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grassy gnoll posted:I assume the answer is "of course he didn't think about it," but are you given any guidance as to what to do if one of the PCs is a Sigmarite with more pull or a highly-connected Witch Hunter or whatever else might trump Johannes? Given you're PCs with like 600 EXP in your first career, it's really unlikely any Sigmarite in the PC party is anything but an Initiate. Basically it's not possible to even be ordained by this point. The only character that might pull rank on him is a Noble and even then, he's also a Noble. E: Also, his 'rank' is really more a matter of the PCs deciding not to hurt him or whatever. They're all alone in the forest, and his two bodyguards are probably not a match for a decent combat PC at this point. Nor is he very dangerous. If your party decided 'gently caress the adventure, we're robbing the fat rear end in a top hat and stealing his coach' there's really nothing to stop them. Given the sheer value of his rings and jewelry, too, this would probably work out pretty well for a party materially, and doing it right now would let them avoid the incoming Beastman Siege, too. Stealing his giant useless ceremonial gold hammer, rings, and other trappings is worth like 500 GC. I think Nils exists mostly to be cute enough to stop the PCs from doing this. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Apr 14, 2020 |
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Apr 14, 2020 15:07
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The players should call the Warhammer Cops on the rear end in a top hat who wrote this adventure.
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Apr 14, 2020 15:12
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It really shows that the author had no abilty to think on his feet. Oh no my players wanna do something fun better make sure they are shackled to these train tracks.
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Apr 14, 2020 15:58
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Or, just like... let your players tell them to gently caress off! They get pissy, leave in a huff, mutants show up, you do your thing with the mutants, the sigmarites show up an hour yelling to let them in because the beastmen are coming. Now you've got an interesting scene where the mutants don't want to let the sigmarites stay in the inn. Same dynamic, just reversed.
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Apr 14, 2020 16:18
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones Waylaid By Jackassery Is An Evergreen Post Title Sif and Oleg are on watch, talking about lutefisk and plump helmets and how little Sif misses the former and how much Oleg misses the latter, when they hear something coming from the courtyard of the inn. Some silly bastard put a secret escape tunnel in the well and now it's paying off by letting people sneak in. A band of mutants, led by Feodor (a former tailer with porcupine quills for hair), are trying to sneak in to steal food. Feodor has tried to run his band like normal people. They do some outlawry to survive, but they don't eat people, or run with the beastmen, or worship Chaos Gods. With him are the other two named mutants, Piers (who is huge and has giant chisel hands) and Lena (who has 2 pupils per eye and birdlike bones). They intend to slip in, open the gates for their fellows, steal some food, and leave without killing anyone. If they catch a PC by surprise, they intentionally don't kill them; they just put a knife to their throat and tie them up so they can't raise the alarm. They have no actual hostile intent. Sif and Oleg notice them, though, and are obviously a little unhappy to see strange people sneaking into the inn and trying to open the locked gate. If there's any fighting, the 16 other mutants outside will try to climb the gate (takes 10 rounds) and join in, though their allies are likely dead by that point depending on how fast more PCs, the Hammer Bearers, etc get into the fight. Oleg covers Sif with the crossbow as she goes to see what the hell all this is about. Sif is Norse; she's more used to people with mutations than most of the Empire, even if she doesn't realize she herself is a mutant. She quietly asks what they want, and Feodor tries to explain. Sif tells him there is no food, and the team just doesn't have enough to feed 20 people. She shows Feodor the empty larders, and while he's disappointed and his people are starving, he understands. If there's any fighting or loud noises once the mutants are in, the Sigmarites come down, see them, and get ready to fight, while the mutants panic about how Sigmarites will bring down the Hunters and do the same. Similarly, if things go like they do for Sif and Oleg and 'threaten to end peacefully', one of the Hammer Bearers gets up to take a piss and automatically spots the mutants and a fight starts. There is, effectively, no way to avoid a fight here. And nothing you can do to calm things down. Despite there being a whole bunch of stuff about PCs trying to avoid a fight. Welcome to how this adventure slams its dick in a door. First, there are a lot of mutants. Piers is a dangerous warrior, Lena is a pretty good archer, Feodor is an okay melee fighter; they're all Outlaws and have actual combat training. Then they have 16 fairly weak fodder buddies (WS 30, SB 2, TB 2, with poor quality clubs, which this book seems to assume are -10 to hit instead of -5). 19 combatants is a pretty tough ask for 2 lovely religious militia and a PC party. Plus, anyone who dies here will only hurt you in the next sections. Second, what is the goddamn point of a scenario with the challenge 'keep people from pointlessly killing one another' when they automatically start trying to kill one another, and there's no room for checks or anything to try to stop it? "Any attempts to calm things down fail, and the mutants attack the PCs as well." You have 5 rounds of combat before everyone hears the Beastmen coming from their war horns, and the fighting stops. This is such bullshit that instead, our team faces 5 rounds of vicious argument as some of the PCs are sort of horrified by the mutants, Johannes is shrieking to kill them all, the Hammer Bearers are getting their weapons but Sif moves between the two parties and glares at them, etc etc. Then the horn interrupts it before anyone can kill anyone. Even in the normal scenario, everyone immediately stops fighting with no input from the PCs at this point. Johannes wants to run, but it's impossible to do so in time. The Hammer Bearers stop fighting, but start barricading the doors and trying to block the other mutants from entering the main building of the inn, trying to leave them out by themselves to get slaughtered. The PCs not being idiots or jerks and wanting 16 extra bodies to fight off beastmen, Sif just throws the two idiots back and opens the doors, while Oleg (being a dwarf, and thus experienced at defending fortifications) tells them many of them need to get out and take the walls to bleed the incoming beastmen with ranged weapons while the semi-non-combatant mutants fortify the main inn, blocking whatever windows they don't want to use as firing ports and setting up a fallback point for after the walls are taken. Defending coaching inns is genuinely good for combat setpieces in Warhams; they're small enough (and an attacking force is likely small enough) that PCs can play a big role, and they have actual walls and are meant to be defensible. They convince the elf to get up on the walls with Oleg, Lena, and anyone else with a ranged weapon. Johannes runs for cover and refuses to do anything useful, but with him barricaded into a room he's safe enough. The Hammer Bearers will 'listen to any martially minded PC', so they've decided they're scared enough to follow Sif/Oleg's orders while Syphan gets up on the battlements with the ranged crew. Two minutes isn't a lot of time, but it's enough to get ready. The incoming fight is brutal, but winnable. The real danger is the Beastman Champion. But the Beastmen also use pretty stupid tactics; they send the Ungors and Brays up first, because they assume the inn isn't well defended and want to see what happens to their weakest members. The initial Beastman band is 27 of them, but 'more will arrive' as the PCs fight through the night. Combat should focus on the PCs, and any round where the PCs are killing enemies, their allies do well and kill 1 extra Beastman per Hammer Bearer and d5 Beastmen for the Mutants, while rounds when PCs fail to drop anyone, they lose a mutant or a Hammer Bearer. I'd slow that a little if the PCs take on Korska the Champion, though; he's a badass and the whole party will probably be necessary to take him out. Korska is beatable, but he's a definite boss: WS 70, SB 5, TB 6, medium armor, 2 Attacks, and a great weapon with Strike Mighty. Also Agi 51 and Dodge. However, he has a secret weakness that the team used to kill him when I was rolling stuff out: He has a middling WP of 42. Syphan is real good at Touch spells and has good initiative. When they challenged him, she got lucky and hit him with Sleep. Unconscious from the mighty boop to his snoot, he was then Helpless against Sif's first hits, making them do 2d10+5 instead of d10+5 before he could wake up. In a dramatic example of why you shouldn't give people stun spells for the most part, he took 17 of his 19 Wounds after he got booped (failing to dodge it or save), fell asleep, got stabbed twice, and stood up just in time to get stabbed in the throat by a lucky Outnumber-fueled strike by Johan. Three more wounds put him on Crits and knocked him over, then for insult to injury, Oleg Furied him and cut off his leg. Now, normally, you'd want to focus ranged fire on Korska before he gets into melee, etc. I'd make Korska come out of the crowd to challenge the party after a few waves of the normal semi-abstracted combat; as it is there's no guidance on how to use the badass enemy boss wrecking ball. Even without the Sleep cheesing, the party could beat him, but they'd need to focus on him and hopefully have had the elf shoot him, give Syphan some time to fire magic darts at him, etc before it gets to melee. Sif can hang with the guy (sword and shield is very much the ideal weapon against greatweapon enemies in a duel) but two or three hits from a Damage 6 Impact weapon is bad for her since on average it'll do 7 wounds a hit and she has 16 wounds, and her average counter attack does 2. Whatever happens with the fight, if the PCs are losing, they can escape via the tunnel in the well. If they make it through enough assaults until morning, the wood elf kithband looking for Lorinoc and any other survivors shows up and cuts through the back of the Beastmen. This makes them run. For our heroes, the beastmen back off to circle and plot revenge after the heroes kill Korska. Then get whacked by 10 Kithbanders and their badass Waywatcher-esque Captain. Coriael the Captain leads them, a warrior who hates humans, but has had to deal with them enough that he's made peace with the fact that they aren't going anywhere and it's worthwhile to protect them/help them out when he can so they'll do the same for elves. He tells the PCs (especially if they helped out Lorinoc, which our heroes did) that he'll help them (and Johannes and the others) to safety, as per the treaties/good relations between his people and theirs. He warns there's a full warherd coming and it'll be pissed about the dead champion. Then he has any of the mutants who seek shelter shot. There is nothing the PCs can do about this. The mutants are automatically left behind to die at the hands of the beastmen, or shot by the elves if they try to follow. The elves will not listen to the PCs, and say 'killing them is a mercy'. 'Elves see all mutants are a distortion of the natural order that must be cleansed'. The elves scoff at any PC who objects as being a fool. Again, there's nothing you can do to help Lena, Piers, Feodor, or their band, even if you kept them alive in the fight. They just get left behind to die or are murdered by callous rear end in a top hat elves. Johannes offers the PCs many of his rings to protect him on the way to the next town, and they can choose to bring him with them with the elves or go their own way; it makes no difference, they all lead the same place. Coriael and his band will be showing up on and off through the whole adventure to fail to murder 9 year old Karl, which considering they're Asrai is kind of a feat. I suppose they have a harder time murdering children who don't speak French? Our heroes are actual heroes, though. Since it won't affect the story in any way, when the Thousand Crowns realize Coriael is about to shoot Lena when she tries to follow them, Syphan thinks quick and casts Drop, making him drop his bow. They refuse to let the people who fought alongside them get murdered for nothing, insisting they let them accompany them just long enough to keep them out of the line of the Beastmen, at least. Syphan appeals to the elfs in Eltharin, saying if they leave the mutants to be captured, they may be forced to join the enemy and become a problem later. The elves grudgingly agree to let the mutants keep up long enough to get them out of danger, then the heroes part ways with them, dragging Father Johannes and company along with them. During the walk, when he becomes exhausted, Sif offers to carry the fat man. And 'accidentally' drops him in a mud puddle. Clumsy of her. And then they catch up to the Crusade. The whole 'you can't actually do anything, the mutants always get horribly murdered' thing is the real failing of the adventure. If you fought alongside them, realized they're decent people just trying to live, etc, the whole 'oh, they're just twisted monsters and death would be a mercy' thing from the elves really sucks. And even if you refuse to go with the elves, the mutants just vanish from the adventure and get eaten by Beastmen. In many ways, fighting the battle does absolutely nothing. The battle is fairly well handled and their way of abstracting it is decent; the other suggestion is if you want to play it all out, divvy up the NPCs to each player to control. But that will take forever with that much rolling; the abstracted method is better. Korska is strong enough that they needed some guidance on where to put him. All in all, it's a good adventure concept, just so heavily railroaded and lol nothing matters to actually land. Next Time: The Crusade of the Child Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Apr 14, 2020 |
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Apr 14, 2020 16:40
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As a side note, Coriael the Badass Elf Captain repeatedly tripping over his own dick as he fails to murder a child with his cadre of ninjas and becomes increasingly frantic, bitter, and frustrated is legit one of my favorite running subplots in this pile. Also note the rest of the adventure will assume, as its normal path, that the PCs are totally up for child murder. It mentions they might not be, but the majority of the material expects the 'standard' path will be the PCs trying to help the elfs murder a nine year old boy. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Apr 14, 2020 |
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Apr 14, 2020 16:43
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Getting some real "Well this is how my group plays, so this is obviously how everyone plays" vibes from the writer here.
