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"I thought you said we would have a promised land." "Oh, no; I said promised sand. That's what I call an inhospitable desert." "You call an inhospitable desert 'promised sand'." (I'm not sorry for this.)
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Jan 31, 2018 17:14
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AweStriker posted:"I thought you said we would have a promised land." "It's a regional dialect." "What Region?" "Arakkis." "Really? Because I'm from Arrakeen and I've never heard anyone say that." "Northern Arakkis." "I see."
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Jan 31, 2018 17:19
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AweStriker posted:"I thought you said we would have a promised land." That's what you get for the calf, guys.
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Jan 31, 2018 17:24
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Halloween Jack posted:Yeah, but the land is sandy. No one wants sandy land unless it's well-irrigated. It's a bad title. A pun is no reason to give people crap land for growing food in. The writer was clearly an idiot so I'm just guessing.
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Jan 31, 2018 17:35
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Scion: Origin: Punching Zeus Not everything the gods or Scions do is going to have anything to do with the Titan Wars. Everyone has their own agendas, too, including unrelated third parties. And it doesn't matter how small those agendas seem when Fate gets involved. The goals of various gods and pantheons are going to clash, and while most of the gods agree that the Titanic threat takes precedence over other conflicts, they still fight those other conflicts. Gods are as easily distracted as anyone else, and their emotions, their loves, their hates - these are the key things that distract them. God-on-god conflict isn't rare. Hell, divine arguments are what legends are made of. Followers of Zeus characterize Hera's antagonism towards him as simple jealousy, while followers of Hera claim she protects people from the selfish and abusive exploitation of her husband. Horus and Set have been feuding for a long time, their rivalry born out politics, patricide and rape. And yet, relationships shift, and the priests know that, like Set, today's enemy might be tomorrow's god of kings. The gods used to be more generally cautious about starting fights with their foreign counterparts, though. They didn't know the other pantheons that well. Now, they benefit as much as anyone from the smaller world brought about by colonization, imperialism and mass communication. It's made the other gods feel more familiar to them, even if they aren't, and that means they're more comfortable picking fights. A lot of the time, gods that share the same purview will end up with competing cults, now no longer separated by geography and culture. The war gods are notable for their contention over who is the 'true' war god that will rule over the rest. Of course, not all gods are so competitive, and some enjoy intercultural exchange. Trickster gods, in particular, seem to enjoy traveling to foreign places where no one knows their habits or weaknesses - or their pranks. The Aesir have a saying - only Loki could go to China. Just about every pantheon has developed similar strategies for dealing with other pantheons - ignore, incorporate, or treat as subordinate. That worked when mortals communicated only by word of mouth. Now? Not so much. Every pantheon is, of sorts, a government - and even the ones that favor individualism among themselves do so out of a common ethos. Even without a leader, gods follow codes. Sure, the Tuatha de Danann don't need approval for what they do, but they must obey the laws of Honor and Prowess. They keep their promises even without someone looking over their shoulder. Typically, pantheons will consider themselves the guardians of their worshippers and the cultures that pay them the most respect. The Kami say they are the essence of Japan and will protect their primacy in its borders, for example. But with diaspora, conversion and colonialism, these firm lines fade, borders are redrawn, which can lead to conflict. In order to escape from Fatebinding by millions or being called on to sanctify things they didn't approve of (not all war gods want to be the god of cluster bombs, we are told), the pantheons have told mortals to accept or at worst avoid the new religions that took over civil society, the monotheist faiths. Pantheons born under imperial monotheism have grudgingly followed that example, caring for people rather than nation-states. The gods stepped aside - but they chose to, they never signed anything, and mortals often treat it as an implied agreement. People don't interfere with divine cults, and so gods don't interfere with government, business or militaries. The gods never agreed to that. It is mostly in their best interests to do so, of course, or at least appear to do so. Your Incarnation might play CEO, but it's a bad idea to make the world's top OS chant your praises when turned on. Basically, the rule is to do to mortals only as they'd have done to each other anyway. Sure, some degree of open participation is inevitable and tolerated, but there's reasons that Tyr only runs Fenris Arms, not General Dynamics. Mortal forces, for their part, treat bringing a Scion or similar into intelligence, military or other work similar to bringing in a nuke, except the nuke can get drunk and has family destined to fight them as part of a moral lesson made real. It's done quietly and sparingly. Strategically, it's also better to, ironically, deploy Scions only in scenarios when the enemy is least likely to have their own divine agents, to avoid grudge matches between gods. Governments also tend to go out of their way to avoid being involved in divine affairs, even when a pantheon has a strong national identity. Less than a century ago, governments were more openly supportive of their gods, but it went poorly. Basically - warrior Scions and Incarnations can join military groups, but it almost never goes the other way. Yes, some operators and soldiers will take a holiday to worship via action, but governments frown on that kind of thing and almost never condone it. And then there's Fate. The gods are coated in it, it is the world they exist in. They shape it like a swimmer shapes a pool with their movements, pushing things toward and away from them. But unlike a pool, a god can't get out. Only the Primordials know how to escape Fate, and the currents of Fate are stronger than any ocean's. Gods struggle against Fate, via Fatebinding and other ways, and must deal with problems they can't just magic their way out of. Two nations are destined to war, and no one can stop it. Trying just makes it worse. Fated events make problems, and no one knows why they are fated. Those that study Fate flock these events, primarily to do postmortems - it's usually only obviously predestined after the fact. Next time: Storypath.
