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From the kickstarter thread:gnome7 posted:And I have finally completed the book from my third kickstarter. Panic at the Dojo is available for sale! It's time to throw your money at the screen to make things happen!
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Sep 9, 2018 02:26
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Mors Rattus posted:I really think it’s important to note that the social normalization fairy is backed by a bunch of evil, psychotic trees that whisper into the minds of the elf equivalent of the guys from Deliverance. It was here, very belatedly, I realized that part of an entire faction in the setting are essentially the trees from The Wizard of Oz. "How would you like it if somebody picked YOUR apples!?"
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Sep 9, 2018 02:54
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psudonym55 posted:I can't speak for the entire Enemy Within campaign but the campaign expects you to have completed the oldenhaller contract which is the starter adventure in the 1e core rulebook. The enemy withins reputation is (in my opinion) based pretty much on the first two parts. Shadows over Bogenhaven is pretty good, and Death on the Reik is just amazing. After that Power Behind the Throne is much like book 2 of Paths of the damned as mentioned previously. Lot's of running around talking to NPC's following up plot threads, and it's a bit dull and very easy to mess things up. Something Rotten in Kislev is just bad. It's rail-roady, the difficulty spikes are all over the place, an always annoying "The party get unskippably captured" bit.Climaxing in a final boss who they don't bother to stat who has explicit permission to break the rules over his knees and defeat the party in any way he likes including a second "Unskippably captured". Oh and let's not forget the "Unskippably shipped North" that is your reward for completing the last adventure in the first place. Finally, it's completly unconnected with the whole 'Empire in Peril' adventure path you've been following up to this point. Can't really speak to Empire in Flames/Chaos as we never got that far, but I've glanced through a PDF copy and wasn't impressed. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 09:54
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Night10194 posted:we took a break from the campaign to go play Spire. I want someone to talk about playing Spire. It's semi-amazing that there isn't a thread yet. Death on the Reik is, in large part, amazing for being a Traveller campaign set on riverboats instead of starships. Which reminds me, I should write up Traveller Adventure 3: Twilight's Peak.
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Sep 9, 2018 10:24
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Eh, I had some spare time and dug up a copy of Something Rotten in Kislev and was reminded of all the bullshit I'd forgotten. So let's have a quick runthrough. So, as I said. The first problem is it's totally disconnected from the overarching grand campaign it's supposedly a part of. To the point where Cubicle 7 and others are/were apparently talking about doing a new edition of The Enemy Within and the talk was of replacing this episode entirely with something new, possibly involving Skaven. What this actually is, is a guide to Kislev, comined with a series of vaguely linked adventures. The Kislev part is fine, but it's the adventures that are the meat of the thing so let's focus on them. At this point lets introduce the Capture Counter. You know where the party are taken prisoner no matter what they do because the plot requires it. You know how much that players hate it, and how bullshit heavy-handed the GM often has to be to make it happen? Buckle up people. Capture counter = 1. Yep that's how the campaign begins. The players having completed the Middenheim adventure, and with absolutely no reason to travel a 1000 miles north start the game in Jail and are given no choice but to travel North by M's Duke where the party are all made Knights Panther and sent forth under a treaty obligation to help out the Kislevians. You at least get given suitable armour, weapons and a horse. No plate though, mail only. Of course if you're, as I was , playing a Wizard, or some other non-fighter focused type, then things start to look a bit silly. After that you're sent North. No adventures enroute are given, but it does point out you could add adventure and incident if you like, so fair enough I guess. At Kislev the Tsar is understandably unimpressed by this random collection of a small party of murderhobo's when he was expecting a substantial force of Knights. However you are given a chance to impress by trouble shooting a small problem one of his Nobles are having. The Beast Child I'm going to gloss over this one, it isn't actually that bad. It's got a few railroady bits and if the party fucks up, then x happens anyway. But a decent GM could make it work. It's got some roleplaying, combat, exploration and lots of strange spirits that could help or hinder you. Death takes a Holiday Oh boy. So having proved themselves they have a second task. quote:Go to some remote city called Chernozatvara and tell one Gurthgano Gorthaud that Sulring Durgal is involved in Bolgasgrad, he will instruct you further. Who is GG? How will we recognise him? Who is SD? What is