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That Old Tree posted:Since they're already selling the PDF and are pushing a discount on print books if you buy the PDF, I'd suggest now's the perfect time to start. Well then, better get reading :-D
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Apr 1, 2020 12:09
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Jerik posted:it does suggest that any PCs left alone with a doppelganger are automatically killed, and has a section for what happens if all the PCs are killed All the PC's are killed alone by the doppelgangers... who are unaware that the other doppelgangers have also replaced the rest of the party since they forgot to arrange a smart signal to identify each other. So they stick to the role with desperation, eager not to be uncovered. Only after they defeat the final boss does one of them cave and go "...guys, I'm not Bob, I killed him and took his form and... I needed you to know that I've really enjoyed my time with you, and with being Bob." Then the rest of them look at each other, drop disguises one by one, and wonder what the hell to do now that they've murdered their own boss and saved the world by accident.
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Apr 1, 2020 14:07
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PurpleXVI posted:All the PC's are killed alone by the doppelgangers... who are unaware that the other doppelgangers have also replaced the rest of the party since they forgot to arrange a smart signal to identify each other. 
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Apr 1, 2020 14:28
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Jerik posted:Edit: Make that at least four! I forgot From the Shadows, where the PCs all get decapitated and then brought back by Azalin as disembodied heads. Yeah, Ravenloft was pretty bad about this... My favourite (for which read: most horrifying) piece of dumb RPG railroading comes from a sadly forgotten RPG that was quite big once upon a time, Space: 1889. The first thing I noticed was that all the published adventures by one particular author seemed to have a Thing for destroying the party's vehicles. In a Victoriana steampunk game you'd expect the PCs to have some custom conveyances and such, which this author dealt with by including little sidebars on how to destroy them and kill any NPC allies in Act 1 to ensure the PCs couldn't bypass bits of the adventure due to inconvenient zeppelins or something. I'm guessing none of this GM's home game PCs bothered to waste resources on such things after a while, but it's really noticeable in a game with such detailed invention mechanics (and a genre full of wisecracking servants). It got so bad that one day myself and a bunch of friends went through his published adventures with a "time until PC's vehicle trashed" counter. Usually it took about three pages before a little sidebar appeared saying something like "if your party has access to a flyer or such then here are some suggested ways to destroy it". But the real killer was one particular adventure by this guy published in Challenge magazine. This involved an expedition to a ruined city full of hideous degenerate remnants of its former inhabitants, twisted and warped by a plague in the distant past. When the party arrived and got their bearings, the adventure included instructions to the GM to make one of the PCs disappear during their opening sweep of the ruins. The GM was then supposed to take away that player's character sheet and hand them a replacement, or have them roll up a new one. The other PCs would then break into a forgotten temple, hear their comrade screaming, and stumble across their missing fellow PC being flayed alive as a sacrifice. They explicitly could not intervene to stop it and were expected to watch. The GM was told not to worry, this was only temporary and actually the flaying was an illusion, but not to tell the players this as it would spoil the surprise at the end of the adventure. "SURPRISE! Your PC whom I forcibly and unavoidably showed you all being horrifically killed isn't actually dead! You can have them back! Hey wait where are you all going..."
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Apr 1, 2020 15:05
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Ooh, ooh. Dark Sun supplement, Mind Lords of the Last Sea. It included an adventure that, as written, both killed at least one PC in the first encounter, and would result in destabilizing the hidden city by killing one of the three titular Mind Lords and rendering the rest of the supplment a big question mark. Said first encounter is basically the Mind Lord in question popping in, using a custom Teleport Brain power, and loving off again. Granted Dark Sun had that character tree, where you'd presumably have several backup PCs per player ready... but still. Christ.
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Apr 1, 2020 17:32
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PurpleXVI posted:All the PC's are killed alone by the doppelgangers... who are unaware that the other doppelgangers have also replaced the rest of the party since they forgot to arrange a smart signal to identify each other. So they stick to the role with desperation, eager not to be uncovered. Only after they defeat the final boss does one of them cave and go "...guys, I'm not Bob, I killed him and took his form and... I needed you to know that I've really enjoyed my time with you, and with being Bob." Then the rest of them look at each other, drop disguises one by one, and wonder what the hell to do now that they've murdered their own boss and saved the world by accident. As a "meet cute" opening to a campaign, this kind of owns.
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Apr 1, 2020 18:02
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Heck, running a whole party of doppelgangers could be massive fun if the players actually work at giving them personalities. "Oh come on, I was Jeremy McClellan 1st earl of the Highlands last week! I want to be Frau Schuller!" " But #3 is Frau Schuller today. " "No I'm not, I can never get the cooking just right. And also I find her disgusting." *#5 Kramers their way into the room, in guise of Little Pete the chimney sweep*
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Apr 1, 2020 20:17
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Jerik posted:The two adventures I was referring to were Adam's Wrath (flesh golems) and Requiem (undead). Both adventures explicitly mandate that there has to be a TPK; all of the PCs have to be killed for the adventure to progress. Hour of the Knife doesn't go quite that far... it does suggest that any PCs left alone with a doppelganger are automatically killed, and has a section for what happens if all the PCs are killed—but that doesn't have to happen, and in fact if the PCs stick together it's possible (if unlikely) to complete the adventure with no fatalities. Same for The Created (the one with the evil puppets)—while it does have an eventuality for what happens if all the PCs are defeated by the puppets, it also says that this doesn't have to happen and that the adventure still works if the PCs win the fight. But I'll give you Thoughts of Darkness. I admit I'd never read it all the way through, but glancing over it now... yep, you're right; it also has a mandatory TPK. So that's at least three. I mean, yes, technically you can beat Hour of the Knife without a TPK, but there's a very important part of the adventure (from the author's perspective that is) where all of the PCs have been killed and they wake up in a sewer while the dark lord of the domain explains why he needs you to kill his rival before that guy can become immortal with the murder ritual and also if you don't help him he attached magical scarabs to your hearts that can insta-kill you if you refuse to follow his orders to get his immortality knife back. For those of you who haven't read the adventure it actually gets even dumber after all of this because this dark lord's "curse" is that everyone he touches gets brought back to life, which I guess is really inconvenient if you're a doppelganger and a serial killer and that's how he brought the party back to life. To say that it's unlikely the party will avoid mass murder while also getting all the clues to stopping the villain before he succeeds is a bit of an understatement. Created is pretty similar, but the writer wasn't as bad and gave you some room actually succeed so you're right that doesn't count. Now I want to check out old Ravenloft modules on DriveThruRPG to see if I can find more, well so much for classwork today.
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Apr 1, 2020 22:36
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Ithle01 posted:I mean, yes, technically you can beat Hour of the Knife without a TPK, but there's a very important part of the adventure (from the author's perspective that is) where all of the PCs have been killed and they wake up in a sewer while the dark lord of the domain explains why he needs you to kill his rival before that guy can become immortal with the murder ritual and also if you don't help him he attached magical scarabs to your hearts that can insta-kill you if you refuse to follow his orders to get his immortality knife back. For those of you who haven't read the adventure it actually gets even dumber after all of this because this dark lord's "curse" is that everyone he touches gets brought back to life, which I guess is really inconvenient if you're a doppelganger and a serial killer and that's how he brought the party back to life. To say that it's unlikely the party will avoid mass murder while also getting all the clues to stopping the villain before he succeeds is a bit of an understatement. Created is pretty similar, but the writer wasn't as bad and gave you some room actually succeed so you're right that doesn't count. I may have overstated the case saying that the PCs could complete it with no casualties, but Hour of the Knife definitely wasn't a required TPK. The introduction said that "Once the players have worked their way through the events in the first chapter, or all the PCs have been killed and replaced by doppelgangers, the DM should turn to 'An Encounter with Evil'"—so they can get to the encounter with the domain lord even if they haven't all died. And at the beginning of the section in question, it says that "The encounter should definitely be run by the end of 'Murder Most Foul,' even if some of the PCs are still alive. In this case, Sodo will speak only to those PCs who were killed or replaced by doppelgangers." So the adventure absolutely did explicitly allow for some of the PCs to not be replaced by doppelgangers—but you're partly right in that it did assume that at least some of the PCs had been. Still not quite a mandatory TPK like those other adventures, though. You could sort of also count The Forgotten Terror, in that it suggests getting characters drawn into the domain of Aggarath by having them all stabbed to death with the magic dagger that contains the domain, but that's only an alternate optional beginning if they didn't play through the preceding adventure. No other Ravenloft adventures come to mind with mandatory TPKs, but I wouldn' t be at all surprised if there are more that I've forgotten.
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Apr 1, 2020 23:53
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[quote="Jerik" post="503766037"] Part 9 ("It's Like The Office, But With Gods")/quote] Why did I reread this. It just made me mad again. (Not your content, the content of the book.) It did remind me that I want to get a big rear end tattoo of Guanyu when/if I ever finish this god drat dissertation though.
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Apr 2, 2020 00:41
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Please review some of these Ravenloft modules, they sound "wonderful."