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Jan 31, 2018 18:53
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Promised Sands is entirely full of cute respellings of things to ensure that you know that it's the wink wink far future. Camel? Noooo, kamel. That said, it's like that stupid demonstration teachers do with the jar full of sand and golf balls, because somehow the book is also entirely full of meanspirited bullshit, spelling errors that aren't cutely done on purpose, the author forgetting the names of his own skills and tables, and hilarious critical fail results (most of which are either you die, or you are sold into slavery).
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Jan 31, 2018 19:02
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Critical failure results the odds of which are1:1000 yet each had to be meticulously written out.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:42
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theironjef posted:Promised Sands is entirely full of cute respellings of things to ensure that you know that it's the wink wink far future. Camel? Noooo, kamel. That said, it's like that stupid demonstration teachers do with the jar full of sand and golf balls, because somehow the book is also entirely full of meanspirited bullshit, spelling errors that aren't cutely done on purpose, the author forgetting the names of his own skills and tables, and hilarious critical fail results (most of which are either you die, or you are sold into slavery). So how long until someone on here does a writeup, I wonder.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:50
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 Review Part 3: I Am The Modren Man  Chapter 1 Continued Atlantean Culture The surviving modern Atlantean is a psychological minefield. Immortality has made them restless egomaniacs with a god complex, obsessed with being the apex at one thing or another, be that war, political maneuverings, science, art, or what have you. Atlantean interactions are pretty much centuries-long dick waving contests, and most are too prideful to work with one another for more than a brief period of time. Even the Celestial Families are more a matter of heritage than any cohesive unit for what few Atlanteans remain. This is a problem for them, as multiple storms are on the horizon. Humans have become technologically advanced enough to challenge and even kill Atlanteans, the Grays are on Earth and gathering allies, and the Saurians are an unknown factor that most Atlanteans see as too minor to be important but some are genuinely concerned about. There are only two cohesive 'societies' of Atlantean that still exist, one of which are the Nameless Priests. At this point, the Nameless are so inbred and mentally burdened that they are almost always dissociative psychopaths, barely connecting with the world around them and living in monastic communes. These communes must never fall below sixty-seven members, as sixty-six is considered an unholy number, and most are meant to have a membership around the sacred number eighty-eight. Unlike other Atlanteans, the Nameless are so obsessed with blood purity that they refuse to utilize internal nanites, meaning that they still have a mortal lifespan that caps out at around age 300. When a Nameless dies, all the other members of the commune begin having sex in an attempt to produce what they consider a viable offspring. All of the nonviable offspring are aborted, and once the viable one is born and matured their parent is executed to maintain the constant population number. One Nameless commune in the Himalayas has found and begun a tenuous diplomacy with the Pilosi living there, which would probably be a shock to other Atlanteans if the commune ever decided to give enough of a gently caress to inform anyone else (which is unlikely). The other connected Atlantean social group are the Forgotten. Members of the Atlantean diaspora that were deemed to have committed a crime worth capital punishment were literally unpersoned, their memories forcibly removed as they were thrown into the wilderness of Earth to fend for themselves. While these sentences are meant to be carried out for several thousand years before being revoked, some were forgotten due to the Nameless not having all their chickens in a row, hence the moniker. The amnesiac Forgotten were still immortal, however, and inevitably stumbled across other members of the Forgotten that were 'familiar' due to facial recognition software being part of the standard Atlantean nanomachine system package. Slowly but surely, they came together into their own secret society, attempting to find their true origin. This search went in vain until the 1980s, when a Forgotten scientist who had taken the human name Randolph Winot was drafted into a cell of Aegis. Winot's work ended up putting him in direct contact with Atlantean technology. Realizing that the craft had the same nanotechnology within his own body, he informed forty-three other Forgotten of this occurrence and they formulated a plan. Randolph Winot would continue to work for Aegis, work his way to the top rank of his cell, and demand a face to face meeting with the Atlantean who had provided the craft to Aegis. The Atlantean in question, Leese, was set upon by the whole group of Forgotten, tortured, and eventually gave up knowledge of Atlantean culture and the punishment of the Forgotten before dying soon after. This knowledge created a schism in the Forgotten. Some felt that they could return to the Atlanteans and plead the case for their memories to be restored, but the majority were mad as hell and wanted to both take their memories by force and give the Atlanteans a world of hurt. The retributive group, now forty-five strong, is known as the Reckoners and remains led by Randolph Winot. They seek to use contacts in Aegis and NDD, as well as a newfound alliance with the Grays, to shore up power and then beat the poo poo out of the Atlanteans hiding on Earth. Meanwhile, the eleven 'Pacifiers' have similarly sunk their tendrils into Aegis and the NDD to learn more information about their brethren, while also contacting Nameless Priest communes as they try and fail to get them to break out of their dissociative slump.  