happening in B? What will GG ask us to do? Are we supposed to do anything he asks? Just a few of numerous questions any PC's will have. Unfortunately. quote:This is all the information the PC's are given, Bogdanov will say no more. So they get to the city, actually a small fortified village, which is on an island. On the Island, surrounding it, are a force of Kislev horsemen. On the river banks are a large force of Hobgoblin steppe warriors. To get to the city they're going to have to get past the Hobgoblins, over the water, past the Kislevians and into the city. Now there's far to many Hobgoblins to fight so the smart play is to sneak through unless you really fancy your diplomatic skills. Especially since you probably have a party dwarf, and they have Hatred of Hobgoblins, and guess what Hobgoblins have ditto for Dwarves. So that's obviously a non-starter. However. quote:
Capture Counter = 2 So it turns out the Hobgoblins are sieging the Kislevians who were sieging the town which is full of the undead. Fortunately the Hobgoblin want's the PC's to deliver a message demanding their surrender to the Kislevians, and will only charge 3GP for passage, rather than say, stripping them of all valuables, sending one PC across with the message and keeping everyone else for torture/food/slaves  The party are stopped halfway by a volley of arrows at their feet. If they do anything to precipitous in return it's TPK time. Otherwise they are eventually stripped of weapons and taken to meet their leader. Capture Counter = 3 You end up meeting a Shaman that tells you the town is overrun by undead who they were unsuccessfully attempting to deal with. quote:If the PC's are uncooperative, Dafa (the Shamen) will help them anyway, as it's in his best interests. Why he thinks a small group of foreign weirdo's will have better luck than his much larger warband is unclear. So the party get into the city, helped perhaps by a distraction from the Kislevian. It is over-run with undead. Not vanilla zombies either. They can sense life and have been given enchantments that make them very hard to destroy. And they all want to grapple with the PC's. Capture Counter = 4 No really. We stood no chance when we played it, and I can't see it go any other way. There's so many goddamn zombies and they'll all super hard to put down. quote:Once a PC is surrounded by two or three zombies he's a goner. Sooner or later they'll make a successful grappling check and the others will show up to help. Up to 4 zombies can grapple a player at once and allgrapples must be broken to break free. So it's off to the tower. So our party find themselves brought before the mysterious Gurthgano, who turns out to be a Dwarven Necromancer who calls himself Annandil. Annandil has an actually interesting backstory. He was discovered as a foundling by (presumably not very bright or observant) Elves, who raised them as their own only to discover he was a dwarf and later exiled him. Much exposition follows. Annandil give some tips about the undead, their lore and fighting them, and that Surling Durghal is a mighty Elven Necromancer who is alledgedly 5 millenia old that he had brief dealings with a few years ago. Plus he just happens to have a few useful magic items to fight undead that he no longer needs, that the party can have! Assuming they don't try to kill him, which is probably going to end in a TPK he then releases them to go. There are a few wrinkles though. The party must swear an oath, backed by a terrible curse* that Necromancy is totes cool, and that the party can only fight provably evil Necromancer in future. Those refusing to swear are recruited into the ranks of his Zombie minion. Hope there isn't a Raven Knight, Priest of Morr or similar in the party. Also the party are still stuck in the middle of a band of Kislevian warriors who are hoping and expecting you to have dealt with what ever evil was within, and the Hobgoblins are waiting to hear you bring back the K's surrender. Fortunatly Annadil has a option for you........ This is running way longer than I though. Rejoin us in a day or two for 'The escape! 'and SRIK part 3 'Things really get bullshit'. *That is not detailed in any way. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 19:20
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Huh, I thought only Chaos Dorf sorcerers could use actual magic as dorfs. E: Warhammer Premades in general have a huge thing for railroading and trying to puzzle out the exact solutions the scenario designer came up with. And lovely combat balance. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 19:32
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First edition they could, only they have half the magic points of a normal caster. It's irrelevant here as Annadil isn't statted. If you somehow get past the zombies, or indeed later attack him,the book tells you he just goes invisible and uses sleep spells to put the party to sleep. There may be some 'early installment weirdness' going on here. WFRP may predate the introduction of Chaos Dwarves as a proper faction. I'm not sure of the timeline here. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 19:41
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Yeah, from what I understand there's a lot of different stuff from 80s/early 90s warhammer. Like how Bretonnia used to be pre-revolutionary france and got all the knight stuff added on later.
