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Mors Rattus posted:If the main effect of the mythos is "everyone commits a lot more rapes" then it's way more prosaic and boring than its fans like to paint it. Here is the Unearthed Arcana description of the 4th level AD&D spell, Stoneskin quote:Stoneskin (Alteration) Here is a description of the Carcosa ritual to bind the "Slime God" to the Sorcerer's will for 24 hours. quote:The Ineluctable Notice the similarity in tone of the two descriptions. There's no emotion. The text is dry, even dull. The Stoneskin spell outlines the effects and limits of the spell along with the material components. The Ineluctable Name ritual outlines the requirements for learning the ritual as well as the material components. The point of Carcosa isn't "everyone commits more rapes." It's that rapes are normal. Human sacrifice is normal. The perverts and weirdos of Carcosa are the ones who don't rape and who aren't willing to murder 13 guys with a gross dagger to boss around a Slime God for a day. Carcosa is a place where constant contact with the Mythos has utterly shattered the human social contract beyond repair. For me, it would be a setting to drop some players into with the idea of "this is what your world will be like if you let these things get in." But I sure as hell wouldn't want to run it a straight as an actual game setting.
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Dec 23, 2019 03:19
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 17:18 |
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Again, if the primary change to human society is that rape and murder are expected and normal, these things are way more prosaic and lame than Mythos fans sell them as. This isn’t eldritch or cosmic or anything. It’s just gross and dull. This isn’t a world broken by madness or warped beyond recognition or ruled by the vile secrets of strange and alien beings. It’s tired and boring and gross and completely normal for chuds. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Dec 23, 2019 |
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Dec 23, 2019 04:20
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It's more boring than the apocalypse presented in the drat Lovecraft books, which was either an unknowable repossession of Earth by alien entities or "humanity becomes so good at partying down that the Old Ones return to teach us new ways to do so, and the world burns with esctacy and freedom." Instead it's just rape rape rape, murder murder murder.
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Dec 23, 2019 04:33
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The Shallows is a drat fine short story that does all of that better, by just having a guy go about his day in a post Mythos world and remember bad poo poo that happened between the apocalypse and now.
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Dec 23, 2019 04:57
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Nessus posted:"humanity becomes so good at partying down that the Old Ones return to teach us new ways to do so, and the world burns with esctacy and freedom." The best take on this is that it happened, our modern society is Lovecraft's nightmare, and the Great Old Ones are barely-interested amoral alien monsters, and that's it. But that doesn't sell lurid kickstarter games.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:05
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Joe Slowboat posted:The best take on this is that it happened, our modern society is Lovecraft's nightmare, and the Great Old Ones are barely-interested amoral alien monsters, and that's it.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:15
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Nessus posted:I refuse to believe that this has come to pass even if I'm pretty sure Nyarlathotep invented Twitter To be clear this is mostly based on the idea that what made the Great Old Ones terrifying to Lovecraft was that they put his favored kind of human civilization - white New England upper-class repression - on the same level as everyone else. In a world where Lovecraft has become a widely reviled symbol for a rotten order, not because of his morbid imaginings but because of his racism and classism and sexism and so on... That's a world which would be alien to him. Not totally, yet, but The Culture would make him break out in a cold sweat as much as Mad Max, if either came to pass. Cthulhu is a beloved pop-cultural figure while Lovecraft is the weird ancestor who worshiped at the altar of a horrible power, his image positive only where his real beliefs can be quietly ignored.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:23
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Also that award that used his head as a bust was creepy as hell.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:27
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Stygian was one of the best video games of the tear.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:29
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Young Freud posted:Oh hell, is this something topical? 'Cuz, along with J.K. Rowling, Richard Morgan of "Altered Carbon" fame (and basically the uncredited writer of Eclipse Phase, since a lot of the game's concepts came from his novel series) outed himself as a transphobe, claiming to be a "bio-materialist" or some poo poo. Wow, was not really expecting that. Is it being discussed elsewhere on the forums?
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Dec 23, 2019 13:59
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Wow, was not really expecting that. Is it being discussed elsewhere on the forums?
