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Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

gradenko_2000 posted:

I really liked the idea of the Marines storming Innsmouth while the Navy depth-charges Dagon's resting place ... and then the story picks up with having to hunt down all of the Marines that survived the raid and "retiring" them.

I like the idea that Navy UDT and perhaps the Navy SEALs are all descendents of Innsmouth, when America weaponized the Deep Ones during WW2.

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wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


I would like to mention that there's already a great setting in which medieval ideas about how the world works are actually the way the world works, and it's Ars Magica.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


There's a reason the protagonist/narrator of my alt-history CoC setting is a German Jew, and there aren't any Nazis in it.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Hypnobeard posted:

Sounds like a fun proto-Delta Green campaign.

Almost but not quite literally; Delta Green's inception was the raid on Innsmouth, where the US Navy learned about strange things and decided to found a division for rooting out Deep Ones mostly by sending US Marines into random South American countries, performing the Summon Deep One ritual, and machine-gunning whomever came out of the water. At one point they lose their entire archive when a cryptographer reads one mythos text to many and burns down the library containing all the files on the Deep Ones. Delta Green are eventually formed from this division when the OSS decides they want a group that can track down and kill Nazi occultists.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Is the navy raiding Innsmouth from the original story? Because, like, I can't think of much reason to do it otherwise, the Deep Ones aren't causing trouble and the locals like them.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Mors Rattus posted:

Is the navy raiding Innsmouth from the original story? Because, like, I can't think of much reason to do it otherwise, the Deep Ones aren't causing trouble and the locals like them.

H.P. Lovecraft posted:

During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting—under suitable precautions—of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

The navy's involvement was sending a submarine to torpedo Y'ha-nthlei.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!


Starfinger Core Rules Part #21: "We didn’t try to make a fantasy that was so unique and bizarre that you’d never run into it before."
(James Sutter, Starfinger Creative Director, Game Informer interview.)

Time for the Pact Worlds proper.



Sun

Worshippers of Sarenae (that's the sun goddess) found a bunch of mysterious bubble-cities on the surface of the sun protected by magic, and have settled there with "sunskimmers" that gather up solar energy or "magically bottle nuclear fire" to keep the place running. There are corporate robotics plants or "jungle boxes" that make use of the solar energy, though some of the jungle boxes apparently had sentient plant creatures take over them.

Apparently the Sun naturally opens portals to the Positive Energy Plane or the Plane of Fire, and sometimes people meet delegations from the Plane of Fire at the bubble-cities. There are efreet and the like who say there's mysterious civilizations underneath the sun's surface that are also are mysterious, but are afraid to talk about them, in other to preserve the mystery.

:iiam:

Plane of Fire II.



Aballon

The closest planet to the Sun, Aballon had robotic life seeded by a mysterious race called the "First Ones" who then apparently moved on after building a robot civilization. The sentient robots that inhabit the planet are divided between those who stockpile resources to give to the First Ones upon their "eventual" return, and those who seek to emulate the First Ones by traveling onwards.

You may think "Oh, this must be where androids come from.", but it isn't - most androids were constructed elsewhere. Instead, if you want to play a rad Aballonian robot, you're just out of luck right now. Maybe in a supplement they'll show up. However, it is a haven for artificial creatures. They also have a famous robot court and worship Triune, as Epoch, one of the god's three aspects, was constructed here.

Robot Mercury.



Castrovel

A hot jungle planet, this is mostly settled by lashuntas, elves, and formians. Oh, do you not know what a formian is? Well, you have to realize this Complete Game includes a lot of references to old D&D monsters it presumes you already know about. Like the efreet I mentioned above! Don't worry, no description or stats are available in this Complete Game, so just forget about them.

Apparently this has usually had matriarchal city-states in old serial sci-fi fashion connected by ancient teleportation portals (for all your MMO quick travel needs), but there's been more privatization and corporate exploitation nowadays (for all your Avatar emulation needs). The lashunta and formians used to be at war but have come to peace. Elves now serve as xenophobic psuedo-natives that keep people off their continent, should you need some angry natives.

