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Glorantha is fine because Glorantha is unique to every individual and just as true.
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May 31, 2018 05:40
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Feel like L5R is bad with this as the tone hammers in that if you're not adding -san or -sama to names or otherwise acting not like a native of Glorious Not-Nippon would  , the GM is all out given a mandate to seppuku the character off....Meanwhile players usually aren't interested in trials of getting weird etiquette right. My games devolved into players giving NPCs nicknames based on Asian sauces for crying out loud. Then again pressure is put upon the GM for protraying Rokugan and the superior Asian way right. Terratina fucked around with this message at 09:58 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 09:49
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Cultures: Purgare, pt. 4 Degenesis Rebirth Primal Punk Chapter 2: Cultures Perugia It's a pilgrimage site beyond the Apennines, the gateway to the final battlefield. The Anabaptists come here to be anointed by Elysian oils – exactly 14 drops rubbed into the head (“spine will burn, the air will taste of metal, the pupils will dilate”) - and to throw down with some Psychokinetics. The plazas echo with sermons, the Palazzo Dei Priori - with the wails of the maimed. The baptisteries are often dry, as the water keeps getting contaminated with blood - they should probably handle the maimed folks better. Sforza smiths repair weapons and sell new ones. Sforza are the Goliath-Orlock family that controls the city. Each member has proven himself (or herself) in the forge. They're prudent, but uncompromising. Perugia posted:Day by day, Anabaptists and Spitalians gather, fight to be at the top of the pecking order, threaten each other only to laugh in the end and clap each others’ shoulders. Together they make history – or rot together as breeding sacs for fleas and ticks, forgotten amidst the Filaments. The Filaments must be some sort of Psychokinetic attack type. Also, I'm not sure if fleas and ticks like corpses that much. Once you go to Perugia, you really can't turn back, else your family consider you a coward. But some do get a little lily-livered when they see the returning warriors: dirty, bloody, their armor torn, they drag their swords along the ground, some clutching stumps of amputated legs or arms. Those that (very naturally) freak out, remain in Perugia and work as part of the supply chain. They don't really ever return home. There's a rumor that someone is selling Psychonaut body parts for deserters and cowards who wish to go back. Sforza consider this to be no more than slander by the Modica family, but Cathedral City is looking into the matter anyways. Macerata Speaking of the Modica, they were one of the first ones to accept the Anabaptists. They have gained great honor – one of their kind has been declared Baptist (probably their version of an Iconide) and carries the time from the clock of Macerata to Cathedral city, where it's beamed to all other chronos (watches). But the fight in the Adriatic has drained the clan of blood. A 14-year-old boy is now the heir of his family – his dad an uncle were killed by a Psychokinetic on their way North (the books implies that they were 100% assassinated). Life has a lot of poo poo in store for him. L'Aquila Situated in the Ateno valley, it's surrounded by Abruzo like a fortress. Since the current day Abruzo is noted for a fuckton of natural parks, it might just be a forrest. The Capodieci that rule here have accepted the Anabaptists, but don't allow themselves to be ruled by them. Baptisteries and aqueducts can be found here and there, and there are many Anabaptist emissaries at court of Emilio Capodieci. L'Aquila posted:For him, dealing with the Anabaptists is a dance where he leads and the woman still enjoys herself. He's also very good at conquering villages in with words rather than swords.  Campobasso And now, for a taste of something completely different! The Campobasso is the weird Italian nationalist enclave and the De Paulo family has assassins shooting any Anabaptist they see, and toppling any crosses that appear. The citizens hide the family, and they even coin their own currency, the Lira. Lol, these guys! The Crossroads Life is relatively normal on the east side of the Apennines. Yet crossing the mountains west isn't that hard. But the west is where poo poo is constantly hovering near the fan. Towers Ash, carbon monoxide eruptions and similar bullshit is the order of the day on the strange side of Purgare. That's why any clan that's worth their salt has build a giant sandstone tower that rises above it all. San Gimigiano, the City of Towers in Tuscany, had 15 such towers, growing higher and higher, before they were felled by an earthquake. Only the Salvucci, Ardinghelli, Tozzi and Colei families survived with their abodes intact. They made penance and decided not to build their towers any higher lest they incur another quake. The book says that the other villages did not the receive the mercy of the divine sign and that any towers built continue to grow until either the tower or its inhabitants die... which sounds like a very natural thing for houses? Unless this should imply that that the deaths come sooner rather than later. Also, I like how you can read the sentence to mean that some towers don't stop getting bigger after the inhabitants die. Harvesting Villages If you live in a villages on the slopes of the Apennines, your place looks like an idyllic picture of an Italian village. Poisonous gas passes over the town, and sun seems to triple in the sky. Such is the effect of living under a force dome produced by a Psychokinetic. Harvesting Villages posted:He is hiding in a Rift, cocooned in Filaments. Lines of force are extended into fields absorbing all light once and for all. Absolute darkness fills the Rift. More force fields protect the place and divert the poisonous swathes. Where the field lines’ offshoots rise from the ground, the townspeople gather. They extend their hands into the pull and let it tousle their hair. Some throw planes made of light wood into the forcefields and watch them rise, follow the field lines and land a hundred paces away. That's what the pleasant side of such life looks like; force fields ward off poison and do... other things that I don't understand. Unfortunately, such a town is an ant farm/food storage from the Psychokinetic. How does the fucker feed? By sending hordes and hordes of mosquitoes, ticks and fleas to drink their blood.  This is not a subtle, continuous process, but something that occurs like a flood. I bet all of those villagers are a hair-length away from being crazy. Vigilantes Some people think that being bug MREs kinda sucks. They're the Vigilantes, who watch for changes in light and bug activity to hunt Psychokinetics. They use Lupatas – sawn-off shotguns – to get close enough that a Psychokinetic can't avoid the shot by bending light or swatting the bullets away, and punch him full of cartoonish holes. Vigilantes posted:Vigilantes do not have to be good shots; they only need to come close enough. That's my kind of player class! They come from the clans and the stay with the clans (ugh, why do we need to qualify?). The locals love them – not being engulfed by mosquitoes and ticks is amazing – yet the Vigilantes never marry, because it's a hazardous job. Next time: Did you know that Roma is inhabitted by the Romani?
