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Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Which was, admittedly, the point. I imagine the intent was more so that your gun character could rattle off a ton of models in between them not mattering.

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Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Or the player could feel smart for picking the "best" weapon. D&D at least had little trade-offs like swords getting more frequent criticals and axes getting better ones.

Feinne
Oct 9, 2007

When you fall, get right back up again.
One thing to be said for Dark*Matter, it's Arms and Equipment Guide does seem to mostly avoid adding in extra weapons that aren't at all different from their alternatives. The overall book is probably not interesting enough to cover but I'll hit the guns part since we're talking about them.

Revolvers:

They present four, the .38, the .357 magnum, the .44 magnum, and the 454 Casull. The magnum is slightly more damaging than the .38, and the .44 and 454 are better than that and very similar in damage. Both the .44 and 454 are harder to shoot multiple times in a round than normal. The Casull is actually a bit inferior in damage to the .44 (d4+2w/d4+3w/d4+2m for the .44 vs d6w/d6+1w/d6m for the 454 leading to more variance for the same maximum damage) but has more range and is more accurate. I'd say this is almost a justifiable level of difference.

Semi-Automatic Handguns:

Nine are presented, though two are silenced versions of presented cailbers. They have .22 (and silenced), .32 ACP, .380 ACP, 9mm (also silenced), 10mm, .45 cal, and .50 cal. Where available a silencer reduces all the damage you do by 1. The .22 is obviously the weakest, the .32 ACP and .380 ACP are almost identical with the .380 being harder to conceal but having a larger clip. The 9 and 10 mm are almost identical, with the 10 having a smaller clip and shorter range but doing veeeery slightly more damage on an amazing success. The .45 is basically the same as the 10mm. The Desert Eagle, .50 is comparable in damage to the 454 Casull and has the same multi-firing problem. A bunch of these are questionably different enough to deserve existing, though it should be noted each gun has a blurb to explain where you would theoretically see that gun to justify why you should care.

Machine Pistols:

There's three presented, the 9mm (in pistol or Uzi layout) and the .32 ACP in standard layout. The 9mm ones do very slightly more damage. The pistol layout can fire bursts as well as single shot (which use more ammunition but are more accurate as I recall from the Alternity rules), while the Uzi layout only fires single shot. The .32 ACP can also autofire. I'll let these go, they are actually all a bit different.

Submachine Guns:

They've got 6 SMGs, the 5.45mm Russian, four different 9mm layouts (full frame, small frame, large capacity, and Uzi), and a .45 ACP. The 5.45 Russian is noted as essentially a cut down AK-74. The variant 9mm SMGs are best discussed in terms of how they differ from the full frame. The small frame can be concealed (which the standard cannot) but is shorter ranged. The large capacity 9mm no longer has a stock and is thus less accurate. The Uzi frame is slightly better than the standard in a couple small respects and has a Mini version that can be concealed but is less accurate. The .45 ACP can't fire single shots at all, and is kind of inaccurate, but is heavy enough that it doesn't lose any accuracy if suppressed. The only one of these that I wouldn't say there is a legit difference in would be the standard to Uzi, and I guess they felt the need to include both.

Assault Rifles:

There's four presented, the 5.45 Russian, 7.62 Russian, 5.56 NATO, and 7.62 NATO. They're all pretty similar really, there's some minor variations noted in each to account for specific configurations but they totally could have just had one assault rifle and then some special notes for how the configurations impact them.

Shotguns:

There's three shotguns presented, the 12 gauge pump, 12 gauge automatic, and 10 gauge pump. The 12 gauge shotguns do the same damage, the automatic just has additional firing options. The 10 gauage is a little bit more damaging. Shotguns can be sawed off making them able to be hidden but less accurate. They also have a brief discussion of ammunition. Birdshot is more accurate than normal, deals double damage within 4 meters and half damage at the gun's medium or long range. Buckshot raises the double damage range to the gun's short range, and only deals half damage at long range. Rifled slugs are less accurate, but have triple the normal range and deal double damage at short and medium. They also have Good Firepower at short range, making them EXCEPTIONALLY lethal up close.