Pulp Venus.



Absalom Station

As mentioned before, this is home to the Starstone, which acts as a Drift beacon and powers the station. There are myriad neighborhoods namedropped, no doubt to be dealt with in some fat location book, and right now we get engineering bays and corporate enclaves to gang-ruled sections. Because when you run the most powerful station in multiple systems that serves as the ruling seat of the solar system, what you put up with is outright gang rule over parts of it. That poo poo is okey-doke.

somebody's been playing too many bioware games, I think

There are a lot of ships called the "Armada" that use the station as a home base while the crew largely give in the chips. Technomancers are trained in the "Arcanamirium" and solarians are trained in the "Cosmonastery", which are real names I'm not making up. (I like getting a little cosmonastery myself, if you know what I mean.) They also have issues where nativist terrorists (that is, humans and other ex-Golarion races) want to kick out or restrict foreigners, which has increased tensions.

Babylon Citadel.



Akiton

A dying world wrecked by environmental disaster, its mining industry was wrecked by the discovery of interstellar travel. These days it's a lawless desert planet where people fight all the time. The wealthy hold it together but everything else is falling apart.

Though it's home to a variety of races, the main indigenous inhabitants are the ysoki. There are are red martians taken straight from Barsoom minus the egg-laying, shobhads which are green martians but bigger, and lizardfolk "who make model citizens until their reproductive cycle drives them violently insane". A lot of races mentioned with no stats yet to actually use them, a... theme we'll see a lot in this section. A lot.

Tatooine Barsoom.



Verces

So, this is a tidally locked world. Could life actually exist on a planet like that? Don't ask questions like that, it does! One side is a desert home to "plants and animals with photosynthesizing skin" while the other is full of sinister predators because it's dark, man, so dark, like. Meanwhile, there's a temperate zone in the middle that forms the "Ring of Nations" that was the inspiration the Pact Worlds. However, they're occasionally raided by "Outlaw Kingdoms" that exist outside the ring, somehow. There are also solar farms and ice mines here as well. Inhabited largely by the verthani, who apparently are like humans but with color-changing skin and black eyes. Can you play one? Not yet!

Also there is a mysterious tube on the bright side of the planet that nobody has returned from exploring, and those who did only "transmitt[ed] only strange ravings about winged creatures in the depths". So bats? Sounds like bats to me. Spacebats.

'winged creatures' is supposed to be scary and ominous in a setting where a winged alien might be your goofball neighbor, I suppose

Coruscant meets Pandora.



Idari

Not a planet, but a kasthan colony ship parked in orbit just past Verces, since they couldn't find room on Akiton? Seriously? That place is a dying desert shithole where nothing grows and people kill each other every day, it can't have that many people. Well, whatever. I suspect they took one look at the world and were like "y'know, maybe space is better anyway". This has a large rotating center with people living along the interior of the "Drum", despite the fact the art makes it look like it has a big gaping hole in the side. Though it doesn't fly anymore, a good deal of the population works for the government just maintaining it. Yet despite this, anybody can emigrate whenever they want, so working on the ship must be a pretty sweet gig to hang around doing menial labor all the time.

They have a large spire-like temple called the Sholar Adat where the dead are taken, and they take a "hair-thin" slice of the deceased brain which can be used to summon back the deceased's soul for questioning via technomagic. It implies this might require an undetailed fee and accessing souls older than a century requires a warrant for some reason. Kind of a neat idea, but a bit vaguely presented.

Generation Ship.



Diaspora

An asteroid belt caused by the collison of two planets millennia ago, this is your standard asteroid felt with some larger chunks for settling. It's implied in the text it's not your cinematic sort of belt where the asteroids are close enough to form an obstacle course, but the art is firmly in the dramatic rock swarm territory. It's mainly home to miners and space pirates, but there are also "sarcesians", angelic humanoids adapted to hard vacuum. Are there rules for them or any more details than that? Of course not! Buy supplements, kiddo! Also they hate Eox.

