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Holy poo poo that's a deep pull and perfect. Marry me.
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Apr 9, 2020 06:35
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Wait is that Scary Go Round? Incredible.
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Apr 9, 2020 07:08
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White Wolf's fiction interludes would probably be a lot more palatable if the monster turned out to be Desmond Fishman.
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Apr 9, 2020 07:28
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What happens if a centaur offends against the gods? Do two of their legs fall off?
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Apr 9, 2020 07:38
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Hunter: the Reckoning - Player's Guide Part Two: Hermits & Wayward Chapter... Half: The 'Lost' Creeds Hermits Shut up. Please, shut up. You're not making this any easier. (oops its fiction time again) William is a Hermit. It's late at night, and he's going to the grocery story. Nobody is around, which pleases him. He seems nervous about the idea of encountering people. He gets his groceries quickly, pays for them, and leaves before anyone else can show up. Unfortunately as he's walking home he hears loud agry voices and sees a group of teenagers trying to get some change from an older businessman type. William freezes, horrified (presumably because he knows what's coming although the wording doesn't rule out the possibility that he just can't believe the nerve of these dang kids). That's when the wind picks up and he hears DEATH LOOMS followed by a sudden storm of voices and images overwhelming him. William screams, and sees that the businessman is actually a corrupted, rotting thing, yells out that he has a knife to scare the teens off and then everyone basically runs away, leaving the intense pain in William's head to start to subside once the monster is gone. Hermits used to be good communicators. Good listeners. People that you'd turn to. Not anymore. It's the voices, you see. Other Hunters might get a bit of the Messengers shouting in their brains; Hermits get overwhelmed. Even the Imbuing is like opening a floodgate. Being around other Hunters makes it worse. Being around Hunters equals a barrage of signs and messages but unfortunately it's so overwhelming and painful that actually doing anything with it is nearly impossible. Being around monsters is worse than that. Most Hermits inevitably retreat from society. They tend to still be pretty good at gathering information, as long as it's not in-person. Hermits tend to be good at Perception and other mental traits, as well as Knowledges, but aren't very social. Every hermit has the Patron Background (how loud the Messengers shout) at 3 automatically and can buy it up to 4 or 5 like they were buying dots 1-2. They also start play with a derangement 'that hampers social interaction considerably' such as Hysteria, Manic-Depression, or Paranoia and look Trying to unpack the way WoD Stuff handled.......... (sigh) "derangements" is just... I don't even know where to begin. Everything about it is just so so bad. Worse still is that the Hermit's brain pain is also represented by +1 to the difficulty of all rolls when they're within 100 feet "or so" (helpful) of monsters or other Imbued. They have a starting Conviction of 3 (low) and trend towards Vision and Mercy Edges. There's also the standard white wolf sidebar of Hermit stereotypes about other Creeds, although the Hunter: the Reckoning versions of this do have one running joke that I actually kind of like. See, in one of the fiction pieces in the Hunter Corebook, a Hunter goes on some talk show or something and demonstrates his Edges live on air which of course leads to his arrest and later death when he tries to escape. The funny bit is that each of the different Creed stereotype boxes reference this incident, but none of them can agree on what Creed the guy was a member of (Hermits think "that maniac on TV" was a Wayward btw). Playing a Hermit is a bit of a niche choice but I can see how some interesting stuff might come out of it. Personally, I'd lose the mechanical penalty when they're around other Hunters (keep the idea that it hurts if you want but not the +1 difficulty). It's not for everyone, certainly. Moving on! Waywards We don't judge. We send the wicked to Him for that. Get in the way and you can go be judged, too.  as an apology for showing you the book cover, here's a bit of art that I actually like- wait wasn't there something about Hunters being all average and ? The Wayward from our fiction piece doesn't get named (it's first-person) but I'm pretty sure it's the main signature Wayward whose Hunter-Net (remember how Hunters have their own 90s-era website?) handle is God45 and whose real name I have sadly forgotten (I'm like 99% sure he's also the guy in the picture above). Not that it really matters. While running an "errand" The Wayward an unusual collection of people and spots a Hunter sign on one of their bags (remember also how Hunters have a cool code that only they can read). The Wayward approaches them as a fellow hunter, pointing out that a group including a 'nerdy kid' and a 'soccer mom' needs to make some effort to look like they belong together, and finds out that they're observing a 'lost soul' that they think they can help. The Wayward is not having any of that poo poo, but bluffs them and tags along. They go into an alley and the soccer mom goes ahead to try to speak with the monster that's hiding out there. When she does, the Wayward does something that feels like pouring fury into soccer mom causing her to snap and attack the monster. She dies, but it prompts the others to actually fight and the Wayward opens up with his shotgun. After finishing the monster, he realises that one of the other Hunters is still alive when she gasps out 'why?'. The Wayward's answer? "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, remember?" It doesn't really matter who Waywards used to be. What matters is what they know- more importantly, what other Hunters just don't get. To quote the book: quote:"The others just don't get it. This isn't some sort of intellectual exercise that's up for debate. Monsters are not sad, sympathetic creatures. This isn't even a war. In war, there are codes and conventions, rules and regulations. This is the last desperate struggle to survive in the face of utter evil. Half-measures won't do. You can't afford to be squeamish or worry about ethics. The monsters and all the other scum have to be destroyed, every last one of them. No matter what the cost. Even if it takes the last drop of blood of every person on Earth, it'll still be a bargain. At least we'll know that none of them are left." Waywards are pretty intense (I think that reference to "monsters and other scum" is talking about people who help monsters but it's something maybe you'd want to specify there). Maybe other hunters don't understand because they don't have the clarity that Waywards have. Other hunters have to choose to see. Waywards can't choose not to. From the moment of their Imbuing, Waywards have the monster-detecting aspect of their Second Sight on all the time. And when you can See All The Time, it's hard to pretend anything else matters. That anything from your old life is important. It also makes it hard to care about things like collateral damage. Because Waywards don't know when to stop, don't believe there's such a thing as going 'too far'. So they don't charge in guns blazing. They fight dirty. Really dirty. They set fires, shoot through human shields and never ever trust anyone. When they do charge in, they make sure that someone else is ahead of them to catch a bullet because Waywards can't afford not to live to fight another day. (The Wayward Standard White Wolf Stereotypes Sidebar thinks that 'that idiot on Television' was an Innocent) Waywards concentrate on physical attributes, combat and survival skills. They like Vision and Zeal edges. All Waywards have permanent Sight (but they still have to pay to activate the mind-control immunity). Interestingly, Waywards can never buy any of the Edges that allow them to differentiate between types of monsters. All monsters are monsters to the Wayward. Waywards.... God dammit. Waywards also start play with a derangement such as Megalomania, Multiple Personalities, Fugue, or Schizophrenia "that, in their case, makes them violent and desensitized to suffering." COOL. Apart from that deeply unfortunate moment, though, Waywards are rad as hell. Not a Creed I would advocate including in every game, certainly. I'd want to talk that one over with the rest of the group for sure. But if you want to play a guy who is absolutely. Going to kill. Every. Last. One. OF THOSE GOD DAMNED VAMPIRES. NO MATTER WHAT. We have a Creed for that. Your starting Conviction is 4. (I can absolutely understand why some people would really not want to play a game with another PC who is effectively a compulsive killer, don't get me wrong. It's a niche, though. A hosed-up antiheroic-at-best niche. They'd also work pretty well for an antagonist-Hunter which is a recurring thing in the fiction.) I wish I could remember more from the Wayward Creed book but sadly it's been like a decade since I read it. So, those are the Lost Creeds. I like them, but they absolutely need to be used carefully. A Hermit player really needs to know what they're getting into and the ST really needs to make the fact that they're mechanically disadvantaged not just prevent them from ever doing anything. I remember they had some pretty cool Edges, but I couldn't tell you what they are sadly. A Hermit also works pretty well as an NPC ally, an informant type, or as a way to sort of show off Waywards, meanwhile, really need everyone to be okay with them to be present it a game, but make excellent antagonists and poo poo-stirrers. Honestly, also, when you see the way that the line talks about making sure not to have your Hunter be in danger of being too heroic or competent, it is refreshing as hell to be able to turn back to Creed: gently caress It, Kill Everything. Less facetiously, the idea of a character with constant unending monster-detection on is cool as hell. At the risk of too much commentary, another thing that I find pretty interesting about the Lost Creeds is what they imply about the greater Hunter situation and the Messengers. Not knowing what the gently caress is going on with the Messengers and being a little bit paranoid about it is a big part of my preferred Hunter take, and the addition of the Lost adds the fascinating wrinkle that not only do Hunters not know what the Messengers are up to but also their plan seems to be a little bit... broken. Think about it. Hermits and Waywards both have obvious functions for the greater Hunter struggle (the Reckoning, if you will) but at the same time they don't... work. Hermits presumably should be getting direct contact, possibly even specific strategic instructions from the Messengers but the feed is too much so they can't make sense of it. Waywards being rabid doesn't make sense given the existence of Mercy creeds. No other Creed is messed with like that, but why create Hunters who are basically guaranteed to hate some of the other types? To me, those kinds of questions that can be asked in-character make the game more interesting. Edit: Like, seriously, look at Waywards and then think about the fact that both the Corebook and (we'll get there) the Player's Guide have big screeds of "advice" insisting that you mustn't dare to make your Hunter any sort of competent action hero, anything other than a scared average guy who doesn't know how to fight and won't just jump into battle and so on and so on. "Scared average person confronts secret world of monsters" isn't the worst hook I would play that game, but when people talk about Hunter: the Reckoning's confusion of tone it's because of poo poo like this (and the art). Lastly, I know I said I would be doing Bystanders as well in this section but the post got a little long and uh I found some stuff so I feel like it should probably be it's own post. Coming up: Bystanders, but for real this time. Aethyron fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 08:50
