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TheNamedSavior posted:Fitting this thread's theme of lovely elf games being made by shitter old white men: Goddamn. Ettin posted this on Twitter in response... https://twitter.com/Ettin64/status/1129989684174573568
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May 19, 2019 17:50
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
You’re more likely to be right than I am. There was definitely something about the Coalition refurbing an old Space Shuttle, and the memory was associated with that. Edit for new page quote response Midjack fucked around with this message at 17:56 on May 19, 2019 |
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May 19, 2019 17:53
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Fangs at the Gate: Dealing With Other People Obviously, the Silver Pact is both fully aware that other Exalts and powerful beings are out there, and while they consider their vendetta to belong to them alone, they aren't going to give up allies or ignore potential problems. The loose nature of the Pact means that they have, at best, a broad consensus on any of these other groups, however. Individual Pact members may have wildly different opinions due to personal experiences. Independent Lunars that reject membership in the Pact are free to do so, and the Pact expects its members to not harm them or otherwise turn them against the Pact if possible, and to welcome them if they change their minds. While these Lunars do not get the full benefits of Pact membership, they tend to have peaceful relations with the Pact, mostly made of exchanged favors or alliances of convenience. When conflict happens, it tends to be over personal problems or individual feuds. Competition over territory or resources can cause grudges, as can conflicting agendas, inadvertant mistakes or just not liking each other. Without the shahan-ya councils to resolve these problems, tensions between independents and Pact Lunars can get rough, as can those between independents themselves. When the Changing Moon merchant Hibiscus Cutter slew one of Yena's Daughters to defend his caravan, Yena Bone-Breaker swore vendetta gainst him, killed every member of his trade company and only spared him in deference to Pact rules. Some independents are former Pact Lunars who've left it. Doing so does not have the same harsh penalties as banishment from the Pact, though it's rare for someone to leave without some inciting incident or feud that may continue to complicate relations. Because of the loose nature of the Pact, leaving it is not really a formal matter, and indeed an independent may be viewed differently by different people. Many believed Ma-H-Suchi left the Pact when he went into seclusion, but others continued to see him as a shahan-ya. Lilith was a prominent member of the early Pact, and while she left it behind along with her human life, many still count her among its ranks. While the Dragon-Blooded successor states of the Shogunate are the greatest foes of the Silver Pact, only its greatest extremists believe that all Dragon-Bloods are their enemies. Those Dragon-Blooded societies that neither claim descent from the Shogunate nor engage in imperialism are usually seen as different, though they may not be fully trusted, and they can on occasion be allies. Individual Pact members have occasionally dealt with groups such as the Wanasaan and the Forest Witches, though rarely for long-term alliance. Lone outcastes can be allies, valued for their power and ability to infiltrate the Realm. Some have even join Lunar Circles or the school of a shahan-ya. This often draws skepticism or opposition from other Pact members, but rarely to the point of violence. In River Province, the Grass Spiders have proven to be very useful allies, allowing assassinations that do not risk revealing Lunar involvement and causing a Wyld Hunt. The Seven Storms Brotherhood are a contentious (but not especially important) issue for the Southern Pact. Some feel that the bandits could be a valuable ally against the satrapies, but others find them too volatile and unpredictable to use as anything but an unwitting diversion. Creation has forgotten the Sidereals; the Silver Pact has not. They despise the Bronze Faction, who masterminded the Usurpation and have helped to coordinate the Wyld Hunt for centuries. However, not all Sidereals are complicit in this, and some are even active foes of the Bronze Faction. Not all Lunars understand Heaven's politics enough to draw these distinctions, of course. Those that do, who are usually First Age elders, may occasionally find alliance with independent Sidereals. When the Cult of the Violet Star summoned the demon Nubkhaes into the world unbound, Raksi worked with the Sidereal Naj the Hellbinder to banish it and purge the cult. At other times, however, there have been battles between Lunars and Sidereals over miunderstandings. When the Sidereal Xaphem-Om went to the Caul to investigate if whatever magic banished it from Creation long ago could do it again, the young Lunar Bends-the-Oak mistook him for a Bronze Faction saboteur and started a fight that killed both. The Gold Faction, newly empowered by the return of the Solars, has made diplomatic approaches to a few shahan-yas it thinks will be sympathetic, and negotiations remain in progress. Not all Lunars that know of them agree with the idea of aiding the returning Solars at all, and some of them still distrust Sidereals on principle. Even the most trusting are wary, as they know the Bronze Faction have the potential to intercept communications meant for the Gold. For most of the Second Age, the Silver Pact has had mixed opinions on the few Solars that remained in the world. The Lunars bonded to them were often, but not always, strong allies to their mates. Others saw them as anything from potential allies to liabilities to useful idiots to throw at the Wyld Hunt to distract them. The Bull of the North's growing empire drew the Realm's attention and broke the legions of House Tepet, allowing other Pact ventures in the North to flourish, so that's a sign in their favor. On the other hand, the returning Solars have thrown every plan into chaos. They could be potent allies, but their agendas could easily conflict with the Pact's. No Lunar is about to just step aside and let the nascent Solars claim dominion over the world without a fight. Complicating things are the bonds between many individual Lunars and Solars, which have brought forth a torrent of emotions. Thus far, there is no consensus on Solars, and there may not be time to form one before action is required. Rumors have existed for some time about the existence of deathknights, but the Pact was not able to confirm them until Mask of Winters conquered Thorns. Most Lunars aren't really sure what to make of them, and any Lunar's views on the Abyssals are likely to be determined by their own experiences with them. Complicating things is the fact that some Lunars have felt the Solar Bond come to life in the presence of an Abyssal, concluding that they must somehow be Solars tainted by the Underworld. Anja Silverclaws, a staunch foe of the Mask, was shocked to find tghat her Solar mate is, in fact, one of his deathknights. The duel was a draw, and Anja tells herself that this will not undermine her commitment to killing the Abyssal, but the truth may be more complex. The Pact as a whole has not yet fully accepted the connection between the Abyssals and Solars, but they're going to have to at some point when deciding if the deathknights can be made allies against the Realm or not. The Silver Pact knows very little about the Infernals; most have no idea they even exist. Those that do have gained some minor rumors from bound demons or shamanic visions, but not enough to understand the nature of the Infernals or what impact they may have on the world. Encounters have been rare, but at least one Lunar has claimed to meet her Solar mate reborn as an Infernal, which is...troubling. Exigents are too variable to easily generalize. Some Exigents have been worthy allies to the Pact, such as Bazidara, the Chosen of Amoth City-Smiter, the god of ruins, who fought alongside Ma-Ha-Suchi against the Shogunate before dying to a Wyld Hunt, and the god-admirals of Cabochon still trade with Sunken Luthe. Others are foes of the Pact, either due to service to the Immaculate Order or due to having conflicting goals. Likewise, the Pact deals only infrequently with Liminals, and as they lack any cohesive social structure, all relationships with them are individual. Most Liminals don't care about the war with the Realm, though some will help in exchange for the aid of Lunar witches or necromancers in dealing with undead. Others have fought against Lunars who open shadowlands or raise undead armies. Withari's Child is a Southwestenr Liminal with plenty of ghostly enemies, and she occasionally calls on Ul the Burning Eye for help or refuge. Ul enjoys her strangeness and hopes to study her reanimated flesh to further his understanding of necromancy. Another, Dreams-of-Rain, was made by a Ragara sorcerer that sought to resurrect her late son, only to watch his creator die at Lunar fangs. He seeks to track down and kill the Lunar that slew his creator, and he has no problem undermining other Lunar plans or domains along the way. Next time: Getimians, the Guild, ghosts and raksha
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May 20, 2019 01:39
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Oh no, Infernals are still around?  Please tell me they re-wrote how they were formed.
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May 20, 2019 02:55
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SirPhoebos posted:Oh no, Infernals are still around? The new devs have said that literally nothing but ‘they used to be Solars’ was retained.
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May 20, 2019 03:10
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Mors Rattus posted:The new devs have said that literally nothing but ‘they used to be Solars’ was retained. That's too bad. I really liked being able to use tactically falling in love as a persistent dice adder.
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May 20, 2019 03:54
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 Etherscope #4: Just a Twelve-Step Program I should go over task resolution real quick, just to clarify. The general idea is that you’re always going to be rolling 1d20 + modifiers against some Difficulty Class (DC), and if you roll at or above the DC you succeed. Real simple, but lacking in nuance; there’s no provision for results beyond binary success and failure. At this point we’re only 17 pages in. It sure seemed like longer when I first read that half-baked mess, right? But it’s refreshing to see that the game won’t just dump out nearly a hundred pages of setting detail that really doesn’t belong at the front of a sandwich press. New players shouldn’t just be thrown into the deep end without learning to figuratively swim, and veterans probably know half of what’s there already. That aside, chargen sounds simple enough:
 ? Yeah, those have issues. We’ll deal with everything in due time.Ability Scores Ability scores are the most basic attributes of a character. Usually you won’t use your ability scores directly, but instead you’ll derive modifiers and use those. Subtract 10 then divide by 2, rounding down, to get this secondary value. Thus a 10 or 11 in Strength is “average” with a +0 modifier, while an 18 is about the best you can do at chargen for a +4 modifier. If you’ve played anything that derived from D&D you’ve probably seen these before in some form or another:
So how do we select our ability scores, anyway? Etherscope exclusively employs a point-buy system to choose your starting six. This was a secondary option in its predecessors, but ES made the sensible decision to flatly block you from potentially loving over your character sheet by only giving you the one option. All six ability scores start at 8, and you can then spend points from a pool of 25 to increase them. The progression isn’t entirely one-for-one - picking up that coveted 18 in an ability score costs 15 points rather than 10 - but you still have some leeway. I should note that the progression isn’t quite what WotC used in its products. Apparently there was a clause in the OGL or some other license that prohibited third-party publishers from using the exact character generation and advancement rules of D&D and d20 Modern, so instead those publishers who wanted to release standalone products had to change things just enough to pass legal scrutiny. The result here is slightly more lenient, though the difference will probably be meaningless half the time in practice.  So if you wanted to, you could select an array of 15/14 x5 for a “well-rounded” character. Or inversely, you can take 18/12 x5 for a specialist. I don’t think I’d recommend either over moderate min-maxing with 16/16/12/12/12/10, but at least we don’t have full casters to make the power gap horrendous. Character Race Aaaaand we’re right back into the forest of ill-conceived social commentary, this time with the  of eugenics. Redmond and McClelland just couldn’t leave well enough alone, but instead felt compelled to include this sidebar:Etherscope posted:A Note on Eugenics  Look, I figure that this is borne out of ignorance rather than malice, but eugenics is still an ethical minefield that is hard to deal with tastefully. You can’t just go barging in with your keyboard and wave a figurative magic wand to declare that There Are No Problems Here. There’s certainly the potential for abuse very real so long as meaningful population differences exist, ie always. What about privileged access? Or the potential for cultural erasure, even unintentionally? I’m guessing that Redmond and McClelland didn’t bother to consider any of that, but instead just wanted a thin justification for cribbing off Shadowrun/D&D/Aldous Huxley. And as we’ll see, they really really should have considered that stuff.Most of the “races” present are some strain of human and thus nominally of the same species. Like with D&D, humans get an extra feat at 1st level and additional skill points over their career (4 at chargen, +1 per additional level), but here in ES that stuff is already factored in. Humans were already a very strong choice in 3E, so orienting things around them makes sense. Usually other races were about pushing ability scores around and/or handing out increasingly irrelevant bonuses, while +1 feat and +1 fully leveled skill never stopped being relevant. So when we get to the one race that isn’t human, haha are they the usual hot garbage that’s probably not worth it if you don’t have an extremely compelling story reason. Alphas are “a new generation of superhuman”, privileged both in the setting and in the mechanics. Yay. Alpha humans all look similar with “a pale grey-brown skin tone, large eyes of all normal human colours, and dark hair” - designer babies to a T. The entire program is pretty new by the setting’s standards, with even the oldest alphas still in their late twenties. Generally they’re born to high society, but in theory you have the option to play a lower-class alpha bastard. Mechanically, alphas get the usual human bonuses plus some extra stuff. They get +2 Dexterity/Intelligence/Wisdom/Charisma, but -2 Constitution. And a +2 bonus to resist disease or poison. And they get bonus influence points in the same manner as extra skill points for humans, at 4 for chargen and +1 per additional level. What’s this all cost them? Well...they can’t take a working class social template and have an XP debt of 100, enough to reach 2nd level. (The text says 1000 XP but this was altered in errata as a consequence of that same OGL clause about character advancement.) Or if you take the option of playing a bastard, you don’t get more influence points but you also aren’t restricted from taking any social template you like. This is the usual sort of balancing argument between alternatives that was taken seriously at the time, and yet with hindsight we can see it as laughable. (Anyone remember the Lightning Warrior, and how it gave up its familiar?) And because ES is clueless here from a mechanics standpoint, it ends up justifying the very scientific racism that it should have avoided. Alphas are just plain better than normal humans. I’m frankly flabbergasted that the writers didn’t understand their own subtext. Betas are just baseline humans. They only get the standard human benefits above, but like I’ve said those are still very nice. Next!  Gammas, deltas, epsilons, and fey. Gammas were the first new strain developed by the Eugenics League. Unlike the complex process that made alphas, the one for producing gammas just spliced in some rodent genes in shotgun fashion. As a result the eldest strain is both resilient and numerous, just like the rodents they share characteristics with. “Bred for...a rapid population growth”, “their incisors are enlarged”, “gamma eyes are...exceptionally small and beady”, yeah they’re basically rat-people. Despite being “phased out” in favor of deltas and epsilons, there are still a lot of gammas in the urban areas that wanted them most. Especially in the sewers, because did you get that these are rat-people yet? As rat-people in all but name, gammas are of Small size. This makes for a couple of fiddly modifiers in combat but ends up not doing especially much. What really mattered in 3E combat was if you went up to Large or down to Tiny, because all of a sudden you had more or less reach and space in the combat grid. In addition to that, gammas get a +4 bonus to resist disease (which in a setting without clerics does matter more), and +2 Dexterity/Constitution but -2 Strength/Intelligence. If you are playing a “transgenic race” it is mechanically enshrined that you are mentally inferior. Sigh. How did this get written without self-awareness, again? Deltas were another iteration on the gamma framework, but this time made to be more useful (well, compliant) to their capitalist overlords. Rather than reinventing the genetic wheel, scientists in the Eugenics League took the more expedient option of reengineering what gammas already were. The results here were deltas and gammas, dog-people and horse-people respectively. Delta humans themselves are the rarest of the planned underclasses, but were still useful enough to see inclusion in various rungs of society like industry or the military. Rarely are they the ones in charge, of course. Mechanically speaking, avoid playing a delta. They get +2 Constitution/Wisdom but -2 Intelligence/Charisma; adding +2/-2 to ability scores is something of a fad in this book. As dog-people, deltas also have a pronounced sense of scent. By default this allows you to detect odors at a range of 30 feet, with some modifiers if it’s strong or upwind/downwind. If they’re within 5 feet or move after you detect them, you can instead pinpoint their location. You can even use this to track someone else with Survival, at DC 10 + 2 per hour but without the usual increases, if you already have the Track feat. It’s neat as a niche effect but sadly not as amazing as the designers thought. In particular it can’t make up for how deltas only get one excellence point at chargen rather than three. We’ll get to exactly what excellence points do later, but right now I’ll just say that they’re the metacurrency of ES. So being down that far on a vital resource in the name of modelling their “reduced spirit” sucks. Like deltas, epsilons are ultimately derived from gammas. As noted above, they were spliced with horse genes in order to make perfect laborers (ie, hardy and accepting of abuse). They’re more common in the modern day than deltas, but compared to gammas they’re still a limited underclass, “not as often found outside of the poorest city boroughs or farming communities”. And just like how gammas are smaller than normal as rat-people, epsilons are larger than normal at over six feet tall. Just like with deltas, avoid playing a gamma. They get +2 Strength/Constitution but -2 Intelligence and -4 Charisma. This design mistake is unfortunately all too common in D&D and d20, that boosting Strength gets overvalued. Sure, an increase to both melee attack and damage helps, but not so much that it outweighs the benefits of other ability scores like Dexterity (bonus to Defense and ranged attack) and Intelligence (more skill points). If anything, effects like this just serve to pigeonhole characters when overspecializing is already a significant problem. Otherwise gammas get shafted as badly as deltas! Sure, they can lift more (who cares if you aren’t dungeon crawling?), but in return for that they get the same reduced spirit for only one excellence point at chargen. Fey are the last race in ES, and the only one that is distinctly not human. Instead, well, they’re our ancient Lemurians! Fey look mostly like humans but in aggregate are tall, thin, angular, and pale - essentially they’re just ersatz elves. Not much is known about them in modern society, and the majority of the world doesn’t even know they exist. Hell, many fey don’t even know that they are fey! Naturally this begs some big questions about they didn’t die out if they’re an entirely separate species from humans. For right now?  The one human who does know the most about them goes only by the pseudonym Veritas, publishing their research anonymously on cyberspace. They speculated that, just like how humans were a distinct evolutionary branch from the other extant great apes, that the fey were yet another primate descended from aquatic apes. (Not coincidentally there’s an actual psuedoscientic theory that humans came from aquatic apes!  ) By now any such traits would be vestigial, so while the theory isn’t well supported it has been latched onto by fey exceptionalists.Mechanically, fey are pretty meh. They don’t get the standard bonus feat and skill points like humans, so already they’re in a hole. They get +2 Dexterity/Intelligence but -2 Strength/Wisdom, apparently the result of being “graceful and intelligent” but weak and alien compared to humans. Fuckdamn, stop ascribing all these reasons for altering really broad categories down to very specific modifiers!  , but -4 to be treated with surgery by humans due to “unusual anatomy”. At least the writers didn’t see an excuse to fool around with excellence points more. But more than the rest, fey have an affinity for etheric energy. First, they can sense it through touch. Spend an excellence point and roll Wisdom + your level; DC 15 detects the existence of ethertech, DC 20 detects a person using occult powers, but only DC 30 actually gives you a vague clue of what’s going on. This could be so cool, if it weren’t absolutely hobbled! Second, they get a Scope familiar, which is frankly more vestigial than their ether sense. Sure, your familiar can’t be destroyed, but all it can do is to hang around with you in cyberspace and provide a small bonus to you. Want that bonus in reality? Nope, only in cyberspace. Want it to scout? Nope, if it goes more than 30 feet from you then you have to make a DC 20 Will save or lose 500 XP per level. Success merely halves that. Either is absolutely crippling, since the XP rewards got rebalanced to a tenth of what they are in D&D. The effect is that if you fail you probably lose a lot of levels, at best dropping 6 levels if you’re at 20th level or at worst dropping to 1st level if you’re at 11th level or below. Success isn’t far behind either. The one saving grace here is that it has no actual stats or rules to be taken away if you don’t want that, so in practice it’s just a minor bonus that you’ll probably forget half the time.After all this it’s just depressing to see how players are told on the one hand that they can Play Anything They Want...and on the other hand get shown that half of what’s here is patently inferior in some way. That, once again, scientific racism is ignorantly being enshrined in the rules. If I had my way here I’d first off jettison all of the ability score modifiers, secondly toss out the arbitrary excellence point penalties, and more generally just rework all the races entirely with distinctive bonuses without any attempt at justifying otherwise. Players shouldn’t be told why they can’t put together rules elements A and B, but rather that that’s fine but that they could do even better by choosing C instead of B. If you’re the designer, build your giant robot of offense in its entirety - don’t forget to include the head, and especially don’t be a dumbass who only included the legs! I have no doubt that Redmond and McClelland at least had good intentions, but in contrast their actions are just euughuugh exasperating. Next: The Social Wars NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 17:56 on May 20, 2019 |
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May 20, 2019 08:17
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Cults: Apocalyptics, pt.5 Degenesis Rebirth Primal Punk Chapter 3: Cults STEREOTYPES quote:ANABAPTISTS: As long as they don’t follow a track of Sepsis to our doorstep, we get along. In the end, they’re only flesh and blood.  DEJAN THE RAVEN  Culture: Balkhan Concept: The Adventurer Cult: Apocalyptics (Raven) Dejan is the Raven of Carrion Birds. However, he got owned when Dust Riders came in town. Dejan had to sacrifice his hand to appease Mother of Ravens – but that might not be enough if he doesn't get back at newcomers. JELENA THE MAGPIE  Culture: Balkhan Concept: The Healer Cult: Apocalyptics (Magpie) She's the consort of the Osman Iconide, which allows her flock to get away with stuff – and for her to steal stuff from his home. HAGRA  Culture: Balkhan Concept: The Traditionalist Cult: Apocalyptics (Vulture) Why not “Hagra the Vulture?” Anyway, he's a looter in Hybrispania who caught either black plague or something nastier from looting. Why are all three NPCs from Balkhan?  In Conclusion: Apocalyptics are the worst cult in-setting and outside of it. The whole concept of party hounds that are also edgy criminals is boring and tiring. And its hard to believe that they hold any power if they hate actual planning, rely on cards (which, to fair, might be a way for Raven to plan without looking like a lame rear end square) and Logan's Run themselves. There's no fun angle to them and they actively making the world a worse place by smuggling Burn. gently caress these guys and shoot them on sight. Next time: flamethrowers and brimstone!
