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Mors Rattus posted: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. Have you met cultists. Not very bright chaps. But seriously, yes. Cosmic horror has no place in the 1-20 level grind.
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Oct 19, 2017 21:17
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Well, it's like...if you want to prevent the destruction of the world by placating Dread Smithers the Slumberer In Whose Dreams Lies Chaos, why not worship the god who can beat that guy up and stop him destroying the world? If you want to accelerate it, why not worship the guy who's actively working towards it rather than the one who's napping?
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Oct 19, 2017 21:19
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theironjef posted: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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Oct 19, 2017 21:20
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Mors Rattus posted:Well, it's like...if you want to prevent the destruction of the world by placating Dread Smithers the Slumberer In Whose Dreams Lies Chaos, why not worship the god who can beat that guy up and stop him destroying the world? My best guess would be that the one who's actively working for it has been getting his rear end kicked across multiple Adventure Paths (TM) and so the frustrated wannabe nihilistic dick kicks the sand and goes 'WELL WHAT ELSE WE GOT'.
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Oct 19, 2017 21:22
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And throwing Cthulhu in space doesn't really work - as a lot of the horror is the Unearthly, Alien things like The Color out of Space or Mi-Gos invading your new england sensible world. Space is weird and alien by default - it doesn't work.
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Oct 19, 2017 21:22
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That depends on how broadly you define it. "Fantasy Heartbreakers" are heartbreakers because they were competing directly with D&D in its exact niche. There are a lot of games that followed White Wolf in terms of publishing model, and a lot of games in the 90s with at least a vaguely "dark" aesthetic, but...well, not all of them are set in the modern day, not all of them feature monsters as PCs, and so on. Like, is Underground a WoD heartbreaker despite being an 80s superhero game? What about edgy, urban conspiracy focused games like Over the Edge and Conspiracy X? Also, I'm not sure that the idea of the heartbreaker can apply to that many White Wolf inspired games, because a lot of White Wolf fans would actually make room in their collection for other games like SLA Industries and Kult. Whereas I've literally never even heard of someone who fell in love with Forge: Out of Chaos or The Fifth Cycle in addition to D&D. Insylum is absolutely not a WoD heartbreaker; it's a short, extremely rules-lite Forge game. Okay, enough of me being pedantic, here's other games that are in the same genre as the WoD in a very broad sense: The 23rd Letter Armageddon Asylum BESM Cold Hands, Dark Hearts Children of Fire Dark Conspiracy Darktown: The Apocalyptic Cycle Dragon Storm Everlasting Fireborn The Godsend Agenda Immortal: The Invisible War In Nomine Kult Legacy: War of Ages The Last Exodus: The Interactive Story Arc of the Third and Last Dance When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might so When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You'll Know That You're Right Lost Souls Nephilim Neverwhere Nightbane Nightlife Obsidian: Age of Judgment Pandemonium! Purgatory Shades of Nightfall The Seventh Seal Spookshow SLA Industries The Whispering Vault Tribe 8 UnderWorld WitchCraft World of Bloodshadows World of Necroscope World of Species (seriously) unseenlibrarian posted:Vampire: Undeath! Though that's less a Heartbreaker and more just...plagiarism and weird scat fetishes.
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Oct 19, 2017 21:25
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Robindaybird posted:And throwing Cthulhu in space doesn't really work - as a lot of the horror is the Unearthly, Alien things like The Color out of Space or Mi-Gos invading your new england sensible world. Reverse it. New England Housewives are invading pluto, setting up little league games and attending PTA meetings! How will the Mi-Go come to comprehend such a bizarre series of unnatural occurrences?
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Oct 19, 2017 21:27
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Mors Rattus posted: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. Some people ask themselves, "Do I want to worship a god, or do I want to worship a god who's an octopus man with bat wings and lives in a super-Atlantis". Sometimes, the answer to that question is obvious.
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Oct 19, 2017 21:55
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theironjef posted: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. If you really must do eldritch horror like do Carcosa or something, a huge inexplicable city that shouldn't exist on a world you shouldn't be able to live on where the layout changes for no obvious reason inhabited largely by people who simply woke up one day to find their house was now in Carcosa.
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Oct 19, 2017 21:56
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Feinne posted: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. There was a story that touched on this in the aftermath, "The Doom that Came to Innsmouth" Unfortunately it still decided the humans were right and that the Deep One taint makes you evil or whatever. Also there's rape.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:14
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Kaza42 posted:Reverse it. New England Housewives are invading pluto, setting up little league games and attending PTA meetings! How will the Mi-Go come to comprehend such a bizarre series of unnatural occurrences? I´m just quoting to say that I find the idea of Mi-Go being forced to sit in tupperware sales meetings and wondering what the hell they are doing and WHY this person is trying to sell them low-quality brain jars and what is this and why is Number.6 suddenly saying they are buying one that´s particularly modular and........well, I find this hilarious.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:24
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Halloween Jack posted:The 23rd Letter My sanity! The 23rd letter doth surround me! The Cubs must have won! Also that list needs Vanishing Point and Heaven & Earth.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:24
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Last May your apartment block got devoured by Carcossa. You would complain but your old apartment was a three-room one-bath with zero amenities outside of a sink, toilet, a standing shower, access to a washer and dryer on the ground floor (you are on the sixth) and heating (no air) that had less floor space than a metal shipping container. Now your apartment is a baroque 18th century French parlor that still gets cable and wifi and electricity is found by plugging a power strip into the base of a shuddering bust of a woman that looks like Catherine the Great that you swear is breathing. In lieu of your old kitchen is an attached washroom where faceless peasants scrub orange blood off rotting clothes into the sink as a man in a tricorn hat, carbine rifle and an owl's mask carts new clothes in. It's child's play to slip your laundry into their washbasins and they do a real good job of washing and drying your duds. The real dealbreaker of this room is the fact that the shower is open-air and a little chilly but located in the corner so the faceless peasants or owl soldiers don't see your naked business. The bedroom is okay. You don't remember the mattress being this lumpy but hey you can just get a new mattress. Nice view of a crumbling Gothic city lit by an eclipse and flickering gas lamps and it's much more quiet than all the traffic you're used to. You're still not entirely used to the kitchen that used to be your bathroom, what with it being occupied by the gleeful howling soldiers of the French revolution swapping stories with Bolshevik rebels sharing rum and vodka with liberated Haitian slaves. At least it has all the previous equipment and fixtures, plus the revelers are always willing to share some of their cooking in exchange for a toast to "No Kings, No Masters, No Gods". Plus now you no longer have to hike up and down six floors. Just exit through your apartment door and voila, the streets of NYC are at your feet. No, the real horror is trying to find your way to the Hall of the Court of the King In Yellow so you can file your yearly taxes. That is if you're able to fill out the correct forms and get authorization from an official representative of His Grace!!!! Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Oct 19, 2017 |