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 Heart: The City Beneath 03 - Character Creation - Ancestries and Callings It's been brought to my attention that I am in fact completely wrong regarding the distribution of Skills and Domains in Spire as opposed to Heart, and I must apologize for that. It still remains that generally, a starting Heart character will tend to have less than a starting Spire character (2 + max of 3 from Minor abilities, as opposed to 4+ from Class and Durance, plus possibly another one from the starting advance), but as the game goes on, Heart characters tend to pick them up just as quickly. Don't know where I got the bit about Knacks from either - if anything, Knacks in Heart pretty much require double-purchase of a Skill or Domain, or are entirely transitory, which is a lot cleaner than Spire where you tend to end up with a handful of them. Annnyway, character creation! It's pretty simple;
I'll cover the first two in this post, as they're pretty simple, although the Callings are a brilliant bit of game design, and I'll tackle Classes over the next few posts as they're a bit more meaty. On a surface level, Callings sit in the same conceptual space as your Durance as Spire, but they tie in to the advancement system in Heart and are much more a driver of character behaviour, as well as a narrative tool players can use. Ancestries are just that. Whereas in Spire most PCs would be Drow as a matter of course, Heart broadens the options to allow for Human, Gnoll or even Aelfir as player characters - when you're making your way through a nightmarish semi-sentient hell-dungeon, race and skin colour become decidedly secondary considerations. When you're in a Haven (a slightly-more-safe refuge built around a stable landmark) there might be a bit of prejudice, but that's as likely to be about where you're from as whether you have fur or pointed ears. All ancestries have a choice of three questions the player can answer one of to flesh out the character a bit, as well as a d20 table to generate a couple of trinkets they start with, but no other mechanical effects. Drow are the same as in Spire - monochromatic elves who blister at the touch of the sun and worship a triple Goddess of the Moon. They're the underclass (and former rulers) of the city above, and are often driven down into the under-city for a multitude of reasons, from escape from the regime above, to pilgrimage to the Temple of the Moon Below. Humans in Heart/Spire have a reputation for digging up the past, often working as retro-engineers and tomb-robbers. They also invented guns, and, shortly after, the arms trade. So ending up in the semi-permeable reality below the city isn't an entirely unusual fate. Also they're canonically mostly welsh or cornish. Aelfir, the High Elves are the masked rulers of the City Above, alien with bizarre and baroque customs and tradition. But sometimes they too fall, and by the point they've ended up in the City Below, they've adjusted to no longer being on top of the heap.  Gnolls are the hyena-headed people of the far south; a nation with advanced technology built of their mastery of demonology, that's currently fighting an on-off war with the Aelfir. So in Spire, where their presence is generally forbidden, they tend to gravitate to the under-city. Obviously although Spire brought up the idea of being a disgraced Aelfir or a human, the emphasis was on playing only Drow and playing within the bounds of that culture. Callings are where we start to see some mechanical meat to the character. There's five of these, each corresponding to a different reason for a character to find themselves in the City Below. Callings give you four things; a Core Ability, three questions to answer about your character and how the Calling brought them out of the City Above, another random trinket table to flesh out your character and a list of Beats. Beats, which come in Minor, Major and Zenith forms are the core of advancement in Heart. They're little milestones in your character's story, and advancement is simple; you choose two at the end of each session (and at character creation); if you trigger the circumstances of each beat (usually taking fallout or doing things that get you in trouble), you get a Minor/Major/Zenith advance and check off the beat. Once you've hit a given beat you can't choose it again. This is so much clearer than Spire's advancement, and gives the player the opportunity to say "next session, can I have the chance of X happening?". Note that Zenith Abilities generally result in the death/retirement of the character so picking a Zenith beat is a signal to the GM to say "I think my character's arc is approaching a logical end". In fact this is one of the better RPG experience/advancement settings I've seen. Here's the five Callings; Adventure. You're so jaded that only in the living nightmare of the City Below can you really feel alive. Has the core ability Legendary which lets them remove stress whenever they hit a beat. Minor beats involve taking risky or dramatic actions; taking major fallout for example, getting into trouble with the authorities or having things named after you. Or kicking someone off a tall building. Major beats are more conventional heroism; slaying a might beast, saving a Haven, hiring a bard to sign of your exploits. There's two Zenith beats, either lead a Haven to prosperity, or reach Tier 4 of the Heart (more on that when we get to delving, but that's entering the Heart itself).  Enlightenment. They all said you were mad! You'll prove them wrong! You're on a quest to prove that something that other have told you was impossible, isn't. Core ability is Unorthodox Methods - once a session automatically succeed with a 6 (succeed but take stress). Minor beats revolve around the pursuit of knowledge despite the risks (or the destruction of knowledge that contradicts your theories). Major beats involve sacrifice - either personal, or of others - whilst pursuing your theories. For your Zenith beat;  Forced. You don't want to be down here, but you've not been given a choice.  Minor beats revolve around either your relationship with your masters, how their orders make your life harder, and forging a life outside of their control. Major beats involve either directly fighting back against the powers controlling you, or carrying out their orders with significant consequences. The Zenith beat is simple; either escape your master's control, or enact your bloody revenge. Heartsong. You've heard the sweet song of the heart and are now drawn towards its fleshy red embrace. Your core ability is In the Blood - you gain Echo protection, and once a situation (i.e. a discrete scene), you can allocate stress to Echo instead of another resistance. Minor beats involve sacrifice, and taking the Heart into your body by eating things it creates, or graft parts of the flora and fauna of the City Below onto yourself, as well as seeking to strengthen your connection with the Heart itself. Major beats go further, tearing down Havens, or spreading your visions. And in the end you'll either become one with the Heart, or tear its connection to you from your body, severing the link. Penitant. You caused harm to your organisation through either malice or incompetance, and now seek to make amends by delving into the City Below.  Minor beats for the Penitant involve making penance for your crimes, and punishing others for their transgressions as well as performing acts to re-establish your bonds with your order or organisation. Major beats either escalate these stakes, or add ambuguity - further crimes you seek to hide from your order. Finally, for your Zenith beat you either find forgiveness from your order, or you betray them, intentionally this time. So quite a mix there; generally players should have an idea of what Zenith beat they're ultimately working towards after a few sessions of play. This does also put a bit of a time limit on a campaign of Heart - it's not intended to run past around a dozen sessions or so before all the characters have been retired one way or another, but this is hardly a flaw - it lets the game focus on the narrative of the group, rather than serving as an open-ended sandbox. Next: Character Creation Part 2 - Equipment, Resources and our first class; The Cleaver
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Apr 9, 2020 10:17
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Now I doubly want to make an RPG to do better than Zak Smith, purely so I can have a voice at GenCon to publicly state that Zak Smith is a Rapist, Abuser, and poo poo his pants at GenCon in 2017.
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Apr 9, 2020 10:19
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LazyAngel posted:although the Callings are a brilliant bit of game design Agreed wholeheartedly. Maybe one of the best XP systems I've ever seen. LazyAngel posted:So quite a mix there; generally players should have an idea of what Zenith beat they're ultimately working towards after a few sessions of play. This does also put a bit of a time limit on a campaign of Heart - it's not intended to run past around a dozen sessions or so before all the characters have been retired one way or another, but this is hardly a flaw - it lets the game focus on the narrative of the group, rather than serving as an open-ended sandbox. I do wonder how to deal with a campaign where players don't end on the same session. I could easily envision a campaign where Avery wraps up their Zenith beat on session 7, but it takes Blair 3 more sessions to wrap up theirs. What does Avery do for those last three sessions?
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Apr 9, 2020 13:42
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The basic idea of the Wayward plays really well into the strong part of Hunter, I think. Namely the 'you can no longer fail to see the insanity around you'. The whole 'moment of terrible, terrible clarity and no way to return to normalcy' is the strong horror idea at the heart of Hunter before all the other stuff gets poured over it to smother it. Not so sure I care for the 'every last one of these guys is a murderous psychopath who doesn't care how many humans they get killed' aspect, though. It would be more interesting to have a variety of reactions to always-on monster detection.
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Apr 9, 2020 14:24
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CitizenKeen posted:Agreed wholeheartedly. Maybe one of the best XP systems I've ever seen. Well, it depends heavily on the actual Zenith ability you pick - some hit immediately, some need to be triggered, and some take time to remove you from the game. Plus there's abilities that explicitly assume that there'll still be other players around for some time later (the Vermissian Knight can become a rampaging train-golem that can, once in the game, turn up at a later point, thwack an enemy, and dissapear into the night, for example), so I guess the assumption is towards a campaign where you're likely to bring in a fresh character every so often, if it goes on that long?
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Apr 9, 2020 14:51
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At least WW was kind enough to shunt the 'this character option is actually almost impossible to use in a functioning party' things out of the main book.
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Apr 9, 2020 15:10
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LazyAngel posted:Well, it depends heavily on the actual Zenith ability you pick - some hit immediately, some need to be triggered, and some take time to remove you from the game. Plus there's abilities that explicitly assume that there'll still be other players around for some time later (the Vermissian Knight can become a rampaging train-golem that can, once in the game, turn up at a later point, thwack an enemy, and dissapear into the night, for example), so I guess the assumption is towards a campaign where you're likely to bring in a fresh character every so often, if it goes on that long? I see it playing out two ways:
(1) seems somewhat unfulfilling as a player. "I just had this amazing moment. And now I'll play Steve. for two more sessions. Say hi to Steve!" (2) seems fair, but playing an indefinite campaign with cycling players seems like it could be tough to maintain narrative drive.
