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For stuff that claims you want to avoid unnecessary combat, the published adventures sure do end in combat most of the time. It's one of the reasons I pay attention to characters' combat stats as much as I do; it's just going to come up. You can be more certain of it than anything else in a published scenario. You'd think someone like Johan or Shanna would have a ton to do, but whole chapters will pass where the spy and thief are just kinda lovely second line fighters. E: Part of it is simple: If players actually used investigative or spying skills during most of these chapters, Thousand Thrones would fall apart because investigation is actually really hard to write well and their solution is always a linear trail of clues with no diversion. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 22:48
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It would have been so simple to flesh out the nurglite cult and by that provide an in for some good spying opportunities. Heck, I bet every group of mercenary murderhobos would be thrilled to save some dudes from getting too deep before burning the clubhouse down.
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Apr 16, 2020 23:19
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Night10194 posted:For stuff that claims you want to avoid unnecessary combat, the published adventures sure do end in combat most of the time. It's one of the reasons I pay attention to characters' combat stats as much as I do; it's just going to come up. You can be more certain of it than anything else in a published scenario. Have you got access to a published adventure that does investigation well, or is that a general failing of the studio? It sounds like you might need a break after this one.
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Apr 16, 2020 23:31
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I do not. Published adventures in general are one of the major failings of WHFRP2e. Terror in Talabheim and the one that game with Realm of Sorcery (about the explosion wine) are the only two I'd say are pretty good. Ashes of Middenheim is acceptable, Spires of Altdorf is boring but has some good points, everything else is terrible. When I first bought WHFRP on sale at a friend's gaming store (because I was getting into Dark Heresy and a friend played WHFB too) reading the adventures in Plundered Vaults almost put me off ever trying the game. The published adventures are absolutely the worst part of 2nd edition and make the game seem pretty miserable, apparently due to a mixture of crazy editorial dictates, GW, and the writers just generally not being as good at writing adventures as adventure hooks. Oh, most of Lure of the Liche Lord is good too, but that's because it's NOT a firm narrative and is 'here's a toolkit and all the legwork done for The Big Dungeon if you use it, have fun', which I think would've been a much stronger model for future adventures but it came out right before the edition ended with the shuttering of Black Industries. E: All this is why I originally didn't cover the published adventures too much aside from Paths of the Damned. But I'm bored and locked in my apartment thanks to the pandemic so hey, why not get mad at dumb warhams stuff and have fun. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 23:38
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 Heart: The City Beneath 06 - Classes - Junk Mage, Vermissian Knight, Witch Now into the home stretch, with what are possibly my three favourite classes. An interesting thing to note is that nobody gets Kill as an automatic skill, and I quite like this - it's easy enough for pretty much any class to pick up the skill, but there has to be a conscious decision on the player's part. After all, your class skills reflect what you're doing day-to-day, and even the Cleaver, Hound or Knight are Hunting or Delving as a day job. Pretty much no-one is a Killer by profession (even a hitman would probably have Hunt or Discern instead). The Junk Mage There are great and powerful entities out there, beyond the world that we see and feel, and the Junk Mage has learnt to tap their power; stealing or bargining for mana from alien minds. They're basically half-mad magic-junkies, scraping together spells from bits of dream, half-formed true names and theoretically thaumaturgy, riding the bleeding edge until they burn out. Very much Heart's warlock analogue, Junk Mages start with Discern and Occult (pretty much as you'd expect), and a small selection of esoteric or just plain unsubtle weaponry. Their core abilities are Ravening Knowledge - they roll with mastery to cast spells when they have four or more Mind stress, and Sacrifice - they can destroy an Occult resource to protect from spell-casting backlash. As long as they can keep themselves just unbalanced enough, they can work wonders. Minor abilities for the Junk mage play up their packrat habits, letting them fix and improve their gear (making it more dangerous to use to boot), smell magic or avoid attention. Or just carry a whole lot of random arcana;  As could be expected, they can never get Mind protection - they embrace the insanity rather than hardening themselves against it. Major abilities are all spells, invoking one of the entities the mage is bound to/stealing from; the Minor abilities associated with them tend to grant access to additional spells, or alternative uses of the major ability. Curse of the Sky Court taps into an exiled fae court of the air, throwing those nearby into an orgy of hedonism. Frenzy of the Sky Court channels their mercurial energies instead, gaining protection, but hindering actions that need concentration. Greed of the Red King invokes an ancient spirit of greed and flame, letting you smell worth and see want.  Kiss of the Drowned Queen summons the power of that ancient Eel-queen, conjuring salt water into the lungs of a target. Sanctum of the Stone Chorus opens a path to a temple of the Old Gods; imprisoned parasite-deities which can remove Echo stress (and other forms of stress with upgrades). The Zenith abilities entail making a pact with one of these entities. Summoning the Red King, and either being added to his hoard or taking his place. Becoming the advisor to the Drowned Queen; her most loyal subject until you end up mad, assassinated or taken as her latest spouse. Or opening the prison of the Stone Chorus, adding your target as another captive. You become part of the lock on the door, however. Junk Mage Class Breakdown The Vermissian Knight The Vermissian is a wonder of engineering, a public transport system designed to grant free and easy access to all parts of the Spire. But the original engineers decided to use the Heart as a source of occult power, and everything went horribly, horribly wrong. The infrastructure is home now to the deranged and the desperate; heretics and fringe historians. The Vermissian Knights are the guardians of those who live in and near the tunnels and stations - often the largest pockets of civilisation in the City Below. Wielding good steel, and armoured scavenged from feral locomotives, they are a symbol of protection and order. A tank, pretty much literally, the Vermissian Knight is probably the toughest class in terms of straight-up combat, and is pretty good at protecting the rest of the party. They start with Delve and Technology and a single core ability;  It's expensive, but makes them very versitile. A Knight's Minor Abilities tend towards protecting yourself or others and tracking and delving around obstacles. They can't get Mind protection - there's just too much wierdness that they're exposed to - but they make up for it by being able to get very good Echo, Blood and Fortune protection; they know how to handle themselves in the City Below. Major Abilities include; Aetheric Field - discharge the occult energies in your armour once per session, Dragon-Killer - you get a Knight's greatblade which excels at killing anything bigger than yourself, Overclock - you learn how to boost your armour up to and beyond its limits, Trailblazer - increase the amount of stress you inflict on a Delve (and how much it inflicts on you) by forced-marching. Also, and possibly most iconic;  When they hit their Zenith, a knight may learn the location of a unique landmark, dying tragically or ascending to a protective spirit when they reach it, take a heartseed into their armour and body, becoming an engine of destruction (who can be invoked to turn up later by the rest of the party), or learn the rite that summons the Last Train (although it will kill you to call it). Vermissian Knight Class Breakdown The Witch Deep in the City Beneath, in the ruins of a burnt-out and forgotten cathedral, is Hallow. This ramshackle town is where the Witches congregate - carries of a blood-disease that bonds them with the Heart; an occult aristocracy with notable bloodlines and lineages. The disease may eventually kill them, but in the mean time it grants uncanny powers over blood and the creatures of the Heart. Witches are hard to pin down in terms of their party role - Sorcerer might be the closest, what with the social skills and magical punch, but they're no slouch in a fight. Along with Compel and Occult, they have a pair of core abilities; Crucible let's them roll a d6 against their Echo stress - if it's less, they roll with mastery on their next action, otherwise they take that much stress, and True Form lets them revert to a vicious, bestial horror; terrifying in combat, but bad at anything else (this triggers automatically when they take Major fallout). So maybe Noble/Sorcerer + the Hulk. This is basically Spire's Blood Witch, but in their natural habitat and without the restrictions placed upon then by having to live in a 'normal' society. The Witch's Minor Abilities let them ignore fallout, expand the scope of their True Form, read emotions and fix both bodies and objects. They can't get straight Echo protection - they're too open to the energies of the Heart, although even there they can get temporary protection. In a break from form, the Witch actually has six Major Abilities to choose from; Ascendancy - add the Occult domain to the local area for a scene, Crimson Mirror - see omens in a bloody mirror, Exsanguinate - exactly as you'd expect, Familiar - gain a bonded, warped animal that can soak up stress for you, Great and Terrible - get greater control over your True Form, and;  The Zenith abilities are what happens when their status in the City Below, and their mastery of the disease reach a peak; they bond themselves to the landscape, a nightmare creature for a time before fading into a haunting echo, they ascend to dominion over the Witches of Hallow (although after a couple of sessions they'll be interred in the Red Vaults beneath), or...  Witch Class Breakdown Next: Playing and Running the game
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Apr 17, 2020 11:46
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Predatory buildings and feral locomotives? Where has this been all my life? *perfect resurrection* Oh, I cackled.
