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U.T. Raptor posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ1qOe-k-Ss Going back to this talent, I just realised the legendary version is a bit different. Technically you can define almost anything as a mount - so if you're small, you can quite easily jump on that almighty lich wizard endboss and turn him into a mount. Or anything else!
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Sep 12, 2019 13:04
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(okay, the scene with the snake was slightly more on-point, but the only copy I could find on Youtube was of hilariously god-awful quality)
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Mounts have to be one size category larger than you, or specifically stated to be able to carry your weight. Insert halfling luchador wrestling all the big bads into submission. Redemption by suplex.
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Sep 12, 2019 13:13
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Kurieg posted:Mounts have to be one size category larger than you, or specifically stated to be able to carry your weight. By god it's Slamwise Gamgee's music!
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Sep 12, 2019 14:00
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I like the grigsbane, which keeps magical pests away "unreliably." So, 50 orbs for something that may or may not actually work? (Or, more likely, works until the DM decides that it doesn't.) Night10194 posted:By god it's Slamwise Gamgee's music! He's got him in the Shire Sharpshooter! It's over!
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Sep 12, 2019 14:10
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Night10194 posted:By god it's Slamwise Gamgee's music! "I may not be able to suplex my personal issues." *Crowd pops and joins in the chant* "BUT I CAN! SUPLEX! YOU!"
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Sep 12, 2019 14:33
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Ripping off all of this for the Dungeonbrawl game I'll eventually run. Slamwise goes in the battle royale with Jake the Drake, Umber Hulk Hogan, and the Macho Modron.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:22
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Halloween Jack posted:Ripping off all of this for the Dungeonbrawl game I'll eventually run. Slamwise goes in the battle royale with Jake the Drake, Umber Hulk Hogan, and the Macho Modron. Shame about Umber Hulk Hogan's racism, though.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:28
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Yeah that whole thing with Bubba The Love Gelatinous Cube's wife and the lawsuit was real lovely.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:29
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I was going to make a Peter Thiel joke but I already planned a dungeon run by a fascist vampire
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Sep 12, 2019 15:33
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition Post 3, Randomness I should also note a really interesting bit in the 'what is this game about' part just before character creation. I will quote directly, because it warms my heart to see this stated so clearly in a game from 1986: "The GM cannot 'win' as such. His aim should be to provide an interesting and demanding game for the players. Because of his unique position, the GM could kill off a player's character at any time, but that is not the idea of the game and should not be the aim of the GM." It's really nice to see a game that starts right off the bat with 'Adversarial GMing is kind of a dumb idea, because the GM has ultimate power to do whatevs and so 'killing the players' isn't a good gaming goal for the GM. One of the things that stands out for me throughout the whole book is that the GMing advice is surprisingly good. It focuses on trying to find ways to provide a challenge and force players to make plans or feel tense without focusing on killing everyone all the time (because players will enjoy advancing and sometimes seeing their clever plans succeed). Fate Points likely come out of this mindset as a nice way to cushion lethal situations and damage, letting you still throw nasty stuff that could go either way at players without TPKing them all the time. A friend of mine always said his impression of 2e was that it wants to look meaner than it is, so that when you somehow succeed it feels great. Considering that's an explicit goal of 1e's GMing advice, I'd say that's very likely true in 2e as well. Now on to making some example people. So, we'll be making two people to see how differently they come out. I'll even roll for their species; d4 to see who they are. Rolls are 2 (Elf) and 1 (Human). Rolling d4 for species isn't normally in the game, but I can't make one of everybody. We'll do the human first, because then we'll have something to compare the elf to. I start out by rolling 2d10 down the line (except for d3 for Movement, Wounds, S, and T) and get 5 Movement, 6 Wounds, 3 Str, 4 Toughness, plus 32 WS, 26 BS, 37 Init, 23 Dex, 29 Ld, 36 Int, 35 Cool, 26 WP, and 33 Fel. Got some real highs and lows on our would-be hero here. Somehow extremely fast and agile for a human, but can't handle fine motor control to save her life. She'll be a her. She's 5' 9" (5'+d10 Inches), and we'll say she's young. To get her age, we roll 6d6, and then if the result is under 16 we roll again and add them together. She's 22, which is in a good range for a human (+1 random skills) but not the best (30-40 is optimal for an adventurer at +2 skills). She also rolls for Fate and gets 3, average for a human. She rolls a d4 for how many random skills she gets and adds 1 for age. A 4 here means she has 5 skills outside her Career, and humans do not have any mandatory Random Skills, unlike everyone else. They just go right to the rolling tables. She'll be a Rogue considering her stats. Dicing off for skills, she'll be a woman of Lightning Reflexes (+10 base Init), Fleet of Foot (+1 Mv, she's lightning quick), both Silent Move Rural and Urban, and Very Resilient for +1 T. So she's basically an elite athlete who got into thievery, but who has terrible manual dexterity. Next, she rolls for Career. Getting a 66, she's a Raconteur, a wandering storyteller. This gives her Blather, Seduction, Charm, Public Speaking, Story Telling, and Wit, and a 25% chance of Etiquette. She hits it with a 20, so she actually knows her manners very well. She picks up +10 Fel as her Free Advance because hey. She'll need +10 WS, +1 Wound, +10 Ld, +10 Int, and +10 Cool before she can finish. She has to get cooler. Something to note is these skills are a mixture of what skills would do in 2e, and what Talents do in 2e: Blather unlocks the ability to make a Fel test to try to confuse people (and to do it for a full d6 Rounds if succeeded by 10% or more), which doesn't work in combat and is used to buy time. Charm, by contrast, effectively gives +10 Fellowship (Giving her a base 53 now!). Her Silent Moves aren't even rolled for; they instead penalize the base chances of enemies to hear her at various distances in various environments. Seduction is as weird as it always is (+10 to most tests with members of the opposite sex, can make people sleep with her if they fail a WP test against her) and a product of its time. There's gonna be a lot of products of their time. Public Speaking lets her work crowds up to her Ld stat rather than just talking to small groups. Wit is a straight +10 to Bluffing and Gossiping; note a lot of stuff that was a skill in 2e is just a standard test type and having various skills gives bonuses to it and/or lets it work on more people or do something new. Storytelling improves Gossiping and Busking by 10%. Note that all this taken together means if she's gossiping among people attracted to her, she's at like 83% base chance of learning interesting stuff already; she's really good at her chosen job off the bat. I'm talking in detail about starting skills here because it's a good place to get across a sampling of them without having to go hard on them. Also, being extremely good at running away very quickly (and able to hold her liquor or take a punch) seems like a good talent for a wandering storyteller and lady of wit. Mia Becker is tough, quick on her feet, and has long since incorporated her butterfingers and poor manual dexterity into a talent for physical comedy. The way she does pratfalls, one almost wouldn't notice that doing them without hurting herself takes enormous physical grace that her shakey hands don't seem to match. She looks like a fun character to play, honestly. Next up, I'm grabbing the Elf Name Generator from 4e and going in on an Elf. I should also note here that 1e's fluff for the High Elves really plays up that the ones in the Old World are often lovely first world tourists on trust funds having 'adventure vacations' and 'slumming it', which I adore. I've always run/written Ulthuan as the Hams 1st World because it's fun and I'm glad to know it was the original take in the RPG! Galolric will be our elf, and he starts out rolling stats: 6 Movement (d3+3), 5 Wounds, 4 Strength, 2 Toughness. Note outliers in Str and Tough are much more common in 1e since they're 1/3 of rolls. He's buff, but always skipped cardio. However, he has a natural 49 WS, 22 BS (lol), 69 Init (leaving Mia in the dust), 40 Dex, 42 Ld, 55 Int, 58 Cl, 45 WP, and 46 Fel. Not only did he have higher stats in general, but goddamn, I rolled like mad for this elf. The only thing he sucks with is bows. Look at how his stats are compared to Mia, it's nuts. However, he only has 1 Fate. And with 2 Toughness and 5 Wounds, he's probably gonna regret that! Gal will be a Warrior; his stats basically demand it. He'll also be young, and he's 6' 4" (5' 6"+d10 Inches). A young elf is 10d12, min 16 like humans. Gal's 46, very young for an elf to be out and about. This just barely gives him +1 Skills. He rolls his d4 and gets a 3, so he has 4 Skills. He has to start with Excellent Vision, but also a choice of Dance, Musicianship, or Singing. He'll take Musicianship. That means he only gets 2 random rolls. Note that having no Mandatory Skills is meant to be a human advantage. He gets Lightning Reflexes and Singing. So he's really good at music in general and he's got a 79% Init from day 1. He is a buff, but poorly conditioned elf pop star or something. Rolling for Career, he's no great warrior at all, he's just someone else's Servant, escaped to try to find