The Parts of a Disjointed Whole As the rest of the modern Atlanteans are so disconnected and individualistic, five NPC Atlanteans are presented near the end of the section to highlight some of those operating on Earth with disparate goals and attitudes. The first of these is Azek'al, Guardian of Humanity. One of the original Qwezadaco'al who created humans and part of an ancient faction that tried and failed to convince the Atlanteans to give their creations the same rights and technology as their own kind, Azek'al sees humans as his collective children. Having already served three thousand years of memory wipe for attempting to give Atlantean nanotechnology to humans directly, Azek'al has looked for a loophole in Atlantean law via giving a guiding hand to human scientists and innovators in the hopes that they will soon invent the same sort of technology on their own. His current machinations involve creating a Silicon Valley nonprofit called the Forward Thought Institute, which he heads under the human guise Louis Michaels. Unfortunately, his hopes of a golden age of humanity are currently on the rocks. His two most trusted scientists, Laura Dickinson and Jeremy Lee, are the only members of the Forward Thought Institute that know Azek'al's secret, and have even been given limited nanoaugmentation; unfortunately, they only see dollar signs, and are secretly more than willing to gently caress Azek'al over if it means they can control the flow of technology and become filthy rich. Voeth'am, The Eugenicist, is unsurprisingly less of a benevolent figure. Once a famed Atlantean explorer, the species' first encounter with the Grays broke something inside of her. Suddenly, there was an alien culture out there that had powers that the Atlanteans not only didn't understand, but could not possess, and that ate at Voeth'am for millennia. It's all she thinks about and the obsession that colors all her pursuits; Voeth'am wants nothing more than to grant Atlanteans the power of psychic awakening. She's made numerous attempts at mucking about with Gray DNA to see if there's something there that could work with Atlanteans rather than simply create humans again, studied all manner of psychic powers and magic rituals, observed the Seepage, and kept the company of sorcerers and scientists alike, but her efforts have not been fruitful. Her latest and most desperate plan is to create a metahuman (an artificial superhuman created by the Grays that will be explained more in their chapter) that is both psychically active and receptive to nanotechnology, then transplant her consciousness and nanites into it. For this to be a valid plan, however, she has to thread the line of working with the Grays via a collection of middlemen; not only would the Atlanteans definitely convict her of high treason were they to find out, but Aegis would almost certainly send their top agents to disrupt the plan if they knew of it, seeing it as a top threat to humanity. Djerl'r, Hegemon, is God. Like, literally, he's God. The capital G God. Yahweh. Jehovah. That God. In ancient times, he came to humanity proclaiming divinity, using nanotechnology to perform miracles such as manna from heaven and disasters such as the Ten Plagues of Egypt. After that got boring, he gave up on the physical god bit, instead playing a new game of taking on a human form and rising to power, 'dying', then taking a new form and doing it all over again. King Philip, Henry II, Pope Innocent III, Qin Shi Huang Di, Boudica, Hernan Cortes, and Tokugawa Ieyasu are called out as specific 'people' that were all just Djerl'r entertaining himself. After the other Atlanteans got tired of him literally sending out messages bragging of his accomplishments, Djerl'r decided that his next game would be to unify the Atlanteans once more, with him as the king of course. To this end, he has installed a network of informants in the US political system, Aegis, and the NDD, collected information on all known sapient species, and openly aided numerous Atlanteans while covertly sabotaging and even murdering others. Erlyn'lo, History Maker, has a hobby that is less directly destructive but definitely insidious. She sees herself as an artist and writer, with human history and prehistory as her canvas. Whenever history needs to be rewritten or surprising new evidence of the past comes to light, there's a good possibility it's something Elryn'lo has whipped up using her nanomachines. She even created the whole 'human fossil record' from Australopithecus onward from scratch - Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were both Atlantean creations, remember - as part of her game. Right now, she's considering creating 'evidence' endorsing either young earth creationism or astrobiological origins of all life on Earth. Since Aegis is getting too close to uncovering the True History for her liking, she also has started to plan a story that will put the organization in disarray. Finally, there's Lerun'al, The Prophet. A pacifist and great philosopher since the days when Adlan'ns was still a habitable world, Lerun'al was both fascinated by the existence of the Grays and horrified at her kin's senseless slaughter of them. She took the stars as a wandering contemplative for millennia before eventually reaching Earth, where