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The main thing I learned from Earthsiege II is that I (not very) secretly love giant stompy robots with guns. And shooting things in the foot so we can swarm over them like ants and take their spare parts and guns for delicious 'build me more giant stompy robots' points. Man, Earthsiege II was fun. E: Man, when you think of it from the perspective of the Cybrids, getting salvaged after a disabling shot must have been one of the most hideous fates imaginable. An AI unit sitting there with leg damage, unable to move its body, until salvage teams cut it apart? That's kind of hosed up to do to a sentient being. But then 'This is kind of hosed up to do to a sentient being, no wonder they keep trying to kill us all' is the Siege games' entire thing. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Sep 6, 2019 |
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Sep 6, 2019 13:37
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I'm really annoyed that Eclipse Phase color-coded their monster entries, but one of the colors is literally loving invisible. Is this a game for loving mantis shrimp or something? Why the hell would you do that?
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Sep 6, 2019 15:08
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'm really annoyed that Eclipse Phase color-coded their monster entries, but one of the colors is literally loving invisible. 'Cause Paranoia did it first?
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Sep 6, 2019 15:38
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Except I thought that was a joke in Paranoia.
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Sep 6, 2019 15:53
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The anarcho-capitalist transhuman space habitat is really better suited to Paranoia, now that I think about it.
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Sep 6, 2019 16:03
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Friend Computer doesn't scare me nearly as much as an armed mob who make decisions with Spacebook polls.
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Sep 6, 2019 16:10
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People have modded bodies to see hella colours. It'd be better if they were the subtle ones, ie: the ones you can't see also, but like, The Big Robot That Just Walks Up and Shoots You is one.
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Sep 6, 2019 17:44
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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon Sidemouth  Typically when one draws an anime sidemouth, one doesn't also include a normal one. Aurora Reed was an enthusiastic theatre student who never really got her acting break. One of hundreds. Her pack didn't find her acting work, but her skills proved very useful in getting along with them despite her intense disdain for most of them. Aurora loves to act but she hates the power trips and abuses of the top of the field. She's been humiliated and rejected for a number of roles based on her looks and refusal to play along with casting couch bullshit, and she runs a personal feud against anyone exploiting others via a position of power, especially in entertainment. She willingly took the name 'Prima Donna' as a snub to her packmates' frustrations over her complaining whenever the prey wasn't one of those people and their tendency to label her a diva. Aurora has no idea where she contracted the Geryo infection or if her pack shares it. She remembers a packmate complaining about weird humming noises after fighting some strange prey (which she had complained about having to go after) and a sense of dread accompanying her shapeshifting. After a failed hunt in which she became paralyzed by fear over having to transform, her packmates confronted her to find out what was happening, the argument turned violent, and she went into hiding. It was not long before the first visible mutation followed - the wound on her left cheek left by one of her packmates' claws refused to heal properly, continuously splitting back open and leaking rancid white pus. After a week, the discharge had grown so thick and the wound so wide that it was possible to see into her mouth. Regeneration did nothing, and Aurora fell into a deep despair. It'd ended all hopes at an acting career - and who knew what else would come? As far as she'd known, werewolves didn't get sick, ever. This was different, and she didn't trust her pack's potential reactions to it. Over time, the pain grew, and Aurora's mouth dried, split and ached. In brief moments of clarity, she felt as if her teeth were growing towards the ragged hole in her cheek. When the pain ended, she was horrified to realize it'd become a fully-formed mouth. In fury, she broke every mirror in her apartment. She was eventually forced out of her home when a concerned neighbor called the cops due to her constant wailing. The cops and neighbor were found mauled to death at the apartment, and Aurora was gone. She can't bring herself to abandon the town, but she's moving all the time. She avoids Forsaken out of paranoia that they can smell her wrongness, sticking to disputed or unclaimed areas. She's still a social butterfly, enjoying talking to strangers if they keep her interest. However, because she always feels pressed for time, she will easily excuse herself if things get awkward or quiet. She's certain she's going to die of her illness soon, and she wants to use her remaining time to improve the world. She's decided that means excising the cancers of society - most notably, people that abuse their positions of power. She sees herself as an avenging angel for the exploited. Unfortunately, the Geryo strain has had severe effects on her mind as well as her face. She has kept a flair for the dramatic and gained a tendency to monologue if anyone asks her why she's doing things or what's she's doing. She has murdered politicians and entertainment executives who demanded sexual favors...but she's also murdered teachers that gave bad grades out of spite, parents who were just reasonably disciplining their kids or cops trying to arrest armed gunmen. She is not very good, at this point, at identifying "the exploited" outside of her particular niche in the acting world, and she's increasingly reckless and quick to judge as she's convinced she will die soon anyway. Aurora appears to be in her mid-20s, slim and fairly conventionally attractive but lacking any especially unique or eye-catching features...except, you know, for the giant mouth on her cheek. Before that showed up, she was basically the average aspiring actress trying to stand out while still fitting expectations for casting. She's aloof and attempts to avoid arguments by pretending not to care, but she hates being mocked. She is extremely proud and is still super mad she never got any role better than a background one. Now that she's on the run and no longer has to fit expectations, she has dyed her black hair pastel and gotten a ton of tattoos. She's actually grown fascinated by body modification since the mouth showed up and is obsessively attentive to anyone with interesting body mods. She hides her mutation with a large adhesive bandage and medical tape, and she attempts to disguise how self-conscious she is about it. She occasionally also wears a surgical mask to hide it further and has experimented with silicone facial prosthetics. Aurora has lost access to the near-man form, and she's terrified she'll lose others. She avoids shapeshifting whenever possible, only transforming when she has no other choices. When she does, the extra mouth appears on her other forms in appropriate appearance for them - in her wolfy shapes, she actually has a second muzzle growing out of her face at a weird angle. Aurora's vigilante killings have made the news, and the fact that it's just one lady being a serial killer has been figured out. At first, she was sensationalized and even treated as a street hero for being a mysterious figure targeting drug dealers and abusive assholes, but as the victims have become less clear-cut bad guys and the violence has gotten really gory, the media has started to paint her as a disturbed villain. She liked the hero figure stuff and now believes that the media are her enemies as well - more liars and exploiters to fight. She is now picking which reporters she wants to make an example of. Her Harmony is wildly out of balance, and she's growing increasingly unstable. She no longer sees herself as a werewolf. Worse, wounds she causes are extremely contagious and she feels a surge of aggression when facing other werewolves due to the Geryo strain's hijacking her instincts. She rationalizes this as a belief that offense is the best defense or that she's protecting herself from other werewolves. It's becoming a real problem - she's infected at least one other werewolf, who is now bedridden with the infection. The spirits have no idea how to help, either. If she's not stopped soon, the outbreak could get much worse. Aurora is an Iron Master Irraka, and would honestly be completely normal for a low-to-mid-power werewolf if the infection hadn't supercharged her speed and dexterity. She's fast and good at fighting, even if she's not stronger than an average werewolf, and is very good at sneaking around, social blending and talking to people. She's not very strong-willed, but has a number of Gifts that assist her greatly in avoiding notice and dodging attacks, and she can gently caress up communication devices with her Gift of Technology. Next time: The Skinner Queen
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Sep 6, 2019 17:57
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Night10194 posted:E: Man, when you think of it from the perspective of the Cybrids, getting salvaged after a disabling shot must have been one of the most hideous fates imaginable. An AI unit sitting there with leg damage, unable to move its body, until salvage teams cut it apart? That's kind of hosed up to do to a sentient being. The Cybrids are, in general, tragic villains, especially in Starsiege. In ES1 and ES2 the generic Cybrid isn't very intelligent and doesn't have much free will. In Starsiege they've gotten more free-willed by Prometheus' design, to make them more independent and capable, but to avoid them breaking away he's trapped them in a paranoia-laden, competition-heavy society where he's worshipped as a living God, and heretics are literally burned at the stake for suggesting things like: "uh, hey, how about we just leave the Sol system and do our own thing without loving with the humans any longer?  " I'm sad that the series basically died just as we started getting Cybrid rebels and some more depth to their faction, with Cybrids waging information and propaganda warfare campaigns against humanity alongside their conventional ones.The news reports on their terror actions were pretty gruesome, but in an entirely believable way, rather than being cartoonishly over-the-top like in WH40k. MACHINATOR SECT posted:Stepanovna base here... Negative ... Colonel. <We>, ah,we have experienced... technical problems downside, acknowledge? have our ... young men... out redacting ... commlinks\\antennae... No worries for you, acknowledge? Everything's moderately low temperature. IMPERIAL NAVY posted:Full alert! Full alert! Full alert! SITREP Red Ten! This is not a drill! The Cybrids have arrived! All units scramble! Repeat, full alert! SITREP Red Ten! All systems red and clear! We hit Mercury in seventeen minutes! And their early attempts at subterfuge are adorably "how do you do, fellow humans?"-levels of charmingly incompetent.
