Mr. Prokosch posted:Yeah, you're not in any way wrong, but the Internals book is considered the worst poo poo in the whole line. It's like judging D&D by the Book of Vile Darkness or The Book of Erotic Fantasy. It's really bizarre how, for the last stretch of 2e, the devs thought Infernals were the most popular splat of that edition, and then they did some actual polling and it turns out it was just a bunch of really vocal weirdos who liked the weirdly codified and rigid structure of the charms and demons in general drowning out the majority, and most people didn't really like them at all because of those first chapters to their book being insanely bad. also hmm do I even care to do more of the stupid Realm book, I think reading through the rest of the provinces gives me the impression that none get very good. None of the cities are giving any really defining traits beyond "this is the city of weaving! this is the city where people gently caress a lot once a year!" The one I liked the most, Chanos, was good because it actually had poo poo that made it feel like a city; districts, multiple businesses, and so on. I honestly feel like I don't exactly like the extremely pared down approach of Exalted 3e to back-story stuff, as while it's an improvement over 2e's meticulous and boring prose, it mostly just hints at poo poo without ever giving any possibility as to what that poo poo is and that feels very dull. I'm not going to be wowed by all these references to "the ghost-faced warriors of Ithen" if they're never going to get a write-up because writing my own poo poo up and explaining it to the players is hard.
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Jul 16, 2019 06:52
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SunAndSpring posted:It's really bizarre how, for the last stretch of 2e, the devs thought Infernals were the most popular splat of that edition, and then they did some actual polling and it turns out it was just a bunch of really vocal weirdos who liked the weirdly codified and rigid structure of the charms and demons in general drowning out the majority, and most people didn't really like them at all because of those first chapters to their book being insanely bad. I've been waiting for someone to get to reviewing the satrapies, myself, but everyone seems to burn out before getting there.
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Jul 16, 2019 07:57
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I own Nyambe myself, and never quite worked out what to do with it- I may give it a second look now, though. Good write up.
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Jul 16, 2019 07:57
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SunAndSpring posted:also hmm do I even care to do more of the stupid Realm book, I think reading through the rest of the provinces gives me the impression that none get very good. None of the cities are giving any really defining traits beyond "this is the city of weaving! this is the city where people gently caress a lot once a year!" Thank you! Between the L5R and DnD like art, to the fact there is no math in the book whatsoever, to just how basic and thing each description is....I don't understand why people like it at all.
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Jul 16, 2019 08:26
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hyphz posted:The book also mentions the intriguing possibility that the PCs might somehow have two bullets, which I suppose they could have if they gave Belphegor's Eye to the Innocent after using it to pay their way into the elevator. Unfortunately, it's another Jareth moment, because if the PCs actually shoot both Satan and Hades then there's no freaking clue what happens other than the PCs potentially being stuck in the gameroom until Cthulhu rises. Tucked away in a random footnote in a completely different section of the book (!) is the suggestion that the PCs might be able to escape from Hell if they.. destroy Satan's Tarot deck? Huh. Given the combination of meticulous planning and ruthless backstabbing required to get all the conditions in place to where that would even be possible, I think my first instinct if a group of PCs did something like that would be to tell them "I sure hope you were angling to be the new rulers of Hell, because guess what you just became by default".
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Jul 16, 2019 13:01
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SunAndSpring posted:also hmm do I even care to do more of the stupid Realm book, I think reading through the rest of the provinces gives me the impression that none get very good. None of the cities are giving any really defining traits beyond "this is the city of weaving! this is the city where people gently caress a lot once a year!" The one I liked the most, Chanos, was good because it actually had poo poo that made it feel like a city; districts, multiple businesses, and so on. I honestly feel like I don't exactly like the extremely pared down approach of Exalted 3e to back-story stuff, as while it's an improvement over 2e's meticulous and boring prose, it mostly just hints at poo poo without ever giving any possibility as to what that poo poo is and that feels very dull. I'm not going to be wowed by all these references to "the ghost-faced warriors of Ithen" if they're never going to get a write-up because writing my own poo poo up and explaining it to the players is hard. Well, if the rest of the book is poo poo, instead of reviewing it in INTRICATE DETAIL just make fun of it. Thuryl posted:Given the combination of meticulous planning and ruthless backstabbing required to get all the conditions in place to where that would even be possible, I think my first instinct if a group of PCs did something like that would be to tell them "I sure hope you were angling to be the new rulers of Hell, because guess what you just became by default". "Okay, first order of business, all this old-school gambling sucks. From now on, it's replaced with competitive Magic: the Gathering. Souls are no longer casino chips, instead they will be crafted into rare MtG cards." PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Jul 16, 2019 |
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Jul 16, 2019 13:30
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PurpleXVI posted:"Okay, first order of business, all this old-school gambling sucks. From now on, it's replaced with competitive Magic: the Gathering. Souls are no longer casino chips, instead they will be crafted into rare MtG cards."