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Oct 19, 2017 22:30
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Hostile V posted:You're still not entirely used to the kitchen that used to be your bathroom, what with it being occupied by the gleeful howling soldiers of the French revolution swapping stories with Bolshevik rebels sharing rum and vodka with liberated Haitian slaves. At least it has all the previous equipment and fixtures, plus the revelers are always willing to share some of their cooking in exchange for a toast to "No Kings, No Masters, No Gods". And now I want a hell apartment.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:38
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I'm really sad I can't 5-vote individual posts.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:48
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unseenlibrarian posted:On that note, Winter Tide s free on Tor.com in ebook form for the next 48 hours, and the elevator pitch is essentially 'survivors of the Innsmouth raid teams up with an FBI agent to investigate the possibility of Russians using Waite-style body-switching sorcery.' Quoting this because this book is great and so is the precursor story The Litany of Earth as a counterpoint to Lovecraft's horror--it has a lot of human-centric foibles and an acceptance of cosmic insignificance that isn't nihilistic. The basic premise follows the last Deep One survivors of the Innsmouth raid, after years of internment by the US government. Also I can understand being worn out with Lovecraft stuff. There are some modern collections of things written with his toys that are pretty good, but more than that, there are modern horror authors who try to address some of that existential dread and do so in more convincing ways to a modern reader who ain't scared that Earth is a tiny little speck about the size of Mickey Rooney. Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron are two such.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:54
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I'd worship Hastur. He's not so evil, he'll just give you the mother of all trips.
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Oct 19, 2017 23:04
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I don't think any of the greatest hits of Ol' HPL would care about worship anyway. Perhaps you could get something going in the form of Nyarlathotep but you are likely already worshiping Nyarlathotep and don't realize it. If you wanted to be clever you'd do something like write in the Space Shrimps, who keep to themselves but are widespread in a lot of star systems and are good candidates for low-grade neutral trader situations - the tavern-keepers of the spaceways. Throw in some offhand remarks on how they don't get into fights because they live in a different habitable band than most races and have a weird biology. At the very end note that they can also perform surgery - even live debraining - like virtuosos.
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Oct 19, 2017 23:28
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Betrayal At House On The Hill, 1 (This could end up having really irregular updates. Fair warning?) So. Disclaimer first of all: this is a board game, not an RPG - although it's a very RPG-like board game, in that it has characters and maps and adventures and similar. It's also a hugely controversial board game. Not trigger-warning political controversial, but quality controversial. There are people who love it to bits, and then people who think it's a huge pile of rubbish. The latter group are likely to be more accurate. The premise, however, gives an awful lot to love. 3-6 players enter and explore a haunted mansion. As you explore, you uncover clues about what is going on in the mansion. Eventually, someone will discover the truth, and when they do, it will corrupt one of the PCs and they'll turn traitor. It's then down to a battle between the house's forces and the traitor PC, and the remaining uncorrupted PCs, to contain the threat. Depending upon the clues you find, the nature of the betrayal and the threat will vary, with each option having different rules and possibilities. And even in the basic set, there are 50 possible threat adventures. Wow! That sounds awesome, right? Sign me up! Well, there's a few design problems with it. In fact, looking at how this game actually turns out turns out to be a pretty good exercise in spotting design problems. So, setup. Each player chooses a character, represented by a tile. The tiles are two-sided, with a different character on each side; but broadly, the two characters on each side of a single tile will be different variations on a theme. Characters have four stats: Might, Speed, Knowledge and Sanity. They're represented by a marked scale on the tile, and there are four little clips provided per player to attach to the edges of the tile to represent current values. The minimum, maximum, and starting values for each stat vary between characters, and some characters have the same number written in multiple positions on the track, meaning that multiple raising or lowering events have to occur for the stat to actually change. If a character's clip goes below their minimum in any stat after the Haunt has started (that's the bit of the game after the traitor has shown up), they're dead. Stats are also hit points; Might and Speed are your physical hit points, and Knowledge and Sanity are your mental hit points. When you take damage, you can mark it off any combination of the two related stats. Each character also has a hobby and a birthday, which don't do much other than being used to determine who goes first. You can roll on your stats using the custom dice included with the game, which are d6s but with only the numbers 0, 1, and 2 (in even distribution). You roll a number of dice equal to your stat, and try to beat the target number. In an opposed roll, you both roll your stats and whoever rolls highest wins. Nice and easy. So, who are the characters? We'll go tile by tile: The red tile is the bruiser: it gives us Ox Bellows (Mi 5, Sp 4, Sa 3, Kn 3) and Darrin "Flash" Williams (Mi 3, Sp 6, Kn 3, Sa 3). In other words, the fast dumb guy and the strong dumb guy. The purple tile has Jenny LeClerc (Mi 4, Sp 4, Sa 4, Kn 3) and Heather Granville (Mi 3, Sp 4, Sa 3, Kn 5). Pretty average, general purpose ladies. The green tile is scrappy little boys. Brandon Jaspers (Mi 4, Sp 4, Sa 4, Kn 3) and Peter Akimoto (Mi 3, Sp 4, Sa 4, Kn 4). So, at least initially, a clone of Jenny LeClerc and a stat swap, although the rest of their scales are different. Eh. The blue tile is people who sound magic-y, but aren't. Madam Zostra (Mi 4, Sp 3, Sa 4, Kn 4) and Vivian Lopez (Mi 2, Sp 4, Sa 4, Kn 5). Zostra's just another generic character while Vivian has impressively boosted mental stats. But if you want the super smart folks, you'll want the white tile. Father Rhinehardt (Mi 2, Sp 3, Sa 6, Kn 4) and Professor Longfellow (Mi 3, Sp 4, Sa 3, Kn 5). Longfellow's a single point off Lopez, but Rhinehardt gives up hugely on his physical stats for a massive Sanity score. And finally, the orange tile is.. scappy little girls. Zoe Ingstrom (Mi 3, Sp 4, Sa 5, Kn 3) and Missy Dubourde (Mi 3, Sp 5, Sa 3, Kn 4). So far so meh. So, we grab our characters and miniatures for them (there's only 6 miniatures because the two characters on each tile use the same mini. Yep), lay out a simple corridor of three room