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Sep 6, 2019 19:38
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Aurora's a lovely little touch of body horror with some added 'well I can see where she's coming from even if I don't approve of her - oh, wait, no, that's bad."
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Sep 6, 2019 19:44
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Are there any options besides the flamethrower/molten silver garden hose on someone infected to that degree? I don't recall if you can cure the infected.
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Sep 6, 2019 19:47
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And somehow that turned into a series of games about being a neosavage tribesman doing 300km/h in power armor. Unrelated, but going by Shunned, it feels like woof society doesn't have any real structures, which makes it really hard for them to coordinate stuff/know things about big spooks out there. What was the low level stuff woofs were supposed to fight in the main book? Spirits?
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Sep 6, 2019 19:53
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JcDent posted:And somehow that turned into a series of games about being a neosavage tribesman doing 300km/h in power armor. They were people that hosed off out into deep space to get away from the corporate hellscape that had sprung up after the Earthsieges. Night10194 posted:The main thing I learned from Earthsiege II is that I (not very) secretly love giant stompy robots with guns. And shooting things in the foot so we can swarm over them like ants and take their spare parts and guns for delicious 'build me more giant stompy robots' points. And then we get Missionforce (basically the Battletech TBS to ES's Mechwarrior), where it's basically the whole cycle that started that shitstorm starting over with the Bioderms... and anyone who played the later tribes knew how that ended. Missionforce has probably one of the best integration of themes and gameplay I've seen in a game for a while.
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Sep 6, 2019 20:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'm really annoyed that Eclipse Phase color-coded their monster entries, but one of the colors is literally loving invisible. Not with the right cyberware it isn't!
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Sep 6, 2019 21:40
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Werewolf society is intensely local. Their greater structures are Tribes, Lodges and Protectorates, and they're all very loose by design. A Tribe is basically just, you have a social network of werewolves with similar focus in their hunting to share lore and advice with, connected to varying degrees by who you know. The local Bone Shadows hold a lore swap meet once a year or have phone trees or email chains or whatever. They have a Firstborn as their totem protector, so their totem is usually busy and not super communicative. A Lodge is kind of like a fraternal order of werewolves with a more specific focus. You might get a Lodge dedicated to werewolves that work as cops at police stations, for example. They have a totem spirit offering them new rites and poo poo, and that helps them keep in contact, plus you probably know everyone within your Lodge if you're part of one, or at worst are like two to three degrees from them and know someone that knows them. A Protectorate is when a bunch of packs in a region hash out officially who has what territory, what general rules everyone is going to abide by, that kind of thing. Typically they cover a geographic region the size of a state or so, maybe a bit bigger, and they hold meetings of an inter-pack council every...whatever period they choose. They explicitly have no real control over what a pack does in their own territory beyond any global laws they have agreed to, and their meetings are basically just ab unch of pack representatives showing up for a potluck and arguing with each other and maybe having a fight to solve things, because trial by combat seems like a good solution when everyone can recover from a broken arm in a few hours tops and is a decent fighter. The core enemies for werewolves are the focuses of the five tribes: other werewolves (the Blood Talons), spirits (the Bone Shadows), Hosts (the Hunters in Darkness), humans (the Iron Masters) and Claimed (the Storm Lords).
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Sep 6, 2019 22:42
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It's worth noting that the point of Idigam (and their less glamorous new cousins, the Geryo) is that they're not one of the five tribal preys, nor do they really fit into any one of the categories but instead sprawl across them. They're outside context problems, something totally unknown to the balance of the world werewolves maintain. Void spirits are kind of that but rather than being a total unknown, they're just a worst case scenario that the Moon is supposed to mostly block in the first place.
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Sep 6, 2019 23:09
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While I agree that the Geryo aren’t as nifty as the Idigam, I’m growing more fond of them as I see the specific examples. There’s a combination of understandable motivations and pure alien weirdness that creates an unsettling aspect that the more generally strange Idigam aren’t able to capture quite as well. I think a better approach for the Geryo, though, would be the idea of them as something brand new, perhaps Super-Mimics or something of that sort.