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Jul 16, 2019 14:05
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SunAndSpring posted:It's really bizarre how, for the last stretch of 2e, the devs thought Infernals were the most popular splat of that edition, and then they did some actual polling and it turns out it was just a bunch of really vocal weirdos who liked the weirdly codified and rigid structure of the charms and demons in general drowning out the majority, and most people didn't really like them at all because of those first chapters to their book being insanely bad. I don't recall any polling like that happening. As far as I'm aware, Infernals got a lot of billing in the latter half of 2e because: 1) They were basically built up on stilts that let them hover over the parts of the game system that didn't work. Perfects are the only thing that matters? Well, whatever, Infernals have an entire combat suite based around perfects. This made them a lot easier to write decent mechanics for, until the core system got fixes and the Infernals basically fell apart. 2) The Ink Monkeys had a standing approval to publish Infernal content to the blog, whereas everything else had to go through an interminable approvals process, and they were desperate to blog as much as possible to prevent the line from being cancelled.
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Jul 16, 2019 14:23
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Sig: Manual of the Primes Oh, It's Just This One Joke, Over And Over  Mountain Royal, by Jason Pitre Beliefs Power corrupts. Those who bend do not break. You are your culture. Mountain Royal is...easily the least well-written prime. Because it's...it's a city on Earth. There's cars, there's paved roads, there's electric lamps and skyscrapers. Everyone is human, but there are two distinct language groups there. There are many stone churchs, empty and ignored. Groups of youths in V For VEndetta masks shout against Austerity, which the author-mouthpiece assumes is a demon. The entire thing is literally 'some rando from a D&D world wanders into Earth and gets confused.' This is not fun to read. He mistakes the cars for weird mechanical beetles and has no idea what's going on. He assumes 'Austeritae' is some kind of religious demon. When the cops show up, he calls them Guardians and assumes they serve Austeritae and watches as they use tear gas, tasers and guns on the mob. There's not a lot to say here. The guy talks about how the place is cold and snowy, and he likes pizza and thinks the art and performances of Earth are cool. Also he likes the beer and cheese, and thinks the cops' weapons would sell for a high price on the Night Markets. The book claims I am really disappointed with Mountain Royal. Next time: Whispering Sands, by Hannah Shafer Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jul 16, 2019 |
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Jul 16, 2019 15:41
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 WARNING: (SLIGHTLY LESS) SPOILERS ALL THROUGH THIS POST. So, Alas Vegas, then. Unlike some other reviewers, I don't think I'd pull my pledge entirely if I owned a time machine. I might pledge less, but I'd still have been interested in seeing this. I can't deny I'm a little disappointed, but as I said, there are parts of this I absolutely love. This is partly because I'm a sucker for alternative cosmologies with internal consistency and experimentation (it's one reason I like Unknown Armies so much) and Alas Vegas has a bunch of that. The rules about chip denominations, the horror of keeping people alive to prevent them being chipped, the idea that mortals can't use guns so they naturally thought "hey can we use bows".. they all work well. Another reason is that while it's a railroad, it's trying hard not to be a "pinball protagonist" story where the PCs can't do anything except see parts of the setting. The PCs do have options, they can access previous resources, and the ending "haha you were part of my plan all along" has a twist that gives the PCs agency. Those facts alone make it better than a ton of pre-written adventures I've seen. At the same time, it hits a ton of problems I'd have running. How do you make journeys through surreal landscapes entertaining, while the PCs can't really do anything? How do you make Hell a sandbox without making it seem like a world of opportunity, which is exactly how Hell should not feel? As I've mentioned here, the author, James Wallis, is a multiple published author, editor and former TV presenter (I went to look for what he presented, and it's something called Download Extra on a Sky channel helpfully named ".tv", which I haven't been able to find any examples of). That means that when it comes to storytelling and charisma he's probably at least above average, if not exceptional. (It might not surprise anyone to learn that Alas Vegas was originally a novel.) So it's perfectly possible that if he's run this at conventions or playtesting, people might well be playing simply for the joy of being involved in his storytelling, and obviously he'd have an easier time improvising things in the world he invented. Warning: rambling theory paragraph, skip if you like. Books and articles love to talk about GM-as-referee or arbiter or narrator and so on, but what about GM-as-personality? It's never considered really. It then becomes a brain burner if GM-as-personality is the apex of the GM's art or a confounding variable. I don't know any GMs like that personally, maybe there's a goon or two who might qualify, but I can't deny that I'd like it if I was one of them. A GM-as-personality can run anything and engage anyone, but only