a life of adventure and let his natural talents show. Servant...well, it's one of those careers that isn't very good. The only thing he's guaranteed is Dodge Blow. He has a bunch of small chances for extra skills from his day job, and does come out of it knowing Etiquette and Cooking. Etiquette is as it is in 2e: +10% with high society diplomacy. Cooking makes his field rations nicer (just a roleplaying thing) but also gives him +10 to notice poison in food or drink, because he's used to tasting stuff to see if it's 'off'. So while Mia's career made her pretty good at stuff, Gal...well, he's got big dreams, I guess. And he's good at getting out of the way, there is that. And his base stats are amazing, and for the most part, base stats can carry you further without needing skills, it seems. Plus he's good at finding work as a musician (Sing and Musicianship team up for +20 to busking tests and looking for Entertainer work) and being an elf with Excellent Vision, he has a 50% higher vision range than humans. He is a man of talent who was wasted as manservant to a lovely adventure tourist High Elf. Escaping his master after the young man passed out from one too many shots at an Altdorf bar (and stealing the guy's sword and purse), Galolric tries to pass himself off as an elven knight in training and looks for adventure in a part of the world where no-one knows he should be scrubbing the floors. He'll also grab +10 WS for his Free Advance so he's as skilled as the average Chaos Warrior. So, both still came out interesting, but as you can see the heavy randomness really changes up what a character can do. Some of this is mitigated by the very different Skill and Test systems, and they're one place I'm not entirely sure 2e was fully an improvement; there's a part of me that really likes the idea that most characters can do most things on base stat pretty well and skills just team up to add to various test types. Skills in 1e are mostly what we would describe as Talents in 2e, and I actually suspect a lot of the '-10 to everything' adventure design in 2e was writers thinking in terms of 1e and not actually adapting to some of the lower base chances. If you wanted to challenge Gal on Init, it'd be pretty hard, after all. He and Mia could reasonably hit 'harder' tests in their specialties and things they're very good at. We'll get into all of this more next time in Skills and Tests. Next Time: Skills, Tests, and Subsystems Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Sep 12, 2019 |
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Sep 12, 2019 15:36
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Night Horrors: The Tormented Part 3: Matchbox Twenty  Background Image Energies Beatrice Ahuja was once a member of a Promethean throng known as the Matchbox. They were close to the New Dawn, seemingly empowered by Pyros and vitality, ready to seize their new lives. They had long been held in regard for what passes as Promethean society for their simple but effective studies of the Refinements (read: philosophies of humanity), Lineages and Pandorans. Many eagerly awaited news of their ascension to humanity. One night, however, Beatrice sent out a message: "The Matchbox is alight. There will be no ascension. There will be no survivors. We were betrayed by our own hopes, willing to step on each other's faces for a chance to live. We threw each other into the fire as hope guided us to a new, flickering light. I am the only one left. I did not reach the light. The others are dead. The Ladder is a folly. There is no hope for creatures like us." The report spread far and wide, crushing optimism for many, while others sought Beatrice to learn the details. They could not find her. Before her fall, Beatrice was a widely recognized (for Promethean values of 'widely recognized') paragon of the Refinement of Gold, a master of emulating humanity, but quickly abandoned it for Iron, being an outspoken proponent of avoiding over-reliance on Alembics (read: specially developed Promethean powers) because they slowed down progress of the soul. She moved on to Lead after that. This is, as a side note, the mechanically correct choice as a Promethean - once you complete your Refinement's Roles, you should swap. Anyway, Beatrice's philosophy appealed to many, despite the controversial nature of it, because while it was tempting to rest easy in a Refinement, her way was one of constant internal growth and motion. She had constant energy, being an Extempore (read: Promethean of unique Lineage) born of pure energy, and she was the core around which the Matchbox formed. Her fall was a terrible thing, and it seemed that in the final moments, when one of the Matchbox might have to give up their life for the rest or perhaps that the New Dawn could visit only one of them, they could not give up their own hopes and fell to internal strife. In a moment of despair, Beatrice attempted to recreate her throng and find her old purpose. It went horribly wrong. Her efforts to resurrect them may have been tainted by bitterness or perhaps she used too much of the static and white noise that was her own humour in the process. What awoke were physical replicas of the old Matchbox, but with a constant hiss of energy around them, black and white static in their eyes and a terrible crackling whenever they spoke. Beatrice fell to the path of the Centimanus out of despair at having made these Pandorans. They depleted her power, but they did not attempt to kill her. Rather, they recognized her sacrifices in making them and did their best to comfort their "mother," allowing her to exist within them as a buzzing audio form until she was able to re-emerge into her own physical existence. The Ahuja Pandorans, as some call them, now terrorize Prometheans in an effort to inflict twisted versions of Beatrice's moral lessons. They came after those Prometheans that do not move on in their roles, seeking to steal their power via fear and devouring. They rarely kill, preferring to leave their prey as withered but living husks. Somehow, they channel Beatrice's belief that the New Dawn can only be gained by abandoning pursuit of personal power, though they have only a vestigial grasp or memory of her old cause. Beatrice herself no longer believes in her old code, thanks to the betrayals she saw and took part in, and her "children" subverting her beliefs to weaken others has only increased her loss of faith. Beatrice's existence is within her Pandorans, spread between their bodies in a state of tortured mourning. She is able to communicate through them - the rare times their words make any sense are when her consciousness surfaces, dreamlike, to speak - but she can't control their actions, which are driven by her nightmares and suffering. Beatrice really wishes another way existed, but she is convinced that all Prometheans are hopeless and that the New Dawn is impossible. She really believes the Matchbox were the best of all Prometheans, and if they were unable to achieve humanity, no one else has any hope of it. Therefore, by giving everyone else a harsh reality check, she's doing them a favor, really. Beatrice herself has not been seen since her message went out, but is remembered as being a Sikh woman with traditional bana in blue and yellow, a kind face and a permanent crackle in her voice, as if she'd spent a lifetime smoking. Today, she primarily appears through the bodies of her "children," each of which manifests her abilities with varying focus. Each Pandoran resembles a member of the Matchbox - a huge, tanned Tammuz with Maori tattoos, a spiny, scary Galateid with green hair, an innocent-looking Frankenstein that resembles a child sewn up after an autopsy, and a Faceless in a gas mask that stinks of ammonia. They were made using the bodies of the Matchbox, but their actions bear little resemblance to their forebears, with any resemblances driven only by Beatrice's memories. Ahuja and her Pandorans all possess strange humours, being Extempore. Specifically, they buzz and crackle with static electricity at all times, making hair stand on end and causing earaches, as well as disrupting local electronic transmissions. When wounded or purging Vitriol (read: enlightenment juice) they leak vibrant static energies, which are able to overload anything in the local area capable of producing feedback; that feedback takes the form of Beatrice wailing and crying. Unlike most, the Ahuja Pandorans are not simply automata without thought. They target only strong Prometheans, both to feed on them and to teach them "valuable lessons." Some Prometheans understand they are somehow tied to Ahuja, but have not managed to figure out a way to communicate with her while she hibernates inside the Pandorans. Each one wears a skull around their necks, believed to be taken from the Prometheans whose bodies were used to create them. Despite her depression, Beatrice remains a wise being, and while her throng failed in its goal, their work wasn't entirely in vain. Ahuja's theories led them to a Pilgrimage that was not harmful to the mortals they met, and was relatively fast compared to most others. While their communal betrayal ruined their plans, their method was in fact a good one - and as I noted, the mechanically optimal path. If Beatrice could be made to understand the errors the Matchbox made, she might be able to remember her philosophy and become a teacher again...but it'll be hard while she's on the Refinement of Flux. Beatrice genuinely loves her Pandorans despite their state, in part due to their resemblance to her old friends and in part because they held her when she needed it, even if it caused them to absorb her for a while. She knows making them was an act of madness, but currently they are her sole comfort. If a throng were able to somehow bring her Pandorans together and address them as intelligent beings capable of hope, Beatrice might talk through them. A tiny part of her consciousness still believes that redeeming her would be of no import compared to allowing her Pandorans to somehow engage in the Pilgrimage, and giving her the ability to do so might resurrect her lost hopes. It wouldn't fix everything, however. Many that looked to Beatrice for hope turned Centimanus when her fall came and her last message went out, driven to despair by the loss of what they saw as their great mentor. While redeeming her would be nice, some Prometheans are not going to forgive her and would try to kill her for what they see as a betrayal of all of their kind. Others believe that she's just an agent of chaos, that the entire story's a hoax designed to dupe people into sympathy for her. If so, Beatrice certainly isn't confirming it. Her depression prevents much communication, of course, but if confronted by this rumor her reaction might be terrible. It claims she has legions of Pandorans based on her throngmates lying in wait to strike as she laughs at everyone else. Also of note - while Beatrice is still stuck inside her Pandorans, something else has come out of them. An energy creature that very much resembles Beatrice has emerged, speaking with her voice. It emerged from the residual energies left by her Pandorans when they use her powers. It is a reflection of the old Beatrice, essentially an energy-based ghost or reflection. It does not appear to be aware that it's not the real Beatrice, and it seems to be acting as the old Beatrice would. Beatrice is a pretty experienced Promethean, extremely smart but not really bad at anything. She's not a fighter, but her stats mean she'd be pretty slow to die even by Promethean standards. She has a wide but shallow array of magic powers. She can boost her speed and athleticism, toughen herself up and appear as a normal human, command Pandorans, disrupt the use of Promethean powers, boost her vision and see various invisible things, boost her scent, hearing and taste, detect or disrupt supernatural powers generally, sense memories with a touch, and boost her resolve and will.  