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Apr 14, 2020 17:40
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Also as a personal note, I have a serious problem with any adventure that suggests violence against children, especially if it suggests there's any capacity for it being 'justified'. It's something of a personal issue for me, not because of anything that happened to me, but because my father did expert witnessing for medical evidence for child abuse trials. I've heard a lot about the awful things real people do to real children. I don't play games to have the 'moral dilemma' of 'do we murder the magic child' because gently caress that poo poo. I mean I play a Witch Hunter (still just a Priest, but he's a Templar of Sigmar and a licensed hat-wearer), but a big part of his character is that that's one line he simply can't cross even though his duties technically demand that. And you actually get interesting stories out of a Hunter who can't do part of his job. My GM knows I can't play that kind of thing, and doesn't want to run it, either, so instead writing about getting around it works just fine.
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Apr 14, 2020 17:44
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A powerful character who gets to shout at the PCs with a bank of GM punishments ready for them if they answer back is a huge red flag. Yes, a fat arsehole character is a worthy complication in an adventure, but the PCs should be allowed to give them a wedgie if they so desire.
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Apr 14, 2020 18:48
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I quit playing with a group over that. I was already tired of the meat grinder encounters, but when the untouchable antagonist NPC started spouting misogynist bullshit I just went 'nope, you can take this "but the Middle Ages!" bullshit and hop off the host's balcony.'
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Apr 14, 2020 19:47
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones What do you mean you're not up for child murder Are you up for some child murder? The adventure certainly hopes so, because the majority of the assumed material here relies on the players trying to help some elves kill a nine year old boy (which they fail at miserably). Something to note is that again, the PCs are likely to be pretty wounded by this point. The crusade is a giant mess of crazy Sigmarites. Karl's aura doesn't actually change a person's personality, it just inserts 'please do nice things for and protect Karl' and 'Karl is pretty cool, yo' into their mental programming. Because of the nature of how he was unveiled to the world, this means the majority of people who decided they were going to do anything for him are fanatical Sigmarites. You know how fanatical Sigmarites can be. So the parade of enthralled people following their savior (actually kind of dragging him) to Altdorf are a zealous and violent bunch who have done immense damage to the countryside and the land in their path. Karl himself doesn't really understand quite why they're doing any of this, or calling him Sigmar; he's just a friendly nine year old boy who's kind of lonely. But I'd probably assume he's going along with it from a mixture of being terrified of the angry shouty priestes and flagellants and excited about the attention. As soon as the elfs get near the Crusade, they stop. They can sense Karl's Aura (as can Syphan, you'd assume, given her Magical Sense) from 40 meters away. It doesn't kick in until 20 meters. Karl's Aura will reprogram a character if they fail a WP -30 test for humans, +10 test for elfs, +20 for dwarfs. They...don't mention what the test is for Halflings, but given Resistance to Chaos and how the 'Halfing PCs' section talks about them being pretty unaffected, I'm just going to say Shanna's immune. She knows to count cards in her head and recite mathematics any time she feels the tingle of mind control. You would normally want to tread very carefully with a plot about the majority of the party probably getting mindwhammied (even if it's mostly 'you are still you, you just decide this kid is THE BEST KID) but the sidebar says players shouldn't whine about it because that's just part of roleplaying and they need to handle the challenge. That is really, really not the right mindset to go into this with. The bit where it doesn't really rewrite you is fine, and players who were willing to accept 'we fall under the sway of the aura for a time and so our PCs try to save Karl at all times' as the plot hook would be fine; I just don't trust anything phrased as 'you've got to be willing to handle THE CHALLENGE of getting mindwhammied'. But that comes up later. As soon as the elfs realize how powerful Karl is, a couple of them wonder aloud if he IS Sigmar, before their leader shushes them and says 'we're Asrai, it's child-killing time'. That's just how the Fae respond to their problems, because they themselves have no idea they're being controlled by insane racist trees from a hellforest and a nightmare queen who sacrificed her husband to the forest for power. You know how it is, you try to pull the speck out of your neighbor's mindwhammied child-worshiping eye, not realizing you have an entire log in your coal-black inhuman orb because you're a wood elf and you can't see wood. The elves assume the players will help them scout out the crusade to get to child murderin'; this child isn't french, and so may be a little outside their experience. If the players don't, hillbilly scottish elf ninjas will be trying to murder them for the rest of the campaign and all elf encounters turn hostile. Even if you want to gently caress the elfs over, it's best to agree in the moment. The elfs take Johannes hostage, somehow expecting this will make the PCs more complaint and unlikely to betray them (I can imagine many groups deciding to smash the BETRAY ELF button as soon as they realize it might kill Fat Sigmarite) because Asrai are bad at reading humans. Lots of NPCs get set up in the camp, and we're going to be with them awhile. Butcher Groff is introduced as a guy feeding the crusade; he's naturally an evil Nurglite the PCs will deal with later. They meet the owner of the Reaper's Rest Inn that they just defended and give him back his pipe; this means they have better access to alcohol the rest of the time they're at the Crusade, which Sif is especially excited about. They maybe hear about Helmut, Krieger (no relation to genius scientists, no hybrid mutant pig-boy), and 'Jan', three of the 'inner circle' of the Crusade. Helmut is a Sigmarite Priest, the Sigmarite Priest from back in Marienburg. He's a decent enough sort who just thinks Karl's power comes from genuine charisma, supposedly, but he never really shows much character during the story. He's suspicious of the businessman Jan, because he thinks Jan is trying to use the Crusade to make money. Jan is trying to use the crusade...because he's Tobias, the Nurglite Magus from Marienburg who was supposed to grab the boy for his master originally. Jan's fuckup led to all of this, and now he's trying to make the best of it, plot to plague the Crusade and Altdorf, and kidnap the child later to use an amulet originally created for effectively sexual assault (look, there's no other way to take 'mind control amulet designed to make someone fall in love with someone they didn't want to be in love with') to mind control him and have their own mind-controlled mind-controller. Then there's Krieger, who was sent to disperse the crusade with his mercenaries but converted instead, and who now runs the military side of things. He's said to be calm, gentle, and genuinely excellent as a commander. Meanwhile, what they're all presiding over is a hosed up mess of diseased people (there's an entire Nurgle cult hidden in the camp, remember, plus a bunch of people in close proximity with poor logistics and planning means sickness) who are all starving, miserable, and robbing the countryside as they go. So, a fairly normal Flagellant Order. Given the man making sure they're fed is a Nurglite (Jan's money and Groff's meat, etc), it's no surprise sickness is everywhere and the Crusade's left more than a few bodies in its wake, either from Flagellants killing people to take their food and/or money as 'donations' or for their refusal to convert, or from people dropping from disease. The heroes have to be a little careful not to trip too many alarms; people have tried to murder the Child before, and the Crusade is on alert for it. And has dozens of armed men and women; many of them are Krieger's actual soldiers, not just Flagellants. They're also followed by some Strigany, the not-Roma of Warhammer, who will be factoring later in an adventure in Sylvannia but who aren't important yet. Once the heroes find out where the boy will be and when, they can betray the elves to the crusade or they can go back to the elves. Our team goes back to the elves to give them wrong information; maybe it will get them off their back peacefully. When they go back, Johannes is awed at the power Karl wields over his followers; he offers the PCs a ton of money and influence if they'll perform the simple task of breaking into an armed camp and kidnapping a boy who might have magic powers to bring to him. They tell him to stuff it, and give the elves the wrong location. Good thing, too, because whatever you do the elves get a decoy location. If you stay with the Crusade, this same encounter happens; that night, while the elves wait to kill a child, they're set upon by a fuckton of zombies and a bunch of Ghouls! Holy poo poo, someone remembered Strigoi can use Ghouls! As the PCs and elves are fighting this off while Johannes flails and cries in the background (after getting them all made by the enemy in the first place by tripping on something) one of the Ghouls says something like 'We're drawn enough off, the master has his diversion!' At hearing that, the PCs break off to see what's happening at the main camp, fighting free of the zombies and running to the tents to find that oh, hey, is the master of those dozens of Strigoi. He's here to kidnap Karl because he has a crazy theory that Sigmar wandered off into the mountains to become a vampire and so Karl is Sigmar and so Karl is a super scion of Nagash and honestly the entire Thousand Thrones prophecy makes no goddamn sense. They arrive to find fighting in the middle of the camp, and the Strigoi Lord (who just uses the stats of one of the mook Strigoi they fought *four of*) in the middle of being killed by the third tier Krieger and his men. That's right, if they don't do anything, Krieger just kills the Strigoi and they were totally unnecessary. Otherwise, more ghouls attack as the PCs join in, but I'd have Krieger's men hold them off and let the PCs just fight Mad Orlock the Strigoi Master. Because goddamn, do they deserve the revenge. Orlock is dangerous, but without armor, the PCs can pretty clearly take him down. He's supposed to escape if Krieger nails him, and in the ordinary fight 'you should consider maybe letting the PCs' intervention turn the tide'. Oh, joy. Fun. Maybe the PCs matter a little to a cutscene! Instead, Sif lops the drat vampire's head clean off, in revenge for what one of his servants almost did to her eye. He's totally unimportant and wouldn't have come up again, so it doesn't matter that he's a dust pile. Having saved Karl from vampires, and with the elves out doing their own thing and Johannes far from them, the Crusaders thank the Thousand Crowns and offer to let them see Karl. If you refuse here, they kill you. Only a heretic would refuse to see the savior! If you escape, the GM is told to give the players new characters who played along and were in the Crusade to begin with. Yes, really. Your PCs are taken away if you escape this encounter with the mind whammy child. You are getting mind whammied goddamnit. The PCs meet Karl, and check to see who gets whammed. Our heroes actually roll extremely well (with judicious use of Fortune) and only Sif and Johan actually fall for it. Katarine is still concerned about the kid's well being, because like anyone making the save she sees Karl for a friendly and nice nine year old boy who is kind of terrified and has no idea what's going on. Sif experiences a weird mental shift as her previous object of worship, the giant pile of gold she wants to see herself owning before she dies, now has a cherubic little boy sitting on top of it. This boy is her ticket to that fulfilling pile of gold and glory. She is going to be the best warrior of an Emperor to be. This is doubly weird because as a Norsewoman she's pretty likely to dislike Sigmar due to the cultural hatred of him for making them live in Norsca. Johan is just really happy to be appreciated and told he's a hero and wants to help out. Syphan, Oleg, and Shanna think the humans are kind of weird about this but the kid seems okay. Karl is obviously shaken from the whole vampire battle and seeing a couple of his guards get eviscerated, but his gratitude to the heroes is very genuine. They're welcomed to the Crusade, because the other option was the campaign ending there. It's a tempting option, but I've committed. So yeah. The bit where you're not even important to this pileup encounter, the stuff with the elfs, the child murder stuff, the everything else...this is terrible. Oh, also, if the PCs try to use subterfuge to actually try to kill Karl they lose pretty much automatically. It isn't until later that any attempt to kill Karl is met with a perfect body double. Schwalb loves body doubles like he loves poop, blood, and mutations. If your campaign didn't end after Chicken Attack, I would be willing to bet most groups stop playing Thousand Thrones at this adventure. Also, I wonder: Syphan has Magical Sense. You'd think she'd have a chance to spot all these magic-enabled Nurglite Cultists or Nurgle Magic in the camp. But nobody ever seems to consider Magical Sense when planning out cult adventures. Next Time: The Altdorf Railroad
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Apr 14, 2020 20:12