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May 20, 2019 08:25
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 Rifts Coalition Wars 3: Sorcerers' Revenge part 4, "This means even if the Vanguard made itself known to the CS, they would NEVER accept their help, trust them or work with them." It's time for the last group the Coalition wants. Not most, not least. Somewhere in the middle.  "Power exudes from every orifice!" The Vanguard By Bill Coffin & Kevin Siembieda Once upon a time, nearly a century ago, Chi-Town accepted magic, if begrudgingly. The Chi-Town Magic Division of the military oversaw that research, but with the war against the Federation of Magic, public panic turned against them. Joseph Prosek, the farther of Karl Prosek, would ban all magic use. All Chi-Town mages were forced to either undergo severe (psychic?) indoctrination to eliminate their ability to cast spells, or be exiled. A good number of mages were simply killed when they resisted this new edicts. By now, the Coalition has erased public knowledge of this event, and the "destruction" of the Chi-Town library eliminated most precise records of it. Meanwhile, the exiled mages formed their own society based on most of the same notions of the Coalition, save for the acceptance of magic as a tool. They would call themselves the "Vanguard", dedicating themselves to eliminating supernatural and magical threats to humanity before the Coalition ever saw them. Because that makes sense. However, as staunch human supremacists, they see communities like Lazlo and Tolkeen as corrupted by the extensive presence of the nonhuman. A number of Vanguard have infiltrated both communities, and with the Tolkeen war on, Vanguard mages have at times worked to subvert and sabotage Tolkeen's war effort. All that Tolkeen knows so far is occasionally having to deal with pro-Coalition dissidents, but are shocked and confused whenever these mages are discovered. After all, pro-Coalition mages don't make a world of sense. Coalition intelligence has gotten reports of the "Vanguard" but largely dismisses them. Even if they do exist, to the Coalition's thinking, wizards helping them out would have to be insane and would be as dangerous as any other spellcaster. As such, the Vanguard would be subject to the same lethal prejudice any other spellcaster would be. The Vanguard dreams that if they aid the Coalition, one day they might be accepted back, but it's extremely unlikely.  "We won't stand for your forced cultural diversity!" The Vanguard is rumored to be led by Ernst Vinien, a highly decorated mage from when Chi-Town tolerated magic who faked his death and fled into exile. He was one of the few responsible for founding the Vanguard, and is said to lead them to this day - but that would make him over a century old. There are myriad rumors about how he might have lived as long as he did, or perhaps that he had successors take on his name to keep the legend alive. Right now, the majority of Vanguard is in and around Tolkeen to assist the Coalition war effort. They have a military hierarchy that boils down to operating as 5-person cells designed to limit the damage that can be done by exposure and interrogation. In Tolkeen, they generally focus on undercover operations. They pass on intelligence to the Coalition anonymously, steal supplies and money, insert false intelligence and rumors, character assassination, and more rarely the assassination of key figures. We get a long detailed list of their axioms, but they're largely what you'd expect at this point for fanatical undercover operatives. Vanguard characters can be Ley Line Walkers, Mystics, Techno-Wizards, or Conjurers (the last one being from Rifts World Book 16: Federation of Magic). They see spellcasters like Shifters, Warlocks, and Witches that contact alien powers as being corrupted - only magic that comes from purely human power can be trusted. Ironically, Vanguard spellcasters are just plain better than other spellcasters skill-wise, gaining increased access to hand-to-hand and various skill groups related to technology and espionage. Their "limitation" is that they can't reveal themselves no matter what - they can work with and manipulate outsiders, but never be open with them. Of course, you can play a runaway Vanguard member, and get that increased access to skills, but you're likely to be hunted down by the racist mages. The Vanguard are clearly an addition by Coffin to further explain why mages don't run roughshod over the Coalition, though the idea they've kept up their ideology and secrecy over most of a century is hard to swallow. Particularly, it feels like we need a better idea of their culture and how it's been maintained - we get how they operate, but not much on them as a people other than "well, they're mysterious!" Still, they're at least an interesting villainous addition to things, but definitely feel shoehorned in as a heavy-handed retcon. Next: Rustbuckets.
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May 20, 2019 09:52
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Vanguard Kills And Suffers In Obscurity For Fundamentally Wizocidal Regime in Well-Thought-Out Scheme
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May 20, 2019 10:28
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100 years seems way too long, like that's great grand kids kinda time. And they're probably not itching to go back to where great great uncle lou was lobotomised and murdered.
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May 20, 2019 10:35
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Cassa posted:100 years seems way too long, like that's great grand kids kinda time. And they're probably not itching to go back to where great great uncle lou was lobotomised and murdered.
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May 20, 2019 10:39
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Mors Rattus posted:The new devs have said that literally nothing but ‘they used to be Solars’ was retained. Even pre-new devs, the little bit of teaser from the core book KS had them changed quite a bit. Biggest being (which I expect they'll keep), that infernals aren't just defaulted to devoted minions of the yozis. It was much more of a "grant these guys power and let them go muck poo poo up in creation, it'll help us in some fashion" type of deal.
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May 20, 2019 13:18
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Fangs at the Gate: Ghost Alliance When Getimians first started showing up and striking at the plans of the Sidereals, the Silver Pact hoped that these mysterious new Exalts could be allies. However, the more they’ve learned, the less likely that seems. Rakan Thulio, the leader of the Getimians, is known to the First Age elders of the Pact as one of the architects of the Usurpation, and even if he has renounced the Bronze Faction, not one of them would trust him. Those Pact members who have actually encountered Getimians have tried to make use of their hatred of Sidereals and their power to disrupt destinies, but largely as unknowing assets rather than friends. The Guild’s world-spanning trade syndicate is easily the most prominent mortal group that the Pact deals with. Like the Pact, the Guild is decentralized, making it much more resilient against Lunar infiltration than nations or other organizations tend to be. Profit is its sole motive in all things, so it’s not a great ally, but it can be a useful tool. In regions where the Guild’s presence undermines the Realm’s power, the Pact ignores it or even supports it actively. Where its activities serve the Realm, or its slavers and drug dealers encroach on Lunar dominions, the Pact acts against it and ruins those responsible. The First Golden Door Consortium, which runs caravans from Nexus to Greyfalls, prospers because its primary shareholder, Guild factor Miral of Cho-Holuth, has made a deal with Ma-Ha-Suchi’s student Ranotis to trade information on Realm and Lookshyan purchases and troop movements in exchange for safe passage. Ranotis has discovered that Miral has also been suborned by the Greyfalls satrap Cynis Verheen, so he now feed the woman false information of his own, to turn her into an unwitting triple agent. The Pact deals frequently with the gods and elementals of Creation, both in their own territory and Realm satrapies. Spirits can offer miracles or blessings to Pact operations or dominions, and Lunars can protect spirits from the Immaculates or other threats, or intervene when a god’s cult or domain is under threat. However, when spirits exploit mortal communities, Lunar shamans may step in to intercede on behalf of the mortals or cast down gods that won’t resolve things peacefully. This is most common in Lunar dominions, but some Lunars just don’t like spirits mistreating or neglecting worshippers. Many shamans and witches maintain long ties to specific spirit courts, working to indebt the gods and elementals so they can call on them later. Aqadar trades favors with the spirit courts of Fajad, dedicating large amounts of energy to covertly opposing the Immaculates in suppressing their worship so that they will assist his sorcerous research. Smiling Zamisha maintains relations with the clan gods of the Eskari by subduing or killing any spirit that contests their place as chief gods of the people. Gods associated with Luna’s own spirit courts, who tend to hold dominion over things like tides, purity, illness, nocturnal habits or dreams, are actively sought out as allies. Some shamans feel spiritually elevated by this, while others hope to use the shared affinity for easier bargaining. Such gods include Tethys on the Untrammeled Path, god of the lost, Merevin the Fever-Dream, and Kama-Soth, bat-god of the lunar eclipse. Ghosts hold a number of positions in the shadowlands and Underworld, and many have reason to work with Lunars. Ancestor spirits with prominent cults are similar to gods in their concerns and interests, and often even more invested in protecting their worshippers due to the blood ties between them. Weaker ghosts are often threatened by Underworld denizens – more powerful ghosts, monsters, deathknights or Liminal ghost-hunters, for example – and want protection. The undead may lack the sheer power of gods and elementals most of the time, but their ties to the living are often excellent leverage. Lunars may consider ghosts whose descendants dwell in their dominions to be part of their flock in general, as well. Wake, a Lunar living in the ancestor-worshipping Touman Clans, has many old friends among the clan ghosts, defending them as much as she does the living Touman. Further, Lunars have long been the premier necromancers of the Second Age, with some trading with the ghosts of the Underworld for secrets. Seven Obsidian Leopard treats with ancient ghosts for their service and to learn the history of the Dreaming Sea and its secrets, offering up gifts of either his own blood or that of Dragon-Blooded prisoners in exchange. Smiling Rat makes dark pacts with the ghosts of victims of the Realm, offering them a chance to use their power and even their unlives to fuel the dark magic he would turn on their killers. The Silver Pact watches the Fair Folk carefully, ever since the invasion that ended the Shogunate. They won’t let such a thing happen again. They infiltrate the courts of fae princes who have enough power to threaten Creation, using spycraft, sabotage and murder when they must. When Prince Ravel-Soul of the Lapis Lazuli Court discovered the Ophion Megalith, a First Age weapon long lost to the Wyld, Bhagaval Iron-Hand convinced three rival courts that the prince would use it against them, and he took advantage of the ensuing conflict to irreparably damage the Monolith. However, not all fae need to be enemies. Working with them is never easy or safe, but Lunars have bargained with the Fair Folk or bound them to service. Klesamra Lotus-Seed recruited around six Southern courts of the fae to the Pact’s aid by promising them a tithe of souls from captured Realm citizens…but doing so caused massive controversy and ultimately led to Klesamra being censured by a council of shahan-yas. Besides these world-spanning powers, the Lunars often deal with local noteworthies. While any regional power may be of little concern to the Pact as a whole, individual Lunars or schools active in their sphere of influence must take them into account. The Eastern Pact has varying opinions on the Confederation of Rivers, a mutual defense pact and alliance of non-aggression in the Scavenger Lands. Ma-Ha-Suchi says it is nothing but an adjunct to Lookshyan hegemony and wants to undermine its limited power and destroy the alliance. Sublime Danger, on the other hand, believes that a stronger and more independent Confederation would be a potential counterweight to Lookshy’s interests. In the Dreaming Sea, Tanisa Ring-Eater and her followers work to undermine diplomatic ties between Volivat and Ysyr, so that her agents in Prasad can more easily steer the Prasadi against the Realm. This goes against Seven Obsidian Leopard’s plans, however, as he’d rather see Volivat and Ysyr crush the Prasadi Dragon-Bloods. He has secretly made an agent of the sorcerer-prince Ahaz of the Palace Couril in Ysyr, using his influence in exchange for teaching him magic. In the Southwest, Sha’a Oka welcomes the aid of the Lintha pirates under his follower Lintha Haquen Fia-Shaw Flowers Unbending in the Storm, and the guerrilla Ten Stripes encourages Lintha piracy against satrapial interests as well. However, Lunars outside the Realm’s sphere of influence, like Lukha Palash, actively hunt Lintha raiders to protect their own dominions from pirates. Next time: Lunar dominions
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May 20, 2019 14:02
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Fangs at the Gate: Does Whatever A Spider Can Lunar dominions are societies that Lunars have turned into weapons against the hegemony of the Dragon-Bloods. The Realm’s power extends far beyond its actual borders, as satrapies send out raiders to get enough resources to meet their tribute demands, while neighboring nations raid each other for resources to sell at the lucrative Realm markets. Exiles migrate from the satrapies to conquer new lands, diseases spread from the Inland Sea cities with travelers, Immaculate missionaries destroy old customs in order to spread their religion. Dynastic or satrapial businesses force locals to buy goods at markups or face terrible violence or enslavement. These all cause resentment, which Lunars can use to forge a society into a resistance. Some dominions are military staging areas against the Realm, others are strongholds meant to lure in legion forces and defeat them defensively. Others lie beyond the Realm’s influence, gathering strength for the eventual day when the Pact moves against the Dynasty in force. Many of these areas are blessed by the Lunar Charm Boundary-Marking Meditation, which allows the area to have three qualities designated, such as ‘fertile,’ ‘menacing’ or ‘isolated.’ The listed domains may have their qualities given in sidebars. If one of these qualities is noted to support an action, it counts as an applicable specialty, and if a quality opposes an action, it causes a minor penalty. The territory’s master can deny enemies these benefits or exempt allies from penalties. Because Boundary-Marking Meditation has a size limit, a dominion may have multiple distinct territories within it. The Mountain of the Spider King in the Northern Threshold is all that keeps the scenic Black Shale Road from being a delight to travelers. It towers over the road in the far North, and it gets few visitors, despite overlooking a busy trade route. Guild members offer up a silver tithe and are careful about their movement of slaves along the Road to maintain its use between Whitewall, Gethamane and Grieve. Independent merchants often pay much lower rates, though they also risk death if they offend the Spider King. The Mountain is a warren of caves and tunnels, natural or man-made, ranging in size from large enough only for a crawling children to enough for an entire town. Within the caves, Aum-Ashatra the Spider King makes his home and watches over his people. Few Realm merchants can ever get their goods past Black Shale Road, and many favor longer but safer routes as a result. Other merchants, unable or unwilling to travel the White Sea, must pay the Spider King a tithe for safe passage or risk being killed as an example. While ancient, Aum-Ashatra retains his youthful vigor. His face has been hardened by the centuries of trouble he’s seen, but he still smiles easily. His presence lights up the room, and he is fond of small jokes and pranks when he has the chance. However, centuries of leadership and war weigh on him, and when it comes to defending the peoples of the Mountain, he has no time for humor. When he holds court, he uses his favored granddaughters as his mouthpieces so that he can maintain an expression of total impassivity when making judgments. He is most typically found in his six-armed hybrid form, his skin nearly as dark as the Mountain’s stone. When he chooses to walk unnoticed, he takes on his ever-youthful human shape, with only the venom dripping from his hollow fangs to reveal his true nature. Aum-Ashatra has declared himself a protector of the lost and downtrodden, making the Mountain a refuge for travelers in need and a bulwark against the Realm. Aum-Ashatra’s people have absorbed the virtue of hospitality, and they offer food and shelter to refugees, war orphans and other unfortunates that arrive on the mountain. In exchange, Aum-Ashatra extracts whatever favors his guests might provide to aid the Mountain or harm the Realm. Many that have nowhere else to go decide to stay, getting adopted into one of the many families of the caves. Aum-Ashatra is a proud Pact member and shahan-ya, taking his duties very seriously. It is rare that the Spider King is without a Lunar protégé being tutored in spying and intrigue while helping to defend the Mountain or fight the Realm. In the Northern councils, Aum-Ashatra remains aloof from any matter he deems local or petty, saving his words for the decisions he sees as truly vital to the destruction of the Realm. The Mountain dominion was established some two centuries ago when Aum-Ashatra and a handful of followers, Moon-Touched children and mortal bandits pledged to him settled in the caves. Their descendants make up most of the people of the Mountain, though refugees and exiles seeking shelter have contributed over the past two centuries as well. Food is a constant problem. The locals tend edible fungi in the depths and go out to hunt, fish and tend foothill crops, but these are inconsistent at best. The tithes paid to the Spider King by passing merchants and the spoils of raiding Realm caravans are traded to local neighbors and bandits in exchange for food to supplement local supplies, plus any other goods the locals can’t produce. When these are not enough, especially in harsh winters, the Mountain sends out raiders to pillage the food that their neighbors will not trade to them. At these times, the mandate of hospitality becomes contentious, and the Mountain locals sour on refugees and exiles sheltered within. Crime within the Mountain is harshly punished, with minor offenses resulting in branding, exile or swift execution. More major offenses are punished with slow poison or being cast out naked into the snow. The Mountain is dark, well-defended and labyrinthine. The Spider King’s spouses have always been those whose wit, determination and will impressed him. Their descendants form the four families of the Mountain. Each family is self-ruled, electing a chief to address its needs and problems to the Spider King. His lineage is strong, and any spider-folk descendants are considered family elites, sought out for their wisdom, which the locals believe is greater than normal humans, and favored in chief elections. The Ariha are the eldest of the families, and they work the mushroom farms of the black shale caves, using the crop to secure a place for themselves as wealthy merchants. The Tehraihn are warriors, seeing themselves as the first line of defense for the Mountain and earning their wealth by raiding. The trappers and artisans of the Vezhetra create the wares that are sold in Mountain markets and the traps that guard the caves. The newest family are the Shasai, who serve as diplomats and mediators among the other three. Outsiders living in the Mountain must seek adoption into one of the families, which means tests to ensure they aren’t spies or Realm sympathizers. The life of an adoptee is one of hard labor, but they get a warm bed and meals, which can sound amazing to many of those that seek the mercy of the Spider King. The Mountain does not keep slaves – captives are taken only for interrogation or ransom, and any others that surrender are either killed or allowed to flee. The spiderfolk of the Mountain are notable for their extra limbs and functioning spinnerets. Sidebar: where do beastfolk come from? Beastfolk are humans with animalistic mutations. A bearwoman might have a bear’s head, shaggy fur and sharp claws, while a centipede-man might have multiple limbs, a chitinous exoskeleton and venomous fangs. Beastfolk can occur due to Wyld mutation or divine blessing, and it’s usually heritable by children, though the mutations may diminish or disappear over multiple generations of interbreeding with normal humans. Some cultures are prejudiced against beastfolk, but they are human in all meaningful senses of the word, and they can Exalt. Lunars may transform normal humans into beastfolk, primarily by use of the Charm Beast-Soul Crucible Awakening to create a sacred testing ground that will bless those who overcome its trials with traits of the Lunar’s spirit shape. Further, the children a Lunar has while using the Charm Hybrid Body Transformation (which turns you into a beastfolk/furry hybrid shape yourself to gain access to their mutations) will inherit the mutations. Also, in the Deep Wyld, it is possible for couplings between humans and animals to possibly yield beastfolk. I have no idea why this was even mentioned. Anyway. Each of the Mountain’s four families oversee a section of its tunnels that lead into the upper reaches, making their homes in the rock. Their cavern-homes are blocky, square and utilitarian in design, meant as a final line of defense if the enemy takes the Mountain. Each home has at least one escape tunnel linked into other, hidden evacuation tunnels. Despite this pragmatic approach, a local home’s interior is deeply personal to the Mountain people, and most decorate with colorful stones, fish scales and battle trophies. Beneath the home-caverns are the underground markets lit by torches, where the locals sell their goods, primarily wool, leather, wood, meat, fish and fur, plus anything the warriors have plundered from raids or the local tinkerers have remade from looted goods. The markets also serve as meeting halls, and they are the only place in the Mountain with taverns or baths, dug deep to reach the sulfur vents that heat mountain springs. The lower tunnels range from a hundred yards above ground to deep below it, and make up most of the obvious entrances to the Mountain. They are an unmappable maze of passages, full of deadly traps. Few of the locals ever go there, for the traps can’t tell friend from foe, and so many have been made that even Aum-Ashatra doesn’t know where they all are. The Mountain is also home to cat-sized giant spiders, originally domesticated by Aum-Ashatra himself. They hunt the rats in the middle regions as well as any other vermin that threaten the storehouses. Larger feral spider breeds can be found in the lower tunnels, which further discourages exploration. The Realm’s first interest in the Black Shale Road was during the time when the sorcerous empire of Bagrash Kol tnreatened their Northern satrapies. The legions intended to use the ancient road as a supply route in case of war. However, Aum-Ashatra, then living in disguise among the Dynasts, caught wind of this and retreated to the Mountain, establishing it as a defense against the Realm’s movements. After years of losing scouts, supplies and caravans along the Black Shale Road, the Realm figured out where the raids were coming from. They’ve sieged the Mountain several times, and it’s always been a protracted and bloody affair that has never actually succeeded. Even when the Dragon-Bloods defeat the locals in the field, they’ve never forced Aum-Ashatra out of his lair. Travelers often see the Mountain as a place of safety, as the low tunnels seem like easy refuge from the weather, but the traps and spiders make them far more dangerous than they look. In winter, the locals build fires in the cave mouths to lure in travelers. In battle, Aum-Ashatra favors misdirection and feints, using feigned weakness and traps to disorient and divide his foes. He only enters battle personally when the Mountain’s warriors face Dragon-Bloods or when he wants to spread tales of the terrifying six-armed god with death-dripping fangs. Arisahvta, chief of the Ariha, is a stern woman who always seems disappointed. She is young but brilliant, the handpicked successor of the last chief after managing the family food reserves well during a famine. The Ariha remain unsure of her, though, for she is a sharp-tongued woman with a hot temper and little patience for those that can’t keep up with her. She especially dislikes refugees and adoptees, as she thinks hospitality is an unneeded drain on already tight resources. Quicksilver Razor Edge is the spider-man chief of the Tehraihn since he slew a Dragon-Blood in combat, albeit at the cost of a foot and three arms. He now suffers chronic pain and shortness of breath from his many injuries, and his enforced retirement has given him a new view on life. He trains his children to be the greatest warriors the family’s ever seen, developing new and terrifying tactics to use on Realm soldiers. Ix Tzel is the greatest of Aum-Ashatra’s Lunar students, a proud and wise savant who educates the locals when not serving his shahan-ya. It has taken him years to achieve his trusted rank, and he is jealously vigilant against any threat to his position. While he isn’t openly unfriendly to other students, he subtly works against those he’s decided are unworthy. A few days west of the Mountain is the satrapy Tantara, sheltered in the bay. Much of the white-towered city is abandoned and overgrown, but it’s been remaking itself ever since the Imperial Navy established a presence in the port a few decades back. It is used as a base for anti-pirate operations in the White Sea, so that shipping can more safely bypass the Mountain. Today, herring fisheries and Guild traders thrive in the lower city, and new construction has started to sprawl along the shore. The past year has seen much of the Navy retreat to the Blessed Isle, though, and so businesses have suffered and piracy increased. The three princes of the city and its satrap, Sesus Magel Shireen, argue a lot over how best to protect the merchant traffic and the city itself while still meeting the Sesus demands for tribute. Spray is the largest and oldest of the fishing villages in the cliffs above the White Sea, where the small communities worship a group of seabird-gods. The fisherfolk have been given the protection of the Spider King as long as they maintain their end of his ancient bargain with them, providing a trade outlet for the Mountain. More than one village has been razed in retribution for selling information to the Realm, though, and others have been torched by the Imperial Navy for piracy, either because of their own raiding or because they harbor White Sea pirates like Broken Spear Mokraj. High in the mountains, higher than even the Spider King’s people often go, are the Skyborn nomads, who tame immense flying eels and herd mountain goats. The Skyborn descend from the twin children of an avian god, and they are adapted to the high altitudes enough that they get sick if they go down too far. Aum-Ashatra has taken advantage of them through very one-sided trade deals, knowing that the mountain herders have very few trading options. Their divine ancestor has grown quite angry about this and has begun petitioning the nearby Immaculates to aid his children. Next time: Skandhar-Bhal, the Valley of Enlightenment
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May 20, 2019 15:58
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Mors Rattus posted:Also, in the Deep Wyld, it is possible for couplings between humans and animals to possibly yield beastfolk. I have no idea why this was even mentioned. Presumably to head off arguments about something that was true in prior editions and prevent those discussions from spiraling into multi-page dissertations on the optimality of bestiality. Honestly I think this works better than Progenitive Essence for DBs because rather than inventing new setting metaphysics that just provoke further arguments, it just posits that yeah, you can do this because the Wyld gives no fucks about biochemical barriers but why would you want to?