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Dec 23, 2019 14:12
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 Or scold like a lawyer screaming wrong wrong wrong The Player’s Guide chapter is both short and I’ve covered most of it, since the rest of this writeup doesn’t make sense without knowing how to play the game. The obligatory “What is a roleplaying game, what’s a GM, who am I” section is here. It takes up about a page, which is good, but there’s no reason it should be located this far back in the book.  Absolutely not. Here’s the entirety of what Wild Lands has to say about leveling up. quote:At the end of the quest experience points will be transferred to the players. It is important to note that players receive experience whether they succeed or fail. However, failure may result in the characters losing out on other opportunities There’s no full stop at the end of that sentence, either. We’ve got a concession to failing forward, but why is this broken out into XP levels? There’s no guide to how much XP is an appropriate award for completing a quest in the core book. You’ve got to go to the adventure guide for that, and that only covers level 1 and 2 quests. Want to guess how much experience you get from each? A level 1 quest gives you 75 XP, and a level 2 grants 150. Enough to level on completion. Well, that was pointless. There’s a breakdown of what success count should be used to set difficulties for tests. Notation is given as “[Ability] AC (n),” e.g. “Phy AC(3)” means you’d need to roll a number of dice equal to your Physicality, plus bonus dice, and get three or more dice coming up five or six. No reason why this needed special notation, but okay. Aiding another player is given a callout box. It’s an optional rule, and you can, once per day, aid another player character to give them +1 die on their checks. If your GM allows it, apparently. I’m going to be charitable and suppose this is to try and encourage players to act out on their own, rather than default to “I help Gus lift the gate/open the chest/scratch his rear end.” Failure is addressed, after a fashion, but it boils down to “sometimes your players won’t get the right number of successes. Tell them what happens and let them react.”  What even Behold the sum total of exploration and encounter crafting rules outside of the random encounter table. Come on down, we’ve got special unit names, we’ve got internal contradictions, we got plenty of snakes and lizards for ‘em to play with, that ain’t no problem at all. After a general description of the rules, combat comes up. Initiative is down to who gets the drop on the other side, or if it’s not clear, flip a coin. Straight up. Players move and act together, as do their opponents. quote:Players can take turns in whatever order works for the group, but going in a clockwise rotation around the table is traditional. Is it? As mentioned, a character’s turn is a standard and a quick action, plus movement. You can hold an action, but you have to write down what you want to do and what opposed action triggers your action. No.  Fffffffff Then there’s the best illustration in the game.  YEAAAAAHHHH Shame about everything else on that page. How many granular levels of “I dunno” do you need in place of actual actionable rules, for god’s sake?
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Dec 23, 2019 18:14
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Young Freud posted:Oh hell, is this something topical? 'Cuz, along with J.K. Rowling, Richard Morgan of "Altered Carbon" fame (and basically the uncredited writer of Eclipse Phase, since a lot of the game's concepts came from his novel series) outed himself as a transphobe, claiming to be a "bio-materialist" or some poo poo. I'll have a version that's less  later, but cliffnotes version? Transhumanism is literally Bio-Determinism: The Ideology, for all it's liberatory pretension, and if anything, his take is probably more accurate to the thought processes of a fair amount of the weird dark money around that brand of ideology/futurism that isn't just straight MIC PR, then the  about The Morphological Freedom Future that is ~40% of EP.
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Dec 23, 2019 18:34
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There isn’t really a single coherent transhumanism, though? I agree that a large swathe of the ideological space is Bad and chud-aligned but it’s important to note that, like internet skepticism, it’s a coalition of aesthetically similar ideologies rather than a functional whole. E: also yeah the rich assholes funding the present version of Futurism are mostly fash; ironically, Morgan’s avowed anticapitalism means they’d want to process him for soylent too, despite the rest.
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Dec 23, 2019 18:55
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They all ultimately share origins of thought, and that causes their rhetoric to exhibit convergent evolution, and these rhetorics are both toxic to thought about tech, and enable dangerous cultural currents. There is a reason why whenever NTs start talking about the end of weakness that I start backing away and feel for a heavy object (metaphorically). Or less  , transhumanism can be divided into the dreamers, the Yuds and the money types, and the former either knowingly or unknowingly act as ways to get some ugly ways of thinking back into the mainstream - bear in mind, it's quite possible for one to be combos of the above.
StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Dec 23, 2019 |
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Dec 23, 2019 19:15
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There’s also practical bodyhackers (none of which is at all useful or practical but it’s a distinct ideological framework) and the vague cloud of SFF nerd love of cyborgs which doesn’t have a consistent political alignment - in fact for a while ‘transhumanism’ was the snarl word from the right wing in SFF who saw it as destabilizing gender (among other things). My point is mostly that something like Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is also a strand of transhumanism (Or inspires one) which is pretty incompatible with the Yuds cult. And that strain is pretty distinct from the technocratic utopian futurism of EP.
