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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. Promethean 1e won't really fight you much on this if you're willing to tear out and ignore certain systems – specifically, you may not want to use the Disquiet or Wasteland rules that force Prometheans to stay on the move and prevent them from ever being accepted too long in one place, and the Refinement and Milestone rules for progressing along the Pilgrimage to fulfillment and full human life will be pretty useless. You won't be provided much in the way of spider monsters to fight. The utility of Pandorans, the main antagonists in the Promethean corebook, is more as instigating antagonists that throw situations you care about into disarray and are brief big problems. They don't work as well as long-term antagonists and things you travel around fumigating entire nests of. But the Transmutation powers will work fine for fighting spider monsters, and you can pull antagonists from other nWoD books pretty freely. The Transmutations do not lack for either effects that are bizarre and flashy, like twisting your flesh and snapping your bones to reconfigure yourself into a giant dog-monster made of human body parts, or effects which are just generally hefty, like pointing out which powers you want to buy to throw cars at people or hurl lightning. Promethean 2e will fight you a bit more, because more of the mechanical systems plug into the Pilgrimage stuff. Humanity is replaced with a literal Pilgrimage meter, and your Transmutation powers slot in and out based on which Refinement (approach to personal growth and discovery) you're currently walking. Ithle01 posted: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. Later in the book the cloning labs and what's up with them gets fleshed out. Clones were introduced in the Promethean 1e corebook as slave creatures with little to no will of their own, one of the reasons Prometheans were put upon because making these clones required harvesting Prometheans for parts. They were one of the least cool things in Prom 1e, little more than a short writeup of characterless men-in-black goons dispatched to collect Prometheans as materials to make more goons. The clones in Night Horrors: The Tormented are much more interesting. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Sep 13, 2019 |
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Sep 13, 2019 07:33
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 08:30 |
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Hmmm, well Disquiet and Wasteland don't seem like much of a problem, but I think I have a better idea of what this is about. Thanks for the replies.
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Sep 13, 2019 08:06
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Night Horrors: The Tormented Part 5: Ghostface Helper  Shockingly, this dude is not high as gently caress. Nivilin the Lost was, at one point, a promising Ulgan with a talent for helping ghosts move on. Heartbreak, however, has sent him down the path of the Centimanus while his throng desperately tries to cover for him. He worked constantly to try to gain mortal acceptance. He even put his phone number in the yellow pages as an exorcist for hire, against his throng's advice. Sure, it got him more harassing phone calls than anything else, but he really, truly wanted to help people, even if his few clients weren't generally grateful. He'd drop everything at any time to go do the work, but once he ended the haunting, they would call him a fake and refuse to pay. His throng begged him to move on, to shift himself from Aurum ('achieve humanity through mimicking human behavior') to Argentum ('achieve humanity through pursuit of the mysterious'), to better use his talents to learn without having to interact with assholes. He ignored them, certain that the Divine Fire meant for him to forge a bond with mortality. Spiritualism was a tool, but love was what he was seeking. One night, Nivilin answered a midnight phone call from desperate parents looking for a cure for their infant daughter. She'd been sickly since birth, but testing revealed nothing wrong with her despite her constant weight loss. The doctors could do nothing. Now, they were calling an exorcist. Nivilin went, discovering a spiritual parasite latched onto the girl. It was an evil thing, but weak, and he was able to quickly defeat it with his powers, driving it away. The girl smiled at him, and Nivilin felt the warmth of love flow into him. His Pyros rose up in joy - and her parents snatched the baby away, terrified by what they felt coming from the Promethean. They called him a devil-worshipping pervert and threatened to call the cops. His heart broke as the baby began to cry, and he fled, rejecting the love he had felt and turning from his path, falling deep into Torment. (Read: a magically enforced temper tantrum caused by significant failure on the Pilgrimage, among other things.) At this point, Nivilin turned to Argentum, delving into the mysteries of the spirit world and learning more about spirits and ghosts. (Promethean does not make a strong distinction between the two.) He began to help these beings as once he helped mortals...and unlike mortals, the spirits were grateful. Selfish, yes, unpredictable, but grateful. As word spread among them about the Promethean that would aid them, they began to approach him for aid from all over. Any kind of spirit - he turned none down. He was happily surprised, loving the feeling of being thanked for his work, and he lost himself in it. His throng was horrified as they realized he was no longer actually following the Pilgrimage - just working for spirits to feel respected. He went from being a mediator or even facilitator to an accomplice, aiding a fire spirit in burning down homes and a drowning spirit in killing a swimmer. Eventually, a small and pathetic spirit came to him. It had tried, it said, and failed to kill a mortal over ten years before, and now it had one last chance. It had starved these past ten years, was too weak to kill, but Nivilin might help it. Nivilin recognized it immediately as the creature he had banished from the infant girl ten years prior...and decided he didn't care. Love had broke him, so he would break it back. Nivilin reattached the parasite-spirit to the girl, now a ten-year-old child, and his Pilgrimage ended entirely. He fell to Flux and became Centimanus. Nivilin gives no shits about either mortals or other Prometheans. Even his own throng is an afterthought for him. He isn't needlessly cruel, but he also doesn't care if he has to maim or kill people to pursue his goals. He didn't embrace Flux for philosophical reasons or power - he did it because he gave up on becoming human, but a Promethean burns too bright to exist without following a path. He became a Centimanus largely because he rejected being anything else. He still acts pretty much like he did before becoming a Centimanus, working with spirits and keeping up appearances. His throng hasn't even realized he's dangerous, in fact. They know he's fallen to Flux, but don't understand the full implications of that. He's still one of them, a friend, and not one of those bad, dangerous Centimani they've heard about. Nivilin has done nothing to disabuse them of this, largely because he doesn't care enough about them to do so. He has occasional use for them and has no compulsion to cause trouble needlessly. Nivilin always takes the easiest path to his goals, no matter what that is. He's buried himself in his work with spirits, even experimenting with his Flux powers to try and burn away and destroy the material world. He surrounds himself with spirits, some bound as servants, others asking for help. They speak to him constantly, and he listens to them more than anything else. His body appears Mediterranean, with tan skin and dark hair that falls to his shoulders in soft curls. He's a well-built man, not too thin or too muscular, with full lips. Pyros has begun to char and blacken the wounds left from his creation, causing him to smell faintly of burning flesh - or stronger, when he's using his power. His eyes are black pools in bloodshot sockets, and he's hard to read. That's less because he's good at hiding his feelings and more because his facial muscles don't work properly as a side effect of his birth process. He is now experimenting with body modification to more closely emulate spirits, and he has carved a number of ritual scars into his skin. Nivilin, thirteen years ago, kept the infant girl's shoe. It fell off the baby when her parents snatched her away, and he's kept it in a box that is shoved in the back of his closet. He has not opened it