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Apr 9, 2020 15:33
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: The Thousand Thrones It offered the most money So our heroes come out of the tavern where they spent a not-inconsiderable amount of their money establishing their new fellowship by partying and getting to know one another. They missed the events of the last day or two thanks to their pub crawl, and thus despite all of them having spent considerable time in Marienburg they're totally unaware of the Crusade of the Child, only that it looks like a hurricane hit the poor district and hundreds, maybe thousands of citizens are missing, there are weird relic vendors running all over the place trying to make a few shillings on the emergence of a new fanatical Sigmarite movement, and the Theoganist in Exile Esmer has been seen rubbing his greedy hands together with such vigor they've threatened to catch fire and upend the public peace. It is really bizarre that your PCs, who have presumably been in Marienburg this entire time, will start out having heard nothing about the whole fanatical Sigmarite crusade that started on the drop of a hat and set off to carry a nine-year-old boy to demand Volkmar's blessing as the scion of Sigmar. Our heroes being on a pub crawl and hammered out of their minds as the dwarf discovered the elf could hang with him and neither could beat the norsewoman while the halfling told everybody they were spending too much money and the servant delighted in not having to clean any of it up is as good of an explanation for it as any. Being PCs, they also see opportunity. Some kind of crazy crusade that popped up out of nowhere probably means there are people who want it investigated, and they've just spent almost all their collective savings on Estalian brandy (dwarfs refuse to accept you don't drink that in pints) and Bugman's beer. You get plenty of hooks for people asking them to investigate; one's a slimey, evil nobleman who wants you to find his wife and steal his illegitimate daughter from the crusade (he doesn't care about the wife). One is an elf who is curious about this mess and worried it means humans have gotten up to mischief again. One would be the old standby of 'you're all prisoners on a chain gang who get ordered to investigate for your freedom' because bad Hams adventures love PCs being drafted/forced into adventure. The final one is a Lahmian. She's got her own plans for the Crusade and the child, but she's also offering a shitton of money compared to the others and she actually ties into the main plot, so wham, our heroes end up in the estate of Selena Reiva. She is not subtle. None of the vampires in this book are subtle. Curiously, having a PC with Magical Sense potentially derails several elements of this book, because someone who uses Magical Sense even semi-regularly is going to start spotting hidden vampires (some Lahmians might have Aethyric Cipher and thus be harder to spot, but most are one success away from unveiling) and evil magic cultists. This is never addressed, nor is there any mention of the beautiful vampiress who makes requests like 'only come in at night' and 'Karl may be important to my...people' while never drinking wine having Aethyric Cipher. She is smarter than the other vampires duped by the prophecy, though, and hit on hiring some PCs to investigate Karl and the Crusade and think about it a little before she does anything stupid. She offers 100 GC, in advance, for the PCs to investigate and report to her. This is a lot of money, a suspicious amount of money, but getting paid in advance means they can't refuse to pay you later after they turn out to be evil. Morever, the book says PCs negotiating with her are offered regular bonuses for completing objectives throughout the campaign. If you want to get the PCs to ignore that someone is shady as hell, offering the party 100 karls in advance and a generous set of performance based bonuses worked for Globex and Hank Scorpio, and it can work for you. Which is probably how I'd end up running Selena if I was running, come to think of it. Beware of her twisted twin obsessions: Her plot to rule the world and her employees' health. It would be pretty funny to make the PCs relatively loyal to a probably evil vampire just by having her turn out to be the one good boss a WHFRP party ever gets. Players coming up with increasingly ridiculous excuses for their boss's behavior because they get paid on time and regularly would be a good bit of Hams dark comedy. This would also work with the fact that the 'separate hooks' thing gets dropped around Altdorf so Selena never actually betrays the party or anything in the written module. The few times she does pop up are exclusively moments where she sends gifts to help the players out if they're low on money and supplies, or offers the bonuses she promised. Ironically, Selena really is the best boss the PCs can pick here. So our heroes take the money and get to work. The first step is obviously asking around. Gossip is an evergreen skill that every WHFRP character can enjoy. There's a huge host of false rumors the characters can learn (roll d10+DoS on a Gossip test on every successful Gossip test, if you get over 10 you get the true story of Karl but no indicator it's the true story). Once they learn a little more, there's a Gossip-10 To Continue Plot to hear about the people who didn't believe in Karl and how one of them was hung up from a gibbet to die of exposure for her blasphemy. This is the original Shallyan Abbess who tried to kill the boy when she realized he had powers. While they ask around and learn about the many different miraculous emergences of Karl, Sigmar Reborn, or Karl, Scion of Sigmar (no-one can quite agree on who Karl is) they can potentially run into people whose lives were ruined by the religious mania by failing Gossip by 20 or more, at which point they need to scarper or calm things down or their asking around triggers a brawl because tempers are raw. This event is mostly resolved by Johan and Syphan pulling Sif away before she can get into a proper fistfight, which she is definitely up for, while Shanna explains things to an angry burgher and calms things down. Getting in a real fight (anyone drawing weapons) leads the everpresent Warhammer Cops, who you're going to get real familiar with, to instantly arrive and start arresting people. Every city in the Old World, despite being a broken down cesspit of violence in Schwalb's writing on the setting, has a dedicated police force that will not stop until any violent action by PCs that wasn't a major campaign setpiece is thoroughly investigated. They are also always available to be used as a revenge plot by any and all parties the PCs may have done any crimes to. One wonders how criminals make a living in the Old World with these guys around, until you notice they only seem to apply this level of attention to PCs. My bitterness about this is going to make a lot more sense as the campaign goes on. Suffice to say most places can spare 30 armed men if they need to to annoy the PCs at the drop of a hat, but very few have those to help the PCs fight beastmen. Anyway, the PCs also run into a lovely little relic seller, who tries to get them to buy false relics of The Child. One of his relics is real, though; the actual shirt the cultists ripped off the poor boy. He tries to charge 12 crowns for it, as much as an armored pair of pants, and the party has a thief. Shanna just steals it from him an hour or two later because c'mon. This is actually an important clue, because it's a standard-issue garment from the local Shallyan orphanage, which also confirmed the one rumor they heard about the boy being raised by the Shallyans, though they don't know if he was kidnapped by Chaos Worshipers for certain yet. The heroes also find out about the old abbess being locked up, and decide they're going to go have a talk with her, too. Since all this asking around probably takes hours, it's easier for them to go talk to the imprisoned abbess at night. No guards are stationed at night and with a little observation, you can see patrols only pass once per half hour. Abbess Widmann has been locked up, her hands broken with a hammer (a classic Sigmarite punishment), and left to die of thirst in a gibbet like a pirate. The Abbess is easy to talk to if you just offer her some water and don't act like a dick, telling the PCs about a Witch Hunter associate of hers and insisting the boy had no hammer birthmark (it must be a later addition) and that he is some kind of strange mutant who can warp peoples' minds. That certainly fits as one possibility for the sudden mania. You're not meant to be able to free her as 'loud noises will draw the locals, then the Warhammer Cops', but...they have a Thief with Pick Lock. It makes no difference to the adventure (it assumes you'll leave the brutalized woman to die in agony, which is another unfortunate theme of this adventure) so Shanna picks the lock and the protagonists get the haggard woman out and take her somewhere to get help. They obviously can't take her to the Shallyans, since something weird is going on; her former subordinates are the ones that said she was an evil witch and should be killed in agony, which is not a very Shallyan thing to do. Though 'this baby who has done nothing actually wrong besides be born with a strange mutation should be given back to the Hunters to be murdered' also isn't very good Shallyaning by the Abbess and did in its way make things much worse. Still, the heroes now know something is up with the Shallyans, they've deposited a badly wounded woman with a local doctor to get help, and they know the Witch Hunter who originally found the boy from Widmann's testimony. The heroes go to the Shallyans in the morning, forewarned things are hosed up. If you use the excuse that you're returning the relic of the boy, you can get in much easier (and get +20 to diplomatic skills while in), hence why they needed the shirt from the relic seller. Otherwise it takes a little Charm. Even if you didn't visit Abbess Widmann, Gerda can't hide that she's no longer really a Shallyan. She's become a devout Sigmarite, but specifically crazy devoted to Karl. She has an inner viciousness towards his enemies and has come to delight in suffering, and the one kind of subtle theme through peoples' interactions with the boy is that Karl doesn't really control how people become devoted to him. He's not a bad kid; he doesn't even know he's doing this to people. But people who become fanatical then insert what they want into what he is, and many of them that become brutal or vicious do it because this was some hidden part of their personality they were keeping down until they had an object of fanaticism they felt justified showing it off. This being Schwalb's Warhammer, this means nearly everyone who meets Karl becomes some flavor of violent or cruel psycho because everyone in the world is an evil bastard at heart. Gerda always had a sadistic streak, she just feels justified in it now. She gives the PCs a long and rambling testimony that is mostly common knowledge (and partly bullshit) about what happened, emphasizing how holy Karl is, but the real thing to see here is that she has a cruel streak and has taken to having her sisters punished for any infractions against Karl, while having the orphans build a shrine to Sigmar (and Karl), which is loving weird for Shallyans. This encounter is mostly to show off that something is wrong, something our heroes already knew. Osric the Hunter is another person who failed to realize how many had fallen under Karl's spell, which is odd because you'd think the cheering crowds would clue him in. He tried to speak against the boy and say he couldn't possibly be Sigmar, like Abbess Widmann, and got the poo poo kicked out of him. Osric has buddies, though, and they've taken him for treatment and hidden him away. This makes finding him harder; if the PCs fail the Gossip-10 to find him, his friends show up to try to scare them off. They can talk the friends into their good intentions with Charm, and learn the friends took Osric to an opium den for his injuries. Getting past the bouncer is actually easier if you failed, met Osric's friends, and talked them into giving you a token for the den. The bouncer and his door can miraculously resist any PC attempt to force their way in, but flashing a few gold coins to show you're a customer works automatically, otherwise it takes extremely hard Intimidate or Charm tests. No word on what happens if you don't get in. When you find Osric, he's in awful shape. There's some rigamarole in finding him but it's all time wasting since he's critical path. Despite him being totally necessary, it still takes a Charm -10 to continue the plot. Remember that Shanna is actually good at Charm (even if her Fel is below average for a Halfling) and she has a 37. Roll At -10 To Continue Plot is the marker of lovely Warhams adventure writing. Osric is able to tell them he found the boy in the marshes, rescuing him from the Stromfels cult and telling the PCs how to get to the place to investigate further. If they tell him they're going to kill the evil mutant child, he even tosses them 10 crowns from his remaining funds to help them, so we'll say our heroes read the room and tell the Witch Hunter what he wants to hear. He tells them to show no mercy to Chaos, even if it's innocent, they get their money and their next plot coupon, and they walk out of the place without further incident, leaving him to be treated. They go report that the child was found with a weird cult, and if you do this, Selena actually pays each PC 2 GC for their work so far to help them get guides and supplies for their trip into the Marsh, but only if they report they're going to do so. She likes initiative. None of the other potential employers do anything but tell you to get in there. Again, Selena is actually the best boss you can pick. Our heroes chose wisely with the obviously evil vampiress. Aside from the Everpresent Warhammer Cops and Roll At -10 To Continue Plot, this is a pretty standard intro investigation section. It does feature our very first brutalized woman left to die that the PCs are not expected or able to help, and I'm kind of tempted to start a counter for them because it seems to come up with some regularity, along with evil magic temptresses and beautiful women being horrifically mutated into monsters. Maybe we'll hit a bingo like with Forges by the time this is done. So far the adventure is mostly somewhat dull; it gets much worse later. Next Time: Our First Minidungeon
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Apr 9, 2020 15:34
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Night10194 posted:The basic idea of the Wayward plays really well into the strong part of Hunter, I think. Namely the 'you can no longer fail to see the insanity around you'. The whole 'moment of terrible, terrible clarity and no way to return to normalcy' is the strong horror idea at the heart of Hunter before all the other stuff gets poured over it to smother it. That's more cleared up in their own book in that they see Hunters and regular people else as tools in their war, they can appreciate that you have to maintain them. They also don't care if they break. I like both the Wayward and the Hermit as botched attempts at getting Vision right.
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Apr 9, 2020 15:41
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I'm impressed with how Heart improved some of the worst problems of Spire. Callings are brilliant (aside from my general agreements re: Zenith beats) and a huge improvement of the old "guesstimate/argue about whether you earned no advance, a small advance or a large advance after each session" system. I like my games fast and loose, but advancement needs to have concrete conditions, even if the ways you meet those conditions are open to the player. e: Plus, they fixed the weird, kind of pointless obsession with a hole in reality in their game about political revolution by just making a game about said hole in reality  . I do like the Heart and the weirdness around it, but it didn't mesh well with the rest of Spire, imo.
Big Mad Drongo fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 15:44
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Big Mad Drongo posted:I'm impressed with how Heart improved some of the worst problems of Spire. Callings are brilliant (aside from my general agreements re: Zenith beats) and a huge improvement of the old "guesstimate/argue about whether you earned no advance, a small advance or a large advance after each session" system. I like my games fast and loose, but advancement needs to have concrete conditions, even if the ways you meet those conditions are open to the player. This is very much true. Trying to decide when to give out Advances and which ones was one of the parts of Spire I definitely didn't care for. E: The Heart being kind of weird in how much attention it got in Spire is also very much one of Spire's issues. I just tended to de-emphasize it when writing and make it less of an overall threat and more of 'why is there a place down below where the Aelfir are afraid to send troops with any regularity, so the resistance can hide guns and outlaws in here'. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 15:45
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Not only do Callings do a great job of defining what needs to happen to advance a character, they make explicit what needs to happen to advance the game. You have one chaotic-neutral character who gets it in their head that they want to go up into the Spire and murder some Aelfer and ascend to godhood... That's great bub. But it's not worth much in the way of advancement. Any future game in pretty much any system, I want to utilize an XP system similar to Callings. It's likely a fair bit of work[*], but also likely worth it. Also, the nice thing about Callings is that they're territory ripe for balance-proof homebrewing. You want to make a "Big Heartblooded Game Hunter" that isn't just an Adventure/Cleaver. You don't need to make a class, with all the balance issues that entails. You can make it a calling, and run with it. It's a lot harder for a Calling to be unbalanced. Night10194 posted:E: The Heart being kind of weird in how much attention it got in Spire is also very much one of Spire's issues. I just tended to de-emphasize it when writing and make it less of an overall threat and more of 'why is there a place down below where the Aelfir are afraid to send troops with any regularity, so the resistance can hide guns and outlaws in here'. When you say "I just tended to de-emphasize it when writing", do you mean for your own campaign, or have you written Spire-related stuff I should know about?