Hunting Rifles:

They've got two, the deer rifle (a .30-06) and the safari rifle (a .460). The safari rifle is heavier, longer ranged, and more damaging. Having a bolt-action or two is probably acceptable.

Sniper Rifles:

Five of these, 7.62 in NATO and Russian variants, the .300 Win Mag, .50 cal NATO, and a benchrest railgun (not that kind though, just a gun mounted on rails that are in turn clamped down). The two 7.62s and the .30 Win Mag are basically identical. The .50 cal is laughably powerful but almost impossible to fire without it being supported. The railgun requires a significant amount of setup and obvious has to be broken back down to move but is capable of crazy high accuracy bonuses. It's more for assassinating someone than combat. They didn't need three nearly identical sniper rifles come on guys.

Machine Guns:

They start by questioning what you're doing where you need a loving machine gun which is pretty fun. These come in the same variants as the ARs. The 7.62mm variants only have autofire, whereas the smaller ones also have more normal firing options.

Grenade Launchers:

They've got a couple grenade launchers. One is an under-barrel for something like an M-16, and the other is a rotating barrel launcher. There's a ton of different grenades but they're all pretty different so sure why not.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

hectorgrey posted:

I don't know much about firearms, but I'm guessing it is largely down to weight, barrel length (to make it easier to get around corners indoors) and reducing over-penetration at close range?

Concealability as well: pistols and submachine guns are the choice weapons in Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, because assault rifles, while powerful and long range, are inconspicuous AF, tending to be ranked as something like little to no concealability in those games. Even the cut-down assault carbines require a trenchcoat to carry around concealed and that, in itself, tends to arouse suspicion if you're operating in summer months, the tropics, and the post-global warming environment. As a result, concealable firearms that you could fit under a windbreaker, blazer or leather jacket where the way to go.

Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 even incentivized this by making pistol calibers more powerful: Shadowrun had Heavy Pistols have a point higher (9M) in their damage values than Assault Rifles (8M) with the only real advantage rifles having being range. Meanwhile the change from the first version of Cyberpunk to 2020 had damages rated logarithmically, since that first edition had 7.62 NATO and .30-06 do ungodly amounts (11D6) compared to say 9mm Parabellum (1D6+3), .357 Magnum (2D6+3) or 5.56 NATO (5D6) and the highest armor value you had was SP25 from the Doorgunner Vest (basically Vietnam-era ceramic "chicken plate" or, as the illustration in Friday Night Firefight suggests, the Second Chance HardCorps IV plated "apron").

In short, this wouldn't happen in first edition Cyberpunk RAW...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMyFeaijWlo

Cyberpunk 2020 dropped down the higher-end to make things more survivable (7.62 NATO became 6D6) while increasing the lower end to make that low- and medium- caliber weapons more viable (9mm Para became 2D6+1, .357 Magnum was 3D6), while also giving melee weapons and martial arts better balance (more strength enhancements, so if you were superstrong thanks to grafted muscle, bone lacing, or cyberlimbs, you could do some serious damage; higher-end melee weapons like swords had an extra d6 added; edged weapons got an AP effect, with monoweapons dividing armor by 4)

darthbob88 posted:

Looks to me like it just has a shorter range increment, which TBH I'd kinda expect in going from a rifle with a 20 inch barrel to a carbine with a 14.5 inch barrel. What surprises me is that they don't model the carbine being a pound or two lighter than the full-length rifle.

The hilarious thing is that, in real life, the quantified effective range against point targets of the M4 carbine is about 50m less than the M16. That's hardly a disadvantage, considering anything more than 400 meters away is the domain for support and indirect fire weapons anyway and most of your engagements with the rifle are likely going to be within 150 meters.

Dawgstar posted:

And the biggest benefit of Feng Shui's guns description was they were entertaining to read. More interesting than charts.