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Apr 2, 2020 02:18
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PurpleXVI posted:Please review some of these Ravenloft modules, they sound "wonderful." I'd love to—and I have all the Ravenloft modules—but I want to finish up what I'm in the middle of, though, like I mentioned before, I may have made a poor choice for the subject of my first review (Deities & Demigods 1E) based on the amount of research required. Like I said, I have a good deal of affection for Ravenloft... but yeah, there's some pretty ridiculous stuff there that would make for entertaining reviews. My reviewing Deities & Demigods was mainly intended to lead into a reviews of Planescape materials... but I did kind of want to review Ravenloft, too, and maybe once I finally finish my Deities & Demigods review I can do some Ravenloft reviews as well. (Though of course if anyone else wants to beat me to the punch and start reviewing Ravenloft adventures, they're welcome to do so.) I'll leave you with one of my favorite terrible excerpts from a Ravenloft adventure. Just imagine any DM actually trying to follow this advice; there's no possible way this could end up being anything but risible: The Taskmaster's Leash posted:Terror Tip: The Fiend Unmasked
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Apr 2, 2020 02:45
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Jerik posted:I'd love to—and I have all the Ravenloft modules—but I want to finish up what I'm in the middle of, though, like I mentioned before, I may have made a poor choice for the subject of my first review (Deities & Demigods 1E) based on the amount of research required. Like I said, I have a good deal of affection for Ravenloft... but yeah, there's some pretty ridiculous stuff there that would make for entertaining reviews. My reviewing Deities & Demigods was mainly intended to lead into a reviews of Planescape materials... but I did kind of want to review Ravenloft, too, and maybe once I finally finish my Deities & Demigods review I can do some Ravenloft reviews as well. (Though of course if anyone else wants to beat me to the punch and start reviewing Ravenloft adventures, they're welcome to do so.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FybA0SaL0nI
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Apr 2, 2020 03:39
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Terror in Talabheim I discuss matter-thing with Commander-thing. Mention-say can put-put family on priority-list, yes-yes. So willing, is pathetic man-thing. Look, I know I did the Deus Ex joke before, but the exact Grey Death stuff happens in this bit. The disease is even called the Grey Ague. I had to. So, on returning to Tallagad, the PCs find things have gotten a little nuts. The port town isn't infested by zombies or something, but portions of it are on fire thanks to insane Sigmarite zealots who are blaming the sudden and extremely perilous plague on the sins and iniquities of the populace. Other parts are on fire because people are rioting to try to steal food and hole up in their homes. Shivering plague victims line the streets, coughing and slowly dying, and the Shallyan missionaries seem to be unable to do anything about it, even the Blessed ones with actual magic. No-one but the insane flagellants is coming into the town any longer, and any ships in port have left or are leaving, and they aren't taking passengers. The PCs could flee on foot if they want, but they have the milder form of the plague themselves. They need treatment and Talabheim itself seems to be the only place close enough to get it. So yes, that's the reason for the 'PCs get the plague themselves' bit. To get them to keep trying to get into Talabheim, the thing they did that sidequest to do. Thankfully, if they go to see the Magistrate, while he has evacuated the intense bureaucracy of Talabheim and its environs is a powerful thing: The clerks will have the PCs' names on their roster and will still find and pay them the 8 GC each they're owed for completing the refugee mission. They'll also potentially give the PCs paperwork for a 2 week stay in Talabheim, except there's no legal entry to Talabheim right now because of the plague. So yes, they get everything they were promised, and they get it on time, they just can't actually use it at moment (though the money will certainly be helpful). I appreciate that Taalagad falling apart isn't used as an excuse to stiff them like it normally would be. The Taalagad section has a bunch of optional flavor encounters: Saving a peasant boy from being attacked by rats the size of dogs (which will tell any player this is a Skaven adventure), being attacked by the insane flagellants screaming that the players are sinful and weird and need to be purged by fire, seeing people try to force aboard one of the last ships leaving the city and getting shot for their troubles, or watching a bunch of Hochlander refugees try to force their way into Talabheim and get hit by a cannon. The city is enforcing its quarantine with cannon. Naturally, the PCs are sick and one of the first places to go is the Shallyans. It's the logical place to look for a doctor, but this is where the PCs discover magic and prayer aren't working on this plague for some reason. While visiting the Shallyan shrine, the PCs see a weeping woman who keeps insisting the disease is some kind of curse, and can't be a normal disease. Her name is Kristine, a young annointed priestess whose father is a commander in the watch up the Wizarding Way. She's been untouched by the plague, but none of her magic works and for some reason, she's taken it much harder than her sisters. That's with good reason. My PCs wanted a doctor and someone with Science around since they didn't have one when I was running, so instead of Kristine being a bit of sad flavor and foreshadowing for another plot point, they managed to talk her down and convince her to join them in investigating the plague so she could try to do something about it all. Surely an elf, a dwarf scholar, and two wizards might be able to figure out this puzzle, after all. The Shallyans can't help the PCs beyond some comfort for their symptoms, and they're both busy and extremely frustrated (and a little frightened). But if the PCs offer to help them or say they're investigating the disease themselves, the Shallyans will ask them to get help from an expert apothecary and doctor within Taalagad. This is really important: PCs only hear about Widenhoft the Healer if they make a Gossip +20 test, Common Knowledge (Empire)-10 to know of his rep, or actually offer to help the Shallyans. Being a decent person here is the easiest way to find him. The problem is, the Skaven also knew of Widenhoft's scientific and medical achievements, and they have real reason to fear someone figuring this disease out. When the PCs go to visit his home in Taalagad, he's already gotten a subtle ninja shuriken in the back. However, the Skaven weren't smart enough to burn his notes or ransack his home. They just assumed killing him was enough. His notes can be deciphered with a Science test, but even if the PCs can't understand the technicalities just taking them with them will help a lot down the line. And some parts can be understood anyway: He has a bit of a small blue vial of fluid with notes 'not an inoculant, an antidote?' and notes on the quality of the water (which will match up with the silvery substance PCs saw being dumped if they spotted the drinking water being toyed with). He also has notes comparing the disease to one that hit Tilea centuries ago, but noting it's much more powerful. Remembering the name of the reference book he used is important! Knowing that will save the PCs a lot of trouble later when they meet his colleague in Talabheim. Most important, though, there's a note in his home from a Rudolf Nierhaus. Father of Kristine Nierhaus. The commander of the High Watch at the Wizarding Way. He sent the little bit of antidote, to be analyzed. And was dearly afraid he and Widenhoft were being watched. The PCs clearly have a talk to be had with the Captain. There's no simple way to get to the Captain; the adventure expects your PCs to come up with their own way, but any mention of Widenhoft will get his men's attention and get them roughly shown in to see the Captain. Before they do, a +10 Gossip test will also tell them Kristine was recently very ill, but miraculously recovered, which was attributed to Shallya. Considering the tiny bit of 'antidote', the PCs may suspect that is far from the case. Rudolf Nierhaus has betrayed his city to the ratmen. They infected his wife and daughter, and then promised a cure if he helped them. The cure works, but it only temporarily shuts down the disease; this is part of Steeleye's plan to control Talabheim once he takes it, by controlling access to a periodic pause in plague symptoms among the humans so long as they obey him. So yeah, this is literally that scene from the opening of Deus Ex with the Ambrosia priority vaccine list and everything. It's honestly a pretty good plan for rats, and suggests that Steeleye actually understands humans a bit better than usual since he's figured out how to fairly easily manipulate familial love. The Seer wanted the huge quarantine and heavy-handed reaction to spread fear and panic, and to cut Talabheim off. Kristine is going nuts because she thinks her father made a deal with Nurgle, not ratmen, and fears her health comes at the expense of everyone around her. Nierhaus is very angry the PCs know what's going on at all, until they tell him Widenhoft is dead. Then he panics and despairs, because it means the Skaven know he screwed them and tried to send the antidote for analysis. If they have Widenhoft's notes, he'll tell them to go see 'Eladio the Estalian' to get into the city illegally and will tell them to find Widenhoft's colleague, Dr. Daubler. If they don't, he'll tell them the same but add 'go get his notes immediately before they destroy them.' Telling him what's going on will immediately get him to help, no tests involved, because this is critical path stuff. They never really learn the extent of why any of this happened with Nierhaus, just that he was panicking. Going to the Estalian gets them in contact with a smuggler who likes to hide behind being a fiery and extremely stereotypical Diestro, who will tell them (once he's leading them through dark passages into the city) that the captain shot himself after their meeting. Eladio also knows what Skaven are and is quite aware they're real, like most non-Imperials. He knows what's going down, knows what's at stake, and will do everything he can to help the PCs on their mission. And they'll need him, because deep in the tunnels, they run into a terrifying boss fight! At least, the book seems to think so. It's three Plague Monks, Pestilens mooks, all Frenzied and crazy, running from something down another tunnel and running smack into the PCs. These are troops of Nelrich the Plague Priest, fleeing the purge by Steeleye's Skryre minions and their machine guns. This is meant to be a serious encounter. They're basically slightly tougher Clanrats. 'The fight should be vicious and memorable, but the PCs should be victorious', says the book. The PCs are 2nd tier characters, with an additional highly skilled 2nd tier NPC as backup. The Plague Monks will probably last one, maybe two rounds depending on luck and defense rolls, and aren't likely to do damage. The default party would completely body this encounter, and it's meant to be scary. It's a bit weird. Then, the PCs make it into the city and on to the next chapter. If the PCs never found out about Widenhoft, things get rougher. They have to get passage into the city just to escape starving and dying outside or being attacked by more zealots, but without a recommendation to the charming Estalian smuggler, they have to use shittier ones who intend to murder them for their possessions, which are worth money. This eventually leads to a much rougher fight than the Plague Priests, because the smugglers have a crazy-rear end giant Norseman sociopath with them as their champion, and he's pretty nasty; WS 56, SB 4, TB 5, some mail (though unarmored on his arms and legs), and a great weapon, who is a loving Khainite. Not Khornate. Khainite. He likes murder in all ways, not just 'skulls and blood'. Add in an ex-Protagonist turned Thug as backup and 3 basic thugs, and that's a pretty mean fight. Though the normal thugs and the protagonist will run once one or two dies, and the Norseman won't. After taking them out and realizing they're lost in the tunnels, the PCs find a guy the Khainite had planned to sacrifice later, a little halfling militiaman, who can lead them into the city. However, this route lacks Widenhoft's notes or mention of Dr. Daubler, and so effectively cuts the PCs off from the rest of the 'curing the Grey Ague' sideplot. They'll have to just survive the disease on their own. If they got the enhanced version of the plague and missed Widenhoft's notes, they're probably all dead. It's much more likely PCs will have the light version and will have gone the route with Captain Nierhaus, though, if they've engaged with the adventure at all. The mechanical challenges are fine, and I'm glad there are alternate ways into the city, but the whole first half of TiT is weaker than the back half. At least if you go the Nierhaus route you actually have some idea what you're trying to do, and some route to doing it. The other route is a little more suspect, because on some level PCs don't really have a lot of reason to go into the city. This also reflects our usual 'the published adventures have no idea what makes an easy or hard combat' problem; the plague monks are a complete joke for PCs of this tier and would have been doable with 1st tier rookies, especially with Eladio and his 48 WS, Strike Mighty, 2 attacks, etc Diestro self around. In general, TiT errs on the side of easier combats, but I understand that. It has a lot of mandatory combats, so it has to account for the possibility the PCs aren't great at fighting. The default party has more than enough firepower to beat the game's mandatory combats. I had to up the rats some for mine, because my PCs were higher level and included a Master Bright Wizard, but thankfully Skaven are easy to scale up or down. Next we get to what I think is the weakest part of the campaign, the bits in Talabheim itself before things go Vermintide. Next Time: The PCs Get Drafted
