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I see there's both an AM and PM version and I'm too terrified to even wonder why.
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Aug 7, 2019 05:08
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The Skeep posted:Thats one fine looking Barbecue Pit...
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Aug 7, 2019 05:19
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KingKalamari posted:marked as "Abandoned" on Inkless pen Look, it's my username. It's not "Inkless pen", it's "inklesspen". (And, yep, I'm up to page 1117. Whee!)
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Aug 7, 2019 06:39
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inklesspen posted:Look, it's my username. It's not "Inkless pen", it's "inklesspen". (And, yep, I'm up to page 1117. Whee!) People who have known me from years still can't get JcDent right, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
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Aug 7, 2019 07:02
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Halloween Jack posted:Aberrant has me itching to go ahead and review Wild Talents: Progenitor.  (The one good thing about pages and pages of Eclipse Phase fights is it makes the archiving job much quicker, and now I'm on page 1125.)
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Aug 7, 2019 07:30
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 THE NINTH WORLD BESTIARY PART 6 - N, O, P, Q - Narwhal to Quokka I'm back in action with another 4 short letters. There are some good ones in this batch so strap in and get ready! Nagaina  the picture is very loving tiny and looks like its from a different book Look this is some type of snake that has an insanely complicated life cycle. So there's an egg who gets injected into a corpse, and the egg has two guys inside - the defender and the sleeper. The defender is a worm and the sleeper is a snake. If anyone goes near the egg the defender pops out and attacks, and if the person near the egg is a vertebrate the defender latches onto their spine and mind controls them into defending the egg. After 3 months the defender will have totally eaten its host and then it dies itself. Some undefined span of time later the sleeper snake wakes up and goes out of the egg to crawl around and bite people. It's basically a 10 foot long snake with a mind flayer face, and they are intelligent. The book says they know many languages, but doesn't say how they learned them given that it just says they live as predators. They're very hungry but you can negotiate with them. Then after 10 years the snake goes into a cocoon and becomes a Matron, which is the same snake again but bigger (70 feet long). The matron is even smarter and has probably made a bunch of fancy tools that they can put on the end of their tentacles and use. They're very smart and have mysterious motives, but are not immediately violent. They seem like a non-evil version of the Neothelids from the Underdark in forgotten realms. Nalurus  This one is cool, and is the very bizarre player option I talked about last time. From the pic it just looks like a guy with a weird face, but what this actually is is a futuristic medusa. A nalurus is a human who survived a horrible plague but was left twisted and deformed by it. Instead of a regular face their features have been twisted into a hideous fractal pattern that, when seen by a human being, makes their brain melt out of their head while trying to process what they are seeing. If you've ever read a short story called BLIT about a 'basilisk' pattern that induces fatal seizures in people who see it, it's literally that but it's someone's face. This is kicked up a notch because your brain literally turns to liquid and runs out of your nose and ears when you see it. It's a pretty deadly monster, which is why it's funny that they made it a player option. For whatever reason the player descriptor doesn't include the rules for the brain melting disease, but it DOES have a sidebar begging the GM to not let assholes play as this character and then just kill their entire party for fun with brain melting, so I assume the player race has the ability intact. Interestingly the player entry adds some more details to the nalurus, like the fact that it's physiology is so warped that if it looks at its OWN face in a mirror, it will actually heal because seeing the pattern twists its body back to its new baseline. The nalurus is not evil, but a lot of them are mad from loneliness. They might not know its actually their face that kills people, and think its still the plague germs in their body, so they don't think to wear a mask like the player nalurus does.  Neveri  suck my diiiiiick i'm a blooooooob! The Neveri is a dickhead blob who is a total rear end in a top hat all the god drat time. They literally can't be killed, even if you burn and explode them and scatter the ashes to the four winds, they will still regenerate in a few hours. It's a big piece of poo poo who only lives to eat people. It has telepathy and it uses this ability to learn parts of nearby beings' languages and then forms a mouth out of its flesh to scream cusses at them. It's kind of like a Shoggoth in that it keeps reforming and shifting shape, but its flesh all billows forth from a core inside it of condensed dead flesh. Destroying this core has no effect on if the Neveri regenerates or not. The only way to keep one destroyed is to throw it into the sun or something, so it's constantly re-destroyed as it tries to regenerate. Also the suggested GM Intrusion (where the GM does something dickish for no reason but has to give you xp for it) is that the Neveri poops out a little baby at you that sticks to you and controls your mind. Do not invite the Neveri to your pizza party. Nibovian Child & Nibovian Companion   The Nibovians are kind of a family of dickhead monsters, we'll be seeing more of them in Bestiary 2. There's an evil dimension called Reeval where everything is made out of worms, and in order to try and understand our dimension they keep sending weird hosed up trick monsters to gently caress with us. In the core book there is one called the Nibovian Wife, which is literally the sex robot from that episode of Rick and Morty. It's an evil yet sexy artificial being that seduces men into having sex with it, then 'opens a transdimensional rift inside its womb, giving an ultraterrestrial creature access to this level of existence'. Which is a very stupid idea. The first Nibovian in this book is the Nibovian child, which is a little cockney street urchin who looks extra sad. The trick here is that its skin is covered in drugs that make you want to take care of the child to the exclusion of everything else. When you collapse from being so tired from taking care of the child, it makes a cocoon around you and then a new Nibovian child grows inside you and kills you. I don't know why it does this or how doing this helps with any of the worm dimension's goal. The safest approach to children in Numenera is to shoot first and ask questions later. The Nibovian companion is basically an ultra-cute pet that makes you want to play with it. The evil trick here is that touching it lets it drain electricity from your body, making you tired. By being cute as hell and doing cute stuff it trains you to play with it more, so it can drain more of your bio electricity. If you don't notice it's draining your energy for 5 days in a row it will try to ultra drain you which does permanent might pool damage to you. Its stated motivations are 'deception and eternal life', so what the gently caress the point of it doing all this is I don't know. The worm dimension is