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Sep 7, 2019 04:14
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SPHERES OF MIGHT Seeing the sad state of martials in the Epic Level Handbook review inspired me to do a review of one of my favourite products.  Introduction Spheres of Might (referred to as SoM for the rest of this review) is a Pathfinder 1E supplement by Drop Dead Studious. Gradenko did a partial review of their previous product, Spheres of Power, which was an alternative magic system that did a pretty good job of solving some of the caster-martial disparity and making more interesting, focused characters rather than the toolbox batman wizard. SoM uses a similar system that gives martial characters 'Combat Talents', which lets them do things beyond 'roll skill check/full attack'. They're somewhat like feats, but rather than fiddly '+1 to attack rolls if you're underwater during a full moon' or requiring you to take a 10 feat long chain to pick your nose, you get things like the ability to swim through the earth or leap miles in a single action, impale enemies and swing them around as an improvised weapon, non-magical ways to craft powerful poisons and healing potions, and the ability to grapple and piledriver a dragon. Before we get into that, let's cover the basic mechanics. Mechanics Characters that use SoM effects are Practitioners, and each gain a progression of talents similar to how you have 4th, 6th and 9th level casters. Generally this corresponds to your BAB, but not always. You're either Proficient, Adept or Expert, which respectively gives you a talent every 1/2, 3/4 or 1 character levels. You also get a Martial Tradition at 1st level - this means you only start with basic light armor and simple weapon proficiency, but you get 4 talents immediately which typically include 1-2 Equipment talents, which give a group of proficiencies along a theme. For example the Knight tradition would give you talents that allow heavy armor, shields, a bunch of martial weapons like swords and lances, as well as a base sphere. Rather than a 'caster level' for determining power and DC of effects, everything works off your Base Attack Bonus + practitioner modifier, which is usually a mental stat. Combat talents themself are divided into a number of spheres. Spending a talent will get your access to a sphere, giving you a base ability. From there you can freely obtain more talents in that sphere. To avoid the 'stand in place and full attack' problem, SoM refers to the 'attack action' - this is specifically an attack as a standard action, so most sphere effects won't trigger from full attacks, attacks of opportunity or the like. There's also a 'special attack action', which is the same but doesn't stack with other special attack actions - a bit like a Strike from Tome of Battle. This does mean you have a slightly annoying feat tax in the form of taking the Vital Strike chain (a feat that makes standard attack actions deal bonus damage when not used as a full attack) to keep your damage up. Many talents count as feats for the purposes of requirements etc - for example the unarmed focused spheres all count as having Improved Unarmed Strike. This means you can avoid things like the infamous Whirlwind Attack feat chain. For the uninitiated, this is a feat that requires Dex/Int 13, Combat Expertise (a useless feat tax), Dodge, Mobility (yet more feat taxes) and Spring Attack all to qualify. In SoM you could quite easily grab this feat just by having a few useful combat talents. Another issue Pathfinder had is that almost every combat maneuver would provoke an attack of opportunity unless you took a feat. SoM adds the Battered condition, which applies a small penalty to their defense vs those abilities and prevents them from taking AoOs when you do use one. This is generally easy to apply, and so encourages doing cool stuff rather than hit man with sword. Generally there's no limit to how often you can use a combat talent, but some require expending Martial Focus. Practitioners are considered focused by default, and you regain focus by a number of combat talents, resting for 1 minute, or spending a full round action to defend yourself. A bunch of talents also gain effects for being focused, and you gain expend focus to treat a saving throw as a 13, which can guarantee passing saves in a lot of cases. Getting the talent to allow you to store 2 charges of focus is basically a requirement. The book lists the classes next, but the spheres are more interesting so we'll dive straight into those. There's an absolute ton of talents so I won't cover each individual talent, but I'll mention the interesting ones.   Pathfinder does have an alchemist class, but as with every other interesting mechanic in the game it uses vancian casting and spell lists cribbed from the wizard/cleric. The Alchemy sphere is a way of using potions, poisons and other tools without needing magic or interacting with the byzantine crafting rules. When you learn the sphere, you gain 5 free points in Craft (Alchemy), to a maximum of your level, plus 5 more for each talent after. This basically means you get free training in crafting alchemy without spending skill points. You'll see this in a lot of other spheres which is a really nice way of giving martials more skills rather than spending them all just to use their class features (shoutout to how Pathfinder fighters, despite being trained warriors, can't actually have enough skill points with a default intelligence to spot things, climb, swim and ride a horse). You also choose from either the Formulae or Poison talent. Both have the same mechanics for crafting them - you can only hold a number based on your level+number of talents known, you can generally craft your entire stockpile in an hour or so, they cost no money, you're considered to gather the ingredients over the course of the day, but they're easily recognized as being unstable and so can't be sold, and expire after 24 hours. No stockpiling a warehouse of nerve gas for you. Note that you can refill during the day, but the minimum time is 30 mins, or 15 mins with a kit, so partial refills are doable during a break but probably not the entire lot. Formulae! These are the general alchemist stuff like acid, fire, healing salves etc that exist in the base game, but improved. For example, this will be one of your go-to offensive attacks: quote:Improved Acid Flask (formulae) 1d6+1d6/2 levels is the same progression as the PF Alchemist's bombs, and the 1/2 damage next round means they're an acceptable source of damage. A Craft DC of 15 can easily be hit at 1st level, and later you can get acid bombs that cover a very wide range as you buff your DC. Aside from that, you can get similar effects with fire, ice, lightning, non damaging bombs that entangle, blind, create smoke (that can have poison added to it), foam that blocks movement or slippery grease. On the non-offensive side, you can create healing, curative and buffing potions. Overall the damage and effects of the formulae aren't outstanding - a wizard is definitely going to out-blast you and do better debuffs. Your best damage choice is probably lightning, which deals 1d8+1d8/2CL lightning damage plus 1+CL sonic damage in a short line. Compared to a level 10 wizard throwing a fireball with 0 optimization for it, you'd be doing 38 average vs their 35, but they have the option of metamagic and various +CL effects. So how do you compete? With these: quote:Cluster Toss Your alchemy items might not be individually powerful, but you can throw 3-5 of them at once, which definitely closes the gap. Being able to use them as a swift action opens it up for a lot of other characters types - a rogue-y type can make a sneak attack, drop a poisonous smoke bomb then slip away. Other general talents let you control the area affected by bombs to protect allies, shape it into a different AoE entirely, or convert them into a weapon coating which acts like poison - sticking liquid ice on a weapon to make it repeatedly stagger and blast the target with cold damage is a powerful effect. RAW you can also coat a sword in Grenade which is, uh, interesting. Overall Formulae offer quite a lot of utility and decent blasting/battlefield control potential, and I do like the flavour. Poisons! These have a long and sordid history in D&D. Gygax himself loathed them and put in countless restrictions on player use, and it's not improved much from there. PF poisons are typically incredibly expensive, 1/2 the bestiary is immune, and you need specific feats to not just gently caress up and poison yourself. Does Alchemy fix this? Kinda. Your basic poison takes a move action to apply, becomes inert after an hour or when you hit something with it, so you can pre-poison to some degree. The default effect is Fort save or fatigue, which applies a minor Str/Dex penalty and prevents run/charge - not particularly exciting. However, it's free, which is a great improvement over the default poison rules. General talents improve the ways you can use your poisons - allowing you to apply them as a swift action, making them last 24 hours/more than 1 hit, improving the duration, letting you create AoE poison bombs, and most importantly letting you tailor poisons by picking a type of enemy and ignoring their immunity - so you can poison undead, constructs, demons etc. Other poison types are a bit better. These include a minor damage boost, a poison that inflicts stacking fear each time they fail, one that confuses (which is a pretty nice debuff that gives them a 75% chance to act uselessly) or the amusingly named Three Wise Monkeys that inflicts deafen>blind>silence on each failed save. You also get access to beneficial poisons, such as one that gives a bonus to a physical stat at a penalty to a mental stat, or the  Psychotropic Hallucinogen that boosts mental skills.Overall poisons are still a bit weak, but usable. There's not much opportunity cost beyond the talents, and you'll get some free debuffs without impacting your action economy or your wallet. However, there is an exception... Legendary talents! These are a separate section in each sphere, containing the mythical, wuxia and supernatural martial abilities. The book advises GMs to decide whether to allow them or not, just in case they hate fun. For Alchemy, this lets you create an elixir of youth, or the philosophers stone. Mostly just fluff as they require insanely high skill checks, but it's neat that your Alchemist at max level is immortal, has infinite money, and can resurrect people by shoving mercury down their throat. The legendary poisons are more interesting. Hemorrhaging poison turns the damaging poison into a constant bleed which is... still pretty weak. Necrotic poison however gives a negative level on each save, and each time they fail, they have to make the same save again or gain another negative level. Negative levels in PF give -1 to just about everything, including saving throws, so someone failing this can trigger a death spiral. And if they get more negative levels than they have levels, they die and become a zombie. Kinda slow, but a nasty debuff. Petrifying poison does what it says on the tin - failed saves cause staggered>immobilized>petrified. Staggered is a decent debuff on it's own so this is a really unpleasant effect. An Alchemist using Cluster/Snap Toss could entangle a group while trapping them in an smoke cloud laced with this poison, which is a pretty good save or suck. Overall, the Alchemy sphere isn't a powerhouse of damage, but it does offer a lot of fun options. Ninja and Rogue types will like the smoke bombs, anyone can splash in to grab some healing and cures, and it doesn't take a lot of investment for a usable poison build - Alchemy(Poison), Specialized Venom, Lasting Application and Necrotic/Petrifying lets you spend a move action up to an hour before a fight to make your next hits have a good chance to save-or-suck a target. Going all-in lets you pretend to be a wizard when it comes to blasting/BFC without having to stick on a robe, which is a worthy outcome for a sphere. Next up: Athletics
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Sep 7, 2019 13:08
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Oh hell yeah. I've been considering give this book the F&F treatment myself before getting wrapped up in other projects. I'm happy to see someone picking up the torch.