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Apr 9, 2020 16:12
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CitizenKeen posted:I see it playing out two ways: Re-reading the bits on advancement in the GM section, it's more that character arcs (creation -> Zenith or Crit fallout) are decoupled from the campaign arc (whatever the overall goal of the party is). So the advice to the GM is to work out where the campaign is going to end up in terms of the group's goals as a whole, and aim roughly towards that, whereas beats relate to individual characters. So yes, some characters may survive, joined by newcomers, to the end of the campaign - but the emphasis behind the Zenith beats and Critical Fallout is what makes a good story for the GM and the players.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:17
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CitizenKeen posted:When you say "I just tended to de-emphasize it when writing", do you mean for your own campaign, or have you written Spire-related stuff I should know about? No, no, for my own campaigns. While I'd love to write for Spire, I do not.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:17
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Leraika posted:At least WW was kind enough to shunt the 'this character option is actually almost impossible to use in a functioning party' things out of the main book. Pretty much my thinking, too. Derangement bullshit aside, you've got one type who takes penalties from being too close to allies, and another who is violently antisocial. poo poo, I've known a number of people who'd have derailed a game by playing like a Wayward to start with.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:26
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CitizenKeen posted:Also, the nice thing about Callings is that they're territory ripe for balance-proof homebrewing. You want to make a "Big Heartblooded Game Hunter" that isn't just an Adventure/Cleaver. You don't need to make a class, with all the balance issues that entails. You can make it a calling, and run with it. It's a lot harder for a Calling to be unbalanced. This is very true, and if I ever run Spire again I'll probably create some appropriate Callings (or if we're lucky, they'll get backported into the system by the writers themselves). "Why do you fight against the Aelfir?" has plenty of space to work with, from motivations of "patriotism" to "revenge" to "I just want to gently caress poo poo up."
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Apr 9, 2020 16:37
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Hunter: the Reckoning - Player's Guide Part Three: Bystanders Chapter 1: Bystanders I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; for I do not forget thy commandments. --Psalms 119:176 This chapter opens with a way too long fiction piece about Alison, a woman who is a Bystander and also living with her vampire husband, with flashbacks to how a vampire broke in and turned him, which was her failed Imbuing as she was unable to kill the man she married. So, instead, he drinks some of her blood. She then starts buying rabbits for him to feed on, which is expensive. As time goes on, Vampire Richard starts becoming more and more controlling and abusive with Alison and their son. Then there's a Hunter-Net post: She's killed her monster husband. She needs to know how to hide the body. This is where we are introduced to my ancient and eternal nemesis: huge chunks of White Wolf fiction written in some difficult to read handwriting font. They do this constantly and I hate it I hate it so much. The first part, detailing how Alison found her way to Hunter-Net and how contact with other Imbued made her wonder why she can't see things like they can is just in a 'this is her computer journal' font that is legible, but annoying. The next part, well.  This is honestly one of the least bad examples and I still don't want to read paragraphs of it in a printed book I paid for. They switch fonts to indicate a different character. This guy's story is about how he's running after "they" (the Messengers) tried to get inside his head and infect him, and whatever you do don't play along just run. The next story, in is the testimony of Lawrence Allen Parker, explaining to a detective and psychiatrist how one night he went out looking for his daughter Natalie, finding her hanging out with a group of teens led by a guy who for a moment seemed to have something wrong with his teeth which scared Parker. He took her home, but she seemed to be obsessed with the guy. Parker wanted to kill him but couldn't do it. Natalie left, claiming that she didn't want to live with the cattle anymore. Parker went back to the park and started shooting them. They weren't people anymore. But then he saw Natalie and stopped. She turned him in to the cops. He gets sent to an asylum. All three of these stories: Alison dealing with the aftermath of killing her vampire husband, Parker's thing, and handwriting guy uh being paranoid and running away are intertwined. Parker's is probably the most interesting? The takeaway, as the next section explains, is that not everyone reacts well in a crisis. Some people have the combination of courage and selflessness. Some people freeze. The shock of the Imbuing is worse, because not only do potential Hunters have to act in a stressful and horrifying situation but they also have to face the whole 'monsters are real' thing. The Messengers don't seem to have any time for people who hesitate. Those people are usually called Bystanders, or Duds by more uncharitable hunters. A lot of Hunters don't have any time for them, looking at people who see the danger yet don't do anything with scorn. But even the best people can be caught off guard and have a bad moment and just freeze. And then the monster is gone, and everything seems normal. Most Hunters assume that Bystanders just forget and go on with their lives (the book actually says "go back to being docile members of the herd" which, wow). The truth is that mostly they're haunted by the experience. They replay it over and over. Some try to convince themselves it wasn't real, or that they're crazy. Others admit the terrible truth. Monsters could be anywhere. Bystanders have no Sight, no Edges, and they don't know who to turn to. Then the book goes on to restate the idea that while a Hunter might look at the Imbuing as pass/fail where failures go back to being "just another member of the witless masses", that's actually a profound misconception. The Imbuing shows you a truth you can't deny. It's irrevocable. The question isn't if you are changed, but how. Bystanders can't act the way Hunters can, but at the same time they're a little less alienated from normal life because Seeing isn't an option for them. They're also far more vulnerable. They don't get any of the Hunter protections from mind control etc. And if this whole paragraph feels like I'm restating the one above it's because this section is like that. Apparently Bystanders can meet a person's eyes and recognise the shared trauma of the Imbuing, which I don't think is ever really referenced again or mechanically supported in any way. This isn't always a good thing, as it can lead them into the clutches of unstable hunters who will manipulate them into becoming sacrificial lambs for their goals. In one infamous event, a prominent Hunter called Memphis68 (Hunter-Net tag) used a bystander as a human bomb in order to kill a particularly well-protected Vampire. Most Hunters would denounce that, but others blame Bystanders for being Bystanders A lot of Bystanders don't know that Hunters even exist- think out it. If you face the Imbuing alone and fail, you might never realise anyone else had had that experience. Then there's some words about how the Imbuing is mostly the same for Bystanders as it is for Hunters but they hesitate instead of acting which is really something I feel like we're already clear on by now. There's some stuff about how Hunters get to define themselves by what happened during their Imbuing but Bystanders can't. There's a text box about how the easiest way to end up with a Bystander character is someone deciding they want to play one in advance, but if you waaanted the Storyteller could run the Imbuing like a regular session and "if you can't think of something to do right away, or your character hesitates for any reason" oops, the Storyteller can decide your a Bystander. This approach is true to the game because the Messengers are also very arbitrary and it "can help you identify with the resentment" your new Bystander would feel. It's a part of the thing from the corebook where the ST assigns people to creeds based on how they roleplay the Imbuing which is a deeply bad idea there and a catastrophically bad one here. In fairness I should note that they do say that the Storyteller and Players should all agree to this approach in advance and ultimately everyone should enjoy their character and have fun, but on the other hand this idea is so garbage. It's also pointed out that Bystander =/= any person who happened to be nearby during an Imbuing. Bystanders fail to answer the call, but they are called. Other people who just were there can't even become Bystanders. They're "the human masses". I actually tried this kind of approach once or twice in high school and maybe it was just my group but it really seemed like there's not actually any kind of natural way to roleplay a reaction while at the same time not force-fit your behaviour to a Creed. If you know what the Creeds are you pretty much know what kind of reactions fit which Creed (or you wanted to play an Innocent for some reason and now what the hell do you even do?) That, and the post-Imbuing freakout that the game desperately wants you to play, just became tedious chores to get through before you could engage with the actual Hunting and Reckoning. Anyway, a lot of Bystanders don't react very well to their situation but they're stuck with it and generally over time end up falling into one of three general categories: Aggressive, Cautious, or Fearful. There's a lot of words explaining these, and talking about how a Bystander might be motivated to act in one way or another by fear or guilt or growing confidence. It's not terrible information but it is pretty padded, especially because we already got a lot of it earlier. Sometimes Bystanders find Hunters or even end up on Hunter-Net. They can end up being allies because powers or not, just talking to someone who knows what you know is a relief. Bystander groups tend to be a lot less contentious then Hunter team-ups as they're less ideological and more dependent on mutual support. Most Bystander groups are very tiny, grassroots organisations that don't operate outside their city or neighbourhood, dealing with their own immediate problems. Relationships between Bystanders and Hunters can be rocky and we get the suggestion that some Bystanders might not see much difference between Hunters and monsters and to be fair, some hunters (God45, Memphis68) are pretty callous with Bystanders and, well, bystanders. Still, Bystander/Hunter teams are definitely a thing. Bystanders may not have powers but they can still gun. Or drive a getaway car. Do research. Plant a bomb. Etc. Bystanders can act as a pretty good support system for the Imbued. Well, that was a lot of restating the same ideas. Yikes. Now it's time for some actual rules. Specifically, how to create a Bystander. Basically, instead of getting Hunter Virtues (I was much happier when I had forgotten about Virtues being a thing in the oWoD), Bystanders get Courage, Reason, and Self-Control. There are a lot of examples of when they might have to roll these, most of which boil down to "saw monstery stuff". If they fail, they lose Conviction, which is bad. Yes, Bystanders also have Conviction, but it's... different. So, Bystanders start with 10 Conviction. They can't really do anything with it, though, it's just there as a SAN bar now. Yes, Derangements are back, because Bystanders get Derangements when their Conviction drops to 3, 2, and 1 (or existing ones get worse). Lose your last point and you snap. When a point of Conviction is lost, you can't get it back in play or by spending xp. Once per game session you can trade a point of a Virtue to regain 1 Conviction which is a temporary solution at best because now it's harder to succeed on Virtue rolls to avoid losing more Conviction. There's no indication that boosting your Conviction back up gets rid of Derangements though. Oh, but you can buy Virtues back with xp at a price of [current score x 2] so that's something? Seems needlessly circuitous to me, but at least that's on-brand with the rest of the chapter. There's also a bit where Bystanders can spend Willpower to try to resist the terror of a supernatural experience but you still have to make a Virtue roll to maybe lose Conviction. It's also mentioned that when a Virtue roll happens the difficulty is 7, but Storytellers should modify that up or down depending on the circumstances. There is no guidance on what kind of circumstances should do modify the difficulty or by how much. I don't know why Conviction is so weirdly overloaded as a stat but between this and regular Hunter use there are like 8 different things it's very important for. Bystanders also get a few other special abilities and it turns out that yes there are actual game rules for detecting someone else's Imbuing trauma, I was just wrong before. Dammit. A Bystander can make a difficulty 6 Perception roll to see that someone else