It's a skin condition. Dr. Bennet Prichard is the best friend a Hunter could have. No matter what monster threatens, he has a lead or theory to keep you going. He connects various Hunter cells, helping them find others with similar causes. He rises to the occasion, coordinating hunts and even helping fight occasionally. He's smart, fast and all he wants are live captures so he can experiment on some monsters to develop new tools to help the hunt. It's taken him a very long time to build up this reputation and persona among Hunters, and it's all to find new supernatural beings to analyze and dissect, so that he can find what's missing from his own broken existence. He's certain he's on the right path - the truth is there, waiting for him in the flesh of his subjects. He's not always been so sure, but he's always been curious. At first, his curiosity was limited to his own body, the feelings of it and the idiosyncracies of his muscles and tendons. He was a gentle watcher, separate from humanity but fascinated by them. However, something hid among them, and that something noticed him watching. One night, the somethings took him, strapping him to a table in their lair. For years, he suffered under their experiments. They studied him, vivisected him, took notes and whispered to each other about what he might be. He fell into despair, interrupted only by the pain of the incisions. His captors studied him scientifically and mystically to determine what he was, and while they questioned him, he had no answers they liked. He thought his torture would be eternal - but one night, gunfire burst through the lair of these witches. They had caught the attention of Hunters, and those saviors hadn't a clue what Prichard was beyond a victim of the witches. They freed him, and as he recovered, he had an epiphany. His experience, agonizing though it was, had given him something. Prichard set about creating a relationship with his mortal saviors, learning about their ideal of stamping out monsters that preyed on humans. He turned his skills at watching and study to seeing the patterns of mortals and the creatures thatm oved among them. His first deal was for a vampire - he'd lead his new friends to a vampire nest in exchange for one of the monsters to study. While at first reluctant, the Hunters agreed when they learned how much information Prichard had gatheredo n the nest. As the vampires burned, he took his prize home and set about cutting it apart. For more than a decade, he has worked with Hunter cells, providing them information to gain their trust and helping them figure out how to fight the things they go up against. In exchange, he receives subjects to study. He sends out regular info updates, can call on hunter cells to provide backup for those that work with him, will help with his exceptional surgical skills and will even sometimes go onsite to provide direct backup. He keeps his social interactions with the cells as brief as possible, of course, but all of them know that when it gets bad, they can count on the Doc. Prichard is very unsettling. His skin is covered in patches of vitiligo, and so gaunt that the lines of his skull are nearly visible, making him come off as skeletal. He appears to be a well-groomed (but for the pale patches) African-American man with a trimmed beard and close-cut hair. He dresses comfortably in well-tailored and durable clothes and, usually, a lab coat. His hands are practically bone-white and usually covered by dark gloves. He's not large, but he's fit and wiry, with nimble hands and a slight limp. Few notice that his left leg is prosthetic. His voice is a deep, soft baritone that requires attention to be able to catch what he's saying, as he's not loud. He speaks briefly and with few words, never interrupts anyone, and has a piercing stare. He never jokes and does not even really acknowledge that humor is a thing. He is serious, direct and doesn't conceal irritation when dealing with people that waste his time. The Hunters that deal with him speak highly of him, to the point of absolute loyalty, even though he never treats them in a friendlier way than slight smiles and handshakes. He is eager to hear any news they bring, and while he considers some of them friends, earning his friendship is a very slow process. The only thing that can really rattle Prichard's demanor is direct disrespect, either to himself or his friends. When angry, he often hisses at the cause, gets up in their space and forces them to either engage him or back away. Because he knows the risks of his allies discovering his true nature, Prichard keeps all meetings as brief as possible and is rarely available to any given person for more than a few minutes. He knows even these brief interactions hold the danger of Disquiet, which could unravel all he's worked for. Thus, he spends much of his time online, hunting for traces of supernatural activity. He's extremely interested in finding another Promethean to study and dissect, much as he was once studied by wizards. He will pay heavily for any information on beings similar to himself in any fashion. He knows they exist, but hasn't seen one since his genitor created him. He's actually starting to lose hope. After years of work, his studies have started to plateau and he's yet to find anything that concretely aids his Pilgrimage. He has recorded the internal alchemy of dozens of monsters, but they've never been very close to his own condition, so he has few breakthroughs. Because of his deceptions and his fear of discovery, it should perhaps be unsurprising that the lack of progress has caused him to daydream of leaving his path and giving up. If he ever does become a Centimanus, his hunter allies are in grave danger. Doc Prichard is very careful to keep his lair hidden, but folks aren't dumb. There's rumors flying about the industrial district of his city, and the poor and homeless whisper about his comings and goings. They watch him until he finally calls in his friends to push them out. So far, Prichard's never had any of them killed, but it's only a matter of time before he has to cross that line, given how curious people are getting about the weird guy that drags bodies in and calls in thugs to clear them out of his sewage tunnels. Younger hunters often discuss over drinks what the good doctor might actually be - he knows so much about the undead condition, after all. While their elders that have worked with him longer are deeply loyal, the younger and more curious theorize he could be anything from a rogue witch to a traitor vampire. The older hunters usually end these rumors as best they can, but sometimes the foolhardy go looking for trouble they're unable to handle. It'd be fairly easy for new Hunters or Prometheans in town to overhear these discussions at a bar and start seeking the truth. On a positive note for the city (and a negative one for Prichard), they're actually running low on targets. As he grows desperate, he's been sending more and more hunters out to capture monsters - particularly the street-level vampires that ran many of the city's gangs. Without direction and with their leaders being kidnapped, these gangs and enforcers are too scared to act. While that's nice, it's also really weird, and more than a few people have taken notice and want to know why. Prichard is an Osiran, quite smart but not really remarkable outside that. He's a decent-ish fighter, but it's his academic skills that make him so useful to his Hunter buddies. They and his well-hidden lair are what make him so hard to take down, if that was your goal. He is able to charge objects with Divine Fire to empower them, raise corpses as zombie pseudo-Prometheans he can question about their lives or command, can temporarily immobilize people, is good at preventing his Disquiet from spreading, can make his bodily fluids poisonous, can sense the past presence of other Prometheans, tap into the Promethean collective memory to get temporary skills, can imprint his own memories on places for others to find, and can drain Pyros from other Prometheans or can tear it out of the flesh of living beings. Next time: The Showman, Madame Happythoughts
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Sep 12, 2019 16:18
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Really shouldve rolled a Dwarf Slayer so we could get on the Naked Dwarf Syndrome train
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Sep 12, 2019 16:32
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Yeah, but I was letting the dice decide everything in the spirit of things. For reference, if you think Mia is tough (and she is), a Dwarf Troll Slayer could be starting play at T 6, naked as the day they were born. Heck, a class with +T as a Dwarf like Tunnel Fighter can potentially start with 7, and with a suit of mail. That gives them DR 8, making an average S3 foe have only a 1-6 chance of inflicting any kind of damage on them since the damage die is a d6. Of course, any time they take that damage it triggers fury chances. Still, it's possible to begin with a dorf who just kinda walks through normal attacks mocking the people who thought they could hurt him.