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May 31, 2018 09:52
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Terratina posted:Feel like L5R is bad with this as the tone hammers in that if you're not adding -san or -sama to names or otherwise acting not like a native of Glorious Not-Nippon would
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May 31, 2018 10:14
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Terrible Opinions posted:It should be done the Paradox way with a dynamic system of honorifics generated by computer based on age, social rank, language being spoken, and of course religion of the participants. Including rules for playing long dead languages like ancient Egyptians. Username checks out, and yet at the same time I wanna see this...
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May 31, 2018 10:25
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Ancient Egyptian etiquette was probably about as complicated.
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May 31, 2018 11:41
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It involved a lot more sex tho, if their myths are accurate
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May 31, 2018 13:22
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Mors Rattus posted:It involved a lot more sex tho, if their myths are accurate All I know is that if someone offers you a salad you should definitely politely decline.
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May 31, 2018 13:57
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For those following my review, Kings Of Silver is now up on Rowan Rook & Deckard - a Spire campaign framework that’s a bit more extensive than Eidolon Sky; the previous adventure they published. Amongst other things it really cements the feel of Spire society - revolutionary France mixed with the roaring twenties.
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May 31, 2018 14:48
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Okay, so, I have been suckered by you into buying Spire and wow, the aelfir really are amazing villains. I particularly love the bit about how their mask rituals are so complex, and they're so averse to asking questions, that every single one of them is just getting by on bluff.
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May 31, 2018 15:57
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The Aelfir are also at that solid place between being powerful and frightening opponents, but actually having enough room for the PCs to work against them. They're generally disorganized and out of touch, leaving you cracks to slip into and work with. Also the bit about how like a tenth of the city's most powerful Aelfir are just drow and humans in masks is fantastic.
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May 31, 2018 16:49
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Ancient Egyptian etiquette was probably about as complicated. Mors Rattus posted:It involved a lot more sex tho, if their myths are accurate
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May 31, 2018 17:34
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The ancients really love their puns, I believe the earliest written accounts of Jesus, his speeches were full of puns and double-meanings - like calling Peter the rock of the rock, since his name also sounds like "Petra" or his condemnation of the Pharisees of being so blind that they're straining a gnat and swallowing a camel is they use the same word (Galma), Greek Orators judge a man's wit by his punnery. The Enlightenment started the idea of Puns are bad because they were hoity-toity and thought Puns as too silly.
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May 31, 2018 17:46
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Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Black Crusade Robodragons and cunning gnomes We start pretty standard with our first major Vortex world. You might recognize Xurant from the Xur Frost Father Khornate hyper-class. Xurant isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's kind of cool; it's your usual post-apocalyptic world that has returned to savagery and nomadic herder-tribes, just what they herd are giant dragon-like war-mounts called Xurush. Xurush are insanely dangerous creatures and most Xur warfare revolves around them, with a man (or woman, there is no distinction among the Xur) being just as likely to dedicate an epic poem to the strength and skill of their mount as they would be to laud their own deeds. Despite being Khornates (they worship him in an aspect known as Baphtar) the Xur absolutely love their murder-lizards, with prized and successful lizards being bedecked with jewels and pampered by their doting owners as they're put out to stud. In addition to their lizards, the locals also really love war. I don't know why the setting keeps pointing out how warlike everyone is and how much they love war, because it's so goddamn uniform in 40k that you might well point out when someone doesn't and otherwise just assume everyone else is some flavor of the fiercest warrior ever really we insist unlike all those other fiercest bestest fighters we just finished talking about. They'll sometimes stop their wars to go and worship at the thrones of Baphtar, where tribes contest among themselves (which is basically just more war, really. It's very warhammer to take a break from war for some nice, refreshing war) to be worthy of his blessings. Sometimes, a tribe will be fierce enough that the 'iron ships' of the God will descend and pick the best among them to take a stab at either becoming Chaos Marines or just picking up an assault rifle and becoming space warriors. Meanwhile, among the broken and ancient cities, a race of tiny gnomes lives in the subways. The Svartlings are devoted to Tzeentch, and no-one knows if they're mutated humans or something else. They build cool giant robot dragons that menace the Xur in order to scare them away from the golden palaces of underground gnome wizards, though. The Xur are terrified of these 'Onir' beasts and generally leave the cities alone, save the occasional heretic against Baphtar who goes to seek out the gnome-wizards and learn their subtle ways. Xurant is pretty standard 40k fare, but it's got a nice set of plot hooks and places where your PCs can show up and tip the balance in its weird gnome-war. The Xurush are mean as hell and if your PCs can befriend the Xur, getting a couple cool rideable dragon-dinosaur lizard horrors that can shrug off bolter fire is a good get. Q'sal is a beautiful, gleaming paradise of order and peace within the Vortex. It is full of tall, gleaming spires, and the average citizen lives at ease, watched over by the benevolent and wise sorcerer-kings and their technomancers. Naturally this is all bullshit and it's run entirely on damned souls and evil. Literally the entire economy runs on souls. They will trade all manner of powerful wealth for souls brought in by raiders and slavers, which they convert into fantastic devices, energy, and food. Also they have three evil cities that all hate each other and constantly intrigue against one another because they're Tzeentch Town. There's a lot of words about the various superstitions and all of the three very interchangeable cities, but really the core hook here is just an evil wizard planet that looks nicer than it is. Your PCs will probably get involved in intrigue or trade in souls or something. Berin and Asphodel are