This was true of stuff like the Street Samurai Catalog for Shadowrun, with its pre-Internet take on comment sections and including internet rivalry, shitposting, and comment wars, and the Solo Of Fortune "magazines" for Cyberpunk 2020, which basically read like your typical gunwriters shooting the poo poo in Guns & Ammo. They gave some believability and immersiveness into their world setting instead of being just a list of guns.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Young Freud posted:

"AKs doing more damage" is one of those "know a little/know some/know a lot" things. People who think they know about guns (like most game designers) confuse the 7.62x39mm M43 cartridge with 7.62x51mm NATO, which has impressive ballistics thanks in part of the longer case length. 7.62mm M43 is an intermediate cartridge, a middle point between pistol cartridges and full-length rifle rounds used in precision long range shooting and hunting, and is really comparable to other assault rifle cartridges like the 5.56x45mm NATO used in the West. But even it's lacking, it's own ballistics aren't straight like the 5.56mm, dropping earlier in it's flight trajectory, and it's heavier bullet drills through a target instead of tumbling and disintegrating inside a subject like the 5.56mm. It's why the Russians largely abandoned the M43 cartridge in favor for the 5.45x39mm round, with it's similar ballistics to NATO round, and relegated the M43 to surplus and export.

If it was "more damage than the M16" (which I'll get to) and not "more damage than the G3" (pure nonsense) it'd be slightly more reasonable depending on exactly what is being modeled. While the M193 and M855 rounds have a tendency to tumble and disintegrate inside the target, it sometimes takes more than a body's worth of flesh for the M855 to disintegrate. In these situations, where both bullets are just passing through tissue without yawing, the wider M43 is just plain better. (Though not as good as the 7.62x39 mm M67 of Yugoslavian manufacture, which begins to yaw much earlier.)

JackMann
Aug 11, 2010

Secure. Contain. Protect.
Fallen Rib
If I forgot to mention, the game also esxpects you to track different calibers of ammunition, in case you thought about sharing with your buddy.

Tracking how many bullets you have kind of makes sense, since some combat options are balanced by taking more ammo, like double tap and three-round burst. But the weaopons have way too much granularity for an otherwise light game.

It's one of those things that show how much the game has its roots in 90's game design, like the way character creation comes before the system.

Keep in mind I still really like the game. I think overall it's a good system. But that makes the more puzzling bits stand out more.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Gun catalogues in RPG books were more meaningful when you couldn't just Wikipedia a thousand different guns.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Halloween Jack posted:

Gun catalogues in RPG books were more meaningful when you couldn't just Wikipedia a thousand different guns.

There's lots of things in old RPG manuals that reflect how they had to be reference works for the real-world settings they're using, as much as reference works for the system itself. Call of Cthulhu: Secrets of Japan comes to mind as a book that is half Cthulhu-mythos-in-Japan and half tonally dissonant japanophilia that was trite even when it was released mixed with bad manga-style art reference book on everyday life in modern-day Japan.

LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 15:30 on May 6, 2018

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Halloween Jack posted:

Gun catalogues in RPG books were more meaningful when you couldn't just Wikipedia a thousand different guns.

Part of me thinks that this was the nature of '80s-'90s pre-AWB gun culture, where there was interesting one-offs like the Pancor Jackhammer, the Enfield XL64, the LAPA FA-03, or the H&K CAWS shotgun that could be the next big thing and a lot of these weapon catalogs where RPG gun guys extrapolating from there. Scott Ruggles, one of the guys who did weapon illustrations for Cyberpunk and I'm pretty sure was Bubba in the Solo Of Fortune photo-essay on the Sternmeyer CG13 and the Fabrica de Armes bullpup, apparently dug up a lot of prototype guns to base his drawings and mockups on: the Militech autoshotgun is based off the S&W AS1(?), the Militech Ronin and Mark IV an Americanized Enfield EM-2 with AR-18 parts, etc.

Nowadays , you have less invovation, with everyone either building ARs, AKs, or Glocks, so its all variations on those. Even the Europeans are giving up, trashing the FAMAS and the G36 for AR-based rifles.