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Sep 12, 2019 16:38
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A Slayer can easily get their Toughness up to 9, making their skin over four times better at stopping swords than full plate armor.
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Sep 12, 2019 16:44
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Clearly this leads to a Chaos villain who has their armor made entirely out of dwarf slayer skins, and is thus invincible.
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Sep 12, 2019 16:45
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I remember when I got a invisible chair, I thought I'd like fake people out and make think think I'm hovering, but... like, you bash your knee on it all the time, and then there was the time I knocked it over and thought I'd put it right-side up but it was actually on its back and I tried to sit down and fell over. And they don't tell you how you have to keep it clean; if any like, dust or dirt falls on the thing, you just see it hovering there. I threw it away and then realized I could have given it to Goodwill if they believe it exists, but could never find it again. Don't know if somebody took it or I just lost it.
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Sep 12, 2019 16:52
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it costs 50 child labor sweatshop memories of what cheese tastes like to unreliably keep magic bugs out of your house it costs 25 personal and meaningful memories to decorate any given room gently caress this economy.
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Sep 12, 2019 17:27
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any given B&B type nicely decorated cozy inn setup costs HUNDREDS of personal memories like recipes that mean something and poo poo to furnish, let alone the cost of the building itself which must be thousands, all assuming they're not even going for high end poo poo. gently caress off Invisible Sun.
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Sep 12, 2019 17:30
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sexpig by night posted:it costs 50 child labor sweatshop memories of what cheese tastes like to unreliably keep magic bugs out of your house
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Sep 12, 2019 17:36
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Night10194 posted:Clearly this leads to a Chaos villain who has their armor made entirely out of dwarf slayer skins, and is thus invincible. the first three quarters of the campaign is the heroes trying to stop him from forging the demonknife that will let him actually cut the slayers skin
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Sep 12, 2019 17:47
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Please help me budget this my children are dying Which is really slowing down production!
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Sep 12, 2019 18:13
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Connecting this to personal enhancement discussed in chapter one like months ago: we now have a use for all those babies we made when we were grinding out our levelups. Edit: oh man how do I even find the page that was on. I mean I know I can search the thread for the word "miscarriage"... But I don't wanna 
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Sep 12, 2019 18:31
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D&D Wizards: The authors of all of life's miseries, really.
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Sep 12, 2019 18:34
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Wizards! No sense of right and wrong or game design!
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Sep 12, 2019 18:35
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Night10194 posted:
RPG Fantasy guns always seem ridiculously over-costed. Early arquebuses were quite cheap, and the more complicated wheelocks and flintlocks still weren't that pricey.
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Sep 12, 2019 18:43
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They did lower the overall cost of guns a lot in 4e. The weird thing is guns in 1e are absolute dogshit with no reason to ever use one (a pistol is a Damage 3 weapon with no ways to boost this, 1 shot per 2 rounds, and requires special training), while 2e's guns suffer some from action economy but do hit pretty hard and make a brace of pistols fairly attractive, at least. Then 4e's guns are slow but cause fear and do a fuckton of damage, plus almost no-one multi-attacks in 4e without specialized talents. As guns got more and more mechanically useful they made them less expensive/rare with each edition. The funniest thing is, my group often plays in our own 1 century later version of the 2e setting where they have access to stuff like infantry rifles and cap-and-ball revolvers. They use guns an awful lot more and it does make ranged weapons stronger, but it still hasn't removed the need for melee or made ranged unbalance the game much. They really could have left Impact on repeater pistols/firearms without it messing things up much, which I can say from experience since the Damage 4 Impact Imperial Cavalry Revolver hasn't really unbalanced the system for me.
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Sep 12, 2019 18:50
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Would it be OK to ask for a brief overview of Important Promethean Terms And Enemy Types/Groups or should I just gently caress off and wiki it?Deptfordx posted:RPG Fantasy guns always seem ridiculously over-costed. Early arquebuses were quite cheap, and the more complicated wheelocks and flintlocks still weren't that pricey. That's probably because most people don't understand guns. Arquebus is the same as a modern pistol: you shoot a person, he dies, no armor can save him. Meanwhile, a bow can get stuck in a dude or be stuck in armor. It's not how it was historically (iirc, the real heavy plate was there so you could no sell arquebus shots) or realistically, and it also ignored stuff like reload rates, accuracy (or lack thereof) or the fun of keeping a match lit, or the need to have it braced or
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Sep 12, 2019 20:26
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That's the thing; armor-piercing is hard to handle in systems like D&D where the whole attack/defense mechanic is built around armor.
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Sep 12, 2019 20:33
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Promethean overview: All Prometheans are powered by magical alchemy, animated by a dominant humour in place of, like, normal fluids. They are visibly inhuman when using their magic powers as a result, because the alchemical power blazes through. They cause Disquiet, which basically makes humans act obsessively towards them, flavored by their Lineage. Your chief subgroups are the Lineages, which are How You Got Made. The main ones are: 1. Frankensteins/The Wretched, made by being put together out of various stolen body parts. Their primary humour is yellow bile, making them hot-tempered and vengeful. They are usually super strong and can replace their body parts more easily. Their Disquiet is anger- and blame-based - they get mobs with torches and pitchforks after them for all perceived ills. 2. Galateids/The Muses, typically made of a single body made out of a desire to create the perfect object of love. Their chief humour is blood, making them tend to bravery, compassion and impracticality or confusion. They tend to be insanely beautiful and able to inspire. Their Disquiet is possessiveness - people want to own and control them. 3. Osirans/The Nepri, made from ritually prepared corpses missing a bit. Like Osiris, see. Their chief humour is phlegm, making them calm and dispassionate - sometimes to dangerous extremes of unemotionality. Also they suffer heavily from psychological fatigue and depression. They can speak to corpses and are better than other Prometheans at coming back to life. Their Disquiet is based on jealousy, obsessive curiosity and envy. 4. Tammuz/The Named are created to serve, animated by mystical names inscribed on their corpses after being buried in earth and clay. Their humour is black bile, making them meticulous, cautious and stubborn, as well as prone to insomnia and violent outbursts when upset or obsessive activity. They are able to wield mystic words of power and are very tough. Their Disquiet causes everything they say to be taken the wrong way or gets misinterpreted in the worst possible sense.. 4. Ulgans/The Riven are made when a body's soul is removed, their body gets turned into spiritual ectoplasm and is torn apart and put back together by spirits. Their humour is ectoplasm, making them driven and ambitious, but also attractive to ghosts and spirits. They tend to be protective but feel detached from others. They can see spirits and can temporarily phase in and out of reality, and they are often plagued by the memories of the spirits or ghosts bound into them as a power source. 5. Unfleshed/The Manufactured are inanimate objects brought to life by obsession, usually when a human attempts to make a perfect replica of a person out of them. These are your walking mannequins, AIs, statues, etc. Their humour is oil, reflecting both the best and worst of technology. They are obedient and eager to serve, but also prone to lashing out violently when they feel controlled by someone. They're tough because they're not made of meat. 6. Extempore/The Matchless is the catchall for weird one-offs. Prometheans follow a Refinement, a philosophical path to understanding humanity, which gives them Transmutations (broad powersets) split into Alembics (less broad powersets), and require they conform to certain roles of human behavior, which they learn to understand and master. Ideally, after mastering them, you then move on to a new Refinement until you finally achieve enough understanding and gain enough Azoth (your power stat) to become a real boy. E: Your chief antagonists are: Pandorans ('someone tried to make a Promethean and it hosed up and made a monster instead'), Alchemists (people hunting you to get at the valuable mystic juices inside your body) and Rathbens (like Alchemists, but they're scientists, not mystics, and your mystic juices are the key to mastering the science of cloning). Oh, and Centimani, who are Prometheans that have rejected the path of gaining humanity in favor of monstrosity and chaos. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Sep 12, 2019 |
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Sep 12, 2019 20:55
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Night10194 posted:
Totally saw that go down. A game back in the day, we had a tough and heavy armoured Dwarf Pc who got ahead of the party and he solo'ed at least a dozen goblins and their chief. Just waded though them.