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Apr 2, 2020 16:20
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 Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century Ghost in the Machine: Ere I Am J H “Ghost in the Machine” is a very simple introductory adventure for starting characters. It has its shortcomings here and there but I think it’s a good launching point, maybe in need of a little elaboration. It starts with the PCs stuck on Luna, all of them having worked for the Transplanet Freight Corporation which just recently got bought out by RAM, who fired everyone. So everyone’s at the Free Fall Bar & Grill trying to figure out what to do next, when a woman approaches them. Shandry Roberts is looking for a rocket crew to buy a ship for a wealthy client, then fly it to Earth, for a thousand credits. They pretty much have to take the job, and the text even admits they’re kind of railroading the PCs here. But really it seems they only have to not dismiss her completely, because while they’re talking, some goons show up pretending to be the moon police. They try to arrest her, she asks the PCs to help her out, and the PCs should easily notice that these are not real police officers. As soon as the PCs even object, the goons start firing. The good thing about this fight is it gives us some stats for low-level NPC enemies- it’s three thugs, two are second-level warriors and their leader is third level. They get the basic writeups, THAC0, hp, AC, and it’s all based on class and equipment so it’s easy to use these as templates. Shandry Roberts (a second-level Rogue) gets a longer write-up with attributes and skills, she’s about on par with a PC of that level. Five rounds after the fight (if it lasts that long) the real moon police show up, the thugs beat a retreat, and Shandry advises the PCs come with her if they don’t want to get arrested. Once they’ve found a quiet place to talk, Shandry tells the PCs the real story. Simund Holzerhein had a private space yacht built with all the latest bells and whistles. One of its features was a computer loaded with RAM data. The yacht got captured by pirates, and was presumed destroyed in a pirate battle, but Shandry Roberts- a NEO agent- found out the yacht was not destroyed, but sold to a Lunar scrap vendor. Also, the pirates who took it are now convinced it’s haunted as three of their own died on it. So now the PC’s job is to help find the ship and fly it to a NEO base in Earth orbit. They’ll get the thousand credits each, plus the ship once NEO’s done getting the info from its computers. If they agree, they first need to head to the Triplanetary Angel, the liner Roberts took from Mars to retrieve some important data. If they don’t agree, well it’s kind of a “but thou must!” situation. To get to where the liner is docked, they have to take the monorail, and at the station there’s another firefight with RAM security- a bunch of 2nd level warriors, one for each member of the party + Shandry. They’re all packing heat guns which do 2d6 damage on hit, but the PCs only have to take down four of ‘em for the remainder to flee (or kill themselves if they can’t somehow.) The fallen agents all carry security cards, which are keyed to their ID but can be reprogrammed on a Difficult Electronic Repair check. Again given how high skills are gonna be at 1st level this is something like a single-digit percentage chance but hey, worth a shot. Indeed it comes in handy quickly when they get to the Triplanetary Angel. They can use the cards to get past port security and onto the ship, or just bluff their way through (the guard is actually supposed to let Roberts on but nobody else, because RAM’s trying to catch her.) Once they get to her stateroom, there are three RAM thugs waiting, each with a rocket pistol. However they only brought three rounds of ammo and won’t shoot at Shandry because they want to get her alive, so in theory this should be another easy one. The last obstacle here will be bluffing past the Triplanetary guards as they leave. The game actually suggests Shandry makes the check, and if things start to get violent the guards use their sonic stunners to put the PCs down until Shandry finally succeeds on a roll, all of which is a bit weird. But anyway it’s now time to get the rocket. It’s sitting in a used rocket dealership, stripped to gray primer and sporting a few signs of battle, but otherwise in good shape. Stats wise, it uses the data card for Princess Ardala’s Princess of Mars ship: it’s a 35-ton Scout Cruiser/Yacht with an AC of 8 (6 with the AC defense bonus), speed of 4, 2 missile mounts and a beam laser, 140 hull points- a solid starter ship, really. (Especially compared to, say, the D6 Star Wars where you at most start with a Stock Light Freighter that has a super-slow hyperdrive and one gun.) The GM is encouraged to use the game’s enclosed deck plans as well, keeping track of where the PCs take their stations, etc. This will come into play later. After Shandry pays the dealer, you go through the standard rigamarole of prepping for launch. The dealer does mention that the ship’s haunted, but whatever, off you go into the void. It turns out, he’s right, sorta. On board the ship’s computer is a powerful Digital Personality, Horatio.dos, programmed to defend the yacht against unauthorized use. It has done so by successfully sabotaging systems to kill off most of the pirates, and now it’s gonna do the same to the PCs. First it sends out a little anti-theft signal to RAM. This draws out a heavy cruiser, the Maximus Argyre, who promptly bear down on the ship and signal to the PCs to stop. This is… unfortunately kind of a bad non-encounter. There’s basically no way the ship can win against a heavy cruiser, the PCs are massively outgunned, and Shandry tells them their only chance is to run. If they do run, they can easily escape, they’ve got higher speed.You may not even need to set up the hex map. If they fight, they’ll probably get plastered. So, why is this here? Is it just to teach the players there are some things they shouldn’t gently caress with yet? I really don’t get it. Moving on. Once the PCs lose their pursuer, it’s a ten hour trip from the Moon to Earth. During this time, Horatio.dos decides to try killing off the PCs himself, one by one. If they’re on the Control Deck, he tries to electrocute them, making an attack roll to force a save vs. electrical shock for 1d8 damage. If they’re on the Power Deck, Horatio momentarily floods radiation into the chamber (fortunately this only does 1d6 damage.) It’s mostly enough to be scary but not brutally unfair. Each time, Horatio asks the PC for their identification- if they use one of the RAM ID cards, they’re let off and he moves to his next victim. Eventually the PCs can work out that something’s wrong, and try to disable Horatio (a Computer Repair check, or randomly pulling wires and damaging ship systems until you get the right ones- I kinda like that they put in a contingency if nobody has the skill.) Failing that they can ask for a tow from NEO and then cut power to the computer, or even talk Horatio into believing they’re all RAM agents. See, this is mostly good design. You’ve got options. (Though it can end anticlimactically.) Anyway, that’s the last encounter. The ship docks with the NEO base Salvation, Shandry thanks the PCs, they get their reward. After a little while the hologram Dr. Huer- himself a DP- pops up to usher them into Commander Turabian’s office. Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering are there, as well as a couple of other dudes. They’ve decoded the data on board the yacht, and it contains information on a RAM project that could potentially doom the solar system. quote:Wilma turns to you. “You see, you’re now the owners of a RAM executive ship, and…” Oh, Buck. You scamp. So that’s the adventure. I think it needs some tweaks here and there but it’s a good setup for a campaign. It's short, puts the PCs in the middle of the RAM conflict, and hands them a nice spaceship for their troubles. And that’s the end of the World Book! Good thing too, the spine’s a bit worse for wear after scanning so much of it. Next up, we will move on to The Technology Book!
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Apr 2, 2020 16:45
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Man, if young Night had found the Buck Rogers books I would have played the heck out of it back in my 2e D&D days. God knows I spent enough time trying to make Sci-Fi 2e stuff on my own when I was first fumbling around with trying to design stuff.
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Apr 2, 2020 16:48
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I'll loving defend Ravenloft as a setting, but there's honestly no defending the 1e modules - they're best used to cannibalize neat ideas and trash the rest.
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Apr 2, 2020 18:26
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Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed Dark Lords of Nothing Baalim are Scelesti who have gone to the Astral being known as the Old Man, Aeon of Paradox, or to one of the potent Abyssal anti-gods knwon as the Annunaki in order to gain further control over Paradox and the Abyss. They have bargained for the Elder Diadem; while Abyssal Mage Sight shows this as a true crown, it is not actually a physical object but an abstract thing, a power that alters the soul. The Pentacle and Seers agree: there is no higher crime than acquiring the Diadem, and any report of an active Baal is cause to focus on taking them out to the exclusion of all else. The Elder Diadem is rarely sought or found by Rabashkim and especially not by non-Scelesti, but if any were to attain it, they would immediately become Nasnasi with Joining 1 and then become Baal. All Baalim, on top of the normal traits of Nasnasi, gain additional powers. They can retain Paradox within themselves indefinitely and are never harmed by doing so, unlike normal Nasnasi. They can create Paradox anomalies just by spending Willpower and using Paradox they've controlled or stored inside themselves, and can generate as many anomalies as they have the Paradox for at once, as long as they don't warp spells with it. (That has to be done to spells being cast and takes actual effort.) They can spend Willpower and Paradox to erode Supernal phenomena as if a Sleeper were witnessing it or to heal an Abyssal entity, even outside the presence of Sleepers at all. They can also use this to dispel magic or counter spells being cast, even if they lack the Arcana necessary to do so. They can also attempt to control or store other mages' Paradox inside themselves, as long as the Paradox is being caused nearby. The price of all this is that all Baalim suffer an Abyssal curse. The Diadem may bring power, but it fundamentally corrupts their very nature. The curse grows stronger as Joining increases, but even if a baal were to lose all Joining and regain Wisdom, they would still suffer the curse as if they had Joining 1. The curse can't be gotten rid of. No magic will weaken it in any way, except perhaps Imperial magic, wielded by the archmasters who are beyond the scope of actual play. If your curse renders a leg unusable, you can't use magic to use that leg by any means. The effects of the curse vary by Scelestus, but usually reflect the Dur-Abzu and Ruling Arcana of the mage involved. Mechanically, a curse is a Persisent Condition which cannot be removed, plus one per 3 full dots of Joining - so 2 at Joining, 3 at 6 and 4 at 9. "Common" curses, insofar as they can be called that, might be things like addiction to various strange and awful things, blindness, inability to speak, constantly being easy for a specific kind of Abyssal entity to possess, or similar. While the Elder Diadem is certainly an increase in power, it's extremely not worth it; it primarily turns Paradox into Mana for purposes of destroying other magic and reduces how many rolls you have to make to do so, which is...I mean, it's useful and potent but I would not call it a very wow, cool power type thing. Qliphoth, also called Dwellers at the Threshold, are what happens to a Scelestus that gets too in touch with the Abyss. Their beings have been hollowed out and made sock puppets for the Abyss, and these empty shells are typically taken by the rest of humanity to be mentally ill vagrants, muttering to themselves or staring at people but generally not doing much to reality itself. Mage Sight puts the lie to that - every Qliphoth (Qlippah is what the singular should be but it's not, apparently) is a hole in reality, a wound leading to the Abyss. They are trapped in eternal torment, and their existence is a lure for others to join