has seen what you've seen. It's noted that maaaybe Hunters could do this if they thought to try but mostly they have better ways to find each other (hunter-net, hunter code). They also can spend a Willpower point to block mind/emotion-altering powers on them, although it might not be possible if they're unaware of the attempt which, since they can't detect monsters, is not great for them. Now, finally, we actually run through the steps of Bystander creation but uh attributes/skills/backgrounds/freebies are all the same as Hunters so I'm not going through it again. The section is pretty much standard White Wolf chargen stuff. There are a couple of new Natures and Demeanors (Believer, Negotiator, Skeptic) and a new Background (Archive) that Hunter characters can also use. They also run through how Bystanders might use some Backgrounds from other books, including the Steel Nerves Background from Creed Book: Judge. Naturally, they explain how maybe a Bystander could have this, but you'll have to buy the Judge book to learn what it actually does. Thanks, Player's Guide! Lastly, there's a little taste of Bystander-exclusive Merits & Flaws (the main list is coming, don't worry). They mostly just give you an extra piece of the Hunter package like being able to read Hunter code or see through illusions, stuff like that. If anyone's unfamiliar with this mechanic, Merits and Flaws can be bought with your Freebie Points. They, uh, give you benefits or penalties. You can also take extra Flaws to get more points to buy other stuff, which I'm sure has never been horribly exploited by anyone. There are a few funnier ones though: -Haggard Appearance (1 point flaw): You look so stressed and terrible that your Appearance drops permanently by one, you can't ever raise it again and all Social rolls are +1 Difficulty which is A. Lot. for 1 measly point. -Nervous Condition (2 point flaw): Your hands shake, because of the trauma. All Dex-based actions are +1 difficulty but if you're extra stressed maybe it's up to +3. Also +1 if you're shocked. Penalties are cumulative. -Broken Health (3 point flaw): The trauma of the Imbuing has physically wrecked you. You get -2 Stamina, which again cannot be improved by XP or Edges, and Stamina rolls are +1 difficulty. The book tries to tell you that you shouldn't take more than one Bystander Merit and one Bystander Flaw which is probably wise. But less funny. I'm going to skip over some stuff talking about the Prelude again and instead mention a sidebar that a) drops the phrase "docile, ignorant masses" and b) says that if someone in your game chooses to play a Bystander, make sure to still make them an active part of the game. Don't squeeze them and their character out because they lack Hunter powers, which is nice to see. Yes, let's all remember to be good to each other when we're gaming. We're all here to have fun and if someone's fun is playing a less potent character, don't punish them for that. That's nice, book. This section may have been repetitive and wordy, but that's a nice bit of advice. Well done. Now, to turn the page and look at some sample Bystander characters.  OH COME THE gently caress ON Really? Really. We're going to do this. We're actually going to loving do this. COOL. So, yes. There is a whole page of backstory and roleplaying hints for the "Former Skinhead" including fun little tidbits like how his old Reverend called him "a paladin of the white race" and just a whole bunch of other poo poo that I loving do not want to retype. Turns out the Reverend was a monster or something. And yes, there is a picture, and yes the guy in the picture is shirtless and you can see his swastika tattoos. In fact "various white-pride and Nazi tattoos" are mentioned in his Equipment list. We're also told that "ironically, [his] experience with the supremacists gives [him] an interesting perspective on the imbued and their extreme attitudes towards monsters" which I'm honestly not sure I've ever wanted to tell a book to gently caress off more, and I feel kinda bad about retyping. There's definitely a character sheet. They commissioned art for this. Someone saw this sample character and was like "yes, make sure to get a picture of the skinhead to put in the book and make sure we see all the tattoos". And then more people saw it and let the book go out like that and they shipped it to stores not just in America but other countries and it sat on shelves and I bought one and then I guess never bothered to read this section because I absolutely don't remember this being there. gently caress. It really should not have been hard to avoid suggesting that you roleplay a nazi. Oh and spoiler alert this is not actually the last time the book will do something like this. But we'll get there. ANY-loving-WAY, the other sample characters are the 'Revolutionary Student' an outspoken leftist activist college girl who is full of regret, shame, and helplessness for failing to stand up and act the one time it actually mattered because "how do you protest something that simply can't be?" when she was out with her friends and ran away when she saw monster "putting the moves on one of the girls" who died later that night. Her equipment list is: 'student card, mace, ballpoint pen, and 240 signatures so far'. We also have 'Security Guard', 'Home-Shopping Channel Host' and 'Tomboy'. They're fine, I guess. There's also Notable Bystanders, like Alison Hersy aka Rabbitkeeper377 she of the abusive vampire husband. She's mostly on Hunter-Net, trying to pass on what she knows about vamps. Then Stephen Lambert, aka Moderator87 who revealed his name, phone number and the fact that his wife was crippled in his failed Imbuing because I guess he wants to die? He tries to gather and pass on information but how would any Hunter ever trust anything coming from him? Also, he's blind? Lastly, there's Martin Soldan who is not on Hunter-Net but tries to help out Imbued in Miami and/or convince them that they're blessed by God. And that's Bystanders. They actually fill an interesting space in Hunter, and although I didn't really cover it much I do actually think they did a good job with giving them a bunch of merits to fine-tune which parts of the Hunter power-set your Bystander ended up with. It's too bad that most of the other Hunter books largely forget they exist. It's also too bad that they're largely crowded out of their conceptual space by the never-ending insistence that regular Hunters be helpless and terrified- an idea I'll come back to a bit later, but let's just say that when the writing already wants it to be hard for you to engage with the main game concept of actually hunting monsters, having a splat that's just That, But More ends up feeling weirdly redundant. Weirdly redundant also stands for my assessment of the writing in this chapter which spends a lot of time giving you the same information in different ways. It does a good job explaining Bystanders, don't get me wrong, but then it does it again, and again, and again. There's also the weird double-standard of the game absolutely demanding that you play an average person while also being dismissive and contemptuous whenever it talks about the, ugh, "herd". Oh, and also whoever wrote those sample characters can get hosed. Coming up: Variant character creation rules Aethyron fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 17:36
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones Swampfight! SWAMPFIGHT! Hey, it's our first major combat section of the game. One of the other things I generally notice in Thousand Thrones is how long everything is. Nothing is ever 'let's get this simple bit out of the way to get on to the main event'. Everything is a production. So too going to the evil swamp temple.The PCs need a guide, and are introduced to Herr Jekil Sumpfmund, a lunatic swamper who loves the marshes and wants to show off the glory of nature to the protagonists. Buying his pamphlets on the wonders of the marsh actually gives the PCs +10 to Outdoor Survival while there, so they do so out of morbid curiosity. After Syphan, Johan, and Shanna finish reading it aloud to Sif and Oleg, the latter remarks he's an awful lot more ready to avoid anything Jekil is excited about once they get there. All in all, the three day tour and pamphlets will cost them a trivial amount of money (six shillings, 6 pence). If I'm honest, I very rarely end up tracking shillings and pence when I'm GMing because almost everything important to adventuring costs crowns and PCs mostly deal in those. When you're carrying 120 gold crowns from your job so far, and there's 24 shillings to the crown, a handful of shillings doesn't matter much. Realizing they're heading into a dungeon, they also take accounting of their gear. I forgot about the bonuses Mercs get from Career Compendium, and this is a good chance to finally really demonstrate how useless it is, so Sif gains Frenzy (She gets a choice between it and Menacing). She knows how to play the part of a Norse Warrior for potential employers, but is understandably reluctant to actually do it since it's a good way to get yourself killed for little benefit in a real fight. She also gets a second hand weapon, in case they meet anyone who needs to be armed during their trips. The first thing they do is fill in everyone's armor to full leathers, at least; they're going into a lovely swamp, exposed surfaces invite more bullshit. This costs them 24 GC from the party funds to armor Oleg and Johan's pants; an important endeavor. I've seen Stand By Me. I know what happens to unprotected people in leech-filled hellwater. Between personal funds and stuff, they have 111 GC left in the pot. They get a shield for Johan and Oleg, in case they end up in the thick of things with their hand weapons, taking them to 91 but ensuring the two secondary fighters (they both have Dodge, it qualifies) won't just fold. Finally, they spend 55 on getting some sleeves and pants added to Sif's mail. She's not quite in full medium armor, but she's close. 36 crowns is a healthy enough reserve for expenses, and they're ready for their first combat section. This also points out the oddity that buying a Sleeved Mail Coat is actually more expensive than a Sleeved Mail Shirt and Mail Leggings for the exact same effects. You pay 130 total for the full coat, 115 for the pieces to put together (discounting the 60 for Sif's original shirt). I don't know why it's like this, but this knocks 15 crowns off the first full major armor upgrade fighters will often get, and that's a lot of money. While Sif would like a better helmet, the team is not made of money. Shanna will be doing the team's ledgers, as it is her calling. Thus equipped, they head into the swamps. It takes three days of rowing and journeying to get to the temple, during which they have plenty of time to have encounters. Jekil is happy to row, and the party is just as good at Outdoor Survival as he is, so Oleg will be handling any nonsense they come across while he rows through the hellish mist and points out everything around him with glee. Now, normally this doesn't actually matter unless Jekil gets eaten or something; if that happens, the random encounters get worse (and more frequent) if the PCs fail Outdoor Survival rolls, and they need Navigation checks to find the temple. If Jekil is alive, he's so competent at swamping that Navigation tests aren't needed. We'll be using the method where they determine their encounters by an Outdoor Survival test each day so Oleg gets to do something. One encounter a day, roll d10+DoF on Outdoor Survival, pushing things closer to Hideous Giant Deathsnake Encounter on 10+. The encounters range from weird to dangerous, with Hideous Giant Deathsnake being the most lethal (A Fen Worm is a pretty nasty, if potentially doable, enemy for a party this level). Oleg fails the first, but not by much, and our heroes roll low, encountering Bog Flowers. This encounter is not dangerous unless you're stupid enough to drink squeezed nectar out of a plant growing around piles of dead birds. The nectar will make someone fall asleep for up to 5 hours, with a Tough-10 to avoid it (failure results in -10 to all stats but Toughness for the same period). So this is just a useful poison your PCs can harvest, that stays fresh for two weeks. Seeing no reason why not (it doesn't take any checks) they harvest some doses of the tranquilizer. They don't have Prepare Poison, but maybe they can sell it or figure out a way to use it anyway. On day 2, Oleg does not do well. And they rolled a 10 on the d10 anyway. So Hideous Death Snake it is. The Fen Worm is a little dangerous for a low level party. Like many Monsters, it hits hard and attacks a lot, but has poor WS. With 4 Damage 6 Attacks that all inflict a Tough test or take 5 extra unreducable wounds, if it gets lucky, someone is dying. Because it's 'massive', it gives PCs +10 to hit it. At 23 Wounds, 4 Attacks, but only WS 30 (It has DR 7, though) this is mostly a luck check, especially as it starts by testing Silent Move against Perception. If it ambushes the party, someone is getting et. Running the combat off screen, Outnumber and Action Economy gave the heroes the opening they needed. In round 1, it missed all 4 attacks, took a Fury from Syphan that did 13 Wounds, took a bunch of other hits, and seemed to be on its way out. Round 2, failed to hit anyone again thanks to good defensive rolls, got chopped to pieces by outnumber. But missing 7 out of 8 attacks (and getting parried on the one that hit) is lucky. If its luck had gone the other direction, someone would probably be burning Fate or losing