a pair of newly sucked-in planets, one full of orks, one full of kroot. They fight. Both can be recruited to join your chaos army if you'll get them off the bloody hellholes they've found themselves in. When the planets get close enough they engage in planetary boarding actions against one another. The Hollows I've mentioned elsewhere, but it's a planet of mad wizard scientists locked in wizard wars over wizard science. Wars that have caused the planet to mostly stop rotating, which is making it slowly flatten and spin-out like pottery clay. This is the planet where the original wizard-king-scientist accidentally (or maybe intentionally) animated an entire city as a daemon engine and then vanished, and now Forge Pollox and Forge Castir fight over his legacy and the planet's terrible secrets. If you need wizards who are also techpriests, or really big guns, or robots with demons in them, come kill some people for one side or the other and get paid in techloots. The Writhing World is a meat planet made of meat. It is a worm-planet full of continents of flesh that shift and scamper and scurry all over the place. Mighty wizard biomancers control entire walking cities of flesh and lead primitive tribes across its surface. There isn't much given for the region besides 'worm planet'. Kurse is a former Dark Age of Technology colony that went crazy when it got sucked into space-hell, as you do. They then proceeded to blow themselves up like everyone in 40k does, eventually resulting in a planet that is 'a guttering ember of a world' and mostly serves as a port of call and gathering place for devil pirates. Most activity is in the orbital habitats built by the Magi of Forge Castir, where the main industry is gladiatorial killing because this is Chaos. The surface is still full of lost tech for adventurers to loot, while the habitats are some of the more 'normal' and livable parts of the Vortex, providing Chaos armies with people and laborers in between big gladiatorial games. Malignia is a temperate, forested planet whose name should probably give you a clue that it's actually a murderous death-world whose life hates everything. These are a dime a dozen in 40k and I don't know why people keep trying to live on them. There is a past warlord who supposedly built an enormous pleasure dome somewhere on this planet, full of 'concubine-witches and mighty treasures' and defended by guns and the local wildlife, if your PCs feel like having a standard D&D dungeon crawl. Otherwise, this is a bog standard Death World that could be anywhere in the setting. Much more interesting is the Anathema: There's a small globe of Reality that is holding out against the Warp, somewhere in the Vortex. None of the evil powers of the place have managed to get inside of it, and they have no idea what might be within. Whatever it is, it freaks the locals out to no end that there's a little Reality tumor in their hell-plane, and most who witness it make worried prayers for protection to the Gods of the Warp at the sight of a stellar phenomena that makes the Warp recoil so. Sacgrave was a major pirate port full of pirate fortifications until it pissed off enough Eldar. At that point we get a long and boring description of how many ships the Eldar sent against them to crush them, and how even worse than the Eldar, the Eldar had ACTUAL MAIN CHARACTERS (Space Marines, from the Grey Knights Demonhunters) with them so their victory was assured. The pirates were slaughtered, and now the planet is a pirate grave full of rumors (but no actual substance, as of yet) of hidden, ancient pirate treasure. This takes the book like 3 pages to get across. Messia is a Mad Max Planet full of drugged up mercenary warboys, as you'll recall from the Chem Hunter of Messia hyperclass. Great road-fortresses fight over water and drilling rigs, biker gangs battle each other, and we've seen this a thousand times. Mutant biker hordes fighting in the ruins of a destroyed civilization over precious resources and all that. Guess who makes a surprise appearance from Dark Heresy! It's the Scarystar! I mean, ahem, it is Dread Koumos, THE TYRANT STAR. It shows up in the Vortex, too, and does exactly what it does in Calixis: Make people go a little weird for awhile and then leave. The difference is the people of the Vortex regard this as a little blase rather than a sign of the apocalypse. A local curiosity, nothing more. Finally, you have the Cat's Cradle, a series of many worlds you're mostly left to invent existing in a huge spatial anamoly with the curious feature that people can walk between the worlds. Literally. You can, at the right time, just jump interstellar distances under normal human power and land on another world. You cannot get into the deeper inner ring of the Vortex without passing through this region, and it is full of evil wizards who seek to trick you with the black arts if you should trespass their wizardly domains. Next Time: The Inner Rings.
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May 31, 2018 18:36
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By the way, would it be OK if I wrote up a miniature game at some point? IDK hownbad it is mechanically, but the writing/fluff is, welll... it was released in 1996 and one of the three devs is wearing a trenchcoat in tbe group photo.
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May 31, 2018 20:07
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I love the bat-poo poo crazyness of the Vortex worlds. It takes the best of the that special science-fantast weirdness of old 2000AD comics and just runs with it. WH40K for me gets boring when it tries to be grounded. The insanity of literally walking between worlds mixed with the abundance of post-apocalyptic societies in all states of reestablishment makes for good fodder for adventures. Hell, all of 40K should be set in the Vortex Worlds, maybe with a few normal places just for contrast.
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May 31, 2018 20:13
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Really? I'm finding the Vortex way, way more boring than I remembered it on a re-read. Very little of it actually rises above 'about what you'd expect from 40k'. I think the Cat's Cradle is the only place that stands out like I remembered it from years ago, so far. E: For whatever reason, I remembered it being way more out there than it is. Much more stuff like the Cat's Cradle, less 'This is a barbarian hellwar planet, this is an industrial hellwar planet, this is the mad max hellwar planet'. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 20:40 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 20:28
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JcDent posted:By the way, would it be OK if I wrote up a miniature game at some point? IDK hownbad it is mechanically, but the writing/fluff is, welll... it was released in 1996 and one of the three devs is wearing a trenchcoat in tbe group photo. I say 
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May 31, 2018 20:57
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JcDent posted:By the way, would it be OK if I wrote up a miniature game at some point? IDK hownbad it is mechanically, but the writing/fluff is, welll... it was released in 1996 and one of the three devs is wearing a trenchcoat in tbe group photo. Always be posting. Also, they’ve been done here before - I did Freebooter’s Fate ages ago, and I know I’ve been meaning to write up a bunch of post-apocalyptic skirmish games.