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Night10194 posted:I should note also, Unquiet Place is one of the adventures that Schwalb has no actual writing credit on, though he's still the overall editor and director. He's credited on every other adventure on the book, but Chiken Attack is 'solely' Chuck Morrison who I don't remember doing anything else in WHFRP. Schwalb is on most of them, and is the overall primary author and editor/designer for the campaign, but cannot be fully blamed for chicken adventure. Chuck Morrison has spoken about writing chapter 2 what he originally intended the chapter to be and how it ended up. To quote him "This was all 10+ years ago so the details are fuzzy but my original idea for "An Unquiet Peace" was for the PCs to have to choose between supporting a corrupt, violent, and decadent older brother ascend to power in the little village of Pfeifeldorf or ally with the better, younger brother in a conspiracy to murder the elder one. This investigation and the choice at the end were supposed to be lightened up by humorous run-ins with villagers. That didn't work out very well either. The "chicken hunt" is a bit of a troll on characters who take themselves too seriously -- but against the backdrop of the prophecy about the child, where the PCs really do have some urgency and really are on an important mission, it just serves to anger them. Being railroaded into it makes the situation even worse. The call for the Vampires came after we had turned in our drafts for the halfway mark -- each chapter was supposed to be 20,000 words, so everyone had, in theory, written 10,000 by that point. Then someone from above -- Kate Flack, maybe? -- gave us a directive to add each of the major vampire clans to the story, and feature them in as many chapters as possible. I was given the Blood Dragon vampire, and I think I was told to have the Strigany capture him and carry him away so he could be featured in a later chapter. I tried to work in the vampires as best I could, and it entailed quite a bit of rewriting those first 10,000 words, but I wasn't very successful and the adventure suffered for it." Source: https://www.windsofchaos.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6
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Apr 14, 2020 20:20
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That explains a lot. So it was basically meant to be a stand-alone adventure that got shoved into this campaign, had the vampires inserted out of nowhere, and just didn't work at all? E: The odd thing is the poster saying the fate of Hollenbach matters. Because it doesn't; they outright say if any of the vamps who are meant to be kidnapped/tricked into being there for the ritual at the end are killed or prevented from being sent to Kislev, the enemy just kidnaps another of the same line and goes from there. And that whole thing really does a good job of pointing out why this is such a lovely campaign: trying to shove the vampires in, AND the Black Witch, AND the Child, AND everything else just falls apart. Even if you didn't have the terrible balancing, railroading, etc. Especially as the Black Witch never actually has any kind of character, but that's kind of par for the course for Chaos villains. One of the reasons I'm always so annoyed to see them is Chaos just gets to seize people and make them wholeheartedly do what it wants, running roughshod over their character or excusing that they never had one. Any time I write a Chaos Villain, I work on why they fell, what their circumstance was, what they think they'll get out of it, because they so often lack any of that. Yeah, reading all this, it sounds like directives from the top consistently prevented WHFRP2e campaigns from doing anything good or interesting. But Thousand Thrones is still instructively terrible and worth looking at. The Vampire element being a late insertion that was never meant to go into the campaign to begin with is hilarious, too. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Apr 14, 2020 |
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Apr 14, 2020 20:23
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I feel really sorry for Karl.
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Apr 14, 2020 20:32
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Josef bugman posted:I feel really sorry for Karl. I do, too. If I was running this, I'd be running around the idea that the PCs don't get mindwhammied because they don't scare the kid. They're introduced rescuing him, so his powers don't activate. I know my group well enough to know they'd want to make the rest of the game about trying to get the poor kid away from all this insanity and get him some help, so a campaign where they're trying to gently extract the Child from the Crusade of crazies who are using him as license to hurt people and steal poo poo would be fun.
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Apr 14, 2020 20:34
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Night10194 posted:I do, too. If I was running this, I'd be running around the idea that the PCs don't get mindwhammied because they don't scare the kid. They're introduced rescuing him, so his powers don't activate. I know my group well enough to know they'd want to make the rest of the game about trying to get the poor kid away from all this insanity and get him some help, so a campaign where they're trying to gently extract the Child from the Crusade of crazies who are using him as license to hurt people and steal poo poo would be fun. Mhm. Though that is a good point you raised about Chaos in warhammer, it is often very boring because it is just an annihilation of everything else, it has no themes other than parasitism/ nihilism.
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Apr 14, 2020 20:38
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I like that the author of Chikin Attack says to completely skip his chapter as it is completely pointless. Big points for honesty.
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Apr 14, 2020 20:48
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It's like finding out Terror in Talabheim's ending was a dictate from above; it changes the impression of the adventure entirely. E: Note, as the author himself says, my advice is still do not expose adventure directly to face. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Apr 14, 2020 |
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Apr 14, 2020 20:50
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I can kind of get what they're going for here: an innocent child with unfathomably dangerous powers he can't control that make him a serious danger to everyone around him whether he wants to be or not. You know, the kind of scenario fascists like to propose to twist people into agreeing with them. This whole adventure so far really does feel like it was written by a chud who wants to get non-chuds to agree with him, by 'writing' or by narrative cudgel. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Apr 14, 2020 |
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Apr 14, 2020 21:29
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The funny thing is there's nothing to suggest he can't learn to control it, because he doesn't even know he has it. It just triggers when he's terrified, and he's always terrified because people are constantly trying to murder him or use him as their excuse to do crazy things.
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Apr 14, 2020 21:39
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Just Dan Again posted:That was something about old Changeling I could never really get past- if none of the stuff that's happening is "real" in any sense to anyone who isn't a Changeling, the stakes just don't seem quite as high. Like, you can disbelieve the Antediluvians or the Wyrm. There are still tangible evil vampires and werewolves who can do real damage to the things your characters care about. If a Changeling only has Changeling friends then the stakes are plenty high, but it seems like it'd be pretty hard for evil changelings to actually do anything to a PC's mortal friends or family with their magic. It's been a long time ago, but I recall that one aspect of CtD was that of Chimeras. They could do damage to those who saw and believed in them but were otherwise invisible/intangible/unreal. So a bunch of changelings fighting a chimerical version of a One-eyed, One-horned, Flying Purple People Eater would look like some kind of crazy people or performance art or something. That said, quite a few Changeling powers were fully capable of affecting real people in real ways. While unimaginative adults were more resistant to Changeling effects, children tended to be vulnerable. So, evil changelings could easily lure a PC's sister's young children away to Neverland or something. Changelings were a little like Wraiths. Many Wraiths can't do a lot to directly affect normal humans, though those with the right powers can. The same is true for Changelings.
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Apr 15, 2020 03:04
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Everyone posted:That said, quite a few Changeling powers were fully capable of affecting real people in real ways. While unimaginative adults were more resistant to Changeling effects, children tended to be vulnerable. So, evil changelings could easily lure a PC's sister's young children away to Neverland or something. That's not a point in Changeling's favor, that makes it worse.
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Apr 15, 2020 04:05
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Changelings had a handful of tricks to force chimerical reality onto mundanes, and a couple more when the hardcover version hit the shelves. They were also quite capable of using firearms and other mundane weapons if they really wanted to gently caress someone up. But generally speaking when dealing with anything that wasn't chimerical, they were regular, squishy mortals.
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Apr 15, 2020 04:59
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Can they self-buff?
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Apr 15, 2020 05:27
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 With character creation out of the way, we turn to the Setting Book. This book includes a list of all the various common setting tropes and NPC types for a supers campaign, with more checklists for each: The Super Prison, The Megacorporation, The Dystopian Future, etc. Here's a typical Setting Book page:  These can be filled out by the narrator alone, or collaboratively by the narrator and players. You don't need to fill out the entire book at once, however. At the start of the series, you fill in the first couple of pages, called The Basics, which include details about the city the campaign takes place in and important landmarks, how common supers are and how they're viewed, and how lethal super-powered combat is. Then, as the game goes on, if you need details on The Super-Science Lab, The Hero Academy, or The Team Mentor, you can turn to the appropriate page and fill it out; there are also spaces on each page to record events involving these places or people. This takes up about two-thirds of the book; the rest of the book is record sheets for noting details on minor NPCs and important events from each issue you play. So as you play more and more games, the Setting Book will gradually fill up with details about your particular Spectaculars universe. Each series pad includes about a dozen issues (scenarios) to play, as well as villain Archetype sheets to help the narrator come up with villains for each issue. There are frequently multiple villain options for a particular issue, which helps the narrator to customize each game even further. Despite my earlier grousing about the price, you do get quite a lot of content for your 75 beans. There are also some further hero archetypes buried deeper in each series pad; these Archetypes are intended to be unlocked by playing certain issues. For example, playing the Alien Invasion issue in Explorers of the Unknown makes the Alien Refugee hero Archetype available to players. However, there's nothing stopping you from declaring that all Archetypes are available at the start, or bringing Archetypes from one series into another. As for the gameplay itself, Spectaculars uses a percentile system: you say what you want to do and roll the appropriate power or skill rating. Depending on what you're trying to do, the narrator can also add up to four advantage dice (d8s) or challenge dice (d10s) to the roll. Advantage dice are given out for using the environment in a clever way, doing something particularly entertaining, or exploiting something you've learned about the opposition; challenge dice are used when circumstances are stacked against you. You can get both kinds of die on a single roll, and the rules urge the narrator to be generous in handing them out. The game includes custom advantage and challenge dice; the advantage dice are marked with symbols on half their faces, the challenge dice on six faces. Each die that comes up showing a symbol gives you a boon (advantage) or drawback (challenge). You can, of course, use regular d8s and d10s, so you're not required to also buy special dice if you get the digital edition. Details of boons or drawbacks are up to the narrator to adjudicate, although there are lists of possible effects for inspiration. The more you get, the more beneficial or severe the result should be. Boons can include knocking an enemy back, doing extra damage, giving another player advantage dice on their turn, learning a secret about the situation, achieving a secondary goal in addition to what you were trying to do, healing some Resistance, and so on. Drawbacks can mean putting yourself in a bad position, taking damage, or having to draw from the Deck of Complications. You can also spend Hero Points during play to increase your chance of success (1 hero point = +10% chance, but also one extra challenge die) or do a team maneuver with another hero to give them two advantage dice on their roll. One thing I like is that team maneuvers don't require an action – you just explain how you're helping and pay the Hero Point. This helps encourage creative thinking and teamwork. While this system is quick and easy to learn, it does put a lot of weight on the narrator to keep the advantage and challenge dice flowing and come up with interesting boons and drawbacks. At times it can feel like early stunt-based systems like Feng Shui or Exalted, where you end up adding a bunch of unnecessary flips to a straightforward attack to get those extra bonuses.