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May 20, 2019 16:21
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I thought about posting about Leda and the Swan but reconsidered. There is a mythical space for that sort of stuff but People Gotta Make It Weird.
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May 20, 2019 16:51
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Warhammer Fantasy: Paths of the Damned Part 2: Spires of Altdorf Roll to discover your enemy is lairing in a trap-laden fortress like a spider One of the bits I appreciate about the whole Carlott arc is that Carlott absolutely knows she can't take the PCs on in a fair fight. Even if they weren't as dangerous as Brute Squad, or were earlier in the adventure and so hundreds of EXP back, they'd still outnumber her enough that she really doesn't want to fight them woman to PC Party because she's aware of the existence of action economy. She's not a joke in a fight, either, but she's really no match for Otto or Katiya in a duel; she's about equivalent in strength, toughness, but they're both better equipped since she only ever wears medium armor on her chest and nowhere else. An awful lot of enemies don't wear full armor. They're also more skilled than she is. Another thing I appreciate is that while I showed off all her murder attempts against Brute Squad because I think they're fun encounters, there are many points in her arc where you can find her early and stop the attacks. It gets increasingly easy to find her as the attacks go on, culminating in the mutant Adventurers telling you basically everything about her, but you can actually get at her as far back as the first thug attack conceivably; as soon as you hear about the Three Beards bar the path to finding her is open. The Three Beards is a lovely bar and brothel in a bad part of town, inhabited by thugs and sellswords. Staking out the bar and finding Carlott from her description is a matter of some stealth and investigation, then requires carefully following her through the maze of tenements around the area. One of the notes in the book is that Carlott isn't very smart. She has a 27% Int and is terrible at perception. Even an unskilled PC can follow her through the crowds if she doesn't think she's being followed, in case you don't have a rogue. I like that Carlott being kind of out of her depth trying to be a cult mastermind is also used as a gameplay mechanic to help parties without a stealth specialist track her. Following her like this would be extremely easy for a skilled rogue/investigator like Pierre, or even someone with basic stealth skills like Katiya. Heck, even Liniel could do it with her great elven Agi. So while Brute Squad went through all 6 murder attempts, it's not only possible but pretty likely you'll get her before the mirror match finale if you really try. Which is good! In general, the Carlott arc is like looking at this adventure if the whole thing was well done. The actual confrontation with her has some nice wrinkles and space for multiple PC types and ways to handle it, too. Still, Brute Squad knows exactly where she is, and knows she's set up a trap-filled lair in an old warehouse she's bought. They give themselves a day and get Solveig a poultice (which lets her Heal as if she was lightly wounded, healing 8 Wounds and telling the others she'll be fine despite the fact that her arm was hanging by a thread yesterday). She also takes up the greataxe that the mutant almost killed her with; Ulricans get Two-Handed and Solveig is not the kind to care about her own safety. They know the warehouse will be dangerous, but they also know Carlott's actual Chaos Shrine is there. They're also feeling a little more cautious after Solveig's injuries and send Pierre in first to scout. You really want to do this. If you send a scout, there's a bunch of easy Stealth stuff to do inside and around. If you just charge in, the front door is set up to slam shut behind you and lock you in a murder-hole where Carlott's minions fire bows down at you from cover above until someone makes a Str-20 test to break down the door or the party hits on playing dead and then attacking the thugs when they come to loot the bodies. Even if you don't scout, you get Per tests to realize this trap is here; it's a nasty ambush and just letting PCs walk right into it would be bad form. Getting into the warehouse without alerting the thugs that they should slam the door is an Easy (+20) Silent Move test, so Katiya and Pierre go in first to look for a way to disable the rigging. Looking around inside, they find something even better: A window whose boards they can pull up that will let the rest of the party in. Simple Agi tests will get you in through the window without alerting Carlott and her backup, and in general the test difficulties are set to make it possible that a party of non-specialists find the windows and get in without alerting the enemy. Also, if a fight starts, it's 6 thugs with shortbows (using the Bandit statistics, so mooks) against a party of 5, plus Carlott will be alerted and come running. The party can absolutely win that battle if they're past the main trap. If you surprise Carlott, though, you can kick down her flimsy door to her office and find her staring blankly into space, trying to think of something more inventive and effective for killing the PCs as she sits in bed. Also, if players have noticed a pattern from Adelbert and the other thugs she's hired, if you rip away her curtain and reveal her severed head Chaos Shrine in her bedroom, when the thugs come to back her up they suddenly start backpedaling and going 'Whoa! Whoa, we didn't know about no Chaos poo poo, good sirs! Don't call the Hunters, we'll help you with this cultist!' I really, really love the way Carlott has had no luck finding actual Chaos Cultists because all she knows is criming, but the criminals in the city are too smart to want to work with Chaos once they see it. As for Brute Squad, they have two stealth characters who can get the drop on Carlott pretty easily, and they know where the shrine is. As the others wait in the shadows to provide backup near the window, Katiya and Pierre successfully slip into Carlott's room. As Katiya confronts her and challenges her with her saber, Pierre pulls aside the curtain to smash whatever's in the shrine with his pick, reasoning that might stop the probably-a-powerful-cult-magus from summoning demons; they don't actually know Carlott's sort of in over her head. The other three move in behind the thugs as they come to help Carlott, her axe and dagger clashing with Katiya's saber and shield as neither can seem to hit the other. The thugs are astonished to see the Chaos Shrine and immediately join in, yelling that they ain't workin' with no Chaos Cultist, at which point all of Brute Squad comes together to curbstomp Carlott and the annoying part of the denouement triggers. You see, Chart is pretty convinced Carlott will make a great recurring villain, and I can certainly see some groups enjoying having Chaos Wile E. Coyote (Super Genius) taking the occasional hilarious swing at them. But for this encounter, it's fiat that Carlott will escape when defeated, because she has a secret escape tunnel (she'll get knocked into her bookshelves and scramble out in the chaos) and a Fate Point. Now, I like the OPTION of Carlott getting away; she's a fun villain and could continue to be one down the line. But I'd rather gauge if my players were enjoying dealing with her before deciding whether or not they can capture/kill her here. Heck, if you want her Fate Point to go off still, you could have her captured here and turned in for a reward with the option to have her escape before her execution. Still, it's a minor complaint and something a GM can easily fix. With that, the Carlott arc is over, as is the canon route of Brute Squad's adventures in Altdorf. They knock her through the shelves, she scarpers, they decide that's enough on this matter and go to get drunk and work out how to get paid. As they sit around a table bandying about ideas, I'm left to explain why I keep hammering this point so much. You need gear in Hams. If Solveig had been in full mail armor, she would've been knocked to 0 but not Critted at all. She almost died (well, Burned Fate) back in the Mutant Mirror Match because she's been stuck in light armor, not wanting to upgrade to Studded because then she couldn't upgrade that set to mail and she wants to top out at mail with Armored Caster. A company of adventurers in WHRP needs some money at some point, especially as in the setting you're usually intended to care about it quite a bit. There's lots of implication you should care about having nice clothes, or getting a good drink every now and then; your PCs have a rough life and deserve a break. But if you go entire plot arcs and adventures without pay, PCs will be scrambling just to buy ammunition and essentials. I don't know where this blind spot on monetary rewards comes from but it's everywhere in WHFRP's premades. However, the team has made contacts in the Colleges and has a powerful magical amulet that they can't use. I'll rule they're able to gift it back to the Bright College as well as handing over Wolfgang for pacification (enjoy that, rear end in a top hat) rather than giving him to the Hunters. In return the Bright College gives them what was to be Wolfgang's yearly salary for 1 year on his promotion to Wizard Lord, because the core book lists the yearly income of an average Wizard Lord. 500 GC goes a long way to making the team happy with their adventures in Altdorf. Liniel also presents Lord Frederick with a bill for the destruction of one (1) Chaos Artifact, which he agrees is fair, and he promptly pays the wizard Gabrielle Marsner for her services rather than Brute Squad, misunderstanding her intentions and assuming, still, that real heroes don't ask for rewards. Liniel's ears twitch, but she bites her tongue on the matter when he presents the party with some of his made-up awards, but also a Best Quality Rapier for Otto as a personal gift. It seems a nice way to make up for him losing his Best Hand Weapon from Ashes due to losing their runesmith. The team also sells the dumb medals for another fifty crowns, and with that, they've made a little more money than they did in Middenheim. But only a little. With bills to pay and gear to pick up, but with no urgent matters to handle in the meantime, they collect their EXP (50 for each assassination attempt, 200 for defeating Carlott, for 500), their Fate Point for defeating Wolfgang, and declare they've beaten Spires of Altdorf. It's time for the team to take in a couple operas, get drunk, let Liniel loose among the elven embassies, and generally wait for the Chalice of Wrath to show up because they're pretty convinced they can't get off this dumb main plot even if they tried. The book also suggests sending them at a few other select pre-mades to grind for more EXP, and we'll assume they do that off-screen; they're hideously overleveled for the adventures suggested in Spires (Most of which are for PCs in mid-to-late 1st career) and I don't feel like covering them. So we'll assume they face-stomp two haunted houses and some other intrigues to level grind in the meantime. Good work, Brute Squad. You may also notice with no-one dying so far, they're getting kind of crazy on Fate. The official position seems to be to give Fate at the end of successful major story arcs, with the assumption someone is likely to use up a Fate Point in the process, but I like to award it more rarely but balance encounters such that PCs are less likely to Burn it. I find that the official approach can lead to a situation where Fate starts to snowball. Even their goddamn Elf has 4 Fate (with +1 Fortune a day from Lucky) now. With so many rerolls per day, it's getting increasingly hard to put them in a situation where they might need to Burn any. Next Time: The Mustache Dimension
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May 20, 2019 17:05
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Fangs at the Gate: The Kung Fu Priests of Peace Skandhar-Bhal lies in the Chiasa Savara mountain range of the North, impenetrable in winter and dangerous even in warmer times. There are few paths, but for those that know where to look, glyphs in the stone and white flags mark a trail through the mountains. Following the path is dangerous, between the ice, snow, blizzards and white leopards. Caves and crevices along the way show paintings of the moon falling from the sky and are full of makeshift graves. At the height of the trail, hidden by the misted mountains, is the green valley. Beneath the plant-coated upper slopes are a few brightly-colored homes among farms, pastures and streams. White stone buildings dot the valley floor, facing inwards towards a circle of temples around an ornate stupa-manse whose silver tower nearly reaches the heights of the mountain peaks. The valley is a verdant, fertile one full of farms, meadows and trees, its air echoing with the sound of bells strung between buildings. Legends claim that long ago, before history, the moon grew weary one night and fell to Creation in its sleep, or it became frustrated with Mela and hurled a piece of itself to ground in the North to spite her, or it wanted to hide from a great battle and so it set its heart down where it could never be found. Whatever the truth, a stone did fall long ago from the moon, crashing into the mountains and creating the valley. Heaven sent nine powerful gods to guard the Moon-That-Fell. They led a group of lesser spirits to Skhandhar-Bhal, finding worship from wanderers that stumbled into the rich valley. Their disciples made a sacred village around the fallen stone, and the valley became a settlement of hermits and sages, united by the desire to pray and to learn. Some eventually left the valley, marking the path and spreading its legend that future pilgrims might find it. New ideas and new people flourished, bringing knowledge of architecture, agriculture and other practical skills in an atmosphere of communal learning. Today, the Moon-That-Fell is enclosed in the great stupa, tended to by one of the valley’s monastic orders. The egg-shaped stone is nearly ten feet tall and over five feet wide, shining a beautiful silver that reflects even the faintest of light with a glow like the full moon itself. Centuries ago, anyone could gaze on the Moon-That-Fell whenever they liked, but it is now kept locked behind ornate silver doors, except during come of age rites or special festivals. The valley’s Lunar master believes this helps conserve its great and numinous power, encouraging the locals to view Luna’s relic with proper reverence. That master is the Full Moon named Vanamaithri Mirror-Soul, who traveled the valley in search of enlightenment long ago. They had become sickened by their own bloodlust, seeking new clarity in the frozen heart of the North. They studied under the ascetics of Skandhar-Bhal for years, finding calm for the first time since their Exaltation. In time, they became a teacher, imparting what they’d learned over their long life as philosophy, history and martial arts. Formally, Vanamaithri doesn’t rule the valley, but is looked on by the locals as both a spiritual and temporal leader with a special connection to the Moon-That-Fell. Even the nine gods cannot contest them. They live openly as a Lunar, often walking among the temples in their great tortoise spirit shape, and they are said to teach more with silence than others could with a thousand words. While they have lived quietly for centuries, they now prepare to return to the world as a warrior, leading the fighters of Skandhar-Bhal with them. Several monastic orders make their home in the valley. The Order of the Moon-That-Fell are the acolytes of Vanamaithri and the most prominent, practicing rigorous martial arts training, but each of the nine gods has their own temple of devotees as well. Shining Horse’s acolytes tame horses and train them to navigate even the treacherous foothills. Jade Eagle’s monks care for the dead, returning their bodies to the sky and preparing their souls to reincarnate. Scarlet Doe’s followers must be total pacifists, learning to speak without breath and move without sound. Other, lesser temples have risen and fallen through the centuries, with some worshipping local terrestrial gods or ancestral ghosts who have submitted to the nine celestial gods, and others emerged from schisms in the larger orders. The temples began as a ring of shrines to the nine gods and the Moon-That-Fell, but they have since expanded into towering viharas, covered in bronze idols of their patron gods and many colorful prayer flags. Lesser shrines and temples form a second circle around them, varying in size and wealth. Only monks live in the temples, but they employ their lay followers as cooks, gardeners, crafters and guards, though the more martial monks provide most of the security the valley needs, which isn’t much. The spaces between temples are used as training yards, sacred gardens and uncultivated fields. In theory, the monastic orders exist in harmony, but friction between members can escalate into monastery-wide conflicts. These disputes usually start with low-ranking monks arguing over crop allocations, drunken slanders or personal feuds. Most orders then close ranks around accused wrongdoers, preventing the easy resolution of personal wrongs. The nine celestial spirits and their divine retinues jealously guard their roles as the gods of the valley. Those terrestrial gods that refuse to acknowledge them as superiors were long ago driven into the wilds, and the temples name them devils and forbid any dealings with them. Rural families will occasionally form secret bargains with these gods, but this is dangerous. If their ceremonies or shrines are discovered, they will be shunned by the community, unable to access the temples or trade with the more pious valley people. The Order of the Moon-That-Fell worship Luna directly, taking Vanamaithri as their prophet. They emphasize the danger of violent emotion and the importance of self-mastery to achieve true calm, with acolytes confronting their darker passions to better understand and live in peace with themselves. They are the greatest martial artists of the valley, though they’ve rarely seen true battle. More often, their training is used to withstand the dangers of the mountains or to look for lost or dead pilgrims. The Silent Acolytes worship Scarlet Doe and are led by her daughter, Ceryneika. Their philosophy is built on empathy, teaching that enlightenment comes from learning to feel with a heart that encompasses all Creation, becoming divine by understanding it. They harvest local plants and animals to create medicinal and entheogenic compounds, and they also tend to the sick and injured of the valley. This calling tends to draw them from monastic isolation, which makes the Silent Acolytes more worldly than the other orders. The School of Pale Sky tend to the dead under the guidance of Jade Eagle. They chant prayers for the deceased and anoint them with herbs, laying them out on the peaks for carrion birds and scaveners. This frees the soul, they hold, to Jade Eagle’s guidance to the next life. They also deal with the valley’s ghosts, communing with them to aid them in resolving whatever ties them to the world still. They also exorcise malevolent ghosts or those that want worship over the nine gods. The lesser order of the Silver Dragon Temple are a syncretic offshoot of the Immaculates, though at this point they share little but symbology. Only the initiated may read their centuries-old Immaculate texts, all original, that they brought to the valley. The Silver Dragon monks hold that these should be read metaphorically, not literally, and they also take an active role in the farms and mines of the valley. They record successful innovations and share practical wisdom with new generations. While they believe the harmony of elements in the valley brings them closer to enlightenment, they still hold themselves apart from the lay people and expect appropriate reverence. The valley is hidden, sacred and peaceful. While most residents of the valley are monks, many put off their monastic vows until late in life, and others serve the temples as lay people. Over the centuries, pilgrims have become farmers or crafters and a community has formed. Secular residents live further from the center of the valley than the monks do, and the large white stone homes each contain multiple generations of family. A shallow mine in the northeastern part of the valley is used for metal to make tools and silver for bells, and the warm summers and short winters allow self-sustaining agriculture despite the mountainous surroundings. The locals mostly eat barley, vegetables, duck eggs and meat, yak and goat meat and dairy, and fish from the highland streams and lakes. The monastic orders may have dietary restrictions – Scarlet Doe’s monks, for example, are strictly vegetarian. Local cuisine is simple by design, both for spiritual reasons and because spices aren’t really a thing the valley has access to. The locals have little need for money, either. They don’t trade with the outside and they have neither industry nor merchants. Locals give most of their produce to the temples, which redistribute goods as needed. Each household also keeps a share of produce to trade for services that can’t be stockpiled or to repay debts. There is no official hierarchy, but it is generally understood that the monks are more divine, capable, wise and smart. This is especially true of abbots and other ranking monks, most of whom have been monks since childhood rather than entering later in life as most do. Some families give children they don’t need to work the crops or do tradework to the temples as acolytes. Daily prayer is a duty of all people at the many shrines in the valley. (There are even shrines to the Immaculate Dragons, built long ago by heterodox Immaculate pilgrims and schismatics.) The silversmiths make prayer bells to commemorate each new birth, inscribing them with the child’s name and prayers to gods or sages that the parents hope they will emulate. Skandhar-Bhal has no formal laws or judiciary or even police. Petty crimes like slander, brawls or theft are seen as symptoms of a straying mind, one that requires remedial (and heavy) reeducation by the community and hours of public prayer. Culprits of worse deeds are usually confined to a cell in a monastery and given food and educational scrolls plus the company of monks until the monastery’s leader decides to release them. Leaving the valley for any reason is discouraged, and children are taught that the outside world is a dangerous place of chaos and unenlightened people. The few pilgrims that show up rarely do anything to disabuse them of this idea, as they are usually driven to escape the outside world for similar reasons, thus reinforcing the belief that the valley is a blessed paradise and that the only reason to leave is to spread enlightenment to outsiders. Proselytizing monks that venture out from the valley are tasked to keep its location a secret from any that might harm it. Dancing Ceryneika is Scarlet Doe’s god-blood daughter and leader of her mother’s temple. She is nearly 50 but still looks like a young maiden – and often acts the part, impetuous and reckless. She is ruthless against any behavior she deems violent or aggressive, whether drunken brawls or extended feuds, and is skeptical even of the martial arts training that the other orders practice. She encourages people to discipline their children for participating even in competitive games, lest the play inspire an aggressive mindset. While fighting to enforce her views would go against them, she and her monks have other means to make their point, such as refusing medical treatment to the aggressors of fights. Agallai Stone-Blessed is the closest Vanamaithri has to a rival for leadership of the valley. She is a Dragon-Blood descended from a renegade Dynastic heretic who helped found the Silver Dragon Temple. She has never been interested in becoming a monk, and instead she keeps the peace of the outer valley, traveling its borders monthly. Old and young alike refer to the aging Earth Aspect as Grandmother Aga, seeing her as an equal in wisdom and ability to the monks despite her worldly life. Even she doesn’t realize how many of them would follow her every order if she asked it, which could destroy the valley’s respect for the monastic leaders. Jade Eagle is a god growing bored with peace. He is a hunter with nothing to hunt, and he’s developed other things over the centuries to keep his dissatisfaction at bay. He will head out for weeks at a time to gossip with other gods or fight passing air elementals, and many of his fellow gods see him as unreliable or even a troublemaker. While the valley’s mortals revere him as warrior and psychopomp, many are also uneasy with him. His temple is a safety valve for those that don’t quite fit in, training them as survivalists and scouts to hunt for dangers in the mountains. Jade Eagle is a close friend of Vanamaithri, and he’s long been concerned that the Lunar allowed himself to become too pacifistic and unemotional. On the other hand, he also worries about what might happen if his youthful bloodlust took him over again. Next time: The Touman of Medo
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May 20, 2019 17:36
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God drat it Etherscope.