a limb or something. Like a lot of WHFRP combat, this is mostly just a numbers check; I'm fine with the combat system being such, but it's important to acknowledge it. Because it means the PCs don't really have, say, tactical play that can mitigate the danger of the Fen Worm coming at them. This is just a gear/stat check. Keep this in mind, because there will be a lot of combats where the simple numbers of battle are heavily against the PCs, and the lack of tactical options to even that up means 'good play' is not going to even out 'they have a shitload of attacks and skill and numbers'. I'll only be rolling out off-screen anything I think needs direct demonstration; most combats will just be my assessment of what the PCs could or couldn't do. On the last day, despite Oleg's successes, they roll a 9 and run into the other actual combat encounter, a terrible hell-plant. However, despite the hell-plant's annoying grappling rules and it grabbing the bote, it has 10 wounds. And there's only a listed penalty for fighting from the boat, not for fighting from being knocked out into the water. The terrifying encounter is cut short when it's hit by Oleg's crossbow, a magic dart from Syphan, and a slingstone from Shanna, and dies on round 1 since it only has 10 wounds and made the mistake of knocking them into the water. Kind of a nothing encounter. There were others possible, like finding a bote full of supplies with a dead fisherman, or a dead body with a bunch of jewelry who shoots hallucinogenic spores at you if it's disturbed, but our heroes had an easy time due to good luck in the actual encounters. The whole '10 random encounters possible, roll as many as you like' thing is common in these early sections. The swamp temple is not well defended. There are 9 cultists, but most aren't much of fighters. It also brings about an important problem: Whenever the game calls for Concealment/Silent Move tests, it always asks the entire party to make them if they're going anywhere. This is a problem, even if the whole party are stealth specialists somehow, because while one person making a 49% roll (with a reroll in the wings for Fortune) isn't hard, 3 people doing it is now 3 points of failure and they're probably not as good as Shanna. You also need both stealth skills AND Scale Sheer Surface (which is Str based, so even if Shanna had taken it in place of Charm she'd still struggle) to make some of the stealthy approaches, so...Look, making people roll constantly and requiring the skills to be on every character for the team to do anything with stealth just makes stealth a non-option much of the time, or at best makes things the Shanna Show for a bit while everyone else waits in the wings. There's no real awareness in this campaign that every dice roll is a significant chance of failure. The cultists won't even all be there at once, so chances are the party may be able to win a straight fight with the enemy when they arrive as it is. The main danger in a fight is Udo and Wim, two mutant cultists with actual fighting careers. Udo is a large man described as 'idiotic' (12 Int) who is just here because his brother Wim tells him Stromfels is great and emotionally blackmails him. He's tough as hell, though Sif can probably take him one on one since she's better equipped, just as strong, and more skilled (He's a Thug, which isn't a great fighter career). His brother Wim is a slim fellow with giant ears and eyes who is a pretty skilled and vicious pirate, but TB 3 and basically unarmored, so he'll drop like a cheap sack of grain when he gets hit. The actual cult priest isn't much of a fighter, but he does have a shark head, which is sort of cool. The normal cultists are just your normal WS 30-something 1 attack unarmored fodder cultists, though they do have Strike Mighty and there can be up to 6 of them, depending on GM. If you fight all 9 foes at once things will go badly. Still, they're split up around the cult compound (an old, crumbling watchtower and wall) and you can pretty easily engage them piecemeal, plus as noted many of them might not even be in the temple. A 'miniboss' fight with Wim, Udo, and Dahlbert the Priest should be easy enough for most groups. Potentially, Shanna could sneak in, steal the cult leader's journal, and the whole party would never have to fight anything, but most groups will probably get into a scrap with the cultists. It's cultists. The important thing in a fight is that if Udo and Wim go down, or he's sorely pressed or badly wounded (even if they're still up), the Priest Dahlbert surrenders immediately to beg for his life and tells the PCs everything he knows. Our team (with the advantage of Fortune Points) could likely handle a fight with the six lesser cultists, then the big bosses as they're called back to guard the priest, but as the advice is not to have all 9 in the temple and low level combat is extremely swingy (AV 1 doesn't protect you much from Damage 4 enemies) it'd still be dangerous. There's no talk of, say, convincing Udo not to hurt you or something, either. Despite that being kind of setup in his description since he's not really evil and is only here because of his brother's poor influence. Somehow, the cult boss's journal takes a Read/Write test (I think 4e was correct to make Read/Write just a binary Talent, the games always struggle to excuse it as a Skill) while questioning him is easy; he thinks you were sent by the guy he's scared of anyway, a cultist named Jurgan Baer who he thinks was looking for Karl. The journal or the priest can also confirm the cult 'created' Karl to be their king and to help Stromfels rule the world, but the cult also doesn't mention any birthmarks, lending credence to the Abbess's story. The journal or priest is independent confirmation that A: The birthmark is not a birthmark, B: The boy has powers of some kind, C: Some other Chaos Cult is interested in him (which lines up with the rumor about defeating a Chaos Cultist and inspiring the crowd), and D: The general description of how the boy was taken by the Hunters and given to the Shallyans matches perfectly with what the PCs have heard from other sources. This is, as they say, a jackpot when it comes to confirming or falsifying rumors. The PCs also search the heck out of the place to find any treasure, getting about 10 crowns worth of junk in the process. It's a living. They also gather up every enemy Hand Weapon, because hilariously, this is a much easier way to make money than most actual quest rewards. Always be taking your enemies' gear and selling it. It's the most consistent guaranteed payday. The priest or journal also tells them where Baer can be found, so next the heroes are off to another step in their rigamarole of learning more about the boy. This is the last we ever see of the Stromfels cult, so I guess that's the end of Shark Week. Things still haven't really gotten bad; this was all reasonable enough cult busting, and the Fen Worm was beatable, just a pretty nasty luck check encounter. Next time, we get the first point where I'd have set the module down if I was intending to run it myself. Next Time: Sewer Fun Time
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Apr 9, 2020 17:56
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Gotta say I’m a bit disappointed with the way they handle the gods in Odyssey. (In addition to the creepy stuff posted before) They all appear to have kinda lost a lot of their edge in favour of a pretty bog standard good/evil dichotomy. Considering the myth they’re based on allow for them to play for a far different roles depending on the story (as patrons, adversaries, instigators, etc.).This makes the good Gods (at least for now) pretty lame. There’s potential in the Civilization v. Natural conflict to mirror a bit of the titanomachy, but it kinda falls flat when the most prominent Deity on one side are A Cruel Despot and A Murder sex-cult and the other side feels as so few flaw to build off of. For example Sydon created two species via Curses and the others seem to have way more of a link to the Titans than the new Gods, whereas the Five Gods haven't really touched them. Obviously this can change as more of the settings is explained. Love Santa Hephaistos though, that's pretty cool. Also no Love Goddess ? Come on Aphrodite plays a huge part in the Trojan war ! She present in so many myths and influencing the mythos is so many ways. (maybe it's a good thing though, considering) Hype to learn more about it ! And Warhams Too (your reviews got me making my Kislev game that running to this day) ! And Reckonin too ! And Heart too !
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Apr 9, 2020 17:59
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Oh, another standard of Schwalb Warhammer: Investigating/being curious about stuff in a dungeon is full of WP tests or gain Insanity. However, as according to the WHFRP Core Book Insanity is a full Optional Rule at the discretion of any individual playgroup, these events will be remarked on at times but generally ignored. We've never used Insanity because it's a terrible system and an invitation to bad designers to try to sprinkle IP around to get around their failure to cause tension or horror more organically in their modules, trying to make it scary because 'you find a cured haunch of human meat!' causes an IP with the mechanical equivalent of an attempted jump scare. E: The reason IP tends to be so bad as a mechanic is most of the other sources of permanent damage can be mitigated. You can get a peg leg if you lose your leg. You won't be quite as effective, but you'll be fine enough to continue playing. You can earn more Fate to give you more extra lives to get around death. The only thing that cures Insanity is our hardworking friend the 3rd tier Shallyan (or a Tzeentch wizard using Mindfire) or a Very Hard surgery check that can easily kill you (or cause more Insanity). IP creep up fairly consistently since they're common 'you should be scared' events, but you also gain 1 every time you get critted. It's simply really hard to get rid of, and most Insanities make a PC nearly unplayable or seriously cripple them, even more than losing an eye or a limb. They also tend to take away a player's agency and ability to control their character. Since this campaign also makes a big deal out of how the GM should be trying not to turf the PCs at every turn so they can get invested in the plot (making some generous assumptions about its nature) I think I'm quite justified in just cutting out the optional creeping unplayability counter. I'm also just not very comfortable with mental health issues being portrayed as something that instantly makes someone incapable. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 18:04
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Bystanders feel more like the traditional oWoD Ally subsplat than 'proper' PCs to me. Also, I don't think I've met anyone who's actually run one of those Preludes they always devoted a few pages to.
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Apr 9, 2020 18:28
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My first (and only) Vampire game I took part in had the ST doing preludes with each player to cover their turning. As this was done over IRC years ago mine got interrupted by either a computer crash or my connection dying early on and then the whole campaign sorta fizzled out into nothing after that.
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Apr 9, 2020 18:34
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I did! Albeit it was for a single PC, in a different system, and the entire point was the PC becoming a Bystander because of a mismatch with what she was 'supposed' to do (was supposed to be an Innocent and hide, instead shot a werewolf in the back of the head with a shotgun to save a co-worker) and was a setup for a long plot of 'gently caress the Messengers, who are trying to make Hunters into vessels for their glorious return to become God Kings of the earth because gently caress, it's the Exalted'. Which meant the Imbuing explicitly went differently; the Messengers would pick you out, decide what flavor you were suited for, and if you either didn't act or acted 'wrong' you'd get the Bystander whammy because they needed you compliant to eventually replace you with one of them. Ironically, what I did for the Bystander in that game was effectively a Wayward: Can't ever turn off the second sight, intended to force the disobedient vessel to look on the madness and destroy themselves because they won't work for the eventual intended possession. That whole campaign was just not giving a gently caress about the normal 'canon' of the World of Darkness and doing our own thing. And using Cinematic Unisystem with a little 'your Hunter Powers/magic abilities' add-on thing a friend and I wrote a long time ago, with the Bystander ability being 'your magic path EXP turns into normal EXP and you're better at mundane things'. But it did definitely feature the Prelude the books want, and the Prelude was definitely a strong moment. Of all the games, I think Hunter is the one that (even if you're using the normal setting and everything) you really do need to play the Imbuing moment since it's the core of Hunter's experience. Handing out powers based only on what the players do will always be a terrible idea, though; the Prelude doesn't lose any impact because GM and player sat down and went 'I want to play someone who didn't play along, how can we write this campaign?' or 'I really want to play an Avenger, let's factor that into the Prelude' or whatever.