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Apr 17, 2020 13:11
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A Paladin who communes with the feral spirits of subway trains. Yeah, that's the good kind of twisted. I think I might get this game.
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Apr 17, 2020 13:50
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My question, however, is: what exactly are you supposed to do in this game?
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Apr 17, 2020 15:05
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Dive deep into a weird dungeon, hopefully find what you're looking for before you die, then die. I absolutely cannot wait for the supplements, because the core set is always their baseline stuff.
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Apr 17, 2020 15:16
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It's not grabbing me like Spire at all. A revolution against crazy oppressor elves is a way more interesting hook and by that token makes the classes in it more interesting to me.
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Apr 17, 2020 15:20
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You're playing people stupid and greedy enough to descend into Train Hell to find their thing. It's a pretty narrow focus and will understandably not grab everyone.
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Apr 17, 2020 15:44
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“Tabletop Darkest Dungeon that is also a Spire spinoff” is fun but, really, mostly makes me wish they made Heart first so Spire could be the more mechanically developed of the two, because Spire is, yeah, a far more delicious core concept and hook (Heart is clearly cool but I will probably never run it when I could be running Spire).
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Apr 17, 2020 16:59
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The thing for me is that I prefer my crazy abilities and things to be rooted in a society or wider context. Like a Midwife; they're extra cool because 'spider paladin nursery worker' is cool on its own, but also fulfills an interesting slot in a wider society and says neat stuff about the Drow and their culture. Being a Lahjan or an Idol or a Knight would mean more to me and give me more of the stuff I like to work with on a character.
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Apr 17, 2020 17:48
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Night10194 posted:The thing for me is that I prefer my crazy abilities and things to be rooted in a society or wider context. Like a Midwife; they're extra cool because 'spider paladin nursery worker' is cool on its own, but also fulfills an interesting slot in a wider society and says neat stuff about the Drow and their culture. Being a Lahjan or an Idol or a Knight would mean more to me and give me more of the stuff I like to work with on a character. 
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Apr 17, 2020 18:09
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I also prefer Heart over Spire. The flavor and presentation as a toolkit, rather than a prescribed story about insurrection, does it for me. You're ultimately playing a good version of Wickian Doomed Heroic Manchildren. I feel like a game about your life getting hosed up enough that escaping into an unreal realm of wonder and horror seems like a good idea should be a pretty easy sell in this, the forum about roleplaying games.
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Apr 17, 2020 18:39
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grassy gnoll posted:I also prefer Heart over Spire. The flavor and presentation as a toolkit, rather than a prescribed story about insurrection, does it for me. ...I don't think anyone else has expressed that they prefer Heart to Spire yet? I mean, they might, but we're mostly saying Heart is cool but not as interesting as Spire even as it's more gonzo.
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Apr 17, 2020 18:44
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grassy gnoll posted:I also prefer Heart over Spire. The flavor and presentation as a toolkit, rather than a prescribed story about insurrection, does it for me. It's a matter of taste. I don't think Heart looks bad or something; if it's what you want it looks like it'll be great. Just not as much my kind of thing.
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Apr 17, 2020 18:55
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I really like both, but I'd have a lot of trouble finding people to play either in person.
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Apr 17, 2020 19:03
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Night10194 posted:It's a matter of taste. I don't think Heart looks bad or something; if it's what you want it looks like it'll be great. Just not as much my kind of thing. Sure, and don't read my last post as an attack or anything. I like Spire quite a lot. I just thought it was a kinda funny contrast.
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Apr 17, 2020 19:27
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What people have said - the Calling is why you’re down here; past that it’s a struggle to survive and keep yourself going while you end up delving ever deeper and deeper. It’s certainly not got the broader (occasionally too broad) society of Spire, with so much going on, but mechanically it’s much better and much more focussed. Check the QuickStart adventure for an idea - it’s pretty standard “go to a place and fight off /negotiate with a powerful being”, but the flavour of it is distinctly Heart. I’ll get to the setting chapters in a bit, but it’s not wrong to say that there’s plenty for players to get themselves in even more trouble doing.