because that engagement comes from something entirely orthogonal to the actual game. Which is naturally going to give all kinds of wrong results in playtesting, but then how do you limit the GM's personality contribution to playtesting without limiting everything else too and requiring every game to be baby's first RPG? There's two other possibilities. One is that it's well known that after Alas Vegas succeeded heavily on its Kickstarter, Wallis wanted to write more material to "justify the extra money". As was pointed out to him this was technically unnecessary, the extra money would be justified by selling more copies, but hey, we can't complain. So maybe Vegas started as a framework-type adventure, and the extra content is the stuff that was added, but he couldn't add it all to every branch? And there's a third one. Of all the bits of Fugue that make it awkward, the biggest by far is the rotating GM. That enforces a degree of railroading and ties the hands of GMs by hiding future information from them. If this was originally GM-as-personality, a rotating GM would make no sense. But how do you take a game that worked on the personality of the GM and make it interesting for Joe Schmoe? The answer is: GM-as-curiosity. The reason for the rotating GM would be that the players are meant to enjoy learning about you via how you run the sessions. And thinking of that puts everything into perspective. The reason for the selective information, the reason for the mismatched system that requires a bunch of fiat, are all because GMing the game is part of the game, and how you use these tools is part of what you're communicating. In fact, it's the majority. The real game of Alas Vegas is running Alas Vegas; that's why everyone gets to do it. I don't know 100% that this was intended. If it was, it could have been made much clearer. But this is the guy who wrote Baron Munchausen, which entirely revolves around one person telling a story while others around the table throw in complications. And at least one his "business card RPGs" has the statement "On your turn, you are the GM..". Ok, enough rambling. Let's look at the remaining content of the book. I'll be briefer on this, because these are much shorter adventures (some of them are shorter than a single Vegas chapter). Killing Bugsy Siegel isn't a Fugue adventure at all. It's a Cursed Earth or Chainsaw Warrior style game (albeit with no dice) of dividing the Tarot deck into a hand of resources and an encounter deck, and playing through one to generate a story as you go. It's quite interesting, but I'm not going to post too much of it here because it's all just rules and unlike Fugue they're not freely available. Let's not ask the question about whether or not it's a good idea to write a game about killing a real person, albeit one who's long dead. Yet Already It Seems I Have Travelled Far is arguably an even more intriguing cosmology than Vegas. It's based on time travel, and it adds a new twist to the Fugue system. When you have a flashback, you draw a card; the number tells you how long ago it was, and the suit tells you which of the 4 timelines it's in. The timelines are tracked on paper, Microscope style. As you might guess, each timeline gets one session and one GM, and results of flashbacks can affect future sessions or the current one. In the last two sessions, flashbacks become actual full-blown time travel and all the PCs appear in the flashback and can make changes. The background to this one is based on Abel Archer, the 1983 military exercise that was mistaken by the Soviets for cover for an actual nuclear strike, which nearly resulted in them firing back and starting a war. In this world, they did fire back, and there was a nuclear war, until a Professor Klingsor invented the time machine and went back to make sure that a Soviet agent in the US was able to discover that Abel Archer really was just an exercise. (It's an anagram of "Long risk" if you're wondering about that name.) The only problem is that time travel is something you're really not supposed to do, and it fractured the timeline into 4 parts. It also summoned "demons", creatures from outside reality who feed on corrupted timelines and eventually wipe them out. The four time lines are: Cups World, like our own but with strange misshapen dog-sized spiders in the alleys and a prevalent drug named Demon Dust; Wands World, the original timeline that Klingsor changed, where the change has started to break down so the world is becoming post-apocalyptic even though nobody remembers the apocalypse; Coins World, where demons have been present for centuries and an Order has developed to manipulate them and use them for time travel; and Swords World, where Klingsor carried on making changes to history, and has created an idealised future of flying cars, enough for everyone, and any dissenter either mysteriously disappearing or having such terrible luck they never achieve anything. It sounds fascinating, and there's a ton of stuff, but ew boy. If you thought Vegas was a railroad, this is even worse: a pixel hunt. The PCs are in a city, they can wander all over the city until they happen to mention a flashback to the one guy who advances the adventure. What they're trying to do in each world is to find the time machine and the background behind it, which then takes them to the next World. Also, I can't forgive the ending. Essentially, the PCs find that ultimately, to stabilize reality there must be only one timeline, and it's their presence in a timeline that forces that timeline to exist. So they have to go back and kill themselves, yes they are the ones who sent the assassin guys grooooan, and at that point the game seems to