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Sep 12, 2019 21:12
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition Post 4, Testing Your Patience Honestly, the basic resolution mechanic is exactly as it's been for every single percentile Warhammer game. Roll vs. TN on d100, if you go over TN, you fail. Under TN, you succeed. More under TN, the GM can decide you succeed by more. WHFRP 1e also had the idea that if you wanted to test two stats in short order, you could average them and get that as your TN, which is actually a good idea compared to a sequence of tests because 'Make a 50% test based on your 40% and 60% stat' is significantly less bullshit than 'Make a 40% check, then a 60% check, in sequence.' The former has way better odds! A series of tests is saved for very difficult sequences of actions, instead. We also get an enormous number of 'standard sorts of tests', but note that effectively unless something needs a skill to be attempted (similar to a 2e or 4e Advanced Skill) PCs attempt actions at their base stat. Which is effectively like having a skill trained in 2e. Your Skills mostly give bonuses, or ways to use a test in a new way. What else is curious to me is how often a test is actually a flat number; for instance, if you try to sneak around, opponents just have a fixed chance to notice the noise at various distances (with a penalty if you have Silent Move as a Skill). You don't roll at all, you just say you want to move quietly, and they roll against it at a flat number. A pretty low one, too, as long as you can move quietly. Mia can only be heard 20% of the time unless her enemies have ways to boost their Listen test. Every single test type listed in the standard tests is its own subsystem, and this is what makes me kind of conflicted. On one hand, I really like the idea of 'you can do most of the stuff we'd consider a Basic Skill later with base stat without needing to have any extra training, extra training and relevant abilities only help you out'. It opens up a much wider set of options for characters, and is more in line with 'I'm going to try a ton of options that aren't combat'. I think Basic Skill use is overly penalized in 2e; halving your stat if you don't actually have the skill means you'll generally never try to put yourself in a situation where you're going to rely on a Basic you don't have unless you have no other choice, even if you're great at its stat. The issue is that 1e's Tests are extremely random in how they work, and how skills will apply to them. There's no standardization. There are tables for your exact chance to find a job to work at for a little while between adventures. There's an entire subsystem for avoiding poison in your wine. Whether something uses a stat or just flat chances has no real rhyme or reason to it. Lock Picking suddenly introduces a specific Lock Rating that penalizes your chances. In short, 1e's tests have a simple base resolution system and then a ton of 'here's how you roll for offering a bribe' or 'here's some extra rules tacked on to picking a lock', without much streamlining. 2e is much simpler, but also introduced what I think is a too-harsh penalty for not having skills compared to the original system where almost anyone could try most tactics. 2e also did another thing that instantly makes it a better game even if I see quite a bit of merit in 1e's stuff: It tossed the idea of critical fumbles out the window, into the trash, where it belongs. Yes, 1e has fumbles. Failing by 20 or more causes you problems. Failing by 30 or more can potentially injure you or cause even bigger problems, invoking a Risk test that has a 50-50 chance (generally) of causing you d3 unreducable wounds. Lots of other test types have extra fumble effects or specific fumbles that can make things worse. This is a bad idea. Critical failure rules specifically based on your chance to succeed when your chance to succeed may be 30-50% mean you have really high odds of crit-failing to one degree or another, too. Fumble rules have always sucked, but this is even worse than usual. Especially when you recall that you don't have Fortune/rerolls like you get from Fate in 2e and 4e. Anyway, let's talk about Skills, too. Skills are another place where the game just doesn't have any sense of what an individual skill is worth, because it's not trying to. It isn't interested in trying to make skills balance against one another, it just wants to have a huge list of potential edges PCs or other characters could have from their training and experience. They're mostly fine, but it was an interesting surprise to discover that for the most part, Skills in 1e function like Talents in 2e or 4e. You also don't get any benefit from having a Skill twice, so if you rolled a random Skill or whatever but also got it from your Career, it's just wasted. One of the most annoying aspects of the Skill system is the % chance for starting skills stuff in a Basic Career. Your Physician's Apprentice can very much join the party having no idea how to do anything useful medically, because all the actual medical skills in that Career are 50% chances. Which you then have to spend EXP on if you want them, if you failed to learn them this first time. Similarly, you can actually attempt to learn any Skill in the game outside your Career if you can get a teacher, spend some money, and the GM approves. However, if you fail a stat check to learn the skill, you waste your time, money, and the 100 EXP you spent on it. Now we see where they got that rule for learning out-of-Career Talents in downtime in 4e. In general, a lot of 4e owes a lot more to 1e than 2e on a readthrough of 1e. Now, I certainly can't go over every goddamn Skill. There are 133 of them. Suffice to say they're usually very significant character advancements, though. And some of them are hilarious. Like Strongman. Which gives you +d4 max wounds and +1 Str, but requires you to spend more money on all the raw eggs you eat to keep yourself as buff as the Great Gama. If you lose your diet for 10 days, you lose this skill until you can spend enough money to have meat and eggs and stuff all the time for 30 days. Similarly, a very few skills have an embryonic version of Skill Mastery; Lock Picking requires the Pick Lock skill to try at all, and Pick Lock notes that you can acquire it more than once for +10 to Lockpick tests for each rank. Considering Skill Mastery went on to be a major cornerstone of 2e and 4e both, it's interesting to see its origins here with a couple edge cases. Also of note: Having Street Fighter didn't used to give you bonuses to unarmed fighting, but rather eliminated a penalty for it (originally -20 WS) while making your bare fists do the damage of a Hand Weapon. That's the sort of thing Skills do in 1e. One thing I like is the way lots of skills that often just end up color instead give stacking bonuses to something. Being an actor might just give you the basic bonuses to busking and getting employed as a performer that most of the performance skills do, but it also makes you better at lying and gossiping since you know how to read people and react properly from getting into character. Little stuff like that helps with the thing that's attractive about WHFRP: It's always been a game where all the little flavor in your character background actually ends up mattering. The skill system here feels like a nice way to do that, combined with the more generous ability to do most sorts of tests without needing specific training. However, it's also all over the place, and leaves you potentially at the mercy of needing massive base stats to do certain things if there don't happen to be a bunch of stacking skills that help you out with them. In general I think 2e was a step in the right direction in separating these into Skills and Talents, it just over-penalized being untrained. Once again, what strikes me in going through 1e is that a lot of this still looks fun to play with, despite being a disorganized mess with no sense of standardization. Look at Mia; she turned out looking like a character who'd be fun to write about. The issue is primarily that it's much more likely you end up with a character who is terrible, or way behind the people who rolled well, comparatively. No mercy rules on rolling stats, no standardization or concern for balancing the base careers mean you can end up with a large gulf of ability and I think 2e was right to try to even things out. Next Time: Murdertown
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Sep 12, 2019 21:13