the human experiment was in full swing. Humans' powers of precognition sparked a new passion in Lerun'al, and she began devoting herself to recording human prophecy and precognitive techniques over the ages. Things took a turn for the unpleasant in the 1950s, when an overwhelming pattern of dreams and visions related to the apocalypse began to appear. Most of these featured demons with large heads and eyes, which Lerun'al understandably believed to be the Grays. She took it upon herself to avoid humanity suffering this future by helping human psychics become stronger and influencing media producers to create increasingly negative portrayals of Grays in pop culture. Will her plans stop the apocalypse? Well... Conspiracy X 2.0: The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook posted:If only she knew that the greater threat would come from the Saurians. Next Update: We finish the Atlantean chapter with Atlantean game mechanics and technological marvels.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:07
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JcDent posted:Critical failure results the odds of which are1:1000 yet each had to be meticulously written out.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:13
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FMguru posted:KISS is hilarious because they were a mediocre bunch of crowd-pleasers, led by one of the most mercenary and bottom-line focused bandleaders in the history of music - which you'd think would be the opposite of a game that's seemingly all about when music meant something and wasn't just a bunch of watered down corporate crap, maaaaan. That is the sticking point. What powerful themes does KISS explore in their music? That Detroit is a rockin' town? That you should lick things up? To shout? Also it just has to be said - getting pissy because nobody wants to call you Ravenwolf Grigori or whatever when people use the names 'Henry Rollins' and 'Gene Simmons' is because those names exist in nature. Looking forward to the rest of this mess, Daeren. Go with God.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:24
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DicktheCat posted:So how long until someone on here does a writeup, I wonder. Go for it. It's a loving undertaking though that's for sure.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:34
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Halloween Jack posted:Critical result tables are one of my pet peeves. Too much page space, too much rolling, too much time devoted to something that is usually insipid and usually disadvantages the PCs. It's amazing just how much detail often goes into loving PCs over in RPGs.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:36
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Dawgstar posted:That is the sticking point. What powerful themes does KISS explore in their music? That Detroit is a rockin' town? That you should lick things up? To shout? I don't think anyone except for small children ever called KISS by their stage names.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:44
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A friend got really into KISS in their "Psycho Circus" phase as a teenager, and I told him "Dude this is Ziggy Stardust but for morons."
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Jan 31, 2018 21:14
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Wikipedia Brown posted:Next: A ton more pages detailing the setting, which I'll mostly skip over, because it's Star Trek, duh.]  Though you probably ought not to get caught up in the weeds, it's true. I would actually be legitimately interested in seeing how they recap and define the setting perspective that the book is working from, mostly since this is a point of substantial dispute among Trek nerds as it is.
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Jan 31, 2018 21:59
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When I was a pre-teen, I was convinced our GM had some thousand-entry critical failure table. Turned out he just made us keep rolling a d6 until it didn't show a 1 while he came up with something appropriately disastrous.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:44
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Kurieg posted:I don't think anyone except for small children ever called KISS by their stage names. Eh. Everybody calls Chaim Witz, "Gene Simmons." Nobody calls him the Demon or whatever.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:52
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Reminds me of a terrible pen-name I spotted in the bookstore on some supernatural fantasy/romance thing, "Ravyn St Crowe". Brucato would probably consider that genius. oriongates fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 22:54
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E: Yes that ^^TheAwfulWaffle posted:Eh. Everybody calls Chaim Witz, "Gene Simmons." Nobody calls him the Demon or whatever. He also legally changed his name to Eugene Klein, most people wouldn't call him Chaim Witz anyway.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:56
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Storm Constantine's Wraeththu, by Gabriel Strange Lucien Soulban is legit tho
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Jan 31, 2018 22:58
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TheAwfulWaffle posted:Eh. Everybody calls Chaim Witz, "Gene Simmons." Nobody calls him the Demon or whatever. Yeah, I wasn't even talking about calling them Space Ace or whatever.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:05
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Is Brucato enough of a poo poo to include G.G.Allin in his mystical rock'n'roll game?