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Sep 9, 2018 19:46
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They pull the exact same being captured with no chance to escape, avoid or interact with the being captured in anyway in The Thousand Thrones. Where the party is captured, dragged to a town, stripped of all of their equipment and made to investigate a missing chicken under threat of being shot dead if they try to leave the town.
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Sep 9, 2018 20:09
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psudonym55 posted:They pull the exact same being captured with no chance to escape, avoid or interact with the being captured in anyway in The Thousand Thrones. that has to be one loving special chicken to go through all that effort for something that's likely to have been snatched by a fox or feral dog
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Sep 9, 2018 20:14
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This was no chicken. This was evil manifest. 
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Sep 9, 2018 20:16
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, from what I understand there's a lot of different stuff from 80s/early 90s warhammer. Like how Bretonnia used to be pre-revolutionary france and got all the knight stuff added on later. The best Bretonnia is the one that's both. The cities are going whole-hog on copying Marienburg, everywhere else it's knights and damsels and Maximum Chivalry and they're all trying very hard to make it work.
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Sep 9, 2018 20:30
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It's a perfectly ordinary chicken that leads to a set of pretty tedious fetch/npc interaction quests. An old man has a bit of purple cloth but the get the cloth from him you need to get a pie but to get the pie you need to do something else and so on and so forth. Which leads to investigating a suicide and then suddenly vampires! Or you can not investigate anything and sit in the stocks until the vampires attack. psudonym55 fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 20:39
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The parts of Thousand Thrones I skimmed all looked like unfun horseshit.
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Sep 9, 2018 20:40
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The Thousand Thrones is pretty much all unfun horse poo poo. The entire thing is pretty much on rails from step one. Several of the chapters are literally designed to waste your time. The entirety of chapter 7 is a red herring designed to do nothing but to waste the players time. They pull the story important npc getting kidnapped several times with no way for the party to stop or even interact with in in any way possible.
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Sep 9, 2018 20:46
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What we have here is the classic Warhammer dichotomy. The setting has compelling and evocative ideas but it's written by idiots who turned up because they were busy wanking to the idea of GRIMDARK. So all is woe and suffering and tedium to impress on the players that everything is miserable and the only fun you're allowed should come from stamping on human faces forever.
Loxbourne fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 21:58
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The weird thing is that the dichotomy is between the sourcebooks and the adventures. Like, look at the Bret book: Every page had something great, then the adventure is just a pile of railroading where a Damsel laserbeams the boss after he was about to nosell being beaten and NPCs do everything. Somehow that's in the same book with 'If you fail a check, you CAUSE AN ADVENTURE!'