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Apr 15, 2020 06:46
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 Heart: The City Beneath 06 - Classes - Heretic, Hound, Incarnadine The next three! A bit less body-horror in this batch. I'll probably keep the D&D analogues for each class, as those are kind of our archetypical dungeon-delving roles, and the Heart is nothing if not a massive dungeon. Plus Grant and Chris have done something similar to Kieron Gillan's Die in that they've subverted the traditional party roles in interesting ways. The Heretic Within the City Below continues the traditional Drow worship of the Danmou; their triple-goddess of the Moon, now (mostly) outlawed in the City Above. Close to the Heart, however, this worship has twisted into belief in a Moon Below, of which the one hanging in the sky is a pale reflection. Priests and healers, they follow a syncretic religion which worships all three faces of the moon in a way that would likely now be unrecognisable in the Spire. Heretics start with Mend and Religion as you might expect, and tend to take more of a healing/supportive role in a party of delvers (although they can power up for combat very effectively if they need to); they're literal clerics, just a little strange. Their single Core Ability is Ministrations - they can lead a group in a ritual that will clear Minor Blood or Mind fallout, or reduce Major fallout to Minor, but it takes time (and makes a Delve harder if you're part-way through). Their Minor Abilities let them grant protection to their allies, and interact with the devout of the Moon Below, as well as seeing in the dark, or discrening lies (it's a bit of a grab-bag). As with other classes, they can improve their protection against four kinds of stress, and although they don't have a repeating way of boosting Blood Protection, other Minor and Major abilites grant it, making the Heretic pretty tough in the long run. The Heretic's Major abilities represent five of the six virtues of the Danmou (the sixth, Grace, is missing, possibly stolen by the Aelfir). Oath of Community lets you reduce the effects of Blood fallout and stress, both for yourself and your allies. Oath of Fury is more aggresive, letting you augment your killing abilities considerably, although failing to make a worthy kill causes Mind stress.  Oath of Tenacity increases the stress you deal for Risky or Dangerous rolls, Rite of Vigilance lets you see the souls of nearby creatures, even through obstacles. When they hit their Zenith, they may ascend as an Angel of the goddess, taking on great powers for a scene before being ossified into a bone-crystal statue, look upon the Goddess herself, become a beacon to the faithful and converting the secular (and triggering an elite kill-team of Aelfir Paladins to come mobilise and hunt you down), or die a martyr's death, creating a holy landmark where you've fallen. Heretic Class Breakdown The Hound Long ago, a mad Aelfir general sent the nine-hundred men of the 33rd down into the City Below in an attempt to pacify the Heart. A mere three hundred survived, cut off and besieged. In order to save the remaining troops, the officers did something terrible, and forgotten. The Hounds are those who bear the badges of those three hundred, protectors of all who draw breath in the City Below. The first of the two 'fighter' types, Hounds are somewhere between a Western lawman and Sam Vimes, with a touch of secular Paladin. They start with Hunt and Haven, and their single core ability is In The Thick of It - once per scene they can mark stress to Fortune in place of another resistance, and when they're hit with Fortune fallout, they roll with Mastery for the entire scene. Minor abilities let them survive the inevitable perils the Heart will throw their way, ferret out injustice, force themselves to be the center of attention, or just find a safe place to hole up and gain a brief respite. True to their nature they never get Fortune protection - Hounds are never lucky, but are otherwise pretty hardened to the more mundane dangers of the Heart. Their Major Abilities are Condemn - declare somone a wanted criminal, Forewarned and Forearmed - spend time to prepare for coming challenges, Stare Down, where your gaze becomes a weapon (it doesn't kill, just terrifies and demoralises), Trench-Fighter - you know how to hit where it hurts, and Unstoppable - when you're hurt, you're even more dangerous. At their Zenith, they either transform to become the original owner of their badge, eternally standing watch over a landmark, or resort to destroying their badge, freeing the 33rd to act out their final moments (destroying the landmark you're in in the process). Or they can become a...  Hound Class Breakdown The Incarnadine In the City Above, fortunes wax and wane, and sometimes someone will find themselves entirely indebted to their creditors. Rarer still is it to be so catestrophically in debt that you attract the attention of Incane, the Crimson God. Parts of your life and memories have been repossessed, and you bear Incarne's mark as one of their priest-merchants, wielding the metaphysical force of your own debt. Incarnadines get Compel and Haven as their starting skill and domain; they're merchants at heart, unscrupulous and desperate. Essentially, the nearest D&D role is the Bard - they've got a lot of utility, and make good faces, but aren't stand-up fighters, along with a touch of the rogue. They don't know what you need - they just make you think you want it. They have two core abilities; The Cost of Doing Business lets them consume a resource, roll and set aside its dice to use when they perform a later action or inflict stress. Also, if they go down, they explode;  Their Minor Abilities are largely based around trade and exchange, hurting those who've shed your blood, manipulating (or stealing) resources, and getting away from those you've wronged in turn. They can never get Blood protection, however - they're never going to be front-line fighters, although they'll happily knife someone in the back, literally and metaphorically. Incarnadines get the usual five Major Abilities; Backstab gives them a nice combat punch against unaware targets, Broker lets them pray to Incarne to remove stress from another (and eventually trade fallout), Crave instills a great desire in the target, Debtor's Reds - the holy robes of Incarne - inflict stress on your enemies whenever they see you act, and Karmic Ledger let's you know someone's deepest Karmic debt, and use it to your advantage. Finally Network lets you start to build out an actual trading network through the City Below, reaping resources as you do. (Theoretically, Heart is a traingame after all...) Their Zenith rewards are interesting. Either receive a favour from Incarne, being able to buy anything; physical, conceptual, whatever, but it'll cost your life (a couple of sessions later), or wield the weight of Incarne's own Debt against a target - you also use it to clear your own stress, but there's a 10% chance each time that this will kill you. Or finally, you can pay off your debt. Unlike all the other Zenith Abilities this doesn't benefit your party in the slightest; it's the single selfish one. But it does mean you can go back to a normal life, dying decades later surrounded by your loved ones. Incarnadine Class Breakdown Next: The Junk Mage, Vermissian Knight and Witch
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Apr 15, 2020 09:14
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The Lone Badger posted:Can they self-buff? Changelings? Yeah. They can get extra health levels via one power and extra actions via another. There might be some more in C20.
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Apr 15, 2020 15:43
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: The Thousand Thrones Champion of Karl So, our heroes are at a major crossroad. Even if they wanted to stop the campaign at this point, Johan and Sif are currently enamored with a 9 year old boy. Sif calls him Better Sigmar to the annoyance of basically everyone in the Crusade. Things are not helped by the fact that the boy presented her with a nice silver ring with a topaz comet on it as thanks for slaying a terrible vampire to save his life. It's not an arm ring, but he's not Norse, so he probably couldn't know that was the fashion; she's still seized on the fact that he is a ring-giver and rewarded her with jewelry she can show off for slaying a mighty foe. Even without the mind-whammy she might be on the kid's side now. Johan is just happy to be appreciated for once (ignoring that the party has always appreciated Johan) and is trying to angle to become the Child's chef. He doesn't have one, and Johan has so many ideas for how to help out with his old talents for cookery. You see, one of the themes of the heroes is that they're genuinely trying to engage with the adventures and accomplish goals, as much as they don't go along with a lot of the lovely stuff. So Sif having a comical rivalry with Captain Krieger in her quest to become the best Bondsman of Better Sigmar (Who has not been as lovely to the Norse as Worse Sigmar) or Johan trying to become the Child's personal chef, or Katarine just trying to make sure the boy isn't so terrified and alone are all reasonable responses to plot developments. Syphan isn't allowed to Magical Sense around the encampment, though; if she did that she'd see Jan was a wizard and spoil the plot immediately. Oleg and Shanna are confused by their friends' weirdness, but they still have a job to do for Selena back in Marienburg and she's been a good employer. She'll even send extra money during the Altdorf section! Oleg doesn't break his word and Shanna likes having a good employer. Syphan is stuck in all this because Johan is, and she's not leaving her friend behind as silly as she finds all this. She's actually a little hurt that he acts like no-one else ever appreciated him, since she certainly did; this will lead her to realize he's mind-whammied. The other crossroads is that everyone is supposed to finish their first career by now. They don't actually have enough EXP for that, so we'll say they went through a few other adventures on the way to Altdorf as Sif and Joahn tried to do some extra good on the side to get in good with the Crusade. That means a full update of where everyone is in their tracks! I'll be moving everyone to about 1500 EXP, as that should even everything out. First up, Sif Gundredsdottir, aspiring Champion of Karl quote:Name: Sif Gundredsdottir Sif has been having a weird time so far. The great glory and gold her father told her you'd find with a bunch of southron weirdos hasn't really materialized. She's killed plenty of foes, up to and including slaying a Strigoi Vampire, and taken plenty of beating, but she's really only made a little money in the affair. She likes her new friends, and they have a good working relationship; that will keep her around despite the tremendous danger and poor pay. More importantly, she's found a new devotion to Better Sigmar. It seems to amuse the boy when she calls him that, and piss off Helmut and basically everyone else in the Crusade. They mutter about Norse savages, and Helmut makes little sermons about how Karl's goodness is so strong it's obviously rescued her from Chaos and she simply needs some time to acclimate. With all the flagellants around, she's picked up the ability to wield a flail and replaced her old viking sword with a morningstar. She gave the sword to the boy, to symbolize she is now his Bondsman. Neither he nor the others really seem to understand her habits, but as she's huge and seems loyal, she seems to make him feel a little less frightened. Sif is going to be sticking with 'shield and weapon' for the most part, so picking up Flail and thus Morningstars is purely an upgrade for her. Effectively, the Morningstar is just a Hand Weapon that has Impact during the first round it's used in a fight. It's a small upgrade, but significant. If Sif's first two attacks hit like a Great Weapon she can possibly smash one or two opponents round one before staying stuck in. With her full Mail armor and her improved S and T from Veteran, she's also about as tough as a Chaos Warrior, hits harder, and has 2 attacks. Mechanically, it's hard to ask for a better frontliner unless you had a Bret going into Heroism right now. Johan Kleiner, aspiring Chef/Spy quote:Name: Johan Kleiner Johan has finally found a place where he's appreciated for his cooking and cleaning prowess as well as his abilities at adventure. Syphan has never quite understood that Johan really loved cooking, he just hated that his boss never