Young Freud fucked around with this message at 02:55 on May 6, 2018

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Yeah, lots of gun catalogue sourcebooks got a lot of mileage out of weird prototypes like the Jackhammer, the OICW, the Gyrojets...either by just including rules for them, or having a genre-adapted ripoff.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

LatwPIAT posted:

There's lots of things in old RPG manuals that reflect how they had to be reference works for the real-world settings they're using, as much as reference works for the system itself. Call of Cthulhu: Secrets of Japan comes to mind as a book that is half Cthulhu-mythos-in-Japan and half tonally dissonant japanophilia that was trite even when it was released mixed with bad manga-style art reference book on every life in modern-day Japan.

I love CoC's Japan book because you'd never know it came out in loving 2005 with how weird it was about Japan.

Like, it had everything, the intro text being full of crazy stereotypes, rules for being a sumo wrestler, weird rambles about how the mysterious japanese have such strange and exotic rules.

It was actually a pretty solid book though. Kinda a neat attempt to do a ~perverted Buddhism~ style of mythos, and if I remember right it even had the occasional cute little pronunciation sidebar about how a Japanese speaker likely would pronounce the more exotic mythos words clearly written entirely by and for european tongues that SEEMED to have at least a proof read by an actual speaker and all.

It's a cool book but boy is it some 80's style treatment of Japan for a game that was made when fuckin Bush was in the white house.

To be fair there are a couple times when the 80's bullshit at least actually has a neat effect. Like there's a bit that says a Japanese person who fails a SAN check obviously behaves like normal, but if he's in a group of people who succeeded they suffer kinda a dampened effect because they'd probably try to keep it together in the crowd, but also if the whole crowd fails poo poo's just gonna go bonkers as a whole mob of people has a mental break in a society where self control is important. It's stupid and probably a little offensive but at least they loving tried to do something with these weird stereotypes to make a Japanese game feel different beyond "AHSO YOU LACK HONOR AND SHAME YOUR FAMILY, CTHULHU"

sexpig by night fucked around with this message at 04:24 on May 6, 2018

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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



My buddy the artist got stiffed by Chaosium for that book so boo on them. I'm told their new management has made it square, though.

Going cross-cultural with things like "how you react to losing too much mental HP" seems like something you might note but which you probably don't want to dictate. Obviously there are culturally mediated disorders aplenty and it's certainly fair to note them.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

Nessus posted:

My buddy the artist got stiffed by Chaosium for that book so boo on them. I'm told their new management has made it square, though.

Going cross-cultural with things like "how you react to losing too much mental HP" seems like something you might note but which you probably don't want to dictate. Obviously there are culturally mediated disorders aplenty and it's certainly fair to note them.

Yea in the grand scheme it's probably a bad idea but I kinda liked it as a general variant rule that I wound up poaching for all my games, so at least it had some use.

Like, I like the idea that different cultures have different reactions to mythos things but yea there's no real way to put down 'and as we all know the japanese mind means that in a crowd they're more docile and calm' that isn't...well...Lovecraftian in a different way.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

Halloween Jack posted:

Gun catalogues in RPG books were more meaningful when you couldn't just Wikipedia a thousand different guns.

Do you really want to wiki for something that the product you paid real money for could do that instead?

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


sexpig by night posted:

rules for being a sumo wrestler

SUBALUWA

Has there been a single RPG book dedicated to Japan in a line that wasn't already focused on the region that didn't end up like this?

White Coke
May 29, 2015

sexpig by night posted:

It's a cool book but boy is it some 80's style treatment of Japan for a game that was made when fuckin Bush was in the white house.

Considering what his father did to the prime minister, it seems appropriate.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

Nessus posted:

My buddy the artist got stiffed by Chaosium for that book so boo on them. I'm told their new management has made it square, though.

Going cross-cultural with things like "how you react to losing too much mental HP" seems like something you might note but which you probably don't want to dictate. Obviously there are culturally mediated disorders aplenty and it's certainly fair to note them.

Dang it. Has Chaosium improved in terms of leadership since then, because I like their Glorantha output.