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Apr 17, 2020 19:52
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones Chapter Content Warning Chapter 5 is not going to be a nice time for anyone. I should note I probably came off as too flippant in my last update about Ansel being a sexual predator. It's just that's his entire story and it makes me angry. A guy who desperately spent years trying to find a way to become a wizard so he could force a woman who didn't care for him to love him? Who physically broke into her house to kidnap her and then try to clip a magic relic to her to force her to be 'undyingly loyal' as if he were her father (which naturally killed her in agony)? So yeah. The whole Necklace of Undying Loyalty starts out with sexual menace, the thing I would prefer writers just leave the hell out of RPGs because I've never seen one handle it well. There are lots of ways to introduce the loyalty amulet without starting at sexual menace o'clock. Sexual menace is absolutely one of the biggest warning flags of terrible 'dark fantasy'. This chapter also features one mandated child murder and one strongly suggested one, so have fun with that, too. The authors would probably defend this by saying it's 'meant to be dark'. I can write dark stories without the protagonists being forced to murder children and without touching on sexual menace, thanks. So you know what, let's start with some fun stuff first before we get into all the slime and suicide and euthanasia. Our heroes have picked up another 300 EXP, so Sif has maxed out her WS and picked up Longbow use (and a longbow) so they actually have a ranged option if need be. Veteran is a good track for becoming good at both melee and ranged. Katarine picked up a Fel advance, Heal+10 (66% Heal check with Surgery, she's a good doctor), and Outdoor Survival because she can't call herself a Rhyan without it. Oleg grabbed Shadowing, Scale Sheer Surface, and Strike to Injure and is like 1 advance off finishing Shieldbreaker. Johan picked up +10 WS and +5 Agi; he's quick and actually decent enough with a sword now. Shanna got an Attack (not that she ever wants to be in melee), +5 WS, and Gamble+10. With all the gambling minigames prior, surely there will be more (it never happens again). Syphan jumped the rails and went into Seer for 200 (she had 100 saved), and then bought Keen Senses and Luck because holy poo poo, Seer gives you those? +20% to all Per tests and +1 Fortune a day? gently caress yeah, elf wizard needs those. Syphan is basically a long-form mechanical joke about Witchcraft and alternate wizarding, and drat is she going to pay off. Especially because it's time for her to pick up something she's entitled to according to Realm of Sorcery: She's got Mag 2 and Lore of Light, she can get a Familiar! While Shanna is buying supplies for their chase through the Drakwald forest towards Ostland, Shanna accidentally gets a merchant to throw in a rare pet he's been unable to sell as a free bonus. A strange bear-like creature, with dextrous hands and a bandit mask, that he calls the Wash-Bear since she washes everything he gives her before eating it. He even throws in a bottle of 'elven tree-blood' for a crown, some kind of exotic syrup from the same land as the washbear. Syphan immediately recognizes what Shanna has bought, demanding immediate possession of the bottle of syrup and the 'raccoon', whatever one of those is. She takes the washbear off to perform some kind of elaborate magical ritual, which appears to be a dance party where she dances around with the creature and feeds her treats occasionally. By the end of it, the party has an adorable washbear with a little wizard's hat who can talk. Rose the Raccoon will be Syphan's familiar, using the Weasel/Ferret stats (it's what she rolled, I thought a raccoon would be funnier). She rolls for Rose's first Familiar Power and gets GM's choice, and I'm here to show off how nuts Familiars are so she gets Magic Power, which straight gives +1 Mag while your Familiar lives. That's right, as long as Rose is alive, Syphan is Mag 3. As if she was a whole tier of wizard higher. Rose will gain 50 EXP for every 100 Syphan does, and for 300 more can buy more abilities, or can become the smartest, buffest raccoon in the universe as time goes. Rose likes math, organization and cleaning things. She will get along well with Shanna. Rose the Raccoon will wash everything you love, as Syphan discovers when she catches her new Familiar washing her spell components. Familiars are fun as hell but basically broken in how useful they are. Other wizards can gently caress with you with your Familiar, and Witch Hunters might not like them, but who doesn't want a cute, leveling-up magic companion animal that gives you bonuses? Other notable familiars include Mssr. Fluffles the Existentialism Cat and Mielo the furiously helpful idiot osprey. Always get a Familiar as a wizard. It's one of the fun parts of playing one. So yeah, that anecdote is in there because otherwise this whole series of updates is just going to be misery and slime. Plus, Rose is a significant mechanical upgrade and part of how Syphan will get away with the stupid poo poo she's pulling advancement wise. Tiny magical raccoon done, the team descends into the Drakwald forest for a month's journey to Ansel's old village. This is potentially going to take multiple sessions for a normal group, because you check for a random encounter every day (and can take a long time if you don't hire the specific guide the book wants you to use, or he dies, or you don't make proper skill checks). 5% chance per day, +5% for however many days it's been without an encounter. 30% chance of a second encounter on days when you have one. Most of the encounters are pretty trivial; a lone troll, a small band of gobbos, some bandits equal in number to the heroes, a tree full of naked corpses, etc etc. The really dangerous one is running into a detachment of Knights Panther who assume you're cultists. Roll Charm at -10 (+20 if you have the Guide) to talk them out of a fight. If you fail, they either arrest you and delay you for 2 weeks (which depending on your GM, may fail the scenario since you're in a time sensitive chase to rescue Karl before he, himself, is mind-whammied) or you have to fight 12 Knights Panther. That is a guaranteed party wipe. The book talks about how they retreat if you kill 5, then spread rumors that you're a Chaos Warband to cause you further trouble but no, no party of 3-6 1800 EXP characters are going to beat these assholes. This is being outnumbered either 4-1 or 2-1 by guys who have WS 62 (1 point less than Sif), SB 4, TB 4, 2 attacks, Plate Armor, Warhorses (who will also attack), Lances, Shields, and Hand Weapons. They're highly trained, fast on their mounts, experiences, and enormously outnumber the party. If a fight starts with these guys, you will just die. They would potentially wipe a Tier 3 team. There is a weird tendency in all of WHFRP to seriously undervalue 'human' enemies. 'They're just people' and all. Human enemies will gently caress you up because just one of those guys is a match for the extremely great-for-her-level party fighter. If you reworked this encounter to be like, one badass knight and his men at arms running around and not being too picky about who they kill, rob, and pass off as Chaos marauders? Good. But making every one of the 12 man party an excellent knight with more EXP than the party is uh...I guess if you fail the Charm test you just get arrested and hope your GM decrees the 2 week delay doesn't matter, at which point what's the point of the encounter anyway? Just like with Ashes, these 'ordinary human' knights are absolute shitkickers while the average Chaos Demon would be a chump next to them. 10% chance you run into that encounter on every encounter roll, BTW. Our heroes go through a bunch of minor BS encounters that don't threaten them, than talk their way out of the Knight encounter because they learned you hire a guide whenever the book says you do. This would probably take hours of play and grinding, boring, samey encounters with minor enemies for most groups, so be glad you can skip it in a sentence. They arrive at the town of Kietchdorf and find it's suffering plague problems, a sure sign their enemies are nearby. You aren't intended to do anything in Kietchdorf, just rest up and head on over to Ruhrhoff, Ansel's home village. You'll accidentally solve the plague problem during the main adventure so there's no reason to investigate it, and no-one here knows much. One person tells you their son is missing and gives his description; you'll meet him in the dungeon later. The blacksmith lost his family to Beastmen, and you find their corpses on the way into town. If you try to give the guy some closure by telling him what happened, he kills himself. Nice. Thanks, game. That's about it for Kietchdorf, nothing really happens there. The team debates looking for the Nurgle cultists there, but reasons they'll have to handle it on their way back if at all; time is of the essence, and if it's their enemies they might catch and destroy them on the way anyway. Next, they arrive in Ruhrhoff, after what was probably a long series of boring sessions if you play it by the book. Finally, the splatterhouse dungeon towns can begin! The Drakwald section is as dull as Chapter 4, the only thing that stands out is how bonkers the Knights are. Next come the 'fun' parts of Chapter 5. I would like to note Chapter 5 is covered in 'By the way, this is the adventure you'll want to insert into other campaigns! It can easily be adapted to remove Thousand Thrones, it's great!' style sidebars. It is not. Next Time: Resident Evil, but lovely
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Apr 17, 2020 20:20
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I'm once again struck by how many of these encounters have only one real solution, one near-impossible combat solution and then a lot of stuff that either does nothing or TPK's you.