let him do it and assigned him to cleaning the privies instead of trying to become a chef. Sure, the stuff he has to work with isn't the best, and he has to steal a fair amount of it from some of the other factions of the Crusade (which has only made him better at being an adventurer and set him further on the path of The Spy), but the Child himself likes Johan's pastries and meat pies. So not only is he hailed as a hero for helping to save the boy from a vampire lord, he's cooking for the inner circle and actually getting to do one of the things he loves. Things are looking up for Johan. Unless he realizes he's been mind-whammied. Then he might be a bit cross. Spy is a huge upgrade for Johan. Johan was useful as a Servant (or would be if the adventure ever gave him stuff to do like sneaking into parties, but you know) but now he's an actual Spy. Combined with Servant giving him Dodge and this class giving him +1 Attacks (and some pretty good WS, eventually; +15 during Spy) and while he's no Sif, he can hold his own with his cleaver and shield well enough to actually fight as something approaching a frontliner. Spy also fills in his ability to do disguise, stealth, and trickery. You would think these would be extremely useful for intriguing during these adventures, but they rarely come up. In a normal campaign that isn't so badly written, Johan would be awesome. As it is he'll still be good enough and a good secondary warrior. And the guy can still cook! Plus the huge WP from Spy (He eventually gets +35!) will make him completely unflappable by crazy horror poo poo. Syphan of Naggarythe (Naggarond), Champion of Light (She named herself) quote:Name: Syphan of Naggarythe (Naggarond) Syphan has finally done it! She's mastered a Lore of Magic and completed her minor magic apprenticeship! No-one in Ulthuan or Naggarond would agree, but she doesn't know that. Since she's clearly completely mastered the Wind of Hysh outside of maybe a few spells that will take more practice, she's decided to turn her (laser) eyes in other directions. Syphan has a crazy plan that she can clearly start working her way towards mastering High Magic already. This is not going to happen, but will lead to hilarious consequences as she tries. Now that she is a White Wizard, she's shifted her wardrobe to flowing white gossamer robes that get dirty at an astonishing pace and end up greyish-black, but she still acts as if she's a mighty holy wizard despite being no better than a human journeyman. She wanders the camp of the Child, frightening others by being an elf, and terrifying them by being a wizard when she tries to offer her healing and wise counsel. She's just so excited to have actually touched a Wind of Magic properly that she's not paying proper attention to her Magical Senses, which should be telling her the camp is filthy with Nurglites. She's almost in a good enough mood to ignore that her best bud Johan is more distant and unusual than ever, or that everything that's happened since she came up with the 'adventuring party' idea has been complete bullshit and almost gotten everyone killed repeatedly. Syphan is going to go in a completely hilarious direction, mechanically. She's got Light, she can do some awesome stuff with it (like no-selling ranged attacks, potentially one-shotting demons, healing people, shooting lasers from her eyes, generating a magic sentinel shield that blocks attacks, and blessing the team's weapons to utterly destroy demons), and now she's going to do something amazingly foolish: She's going to 200 out into Seer and then go into Vikti as she tries to learn 'high magic' (Witchcraft). This will give her some combat skills, and with her natural ability at WS and parrying and Radiant Sentinel/Shimmering Cloak she can actually handle fighting physically, but it will also let her pick up some extra spells. Like Flaming Sword or Beast Claws. Syphan is not a wise woman, but she is an extremely enthusiastic one, and building her silly build will be hilarious. Massively overestimating yourself, doing something dumb about it, and then bumbling through and pretending you meant to do everything is the tradition of her people. Shanna Applebottom, Increasingly Exasperated Hobbit quote:Name: Shanna Applebottom Shanna is not having a great adventure. Some of her friends have gone crazy out of nowhere, the Crusade is a disorganized mess of crazy giant humans who keep almost stepping on her or mistaking her for a pie seller, and it's almost impossible to keep the team's ledgers straight in these conditions. She's soldiering on, though; order will come out of chaos, no matter who she has to rob to cause it. To that end, she's ingratiating herself into the Crusade's suppliers and logistics, investigating this Jan character. He's a Marienburger merchant. She knows (and hates) Marienburger merchants. Plus, he almost certainly has the best stuff to steal when he annoys her sensibilities. To this end, she's becoming as much of a merchant as she was a thief, ironically fulfilling her original ambitions in going to Marienburg in the first place. She'll get to the bottom of everything eventually, or her name isn't Shanna Applebottom (See? Getting to bottoms is right in the name). Besides, someone has to worry about the team's money and keep everyone supplied. Gods know they could all use better armor if they're going to keep fighting goddamn vampire swarms. Since Johan can handle a lot of the stealthy stuff as well as Shanna can, and they don't really have a party face, Shanna is going into Fence. Fence is a fantastic career despite being very short and seemingly empty; it's a big round-house for criminals. It gets some much needed abilities (and a second attack, though with her relegated to ranged combat and lacking Rapid Reload, that doesn't help her sling much) and makes her a very good merchant. This is actually important, because a good merchant sells loot for a lot of money and can whack big discounts off what the team buys. She'll be working hard on upgrading everyone's gear once they get into Altdorf and have a larger market to work with. She's also still a very good thief. She'll be going into Crime Lord after Fence, both because it's funny and because it makes Shanna the party's face character. The little math-loving halfling who just wants things in their proper place is going to become a terrifying crime boss entirely because of her frustration with accounting fraud and poor logistics driving her to crime, and it's that kind of silliness that helps keep me writing when I run into yet another pile of railroaded trash. Oleg Balinson, Dwarven Olympic Sprinter quote:Name: Oleg Balinson Oleg has slowly realized his friends need a shield as much as they need eyes and ears, in more ways than one. Watching Sif fall under the Child's influence has made him determined to make himself able to defend his comrades in case she's compromised; he needs to have a chance of beating her if she turns on the others because of this strange magic. To that end, he's spent hours working with his shield and axe, trying to unlock the true skills of a dwarven Ranger. His efforts have born plenty of fruit. The sturdy, agile dwarven athlete and mailman has grown greatly in his martial prowess, to the point that he might actually be able to beat Sif if it came to it. He can't abide the elven suggestion that they slay a human child to try to prevent him doing harm; typical wutelgi cowardice, being willing to do great evil because they're afraid of a challenge. At least his own elven comrade isn't such a coward. He'll stay by his friends, because a dawi doesn't break faith, he'll do the job he promised Selena, because again, he doesn't break faith, and he'll get them all through this alive. And find some way to save this kid from all the crazy humans around him. It's a dwarf's job to do things the right way, no matter how hard the right way might be. Oleg diverted into Shieldbreaker because it won't take him very long and fills out his warrior skills. He'll be back on the Scout track as soon as it's done. Shieldbreaker is an awesome 'second 1st tier' for a lot of classes like Tomb Robber and Rat Catcher, and it's even available for non-dwarves because dwarfs will teach tunnel fighting to allied humans or others they can trust. It's good for Oleg, too; the extra Dodge makes him much more survivable, the extra +5 Tough in addition to his Very Resilient from Runebearer pushes him to TB5, and Strike Mighty really ups his melee power. As does +1 Attacks. He'll always be more melee focused than ranged, even as a Scout; it helps him a lot to spend a few hundred EXP on a short-ish second 1st tier to fill that out. Besides, Bardin from Vermintide shows us all Dwarven Rangers need to be total badasses with a shield and axe. I also think the Crusade and his determination to do things the (hard) right way (partly to spite the lovely elves, as a dwarf should) will help his character a lot. Katarine, Aspiring Doctor quote:Name: Katarine Katarine has seen terrible things since she joined the Thousand Crowns. She's fought vampires and undead, battled terrible creatures in the sewers, and seen a great deal of cruelty outside of the cruelty of her husband. She's seen the cruelty of the people of the Crusade, beating and shrieking and stealing as soon as they think they have divine sanction. She's seen the cruelty of Lucas von Speier, and only narrowly saved his brother from his treacherous plots only to find the man was still ruined by them. She's seen the alien cruelty of the Asrai as they tried to cut down decent men and women who were just trying to survive and who had helped her and her friends greatly in battle. And the cruelty of men like Father Johannes. Sigmar holds no more allure for her, but she's felt the call of Rhya, the Mother Goddess, in seeing what all of this is doing to the poor boy at the center of it. On her journeys, she's heard of the sects of Rhya that help people like her and like him, and so she's sworn herself to Rhya's service in hopes of doing the same. Who knows where her skills as a healer and her new calling will take her? Shallya would have been the obvious choice for her, but Katarine is a little too active and willing to hit someone in the face for being a bastard. She isn't quite as focused on all-encompassing mercy, and I was originally going to put her in Initiate of Sigmar if she fell under Karl's sway, but she didn't. Considering Rhya has an actual sect of abuse councillors who help women get away from physically abusive husbands and considering Katarine is a caring woman who would want to help people like herself, Rhya is actually a perfect fit. And still fits a healer. So off she goes into the nature priestess track. It'll be a long time and I'm not sure she'll ever reach the Lore of Rhya, but combined with her medical skills the other things priests learn will still help the party quite a bit, and Katarine is kind of the 'bonus' character as it is, so she can focus primarily on RP-type advances anyway. So that's the team as they finish the first third of the story and enter the next major section. It's going to be a fun time in Altdorf (it is not), but at least they don't have to play a loving dating sim to progress. Next Time: Walking with the Crusade
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Apr 15, 2020 16:14
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wiegieman posted:That's not a point in Changeling's favor, that makes it worse. I never really said it was. The question/concept was "Are a Changeling PC's mortal friends/family/etc. safe from other Changeling's magic?" And the answer is pretty much, "No, they're not." That said, a Changeling PC's mortals are probably in a little less danger over all than those of a Werewolf, Vampire or Mage, but they're still potentially in danger. ' None of the above detracts from the idea that Changeling: The Lost is an order of magnitude better than Dreaming. In some ways, I'd kind of like to run Changeling: The Dreaming for a few episodes and then let the characters figure out that they're prisoners and puppets of some crazy-rear end True Fae inside some hosed up realm he's built that they have to escape. Basically run Changeling the Dream as a prelude to Changeling the Lost.
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Apr 16, 2020 04:12
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Dawgstar posted:Changelings? Yeah. They can get extra health levels via one power and extra actions via another. There might be some more in C20. There you go then. Guy Who Doesn't Believe In Fairies might be immune to your powers, but you get more actions than him so you win anyway.