them. Any Nasnas that hits Joining 10 immediately becomes a Qliphoth. They are eternally trapped in a permanent Mystery Play inside an Abyssal Verge that forms around their soul, a hell of anti-existence that only they experience. Well, them and anyone else that gets trapped in their Verge. This Verge is formed from the broken remains of their Oneiros, torn apart and abosrbed by the Anunnaki that consumed their soul. Abyssal entities harass and attack anyone in the Verge, particularly a potent Acamoth formed from the daimon of the Scelestus. (A daimon is basically the protective entity/superego/idealized self that watches over your unconscious mind and keeps other people from loving with it too hard most of the time.) Other entities from from Goetia and soul-symbols based on the Scelestus' Path and Legacy, now turned into Acamoth and reflective of their Dur-Abzu. Because their Oneiros is essentially one with the Abyss, a Qliphoth cannot enter the Astral by any means, either. They do, at least, retain all of their powers and count as having high Joining. ('At least,' he says. This is not a good thing.) Why is it not a good thing? Well, because Qliphoth are bad for everything around them. Their human shell appears to be a worn down and barely lucid version of their old self. This shell has no stats, cannot use magic or powers of any kind, and can't even roll dice. Any actions the shell takes are just shadows and mirrors of the things the Scelestus is doing within their Verge, and have no real effect on reality. To any outsider, it just looks like wandering around, muttering incoherently and reacting to things that aren't there. Mages may recognize the shell appearing to perform spellcasting yantras, but the magic takes affect only within the Verge, not normal reality. However, this is not really a blessing. Sure, the shell is itself relatively harmless in terms of what it does. You can't kill it, though. A Qliphoth's shell never takes wound penalties, can't fall unconscious and can't die. Even if you somehow found a way to destroy the body, it would regenerate within days, apparently unharmed, as it reformed from the soul within the Verge. The only way to get rid of it is to enter the Verge and kill the Scelestus themselves or somehow remove their soul. Within the Verge, the Qliphoth very much does have stats. They retain their Path and Legacy, though their Virtue and Vice are usually strange and corrupted. They retain Obsessions, usually with the Abyss, and always seek to escape the Abyss, though they are incapable of doing so. Their stats are, uniformly, superhuman. Their lowest stat is a single 3 in Composure, and by default their Wits, Dexterity, Stamina and Presence are all 7+. They also have superhumanly high skills, particularly Ocullt (1), Stealth (9), Intimidation (8) and Persuasion (7), plus a bunch of 6s and 5s. They always have Willpower 10 even though they shouldn't, and can spend as much as they want per turn, though only 1 on any given effect. Their Defense is an insane 13, and on top of their Legacy attainments and 15 dots worth of Arcana, they also can innately sense other mages nearby and get a number of other monstrous powers, as well as an Influence like a spirit, though it defaults to 1. On top of all this, Qliphoth get the rote quality on all Clash of Wills rolls, making their magic very hard to resist, and retain all Nasnasi powers except for the ability to lose or gain Joining and the ability to control PAradox. All spells they cast are automatically befouled for free. Also, while they don't have Gnosis, they have an effective Gnosis of 10 for any mechanics that require it - including resistance to most supernatural effects. So Qliphoth are insanely hard to alter with supernatural powers, even before the grab bag of Dread Powers the GM feels like giving them, which are basically random horror monster abilities meant for putting together monsters with greater ease. Any kind of stuff could be here, from teleportation to electronic control to a hypnotic gaze to the ability to drive people mad with a touch. But wait! There's more! See, that shell? That shell is easy to mistake for someone going through an Awakening - they're acting out a Mystery Play only they can see. One that is full of torment, sure, but not all Awakenings are pleasant. Plus, Mage Sight on the location of the Verge makes it look like some weird inverse of a Lustrum - that is, an archmaster's personal gateway to the Supernal. Mages tend to be very curious about both things. For the Qliphoth, reality is simulanteously the Abyss and the Fallen World, as their Mage Sight is on permanently, and they lack any real control over what's going on, driven by Abyssal urges. Before you ask: no, they're not savable.0 Now, the problem is that mages are going to be drawn to investigate by their own curiosity. However, anyone that does magic within sensory range of the shell cannot contain Paradox. They must release it, and it doesn't have the normal effects. Instead, the caster is automatically drawn into the Mystery Play of the Qliphoth, trapping them in the Verge as well. This also affects any Sleeper that suffers a Quiescence-based breaking point in the area, so basically any Sleeper that witnesses magic. They all get dragged into this horrible waking dream of the Anunnaki's Abyssal world, full of tormenting Abyssal goetia. Anyone "infected" can be interacted with by these Abyssal entities and is subject to the nature of the Abyssal Verge. Within it, no Paradox may be contained, and any dramatic failure on spellcasting by a non-Nasnas causes a Paradox Condition instead of the normal effects. Further, any skill rolls reliant on knowledge of natural or physical laws are a t a penalty, and attempts by Scelesti to control Paradox or summon Abyssal entities get a bonus. Also, you can be affected by the Qliphoth's magic, and you can use magic on them. Also fun: anyone who goes and uses Focused Mage Sight to study a Qliphoth shell without being a Nasnas is exposed to Abyssal taint, and becomes horribly sick. Further, successfully studying the Mystery of their nature causes you to become visible to the Abyssal entities within, who will try to use you as a conduit to escape into the normal world. Oh, and if you dramatically fail, you get pulled into the Verge as above. Qliphoth play the natural and innate curiosity of mages, which normally serves them well, against them. Once someone has been drawn into alignment with the Verge, they can't get out easily (except for Scelesti, who have an easier time of it). It is not a physical place, and the Abyssal beings do not care about distance or physics or Space or Time. Anywhere you go, you're still within the Verge. The only way to escape is to either kill the Qliphoth or destroy their soul. Because only their shell is outside the Verge, to do this requires you to go inside. Anyone that manages to actually destroy the Qliphoth or the remnants of its soul takes resistant agg damage as the Verge collapses on itself, ejecting everyone back into reality but leaving a horrible Abyssal taint on the surrounding area for a while. You'd think the soul would be the easier target. However, Qliphoth are immune to normal Death-based soul theft due to their Abyssal taint. And doing this isn't the merciful option, either - the soulless remains of the Scelestus remain completely and utterly broken. Their Joining is still 10, but without a soul they can't do any magic. Putting a new soul in will just start up the Verge again, because the container is broken. It is, as far as anyone knows, impossible to restore a Qliphoth back to any semblance of normality...though some believe that an archmaster might be able to do it. Nasnas, of course, can just use their Abyssal Mage Sight to enter the Verge in the presence of the shell. Once there, they still have some trouble getting out, however. They must fully study and understand the Verge via Mage Sight, with all its usual effects, then find the anti-symbol within it that corresponds to their Dur-Abzu. From there, they have to undergo a trial similar to the one that allowed them to gain ?Joining in the first place. If they survive this, they can leave the Verge, but there will be a cost. They either have to sacrifice a full dot of Willpower, then take potentially a lot of resistant aggrvated damage...or they can sacrifice the life or soul of another mage as an offering. Doing that (and surviving the trials) will get them out without a problem. So why would they go there? Well, frankly, many Autarchs and Shedim undergo these trials willingly, sometimes as an act of worship of the Abyss or the Annunaki that has consumed the Qliphoth, and others as a rite of passage to gain status among Scelesti. Sometimes, a group of Scelesti seeking the Elder Diadem will enter a Qliphoth Verge and compete to see who can fulfill the trials and bargain the for the Elder Diadem with the Annunaki first, to earn its favor. Others use them to hunt for esoteric Abyssal secrets. It's still a horrible idea, but when is this not? There are also two forms of Abyssal...call them mages or entities...that stand over the Baalim. Aswadim, as they are known, surpass all mortal Scelesti. They are archmasters of the Abyss, embodiments of its power. They believe that to become free of the Lie, one must also be free of the Supernal, existing beyond form, beyond symbol and beyond even the laws of magic. They wield Abyssal powers that go deeper and darker than PAradox, but are unable to act directly without drawing attention from other great Supernal beings. Thus, they often employ Scelesti and Sleeper cults to do their bidding in the Fallen World. Fortunately for everyone, very few Scelesti ever become Aswadim - they tend to get killed by other mages or their own experimentation first. Most Aswadim are, instead, archmasters who embraced the Abyss after their own ascension in order to surpass their innate limits. The other are Annunaki, mentioned above. These are the entities that are greater and more potent than the Acamoth and Gulmoth of the Abyss. They are sleeping anti-deities, the creators of other Abyssal spirits. Each is a universe that could have existed but didn't, dying in the cradle. Each embodies a set of physical and mystical laws that are entirely incompatible with the Supernal and FAllen Worlds. Every Abyssal Verge is a fragment of one of these massive universe-corpses brushing against the world, and they are the ones who claim the souls of those that become Qliphoth. The Annunaki are impossible things, literally impossible. They can't exist, definitionally. However, their nonexistence can leak into the world anyway, because the Abyss is nothing if not paradoxical. Annunaki known to exist include the Isophage, a principle of anti-sympathy that creates parasitc bonds that prevent one side of a pair from existing while the other does. Its touch makes sympathetic bonds drain self and definition, absorbing the identity of one into another and creating faceless, meaningless shells. The Ashen Periphery may touch the world when someone should die at sea but inexplicably survives, causing a brief hiccup of reality. Within it, the ocean is a void of broken perspective, infinite dimensionality that consumes the horizon and allows beings on the edge of sight to feast on the souls of those trapped in its dark calm. Others seek, insofar as they are able, to remake the world in a way that would destroy some of the Arcana, which would, necessarily, destroy all existence as we know it. Their efforts cause waves in the world, spreading the influence of the Abyss. Where their shadows pass under reality, Scelesti and cults spread, madness leaks into reality and bizarre thoughts and actions that make no sense are common. The worst, most insane stuff you'd hear on Alex Jones or Art Bell? Yeah that's the stuff that you'll start hearing all over the media when an Annunaki grows dangerously close to the world. Next time: The Nasnas Eschatologist Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Apr 3, 2020 |
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Apr 2, 2020 22:45
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The best-known Annunaki in the gameline is the Prince of 10,000 Leaves, the aggressive impossible history that’s infected Boston, and the go-to example of Abyssal world/gods long before we thought of a name for them.
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Apr 2, 2020 22:51
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Dave Brookshaw posted:The best-known Annunaki in the gameline is the Prince of 10,000 Leaves, the aggressive impossible history that’s infected Boston, and the go-to example of Abyssal world/gods long before we thought of a name for them. My main complaint is mostly that y'all were super goddamn inconsistent in using Hebrew grammar for the names properly. Qliphoth/Qlippot and Rabashkim are both plurals grammatically and would be Qlippah/Qliphah and...probably Rabashkah, respectively. -ot and -im are both plural suffixes.
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Apr 2, 2020 22:53
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I told you it was worse. Incidentally, qlippoth being unsavable is new. Before they were just savable enough to make you want to try.
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Apr 3, 2020 00:43
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The possible cure for Qliphoth requires archmastery (of Death) so we didn’t mention it here. (I invented them as “oMage Maurauders done horrible” for Imperial Mysteries. I was very glad to see them finally get more than four paragraphs.)