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Night Horrors: The Tormented Part 4: The Mentalist  It's magic! "Sensational" Jasper Brouillard is an anomaly - a popular, even famous stage magician and spiritualist that is also a Promethean. In life, Jasper was a medium of great ability but diminishing wealth, drawing fewer and fewer crowds in Las Vegas. He became a street magician to stay relevant, though few other mediums followed his lead despite he popularity he earned once TV crews started following him around. They couldn't - Jasper was able to put on accurate seances and channel spirits in public without any apparent preparation or hot reads. He did what no one else seemed able to - he legitimately heard the voices of the dead and accurately communicated them. Whatever methods he used, however, died with him. He was murdered on live broadcast while interviewing nightclub patrons and offering to contact the dead using his Ouija board. As he channeled a screaming spirit that was accusing someone in the club of killing her, he was shot by an unidentified attacker. The bullet went directly through his head, and he died. By chance, one of the patrons was an Ulgan Promethean who seized the chance represented by the many spirits hanging out around Jasper to reignite the spark of life in his corpse. When "Jasper" returned from his experience in Twilight, he was Ulgan, housing the spirits he once communed with. The man who goes by Jasper Brouillard now has no memory of his body's former life. It is unclear to anyone whether the spirits powering his body are ghosts or elemental spirits of murder and vengeance; Brouillard presumably knows but isn't saying. Still, when he stood up after being shot, he became a sensation. He claimed later to have visited a private surgeon for the bullet wound, but the media frenzy was less about his miraculous recovery and more about his abilities. In the first interview he gave after his "near-death experience," he revealed with terrifying accuracy the secrets of six randomly selected people. He said that he received these secrets from the ghosts of angry relatives or victims of crime. His statements were so accurate and delivered with such conviction that for a long while, he was the only medium on primetime TV. The Showman, as Prometheans know him, loves the spotlight. He's pursuing lucrative TV contracts and even an autobiopic, ignoring the inner feelings of torment and the pressure other Prometheans put on him to keep a lower profile as well as the jealousy of his peers in the business. Somehow, he seems to have the best of both worlds, using his wealth and fame to keep touring so as to avoid the negative consequences of his own nature. Many were envious, but he seemed to be causing little harm...at first. As time went on, however, his shows became less about talking to the dead beyond vague pronouncements and more about special effects. While he always carries his Ouija board, he never uses it now - indeed, he hasn't since he was "born." Many found him weird and uncomfortable among Prometheans, but few called him an enemy...until, one night, he performed a live dissection of a Frankenstein on stage, framing it as a trick involving animatronics and illusion. Critics proclaimed it an unbelievable act, disgusting but amazing, and he only drew more applause when he started identifying the former owners of the Frankenstein's body parts. Prometheans wondered what the gently caress was going on. Jasper's Pilgrimage has been unusual, to say the least. He's traveled the world, spending weeks away from his production teams to explore the places he goes to, and particularly their cemeteries. His personality has shifted rapidly through all this, skipping between Refinements quickly in hopes of finding one that'd ground him and give him purpose. His mercurial, shifting nature has given him little chance to study, so his Pilgrimage is primarily based in action - specifically, taking other Prometheans apart and trying to talk to their humours as if they were spirits representing the basic parts of life. Even he is surprised at how quickly it's going. He knows other Prometheans hate and envy him, but why should he feel bad for killing things that aren't even alive or human? All he cares about is fame and followers, and he only rarely questions his gifts. He is half dead, half alive, and easily approachable by ghosts and spirits. He can identify and communicate with them easily, using them to learn more about other Prometheans, mortals and his path. Some Prometheans even seek him out, as he can easily seek out the ghosts of demiurges, the origins of their body parts or the circumstances that led to their births. He maintains a balance between being a great if sensationalist resource and abusing his fellows for cheap entertainment and money. Jasper is a handsome man who looks exactly like a stage magician should. He's such a stereotype that few would trust him easily - the grand gestures, waxed facial hair, purple outfit and stupid magic tricks with his top hat don't inspire confidence - but his results are clear. He loves to surprise people with his talent - they expect a circus magician, and he's a real mystic. He has a strong Quebecois accent, and he can range from quiet and intense to booming. While he is one of the greatest celebrity mediums, his grandeur is only when the cameras are on. He's not about to put on shows for free, after all, and he knows how to balance his shows between intimacy and magnifience. He never stops smiling. He doesn't worry about his associations with mortals, despite the Disquiet he causes over time. He regularly has to shift stage crews, agents and so on, and he's rarely in one place for more than a month at a time. His only permanent residence is his hotel room at the Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas, which has caused the place to lose business and increased local violence and vice among other longterm residents; he doesn't care. He has a distinct scar in the center of his forehead, where the bullet entered his skull. He wears a long wig to hide the exit wound at the base of his skull. Jasper collects secrets, partially for the money he can make off them and partially to aid his Pilgrimage. He has a lot of dirt on other Prometheans, though he rarely uses it just to hurt someone. Rather, he believes his Pilgrimage is about experiencing everything humanity has to offer, learn about life and death, and remain relevant to mortals. Other Prometheans, in his mind, aren't alive and thus aren't worthy of sharing his fame. He aspires to find the ghost of the true Jasper Brouillard, in the hopes that the dead medium will be able to show him how to use his gifts and ties to the dead. The Showman is not a true medium, and his Promethean powers can only go so far in making up for what he lost when his shell died. He hopes that if he can bind the ghost of Jasper Brouillard to himself, he will regain the man's powers. It's a fairly open secret that Jasper partakes in excessive vice in his safe haven in Vegas. He is well known in the industry for his love of sex, violence and weird poo poo. The hotel managers know he's a decadent hedonist, but he pays his bills on time and always cleans up his messes. When not touring or performing or having private fun, Jasper enjoys watching various acts along the Strip. Jasper is well known among Prometheans for his fascinating with Frankensteins. He has worked with illicent clone labs before to kidnap Frankensteins so that he can trace the origins of their parts, and his live dissection of a Frankenstein on TV has earned him the Lineage's hatred. They aren't generally very good at controlling their anger, either. Some believe he's not a Promethean but a Sin-Eater; they're wrong, though they almost weren't. In life, Jasper Brouillard's spiritual abilities attracted many powerful ghosts, including several full-on geists. A handful were planning to fight over who got to claim him when he died, but they never counted on a Promethean stealing their thunder. Now, bitter over the loss, these vengeful superghosts are hunting for Jasper's genitor. For his part, Jasper would love to actually meet a Sin-Eater and learn from them. Others are more worried about the Prometheans that'll seek him out. Jasper has no followers yet on his path of hedonism, excess and wanton disregard for other Prometheans, but it can't be long before others, tired of the tragedy of their existences, try to follow his footsteps. Given how much harm Jasper causes to the mortals around him just by not caring about what his nature does to them, many Prometheans regard this prospect as a horrific crime in the making, with the potential of hurting all of them - if not just morally, than for the practical effects of Disquiet being more widespread. Jasper is smart, charismatic and manipulative as hell, but he's pretty weak-willed and not exactly a fighter. He's more likely to rely on hired bodyguards than his own talents in a fight. Or ghosts, I suppose. He's famous and well-connected, especially for a Promethean, and has decent wealth - extravagant wealth by Promethean standards. He's also quite potent magically. He can make himself resemble other people easily or even copy their fingerprints onto his own hands, he's super stealthy and can turn practically invisible, he can make people slavishly obsessed with him for a while or cause massive confusion and amnesia, can sprout claws (though it's a bad idea for him) or turn into a giant dogbeast or copy normal animals, can alter his own appearance in various ways to scare folks or avoid notice, can do the weird memory tricks the last guy could do, can tap into the Promethean collective unconscious to gain information about supernatural stuff, can temporarily disguise himself as other kinds of supernatural critter, and can make objects explode into invisible supernatural energy that distracts magical senses.  