There's also a small planetoid here called Nisis, mainly made up of ice and water and full of monsters that eat colonists. The solution, seemingly, has been to send more colonists. Also it has a magic river that flows between various asteroids and planetoids, but it's become more dangerous because of attacks of unseen creatures which are called "diaspora wyrms" even though nobody's seen them. Also Nisis is growing bigger! This is mysterious. What's going on?

:iiam:

Also there are spooky space cultists who all vanished and left a haunted asteroid. You should totally go there, that'd be a great plan.

"Looks like Poppycock."



Eox

Once home to the technologically and magically advanced elebrians - who were like humans only they were called elebrians instead - they became haughty and decided to blow up all other worlds that didn't acknowledge them as The Most Awesome Ever. So they blew up two planets and created the Diaspora (which is why the sarcesians hate them) but the backblast from the weapon nuked their whole world. Oooops. The survivors became necromancers and most of the survivors are undead or mutants, in that order. Bizarrely, though the elebrians previously had spaceships statted up, the elebrians get no stats themselves, despite being one of the core setting races who get mentioned a bunch.

Run by the bone sages (no doubt experts in the ancient art of boning), the non-undead elebrians are often contentious internally but united against external threats, and are generally just amoral as opposed to malevolent. Also they have a city set up entirely for living inhabitants which have "cruel reality shows and competitions" that are aired throughout the Pact Worlds. Seems ethical.

Ghost World.



Triaxus

So, this has an eccentric orbit that causes a 317 year summer / winter cycle, and is home to "ryphorians" who are humanoids that have dark sun during the summer cycle and white fur in the winter cycle (it's currently winter). Though the local humanoid nations have been traditionally at conflict with dragon-ruled nations, the Pact has gotten the dragons to go corporate (they're mostly evil dragons). A few Triaxian countries have rejected the Pact to embrace xenophobia, instead.

There's also the mercenary company called the Skyfire Legion that used to ride "dragonkin", which - I had to look them up because poo poo is so rarely explained here - are riding-sized dragons that bond with riders telepathically. Instead, these days humanoids and dragonkin team up as coopilots on starfighters. There's also Ning, which is anti-Pact but pro-Corporations and pro-criminals, and is "obsessed with honor and status" and has "genderless warriors" and... the whole thing feels vaguely Ming the Mercilessish, but it's not very detailed here.

Mongo Pern.



Liavara

A ringed gas giant, apparently the gassy interior is well-populated witha fauna like "oma space whales", "giant bacteria", or "keji swarms". Apparently this planet is home to the "Dreamers", who are descendants of barathus colonists who have gone into an enlightened nature children sort of state and sing prophetic songs, like you do. Who are the barathus? Wait until the next planet for that. The barathus apparently are fairly territorial and see the Dreamers as "psuedoholy". As such, gas mining and colonization is fairly restricted.

Naturally, it has many moons, including Arkanen, which apparently loses its atmosphere throughout the year only to have it replenished in an "impossible" orbit that travels through Liavara's atmosphere, and some think it was deliberately crafted to orbit in this fashion. In addition, there's Osoro, which has settled mountains rising over a poisonous lower atmosphere. Melos had all of its population vanish and has ruins that get picked over. And there's Hallas, which is apparently isolated as the local energy beings tend to cause normal people's heads to explode incidentally.

Saturn Rukh.



Bretheda

A gas giant and the largest planet in the system. Here you can find the barathus, who are big jellyfish that are intensely communal and rely on biotechnology. They have a larger entity called Confluence that serves as the equivalent of a government when needed, formed by barathus who volunteer to be a part of a communal intelligence.

There's an ice-covered moon called Titan Kalo-Mahoi run by "the aquatic Kalo", a forested moon of Endor Marata with a "seven-gendered" "furry" race called the maraquoi who are split between trying to preserve their culture and joining with the rest of the solar system. There's Dykon which has the "urogs", brilliant crystalline creatures. Then there are the "death moons" like Thyst or Varos with extremely hostile environments that are largely home to mining operations.



Jupiter Medusa.

