the table and don’t move." The story of Shawn Crane’s life is a story of close calls, missed opportunities and what could have been. He’s also not really a Bather in the sense as we’ve seen before. He wouldn’t have been born if his mom decided to not get an abortion, he would’ve been a track and field star if his stepdad wasn’t too drunk to drive, he would’ve graduated college if he didn’t find heroin. The nudges and twists and turns of his life resulted in Shawn nearly dying from a heroin overdose bought from a weird dealer he’d never met before, a man who gave him the creeps. Shawn wouldn’t have become a Blood Bather if he didn’t buy that smack. Whatever he bought had a heavy hallucinogen attached to it, something strong enough to paralyze him and his friends and give them horrific visions. In the midst of the hallucination, he realized that the television was telling him how he and his friends were going to die seconds before they happened. Once the television was done saying how Lisa would try to claw her eyes out and fall out a window, she did. His friend Bill sat down next to him with a shotgun and blew his brains out and covered Shawn in gore. Then the television told Shawn that he would be ripped apart and eaten while he was still alive, devoured by the demons and monsters in the room. But the blood somehow began to invigorate Shawn and he managed to get out and find a place to lay low. When he took a shower and felt himself grow weaker, that's when the grim reality of what was happening to him began to sink in. Something about getting splattered warded off the smack demons and reinvigorated him, but he didn't know why. So Shawn started seeking out the deranged amongst the city's destitute and that's how he came upon the Ritual. Unfortunately his Ritual isn't particularly good. While it does keep the smack demons at bay, it has to be done on a daily basis. If he misses a single day, he dies and the smack demons know it. Today Shawn is clean of heroin because he knows he can't afford to zonk out and miss the chance to get his fix of blood (though he's still an avid drinker who is generally half sober at all times). Shawn Crane is gangly and tall with ratty blond hair, big teeth and arms covered in nonsense tattoos of kanji, tribal bands and cartoon characters. He is not a handsome man but he's able to hide the madness lurking beneath to be charming (up until he can't afford to be and turns on a dime). Then there's the fact that something is watching over Shawn. His Ritual would be impossible to keep up if he wasn't being nudged along by a mysterious force that sprinkles unfortunate accidents in the path of people after him. Whatever is keeping an eye on him has big plans and is interested in keeping the blood flowing until Shawn fulfills his nebulous destiny.  The main thrust of using Shawn is that he really doesn't want to die. The players are likely to come across him either as victims or for help staying ahead of the cops. Because Shawn lives a day at a time, he hasn't really considered the weird dealer, the weird smack or what might've caused the smack demons. If they're willing to help (and maybe willing to bleed a little), they might be able to find out more about something insidious going on.  Thoughts on Shawn: I don't like Shawn the character too much because he kind of reeks of a certain degree of GM homerule. The plot idea is decent and he's generally an excellent example of why you should never set the Ritual time to be too soon. But he really does feel like the Bather template was added as an afterthought or that he might've been a character/GMPC that one of the writers enjoyed enough to slide on in. Diego Flores  "No one will miss him. Or her. Use them both. How many times must I tell you? First the right wrist, then the left! Idiota. Just let me do it. Go and prepare my room, and God help you if I find blood on my sheets." Diego is a shallow man who attempts to make up for his lack of interesting characteristics by being obscenely rich and hedonistic. Raised in Spain by an obscenely wealthy family, Diego got everything he asked for and more the moment it crossed his mind. Then his mother died when he was 16, absolutely trashed on alcohol and driving her car directly into the sea. Suicide? Accident? Who can tell. That was the moment Diego decided he didn't want to die and decided that this was a good use of his money. His family had no history of the occult or the supernatural, but the money got funneled into paying researchers and cranks and one of them turned up the Bathing Ritual and how it might work. Diego took a look at it, sussed out how he thought it would work and then started paying the right people to get his Ritual in motion. He assembled a team of ex-military manhunters, paid the staff for the silence and picked his victims from the parties he threw every winter. And that was it. Diego Flores became a Bather. Things went pretty good until he picked the wrong girl to kill. Lyuba Novy was a Russian girl who didn't really speak Spanish but met Diego at one of his parties. Assuming that she was just a traveling student, Diego had her selected and killed her with the six other people he used for his Ritual. Not too late after, he was seduced by a beautiful woman who revealed herself to be an old witch who laid a hex on him for Lyuba's death: since he took the blood of a witch, all he could survive on was the blood of a witch. When the next year rolled around and his