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May 31, 2018 22:30
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Night10194 posted:The Aelfir are also at that solid place between being powerful and frightening opponents, but actually having enough room for the PCs to work against them. They're generally disorganized and out of touch, leaving you cracks to slip into and work with. That sounds so great. In a lot of espionage style games, you end up having to just leave weird gaps to make fun stuff possible. You just sorta hope your players never notice that all the noise they make never seems to bring any heat, because you really don't feel like slowing the scene down with a bunch of cops showing up every time. So with everyone in this thread picking up the Spire, who's going to run a forum game?
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May 31, 2018 22:51
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JcDent posted:By the way, would it be OK if I wrote up a miniature game at some point? IDK hownbad it is mechanically, but the writing/fluff is, welll... it was released in 1996 and one of the three devs is wearing a trenchcoat in tbe group photo.  Also I have some unique stuff I need to dig for in the piles of stuff littering my apartment and only by promising to bring it forth can I be sure that I'll actually search. Teaser: two original DnD adventures written by the Israeli publisher of TSR in the 90's. E: E: found some scans online. First module: The Moon Women, or The Lunar Women if you prefer.  Second module: War of the living statues.  By popular demand fucked around with this message at 23:31 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 22:56
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War of the Living Statues sounds like it might be unusual plot-wise.
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May 31, 2018 23:19
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Both of the modules are nothing to write home about, but I figured that since they are almost unknown I should review them. They are not well known in here either, a quick search found them for sale on some FLGS, the page was set up in 2009 and no one paid the price yet (100 ils and 40 ils for a damaged copy)
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May 31, 2018 23:27
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I'm gonna start with some background info. Dungeons and Dragons The Dream Lands campaign setting (All of two modules) Unfortunately there's scarce little information on the internet about the author and the publishing company, but I'll do my best. From about 1989 until the mid 90's Mitzuv was the sole franchise publisher of TSR and some other gaming and book companies. Other than D&D and AD&D Mitzuv also published fantasy and SF novels as well as gamebooks from Steve Jackson Games, mostly Fighting Fantasy. The writer and producer of the modules is Geva Perry, who translated many of the books published by Mitzuv and was by all accounts one of the first gaming and post-Tolkien* fantasy nerds in Israel. Both adventures are set on a vast continent called Nulimis or Nolimis (Hebrew is a funny language) in the setting of The Dream Lands. Map to come later. *The Hobbit was first translated into hebrew in 1976. E: it's 02:20 and I just took Ambien so let me quickly summerize the back blurbs before I turn into a frothing racist and you guys can decide which I'll start with. Lunar ladies: Empress Elvira(sic) tasks the PC's with recovering the stolen enchanted staff of fertility back from the amazon women of the moon (and they seem to like fetish cloths). War of the living statues: The Baron is missing! The search party is missing! The king hires you to figure out just what is happening. "The king thinks that the baron intends to rebel against him, but the true occurrences are stranger, more horrible and dangerous by far!" By popular demand fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Jun 1, 2018 |
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Jun 1, 2018 00:10
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Lunar Ladies and any translation sperging you wanna do is very appreciated. (I’m assuming you speak Hebrew.)
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Jun 1, 2018 00:52
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Sure, Hebrew has Diacritics which, Wikipedia will explain change the way certain syllables are pronounced. The fun bit is that we rarely if ever use diacritics anymore, and so Geva is leaving me to decide how each name is pronounced. Theoretically the empress could be called: Alvira, Albira, Aelvira. But Geva is an unimaginative hack, so I'm going with the obvious fantasy nerd reference. I really think that he named the continent Nolimit and changed the last letter. By popular demand fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Jun 1, 2018 |
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Jun 1, 2018 01:11
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Night10194 posted:If you need wizards who are also techpriests, or really big guns, or robots with demons in them, come kill some people for one side or the other and get paid in techloots. I didn't know until you said it, but I want a cyborg wizard-gun more than anything in the world now.
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Jun 1, 2018 07:11
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Rand Brittain posted:Okay, so, I have been suckered by you into buying Spire and wow, the aelfir really are amazing villains. I particularly love the bit about how their mask rituals are so complex, and they're so averse to asking questions, that every single one of them is just getting by on bluff. So the complex rules about masks are actually a gigantic game of Mornington Crescent? And whenever an Aelfir desperately makes up a rule on the spot everyone around him will nod sagely and say "of course I knew that", quietly adding it to their store of what they 'know'.