encourage some kind of bizarre PvP thing where the person who GMed each timeline vies for their timeline to be the one that survives or something? Huh. Still, apart from that it's a fascinating idea. Warlock Kings is our next one. Take Total Recall. Good start. Make it fantasy. Now reverse it. And you've got the basic idea of this one. The PCs start as Paladins who've been corrupted by the Dark Lord and given a magical eye and hand each (hmm, now where did we get that from). Their task is to work from the inside and screw up the Dark Lord's invasion of three different lands. There's one session per land, and the PCs can play them in any order. Also, they're written up puzzle-piece style as suggested things to link into encounters, and they're disconnected by geographical separation. So if you like sandboxing and exploration, this is by far the best adventure in the book. The Fugue twist on this one is that the PCs can choose whether their flashbacks occur before or after they were corrupted. If it's before, they get mundane abilities from being a Paladin. If it's after, they get magic powers (limited by GM fiat) from the hand and eye. Also, there's an overall clock which affects what's happening in each scenario when the PCs get to it; each has a series of events on a "campaign sheet" which are ticked off as the PCs pass through them. This is probably the adventure that traditional groups will like the most, but again, it has a problem with the ending. Remember what I said about reversing Total Recall? The intended twist of this one is that no, the PCs aren't Paladins who erased their memories in order to infiltrate the Dark Lord, they actually did fall, get screwed by Fate in their lives, and ask to join the Dark Lord of their own free will and intent. I know a lot of players who that wouldn't make happy. If the PCs actually kill the Dark Lord (and it's listed as being a tough fight, the eyes and hands all shut down, but no clue as to how you make a fight tough in Fugue) then there's no real ending other than the PCs being asked to make up for themselves what happens next, which could be really dissatisfying. Finally, Remembering Cosmic Man takes Fugue into.. classic superheroes? The twist with this one is that the players make up a superhero each, but then at the start of the adventure they're immediately arrested for the apparent murder of Cosmic Man, the setting's Superman analogue. For the first three sessions, the players instead play agents of the civilian anti-super force who fight supervillains with tech (the PCs were actually the only "heroes" in the city; all the other supers were either villains or just used their powers for fancy jobs), but their flashbacks apply to their heroes. The GMing structure of this one's a mystery with filler. There's a bunch of very skeletal "sample encounters" the PCs might have with supervillains, and a chain of clues for them to follow (not related to those encounters) which lead to the killer of Cosmic Man, which isn't actually any of the PC heroes. They also get to learn that superheroes are created from a magical Tarot deck, and to pointlessly look for the deck, which they can't find by fiat until the final session when they play their supers again. The reveal on this one? Another open ending, but a bit better. Cosmic Man killed himself - well, what he actually did was to destroy the Tarot card that gave him his powers, which also made him young, so destroying it caused his immediate death of old age. He did it because he believed that having super-people at all was ruining things, and he used one of the extra cards to give the PCs amnesia exactly so they'd be shut down for a few days and the city would be without superheroes, and would see what would happen. The ending is that the PCs get hold of the Tarot deck, and can choose what they do with it; they can give themselves all the powers, depower themselves, shred the entire deck, etc. It's a nice conceit, but the violent change to the background that the PCs will use to give themselves flashbacks could potentially be very awkward, and Fugue isn't really made for playing out a game that's 75% regular anti-super agents having comic book style encounters. So, that's our Vegas. As I said above, it's a tad disappointing, but it's far from meritless: there's a ton of good ideas here, even if the system's kind of weak. Certainly a lot more could be done with the hell-Vegas setting and I'm also kinda partial to the four-timelines setting of But Already. If it was a game for exploring GMing, that'd be a fascinating idea, but it really needed to be better expressed in that way.
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Jul 16, 2019 16:54
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SunAndSpring posted:It's really bizarre how, for the last stretch of 2e, the devs thought Infernals were the most popular splat of that edition, and then they did some actual polling and it turns out it was just a bunch of really vocal weirdos who liked the weirdly codified and rigid structure of the charms and demons in general drowning out the majority, and most people didn't really like them at all because of those first chapters to their book being insanely bad. I remember at least a couple of those super-vocal people were also super-vocal about transhumanism. I dunno if that was the majority of the infernals fanbase or how the devs viewed it, but I just remember a couple of those guys really latching on to demon shintai, and also being huge fanboys for anything about turning into nanoswarms or whatever other poo poo was the geek fad du jour at the time. That was always what that particular craze seemed tied to, to me as an outside observer.