since. Now, three years after having murdered the girl, he still has it. He claims not to care, even believes what he says, but if it were stolen he would go to great lengths to get it back. The shoe is a reminder of the love he once felt, and could be used to get him back on the Pilgrimage, in theory. He's also discovered something weird: an alien conspiracy of not-quite-spirits, which refer to themselves as angels, which serve some greater entity that he knows is not the Principle. Yeah he stumbled onto the God-Machine by accident. He is terrified and fascinated by how vast this conspiracy appears to be, having run into it all over the place, and is torn between hiding from it out of fear and examining it from curiosity. He hasn't told anyone about this because he's afraid doing so would draw the angels' attention. (It probably wouldn't at first, but eventually, sure.) Nivilin is ruthless in pursuit of knowledge of spirits or helping them. His obsession with them began well before his fall three years back, and he's racked up a notable body count. At this point, he's either personally killed or helped a spirit kill thirteen mortals and two Prometheans. (He conceals the Promethean deaths from his throng, as he knows they'd finally try to stop him if they learned about that.) Despite this, he retains a reputation for being an excellent mentor in the path of Argentum - he certainly spent a lot of time pursuing it before his final fall. His throng pretends he still follows that path, hoping that continued contact with other Prometheans will help him get back to his old self. Despite their efforts at cover-ups, however, word's starting to get out that he's dangerous. The last Promethean he killed, Ella the Unburnt, left a paper trail he didn't expect. She had no throng, but she was part of a small online forum with some other Prometheans, and she let them know she was meeting Nivilin before she vanished. Nivilin killed her so he could take her heart and bury it at the behest of a restless ghost. He also still maintains his yellow pages ad, though he no longer helps humans that hire him. Rather, he aids the haunting spirits in getting rid of them. He craves the gratitude and admiration his spiritual sycophants happily shower him in when he helps them, y'see. Nivilin is extremely intelligent and strong-willed, but average socially and physically. He's not very good at fighting, but his knowledge of spirits and many deals with them mean he has plenty of invisible backup. He's actually not super powerful magically - he's good at finding and loving with magic, he can make Wastelands and Disquiet worse, but his main gimmick is he can manifest mutant powers based on the spirits, Pandorans and Promethans around him, which he can make permanent at the cost of backsliding on a Pilgrimage that's already stalled and using stolen Vitriol. (Short form: Promethean Pilgrimage XP takes physical form as magic enlightenment juice that lives in their stomach. You can steal that juice and use it for yourself by killing them!)  ...for we are many. Roslynn the Many-Voiced is an Extempore, but the only one of her kind - an Extempore who has a clear and distinct history and lineage. She can trace her line back: the Gestalt, as they refer to themselves. They only get one shot at humanity, and if they fail, they need to create a new Promethean and pour all their memories into it. Roslynn is number six of these cyclical Prometheans, and as she finally approaches the New Dawn, she's terrified. The voices of the Gestalt speak in her mind. They are nameless, as much Roslynn as her own mental voice, but they do have some distinct personalities. Roslynn's creator speaks to her in a soft voice that she thinks is probably male. She never met him or any other member of the Gestalt, because Pyros consumes their bodies as part of the creation of their new Promethean-self. The creator is hesitant, gentle and sad, always apologizing for the harsh destiny he gave Roslynn. The loudest of the voices, though, is shrill and relentless in demanding she pursue the New Dawn. She believes this is the Fourth. She has heard the First only once - a single sentence, flat and soft: "Finish it." That's her duty and the only reason she exists. Finish the First's Pilgrimage. Using the experiences and memories of her predecessors, Roslynn has been able to blaze through her Refinements with shocking ease, only rarely interacting with other Prometheans. She has only ever failed once - she can't understand Cuprum ('finding humanity through strong self-identity'), and nor can any past member of the Gestalt, because they don't have a singular self. The Gestalt pushes her ownwards, to wrap up their unfinishes business and become mortal. They're sure she can do it. Not just for herself, but for the six before her who died so she would have that chance. Roslynn has finally cracked under the pressure. She's terrified of the New Dawn, because she knows she can only try once - and if she fails, she must commit suicide to create the next of the Gestalt, or else everything ends for all of them. And so, she is stalling, dragging her feet in the final stretch. She's not risking failure, but she's slowing herself down so she doesn't have to take the final leap yet. She can't fail if she never jumps, right? Unfortunately, after six failures, the Gestalt is very good at mentoring the Pilgrimage. Roslynn's far along her path, and despite her best efforts, she can feel the end looming. She has come up with a desperate plan to deal with it. Roslynn has actually witnessed another Promethean achieving the New Dawn. She felt his Azoth transform him, felt the first signs of Disquiet in him as he hesitated during their hug afterwards. Knowing it's real, not just a story, should have made her feel good, but it only reinforced her fears. What if the reason the Gestalt has kept failing is that it's not possible for them, specifically? She knows she and her predecessors are not normal for Prometheans, so maybe their Pilgrimage is impossible. Maybe they're just broken, and the same thing that has made her path so easy will block her from ending it. That'd make the whole thing impossible to do and so best to just stop trying, because her next creation would be unable to do it as well if she made one. Thus, her plan hinges on the fact that other Prometheans can, provably, become human. By using the Gestalt's knowledge, she is seeking a Promethean with a compatible essence to her own. She's not quite sure what that means, but believes she'll know it when she sees it. She's studied and discarded three candidates so far, and that makes her confident - if she can tell someone's not a match, she must be able to tell if someone is one. Once she has a target, she plans to sacrifice herself and that target as the New Dawn is achieved, creating a new Gestalt from their shared flesh who should, in its moment of creation, be immediately redeemed and become human. Roslynn's plan relies on the target being able to carry both their essences in the combined form of the new Gestalt, taking them both through the New Dawn. She has not considered that her plan could also result on both of them being permanently stranded as Prometheans. The Gestalt prefers to be solitary, but Roslynn forces herself to be social since coming up with her plan. She believes compatibility is as much about personality as flesh and Pyros. It wasn't until she sat down and talked with her last candidate that she found his Pilgrimage was wholly incompatible with her own and thus was not viable. She practices her social skills on mortals so she'll be ready next time. She's not good at it - she tends to be terrifyingly brusque, though she's gotten better at concealing her intentions. She has collapsed under the pressure of her forebears and is now desperate to end the Pilgrimage once and for all. In times of duress or Torment, she shows personality traits from past cycles of the Gestalt, which makes her unpredictable and dangerous. Her body is Middle-Eastern, with thick, dark hair in a pixie cut (originally a long braid, but she didn't like it). She's tall and muscular, with callouses and a broken nose from her body's mortal dies as an MMA fighter. Her throat still bears a red line where her creator cut it when he decided she was ready to become Gestalt. In Torment, her body sheds desert sands, as do all past Gestalts. Her facial features sometimes get her mistaken for male; Roslynn doesn't mind, because she only picked a female self-identity because matching her assigned gender seemed easier to her. Her eyes are brilliant green. The Fifth of the Gestalts was a Centimanus, and he made the Sixth only because the First literally forced its way into taking