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Jun 1, 2018 08:13
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Cultures: Purgare, pt. 4 Degenesis Rebirth Primal Punk Chapter 2: Cultures Roma  A picture from earlier in the Purgare write up. Roma posted:A Bygone historian once wrote: “In Rome, everything converges, from everywhere, the terrible and the nefarious, all is being celebrated.” What was meant to describe the past should prove prophetic.  The miasma from the Reaper's Blow erodes the palaces of the city, leaving them pockmarked and black, and any windows still existing are covered by soot. Having spent the last week in Rome, I don't see the difference. The surviving people live in the catacombs and dig tunnels into buildings. They nest in St. Peter's Basilica (I bet the high dome is sooo easy to seal from the poisonous vapors), loot libraries and palaces. “The Romani do not care much for the past,” writes the book in the most hilarious translation faux pas. I doubt that Rome is fully inhabited by the Roma people. Anyways, current Romans are looting the city and selling poo poo to Neolybians, who pay in gold, weapons and delicacies. Only one type of the goods mentioned seems to be obviously useful to post apocalyptic people in a hellhole city, but what do I know. Also, the book claims that Neolybians are waiting in the port with their transports. Since the citizens of Rome don't care about the past and insist on living in the underground of some poisoned city instead of running to the east, they burn fires in ancient halls, eat their simple meals from golden bowls and cosplay Metro 2033 in many other ways. Roma posted:Some Purgans read from books, others sit on them. Whores walk from one man to the next, whispering into their ears, smiling coyly and leaning against statues of ancient Roman senators. A Spitalian deserter – or simply someone in a Spitalian suit – treats sores. Africans sit in a circle next to Purgans, chatting about their adventures at sea. They wait for a passage to Corpse where they intend to join the Apocalyptics’ pirate crews. The Burn addicts lie amidst the crowd, spores flake from their mouths, and the Purgan sign blossoms on their chests, first red, then white. The section on Rome ends with “the Romani celebrate life instead of cursing it.” This is stupid on both translation and on the meta level. Sure, let terminal Burn cases spread spores among you, that will surely end well. Corpse I guess neither Sicily, nor Sardinia had names that could be easily edgy-fied. Apparently, the Reaper's Blow is 2500 meters under the water (finally, back to metric), causing bubbles and vortexes that can gently caress up entire fleets at a time.  Picture goes here. It's the island of pirates. They had left so many stolen ships to rust on the shores that they from a barrier on the east and south shores of the island. The pirates put catapults and harpoons (because Waterworld) on top, and a/the fairway can be blocked with chains. The west is guarded by the shore rising thirty steps (?) over the water, and a dangerous current that frequently smashes ships up. The pirates use this as a base for piracy in the Med. African tankers as well as coastal cities are all good targets. Only Rome is spared. The myth is that pirates are too proud to deal with that shithole; the truth it that Rome trades well. Pirates also rework African rifles into Lupatas. I guess they have many spares, since Tripoli sends Scourgers to clear the island, yet their boats only become a part of the barrier. Oh, an peep at this map:  That's Corsica and Sardinia joined into one thing. It's a poo poo ton of territory for the pirates to control. Bedain Bedain posted:Olive groves and vineyards, healthy crops in abundance, a mild climate and friendly people – this is how Sicily greeted the Africans. They answered by first igniting the ports with incendiary grenades from their ships and then sending out hundreds of Scourgers. Surge Tanks crashed into the docks, their tracks crushed the ancient concrete. They rolled through the fields and stopped in front of settlements, shaking and roaring. Buggies encircled them, hunted those who tried to escape. The Neolibyan Sarahali, a big man with hands like paws and a tendency to flamboyant gestures confronted the island’s eldest, put an arm around his shoulders and walked through the village with him. Sarahali wasn't that good with Purgan, so he used an ancient word for belly, Bedain, to name the place, and it stuck. Africans don't even use “Sicily” as a name anymore, while any Purgan who does so is whipped. When Sarahali said that Bedain would “breast-feed the Lion,” he probably had fermented milk in mind, since he only cares for the wine production and not foodstuff. He has also transformed Syracuse into a major hub for the looting of the Med, with hundreds of ships moored there at a time. If we're going to take the timeline seriously, the Africans probably struck Spain first, then, once the war bogged down, they moved to looting Franka. And now, with Badain being taken within living memory/lifetime of Sarahali, they have turned to the rest of the region... which still isn't much, what with the Adriatic being dry, the Balkhans being famously a pain to penetrate, and Turkey mostly overgrown with Psychovores. So maybe there is enough stuff to loot, but not for long. Scrap, once offloaded, gets picked over by Scrappers, with useful stuff fixed up and loaded up for sale in Tripoli. Bedain posted:The remainders are heaps of iron shores and broken machinery surrounded by a nest of cables and rust – a Mecca for Scrappers. The placid Mediterranean city of Syracuse has become a rusty technodrome, the historical city center smoldering under thumb-thick steel sheets, riffle files, and metal beams. As we all know, “a Mecca for Scrappers” means “a pile of refuse that you already picked over for the good stuff, and now you're just doing it for scrap metal.”  I guess this is Bedain? The picture was on the opposite page of the Roma section. So we end our introduction to Purgare the usual way: with a brief overview of some strange periphery territory! It was definitely something. I guess it rains strange plantlife in Aaaaafricaaa
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Jun 1, 2018 09:37
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Dungeons and Dragons The Dream Lands First up the world map, taken from the second module as that's the better version.   the map is filled with silly and unimaginative names such as Pyromount(transliterated), cities named Gold, Silver, Electrum, and even some regions plainly named Good, Evil, Chaos and such. I invite any Hebrew fluent person who feels like listing them all to pitch in, if no one does then I'll get back to this after doing both modules. quote:The game "Dungeons and Dragons" has gone through a long way in Israel. I still remember the first days, to Carol Dalcanho, the inner illustrations artist. and a shout out to Ol' Gary Gygex. *This is true, in the early 90's RPG's were sold mostly at computer and bookstores. there was a market crash of sorts in the mid 90's, and at the early 00's new FLGS's started popping up to fill the niche. and now: The Lunar Ladies the module starts with a page of some generic starter GM tips; this adventure is for 4-7 character 12-16 level party. a note that it was first played at Israeli Dragon Tournament in Purim 1991. quote:About this adventure and the land in which it takes place up next: the Tismanian empire (that crescent shaped isle in the upper right and a bit of land bordering it) By popular demand fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Jun 1, 2018 |
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Jun 1, 2018 10:46
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The Lone Badger posted:So the complex rules about masks are actually a gigantic game of Mornington Crescent? And whenever an Aelfir desperately makes up a rule on the spot everyone around him will nod sagely and say "of course I knew that", quietly adding it to their store of what they 'know'. Yes. It would be considered gauche to hide the actual rules under any less than 3 layers of allegory, after all, which leaves no-one actually knowing for sure what they are. They count entirely on panache to see them through as they make it all up.