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Apr 17, 2020 22:39
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The actual final mandatory combat of this adventure has a simultaneous 'if players play badly or stupidly, they deserve what they get' and 'GM, arbitrarily decide how much combat they get swarmed by' sidebar. No-one designing for this book really 'gets' the game's combat system or balance. Especially considering you're meant to use a party creation system that ensures you only have a single dedicated warrior on a 5 PC team. It's why I keep pointing out if Sif can handle something. That's supposed to be her job. The others back her up, but she's meant to be the 'this character takes the lead on combat challenges' dedicated warrior. But she's constantly outnumbered, often near-matched in stats despite being well above average for a fighter and having stuff like 'has a loving positive mutation', etc. So all the others have to put resources to being able to keep up in combat rather than other parts of the game, and they still wouldn't be enough for some of the things the GM can just randomly decide happen. E: I mean, Johan was mandated by the party creation system, but what does he do that Shanna can't? He's just a shittier fighter most of the time because he's relying on the extremely strict linear adventures to give him chances to be a spy. In a freeform game with a competent GM, 'disguise guy who knows how to blend in' is golden. Here? Naw. Oleg gets more mileage out of being a good warrior than anything else because despite mandating a Ranger, they always give you guides (who you have to hire; your Ranger won't be good enough and you get hosed because 'you don't know the area'). Etc etc. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Apr 17, 2020 |
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Apr 17, 2020 22:50
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Night10194 posted:Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones Possibly this module was written by the dude from the first 15 sec of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96DQspxu0jg
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Apr 17, 2020 22:57
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The sexual menace stuff is only in the beginning and I'm fairly confident it's generic dark fantasy hackery rather than magical realm stuff. I'm much more suspicious of every female mutant being described as 'formerly pretty' or 'once beautiful' and the number of women being forced to turn into horrible monsters throughout this campaign. Oh, and all the poo poo. There's gonna be a lot of poo poo. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Apr 17, 2020 |
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Apr 17, 2020 23:10
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 Bretonnian rubbish panda.
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Apr 18, 2020 00:41
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I love Rosa. She has clearer motivations than any of the villains in this adventure.
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Apr 18, 2020 02:36
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Rose just wants to wash things, become more powerful, and magically empower her owner. Familiars are such great fun that it's sort of a shame they're so insanely mechanically good that they border on broken. The stuff she can do for Syphan ranges from 'double the targets or range or AoE of a spell in return for one of its dice contributing only to miscasts instead of casting number' to 'Just straight +2 Fortune a day' to eating enemy magic and then reflecting it back at enemies to giving Syphan +10 Int and WP (While Rose gets them too). She can also slowly be built into a surprisingly clever and dangerous combat pet or alternate scholar. Like the Witch in my current home game is slowly doing with her furiously stupid but extremely helpful Osprey. Mielo is becoming smart and it confuses him so much! They don't really fully unbalance the game or something, they're just crazy good and every ability they have rocks. Plus you get a cute magical pet. Who doesn't want that? E: Playing a wizard is just plain fun in Hams. They aren't super broken or anything, they're just quirky and weird and get cool pets and fun abilities. And Witches are great fun, too. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Apr 18, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 02:46
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There's so much fun to be had in Hams, but it seems like the GM needs to have a really thorough understanding of the system in order to let that fun come forward. And the folks who made the game did a really bad job making that clear to prospective GMs.
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Apr 18, 2020 04:26
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Just Dan Again posted:There's so much fun to be had in Hams, but it seems like the GM needs to have a really thorough understanding of the system in order to let that fun come forward. And the folks who made the game did a really bad job making that clear to prospective GMs. Hams feels like it's very much a victim of a time when RPG writing was niche enough to have some real weirdos.
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Apr 18, 2020 04:32
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wiegieman posted:Hams feels like it's very much a victim of a time when RPG writing was niche enough to have some real weirdos. How are you writing this from the future?
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Apr 18, 2020 04:58
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Just Dan Again posted:There's so much fun to be had in Hams, but it seems like the GM needs to have a really thorough understanding of the system in order to let that fun come forward. And the folks who made the game did a really bad job making that clear to prospective GMs. The main issues with Hams are severalfold: One of them is that the primary rulebook design was done by one guy, and then other people did the rest of the books, which can result in some uneven power. The Brets' Virtues, for instance, are flavorful and cool as hell but they're probably too strong. As the line goes, you get increasing amounts of 'this magic/whatever ignores armor because it feels like it should', when armor is meant to be one of the major defenses in combat; you see this especially with how utterly bullshit powerful some of the Skaven combat magic is (like the spell that does 6-15 Wounds per round for 3-4 rounds with no save, no reduction, no nothing, which will one-cast a Chaos or Vampire Lord and will scare the piss out of a Dragon, even). There's also just a weird culture of 'every check should be at -10 or -20' among the adventure writers, when that's completely opposite of the advice in the GMing section of the core book. The other issue is that mixture of editorial oversight that 'PCs can't change anything serious in the setting in the published adventures' and some of the 'culture' surrounding the setting and play means there's a lot that tells you not to have consequential adventures, that you should never get paid, etc. My group cheerfully ignores this, and we've had a great time doing it. Similarly, all the stuff where it pretends 'human' enemies aren't that dangerous is just nuts; human enemies are insanely dangerous! A Champion or whatever will gently caress you up. Even a bunch of reasonably trained soldiers like the guy they used for the Old World Bestiary as a measuring stick will gently caress up a PC party for a long time. Most PC parties don't have a full party of combatants. And nothing is more dangerous than numbers. Hams' combat engine is best suited to smaller scale combats or combats with big, seemingly extremely dangerous foes. Instead of 12 armed and trained soldiers, throw another party of colorful thugs at them (you know, other Adventurers). Have one big scary guy and then some lovely mooks the less combat capable PCs can engage. Give PCs more ways to outright avoid combats or more things for spies and social characters and scholars to do. Always be aware of how much Outnumber matters, and how much of a big deal it can be when it's on your players' side. Even if there are no official rules for it, come up with points in a fight where enemies might run, or surrender, so you don't have to chew through everyone. And even if you keep the stakes and scales lower, loving let players accomplish things! The 1e GMing advice on that is loving great and it's as old as I am: If PCs think taking risks can pay off, they'll keep taking risks and causing cool stories. Let them get there just in time to rescue the sacrifice. Let them break people out of lovely situations. Let them take out a Cult Magus or unmask a terrible conspiracy. They don't always have to succeed, but they should have a chance, so they'll keep trying. Terror in Talabheim's concern that the players will just try to run away is legitimate when other adventures are like this one. Hell, if they're playing scum and thugs, let them profit from screwing their employers (who were trying to screw them, anyway). If they want to be heroes trying their best in a lovely world, let it matter sometimes. That's all you have to do. That's the stuff my group's done, and it's why this is one of my favorite RPGs, weirdness and all. E: The other thing to remember: There's some light tactical positioning and target selection, but overall the combat engine just isn't very complicated and combat is mostly about mood, flavor, and an extended series of skill checks. That in mind, there isn't 'tactical play' you can use to even the odds outside of very basic 'we fight at a choke point' or whatever stuff. This is one reason I mention some fights being insane. If the enemy has the numbers to kick your rear end, they're going to kick your rear end most likely. There's not a lot of 'being clever' you can really do to even the odds with dangerous enemies within the bounds of the normal combat engine besides stuff like trying to surprise people. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Apr 18, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 05:05
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Ithle01 posted:How are you writing this from the future? It's 2070 and Earth is dead but by god RPG writing doesn't have a single weird fetish so the sum total of human culture was worth it.