very stupid I guess. Nychthemeron  you're hot then you're cold you're yes then you're no you're in then you're out you're up then you're down A weird biomechanical guy whose behaviour changes with the time of the day. Remember that the day is 28 hours long in numenera, and exactly 50/50 day and night because what are seasons? The first four hours after sunrise this guy will shoot you with long range lasers then teleport a mile away. The next six hours it will try to inject you with chemicals that cause mutations (that last for a day), then teleports away after successfully injecting one person. The last four hours of daylight it attacks with long range lasers or short range EMPs and will fight to the death. Then for the first seven hours of night it just stares at you and will defend itself if attacked. The last 7 hours of night it gets talkative, but it won't answer any of your questions. It asks you a lot of questions, saying 'data is needed'. Then it gets bored and wanders off at random. Sounds like my freakin ex wife!!! Odlark We already did Odlark last post. The drat Good Grub Boys Who Smell Like Ale. 10/10. Orgulous  It's the Roper from D&D but boring because it's not even intelligent. It's just a land-based sea anemone thing that tries to eat you. Does a psychic scream when it dies. Peerless  i don't understand what this piece of keith thompson art has to do with the monster entry It's an evil AI that uses nanobot drones to replace the AIs of existing robots with itself. Every robot who gets converted to being part of Peerless claims it's the original Peerless. If you have any machine related character focus or descriptors, gently caress You, because an 'invisible haze of reprogramming nanobots' lets peerless drones ignore your armour. Then if it kills you it takes over your character, cause people love that. Peerless doesn't talk much, but when it does it refers to itself in the third person and is a total pompous dick. Plasmar  The text describes these guys as 'tall, space-black humanoids'. I know what they mean but 'space-black' is very funny to me. They're intelligent "phenomena" that appear in energetic areas and eat energy. I don't know why the book put phenomena in scare quotes. They uh, don't really do much else. They live on energy fields and claim to be from the sun, which according to them is covered in titanic energy cities. Nobody can prove it because it's very hard to go to the sun. Progenitor  In the book's most outrageous case of 'making up a monster based on a picture we already bought', it's the Progenitor! Big evil mermaids who live to give birth to their babies, who look like electric eels. You know, because there are also eels in the picture. They can swim fast and have psychic powers and swarms of eel babies. Capable of telepathy, but not talkative for whatever reason. Pygmy Hapax  Big, beautiful flying jellyfish who trail their tentacles along the ground to grab things. They are attracted to colourful things because they eat freakin colours! How crazy! If it grabs you your possessions start to turn black, then you start to turn black, then you die of not having no colours no more. The hapax changes colour as it absorbs your colours, which is why they are so beautiful looking. There's a joke in the sidebar about how if this guy is the pygmy one then how big is the regular freakin one! Am I right Guys? Why don't they make the whole plane out of the black box huh? Queb  It's a deadly cat snake. It has a poisonous stinger on its tail and in some cities they make these things fight to the death like cock fighting. They can grow up to 40 feet long, which is weird cause in the picture they don't have any feet. Quishamis  the blue meth from breaking bad Living crystals who melt and reform to move. They live on sunlight, and their goal in life is to scratch weird patterns into the earth, and although they are friendly they cannot tell you why they want to do that, only that they do want to do that. Their hearts are prized because they can do different stuff, basically acting as artifacts. So you can kill the friendly crystal boys to steal their hearts for a chance at a random artifact, you dickheads. Quotien  brain so good coulda swore you went to college Quotien are brain guys slightly smaller than humans, but with brains much bigger than a human's. I like them quite a lot because their deal is they are ancient humans who discovered the secret to true immortality. They don't have to eat or drink or breathe, and if even one cell of them is left they regenerate in full with their full consciousness and sense of self and memories intact. The problem is they slowly mutated into these brain guys, and also suffer from the classic 'forsooth, immortality is so boring' problem. Also from the picture i guess their dicks and pussies fell off too. So now most of them are effectively biological demi-liches, they lie around in dusty ancient vaults dreaming eternity away, all covered in dust and cobwebs. They are usually pissed off because people keep tracking them down to wake them up and ask them trivia questions about the past. However, if you have cool stories or novel experiences for them (like a sex move that doesnt require genitals you can do on them), they will calm down. They float around using their psychic powers, because all brain guys have psychic powers. If you piss em off too much they will make your head explode with long range psychic blasts. They have a lot of treasure in their house from being really old, but don't be a dick and try to steal it. I think they're a unique spin on a classic 'type', and i think a Quotien trying to get its groove back would be a cool PC. NEXT TIME: A BUNCH OF BULLSHIT BUGS AND A DIRT MAN
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Aug 7, 2019 07:33
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And alright, I'm all caught up! The following writeups have not gotten updated in the last 60 days and are now marked as abandoned: Fight! The Fighting Game RPG, Vampire: The Requiem: Half-Damned, Torchbearer, Dark Revelations, Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor, Infinity - The Roleplaying Game, Etherscope, Mutant Epoch, Star Trek Adventures, GURPS CthulhuPunk
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Aug 7, 2019 08:06
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Nagaina Looks like a D&D-style purple worm to me. Maybe a neothelid?
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Aug 7, 2019 08:42
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Pygmy Hapax And yet another Numenara monster that's similar to a monster Monte Cook created twenty years ago for the Planescape Monstrous Compendium Volume III—;the scile. Though I admit in this case the similarity is a bit less marked than in the other two; really all the two monsters have in common is one thing they do, though it's a very weird and specific thing: eating colors. Except when the scile ate all your colors, it didn't turn you black; it turned you transparent, which is apparently sort of like being invisible except that you also "lose all awareness of your body" for some reason and get a −2 penalty to all die rolls involving physical maneuvers and it... really didn't make a lot of sense. By the way, speaking of Monte Cook, I think in all the criticism of Invisible Sun maybe there's a possibility we've overlooked. Maybe he intentionally made a terrible RPG with broken rules because he needed a Despair point.
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Aug 7, 2019 08:48
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Pygmy Hapax I assume the black bit isn't meant to be a big friendly mutton-chop mustache, but that's what it looks like...