over the body and perfoming the generative act. The Sixth was Roslynn's creator and tried to get things back on track. However, the Fifth made a Pandoran in his brief time as Centimanus, and that creature, a sublimatus that calls himself the Silent, hunted the Sixth and now Roslynn. Roslynn hasn't a clue what to do about the Silent and is very worried that other Prometheans will judge her for the actions of the Fifth. She has also driven another Promethean to commit murder in the belief that committing the ultimate human sin would bring him closer to the New Dawn (and thus allow her merger); however, after he moved from Cuprum back to Aurum, he was overcome with guilt and committed suicide. Roslynn has never told anyone, believing that if she does, no one will ever let her get close to them again. The First was a Kuwaiti soldier in the first Gulf War. She and her unit died in a massive explosion, and the collective cry of their spirits to survive called down the Divine Fire. She stood up as an Extempore, with sand and Pyros as her humour. Desperate to end the Pilgrimage at last, the First has been quietly guiding Roslynn in her new, risky effort to hijack the New Dawn. If Roslynn fucks up or is stopped, the First intends to lead every future Gestalt to greater risks, as long as the lineage survives. The reason Roslynn has been able to proceed so quickly on her Pilgrimage is that the experiences of the past Gestalts have been able to speed her along the path, and she's able to complete their experiences of humanity as if they were her own. If someone were to kill her and steal all of her Vitriol, they would gain this ability for themselves, too. Roslynn's Wasteland causes massive sand spread. It flows continually, and cannot be kept out by any wall. It rises into beds, gets into food and drink. As it grows and festers, the sounds of screams, explosions and gunfire can be heard. Mortals must eventually evacuate to avoid going mad from the phantom sounds of the dead and dying or drowning in the rising sand. So far, no Gestalt has ever triggered a Firestorm, so what form theirs would take is currently unknown. They did ruin an area near Musil with sand, though. (I think that might be an alternate spelling of Mosul?) Roslynn is extremely strong-willed and reasonable clever. She's strong and tough, but exceptionally bad at talking to people. She's a great investigator and surprisingly well-informed on the occult and science, in part due to education from the other Gestalts in her head. She's a decent enough fighter. Magically, she's not great. She can boost her vision, read auras or surface thoughts, can use clairvoyance to watch people from afar, is good at getting through supernatural defenses and harming supernatural beings, and has good ability to resist supernatural effects. She's actually better at fighting monsters than she is humans. Next time: The Remnant, Vachellia Offering Shade and Thorns
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Sep 13, 2019 16:52
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Eclipse Phase: Gatecrashing Vague Aliens Doing Vague Things on Vague Planets Let's get back to reviewing these planets. Droplet Droplet is like a Soggy Earth. Bit denser atmosphere, much higher ocean surface, so there's only about 8% dry land. It's another place the Spooky Spider Aliens, the Iktomi, have shown up. Which is great because it doesn't mean anything considering that no one knows a goddamn thing about the Iktomi except that they were aliens, they're dead, they probably looked spidery and as a weird spooky coincidence they also liked web-ish designs because let's just make them space spiders rather than being creative. Droplet has a ton of aggressive, super-sized wildlife, both flying, swimming and amphibious, it'd be great if any of it was statted for use, but it isn't. The only statted thing from the world is a bunch of cute hexapod lizards you can have as a pet, which is cool, lizards are cute. Like most worlds described here, this one has only a single interesting thing described. In this case it's a structure called the Toadstool, which is a big self-repairing mushroom-looking thing that does vague thing to Asyncs. Oh, I guess there was also a precursor civilization even older than the Iktomi on Droplet, but unlike the Iktomi which have left behind one or two pieces of alien tech that GM's and players can interact with, these guys were just amphibious centaurs.  more like the chodestool lol Echo Hope you like spiders, because this one has spiders. Yes, it's more Iktomi. Echo's a half-Earth with an appropriately halved atmospheric density and gravity, except once it had a decent atmosphere but something spooky and vague happened to it. Thankfully this is also where a Smart Science Man learned the one thing we'll ever know about Iktomi culture: "Mind the Weave," what is the Weave? Well gently caress knows, it's just a picture of a Pandora Gate in the middle of a spiderweb. Could just mean "mind the loving gap, you moron, don't trip when you enter the gate" or "leave the Gate network clean, don't mess it up by throwing McBurg wrappers everywhere." Echo also has a bunch of buildings where the wind makes spooky or cool music when it blows through them and this does vague things vaguely to asyncs. (Spoiler: everything about Asyncs is vague and useless) Echo does have another planet, nearby that you can fly to, though. Its main thing is that it has giant kaiju that will try to eat you, and little flying monkeys that will try to lure you into giant land anemones so they can eat you. They decided to stat the monkeys and land anemones, but otherwise tell us nothing about the place except that some hypercorps are poking at the fun genetics present on the planet. Fortean It's an icy moon where genehackers are making weird cryptid critters and resurrecting Earth species that no one managed to get a full genetic library for off of Earth before/during the Fall. Somehow this is too transgressive to do in Sol, despite the fact that Sol is where someone uplifted an octopus and did hundreds of other wacky things to the human genome. But no, you make one pet griffon and apparently you've crossed the line and need to hide out in another solar system for ??? reasons. They've apparently also been working on organic ways to give creatures firebreath so they can make dragons and the like, which is actually pretty cool. That would have been something to make pod morphs really stand out, if you could literally sleeve into a dragonmorph or something. Giza Spoiler, you cannot, as a player or GM, interact with Giza unless you rewrite the canon. In the fluff established in the book Firewall has already shoved a bunch of nukes through the gate and blown it up on the Giza side. Now, the Gates do eventually tend to rebuild themselves even if nuked down to their constituent atoms, but have fun waiting a couple of in-game years for that to happen. It feels extremely like one member of the writing team made something a bit softer sci-fi than the rest, something that players could actually interact with rather than just being mystified by, and one of the others appended "and then firewall nuked it, the end" so no one would accidentally have fun. Which is a shame, because Giza actually has way more potential for actually being interacted with than just about any other planet in Gatecrashing. It's a relatively habitable planet, wear a thick coat and bring an air tank and you're golden. No aliens will try to eat you. So what's so special about it? Space Omegle. Alien Space Omegle. See, Giza's got these spooky stone pyramids lying around. If you go over and poke one, it invades your morph/systems/brain with a bunch of microtendrils that go "YO SUP BAYBEE YOU WANNA CHAT WITH SOME COOL NERDS?" and if you go "HELL YEAH BOYEE" it randomly connects you to someone poking at another Giza-esque site somewhere else, probably in another galaxy or solar system, and handles the translating as far as it can. Usually what then happens, according to the lore, is that the other alien trolls you and sends you a picture of its dick. No, really. Giza posted:Approximately 15% of contacts were able to coherently communicate, amenable to talking to us, and had useful information they were willing to trade. Of the remainder, at least 35% were what Go-nin categorized as “bad faith operators” who seemed primarily interested in acting in a manner to provoke annoyance on the part of the user by attempting to discover what they found vulgar and offensive and spewing it back at them. Depending on your view of humanity, it would either be relieving or extremely horrifying to know that aliens are basically just like us. Enough folks have poked at the Giza