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Apr 18, 2020 05:23
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 After the first issue is completed, the players are encouraged to write down an Aspiration and a Turmoil for their hero. An Aspiration is an overarching goal for the character: “I want to find out what happened to my parents,” “I will never rest until I defeat <villain name>,” “I need to perfect the design for my Chronosynclastic Infundibulum.” Turmoils, meanwhile, are sources of drama: “I have to take care of my sick old aunt,” “My snoopy coworker keeps trying to figure out my secret identity,” “Can a being of living electricity find love in the big city?” Creating an Aspiration and Turmoil for your character earns the team one Continuity Token. Continuity Tokens are kept in a pool for the team. They can be spent to either create a back issue (declare that your character has faced this particular enemy or situation before and you know something about how to handle them) or a retcon (create a new fact about a character, setting detail, or situation). Character advancement is handled simply. Each character record sheet has a track:  The character marks off a box on the track each time they either complete an issue or successfully play through an Interlude scene based on their Aspiration or Turmoil. At four places on the track, the character earns a Story Reward, which can be used for a variety of benefits, including changing out one of their powers, adding a new skill, changing Archetypes, or gaining an in-setting benefit such as acquiring a sidekick, getting a new vehicle, becoming rich, or making an arch-enemy. There are even fourth-wall-breaking rewards, such as getting your own toy line, animated series, or solo comic. Story Rewards tend to broaden rather than heighten the character's capabilities; the basic statistics stay the same, and you can never acquire more than three powers. That means even an experienced hero isn't that much more powerful than a raw newbie, so you can bring a new character into an ongoing series without having to worry about keeping up. At the end of the advancement track and the fifth Story Reward, the character retires. It's up to the player what form this takes: you can just hang up the cape, step back to become a team mentor or leader of an agency, be lost in an alternate dimension, die heroically, or even switch sides to become a villain. Retiring a character gives you an origin bonus on your next character, such as getting extra Hero Points or being able to choose instead of randomly draw some of your powers. And that's the rules. The remainder of the Rules Book is a set of random origin generation tables for heroes, and advice for the narrator on how to run the game, as well as how to create your own issues and series, and some optional rules such as non-random character generation. I'm not completely sold on Spectaculars -- I like a little bit more crunch in my supers systems, although not to the point of Hero or M&M. But it's an excellent resource to have if you ever need a quick, easy change of pace for your game group, or something to run a fill-in session with very little prep and rules-learning effort. And some of the game tools, such as the Setting Book or the Deck of Complications, can be useful even for supers games using other systems. Selachian fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Apr 18, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 05:38
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So just for curiosity's sake, I imagine the reason that the familiar pets can get so powerful(aside from the mage boosts), is that like everything else, they're statted like players are, right? Is it like getting an extra starting character in the party or what sort of power level do they start at?
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Apr 18, 2020 09:52
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  Continuing our nautical chapter themes, the Nether Sea is one of the two realms of the titans who the PCs must visit in order to avert the Doom of Thylea. It is accessed via Charybdis, who much like in the mythological source material is a giant whirlpool. The one of this setting is in fact a portal kept open by two of Kentimane’s hands, and the mixing of the two oceans is what results in the whirlpool. A ship which ends up in it will sink, but instead of a watery grave will spin down to what very well looks like a subterranean ocean. The Nether Sea is in perpetual night, and has its own pseudo-sky and constellations which are mithril veins in the cavernous ceiling. The waters are highly acidic and can quickly eat through the hull of most ships (but the Ultros’ is highly resistant), and those who become submerged or drink the water end up having their very forms changed. There’s a d100 table with a list of effects, and the durations get longer the more times one is exposed to the waters; you may get lucky and turn into an elemental, treant, or merely get an increased ability score, but at worst you may turn into a statue or lighter-than-air gas. Scattered through the plane are iron prison cubes impenetrable even to the efforts of the gods, holding unknown monsters from the world’s earliest days. Massive evil-aligned whale-like things swim about and ignore the party unless attacked. These monsters have no names, for their existence is unknown to the mortal world. I actually like this touch of unknown horrors. The Nether Sea is vast, but the adventure details 7 places of note. There’s a Charybdis-clone which can shoot the Ultros back up into the air so the PCs can leave, and the River Lethe pours from a high-above tunnel in the form of a rainstorm. An island containing Lutheria’s petrified titan siblings can tell the PCs of their sister’s weaknesses, where and how to find her, and the properties of the Nether Sea as a plane of existence. The Island of the Oathbreakers is a prison managed by yugoloths and erinyes devils, and one of the prisoners can give both similar and new information as the titans. Epic Paths: One of the prison cubes has already fallen and broke apart. It once housed the Kraken, but now it’s home to Hezzebal, a former brass mount of a Dragonlord driven insane from his time in this forlorn realm. He blames the Vanished One for being left behind, and will treat the PCs as an enemy unless they magically heal his shattered mind. The fabled treasure hoard of the Dragonlords is here, and the Lost One can find one of their wish list magic items among the loot. Estor will claim the Xiphos of Slaughter as part of the oath, a cursed item which drives the user murderously insane. Which is a good deal as such a mentality is superfluous when it comes to the wicked ghost.  Prison of the Tarrasque: The only other cube the PCs can infiltrate is a mini-dungeon which houses perhaps one of the most infamous entries in the Monster Manual. An impossibly slow sand hourglass hangs above the cube, counting down to 300 years until the cubes open and the beast and rest of its kin are free to terrorize Thylea once more.  