Ritual didn't work, Diego started paying the researchers to go through the records of everyone he killed. That's when his manhunters found the old woman who hexed him: Lyuba's mother. She revealed what she had done after torture and one of the manhunters confided in Diego a bit he left off on his resume: he used to be in Task Force Valkyrie and it used to be his job to hunt down the supernatural. With the right amount of funding, he could find Diego the witches he needs to live. The money keeps flowing and the blood keeps flowing for the last five years. Diego stays young and beautiful, jet-setting around the world and seducing who he pleases, drawing the blood of witches when it strikes his fancy. Diego is a beautiful man, Ritual or not, with rich black hair, soulful brown eyes, a swimmer's body and a charmingly soft voice. He's also able to alter himself and his mannerisms to disguise himself and talk people into following him back to his place. Diego is the kind of man who has seduced the lovers of his enemies and publically humiliated them to prove a point. He's not really capable of doing much more than that, which is where his money and servants and manhunters come into play. They know people and money talks, making it pretty hard to get close to him. Diego's big purpose and thrust is to be an antagonist, even the kind of bad guy who doesn't even realize he's behind everything bad that have happened to the PCs. The name of the game is stripping everything away from him to get at him. One interesting little ace in the hole for the PCs: he is unaware of the fact that he can't really be Diego Flores forever. Eventually he will have to fake his death and change his name. The thought has never crossed his mind and his servants probably won't ever say that to his face. Dropping that bomb on him would be a deliciously fun thing to do.  Thoughts on Diego: He's a good one-dimensional antagonist and as previously mentioned is pretty good for long play. He's sufficiently dickish enough that it's emotionally investing to crush him more than stopping him from killing people. Bob Pilot  "Please God, this time. If it doesn’t work this time, I’ll just let myself die. This time. This time I’ll get it right." Bob Pilot is a man who lost everything to cancer. He worked at the industrial plant until he couldn't continue as foreman. His wife left him and he ended up in hospice care. All that was left for Bob was the wild world of the internet, keeping his mind alert and focused as a reader and an amateur scholar. He even took to writing, putting together some essays about his condition and how it feels to be dying. These essays didn't go unnoticed and he ended up seeing an odd cross-section of humanity: people proselytizing to a dying man, compliments for his courage, questions to take his stuff before he goes, cranks doing fringe research. And then one day he had a visitor with a story to tell him, a story about a Ritual and how he could save himself if he figured out how the Ritual worked. The following summer, Bob broke into the abandoned plant and prepared the industrial grinder for human sacrifices. His time meditating on death and focusing on studying people and culture lead Bob to conclude that some people should die for the betterment of everyone else. Some people had more bad than good in them. The first person in the grinder was his ex-wife and Bob lowered himself into the slurry in the vat to be healed. The lady left a detail out, though: Bob was under the impression that he had to only do the Ritual once. When he found his thin body wasting away further months later, when he started losing his hair again, he realized the uncomfortable truth that he would have to keep killing to stay alive. Bob's ultimate goal is to perform the Ritual in such a way that it'll be permanent, unaware that this is impossible. He keeps picking people he thinks are more bad than good, people who are selfish, greedy, capricious or useless. He believes that if he truly rids the world of the bad, he'll be able to live forever. Bob's attempted to find the woman, but the hospice has no records of her visiting him and his own memory is troublingly addled whenever he tries to put together what she looked like. Bob Pilot looks like he's always on the cusp of a recent recovery from his illness. When he's healthy, his black skin is healthy and he carries his slender frame with energy. When he gets close to the time of Ritual, his health begins to fade: hair loss, a change in eye color, a yellowing of his teeth and nails, slender becomes gaunt. He used to be a bigger, stronger man and the best he can do is perform the Ritual to stay healthy. Bob's main thrust is he's a desperate man aware of his hypocrisy but so scared of death that he's fooled himself into thinking he's helping the world. He's constantly moving closer to the edge of reason every time he kills, liquefies the bodies and pulls the lever to flush it all down the drain. The general climax of using Bob will be him realizing that he either has to remain a Bather forever or die.  Thoughts on Bob: He's a much more compelling character than Liesel or Diego. He does a good job of juxtaposing the brutal nature of what he does with the fact that he's trying to remain good. Ultimately he's best as a morally conflicted character that the PCs nudge in one direction or the other; there can't be any middle ground with Blood Bathing. NEXT TIME: We move onto the next breed of Immortals. 