artifacts that they now know how human Wi-Fi works and you don't actually have to touch them to get chatting. It even lets users set up a social media-esque profile, in case you really want to find some sexy alien molds to swipe left on(or is it right? I don't know how Tinder works). Depending on who you hook up with, you either get text chat, VR chat or MIND TO MIND INTERFACING and can send them pictures and video. The service, not being designed by morons, automatically filters anything that would identify where you're from in the solar system. It doesn't allow you to describe yourself, which makes you wonder how aliens got around sending dick pics, it doesn't allow you to send forks and you can't connect to anyone at the same Giza site as yourself. It's also patrolled by a badly programmed censoring system that cracks down on stuff sometimes like preventing some human poetry from being shared because it's "too sexual." The only remaining quest hook here is that a couple of the guys who found the Giza site managed to escape into the wider Sol system with a few cool things aliens told them, like how to build a super-effective solar cell that also sometimes explodes if you're not really careful. Whoops lol.  asl?????????? Just In Case It's a space survivalist bunker built and staffed by non-Consortium corps in case the TITANs come back to eat all of Sol or the PC takes over all of Sol. Also they're working on stuff to spread humans to other systems without the use of Pandora Gates. That's it. Krypton Probably not dangerous to Superman, it's a space resort on a planet with a thin atmosphere, cold weather, warm geysers and super-cool giant crystals everywhere. You can easily get me hooked by imagining giant crystals, those things are neat. It, of course, has a vague threat that vaguely destroyed some vague Firewall goons in the past so now Firewall is vaguely interested in doing something more about it if the GM can decide what it is. Alternately your PC's can use the place to have a beach episode if you're out of ideas, I guess. Lassiter Lassiter's stupid, like real goddamn stupid. So it's a space planet with no space badguys on, only space goodguys, because it's the SECRET FIREWALL HEADQUARTERS where they give the Prometheans blowjobs while the Prometheans tell them it's gonna be all different this time baby i'm not no TITAN i'm not gonna hurt you honest now go back to the kitchen and make me another bunch of dead fascists/capitalists and if you make them real good this time no one will have to fall down the stairs okay? Also the Promethean is disassembling a loving moon to make itself a super hypermind. That's not shady or anything. The only hook for Lassiter is if you're somehow not a loving moron and become aware of it and start assembling a fat stack of nukes to shove through the gate from Carnivale to this place, maybe strap a couple of drunk Scum to the pile just to make sure it's a total win. Luca Luca's another one of the very common Earth-esque planets. You can breathe the atmosphere without dying, and even apparently eat the local plants and wildlife without dying, and it has the requisite dead alien culture, too, of course. The writer describes their technological level as "feudal" despite the fact that they apparently invented primitive radios. That seems more like, what, renaissance, at the earliest? They were big ol' hexapod ant-eaters, essentially, and they ate pre-sapient mega-ants(big as a fist for the soldier caste) that are still around and have huge hives and may on a hive level be pretty clever. The main local draw is that you have decent odds of getting pasted by an asteroid while living there, neat. The main story hooks for this place are that scientists found enough Lucan genetic material to recreate the natives and then ?????, and the other is that hypercorps want to terraform the place into something more human-standard, which would likely annihilate most of the existing ecology as well as destroying any remaining Lucan archeological sites that have yet to investigated. The latter, at least, is something that can easily be used for a single mission or brief campaign, either stopping anarchist obstructors or blowing up hypercorp badguys, depending on the party's ideological bent/greed. Mishipizheu Don't ask me how to pronounce that, please. Anyway, it's an ocean planet full of cool invertebrate life(vaguely described, not statted), like living, floating reefs and stalking megajellies. The main thing is that it should never have the moon it has, astronomically speaking(the moon is where the Pandora Gate is, by the way), and its local star is dying much sooner than predicted, so it'll be annihilated and/or rendered lifeless again in about 1000 years. Sucks. The only suggestion in the text is that there's alien space technology under the moon's surface and then it leaves it at that. Not really sure what you could do with this world except to invent an alien tech mystery from whole cloth and put it under the moon, since the whole "star is dying" isn't really something humans can interact with in this setting. Maybe you could rescue some space lampreys and nautiloids from Mishipizheu and transplant them to another ocean to save them? Moravec Yet another terrestrial world with very large oceans and a dead alien culture. The interesting thing about Moravec is that the dead aliens left behind their very active space internet, a bit dinged up, but still maintained physically by drones and such. Humans and their AGI's can even connect to it and VR-surf the alien internet, which seems abandoned, but vaguely spooky and sometimes vague things happen. Also sometimes the repair bots throw laser light shows at the local researchers, which may be attempts to communicate, but who knows. If you log in and surf the alien internet it's like exploring an abandoned, buggy MMO written in a foreign language, you'll have no idea what's going on, but occasionally it will seem profound, and there's a lifetime of searching to do because there's enough space in there for three billion aliens to have had their own perfectly simulated world right down to bacteria and grains of dust. Despite this titanic trove of information and, presumably, language, researchers have yet to learn anything about the locals except that they were centaurs with three arms and cones for heads. Good job, science people. Next: The last of the planets. Honest.
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Sep 13, 2019 22:26
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Man, I bet SA was great on Pre-Fall Earth - I can imagine the biohacking disaster mock thread where folks went to laugh at proto-Exhumans (before they became genuinely dangerous) - I bet some Exhuman-hunter crows still cite the posts on Abandoned Weakness or others as useful data on their early projects - or the Photo Chop Shop thread in The Skin Bin, or whatever. Or at least, it would have been funny until some idiot Basilisk hacked GBS or YOSPOS. If there's still goons by then, there's probably entire Firewall servers commonly populated by us. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Sep 13, 2019 |
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Sep 13, 2019 22:53
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PurpleXVI posted:Spoiler, you cannot, as a player or GM, interact with Giza unless you rewrite the canon. In the fluff established in the book Firewall has already shoved a bunch of nukes through the gate and blown it up on the Giza side. Now, the Gates do eventually tend to rebuild themselves even if nuked down to their constituent atoms, but have fun waiting a couple of in-game years for that to happen. It feels extremely like one member of the writing team made something a bit softer sci-fi than the rest, something that players could actually interact with rather than just being mystified by, and one of the others appended "and then firewall nuked it, the end" so no one would accidentally have fun. This is one of the reasons why most metaplots suck. I really like Giza. The FATE version of Eclipse Phase had random tables for what types of alien species you can interact with in chatrooms. They included a few cool and funny entries: quote:Hostile anti-sapient filter feeders offer a weapon that blows up the nearest star, hate you, and want nothing of yours. quote:Easily offended but talkative starfish beings in an underwater video chat offer millions of varieties of programmable building coral, seek biological weapons or pharmaceutical knowledge in return. quote:An avian/dinosauroid species faced with extinction offer all data necessary to clone members of their species, but the black-box artifact blocks them from sending through any egos.