It's also a skin condition. The condition is being on fire. Missy Bellingrath has always been on the move, from day one. She's a drifter in the swamps of the Gulf Coast, born during Hurricane Katrina. Her creator, another Frankenstein with a face made of tattered skin stapled to a skull, made her using the storm's energies and dared her to catch him if she could. The chase was her only purpose. She was always just a day or so behind, stumbling into all kinds of traps - shapeshifting crocodiles, voodoo mystics, the works. She made friends with the mystics and studied under them, and they experimented with the humours within her, distilling them into various concoctions. Fearing that she'd be nothing but a source of materials, Missy fled the coven with the potions and began studying alchemy as best she could. Sure it couldn't hurt her, she drank deep of the potion, which energized her and improved her already terrifying strength. She forgot entirely about chasing her creator, because now she had a new purpose: perfecting the potion and finding something besides Pyros to fuel it. Missy gave up on everything but finding more tools to make her new drug...well, that and maybe someone to bring with her. She still feels the call of her "missing" body parts, the counterparts of those used to create her, though she's given up on her creator's game of tag. Why bother hunting him when she could find meaning in the needle and her new concoction? The creation, based on the voodoo cabal's starting point and then Missy's instinctive grasp of alchemy, is a potent stimulant that infuses Promethean bodies, causing their disfigurements to become obvious as if they'd used magic. It is extremely addictive, but gives a bonus to all physical and mental actions for several hours, though a penalty to tasks that require concentration or coordination. The bonus increases if the drug is made using supernatural ingredients, such as werewolf bones or vampire blood. Missy has yet to make one based on Promethean humours, so it's unknown what those would do. The real problem is the other side effect it has on Prometheans: it brings their body parts to life. Those created from the bodies of the dead feel a rush of emotion from the people whose body parts they were made of, and can hear their voices whispering and feel their flesh burning. Any creature made from dead body parts or similar will have the same effects, though the source of the voices is unclear and mysterious. Prometheans that roll badly when taking the drug can also ignite their internal Pyros stores, taking Lethal damage (or Aggravated if they're really unlucky and literally burst into flame). Missy's not really able to pass for human any more. Her genitor tried to make her as complete as he could and match her parts properly, but her drug habit and lack of care for herself has ruined all that work. Parts of her pale skin are scorched around the edges or even burned away. Her stitching is cracked and blackened by the heat, leaving long marks along her seams. She has pierced several of the areas they've burned away with titanium bars to hold herself together, plus some rings and studs for looks. She wears anything she can find - usually t-shirts and jeans - and is generally twitchy, giggles for no reason and stares off into space at random without finishing her sentences. When she finds something that catches her eye, she becomes a skilled manipulator who has mastered the art of getting people isolated so she can jab a syringe into them to extract precious bodily fluids to make her drug. While high, she is a hedonist that follows whatever desire happens to get into her head at that moment. Missy's met a few other Prometheans and shared her drug with them, and the word's out among the Gulf Coast Prometheans. Everyone wants to know what's in the drug that maeks everything feel so clear...but while Missy's happy to share her stash, she charges a hefty price to learn how to make the stuff. Specifically, she won't do it except for a draught of the humours that animate the Promethean asking for instruction. No one knows if anyone's taken her up on that or not, but it is perhaps unsurprising that her clients tend to view her as a dangerous and unhinged (if necessary) killer. The humans that get in Missy's orbit are rarely left particularly sane, either. She sends some into permanent fugue states, broken by whatever loss she took from them, while others had their minds broken by her drug, unable to handle their glimpse of its power. She is known as Madame Happy Thoughts among the drug user community, most of whom would kill for another hit of the stuff. Those Prometheans not interested in her stash tend to find her very, very disturbing. Some say she's stealing the power of the Principle itself, though the drug does not appear to have any negative effects (or positive ones) on the Pilgrimage. Sure, addiction can stunt your growth by refocusing you on just pursuing the high, but that's about it. Missy is, at this point, a Centimanus, though as they go, not a particularly malicious one except for her habit of stealing bodily fluids. Her stats are nothing special - she's clever and fast, but she's basically average at stuff. She's decently good for a self-taught chemist and medic, but not amazing. She also has very little in the way of mystic power. She can boost her smell, taste and hearing, can cause Disquiet deliberately, can worsen Wastelands (read: the negative environmental aura of being a Promethean in one place too long), and can summon Firestorms (giant...firestorms of Divine Fire going haywire). Oh, and she has a bite attack, because she uses one of the new powers in this book that lets her eat people to steal their mental abilities, stats or skills temporarily. So that's a trick. Next time: The Lost, the Many-Voiced
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Sep 12, 2019 22:18
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Eclipse Phase: Gatecrashing The Good Gate and the Bad Gates After getting told about the "generics" of Gatecrashing, what's next is the specifics about using any one of the Sol system's five gates. This is largely not anything remarkable, mostly a description of any specific business circumstances(repeat missions for Terragenesis off the Vulcanoid gate gets you a bonus for being a repeat customer) and the atmosphere around each gate(Serious and slightly shady, serious and very shady, super cool and professional, super wacky and cool but also professional, ultra shady and evil, from innermost to outermost. Guess which one is the anarchist gate). The Anarchist gate is simultaneously in "totally free hands," completely locked down by the Love & Rage Collective, in danger of being monopolized by L&R , not in danger because the other anarchists would take care of them if they got evil, laid back and chillaxed, super-well planned and efficient despite being laid back and chillaxed and the only gate operating crew humane enough to prioritize a rescue over other activity. Because you know we just wouldn't get that the hypercapitalists are bad people unless they cackled at the profit they earned from letting a Gatecrasher die. The anarchists of course also do fishmalky things like easter egg hunts on alien worlds. You also know how evil the Ultimates are because the guy narrating the bit about the Go-Nin gate on Discord keeps talking about OVERHUMANS and GENETIC INFERIORS despite the fact that every single writeup on the Ultimates mentions that their philosophy is about mindset, not genes, and also the fact that genetics are hilariously irrelevant in the EP world. Some writers really wanted to make them sound like Nazis as much as possible. It's especially clashing when in the next paragraph he drops back to a philosophy completely unfocused on people's genetics, only on their willingness to modify and resleeve themselves to be tougher and smarter. Anyway the bit about the existing gates is mostly just for flavouring anything occurring near them or setting the scene before heading out into the unknown. The actually interesting part of this chapter are the unknown gates, the ones rumoured to be scattered around Sol. Chasing one of these rumours could be the foundation for an entire campaign, as gates are A) immensely profitable if you can lock one down and make sure no one steals it from you, B) potential sneaky ways in and out of the system for various villains and shady operations. The book does a good job of positing where the various gates could be, what makes it likely for them to be hidden there, how they could be hidden, how they could be found, who'd have an interest in them, etc. It's not a long section, but it's enough to be inspiring, even if it does seem somewhat conspicuous that it ignores theories of a new gate anywhere between Earth and the outer fringes of the system, possibly just so no one gets any ideas that the Jovians might be relevant to the game's setting any time soon.  