Trope Alert: Time-Sensitive Unsealed Evil: The cubes unlock early during the final chapter of the adventure path. Additionally, the overall concept of these monsters is not unlike the Old Gods of Dragon Age Origins. Said beings are dragons corrupted by Darkspawn blood who slumber deep beneath the earth and rise every few generations to make war upon the surface. Mass Effect’s Reapers are the same in that they lair in the dark reaches of space before coming to destroy galactic civilization every 50,000 years or so.The dungeon is a one-level, 12 room jaunt, and all of its inhabitants are geared towards the care and feeding of the tarrasque. Golems forged out of primordial clay act as stewards and caretakers, feeding and breeding a pair of chained purple worms for their larvae. Said grubs are thrown off a bridge into a massive chamber full of thousands of the squirming things. An ultraloth is the cube’s ‘warden,’ tasked with guarding the tarrasque as part of an oath with Lutheria. He has no love for the god and will offer to show them how to find the goddess by awakening the tarrasque which sleeps at the bottom of a deep pit in the cube. A secret he will share if the party swears an oath to kill the goddess and bring back her crystal scythe to him. Fortunately by ‘awaken’ he means merely raising it from its slumber as opposed to freeing it: the beast will angrily ram against the cube’s sides, attracting Lutheria’s attention and summoning her barge into nearby waters.  Hypnos, the Throne of Dreams: Lutheria’s residence of choice is a garden-barge towed by her enslaved sibling Talieus, who confusingly shares the same name as one of Sydon’s sons encountered in Praxys. His eyes and mouth are sewn shut by indestructible thread, but the sword Titansbane can cut through them. This frees him from service, and he gives the party a hearty thanks by leaving Lutheria’s base of operations high, dry, and immobile. The barge’s magic and floral scents create a dreamlike sensation of those who board: the PCs will lose their overall sense of time and distance. Trope Alert: Impassive Enemies: The barge’s inhabitants act irrationally and do not notice or react to fights and other disturbances outside their rooms no matter how loud things get.A fair portion of enemy monsters have deception, fey, and shapechanging themes. Jackalweres and lamia are the most common monsters and take various forms: beautiful people who attend who tempt the party with sleep-inducing drugs,* children who seem eager to show them a gallery of strange art and treasure, and drooling madmen who attack if the PCs try to steal any treasure as but a few examples. The barge’s armory is full of cursed weapons and armor forged by Sydon, their magic wrought from Lutheria’s own mind in a failed attempt to cure her insanity. The equipment causes the goddess to gain disadvantage on attack rolls and/or suffer the Confusion spell effect when she attacks those bearing such an item. Even better, the equipment will immediately be rid of their curses if this happens during combat. *they won’t kill sleeping PCs. They will bind them in the kitchen quarters to later cook them alive. Lutheria herself holds court in the very last, very large room. A group of goatlings along with a pair of lamia and satyr minstrels* are drinking and partying. The PCs are being judged by the goddess as soon as they set foot here, and if they piss her off too much she’ll abandon any attempts at mercy, negotiation, or chatter and attempt to kill the party. It is possible to bargain with Lutheria and renew the Oath of Peace, although the adventure path at large leans heavily in favor of going Kratos on her rear end given that her demands are both unpalatable and create a minor plot hole: in the very next chapter, she ends up attacking Mytros despite this explicitly being forbidden, thereby making her an oathbreaker. *like satyrs, but with some bardic abilities. Editing Retcon: I made a bit of a mistake in regards to the Nether Sea chapter. Lutheria will not go on her rape and murder spree in Mytros if the PCs swore Oaths of Service to her as part of the Oath of Peace bargain. Which makes what I thought was a major plothole less of one, although there’s still the issue of what happens if she’s called out when cheating at Twenty Squares. What are the 3 things that change Lutheria’s reaction one way or the other? First, choosing to join in or refuse the attendant drunken party (which will deal psychic damage until a Wisdom save is made); laughing or not laughing, however insincerely, at Lutheria’s terrible comedy routine where she only knows jokes about torturing children; and finally, challenging her to a game of Twenty Squares in which the Three Furies will act as neutral judges. Twenty Squares is a very popular fictional board game of strategy and skill, and the boards are magically enchanted to make players honorbound to the conditions set should a player win or lose. The PCs must be the ones to request the game, and part of the game’s rules means that the challenged person sets the terms of winning/losing. Lutheria summons seven crew members along with seven of her goatlings, where the losers’ side will die at the hands of her crystal scythe. Twenty Squares has no fancy mini-game rules. It is a series of seven opposed skill checks where the first person to roll higher in four of them wins the game. Each check is a specific skill in order, with a focus on strategy-minded and social ones such as Deception, History, Insight, etc. Lutheria, being whatever the womanly equivalent of an immature manchild is, cannot stand the thought of losing and will resort to cheating by spending one of her Legendary Resistances* to automatically win a check. This is a weakness the PCs can learn on the Island of Oathbreakers. It says that the PCs can catch Lutheria cheating with a high enough Perception check, but does not explain how/if the Furies punish her if caught red-handed. Which, given that Twenty Squares’ rules has magical foundations, begs the question of to what extent cheating counts as oathbreaking. *A common 5th Edition “boss battle” ability where they can automatically succeed on a saving throw should they fail it. Renewing the Oath of Peace: The only terms Lutheria agrees to are: 1. The party as a whole must swear an indefinite Oath of Service to her where she can ask them to do anything for the rest of their lives upon pain of death (Geas). This will not be enforced until the PCs render Sydon dead or defanged of being a threat. 2. She will promise not to harm the mortal cities of Thylea, with the implication that smaller settlements will receive no such protection. 3. Lutheria’s temples will remain standing and receive worship and sacrifices. The book says that this will be a continuation of the status quo in regards to her faith and its activities. 4. As Sydon is not present, renewing the Oath here will not ward off the Lord of Storms’ wrath. But she will not aid her brother nor hinder the party in opposing him and his Order. No halfway-reasonable gaming group is going to find this satisfactory. Not only does it allow for Lutheria to make any number of demands on the PCs, it will not bring peace to Thylea. Her brother Sydon is still a threat, one which she is not obligated to commit any resources on her part in fighting. Furthermore, the promise not to attack Thylea’s cities rings hollow; even discounting the many smaller settlements, Lutheria’s cult is very much a “rot from within” type of cult and doesn't have standing armies. One could argue that individual acts of her worshipers (like the cult in Mytros) can violate this, but the mention of continuing the status quo makes it sound like the cult is going to keep being sex pests, murdering children, and transforming teenage girls into monsters (not discounting when she breaks this part of the deal in the chapter of Mytros’ invasion). Furthermore, she will not budge on any issues, no matter how much the PCs got on her good side. Compounding things, the Doomed and Haunted One’s backgrounds cannot be resolved unless the PCs kill Lutheria, and she has no desire to reverse their ill fortunes. So what if the PCs end up in combat with Lutheria? Well, it’s going to be a very difficult battle. They should be around 10th to 12th