tiles (Entrance Hall, Foyer, Grand Staircase) for the PCs to arrive in, lay out the Basement Landing and the Upper Landing in separate areas to be used when these areas are discovered, and off we go. On your turn, you get to move up to your speed in room tiles, and enter one new room. When you enter a new room, you grab a tile from the stack, check that it (based on its back) is appropriate to the floor you're on, and place it next to your room if it is. If it isn't, you toss in in the discard pile and keep drawing until you get one that is appropriate to your floor. It has to connect to the room you came from, and ideally to any other adjacent tiles as well, but that's not mandatory (haunted houses would pretty commonly have false doors and windows after all). You can't completely close an area off. The vast majority of rooms don't contain anything other than an instruction to draw one of the three types of card - items, events, and omens. There's a few special rooms, most of which either require a roll to avoid either ending your turn or taking damage, a few of which give you a bonus you can collect once per game, and a few of which - either automatically or on a roll - dump you in the basement. And here's where anyone who's played this game is groaning. Let's talk about the basement. The starting location for the game has the staircase to the upper floor, but there's no stairs to the basement in the starting setup. What that means is that if you end up in the basement, the only way to get back up to the main floor is to either find the Stairs From Basement tile, or the Mystic Elevator (which randomly teleports between rooms on all three floors). There are 24 potential Basement tiles in the game, of which only 2 can get you out of the basement. Well, um, ok, the chances are still OK, right? Well, no, wait - remember how drawing works? The Stairs from Basement tile can only be in the basement, so any time someone explores on the other floors, they can end up cycling the deck over the Stairs. The upshot is that there are games in which someone falls into the basement early in the game and then spends the entire game isolated and wandering around aimlessly trying to get out. Of course this becomes doubly annoying if that person ends up becoming the traitor as the other players will then have an incentive to try to keep them there. I've known groups playing this to more than once wonder if they could simply consider the traitor defeated and leave because he was stuck in the basement. We also have to mention that the 1st Edition of this game enabled you to discover an Underground Lake on the top floor of the house. There was no explanation. The errata turned it into yet another room which sends you crashing down to the Basement, but the 2nd edition just printed it correctly, so you can only find it in the Basement anyway. So, the main reason to go into rooms is to draw from those three types of cards. Each room has an indicator on it which states which type of card you draw. Items are what they sound like, and are generally helpful. They divide into broad categories pretty well. The Axe, Blood Dagger, Dynamite , Revolver and Sacrificial Dagger all give bonuses to attack, with the scary daggers either always or possibly draining your stats as they do. The Idol, Lucky Stone, and Rabbit's Foot all give rerolls in varying combinations. The Healing Salve, Medical Kit and Smelling Salts all heal stat damage. The remaining items have varying effects. The Music Box can mesmerise monsters and players; the Pickpoket's (sic} Gloves let you steal from another player, once; the Bottle has a random effect on your stats; the Dark Dice have a similar random effect but can be reused; the Puzzle Box lets you try to open it once a turn, with a chance of finding 2 items inside; the Candle and Bell give bonuses to dealing with events and let you move heroes around; the Armor protects you from physical damage; the Angel Feather gives you an automatic victory on one roll; the Amulet of the Ages is a straight up stat buff; and the Adrenaline Shot is a one shot bonus to a dice roll. Events aren't so good. There are too many of these to list, but let's have a few highlights. Silence and Mists From The Walls give everyone in the basement a chance of mental damage - even if the person who drew it isn't there - as if being in the basement wasn't bad enough (and Mystic Slide, The Lost One and The Walls can kick you into the basement). The Secret Stairs and Secret Passage let you create links between rooms, and will have objects thrown at you by anyone stuck in the basement if you don't use them to let them out. Lights Out drops your effective speed to 1 until you meet another PC. Grave Dirt applies continuous physical damage until an item increases your traits or you arrive in certain beneficial rooms. Bloody Vision has you make a Sanity roll to avoid attacking an explorer in your area, although you'd have to be very unlucky for it to trigger. And finally, Omens. Omens resemble items, in that they're mostly beneficial and continuous. The unique feature of Omens is that they're the clues which can start the Haunt. Once you find an Omen, you roll 5 dice and if you've rolled less than the number of haunt cards found in the game so far, you've just found the secret of the mansion, and the Haunt starts. Which Haunt you get is determined by which Omen you found and where you found it. So, um, oh. That's our investigation. You don't find meaningful clues as you go, you just find one. Randomly. And it doesn't even make sense. Did you find a Book in an Abandoned Room? Well, one of your party members has just turned into Poison Ivy. Yep, that's an actual trigger. (The book turns out to be how to make weedkiller.) Once the haunt starts, a couple of new rules kick in. First of all, PvP becomes a thing. If you feel the need to beat someone up, you make an opposed Might roll, and the person who rolls lowest takes physical damage equal to the difference between the rolls; or, if you want, if you did at least 2 damage you can waive it to steal an item from them. The house itself is on the traitor's side, so they don't need to accept negative events and can use only the positive powers of rooms. And finally, there can be monsters. Monsters are played by the traitor in their turn, and work much like player characters, except their movement speed gets randomized. Oh.. and if a monster gets stuck in the basement, the traitor can search the deck for the Basement Stairs to get them out! Can't have that mechanic derailing monsters, can we? But, of course, leaving a player stuck down there is apparently fine. Even the traitor. Game design! The other big deal with the Haunt starting is that the Haunt rules come into play. These are written in two separate books. The traitor gets to read the Traitor's Tome, and everyone else gets to read the rules in Secrets of Survival. This is a design technique called a bloody stupid idea. What it means is that one or other group can be instantly screwed over by a rule they didn't know existed because it was in the other book. I get the idea that they want both sides to be potentially surprised, but when the surprise can be that everything they've done in the game is void, it's not going to be fun. So, let's talk generally about the pre-haunt gameplay. It sounds sort of fun, but.. honestly.. it isn't all that much, because there's no goal. You kind of move into random rooms and draw random cards, and you have no idea what's good or bad, because you don't know what the Haunt is going to be. There's actually relatively little motivation to explore, given that Events are generally bad. The main motivation to explore is a slightly higher chance of getting to be the traitor. But if a player manages to get supremely powered-up, you can even get into a situation where no-one other than them wants to be the traitor, so exploration halts. We've probably talked enough about dossing around in the basement, but that can be a pretty big problem, too. By the way, that's all the rules. So, from next post onwards? Haunts. If you think this is ratty design, you've seen nothing yet. hyphz fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 20, 2017 01:20
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Betrayal is a fun but flawed game. I love it.