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Jun 1, 2018 12:43
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I appreciate that the Aelfir are so elven it makes them stupid.
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Jun 1, 2018 14:28
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Night10194 posted:Yes. It would be considered gauche to hide the actual rules under any less than 3 layers of allegory, after all, which leaves no-one actually knowing for sure what they are. They count entirely on panache to see them through as they make it all up. I love this whole thing as a mechanism for letting your players bullshit their way through what 'should' be delicate social interactions without having to actually remember a bunch of etiquette a la L5R/Glorantha/Tekumel
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Jun 1, 2018 15:00
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Doesn't Glorantha as a setting basically say character mannerisms are separate from players unless stated? Like saying the greeting which is never actually explicitly stated due to it being obvious if your character would know and say it or not. Being uptight in that setting sounds absurd to me.
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Jun 1, 2018 15:05
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It's an espionage setting where there are a bunch of cultural and practical reasons why most people go around with masks, disguises, and concealing clothes. It's a lovely example of a bunch of cultural stuff that fits its setting but is also clearly written towards making it easier to do the primary stuff you'll be doing. Also, having gotten to try it out a little myself, it's surprising how right things can potentially go for characters who are doing stuff they're actually good and trained at (and who get lucky). Domains especially go a really long way towards making sure that for 0 Difficulty actions you can often still throw 2d10, which at least gives you a 75% or so chance of succeeding (just potentially with stress) even if you don't have any associated skill. So, say, a PC who used to be Enlisted and took one of the Enlisted advances that gets them Compel and Order is going to be able to toss on a city watch uniform or allied defense force face-scarf and pretend to be a soldier or cop reasonably well even if they don't have Sneak. In practice the broad competences stuff works really well to enable players to try to come up with and execute a variety of plans. Basically Spire seems pretty good in play so far.
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Jun 1, 2018 15:18
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Night10194 posted:Really? I'm finding the Vortex way, way more boring than I remembered it on a re-read. Very little of it actually rises above 'about what you'd expect from 40k'. I think the Cat's Cradle is the only place that stands out like I remembered it from years ago, so far. I get the impression that they avoid the cliche of ‘this planet is earth, but more so’. Like ‘desert planet’, ‘jungle planet’ etc. There’s some variation to it that elevates it and makes these worlds more fun.
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Jun 1, 2018 15:20
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Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Black Crusade Avast, tis Cthulhu The Inner Worlds are supposedly a little weirder because they are more infused with the Warp, but there really isn't much of a qualitative difference between them and the outer worlds described previously. We start out with Aphexis, the planet of the boring. I'm not being critical or hyperbolic there; it's a grey world where there is neither day nor night, and where a large population drudges their way through joyless, neutral lives. Warlords occasionally come in and take over Aphexis, but they discover the people neither resist enough to be interesting, nor work hard enough to be worthwhile; no amount of mass slaughter, torture, or anything can get the Aphexians to do anything more than the bare minimum on anything. Eventually, every warlord gets bored and gives up. So yes, this is an entire planet that has learned that if you just ignore all the screaming toddler-like warlords of Chaos they'll get distracted by something else and go away. Next is Melancholia, which you might remember from the hyperclass the Flesh Shaper. Melancholia is another dull, grey planet of mind-numbing drudgery and boredom, except it has a purpose. The planet is set up like this to breed the most insane and complex internal lives of wild desire possible among its repressed, joyless inhabitants while the followers of Slaanesh watch from above, scanning for particularly amusing and blessed deviants to take up to space and introduce to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. These liberated turbo-puritans have incredible insight into the ways of the Prince of Pleasure and come up with the best schemes and masquerades and capers, as well as being able to master that tremendous evil shapeshifting magic from the special class. So yes, Slaanesh maintains an entire planet of horribly repressed, joyless puritans so he can unleash their pent up desires and introduce them to a world of color to see what happens. Mire is a swamp planet full of crazy eyed cannibal survivalist priests, who you might remember from the Death Priest of Mire. It gets like, one paragraph in the book. There's nothing else to say about it. It has a silly description where whole tribes will fight wars over a potato, I guess, which begs the question of how there are entire tribes on the planet at all, but warhams logic. Gee, do you think the planet of MAMMON might have to do with THE SIN OF GREED? It totally does. It's a resource-less rock with a divided population that each suspect the other side has all the treasure and fight each other over it. They are, of course, described as 'some of the most warlike and aggressive people in the galaxy' because really guys, this time it's exceptional, I swear. Rather than just being the boilerplate default for absolutely everyone in the drat setting. Oh, they also all still think they're Imperials despite being trapped in space hell. Furia is an ocean planet full of mad max pirates who live in terror of the Cthulhus below. It is unusual for being entirely an ocean; there are absolutely no dry parts of Furia and every settlement is a floating set of boats and flotsam lashed together, with a couple autocannons and missile launchers if they're lucky. The people have no sources of fresh water besides evaporation and the blood of the sea life they catch and eat, which pleases Khorne. Thirst and