Apostae

A rocky planet once apparently settled by a lost race, the drow have come here because it's dark and already has a bunch of ruins and tunnels carved up where they can be at home. And "home" involves summoning demons and using orcs and other races as near slave-labor. The Pact Worlds apparently put up with this because-

:confused:

Since the drow settlements are comparatively small, there are still a lot of dungeons ruins to explore and a mysterious portal to an unknown location. Not really more to say.

Menzoberranzan Neptune.



Aucturn

A planet that most believe is actually a giant Great Old One egg, and apparently it's warred over by the "cults of the Elder Mythos" who want to ride it like an atom bomb and the "Dominion of the Black" who think they can control Peepthulu. There's also a big temple to Nyarlathotep which is run by Carsai the King who may actualy also be Nyarlathotep. He's apparently become a pop culture icon for the edgy and successfully promoted Elder God worship.

In any case, it's big organic goozone with a spooky and poisonous green atmosphere. There's apparently a mountain called the Gravid Mound that some think is a big pregnant lump where Aucturn will give birth before it's born because Those Are the Ways of the Goooods. Apparently, they think they'll get some sort of big pinata explosion of cool magic instead of all dying. Makes sense.

Yuggoth Pluto.

And that's that, we can wrap up the Pact Worlds system there. There are some interesting ideas, and some derivative ones, but it's hard to use either given the lack of stats provided in this section for the litany of things that are namedropped.

Next: New worlds, new civilizations.

Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Oct 19, 2017

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.
You figure with that impressive pagecount they'd have the place to cover all those cool-sounding races.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

MonsieurChoc posted:

You figure with that impressive pagecount they'd have the place to cover all those cool-sounding races.
And bump the appendix entry on space elves?! You fiend.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

MonsieurChoc posted:

You figure with that impressive pagecount they'd have the place to cover all those cool-sounding races.

Some of them did get covered in the planet hopping supplement for Pathfinder that I impulse bought a year or so ago.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Starfinger Core Rules Part #21: "We didn’t try to make a fantasy that was so unique and bizarre that you’d never run into it before."
(James Sutter, Starfinger Creative Director, Game Informer interview.)
Mission accomplished, I guess.

e: lol at the company whose whole business concept is "you don't have to change your game with the times" worry about making something "too original".

MollyMetroid
Jan 20, 2004

Trout Clan Daimyo
Remember how I started and then abandoned a Reign of Winter review? One of the adventures takes place on Triaxus.

In fact, Pathfinder had rules for the Kasatha and the Ysoki and the Androids already, I think the only species that were brand new to Starfinger are the Vesk and the Shirren?

You also had most of the pact worlds already.

Like, the core setting junk is already there if you want to do a planetary romance / sword and planet in pathfinder. Even laser guns and chainsaws and cybernetics are in Pathfinder proper.

What PF doesn't have are rules for starships. But I bet you could take something from Aethera or some other third party, or just make up some Spelljammer type things without real issue, if you wanted to...

But, you'd have to want to. And I kind of don't anymore, and I'm someone who actually didn't mind Pathfinder.

I think that says an awful lot.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Kurieg posted:

Some of them did get covered in the planet hopping supplement for Pathfinder that I impulse bought a year or so ago.

Yeah. Some of them are based on preexisting Pathfinder races, so in theory you can find some of their stats online and try and convert them to Starfinger. A few of them showed up in the Free RPG Day Starfinger supplement, but that's based on a beta version of the rules and so some slight adjustments are necessary to bring them up to date with the finished rules (mainly in their HP values).

There's still many races that don't fall under those two categories, though, even if you're inclined to be generous regarding the above excuses.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Incidentally, for those wondering: FFG recently sent out an email about changes in response to messages they got about the beta. Duels are going to be heavily reworked and Iaijutsu will be expanded to not just be a single technique. They are looking into renaming Wounds and Outbursts. People have apparently asked them to remove Strife and Outbursts; they have no plans to do so. (I don't know why people want that; they say that they want players not to look at Outbursts as purely negative things to avoid, but as things to embrace in some situations.) They're also taking votes on which Minor Clan stats to show us, though not any Schools. Current options are, I believe, Fox, Wasp and Mantis. It might be Bat instead of Fox, I can't check right now.