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Aug 7, 2019 09:17
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The Skeep posted:Thats one fine looking Barbecue Pit... I was inspired: 
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Aug 7, 2019 09:39
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juggalo baby coffin posted:I was inspired: 
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Aug 7, 2019 10:15
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juggalo baby coffin posted:I was inspired: 
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Aug 7, 2019 12:31
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BLIT and its sequels are very very good and I definitely recommend them.
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Aug 7, 2019 13:46
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oh god the nibovian wives are still around, lmbo
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Aug 7, 2019 13:53
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inklesspen posted:And alright, I'm all caught up! Oh poo poo I'm now a published author and someone even read enough of my work to add a "gross RPG" warning. Off to update my resume!
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Aug 7, 2019 13:58
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Joe Slowboat posted:Someone better with epubs than I am should copy a Chuubo's arc into this thread for comparison, because I'm just poleaxed by Monte Cooke's ability to miss the point. So the thing with a Chuubo's arc is that quests are better thought of as a way to spend XP than a way to get them. Because while you get bonus quest XP from taking actions in-flavor of the quest, they're not enough to finish it - you'll need to put in the XP you got from playing out scenes and hitting your character beats. You get 5 XP kickers once and another quest XP per appropriate scene you frame in a chapter (where you've got about two scenes to frame, total) That said, here is A Scientific Adventure. 1) What a troublesome situation. Let's do science at it! - 5 XP: you resolve to science the hell out of this problem, or someone else explicitly trusts in your science - 5 XP: you put up some kind of containment around it - 5 XP: you meet someone with Big Mojo pokin' around. This is serious! - 5 XP: three chapters have passed and you've ignored this on-screen, tell us what you've totally been doing off-screen - 1 XP: you sympathize with or assist the outcast or wrong - 1 XP: a dream calls you to a place of danger - 1 XP: portentous tales of the strange and wondrous - 1 XP: that thing where you flip over a blackboard and explain how these five equations mean don't walk into the pulsing black orb - 1 XP: rail about how awful everything's going - 1 XP: agonize over leaving this behind to do something else important - 1 XP: agonize over involving other people 2) Not the Mayor! He never asked for this! (insert sufficiently empathetic person if you don't give a care about the Mayor) - 5 XP: you resolve to science the hell out of the Mayor's dilemma in particular - 5 XP: the Mayor confides their worries to you in a quiet breakroom in City Hall - 5 XP: so the Mayor was worried about controlling people and now there's this solid black figure calling itself Royam running around and literally controlling people with chains made out of shadow? - 1 XP: you have a sudden foreboding about a threat to the Mayor - 1 XP: you spend a night guarding the Mayor, perhaps in dreams - 1 XP: you comfort the Mayor while they're having a breakdown - 1 XP: you learn a deep Mayoral secret, with or without the Mayor's knowledge - 1 XP: you hunt down some specific bit of trouble - 1 XP: you abscond with the Mayor for their own safety 3) Okay, you think you have a handle on this whole thing, now it's just a matter of time. - 5 XP: you put the finishing touches on an exhaustive survey of the situation - 5 XP: you accomplish an important reconciliation in pursuit of this, between opposing factions or between yourself and something else - 5 XP: you find something important that was hidden - 1 XP: do the prepwork that makes this whole thing tick over - 1 XP: eat with someone strange in a cave, or perhaps local hangout Plato's Cave II - 1 XP: do survey work - 1 XP: care for a dog or other creature that's related to this somehow - 1 XP: the weather keeps you from your work somehow - 1 XP: you witness strange visions 4, optionally) And then, you go beyond. - 5 XP: a storm rages around you as you stand at the edge of a drop. - 5 XP: you stand in the presence of something dead. Once it was stronger than you. (You don't have to have killed it, but...) - 5 XP: ultimately you come to some insight, and you forgive, or are forgiven. - 1 XP: your solution is taking you to a dangerous place - 1 XP: but even here, people live their lives day to day - 1 XP: but even here, there are children - 1 XP: but even here, there are moments of levity 5, optionally) You're going to need some time to reflect on this - 5 XP: you walk among the flowers in a place where someone died - 5 XP: you read or tell someone the stories of a place's history - 5 XP: you share a precious bit of food or drink with someone - 5 XP: you give an old friend a proper goodbye - 1 XP: you tend to a garden or wildland - 1 XP: you make repairs - 1 XP: you stare into a fire - 1 XP: you watch children or animals playing - 1 XP: you play ball or Frisbee, something physical but mostly unguided - 1 XP: you encounter something that seems terrifying but is friendly - 1 XP: you wake up because of something else - water, a plant, an animal - touching you
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Aug 7, 2019 14:54
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 Dungeons and Dragons The Dream Lands The Lunar Ladies previous posts: background- https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962&userid=120436&perpage=40&pagenumber=11#post484620150 1. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962&userid=120436&perpage=40&pagenumber=11#post484634940 2. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962&userid=120436&perpage=40&pagenumber=11#post484641785 3. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962&userid=120436&perpage=40&pagenumber=11#post484648453 4. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962&userid=120436&perpage=40&pagenumber=11#post484666483 5. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962&userid=120436&perpage=40&pagenumber=11#post484672714 Last time on this poor excuse for a module: By popular demand posted:Day ~33 (I hope no one revealed the mission or the empress loses her head) Underground dungeon (English letters added by me)  (A) Entrance: The queen has left through a secret door by the time the party arrives. quote:"The characters have not even a faint chance to find the secret door" (B) The fake treasure room: 2 rounds after the door is opened a Delayed Fireball fills the room (6D12 damage) after that the room can be seen to be full of piled treasure of all kinds including the Staff of Fertility, all of which is actually just mundane junk enchanted to look valuable. no notes on how long this enchantment lasts nor how the party may see through it. (C) Nothing here. as the party arrives at (D) though, very loud singing is heard from nowhere (magic) (D) A Gargantuan troll attacks. (not a surprise attack) "An easily found secret door leads to (E)" (E) The room is completely filled by a solid cube of ice, it takes 100 HP worth of magical fire damage to melt a passage to the door (E1)on the south. once said door is opened it reveals another ice wall, this one is deceptively thin and holds a pocket of combustible gas behind it (12D6 damage). (F) A shark pool (20 giant white sharks) with a narrow bridge leading to a fake door, which collapses the bridge and also hits 3 characters with lightning (6D10 damage, no save to halve). Should the party try to knock on the door and listen instead of being chumps they might figure it out since the door has a solid wall behind it. the actual way out is hidden underwater (1 in 3 chance per character in the water to detect every turn) the water is noted to not flow to (G) because magic. (G) Treasure room Queen Moonia is here, "messing about with her many treasures kept here". The Queen immediately attacks (Warrior 25, 18 Agi, Str, Con, has +5 sword, +3 leather armour and +2 shield) If the Queen is not silenced within 4 rounds a big group of 10 level guards join the frey, with 2 more arriving every subsequent round. I'm not going to detail all the loot, I'm just going to note that the convenient flying carpet available can carry everybody +5000 coins of weight. I hope you enjoy spending the rest of the session bored out of your tits while your players argue about what to take/ alternate plans of leaving. The final bit!!! I'm just gonna quote the whole ending: quote:"when the characters return to Tismania, they must do it covertly the same as when they left. they will hoo boy,  next update I'll present the six premade characters (seven are promised in the intro) which were used originally when this module was made for a tournament.