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Apr 9, 2020 18:36
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones There Is Nothing You Can Do For The Abused Spouse So the clues they have lead to the worst part of town, near the sewage runoffs. Being a Nurglite cult, Baer's buddies obviously hid down in the sewers with all the poo poo. There's a community around the "Dead Canal" and it's as brutal and desperate as you'd imagine. There's a lot of potential for PCs getting their money stolen or being attacked by thugs; this is one of the few parts of town the otherwise eagle-eyed Warhammer Cops don't show up. If they're smart, they keep their weapons and armor visible (don't look like an easy target) and their financial situation murky. The 46 crowns (more, if you count them selling off gear taken off the cultists, but that'll come after the job) that the team is carrying is a goddamn fortune to the people of the Canal. Looking around enough eventually turns up a thief who tells you he knows Baer and what happened to him, but he wants you to kill somebody for him first. For once, a character can be told he's trying to hold out on a unit of armed men and women who look like out of town mercenaries and this is a Really Bad Idea: A successful Intimidate (or a bribe of 4-6 shillings) skips the murder. The money's nothing, and Intimidating the little guy is easy enough for a group with a wizard and a giant norsewoman (You can also just get a bit of 'evidence' you killed the guy from the guy you're meant to kill and fob it off, or just commit the murder, no-one cares down here apparently). Once he's pliant, the thief tells the party Baer used to run with a pretty scary gang in the sewers, but had been alone lately. Apparently, he ran afoul of a gang of gamblers and just got shanked and left in the canal. The gang is well known, so now the PCs need to go get Baer's poo poo from the guys who knifed him. This is actually relatively easy. Either you go when they're open, gamble with the gangsters and win Baer's purse, you kick the poo poo out of them (there are 10 of them, but they're pretty terrible fighters, with no capacity to Dodge or Parry and only very basic civilian stats), or you send Shanna through the back door and she robs the joint. Or you can buy the macguffin for 5 crowns, but hey. Instead, they send Shanna through the back door to rob the joint. She became a thief on the assumption she would, in fact, steal some poo poo. A simple Lock Pick and Sneak roll, and she's got not just Baer's purse, but a whole day's take of other purses. Stealing a bunch of purses from one central place where other thieves collected them appeals to her sense of organization, and making an extra 6 crowns appeals to her sense of profit, so it's a good night for Shanna Applebottom. It's not actually necessary to get the purse, but it helps; having it and the map inside it halves the number of random encounters in the upcoming sewer dungeon since you know where to go and don't waste time wandering around. Oleg recommends some rags soaked in herbs to deal with the smell (An old ranger trick, dwarfs know about lovely sewers) and the team heads into their very first sewer level. There's no map of the sewers because they aren't a mapped dungeon crawl. Instead you're to 'ask your players where they're going, then just make it all up' as it's actually a linear series of encounters and time-wasting. Like with the swamp, you roll d10 X number of times to see which encounter they have on a list of 10. With the map, they have 3. You can also pick encounters, so we're going to toss them into the worst of them right away. A little ways into the sewer, the protagonists find a door built into the sides of a passage. Locked, barred, and with someone sobbing on the other end. Looking through the grates, they see a beaten up woman in a soiled dress with no shoes sobbing in a basement. As soon as she hears someone on the other end of the locked door, she rattles it and begs for help. Before Shanna can get her lockpicks out, Sif makes the Str-10 check and kicks the door in with a crash. The woman on the other side is Katarine, an abused 18 year old girl whose two years of marriage to a petty merchant have resulted in bruises, scars, and being locked in a basement and only let out to clean and cook for her husband. The book posits you can let her out and ignore her, at which point she's horribly murdered by ghouls trying to escape the sewers. You can go up and beat the poo poo out of her husband, at which point she's accused of his murder/assault, you ruin her life, and 'she seeks revenge'. Or you can take her with you, which says she's a liability and the sewers will try to kill her. Those are the three options. Despite this being intended to give the PCs a way back out of the sewer to go get healing or whatever, there's no option to just, like...escort her upstairs, tell her husband to gently caress himself, and let her go out the front door or something. She's given full stats, and she's actually a fantastic character; she's basically Johan if he was less strong but more sociable. This encounter is loving awful as written, so our heroes are having none of this. While Johan and Oleg watch the rescued woman, Sif, Syphan and Shanna go upstairs. They find her shocked husband, who yells at them to mind their own business. Sif takes the little dagger he used to cut his wife, punches him in the face once, declares that where she comes from this how divorce works (it is, actually), and takes his 5 crown purse. They walk back downstairs, toss the purse to Katarine, and offer to take her with them. She accepts, Sif hands her her spare hand-axe and her husband's dagger (and a spare pare of boots taken off a dead cultist), and they tell her to stay in the middle of the marching order until they can get her some armor. Katarine joins the party, because this is probably what my players would do. Hence forth they have a sixth member. They then encounter the Ghoul Pack, to show off what bastards Ghouls are, but also because these were supposed to murder Katarine. The Ghouls have two really nasty powers. One, players have to make Fear tests to fight them. Two, they do poison damage and have 2 attacks. The encounter is meant to be one or two ghouls, or more if the PCs are higher level. These PCs being normal, they'll run into 2. It's a short, nasty fight, but Sif's armor, the shields on Oleg and Johan, and the rest would see them through fine. Not to mention Ghouls are living targets; Syphan's Sleep spell works on them. Her crazy WS is really good for landing that with Fast Hands. Finally, they run into some mutant smugglers who have been changed by being too close to the Nurgle temple. The mutants aren't actually hostile, and merely ask the players for food. They're trying to get into the temple, themselves, because they know it turned them and they hope it can cure them. There's a big description of all their individual hideous mutations, because Schwalb goddamn loves long descriptions of hideous and painful mutations. If the PCs agree to help, the mutants help them find the temple faster. If they don't, but don't go hostile, nothing happens. There is no cure and no way to help them (obviously), and telling them there's no cure on the way back will send them into a rage and start a fight, or send them into insanity and 'make them embrace that they are forever creatures of Chaos' and turn cultist after the PCs leave. The heroes just leave them some spare rations and water and continue on their way without a fight. There are other encounters; you can run into a dropped Poison Wind Globe, fall into a pit that takes a -20 Scale Surface test to escape, fight a sewer lizard that only one PC at a time can engage, get caught in mould that hurts you and then grows and kills you in two days if you fail Toughness tests, or encounter REVENGE from some NPC you didn't murder yet who hates you. They're not very exciting. One of the other encounters is, if you didn't take Katarine with you or something, hearing her screaming in terror as she's ripped apart by ghouls. Yay. Katarine stands out because all the presented options in the book sucked. Finally, the heroes find the cult lair. And encounter the boss: A lesser Beast of Nurgle. The beast isn't that dangerous (23 WS, 3 Attacks, damage 3, TB 6, 20 Wounds) but it is Frightening and anyone hit by the tentacles has to make a Tough+10 or be paralyzed, losing -1 Movement and -10 to all stat tests per round. If anyone drops to 0, the next round, the Beast swallows anyone paralyzed adjacent to it as a full round, instant-killing them. So one or two unlucky hits can take a couple PCs out in an otherwise easy fight. This team's high Movement scores effectively neutralize that threat, though, and their numbers and the beast's terrible WS make it an easy fight for them. One cultist is left behind in the icky Nurgle base, a crazed scholar named Reuban. When the cult's leader Tobias told the cult to move out and infiltrate Karl's followers, he left Baer and Reuban behind, telling Baer to kill the poor man. Baer didn't, but he also hasn't been down in awhile (being dead and all) and so Reuban is even crazier. Reuban's insane rantings are actually a bunch of hints about the Witch, but it's going to be so long before she actually factors into anything that no-one is going to remember his stuff six months down the line when they face the Black Witch, and none of what he says is really useful for fighting her anyway. There's no helping the crazed man, but he has a letter on him that tells the PCs in no uncertain terms that Nurglites are among the band following Karl and have terrible plans of some kind. The team leaves the man to his fate, coming out of the sewers and heading right for the nearest bath (and to get Katarine some new clothes and officially welcome her to the party). Then they report to their boss. Selena tells them to go find the Crusade and protect Karl; he's 'important to her...people'. She also hands each member of the party (including the new girl) 10 gold crowns for travel expenses, which is pretty great. She's genuinely concerned about what the Nurglites are doing, and genuinely wants the protagonists to stop them. Sure, she thinks Karl might be the one prophesied to bring about the rule of night and the reign of blood, but no Nurglites! And with that, our heroes are welcoming their new member, spending their first EXP (they get about 300 EXP for this adventure), and heading off to where they'll be waylaid by absolutely and utter horseshit and the search for a stolen chiken. Look forward to our first encounters with hostile vampires and how this book absolutely does not understand how to use vampires! Be thrilled by PCs being outnumbered by Vampires in first tier! Be amazed by 30 men being spared to force the PCs to investigate a chicken! Watch as all involved begin to question the wisdom of this 'adventure' business! Next Time: Waylaid By Jackassery
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Apr 9, 2020 20:40
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And this is why I tend to be so down on Games Workshop and their writing. You can laugh at Warhams as a setting, you can enjoy the parts with good writing or the entertaining bits where goofy old GW has stuck around and refused to leave...but sooner or later somehow the bullshit always catches up, usually via authors having their hands in their trousers as they kill women and children while insisting how "necessary" and "natural" it all is.
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Apr 9, 2020 21:01
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Loxbourne posted:And this is why I tend to be so down on Games Workshop and their writing. You can laugh at Warhams as a setting, you can enjoy the parts with good writing or the entertaining bits where goofy old GW has stuck around and refused to leave...but sooner or later somehow the bullshit always catches up, usually via authors having their hands in their trousers as they kill women and children while insisting how "necessary" and "natural" it all is. This seems to be limited to specific authors in the 2e line, though. Specifically, it shows up a lot in Schwalb's work. To the point that I'd love to hear if this is still a problem on Shadow of the Demon Lord. I don't know if this is just a 'this is what the guy who loves grimdark thinks it should look like in Hams' thing, or if it's a wider problem in his adventure writing, but I can say his work on Forges and Thousand Thrones gives me some serious pause about him as a writer. The writing on the encounter with Katarine in the original is definitely where I'd check out and shelve it and not run the adventure, because it's a problem that will keep going.
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Apr 9, 2020 21:07
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Aethyron posted:
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Apr 9, 2020 21:20
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The Lone Badger posted:What happens if a centaur offends against the gods? Do two of their legs fall off? Given that the Harpy/Medusa curses cause gradual changes to the afflicted's anatomy over a period of 4-5 weeks until they resemble said monster, yes. The medusa race states that if their curse is cured, then they revert to the traits of their original race.