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Oct 20, 2017 01:50
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theironjef posted: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. I dunno sticking some vaguely lovecrafty poo poo into D&D is how we got Aboleths and mind flayers, and those are fun
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Oct 20, 2017 02:08
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Im ready to be haunted. And also furious that i lost a game because of a rule not in my rule book
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Oct 20, 2017 02:10
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Things just need to be slightly tweaked to get Lovecraft working again. Back when his audience was WASPs with only an inkling of what we consider modern science, running in and yelling, "There is no God and hosed up ancient things in the universe don't give a poo poo about us!" was a pretty upsetting sentiment. The loss of a loving creator was a hefty pill for a lot of readers to swallow, but today that's generally the status quo; even if a reader believes in a creator, they're probably expecting the creator to be a hands-off sort of person. To get a modern reader creeped out, you just need to ring the two following bells: 1. The existence of a god or essentially godlike thing is utterly, conclusively proven. Like, Azathoth tools on over to the Milky Way and you can see him eating starts when you look up at night, or some sciencey thing happens like they discover some tachyon that lets people see the angels and demons flying all over the place. So it's not 'humanity's totally alone', it's 'humanity is definitely not alone'. 2. The godlike thing is directly malevolent. Humans do have an immortal soul, but it's dragged to some hosed-up Hellraiser place for an eternity of misery. People watch Aunt Edna's departing spirit being torn apart and eaten by 'angels' from the hospital bed. Every last human who is alive is completely, utterly hosed the moment they die, and nobody escapes. Dead Space did a pretty good job of this with the necromorphs, although humanity could at least sorta fight back despite a bunch of idiots intentionally going and digging up markers for contrived reasons.
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Oct 20, 2017 02:12
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You know people say that, but deism and a non-interventionist conception of God had been around since the 1700s and had been building support since the 1800s, with atheism also becoming more and more common. You had relatively optimistic atheists and deists in Lovecraft's day too, and I think he himself probably would have been one of them if he hadn't been saddled with a remarkably unpleasant upbringing and a whole host of mental disorders the world he lived in was very bad at dealing with. I like to imagine there was an alternate universe where he was only mildly racist, had an okay life, and wrote very twee children's stories about cats having adventures
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Oct 20, 2017 02:21
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Valatar posted:Things just need to be slightly tweaked to get Lovecraft working again. Back when his audience was WASPs with only an inkling of what we consider modern science, running in and yelling, "There is no God and hosed up ancient things in the universe don't give a poo poo about us!" was a pretty upsetting sentiment. The loss of a loving creator was a hefty pill for a lot of readers to swallow, but today that's generally the status quo; even if a reader believes in a creator, they're probably expecting the creator to be a hands-off sort of person. To get a modern reader creeped out, you just need to ring the two following bells: Neither of these, to me at least, seem "horrifying." At least not in the fictional sense. Both these examples do not expand the scope of perception, they limit it. "Dismally dealing with how objectively speaking the world sucks" is the venue of "approximately seventy percent of all media not intended for children," at least in the present environment. The Vosgian Beast posted:You know people say that, but deism and a non-interventionist conception of God had been around since the 1700s and had been building support since the 1800s, with atheism also becoming more and more common. You had relatively optimistic atheists and deists in Lovecraft's day too, and I think he himself probably would have been one of them if he hadn't been saddled with a remarkably unpleasant upbringing and a whole host of mental disorders the world he lived in was very bad at dealing with.
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Oct 20, 2017 02:32
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I'm pretty sure there is a rule that the Traitor in Betrayal can bypass certain obstacles of the house, such as being able to ascend the coal chute, specifically so they can't get completely stuck somewhere. Maybe I am misremembering it slightly. Also there was an expansion booklet for the game, with another 50(I think) scenarios!
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Oct 20, 2017 02:44
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Nessus posted:This was basically his Dreamlands books, I think There's a scene where a man needs to go from the moon to earth, so he gathers a group of space cats who gather around him and fly him back home working as his furry space suit
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Oct 20, 2017 02:47
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The Vosgian Beast posted:There's a scene where a man needs to go from the moon to earth, so he gathers a group of space cats who gather around him and fly him back home working as his furry space suit
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Oct 20, 2017 02:59
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Robindaybird posted:And throwing Cthulhu in space doesn't really work - as a lot of the horror is the Unearthly, Alien things like The Color out of Space or Mi-Gos invading your new england sensible world. This isn't really true, though. There's already a Lovecraftian setting where everything is weird and the protagonist is an experienced adventurer who's relatively comfortable with it all but can still get in over his head -- and it's one of the best things he ever wrote, the Dream Cycle owns. At the end of the day execution is everything.
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Oct 20, 2017 03:10
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Green Intern posted:I'm pretty sure there is a rule that the Traitor in Betrayal can bypass certain obstacles of the house, such as being able to ascend the coal chute, specifically so they can't get completely stuck somewhere. Maybe I am misremembering it slightly. The expansion (Witches' Way) has 50 more Haunts and a few new Item cards, including the Chainsaw (which, besides being a very good weapon, lets you roll more attack dice if you the player actually go "BzzzZzZzzzzzzzz!" when you make the attack roll.)
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Oct 20, 2017 03:11
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Green Intern posted:I'm pretty sure there is a rule that the Traitor in Betrayal can bypass certain obstacles of the house, such as being able to ascend the coal chute, specifically so they can't get completely stuck somewhere. Maybe I am misremembering it slightly. The rule lets them chose whatever option they want on tiles in play. It does not let you summon a way out of the basement if one doesn't already exist in play.
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Oct 20, 2017 03:13
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hyphz posted:Betrayal At House On The Hill, 1 I generally like the game despite the flaws, but gently caress Death.
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Oct 20, 2017 03:15
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Valatar posted:2. The godlike thing is directly malevolent. Humans do have an immortal soul, but it's dragged to some hosed-up Hellraiser place for an eternity of misery. People watch Aunt Edna's departing spirit being torn apart and eaten by 'angels' from the hospital bed. Every last human who is alive is completely, utterly hosed the moment they die, and nobody escapes. My response is more along the lines of, "Ehh, that's pretty horrifying, but at least the soul still exists, rather than being obliterated as soon as a person dies". Because that is the most existentially horrifying thing I can imagine.