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Apr 3, 2020 17:44
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 Heart: The City Beneath 01 - An Introduction Heart is an rpg by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, a sequel of sorts to their previous game, Spire, a game of murder and covert rebellian, which I reviewed in this thread some time ago. Heart's their newest release (PDFs dropped on the 1st of April), and it works as both a kind of sequel to Spire, and as a second iteration of the core mechanics. My review of Spire was a bit of just a read-through, but I've been running it for my ground for a bit, and so I'll see if I can add in my observations about Heart as I go. Before I start, however, I'd like to point out that if anything here immediately grabs your interest, the game itself can be bought here, or the (free) quickstart rules can be found here. The creators also have a podcast; Hearty Dice Friends, which is well worth listening to. Oh, and the excellent layout design was done by our very own Flavivirus, so you'd be supporting goon-adjacent projects there! So what's it all about? Whereas Spire concerned itself with the titular mile-high city, Heart goes deep beneath, down towards the crack in reality that sits under the city - bad enough at the best of times, but when enterprising engineers tried to use it as the basis of a mass transit system, things went from bad to worse. So it's delving deep into the earth, rather than conspiring against the powers that be, and the PCs are the kind of people who'd end up doing this for a living; the obsessed, desperate or forced. Next: I'll give an overview of the system
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Apr 4, 2020 11:16
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Terror in Talabheim Please Stay The section in Talabheim before everything really goes to hell is easily the weakest part of the adventure. It's more than a little directionless, and the main part of the plot (curing the plague) is both optional and won't really do anything for either the PCs or the city. The first thing you have to do on arriving is deal with any PCs with plague symptoms. However, it you have the lighter infection there's a good chance you're fairly close to getting better, and the game even suggests just holing up away from the cops (so you don't get arrested/sequestered) and toughing out the infection. If you're struggling and need help, there's Dr. Daubler. The PCs either know of him from dealing with Widenhoft and Nierhaus, or they can find out about him with a Gossip +20. The Shallyans are around, but they're insanely busy. Not only are they besieged by Talabheimers asking for help (which they're doing their best to give), but a PC who knows anything about their religion will recognize that they've done their own equivalent of gearing up for war. A Charm test tells PCs that the Shallyans have decided this is the work of Nurgle (considering Pestilens, probably correct) and are gathering everything they can for the fight against the plague. Still, they're too busy to help easily. Oh, and one of the big signs of how scared the city is? The Countess has lowered the Cup Duty to try to keep the public from panicking. Taxes are being lowered or intentionally not collected. In Talabheim. Once the PCs find Dr. Daubler, he's actually a genuinely good guy. An intelligent, learned physician and devoted follower of Shallya, he lives a comfortable life but does his best for his patients, even at risk to his own health. The good doctor is learned, good humored, and actually good at healing people rather than being a quack or con-man. He's not only got an excellent Heal skill, but he actually has devised something of a treatment regimen for the Ague. It won't cure a PC, but it will let them reroll the Toughness tests not to lose further Toughness. At 12 silver per daily dose, it's expensive, but it greatly enhances someone's chances of surviving the 10 day course of illness. More importantly, if the PCs mention Widenhoft's notes or Captain Nierhaus, they immediately get his full attention. Giving him the notes and remembering the book Widenhoft was referencing will make things easy on Daubler; within 5 days he'll finish Widenhoft's work and come up with an even better treatment, and he'll discover the whole 'cast cure poison, THEN cure disease' thing and share it with the Shallyans, too. This won't stop what's coming (the epidemic is too widely spread and it's only one part of the evil rat plan) but it will probably save a lot of lives. I appreciate that while it doesn't prevent the adventure from proceeding or anything, the book goes to lengths to point out that coming up with this cure will stop the same plague from working elsewhere and will still save hundreds of lives in Talabheim. The one issue is it probably comes too late to be very important to the PCs. It is possible they got a worse case of the Ague (you roll Toughness when first afflicted with a disease to modify its length, so they might have it longer than 10 days) but most of the time PCs will almost be better by the time Daubler comes up with a better treatment/tells the Shallyans what they're missing. His improved treatment isn't a cure, but it lets the character taking it not only reroll their Toughness save, but make it at +40. Also, as this comes after 5 days, if the PCs had the advanced form of the disease there's a pretty good chance one or more of them die of it before then. Which leads us to the single worst part of this adventure. The adventure says 'if PCs think they can just Burn Fate to survive the disease, this scenario (which already suggested maybe just waiting a few days) loses much of its impact. So if they do, have them 'die', be put in the corpse piles, and then wake up on a slab, naked, with no gear, surrounded by reanimating zombies' Now on one hand, the PC is not tied down, and this will give away the Necromancer who is working with the Skaven to be fed plague victims early. But punishing burning Fate with 'you wake up in a situation extremely likely to make you burn more Fate' is completely counter to what burning a Fate point is about in my view. Losing a Fate point is also a seriously painful blow to a character. As my players could tell you from our side game last night, having a stock of rerolls when some crazy lich motherfucker tries to steal your life from you or you really need to make sure an attack hits to finish the guy off or make this skill check RIGHT NOW is one of the biggest advantages PCs have. Going from 3 to 2 Fate is a serious, measurable blow to a character's capabilities. The general spirit of trying to punish a PC for 'giving the game away' that Fate is literally a stock of extra lives during a plague plotline isn't great. What's hosed up is this adventure also contains the single best use of the Fate burn mechanic I've seen, so I think this is just a one time oversight by the author. Anyway, after dealing with (or not dealing with, but surviving) the plague, the PCs get drafted into the militia. Everyone who isn't currently sick as hell does. They can try to hide from this, but if they do, patriotic crime bosses instead recruit them to do militia things in the Tallow, the crime-ridden area the militia doesn't go. They recognize that the city itself is in peril and are making sure their 'boys' suspend being thugs and criminals until the city isn't dying anymore, because they would like to continue to steal from it and can't do that if Talabheim is taken over by rat people. Speaking of, despite rat people not being 'real', most characters in this section will absolutely recognize they're fighting rat people, and Daubler will outright tell the PCs that's what's what. Militia duty is mostly a bunch of boring little sidequests and tension building exercises, but it's a little too slow paced. Nothing really happens with the Militia, until you discover a lone, wounded Plague Monk and the remains of a goddamn machine gun massacre, the players' first hint the rat people have guns (and apparently, machine guns). This is just a little foreshadowing. What's funny is they still use the stats for Ratling Guns from Children of the Horned Rat, where a Ratling Gun is just a shittier Blunderbuss, so there's a lot of ado made about nothing about the Skaven MGs. The real threats will come from Jezzails, Warplock Pistols, and goddamn Warpfire Throwers (though with the added fun rule that a called shot to the tank will make the weapon and both rats carrying it explode). But that comes later. The Militia bits do get exciting, but not in Chapter 3. So I'll instead take a moment to talk about something I appreciate in both Chart and Luikart's writing for the setting. See Daubler and the Shallyans up there? It's genuinely good to have stuff like that tossed in with the setting. It makes it stand out more when people betray you or try to use you when there are also actual decent people out there who show it doesn't have to be that way. It adds variety and keeps things from being just a morass of assholes. It reminds me of the bit in Realm of Sorcery (same author as Terror in Talabheim) where failed wizards aren't killed or something, they're taught enough to keep themselves safe and then either given a mundane job by their College or a license to go back to the normal world and make their living. Because the wizards aren't just dicks all the time. Having some decency, compassion, or even simple competence mixed in there among the jerks and the idiots goes a long way to making the setting feel fuller and more fleshed out, and helps make PCs want to engage with NPCs and adventures. But next time, things get Ratfight. Extremely Ratfight. To the point that I'd wonder if Terror in Talabheim wasn't one of the main inspirations behind Vermintide 1. Next Time: Ratfight! RATFIGHT!
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Apr 4, 2020 14:47
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Terror in Talabheim And They Lose Everything I should preface this by saying this bit is avoidable, but incidents like what's coming up are kind of why PCs might try to run away from main plots as soon as they see signs of them. The PCs should spend about 2 weeks or so wasting time with Militia work and not really doing much, getting a chance to watch the disease spread (and take care of their own cases) as they get paid a tiny wage and fight a mixture of corpse cart duty and boredom. There's an interesting bit of foreshadowing in the rumors flying around the city: A legal precedent has been found saying that any noble who does not act to defend the city in a crisis like this forfeits their claims and titles within the city, and it's true enough that while the rich have thrown thousands of GC into trying to change or argue down that law, old family patriarchs are dusting off their swords and considering reporting for 'militia duty' (as lightly as possible). Believe me, this will be important later. The city has actually discovered enough signs to expect a Skaven attack of some kind, though they're wrong about the type and scale of the threat. This is part of the reason for calling up so many militia, and for bringing the city's army into the richer districts to hole up and prepare to protect the city's centers of government (and to be close to the Countess for orders if things go down). Things are tense, but still proceeding like the slow motion disaster that is a plague. At some point, the PCs are taking a rest, and depending on how much they've shelled out for lodgings they're going to get completely turbofucked. If they're in the Tallow poor district, this is going to hurt real bad. If they're outside of it, they'll be fine. Because now is the time when the Skyre machine gunners and flamethrowers finally drive the Pestilens forces into the open, flushing them out of the tunnels to force them to invade the poor district as part of Steeleye loving over Nelrich. To the people on the ground (and the city's army) this seems like the main attack: Thousands of rats. It is not. If the PCs were slumming it in the Tallow, they're awakened (or their character on watch notices) a strange noise from the streets, and then realizes there are thousands of rats, and they are about to get positively blasted with rats. The PCs have about twenty seconds to wake their fellows, grab one hand weapon or their weapon and shield, and run like hell. Losing all their armor and any other possessions. You can't have been sleeping in armor, which makes enough sense, but this is a situation where the PCs are likely to lose hundreds of GC worth of expensive, difficult to replace gear right before the campaign's pace of combat ramps up. So you'd better hope you paid for a nicer bed. This isn't really a combat scene, it's a chase. There are too many rats for the PCs to do a drat thing, so they need to run for it, only occasionally having smaller combats or simple WS tests to try to force their way through any rats that threaten to cut them off. PCs can get to the roofs with Scale Sheer Surface +20 and make their way over a safer route that way, or they can run with the fleeing crowd of citizens and risk getting trampled. The safest route is to go via the back alleys, occasionally fighting off rats. As they run, they should get a look at Nelrich himself in the back of the swarm to introduce them to one of the main villains, as well as see plenty of scenes of overwhelmed militia trying to fight or locals doing their best to get away. When they reach the barricades leading into better parts of town, they need to hide or they'll risk getting shot down by friendly fire as the militia and army try to contain the mess to the Tallows. It's possible to pick a building and make a stand; the arrows from the barricades keep the ratmen from overrunning the PCs and they can finally fight some of them off. Otherwise they need a way to slip past the barricades to safety. They're still kind of hosed, though, considering their gear (and potentially, their money) all get left behind. If you stayed in a nicer part of town, you instead get drafted to man the barricades and aside from a WP test or gain 1 IP for brutally enforcing a quarantine, the PCs don't have to do poo poo and don't get in any danger, and also keep all their stuff. It's really clear they want you to have the scene where you're running for your life from rat people, but having it can potentially totally derail your party's material situation in a way that's really hard to recover from in a city under siege. I'd probably just have the PCs on night patrol with the militia in the Tallows when the ratfight gets started, so they have the whole exciting escape scene but don't get hosed over sideways. At the end of the mess, rats now own the poorer part of Talabheim, but they've been completely contained. The attack is designed to both kill Nelrich's people (and hopefully Nelrich), but also to get Talabheim to finally send for help. This is one of the important steps in Steeleye's overall plan to get the Empire to attack a rat-man held Talabheim and let him take advantage of its legendary defenses to destroy some of their armies and open up more places for conquest. To do that, he needs an incoming Imperial army. And he needed Nelrich's people bottled up and wrecked anyway, so why not shoot them in the back and drive them into making his sacrificial feint for him? This will absolutely not go wrong for him later in any way! As if things weren't bad enough, with the city jittery about the contained ratmen and the plague, next things get kinda weird on the PCs. They start having encounters with zombies trying to maul and infect random citizens, giving them chances to rescue people but also to investigate why the hell zombies are attacking people and where they're coming from. This is the Vampire Hunter's time to shine among the default PCs; she actually has Knowledge (Necromancy) and can identify some of the weird modifications made to these undead and that whoever's doing it likely has a copy of the famous Liber Mortis, penned by the Necromancer Van Hel himself. You might recall Van Hel as the first Sylvannian that Vlad taught Necromancy to back during the plagues of 1111, specifically to make sure Sylvannia would be able to survive rat people troubles. Unfortunately for the PCs, the Necromancer in this scenario is not following in those distinguished footsteps. Dr. Gugula Skell considers herself an academic, and an open-minded scholar. This is why she's had no problem allying with Steeleye and his ratmen. Their plan will give her plenty of corpses, and all she has to do is modify the zombies to carry the Grey Ague and ensure they spread both plague and terror more widely in the city. In return, more corpses and free reign to work. It wouldn't be Nazis without their evil necromancer who calls herself a Doctor. Skell's mistake is that she's very artistic, and can't resist flourishes on her work. Flourishes that help the PCs to find her manor, and realize the eccentric doctor that lives within is a Necromancer. You see, she does the same work with statuery and amateur art, and her general art style carries over to the zombies, letting her be identified as a rich eccentric who lives in a spooky mansion. There's a bunch of spooky mansion stuff, but Skell isn't in when the PCs go to wreck up her house. The closest thing to a major confrontation waiting for them is a surprisingly lucid Wight who still loves his city. Christopher cannot actually resist the order to fight the PCs for intruding, but while introducing himself as a warrior, if they promise to kill him and put him to rest, he'll happily tell the PCs all about who hired Skell and who is helping her. Christopher is tough as hell, but he's only one enemy; a PC party should defeat him. But anyone with decent DR, 18 Wounds, 50% WS, and doing Damage 6 with every attack is a threat in combat. Unfortunately for the PCs, learning who Skell is and that she's working with the ratmen is too late. This is one of the triggers (the other is ignoring the zombie subplot) that leads to the main attack, probably right as the PCs are going to warn someone important about Skell and that there's definitely a bigger rat making all the rules who isn't with the ones bottled up in the poor districts. This leads to the biggest setpiece in the campaign, the actual battle of Talabheim. I don't quite like this section, myself. The escape can really gently caress the players, and the Skell stuff is okay (you need to introduce some of your villains, and Skell and a Skyre Engineer are there to be sub-villains and additional boss fights later in the campaign) but I'd like to see it benefit the players at least a little to have uncovered her. Maybe let them burn her mansion down or something so she'll be less of a problem later, or get some significant treasure off of defeating Christopher like a famous sword or something. As it is, ignoring her is actually a safer trigger for the next event, as the PCs don't really gain anything by engaging and looking into her besides an introduction to their villains. If you're worried players will try to weasel out of main plots, put some benefits in the main plot! Next Time: Blasted With Rats
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Apr 4, 2020 18:15
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Hell yeah, Rattenkrieg against actual rat men. I'm dreading the part when you invariably have to end with a completely unbelievable "but the empire refused to change"
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Apr 4, 2020 19:21
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A bit disappointed that the adventure doesn't seem to give the PC's any way to "save" the lucid, patriotic Wight or turn him to their side. That seems like the sort of very cool ally that would be a great tableturner at some pivotal moment in the game.