desperate poverty drive great moisture wars among the people, but they have to be careful not to make too much noise, or they'll attract a Leviathan. Let me just give you the Wounds, Armor, and TB of a Leviathan: 500 Wounds, 13 TB, Armor 14. Also, you can't actually reduce them below 300 Wounds unless you can attack them underwater. The Leviathans hate the scrap towns and will, if they realize one is there, track it across hundreds of miles to attack. They will withdraw if they take hits from a melta weapon or anything that can actually hurt them, though, so the towns fight endlessly over the wreckage of ancient scoutships and the means to drive off the roving monsters. The planet is also the graveyard of plenty of ancient ships, giving your PCs a reason to come here. Furia is a-okay. The Flaming Tomb is a fire planet that is on fire and produces fire wizards. That's...about it. It's a planet where everything is lava. The Lower Vortex is the region that is actually, fully space hell. Beyond the Inner Ring lies the regions where the Warp has full sway and all is madness. To enter, you must pass the tests of (or destroy) Greater Demons that guard the passage into the true heart of madness. Crucible is a planet into which the Dark Gods poured all the malice and sorrow of the extinguished races of the original Heaven Worlds, the first created Demon World of the Vortex. The presence of such complete and total agony makes it valuable to all four Gods, and their demons fight an endless war over who shall be ascendant in control of this planet. The entrapped souls and agonized victims of the planet experience different flavors of eternal suffering, shifting as the various Gods take control of the world and enact their standard business: Khorne raises them up to slaughter them again every day, Slaanesh gets all Hellraiser on them while telling them it's got to be fun, Nurgle lets them die and rot and be reborn again and again while assuring them he loves them, and Tzeentch is still just a cardboard cutout or a random number generator with 'clever plan' written on it so he spooks them by making no sense at all. Four flavors of completely conventional Chaos Hell! Contrition is basically just Hell. It's a city-planet of demons who are, again, constantly burning down and rebuilding the city depending on who rules the planet right now, while meeting up to focus test their latest lies, temptations, and schemes while enjoying torturing the mortals who fell for last quarter's most successful lies, temptations, and schemes. Finally, we have the Frozen Heart of the Vortex. This is the icy center of Hell, where Satan sits and chews on Judas and- Oh, right. Wrong Hell. It's a totally unknown planet that has some pretty disappointing adventures in the Nurgle book where you get killed by an infinite boss fight and then judged by Chaos based on how many waves of infinite enemies they cleared (or if they won and the GM got bored and declared they all died anyway). The fluff in the main book instead focuses on how if the Heart could be explored and calmed, you could open the way for truly enormous fleets and armies to escape the Vortex rather than raiding bands, letting you make it equal to the Eye of Terror and launch your crusade. This is far better than it containing an old guy who asks you what you want and then summons an unwinnable boss fight based on it. And there you have it, the Screaming Vortex. What really stands out about the outer worlds is that when I think on it, they just sound like normal Imperial planets for the most part. Just with more skulls in. I'd remembered it being more...imaginative? There are certainly hooks, and some of the planets are fine, but like all things Chaos it's surprisingly tame when you get down to it. Next Time: A brief delve into the enemies you can face, and why Necrons suck
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Jun 1, 2018 16:04
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Dungeons and Dragons The Dream Lands The Lunar Ladies The module proper begins with this gorgeous piece of art:  after that there's a three paragraph description of the Tismanian empire: 800 years ago one kingdom started to absorb its neighbors peacefully or otherwise and today the empire is a union of various kingdoms and domains. this was a short summery of background-not-appearing-in-this-module. player's background: Tismanian views on gender roles are rather regressive which pisses off the goddess of fertility, Caroline. The priesthood of Caroline and the struggle for equal rights again, will not impact the adventure in any way. Hundreds of years ago an empress had no male children, she prayed to Caroline for male heirs and the goddess gave her a magical staff that will give her the ability to choose what gender the baby will be born as. BUUUUT Caroline is still a vindictive goddess, and so if the staff is not in the empress' possession than no males would be born ANYWHERE in the empire. the possibly NSW staff: https://i.imgur.com/At6mxXh.png this awful sidebar is plastered on every single page. the staff was magicked away by a nation of warrior women (no word on how the empress knows whodunit), who wish to weaken Tismania for future conquest. I'll detail the Lunar Ladies when we get there. The empress is to be executed for losing the staff in one month because we need a deadline, I guess. Empress Elvira calls for the characters in secret and promises 12,000gp and a magic item each for the job. Part the first: the journey south to Moonland(transliterated)  After two days ride (no significant events, just some merchants and travelers SIC) the party reaches The Magic Forest, here they notice a trail of gold coins!  the trail seems like it was caused by some unnoticed hole in someone's bag, after 200 meters it comes to an opening in the ground- anyone taller than a dwarf must bend to enter. This is of course the world's most obvious trap and the party is assumed to take the bait hook line and sinker.  This handsome fellow is a monster called a Goldshitter, which is transliterated. goddamit Geva you loving hack. It hides behind some trees and rolls a bolder for 8D10 damage into the lair and then enters through a secret entrance to finish off the survivors. quote:Goldshitter It can attack two different characters with its claws then bite another with a 2D10 poison which keeps effecting until cured (says the only effective spell is Cure-all but I don't have the rulebooks so I'm not sure which spell it is) Reward: 8,000 REAL gp and a +2 double handed sword. As you may have guessed other than the treasure in the lair all other coins are monster droppings and while indistinguishable they disintegrate in 3 hours. Next: Day 2.