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Oct 20, 2017 03:29
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I don't even know that I'd call Bloodshadows even really in the same vague genre as WOD honestly. It's basically it's own genre of "Film noir+ public magic" which is its own weird subsection of stuff that doesn't even get classed as Urban Fantasy most of the time despite being literally that. Heinlein's Magic Incorporated , Anderson's Case of the Toxic Spell Dump , Aaron Allston's Doc Sidhe and Sidhe Devil, Cast a Deadly Spell , etc. I mean I'm huge mark for that particular sub-subgenre, whatever you call it but I don't think I'd put it in the same space as the WOD or Vampire.
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Oct 20, 2017 04:05
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unseenlibrarian posted:Anderson's Case of the Toxic Spell Dump , It's by Harry Turtledove unless there's another book by that name I'm unaware of. I honestly love his weird little urban fantasy more than the alt-history stuff he's more famous for.
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Oct 20, 2017 04:09
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 ALTERNATE SCENARIOS and THE END KidNight The main gist of KidNight is that an event that the walls between the supernatural and the mundane have fallen down in the wake of adults going blind. The basic reason this has happened is that because the adults can't see, there's nothing stopping the monsters and supernatural from just doing whatever the gently caress they want. Sidenote: the core scenario goes into painstaking detail about everything. KidNight doesn't, it's presumed to just be adding the supernatural on top of vanilla KidWorld. So all of the problems of KidWorld are still an issue, it's just that now children are capable of harnessing a piece of the supernatural to fight back against the monsters. And to that end, there are now new character classes for kids. Concentrators Concentrators are kids who, through sheer force of mental willpower, can tap into the supernatural and bypass the regular rules of time and space. Your average Concentrator is a child with the patience and fortitude to sit for hours on end doing nothing more than willing themselves to have superpowers. They don't take apprentices because it's not really something you can teach, you just have to do it until it works. When they're not working on their powers, they help scavenge or are roaming nomads who help communities for a price. The worst case scenario is that the Concentrator descends into megalomania or they become bullies themselves. Roughly 10 kids out of 1000 become Concentrators with equal weight towards boys and girls. And because the game doesn't really care at this point, there is no info for what happens when they go blind, probably because I think the blindness is supernaturally-caused instead of a prion. There's intro fiction of an abused kid making a deal with a spooky voice to make his dad feel how he feels and then every adult goes blind. I dunno. Did I mention that there's no elaboration? 'cuz there isn't. Concentrators only have a single mandatory disadvantage which is that their ADJ can't go above 5. I don't really care about the skills anymore. The big thing hindering the Concentrator is A: mandatory ADJ cap and B: Concentration skills and the powers you get kinda suck rear end. Also they don't even get their own skills for cheap because gently caress you. Deadies Deadies are kids who have died and then come back. The game elaborates on this a bit: on one hand you have kids whose hearts have stopped but their lives are saved and they're okay. On the other is a kid who dies and can't be saved and becomes undead (all corpses run the risk of becoming undead FYI). A Deadie had their heart stop and their ghost detach from their body but either medicine or force of will restored them to life. This has advantages and disadvantages. In fact let's just look at those to get a handle on Deadies.
Dreamers A Dreamer is a kid who has figured out how to lucid dream to such a degree that they can actually gain powers with the new supernatural problems. Dream powers are pretty okay. The big benefit of them is that you can up your attributes in the dream. They mostly sleep a lot and are protected by other kids and in turn assassinate people or find things for their protectors. They're basically like...the hackers of this world. If they go bad they tend to become bullies or serial killers or dictators who spy on people. There are 5 in 1000 with an even gender identity split and their only disadvantage is a cap to ADJ. Imaginers Imaginers are proto-Summoners or Spiritualists from Pathfinder. No, really.  Imaginary Friends are visible to the Imaginer and can do small things outside of combat. Really the big benefit is that the Imaginer has an invisible, intangible friend who can attack alongside them and the Imaginer can buff the friend. Bad Imaginers either become misanthropes who believe their buddy is better than any human or they pump all of their negative emotions into their friend and let them run amok while pretending they can't stop them. 3 kids in 1000 tend to become Imaginers, even split, etc. Their mandatory advantage is their friend, mandatory disadvantage is a cap on ADJ, yadda yadda. They have an interesting optional advantage where their friend is actually a hive of 20 small friends and...it's a better option because it gives you huge numerical advantage, I'll show you below but Imaginers are actually amazingly good.  Separates Separates are kids who were taken to the realms of the fairies and survived to tell the tale. You don't want to go to the realm of the fairies, it's a horrifying place where you're experimented on and tormented and slowly become less human. The reason they're called Separates is because their bodies are physically unstable, falling to pieces on command. They do their best to get by and entertain, but, well, they run the risk of becoming as cruel and capricious as the fairies themselves. Alternately they become so fearful of ever going back they run around with poison in their pockets or try to burn down anything fairy related or use other kids as bait to save their skins. 12 Separates are found in 1000 with the number increasing as the fairies keep up their machinations. They get a lot of advantages and disadvantages.