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal
There was a leadership overhaul after some kickstarter stuff so it’s probably not the same dudes, iirc

JackMann
Aug 11, 2010

Secure. Contain. Protect.
Fallen Rib
Didn't it end up with the original owners coming back in and kicking the idiots out?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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



JackMann posted:

Didn't it end up with the original owners coming back in and kicking the idiots out?
All I know is they got square with her to her satisfaction.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

sexpig by night posted:

To be fair there are a couple times when the 80's bullshit at least actually has a neat effect. Like there's a bit that says a Japanese person who fails a SAN check obviously behaves like normal, but if he's in a group of people who succeeded they suffer kinda a dampened effect because they'd probably try to keep it together in the crowd, but also if the whole crowd fails poo poo's just gonna go bonkers as a whole mob of people has a mental break in a society where self control is important. It's stupid and probably a little offensive but at least they loving tried to do something with these weird stereotypes to make a Japanese game feel different beyond "AHSO YOU LACK HONOR AND SHAME YOUR FAMILY, CTHULHU"

Somebody thought their Kaiju panic rule was terribly clever indeed.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
I mean, that might make a degree of sense as a general rule, not a Japan-specific thing. Herd mentality is a real pisser.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nessus posted:

My buddy the artist got stiffed by Chaosium for that book so boo on them. I'm told their new management has made it square, though.

I was surprised on checking that this book had eleven artists. All my memories were of the horrible Melissa Uran pieces.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


LatwPIAT posted:

I was surprised on checking that this book had eleven artists. All my memories were of the horrible Melissa Uran pieces.

They hired the Exalted lady for a Call of Cthulhu book?

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

I admit, I liked some of her Ravenloft art, but her style really doesn't seem suited for Cthulhu-y games.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Kavak posted:

They hired the Exalted lady for a Call of Cthulhu book?

Japanese mandates an anime-influenced style, I would assume was the reasoning. Air quotes as needed.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
I lived in Japan for two years, but I don't think I have game-rule worthy insights about the land. It's safe, the food is great and you have alcohol vending machines.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

JcDent posted:

Do you really want to wiki for something that the product you paid real money for could do that instead?
Like literally billions of other humans, yes.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Dawgstar posted:

Japanese mandates an anime-influenced style, I would assume was the reasoning. Air quotes as needed.

Some of the art for Secrets of Japan is pretty decent:



Some of the art isn't too bad, but clashes tonally with Call of Cthulhu:



(Though there is a chapter titled "Call of Cthulhu, Anime Style", so it's probably a very intentional choice to have animesque art in the book despite the apparent clash.)

Some of the art is just amazing:



And then there's... this:

megane
Jun 20, 2008



That samurai xenomorph is pretty sick. The last picture looks like something out of those terrible "Learn to Draw Anime" books.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

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

Robindaybird posted:

I admit, I liked some of her Ravenloft art, but her style really doesn't seem suited for Cthulhu-y games.

I don't know, it's otherworldly and sanity-damaging. Seems appropriate.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

Nessus posted:

All I know is they got square with her to her satisfaction.

Well that is good to hear!

Also a quick thing but has anyone ever done, not here but in general, an indepth look into the ideology of Glorantha or about any setting in D&D?

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
That's considerably more "standard 90s anime" than was MUran's style even in the 90s, so I have to assume they asked her to slant it in that direction.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
Cultures: Pollen



Degenesis: Rebirth
Primal Punk
Chapter 2: Cultures


:poland: Pollen :poland:



Untamed

Pollen – Poland – is hosed up. The ground is constantly churning – for some reason – with old cities rising and submerging all the drat time. The continuous mention of gossamer and spore fields employing spiders would imply that Primer/Sepsis is responsible for that... but who knows. And I don't get how the cities don't get ground up into dust in the process. Spore fields also breed Rift Centipedes to fight vegetation.

But not everything is just boiling cities and spores in Pollen. Periodically, fields of vegetation spring up from the thawing earth. They kill spore fields dead and bear fruits that won't stop growing even after being eaten. The spore fields attack them with spiders and centipedes that have to run the gauntlet of angry plants.