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Dec 23, 2019 20:12
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My mobile internet's trying to save me by not letting the twitter hellsite work right now but the tragic meat machine tweet seems relevant here.
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Dec 23, 2019 20:53
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StratGoatCom posted:
Huh, what?
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Dec 23, 2019 21:32
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Public relations efforts for the military-industrial complex.
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Dec 23, 2019 21:42
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Joe Slowboat posted:There’s also practical bodyhackers (none of which is at all useful or practical but it’s a distinct ideological framework) and the vague cloud of SFF nerd love of cyborgs which doesn’t have a consistent political alignment - in fact for a while ‘transhumanism’ was the snarl word from the right wing in SFF who saw it as destabilizing gender (among other things).
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Dec 23, 2019 22:32
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Nessus posted:What I never understood about these guys is: I can comprehend wishing the literary scene was more to your taste, but why does science fiction, writ large, need to stabilize and reinforce... anything at all?? It's speculative fiction, fa chrissakes. Short version: they’re so intensely conservative that on some level SFF serves more to affirm for them that despite immense changes in tech and setting, the fundamental truths they believe about the universe are still true. And the truths they hold to are really specifically American cultural conservatism, rather than more interesting ones like ‘Marxist analysis’ or even just humanism.
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Dec 23, 2019 22:56
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90s Cringe Rock posted:My mobile internet's trying to save me by not letting the twitter hellsite work right now but the tragic meat machine tweet seems relevant here. I'm not really seeing how that contradicts my framework of 'dreamers, yuds and money' though. Folks like EP devs think they'd be getting the former, but all seems to be doing to me is creating ideological cover for the latter. It smacks to me of the school choice stuff. Also, Grinders are literally a self-harm subculture with extra ideological steps. IIRC, there's a reason why most piecing studios don't do that magnetic implant poo poo. Stupid things have a nasty tendency to break up and they make it so you can't do any kind of magnetic imaging. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Dec 23, 2019 |
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Dec 23, 2019 23:12
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The hell is a Yud
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Dec 24, 2019 00:20
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXARrMadTKk The various weird cult leaders in the futurist community who run outfits like MIRI, Lesswrong or the Lifeboat Foundation.
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Dec 24, 2019 00:31
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Nessus posted:What I never understood about these guys is: I can comprehend wishing the literary scene was more to your taste, but why does science fiction, writ large, need to stabilize and reinforce... anything at all?? It's speculative fiction, fa chrissakes. Control. That's pretty much it. If people read about a thing they will think about the thing and they might come to the "wrong" conclusion as far as these bozos are concerned.
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Dec 24, 2019 01:09
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StratGoatCom posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXARrMadTKk This song led me to this Rational Wiki page and...wow.
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Dec 24, 2019 01:10
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Nessus posted:What I never understood about these guys is: I can comprehend wishing the literary scene was more to your taste, but why does science fiction, writ large, need to stabilize and reinforce... anything at all?? It's speculative fiction, fa chrissakes. Others have already mentioned control and power, and specifically there's an appeal to SFF of being able to take your present day politics and project them into the future as the ideology that will survive/prosper/save humanity. A lot of it flies under the radar, too, since you'll get ostensibly progressive/utopian worlds free of war or racial strife where there's an unstated point in the fictional history where all the non-white people effectively gave up even trying to have their own culture and just assimilated into the (implicitly white American) "norm". Transhumanism, by extension, has been a popular duck blind for a vein of conservative nerds who basically argue that we don't need to bother fixing inequality because The Singularity will just happen any day now and "make it all irrelevant" so we should focus effort on that. Relevant to role playing games, it's a kind of social conflict aversion that prioritizes solutions that just make problems disappear instead of fixing them.
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Dec 24, 2019 01:53
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It’s worth noting that there is a mock thread for this guy and his bubble of weird ‘rationalists’ somewhere on this site, that I keep forgetting the location of.
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Dec 24, 2019 01:56
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The Less Wrong Mock Thread: The Big Yudkowsky https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3627012&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=21 Literally one of the things that got me to spend the  .There is good reason why I use Yud as the type specimen for the 'The various weird cult leaders in the futurist community who run outfits like MIRI, Lesswrong or the Lifeboat Foundation'.