E: Also, they are looking at Stance bonuses to see if any are unbalanced, most notably Earth and Air.

Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Oct 19, 2017

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Kavak posted:

The navy's involvement was sending a submarine to torpedo Y'ha-nthlei.

They also arrested large numbers of Innsmouth folk, with the bleeding-hearts at the time inquiring about their mass detainment and mistreatment by the federal prison system, but eventually agreeing with the government when seeing them.

It's pretty racist, like seeing something in conservative fiction when some of the liberal strawpeople see that the conservative hero is right about their actions against some minority and abandon their lifelong beliefs.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Young Freud posted:

They also arrested large numbers of Innsmouth folk, with the bleeding-hearts at the time inquiring about their mass detainment and mistreatment by the federal prison system, but eventually agreeing with the government when seeing them.

I was just answering what role the military had in the raid, the FBI did the rest as far as I know.

Strange Matter
Oct 6, 2009

Ask me about Genocide
Gonna go out on a limb and say that Cosmonastery actually owns.

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.

Mors Rattus posted:

Incidentally, for those wondering: FFG recently sent out an email about changes in response to messages they got about the beta. Duels are going to be heavily reworked and Iaijutsu will be expanded to not just be a single technique. They are looking into renaming Wounds and Outbursts. People have apparently asked them to remove Strife and Outbursts; they have no plans to do so. (I don't know why people want that; they say that they want players not to look at Outbursts as purely negative things to avoid, but as things to embrace in some situations.) They're also taking votes on which Minor Clan stats to show us, though not any Schools. Current options are, I believe, Fox, Wasp and Mantis. It might be Bat instead of Fox, I can't check right now.

E: Also, they are looking at Stance bonuses to see if any are unbalanced, most notably Earth and Air.

The one Minor clan I want to see doesn't exist due to the reset timeline right now, alas, without a background rewrite.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

RIP Toku, lost to the otherwise laudable metaplot purge. Easy enough to write in as a homebrew, though, just have Toku have worked for some Emperor in times past instead of the Toturi.

MollyMetroid
Jan 20, 2004

Trout Clan Daimyo
Bat was pretty late in the timeline, it's probably Fox. Bat came after the Mantis were a Great Clan and formed as an offshoot of them.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Tendales posted:

Point being, "Lovecraftian Horror" is stuff that's scary to Lovecraft in particular. He wrote convincingly because he really was horrified, but that doesn't mean the stuff that scared him is universally terrifying. We'll never really get the same impact, because we're already comfortable with the universe being weird as hell. The doofy theory that reality is actually a COMPUTER SIMULATION is just as existentially terrifying as Azathoth, but even the true believers just keep making electric cars instead of curling up into a ball and gibbering about how someone could trip over the universe's power cord at any moment.

Everything is shellfish in lovecraft because he was allergic to them.

Nessus posted:

The idea that gods are literally powered in some way by belief or souls is like a generation old at this point. If you think "shadow manipulators of the night are behind all the evil men do" is trite, I think "gods get MP from people doing praise rituals' has to be like doubly so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_%28play%29 400s BC or earlier.

DalaranJ
Apr 15, 2008

Yosuke will now die for you.
Hooray, I can indeed have (poorly designed) adventures on the sun. Does anyone know how to cast endure gravity?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



MightyMatilda posted:

There are many optical illusion - such as a two-pronged item that also has three prongs - that I absolutely hate looking at. I know they're simply pieces of art, but since they are not things that can exist in real space, looking at them fills me with utter revulsion.

Anyway, when I read cosmic horror, I just think that looking at R'iyeh or Y'golonac or whatever is like looking at an optical illusion that actually exists, and that does the trick.
That is impossible, and cannot be scary, for it is not a demonstration of man's inhumanity to man.

Kurieg posted:

I love that TLE somehow managed to Out-edge REIN*HAGEN by having the evil christian god with an invasion army made of Nazis headed by mirror-universe christ vs LITERALLY MOHAMMED.