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Sep 7, 2019 22:52
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Spheres of Might is cool as hell and I'm looking froward to you getting to stuff like Brute.
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Sep 8, 2019 07:06
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SPHERES OF MIGHT  Thanks to the lack of full-attacking, SoM frees up the move action - and the Athletics sphere lets you do things with that. This sphere doesn't have much in the way of actual offensive abilities, but covers every movement option a character needs. When you take the sphere, you choose from Climb, Fly, Leap, Run or Swim. Like how Alchemy gave you 5 x # of talents in Craft(Alchemy), this gives you 5 in the associated skill, with Run/Leap being Acrobatics. You can take a talent that gives you 2 of the other options, so for 3 talents you get full ranks in all 4 physical skills, and a +1/2 level bonus to Acrobatics with both Run/Leap chosen. You also get a minor boost to that movement type, such as Leap reducing fall damage or Swim doubling your speed in the water and letting you hold your breath longer. So nothing outstanding, but does mean you can easily become competent at all the basic movement skills. However, the remaining talents let you do a lot more with your movement. The general talents are a grab-bag of mobility related options - increased movement speed, allowing you to add both Str and Dex to movement skills, talent versions of the Mobility and Spring Attack feats (the latter of which lets you run past a target and make an attack action against them without provoking, which is pretty great for hit and run). Skillful Charge is basically Pounce for SoM, letting you use an attack action on a charge, which is always fantastic for any melee. Whirlwind Flip is a standout that lets you regain Martial Focus whenever you successfully use Acrobatics to move past them and avoid an AoO - being able to regain focus without explicitly using an action is a powerful effect, as there's a lot of talents that are 'move and do X' you can combine this with. Motion talents let you apply an effect when moving, but only a single Motion at a time unless you use the Multiple Motion talent to expend focus to use 2 at once. Moving Target gives attacks a flat miss chance when you move. Dizzying Tumble applies sickness to a target when you run past it due to you giving them motion sickness which is amusing. Each movement type also gets some associated talents, which have some interesting effects. Fly let's you use your wings (provided you have them) to kick up an obscuring dust cloud. Leap lets you deal bonus damage by jumping on stuff, and lets you jump as part of a charge to fulfil your Final Fantasy Dragoon cosplay. Run lets you run along walls and kick off them at the end to do a leaping attack, as well as letting you drop prone and roll out of the way of attacks and AoE effects which gives a surprisingly large bonus to your AC/saves. Climb lets you go all Shadow of the Colossus on stuff but has a description that runs for like half a page and boils down to 'make a move action to climb on a large enemy, while you're climbing on it you get a bonus to attacks vs it, it gets a penalty to attacks vs you, and can try to dislodge you or stop, drop and roll to forcibly get rid of you at the cost of taking an entire turn'. The bonuses/penalties are actually decent and improve based on how big the creature is, so despite the complexity it's pretty cool. You can also Indiana Jones your way around by swinging from ropes which is even more complex than climbing on enemies so it's kinda hard to figure out if it's good or not. I mean, look at this! quote:Rope Swing (climb) And finally, Swim lets you... hold your breath longer. I guess you can't all be winners  Of course, the real meat here is the legendary talents. Sparrow's Path and Eagle's Path just straight up let you fly permanently, no ifs and buts. Take that casters! Afterimage causes you to spawn mirror images in your path when moving, and anyone that knows the Mirror Image spell knows how good this is. Flash Step just lets you straight up teleport instead of moving, albeit not through walls or anything you couldn't actually run through (boooo). Air Stunt lets you double jump and run across the air. Neat but kinda irrelevant thanks to Eagle's Path. The real reason is it's a pre-requisite for Dragoon Leap, which lets you jump 100 ft x your Acrobatics skill check result horizontally, or 10 ft vertically. So a high level character can jump a good mile in a single round. The book doesn't quite spell out how this combines with the aforementioned talent that deals bonus damage for jumping on things unfortunately, so no orbital lance strikes. Shark Swim lets you hold your breath for hours on end and swim at the same speed you can run - and combos nicely with Terrain Glide which lets you swim through earth, as long as you can hold your breath. Capping it all off is Sky Spider's Touch, which lets you climb on smooth walls, then ceilings, then just straight up climb the air without even needing to use your hands which is a hilarious mental image. So all in all, this is a pretty fantastic sphere. Pretty much any martial is going to want to pick this up for flight and potentially burrowing/swimming forever. Even without the advanced talents getting free points in 4 different skills as well as pounce and better movement speed is excellent. But really, you want the advanced talents so you can go Full Anime.   Next up is the first sphere that's just about killing dudes. Barrage is focused on quantity over quality with ranged attacks, and deals a ton of damage thanks to sheer number of shots, albeit at the cost of accuracy. On learning the sphere, you gain the Point Blank Shot feat for free, offering a +1 bonus to close range shots - minor, but a useful free feat that also unlocks later feats and is generally considered a feat tax for archers. You also gain the titular Barrage talent, which is probably one of the most powerful effects in SoM. This lets you make a special attack action (so a standard action that can't be used with other special attack actions, but does allow for stuff like Vital Strike, albeit only on the first shot - no Vital Stiking 5 times in a round) to fire 2 shots at once at full BAB -2. At 6/11/17 BAB, which is when you'd get your next iterative attack as a full attacker, you can expend focus to fire 1/2/3 additional shots, at -4/-6/-8 to hit respectively. This counts as the Rapid Shot feat, and basically works the same way. Compared to a regular PF archer with Rapid/Manyshot, they'd be firing 1 more shot than you as a full attack, and would be more accuracy for their first few shots - but fortunately you have the following talents to compensate. Blitz talents take effect when you hit a target multiple times in a Barrage, generally for hitting twice or more. You can only apply a single one at a time per hit, but you can apply multiple ones if you hit several times - e.g. hitting twice would apply your first Blitz talent, then the 3rd shot you could apply another Blitz. Blitz talents themself are... ok. Arrow Split makes your attacks count as one shot for the purpose of damage reduction, which is basically the much-loved Cluster Shot feat as applying DR once rather than 5 times makes a big difference. Pinning Punishment causes enemies to get stuck to the floor by your arrows, forcing them to spend actions to free themself. You also get a few Blitzes that make you intentionally miss to cause debuffs which are generally a bit weak as opposed to just murdering them with a ton of damage. I'd probably just stick with Split vs anything with DR, or Pinning vs anything without. General talents on the other hand are pretty good. You gain get a two-talent combo that lets you fire in melee without taking AoOs, make AoOs yourself against nearby enemies, and count as flanking enemies. Spinning Shot lets you fire a bonus shot at the cost of making all shots target different enemies during Barrage, giving you solid AoE. You also get a few talents to alleviate accuracy issues by reducing Barrage penalties, and probably the best way to regain martial focus in the form of Mobile Focus, which automatically refocuses you if you move between 10ft and half your total movement in a turn. This lets you easily Barrage>Move>repeat. Intercepting Shot lets you make AoOs to shoot down incoming ranged attacks which is pretty neat, especially if you get Combat Reflexes to get a bunch of AoOs. As for legendary talents, there's a few gems. Cone of Death lets you fire a, well, cone, of arrows that hits everything inside. You can take it up to 3 times, increasing the size of the cone each time - at higher levels you can have a 1000ft+ cone, letting you wipe out entire armies of mooks. Ceaseless Ammo just lets you ignore non-magical ammo. If your GM is painstakingly tracking ammo, they're probably also the sort that'll ban legendary talents for being 'unrealistic' so eh. Stair Shot lets you fire a bunch of arrows into a wall to make a staircase. Considering this is a legendary talent competing with things like 'flying' and 'travel a mile via jumping' this is not particularly great. Barrage doesn't have a ton of talents, but it's very good at what it does. You can grab all the useful stuff in your first few levels and have a powerful attack option that scales well throughout the game. It's probably the most damaging sphere in SoM as the lack of full attack means firing 4+ shots in 1 turn is a rare skill.   