See Interesting Planets! Meet Interesting Aliens! Roll Save Or Die Checks! Probably the best and worst section of the book, for me, is the bit with the pre-made exoplanets, however. Almost every single one of them has something interesting going on, something that'll give you ideas, but, well, most of them have their issues as a thing to use in-game, too. Either they're just not useful as places to run a game or set an adventure, maybe they've already been destroyed or sometimes just nothing about them is statted meaning that it's up to the GM to stat and describe every single thing the PC's might want to interact with. Arcadia This is a Venus-esque planet where hypercorps are building a very shady aerostat which is so shady and mysterious that no one knows what it's for, and also it's not finished yet, and the world contains no native life or anything else of interest. I'm sure you can imagine all sorts of exciting adventures for PC's to get up to in an unfinished aerostat with no stated purpose on an otherwise-unexciting world they can't even explore because the local atmospheric pressure will annihilate them at ground level. Babylon There aren't even any planets to explore here, just an alien spaceship stuck in the corona of the local star that shoots anything that approaches or dodges it so it can't get close enough to learn anything, also the spaceship might be alive and/or have still-living organic pilots. Somehow the space sensors used by a group of explorers can detect life signs at long range, something that always pissed me off in any trying-to-be-hard sci-fi. How would you scan for "life"? Signs of respiration? Methane? CO2? A heartbeat? I feel like I hardly need to A) list how many non-living things could generate those molecules or a regular beat or B) point out how useless this would be at detecting life through any sort of barrier much less at any sort of decent distance. Uh, but yeah, I guess catching up to and exploring an alien craft could be kind of interesting if they'd given the vaguest hints at what was inside and/or statted any of it. Bluewood This is an Earthlike World(tm) where you can have your soft sci-fi Star Trek adventures without a helmet or any concerns about polluting or being polluted by the local ecosphere. The exciting thing about Bluewood is the blue wood, as in blue trees, that are growing everywhere, they grow superquickly, overwhelm transhuman structures with little warning, and also they hack computers. No, really. If you gently caress with the trees, the entire ecosystem will attack you(none of the ecosystem or the trees themselves are statted for this purpose, btw) and, yeah, that's it. It's a planet of fast-growing trees that hack your computer and corrupt the data in your porn stash. Why? Dunno. Brak Kodel Brak Kodel is moderately interesting, since it actually does something with one of the many Spooky Titan Things that Spooky Titans have done, which is collecting heads/egos from people on Earth during the Fall. Brak Kodel is a lovely little Mercury-like planet with no atmosphere except where a bunch of valleys have been roofed over to keep them breathable, these valleys are basically full of weirdo mutant cavemen stuffed with super-psychosurgerized egos from the Fall. One group of cavemen control some of the remaining tech(weather manipulation, some fabbers) and worship the TITANs, then there's a tribe of literally insane cavemen and another tribe of cannibal cavemen. Apparently the TITAN that set the project up sleeved the same Ego into the leaders of all three factions, potentially just for laughs. Pathfinder's found the place and are split between nuking it because it's a TITAN artifact, looting it for tech, and trying to recover any famous or interesting egos that were sleeved into the mutant cavemen. It's an interesting world that could do some stuff, and the cavemen are actually statted for use as opponents or NPC's. Carnivale It's an Earthlike world where the grass gets you hiiiiiiiiiiiigh maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan so of course it's full of Scum that do nothing other than be high and gently caress. I'm not really sure what you could even use this world for other than ERP scenes. Corse Corse would be better for a short story than as a place to set a game, because the story's already been told. Hypercorps show up on a rock at the edge of the galaxy, build some observation equipment, place looks a bit odd, but not too odd, starts looking more and more odd as time goes on. Local astronomical situations look like they've been messed with, something built a craft on the rock and set off barely some years ago, probably a TITAN or TITAN-descended intelligence, about a month into observation they spot whatever took off in the sky, running back to the gate at high speed, like it's fleeing something. Then the corps shove a nuke through and evacuate everyone. Like the idea that there's something out there that could spook a TITAN or a TITAN's Fetch? Neato. Putting that in a place that's already been nuked by a corporation? Less neato.  Next up: Hope you don't expect them to stat any more things rather than just vaguely describing them. Also more mysterious alien trees.
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Sep 12, 2019 23:42
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Yeah, Prometheus seems dope. These are some fun stories.
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Sep 12, 2019 23:53
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PurpleXVI posted:
This was the first part of a hinted at plot in EP 1st ed - the Ultimates there were of a specific faction in the movement, the aptly named Overhumanists; the thing to remember, above all, is that the Ultimates are essentially the Exhuman clade with the best PR and R&D. The 'willingness' bit has a nasty little bite in the tail - anyone who isn't, is by definition inferior - there is an ideological debate between those who want to dare anyone else to come to their level, and those who want to make those who are not them serfs; the latter faction runs Ultimate Gate ops; they were known for some drat nasty poo poo during the Fall and before - I'll go into greater detail on that during my Firewall F&F. Also, remember the 'human' part of the name. Where this will go in 2nd ed, if anywhere, is unknown. Of course there would be Master Race types when genetics tech could make that somewhat less risable. Why would there not be?
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Sep 13, 2019 00:43
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KirbyKhan posted:Yeah, Prometheus seems dope. These are some fun stories. This book has some terrifying lows, but at the least you get some dizzying heights first. I absolutely don't regret the purchase, but it's just a shame it's not consistently good.
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Sep 13, 2019 03:55
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Promethean in nWoD seems interesting, but hard for me to work with because I'm not really good at telling stories about personal growth and discovering what it means to be human. Promethean in oWoD seems like I would take to it like a fish to water because angsty sexy nuclear super- powered Frankensteins fighting spider monsters is the sort of stuff I do well with. So, how feasible is it for me to run a game of Promethean using it just to get into ridiculous pulp adventures? Out of the core book it does not seem like this would work, but this review makes me think otherwise. Also, what the gently caress is going on with these cloning labs? Are these things all over the place or something because the book is just casually tossing out that 'yes, cloning labs exist and they're all over the place' and just not focusing on that like it's no big deal? I have to assume that they're run by a combination of shady government alphabet types and the Umbrella corporation. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Sep 13, 2019 |
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Sep 13, 2019 04:59
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Ithle01 posted:Promethean in nWoD seems interesting, but hard for me to work with because I'm not really good at telling stories about personal growth and discovering what it means to be human. Promethean in oWoD seems like I would take to it like a fish to water because angsty sexy nuclear super- powered Frankensteins fighting spider monsters is the sort of stuff I do well with. So, how feasible is it for me to run a game of Promethean using it just to get into ridiculous pulp adventures? Out of the core book it does not seem like this would work, but this review makes me think otherwise.
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Sep 13, 2019 05:05
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Nessus posted:It doesn't seem like you would need to change the Promethean rules themselves to set things in the classic World of Darkness, you would just flavor the relevant entities appropriately. I wouldn't want to use oWoD rules anyway, I just meant more like the fact that oWoD was an over-the-top ridiculous setting where superheroes with fangs was considered more acceptable than in nWoD which tries to focus on more personal horror elements. I just want to know how well Promethean enables the crazy stuff or if the rules (and by rules I mean super-powers you get) are more down-tuned than up-tuned.
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Sep 13, 2019 05:08
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Ithle01 posted:I wouldn't want to use oWoD rules anyway, I just meant more like the fact that oWoD was an over-the-top ridiculous setting where superheroes with fangs was considered more acceptable than in nWoD which tries to focus on more personal horror elements. I just want to know how well Promethean enables the crazy stuff or if the rules (and by rules I mean super-powers you get) are more down-tuned than up-tuned. The thing about nWoD, and nWoD2/CoD especially, is that while it's much better at supporting the actual style of play it says it's about*, it's still full of crazy weird shenanigans. Ignoring the sadbrains elements of a given game line is usually pretty easy if all you want to do is have Frankenstein and Galatea team up to fight a government conspiracy that wants to suck out all their magical sapience juice. There are hooks in places that it will unbalance some, but for the most part it won't really gently caress up a ton of a game's mechanics (with the exception of Changeling where Clarity is all over everything). * As opposed to say Masquerade's "oooh the long dark ennui and personal horror of being a fireball-throwing telekinetic vampire wizard on the Path of gently caress You right out of the core book."
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Sep 13, 2019 05:37
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