Also a game that specifically states that Muslims are the good guys coming out just months before 9/11? Yeah...
There was a kind of cultural strain of, I don't know what to term it, it's not quite "islamophilic" as "arab/MENA-philic" cultural stuff in the late nineties which, of course, 9/11 concluded, but it was discernible. Of course I also remember reading that that community was well on its way to integration before... yeah.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Cassa posted:

The money to be made from selling drugs seems like a decent way to keep yourself stocked up on gear.
This threatened to derail a Werewolf: the Forsaken campaign I was in. One player wanted to start a drug ring to fund our operations.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Yeah, that's the thing. It made enough sense at the time when a lot of those notions were held as common wisdom even though they were being shat all over.

In a time where I comfortably feel the universe is not anthropocentric or divinely guided in the slightest, though, it feels awfully quaint.

JcDent posted:

Maybe lovecraftian horror for today should work on different principles.
It's not obligatory to like Lovecraft, but "the universe is in fact actively malevolent" and "the chaos of the universe puncturing your ordered existence" are fundamental themes in horror.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I always wondered why there weren't more White Wolf-styled heartbreakers than there were. I mean, there are a fair number, but a lot of them like Delirium or Everlasting are just ex-White Wolf employees to begin with. It could be just because White Wolf worked so hard to corner every edge of their little genre, but it always felt like a pretty easy formula to look at and think "oh, I can do that better!"
There are only so many games I'd call WoD Heartbreakers, but there are a ton of games that probably would not have existed without White Wolf's influence on the market. It went beyond genre to encompass new publishing models. Like Deadlands and Fading Suns, and even L5R...I think any game that followed that "supplement treadmill" model was influenced by White Wolf.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
What would a complete list of Vampire Heartbreakers (supernaturals lurking around in the modern world) include? From memory, I'd say:

- Everlasting
- In Nomine (SJG version)
- Immortal: The Invisble War (the one with Claudia Christian on the cover)
- Legacy (aka Highlander but with the serial numbers filed off)
- Delirium
- The Last Exodus
- Underworld (GMS does Gaiman's Neverwhere)
- Nobilis
- Kult (came out in 1991 in Sweden, may not count)
- Nightlife (came out just before V:tM so not really a VH; it was just surfing the same zeitgeist)
- Insylum
- SLA Industries (maybe?)

Which ones am I missing?

e: I forgot the following from CJ Carella
- Witchcraft
- Armageddon

I think there were a couple of "Book of Revelations becomes real" games from the 1990s, and vaguely recall one was titled "The End"

FMguru fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Oct 19, 2017

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.
Vampire: Undeath! Though that's less a Heartbreaker and more just...plagiarism and weird scat fetishes.

Trollman's dumb thing that I don't think ever got actually published.

The Legacy people did their 'totally not mage' game at some point too though I don't think it ever got a physical release: Warlock.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

unseenlibrarian posted:

Trollman's dumb thing that I don't think ever got actually published.
After Midnight. He did release the PDF as a PWYW thing.

(By the way, if anyone happens to have a link to my readthrough of that in the original grogs.txt, I'd appreciate it)

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Cassa posted:

The money to be made from selling drugs seems like a decent way to keep yourself stocked up on gear.
IIRC, the psionic space-cop protagonists in the Lensman SF setting spent a lot of time breaking up drug ("thionite") smuggling cartels (which were being run by the evil Boskonian pirates).Psst

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

So Starfinder doesn't even wait for a supplement to cram Cthulhu mythos nonsense in there? Great, well I guess I wasn't the target audience anyway.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
I don't like Cthulhu appearing in non-Earth settings, because that just seems lazy. How hard is it to come up with your own eldritch stuff?

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


MightyMatilda posted:

There are many optical illusion - such as a two-pronged item that also has three prongs - that I absolutely hate looking at. I know they're simply pieces of art, but since they are not things that can exist in real space, looking at them fills me with utter revulsion.