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Jul 16, 2019 18:25
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Desiden posted:I remember at least a couple of those super-vocal people were also super-vocal about transhumanism. I dunno if that was the majority of the infernals fanbase or how the devs viewed it, but I just remember a couple of those guys really latching on to demon shintai, and also being huge fanboys for anything about turning into nanoswarms or whatever other poo poo was the geek fad du jour at the time. That was always what that particular craze seemed tied to, to me as an outside observer. There was and is a particular strain of RPG fan, and more generally SFF fan, who thinks that human characters and human drama are fundamentally boring. The most interesting possible thing, in this view, is for somebody or something to be inhuman, to have strange ways of thinking or being, because that's different from real life and therefore more creative. It's a weird way to approach things and it informed a lot of the Exalted 2e fandom in the latter period, I think. Most famously, a forums poster declared that Solars were inherently boring compared to Infernals, because Gilgamesh who built the walls of Uruk is inherently less interesting than Wallmaster, a man who can build walls with his mind/control walls telekinetically. That was an odd moment for the discourse. I assume things have changed since the focus of Ex3 is very different, but, I haven't been on the Onyx Path forums in a long while now.
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Jul 16, 2019 18:41
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Joe Slowboat posted:Wallmaster, a man who can build walls with his mind/control walls telekinetically. That was an odd moment for the discourse. Bitten by a radioactive sheet of drywall, Wallmaster was gifted with all the powers of a wall. Being much larger in two dimensions than the third, separating two areas from each other, occasionally containing a door or window, and being immobile.
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Jul 16, 2019 19:30
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 Hello everyone. So I'm not going to give this the F&F treatment (at least not anytime soon), but I have been reading up on Svimohzia: the Ancient Isle. And in comparison to the other 3 Fantasy Africa sourcebooks I reviewed (Nyambe, Southlands, Spears of the Dawn) I'm 1/3rd through and it's worse in every way fluffwise. It's Kingdoms of Kalamar's hand at a Fantasy Africa setting. For those not in the know, KoK was a 3rd party campaign setting for D&D 3rd Edition, but got a semi-official status due to an out of court settlement with WotC violating a copyright lawsuit. Kalamar's claim to fame is being a low-magic, low-fantasy, "realistic" medieval setting whose terrain is based upon real-world geological science, there are no big time heroes save for the PCs, and hobgoblins are a rising superpower given that they're the only "class level advancing" race with physical ability score bonuses and no penalties to others. Svimohzia is one of Kalamar's six major regions, containing the oldest civilizations much like IRL Africa. For its part it does have a diversity of terrain and advanced kingdoms which are detailed, so that puts it above WotC's Tomb of Annihilation or Paizo's current Mwangi Expanse. BUT I've just completed the first country chapter, and where it falters, it crashes hard. For one, the first country Meznamish is pretty much a declining empire which was temporarily ruled by an evil theocracy, which caused it to adapt freedom of religion when the populace looked back and said "we're never having this happen again." The country is meant to simulate a realm which can and has risen to greatness, but many problems and the trearchery of merchants and nobles have worn it down. The historical and noble house entries have all the worst aspects of a Game of Thrones episode with all that entails. Secondly, this is not country specific but in the first chapter, we have a write-up of the major human ethnic groups and where the other races fit in (KoK is super humanocentric barring hobgoblins). Whereas the various human ethnicities are more or less neutral, we have the write-up of the Dejy, who I believe are a sort of pan-ethnic group representing all manner of nomadic and indigenous people from Bedouin Arabs to indigenous Americans. The Dejy of Svimohzia are quite literally savage jungle dwellers with all the negative Darkest Africa tropes. Some tribes are described as barely sapient, others believe that all spellcasters are evil, some practice cannibalism of outside intruders, and other things which would make it hard for them to join a typical adventuring PC party. You actually need special DM permission to play as one, unlike the other human ethnicities: One Example Tribe posted:Simay: The Ahznoms believe these dark brown-skinned, easternmost tribes to be barbaric, if not cannibalistic, and they are not far from wrong. Left in their natural condition, they have sunk to the lowest depths and degrees of barbarism, dimly groping in a world of mental and moral obscurity. Strength is their most prized attribute, but without the honor prized by hobgoblins. What a Simay wants, he takes. Personal property is personal only so long as it can be defended. Even one's body is not their own, for the Simay feel no shame about eating the flesh of other humans. Perhaps their one redeeming feature is that they only eat humans when no other options are present. And so far I've encountered at least 2 instances of mentally disabled noble