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Apr 4, 2020 22:28
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PurpleXVI posted:A bit disappointed that the adventure doesn't seem to give the PC's any way to "save" the lucid, patriotic Wight or turn him to their side. That seems like the sort of very cool ally that would be a great tableturner at some pivotal moment in the game. It's unfortunate, but he's magically bound. He does everything he can to help you before you fight him, though. And also his main priority is getting himself killed because he's really unhappy being a Wight. One nice thing in the upcoming craziness is that the PCs will, in fact, get to accomplish some significant stuff during the full scale military confrontation. They do a good job of making the 3-5 PCs sort of an important 'tipping point' in much larger fights, where having a couple more people at the right place at the right time changes how things go.
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Apr 4, 2020 22:34
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Heart: The City Beneath 02 - Game Mechanics So the mechanical underpinnings of Heart haven't changed much from Spire, it's mostly a matter of clarity, and a bit more consistency. I'll note significant changes here in italics. Characters in Heart have four elements that tie directly into the core mechanics - Skills, Domains, Knacks and Stress tracks. Skills are the things a character can do well, and are binary - you either have them, or you don't. There's only nine of them, and given that characters will generally start with only a few (at least one, could be up to three or four at absolute most), you end up pretty specialised. The nine skills in Heart are Compel (persuasion and intimidation of any kind), Discern (general perception), Endure, Evade, Hunt (track stuff down), Kill, Mend (healing bodies, fixing equipment) and Sneak (all kinds of stealth). Obviously the main change is the available skills are mostly different, with the exception of Sneak and Compel. Heart doesn't have nearly as much of an emphasis on social interaction as Spire, and characters are generally much more pragmatically-focused - see Kill and Endure instead of Fight and Resist, for example. Also Heart PCs are much, much more focused than Spire PCs - a character in the latter can easily get up to 4/5 skills at creation. Domains are also areas of experience, and you also either have them, or you don't, but they're broad categories relating to different areas of the Heart (and the things that live there). The seven Domains are Cursed (places the Heart directly touches), Desolate (wastelands, abandoned settlements), Occult (any hidden or arcane lore), Religion, Technology, Warren (cramped spaces, twisting corridors), Wild (general flora and fauna). Once again, you're not likely to have more than one or two at character creation. Once again, characters are a bit more focussed here, with respect to Domains, and this helps, I think, define party roles a bit more cleanly. Obviously the Domains are very different, due to the very different setting, and I feel there's considerably less overlap between them in Heart. Knacks are very-specific specialisations that you pick up if you end up getting a given skill or domain a second time, or from certain class abilities, and are usually player-defined. No change from Spire, but Knacks are often handed out in class advances in lieu of giving access to entire Skills or Domains. So how do these go together? Whenever a roll is called for (and we're talking for actions that are important and/or challenging), you assemble a dice pool of one to four d10, roll them, and take the highest value, applying the result on the following table;  When situations are even more fraught, a roll can be considered Risky or Dangerous - removing the highest one or two results from the rolled pool, further reducing the chances of success (if you'd end up having no dice left, you only roll one dice, and can only succeed on a 10, albeit at a cost). This is generally unchanged from Spire, but difficulty removes dice after the roll, making higher difficulties much more dangerous. Also, in Heart you can't have difficulty 3 rolls or higher, they're just rated as impossible. So... Stress is the consequences of failing rolls, or succeeding only at a cost. It's also what you inflict on opponents or situations when you roll well, and it's inflicted either way by the roll of a dice; from d4 to d12, with some effects adjusting the dice type up or down (notably, rolling a critical success). Generally, something not particuarly dangerous causes d4 stress, using appropriate gear tends to inflict d6, and exotic weaponry and specialised tools deal d8 and upwards. For NPCs, stress is generally applied against a single resistance value - once this is gone, the NPC is defeated/driven off/successfully persuaded. The same goes for less animate obstacles - notably forging a route between various landmarks of the Heart. For players, however, stress is applied to one of five tracks; Blood (physical injury and exhaustion), Mind (madness and coping with weirdness), Echo (the Heart's twisting and corruptive effects), Fortune (luck, over-confidence and incompetence), and Supplies (loss of resources, broken equipment, debt). Players and NPCs will sometimes also possess a Protection value (for PCs this is tied to a single track). This simply reduces the amount of stress suffered by the amount of protection (this is usually no more than one or two points though). Obviously, stress tracks have changed - Reputation and Shadow are gone, replaced by Fortune and Echo, and Silver has been changed to the much more survival-orientated Supplies. Protection replaces the extra resistance boxes in Spire - a static armour value ends up being far less confusing than having extra boxes that don't count for fallout. Now Stress on its own doesn't do anything. It's a pain to get rid of - I'll go into that later, but it generally requires the sacrifice of various resources, or some class abilities to get rid of it. The other way to shed stress is to suffer Fallout. Whenever a PC takes stress, the GM rolls a d12 (note that this, and inflicting stress are pretty much the only time the GM actually rolls). If this is equal or less than the total amount of stress the character has, they suffer Fallout - if this roll is 6 or less, then it's Minor, 7 or more and it's Major (much more consequential). The former is generally easier to deal with, and the effects aren't too dehabilitating; many don't have any real mechanical effect.  Minor Blood Fallout  Minor Echo Fallout The latter start getting much more serious, causing ongoing stress, or locking away a character's Skills and Domains until they can be cleared, either through spending resources in a safe place, or certain magic.  Major Echo Fallout  Major Mind Fallout When you take Minor Fallout, it at least clears all stress from the associated resistence track. Major Fallout clears all your stress. Two Minor Fallout effects can be combined (with the agreement of player and GM) into a Major Fallout. Likewise, if the player accepts it, two Major Fallouts can combine to result Critical Fallout - this means that the character will shortly die or otherwise leave the campaign.  Critical Fortune Fallout Certain locations and NPCs will inflict their own fallout as well, not linked to a specific stress track. So, in my opinion, Fallout is much more interesting and varied in its effects than Spire. Also, a Heart PC will never die unless the player agrees to it - there's much more explicit narrative power in the hands of the players here; something that we'll see again when we get to advancement. Plus there's huge story potential in many of the fallout effects, and some Minor Fallout explicitly leads to specific Major and Critical Fallout. So that's it (messily) for the core of the system. Next: Character Creation Part 1 - Ancestries and Callings
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Apr 5, 2020 00:19
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My PC's succeed on a bunch of checks to help the wight so they got to keep his wight sword with all of its magical buffs after killing him. A little improvising during the campaign goes a long way.
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Apr 5, 2020 07:18
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 The Dishonored Roleplaying Game DigitalRaven posted:a single-post F&F I'm making past-me a liar. In a first for a Mophidius game that I've bought, I got an email on Friday announcing a new version of the book. Turns out the new version has enough changes that I'm minded to cover them here rather than leaving people with my initial impressions which were coloured by issues that are now fixed. The new version comes with a four-page errata document so I can figure out what's changed. That starts with a half-page mea culpa from the team, including the email address to send further questions/typos/errors to, with a note that they'll keep issuing updates as the book doesn't go to press until the end of April. I appreciate that. Most of the changes are relatively little (fixed ability titles, fixed ammo costs, and the like), but some stuff that I either called out or had to read through the book several times initially to get. The first major change is that the game makes explicit that characters start with a maximum Void Point capacity of 3. This took me some rummaging to find previously. This makes it clear that this is a flexible quantity that can change (and firms it up as something to hang rules off). A very useful clarification Players can also now spend Void Points to set a single die to 1, giving them two successes. The updated text says "rolled a 1 with a Focus, even if you don't have one that applies)" which is daft because the Focus doesn't matter — any die showing a 1 is two successes. Oh, Mophidius. Even when you issue errata your editing is poo poo. Also, it turns out you clear all Stress at the end of a scene. That's useful — until now the game didn't have any rules for healing outside of taking negative Truths. Focuses are actually capped at 5, even in chargen. Powers are a lot cleaner. references to basic forms of powers and enhancing them are gone; instead, powers are simple yes/no choices. Each one does now have the number of Runes needed to learn it listed. A bit is added about what Runes look like and how to handle players wanting to buy them. As a result? Most of the editing gripes I had are gone. The update doesn't change the (to me) unnecessary complexity of Focuses, nor does it firm up Factions. The powers, however, now do exactly what you'd expect. I'd have liked the fixes to go the other way (giving each power basic versions with enhancements), but that's practically impossible for a book that's in this stage of development, having already gone through layout. I know what I want to change, but now it feels like I have a complete text to build those changes on — I don't have to make up basic rules (healng, powers) just to play. Ultimately, this updated version is what the game should have been when it was released. Kudos to Mophidius for getting an update out just a week after the first version went on sale. One suggestion: maybe do this poo poo before releasing the game next time?