Skills. Skills.  Skills. I'm gonna skip the advantages and disadvantages because they're not easily contained in a picture or two. HORRORS AND DANGERS Animals: the main thing important about animals is that they're all intelligent and capable of speech if necessary. This has lead to problems with kids hunting animals for food and some animals declaring war on mankind. On top of that, sometimes animals end up kidnapped by fairies and end up like Separates, insane and affected permanently. Awakened Corpses: the dead are a lot like a person who is sleeping really deep and it requires a lot of effort to wake them up because Kid Logic. Sufficient noise or stimulus will wake a corpse and produce a soulless animalistic entity that exists only to eat and hunt. Fortunately they're not very fast or smart and a few hours after being awoken they'll go right back to sleep. If that's not fast enough, you can just kill them again with sufficient damage. The Beyond: The Beyond is the void past the stars, the unknown and the unseen, the dead space in the corner of your eye. The Beyond is not empty, The Beyond is not nothingness. The Beyond is home to unknowable beings. The Beyond is indescribable and should not be hosed with. Children haven't exactly heard this message and as such they gently caress with The Beyond. To gently caress with/contact The Beyond, you simply have to try and make contact with something that isn't there. Examples: shining a flashlight at the stars in morse code, speaking into a dead telephone, using a Ouija board. The best case scenario is that you get no response. The worst case scenario is that you do get a response. Something from The Beyond comes for the child who made contact and generally the child doesn't survive this. If you do survive, it's because you ran and hid. Nobody sees the beings of The Beyond and survives. Now admittedly some of the fluffy writing there is all mine because the game doesn't really dip into that but I do like The Beyond. It's kinda wasted on this game and tonally clashing but I dig it. Cannibal Adults: The Cannibal Adults are an enhanced form of Haddock's teachings. Eating the eyes still works, but so does eating more of the child. This is explicitly consuming the child's soul and integrating it into yours to become a god among men and a repository of souls. And, well, there actually are some pretty good benefits to symbolic cannibalism and the effects actually last longer than they do in the core.  These empowered cannibals are even more of a threat than the core eye-eaters and should be avoided at all costs. Dreams: Dreams are complicated because they have rules. Rules which are luckily encapsulated in a sidebar.  This sidebar neglects to mention that the dream world has some unique locations that don't correspond to the real world or pop culture places have been built in the dream world by the collective consciousness of sleepers (Hogwarts, Hell, 2Fort, Gor). Also because murder by dream is very tricky, most Dreamers just hassle kids in their sleep and make them wakeup until they agree to whatever terms are offered. The real threat comes from Nightmares, intelligent monsters that want to kill and scare children but can be outwitted or driven away with enough damage.  The Dream World is one of the three main other worlds that are all accessible from the real world and may or may not actually be interconnected in what is one of the few interesting things in this scenario. Ghosts are more intelligent in the Dream World, Separates can use their powers more easily, Imaginers don't need to expend resources to buff their friends and you can just see your friends, etc. The two other worlds are the Fairy Realm and the Mirror World and it's hypothesized that these three worlds are all just part of the same plane of existence, a plane that contains ghosts, monsters, fairies and imaginary friends. We'll see the other two worlds in a bit, starting with... Fairies: Everything is brighter and more beautiful in the Fairy Realms, home to the fairies. Fairies take the form of six-inch-tall winged beings, slender and tall adults or little black or white animals. The realm is accessed by entering a ring of mushrooms or a child-sized hole in a hill in places that look brighter and more fantastic. You absolutely do not want to go to the Fairy Realms because fairies are completely insane and nothing works the way you'd think it would. Because the human body is a thing that's not from the realm, a lot of fairy pranks are lethal or at the very least dangerous to the people they play jokes on or alter to their whims. The worst case scenario is being abducted by the fairies to be turned into a "science" experiment or a pet or a slave. You also don't want to fight a fairy without the proper defenses because their bites and bodily fluids cause intense and vivid hallucinations. That and they can teleport. The best defenses are rings of salt (won't teleport over salt), iron weapons or church bells. The land of the realm is as wild and shifting as the fairies themselves, often inhospitable or nonsensical or endlessly repeating. Spending more than a few minutes in their lands is a good way to end up stuck and unable to find an exit. On top of that, fairies are somehow able to show up in dreams, meaning that their world has to have some exits into the dream realm. Probably. Ghosts: Ghosts are pretty confused all the time. They spend a lot of time trying to foist their memories onto the world around them, thinking that someone is their mother or their friend or that they need to do something they remember. Ghosts literally have the same level of power as an Imaginary Friend: turn things on and off, lift small things, make eerie noises. However, they never run the risk of disappearing like an Imaginary Friend who has been cut-off from a kid. The main combat benefit that a ghost has is that the more put together it is, the weaker it is. A docile ghost can't do much. An enraged ghost or a vengeful ghost is capable of full-on psychokinetic mayhem at the cost of being so blinded with emotion they can't be talked to or negotiated with. Also ghosts can possess people but it's a rare occurrence and the ghost is generally as confused and incoherent in the flesh so there's no real point outside of being able to interact with the world without being emotionally overcranked. The only defense against a ghost (outside of powers or being a Deadie) is to just go somewhere else so the ghost forgets you. So yeah ghosts and Imaginary Friends might come from the same place. Imaginary Friends: this got kinda covered in the sidebar and what I just said above but yeah there seems to be a link between ghosts and Friends. What's interesting is that it's mentioned that yes IFs without Imaginers will slowly shrivel up and die but there's a solution outside of the friend convincing another kid to adopt them. The other way is for the IF to travel through the Dream World and exit through the Mirror World through a mirror. This isn't a great idea though. Whatever the IF has to endure to become truly alive tends to leave a mark on them and makes them more jaded and callous, especially if they've been abandoned and even if they did it with the help of their Imaginer. Kid Powers: already mentioned this off-handedly. They kinda suck. You're not really allowed to do cool things with them. Interesting things but not cool things. Listeners: the Listeners are basically like tempting fate. If you say "this can't get any worse", it will. If you brag about it, it'll get taken away. If you use metaphors or turns of phrase carelessly, expect dire results. The only saving grace is this can be negated by immediately being like "no not really" and also the fact that the Listeners don't act on everything they hear. But yeah, it's as simple as tempting fate and having it happen. Luck: Luck actually works and lucky/unlucky items actually do stuff, generally in the realm of giving a -4 to +4 buff or penalty with the proper equipment. That's really it. Mirrors: Okay there are a lot to the Mirror World. The thing that keeps you from just walking through a mirror is the premise of your doppelganger, a being unique to you that always blocks the way and always mimics what you do. Doppelgangers are generally peaceful or at the very least calm unless you've been an rear end to yours by saying mean things into the mirror. There's also the rare occasion they just get jealous of the real kid's life and will briefly drag them in to take their place before reverting to their neutral behavior (which is live behind a mirror and copy someone). They really don't like the real world