level at this point in the campaign unless they skipped most of the islands, but the goddess herself is a Challenge Rating 23 powerhouse with some impressive stats. She has advantage on saves vs all forms of magical abilities (not just spells), and her lowest saving throw is +5 Dexterity (the rest are in the double-digits). She has 3 legendary actions, and can spend 2 of them to afflict Confusion or dealing 6d6 necrotic damage to a target on a failed Wisdom or Constitution save respectively. Her offensive spells include a mixture of some debilitating options such as at-will Blight and Hideous Laughter, and 1/day Finger of Death, Irresistible Dance, and Animal Shapes among less directly offensive options. Fortunately the PCs have a few advantages. In addition to the above cursed equipment and draining her legendary saves, she will not immediately take action for 1 round and order her minions to attack the party first. Her servants all have the poisoned condition from their bacchanal and thus have disadvantage on attacks and ability/skill checks. Furthermore, a few of her spells are utility effects which won’t be of immediate use such as Pass Without Trace, Dreams (1 minute casting time), Mirage Arcana (10 minute casting time), and Project Image (which may grant her remote sensing but her Truesight makes this limited in effect). She can cast Animal Shapes which can buff the goatlings into something fiercer, although as it’s concentration that can limit her ability to drop Hideous Laughter and Irresistible Dance. Besides a natural flight speed and her 180 foot Legendary Action Confusion, she doesn’t have any good long-range means of attacking long-range or mobile attack opponents. A canny party might be able to reliably remain out of her range. Scorpion Island centaurs, the pegasus, and Hezzebal the dragon* can all make for reliable allies at this point in the campaign. *who has 3 permanent levels of exhaustion once cured (disadvantage on pretty much every d20 roll and half speed), but is still a formidable dragon. Epic Paths: Lutheria will waste an additional round of combat laughing at the Doomed One as she recalls how she made their life a living hell. In the event that the Haunted One is present, she will become fearful of what he represents and focus all of her attacks on them to the exclusion of any other threats. Much Ado About Oathbreaking: I’ve been going on in the past of how breaking an oath is a much bigger deal for the gods than mortals. And since I’ve been talking about it quite a bit, I may as well spill the beans on what happens. A deity who breaks a sworn oath dissolves out of existence, their form turning into grain-like motes before disappearing entirely. The process is not instantaneous, but it takes effect quickly and manifests in a matter of rounds. This is in fact how Lutheria meets her end at the conclusion of the Adventure Path when she goes crazy enough to try and destroy all of existence. The specifics are that she promises to help some risen empyrean former gods in destroying the PCs, but instead lets them die at the party’s hands so as to fuel a Sphere of Annihilation. Her current actions in this chapter surely beg the question of what makes the time in the Nether Sea different than in the grand finale when she goes back on her word with another group. Thoughts So Far: The Nether Sea is cool in concept and I adore its creepy Primordial Horrors of the Deep theme. The various means of finding out Lutheria’s weaknesses and follies are great as well, allowing for the party a chance at adequate preparation against what may very well be one of their most difficult fights so far in the adventure path. The chapter’s weak points revolved around Lutheria herself, be it her plot hole-inducing actions or the sheer one sided nature of her terms for renewing the Oath of Peace. It is the most transparently-unfair Deal with the Devil scenario I’ve seen in a D&D adventure, and that’s saying a lot. Even discounting the fact that it doesn’t stop Sydon, I imagine that precious few players will want to willingly bind themselves for life to a Chaotic Evil Dionysus. Although she is a literal goddess, it seems unreasonable to make her encounter so wildly out of bounds for the average party level when combat against her is such a likely scenario and all but mandatory for 2 out of the 8 Epic Paths. Join us next time as we climb Praxys, Sydon’s Tower of Power! Libertad! fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Apr 20, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 10:02
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PurpleXVI posted:So just for curiosity's sake, I imagine the reason that the familiar pets can get so powerful(aside from the mage boosts), is that like everything else, they're statted like players are, right? Is it like getting an extra starting character in the party or what sort of power level do they start at? Rose starts at 20% WS, 0% BS, 15% S, 15% T, 30% Agi, 15% Int, 20% WP, 0% Fel, with 4 Wounds, 1 Attack, Natural Weapons, Keen Senses and decent stealth. The thing is she gets 1/2 EXP every time the party does, and can buy advances from the Familiar career. She isn't that powerful for combat, etc, the main point of power is A: She can buy up a ton of Int (+50% Int and +50% WP) over time with the Familiar Career she's automatically in and a lot of knowledge skills and things to help out, B: She can still get stuff like +1 Attacks, which can be powerful if you rolled like 'Wolf' or 'Bear' or 'Warhorse' for a Familiar (Rose will never be much of a fighter and will be focusing on being smart). If your familiar is a goddamn warbear (which is 100% possible) or a warhorse, it can be really excellent as an extra combat ally. Even though a Familiar only gets up to +10 WS, +10 S, +20 T, +2 Wounds, and +1 Attacks as relates to combat, add that over a big ole bear with 33% base WS (43 isn't great but it's servicable), 2 Attacks, 20 Wounds, 52 Str, and 47 T. Now you've got a magic bear who can talk to you and also maul the average Chaos Demon. The issue being a bear is kind of difficult to bring into town. Also, mages can technically have as many Familiars as they want (it just normally takes quite a bit of time and effort to get one). They note Amber Mages will often have like, an entire pack of wolves. The Mag boost stuff doesn't stack, but a bunch of jacked up wolves who are gaining EXP when you do will give some Beastmen pause. E: Also, Familiars aren't strictly controlled. You normally roll a little for their personality if you don't have one in mind, plus how much they actually like you vs. how much they bicker adorably and have to be bribed with treats. The Familiar gets long life, greater ability, and stuff like 'can talk and wear a cute little hat' out of the bargain. The process of binding one is specifically about going out and playing with and getting to know and bonding with the creature, it isn't about enslaving them. Hence Syphan having a Raccoon Dance Party to bind Rose. This is the other reason not to risk your Familiar in combat too much, though. If they die, you take -10% to everything until you have time to mourn and get over the death of your buddy. This also happens to the Familiar if you die. They actually keep their powers, intelligence, etc, and can bond with a new wizard or keep following your buddies around to try to avenge you. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Apr 18, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 13:10
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I believe someone ran a game where the entire party were familiars out to save the day while their masters were unavailable/incapacitated.