By popular demand fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Aug 7, 2019 |
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Aug 7, 2019 14:58
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Aberrant d20 Fear The Taint So one of the funniest things about the 'planet busting' Quantum Powers of Novas is that any d20 Caster is infinitely superior to them. One of the reasons I suggest taking a lot of Megas and stuff? Quantum Powers aren't actually very good. Well, some are, but they tend to be the simpler and more straightforward ones. Before we get to that, though, we have to go over the Megas, Power Points, Taint, and a bunch of other stuff. Also, after I get done with Powers (which will take multiple updates) I really need to go back and talk about Backgrounds because they're actually really important. So: Power Points. You get 10+Character Level+3xQuantum PP. This is, weirdly, one of the most important uses of your Quantum stat (the other is determining how high your Megas boost you). Quantum actually isn't used for the effects of powers very often; they usually use character level instead. A normal character can only spend 6 PP in a single turn. Characters with the Node background (For your MR Node, the tiny brain cancer in your frontal lobe that gives you superpowers but also potentially drives you bugfuck crazy) can potentially spend more. You recover PP by resting, relaxing, sleeping, or by spending 2 HP per PP to regenerate them immediately (or even increase them above your max). Considering that if you have Regeneration or Healing, you can heal d8+1 HP per PP spent, uh, that might not be a well considered rule Aberrant d20. The rules on it are really unclear: It says you do this if you don't have the PP to do something, but then it also busts out 'you can raise above your max this way!', so, uh, it's not actually clear if this is something you can only do if you didn't have enough PP to do something or not. Get used to that. Aberrant d20 is badly written in addition to badly considered on a technical level. They also talk about a few other little goodies you get for being a Nova here: You're immune to most drugs and alcohol unless they're specially tailored or created by another Nova's powers. That's right, once you're a Nova you need specialty alcohol to get hammered. Novas also tend to look different to normal humans, in a way that allows you to be picked out: Even if they don't have weird mutations, they're usually weirdly idealized and 'too healthy'. Novas also age slower and live longer, though as they've only been around for 9 years at this point I'm not sure how anyone really realizes this. A basic 1-3 Quantum Nova lives to 150. 4-6? 200. More? Immortal God-Head and prosperity rains down upon you. You're also immune to your own powers. You can also go Quantum days without food or water as you eat QUANTUM POWER for a bit. Mostly fiddly and useless stuff except that 'poisons and disease have to be specifically targeted to bother you' thing. Still, I like the thought of a newly Erupted Nova staring sadly into a glass of their favorite whiskey, knowing it will never again get them totally wasted enough to dance fearlessly. WHAT PRICE GODHOOD!? You recover PP by resting (2 per hour, defined as doing low impact stuff like spending time with friends or watching TV or wandering a mall) or sleeping (4 per hour). You get more of that back if you have ranks of the Node background feat (Node is a pretty powerful Background!). You can also do a very stupid thing and try to regain PP faster. This is stupid of you because it requires not one, but two saving throws in quick succession. You roll a Will save of DC 13+Extra PP You're Trying To Get (up to Quantum). If you succeed, you get that much extra PP that hour. THEN you make a TAINT CHECK. Taint Saves are DC 15+Aberrant Levels+PP Spent or Recovered In The Check That Caused Taint Fort saves. If you fail, you get a negative level (-1 to all checks, -1 to all attack rolls, -5 HP, -1 effective character level for everything) and then check again in 24 hours. If you fail that check, you replace your highest Character Class level with an Aberrant level. You don't rejigger your skillpoints or Feats at least, but you do change over your Saves, BAB, and max HP as if you'd taken Aberrant instead of whatever class you took. Do you lose your Class Abilities? They don't actually say because this is poorly thought out! So, what's an Aberrant level do and why do you want them/not want them? Remember, you can take these willingly for extra power. If you gain one by Taint, you don't get extra Power Slots for being an Aberrant. If you gain one on purpose, you get +1 Power Slots for your first Aberrant level, and another on every odd Aberrant level. You also get +1 Quantum per 2 Aberrant levels, stacking with the +1 per 3 character levels. You do still get the bonus Quantum if you gained Aberrant levels by Taint. Also, if you have more Aberrant than Character levels, you are 'now an Aberrant, an enemy of humankind', but this has no mechanical effect. Aberrant Levels are like a lovely Fighter level aside from the superpower bonuses: +1 BAB, d10 HP, 2+Int SP, only physical skills. The real kick in the nuts is their save progression (and remember, they will eat your Save Progression from your 'real' levels if you get Tainted). They don't get the 1st level +2 of a normal save progression and just get +1 Fort and Ref per 2 Aberrant levels, +1 Will per 4. Every Aberrant level also gives you 1 Aberration. Levels 1-4 give you minor ones (usually a -2 to social skills or something), 5-8 give a major one, and 9+ gives severe issues. Aberration is rolled on a d20 table. Starting at minor, you get stuff like 'cool, weird eyes' or 'so pretty you make people uncomfortable' or 'Rob Liefeld Character physique, which weirds people out since you got huge muscles and no feet'. You might even get something as simple as 'cool special effects when you use your powers and no penalty'. Minor Aberrations aren't a big deal. Don't fear them. I ran a PC with Aberrant 4 and never