scions who are described in...less than kind terms. This is not just a way of saying someone's stupid: they're given mannerisms which reflect genuine disability: quote:Merely thirteen years of age, Mozvin was a drooling incompetent who lacked the ability to rule the empire, even with the return of the legions (badly weakened by the ravages of jungle fighting). The houses, fearing a revolt from the duchies, elected Onsar to be the boy’s steward and chief advisor. Soon, Onsar eradicated all visible traces of the Church of the Endless Night, and reestablished order in the name of Miznoh’s last heir. Two years later, Mozvin "the Daft" succumbed to his crippling birth defects. quote:The firstborn of Warven II, Warven III (N aristocrat 1) is an idiot who passes his days half-aware and in blissful ignorance, having been born without the intellect or grace of his younger brother. To preserve the integrity of the family line, Warven II named his younger son heir, thereby passing over the elder for the far more competent younger child. Still, the king favors his eldest son and spends most of his free time with the fool. Warven III looks very much like a younger version of his father, though without his shrewd eyes and confidence. The young prince frequently moans and shudders, rocking back and forth, and uttering small yelping noises. There's also a high priestesses who while having dark skin, was born with blonde hair and blue eyes and thus the locals view her as having a divine bloodline/chosen by the gods/special mark due to this: quote:When Hava was born, over 40 years ago, it was clear she received the goddess’ blessing. Her head of beautiful blond curls and incredible blue eyes impelled her pious parents to immerse her in the Courts of Justice, where she could learn the catechism of their faith. It seemed her parents were not the only ones who believed there was a divine hand in her birth; the Courts of Justice lauded her as a living symbol of Svishozh the True’s blessing upon Meznamish. I feel that there's no way I can F&F this without it turning into a "hateview," and after ending on a positive note with Nyambe I would feel better off reviewing a good book I like. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jul 16, 2019 |
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Jul 16, 2019 20:18
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PurpleXVI posted:Bitten by a radioactive sheet of drywall, Wallmaster was gifted with all the powers of a wall. Being much larger in two dimensions than the third, separating two areas from each other, occasionally containing a door or window, and being immobile.
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Jul 16, 2019 20:29
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I think you mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hMRRWzACpM
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Jul 16, 2019 20:37
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I was thinking of the Zelda enemy 
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Jul 16, 2019 20:44
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Libertad! posted:
Holy poo poo This is loving awful even from excerpts, you can tell everyone who wrote it is white because how else did all that poo poo pass by?
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Jul 16, 2019 21:54
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Piell posted:I think you mean Close, but have you considered https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXp8Th41rBs
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Jul 16, 2019 22:59
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Joe Slowboat posted:It's a weird way to approach things and it informed a lot of the Exalted 2e fandom in the latter period, I think. Most famously, a forums poster declared that Solars were inherently boring compared to Infernals, because Gilgamesh who built the walls of Uruk is inherently less interesting than Wallmaster, a man who can build walls with his mind/control walls telekinetically. That was an odd moment for the discourse. Oh god that guy. Did you know that the main problem with Solars is that they're gold?
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Jul 16, 2019 23:11
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LatwPIAT posted:Oh god that guy. No, but I did know that a single Homestuck flash animation is more epic than the Odyssey, Mahabharata, and Epic of Gilgamesh combined. So Solars, being based on those sources, just can't compete.
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Jul 16, 2019 23:23
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I liked the mechanical components of Infernals because they felt genuinely new, weird and different as well as having a sort of general idea you can get your head around, in addition to characterizing their patron entities. They had flavor, sort of like Sidereals, except that unlike Sidereals their powers were more like "you can kick a lot of rear end and green brass spreads in your wake" vs. "under very certain situations you can kick slightly more rear end than an equivalent solar." Similarly I want to love Abyssals a lot but their mechanics tended to be "what Solars do, but like, death-y. Or it works better in the Underworld, I guess. Oh and you can't like, do anything positive with it, even in the Underworld." All the weirdos who were like "ok so step 1 of your plan needs to be figuring out how to become a Primordial" were, in fact, weirdos, but they post a lot so their opinions get heard and reacted to. This is the truth behind Scientific Posting.