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Sep 9, 2018 22:00
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The only WFRP scenario of any edition that I've actually run (When it's my turn to GM I almost invariably write my own stuff) was the short scenario with the Vampire and the warpstone tainted wine from the Realms of Sorcery supplement. Which with a little tinkering to rough off the edges is a fun little caper I used to start a campaign. I've played a lot of them though, and my fellow GM was usually able to find the diamonds in the rough. Haven't played/read a Thousand Thrones, but I played a lot of the Paths of the Damned* and there was definite Jank in there, even with a decent DM. Whoever said that WFRP scenarios in particular seem to be written expecting you to find the one true solution and you have to fumble around till you find it is bang on. I think an ability to ignore/rewrite egregious nonsense is probably core skill no.1 for a GM if you're running a pre-written scenario. I'm over a year and entering the home stretch of running Storm Kings Thunder (was to busy to write my own stuff for once) for 5E now, and I had to change a lot. *Edit: Checking online, maybe we only played the first two, Ashes of Middenheim and Spires of Altdorf. The plot of Forges of Nuln rings not a single bell
Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 22:01
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psudonym55 posted:It's a perfectly ordinary chicken that leads to a set of pretty tedious fetch/npc interaction quests. An old man has a bit of purple cloth but the get the cloth from him you need to My brother did this adventure and in this one he accidentally skipped right to the end. See, his strategy was to temporarily ignore the stupid chicken thing and go off and investigate the graveyard in order to see if they could find something worth stealing or something. And when they found an unlocked grave with what appeared to be a big old vampire's lair in it full of sleeping vampires, they went back and got the lord's knights and all and assaulted them in the middle of the afternoon instead of at night. Moral of the story: Always try and steal poo poo.
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Sep 9, 2018 22:11
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Deptfordx posted:The only WFRP scenario of any edition that I've actually run (When it's my turn to GM I almost invariably write my own stuff) was the short scenario with the Vampire and the warpstone tainted wine from the Realms of Sorcery supplement. Which with a little tinkering to rough off the edges is a fun little caper I used to start a campaign. The one where the PCs accidentally step into a castle full of vampires and every single vampire instantly wants to recruit them into plots targeting all the other vampires is also excellent. I'm hard on GW settings, and I'll stand by my harsh judgments, but when the authors unwind themselves and stop thinking more human suffering = better writing, they can produce some darn good stuff.
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Sep 9, 2018 22:38
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I don't recall that one, where's it from?
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Sep 9, 2018 22:47
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, from what I understand there's a lot of different stuff from 80s/early 90s warhammer. Like how Bretonnia used to be pre-revolutionary france and got all the knight stuff added on later. While it's pretty rare, I do run into a person now and then who's still upset about that.
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Sep 9, 2018 23:33
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Loxbourne posted:The one where the PCs accidentally step into a castle full of vampires and every single vampire instantly wants to recruit them into plots targeting all the other vampires is also excellent. I'm hard on GW settings, and I'll stand by my harsh judgments, but when the authors unwind themselves and stop thinking more human suffering = better writing, they can produce some darn good stuff. In general, Fantasy is at its best in the sections that make it feel like a world people actually live in. And it has a lot of these! Little things like how Apprentices who flunk out of the Imperial Wizard colleges are taught enough to stay stable then offered a job with the college or even just sent back out into life, just with Mag 1 and Magical Sense, rather than being ritually killed or tortured? Or how the Colleges are actual colleges and while you have to struggle with student loans and everything you actually do get to do cool poo poo and learn amazing magic? Or how the Bretonnians are all cheating the system because no-one could live in it as written, or the Kislevites have all these rich traditions and interesting conflicts with one another for fairly sane reasons? Or how peoples' reaction to mutation is actually making mutation one of Chaos's best tools. Those are the good parts. It just falls off the wagon sometimes, and unfortunately does so for like all of Sigmar's Heirs (we'll get to that one after Tome of Salvation) and gets back to MORE SUFFERING, GRIM AND PERILOUS. One of the other things I generally adore about the impression of the setting in the sourcebooks is that people are actually curious about their own world, and often when they're wrong, you can follow their logic and understand why they're wrong. Mutation really is (often) caused by contact with Chaos, and mutants often end up with Chaos (because they have nowhere else to go), so people make the mistake of assuming every mutant is a Chaos worshiper and react badly to the horrifying changes. It makes sense. People would do that.
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Sep 9, 2018 23:37
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Has the Empire ever noticed halflings never seem to mutate or is this just counteracted with trying to ignore their existence and the inability to take them seriously under any circumstances, potential cultists or otherwise?