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May 20, 2019 17:53
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Hostile V posted:God drat it Etherscope. It takes some goddamn weird blindness to go 'man we better be careful we rebuild the reputation of OUR version of eugenics!'
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May 20, 2019 18:31
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Night10194 posted:It takes some goddamn weird blindness to go 'man we better be careful we rebuild the reputation of OUR version of eugenics!' I feel safe saying at this point that D&D can straight up teach and reinforce racism. Skandhar-Bhal reminds me of some isolated Pennsylvania religious communities I’ve been to.
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May 20, 2019 21:03
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Is Daeren or someone else going to finish the Powerchords review? It sounds horrible and problematic, but I still believe in the mystical, trancendent power of rock and roll. I’ve been trying to turn it into RPG form for 15 years (anyone want my notes on a Hold Steady/Unknown Armies game or my Springsteen/Gaslight Anthem/Mountain Goats/THS/Ezra Furman/Tom Waits/Nick Cave Monster of the Week settings. Time of Mysteries has two rock and roll style adventures), based on things like Scott Pilgrim and Wild Zero and Phonogram. I have a whole idea for heroic rock and rollers fighting dance music cyborgs. There’s Starchildren:Velvet Generation, a glam rock RPG reviewed here, and someone was working on a mythical blues based WOD game (I played a blues musician in Mage). You think there’d be more metal games based on the overlap with them and RPGs. So any material would help my own ideas, even if that’s full of sexual assault and liking KISS. I want to write a PBTA hack based on the power of rock and roll (the write up complained about the lack of hip hop, my game would go further & not acknowledge any musical styles outside of rock, punk, and indie, tho I suppose I should make options for them but I have no knowledge of them at all). Dance music would probably work like Banality in Changeling, dulling the mind and the senses. Power would be based on authenticity and fire. I’m not sure about obscurity, since artists like Springsteen still have some of the power, but popularity would hurt it. I was gonna make an Unknown Armies school based on wanting music to be both more and less popular. You need your obscure records. I can suggest as an alternative My Jam, a music based LARP based on Monsterhearts. You pick a song, and when that’s playing you have power over everything. It’s set in a high school dance and has an amazing set up and splats. quote:You will be playing Robert Johnson Memorial High School students attending the [current season] dance, for whatever reasons high school students go to dances. Some of you are here to dance, some of you are here to hang out with friends, some of you are here to cause trouble, and some of you are here because you have nothing better to do. But all of you are also here because music is magic. I love this because it symbolises exactly how music makes you feel! No matter how bad things get, if I put on No Surrender or This Year, i’m powerful for those few minutes, I can do anything! The relationship establishing mechanic is amazing: it’s gently caress, Marry, Kill. quote:Cool. Now you’re going to reintroduce yourselves, maybe letting the other players know a little more of your character. Then you’re going to engage in a time-honored method of establishing truths about interpersonal relationships: by playing gently caress, Marry, Kill. I like this, it’s simple but evocative of the high school setting. The Splats are great because they embody the different ways of relating to music without boxing you into a genre. quote:Melancholy This is so evocative and encompasses so much powerful music, from The Smiths and Springsteen but also Sad Boys/cloud rap/emo rap/gothboiclique. You could do some terrifying stuff with Nick Cave songs. It also emphasises the high school roll of the outsider and how, as Meat Loaf sings, if you hold on to a chorus you can make it through the night. quote:Fanatical The rest of this post pretty handily demonstrates what this mindset looks like from the inside. We are, as the Bouncing Souls once sang, the the true believers, and we create entire religions and cosmologies devoted to our favourite bands in song. quote:Chill I don’t really understand how you’d play them, except for comedy stoners, Deadheads, or vaporwavers. But that’s cool. That’s for the players. And I understand people listen to music that way. quote:Hype Another splat that I don’t intuitively understand, but definitely one that’s needed for role playing and dynamics. Especially since it’s a LARP and you’re actually playing these songs, the other players would probably love their music. It also fits the high school setting. You have massive nights, every song is right... quote:Aggro Another very easy to understand subculture, since so much teenage music is built around this. In a LARP setting they’d have to work hard not to get too aggro and upset people but it’s perfect for the setting. The character sheet is just a series of questions. For example, the Melencholic: quote:Name: Pronouns: I try to present myself as: The first four are universal, the last 4 depend on the splat, and they do a good job of getting you into character, tho i’d like some PBTA style moves. All in all, My Jam is a cool idea i’d love to run, but I still think we need more rock
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May 21, 2019 02:20
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Rifts Coalition Wars 3: Sorcerers' Revenge part 5, "Conventional medical treatment and care will make the individual more comfortable, but does little to save his life." Iron Juggernauts By Kevin Siembieda So, following upon on the Iron Juggernauts in Rifts Coalition Wars 1: Sedition, we have new aerial and naval Juggernauts. If you're hoping for more details on what the Juggernauts are, exactly, or how they're created- keep waiting. There's no real details like that here or during the rest of the series. Most of them continue being huge damage sponges with weak offensive output, having to rely on their innate spells to properly muck with their enemies.  The ineffable lightness of iron. The Warhawk Iron Juggernaut (770 M.D.C.) is fire and air themed, leaving a trail of steam behind- wait, wouldn't that mean water? Well, whatever. They use a "Heaven's Light" polearm that lets it do middling damage or fire lightning, energy, or fire. It's also skilled at disarming, in one of the rare times Siembieda incorporates that mechanic. It also has Silver Blades for it ever fights Coalition werewolves, I guess. (To be clear: no such thing.) It also can vent steam and gets a variety of air and fire spells, and for some reason gets an automatic dodge with a huge bonus when flying, making it really, really hard to damage effectively. We also get specific anti-missile rules where it can attempt to shoot or parry missles, and guidelines and vague rulings on how it can use spells to deflect missiles. The most effective is apparently the fact that a shockwave or wall of wind casting can counter any missile barrage short of larger long-range missiles entirely- but how you time the casting of that is just left completely vague given how slow spells are to cast now. Also wind rush can be used to give missiles a -1 penalty to hit. Sure, seems like a worthwhile use of half your actions...  The Spruce Goose of mecha. The Iron Dragonfly Juggernaut (1210 M.D.C.) is essentially a flying tank with air elemental effects. Its scythe-hands actually do solid damage up-close, particularly charged with electricity, but its lightning blasts are more underwhelming. It also gets mini-missiles and the steam-venting attack, automatic dodge, and a variety of air-themed spells. We also get a similar set of anti-missile rules. Mostly, though, it's a hideous damage sponge designed to take SAMAS missile barrages over and over and over. Also, there feels like a missed opportunity to call it the "Iron Butterfly".  The amazing buoyancy of iron. The Sea Viper Iron Juggernaut (690 M.D.C.) gets a note that Tolkeen has held back on these models to "surprise" the Coalition. Wait, they didn't think they they could hold off the Coalition this long and planned this years in advance? Okay, sure. They're intended as amphibious ambushers, and uses cool spinning blade hands that don't... actually do that much damage, but they look cool! They also have blade feet and an automatic dodge when underwater (similarly to the Warhawk, this'll make it ridiculous to try and wear down). As water elemental-based Juggernauts, they get a bunch of water and ice spells.  Robo from the Black Lagoon. The Earthwake Iron Juggernaut (1187 M.D.C.) is earth and water themed, leaving the burning smoke of sulfur behind- wait, wouldn't that mean fire? Well, whatever. It can shoot lava from lava fingers, shoot magical spears that do fairly solid damage, and has mini-missiles and steam again. They also get automatic extra damage underwater, but a lower bonus. In general, the addition of automatic dodges for the Iron Juggernauts is hilarious- they're already damage sponges that rival or exceed Glitter Boys, so adding in the fact that half or more of the time, enemies will straight-up miss outside of missile barrages (that they can also try and counter... somehow) is a real issue. If that wasn't enough, on a one-on-one fight, either the Iron Dragonfly or Earthwake are big enough to do a body block attack that only takes them one attack and has a very good chance of eliminating two of their opponent's attacks, allowing them to quickly stunlock a single enemy and just keep them knocked on their rear end repeatedly. It's like one of the old bad Mortal Kombat infinite loops, only now in RPG form! Also by this point you can start spilling the beans on what the Iron Juggernauts are, Siembieda. We're over 350+ pages into this, there's no value to the mystery. If it turns out some evil means or methods is used to create them, it'd only help the attempts to demonize the Tolkeen side, but keeping it vague just leaves open the door to the possibility that it might not be entirely evil. Obviously, people are required in their creation, but then it goes on about how if you try and rescue from it they're super-dead and no secrets revealed. Thanks! Way to close off that story hook like a pro! Next: The ______ has been kidnapped by ______. Are you a bad enough ______ to rescue the ______? Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 10:47 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 21, 2019 10:44
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I love that even the golem battle suits(do they have pilots, actually? Or are they just, y'know, independent magical machines?) have minimissiles. EVERYTHING HAS MINIMISSILES. Pretty sure your fridge in RIFTS has mini missiles.
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May 21, 2019 12:54
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Fangs at the Gate: Touman Sam The Touman Clans are the remnant of the empire of the Touman Prince, the high water mark for the power of Medo. The empire was defeated by the Imperial legions, and thousands of Medoans fled north to escape the Realm. They crossed the White Sea and carved out a place in the far North, becoming a terror to the tundra nomads and frontier cities alike. Eventually, the traveling Touman met Wake, a Lunar from the South who saw them as kindred spirits, also far from home. Wake joined them as their divine champion, and the clans grew in power and ambition. As the years passed, they were no longer content to raid the White Sea settlements, turning their armies towards the conquest of the city-state Carnelian. Carnelian, seated on the Huldoth River estuary on the shore of the White Sea, is quite wealthy. Silver, jade and gems flow like water for its merchants. Once, they used this as a shield, using trade and favors to maintain peace with their neighbors. The Touman changed everything, raiding and looting the area in a storm of blades. Most Carnelian aristocrats fled, and those that remained opened their gates to the invaders in the hope of mercy. The clans claimed the city-state for their own, with all its luxuries, and have lived there ever since. While they have changed since conquering Carnelian, the original political structure of the clans remains mostly intact. Each of the clans is led by a knez, a leader elected for life from among the last knez’s offspring by their kin. The voivode, elected from the clan that bears the Touman Prince’s bloodline, holds council the knezi and makes decisions on matters bearing on all clans. Voivode Sangerel, the current leader, leads from the palace of what was once Carnelian’s richest aristocratic family, while the knezi have claimed the palaces of lesser families. It has been 20 years since conquest, and the Touman now stand divided. The rich and powerful are now wealthier than they have ever been, and they want to stay in Carnelian. The poor and marginalized want to return to their nomadic life, but haven’t the resources to depart alone. Wake is not of the Touman, and she is not their ruler, but she has been part of their lives for decades. She is a Full Moon originally from the South, and she spent her early years fighting the Realm, but fell into despair at the losses her battles inflicted on her people. Her time with the Touman has been a respite from that. She joins them on the hunt, drinks and feasts with their nobles, spars with their children, all while completely refusing to take any authority over them. And yet, she is terrifying in battle and will not hesitate to wield her full might to aid the Touman. They welcome her as a friend and divine ally, and she has known many of their current leaders since they were children. While she does her best to avoid political entanglements, the knezi and voivode are careful not be seen opposing her, for fear of losing status. Ambitious warriors and leaders seek her favor, and once she supports a raid or war, few can argue with it. Several canny Touman clansfolk have advanced their causes by manipulating Wake. While they have occasionally made efforts to syncretize worship of the Lunar into their native faith the past few centuries, she resists any but most quiet veneration, as she doesn’t want religious authority, either. Her spirit and her willingness to fight the Realm have at last been rekindled, but her closeness to the Touman Clans has made her uncertain, causing her to delay her decision over whether to get the Touman to fight the Dynasty or to seek out a new people to lead. The vanishing of the Scarlet Empress is forcing her hand – if ever she can strike, it must be now. Sooner or later, she’ll have to get the Touman to abandon Carnelian and raid the satrapies across the White Sea. The Touman are a loud, lively people. They wear brightly-colored, flower coats of fur trim, and their wagons are painted with scenes of their history, though most now sit outside the walls, unused in years. These aren’t realistic images, but artistic impressions with many bright colors and stylized forms, covering everything from Medoan origin myths and legends of fleeing Medo to meeting Wake or conquering Carnelian. Social life revolves around the Meets, communal parties and festivals that can last anywhere from one evening to several days. Drinks are frequent, deals are struck over rich meals and dancing and wrestling are both common, used to keep social disputes from escalating to violence. While the Meets were once held in large tents, they are now hosted in large Carnelian estates. Voivode Sangerel regularly hosts Meets for her knezi, plying them with drink and weed. Carnelian, on the other hand, rose from the collapse of the Haywain Kingdom, which formed after the Great Contagion. While the other city-states of the kingdom fought each other, Carnelian focused inward and thus survived the internal strife that tore apart the others. Carnelianer culture focuses on the cycle of seasons, marking winter with bonfires and dance festivals about the spirits of wood and flame and spring with circle dances and processions honoring the gods. The wealthy enjoy hotboxing imported marijuana in closes chambers, then coming out to eat smoked and pickled delicacies. The Touman have brought change to them, and now colorful fabrics in flowing designs are highly fashionable, while artists are inspired by the stylized look of the Touman wagons. The Touman, on the other hand, have begun incorporating Carnelianer celebrations into the Meets and eating a lot of smoked fish and pickled vegetables. Touman religion is focused on ancestor worship. On death, the body is burned and the bones interred by the whisper-priests to ensure their spirits will watch over their descendants. Living Touman offer prayer and sacrifices to the ancestral ghosts, who give counsel, blessings and spirit negotiations. Not all Touman become ghosts on death, and the ones that do most often are the ones whose families had the wealth to afford great sacrifices on their pyre and a stately interment. Still, with the shifting of clan fortunes, even the poorest Touman might have a long line of ancestral ghosts to call on, while a newly wealthy clan might not. The bones are carried on the journeys of the clans in grand, ox-drawn ossuaries, now interred in the temples of the old gods of Carnelian, both to honor the fallen and to claim dominance over the Carnelianer pantheon. The ancestors are no less drawn into the politics of wealth division among the Touman, as they are motivated by concerns for their kin and the tending of their bones. They counsel the knezi still, but where the ancestors formally spoke as one voice, they may now propose diametrically opposed futures even within the same clan. While no god is revered as much as the ancestors, the Touman do worship spirits of the lands they’ve passed through. Most are short-term syncretisms, lasting only while in a god’s territory, but some minor rural deities followed after them, abandoning their old cults or bringing them with them. Most of Carnelian’s native gods have made similar bargains with the Touman, barring a few holdouts that hate the conquerors too much to ever do so. These have had their cults forbidden, and if they grow too forceful in their discontent, Wake sometimes gets involved personally. The Immaculates have sent missionaries to Carnelian, and they had some success before the Touman conquest. Wake led a warband to tear down their shrines, and her hatred of them has informed the Touman views on the Order. Their occasional efforts to return to Carnelian have not succeeded, and Wake managed to defeat a recent Wyld Hunt with the aid of a Touman honor guard when they came to drive out the Touman ancestor cult and the Lunar Anathema rumored to lead it. However, it was not done without great losses, and the Immaculates continue to send occasional missionaries that force Wake to keep a low profile to ensure they don’t realize she survived. The Touman, traditionally polyamorous, had some cultural confusion when they began pursuing marriages with Carnelianers, for both political and romantic reasons. The Carnelianers saw polyamory as immoral, demanding strict monogamy, which broke from Touman tradition but allowed the clansfolk to consolidate social and political power after the conquest. These families became the new wealthy elites of Carnelian, taking the merchants’ profits into their own coffers and deviating sharply from the Touman traditions of clan-controlled wealth. Today, wealthy urban Touman demonstrate physical strength in sport rather than combat and buy Guild slaves rather than taking them in raids. The eldest children of their marriages are now coming of age, and they form the face of Carnelian’s societal division. Some want to remain and live in privilege, while others yearn for the nomadic life of their people’s legends. Touman whose traditionalism or poverty kept them from adapting and taking advantage of Carnelian’s wealth increasingly grow dissatisfied with city life and the growing gap of rich and poor. Where once they were warriors, scouts and horse breeders, they now have little to do in the cities. Rather than be free and equal, they must serve wealthier kin, which is an attack on both their honor and their purses. Old warriors hate seeing the offspring of rich nobles flaunt unearned prestige and money, yearning to return to the steppe and the equality it had for all Touman. Voivode Sangerel dreams of empire, hoping she can rival the old Touman Prince. She pushes the knezi to support her aims for war with Thetra, the largest and richest of the city’s neighbors. She argues that those elders unfit for battle and those who are uninterested in further glory can stay home in their palaces, leaving the front to younger warriors seeking to prove themselves and claim their own wealth. Sangerel’s plan would be good for everyone (except Thetra, of course) and so it frustrates her endlessly that the council won’t commit. After all, are not their children and those of the poor alike raised to prize glory in battle, freedom and wealth? Are they not being kept from their chances to actually earn those things? Every Touman traces their lineage back to one of the ancient clans that emigrated from Medo in centuries past, finding their place in society via their place in the clan. Each clan has its own unique culture and traditions, and while the knezi serve the voivode, they still pursue the disparate agendas of their clans. For most Touman, clan is determined by birth, though it is not unknown to adopt foreigners, orphans or children that just can’t fit in at all with their birth clan. The Diamandri trace their line all the way back to the Touman Prince, and so they rule by virtue of royal blood and political skill. For generations, all voivodes have been Diamandri, and the duties of clan knez are basically subsumed into that. The clan’s prestige is backed by immense wealth, and they have claimed the best of Carnelian’s manors as well as married heavily into the mercantile and aristocratic Carnelianer families that stayed. Young Diamandri are raised to lead, to trade and to be diplomats. They are traditionally trained to master the horse, bow and spear as well, but the family’s total adoption of city life means they’re not really as good at that any more, for the most part. Some of the new generation ride out regularly to raid and fight bandits, but others hardly leave the city. The Fiaratan hate the idea of settling down, seeing Carnelian as an early grave. They despise the urban lifestyle, which they are ill-suited to temperamentally and wealth-wise. Most are semi-nomadic, living outside the walls to tend horses, cattle and sheep from the tent-cities just beyond the wall and in more distant pastures. They maintain the Wolf Market just outside the east gate, where they and other rural Touman trade in meat, wool and various crafts to merchants and city folk. Wealthy urban Touman tend to see them as backwards, parochial and stubborn, though useful travel guides and guards. Among the other rural and poor clans, however, the Fiaratan are revered as keepers of the traditions, and their master animal breeders and crafters are held in high regard for their mastery of traditional craft secrets that would otherwise be lost. Politically, the Fiaratan speak for a coalition of rural clans, taking the distaste of the city Touman as a badge of honor. The Five Arrows occupy a middle ground, embracing both urban luxury and steppe exuberance. They fight, drink and celebrate wildly, no matter where they are. They are masters of mounted combat and archery, and they make an effort to get their kids out on horseback each summer to learn the old ways. While they respect their ancestors, like all Touman, they also hold Wake in special esteem as their patron, going as far as to model their fish-scale armor on her carp spirit shape. They honor her at every celebration, and their political goals are rarely any different than hers. They largely accept Wake’s desire not to be worshipped, but they have pledged to follow her no matter where she goes. The Nevaz are sometimes said to be Touman in name only. Their ancestors were not Medoan, but neighboring allies of the Touman Prince and refugees picked up on the long trail north. Many clans have foreign blood, of course, but the Nevaz have not assimilated into Touman culture. Their clothes and mannerisms are strange, their accents unfamiliar, and they worship foreign gods as well as their ancestors. This often makes them distrusted and outcast among other Touman, and some make a living in the poorer parts of Carnelian as crafters, actors or peddlers, or work outside the city to maintain the herds. They are more comfortable with new things and less traditionalist than many clans, embracing all kinds of foreign art