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Sep 14, 2019 01:51
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Okay, so a lot of people ranted about the orbs—and rightly so—but almost nobody really commented much about the items on these tables. Which is a shame, because they're a real goldmine of ridiculous garbage. A garbagemine. Let's see...
On an unrelated note... "Gold Mycelium"? I guess maybe the creators of Eldritch Century thought they were making up a mysterious-sounding name, but, well... "mycelium" is already a word. It means the weblike underground part of a fungus. I don't think fungus filaments would make a great versatile building material even if the fungus was somehow made of gold. EDITED TO ADD: I almost forgot—thanks, inklesspen! Jerik fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Sep 14, 2019 |
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Sep 14, 2019 07:34
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Jerik posted:
Off-brand star trek discovery
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Sep 14, 2019 08:04
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Jerik posted:"Gold Mycelium"? I guess maybe the creators of Eldritch Century thought they were making up a mysterious-sounding name, but, well... "mycelium" is already a word. It means the weblike underground part of a fungus. I don't think fungus filaments would make a great versatile building material even if the fungus was somehow made of gold. I mean, do you really think they didn't know what mycelium is? Maybe it bothers your particular sensibilities, but it's perfectly cromulent scifi bullshit to me.
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Sep 14, 2019 08:08
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That Old Tree posted:I mean, do you really think they didn't know what mycelium is? Maybe it bothers your particular sensibilities, but it's perfectly cromulent scifi bullshit to me. Well, I guess it's possible they knew what mycelium was and intentionally wrote about making weapons and airships out of threads of fungal tissue, but considering how little sense that makes yes, I really think it's more likely that they didn't realize it was already a word. Maybe you're right and they used the word with full knowledge of its meaning, but that might actually be worse. [Edited because I had originally started my post with "I mean", without noticing that's how you'd started your post as well, and I was afraid that looked like I was trying to make fun of you, which wasn't my intent.] Jerik fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Sep 14, 2019 |
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Sep 14, 2019 08:20
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I assumed it was a gold-coloured composite material consisting of fungal fibres in a matrix of... something.
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Sep 14, 2019 08:38
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All right, fine, I guess I retract my statement that the makers of Eldritch Century probably didn't know what "mycelium" meant; I may have jumped to a conclusion. Yeah, okay, given that the Zarathustrian Hegemony does seem to have some kind of theme of biological manipulation, maybe Draco Studios really did intend their "Gold Mycelium" technology to involve fungal fibers. That still strikes me as extremely silly, but eh, it's probably not the silliest thing in those excerpts. For what it's worth (which is probably very little), a Google search for "Gold Mycelium" turns up two recurring uses of the phrase (outside of the occasional use in discussing a fungus the subterranean parts of which happen to be gold in color): There's some kind of alternative health product called "Organo Gold Mycelium" that I guess is made from the mycelium of a certain mushroom, Ganoderma lingzhi, that's long been used in traditional Chinese medicine; and a "Bits of Gold Mycelium Wallet", a bitcoin wallet produced by a company named Mycelium. The latter, at least, suggests that Draco Studios may not have been the first people to think the word "mycelium" sounded fancy and high-tech, since the company has no obvious relation to a part of a fungus either. (Okay, to be fair, on further investigation according to the company's about page it started with as a "mesh networking project", and mycelia are meshlike so I guess there could be a metaphor there.)
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Sep 14, 2019 08:49
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Jerik posted:[*]Wow! You can get a sheet of paper that can be reused up to seven times, for only two thousand times the cost of a regular, unreusable sheet of paper! What a deal! Also it's red for some reason! Maybe it's their equivalent of iPaper(c) by Aeppleae (TM) e: For added stupidity - apparently a set of pliers, screwdrivers and whatnot is worth two whole pianos 
RedSnapper fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Sep 14, 2019 |
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Sep 14, 2019 10:11
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That Old Tree posted:I mean, do you really think they didn't know what mycelium is? Maybe it bothers your particular sensibilities, but it's perfectly cromulent scifi bullshit to me. I think the whole thing has been assembled by a bot, because it reads like breathless nerd word salad.
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Sep 14, 2019 12:31
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They could also be using the word mycelium to represent an adaptable mass of synthetic fibers. You know, magic nanomachines. Jain tech in the Polity books creates a nano-mycelium and it is wholly not a fungus. It just creates synthetic strands that infiltrate and link everything.
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Sep 14, 2019 17:34
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The whole faction feels like the writer really liked Rise of Legends and wanted to smash two of the factions together.
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Sep 14, 2019 18:20
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tankfish posted:The whole faction feels like the writer really liked Rise of Legends and wanted to smash two of the factions together. Rise of Legends deserves better even if they named their clockwork Italians "The Vinci" Also I may have been getting the name of that game wrong repeatedly ITT.
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Sep 14, 2019 19:01
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Why nuke Giza? What reason did the book give? It seems like good fun. Lassiter, eh? And not of the Killmatic kind? I don't like it. StratGoatCom posted:Man, I bet SA was great on Pre-Fall Earth - I can imagine the biohacking disaster mock thread where folks went to laugh at proto-Exhumans (before they became genuinely dangerous) - I bet some Exhuman-hunter crows still cite the posts on Abandoned Weakness or others as useful data on their early projects - or the Photo Chop Shop thread in The Skin Bin, or whatever. Or at least, it would have been funny until some idiot Basilisk hacked GBS or YOSPOS. The Real Pod People probably had some rave sleeve reviews
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Sep 14, 2019 20:05
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JcDent posted:Why nuke Giza? What reason did the book give? It seems like good fun. According to Firewall there was too big a chance it was all an alien/TITAN scam and/or someone would eventually sell some human a Species Destroying Device(tm) and they'd end up killing all of us either out of malice or idiocy. Which are reasonable doubts, but imagine if you just had the conversation, and had such a mission as a potential plot device, rather than carving it into stone that it had already happened and annihilated the Giza site...
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Sep 14, 2019 20:12
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That's also kind of funny for them when they're happily palling it up with and building stuff for a 'no I swear I'm not a TITAN, promise' super-AI.
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Sep 14, 2019 20:15
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Night10194 posted:That's also kind of funny for them when they're happily palling it up with and building stuff for a 'no I swear I'm not a TITAN, promise' super-AI.