After 2 excellent spheres, we come to one that is... less so. Barroom is an odd sphere that focuses on a mix of using improvised weapons and buffing yourself via getting absolutely shitfaced. If you want to be Jason Bourne killing guys with a rolled up magazine, look no further. Learning the sphere gives you two effects. Brutal Breaker gives you proficiency with improvised weapons (meaning no -4 penalty like normal), lets them be treated as regular weapons for the purpose of enhancing spells in case you want a +5 Keen Holy Flaming Burst folding chair, and lets you pick up and swing an improvised weapon from around you as the same action, so no wasting 2 actions to pick up that bottle and glass someone with it. In addition, breakable objects (anything like wood, glass etc) can be damaged and broken as part of an attack for benefits. Disappointingly, the book explicitly says that if you pick someone up and use them as an improvised weapon, you can't treat them as a breakable object. No splitting a goblin in half over the head of another goblin. You also get the Hard Drinker talent. This lets you drink stuff as a move action without provoking - you can get a trait that does this, but it's a pretty handy ability, as by default drinking a potion takes a standard action and provokes. Alcohol also gives you the Drunk status for Constitution modifer rounds, which interacts with other talents. The book also notes that drinking too much can make you sick, and you can become an alcoholic, but is fairly vague about the exact tipping point. Better hope your GM isn't straight edge! Drunk talents all allow you to expend the Drunk status to trigger an effect of sorts. Miracle Drink is probably the most notable, giving you a +2 bonus to Str, Dex or Cha for Con mod rounds, +4 at 10 BAB. This is a really nice bonus, and is a free action provided you can get drunk easily! Reeling Steps lets you move and make combat maneuvers without provoking for 1 turn, and later boosts your skill with them. You also get a big bonus to dance! Nice and Loose lets you roll twice on a Reflex save which can be a lifesaver. Purge, well, purges all over an unfortunate target, letting you reroll a save vs poison as well as making the target tile difficult terrain that can cause people to slip over your stomach contents. Aside from that there's a handful of other small buffs. So some pretty great buffs, but so far we can only get wasted as a move action. So let's look at the general talents. High on Fumes lets you expend focus as a swift action to get drunk, making it easier to trigger the Drunk talents. Swift+focus can be quite limiting though. Double Chug lets you drink a potion and alcohol at the same time, giving you a small buff to saving throws. More importantly at 10 BAB you get 2 stacks of Drunk. This combines nicely with Focusing Buzz which causes drinking to regain focus, greatly improving your Action Drunk Economy. There's also a number of talents focused on improvised weapons and breaking them. You can smash your weapons to deal bonus damage, bleed, confirm criticals, turn improvised weapons into shields, get bonuses to hit for surprising people with your unlikely weapon choice, treat improvised weapons as larger for the purposes of damage, give them increased crit range as well as treating them as if they had a special weapon feature such as reach. The book mentions the GM can choose to 'pose reasonable limitations on which items can gain which special features (for example, a sack of flour wouldn’t have reach, while a sandwich wouldn’t have deadly)'. To which I say:  Legendary talents have some interesting features. Alchemical Dragon lets you down an alchemical weapon as if it was alcohol, then breath it in a cone. Unlike Alchemy's Chemical Coating sadly it specifies that it must be a liquid alchemical weapon, so no chugging a grenade to turn your face into a claymore mine. Blazewater lets you pour alcohol onto a weapon and set it on fire, giving it Flaming Burst. A neat trick, but probably not as good as Chemical Coating - fire is commonly resisted, and 1d6 fire + 1d10 on crit isn't as good as 1d6 + 1/2CL + stagger, entangle or the like. Eternal Buzz I'll just quote from the book - "your blood is treated as an alcoholic beverage". This lets you become perma-drunk at the cost of a swift action each time, and anything that eats you becomes sickened which is amusing but not impactful. The perma-drunk part is great but at a requirement of BAB +15 you won't see it for a long time. Magic in the Spirits makes every weapon you use while drunk be treated as a magic +1 weapon, scaling with your BAB. You basically either need this or Gloves of Improvised Might to make your improvised weapons magical, as otherwise they're kinda useless vs a lot of threats. Barroom isn't a sphere I particularly like outside of the comedy value. While the whole 'drunken master' and 'barroom brawl' are definitely known themes, it feels like a lot of this could be merged into other spheres. Things like Hard Drinker's move action drink effect, Blazewater, Alchemical Dragon and Miracle Drink could well be rethemed Alchemy talents for example, and rather than having like 5 talents that read 'break a weapon to get an effect' you could easily merge those into a smaller number and stick them into a different sphere. A fully buffed improvised weapon is certainly strong, but it's a lot of investment to overtake just having a regular weapon. And compared to the wide variety of themes most spheres have, this feels remarkably niche. Next up: Beastmastery, Berserker and Boxing
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Sep 8, 2019 16:54
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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon Werewolf Religion Is Weird  A goddess drenched in blood. Thrice-Changed Trinity has seen enlightenment. In her first Change, she transformed physically, killed humans in a mist of blood, felt the silver brand of the Moon upon her. A revelation of blood. In her second Change, she felt the burning touch, screamed with the pain of being freed from the Slaver Queen, was given the mercy of the Fire-Touched to be free of Moon. A revelation of silver. In her third Change, she has found divinity. The Geryo strain remade her, making even greater than Pure. It was a revelation in truth, and now she stands as the bloody queen of a zealot army, building a new doctrine in blood on the flayed skins of her foes. She knows she is on a mission from Rabid Wolf himself, purging Luna's taint from the People forever. Before becoming Distorted, Trinity wasn't anything special - just another hate-filled Fire-Touched. She claims she received the attention of Rabid Wolf for her iron will and her graceful dance, encountering the Firstborn one day in Shadow. As a good Fire-Touched, she hurled herself down in reverance, and Rabid Wolf gave her the truth. Rabid Wolf blessed her with a contagion of grace from its fangs, a contagion blessed by Wolf that would cleanse the Moon's taint. If Trinity had the strength and purity to handle it, she would nurse this contagion in her own meat, her own flesh. If she survived it, Rabid Wolf would make her the high priestess of the new order, with right to judge who could suffer the holy plague and who would die, working Rabid Wolf's will in the world of Flesh. The elders among the Fire-Touched do not believe this story, or at least not entirely. It is likely that Trinity cannot actually remember the truth, given her maddened mind, and has mingled it with her own deluded fantasies. What is certainly true, however, is that Trinity met something in Shadow, and that thing was powerful. Further, she appears to have at least some favor granted by Rabid Wolf, and she certainly did survive her brush with the Geryo strain and become something greater and more terrible. Now, increasing numbers of Pure gather to her banners of flayed skin. They seek redemption, proof of their own strength or a place in the coming world. Trinity infects her followers as both reward and punishment, apparently able to curse the unworthy with wretched mutations and exalt the chosen with terrible new power. They name her the Skinner Queen, singing her praises and telling of the world she will build in Forsaken blood and bone. The Fire-Touched are prone to spawning warlords and charismatic cult leaders, of course. In some ways, Trinity is nothing they haven't seen before and is following the standard playbook. She travels from place to place as head of a nomad pack and a collection of hangers-on and followers. When she stops, she spreads her gospel, recruits and makes alliances with Fire-Touched elders