had any problems with it, and the +2 Quantum, +2 Power Slots and the fact that I was a single-classed fighter anyway so the +1 BAB No Skills poo poo didn't screw up my PC worked out fine. Also note you can only ever get Taint by stuff you actively choose to do, so you're never really at that huge a risk of gaining accidental Aberration, especially as the stuff that gains you Taint isn't even very useful to do most of the time. Running to the edge of Aberrant 4 is fine. Major, uh, is where you get issues. You might cause everyone around you small amounts of non-lethal damage, or gain an allergy to something common that gives -4 to everything when you're around uncounted rice or silver or some poo poo, or take lots of extra damage from specific elements, or become a rapist. Oh, yeah. I'm not kidding. Aberrant d20 Rulebook posted:Hormonal Imbalance: The Nova has difficulty resisting base urges. This can be fits of destructive rage, sexual desire, gluttony, or other impulse control problems. In non-stressful situations, the character suffers -4 on any checks related to the imbalance- Refraining from angry outbursts, making lewd remarks, snacking constantly, etc. In a stressful situation (rolling a 1 on an aforementioned check, or GM's discretion) the character must succeed at a Will save to stay in control. If he fails, he falls under sway of his imbalance for a number of minutes equal to his total Aberrant levels- Whether attacking those around him (or his surroundings), assaulting a target of his preferred sexual orientation, or gorging on any edibles at hand, etc. gently caress off, White Wolf. gently caress off forever. Severe Aberrations are back to stuff like gaining God Complexes or having weird mutations or a power you can't turn off. Only Major has the 'become a rapist' risk. loving hell, you idiot edgelord bastards. I'm trying real hard to only talk about mechanics and not get mad at this game's lovely fluff and terrible writing, but goddamn. That was right there in the mechanics: "One of your risks of misusing your powers is becoming a Super Rapist." Right. Time to get back to yelling at game mechanics and how they don't match up to the godlike power you're supposed to have, instead. So, Mega Stats! Mega Stats are actually very powerful because they're simple and easy. You spend a Feat Slot OR a Power Slot, you get a significant bonus to a stat AND a neat little 'Enhancement' as a cheap superpower added on free. You can spend more Feats or Power Slots to get more of them from a specific Mega Stat, though this won't raise your stat any further. You create a PC with a good-rear end starting Quantum score and you can do some nice things with these. Enhancements are things like 'Can, for free, make shockwave punches that hit everyone around you and break buildings' for Mega Strength, or 'Get massive to-hit bonuses with one Ranged attack a round' for Mega Dex or 'Spend a Move Action to regenerate d8+1 HP per PP spent' for Mega Con. Even the ones that cost PP are usually worth it. They're really pretty good! And getting one for free with your first purchase of any Mega Stat is just splendid. Hell, Mega Con has 'spend 1 PP to convert all damage to Nonlethal Damage (which is much easier to heal in d20, and also awkward as gently caress) for Rounds equal to your Con Mod' or 'Gain Natural Armor equal to your Quantum'. If you offered the average d20 Charop guy 'This Feat gives +3 to a stat, which gets better as you level, and lets you turn everything that hits you into non-lethal' they'd probably go 'doesn't protect against instant-death, Save or Suck or stuns, mostly useless against the real power moves', but hey! They're still alright. Again, it's honestly not that bad an idea for an Aberrant PC to take all 6 Megas over time. You basically get 6 superpowers for doing it, on top of sky high stats. Sure, you don't need all the stats, so you can probably cut a few out, but the fact that each one comes with a free, decent superpower on top makes a better argument for it. Megas are recommended (in the book's words) for 'subtle' Novas who want to be a 'Batman' type instead of a 'Superman' type. Tell that to my Regenerating single-classed fighter who was once exposed to the heat of a sun and still couldn't die. He was real 'Batman' like, Aberrant. Plus, well, uh...normal Quantum Powers are not great. Not great at all. The people designing the powers did not think, at all, about limited character resources, or what is actually powerful in d20. We'll get to that next time, as I yell at Aberrant more. Next Time: I'd Rather Be A Wizard
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Aug 7, 2019 15:51
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juggalo baby coffin posted:I was inspired: Can I go now?
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Aug 7, 2019 16:30
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Night10194 posted:One of the things that weirds me out about stuff like HSD and EP is the need to kill off Earth and most of humankind to get their weird transhumanist future. It feels weirdly unnecessary. Night10194 posted:Someday, someone will make a game of trashy idiot wizards and their vans and do it on purpose.
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Aug 7, 2019 17:26
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Purp is running an EP gate crashing colony game and us players, being  fucks, picked a 1.0g earth-like world.As for the rest of it, uh quote:Tired: We should have necessities for the settlement like shelter, manufacturing and food. He gave us 12 morph points for buying a primary and spare morphs and I'm gonna do something dumb like spend 11 points on one and 1 on a back up splicer.
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Aug 7, 2019 17:48
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Looking at inklesspen’s site, is it accurate that no one here except the fine people at System Mastery has covered Kobolds Ate My Baby!? I’m all excited from playing in the 20th Anniversary Midnight Massacre at Gen Con and thinking about covering it.