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Sep 14, 2019 21:28
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What was that Yud thing about how any sufficiently powerful AI would convince you to let it do sinister AI things?
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Sep 14, 2019 21:29
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Eclipse Phase: Gatecrashing Read, But Don't Touch One thing I realized while thinking about this review earlier is that despite all the alien tech and ruins humanity's stumbled across while exploring exoplanets(like the Iktomi Kumobots, or the entire loving Moravec network), there are actually no gear pices or other items humanity uses that are based on any discoveries made off it. The closest thing you get is stuff like the Scurrier and Whiplash morphs which are based off alien biological foundations. There's no Meshware based off of recovered Moravecian data, there's no cyberware based off of Kumobot servos or armor, or anything of the sort. Far as I can recall there is all of one alien piece of gear in the entire EP fiction that you will be able to have access to, and which isn't just statted as [works as human plasma rifle] or something similar. Nirvana So Nirvana is a dead system, like, extra dead, since there's a pulsar at the heart of it annihilating everything in the system with sterilizing radiation. It has multiple irradiated planets, but no details on them, so I guess maybe they have dead alien civilizations but no one cares enough to go look, apparently. There's a single hab out here for scientists doing close studies of the pulsar, with a bunch of attached modules for some buddhists who come to meditate on the corpse of a star(kind of metal) and some modules serving as what's officially a Consortium prison. Now, there's some poo poo about how the star does wacky things to asyncs and also therefore to exsurgents with async powers, so the prison is actually a place where Project Ozma is storing some exsurgents for study. Oversight is aware of this, tangentially, and wants to take it down, too. At another point in the book it mentions another pulsar, where an area of space in the vicinity generates matter ex nihilo in tune to its pulsing. It feels like they were trying to do some sort of theme with stars and asyncs/space magic in general, but didn't know where they were going with it or someone nixed it. I mean, either it implies that (some?) stars are sentient, because non-epsilon async powers always interact with sentience rather than physical phenomena, or it's just vague spookiness that the writers never thought about. I mean fancy that. Something vague in Eclipse Phase. Whodathunk it. And, of course, there are at no point any rules for what the pulsar does to asyncs of any kind. Nott There's some dumb accent thing over the O that I can't replicate with this keyboard, but whatever, imagine it. Use the powers of your mind. So Nott is like a frozen hellhole, very inhospitable. There's a research station there specifically loving around with things that require extremely low temperatures, and a bunch of people have gone missing. Okay, that's cool, we've got a not-Earthlike planet and we've got a quest hook. This is already better than most of the planets so far. Sadly, rather than a cool snowbeast hunting people and there being an interesting sub-zero ecology on the planet, it's just some exhuman being an edgelord, which means you can show up, follow the tracks, gib him, then go home again. And, of course, said exhuman/snowbeast is not statted. That'd be doing work. Olaf So Olaf is fuckin' huge. Like it has a diameter that I'm sure the devs misplaced a loving 0 in, because it's over ten times the size of Jupiter, yet has a gravity less than that of Earth(varying from about 0,7G to 0,9G). Anything that tries to go into orbit gets blapped by a hidden defense system, and the crust below a certain depth is impenetrable and self-repairing. It is, of course, also conveniently Earthlike and possibly a Dyson Sphere. It has alien ruins, of course, but they're not detailed in any way, except to mention that there are ruins from many different species present on the "planet." Penrose So Penrose is an entirely artificial location, a space station involving materials sciences that allow it to survive on the edge of a black hole and potentially drain materials and energy from it back into the observable universe. It also has an atmosphere that's like 90% halon, so definitely unbreathable. Oh and it's full of active defense systems that want to murder you, which is what happened to several teams of explorers already. There is of course no statting for the defenses, no description of the inside or outside of the station, not even any art of it, so my man, you are definitely working from absolute zero if you want to make Penrose Station into part of your adventure. Portal So Portal is, try to restrain your surprise here, an exoplanet that has even more gates on it than the one you arrive through. Shocker. And of course the requisite vague alien ruins. It has one of the game's two(no, I refuse to acknowledge the Dream Shells as a "usable" anything) usable alien artifact, however... The Fixor. Which are basically Immovable Rods from D&D defined as remaining stationary relative to the nearest strong gravitational field(i.e. they won't tear through a planet's core) and they can support up to two tons of weight. I'm sure someone will do something creative with that. Portal also hosts yet another kind of Mystic Alien Tree, the Myst Tree, which is a nano-tree that's probably an alien computer but no one knows because you can't interact with it you can just look at it and oooh and aaah at how creative the writer was. The other two "statted" alien artifacts, btw, are Dream Shells, which let you have weird dreams if you put them under their pillow and do vague things to asyncs. At this point I'm pretty sure that going to McDonald's does vague things to asyncs, goddamn. Afterwards there are Scour Rings, which are like hula hoops but if you shake one and toss something through it, it gets stripped down to its atoms. Probably work well as an assassination weapon if you could figure out how to hide the loving thing on your person. Rorty Tired of VAGUE ALIEN MYSTERIES? Want some ACTION? Well good, because that's all Rorty has. It's a frozen chunk of rock where Exhumans sleeves themselves into hulking hivemind-controlled battletanks bristling with guns and then go out and raid places and come back with more egos to psychosurgerize into hive minds and put into battle tanks. Try to control your excitement. Sky Ark Oh boy Sky Ark you know what? I don't really care about the content. It could be absolute poo poo for all I care, but Sky Ark is a good planet because it gets us this loving art:  It's a loving robot cowboy riding a goddamn Triceratops, hell yes. Anyway, it's a place that was kind of primordial and without much native life except for maybe some boss and bacteria, so Terragenesis decided to recreate as many Earth ecologies as possible on Sky Ark. Some extremely lame ecologist terrorists are trying to prevent these people from making dinosaurs and other cool things. [quote]In addition to resurrecting Earthly life that went extinct during the Fall, the research teams working on this project have been reconstructing animals that went extinct hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years ago. The dodo, aurochs, stellar sea cow, and moa are their most widely known successes. Their most recent projects, however, are far more ambitious.