Anyway, when I read cosmic horror, I just think that looking at R'iyeh or Y'golonac or whatever is like looking at an optical illusion that actually exists, and that does the trick.

You've clearly not kept apace with the latest advances in mechanical design:

Feinne
Oct 9, 2007

When you fall, get right back up again.

Young Freud posted:

They also arrested large numbers of Innsmouth folk, with the bleeding-hearts at the time inquiring about their mass detainment and mistreatment by the federal prison system, but eventually agreeing with the government when seeing them.

It's pretty racist, like seeing something in conservative fiction when some of the liberal strawpeople see that the conservative hero is right about their actions against some minority and abandon their lifelong beliefs.

To be fair to Lovecraft that chain of events is pretty much what I'd expect down to the liberal strawpeople uniformly deciding that in the face of weird fish-frog-person hybrids maybe it's not racism after all to discriminate against them.

Now you're making me want a story about the Deep One Civil Rights Movement.

Lynx Winters
May 1, 2003

Borderlawns: The Treehouse of Pandora

JcDent posted:

I don't like Cthulhu appearing in non-Earth settings, because that just seems lazy. How hard is it to come up with your own eldritch stuff?

Paizo didn't get big by innovating, so why start now?

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Dallbun posted:

26: Rite of Passage

There’s a bare gnollknoll in the hills, on top of which is a bonfire being fed by six kobolds, and around which are tents and cookfires of more kobolds. Forty-six total. They’re singing and dancing and such, celebrating the rite of passage of ten young males. (They need to run a gauntlet, presumably representing the fact that the universe has it in for kobolds.) The PCs could crash it, of course, but they could also loot the camp while the kobolds are all distracted up on the hill.

I approve of this brief taste of kobold culture. Keep.

"The kobolds are too drunk to notice that the adventures, too, aren't kobolds. If the PC's stick around, they can get drunk and get initiated into the tribe, which serves no real purpose but could be funny, since the tribe's rituals have no rules for kicking someone out, and now they have to tolerate the tall humanoids hanging out in their camp."

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

theironjef posted:

So Starfinder doesn't even wait for a supplement to cram Cthulhu mythos nonsense in there? Great, well I guess I wasn't the target audience anyway.

Yeah, we'll have a number of Lovecraftian entities coming in to make their special guest appearances, in a game that already has twenty-eight non-Mythos deities listed, and notes that there are more from Pathfinder still out there. "I know we have infernal lords, gods of murder, disease, torture, and no less that two gods overseeing the apocalypse, but why not just add in Yog-Sothoth? YOG! SOTH OTH!"

Granted, that was already in Pathfinder's setting so it's just grandfathering in existing material in that sense.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

JcDent posted:

I don't like Cthulhu appearing in non-Earth settings, because that just seems lazy. How hard is it to come up with your own eldritch stuff?
Seriously. You're in space! Do some New Gods poo poo or something! Or living planets! Anything besides "Lovecraft Again".

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

It's especially weird that it's just cultists doing cult poo poo to the big names, too, and not just owning the confluence of Cthulhu Mythos and space. Like if you put the X-Men into Starfinder, I'd want Corsair and Deathbird and poo poo, and they're just doing Wolverine on the moon. Let's get some Mi'Go and moon beasts and flying polyps and poo poo in there! What? No? Dudes in robes praying to Nylarthotep but on Pluto? Sigh, fine.

Daeren
Aug 18, 2009

YER MUSTACHE IS CROOKED

Evil Mastermind posted:

Seriously. You're in space! Do some New Gods poo poo or something! Or living planets! Anything besides "Lovecraft Again".

Anything, you say? :devil:

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Yes, let's get some Yuuzhan Vong in there. Anything that isn't the musty old-person fart of Lovecraft again. Sticking Lovecraft poo poo in your setting is the epitome of doing something because it's free instead of doing something because it's a good idea.

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Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

It doesn't even fit. This is a world where there are demonstrably deities of equal or greater potency but distinct benevolence, and more active deities of equal or greater malevolence if you feel like being a nihilistic dickhead.

Why bother being a Cthulhu cultist?

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