and craft as well as tactics. Nevaz shamans oversaw much of the negotiation with local spirits during the trek to the north, and their knowledge of many tongues is useful as adjuncts to Diamandri diplomats. They are heavily intermarried to the common people of Carnelian, who find them less foreign and objectionable than most Touman, if still invaders. The Whisperers are the most prominent clan of the priestly lineages. They were ancient even in the time of the Touman Prince, and they tended the ossuary carts on the trip north. Today, those carts are abandoned outside the walls, and the Whisperers instead maintain the opulent temples where they have re-interred the bones. They teach their children history, funerary rites of both themselves and any enemy rites they know, and rhetoric and oratory. This is both to deal with the stubborn dead and to convince the living to obey the ancestors. A few coat themselves in silver and jewels, having become rich as intermediaries with the dead Carnelianers, but their clanfolk consider them heretics for selling their gifts for coin. Minor clans include the Avakhorana, who are royal in that they are descended from a heroic ancestor that married the prince of the city-state Lausche in the early diaspora. They have often claimed the voivode should be of their clan, but when they finally contested an election a decade ago, the fighting decimated them. The survivors live outside Carnelian, trading and intermarrying with the rural clans, sometimes even the Fiaratan. They still resent their treatment and spread dissent against Sangerel and the Diamandri. The Iron Flame are renowned for producing medicine and strong beer, and they’re one of the few clans to listen at all to the Immaculate missionaries. They have few ancestral ghosts and they greatly recall the maladies set upon them by angry gods over the journey north, so they can see the appeal of the Order. Monks that stop by the area typically stay with them, and they have begun to adapt the Immaculate prayer calendar into their worship along with the worship of their few ancestors. There are no living Kuchinte, but their ancestors remain. Many of the ghosts are lorekeepers and storytellers, sharing their wisdom in exchange for worship from other clans. Others gain reputations for impartiality, for they lack living ties, and serve as arbiters for interclan disputes. Their practice of adopting foreign ghosts into the clan has become more common since arriving in Carnelian, getting them access to local secrets and lore, plus connections to adoptees. However, it’s also caused conflict among the dead, and there is currently a religious schism going on among the ghosts regarding certain tracts being spread in the Underworld and a trade war between the ghost merchant Fallen Rings and her living descendants. Sangerel was a competent warrior during the conquest of Carnelian, but it was in administration that she outshone her fellows, earning her way to voivode. She has since dedicated herself and her not inconsiderable charm and intellect to cementing Touman power and wealth in the area, spending much of her time on visiting and parties with other Touman elders, Carnelianer nobles, Guild factors and so on. She dislikes the insecurity of steppe life compared to the luxury of the city, and she wants to expand Touman control of the area to preempt any efforts by neighboring city-states. She also works tirelessly to fight the rising sentiment that the Touman should return to traveling, especially with Wake, whom she is very close to. Batbayer is the newly elected knez of the Five Arrows, after the death of her widely admired mother. She is very ambitious and tired of living in her shadow, having spent years raiding the neighboring peoples to earn glory, wealth and the loyalty of Five Arrows warriors. Other knezi still see her as inexperienced, though, and so she has been currying favor with Sangerel by throwing herself in behind the plans for conquest. Ganzorig, on the other hand, is the sick knez of the Fiaratan. He rose to power on his oratory skills and he is still a powerful speaker. He represents all the rural clans, advocating loudly for a return to the steppe and decrying Carnelian’s wealth and luxury as a poison to the soul. He rejects all middle ground, seeing his power as rooted in his extreme militance, and he fears dying insignificant and forgotten. Old age and infirmity have weakened him, but he refuses to abdicate to a younger knez. Gerel is a knez that died on the journey north, but his ghost remains knez of the Whisperers. It’s unconventional but doable. He has become darker in undeath, sure, his heart is cold now, but he is still wise and eloquent. He died before they ever reached Carnelian, and he doesn’t really understand city life, despite his best efforts. He works hard to mend the rifts dividing the Touman, living and dead, and mediates as best he can between those that want to stay and those that want to leave, but his own bias makes it hard. Ambitious and progressive Whisperers are unhappy, arguing that if their undying knez will not retire to one better suited for the times, he must be taken out by force. Qori, knez of the Nevaz, is a diplomat and translator who married into one of the less prestigious Carnelianer merchant families. His standing at the council has made him a favorite of the Carnelianers, who see him as a sympathetic voice and advocate. He’s made quite a bit of money off that. He’s not liked by the other knezi, though, and it would not be unthinkable for one of them to have him murdered. Iarda White-Glvoe is the high priest of Carnelian’s city father, the Queen of the First Vault, who is a proud god that refused to submit to the Touman. Iarda has led her cult underground, negotiating with Carnelianer nobles and gods alike to turn them against the Touman. She is a hero to the common people opposed to Touman rule, and her firebrand rhetoric has made her following grow immensely – faster, in fact, than that of the god she theoretically serves. Tearshape Love, the local Guild factor, is a fae-blood and the most successful slaver in the region, having made tons of money off the Touman conquest. Her supply of slaves has dwindled slowly over the years, but she figures that war will mean refugees, who are easy prey, and so she pushes the voivode to expand as much as she can. Neighboring Thetra is Carnelian’s greatest rival in terms of power and wealth. The two cities have a shared cultural root, though Thetra has far more temples and shrines. The priests seized control when the Haywain Kingdom fell, clinging to power ever since. They are wealthy patrons of the arts, and the dockside markets are always busy. When the Touman invaded Carnelian, Thetra took in the fleeing nobles and merchants in exchange for their submission to the city’s rulers. A decade ago, a war to take back Carnelian failed against the might of the Touman horses, and today, Patriarch Tmolan is preparing more diligently than the last priest-king, preparing a strong navy and bargaining with neighboring cities and Guild factors for support before making a move. The Touman sacked the ports of Solida and Snow Bay before they conquered Carnelian, and continued to raid them under the last voivode. Under Sangerel, this has evolved to demanding tribute. Either way, the two cities and their surroundings have been unable to recover at all, and the common folk struggle with poverty and famine, while even the rich are losing a lot of money. Banditry is common as the peasants grow desperate and mercenaries look for work while waiting for new wars. In the countryside, villages do their best to fortify. Several would happily set aside old rivalries with city-states like Thetra to fight the Touman, while others see little option but swearing fealty. The Pale Steppe is the home of those Touman that refused to settle in or near Carnelian or who have since left. They still live as nomads, but their reduced numbers mean they are less able to raid, which has made their lifestyle less sustainable. They receive occasional aid from city Touman who want to leave Carnelian, but Sangerel and her supporters see them primarily as a pawn in her expansionist agenda. Next time: Iscomay, Empire of the Bear
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May 21, 2019 12:59
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PurpleXVI posted:I love that even the golem battle suits(do they have pilots, actually? Or are they just, y'know, independent magical machines?) have minimissiles. EVERYTHING HAS MINIMISSILES. Pretty sure your fridge in RIFTS has mini missiles. It's clear a human is implanted or sacrificed to create them, along with a number of elementals, but whether or not they or their soul is running the show in any aspect is completely unclear. They appear to be intelligent but terse.
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May 21, 2019 13:09
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Kevin is refusing to say whether they're alive or not in order to avoid questions about whether you can play one.
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May 21, 2019 14:04
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PurpleXVI posted:I love that even the golem battle suits(do they have pilots, actually? Or are they just, y'know, independent magical machines?) have minimissiles. EVERYTHING HAS MINIMISSILES. Pretty sure your fridge in RIFTS has mini missiles. Robotech was a formative experience for Kevin.
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May 21, 2019 14:12
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Warhammer Fantasy: Paths of the Damned Part 2: Spires of Altdorf Team Mustache Plays By Their Own Rules So, what would have happened if the party had been bored stiff and refused to play along with the adventure at all? What would have happened if Solveig had done as Ulric wished and punched out Maximilliam Saer when he was being a creep? In another dimension, a mirror world where the PCs are having none of this poo poo, we will find out. Physically assaulting any of the contacts leads to an infinite swarm of guards who arrest you, though not before Solveig gives Saer a shiner and a broken nose. It also leads to prison and after allies get you released (Klemperer will always do so for some reason) any social tests you roll during the rest of the Dating Sim portion are at -10. Weirdly, it does not actually lose you any points with them directly. We'll say that's enough to make sure the team never actually meets Gabrielle Marsner. But more importantly, in the Mustache Dimension, they never discover Klara's affair (because Max was punched in his stupid, smug face. The book even says to have him regularly try to rub it in to PCs that they can't do anything but try to win his favor.) and so never get rid of Gottri. What happens if they don't find the Dagger? Somehow, an entire army of beastmen get into Altdorf and assault the Light College, that's what. Huh? How? Why not use a cult attack or something? How did hundreds of Beastmen slip into Altdorf unnoticed and attack a secret wizard college? Who knows, it's Chaos, they can just do whatevs whenevs. Even with the Colleges depleted of many of their combat wizards since they're away with the army, by the time the PCs arrive the Beastman army is broken and the wizards are lasering the remnants. The issue is that one of those remnants has the Dagger. And the PCs are the main thing standing in its way. This is by far the hardest fight in the book. Even Brute Squad is potentially at risk here. You see, the Dagger's wielder has all its giant artifact bonuses: +2 AV to all locations, SB+4 base damage, a point of Armor Piercing, and +20 to hit. So his profile comes out to WS 80, 2 Attacks, Damage 10 (effectively 11, since he pierces armor), with 8 DR on his head and legs, 9 on his arms, and 11 on his chest. And for every 2 PCs, there are 3 other normal mook Beastmen. The main thing that can let you win is these Beastmen have been fighting quite a lot already. The mooks only have 5 HP each, so they'll probably go down in a single blow from advanced characters. The Wielder only has 9 HP. He'd recover 4 (his max his 18) per kill he gets, except Brute Squad (Mustachioed) has Fate. This fight is meant to look impossible, but be fully winnable due to the state of the enemy, which is a good GMing move. Still, the damage rating on the Champion is probably a bit overkill; I'm not all that fond of throwing massive +Damage around after the game intentionally limited S and T advances and scaling to try to prevent one-shots. Also remember this version of Brute Squad hasn't been succeeding objectives and so is significantly behind on EXP. Still, as usual, starts off with the Elf Double Tap, one Damage 4 bullet (she doesn't have Mighty Shot or Sure Shot in this time) hitting the head, one a lightly armored arm. And...the second bullet Furies. 5 Wounds on the headshot, 9 Wounds on the arm shot, and while the Crit doesn't kill him, it does almost blow off his right hand and shoot the Dagger right out of it. It turns out starting most fights with a high initiative, high BS character at fairly close range double-tapping someone with twin pistols is effective. The team is still facing a ton of Beastmen, though, and the wielder isn't dead. Otto bounces off his mail shirt, even without the Dagger bonus to DR, and the Beastmen have shields and parry pretty well when the melee guys charge to keep them from charging Liniel. It turns into a chaotic fight where the Beastman Champion, with his hand mostly blown off, almost takes Otto out with his horns alone as he fights the Imperial for the Dagger. By the end of it, even with that seemingly curbstompy beginning, Solveig is at 4 Wounds, Otto at 3, and Katiya at 6. Pierre took a Crit that required putting his leg back together a bit. Enemies with shields who have a decent WS can be a bastard when they get lucky on defenses, and the Champion just refused to die despite starting off getting blown away. If he'd had the Dagger the whole fight he would have definitely taken out Otto if everything else went the same. Not to mention Liniel had to spend time moving around to the sides to get around the mook Beastman shields and still ended with a -20 to shooting since she was firing into a melee, but that was actually still better to-hit odds than everyone else needing to get past 50% Parry rolls. They also made the mistake of spreading their attacks to try to win quickly instead of focusing down people actually out of active defenses, and 8 foes (and one champion) with good WS can still be dangerous even when they're Damage 3 if you don't take them seriously enough. If they'd lost, Messner and other wizards would've arrived to laser the villain and save them to represent them burning Fate. As it is, the near robbery makes Messner declare the PCs should safeguard the relic for now until it can be destroyed. Okay, sure, we've established the Light College is not fully safe storage for this in case somehow an army of hundreds of Beastmen make it into Altdorf. And that boss fight is an interesting concept, plus an indicator of how Chart sees serious combats: Mandatory combats in Spires are all pretty easy. Dangerous combats happen if you dally too long on a plotline or fail a part of the storyline. It's specifically in the book that this fight is one that may take a Fate Point off a couple PCs because they failed the Dating Sim and had to resort to the exciting action sequence. I do like the design choice of weakening the Beastmen's HP to represent combat fatigue, though; that lets you throw an impressive number of bodyguard mooks at the PCs while still giving them a fighting chance. Team Mustache remembers another wizard offered to destroy the Dagger for them and gets to it, because they figure they're on the plot railroad now. They are, it's true; you're railroaded to success in this adventure one way or another, and I'll talk about some of that when we get to their final encounter. For now, let's see what happens if you trust Wolfgang. First, you get a bunch more warnings this is a bad idea. Like when he sends you out to fetch the last ritual component, a rod and bell made of human bone. The second sign they really shouldn't be doing this is when Wolfgang explains the ritual requires chaining them up in his wizard basement. He says he'll be chained up too and it's all very magical, and because they haven't gained enough EXP at this point, Team Mustache's Pierre may have a fabulous mustache, but he lacks Academic Knowledge (Magic). He cannot see why these are bad ideas yet. Even once they're chained up in his wizard basement, he only needs them to be willing sacrifices at the START of the ritual. He'll let himself loose as soon as it's begun because at that point the PCs' consent no longer magically matters. This is a critical error on Wolfgang's part. You get more tests to realize he's pulling some fuckery but only if you have Knowledge (Magic) or Speak Language (Magic), but Solveig does. She manages to make the inexplicably difficulty -30 test to realize the language he's using is Daemonic. Even without that, most groups probably get suspicious when Wolfy frees himself and starts cackling wizardly. The ritual takes hours, and the chained up PCs have a bunch of ways to stop him. See, Wolfgang is too busy with the ritual to stop the PCs trying to escape or gently caress with him. Disrupting the ritual is Very Bad for Wolfgang. Any PC can, at any point, spend 1 Fate permanently to have their chain turn out to be improperly anchored, heroically break free, and punch the helpless wizard in the face, saving everyone. A -30 Str test will just shatter the chains, but you only get 1 attempt per PC. Getting to a loose object and hitting the magic bell by throwing it at -10 will stop the ritual. Hitting and extinguishing a candle at -30 will do the same. As will throwing a rock at Wolfgang at -20; he has to make a Channeling test with DoS equal to any Wounds received or he's hosed. 'Limit the PCs' tries at this or it will turn into a farce of them flinging rocks at the wizard and annoying him', the book says. Wolfgang has also forgotten the party has a If they fail all of this and the ritual goes off, Wolfgang becomes a turbo-demon prince who never shows up again and they take -1d10 to every single stat, -2 Wounds, and gain 6 Insanity. They technically win the adventure. It's terrible. Don't let him finish. Hilariously, when Team Mustache plays out the Rituals, Otto heroically breaks free of his chains at the exact moment that Pierre picks his lock and Liniel domes Wolfgang with a rock. And Wolfgang rolls a 100 on his Channeling test. So as the other two are about to confront him, he turns around to yell at the party to be quiet in a spare moment, gets whacked in the face with a rock, fumbles klaatu barada niktu, and the Dagger eats him alive. Like, he turns into a swarm of insects and is sucked, screaming, into the eye of the Dagger. It is now more powerful. Good job, Team Mustache! You...made Xath stronger. Oh well. Next they discover that they have to sacrifice a PC with Guillame's lovely knock-off ritual to put the demon in them so they can kill it physically. Being sensible people, they instead give the Dagger to the Temple of Sigmar to put in the don't gently caress with it vault. Okay, okay, they go along with it to show off the encounter. And in fairness, it is treated as a huge heroic act by the PC doing it, and their replacement PC will get +2 Fate and the same EXP they had as a reward for the player to make up for their PC dying a hero. Except Team Mustache does their own thing: They return to, and recruit, Johann Schmidt, saying a very important position has opened up. This adventure has been a bastard and they're not sacrificing one of their own for it! Dick move, I know, but dick moves engender dick moves. The manifest demon is actually very powerful if it's eaten Wolfgang, and less so if it hasn't. Eating Wolfy gets it +15 WS, +15 S and T, and +10 Agi, and +1 Attacks and +5 Wounds over its normal profile of WS 60, S 45, T 45, Agi 50 and 2 attacks. But Chart does something I'm not very excited about here. He tells the GM to make sure they cheat to ensure the PCs will win this fight, no matter how powerful the demon is. 'Fudge rolls to ensure the last PC standing takes the demon out if everyone has fallen'. He actually talks about when you should be cheating your dice rolls to ensure PCs succeed a fair bit in this book, and while I'm not averse to sometimes doctoring things a little myself if it makes for a better story when I'm GMing, the extent of it is a little more than I'm comfortable with. Especially when it combines with the way pre-mades have a hard-on for 'the Players did everything right and succeeded, but then we declare they fail'. The whole Paths of the Damned campaign is full of 'Let the players roll dice to follow or catch this guy, then declare they failed' style stuff as it is. There's too much leaning on GM fiat sometimes. This case, I understand; the author is worried that a TPK after the players already picked a heroic sacrifice would sour them on the game entirely, and that's fairly reasonable. But this line's Pre-Mades do have an issue with the idea that the GM fiats/runs the game very firmly, more firmly than I'd prefer. It's academic, though, as while the Demon has DR 9, it's outnumbered by a party with multiple decent fighters, several guns they aren't afraid to use, etc. They manage to bring it down without needing any GM fiat. In general, single, powerful enemies need active defenses, a lot of Wounds, and/or high DR to be a problem. Single, big monsters are more about looking impressive and feeling impressive than actually being the hardest sorts of fights; squads of elite mooks or guys with heavy armor and good active defenses are much more dangerous. Guess what we'll be seeing in Forges of Nuln? But like, only for the very beginning. Then all the combat turns extremely easy. It's weird. Thus, Team Mustache has a much more annoying adventure and resolves to stop loving around with the dumb Xath plot, wandering off to get drunk and do something else. This has been your look at what happens if you 'fail' every major arc in Spires, and to be fair, they're decent enough failsafe plotlines. The sacrifice is a thing I'm pretty leery of as a mechanic, but at least it's treated as a heroic thing that a PC volunteers for to protect the world from evil and they get huge mechanical benefits for their new PC as congratulations for their participation, plus it happens in a place where it's easy to introduce a new PC. Wolfgang gives enough hints and enough flexibility, and even has a pretty fun emergency action scene if you do gently caress up; I'm fond of the Ritual Disruption event. And the Dagger fight is hard, and I'd have probably slanted the Champion more towards durability than hitting as hard as a light cannon, but it's definitely doable and designed as such. All in all, the Fail State path isn't badly done. In the end, Spires doesn't do it for me. The Dating Sim portion is such a weak, weak idea for a main adventure, and it's the critical path. The other two components are both significantly better, and should have had top billing. The adventure is best when it actually has antagonists and steps away from the weak Xath plot line. The lack of reward, or even mention of reward, is weird. Chart generally assumes PCs are, despite all the mud and blood, genuinely heroic people who are doing as they do to save the world. This is true of Brute Squad, but they also have bills, and when you're dealing with tons of rich people who want you to do things, expecting payment seems reasonable. The really disappointing part of this book is the Altdorf writeup, which just doesn't bring in anything that makes Altdorf feel unique or lived in the way Middenheim did. There isn't the kind of hooks and ideas that can let you make Altdorf a base for a campaign easily like the writeup in Ashes did for Middenheim. The book not working great as a city-book for Altdorf really hurts. I'd have also really liked some guidance for how much the PCs can get for selling Wolfgang's treasures; every group ever will keep those amazing gloves, but a group with no Wizard will surely want to get money for the amulet; I had to make a most reasonable guess. I still appreciate the attempt to make Spires more open, and it has its moments. Carlott is a good idea and she's well executed for the most part. Wolfgang is boring and pretty standard, but the unmasking and his offer are handled well and players are given ample warning and ways to beat the arrogant bastard. The Dating Sim characters mostly suck, and the section wouldn't be as bad as it is if they had more texture and players had more options for interacting with them. It's a fairly easily solved section since the right move every time is 'be friendly'. It's a dull adventure with a couple decent moments, and combat can be a bit too easy off the losing path. And hilariously, never meeting Gabrielle and being on the losing path can actually be really helpful in the next adventure! You'll see. You'll all see. Forges of Nuln is awful. Next Time: Brute Squad After Level Grinding