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Jun 1, 2018 16:43
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Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Black Crusade Monster Manual One thing I'll note in favor in BC: It has the most complete Adversaries section of any of the core books outside of maybe Dark Heresy 1e. You get enough enemies and monsters to provide some actual variety, and some of the big names and heavy hitters are right in the core book. You want a Lord of Change for some reason? Bird dude is right here in the main book. Don't know why the Bloodthirster is in the Khorne book instead, but he is. He's also mechanically almost impossible to defeat because he has 99% WS, may attack in a way that cannot be active defended, and does enough damage to instantly gib almost any PC (3d10+25 Pen 10 Felling 2) but you know, Bloodthirster. They were basically impossible to beat outside of a very lucky Bret Knight with Virtue of Heroism or a battery of cannon back in WHFRP, too. (The solution here is to have multiple lascannons and shoot him before he gets into melee) Even nicer, they actually have whole tiers of human enemies, Imperial enemies, and multiple xeno races to fight. The basic enemy list is actually full enough that I can't go through it all in detail like I could with, say, Deathwatch. You get everything from insane assassin droids to enemy human heretic heroes/warlords to Chaos Marines to Grey Knights among the various human/Marine enemies. Guardsmen, cultists, skilled bounty hunters, an example Inquisitor who looks like Carmen San Diego with a plasma pistol, you name it, you've got it. On the whole, this is fantastic. Or rather it would be if the game mechanics mattered much. Most of these enemies will still get vaporized in one or two rounds of solid combat and combats are going to come down to rocket tag and initiative rolls, for the most part. Bigger foes will often have hundreds of Wounds to try to stop that happening. Later human enemies will often be given 70-100 Wounds in the later sourcebooks, because they finally figured out that the damage in their system was completely out of control. This will not be extended to PCs. You also get the Grey Knights. These are instead your run of the mill turbo paladin 'more Marine than Marine' Grey Knights from the old Codex: Daemonhunters, who hate all forces of Chaos so much that they will often be found buddying up with space elves or in other unusual places so long as it lets them hurt demons. They are a Chapter made entirely of Psykers, recruited from the Black Ships and sequestered on Titan in the Sol system until they're needed, then sent out in their holy warp-resistant armor with their Force halberds to go cut infinite demons in half. They are somehow actually more Original Marine: Do Not Steal special character types than Ultramarines, and are herein presented as being a massive threat to your heretics given they all have Force Weapons, a hands-free stormbolter, better than Marine average stats, and Terminator Armor (Not being able to dodge renders them vulnerable to our good friend Lascannon, though). They are also known for once having killed a whole bunch of uncorrupted Sisters and smeared their 'holy blood' all over themselves so they could steal a daemon weapon once. We also get Eldar Harlequins, the Kill Clowns. These are Eldar performers who worship their Trickster God, Ceogarach, who tricks Slaanesh out of their souls. They go around fighting Chaos and carrying messages between the torture-pirate elves, the normal pirate elves, and the craftworld elves while performing elaborate interpretive dances that tell the history of their people, including the story of the Fall. They are extremely fast dodge tanks who have 2 Dodges a turn at 77% and reroll failed Dodges once, while doing a lot of damage at high skill and having insanely high movement; inadvertently Eldar are actually the ideal character for the Warhammer 40k Roleplay system. The second they fail one of those dodges they're dead, though. They're often led by an illusionist wizard with Psy 8 who can mess with your mind and who is even better at fighting than their Harlequins. You also get Dark Eldar, who like to make deals with Chaos and then backstab it, or get together to enjoy torture piracy together, and like the Harlequins they're fast dodge tanks who do a lot of damage and usually go first. We get the various Demon enemies, who are all really scaled up from how relatively weak they were in DH: No more Primitive for any of these guys. Bloodletters, for instance, have been upgraded to d10+13 Pen 10 +2 damage per kill they get in a fight foes who hit like a truck (but still can't take being hit back). Daemonettes still kind of suck and mostly exist to get blended like fodder, though. Horrors and Plaguebearers are nasty enough, too; it's really only Daemonettes of Slaanesh that stand out as lovely fodder that will have trouble even hurting a human PC in solid armor. We also get an example Slaaneshi Daemon Princess, who is made out of a solipsistic noblewoman who managed to get her world dragged into hell mostly by accident; she was taught how to summon a Keeper of Secrets and take it into herself so as to destroy her as a cunning scheme by a court sorcerer. Instead, she was so strong-willed and self-obsessed that she kind of just ate the demon. And then summoned a few others and did the same, ascending to demonhood and dragging her world into hell. No, I'm not sure how that worked either. She's a taste of what 'boss' level enemies look like: Massive, massive stats like 14 TB, 8 AV, 105 Wounds, 81 Agility and Dodge+10, that sort of thing. Also a powerful psyker and has a +20 WP test or be unable to attack her, with people who fail by 20 or more turning to her side. Will still die to multiple lascannon hits. And finally we get the Necrons. I believe these Necrons predate the full Tomb Kings in Space reboot, but they're as boring as they ever were. They're an unstoppable force that you can't hurt or defeat that runs around doing inscrutable things and blowing up Chaos Lords. Mechanically, they absolutely suck to fight; they get to inflict Zealous Hatred like PCs with their Gauss rifles. They do it on a 9+, too. The ones contained in the core book are basically slower, tougher Space Marines who walk forward critting you repeatedly with their lightning-gauss gun while saying nothing and possessing no actual personality. The Tzeentch book adds in their Reanimation Protocols, giving every downed Necron a Toughness test each turn to get back up with Wounds equal to their Regeneration trait. If they fail it by 30 they actually die. Gee, you know what sounds more fun than fighting a bunch of slow-moving tanks with powerful rifles that cause status effects all the time? Doing it when they keep getting back up. That's certainly an interesting challenge and not just a way to make fighting an already dull and annoying enemy even moreso. Horde rules exist but function exactly as they did in Deathwatch, so no need to go back over them. With that, we have now finished the mechanics and fluff of Black Crusade. Next Time: A wrapup of BC and 40k Night10194 fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jun 1, 2018 |
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Jun 1, 2018 17:25
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Night10194 posted:I should probably also talk about the fluff of some of the enemies, particularly the Grey Knights. Now, note: Black Crusade was written in 2011. The infamous codex of the Grey Knights that included slaughtering a bunch of uncorrupted, on-their-side Sisters and smearing themselves with their holy blood for more power (and this being treated as 'cool') wasn't published until 2014. This is wrong as it was the Grey Knight codex that was published in 2011 that had the infamous Sister incident.
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Jun 1, 2018 17:47
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