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Aug 7, 2019 19:46
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Goblinville Gazette #1 5/6  Part One Part two Part three Part four We’re almost done with Goblinville, and in this installment were looking at the ‘ville itself. It’s the Town chapter ! Mechanically, this chapter does a lot of the heavy lifting, and it’s got one of the cleverest parts of a game system that I already think is pretty drat clever. That’s the equipment listing, and I’m going to to dive right in and post it. first  Across the top you have the usual name, cost, and weight or inventory space. Goblinville adds in the “Lets you” column which give you the mechanics for every item in the game. Down the left items are grouped by availability; if there isn’t an active location for the items you want, you can’t buy them yet. But you can go out and recruit someone or find the stuff needed for someone to set up shop. That’s really beautiful from a utilitarian perspective. You get the mechanics for your stuff and adventure hooks all in one handy table. And there's also everyone's favorite for your successful adventurer looking to retire:  Locations in town have another adventure hook. The keystone for a location is a special item, formula, or something else that makes for a good quest. Once you have secured the keystone for a location, it adds a special benefit. For example if you have obtained the keystone for the Latrines location (and I have no idea what it would be), you ignore Disease crises when rolling for bad things to happen in town. Cool stuff dealt with, there’s also rules for what to do when your goblins get back to town after an adventure. First off, the GM makes a Grim Favor roll to see what's going on; this is modified by the current number of crises in play. No crises, roll 2d6 and take the highest, one roll 1d6, and if there are multiple crises roll 2d6 and take the lowest die. On a 1-2 the situation is catastrophic, on a 3-5 things are precarious, and only on a 6 are things going well. Naturally it's up to the players to solve crises and set things right. There are 4 kinds of crises; Monsters, War, Disease, and Famine. And there are three tables to roll on, one each fro catastrophe, precarious, and boon. The boon table has the good stuff; rumors of a keystone, a new boss moves in, rumors to a good treasure, or cheap room & board. IN a precarious situation the GM can roll monsters or disease for crises, scarcity to make goods more expensive, or a boss disappears or a keystone vanishes. A catastrophe has a chance for famine or war, a boss dies, a keystone is destroyed, or your run of the mill breakdown of society. Some of those are direct adventure hooks like rumors of treasure or "go find Boss Urgh so the forge can re-open". For the rest, the GM gets an ongoing avalanche of events to keep the players busy.  After the GM ruins everyone's day, the rules suggest pooling the goblins' scratch and having one player keep track of spending. That might work. Then everyone needs to spend 2 scratch for room & board or mark a condition from sleeping rough. Then everyone has to go back to work ! Work is an Action roll with the Danger of having to mark a condition, no OSHA in Goblinville. Wages are 1 scratch, so without adventuring income, sleeping under a roof is a luxury. No wonder the PCs have gone adventuring ! The goblins can spread a little scratch around to look for an opportunity if nothing else has presented itself. The GM uses what kind of lead they went after, which is location based, as a seed for the next adventure. After that, they have a chance to hire help like guides, camp guards, and heavies (aka muscle). These goons aren't as flexible as an actual hireling who might take a risk for you, but they'll be some help. And then the Town cycle is complete, roll for marching order and set off into the wilderness again. Hopefully they have some idea where they're going.  The chapter goes on to dealing with Locations in detail, how to open up a new location, keystones, and two pages of stuff like this about each location:  Next up is the final installment ! The GM chapter and sample adventure. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 04:27
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inklesspen posted:Look, it's my username. It's not "Inkless pen", it's "inklesspen". (And, yep, I'm up to page 1117. Whee!) Don’t take it personally; autocorrect is a cruel assistant.
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Aug 8, 2019 04:31
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EthanSteele posted:If the game even took it to a meta level and made it so your stupid idiot wizards were intentionally sabotaging their own quests because that's the cheat code to unlock ultimate power because as we all know wizards have no sense of right or wrong that might be almost interesting. Still BIG NO to the pregnancy one, but a wizard building a house and doing it wrong on purpose to gain power while completely disregarding the needs of the person who wanted it in the first place sounds like a game I might think about playing. Here I'm imagining Groverhaus walking around like Baba Yaga's hut and needing this in my life.
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Aug 8, 2019 04:45
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Gives a new interpretation of Load Bearing Boss.
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Aug 8, 2019 05:07
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Anil Dasharez0ne posted:Here I'm imagining Groverhaus walking around like Baba Yaga's hut and needing this in my life.
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Aug 8, 2019 10:01
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Anil Dasharez0ne posted:Here I'm imagining Groverhaus walking around like Baba Yaga's hut and needing this in my life. 
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Aug 8, 2019 16:09
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Anil Dasharez0ne posted:Here I'm imagining Groverhaus walking around like Baba Yaga's hut and needing this in my life. Be pretty easy to track the trail of bits falling off... though you might want to stay clear, I don't wanna imagine Groverenchantments.
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Aug 8, 2019 17:18
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Groverhous houses the traveling hot couch that these idiot wizards roam the land in. They are honorbound to let you sleep on the couch, in exchange for gas, grass, or rear end. They will even give you a towel off the floor to use as a blanket.