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Sep 10, 2018 00:25
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Halflings are for pies and pipes. That's the beginning and end for the Empire and the emperor, I'm sure.
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Sep 10, 2018 01:09
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psudonym55 posted:It's a perfectly ordinary chicken that leads to a set of pretty tedious fetch/npc interaction quests. An old man has a bit of purple cloth but the get the cloth from him you need to Ha! I remember playing through that. My party got super lucky and actually managed to defeat the vampire. My elf Archer ended up with the vampire's black blade (and was totally going to have it destroyed the next time they were at a temple and wasn't saving it because it's a magic loving sword with a totally nothing of a curse attached to it.)
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Sep 10, 2018 06:55
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MonsterEnvy posted:Like foiling a Nurgle plot to poison a town or summon a great unclean one in it, is a victory. The fact that Chaos will try to do so again does not make it less of a victory. This guy gets it. I feel like a lot of players focus too much on saving the galaxy when saving a town, at least, would be enough. It's one of the gripes I have with Established Franchise Sci-Fi writers (40k, WHF, Star Wars...) where everyone wants to write a book about Death Start 2: Death Harder. But yeah, Chaos should have more stakes in it - at least of the "dick measuring between chaos gods" kind - for the mortal loses to count. Maybe let players traumatize a daemon enough it never wants to manifest again. Maybe lets them embarrass a god enough that their power wanes and others start moving in on their power. Heck, smacking down Nurgle would probably lead to a population explosion, which you can roll into new, other things. Players could also help dwarves regain their lands, too...
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Sep 10, 2018 07:29
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JcDent posted:This guy gets it. I feel like a lot of players focus too much on saving the galaxy when saving a town, at least, would be enough. It's one of the gripes I have with Established Franchise Sci-Fi writers (40k, WHF, Star Wars...) where everyone wants to write a book about Death Start 2: Death Harder.
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Sep 10, 2018 08:12
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Nessus posted:What I find kind of weird for a lot of things is that it's like there's nothing on the continuum between "save lovely little hamlet" and "save literally the entire setting and get a handjob from the elf queen." Like it's surprisingly rare to have something intermediate or just scope-having without it necessarily being a titanic apocalypse. Well, that too. I guess the former is a reaction against the latter, going too far the other route. You could destroy, say, a Beastman tribe, making Evilwald forest or what much safer and more open to trade between Empire and Whatever Else. You could go on an adventure to bring Manrienburg back into the fold. And, as I mentioned before, help drofs retake some settlement from gobbos. E: the thing about super specific adventure requirements reminds of computer quest games, which, when not involving pixel hunts, get to have really specific and sometimes bizarre solutions to problems. You can say that its a limitation of budgets and computing power or whatever, but you don't have the same issues when utilizing the brains of your players. You just have lovely adventure design.
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Sep 10, 2018 09:10
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Nessus posted:What I find kind of weird for a lot of things is that it's like there's nothing on the continuum between "save lovely little hamlet" and "save literally the entire setting and get a handjob from the elf queen." Like it's surprisingly rare to have something intermediate or just scope-having without it necessarily being a titanic apocalypse. It's difficult to articulate, but I think it's down to how it interacts with the setting. If you save Poophamlet from bandits... you change five square miles for the better, nothing big happens. If the entire world is under threat and you save it... you've pretty much already capped out the danger/power scale and afterwards is probably when the campaign ends with everyone riding off into the sunset or performing some heroic sacrifice. So whatever changes happen are primarily for the brief epilogue you write. But if, for instance, you have a campaign that only involves, let's say, Bretonnia, but really shakes it up as it occurs, then you've got a bit more work and challenge to deal with. Firstly, you've got to actually figure out what all these changes do, because the players are probably going to experience and interact with them. Secondly, it's touchy ground because in WFRP I think probably everyone has a favourite faction/nation and someone might get annoyed if, for instance, you undermine the entire assumption that his Bretonnian character was built on. If not treated well it can also come off a bit as writing bad fanfiction. So the mid-scale stuff is actually more challenging to pull off right than the top and bottom of the scale.