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Dec 24, 2019 02:38
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big yud is notable for occupying, prior to the emergence of Elon musk, the largest delta between perceived intellect and actual intellect of anyone on earth. In reality he is somewhat stupider than the average person, albeit with a big vocabulary from reading genre fiction. In the eyes of his cult he’s not just a genius but possibly the greatest genius in history, eclipsing such simpletons as Avicenna and Newton
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Dec 24, 2019 02:39
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I appreciate the link, but also dread finding out how much on it I have to catch up. Also, yeah, Yuds is the rare Dunning-Krueger field generator; as a result of his direct influence an entire subuculture of nerds think they're incredibly good at the two things they are tied for the absolute worst at in the world (skepticism/rational thinking, and ethical philosophy). They're also a seething hive of barely-hidden racism! At best!
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Dec 24, 2019 03:54
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FoldableHuman posted:Others have already mentioned control and power, and specifically there's an appeal to SFF of being able to take your present day politics and project them into the future as the ideology that will survive/prosper/save humanity. A lot of it flies under the radar, too, since you'll get ostensibly progressive/utopian worlds free of war or racial strife where there's an unstated point in the fictional history where all the non-white people effectively gave up even trying to have their own culture and just assimilated into the (implicitly white American) "norm". The overall plot of Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South had a group of rear end in a top hat South African racists from 2014 using time travel to help the American South win the Civil War so they could be big dick slave owners and create an ally for Apartheid South Africa in the future.
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Dec 24, 2019 04:45
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StratGoatCom posted:The Less Wrong Mock Thread: The Big Yudkowsky There's also a Let's Read thread for Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic in TBB: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3702281&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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Dec 24, 2019 04:46
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Oh god. HE wrote that?
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Dec 24, 2019 05:07
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Bieeanshee posted:Oh god. HE wrote that?
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Dec 24, 2019 05:31
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Nessus posted:He wrote the fanfic. I kept hearing all kinds of good things about HP and the Methods of Rationality. I tried to get into it, but just could not. It read like, "What If Harry Potter was possessed by the spirit of Richard Dawkins?" I think if I'd read much more I'd have been rooting for Voldemort to slaughter the lot of them.
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Dec 24, 2019 05:37
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I’ll just go on and scratch a few more checks in the “Eclipse Phase may in fact suck rear end” column.
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Dec 24, 2019 06:02
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Everyone posted:I kept hearing all kinds of good things about HP and the Methods of Rationality. I tried to get into it, but just could not. It read like, "What If Harry Potter was possessed by the spirit of Richard Dawkins?" I think if I'd read much more I'd have been rooting for Voldemort to slaughter the lot of them. It's a decent fanfic, given the steep grading curve that implies. It has some genuinely good bits, some genuinely bad bits and a lot of mediocre bits. It probably doesn't deserve the heavy scorn it gets from some people, but definitely doesn't deserve the worship its biggest fans give it
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Dec 24, 2019 06:10
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Kaza42 posted:It's a decent fanfic, given the steep grading curve that implies. It has some genuinely good bits, some genuinely bad bits and a lot of mediocre bits. It probably doesn't deserve the heavy scorn it gets from some people, but definitely doesn't deserve the worship its biggest fans give it It's not fanfic, because Yudkowski explicitly does not care about Harry Potter. It's just 'fic' or more accurately, 'elaborate propaganda pitched in the form of a long, tedious webnovel ripping off Harry Potter.' It has, on the one hand, less sincerity than Harry Potter fanfic about Harry getting converted to (insert religion here) because at least that comes from a place of deep, if neurotic and religiously terrified, love of the characters. On the other, it's an absolutely sincere portrait of Yudkowski's own thought process in his version of Harry Potter, which is to say the main character is a huge narcissist.