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Apr 16, 2020 04:27
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 Since this is a supers game, combat is a frequent occurrence. Initiative is handled via cards – each hero gets one card, as do most minor villains and minion squads. Major villains can get two or more cards. The narrator gathers the cards for everyone involved in the scene, shuffles them, and deals them out in a line, and then initiative goes along the line left to right. Some team roles and powers allow the players to readjust the initiative track once it's been dealt. At the end of each round, the narrator shuffles and re-deals the initiative cards. When your card comes up, you can move and take an action. Spectaculars uses 13th Age style ranges: you can either be Up Close to something (close enough for melee attacks), Near (close enough to hit with a ranged attack, or a big weapon like a telephone pole), or Far (ranged attacks only). Moving from one range to another requires a single move action. Actions can include taking a second move, attacking with a power, or using a skill. You can attack with any power unless it specifically says you can't use it offensively, as long as you can justify it. Want to attack with Flight? Describe how you're dive-bombing the enemy. To attack, you roll against a power's rating, and if you successfully hit, the damage you do is equal to your roll, possibly modified by boons or drawbacks. Yes, that means your superpower (80% chance, remember) can do anywhere from 1 to 80 damage. Opposition comes in the form of major villains, minor villains, and minions. Major villains have multiple initiative cards, usually one per player, and 100 Resistance per initiative card, and may have several powers as well. Minor villains usually have just one power and/or attack and one initiative card, and 50 or 100 Resistance. Minions are a special case: they come in squads rated for size from 1 (a few henchmen) to 10 (hordes of flunkies), and each successful hit on a minion squad reduces its size by 1 regardless of how much damage you roll, although boons, team roles, and Archetype abilities can increase the number of minions taken out at a time. A minion squad's maximum damage is equal to its size x 10, no matter how high it rolls to attack. If you look back at the power cards from the character creation post, you'll see that most powers have special benefits and/or power stunts that can be invoked by placing Time Tokens on the power card. These can include hitting multiple targets, doing extra damage, getting an extra action, and so on. However, once a power has Time Tokens on it, it cannot be used again until all the tokens have been removed. At the start of your turn, you take one token off each of your powers that has one. Only heroes can use these benefits – villains don't get them even if they have a power drawn from the deck. This helps keep things simple for the narrator when running multiple villains. This is a fast, almost too fast, and swingy system; it's entirely possible for a lucky roll to knock a minor villain out in one hit. If you let the players just stand toe to toe and slug it out with the villains, fights can be quick and boring. But including Complications and Objectives helps make things more interesting. Besides the villains, most Spectaculars fights include a variety of Complications and Objectives that are meant to distract the heroes from just punching villain face. Maybe there's a helicopter crashing, maybe the villain has seeded the area with bombs that need to be found and removed, maybe the villain's henchmen are looting the bank vault while you fight. Each Complication or Objective has a row of boxes, usually one to three. If a player acts to take care of the Complication or Objective and makes a successful power or skill roll, one box is checked off. Once all the boxes have been checked off, the situation has been successfully resolved. Each successful roll to progress a Complication or Objective earns the player one Hero Point, and completely resolving one can provide other benefits, such as a boost to the team's Reputation. However, some Complications, such as the crashing helicopter, are Critical: they get an initiative card, and each time their card comes up, the narrator crosses off one of their boxes. If more than half of the boxes get crossed off, the Complication ends in failure: the helicopter crashes, and videos of you muffing the catch are now all over YouTube. There are also opposed Objectives, such as the example of villains looting a bank vault – for these, both sides have a success track, and the first side to fill all the boxes in theirs succeeds. The game also includes a Deck of Complications that the narrator can draw from if a player rolls too many drawbacks, or if a fight just needs something to pep it up. In between fights are what are called Interlude scenes. These are mostly handled by freeform roleplaying with the occasional power or skill roll as necessary. Each player states their goal during the Interlude: e.g. track down the villain's lair, investigate the strange doohickey they found, or work on their Aspiration or Turmoil (about which more later), and based on this the narrator creates a situation to play through. Most issues will consist of a fight or other dramatic scene, an Interlude, and then a bigger fight at the end, so it's easy to play an issue in a single session. The pattern of fight-freeform Interlude-fight shows a clear influence from Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, but that's hardly a bad thing.
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Apr 16, 2020 05:33
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones Just The Worst Okay, Chapter 4 isn't the worst. There are worse parts. Chapter 4 is the most boring. Literally nothing the PCs do during Chapter 4 has any effect on the actual plot. Any attempt at alternate actions or preventing any upcoming BS will be met by 'and then it all happens anyway'. It also features a possible death that negates Fate Points, happens entirely due to a dice roll you can't really avoid (low chance, but still), and insults your GMing if you decide that this merits giving a killed player a bonus on their new PC. Remember how dying to destroy the demonic essence in Spires got you bonus Fate and stuff on your next PC for having willingly given up your prior one to be a hero (and to apologize for how Fate didn't work on a willing self-sacrifice)? This is basically the opposite. This chapter is, no poo poo, genuinely hard to read without my eyes sliding off the page. It does also feature one of the only scenes where players just have an RP interaction with Karl, though, without any mention of murdering him, so that's nice. Also Chapter 4 basically makes no allowance for Magical Sense (the chapter would genuinely be derailed if, during the course of looking for signs of a cult in the camp, Syphan ever once said 'I'm testing Magical Sense') nor for PCs being suspicious of anything. I was genuinely a little unsure if I should heavily redact and summarize this chapter since so little actually happens, or just let everyone revel in the torrent of bullshit. Since I'm locked in my apartment due to a global pandemic and have a lot of time, I'm opting for the latter. I had to read this poo poo, you get to read my annoyance and boredom at it. I wonder if there's just something about Altdorf that makes adventure writers write really boring adventures in it? This chapter reminds me a lot of Forges of Nuln: It's an 'investigation' on a 'timetable' and the timetable will be followed no matter what you do. So the Crusade is just about to Altdorf. Our heroes get asked 'The Question' because Jan is suspicious of why they've joined the Crusade: "Why are you here?", asked by Karl, meaning anyone under his spell needs a -20 WP test to lie about it. Whatever they say, they'll still be welcomed if they seem charmed, but in our case Selena specifically hired the heroes to keep an eye on Karl and protect him from Chaos. Sif just says exactly that, that they were hired by a pious woman to protect Better Sigmar. Jan stares, Helmut notes that untruth is very difficult before the light of Sigmar, and the party is welcomed to the Crusade. I imagine Jan is a little worried about the 'protect him from Chaos' bit. We get a sidebar on Jan's motives but they're nothing about his character; he doesn't have one, he's just a lovely evil cultist who wants to do evil because, uh, evil! Par for the Chaos Course. It instead just says he's worried about the PCs and will try to frame them/implicate them in killing Captain Krieger if they're investigating Chaos. If they're here to kill Karl, he'll just let them try and get hosed up, figuring that'll be way easier. He gets this information by automatically spying on the PCs with spies who, if they spot them, no-one believes them that they're spies. There is no way to prevent Jan finding out all your motives. After your discussions, the priest Helmut quietly asks the PCs to investigate the possibility of a Chaos Cult among the Crusade. He's worried that people who have been there longer would just finger people closer to Karl than them to get closer to Karl, the heroes killed a goddamn vampire to protect Karl, and they're an unknown quantity that isn't involved in Crusade factionalism yet. The heroes already know there's Nurglite hidden in the Crusade from way back in adventure one, and regardless of enthralled or not, they enthusiastically agree because gently caress Nurgle. Next, Jan walks up to the heroes and goes 'Hey guys, I think the extremely obviously good guy mercenary captain Krieger is the Nurglite you're investigating. You should totally only look at him and not me' in the most suspicious manner possible. In an alternate universe Syphan uses Magical Sense because she's suspicious (c'mon, a Druchii being suspicious is like water being wet or bears being sleepy), realizes he's a Magus, and the party is then locked into a desperate race against time to find proof others will accept beyond the word of a single elf wizard which sounds dangerously close to being a compelling or exciting outcome. But there's no getting off this train. Asking around about Krieger (the game sort of assumes you ask about Krieger and another more stable military man, Lord Eisenbach, and not about Jan) gets lots of confirmation that he's a good commander who always made sure his soldiers got paid on time. He also goes for walks at night, because he's having trouble reconciling what's happened to his mind and so he has trouble sleeping. It's meant to look more sinister. Eisenbach is similarly lauded as a decent guy; he joined up to try to demand reparations from the Emperor for foraging in his lands during the Storm since he never received the pay for damages but got caught up in Karl's aura. He's a decent guy more interested in farming and building up the towns he owns than fighting, though his soldiers mention he's a competent commander when it comes to it. Nothing sinister about him at all (seriously, he's completely normal). In the process of gossiping and investigating, our heroes get a surprise interlude: Karl is still 9, and so he's pretty bored with the constant studying and theology lessons Helmut is trying to put him through. He slips away from his lessons to walk alongside the exciting, weird adventurers who saved him from a vampire. Like most nine year old boys, the idea of being an adventurer sounds cool as heck to him, so he has all kinds of questions about what they do. He asks them all about their deeds, whether or not the job is any fun, what the elves were like ("Are they like your elf, or are there like, more sorts of elf!?") if they've ever seen a real dragon, etc. To try to seem cool to the cool adventurers, he also puffs up a little and tells about the time he totally escaped from and/or defeated two Chaos Cultists back in Marienburg. Katarine tells him he was very brave to survive the whole thing, and Sif is amused that a southron cultist can be taken out by a nine year old boy randomly swinging a hammer once, wondering if that's a function of sad southron cults or Better Sigmar having a good arm. They tell him about Chicken Attack (embellished a little to sound more heroic), about fighting the terrible Fen Worm back in the swamps, and about the heroic battle where their elf put a beastman champion to sleep and they formed a kick circle around him (in their version, naturally, Sif beat him in a fair duel). Karl tells them it sounds awesome and that he wishes they didn't have to go to Altdorf, since he says he wants to go to Kislev. That's a weird swerve, and they ask him why. He tells them he had a vision of needing to defeat a new Chaos Incursion, but an Int-20 tells Syphan he's lying. Syphan asks him why he's so eager to go someplace dismal and cold and what the real reason is, and the boy excuses himself to get back to his lessons. Hmm, there's a certain evil witch who will also be an underdeveloped, underbaked antagonist with no actual character who lives up there. I wonder if this is foreshadowing that won't be followed up on adequately because this adventure is a stitched together nightmare of like 8 authors and Schwalb editing/co-writing everything and the people up above deciding at the last minute to add vampires to try to sell copies of Night's Dark Masters? Probably not. Still, make note that by taking him seriously and telling him about cool adventures, the PCs now count as having Befriended Karl. This is going to matter down the line. A lot. Assuming they don't murder him (they are not going to murder him). Over time, the heroes start to realize they're being watched by people with prominent boils on their lips (Per-10 tests to realize this. With 6 people rolling? Extremely likely someone succeeds). Trying to follow one of them with Johan (he is a spy) automatically gets him made, and the enemy spy (a young peasant girl) bites down on the boil