The true sons of the land of Po bear axes too big to fit on one page

Polish people - the Pollners, I poo poo you not - survive even in this somewhat trying period for their land. They have become muscle-dudes that travel between oasis's on sleds. Once settled, they protect their oasis with stone axes – hey, just like in the illustration – from Psychonauts, Spitaliers, Apocalyptics (the drug Romani, remember?) - whatever. When the oasis goes down, they go looking for a new one.

Uprooted

The pre-Eschaton people of 2071 (some us could be alive at that point) knew the asteroids are coming. Future computers took time from mining bitcoin to calculate impact point. One was certainly near Warsaw, so the Poles retreated to Sudetes and High Tatra, building new cities.

Then poo poo went down.

Uprooted posted:

Zero hour. The sky turned dark blue, the atmosphere heaved, the flash seared bodies and wooden walls hundreds of miles from the point of impact. The asteroid smashed much of Poland and consumed the rest with red dust.
Storms raged through the Tatra’s mountaintops. Hundreds of thousands stared up at the reddish-gray tail that hung twisted in the sky like an umbilical cord to the deadly cold of space.

This is what happens when you don't invest in Eastern Poland.

Nomads

After the Eschaton, messengers from Brno and Breslau reported that poo poo was, indeed, hosed up. However, not all forests and towns got demolished, so people started returning home. They uncovered supplies, headed for cities rumored to be intact, plowed fields, planted crops – potatoes are seriously mentioned – and had hopes in general.

However, Pollen is still Poland:

Nomads posted:

There was hope. But not enough for all.

Some outcasts were inevitably generated by a civilization that was working towards rebirth. These failsons, “hollow-eyed figures with bleeding gums and necrotized finger,” grabbed rocks and clubs and went after... the Clans? How quickly had those formed? Anyways, it was a thing that happened.

Strangers

On unrelated note, some savage-looking types came from the east, dressed in furs and bearing tribal tattoos and trinkets. Curiously enough, those were all of pre-Eschaton nature.

Strangers posted:

But no one asked big Aleko for the dozens of names on his left arm or Anatoly for the meaning of the crests on his chest. They had led the people through hell for thousands of miles, removed any resistance and every know-it-all, judged and bashed in skulls. Whoever or whatever they might have been in their past lives, now the people kneeled in front of them with eyes downcast, kissed their hands and called them fathers.

So, Pollners were amazed by these normal, everyday Russians tribal giants and adopted their culture - hence the illustration at the beginning! Let's see if there's anything further in the chapter to indicate who these Ukrainian/Russian barbarians are and why did the Pollners liked/needed them!

There will be no explanation.

Leechers

But not now, bitches! Spores were floating around Pollen and thus the Pollners got heavily affected by Burn – which is the Sepsis Spore Drug. Or something like it. Point is, Burn makes the cold easier to bear and whatever crap you're eating easier to swallow.

Unfortunately, Burn use leads to Burnbabies, their heads elongated and deformed. The little fuckers are greedy, too:

Leechers posted:

Yet still, they needed their mothers, crawled up on their bodies, and bit into their breasts. They suckled, little fingers clutching warm flesh, pressing. They couldn’t get enough and did not stop until they were torn away.

And even then, the parents did like their children. They were immune to cold and their wounds healed really fast. However, the growth of their powers didn't stop at the Canadian X-Man As Played By A Ruggedly Handsome Australian level. The children developed bone spurs on their hands, and skin fins on their necks and backs.

Leechers posted:

Some Clans called them Leechers as they crawled from one woman to the next at night, seeking their breasts.

:stare:

At the tender age of one, the little shits were already as tall as a kid three years older. They either ate or sat alone in the ruins. Other children didn't want anything to do with them. And one day, the lil' monsters simply ran away.

Next Time: What happened to Leech Jr.?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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



Rand Brittain posted:

That's considerably more "standard 90s anime" than was MUran's style even in the 90s, so I have to assume they asked her to slant it in that direction.
Phrasing, Lana

I think you could actually get a lot more "normal" set-in-Japan art out of people these days since there seems to be a lot more live-action material floating around set in Japan. A lot of this exoticism seems rooted in a lack of readily available non-specialist media which made foreign places all seem super weird and distant and dreamy.