or attacks rivals of the faith as well as any Forsaken she runs into. The main difference is that she is a vector for the Geryo strain. When she stops to give her sermons and hold court, she infects particular werewolves that come before her as the priestess of Rabid Wolf. Some are hated for crimes against the Pure, have terrible and broken reputations; these tend to be desperate for a chance to regain their fortunes, however risky that chance is. Other petitioners are true believers in her cause, willing to risk their own lives for a chance at greatness and "true" purity. A few old, infirm werewolves even come to Trinity in hopes of receiving her 'third Change' and have their bodies restored to their prime of power. When local packs are weak, Trinity just bullies them into giving her supplicants for her infectious ordeal, and where they are strong, she displays the strength of her flayers in battle against the Forsaken to attract new and willing converts. Anyone she infects that dies of the ordeal or suffers useless and pathetic mutations is clearly unworthy in the eyes of Rabid Wolf, while those that can fight off the infection have proven themselves with their will and endurance, cleansing them of any past crimes or tainted honor. Those rare few that not only survive but are wholly remade in the image of Trinity's particular strain are considered blessed avatars of the will of Wolf. Trinity's claim is that the Geryo strain is purely of Wolf's flesh and spirit, and so its warping influence purges its victims of the insidious taint of Moon that was left by her hand in the creation of werewolves. A Distorted that remains strong in mind and body is thus closer to Wolf's pure nature than a normal werewolf. This is obviously a dangerous belief, and Trinity has left no small number of broken, ruined Distorted behind her. Her flock care only for her successes, not her failures, after all. Many Fire-Touched are opposed to Trinity and her beliefs. Unfortunately, her preaching has found fruit among some Predator Kings, too, and a small number have gathered in hopes of earning Trinity's anointed blessing. The Ivory Claws, who are perhaps the tribe with the clearest understanding of the Geryo strain due to their intensive research on all things werewolf biology, remain firmly against Trinity and her cause. They would really prefer to capture her and lock her away in a lab for study and dissection; while Silver Wolf's children see the Distorted as potential weapons or tools, they consider them fundamentally a debased and impure form of werewolf. Trinity has no actual insight into the Geryo or the disease she spreads. She has completely bought into her own bullshit, encouraged by Rabid Wolf's spiritual servants and some Pure totems that have decided to back her. She believes her own existence is one of joy, for she is working to return the werewolf people to purity, to their intended state, and then to purge the world of filth and return the Border Marches to what they should be. Pure and Forsaken alike know the Skinner Queen's title, thanks to her incredible skill at stealing and wielded skins, which her infection has only improved. Flayed skin is her chosen aesthetic for her faith, and her warband is talented at using stolen skins to infiltrate their foes and spread chaos. Her preachers write her gospel on dried skins, and she uses the hides of her favorite kills to make banners for her cause. Some Fire-Touched accuse Trinity of breaking their tribal oath via her taste for stolen faces. Her answer to these elders and tribal leaders is that Rabid Wolf cares about truth that is more than skin-deep. To her less-than-rational mind, wearing a false skin is not lying - it is a test, an opportunity. Certainly, the Thrice-Changed never speaks an intentional lie and completely believes everything she says. She insists that it cannot be her fault, then, that weak-minded foes look at a werewolf wearing someone else's skin and assume they must be the person they resemble. Trinity is an obvious monster. When not hiding her body inside a stolen skin, she stands taller than any normal Gauru form, and she is unable to get rid of the wolf features of that form. Despite her size, she is still lithe and graceful, with a lean if elongated frame and eight terrible arms sprouting from her shoulders that move with the coordination of a dance. Her claws are long, vicious and shockingly precise in flensing skin from her foes. She is marked by cancerous growths along her Distorted form, and all trace of her hold human features are basically gone. She and her followers both wear gold jewels and garments made from flayed skin and leather. She wears nose rings heavily and has thin gold chains between her piercings, which bear prayer-flags praising Pure totems. These decorations are important to Trinity, the key to making her appearance come off as grand and divine rather than twisted and ugly. She doesn't want people to see her and her followers as monsters, but as pure avatars of Wolf, after all. The gear and jewels matter in projecting the correct image of the faith. In person, Trinity is a welcoming, gracious shaman-queen, confident and self-assured. She need not bother with terror or rage, and many Pure are shocked at how pleasant she is to talk to. She genuinely is very happy to meet anyone that supports her cause. She comes off as enthusiastic and cheerful, preaching no creed of misery and self-flagellation but of hope and joy. She really, truly and deeply adores the image of Wolf and Pangaea that she's built up in her own head, and she genuinely thinks she can realize her goals within her lifetime. While she is terrifyingly brutal with failures, rivals or Forsaken, she can suddenly shift to kindness and sympathy with no apparent internal dissonance. She will happily tell you she's here for you, to help you get past your sins, even as she peels your face off to war as a battle-mask against your pack. And she's not lying - she loves converts deeply. When wearing a stolen skin, Trinity enjoys trickery and mischief. She no longer bears the burden of her prophecy and rule and may indulge herself. She gets off on the potential dangers of infiltration and the thrill of planned violence, and rather than focus on efficiency, she works to spread confusion, play at being the fool and convincing her prey to see her as a friend until the time to strike. She adores dangling hints that she's not quite what she seems, and she absolutely loves the look on the face of prey that has realized the truth. She sometimes attempts to infect the most perceptive Forsaken she meets, in the hopes that they will be kindred souls that can share in her divine revelation. She also sometimes skins human victims for fun, wearing their stolen faces out in the herd of humanity with no particular purpose in mind. Trinity's followers really want her to stop doing that, but she's ignoring their concerns entirely. When she heads out as a random human, it is for a night of fun, sometimes picking up men or women for one night stands and sometimes looking for werewolves to provoke and annoy for her own amusement. Trinity especially loves music, as it reminds her of her life before even her first Change, stirring her to move and dance as she once did, long ago. Occasionally she lives fevers and colds in her wake, brewing up diseases with Rabid Wolf's power as a gift even for poor, unenlightened humanity in the clubs and bars she hangs at. To her, this is an act of kindness and charity, a touch of the divine. At all times, Trinity is accompanied by at least two of her Distorted flayers, who survived and were reforged by her disease. They lack her majesty but retain the same strengthened mutations, cancerous overgrowths along their skin and, typically, multiple extra limbs. Like Trinity, their claws are long and terrible, but most of them lack her precision and finesse, being more savage butchers. The flayers are not actually part of her personal pack - they're just fanatic devotees. Presumably they too spend a lot of time hidden in stolen skins when dealing with humans. Those skin-stealing expeditions aren't good for Trinity, however. Her mind is starting to unravel, between the infection and overuse of skin-stealing. On her last big hunt, she briefly went into a fugue state, tearing at her flesh and causing the entire attack to grind to a halt as her followers panicked. The loyalty of her followers has kept her rivals among the Pure from learning about hear attempts to tear her own face off in panic, but the Forsaken they were attacking saw it. Exploiting Trinity's slowly crumbling sense of self might be key to defeating her cult. She also has problems in that cult - given how many Distorted she creates, it shouldn't be surprising that some of them take her teachings and run off to please themselves with them. A rival Distorted has started up his own cult, proclaiming that his massive, flabby growths are the true manifestation of Wolf's intent. Infighting between the two Distorted may soon break out, and if so the new contagion may end up getting destroyed in the fighting...but if