[quote] What they don't have a genome for, they approximate using DNA from other creatures, and they sponsor Reclaimers trying to hit up stuff like old zoos, seed banks, DNA research servers, etc. on Earth. So Sky Ark is bristling with potential. You've got the whole DNA hunter angle, you've got people getting eaten by dinosaurs(potentially, I mean, you know it's gonna happen), you've got eco-terrorists preparing to take shots at the place, etc. Sadly no velociraptor pod morph, but I guess I have to excuse that, and I kind of wish they'd have statted a T-Rex or something. Solemn Earth-esque planet with a thin atmosphere and a faint ecology. Local bacteria corrode all refined metals and eat plastics. Nanobots can keep them at bay, but damage gives the bacteria deep access to dissolve stuff faster than the nanobots can fight them off, also a bunch of anprim fuckheads have set up station on Solemn, where they want to run around with stone axes and hit each other on the head, I guess. No weird alien ruins or anything else to attract people here, I guess, so not really many built-in quest hooks except "stop the anprim morons before they kill someone and now we actually have a reason for the natural attacks some biomorphs have." Not so much podmorphs, though, they'd melt as well. Sunrise It's a tidally locked Earth-esque planet where the plants that live around the equator will try to hunt you and are often motile predators, that's rad. Killer plants are cool. Of course none of it is statted and Sunrise has no plot hooks beyond vague Iktomi presences once upon a vague time. Synergy Synergize! Energy! Synergy! Profit! Growth! Grofit! Wait, no, wrong setting. Anyway, Synergy is a world that gets like five sentences of description: Dense, helium heavy atmosphere. Lots of weird floaters and fliers. Cool local pteranodons you can fly. Awesome. No alien structures or vague plotlines about vague async things. Instead, what we're mostly told about is the local Synergist colony. They got cut off from the rest of transhuman space for a while and decided that the solution was to hivemind themselves up, which worked pretty well and is interesting, except they have no mysteries or complications on their own planet. The only real complications are when they interact with the rest of humanity, so all of Synergy is really just an advert for not going to Synergy and instead dealing with the Synergists in Sol. Tanaka Hope you like mushrooms, fucker, because all of Tanaka is covered in mushroom. Plant mushroom, animal mushroom, mushroom mushroom. All of them are basically split into three hyper-organisms fighting each other to a standstill, apparently this happens every x years and then when the ULTIMATE MUSHROOM wins it eventually splits into more mushrooms with divergent genetics and they enter the mushroom thunderdome again. The mushrooms will kill and eat anything that comes through the gate unless it's an async, because the mushrooms are also psychic. So I guess if you feel like interfering you can go bug the mushrooms playing their RTS games, hear which one is most into consensual ERP with humans or supports your pet political philosophy and then help it win or something. This will of course have absolutely jack poo poo consequences for the rest of human space because transhumanity so far seems completely incapable of capitalizing on scientific opportunities and none of the mushrooms are statted so you can't recruit a horde of shroom troopers and use them to storm the Lunar capital or reconquer Earth or something. Unless of course your GM feels like statting an entire ecology.  Tirion Tirion is planet that spend literally two lines describing, and then they plop a lab on it where Uplifts are tortured by the same "genius" who brought the world the Lost and their Futura morphs. This is literally a plot line about saving traumatized Uplifts that could be slapped down anywhere in Sol, putting it on an exoplanet is wasting space in this book. Vohaul Imagine Venus. Imagine Venus if it was in a different solar system. Imagine Venus if it was in a different solar system and used for dumping toxic/radioactive waste by hypercorps. Imagine Venus if it was in a different solar system, used for dumping toxic/radioactive waste by hypercorps and also had primitive, indigenous aliens who did not want toxic waste in their back yard, except the hypercorps believe the planet is uninhabited. So you've got a planet where most morphs, even synthmorphs, can't survive. You have aliens that are silicon-based cavemen, that live in magma. That can't communicate with humans. And which no one knows exist. Even if you knew they existed the entirety of this adventure would take place Sol-side, stopping the dumping operation. At no point would there be any point to the PC's going through the gate and dealing with the hellish conditions just to be unable to interact with anything. Wormwood It's a rock somewhere in space(no one's found the surface yet), with a bunch of tunnels inside that you arrive in through the gate. There's a non-breathable atmosphere, and no alien artifacts. One guy's gone missing, but he probably just got lost in a tunnel. There are no sinister hypercorp plots or crimes in progress. What an exciting site for an adventure! Excuse me while I book a trip to Sky Ark to ride a loving dinosaur and shoot at militant hippies instead, hacks. What Else Does The Book Have? It's got the rules such as they are for Pandora gates, some new morphs(of note are some cool new flying options), some new ware(like the High-G adaptation you'll never use), some new gear for scouting(useful for exoplanet campaigns) and some suggested plot hook for the listed exoplanets that range from decent(anything suggested for Brak Kodel) to the unimaginative and vague(what if TITANs show up on Bluewood but, like, the trees fight them, man?), but mostly they're straight out what's already implied by the text and, as usual, rely on the GM doing all the work, not filling in any blanks for him whatsoever. As much as I love some of the art and suggestions in this book, it's just... not really good if you were expecting to use most of its pre-made canonical exoplanets for anything.
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Sep 14, 2019 23:15
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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. A bit late on this, but I wanted to say that it had better be run by Vince McMahonticore.
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Sep 14, 2019 23:19
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Do they have some note about how there are a lot of planets that are just not interesting adventure scenarios or is this just meant to be vaguely cosmically xenophobic?
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Sep 14, 2019 23:30
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Nessus posted:Do they have some note about how there are a lot of planets that are just not interesting adventure scenarios or is this just meant to be vaguely cosmically xenophobic? I think they actually thought, in their heads, that these were all cool adventure locations, since they wrote up two PLOT HOOKS for each of them at the end of the book. But it's kind of like the Inner Planes in D&D. Neat locations, give some atmosphere, explain some of the setting's cosmology... but like 1% of 1% of all 20th level parties get bored enough to go there or have a GM high enough on drugs to create an adventure for the place.
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Sep 14, 2019 23:32
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PurpleXVI posted:I think they actually thought, in their heads, that these were all cool adventure locations, since they wrote up two PLOT HOOKS for each of them at the end of the book. But it's kind of like the Inner Planes in D&D. Neat locations, give some atmosphere, explain some of the setting's cosmology... but like 1% of 1% of all 20th level parties get bored enough to go there or have a GM high enough on drugs to create an adventure for the place.
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Sep 15, 2019 00:00
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PurpleXVI posted:But it's kind of like the Inner Planes in D&D. Neat locations, give some atmosphere, explain some of the setting's cosmology... but like 1% of 1% of all 20th level parties get bored enough to go there or have a GM high enough on drugs to create an adventure for the place. ...Hey, I've created and run adventures on the Inner Planes. Not only for my home campaigns, but I ran a Planescape adventure at GenCon one year that was set in the Elemental Plane of Water, and another year I ran an adventure in the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral. And they were relatively low-level adventures; the Inner Planes aren't suitable only for 20th-level characters. But yeah, the canonical information on the Inner Planes was very thin. Even in Planescape, while the Outer Planes got four boxed sets devoted to them, the Inner Planes only got a single relatively thin book, and it came out very near the end of the product cycle, even after the Faction War adventure that a lot of people sort of consider to have been the end of the setting. I think the Inner Planes were unjustly neglected, and had a lot more potential than was ever realized in canon, but oh well...