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Dec 24, 2019 07:01
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 17:18 |
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Chapter 6: Character Creation, pt. 4 Degenesis Rebirth Katharsys Chapter 6: Character Creation Back in page 9 of Katharsys, a side-section on notation said that whenever you see '+' when a Skill is written out (that is, INT+Medicine and poo poo), it means you add up the Attribute and Skill to get the Action Number. With that in mind, lets build a Spitalian, Johann, to see how far we can go. The first rank of Spitalian is Recruit. You need gently caress all for that as you're just some dumb teen who likes being around sick people. The second rank of Spitalian is Orderly.. You need INT+Medicine 4 (not too dumb to heal people) and BOD+Stamina 4 (for running around and carrying out orders). The third rank of Spitalian is Famulancer. You need BOD+Toughness 4 (to survive Post-Eschaton measles you got after Lyknn bit you in the Annex), INT+Medicine 4 (“yep, that's turbo polio”), and INT+Science 4 (for defending vaccination offline).  RIP to a real one. Had he been an Apocalyptic, his body would have been thrown in a roadside ditch. So, we start first by choosing the Culture of our birth. We settle with Hybrispania as it's the most beneficial European region for Spitalians (Africa could be better, depending on whether you want AGI or BOD). Ironically enough, Borca is nearly useless. I assume Pre-Eschaton Germans liked to get drunk on Spanish beaches just like current ones do, so that's where Johann's name comes. Being faux-Spaniards, we get +1 limit to Attributes Intelligence (2->3) Agility (2->3) Skills Melee (2->3) Mobility (2->3) Medicine (2->3) Stealth (2->3) Orienteering (2->3) Then we have to choose one of the Apocalyptic-tarot derived character concepts. We're gonna go with Seeker for Johann: quote:
Being Attributes Intelligence (3->4) Skills Artifact Lore (2->3) Science (2->3) Now, we just gave to choose a Cult, which is kinda obvious at this point. Being Spitalians, we get +1 limit to Skills Toughness (2->3) Medicine (3->4) Faith/Will (2->3) Science (3->4) Perception (2->3) That's right, Cults don't give any Attribute bonuses. Now remember, Attributes all start at 1, and we have 10 points to spend on Johann. Here's how it looks in action: (3) Agility 3 (2) Instinct 2 (4) Intellect 4 (2) Charisma 2 (2) Psyche 2 (2) Body 2 On the other hand, Skills start at 0 and we have 28 points to spend. Here's how we do it: (4) Medicine 4 (4) Science 4 (3) Melee 3 (3) Stealth 3 (3) Toughness 3 (3) Orienteering 2 (3) Artifact Lore 1 (3) Faith 3 (3) Perception 3 (2) Primal 2 After spending skill points, you spend your Backgrounds: you have 4 points and 6 Backgrounds. Johann takes Renown 2 Resources 2  Johann here looking mighty fine. Lyknn won't know what hit him. Not all character art is this SFW, btw. Backgrounds is one of the hard caps preventing you from starting at rank 4. This is where you need to start thinking ahead as many rank 4 classes have Background requirements that go beyond chargen limits. For example, Field Medics need INT+Medicine 8 (We're good, as we're Int 4, Medicine 4), Renown 2, Resources 2, Network 2 (6 point in Backgrounds when you start with 4). If you wanted to go shitkicker route and choose Preservist, you're SOL. The first requirement is “appointed after some outstanding combat against the Spital’s enemies.” Then you need BOD+Melee 8 (we're at 5 now), AGI+Mobility 6 (3), BOD+Toughness 6 (5) and Resources 4 (you can't jam more than 3 in a single Background at start). Now, let's look at what neat poo poo we get from climbing the ranks of Combat Doctor: Medic Harder. As a Recruit, we get the Manual. It's an illustrated "Medicine for Dummies" book which gives +1D to INT+Medicine Rolls as long as your Medicine is 2 or less. It's immediately useless for us, as we're hitting INT+Medicine 8 as Famulancer. Maybe you can give it to the secondary medical character in the group, or roleplay a comical moment where the Spitalian is injured and some Clanner gently caress has to heal him by flipping through the book. You also get a leather apron. As an Orderly, we get a permanent +1D on rolls against illnesses. We also receive the Spitalian Suit, immediately becoming the fetish star of the wasteland. As a Famulancer, we are said to be appreciated in the Protectorate, which means we get free food in territory (no, there are no hard mechanical components to this). It's also said that if we don't choose a medical specialization soon, we might get sent to be a Preservist or to “help allies” (the Village Medic rank). On the more solid side, we get a Splayer (the Spitalian spear) with a Mollusk (the mutant-sensing muscle slab) and one other attachment, as well as a fungicide rifle. Oh, and we have a single level 1 Potential, which are as-of-yet undetailed super powers. Next time:Potentials and derivatives JcDent fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Dec 24, 2019 |
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Dec 24, 2019 07:42
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