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 06:37
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On one hand it's absolutely amazing. On the other, I am disappointed it uses dice, rather than actual cards for resolution.
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Mar 30, 2017 11:26
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Lichtenstein posted:On one hand it's absolutely amazing. On the other, I am disappointed it uses dice, rather than actual cards for resolution. Yes, though you are encouraged to write your trap cards on notecards and keep them hidden, revealing them only when someone activates one of them.
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Mar 30, 2017 13:06
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Oh my god, I so need this game.
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Mar 30, 2017 13:08
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I'm aiming to post the translated rules and PBP sign-up sometime next week. Unfortunately I'm only translating enough to create and play a character. Translating the whole game would be way too big of a project for me to do on my own for fun.
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Mar 30, 2017 13:19
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Basic Chunnel posted:Anybody got a handy link to the Beast rundown? I have the burning desire to learn from some other sucker's misfortune Nuns with Guns posted:The full write up of the main book might be up on inklesspen's archive. Otherwise Kurieg starts covering the main book here. Later, he covers the fiction anthology and the baddie splat about heroes/antagonists beasts/super-beasts. Sin of Onan covered the hunter/beast tie-in thing here at about the same time the baddie splat was being reviewed. The Inklesspen Mirror has everything up to midway through chapter 5, Which picks up here. I go into the fiction anthology basically immediately after I'm done with the main book. Conquering Heroes is here.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:31
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Kurieg posted:The Inklesspen Mirror has everything up to midway through chapter 5, Which picks up here. I go into the fiction anthology basically immediately after I'm done with the main book. Conquering Heroes is here. Speaking of which, how do I get it to recognized that I've un-abandoned a review?
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Mar 30, 2017 17:17
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LuiCypher posted:Speaking of which, how do I get it to recognized that I've un-abandoned a review? You wait for inklesspen to notice.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:20
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Hostile V posted:Thoughts on Shawn: I don't like Shawn the character too much because he kind of reeks of a certain degree of GM homerule. The plot idea is decent and he's generally an excellent example of why you should never set the Ritual time to be too soon. But he really does feel like the Bather template was added as an afterthought or that he might've been a character/GMPC that one of the writers enjoyed enough to slide on in. I agree that the Bather Ritual seems mostly ancillary to what's gripping about the concept, but I like the use of Shawn to highlight rituals that focus more on the gory shedding of blood than its ritual preparation. For the most part, though, I just usually like when a writeup manages to sneak in an entirely new angle. I don't think I'd run TV smack demons as an outright apocalyptic threat, but yes, I like that they're there being jerks and causing problems.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:35
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I've been reading a bunch of Dominions LPs, and it got me wondering how to make an RPG in that setting that wasn't just a heartbreaker with an obscure license tie-in.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:55
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SirPhoebos posted:I've been reading a bunch of Dominions LPs, and it got me wondering how to make an RPG in that setting that wasn't just a heartbreaker with an obscure license tie-in. Focus on the Pretender aspect and emphasise that everyone is warring over who gets to be God. Make the players' resource base entirely dependent on how their faith is doing and hammer it home that no worshippers for their patron = no life. Keep up the apocalyptic tone and always, always dangle the carrot of divinity over the heads. After all, they can fix everything once they're omniscient!
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Mar 30, 2017 18:51
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SirPhoebos posted:I've been reading a bunch of Dominions LPs, and it got me wondering how to make an RPG in that setting that wasn't just a heartbreaker with an obscure license tie-in. It is easy. You just roleplay as a group much like Bogrus and his raiding party who are stuck in the middle of an apocalyptic war. As an added bonus you can have a player party which is made up of almost everything under the sun as a group of concerned citizens doing their part to stop the pretender gods from destroying everything.
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Mar 30, 2017 19:02
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My character is the glowing magic fountain with good scales and lots of magic.
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Mar 30, 2017 19:10
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