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Apr 9, 2020 22:06
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  The first chapter of the adventure path is a sort of “tutorial session” in the sense that you have helpful exposition outlining the basic facts of the setting. Additionally, the PCs have some wiggle room in fights should they mess up. It is here and in further chapters we will see some clear influences of Sky and Ohlen’s prior work in the form of  Trope Alerts.We also get sample quest-based experience awards and milestone points for each Chapter based on what method the DM prefers best:  We start our tale with some boxed text telling the players how their heroes have been summoned to the Heartlands as the Oath of Peace nears its end, and how the Oracle fears for the Doom of Thylea. The DM is encouraged to ask the players to write down their PC’s name at the top of three note cards along with rumors about their past deeds. One of them is mostly true, the other two are fabrications or exaggerations but not marked as such. The cards are all given to the DM, who then hands them out to the other players and that’s what their own PCs heard about their traveling companions. Our first scene literally opens up in a tavern where they meet a bard by the name of Kyrah, who is actually the Goddess of Music in a rather poor disguise. She tells them about how a Titan-corrupted boar is destroying crops and killing villagers and how previous heroes died against it. Should the PCs find and kill it, they can gain fame and power if they offer it to the gods as a sacrifice. Trope Alert: Tutorial DMPC: Kyrah tags along as a helpful guide, explaining the basics of Thylean society if necessary while also helping them indirectly in combat via HEROIC SONGS. She’s not the only god who joins the party on the Adventure Path, although due to the Oath of Peace they cannot “assist the PCs in battle” against Sydon, Lutheria, and their allies. However, there are quite a few encounters where the party is fighting monsters and people not loyal to the Titans. This will bring the inevitable question of what happens if the party asks them for aid in such instances. While the book says to not have them overshadow the PCs, her stats are well… ...godly in comparison to the party. You see, every god in Odyssey of the Dragonlords has one or more ability scores at 30 in reflection of their portfolio, and Kyrah can deal damage with a dagger on par with a greatsword-wielding barbarian. Her 63 HP puts her leagues above the rest of the party, and her Songs are quite clearly meant to alleviate the highly-lethal nature of 1st-level gaming. Her lolrandom Mischief ability, even if generally nonlethal, has the chance of causing the party to drive her off in case something like Stinking Cloud or the blinding lights put a PC in greater danger. She will use a Raise Dead scroll on a PC to bring them back to life, which compounded with the fact that said PC will likely have used their Divine Boon can end up making players feel that they’re being bailed out too easily. The prelude to the boar fight involves hunting and searching for clues, along with being able to set traps for the boar once it’s found. There are some good rules outlines for things like rope snares, camouflaged pits, and the like to help turn the tide in the party’s favor. When the boar is found, it already is quite injured from many weapons sticking out of it and suffers one exhaustion level a round. This means it will die in 6 turns even if the PCs get nary a scratch. Before it breathes its last, the boar speaks of how the end of Thylea is nigh. At this point Kyrah suggests that the boar’s body be burned as a sacrifice to one of the gods. Deities are jealous beings and as such you can’t dedicate it to more than one or a pantheon as a whole. There’s a table for different gods and goddesses and their boons, and some are more useful than others. For example, Pythor will swear an Oath of Service to the party and Volkan will grant them one random magic item once the party meets them, and whose usefulness is mostly in the broadness of potential options. Kyrah will confess her identity and swear an Oath of Protection...which given she’s traveling with the PCs for a while, is a bit superfluous. Thylea grants immediate aid in the form of a Charm of Vitality* for every PC and animals in every forest will aid the party to the best of their ability from here on out. Kyrah advises against sacrificing to Sydon or Lutheria given that sacrifices increase a god’s divine power, but choosing to do so will involve staying their wrath in a single one of their predetermined future encounters. Choosing not to sacrifice to any of the gods causes hurricanes and earthquakes to sweep over the land, turning the PCs into goats for 24 hours. *one-use ability to cure all exhaustion, poison, disease, and roll max value when spending Hit Dice to heal. Temple of the Oracle  Now that the PCs got a taste of divinely-flavored roast boar, they must make their way to the Oracle’s temple. Although the party’s already received summons, Kyrah will encourage them onward if they seem to dilly-dally. Nobody’s heard from her otherwise in two weeks, so Kyrah fears the worst. She is right to be worried, for several of Sydon’s minions invaded the temple, slaying and taking hostage most of its inhabitants. As the Oracle is the god’s daughter,* Sydon wants her taken back to the tower of Praxys alive. The PCs are not so lucky, and his forces will try to kill them before they get too famous and powerful. *This is public knowledge, and she also acted as the arbiter between the gods for the Oath of Peace. The Oracle’s temple is a relatively short 8-room, 2-level dungeon located above a series of hot spring caverns. Sydon’s forces are led by the sea hag Heleka and include a mix of monsters* and human soldiers. The rooms part of the natural caverns have boiling steam geysers which deal damage to those crossing or pushed into them, while the surviving acolytes can heal the party with their spells if rescued. Heleka herself is mocking Versi in the final room, who is held hostage in what looks like animated tendrils of water (a water weird which will overwise flee once the sea hag is slain). *Steam mephits, animated flying swords and rugs disguised as furniture, and a mimic disguised as a door with an ‘animated’ face. Versi will at first grieve for the dead once rescued, but understands the needs of the PCs and speaks to them of their fate: they must sail the seas in order to face the Titans and bring peace to Thylea, but before this they must accomplish three Great Labors to better ready themselves. The legendary Mithral Forge must be brought to working order again so as to build powerful instruments of magic and war. They must also visit the tombs of the Dragonlords in the Necropolis and claim their weapons, and are given a Burnished Dragonlord Coin to pay a toll of safe passage to the guardian of this dread realm. Finally the party must drink from the Horn of Balmytria, a holy silver dragon horn held in an Estoran shrine, to gain an as-yet unknown vision. These three Labors comprise the next chapter, and can more or less be done in any order. But there is a certain point in the plot where a dilemma can be optimally solved should the PCs bring the Mithral Forge to working order early for a specific magic item. Kyrah will tell the PCs in a rather unsubtle way about the perks of the Fame system (it can potentially make you immortal), suggest that the party swear an Oath of Fellowship* among each other to encourage good teamwork, and challenges the party bard to a ‘poetry battle’ to see who can make the best Homeric epic once their quest is done. *an Oath not really outlined in the Introduction. It basically allows the party to share all gains from their Fame equally and to not turn against each other. Epic Paths: Versi can help point the heroes in the right direction for their individual destinies. The Demi-God is encouraged to meet their father Pythor in Estoria. The Vanished One is asked to meet privately with her and to swear an Oath to return to her cave once the prophecy has been fulfilled, and only then will she tell them to retrieve their famous armor and Crown of the Dragonlords from the Tomb of Xander in the Necropolis. Tthe Doomed and Haunted Ones are told about Versi’s evil sister, Demeteria, in the Mossy Temple who either has knowledge of their fate or a lost family artifact respectively. The Gifted One is given a locket containing the soul of their sorceress grandmother who will speak through it, promising that if they take revenge upon Sydon they can restore the order of Dragonlords. The Lost One is promised a way home should they find the Lost Treasure of the Dragonlords, which is truly Lost and not found in the Necropolis. The Dragonslayer is destined to be the scourge of evil dragons and is told to seek out the Forgekeeper of the Mithral Forge. The Cursed One must seek the Necropolis’ guardian to learn about the nature of their curse. Once the PCs leave the temple, Lutheria shows up in a collective dream, mocking them as she chops up an unknown old man alive. This forces the party to make a DC 20 Wisdom save or gain a short-term mental illness. Unless they dedicated the boar sacrifice to Lutheria, in which case they don’t need to make the save at all. Thoughts So Far: There are parts of this chapter I like and don’t like. 1st level is way too low-power and gritty for PCs to begin an Adventure Path when they’re supposedly famous Greek heroes. The adventure tries to rectify this with Kyrah’s aid and neutering the boar monster with exhaustion, which kind of takes the wind out of any high-stakes sails. I do like how the Oracle’s various prophecies all tie into the future quests in some way, and the conceptual power of sacrifices is nice inspiration fodder even if the rewards are not exactly balanced. Sadly there are no future encounters in this style where burning the body of a great foe gives further rewards, which is wasted opportunity. The Oracle’s Temple is just the right length for a starting dungeon crawl, although given that time appears to be of the essence the PCs may be reluctant to take even a short rest after any battles. Although the sea hag is still in the process of searching for a potential route to the sea within the caverns and thus isn’t going to flee with Versi anytime soon, the party does not have a means of knowing this unless they interrogate one of the minions. Join us next time as we cover the three Great Labors and their adjoining quests!
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Apr 9, 2020 22:52
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Aethyron posted:Hunter: the Reckoning - Player's Guide I got the book back in the day, but I really do not recall that much about Hunter except feeling a sense of disappointment. I think I was expecting to get to play something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and instead I got... regularish people who weren't necessarily instant blood squibs for the monsters as opposed to the default normal humans who were instant blood squibs for the monsters. Hunters received Speshal Powerz from The Messengers which let them be... kind of on par with Mortal characters from the NWoD. One of the things I loved most about the NWoD is the way it did away with poo poo like: GM: You see a group of angry mortal gangbangers. Brujah PC: Um, okay. I pull my Katana out from under my Black Leather Trenchcoat, activate Celerity and Potence and then hit them all like 87 times each before they can so much as blink. GM: They're dog food, okay moving down the alley, you see... With NWoD a non-to-so combat oriented Vampire going up against a single more combat oriented normal vanilla mortal was at risk. And a single Vamp going against three or four normal mortals was at high risk for death or torpor unless he was some serious extra mojo/Disciplines because quantity was very much a quality.
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Apr 9, 2020 23:55
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Jerik posted:Can you think of any characters from ancient Greek mythology with names that contain a W (in their most standard English spellings)? You can't, because there aren't any. Were-acles. When the moon is full, he turns into a great, bearded demi-god, son of Zeus. Otherwise he's just like an amphora salesman and doesn't do much cause he's pretty tired a lot. (Good write-up that I was too lazy to make.)
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Apr 10, 2020 00:26
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The pain of th WW font in Hunter was real. Roughly a third of the Martyr book (I think) I still haven't read.
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Apr 10, 2020 00:38
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Everyone posted:I got the book back in the day, but I really do not recall that much about Hunter except feeling a sense of disappointment. I always kind of felt like the marketing and artwork made Hunters out to be Buffy, when they ended up being much less competent than that. I wondered if WW was reluctant to make a player character type that was a threat to vampires, werewolves, or mages or if something else drove that choice.
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Apr 10, 2020 00:43
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Are any of these hunters gonna fight something besides vampires?
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Apr 10, 2020 00:56
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Nessus posted:Yeah, having either a SHARP or an actual "this character was a Nazi skin... was, and they have moved on" situation would be a sensible (if in the latter case not-my-first-choice) concept for a pregen, but this sounds more like "I didn't so much stop being a Nazi as I made a lateral move." I just feel like... why go there? There are 5 sample Bystanders in the chapter and there's absolutely no reason whatsoever this needed to be one of them, and writing down that this skinhead feels bad now that he knows about vampires doesn't come close to excusing the deep grossness of the line about how "ironically" he has an "interesting" perspective on how hunters hate monsters. Like out of nowhere the book is all "hey, you can play a skinhead if you want. I mean an ex-skinhead." Cool, uh, I don't. And the fact this book think that I might is concerning. (I don't actually have a problem with "I used to be a real shithead but finding out about vamps changed my priorities" as a broad-strokes character concept but it's the kind of thing where I'd really want to already know and trust the person bringing it up, not just be blindsided by surprise swastika tattoos in an official sourcebook) Everyone posted:I got the book back in the day, but I really do not recall that much about Hunter except feeling a sense of disappointment. Midjack posted:I always kind of felt like the marketing and artwork made Hunters out to be Buffy, when they ended up being much less competent than that. I wondered if WW was reluctant to make a player character type that was a threat to vampires, werewolves, or mages or if something else drove that choice. Oh yeah the art of Hunter is breathtakingly misleading. I love Reckoning, it's probably my favourite oWoD line, but it is a mess in so many ways. Personally, the Hunters are underdogs thing is part of my preferred take but I can fully understand the letdown of going from the art to the rules. I think that it's a combination of falling too in love with the "hunters are average people" idea, not wanting to make guys who could stomp their other gamelines and just frankly not even knowing their own system that well. Dawgstar posted:The pain of th WW font in Hunter was real. Roughly a third of the Martyr book (I think) I still haven't read. Don't remind me- I bought the Martyr book back in the day and having one of the 3 main stories be in some cramped cursive faux-handwriting was intensely frustrating to try to read.
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Apr 10, 2020 01:18
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