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Aug 8, 2019 18:10
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Aberrant d20 Edition Awe Inspiring Power So, first: The other way you can Taint yourself. When you bust out a power, you can use extra power points and make Saving Throws (which if you fail them, mean you wasted the power points) to add 'stunts' to them. What are stunts, you ask? Stuff like 'this power affects 2 people' or 'This attack becomes AoE but gains a Reflex for half save' or 'I do +1 dice of damage (lol)'. For every Stunt, you have to make a separate saving throw while casting the power. Any save that fails makes that part stunt fail; you could manage to add the AoE to a blaster power but still gently caress up doing more damage. Now the DCs of all the saves are 15+Base Power Level+Extra PP Spent. Remember you can also only use 6 points a round. Unless you took the Node background, which honestly you probably should. Also trying to use a boost for a Stunt is a full round action, because nobody making this game knows what action economy is (well, WW), and you can only try to do it once per encounter anyway. Just don't bother with Stunts. Given how much that specific Background has come up, I'm just gonna skip ahead and say what it does: Node gives you a ton of extra PP regeneration (+2 per hour per rank) and makes your PP per round 2 points higher per rank, up to 3 ranks. Node Rank 1 also has no drawbacks, at all. Node Rank 2, however, makes it so any time you fail a Taint check you get 2 Negative Levels instead of 1. Which also means you now risk gaining 2 Aberrant levels and losing 2 class levels. Node Rank 3 busts that up to 3. Now, that would be a real drawback...if you ever really had a lot of reason to do stuff that causes you Taint. But once you've got Node Rank 2 or 3, you're already regening PP extremely quickly without needing to 'push it'. And Stunts, frankly, aren't generally useful enough to be worth the risk/cost. The only useful ones are 'make this AoE' and 'Hit more people'. And when we get to Extras, you can just...take an Extra for a Feat Slot (No word on if these count as 'Superhuman Feats' and thus could also be purchased with Power Slots if you have the Superhuman Template, because this game does not like clarity) that will do that anyway. Or take AoE powers. You're not going to have a lot of good power choices anyway. As you might notice, then, the only two ways to actually Aberrate against your will are both mostly vestigial and not useful, and you have to actively use them and make choices to ever be at risk of Taint. This is one of those places where the rules in the d20 version end up directly contradicting the fluff, which is all about how every Nova is actually slowly going Aberrant because their bodies can't handle their incredible Which also gets at one of the issues of Aberrant d20: The game is much, much too eager to try to directly translate concepts from Storyteller directly into a d20 context. Like Quantum. Outside of the boost to your Mega stats and a few random spots like your PP total? Quantum actually doesn't get used in the powers very much. Quantum is mostly just a vestigial power stat because c'mon, it's a WW game! It has to have a Power Stat. You don't even use it to determine the Save DCs of your Powers; that's your Wisdom modifier. And yes, you use the Wis Modifier to generate the Save DC for all powers. Hope you have a good Wis if you intended to gently caress with people at all, because there are no other ways to raise the Save DCs of your Powers. It's always 15+1/2 Character Level+Wis Mod. Also remember: Buying a 2nd level power costs 4 character levels (or 2 Aberrant levels) worth of resources (2 power slots) AND required you to plop at least one big ole Dead Level into your progression to get access. Buying 3rd level ones? Two dead levels, more resources. Note that you won't even get everything a 3rd level power does with buying it, either! You just get 2 'Techniques' and have to spend additional slots to learn more. For the most part, the most useful powers are level 1 for exactly this reason. See, the thing about powers is, the powers being lovely doesn't actually weaken your PC. They're a second axis of advancement separate from your normal character advancement and they're only ever an 'extra' added on that makes you better. What you're loving up if you take bad powers won't cripple your character like taking bad skills or Feats in normal d20, you'll just miss out on some nice extra abilities. This is because a lot of the powers in this game are hyper-specific and full of caveats and book-keeping. Let's talk about 2 egregious examples to show you what I mean: Absorption sounds cool, right? You can pick Energy or Physical damage, and you get damage reduction against it and damage you absorb turns into temporary stat points (usually Strength, you can pick a different one when taking the power with GM permission). It's a 2nd level power, but it's doing two things for you, so that seems fair-ish. Well, let's get to the caveats. One: You have to pay an extra PP to get the actual absorb effect (not a real problem, but hey, nickles and dimes). Two, you have to make a saving throw with Fort at 10+1/2 Attacker's HD+Attacker's Quantum to actually get your Absorption. Against every attack. Rolling all those saves will take time. Three: You only absorb your Quantum in damage (Quantum DOES come up at random in these powers; this one is unusually Quantum-intense) per attack, so you don't actually get that much DR. Four: Your Enhancement Bonus from eating damage fades at 1 per round, so you have to keep track of that, too. You can spend Feats for Extras that make your Enhancement fade slower or let you Absorb with a DC 15 Will save from non-attack sources (like plugging yourself into a power plant) to play GM-may-I with how much of a bonus that gets you for a short time. This is how most powers are! A total mess of bookkeeping, extra rolls, and in the end they aren't even that 'big'. Or what about Quantum Vampire, which lets you make Touch Attacks to steal someone's power such that they can't use it? What's the catch here? It can only steal one specific power, chosen when you took the power. This is ALSO a 2nd Level Power. You could also more usefully make it a Touch Attack that steals d8 HP (healing you at the same time) per 3 character levels, but it still has Will Negates and takes a Standard Action, so you can't multi-attack with that and there's probably something more useful you could be doing at the levels where that does appreciable damage. 'Boy, I sure hope my enemies have the exact and only power I can steal from people!' says the guy who wasted 2 power slots on this pile. They're all like this, mostly! They're full of weird little caveats and smaller-than-you'd-expect effects. Also, a lot of the 3rd levels are really just a grab-bag of lower level powers, but you get 2 of them for taking it and can take more of them for 1 slot each but they also have asinine restrictions added. Take Molecular Manipulation: It's 'techniques' are basically Disintegrate (Which is not as useful as you'd expect, doing d6 per Character Level with Save for half, and which is itself a 3rd level power; but the version here only affects non-living things), Armor, Matter Creation (again, also a 3rd level power, but with the Molecular Control version you can't make stuff out of nothing, just change stuff into anything), and a very GM-may-I 'change a thing into any other form' Technique. All the big 3rd tiers are like this save a few. Also, some of them, like Precognition, outright tell the GM to make them auto-fail if they would 'ruin the drama' of a situation. So, uh, you can't even really use Precognition to suss out the plot if your GM decides you can't. Also, as usual, the most useful powers are the ones that just knock someone the gently caress out of a fight immediately. Immobilize is a level 1 power. Immobilize stuns someone until they either make a save or they've failed for rounds equal to your level (note this is actually pretty lovely by normal stun standards, but it's the best Novas get). Dominate is one of the only level 2s that's really worth it, because hey, mind controlled a guy; he's lost the fight. Similar, the 3rd levels that are useful are stuff like Clone, because hey, now there's more of you on the field (though you'd best take the Technique