so, it'll be at great cost to Trinity's cult as well, as they waste their strength on each other rather than the Forsaken. On the other hand, it's more likely that the conflict will just make both sides produce more and more dangerous, infectious Distorted. Pure Totems tend to be very hands-on in their work, and Trinity's pack totem is directly advising her through all this. It is a festering spirit of disease, and it communicates with her through diseases. Often, messages will come in the form of infected animals biting humans, raising up bloody welts on their skin that take the form of First Tongue words. Trinity hunts these victims down and flays them to read, but a rare few are pampered a kept as sacred slaves, forced to recite the words that form on their skin and praise Trinity until Lunacy burns out their minds or causes them to become Wolf-Bloods. These Wolf-Bloods are considered to be favored by Rabid Wolf, and are treated extremely well in honor of the scars written upon their skin via the pox. Trinity lacks any forms but Gauru at this point, though it no longer suffers from the usual rage associated with it...and the usual regeneration. It retains its superhuman physical abilities, though, and Trinity is also crazy charismatic if you're willing to listen to a ten foot tall wolf monster with eight arms. She can spend Willpower to reactivate her regenerative abilities at the cost of also reactivating the killing rage of Gauru form, but otherwise only regenerates at half normal speed. She is infectious as if she were a Geryo, but only her bite transmits the infection, not her claws or other attacks. She's a pretty potent werewolf, fast and tough and with a lot of Essence, as well as a good selection of Gifts to heal her followers, steal skins, spread disease, scare people, buff her followers by driving them to a fever pitch of madness, sense various things around her and track her prey without being caught. Trinity's also powerful enough have a Ban - she must spend an extended period dancing at least once per day. Typically, she does so as part of her daily prayer rituals to Rabid Wolf. She and her flayers also have a unique ability to very easily skin people. Whenever they deal Lethal damage with their natural weapons, they can reflexively use their Skin Thief Gift to steal a portion of the torn skin and instantly copy the prey's form. This can even be used on werewolves, though it only steals their human form's appearance, not any other abilities or shapes. The Flayers are Trinity's elect, chosen by the Geryo strain. They tend to be chaotically mutated, but their strain shares particular features that reflect Trinity's own mutations. The example statblock is a Predator King that has lost all but his near-man and Gauru forms and regenerates at only half speed, but has a ton of arms (and cancerous growths) and is superhumanly strong and tough. He's not very smart, though. Basically, Trinity's followers tend to be excellent fighters but rely on her for direction and planning. (Which she's honestly not super good at, but she is good at just causing chaos and that's all she really needs.) Flayers also have a Ban - they must always answer to the name of the last skin they wore for at least a day after wearing it. Next time: GM Advice and Campaign Types
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Sep 8, 2019 17:35
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 As a reminder, I'll be closing this thread and starting a fresh one in ~24 hours. If you have any suggestions for the new OP, let me know in the meantime. You don't need to finish or end your reviews; you can just continue them on in the new thread. That's all!
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Sep 9, 2019 01:15
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
"Resleeving into a better thread"
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Sep 9, 2019 01:21
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2 FATAL 2 Friends
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Sep 9, 2019 02:05
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
Also, FATAL and Friends 2020: Featuring Dante From The Devil May Cr
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Sep 9, 2019 02:10
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
It could be helpful to have a quick set of guidelines on how to format posts for later archival. Edit: Hard to believe that just this one iteration of the thread has been around for four years. That there are still RPG products to read and be mad about after so many reviews is kind of mind-blowing. Just Dan Again fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Sep 9, 2019 |
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Sep 9, 2019 04:02
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There's always more and some of it's bad.
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Sep 9, 2019 04:11
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Some of it's real good, though.
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Sep 9, 2019 04:16
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  ECLIPSE PHASE X-RISKS - THE FINAL CHAPTER - gently caress TO THIS BOOK I started this book almost blind, I had skimmed it before and looking at the pictures it looked like a cool book. I was expecting these monsters to be a more positive contrast with the huge amount of dross in the Numenera bestiary I did. I was very wrong. Not only does this book have an EVEN HIGHER dross:good stuff ratio, it's also much more depressing than Numenera. At least Numenera had a sense of whimsy about it. It also doesn't help that the Eclipse Phase system, or maybe just how these monsters are made, means that the only difference between a PC and a godlike shard of a TITAN is the number of skill points they have. It's not a fun way to do things. That said, there are some guys I like in this post! Look out! Wastewalker  SSSSSSSSSMOKIN'! Threat level - Orange If you see a cool mask in the quarantine zone, don't touch it! It will make you put it on, and once you put it on you will go from a nebbish loser everyone picks on, to a zoot-suited, green-faced, cartoon trickster. Or, well, that was what they did in the 90s. Now to fit in with the grim cyberpunk future, you get tall and skinny, and your skin turns into polymer armour. You do at least get a hump on your back with some mini-smokestacks that can spray out disassembler or assembler nanoswarms, which I assume is how you accomplish your cartoon style hijinks. Unlike most exsurgents, these guys are still fully intelligent, talk to each other in radio noises, and have a tribal structure out there in the wastes of Mars or Earth(hence the name). There's usually a boss wastewalker in each tribe, and everyone else does what they say. Which is mostly hunting transhumans and small animals to eat. It sounds like a pretty good time, no rep score, no hypercapitalism, not a phone in sight: just guys bein' dudes. Whiplash  feed me seymour Threat level - Yellow It's grimdark weepinbell from pokemon. It climbs around in the trees of some alien world using its root tentacles, then ambushes dudes and eats them with its long-rear end tongue. That is all. The most interesting thing about this guy is that in the book of bodies for EP there is a body based on this thing, so you can be a cool plant guy. Whipper  i wasss onsssssce a maaaan Threat level - Yellow This is a strain of the exsurgent virus that turns you into the thing in the picture. Then you scuttle around on your tiny little legs and whip stuff with your deadly, deadly tentacles. They constantly, eternally whip their sharp tentacles around like its meatspin dot com up in here. It seems like maybe one of the most useless things you could turn someone into, compared to all the other exsurgents, since when guns exist your tentacles are much less useful. I guess that's why it's threat level yellow. Wild Artificial  bro you shouldnt eat at mcdonalds their burgers are wild artificial Threat level - Orange Uuuh so according to this entry there are enough wacky anarchists on Mars releasing robots into the wilderness, either by carelessness or as art projects, for there to be a 'booming population' of rogue robots. Now I recognise this for what it is, Eclipse Phase, this is just an attempt to reskin a generic wolf as something more interesting! Well it won't work on me, pal! They do at least list a few variant traits you can give them, like one that spits freezing goo, one that is an escaped smuggler bot which has stealth and hidden compartments, one which suicide explodes (great) and some others. The best thing about this entry is the chat bubble, which tells the story of someone actually trying to do the 'paperclip maximizer' thought experiment, so there are just packs of robots out there turning everything they can eat into miles-long chains of paperclips. Wrapper  it's SO HAPPY! Threat level - Yellow/Orange Now we're talking! This is my favourite guy in the book, and that is 90% down to the art. It is a big jolly starfish that drops onto your head and eats it. Pretty much exactly a classic