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Sep 15, 2019 01:40
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Jerik posted:...Hey, I've created and run adventures on the Inner Planes. Not only for my home campaigns, but I ran a Planescape adventure at GenCon one year that was set in the Elemental Plane of Water, and another year I ran an adventure in the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral. And they were relatively low-level adventures; the Inner Planes aren't suitable only for 20th-level characters. The Inner Planes have two problemsl largely, that prevent them from being more generally useful. Firstly, most of them require specialized magic to survive(some more than others, admittedly, Earth and its offspring are generally easier to survive in, same goes for the Water and Air-based ones). So this keeps a lot of parties from going there at all. Secondly, yeah, even more than the rest of Planescape it feels like one location in the Inner Planes is often very undifferentiated from the next. Like, I feel that the Inner Planes would have had much more potential if they hadn't been in Planescape, if they hadn't had to compete with... what... eighteen outer planes and multiple named primes? If they'd been part of a tight cosmology where it's just Prime, Astral, Ethereal, Inner, I think they would have had a much easier time seeing use. As it is, the elementals more rarely than the outer planar creatures have an interest in loving with mortal matters.
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Sep 15, 2019 03:14
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PurpleXVI posted:The Inner Planes have two problemsl largely, that prevent them from being more generally useful. Well, the first problem, yeah, that is an issue. It's not an insurmountable one—it's possible to give low-level parties the means to survive even in the most inhospitable of the Inner Planes—but it does mean that setting an adventure in one of those planes takes a bit more care and planning than a typical dungeon delve or even a jaunt to most of the Outer Planes where the PCs don't need special apparatus or enchantments just to breathe and move around. The second problem, though, I think lies more with the fact that the Inner Planes weren't ever developed in nearly as much detail as the Outer Planes than with the nature of the planes themselves. The Inner Planes actually slightly outnumber the Outer Planes—counting the Outlands/Concordant Opposition, there are seventeen Outer Planes; counting the Energy Planes and the Quasi- and Paraelemental Planes, there are eighteen Inner Planes. But very little was ever done with them. I really think that if the Planescape developers had put as much time and thought into the Inner Planes as they did the Outer, they could have been made just as interesting and just as ripe for adventure as the Outer Planes. (In fact, one of many things that I hope to do if the Planescape setting is ever opened to the DMs Guild—but realistically may or may not ever get around to doing even if that happens—is just that, to flesh out the Inner Planes and give them the development I think they deserve.) But the Inner Planes were always treated as an afterthought, which I think is kind of a shame.
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Sep 15, 2019 05:54
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To my understanding there's not a lot inherent to them to make you want to go there unless you need a lot of whatever the plane is about, either. "This is the Elemental Plane of Water!" "Oh boy, what's in it?" "Water and water elementals."
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Sep 15, 2019 06:03
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Yeah, they're the kind of places you go because you need something, or need to go somewhere in there specifically. I think one of the first Planescape adventure modules (The Eternal Boundary?) has a section set in the City of Brass.
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Sep 15, 2019 06:05
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Which itself is not really a place you want to go. It's on the elemental plane of fire, basically everyone who lives there is elementally evil, and their economy revolves entirely around slavery.
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Sep 15, 2019 06:07
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Kurieg posted:Which itself is not really a place you want to go. It's on the elemental plane of fire, basically everyone who lives there is elementally evil, and their economy revolves entirely around slavery. Now that you mention it, how do you have any form of economy on the elemental plane of fire? The only thing there is is fire, and presumably there's plenty to go around.
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Sep 15, 2019 06:23
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megane posted:Now that you mention it, how do you have any form of economy on the elemental plane of fire? The only thing there is is fire, and presumably there's plenty to go around.
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Sep 15, 2019 06:25
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I really like the Elemental Chaos in 4e because it's assumed to be broadly traversible without requiring specialized magical protection like "there is literally no air here that you didn't bring with you" I mean, sure, it's hazardous but that's like "poo poo, river of lava that's really wide, what do we do" rather than "IT IS A CONSTANT SEVEN MILLION DEGREES AND IF YOU AREN'T IMMUNE TO FIRE YOU DIE INSTANTLY"
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Sep 15, 2019 06:26
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Kurieg posted:basically everyone who lives there is elementally evil, and their economy revolves entirely around slavery.
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Sep 15, 2019 06:36
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Bieeanshee posted:Yeah, they're the kind of places you go because you need something, or need to go somewhere in there specifically. I think one of the first Planescape adventure modules (The Eternal Boundary?) has a section set in the City of Brass. In the Elemental Plane of Fire, yes, but not in the City of Brass specifically. Though that entire part of the adventure is set in a self-contained citadel that just happens to be in the Elemental Plane of Fire, so its being set in the Plane of Fire isn't much more than window-dressing. Zereth posted:To my understanding there's not a lot inherent to them to make you want to go there unless you need a lot of whatever the plane is about, either. "This is the Elemental Plane of Water!" "Oh boy, what's in it?" "Water and water elementals." Again, I'd argue that's just because the developers never bothered to do much with the Inner Planes; they certainly could have put lots of interesting stuff there, but instead they just kind of mostly ignored them. Even then, though, there were interesting things placed in the Inner Planes; it's just that they tended to be mentioned once and then forgotten about (or came out too late in the Planescape product cycle to be followed up on). The Elemental Plane of Water, for example, has an enormous and diverse city full of portals to other planes, with multiple districts, warring merchant houses, and political maneuverings. It's fleshed out with thirty pages of description. It's a planar hub second only to Sigil itself, and in fact is often called "the Sigil of the Elements". Seems like an important place that ought to have come up a lot. But no; that thirty-page description appears in an adventure that's not even technically a Planescape product (though much of it does take place on other planes), and then the city gets a few paragraphs' worth of mention in The Inner Planes, and that's it. Anyway, sorry, I think this kind of got turned into a derail about the Inner Planes, which has nothing to do with any of the books currently being reviewed, and that's mostly my fault. I guess this is something I feel more strongly about than I probably should; as much as I love the Planescape setting overall, its neglect of the Inner Planes is one of the things that I think it could have been better about. And I'll have more to say on this subject when (and if) I finally get to a relevant part in my eventual Planescape reviews. But if I'm ever going to get to actually reviewing Planescape, I've got to finally finish my review of Deities & Demigods first, so, uh, yeah, I'll try to have the next part of that review up hopefully in the next day or two. Anyway, I'll shut up about the Inner Planes for now. Sorry for the derailment.
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Sep 15, 2019 06:38
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Most of these EP planets would work better as rumours, actual places that big organisations (which Firewall is supposed to be) been to are much better documented. Even primitive explorers usually got back good impressions of edibles, valuables and stuff to avoid.
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Sep 15, 2019 07:06
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megane posted:Now that you mention it, how do you have any form of economy on the elemental plane of fire? The only thing there is is fire, and presumably there's plenty to go around. it's not just fire, there's a whole city of brass
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Sep 15, 2019 08:31
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