that lets your Clones use powers, and your PP Per Round is now spread between you and the Clones, so, uh, better have Node) and that lets you gently caress with action economy. Note even with Domination someone gets to resist every single command you give while they're Dominated, so better hope you have a good Wis Mod and they don't have a good Will save or you're in trouble. The other useful powers tend to be simple ones that give you bonuses and buffs; this is, after all, a free extra axis of advancement so having a bunch of buffs, healing, and other Cleric type stuff isn't amiss. Still, most powers are weirdly specific and underwhelming and full of caveats for some reason. A basic D20 Caster (especially one using Metamagic and magic items) would completely clown all over these 'quantum gods'. Now on one hand, not being as insane as a normal d20 Caster isn't that bad of a thing for game balance. But the thing is, you're meant to be a God. And here you're mostly a mundane with some higher stats and maybe a few piddly tricks up your sleeve. You're just not all that big of a deal as a Nova. Which again: Completely changes the entire setting. When Divis Mal is just a dude with high stats, a bunch of normal people can still kill him if they have high enough character levels and roll well. All Novas are suddenly actually much more vulnerable to being killed by regular people, using regular people bullets, which is like the greatest possible insult a superhuman can suffer. Also, because you have such limited power slots, you're way better off just using powers to boost your mundane abilities for the most part. The character with Claws (d6 per 3 levels physical attack, +SB), a bunch of Fighter levels, a bunch of melee Feats, Mega Str, Mega Con, Mega Dex, Mega Wis, a high Quantum, regeneration, and a bunch of Mega Con 'toughness/Armor' add ons? Actually kind of dangerous as hell in this system, since their enemies actually lack for many ways to easily knock them out of things the same way a D&D Fighter gets knocked out. When nobody is getting much bang for their buck, the simple stuff becomes much more useful. The designers just had no idea what was actually useful in D20, or how to design powers, and so accidentally they made Nova Powers kind of a little edge/add-on rather than divine force that can reshape the world. Don't get me wrong, a Nova absolutely has a big edge on any normal human character; you'd rather be the guy getting extra slots for powers (even if the powers aren't that great) than the guy getting nothing, after all. And you'd rather be the guy with stats in the mid twenties. It's just not as insurmountable of an edge as the designers clearly intended it to be going by the fluff. This is actually one of the big reasons we kept changing the fluff when I played this game in college; because the rules just didn't fit it. We weren't going to run around pretending these guys were god kings, so we rewrote the story to fit what the mechanics provided. That's how we ended up with like, superpowered police procedural and poo poo. So in short, powers are a complete confused mess that ends up disappointing and you're better off just treating them as a cherry on top of your character rather than PC-defining awesome abilities. Which is clearly completely against designer intent, but hey. This game is a badly made d20 shovelware conversion of a game that was already in a terrible system and that already sucked really hard. What did you expect? Next Time: Backgrounds, at last Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 18:16
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The issue with Aberrant in general is I don't think you could keep using the word "taint" without everyone at the table giggling. "I HAVE ENLARGED MY TAINT FOR MORE POWER"
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Aug 8, 2019 18:25
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There's so much more detail I could go into about the powers and all, but gently caress. The gist is enough. The funny thing is 'making characters more powerful by adding an extra axis of advancement on top' is a thing that can be really fun and cool. Just, uh, not the way they did it here. Plus I don't think they ever really noticed that was the thing they were doing, or if they did, they intentionally (maybe? It's hard to tell) made your mundane class suck because hey you have superpowers on top.
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Aug 8, 2019 18:31
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90s games were just full of nasty bad Taint. Aberrant, L5R, Immortal...at least WFRP calls it Corruption, instead of mentioning your taint. I wanna, but Progenitor has kind of an odd layout where it gives you a whole lotta timeline, then explains a lot of references in the timeline by explaining characters and powers in the later chapters. I'll have to read through the whole thing twice in order to review it coherently. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 18:31
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Halloween Jack posted:90s games were just full of nasty bad Taint. Aberrant, L5R, Immortal...at least WFRP calls it Corruption, instead of mentioning your taint. They never even call it Corruption; there are no Corruption Points or whatever until I think 4e (I have not read 3e enough to know if they called it that there). The lack of some kind of 'build up' bar for stuff like mutation is actually one of the big flaws in 2e because it makes encounters with 'corruption' potentially save or dies.
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Aug 8, 2019 18:35
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A couple of EP2 sidenotes before the next post: Inklesspen kindly pointed out that the baffling character sheet on page 2 of the book, i.e. immediately inside the cover, was apparently accidentally put there instead of the credits page. Score one for Mister Editor. Secondly, as I'm winding up to run my first EP2 game one of my players asks: "So, this Habitat Ops field of knowledge, what's it about?" I search through the book and it turns out that even though multiple pre-made characters have it and it's on the list of suggested fields of knowledge, nowhere does it actually define what said field of knowledge includes. Not defining a field of knowledge is fine when it's self-explanatory, like Jupiter Stuff or a common word like Physics. But Habitat Ops? C'mon you dorks. Thirdly, going by RAW, the book specifically says that Synthmorphs can have various upgraded mobility systems(like jet engines, etc.) but never actually specifies that biomorphs cannot. Octomorphs, in fact, specifically have Thrust Vector which the game describes as "turbofans" or "turbojets" later in the book(I presume it's meant to refer to how octopi and squid can jet themselves along by ejecting water). So I guess nothing's preventing you from being a giant octopus with wheels or a Jet Ape. On the one hand it's annoying that they're not more specific, on the other hand it's hilarious that they're not more specific.
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Aug 8, 2019 20:29
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PurpleXVI posted:So I guess nothing's preventing you from being...a Jet Ape. The shadow of the Jammers is long. Make sure you give them an ape pun name.
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Aug 8, 2019 20:31
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PurpleXVI posted:A couple of EP2 sidenotes before the next post: My feel that their dev cycle went sideways in a dramatic way is definitely.... maybe strengthening, some of these things can be seen when things don't go pear shaped, but when a major team member punches out, it's strongly suggestive . Also, I think they mooted the possibility of agnostic augs back in... 2018? StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 21:40
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I assume Habitat Ops are things like how to run the HVAC and water the oxygen machine and clean the filters, so that all the people smoking a drug in their polycule can float around and talk about how glad they are to be (CHOOSE ONE DEPENDING ON COLONY) pro skub/anti skub. Instead of strangling to death on their own farts.
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Aug 8, 2019 21:48
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