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Sep 10, 2018 09:26
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Maxwell Lord posted:7th Sea in general feels a lot like "We started writing a setting and never ever stopped" Well, they had to do something with their time, because it obviously wasn't mechanics.
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Sep 10, 2018 11:04
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PurpleXVI posted:If not treated well it can also come off a bit as writing bad fanfiction. That's how it feels when people go "let's turn this medieval stasis into an industrial revolution, also communism". Now, if you were supporting Erdarbeiters in the Empire...
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Sep 10, 2018 11:54
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I mean, the whole point is that Bretonnia's medieval stasis is specifically artificial and unstable, and also based on a mythology well known for ending in the fall of its king typically used to symbolise legends fading into history. (and for what it's worth, iirc Age of Sigmar basically has the whole death of King Arthur deal happen in the End Times and the remaining knights of Brettonnia go out crusading to the end)
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Sep 10, 2018 12:15
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Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:Warning! Welcome to 1999! Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:Violence and the Supernatural That means we're finally covering books that are less than two decades old at the time of this writing. Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:The fictional World of Rifts® is violent, deadly and filled with supernatural monsters. Other dimensional beings often referred to as "demons," torment, stalk and prey on humans. Other alien life forms, monsters, gods and demigods, as well as magic, insanity, and war are all elements in this book. And nine years worth of Rifts books have been covered overall. Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:Some parents may find the violence, magic and supernatural elements of the game inappropriate for young readers/players. We suggest parental discretion. Wait. What I have been doing? Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:Please note that none of us at Palladium Books® condone or encourage the occult, the practice of magic, the use of drugs, or violence Somebody stop me before I review again-  Rifts World Book 19: Australia, Part 1 - "Enter Ben Lucas, a very affable and energetic lad with a good feel for Rifts® and a keen sense of Australia." So, we get a bit of a break from Siembieda this time around. But don't worry, Siembieda fans. He's here with some edits and additions to ensure this is as riftsian as it needs to be. This book was done by Ben Lucas. But the notion is familiar.  Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:Magic touched the land, and the native tribes were given their calling to retake their country. And now they flourish. In the aftermath of the Great Cataclysm, the white community was left without support — no cities, no technology. Because, of course, every other group of people was just waiting for the apocalypse to dial things back several centuries and show off their ancient wisdom. I swear if these books weren't written by Americans, then America would be populated by puritans, witches, and Ben Franklins living in log cabins and using masonic magic. But this, apparently, only the start of a Rifts Australia series of books! Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:Enter Ben Lucas, a very affable and energetic lad with a good feel for Rifts® and a keen sense of Australia. Now, those of you in the know, might say, "well of course he has a good feel for Australia, for Pete's sake, Ben is Australian," but Palladium had gotten more than a few manuscripts over the years from other Australians that we found wanting for one reason or another, and were rejected. All of us at Palladium thought Ben did a nice job through and through. Best of all, this should be just the first of several Rifts Australia books — hey, it's a big island continent and there are lots of cool stuff to write about. Specifically, there was supposed to be Rifts Australia 2 (*deep breath*), covering the indigenous peoples of Australia and their magic, and a Rifts Australia 3, covering the Dreamtime as its own dimension. For whatever reason, we're nearly two decades on and neither has emerged. Given how Africa and Spirit West came out, that's probably a blessing. However, even as recently as Rifts World Book 18: Mystic Russia, there was an advert promising "Dream Time magic and Song Lines" in this book. Song Lines is just the local term for ley lines, so I guess they're technically in, but "Dream Time magic"? No, it never shows up. Glossary of Australian Slang, Terms & Language It wouldn't be an Australian book without Australian words to remind us that we're in Australia, y'see. It makes wonder if any British or Australia RPG books about America explain some American words, like moxie or wiseguy.  