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Jan 31, 2018 23:29
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Is Brucato enough of a poo poo to include G.G.Allin in his mystical rock'n'roll game? KISS! Wooooooo!
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Jan 31, 2018 23:31
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theironjef posted:Promised Sands is entirely full of cute respellings of things to ensure that you know that it's the wink wink far future. Camel? Noooo, kamel. That said, it's like that stupid demonstration teachers do with the jar full of sand and golf balls, because somehow the book is also entirely full of meanspirited bullshit, spelling errors that aren't cutely done on purpose, the author forgetting the names of his own skills and tables, and hilarious critical fail results (most of which are either you die, or you are sold into slavery). Kamel is actually german for..."camel". Sorry, just wanted to add that.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:41
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I got kind of annoyed when 7th Sea did this, too. Nobody's impressed by the Crescent Empire's exotic drink, kaffee. Just call it coffee and be done with it!
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Jan 31, 2018 23:44
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FMguru posted:I'm guessing he isn't in there, mostly because Brucato's tastes (so far) have been so hilariously mainstream. He's mentioned three times, actually: as a "dangerous psycho", as an example for a maxed out Bad Reputation flaw-equivalent, and as part of a litany of musicians that destroyed themselves with drugs. Brucato definitely has a soft spot for punk and shock rock, though - I've already glossed over a mention of Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics as one of the bands his father introduced him to, and she's brought up quite a few times.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:45
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Daeren posted:He's mentioned three times, actually: as a "dangerous psycho", as an example for a maxed out Bad Reputation flaw-equivalent, and as part of a litany of musicians that destroyed themselves with drugs. Brucato definitely has a soft spot for punk and shock rock, though - I've already glossed over a mention of Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics as one of the bands his father introduced him to, and she's brought up quite a few times. I'm hesitant to ask if he mentions Chester Bennington at all.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:54
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Kurieg posted:I'm hesitant to ask if he mentions Chester Bennington at all. Not once, it seems, him or his bands.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:09
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Well I guess that's better than making a pithy "TAKE THAT!" against him.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:18
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Daeren posted:He's mentioned three times, actually: as a "dangerous psycho", as an example for a maxed out Bad Reputation flaw-equivalent, and as part of a litany of musicians that destroyed themselves with drugs. Brucato definitely has a soft spot for punk and shock rock, though - I've already glossed over a mention of Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics as one of the bands his father introduced him to, and she's brought up quite a few times. "I wish blowing up cars on stage meant something now," Brucato said wistfully, staring out the window.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:38
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Snorb posted:I'm playing in a biweekly Star Trek Adventures game; we're all agreed that it's much better than Decipher Inc's Star Trek RPG. (I mean, it wasn't *bad* per se, but it was literally possible to one-shot kill literally anything, and it was theoretically possible to use a Vulcan neck pinch on or take computer control of THE ENTIRE BORG COLLECTIVE.) Simulationism where everyone's got a disintegration setting on their weapon is a bad idea, but nerve pinching the entire Borg Collective sounds awesome.
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Feb 1, 2018 01:40
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Does Powerchords do anything with disco? I'm sure if he does it will have all the racism, misogyny, and homophobia that came with bashing and demonizing it.
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Feb 1, 2018 01:41
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:[...] misogyny [...] Really? I haven't heard of that one.
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Feb 1, 2018 02:05
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Mors Rattus posted:Scion: Origin: Punching Zeus I just want to point out again that this is a terrible, terrible pun. I mean, goddamn. So to speak.
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Feb 1, 2018 02:27
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did anyone cover the Prime Directive RPG? I keep getting the recollection that it was supposed to be really complicated and unwieldy to play, but I can't remember where I got that from
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Feb 1, 2018 02:39
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System Mastery covered it really early on.
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Feb 1, 2018 02:44
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Halloween Jack posted:System Mastery covered it really early on. We don't count, especially our earlier stuff. Definitely worth a writeup, that game was hot dumps.
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Feb 1, 2018 02:54
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I kind of like the idea of a "tricode" if it meant that you could take different approaches to solving a problem--like, this task can be solved with Science 5, Violence 7, or Manslut 6.
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Feb 1, 2018 03:28
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Halloween Jack posted:I kind of like the idea of a "tricode" if it meant that you could take different approaches to solving a problem--like, this task can be solved with Science 5, Violence 7, or Manslut 6. Only if Manslut is a solution to every problem.
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Feb 1, 2018 03:37
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