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Apr 5, 2020 19:44
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LazyAngel posted:Knacks are very-specific specialisations that you pick up if you end up getting a given skill or domain a second time, or from certain class abilities, and are usually player-defined. Is this true? I feel like access to Domains and Skills is much higher in Heart. Grabbing the first class from Spire, 2 of 7 Low abilities give a Skill or Domain. In Heart, grabbing the first class, Cleaver, 9 of 13 Minor abilities give a Skill or Domain. And even then, if you remove the 3 abilities that just give access to any Skill or Domain or Protection, that's 7 of 10. I think that math holds true throughout the book - Heart is way happier just giving out Skills and Domains. Edit: In fact, a quick search shows that none of the classes mention Knacks at all, except one ability that may give a Knack in Cleaver. CitizenKeen fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Apr 6, 2020 |
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Apr 6, 2020 14:34
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Terror in Talabheim Now THAT'S a good rat-stick! Alright, so everything before this has been 'told you that story so I could tell you this one'. The plague, the militia duty, all of it is mostly to ensure the players are in place and somewhat aware this is coming. To be fair to Terror in Talabheim, the upcoming section is one of the strongest parts of the adventure, so the payoff is actually pretty worth it. This section also features one of my favorite uses of the Fate mechanic, which is why I think the prior weirdness with the plague death Fate burn was probably an aberration. So the PCs come out of Skell's house knowing poo poo is about to go down, but they neither have time to warn anyone nor does anyone they do manage to warn really believe them when their only evidence is the word of a wight who claimed to be a patriot. However, they have just enough time to grab their own weapons, ammo, do some last minute healing draught shopping, etc to get ready. If they didn't do the Skell subquest, they get caught off guard, though they should be in their full gear when the true ratfight begins. It's time to get your best rat-stick and get ready to bash some rats, because the upcoming section is all action all the time. Once the PCs finish their last day's preparations post Skell (and hopefully get to full health somehow, they're in for a long night), they both notice more and more of the city's soldiers are symptomatic of the Grey Ague and that they smell something odd on the wind. Then a significant portion of the Taalbastion and some of the street of the Old Market district simply collapses and out come a shitload of rats. Stormvermin lead the charge, backed up by a massive swarm of gun-wielding Skryre troops, which is a hell of a shock to the Empire. The Imperial soldiers, even the ones who knew about Skaven, really weren't expecting to be outgunned. The Empire is usually the one doing the outgunning. This is the protagonists' first look at one of the other sub-villains, too: Eckmorkast Sparker. Sparker is a crazy little Skryre Engineer who had a weak spine and who thought sleeping and eating were bullshit that wasted doomsday device designing time. So he replaced his entire spine with a giant warp coil. Then he decided being scared of things got in the way of science. So he engineered the coil that keeps him from needing to eat or sleep to destroy his ability to feel fear. Then he decided to rip out his own scent glands. Other Skaven find him immensely disturbing. He's in on this plan because it involves building a fuckhuge railway cannon, it involves getting piles of Pestilens killed (Skryre is foremost in wanting the plague rats all loving dead-dead), and he thinks it can work. The PCs don't fight Sparker here most likely; he's surrounded by his troops and this first scene is mostly holding on for a little bit against Stormvermin and Clanrats and then falling back as the defenses buckle. This main force is ordered to drive through and seize the city's temples as they're both a centrally located objective and the Skaven believe it will break human morale. There's no set encounters given here, just a 'what troops are present' and some suggestions for things PCs could accomplish or areas they could retreat to in each section. This is to allow you to tailor the level of combat to the players' actual abilities and tastes. What matters in most of these sections is that the PCs represent a 'tipping point' for certain objectives. The PCs deciding to fight for awhile in an area means that that area does a little better. You might only be a few characters, but a few more warm bodies in the right place might be what's needed to prevent a total rout and let people retreat, etc. It doesn't matter if they're super hardened badasses. Thus, the PCs falling back from the main fight to the Manor District (which even more cowardly PCs are likely to do, remembering that's where the knights and the best armed soldiers are) find themselves with a choice. If they jump in and attack Stormvermin in the palatial gardens of the city's rich district, Countess Elise and some of her officials and officers will get the time to get away. This will actually measurably help the PCs later, as she's capable enough to keep people organized in exile outside of the city and provide them some support. Also, saving a likely-soon-to-be-Elector's life is a good thing for an ambitious PC to do. Note that Stormvermin are badasses in this, for some insane reason. While they lack the armor, they're otherwise tougher than Chaos Warriors, having WS 65, SB 5, TB 5, Agi 45 and Dodge, 17 Wounds and Strike Mighty. Only one attack, but when it hits for Damage 6 Impact, uh... I just want to look at those numbers. One of the characters in a little side thing I'm running right now is basically a peasant soldier who had the stats to be a legendary swordsmaster. He has less WS than that Stormvermin as a 2200 EXP character (63 vs. 65), the same SB and offensive power, less Agi, and less TB and less Wounds. The guy is a huge badass. What I'm saying here is the Stormvermin are a little overtuned and I don't really know why. I guess it's because of Children of the Horned Rat and how it made them into insane supersoldiers, as this book is a companion piece to it (heck, it even suggests if you own it it might be fun to run this story from the rat perspective). For reference, a tabletop Stormvermin is like...as good as an Imperial Swordsman while being faster. That's the lofty height of rat jackboots. Anyway, they don't actually have to win, just fight and buy time for a bit. If they don't, Elise is captured and will be forced to read propaganda statements on live rat cabalvision about how grateful she is that the wonderful new overlords have taken the city. That is not a joke. That is Steeleye's plan for capturing the city's nobles, forcing them to read statements about how awesome he is and how he totally deserves to rule Talabheim while using magic to broadcast it to the whole city. Oh, Rats. Fighting in the heavy buildings of the Law Quarter offers the PCs some places to hole up and defend, though they need to be careful. Skryre Warpfire Throwers are going house to house, trying to burn out resistance. Another nice thing is that the game wants you to play out one small section of these fights, but provides lots of friendly forces that can show up to give beleaguered PCs some space to retreat once they've held long enough at a certain point. The game really wants PCs to notice you can shoot the tank on a fire thrower to kill it, and to start doing that themselves. Wouldn't be Skaven if there wasn't lots of exploding that takes out dozens of their own guys. Warpfire Throwers are insanely nasty weapons, as you might remember from Children of the Horned Rat. Getting hit by one gives you an Agi to avoid it, but then does a bunch of armor-ignoring damage and sets you on fire if you fail another Agi test, while also potentially mutating you because gently caress you. Remember being on fire is d10 Wounds, no reduction, every turn until you make an Agi test to go out. Remember an average 2nd tier had 15 Wounds or so. Another fun thing to remember in all this fighting is that if PCs have Gunpowder prof they can use Skaven guns perfectly fine. It might be fun to let the players take out a sniper, capture a Jezzail nest, and start popping flamethrower teams until they have to fall back. The heaviest fighting happens at God's Row, as the PCs keep falling back. The PCs should be informed by one of the city's messengers that everyone who can still fight is falling back to God's Row to make a stand in the temple district with what's left of the knights, the city's Priests, and a bunch of Magisters. God's Row is an absolutely chaotic battle, with Jade Magisters throwing vines and geysers around, priests calling down lightning and wielding flaming hammers and shining spears, Knights charging down the streets to try to rout rat machine gun teams, Imperial State Troops and Militia fighting for their lives, and a huge Amber Magister wrestling rat ogres with his bare claws. PCs should fight at least one rat ogre and its handlers while trying to hold on, slowly getting pushed back to one of the most defensible temples: Sigmar's. At this point, ask the PCs if they wish to make a last stand. If they say yes, every PC gets a Fate Point to use in fighting to the death at the Temple of Sigmar, rallying the troops as best they can and getting a genuine heroic last stand with the guarantee they can continue the campaign after (plus an extra reroll while doing it). I love that. It's a great use of metacurrency to give the PCs a scene that is genuinely brave and heroic for the characters, without the players feeling like they're being chided into throwing away their characters. Plus, if you want a drag-out fight where you stop running and kill as many goddamn rat nazis as you can, this is where to do it. As an added bonus, the rats can't actually breach the walls until Sparker himself deploys a crazy warpstone device to blow the temple door open, and he's completely fearless, so he leads the assault. Not only do you make a last stand, you get a genuine and decent chance to kill one of Steeleye's major allies here. Sparker is a badass little rat, but he's mostly unarmored and doesn't actually have Dodge so his 70 Agi doesn't help him avoid damage much. He's got a heck of a nasty sniper rifle, all the ranged talents, BS 65, and the ability to throw lightning out of his spine (since it counts as the Engineer's little Warp-Lightning generator trick) and everything about him is designed to be a memorably crazy but ultimately beatable rat, like all the best rats. The reason the PCs survive being left for dead after doing all they can in the temple is the fighting is so fierce the Skaven actually fall back, even after taking it, and give the temple of Sigmar something of a wide berth later on. They think it's somehow ill-omened. Note they also get the 'fighting to the death' Fate Point if they declare they're done running at any other point in the battle. If the PCs want a brave last stand at any point or over any objective, they will not be punished for taking it. This is a great way to deal with how hard it can sometimes be to convince PCs to flee, too. As the Row of Gods is lost, if the PCs didn't fight to the death they end up back in the Law Quarter, the last place that's undecided. Here, Steeleye finally makes his triumphant entrance, backed up by a shitton more rats and the esteemed Dr. Skell. His plan is to use her to start raising bodies to really finish off the morale of the defenders, and it works. Seeing corpses standing back up all over the place is enough to finally route the defenders, especially when it's accompanied by a powerful rat mage calling down storms of warp lightning and his fresh troops. Steeleye is too far back to take a shot at, but the book does note PCs with ranged weapons might manage to get a few shots off at Skell if they know about her and realize she's among the rat's entourage from the rising corpses. It's not likely, but it is possible someone is going to roll a Fury and put an arrow in her throat. The battle is officially lost at this point; even if the PCs want to hold out, nobody else does, and most of Talabheim's forces are fleeing for cover. Now's the time to either find a quiet spot to hide and figure out what to do now, or flee into the woods in the Crater. There's no way out of Talabheim, the rats own the joint, and the PCs are trapped. Now is the time to start the Resistance, and start shanking rat nazis in the kidneys. Overall, the Fall of Talabheim is really well done. It's full of exciting scenes and neat action, it lets the PCs actually accomplish things that will help them in the next section (as well as establishing their rep; if they fought bravely more people will recognize them and want to help The Resistance in the next bit), and generally feels like a good climax to the first half of the adventure. The Resistance section is quite strong, too. Basically, Terror in Talabheim doesn't start great, but once you actually get into ratfight it picks up speed quick and the two biggest setpiece (this, and the eventual final battle for Talabheim) both land quite well. I really love the 'PCs making a heroic stand get a Fate Point to use for it' mechanic. It's a great use of Fate for one of its intended purposes: Lots of these kinds of stories have scenes where the heroes are knocked out or captured or something, so having your stock of Fate Points to spend to be left for dead by your enemies after a ferocious last stand is both in-genre and allows for a really cool scene for the heroes. Next Time: Lotta things you can do with a hatchet and a rat nazi.
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Apr 6, 2020 14:56
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On a personal note, I'm disappointed in myself from when I ran this that I didn't embrace just letting my players play Wolfenstein But With Rats more. I did not really do the Resistance section very well. Though I did add a few additional named rats. Tyl Ratger and his Tuberats (modified, improve-improved Clanrats with claws, come out of tubes) and Mickey the Ninja, the latter being one of my longtime players' TT Master Assassin, who has shown up in multiple campaigns and never managed to die.
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Apr 6, 2020 15:07
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How many rat bodies can you stack up like corn wood if you do really well at the defence of the temple district? Because I am imaging one hell of a lot of dead ratmen at the end of this.