so there's never a risk of a kid being permanently replaced. They are also terse and don't talk much and will reveal no information about the Mirror World. So how does one outwit their doppelganger? Sidenote: the Mirror World gets so much info Jesus. Well if you don't have the ability to walk through walls as a Concentrator, there's taunting the doppelganger until they stop mimicking you and then wrestling them out of the way. The Mirror World is a perfect swap of the real world but the only occupants are doppelgangers of yourself/other kids with you, mannequins, animated suits of armor, other kids using the world as a passageway and Bloody Mary. The Mirror World is empty and a little dark and a little cold. As long as you're within the mirror, your doppelganger will stalk you from a distance to try and figure out a good time to strike and incapacitate you and eject you from the mirror. Stepping up a notch from danger are mannequins and walking armor whose only goal is to strangle children to death or cut them up with a sword respectively. And then there's Bloody Mary, who is blind but hunts by smell and will rip kids to pieces. She can also be called into the real world and you can run away from her and let her take kids who are after you. The Mirror World itself is dangerous. The moment you leave a room with a mirror, it will continue to reflect where you are in the real world. If these rooms don't have mirrors in them, they end up warped or incorrect versions of the proper room. An attic would still be like the real attic in design even if the mirrored attic has vaulted ceilings so high you can't see the top. Because sometimes Imaginary Friends emerge from mirrors, there are kids who believe that if you go far enough in a space devoid of a mirror, you'll find the Dream World or the Fairy Realm somewhere out in the Mirror World.  Bloody Mary on the hunt. So why go into the Mirror World? Two reasons. First is that if you walk into the Mirror World holding a mirror, you have a perfect tool with which to spy on the real world. Because there's no corresponding mirror in the real world, you have an invisible eye to monitor that location with. Second is that mirrored items are still perfectly usable and can be brought back. Mirrored bullets will still function, mirrored food is still edible, either can be brought back through into the real world. It's completely unclear if, like, this can be repeated by repeatedly jumping between mirror and real world and bringing more stuff back to make more appear in the real world. I like the Mirror World. It's pretty decent and I'd steal it for use in something better. Hell I'd steal the whole mirror/fairy/dream connection. Monsters:  Yeah that's pretty much all you need to hear about monsters. They're generally unstoppable and run the gamut from horse-headed nightmare goblin to an onryou to a mummy or whatever. Monsters, and things like The Beyond or Bloody Mary, are one of the most common tools of murder in KidNight. When your back is to the wall and you have absolutely nothing to lose, it's common for desperate kids to invoke one of those three to try and save their own asses by adding chaos to the mix. Plus it becomes a matter of outrunning the kids trying to kill you than actually dealing with the monster. SAMPLE ADVENTURE When The Party's Over Yankee is an 11 year old boy who runs [TOWN NAME HERE] who is looking for people to find his 7 year old sister Joy. Joy is mute and has remained mute since seeing her parents' corpses and while Yankee runs the town, Joy is excluded from duties to play and allowed to wander and hang out because Yankee believes she's emotionally stunted and needs protection. However, she has disappeared and she doesn't normally do that. Fundamentally her disappearance has to do with their drug addiction wait hold on where are you going. Okay so Joy and Yankee are addicted to drugs. Specifically, they like doing ecstasy. Joy has been finding the drugs on her wanderings, namely that she's been taking them from an abandoned nightclub called The Pulse that used to be an industrial warehouse. The Pulse was holding an end-of-society rager back during the Plague and the guests all died inside of the club, their ghosts stuck within the building along with their belongings. On top of that, the building is more malevolently haunted by two ghosts: Grady and the Junkie. Grady was the owner with a young son who was pressured into opening the club up for the party by the Junkie and his friends. While the party was going on, the Junkie got the idea that Grady was holding and strangled him and stabbed his son to try and get at their imagined stash. As everyone literally partied themselves to death, the Junkie kept searching their bodies over and over until he died of withdrawal and starvation in the basement. Grady's ghost is more reasonable but that's not saying much. Anyone who enters the building and draws his attention is not allowed to leave. He would rather keep people in the building until they died as well than let his son's murderer go free and he thinks the murderer is in the building. Joy has been taking drugs off the bodies of the club but Grady has been overlooking her because she's a children and reminds him of his son. The reason that Joy hasn't come back is because she went down into the basement and that's the home of the Junkie. The Junkie has been so consumed by his addiction that he is single-handedly committed to finding more drugs, hurting whoever he gets his hands on to try and make them give up the goods. I'm going to skip a lot of this to save time but the crux of the adventure is for the PCs to get stuck in the nightclub by Grady and find a way out. Your choices are to basically overpower Grady (good luck, you need someone who can fight ghosts), try to escape through a mirror (which will work) or to make the Junkie and Grady finally come into contact with each other and let the ghosts fight it out. The latter is the more satisfying choice because you can help Grady win and save Joy from the basement and Grady will pass on to his final rest. You can't really confront Yankee about his drug problem, all he'll say is that he'll forbid people from going back into the nightclub. And that's it for KidNight. KidNight: it's okay. My honest opinion would be strip the whole Mirror/Fairy/Dream thing from this environment and reuse it in a better system like a non-Changeling nWoD campaign. Also I will admit that I do like the idea of The Beyond and how you can just call down something terrible to interact with you by such easy means as yelling into a dead phone. But let's get into the better alternate setting. KIDSURREAL KidSurreal scraps pretty much the entire framework of the world and exchanges it for something wholly different. This is what makes it better than the previous two settings. No blindness, no eye-eaters, no global collapse, no damnation. KidWorld is all about kids being forced to inherit the earth. KidSurreal is all about the perceptions of children being forced onto the world and nobody knows why. The main thrust of KidSurreal is that for the last few years the world has been stuck on a day that will never end. Time and space are permanently stuck on a mid-summer afternoon around 3 PM to 6 PM. The sun never moves. It's not like time has stopped, it's like when you were a kid and things just seemed to drag on and on forever. But, fundamentally, it's like time has stopped. The kids will never age.  So what about adults? Well, adults aren't frozen in time but they're caught on some cosmic hitch like the rest of the world. Pretty much every single adult is caught in this moment they're repeating forever and attempting to get their attention is met with a dismissive "not now" or "just a second". Dad mows the lawn forever, walking around but never letting go of the mower and never running out of gas. Mom watches the same show on TV or talks on the phone. The butcher is busy making sausage, the policeman is sipping coffee, the doctor is busy with a microscope, etc. They won't even give the kids the time of day outside of a dismissive recognition they're being taught to. And kids really haven't tried to snap them out of it, too busy thinking that they'll just do it of their own volition. Could you turn the TV off forcibly or slap the coffee out of the cop's hands? Yes and that might elicit a reaction but a kid wouldn't think that way. They might, but they might also just throw a tantrum because anything more than that could result in punishment the kid doesn't want. Teens, meanwhile, are somewhere between adults and kids. Teens have a little bit of lag going on where they essentially take penalties to their Quickness because they're just a bit out of sync and caught between Kid Time and Adult Time. You can task a teen with doing something but they'll find themselves getting distracted if it takes a while and they'll put it down for a moment and do something else before inevitably finishing it. There are of course two types of adults that exist in KidSurreal. One is more playable than the other. On the one hand you have developmentally-disabled/delayed adults who function mentally like children. They will likely require a good deal of care and help from kids to break away from asking their caretakers for help and be kept alive but disabled adults function like kids when it comes to time. The big benefit is that they have size and more developed physical attributes than kids. The other is...