I mean, not that this would stop, but at least comic artists and such can get better backgrounds to trace or bootleg from all the readily-available poo poo on Netflix.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

Nessus posted:

foreign places all seem super weird and distant and dreamy.

I don't know about distant or dreamy, but I still think it's super weird in some cool ways.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
It didn't really stop people from getting weird ideas about Japan in the 80s when everyone was assuming they'd run the world in a few years. People just like the foreign-ness, and the Japanese themselves seem to have no qualms about playing it up for tourism (and nearly everyone else does it too, Australia is definitely guilty of constantly bullshitting gullible foreigners) and possibly to assert their own identity against otherwise inescapable American culture.

There's even a few cases of Lovecraft-esque Japanese horror that come to mind, often recalling the 'isolated creepy small town' model of things. Not sure how popular Lovecraft's stuff is over there, but some media shows definite influence, whether subtly or taking the piss.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Ghost Leviathan posted:

It didn't really stop people from getting weird ideas about Japan in the 80s when everyone was assuming they'd run the world in a few years. People just like the foreign-ness, and the Japanese themselves seem to have no qualms about playing it up for tourism (and nearly everyone else does it too, Australia is definitely guilty of constantly bullshitting gullible foreigners) and possibly to assert their own identity against otherwise inescapable American culture.

There's even a few cases of Lovecraft-esque Japanese horror that come to mind, often recalling the 'isolated creepy small town' model of things. Not sure how popular Lovecraft's stuff is over there, but some media shows definite influence, whether subtly or taking the piss.

There's an anime series called Nyarko-san, which is essentially a magical girlfriend dealie but the MG is Nyarlathotep. It even directly references the Chaosium RPG along with the fact Lovecraft wrote stories about the Mythos. So it's probably something like the States. Niche, but will probably turn up if you poke around in the horror genre.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Ghost Leviathan posted:

There's even a few cases of Lovecraft-esque Japanese horror that come to mind, often recalling the 'isolated creepy small town' model of things. Not sure how popular Lovecraft's stuff is over there, but some media shows definite influence, whether subtly or taking the piss.

Lovecraft mythos stuff is about as popular over in Japan as it was 10-20 years ago in the US: lots of in-crowd in-jokes that sometimes leaks into the mainstream. A lot of the old guard know his works because of the old literary sci-fi connections but you have newer stuff like the Innsmouth episode of Digimon or the Nitroplus visual novels (which became anime) where Nyarlyohotep takes the form of a big-fitted woman with glasses. I swear there was an anime where Cthulhu and the Elder Gods where depicted as little girls a few years back.

e:fb

Junji Ito is very much the guy who produces Lovecraftian Japanese horror: his prototypical work is Uzamaki, where a town is plagued by coincidences of spirals. The Enigma Of The Amigara Fault is another, where people are compelled by the sacrificial site of an ancient civilization.

Young Freud fucked around with this message at 13:58 on May 7, 2018

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Feinne
Oct 9, 2007

When you fall, get right back up again.

Young Freud posted:

Lovecraft mythos stuff is about as popular over in Japan as it was 10-20 years ago in the US: lots of in-crowd in-jokes that sometimes leaks into the mainstream. A lot of the old guard know his works because of the old literary sci-fi connections but you have newer stuff like the Innsmouth episode of Digimon or the Nitroplus visual novels (which became anime) where Nyarlyohotep takes the form of a big-fitted woman with glasses. I swear there was an anime where Cthulhu and the Elder Gods where depicted as little girls a few years back.

e:fb

Junji Ito is very much the guy who produces Lovecraftian Japanese horror: his prototypical work is Uzamaki, where a town is plagued by coincidences of spirals. The Enigma Of The Amigara Fault is another, where people are compelled by the sacrificial site of an ancient civilization.

Yes Nyarko-chan is a real thing and it is very silly.

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