I'll skip all the classically Australia lingo (or, at least, classic to any Australia-themed RPG book I've opened, I don't know how much Australians actually use the lingo we love to reproduce) and instead focus on the new terms; I'm not going to go over billabongs and tuckerbags. Administration refers to the government of the closed cities of Perth and Melbourne (much more on that later) and their agents - so soldiers venturing out are "Administration" too. Those cities are also known as "tech-cities". People from those places are called city-goers. Outbackers refers to the majority of non-indigenous Australians living outside those cities - pretty much any place outside of the cities is the Outback, not just the wilderness. If you're an outbacker and you ride around on a vehicle making life tough for others, you're probably a roadganger. Outland is the inland desert, and outlanders are the nomads who live there. Ley lines are now songlines. Aboriginal is very unfortunately used as a noun and not an adjective, but we're told "Tribals" is the respectful term. Pretty sure not, but I'm hardly Australian. As best as I understand it, "Aboriginal" as an adjective is fine, but as a noun it's... dated, let's say. In any case, not all Aboriginal communities would use the term "tribe" anyway.  "It is a ritual of hope, so that we might be detailed in later books." Let's aside about that. Like Spirit West or Mystic Russia, that sort of rough term will come up a lot. Such terms will be popping up in direct quotes or possibly even chapter headers. You won't hear them in my direct text - Aboriginal peoples or Aboriginal Australians will probably be my go-to term, or indigenous peoples. Ideally, I would refer to them by their actual nation, clan, alliance, language group, etc. names - but the book practically never refers any specific such thing for me to reliably use, instead treating them as an indistinguishable melange. Similarly, it refers to all Aboriginal sorcerers or shamans as "Mabarn", even though that's a somewhat incorrect term as I understand it. Mabarn is a magic or medicine used by the maparnjarra, a shamanic tradition specific to the Ngaanyatjarra people. I can understand trying to simplify things for an RPG, but if you do that, it'd probably be better to use a more generic term. Rifts Australia, an Overview Differences of Opinion Three outlooks at Australia after the Coming of the Rifts® We get three different narrative chunks here. The first is "A Walkabout by Ernie Longpath, Native Tracker". Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:The Apocalypse stripped 'em of that, gave us back our magic. Brought magic to the world like it was for our ancient ancestors. The way we knew it would be again one day. We took our land back when the spirit returned to it, and the white fella was left flounderin' like a fish on a hot rock — good as dead but goin' mad tryin' to live. Yes, the apocalypse came and Aboriginal Australians were like "subsistence hunting and gathering is here again, gently caress and yes" and instantly adapted to culturally distinctive wizarding and making wild animals dead. "Whitefellas" had it tougher because they're crazy and fight each other all the time! Aren't they so crazy? The next is from Outback Reconnaissance Report 317 by Lt. Cass Crowe, Aerojock for Melbourne's 21st Helicopter Deployment, a pilot from Melbourne. He was supposed to napalm a group of raiders, but they were surprised when the local Outbackers revealed missile batteries and shot him down and some of his fellows down. He wakes up in Outbacker territory, having his wounds cared for, and they let him live - provided he tells Melbourne Administration that they're planning to resist the city's influence, and one day tear it all down, fuckers. He considers them a bunch of barbarian "animals", but admires their rebellious passion. He worries that the Administration is too apathetic, and that they need to find a way to interact with the outside world before it swallows them up. Lastly, there's "A conversation with Gordan Sterling", an Outbacker and Explorer of the Northern Coasts. He's studied history and he talks about the land being "sacred" but then the British Empire came along and made it "boring". (No, really.) And now things are better because people have to re-explore everything, and as an explorer, he really digs that. He's worried about crazy raiders, though. He casts shade on Perth and Melbourne, saying they only survived because they weren't worth nuking. Also the "Tribesmen" are awesome and magical and he's cool with their awesome magicalness, good for them! He doesn't trust white wizards, though, they're crazy. Rifts World Book 19: Australia posted:I love exploring this land of ours, and I'll never be bored here or sad that the old days of Civilization are gone. Not really sad, anyway, I'm a simple man, and don't know no better. Next: Australia gets wet.