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Jul 16, 2019 23:40
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Infernals were popular to talk about because they had the best mechanics in the game and it wasn't even close. They were actually designed for 2e while every other Exalt type was designed for a version of 2e that only existed in their writer's head.
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Jul 16, 2019 23:43
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There's also the fact that the late 2e era of the game got very interested in the Primordial War and characterizing the Yozis and how the Primordials became the Yozis. It was a prime area for deep lore delves, 'huge secrets' for players to theorize about, and generally the kinds of things one talks about on forums. And Infernals were the most directly connected to those ideas.
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Jul 16, 2019 23:48
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I liked the bit where the mechanical punishment for not you know, acting like the Yozis wanted you to only cared about how you acted, not what you were actually doing. So if your primary was... whoever, I forget exactly which yozi it was, you wanted to act like a stereotypical villain with like, taunting people with the details of your plan, and leaving people in elaborate deathtraps and wandering off, and stuff. But you could rant about your plan to free all the orphans the slaver you have slowly lowering into a pool of sharks was using for mining and give them good homes and there's nothing you can do to stop me, bwahahahaha and it worked because the Yozis didn't really understand how humans work.
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Jul 17, 2019 00:10
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I do hope they keep the thing where Infernal Exalted are required to be over the top and decadent but the moral valence thereof isn't predetermined. So you need to be a hellish rock star, but there's no rule that the hellish rockstar can't be a decent person.
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Jul 17, 2019 00:15
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Wasn't the Ebon Dragon's "thing" for his Infernals "marrying a rich widow"?
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Jul 17, 2019 00:29
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I love that he was so far away that Hogan had to loudly establish who it was to the people actually in attendance. I hope he taunted upcoming opponents by saying "The revolution must be coming, because you're about to be the first up against the wall!"
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Jul 17, 2019 00:29
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Tibalt posted:Wasn't the Ebon Dragon's "thing" for his Infernals "marrying a rich widow"?
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Jul 17, 2019 00:43
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The Ebon Dragon's writing in 2e was, shall we say, imperfect. But due to a mechanical trick of the 'maybe intended' kind, one of his Exalted and an E6 Solar of the Eclipse caste could work together to make the Ebon Dragon constantly make terrible mistakes and suffer ridiculously bad luck whenever he tried to do something important. So, the Ebon Dragon being a huge thematic and practical mess had mechanical support.
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Jul 17, 2019 00:49
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Couldn't ebon dragon infernals, like, embody betrayal by betraying the ebon dragon (or something?) I'll admit that everything I know about this is third hand.
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Jul 17, 2019 01:57
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wiegieman posted:Couldn't ebon dragon infernals, like, embody betrayal by betraying the ebon dragon (or something?) I'll admit that everything I know about this is third hand. Yes. It might have been a cult following, but it's the one thing people like about the line. The Curse of Infernals was insanely easily to work around and only added flavor to your character, and didn't hinder it. You could gloat menacingly about how you freed the cities slaves, while tying up the Dragon Blooded slave mistress to the railroad tracks, and call it a day.
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Jul 17, 2019 02:28
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i mean its no secret that the 'evil' version of something tends to have a much stronger cool factor than its good equivalent. its difficult to make the 'good guys' cool because they tend to be more restricted in form and function. Evil spells are normally cooler because they get to be meaner. 'Rapture of Rupture' is a cool spell because blowing up a guy a little bit at a time is way more brutal than blowing them up all at once with a fireball. Monster races are cooler than player races cause 99% of player races are just different sizes of humans. It doesn't have to be that way, but how many non-star trek alien player races have caught on? The thri-keen? i mean this argument does fail when you realise that most players who like the bad guy races pick stuff like drow and tieflings, who for the most part are barely 1% more interesting than the default player races, but still. although the pathfinder extended series of tiefling backgrounds has some very cool looking guys. so i fully understand the appeal of infernals over solars, cause solars are like golden superman whereas infernals can do a lot of wacky poo poo. If they're mechanically also better, then great. could they just leave out all the rape though?