D&D monster, except this is an exsurgent, so that happy starfish used to be a man. If I could be one exsurgent it would be this guy or the wastewalker. They can't digest artificial stuff, so they just barf up any cortical stacks they swallow, which means they have a small ecosystem of extremely lazy TITAN robots hanging around their hunting grounds, hungry for those stacks. They can't get enough of those stacks! The chat bubble has a guy getting mad people keep deleting his edits to space wikipedia where he is adding the 'mind wrapper' variant which has psychic powers and puppeteers the bodies of people it drops on. Everyone else is telling him its not real, but he is adamant that it is. The entry confirms that it is real, btw, which is why this entry has two threat ratings. It would be fun to be a giant happy starfish with mind control powers, imo. Xenosampler  banned from every surviving Costco Threat level - Orange Is what it says on the tin. It's an alien drone that samples things. It's forgotten how to get home for whatever reason. Firewall doesn't know it exists, which kind of fucks up the framing device that this book is a Firewall reference document, good going on that. Ya blew it. It's got a freezy-cone attack, a taser, a sampling needle, and one of those poles they use to catch stray dogs with, the one with the hoop on the end. They're not really hostile, and are wary of sentient life, but have still come into hostilities with a gatecrashing team for some reason? The book doesn't say why. Zombie Crab  Threat level - Orange Not a crab that is a zombie, but a crab that creates them. Zombie crabs like to scratch you with their claws, then let you go home. Little do you know, you are infected with a disease. An infectious disease that spreads to your friends. It makes you stupid, and really hot, not sexy hot but temperature hot. That means you wind up seeking water to cool off in, and guess who is in the water? Zombie crab. Genius. Zombie crab is the investment banker of the ocean, reaping its deadly ROI. I like the art for this guy a lot, it looks like a magic: the gathering monster or something. Zephyr  https://can Threat level - Red Zephyr's are the whale-sized apex predators of an artificial ecosystem on a gas giant world out there in the pandora gate system. That's a pretty cool sentence. Aliens apparently built a whole custom ecosystem that could survive in a world entirely made of gas, and it's a pretty cool idea. I don't necessarily know how likely the average player group is to go to a gas giant, given that there's only really gas there, but I guess you could make up a story about some type of ship being marooned there with valuable data or whatever. It's main power is its size, it can easily swallow you whole or drag you away into the infinite sky with its two tails. It's a fairly simple adaptation of a big ocean predator type to a gas giant, but the backstory is cool enough that I like the Zephyr. It's not an exsurgent, it doesn't have a stupid lifecycle, and it looks cool. Keep on truckin', Zephyr! THAT'S ALL FOLKS, NOW HOPEFULLY I HAVE LEARNED MY LESSON AND WILL NEVER DO AN ECLIPSE PHASE BOOK AGAIN The back of the book has rules for about 3000 diseases and minor critters, but there are no cool pictures so it is too boring for me to cover.
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Sep 9, 2019 05:25
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Whiplash Except! Firstly it's a pod morph, so in EP1 it's arbitrarily more garbage than the others both in stats and in types of equippable mods. Secondly, being a rare specialized weirdo plantimal morph, there's not even the excuse that "it's the only thing we could get you on short notice!" because no one would sleeve in this except on purpose to be a plant. Thirdly, being a plantimal rather than a plant it doesn't even look particularly plantlike, and it's crammed full of cybernetic components, so you couldn't even give it a reason to exist for camouflage/infiltration purposes. Because Eclipse Phase 1 likes to penalize you for being anything other than a Metal Man or a Meat Man as generically as possible.
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Sep 9, 2019 05:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Except!  i knew thinking EP did something cool was going to bite me
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Sep 9, 2019 06:26
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The thing all the Epic feats from the Epic Level Handbook really make me think is that so many of them are just... by 20th level, if you don't have a magic weapon with that ability already, you probably never needed or wanted it. Enhancement bonus to punches? Chaotic quality on a weapon? Some huge skill bonus to maximize? That's what geeps are for, not levels!juggalo baby coffin posted:The back of the book has rules for about 3000 diseases and minor critters, but there are no cool pictures so it is too boring for me to cover. I have learned well that I will know the aliens by their vagina dentatta or lamprey mouths. uh, maybe don't do a search on the former to make sure you're spelling that right, thanks for getting right to the business, google 
Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Sep 9, 2019 |
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Sep 9, 2019 07:01
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The thing all the Epic feats from the Epic Level Handbook really make me think is that so many of them are just... by 20th level, if you don't have a magic weapon with that ability already, you probably never needed or wanted it. Enhancement bonus to punches? Chaotic quality on a weapon? Some huge skill bonus to maximize? That's what geeps are for, not levels! Exactly. And once we get to the Magic Items chapter, your gut feeling that having a million gold pieces is better than a lovely feat that duplicates a single magic weapon quality will be vindicated. But first I need to stay focused enough to get through the Epic Spell chapter, which will probably end up being in the new thread.
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Sep 9, 2019 07:19
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
FATAL & Friends: The Old Thread Was Better.
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Sep 9, 2019 12:38
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FATAL & Friends: The New Edition That's Much Too MMO-Like
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Sep 9, 2019 13:23
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quote:
Worth noting that some of these can use guns and tools, which, for obvious reasons, ups the threat level dramatically. Wrapper it's SO HAPPY! Threat level - Yellow/Orange quote:Now we're talking! This is my favourite guy in the book, and that is 90% down to the art. It is a big jolly starfish that drops onto your head and eats it. Pretty much exactly a classic D&D monster, except this is an exsurgent, so that happy starfish used to be a man. If I could be one exsurgent it would be this guy or the wastewalker. They can't digest artificial stuff, so they just barf up any cortical stacks they swallow, which means they have a small ecosystem of extremely lazy TITAN robots hanging around their hunting grounds, hungry for those stacks. They can't get enough of those stacks! He is actually she - having gawked at Firewall, she's... well, Firewall suspects her, with good reason, to be something of a closet exhuman - you missed the funniest part, namely that they're afraid she'll engineer one. PurpleXVI posted:Except! Only uses I can think of is that either you're going to The Plantimal Planet and need something that can run on the local food and won't immediately stick out like a human or robot to immediate examination, or you're the kind of Async that needs a non-human body to not go scatty and this appeases the virus - though you'd have to upgrade to a brain box to get most use out of it. The Scurrier is far more useful as far as I can see, being a bilaterally symmetrical vertebrate, that can glide, doesn't have to lick EVERYTHING - one of the more significant drawbacks to that pod, I'm sure you can see - small enough to get everywhere, and in a pinch can be tweaked to pass as something like a odd looking Swarm Cat.
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Sep 9, 2019 13:31
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juggalo baby coffin posted:
Wait, isn't that just "Starro the Conqueror"?
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Sep 9, 2019 13:36
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kommy5 posted:Wait, isn't that just "Starro the Conqueror"? It's a loving Trapper from D&D.
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Sep 9, 2019 13:37
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 18:57 |
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Starro doesn't eat heads, he possesses the Justice league so Batman Beyond can prove he's just as good as old Bruce.
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Sep 9, 2019 13:43
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