and instantly dies an agonizing death, vomiting blood and pus. Well, that's certainly one way to confirm you're Nurglites while trying to deny the heroes any information. Johan is eventually allowed to follow one of them after seeing that cutscene, and it leads to the Crusade's butcher. Who is an evil cook. A nemesis worthy of Johan! Johan watches the evil butcher, realizing the man is planning to spread a terrible plague both among the Crusade and the people of Altdorf with his tainted food. Like all the Chaos villains, his writeup doesn't include any kind of 'why is he doing this'. Johan thinks quickly, and uses his Disguise Kit to affix a fake boil to his lip to mimic a Chaos Cultist. They say any attempt to get Groff to believe you're a cultist has a chance of working, after all. Normally you use Charm, but Johan is a Spy, with Disguise, and they all have a notable physical mark; it seems like a fine substitute. Besides, this is one of the only times Johan actually gets to spy on anyone. Let the poor guy have it. With a Fortune point, he gets a 03 on his Disguise check and is able to convince Groff 'the boss wants a full update on The Plan'. Groff revealing the plan right now kind of gives some stuff away early, but hey! It's not like knowing will let the PCs change anything. Groff doesn't tell Johan who Jan is, he calls him Tobias (they already knew this is the name of the Nurglite Magus), but he reveals they intend to kidnap Karl, put a magic necklace of dominion on him, make him love some guy named Ruprecht (the Chaos Sorcerer behind Tobias), and then release a plague in Altdorf. Then they'll have Karl 'cure' the plague (Ruprecht will do the curing) to prove his divinity and take over the Empire. Then Nurglites will rule everything and eventually reduce it to slime. Johan thanks Groff for the update, then returns to the protagonists and they go and inform Helmut. This gets Groff burned at the stake (Helmut believes them) and gets them 2 crowns each as a reward. Then Jan tries to have them killed. That night, as they're ignoring the Krieger subplot because they're pretty sure he's not their man (normally you find a doctored scene designed to implicate him as the cult leader) someone unstoppably slips up to their tent and throws a plague rat in. The rat is covered in fleas that attack the heroes, and you roll a d10 for each of them. On a 7, they roll Toughness or get SUPER NEIGLISH ROT, which runs the entire course of the disease in 30 minutes. Thankfully for our heroes, Sif is the only one bitten, and while she got a 98 first, she Fortuned into a 16 and resisted the disease. If you don't die of the toughness drain, the disease still likely causes several mutations using the Nurgle table in ToC, and if they're 'obvious', the character is unstoppably burned at the pyre the next day and replaced by a new PC. The book mockingly suggests giving them extra Shallya's mercy on making their new PC if you 'feel bad' because feeling bad about an unavoidable save or die horseshit trap is 'bad GMing'. There's nothing you do on this event but hope you don't get unlucky. Meanwhile, the Nurglites do the same to Krieger, regardless of if the PCs played along with implicating him. They find him and his men mutating and screaming, and being cut down by Jan's people. Krieger gets a look at Jan and yells 'You rat!' moments before he gets a knife in the throat. A sane PC party instantly accuses Jan. No-one believes them. The PCs now know Jan is Tobias, but no-one will believe them about it and they can't find any evidence, even though Helmut dislikes the man. Jan then suggests they put Karl in a coffin and sneak him into Altdorf in secret as a 'shipment of goods'. The heroes assign themselves to guard this shipment, knowing Jan is a Nurglite piece of poo poo and intending to protect Karl from him since the module won't let them expose him. Jan will then expose himself, using Nurglite magic while kidnapping Karl with no counterplay allowed or possible during the next scene at the gates of Altdorf, while an infinite number of cultists arrive until the PCs are delayed enough not to catch him. This leads us into the Altdorf section, and hoo boy you better get ready for 'We wuz too late, X is already dead!!!' and a hell of a lot of fiat escapes for enemies in the next section! And the surprise return of Lord Frederick, the character I already hated from Spires! Oh man, it's Frederick senpai! I can't loving wait! It goes without saying that negating Fate to kill off a PC with a randomized deathtrap they can't prevent or avoid is the epitome of complete and total horseshit, and Nathan Long should feel bad about himself for it. He should feel bad about himself for this whole chapter. At least Chicken Attack was a mess because of editorial oversight and all. This is just bad, bad writing from start to finish. There are 'worse' parts of this adventure, but the sheer amount of 'nothing you do matters at all, you might as well cut this entire chapter' is very, very strong here and puts it in the running for worst chapter. Next Time: Why Is Altdorf So BORING
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Apr 16, 2020 14:54
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones We wuz too late, the Vengeance already saw the Comet! Welcome to Altdorf. It's going to be a long and extremely lovely stay as the PCs chase after the open Nurglite cultist to rescue a magic child from his clutches. For the sake of not wasting too much of everyone's time, I am going to be heavily, heavily summarizing this part. There's literally nothing I can do to make it at all interesting to read, and God help you if you actually played this part of the game. I thought Chicken Attack was a poor investigative adventure; this is far, far worse. Tobias (originally Jan) stole the boy well before he actually knew how to get the magic necklace of 'make the boy do whatever my boss says'. Tobias himself and his cultists are immune to the aura of Karl because of a magic ear infection that will eventually render them all completely deaf if not cured. Our heroes actually won't be dealing with Lord Frederick, Hero of Altdorf And Best Guy Ever, because they work for Selena. This is also the last part of the adventure that ever really mentions Selena, and that is mostly to say them sending her word of what's up will take a long time. Johan dispatches one of his Homing Pigeons (they come with being a spy) to report to her that the child is probably actually super holy, some poo poo has gone down, and they're trying to rescue the boy, please send money. 'Anonymous gifts from their patron may arrive if they're low on supplies', so that's coming. Similarly, while they're busy investigating, Shanna handles some bookkeeping. She haggles around a little as best she can, both looking for hints about Tobias's location but also buying gear for the team. She ain't wasting a trip to Altdorf and a chance to upgrade equipment. She's an excellent merchant, and good with numbers, and while they're missing out on a pile of money from Frederick they sell off all the enemy Hand Weapons they've been collecting and Johannes' rings (I don't think he ever comes up again, either) at a markup, getting them about 120 more crowns. With that money, she gets to work. With an excellent Haggle roll, she manages to get some good deals on better gear for the team. By the end of her couple hour diversion for needed supplies, they've got mail armor for Oleg (bought at 30% off, so 105 crowns), a breastplate and helmet for Sif (bought at 30% off as well, for 70), and studded armor for Katarine (No success on that, paid 65 crowns to upgrade her Leather). The team's ledgers are still pretty good; they've spent 240 of the 300 or so they had, and got 2 each for killing Groff, so they're at 72 crowns in the bank. Who needs Frederick? That's more than enough for bribes and poo poo. Oleg and Sif are now even more combat ready, and everyone who might be on the front line except maybe Syphan is better than AV 1 now. Not that it will matter; there are effectively no combats in this section that change anything and multiple combats that are unwinnable 'infinite enemies spawn until you run'. Our heroes have a note Tobias dropped that is part one on the linear quest of clues to reach him. Tobias's Mag 2 rear end had an easy time in a cutscene, but if he had been in the actual combat engine he would be extremely dead. Nurgle is probably the weakest of the 4 Chaos Lores, and a Mag 2 Nurgle Magus just isn't that scary of an enemy; the team could probably have actually taken him and 10 'basic' cultists of the hand-weapon-wielding Burgher variety at once if it weren't for the cutscene zone. But now they have to hunt for him, questioning lots of side characters who give pre-recorded spiels about how some batman wannabe called the Vengeance of Sigmar is totally gonna track down that Sorcerer and kick his rear end. Tobias's note says 'Ansel in Altdorf, ask Estlemann, find necklace for ceremony'. Our heroes know what the necklace is for because they successfully spied on Groff. They know Tobias's overall plan, they know he's reporting to a guy called Ruprecht. Asking around about an 'Ansel' reveals there are a lot of Ansels. Asking around about Estlemann gets some results as soon as they ask someone who can read; guy's known as a shady bookseller who's never actually been caught with his hand in the jar by the Hunters. A Chaos cultist looking around for him's a bad sign, so the heroes get on finding Estlemann's rare books immediately. They find it on Hoffbann street, a street full of booksellers. It's also on fire. Estlemann himself crawled out of the flames, wounded but alive, and has already been taken to the Shallyan hospital nearby. A mercenary, semi-unlicenced Hunter shows up to demand that the bucket brigades stop trying to put out the fire and let as much of the neighborhood burn as possible. You're intended to eventually kill/oppose this guy during the plot anyway (The Warhammer Cops take a break from Altdorf), and he's right here with a bunch of his mook thugs stabbing innocent civilians while they try to put out a bunch of burning bookshops, so our heroes are going to short-circuit some bullshit. I mean, c'mon, it's a dude having people stabbed and shot for trying to put out a fire that's spreading to residential districts so he can watch a bookstore burn, and you're meant to fight him eventually anyhow. There is no anticipation PCs try to step in or do anything heroic here, even though they're expected to fight these guys later in the adventure. Golphus Drabben is a lovely Hunter. He's not really affiliated with the church, and he doesn't care about his duties at all; it's merely an excuse to kill people and usually get paid for it. He, personally, is a total badass of a 3rd tier (as you need to be to have the actual Witch Hunter Career) who came at it from being a Bounty Hunter and Vampire Hunter. He exists to annoy the PCs, brutalize people, possibly get taken out by a brick to the head in a comedy scene, and eventually serve as a potential major combat challenge. He also has his Witch Hunter minions, who are all just normal Bounty Hunters. "He does not believe humanity can be saved, or that his work makes the world a better place. He would have been an assassin, but prefers being on the right side of the law. He hunts witches solely because they are in season and it is sanctioned." Our heroes are just going to engage him right now, while he's busy fighting off an angry mob and murdering citizens of Altdorf. I'll be going over what's supposed to happen in encounters with him in the future, but he and his buddies are actually beatable, especially if they have something keeping them busy. Drabben is a dude in Mail with 3 attacks, 63 BS, 61 WS, a 'Superior' hand weapon that gives him +10 to hit, SB 5, TB 5, and 18 Wounds. He himself is a handful. He's got 6 minions who are 1 attack poorly equipped nerds with crossbows, hand weapons, and no parrying tool or Dodge Blow. They are pretty much fodder against a good PC team. Sif starts the fight by engaging Drabben when she sees him put a crossbow bolt into a fireman who was arguing with him. He gets a trio of bolts into her, only one of them doing anything (1 wound to her chest) because Repeater Crossbows are total poo poo. Then she's on him. The rest of the team jumps into it when they realize the fighter's started it (and honestly, they wanted to anyway; these assholes are murdering innocent people and risking the whole city block). It's a pretty bloody fight, but between Syphan's ranged AoE debuff from blinding people (and her new Damage 7 Laser Eyes spell to replace her old Damage 3 Magic Missile), Sif getting pretty lucky on her one round of Impact attacks, and the party having recently gotten their two backup fighters into 2 Attack territory, they come out of it bloody but fine. Sif's down to 4 Wounds from fighting Drabben with Syphan lasering him, Johan's at 3, Syphan's at 1 from a pair of crossbow hits, Katarine's lost 6 Wounds from a sword blow, and Oleg and Shanna are miraculously untouched, but the Hunters are all down. There being an angry mob in the process of being driven into a riot gives them cover to grab Drabben's stuff, patch themselves, and move on. Remember, you're actually meant to fight this guy eventually (it's possible to avoid, but difficult), so checking if they can take him is legit. Johan takes the Superior Sword. He needs the help. Normally, the next scene is going to the hospital to talk to Estlemann, at which point the Hunters come after him to drag him off and torture him to death, shoving any protesting Shallyan out of the way and threatening to kill them. The PCs must promise to kill Estlemann to let him escape being tortured to death to get information out of him. For the narrative, Drabben and his buddies are already dead or running off to lick their wounds, so that bit obviously doesn't happen. It doesn't add anything to the narrative except a chance the