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May 21, 2019 15:06
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Fangs at the Gate: BEARS The empire of Iscomay is guarded by great wooden forts. Every few years, they build new ones along the Northeastern taiga to mark the new borders after their recent expansions and annexations. Behind the painted walls, the skies are filled with auroras and the land with standing stones, centered around the fertile glacial basin of Oma Valley. While many Iscomayari live as farmers in the sheltered lands, many more live in the scattered walled cities, nearly none more than a century old. Iscomay has changed quite a lot in a relatively short time, and it is unclear if their old traditions will survive – or if Iscomay itself will survive its own imperial hunger. The Oma Valley sits along the shores of the Fang Lakes and the Northeastern forests. Centuries ago, the geomancers of Iscomay raised great pillars along the dragon lines of the region, redirecting the Fire and Wood Essence into the Oma Valley. Generations since have farmed the warm, fertile soil that resulted. The rivers are thick with trout and salmon, the woods full of wild game. While the neighbors may fear winter, Iscomay never does, and its rulers are eager to use their wealth of food as leverage. Many of their cities began as forts or outposts, and their capital, High Sila, is far from the oldest Iscomayari city. It has, however, been the royal seat of power for nearly 200 years. Its markets are full of food, stone and wood to feed the expansion, and many of its citizens, especially its scholars and artists, are from nearby nations, attracted by the wealth and safety. Others did not get a choice. The House of Siladar has ruled Iscomay for centuries. They claim descent from the Shogunate’s Dragon-Blooded daimyos, though there’s essentially no truth to it. Instead, they are a Moon-Touched dynasty, descended from the Lunar True Voice, an ancient culture hero of the Iscomayari and a shaman. Most do not have the supernatural gifts of their early line and can be distinguished from normal people only by a tendency towards heavily muscled builds and being particularly hairy, though occasionally someone will be born with actual magic powers. Under their rule, Iscomay has become an empire, spreading its influence through the Northeast. The Siladars made treaties with their neighbors, trading them food for iron, gems, jade and slaves. As they grew rich, they built up more and more military power, and began aggressively conquering their weaker neighbors. After a few years of bad winters, they were even able to coerce their more potent neighbors into becoming tributaries, subduing resistance with bloody campaigns. Now, Iscomay is a powerful empire and many of its trade partners are independent in name only. Conquered territories are incorporate as imperial provinces. The local prince or governing body are removed or executed, and a loyal governor is installed. The governor oversees administration and law in the province, including taxation, which is typically of food or resources rather than money, the consolidation of military power, and the enforcement of Iscomayari law and religion. Iscomayari geomancers hunt out demesnes in conquered territories so they can expand and empower the geomantic network that ensures the good climate of the Oma Valley. Building new manses is slow, however, and often lags far behind the Empire of the Bear’s borders. In recent years, Iscomay has allowed several nomadic peoples to shelter in the valley for the winter in exchange for tribute, which is often taken from the ransacked caravans of foreign traders. While Iscomay’s wealth is their primary leverage, their army is not weak. It’s made mostly of elite janissaries, foreign-born slaves raised from childhood to serve the Siladar ruler and paid well for their loyalty. As the largest military force in the region, they’d be likely to win most conflicts even if not backed by Iscomayari mystics. However, the current rise in insurrection, banditry and foreign raids in response to Iscomay’s high taxes and oppressive traditions has overstretched their resources. Raising taxes to support a bigger military is aggravating the very problem it’s meant to solve. The military is largely organized geographically, with each province having an assigned bey whom all janissaries report to in the region. The janissary forces are infantry, cavalry and a river navy, all trained in multiple weapons. After a 25 year term, a janissary may retire with a military pension and a grant of farmland, often in a newly conquered territory. Janissaries are raised from childhood in Iscomayari culture and beliefs, trained to see the monarchs as their parents and the rest of the House of Siladar as their stern but beloved family. Their training is harsh, disciplined and socially isolated from the rest of society, with militant khojas serving as chaplains. Despite this, the importance of the janissaries to the empire’s growth and their prestige has resulted in great ambition among them and a certain amount of unrest, especially in their leaders. So far, janissary ambitions are focused on the interests of their children, who are born free rather than as slave-soldiers. Many of these children have earned high rank in the empire, with several marrying into the House of Siladar itself. This increased influence over the government is only pushing the current janissaries to try to claim more themselves. The laws of Iscomay are codified in the Book of the Bear, written 300 years ago by shamans recording the epic traditions of the Iscomayari. Scholar-priests known as khojas assist the people in applying the Book to their everyday lives and make religious rulings on its nuances and interpretations. There is no formal hierarchy of khojas, with standing and authority determined by how other khojas regard them as well as the opinions of the community. Becoming a khoja requires tutelage in the Book from an established khoja for several years followed by a rite of passage in which the aspiring khoja must enter a bear’s den and commune with the totemic beast without being harmed. Many khojas are highly selective about their students, taking only those from powerful or wealthy families or those who show exceptional talent as mystics or geomancers. The actual religion focuses on a local pantheon of gods, some of whom were worshipped before the Book and others added over time by decree of the khojas, headed by the Bear Avatar, the divine embodiment of all bears. The small gods are worshipped directly in most cases, but the Bear Avatar can only be worshipped through bears, which the Iscomayari name as his earthly emissaries and their culture’s totem. In the weeks before winter, they leave offerings of rich food, wine and water at bear dens, to feed them in the lean months. The Book of the Bear has many laws about when various spirits can be petitioned and for what. The laity can pray to them directly, but the khojas interpret the rules. Besides spiritual matters, the Book and thus the khojas govern all kinds of other topics, from dietary law to etiquette and decorum to contract law to agriculture and more. Iscomay imposes these laws on all territorial holdings, expanding the influence of the khojas as the empire grows. Iscomay has highly sophisticated urban architecture due to the powerful geomantic tradition founded by True Voice. Nobles and merchants may live in buildings up to five stories tall, and even these are dwarfed by the Siladar palaces. Rural or poor Iscomayari have smaller homes, though many of the cities have started to replace poorer districts and slums with sprawling tenement complexes. When building their palaces, forts and madrasas, the Iscomayari consider it lucky to have a khoja ritualistically entomb a bear’s body under the foundation, that it might lend its strength to the stones. Their art is heavily focused on sculpture and carving, with miniatures showing bears, plants or traditional and historical scenes being common as decoration, whether from bone, wood or porcelain. The homes of the rich have elaborately carved facades showing allegorical stories from the Book of the Bear and military triumphs. Stelae in the city centers are engraved with sacred laws so that any citizen can read them, and wealthy nobles, janissaries and merchants are often interred under stone pillars carved with their lineage and deeds. Iscomayari fashion tends to be lighter than other Northeastern peoples, largely due to the supernatural warmth of the valley, though as the Empire of the Bear has expanded, heavier garments have come into fashion for travelers. Pelts, claws and fangs of bears may only be worn by the House of Siladar, and the strict religious laws about when bears can be hunted means that only a minority of them actually bother to wear them. The meat of bears is also reserved for the royals, and only after strict ritual purification before eating. For the most part, Iscomayari nobles and rich merchants eat pork, mutton, goat and horse, supplemented with the many crops the valley produces. The poor usually don’t eat much meat except for pork. New dishes and spices are brought in from the provinces, with the wealthiest of course getting them first. The teachings of the Book of the Bear were first laid out by True Voice, the No Moon who started Iscomay’s rise to power. 500 years ago, the people that would become the Iscomayari were meager farmers in a small valley, sheltering in caves for a long, hard winter each year. True Voice was of their people, a young khoja who Exalted. She used the lore of the Silver Pact and local spirits to teach the Iscomayari the secrets of geomancy, founded the House of Siladar and made the Empire of the Bear as a weapon against the Realm. She left Iscomay centuries ago, content with its development and focusing on dominions closer to the Realm. Despite her familial ties to the rulers, she feels no real affinity to her old homeland, having found deeper connections in the Pact. Now that the Realm is on the brink of civil war, though, she has returned and is planning to unleash the Iscomayari against the Realm’s forces alongside the other cultures she’s shaped. There’s only one problem: the House of Siladar has grown rather beyond her initial designs, and pushing it from its imperial ambitions to wage war on the Realm has proven much more difficult than she’d expected. While she cites ancient precedent she’d put in the Book of the Bear in anticipation of this, she has found that the interpretations favored by leading khojas are very different than her initial intent. High Sila is a sprawling cosmopolitan city, where diplomats and Guild merchants buy Iscomayari luxuries in wealthy markets and treat with the House of Siladar. The child-emperor’s palace is full of courtiers and nobles that hope to sway the empire to their ends, while the khojas gather in beautiful madrasas to debate theology and advise the people. The river docks are always busy with merchants and naval ships, and foreign artists and philosophers have thronged to the city. Their foreign ways often disturb the khojas, and while heretical views have been driven underground, the monarchy is too busy expanding to notice the theological firestorm that may be brewing. The old capital, Karaqa, dates back to the first days of Iscomay, but has gone largely unused since then. The royals and most of the government deserted it for High Sila long ago, thanks to its more central location, forcing hundreds of commoners to come with them to work the fields. The unused old capital has become a home to squatters, criminals and bohemians, turning it into a sybaritic paradise of sin, publicly decried but privately enjoyed. The nobles want to reclaim it, but no one can agree on how to do so. The army is preparing to begin a city-wide purge of squatters to make way for peasant farmers relocated from elsewhere in the Empire. Karaqa is sprawling, dilapidated and crime-ridden; True Voice wants to claim High Sila as territory as well, but has yet to convince the local mortals and spirits to allow it. Burdock is a ruin now. Twenty years ago, the king of the Iscomayari demanded extra tribute on top of its monthly grain quota, and the ruling council of the nation, already strained by the demands and their own angry people, failed to deliver. That fall, the crops failed and famine came, with merchants showing up to sell food at massively inflated prices. Those who could leave did. Those who couldn’t died. Iscomay picked up the pieces, integrating Burdock into itself, but the territory is still literally haunted by the ghosts of those who starved as well as remaining an awful place to live right now. The most crucial colonial holding for foreign trade is probably Spur, a city on the Fang Lakes coast. Centuries ago, Iscomay conquered it and drove out its tyrant, the raksha Meliash of the Emerald Mask. Now, it carries Iscomayari goods across the lakes and into the White Sea, bringing back all kinds of goods of the North, like ivory, furs and slaves as well as Haslanti mechanisms, feathersteel and rare magical goods. Rumors persist, however, that Meliash never left, and in the wake of several failed tax rebellions and the oppressive faith of Iscomay, the city’s more rebellious people have adopted their once-feared faerie queen as a symbol of defiance. Storm’s Breach is a mining colony in a Fang Lakes estuary. It sends silver and gems back to High Sila, and it is very cold and plagued by bad weather, an unintended result of the Iscomayari geomantic engineering. The miners are largely the poor and dispossessed, who have taken on harsh labor to survive, but few are happy about it. A Northern Guild factor has come in to talk to the mining town’s leadership, promising them a better life if they will help the Guild gain control of the mines. Ajurai Siladar II is the current emperor, still a child but with more potent Moon-Touched gifts than seen in the entire last generation. He is always followed by his familiar, a grizzly bear, and has strange insight into the spirit world. Despite his power, however, he is a naïve child, heavily influenced by his councilors, personal khoja and court in all matters of governance. He is unaware of how the many interests are manipulating him to maintain the expansion of the empire, and also unaware that True Voice wants to use him to turn the Empire of the Bear against the Northern satrapies. Habja is the most renowned khoja of High Sila and Ajurai’s personal religious tutor. She is a fat, jovial and very strong woman who is extremely traditionalist in her interpretation of the Book. She urges the emperor to reform the lax enforcement of religious dogma in the newer colonies, and while she has many allies in court that share her zeal and social conservatism, she also has many enemies among the more liberal courtiers and the moderates that fear the crackdowns might weaken the control over the provinces needlessly. Bey Isipho Spear-Grace is the commander of High Sila’s janissaries. She is a lean, scarred woman of dark skin and hair, and she was a respected captain even in the time of Ajurai’s mother, though she is remembered more for her historical deeds than her modern work. Despite her high rank, her ambitions have largely been overshadowed by the frontier province beys whose forces actually expand the Empire. Hers mostly put down rebels and bandits – far less prestigious. Her children and grandchildren, who are generally high-ranking ministers, merchants or khojas, have their own ambitions as well. Isipho schemes with her son Najukkan to place his wife, the royal cousin Wawarai Siladar, on the throne. The khoja Qismai is controversial. He is a fiery preacher with impeccable knowledge of the Book of the Bear and good judgments, but his interpretations are often sharply different from consensus. He has condemned many aristocrats, even Siladars, for failure to care for the common people. He also favors a militaristic reading of key passages, though, that aligns with many powerful courtiers’ desires. Qismai’s relationship with Habja is contentious, and they rarely agree on anything except on the topics of imperial expansion and enforcement of religious law on the colonies. Habja’s enemies at court seek to cause a wedge between the two to prevent Habja from gaining Qismai’s popularity with the common people. Nearby Sulat rebelled against Iscomay over taxes, murdering their governor and tax collectors in a mass uprising. They are now run by a descendant of their old royals and started to rebuild. Emperor Ajurai’s council disagrees on whether the rebels should be taken down with overwhelming force or if it’d be better use of time to expand into more profitable lands and leave Sulat to itself. The Urma nomads, meanwhile, have sheltered in Oma Valley for winter for decades now in exchange for tribute. For the rest of the year, they hunt and gather in the forests of the Northeast. Prior chieftains were happy to gather their tribute with fur trapping and raiding caravans, but the current leader, Spear of Evening, believes the Urma should keep their wealth for themselves and has begun secretly raiding Iscomayari merchants and military supply lines. Sulat has approached Spear in an attempt to recruit the Urma as protectors. Dazul, on the shores of the Fang Lakes, are ruled by a demon bound in an obsidian idol. Its advice has brought them more wealth in the last few decades than any of their mortal princes ever did. The aristocrat exorcist-priests commune with the demon while ensuring it cannot escape its prison. They trade ivory, ambergris and silver to Iscomay in exchange for food, but their exports have recently lost value to Iscomayari expansion into regions that have the resources they’ve traditionally traded. The Everwood’s alpine wilds have a prominent place in Iscomayari folklore. They are said to be home to man-eating beasts, deadly ghosts and bear-slaying witches that use unclean magic. They are also home to bandit gangs, though many of those fall prey to the inhuman perils of the wild forest. The khojas have long forbidden logging or hunting in the Everwood, though some merchants and aristocrats have found khojas that disagree and made ventures into the woods. Between the dangerous beasts there and the thick wood, they’ve had little success without even taking into account any theoretical mystical dangers. Next time: The Nameless Lair of Ma-Ha-Suchi
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May 21, 2019 16:14
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Fangs at the Gate: It really is kind of silly how much they call it the Nameless Lair The Nameless Lair of Ma-Ha-Suchi lies at the heart of his dominion, a treacherous and dangerous Southeastern jungle meant to cull the weak and temper the strong. It is just at the southern edge of the Scavenger Lands, but north of the wealthy Southeastern empires. It sits as a bulwark against Realm expansion from their coastal satrapies into the Southeast, though it also is known to raid its neighbors. Attempts to broker peace with the Changing Moon has historically been difficult, though he is a skilled negotiator and not against peaceful relations…on his terms. The people of the Tangle, as Ma-Ha-Suchi’s domain is known, are the Chante-Sa, who live in the bright foliage and hunt it for meat, fruit, roots and greens. Survival isn’t easy, despite the plentiful resources, thanks to huge beasts, toxic plants and unstable ground. Even the Chante-Sa must be cautious and skilled or else they will die; invaders have even more trouble. The Chante-Sa shunned Ma-Ha-Suchi after their first encounter, centuries back. They saw him as a monster to avoid. In his efforts to sway them, Ma-Ha-Suchi turned to their gods, the Three Mothers. In exchange for driving off a swarm of soul-eating monsters that’d forced them out of their ancient temple-demesne, the Threefold Womb, and wounded them with unhealing scars, the goddesses proclaimed Ma-Ha-Suchi their champion and prophet, the Hand of the Mothers. The Chante-Sa have since accepted him not only as their god-king but their family, the beloved Undying Uncle. Ma-Ha-Suchi now nurtures the Chante-Sa into warriors and leaders, ready to survive and fight the Realm when required. He governs with a strong hand and protects the Chante-Sa from any attempt by outsiders to enslave them, invade them or steal their resources. He does so with the aid of the Three Mothers still. First is Gap’Inan, the Hungry Mother, who claims the bodies of the dead and makes art from bone and vines. Second is Chuwe’Inan, the Lavish Mother, whose beauty is as bright as orchids and jungle frogs, but whose transfixing power can be lethal. Third is Mahni’Inan, the River Mother, whose turbulent waters both drown and nourish. The Chante-Sa are divided into three bands – the Band of Bones, the Flower Band and the River Band – each of which claims one Mother as their patron, though all worship the trio together. They have always been more like three related peoples than one people, united largely by proximity and religion. Ma-Ha-Suchi has tried to unify them by fostering common laws and customs, but some divisions remain. Each band is led by an inan, a leader chosen by the band’s favored god. The inan assembles a council of advisors to delegate authority over various matters to, though specifics vary. The inan’s appointment by the Mothers invests them with spiritual authority, but not exhaustively. The priests and shamans may contest the inan on religious matters. Ma-Ha-Suchi and his beastfolk followers are respected but not slavishly obeyed. The Hand of the Mothers is equal to the inans, but not superior. Depending on the land, a band will hunt, gather, fish and farm small plots around their settlement. They raise a wide variety of grains, tubers and fruits, and use both animal hides and plant fibers for clothing, with garments varying based on local needs and band traditions. Worship of the Three Mothers is via communal prayer, offering up sacrifices ranging from beautiful flowers of the Tangle to great beasts taken in the hunt. Chante-Sa art is mostly religious, heavily focusing on music, dance, mystery plays and religious tattoos. Funeral rituals involve eating the dead, that the living may gain some of their experiences and Gap’Inan can see the soul into the next life. They do not eat the flesh of outsiders, which would be a terrible blasphemy, punishable by death or exile. The Band of Bones are cave-dwellers, also called the Gap. They revere Gap’Inan over all else and live mostly in the caves on the eastern edge of the Tangle, where they have made elaborate towns carved into the cave walls. The caves are generally on foothills hidden by the jungle, though the towns extend under the earth. They are kept safe from dangerous beasts by the cave networks, which are illuminated by bioluminescent fungi, insects and vine roots that come in from the roofs. The walls are decorated by skulls painted with a special mixture that causes the glowing fungus to grow on them. The Band of Bones are heavily isolationist and avoid the other Chante-Sa when they can. They come out to tend small terrace farms and to forage or hunt, but they fiercely ward intruders away with ambushes of javelin and poison dart. Even other Chante-Sa are driven off unless vouched for by one of the Gap. The Flower Band, or Chuwe, take Chuwe’Inan as their chief god. They live in the central Tangle, where the giant siti-moi glowers grow. These blossoms grow to the size of elephants, and the Chuwe artisans use secret techniques to turn the bright petals and sepals leather-hard. The thorny vines of the flower are as thick as tree trunks and form giant tangles that protect the hidden Chuwe villages. The Flower Band know the jungle itself better than the other bands, and they are the finest herbalists and hunters in the Tangle. They use hidden northern and southern paths to trade petal-leather, furs and other goods with neighboring tribes or even Threshold merchant trading posts. These traders also serve as guides in the surrounding lands, though they will only lead people through the Tangle proper with permission from the inan or Ma-Ha-Suchi. The River Band, or Mahni, pray to Mahni’Inan above all and make their living on the western edge of the Tangle via the river known as Mahni’Inan’s Blood. It has a strong red color due the mud of the banks. The river is said to be the menstrual flow of Mahni’Inan, while the mud is castoff from her womb. For the Mahni, the river water and mud are the raw stuff of creation. They build their homes from mud and make elaborate, labyrinthine pottery with it. Their houseboats move up and down the river to hunt and fish, gathering in small port towns on the banks. The people of the ports supplement their farms and fishing with hunting and