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Sep 10, 2018 12:26
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I am terribly excited for RIFTS World Book: Taz-Mania.
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Sep 10, 2018 12:59
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Welcome to 1999! I feel like you put more research and thought into the headers of your review updates than Palladium does the entire books.
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Sep 10, 2018 13:09
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Part of the reason the scale of the Fantasy games I play in tends to expand is because I cannot emphasize enough: 3rd tier PCs are actually insanely powerful. As a Bret Knight, I beat a Bloodthirster in an honorable duel (albeit due to Virtue of Heroism) in actual play. 3rd tier vampire hunters get to the point that vampires know their names and are actually sort of scared of them and considering how to assassinate them. Wizard Lords get stuff like AoE demon kills. Champions can hold their own against a Chaos Champion/Lord or powerful vampire or big monsters by themselves. 3rd tier Thieves likely have over 100% in all their thieving skills and are extremely hard to catch outside of really extraordinary measures. By 3rd tier you start to be the kind of guy who goes and defeats Mannfred von Carstein (because he's intentionally statted out to be a main campaign villain) and have it make total sense in setting. Hell, they even introduce a Grandmaster of a Knightly Order class in ToS. This is why games that go that long tend to get into making changes to the setting or doing huge deeds: You become the kind of character that would do that. Like, from a mechanical and narrative point of view. Also by that point fighting off some beastmen to save yon peasant village is mechanically dull and no longer a threat in the least.
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Sep 10, 2018 13:34
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Yeah, the scaling up of power is gradual but very real. (I have been running a 4e game; the first adventure involved moving some rocks, being overjoyed at the discovery of pickled preserves and old beer because they can be sold, and boarding up a cave entrance and running the gently caress away after discovering that it was home to goblins and cave squigs. Because fighting cave squigs at tier 1 is asking to be murdered. I haven't any doubt that by the end, they will be able to take down a Von Carstein.)
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Sep 10, 2018 13:39
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Also the biggest problem of Chaos is the whole 'reading about it, touching it, examining it, or otherwise engaging with it beyond getting into a swordfight destroys your PC' element and the 'There are no mechanical or really narrative reasons to risk that since it doesn't do anything' element. The 'Every Chaos Lord is an interchangeable meatwall that the enemy doesn't give a gently caress about and you can't actually destroy demons' part doesn't help either. Chaos has one answer and it's fire, and one plot and it's 'dodge another bullet and stop them doing something terrible'. They're fine as someone you fight from time to time but they really can't manage as a main antagonist without getting dull. Part of what dooms Paths of the Damned as a campaign line is that it's 3 long adventures spent dealing with the same demon lord, and he's a Khornate so after Medium Priest Liebnitz (who, again, is actually a solid villain and makes Ashes a pretty good campaign intro, insane final battle aside) his followers are pretty much all idiots and beastmen. There's nothing to really interact with, so they have to throw in tons of side plots that have nothing to do with the main plot (mostly) and trying to distract you from the fact that you're spending all this time on an enemy you'll never speak to or interact with if you do things right in any way. It just gets old. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Sep 10, 2018 |
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Sep 10, 2018 13:50
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Yeah, but how many campaigns reach that tier? I legit don't know, so maybe you don't even need to play that long to become Best At Everything. Night10194 posted:Also the biggest problem of Chaos is the whole 'reading about it, touching it, examining it, or otherwise engaging with it beyond getting into a swordfight destroys your PC' element and the 'There are no mechanical or really narrative reasons to risk that since it doesn't do anything' element. Chaos isn't anti matter and you can interact with it without going full 100% corruption for glancing at a Daemon sword. And if it was any more forgiving, you know that players would be all up to their grill in chaos artifacts for even meager benefits. And what are you going to do? Introduce role-playing penalties? I've listened to enought System Mastery to know that poo poo don't fly.
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Sep 10, 2018 14:01
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