[sighs] Perverts. Perverts are adults (the game says they're pretty much all male)...let me just quote verbatim but in a spoiler, alright? It's not graphic but it's something that this game was surprisingly not lovely about up until this point and is the worst part of KidSurreal. The second type is “perverts,” people (almost always men) whose unhealthy interest in children has let them to see the world through children’s eyes. They have discovered, as kids have, that kids are without adult protectors and they intend to take advantage of that fact. I dunno what loving possessed them to put Perverts in this goddamn game but whatever just loving ignore them. So outside of time and being ignored by adults, other kid beliefs have power. Places where adults don't go become huge and sprawling: the woods by the creek become a sprawling jungle, a tree house becomes a mansion, a quarry becomes a lake. Despite the world being essentially a lawless anarchy with the adults not paying attention, kids will still try to badly hide their misdeeds to not attract attention. If you have to steal from the supermarket to survive, you can but a kid will at least hide the food beneath their clothes instead of just running out with it in hand. Kids will also generally not openly fight in front adults. On top of this, rules of games and social conventions become downright immutable. Someone who has been tagged and put in prison cannot leave prison unless under circumstances of the game allow or all of the kids forget that they're playing a game. Kids will also not consciously break these rules. If you can't talk while wearing a red shirt, the red-shirted kid will not speak under any circumstances until their shirt is off. The apex of these effects is called Obsession. An Obsessed kid is like a Dwarven craftsworker in a shop. They will dedicate themselves so wholly to the project they're working on, they'll become literally immune to anything stopping them from doing it. An Obsessed kid who is building a skate ramp does not need to eat, sleep, breathe, drink or use the bathroom as long as they're properly dedicated to building the ramp, entering a state of mind where they won't reply to any stimulus. This isn't really a willing thing, it'll just overtake you at the right moment and you become beholden to it until you finish, no matter how long it takes. The upside is that this allows Builders to enter Obsessive states where they build the best stronghold to protect the others. The downside is that when an Obsessive is in The Zone, they will just keep adding on like it's the Winchester Mystery House. Their creations are completely and totally beholden to their id and things they think are cool at random moments which is why the bathroom is right next to a room filled with feral dogs. Worst case scenario is their megaproject is absolutely not designed to support the weight of anyone on it and it collapses the moment other kids try to interact with it. The other upside of KidSurreal is that this is the world of 2008 permanently trapped in a day. There's electricity still, you can still get mechanical things if you shoplift them, there's still air conditioning and videogames and DVDs. On top of that, this campaign actually allows for the optional rule of the campaign not allowing death. In that case, the kid is just so badly injured they can't focus on the world anymore and lie around waiting for an adult, slipping into the world of adults for medical treatment and being properly saved from the world of children.  The million dollar question though is, like, what is the point of this campaign. There isn't really one. The game has no answers for what has caused the world to stop, it just presents it as plain fact and says that kids don't really look for the answers either. Will the world go back to normal if there's no more kids interacting with the endless day? Who knows, play it out, see how it goes. Maybe one day the parents will finally look up and become aware something's up. While I do sincerely like (most of) KidSurreal and would like some kind of hook outside of endless child id anarchy...I'm glad there isn't one and it has to just stand on its own. Would I play this? Sure! Not in this system. Never in this system. Drop the Perverts also. Just go forth and steal this campaign idea for your own thing. CONCLUSION KidWorld is a bad game and I will ignore sharing the LARP rules. Okay alright fine. KidWorld is worse than I thought it was when I was disgusted by it a good decade ago. A good decade ago, if I hadn't been repulsed by the intro fiction and didn't read things with as critical an eye as I do now, there's no doubt in my mind I wouldn't have tried to nudge my friends into playing this. Hell I managed to nudge them into playing a single session of SLA Industries, we were all playing a lot of 3.5 at the time, I had a d20 Apocalypse game last a session. So thanks for being transparently awful, KidWorld, thanks for being so transparently repugnant that Past Me put you down and let me stay away until I could read it until later. And yeah, it's still bad, I can just articulate why it's bad and not hide behind any past illusions I would have had. For real, as cornball as it sounds, it's a lot like going into your closet years later and figuring out why you were scared of the boogeyman and why you were wrong to be scared but understanding the deeper meaning of the monster in your closet, y'know? I'm not the man I was 9 years ago and it's a little nice to close this closet door. So yeah this book is unpleasant in many senses of the word, nonsensical in many ways and there's no doubt that I would have been dumb enough to try to run it unironically or without stripping ideas out for better systems. Ultimately it didn't live up to why I thought it was once scary but it was still found unique and exciting ways to be stupid and bad. Now let's see if the other game I read about children in horror situations holds water after years of not looking at it. We'll be back in a bit with some NEW WORLD OF DARKNESS: INNOCENTS after a word from our sponsors, so don't change that channel kids! 
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 20, 2017 05:36
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Two pages back but...Young Freud posted: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. ... "Yeah, they're Deep Ones, but they're A-Mer-ican Deep Ones!"
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Oct 20, 2017 05:43
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What sucker doesn't choose to have cool dreams? Also KidSurreal seems like an interesting concept and then suddenly Perverts. Thanks.
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Oct 20, 2017 05:48
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Man, KidSurreal actually seems like a really cool concept randomly bolted onto the worst game ideas imaginable. It's currently aimless, but feel like a session would be run like an episode of Ed, Edd, and Eddy, with a bunch of kids trying to pull off various schemes and shenanigans against each other, usually set off by some random, arbitrary rules established at the start. Like, "Everyone's into pinewood derby now," or "There's a rumor of a monster in the creek, and everyone has to prove they don't believe it," with the ultimate goal of the session-episode is to advance some equally arbitrary sense of kid achievement against one another.
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Oct 20, 2017 06:07
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Precambrian posted:a session would be run like an episode of Ed, Edd, and Eddy Or Phineas and Ferb, I guess.
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Oct 20, 2017 06:43
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