gathering and also raiding the people outside the Tangle. The River Band are the most populous of the trio, providing the most warriors to defend the Tangle and raid for Ma-Ha-Suchi. They also feed most of the Chante-Sa, trading their surplus to the Band of Bones for metalwork and the Flower Band for medicine and foreign goods. Mahni warriors are often arrogant, lording their importance over the other bands, which does not make them well-liked. Before Ma-Ha-Suchi, the three bands fought all the time over…well, just about anything. As one of his first acts as Hand of the Mothers, Ma-Ha-Suchi instituted the Blood Seasons to bring peace. Every fourth new moon, the bands gather and each inan declares how she’s going to provide for the people, then names four champions from her band who will go out into the world and enact her will. That squad then heads out to perform seven tasks proclaimed by the Three Mothers by the next full moon, ranging from slaying great beasts to gathering rare herbs from the Threefold Womb to raiding neighbors for valuables to pranking Ma-Ha-Suchi. Whichever squad manages the tasks first wins the season for their inan. If the Flower Band wins, it is the Season of Flowers, and the Flower Band lead the people, which usually means increased trade. If the River Band wins, it’s the Season of Storms and lots of raiding happens. If the Band of Bones wins, it is the Season of Bones and the Chante-Sa focus on construction and infrastructure. If none succeed, the eldest beastfolk lead the Season of Hunts, mounting a major organized raid with all three bands to attack Realm satrapies. The Nameless Lair proper is a huge, blocky thing of gray stone, draped in vines and moss, at the edge of a lake in the jungle. It was a minor First Age fortress once, its name long lost. Now, it is home to the goatfolk and wolf-folk that serve Ma-Ha-Suchi. They practice fighting constantly, singing and praying to the jungle gods. It is both Ma-Ha-Suchi’s capital and home, and he has converted a former planning chamber into a meeting and audience hall, albeit a rarely used one. It is hung with tapestries and moonsilver artifacts to impress visiting Pact members. The barracks have been made a fairly luxurious communal living space for Ma-Ha-Suchi’s students and Lunar visitors, but his own chambers are plain and ill-cared-for, meant to just be a dark, quiet place for him to be alone. The catacombs in which the beastfolk champions are entombed after death, as are any fallen students, are no less grim. The Chante-Sa consider the place a location of holy terror. It is approached only in direst need, when they must ask Ma-Ha-Suchi for aid directly. He doesn’t resent their petitions or stop Lunar visitors, but he has no patience for any other trespassers. Realm legions sent to the area rarely make it through the Tangle, but more than one Wyld Hunt has reached his doorstep, forcing him to come out and fight in its defense. Many of the Chante-Sa’s most ancient rites revolve around the Threefold Womb and the blessings the Three Mothers grant there. Ma-Ha-Suchi gave them a new way to serve alongside him and earn prestige, the Path of the Mother’s Hand. Any Chante-Sa may walk the path by going to the Threefold Womb and undergoing brutal combat testing, exposure to the elements, the consumption of poison and hallucinogens, sleep deprivation and starvation. At the end of the Path, those who survive are transformed. It is spoken of as a sacred death and rebirth in which Ma-Ha-Suchi is both psychopomp and doula, pulling them screaming from the Threefold Womb and splitting their soul’s caul so they do not smother, then giving them a place among his beastfolk. They are no longer of the band of their birth, having been reborn to a higher calling. Those who gain victory by resourcefulness, keen minds and determination are reborn as goatfolk, their skulls gnarled by great horns. Those who succeed by raw might become sharp-clawed wolf-folk. New beastfolk are brought into the elite beastfolk ranks to learn the ways of Ma-Ha-Suchi’s champions and their duties. The goatfolk are often called on as arbiters, planners, strategists, crafters or shamans, and every inan has a goatfolk advisor that gives policy advice and speaks to Ma-Ha-Suchi on their behalf. The wolf-folk are elite hunters, feeding the Chante-Sa in lean times and guarding the Lair against intrusion. Most outsiders who deal with the Chante-Sa deal with at least one of the beastfolk, either a goatfolk diplomat that speaks for an inan or Ma-Ha-Suchi or a wolf-folk warrior. The untransformed Chante-Sa that accompany these champions wear decorations and helms made from beast skulls, never revealing their faces, which leads many to believe the Nameless Lair is exclusively populated by beastfolk. The Nameless Lair is isolated, well-defended and terrifying, while the Threefold Womb is uplifting, holy and arduous. Mahiya is a deeply spiritual woman who has risen swiftly in the Flower Band thanks to her keen eye and good taste in picking sacrifices to Chuwe’Inan. The goddess likes her and has spurred her on to ever more aggressive trade deals in order to obtain the luxuries both crave. Her husband, Red Cat, is an excellent merchant that apprenticed with the Guild for several years. Their combined skill makes them nearly unbeatable when trading with their neighbors, and some, especially among the River Band, resent them for their ability to make everyone else come out behind. There may or may not be a plan in the works to violently recoup their losses. Aan Jandar is the inan of the River Band. He grew up during famine, and he has never forgotten the hunger that made his body weak. His childhood malnourishment means he’s no good at fighting, but he is an excellent strategist and his raid plans have ensured the band’s prosperity. However, his obsessive focus on survival and victory makes him bad at diplomacy, and despite his council’s advice, he’s done little to deal with grievances or resentments against other bands. Some of his advisors now conspire to get Mahni’Inan to replace him with one of their number before the feuds of the River Band destroy the peace. Greenheart leads the Band of Bones due to her wise judgment, philosophical nature and thaumaturgical skill, a blessing granted to her by the Hungry Mother. Under her leadership, the Gap have begun increasingly numerous and daring raids on the neighboring nations, bringing skulls back to Gap’Inan and wealth to adorn their caves. This has caused problems with the River Band, who see the Gap raids as infringing on their traditional dominance and wealth access. Uakka, a goatfolk shaman, is among the eldest of his kind. He is famous for his cunning and wit in dealing with the supernatural, mediating conflicts between the Chante-Sa and the Tangle’s lesser spirits, such as jungle gods, elementals or fae. He occasionally gets Ma-Ha-Suchi’s Lunar students to help out with more powerful spirits. He takes few students himself, and many goatfolk dislike when he takes River Band shamans as acolytes. They whisper that he is more loyal to the River Band that birthed him than to Ma-Ha-Suchi. Six Day Storm is a scarred and deadly wolf-woman hunter and charismatic commander. She has been entrusted by Ma-Ha-Suchi with the defense of the Chante-Sa against outsiders and with planning raids on the Realm’s forces when the Season of Hunts comes around. She takes spouses from the warriors that serve her, and rarely has fewer than seven husbands at any given time. Despite her skill, she has been banned from returning to the Threefold Womb for some long-ago insult she gave to Chuwe’Inan, and she still holds a grudge over that. The Vuloth are woodworkers of great skill as well as apothecaries, and they are one of the oldest trading partners of the Flower Band, offering their wares for petal-leather and plants. A number of prominent Vulothi have actually intermarried with the Chuwe. Occasionally the River Band raids them, especially now, under Aan Jandar. Mahiya has tried to negotiate peace with her fellow inan and the Vuloth, but so far, Aan Jandar has been ignoring her entirely. Immaculate missionaries have reached out to the Vuloth to offer assistance against raiders serving the hated Anathema Ma-Ha-Suchi. Amajul was once the site of a powerful civilization north of the Tangle, but now it is a ruin, it’s peoples driven off by the raiding of the Chante-Sa. Only wild beasts and spirits dwell there now, in the empty ziggurats, plus the occasional traveler daring enough to stay in old ruins. Nearby Point Sunder is a major trading post for the merchants of the Threshold, a gate to the Vaniwayan River that heads to Prasad and the Dreaming Sea. It is often a target of Chante-Sa raids as a result. The local Guild prince and leader of the Gilded Peacock Consortium, Luvali Faja, has had the outpost fortified by mercenaries and an Exigent champion at great expense. Other merchants that seek to travel through it must now pay high protection fees, as the Gilded Peacocks seek to recoup their investment as well as protect their Prasadi trade. Next time: Mahalanka
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May 21, 2019 21:04
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Rifts Coalition Wars 3: Sorcerers' Revenge part 6, "Think karma!" Adventure Generation Possibilities Tables By Kevin Siembieda Then, we get seven pages of random tables for kidnap plots. Sometimes when I write stuff about Palladium I feel like I must be making up things, but no. Like, you'd think if you want to drill that far, it'd be battles or random enemy operations or something directly related to war plots, but no, we have nearly setting-neutral kidnap plots all of a sudden. This definitely feels like something Siembieda shoved in to shore up a flagging page count, but it's hard to say for certain. We get about a page of going on about all the different possibilities and rewards possible for these kinds of plots. Rifts Coalition Wars 3: Sorcerers' Revenge posted:The most savvy adventurers (villains and criminals among them) have a keen sense of what "good will" can do for them. Game Masters are wise to remember that "rewards" for a good deed can come in many forms, sometimes months or years after the fact. Karma, man. Think karma! Furthermore, player characters who see themselves as "heroes" should find gratification in doing the good deed in and of itself — no monetary reward necessary. Yes, even if you're playing a villainous character, you should do good things! Because karma! Makes sense.   "If only there were some military force dedicated to protecting humans from nonhumans!" So, the tables break down into who is missing and where they were last seen. When looking into what happened to them, we get a number of possibilities. Maybe they were kidnapped, so that goes into rolls on who has been kidnapped?, who may have them, and why kidnap the character. It's possible that it could just be a random incident or foul play, both of which just get single tables. Lastly, they were "taken captive for hostage" - wait, isn't that same as kidnapping? Well, in that case you just roll on the random villain encounter table to see who grabbed them. So I'm here are some sample rolls:
 Nobody deserves this, but genocidal fascists come real close. Since it's really hard to hit the kidnapping or foul play tables, I'm going to force some results to demonstrate those. Yes, despite this being a self-described section about kidnap plots, you only have a 10% chance of hitting the tables that are explictly about kidnapping- and those are the most detailed tables! So, let's force some rolls:
 More tentacles means more hugs. If you're not totally burnt out on people going missing, we have guidelines on soldiers and mercenaries going missing in action. We're told D-Bees under Coalition care usually are executed within 8d4 hours of capture, where wizards are held for 1d4 weeks before being executed or being mutilated with cybernetics to hamper their magic. Non-magical humans will be kept for up months, most likely. While Tolkeen soldiers will likely take soldiers to prison camps, they only execute the most notorious Coalition operatives (generally publicly). We also get suggestions that MIA soldiers could be injured and in hiding, they may have deserted, gone native, or gone rogue. Rifts Coalition Wars 3: Sorcerers' Revenge posted:Going Native. Soldiers suffering from mental or emotional trauma (once known as "shell shock" and "traumatic stress syndrome") may "go native," i.e. live like a primitive savage or adopt the enemy or unallied group of people (tribe or village of Native Americans, Psi-Stalkers, Simvan, etc.) and live with and like them as one of their own. We also get a table of of MIA: who has 'em? Let's roll!
But we're far from done with tables. Let's roll on the Random Discovery Table...
... Random Villain Encounter Table...
... Random Encounters with Coalition Forces ...
 "Eat generic energy, fascist dogs!" ... and, lastly, Random Encounters with Tolkeen's Magic & Supernatural Forces.
Palladium: when in in need of filler, just add tables. Granted, Palladium tables are often fun little toys, even when (or especially when) they produce self-contradictory or confusing results. Weirdly, the kidnapping tables have two different tables for who was kidnapped if you roll a kidnapping result, and it's not clear if they were developed independently and folded into the larger structure, or what. Also, as true to the history of our hobby, some of the encounter tables can produce results the PCs just have to flee from if opposed, like a fully manned Coalition APC, a literal company of troops, adult dragons, etc. There's no attempt to keep the encounters "fair" or "gameable" in the slightest. Next: Meet the new Prosek, same as the old Prosek.
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May 22, 2019 09:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yes, even if you're playing a villainous character, you should do good things! Because karma! Makes sense. I know this isn't what the book means, but I kind of like the idea that 'good' or 'evil' characters are defined not by how they behave typically, but how they behave at their worst. Of course doing something like that would probably make it very hard to claim that the Coalition are just misunderstood. It feels at some points that the emphasis on the fact that not everyone in the Coalition is a baby-killing genocidaire was initially an attempt to demonstrate the banality of evil-you don't need that many people willing to commit mass murder and run death camps to actually make those happen, and it's very possible to make them a thing that people largely ignore because it's not emphasized and important. The grunts just take prisoners and the prisoners go to places and the grunts don't ask questions. The citizens just do their jobs, not knowing that they're also supporting fascist death camps. You don't need that many people to run the fascist death camps, after all. You don't need everyone to be gung ho about them, so long as everyone knows that Those Types are the enemy and don't ask hard questions about whether they're being treated right. But at some point it spiraled into believing that the existence of these people who were ignorant of the Coalition's cruelty somehow justified it, rather than making it more awful because of the banality of it all.
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May 22, 2019 10:44
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Fangs at the Gate: APE LAW, Part the Second Mahalanka lies in the deep Eastern forests. It is built around Sperimin, a mass of First Age metal and glass, jutting even over the forest canopy in its highest towers. In ancient days, it was a metropolis, and even now, it is a place of ancient wonders. Travelers rarely see it, however, for Mahalanka, the City of a Thousand Golden Delights, is closely guarded. It is the home of the devil-empress Raksi and the Thousand Fangs Army, and it is the center of her Thousand Fangs Army Total Control Zone. Even the Realm dares not trespass on her distant stronghold. Sperimin did not truly fall until the Contagion, it should be noted. During the Shogunate, it remained a hub of scholarship, if lessened and battered by internal strife. Raksi and Ma-Ha-Suchi seized the city after the Contagion, to use as their base against Lookshy and the Realm. When the dispute between the two became violent, the battle laid waste to the city, which was already crumbling from old and decaying infrastructure. Raksi drove Ma-Ha-Suchi from Sperimin and claimed the ruins as her domain, raising Mahalanka from the wreckage. The city is a place of glory and terror, like Raksi herself. It is a sprawling metropolis on the banks of the Turquoise River, with great swaths of farmland carved out beyond its borders. The deforestation only makes the ruins of Sperimin stand out even more, though many of the overgrown towers are toppled and broken in the middle of the many-storied new city of wood, brick and sandstone. The construction is no less sophisticated than Nexus or the Imperial City, with massive stepped cisterns providing running water and wastewater sent to irrigate and fertilize the fields. The broad and even roads extend into the forest, moving goods to markets and storehouses. Some of this is highly sophisticated engineering, but sorcerous might also plays a role. Infinitely flowing fountains drive waterwheels and mills, while the foundries and glassblowers use bound fire elementals, and sorcerous wards repel disease and vermin from the crops. On the street level, Mahalanka is vibrant and thriving. Residents and visitors crowd the streets, dressed in vivid patterns amid elaborately decorated facades and merchant-packed plazas full of all manner of goods. In the evening, red paper lanterns with traditional black and silver markings light the streets. Large extended families live in farmhouses, tenements and manors, depending on location and social class. Groups of elders run these families, arranging marriages and jobs for the youths. Even participating in Raksi’s transformative, mystical trials requires the approval of the family elders, unless personally invited by the Lunar god-queen. Those who pass the trials leave their birth families to join the elite beastfolk caste that rules Mahalanka, but most retain some ties to their blood kin. The city runs on a mixed economy, with the bureaucracy taking a share of all grain, textiles and ore, which they collect and redistribute as needed, but workers also earn wages to spend on luxuries or extra staple goods. Mahalanka itself is prosperous, decadent and sorcerous, and Raksi maintains a number of other territories throughout the Total Control Zone. A low wall surrounds an irregular area of greenery at the heart of the city. Here, among carefully tended parks and fenced off wilds, are the arcology-towers of old Sperimin. The tallest are over a hundred stories tall, but most are broken in at least part, and even the intact ones bear the scars of the ages. Vines crawl through their shattered windows, and guano-covered balconies are home to doves and mospids. The greatest of the towers is the Silurian Highvault, where the masters of the First Age studied sorcery. This is Raksi’s personal laboratory and vault of secrets. Its lower levels are full of bound spirits and guardian automata, with terrible winged monsters watching over its many balconies. In the upper reaches, which only Raksi and a few trusted followers may access, the witch-queen performs her greatest sorceries and hides her mightiest artifacts, the greatest of all being the Book of Three Circles. The nearby Halcyon Spire was once Sperimin’s chief and most luxurious residential district, and it is here that Raksi dwells in unimaginable splendor. Apefolk attendants and foreign slaves wait on her constantly, providing for her every desire. She feasts on delicacies and watches ever more intricate entertainments by the finest actors, dancers and acrobats. Glass cabinets display art objects and war trophies, and the Hall of Scarlet Triumphs is home to the jade panoplies of a dozen slain Dragon-Blood champions. Raksi’s most honored guests, her followers or visiting Lunars, stay in the guest quarters in the Sanctum Concordant, full of glass-walled art galleries and concert halls that once drew audiences from across the East. Ancient automata maintain a handful of suites in the finest luxury, but the rest of the tower is dust-caked, revealing the many footprints of visitors exploring the forgotten halls. North of the Devil-Queen’s Garden, as the old city is known, is the Paper Fortress, where the wealthy and powerful beastfolk families live in compounds around the fortified government buildings. As the river gets nearer, these give way to the tenements of lesser officials and government workers, as well as the shops, restaurants and markets that serve their needs. Scattered throughout are the academies, courthouses and ministries. At the center of the Paper Fortress is the Chancery Tower. Its upper reaches are largely collapsed, but the lower areas are used as a meeting place for the Golden Fang Triad, the three chancellors to whom all ministries report. They handle all major government matters, reporting only intermittently to Raksi, who prefers a hands-off approach to rule. Of course, major or willful errors may draw her sudden and terrible wrath. Dread Arbiter Eskrin Fal is the high judge and chief enforcer of Mahalankan law, and she also oversees the academies, religious affairs and civil examinations of the city. She is a passionate legal scholar who is often frustrated by Raksi’s random whims, and she’s done her best to constrain the effects they can have by codifying and reforming the legal code without actually contradicting Raksi openly. She is rigorous in enforcing criminal law and rather less willing to take bribes than past Dread Arbiters, which makes her rather unpopular, so she is always surrounded by bodyguards and poison tasters. Beloved Guardian Jakun Qobal oversees commerce and finance as well as the welfare of the people, ranging from festivals and public works to the daily dole of necessities. He is a young minister that studied the archives of Sperimin under Raksi and now seeks to apply First Age political and economic theory to Mahalanka. He would like to replace both slavery and paid labor with bound demons, abolish families for a planned society, and more. His agenda goes against the conservatism of the other two Triad chancellors, though, as well as their subordinates, who argue that they risk undermining both ancient traditions and battle-readiness against the Realm. Thousand Fangs General Feroz Kutari is old now but still directs the Army and serves as chief spymaster for Raksi. He is a logistical genius, spending much of his life tinkering with the structure and operations of the Thousand Fangs Army to maximize efficiency. He’s often mocked by the apefolk soldiers, however, who call him the Toy Soldier General, unaware of the many counterintelligence officers he has planted amongst them. The Thousand Fangs Barracks district houses the standing army, centered on the First Age tower known as Devil’s Maw Citadel. Once a school of military history, a stone fortress has been built around its base over the centuries. Here, the apefolk train to join the officer corps by studying leadership, strategy, tactics and weapons. Several additional compounds sprawl out from it to house the thousands of non-beastfolk soldiers as well. Around these barracks, tenements house both the longstanding military families and all kinds of shopkeepers that cater to them. Off-duty soldiers party in the teahouses and plazas at all hours, blowing off steam between jobs. Jobs might include training, guard duty or patrols and raids at the borders of the Total Control Zone. The Smoke-Coils form the heavy industry district, which ring with noise from sunrise to sunset. The many workshops, tanneries and mills produce all kinds of goods, from weapons to furniture to glassware to paper and more, both for use in the city and export through the Total Control Zone. Wagonways keep it connected for transport of raw materials and finished goods. Other nations would be astounded by how productive the district is. The immense strength of the apefolk laborers allows them to carry loads and use tools that ordinary mortals would need teams to manage. The oldest part of the district is centered on the Grand Axis, a fallen tower repurposed even though it lies at a 90 degree angle. The windows are now doors, the old floors are walls separating businesses, and ladders provide access through the structure. Centuries of construction around the tower have built up on its sides and upper surface, in some places entirely concealing the original structure. The tenements are more dense around the industrial buildings than anywhere else in the city, to house both the workers and the service industry that caters to them. Further, this is where the government offers housing for the