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Apr 6, 2020 15:11
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They describe them having a hard time getting over the bodies of their own dead by the end of the battle. The thing to remember is, take the default PCs: 3 of the 4 are pretty good in a fight, and they've probably got 600-1000 more EXP than they started with. So you have a fairly badass Vampire Hunter, a Pit Fighter who has probably gotten into Veteran and gotten stronger, a Scout who is probably now solid in melee and ranged, and the social guy can still be rallying NPC troops or something. Even the default party here can put up a hell of a fight against, say, Clanrats and Slaves. And the flamethrower rats explode if you get a hit on their tanks, and the PCs have one genuine markswoman and another decent bowman, and the Pit Fighter might've picked up gun or something in Veteran by now. My group, with having a Master Bright Wizard, a 3rd tier fighter (Vinny the Elf), a Runesmith who had had some time to make his own gear and done a side track in Shieldbreaker, and a Grey Wizard who was also a good shot with a longbow? I had to throw in stuff like the Tuberats specifically to still make this difficult for them because they were considerably ahead of the expected level for this. The real issue for PCs in all these sections is actually Skaven guns. Jezzails do Damage 5 AP, and you can't Dodge guns. Incidental shots from Skryre skirmishers with their pistols and rifles are probably the single most likely thing to nail a PC, aside from the overtuned Stormvermin but at least a skilled melee fighter can parry them. The Rat Ogres are as much of a paper tiger as always, especially since you fight them one at a time. I cannot overemphasize how much 'single big monster' is usually not that dangerous. It can be, but any time you use a single big target, there is a reasonable chance it gets killed no matter how badass it is. This was demonstrated to me on Friday, when in my Myth side game (I like the Myth series and ended up doing a bunch of my own stuff with it using WHFRP) my players killed an extremely powerful ancient undead mage with a party of midway through second tier yokel mercs, in open combat. They were just trying to hold him off while their engineer planted charges to collapse a building on him, but he kept missing 90 and 70% defense rolls, they kept making saves against magic, and they rolled 5 furies over the course of the fight. His 70% WS, SB 7, TB 7, 35 Wounds, 5 Attacks, and 5 Mag did not save him from a pissed off peasant with a greatsword, a whaler, and getting dinged with a rock in the head. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Apr 6, 2020 |
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Apr 6, 2020 15:11
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The idea that the fall of the entire city is mandated is a little annoying and I can see it irritating the gamers in my circles ("All that work for nothing? Bah!"), but otherwise that's a darn good ratfight and it throws up the best aspect of Skaven as villains - they're memorable, batshit crazy, and want to save their own skins. Were I to run this I'd probably try to make the plague section a self-contained story, tossing more plot into it and maybe letting the players get a glimpse of some of the notable villains early. The best time to spring the attack would be right after the players start thinking "hey this sounds an awful lot like the stuff Skaven do when setting up for a major assaOHSHIT".
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Apr 6, 2020 16:08
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I would mostly emphasize the idea that a city is more than its buildings. Yes, Talabheim is fallen - in the sense that the rats control the physical city. But the better the PCs do, the more lives they save and the more prepared, ready and safe the Resistance is when the next bit starts. You can’t save the city’s streets, but you can save its heart, the people, and that matters more.
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Apr 6, 2020 16:23
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Plus the fall sets up the next part, which is all about retaking it. And they do point out at several places that stuff like curing the plague does save hundreds of lives. You can't prevent the rats from taking the city, but everything you do can make it easier to take it back. E: In general, the next part is far more freeform, but having the plague cure (and maybe adding a mission to rescue Dr. Daubler) gives the PCs a huge boost if you think about it. Part of the point of the plague is that the rats can compel loyalty by holding out their extremely temporary 'cure' for those who serve them or inform on neighbors. If the PCs have a means to actually cure plague infections, the Resistance can really undermine part of Steeleye's means of control. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Apr 6, 2020 |
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Apr 6, 2020 16:31
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Terror in Talabheim Shootin', stabbin', and stranglin' rat nazis So, your city has been seized by ratmen. There's an Imperial relief army on the way, but it will probably be months; they need to muster a force that can potentially seize Talabheim, the famously invincible fortress-city. You don't really have an easy way out, and the crater will be swarming with rats as they bully the farms and forests into feeding them and let the Rat Ogres out for exercise murdering the wildlife (and peasants). We get a long sidebar on why trying to run away is a bad idea, that ends with the very silly 'you may well be hanged for desertion if and when Imperial forces find you', when the simple situation is already reason enough not to run. But we also get to see Steeleye make his first public address. He brings out the highest ranking noble he's managed to capture (Elise, one of the Hunter Lords, a Knightly Grandmaster, etc etc) and has them chained to the obelisk of laws at the center of the city. He then broadcasts his image to everyone in Talabheim as he makes his declaration of conquest, starting it off by leveling the obelisk with a huge bolt of warp lightning and badly wounding the captured noble. He tells the people their laws, their city, their forest are all now inherit-inherited by the Skaven. He forces the noble to agree with his speech, striking them several times if they show any defiance, until they tell him they hear and obey, and recommend everyone in Talabheim do the same. I'd take advantage of this scene to set up that Steeleye does this kind of thing regularly, broadcasting himself to the city. It's a nice way to give your main villain presence in the story and update the players on their progress through what he's telling his minions and his slaves. Having the Grey Seer's propaganda hours have him furiously denying the Resistance's progress or trying to tout every victory his forces win against their allies would be a great way to show the effects they're having on their adversary. Meanwhile, the rats hold out a cure for the Grey Ague, promising they'll save obedient slaves, informers, and willing allies so they can work for the glory of the Skaven. Everyone else is forced at gunpoint to get about their tasks. Steeleye realizes humans actually care about their children, unlike Skaven, so he starts instituting a policy whereby families found to be defiant see their children sacrificed to the Horned Rat. Work begins on converting the city into slave camps and Skaven nests. The rats are in charge. Except for all the places they aren't. They never actually managed to break the Temple of Myrmidia, and the Knights of the Verdant Field and Blazing Sun are holed up inside with supplies and defenses. The local dwarven embassy turned out to be too tough for the rats, too; it's been converted into a full (if small) hold and is sheltering citizens and shooting rats, who pretend they didn't really want it anyway and just keep it under siege. The rats struggle a lot more outside the city, and are still getting ambushed by both Taal's Chosen and the Horned Hunters, a bunch of crazy Taalite flagellant-adjacent fanatics who run around shirtless with giant axes and antlers. So why are the PCs going to do something about all this? The book actually goes into a bunch of possible motives, not just for them, but for the other people they could convince to take the risks necessary to fight the rats. They might be motivated by religion; even non-Taalites would be furious to see a bunch of murderous ratmen defying one of the great holy cities of the Empire. Even Shallyans could justify fighting the rats; they're close enough to Nurglites for the strictures, they're using plague as a major weapon and means of controlling the city. It is, in fact, within the strictures for a priestess to bash a rat (the book points this out to make it easier for a Shallyan PC to participate in the incoming political violence and freedom fighting). They might have an actual sense of duty and patriotism. The Empire itself will suffer significantly if it genuinely loses Talabheim. They may have friends and family who are still enslaved who they want to rescue or protect. Nobody wants to raise their kids in a world ruled by goddamn rat nazis. They might want to get paid. I mean, if they win, imagine the rewards that might await. Not to mention the looting opportunities; the rats don't give a gently caress about gold or silver or jewels, so they haven't even bothered fully looting the noble mansions! Finally, they might just realize they don't have much of a choice. The rats control the main safe way in and out of the crater. Getting out another way means strong odds of falling off a mountain and dying. Staying and letting the rats enslave everything without resisting will probably kill or ruin everyone eventually. They mention this makes an excellent way for the PCs to accidentally or intentionally recruit local Chaos Cults and other hostiles; they don't want their city ruled by rats, either. A local cult that planned to take over the city later probably already has stocks of hidden arms and experience at covert action. They might be really useful, and genuinely motivated to deal with the rats. Same for other evils like vampires. You can leave killing them for later, depending on how hard up you are for help. At the same time you probably want to be careful that your Resistance doesn't end up enabling crazy rear end cults to take over the movement or something. PCs might also join the Resistance solely because they're heroes, trying to do what's right with little expectation of reward. This is included mostly for completeness' sake, but I'd say there's a nice joke to be made with it: considering how often PCs don't get paid as it is, a 'hero' who expects no actual reward at the end of a WHFRP campaign may well just have a sense of pattern recognition! The Resistance section is intentionally open ended. The author is aware some groups are not excited about a long-term secondary campaign of terror and mayhem from the shadows against rat nazis. If that's the case, you can hurry this part along to the denouement and have the Imperial army nearby already and Steeleye's plan move much faster. Likewise, if your players are really enjoying making allies and strangling rat stormtroopers, this can become its own major campaign arc, lasting months as they slowly win back parts of the city and make the rats afraid to go to some parts of the city. Skell and Sparker (if they're alive, Skell probably will be, Sparker might not) are there specifically to provide big objectives for the Resistance to take out. Lots of Resistance characters are suggested, from a 'model slave' who is keeping the smile on her face because she's imagining poisoning every goddamn ratman in her restaurant (while passing information to the rebels) to hardened criminals who are just here for the violence to an enslaved Engineer the PCs can help induce flaws in Skaven buildings and kill dozens of them with collapses. If you want to play the long-term or medium-term Resistance arc, there's plenty of information, objectives, characters, and ideas for it, though you'll be doing a fair bit of legwork. I like this sort of approach much better than a pre-defined, narrow narrative in a pre-made. The tools it gives are quite good, too. The author is careful to go over the cracks in the Skaven's power, and if you think about it, Skaven don't handle political violence well and haven't usually put themselves in a position where they have to deal with actual insurgency. Note that Steeleye doesn't have a large contingent of Eshin, either, so he's lacking some in his own spies and assassins. Also note Clan Eshin's general success at influencing rat politics by making the rat politicians aware they can be murdered; your PCs will need to mirror this. Steeleye also has the problem that he's succeeded, a lot. His lieutenants (except Sparker and Skell) are now dragging their feet, trying to make him look bad so he doesn't get all the credit for this incredible victory. There may even be other Skaven who think they can 'use' the Resistance to kill their rivals or interfere in the Grey Seer's plans. A spiteful rat nazi who only cares about his rival losing can be a valuable source. If the PCs rescued Elise, the nobles and some of the city's army in the forests are much better organized to provide a fallback point and supply the Resistance with arms and food. Skaven also just don't think about their slaves that much. They assume slaves are easily cowed, already defeated, and they don't bother to tell them apart. If PCs can mess around with scents and a little acting, they should be able to move surprisingly freely among the slave gangs to coordinate their allies. Heck, they even mention if you saved Elise she's actually genuinely respectful and treats the PCs as trusted advisors, letting them take the lead in the Resistance effort. It's kind of rare for an Imperial noble to actually be that grateful. The main thing keeping the nobles a secondary source of support (besides the PCs being the main characters) is that they know the army is coming. They think things will get better, soon, without taking major risks personally. But the army would have a much easier time if there's a force within the walls that can seize the Taalbastion and let them in. Elise (or if she was captured, her lover Hafner, one of the Hunter Lords) will eventually quietly promise the PCs as much backup as they can muster (which will be more if it's Elise) if they can help ensure the Taalbastion will open for the army. And of course, the PCs will eventually learn Steeleye's actual plans and that he absolutely wants an Imperial army to arrive and besiege him here. Skell is also an amusing point of weakness. She's happy with how things have gone, and Steeleye is too. She has a lot of corpses to work with, he doesn't care as long as she obeys him, and she's happy to keep doing so because hey, more corpses. The other rats complain about her playing with the food, but whenever someone complains too loudly, they remember they are insanely terrified of her. This means that while she's important and powerful, she doesn't have Stormvermin bodyguards or anything. They're also afraid to try to kill her, because necromancer. Again, a major and relatively doable target for the PCs. Similarly, if they didn't save the Countess before, she's still alive and a major feature of Steeleye's conquest show. Rescuing her would be a good move for the Resistance. There's lots of stuff to do, and I could see a group getting really in to building alliances and stabbing rats before it all comes to a head later. Next Time: MY PLAN IS A GIANT GUN, YES-YES!
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Apr 6, 2020 17:57
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