PCs get arrested by the Hunters after killing Estlemann or for being near him when the Hunters arrive to drag him off, at which point they get rescued by a mob of civilians threatening the Hunters for burning their homes. Except the civilians came from the wrong direction, and were suspiciously well armed; someone is trying to help the PCs for some reason. It's the Lahmian. Not the one they work for. A different one. She'll be our...not really there hastily inserted Vampiress for this adventure. Estlemann tells the heroes he had a special customer list. Another man came into his offices (Tobias) with some bodyguards, and started burning rare volumes until Estlemann told him about his special customers that he sold evil books to. Then they broke his legs and set his shop on fire to make it look like the Hunters did it. The Hunters showed up to be assholes completely on their own, falling into covering for the Chaos cultists. The Hunters coming for him is only there because it triggers Estlemann to break down and agree to give the PCs his key to his shop, which will lead to his special customer list. Otherwise, 'even if they torture him' he will tell them nothing more except that he knew an Ansel who was a great customer until he went to Marienburg, went crazy, and came back with a highly distinctive scar. Ansel had also copied Estlemann's special list, after forcing it from him at swordpoint, then fled. Our heroes point out they saved Estlemann's life by dealing with the Hunter assholes a few minutes ago, and Estlemann just gives them the key and passes out from the pain in our version. It changes nothing, after all; normally it's just him begging for a mercy killing and giving you the key if you offer it. Estlemann's Cache is another little sub-adventure where you sneak into his home to get his list, either fighting Drabben and his Hunters to get in or sneaking past. Again: You're pretty much meant to fight them eventually. This is one of many opportunities normally where you could just kill them, so the heroes fighting them when they did only really changes the Estlemann encounter. The other option normally is taking out the two men watching the place before they can get help, if you can't quite hack sneaking past them. If either gets away to get help, Drabben and the rest of the posse arrive and the fight gets a good bit tougher. PCs naturally normally can get past all this by going to the friend of all Warhammer adventure writers and sneaking through the sewers. Inside, they find no surviving books except a damaged Arabian bestiary (worth 10 crowns) but they do find the names of all of Estlemann's special customers pasted to the shelves holding their orders. If the heroes haven't dealt with him and exit onto the street (instead of going back out through the sewers like smarter heroes), they find Drabben waiting with ten guys for backup, and that's considerably more dangerous than 6. There would have been casualties with 4 more apprentice Hunters. The potential fight there will end with a comedy pratfall brick taking Drabben out if the PCs seem in danger, and his mob falling back to get him to help. The Lahmian's Thrall did, in fact, just brick the Hunter in the head unseen to help the PCs out. The PCs investigate the names, and find seven of the 24 people have been killed by Sigmarite Batman. It's pretty easy to make the connection to Ansel demanding the names and Sigmarite Batman killing people from that list. Other victims of Sigmarite Batman seem to be mutants trying to live normal lives, hedge wizards, etc. Somehow the man can just sense mutation, and he kills anyone who is a mutant that he can find, leaving distinctive twin-tailed comet badges made out of tin nailed to his victim's heads. The heroes aren't idiots, and so get looking for who makes the badges (this and looking for the maker of his fancy black mask are the two paths to him). Investigating the mask is the path Tobias took, and leads to another tortured victim (the mask maker) that they find dying in agony that the PCs can only mercy kill for information. Investigating the badges leads right to a 'brother Axel', a lay brother with the Sigmarites, and is a more direct and easy path to the Vengeance. This is twice that scenarios lead to someone begging the PCs for euthanasia for info with no other options. Finding Brother Axel's address is as easy as talking to the Sigmarite lay brothers' record keeper. If they somehow piss him off they can steal it from him. Our heroes are not idiots and so easily talk their way through the bureaucrat and head off to find Axel. Axel is obviously already dying a torturous death, because Tobias found him first. He had a weird mutation that let him 'smell' magic and mutation through gills under his arms. Axel is Ansel, and he obviously told Tobias everything under torture while getting brutalized, so Tobias is off to get the necklace. The necklace is a magic item Ansel got by working for Ruprecht so he could rape a girl he loved who didn't care for him. There's really no other way to phrase 'I'm going to kill some people, slip this on her neck, and use magic to force her to love me'. He had spent his entire life trying to learn magic to magically force this girl to love him. When he used the necklace, she hated him so much that she swelled up and exploded, and the mutated pus from it mutated him, too. Awesome. Fun times. He decided he'd make up for all this by using his ability to sense mutants and magic to murder mutants and hedge mages so Sigmar would take his mutation away. Didn't go well for him. Good riddance to a piece of poo poo. The bit of his journal saying all that takes a little more rigamarole to find about finding the right book in another shop, then the Lahmians steal the journal from the players. Sofia the Lahmian Thief will be showing up in adventure 5, and her mistress, Baroness Theodora Margrave (I thought Margrave was a title for HRE princes) won't really do much but will show up all hosed up in the Hellwomb later because dangit we gotta get one vampire of each flavor there. Lots of fiat poo poo happens to ensure the players arrive at Theodora's black coach chasing Sofia, and she either pays them for the journal and leaves, or sends infinite bodyguards at them until they run. If they haven't killed Drabber, he shows up again to fight them unless they make a Charm-20. If they kill him, eh. If he wins, none of them die and they get released from prison the next day; this is entirely to stop them trying to follow Theodora. After that, it's off to the Drakwald and the areas around Wulfenburg in Osterland to try to get the necklace before Tobias and rescue Karl. Tobias has long since left the city and will get the necklace before them, too, then they'll face him eventually in Chapter 5. So nothing actually happens, they just have a long runaround, the Lahmians don't really do anything (though Sofia will be back next Chapter with a huge unit of extremely dangerous and well-trained soldiers the PCs are expected to fight) and basically nothing was accomplished. There are worse chapters; next chapter has the first instance of genuinely mandatory child murder for instance. But Chapter 4 is the single most boring chapter. Absolutely nothing is accomplished. Nothing moves. Any decision or action PCs take is negated immediately. It's basically all a glorified cutscene, with the chance of dying to a spot of bad luck early and then nothing of interest for the rest of the chapter. Your villain is always mandated to be ahead of you no matter what you do (despite being incredibly obvious and suspicious), your investigation again has to follow a narrow trail of pre-scripted events, and none of it even matters. Next up comes bullshit random encounters and our first splatterhouse 'dungeon'! I'm excited. Are you excited? Next Time: The Drakwald's Knight Infestation
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Apr 16, 2020 19:03
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This adventure has a suspiciously high density of the "Hm, what if the players do [obvious solution]? Uh, well, uhhh, they can't. Because... because gently caress you." pattern.
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Apr 16, 2020 19:28
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Extreme quantities of it. After all, if they solved things, how would things continue? I apologize for the huge wall of text; Chapter 4 took me a long time to even manage a proper readthrough of because it is insanely, crazily boring. I just wanted that one out of the way so we can get to the immensely lovely chapter after. A funny thing is Ruprecht is the only Chaos Villain in the entire adventure who gets a character (even if it's fairly basic), which he gets next chapter. Except everything about his character says he would fit better as a Tzeentch worshiper. I think Nurgle was picked party to make sure there'd be enough poop and slime for Schwalb's tastes. He's a kid who was born with magic, whose newly-rich father didn't want the family shame of having a magic son. He naturally got into magic anyway, because you can't just 'stop' having magic, and he's implied to be a huge prodigy who could have done great things. Except his only outlet was dark magic, and eventually Nurgle just asked him 'hey man, you wanna turn into a giant fat slug monster bloated with poo poo?' and he was like 'DO I' for no real reason, that's just how Chaos works. Tzeentch would have worked way better! "I want to know EVERYTHING about magic!" is a Tzeentch thing! Also Tzeentch's Lore is much better than Nurgle's and would've been better for a major Sorcerer boss down the line.
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Apr 16, 2020 19:34
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Yeah I've noticed that just about every single writer (in fantasy and 40k) has no idea what to do with nurgle. Papa Nurgle is all about how despair and neglect breed terrifying things, not so much about self education in the dark arts.
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Apr 16, 2020 19:57
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The other weird thing is all the...off rules stuff in this book. Like 'Superior' weapons suddenly giving +10 to WS. They give +5 in everything else in the line. Or talking about a 'Piercing' quality on a weapon. Is that Armor Piercing, or something new? It feels like someone putting in their house rules/modifications without remembering this is an official product and so you either need to obey the normal mechanics or at least explain why/how things are different.
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Apr 16, 2020 20:04
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By popular demand posted:Yeah I've noticed that just about every single writer (in fantasy and 40k) has no idea what to do with nurgle. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of writers can't imagine someone reacting to life in the Imperium or the Old World with complete despair. That's not 'fun' to imagine yourself in and try to put your head into, like going KILL MAIM BURN.
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Apr 16, 2020 20:35
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I'd subscribe to that more if they regularly gave Chaos any kind of motivation. I'm not asking for detailed backgrounds for every villain. I'm just asking for like, quirks, things that make them stand out, maybe a little 'how did they get here'. It's astonishing how little actual presence Chaos Villains get given the amount of adventures that revolve around them. If they don't have that, at least give them a personality. Like I can be excited about the fact that my Witch Hunter has annoyed Constant Drachenfels because he's a hammy weirdo who is going to do crazy poo poo and keeps changing his backstory; I'm fine with the occasional inexplicable weirdo who is all flash and no backstory. Or an old Lord who has been in it so long they've lost any memory of how they got started. Etc etc. But the constant parade of 'this guy is just bad, he's a real bad guy, here are his mutations' gets old. Like Paths of the Damned, it is entirely possible the PCs effectively never interact with the Black Witch at all, which like with Xath, is okay because she doesn't actually have a character to interact with. She's just a powerful evil thing with a gross hell womb full of hell spiders. At least give me a Lord with some gimmicks or a memorable bit, goddamnit! Tobias is a nothing villain, Groff is just evil because evil, even Ruprecht who actually gets a backstory comes off pretty generic and forgettable. The Chaos stuff in this book focuses so much on describing their mutations and flowing pus it forgets to actually write them at all. E: Part of the reason this annoys me so much is that Chaos is the most common 'investigative' enemy (yet another lovely cult) and you know what's a critical part of investigations? Motives! Motive is a major way you figure out whodunnit! If the motive is over and over again 'I'm so crazy and goddamn evil and I don't care about anything' it takes a whole element out of solving mysteries. It isn't just that it makes flat and boring characters; it has gameplay implications since 'what does this person get out of what they're doing and/or why do they want to do it' are major ways to catch people. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 20:55
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It also neuters the diplomatic side of the picture. You can't turn them or charm them or reason with them or bargain with them or compromise with them, because, haha, they're crazy cultists with nothing to lose and no sense of self-preservation, and their only goal or desire is to murder everybody. As you say, that's fine for the occasionally wacky throwaway villain, but it's Chaos's entire schtick, top to bottom.
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Apr 16, 2020 22:25
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