poor, indigent or unemployed, as the noise and stench make those who have the power to choose want to live anywhere else. Thanks to the poverty and stress, crimes of passion and desperation are far more common here than any other part of the city. The Roaring Market is the chief commercial district, covering most of the waterfront near the Smoke-Coils. The original Roaring Market is a massive public square, displaying all the goods of the Total Control Zone, from the ironware of the city to the batik of nearby Umbergrove to the cacao of Ixcoatli and other treasures of the Dreaming Sea. The district is full of other plazas and bazaars, most specialized in specific trades or merchandise. Tenements, hostels and manors are home to the many social strata of the district, from simple hawkers to merchant princes to mercenaries. Beyond, snaking between the tenements, is the Road of Idols, where the apefolk build their shrines and temples to the gods. Here, altars to pretty much any god worshipped in the Total Control Zone can be found, from the eternally-disemboweled harvest god Xachapal to Chain Sky of the lapis lazuli mask to Sogame, the blind forge-tender. It is also home to Mahalanka’s own gods and their temples, like the ancient city father Leshka, the deified hero-apeman Sagarin Rabul who is the war god of the Thousand Fangs Army, or the cat-god and granary guardian Amber Agunda. However, there are no shrines to Raksi. She demands worship in person and rarely visits the Road of Idols, after all. When she does, it is usually to get the gods to do something for her, like increase crop fertility, bless the military in war or similar. More rarely, she might intervene in the temple power struggles just to remind the spirits of who is really in charge. The paved roads fan out from Mahalanka, and while the largest head through the forest to the rest of the Total Control Zone, most lead to the satellite towns that form Outer Mahalanka. Each has its own small government offices, temples and barracks, plus a wall or palisade for defense. Roads fan out from them to the farming villages, logging camps and mines. Warehouses, wainwrights and stables in the outer towns are almost always busy, fueling the city’s constant need for goods and food. Only a small proportion of the Outer Mahalankan population are beastfolk, largely the leaders of the ministries and garrisons. Most extended families have blood ties to at least one apefolk, though, and they often visit to see their old kin and receive gifts and celebration to honor them for their proximity to the devil-queen, both beloved and feared. While the towns and villages may seem interchangeable to outsiders, they have very strong local identity. Shattergreen, birthplace of Thousand Fangs General Kutari, holds a yearly festival in his honor. Kutri is home to the raksha Daughter-of-Pox, who toils endlessly to count specks of dirt and soil as penance for some ancient offense against Raksi. Yevane loves ghost stories about the First Age ruins outside it, making a good bit of money by charging outsiders for the privilege of scavenging a site that they long ago took anything useful from. Technically, the Thousand Fangs Army refers to all of Raksi’s beastfolk. In Mahalanka proper, almost all of these are apefolk, between those who pass Raksi’s trials and their children and descendants. Other types of beastfolk are more common in other parts of the Total Control Zone, and while rarely seen in the city, they are given equal respect. Apefolk form the city’s elite caste, with each wearing an elaborate badge that denotes role and rank, whether soldier, bureaucrat, scholar or priest. Mahalankan law allows any beastfolk to punish non-beastfolk at their discretion for all kinds of crimes, including disobedience to lawful orders from beastfolk. These punishments can be cruel and flamboyant, as a way to enforce authority, but this is slightly mitigated by the fact that if Raksi finds out and decides a punishment is excessive, she will inflict the same fate on them. Raksi has a number of testing grounds for aspiring apefolk through the Total Control Zone – nearly every demesne or patch of Wyld In her domain has a testing site, in fact. Each has its own unique trial, from the trap-laden, darkness-filled labyrinth of the Death Pits of Bhaga to the crocodiles and mosquito swarms of Oju Bog to the maddening riddles of the Oracle of Six Torches. On passing their trial, new apefolk leave their families to be adopted into one of the city’s apefolk clans. Most still favor their birth families, of course, especially because the family elder’s permission is needed to take the trials. Even within the Army, though, there is a caste system. Apefolk elevated by the trials are seen as more capable and driven than those born to the role, and receive preferential promotion over their peers. Born apefolk must go to great lengths to prove themselves equally capable. The Total Control Zone comprises a grand empire of numerous Eastern cultures brought under Raksi’s command. The main thing they all have in common is the power of Raksi in their lives. Almost all of the cultures within the Zone see her as benevolent to some degree – a culture hero that shares wisdom, a judge that mediates disputes, a witch-queen that uplifts the worthy as apefolk champions, a goddess whose magic ends famine and drought. However, Raksi also loves the role of the monster, and she uses the terror she causes to teach the cultures under her. To some, she’s a flesh-eating devil that loves to eat sinners and liars, while others speak of her cursing men to the form of beasts or cursed spirits for breaking her law, and others warn their children that they will be given to Raksi for misbehaving. Swearing oaths by the Queen of Fangs is common practice, for few are fool enough to break such a vow. In times of danger, the peoples of the Total Control Zone may petition Raksi for aid. There are strict rules about these requests, which require that a clan or kingdom send a single messenger to Mahalanka, who must present themselves at the gates of Old Sperimin for audience. Apefolk ensure the petitioner receives food, water and any medical care needed after the hard journey, but they have only one hour of audience to make their plea. Some petitions are ignored, while others Raksi gives to her students to deal with. Sometimes, however, she leaves Mahalanka personally to solve the problem, living and walking amongst the people. In one such trip, she pulled the River Raksi from the dry earth to end a drought, and in another she awakened the ancestral statues of the M’nenda to defend them against slavers, and in another she raised the city Kivyat to the sky when floods threatened it. She never asks any payment, for what can mere mortals give for such a wonder? The Sky Runner nomads, led by the apefolk chief Cunning Finds Iron, hunt and trap monkeys, deer and other beasts and raid their neighbors for slaves, which they sell to the Guild caravans on the western edge of the Total Control Zone. This has caused a number of conflicts, especially with the Red Scars, Get of the Tigress and Devil Braids, who have forsworn slavery at the command of Raksi’s lieutenant, Dark Eyes. Then you have the Endless Branch, led by the shaman Jaciral, who was maimed in her youth by a demon accidentally loosed by one of Raksi’s less skilled students. Raksi, in a brief fit of compassionate whim, blessed Jaciral. She would never walk again, but she can now loose her spirit to travel invisibly. She has never revealed this gift to her clan, which makes her knowledge and foresight mysterious to them. Jaciral is grateful for the gift, and so she urges worship of Raksi, which has complicated dealings with the clan gods. Zanzannec is a wealthy city-state that has long traded ivory, salt and gems to Mahalanka but only recently became a tributary after a mass pandemic. They were inducted into the Total Control Zone as the price for Raksi’s aid, and a rebellion by newly transformed apefolk ousted their old government and installed Piradu Sarap as the new governor. Now, Piradu has been challenged by Talarai Gom, a lesser royal cousin of the old regime who has successfully passed Raksi’s trials and is now rallying popular support in preparation for a petition to Raksi for restoration of the throne. Then there’s Yellow-Eyed Rock, where the apefolk exiles and deserters gather. It is an eerie, Wyld-touched place where they can find shelter from pursuers. The local shaman Thunder Wisdom has brokered peace with the local Fair Folk, but even he can’t prevent the Wyld mutation among the exiles. The eldest can barely be recognized as apefolk any more, with their bodies encrusted in crystal, calcified into living stone or dissolved into somewhat amorphous sand. Raksi’s influence is not limited to the Total Control Zone. The Court of Thorns’ spirits, such as the blood-weeping Nemaxi, the many-wolf-headed Lykarrit the Guide or the wood elemental Drinks-the-Day, rule over the Gharan Forest. The trees choke out the light and the wolves and bears menace travel, but a caravan the bears Raksi’s sigil may pass unharmed, for the Queen of Fangs has subdued or befriended the most powerful gods of the court with her power. Oloqui is a tributary of the Ixcoatli, but near enough to the Total Control Zone to trade with them and raid them. The city’s serpentfolk governor has encouraged increased raids in order to meet the Ixcoatli demands for tribute and slaves. However, the raitonfolk lieutenants stationed there are very wary of the strength of the Thousand Fangs Army, and they think negotiations with Raksi are the wiser decision. Next time: The Eskari of the Burning Sands
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May 22, 2019 14:03
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Warhammer Fantasy: Paths of the Damned Part 3: Forges of Nuln A note on advancement, multiclassing, and the career of the Brute Squad quote:Name: Liniel of Caledor Liniel has been beyond satisfied with the performance of the human weapons she acquired; paired with the quickness of an elf's hands and the keenness of an elf's eye, these 'pistols' have been the antidote to much mischief. She's resolved that even after the Chaos mess blows over back home and her name is cleared completely she'll sign on as an Envoy and remain in the human lands awhile, to see where they go with these 'gun' things in a couple centuries. She's come to find the pace of life in the Empire amusing, rather than exhausting, and living among a party of them has shown her she is one of the rare elves who actually enjoys dealing with humans. Not something she ever expected when first fleeing to the Empire to let things back home blow over. Besides, they have nice hats. She would never admit it to a fellow elf, but this wide-brimmed, plumed hat is way cooler than the stupid giant cone helmets they wear back home. You might notice that even with about 2000 EXP after promoting from Noble, Liniel is still in Pistolier. This is because she's effectively multiclassing, going from a social career to a combat one. You might ALSO notice she has basically every Ranged talent in the game, can handle a gun about as well as you can in WHFRP2e, still knows how to use a longbow for long range work, and has become a formidable ranged combatant and a competent melee one. While still being an excellent social character. Multiclassing can make your 2nd career take a very long time, yes, but the whole time you're there, you're acquiring new stats and abilities. Now, instead of just a good talker, Liniel is also excellent at putting two Damage 5 AP1 Impact shots on a target at close range, or firing Damage 4 AP2 volleys with a longbow at BS 68. One of the points of the Career system is that if a Career is taking a long time, it's doing it because you had a lot to learn. quote:Name: Pierre Rhone Pierre has taken the time during their stay in Altdorf to visit the Temple of Verena and petition to be named a lay worshiper of the Goddess of Knowledge, officially converting to the cult. He cannot return to the worship of the Lady of the Lake after all he has learned and done, and harbors a deep and secret fear that perhaps his former Goddess is an inherent enemy of Justice. While he is torn about what to do once his 'errantry' ends (Join the Herrimaults? Return home and pretend to be a normal knight to try to rule his father's fiefs justly?), for now, his course is clear. He must learn all he can while he has the chance, to understand how to serve the cause of Justice and Knowledge, and his friends will need a scholar and expert to help them deal with the third relic of Xathrowhatever. There are always three relics, after all. You learn that kind of thing studying archeology. Pierre is the weakest combatant in the group, and even then he's not terrible at it. His talents lie elsewhere, though; look at that Int score! And with Keen Senses, he's effectively rolling against base TN 90% for most detective skills. Add that to a full suite of rogue skills, his excellent Agi, and enough academics to help the team, and he's covering both the Rogue and Academic role at the same time while being a very effective detective. Sure, he'll be in Investigator for thousands of EXP yet, but again: He's learning useful stuff the entire time, and he's really, really good at his jobs on the team. Nothing will get past Pierre. 3000 EXP or so is where you start to reach 'the PCs are an eclectic group of very competent people'. quote:Name: Otto Blucher Otto is more than satisfied with his career so far. The others might disdain Frederick a bit, but for him, a medal awarded by an Imperial Grandee is the first step on the road to having his name known to all Imperial heroes. Seeing Liniel's skill with a pistol, Otto has trained himself hard to use both hands equally well, and taken advantage of their contacts with Frederick (who does not understand that ammunition is expensive) to learn to shoot. He seeks to develop his own dueling style, and to one day learn to read and write in hopes of making his own manual of arms on the use of fencing techniques in full plate armor. People in the Empire are beginning to hear the name of Otto Blucher, and that is precisely what he wants in life. Hopefully, the next adventure will bring him to the attention of an Elector Count, or Ulric willing, Karl Franz himself! Otto is still in Duelist because Duelist is an extremely long career; it learns both melee and ranged combat while becoming very mobile with Swashbuckler (Otto can jump as a half-action, jump further, and generally use that to slip out of combat without AoOs, despite his full plate), and it also picks up social skills as well. But again, he's still learning useful things the whole time he's here. He's not as good with a gun as Liniel by a long shot, but he's good enough, and adding two more pistols to the team's close range opening volley (especially as Otto also has a good Agi and thus good Init) certainly won't hurt anything. The Glove of Jarfeit also make him even better; even with an SB-1 Fast Rapier, he's still Damage 5 while breaking through enemy active defenses better. Ambidextrous is something that doesn't seem too useful until you realize he can now freely strike to stun with his off-hand whenever he wants (and his Buckler has Pummel for +10 to the check), use two guns at once without having to use up his Quickdraw like Liniel, and operate just fine if his right hand gets broken. quote:Name: Katiya Ivanovna Demechev Katiya plans to ask her friends if they will accompany her to Kislev when this is all over. Their adventures in the south have taught her a great deal about the sword and lance, and made the mild-mannered peasant woman into a hero, but these skills mean nothing if they are not put to the service of the Tzarina or witnessed by the Gryphon Legion. She has been talking to Liniel about how Katarin and her officials are known for being just and fair with those they hire, and how she can guarantee the party will actually be paid for their work if they fight in service of the Tzarina. She thinks the elf has been listening, but convincing the Bretonnian will be a little harder. Still, for now, she is content to stay here in the south until the Xath business is dealt with; even if it has not been a grave threat so far, all forces of Chaos must be exterminated. Every son and daughter of Kislev knows as much, and how would these people get this done without their brave Gospodar sword-sister? Katiya is a multiclass, like Liniel, which is why she's still in Winged Lancer. However, look at her melee stats. She's honestly just as good as Otto is with the Gloves, almost. Her cavalry specialty is kind of a cruel joke, though, because almost the entire campaign takes place in places where you can't ride a horse. Still, shield, saber, and Damage 6 WS 60 2 Attacks will serve. And she still has her social and ranger skills from being a Peasant. Shame the party doesn't really need a ranger because again, the entire adventure path takes place in cities. And if she IS on her horse, a Damage 7 Fast Impact Charge is something nothing in the game can ignore. Especially with something Solveig can do. quote:Name: Solveig Miller Solveig has not found the glorious battles she was expecting with people marked by Ulric, but she assumes that is more a function of being in Altdorf, a land far from the front lines of battle and the wintery north. It is not their fault, and this Khornate threat has to be eliminated; as long as she combats the forces of Khorne, she is still doing Ulric's work. During her adventures with the company after the mess in Altdorf, she has even found herself increasingly marked by her God as she learns to channel his miracles. She was already big. Now she finds herself even taller, stronger, and with the feral claws of a wolf. Obviously a righteous mark of Ulric, Lord of Battles (and also wolves) and not at all any kind of mutation. The other priests signed off on it. She will take the Kislevite's side and suggest the team travel north after this duty is complete, though; battle awaits, and scouring the remnants of evil from the Empire and its faithful allies in Kislev are worthy causes for the Lord of Battles and his servants. Solveig takes a HUGE jump in power as she moves into Warrior Priest. She's now a full 2nd tier fighter in addition to a divine caster. I went by my normal house rule that gaining Mag gains a Divine Mark (or Arcane Mark) because Marks are cool, and she got pretty lucky with them. Ulric's Lore will let her do things like 'All Allies attack 2 times on the Charge, regardless of their Attacks' or let her buff herself into a battle-fury where she gets 3 attacks. Combined with Frenzy if she's feeling crazy, she can get up to doing 3 Damage 7 Impact attacks in a single round, albeit at poor WS due to Frenzy. Priest can be a very frustrating Career path; it takes much too long to actually get your Divine Lore. But once you do, watch out. Ulric's Lore is very strong, too, and she took the buffing/battle path with it. One of the things that's weird about Paths of the Damned as a campaign is that the campaign itself never acknowledges how much better the PCs get. It still treats you like a bunch of ragged errand boys even in Forges of Nuln. Look at the party's abilities. They are in no way humble errand boys anymore; this party can and will take down any combat challenge in Forges, and they're well suited to the diplomatic, roguish, and academic challenges, too. Mid-late second career/early 3rd career characters genuinely shift the tone of the game just by their mechanical power alone. Characters are, by that point, either extremely good at their chosen thing (Otto, Pierre), or have become multi-talented and competent at a variety of abilities (Everyone else). Heck, every single one of the party's primary fighters has a good shot of outright killing the 'unstoppable' serial killer villain in the upcoming adventure in a duel if it came to it. But the books will never really acknowledge this shift. Part of that is them assuming that you'll have ragged and partial equipment, except that if you're using the Trappings system RAW, PCs actually have to have found stuff like Mail or Guns to actually promote. I strongly suspect very few people used Trappings exactly as written, because otherwise you'd never promote into Veteran or Knight if the GM is giving you as little treasure as these books seem to assume they do. Even getting Full Mail is a chore with the sparse rewards and inconsistent payment in these books. This is basically Brute Squad's final form. Forges only really awards its EXP at the end, and sure it's 1200 EXP if they do everything right, but there's no good breakpoints to fill it in like with Altdorf. Even with all this, the group can defeat any of the bosses presented in Forges of Nuln, while handling pretty much all the non-combat challenges. You'll see; the greatest risk in Forges isn't actually anything mechanical, but rather several ways to end up in a fail state by just not predicting the adventure's Adventure Game logic. It will also feature grinding random encounters (there's a part where you're expected to repeat 10 minor, boring encounters to achieve something!), inexplicable outbreaks of Goatman Prime, and an elaborate setup the PCs are canonically not allowed to do anything to change outside of very minor editing. This is going to make writing it up frustrating, because I think that part will not survive contact with any actual PC group or gaming group. Thus, I will be writing up what is supposed to happen, then what actually happens when these situations are exposed to a highly competent team of experienced protagonists. Next Time: The Jewel of the Empire
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May 22, 2019 15:17
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Night10194 posted:Liniel has been beyond satisfied with the performance of the human weapons she acquired; paired with the quickness of an elf's hands and the keenness of an elf's eye, these 'pistols' have been the antidote to much mischief. She's resolved that even after the Chaos mess blows over back home and her name is cleared completely she'll sign on as an Envoy and remain in the human lands awhile, to see where they go with these 'gun' things in a couple centuries. She's come to find the pace of life in the Empire amusing, rather than exhausting, and living among a party of them has shown her she is one of the rare elves who actually enjoys dealing with humans. Not something she ever expected when first fleeing to the Empire to let things back home blow over. Alas poor Liniel, born a few millennia too early to host the Warhammer Fantasy version of Forgotten Weapons. Actually, does Chaos in Fantasy ever bring any guns to the table? I mean, I can see that Khorne would probably want to keep things up close and personal, but I could easily imagine a Nurglish blunderbuss loaded with some sort of awful plague garbage, or Tzeentchian Warpfire pistols. I mean, especially Tzeentch, you'd figure that an entity all about change would embrace the newest gear at every junction, sometimes taken to utterly impractical lengths(though that might be kind of impinging on the Skaven's "thing."). But I don't think I've ever seen any Chaos models with guns, or any references to Chaos using battlefield artillery either. It really must take some seriously convoluted leaps of logic to still make Chaos a threat if they're not innovating to keep pace with the rest of the setting's tech. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 16:04 on May 22, 2019 |
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May 22, 2019 16:01
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Chaos has demon hell cannons made by the Chaos Dwarves, mostly.
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May 22, 2019 16:09
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PurpleXVI posted:Alas poor Liniel, born a few millennia too early to host the Warhammer Fantasy version of Forgotten Weapons. Chaos Dwarfs use guns. A lot. They're heavily implied to be inventing new weapons, too, just the plot always seems to forget the Chorfs. Archy's Hellcannons, which were one of the nastiest surprises in the Storm, were Chorf-made demon-engine cannons that can match an Imperial Great Cannon. Just requires loading it with slaves, and sometimes the gun decides to eat its crew.
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May 22, 2019 16:46
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It feels that there's a strain of thought from the authors that WFRPG is a poo poo-farm simulator, that failure is the only option, and getting paid for work is not grim-dark enough. That this premise would make multi-part campaigns highly unlikely never gets examined because why would you?
SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 17:02 on May 22, 2019 |
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May 22, 2019 16:53
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