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Jul 17, 2019 03:06
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i mean its no secret that the 'evil' version of something tends to have a much stronger cool factor than its good equivalent. its difficult to make the 'good guys' cool because they tend to be more restricted in form and function. Evil spells are normally cooler because they get to be meaner. 'Rapture of Rupture' is a cool spell because blowing up a guy a little bit at a time is way more brutal than blowing them up all at once with a fireball. Monster races are cooler than player races cause 99% of player races are just different sizes of humans. It doesn't have to be that way, but how many non-star trek alien player races have caught on? The thri-keen? I'd have to disagree about the 'evil' thing if only because the Abyssal charm set was definitely crappier than the Solar one by just about every metric and if there's one splat that was supposed to be the evil splat it was them, at least in 2nd edition. The Infernals were gifted vast cosmic power by the yozis, but the yozis in second edition were generally not so much evil as amoral beings who really loving hate you. And yes I'm aware of the the line that Jenna Moran put up front in GoD that said all things in Malfeas are built on the concepts of Pain and Lies, but that line gets ignored by just about everyone. I'd say the reason people liked Infernals was because they were new, the charms had flavor, and they were mechanically not a total poo poo show which put them head and shoulders above every other splat from a 'talking about poo poo on the internet' perspective. It's hard to have a conversation about Sidereals when the only thing you can say is how the charms don't loving work. Infernals also fed directly into a certain internet subgroup that had a fixation on rules as physics. From my personal experience no one in any of my groups gave the slightest poo poo about them and the preferred splats were Solars first, then everyone else with Infernals dead last. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 05:23
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Ithle01 posted:I'd have to disagree about the 'evil' thing if only because the Abyssal charm set was definitely crappier than the Solar one by just about every metric and if there's one splat that was supposed to be the evil splat it was them, at least in 2nd edition. The Infernals were gifted vast cosmic power by the yozis, but the yozis in second edition were generally not so much evil as amoral beings who really loving hate you. And yes I'm aware of the the line that Jenna Moran put up front in GoD that said all things in Malfeas are built on the concepts of Pain and Lies, but that line gets ignored by just about everyone. idk, i think the infernals were definitely evil. and i didnt mean the evil mechanics are always better, i meant it was a bonus. the abyssals are still a lot cooler than the solars, and came off less evil than the yozis.
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Jul 17, 2019 05:28
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juggalo baby coffin posted:idk, i think the infernals were definitely evil. and i didnt mean the evil mechanics are always better, i meant it was a bonus. the abyssals are still a lot cooler than the solars, and came off less evil than the yozis. My way of looking at it is that Abyssals had a redemption mechanic. Infernals didn't have or need one.
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Jul 17, 2019 06:00
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Another thing to keep in mind with the "how and why" Infernals took over a lot of late Exalted 2e is that they were fun to write. On top of being mechanically more sound than every other splat (which on its own contributes to being more fun to write for), it was interesting and enjoyable to unravel how to write their Charms, because it was all much more alive and interconnected than any other Charm set, both narratively and mechanically. Even most of their other, non-Charm mechanics were frankly more fun-oriented than the other splats' ancillary mechanics. Don't buy Followers and Resources and Allies, just take…Infamy? Whatever the "you have the backing of literal Hell" Background was. Vent Limit by acting like a fun weirdo! I can't fault anyone for being unwilling to set aside the first two chapters, but there really was such a stark, bright contrast between the splatterpunk child rape horeshit and the grandiose apotheosis story and game mechanics in that book, a very weird mixture of some of the worst and best of the edition. Which is not to say there weren't faults to the good parts. Michael definitely had some very specific ideas about what each Yozi was like, sort of side-lining potentially more nuanced, interesting aspects from their original descriptions in Games of Divinity. And, while the at-table audience for Essence 5+ shenanigans was and likely will forever remain incredibly small, it was nice for those of us who actually did play those types of games to have those toys. The Infernals got the most and most interesting of those toys. Maybe there were more such things for Solars by the end, after the Dreams rewrite? But that was so, so late, and it still had Mørke's own peccadilloes which tended to be more immediately recognized as one-note, in contrast to Michael Goodwin's stuff which definitely had revisited themes but were much more distinct.
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Jul 17, 2019 06:02
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Ithle01 posted:My way of looking at it is that Abyssals had a redemption mechanic. Infernals didn't have or need one. idk i think thats just cause the abyssals have more restrictions on being good than the infernals do, the yozis are morons who didn't properly think about getting their goals done so there are all sorts of loopholes like people have been talking about. the yozis are definitely more sadistic than the neverborn.
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Jul 17, 2019 06:34
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What we know about 3e Infernals, just about total: 1. Lillun is gone forever from the setting. No more rape stuff. 2. The Yozis can't escape, period, They know this. Infernals are a revenge plot, not an escape plot. 3. They're gonna be weird but will use Abilities, not just Essence.
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Jul 17, 2019 12:55
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We also know that the primary inspirations are We Know the Devil and Count of Monte Cristo.
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Jul 17, 2019 13:28
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