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Apr 18, 2020 14:11
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones Evil Mansions So our heroes get to Ansel's old house in Ruhrhoff. Ruhrhoff is not in good condition. Like a lot of Ostland, it got smashed by the Chaos army that was sweeping through to lose at Middenheim. Somehow, Ansel's old home is still standing, and when the heroes go in there's some pointless searching they can do upstairs that mostly includes a '15% chance for every PC to fall through the floor for d10+1 damage' and nothing else. Going into the spooky basement finds the remnants where Ermaline (Ansel's victim) exploded, and a bloody outline of the Necklace. A successful Per test showed the heroes multiple people (not just Tobias) came in here already, so they can assume the cult has the Necklace. Awesome. The bloody mess is supposedly so bad that the adventurers all need a WP test or they run away from the basement (and into a cultist ambush, if they didn't set guards to cover them while they searched the house). I hate this kind of event; it smacks of being unable to actually write tension or horror, so they just toss in a 'roll against being SO SCARED you run away!' check. This whole adventure will be trying really hard to be a spooky, atmospheric horror adventure, and it just doesn't work. As the heroes find they're too late AGAIN (no matter how quickly they made it here) they get jumped by Eternal Malady Cultists. These will be our designated mooks for the adventure, and they're fine. WS 45, BS 35, SB 2, TB 3, have some light armor, a sword and shield, and a bow. They're all also meant to roll individually or choose specific mutations, with lots of detail lavished on how their bodies are changed, or how they explode in pus, bile, and filth when killed (has no game effect, just coats the PC who killed them in it), etc. I know I like to track lots of individual cosmetic changes and things that don't really effect their combat statline too much for my disposable mooks. Oh, also, they can randomly have Neiglish Rot, too, which is effectively a save or die since our heroes don't have a 3rd tier Shallyan. They only have to make a Touch Attack (Parry and Dodge are at -20%) to slime you and cause a Tough or get the disease which will almost certainly kill you and absolutely certainly horribly mutate you (it lasts for 4 weeks, is Tough or lose 5% to all stats every day dying at 0 Tough, and it causes an automatic mutation every week). Do not give random disposable mooks save or die moves. If you have to give them diseases (they're Nurglites), give them survivable ones! Every loving time with Schwalb, it's loving Neiglish Rot. There are other diseases, goddamnit! Anyway, as the GM for our heroes' story is not an idiot, none of the disposable mooks have the 'rarest and most powerful disease in the world' (which doesn't seem very rare since loving everything seems to have it) they have a pretty easy time with equal numbers of lovely cultists. The book says to throw as many cultists at players during this adventure as you like, and to do it 'whenever they go someplace you don't want them to' or do things you don't like. It reminds me of loving Forges and 'if the PCs are making progress, have them randomly attacked to inflict damage and slow them down because they're getting ahead of the adventure and need to get back on the railroad'. It's one thing to have ready-made mooks waiting in the wings, it's the 'if they don't play exactly how you wanted, more random combat, maybe with a save or die guy tossed in' that pisses me off. The heroes realize they're too late and head on to the Villa Hahn, near Wolfenburg, tracking their enemies and trying to catch up to Tobias before he can enslave Karl. The Villa Hahn is the original family home of Ruprecht Hahn, the Chaos Sorcerer at the heart of a lot of this mess. He's honestly more of a villain than the Black Witch, given he actually has a character (even if the players don't really interact with him outside his minions until they fight him as a sub boss in the final dungeon). His dad was a lovely petty criminal and Stevedore who showed such chutzpah in asking for his soon-to-be-wife's hand in marriage that her powerful crime boss/merchant dad agreed instead of having him whacked. Lucius and Irmella were wed, Lucius made a killing on illegal goods and got a phony title of nobility and a big family villa, and he had two kids. Erich and Ruprecht. Erich was the good son who did everything crime dad wanted, Ruprecht was highly intelligent, diffident, and grew bored quickly with his father's business lessons. He had a talent for magic, a prodigious one, but Lucius feared sending his son to Altdorf when his son hated him. He was afraid Ruprecht would try to ruin his business out of spite. Instead, Ruprecht studied on his own, fell into dark magic, and became so powerful that Nurgle himself came by and was like 'hey kid, you wanna turn into a giant bloated shitslug and vomit on everything?' and Ruprecht was like 'MAN DO I' and that's it for his character. In the hands of writers that didn't like poo poo as much, Ruprecht's backstory would have been perfect for a Tzeentch wizard, but they love poo poo, so here we are with Nurgle. But 'I wanted to learn magic, I was told to just 'stop being a mage', and so I fell in with a bad wizard crowd' is at least a backstory. Ruprecht at least made some choices that led him to where he is. That's the beginnings of a proper villain, shame there isn't anything more. Anyway, on the way to the villa they encounter a broken bridge and have to either take a day to go around (which could be disastrous depending on the GM) or they have to (you guessed it) wade through filth and test for diseases (Green Pox, which is potentially fatal but not nearly as bad as Neiglish Rot). Our heroes instead chop down a nearby tree and toss it across the thin, shallow river, and carefully balance beam across it, because they ain't playing along and they are here to solve problems. This would be a good time for a cultist attack by the book's reasoning! There is no cultist attack. The Villa is meant to introduce Ruprecht and show the characters who keeps trying to kidnap Karl. This is fine, in the hands of a good writer; a villain's old family home introducing his character as the heroes pick their way through the corrupted, dark manor house could be a cool adventure. Old writings, the nature of the corruption, the place itself, all of these can tell you a lot. But there isn't much to Ruprecht, so the house is mostly a haunted house with some gotcha traps, a lot of poo poo, and our mandatory child murder. And stuff like 'if a PC touches the water in the reflecting pool near the entrance, they get impregnated with a Nurgling and give birth to a poo poo-monster at the most socially inappropriate time' (which causes up to 3 Insanity). Our heroes are not idiots, and know that when you're in Chaos Town, you better engage with as little as possible, burn any unusual books, and just kill anything that looks odd. There's really no incentive to do anything else, so they won't be triggering a lot of these 'if you touch or investigate anything, gotcha' traps. They also find Tobia's horse and the coffin he kidnapped Karl with, empty. So Karl and Tobias are here, somewhere. The mansion itself is a big, decaying manor house covered in 'ochre oil' where everything is rotting, about what you expect for Nurgle. All the decorations and once-fine suits of armor and things inside are decayed and 'smeared with excrement'. Searching around the library and study, Shanna finally gets to pick a lock, which discovers a ledger showing the insanely illegal stuff Lucius Hahn made his living on and a note from a clerk saying Ruprecht was getting into the 'extra delicate' stuff (probably warpstone and evil books). Most of the house is fairly empty and mostly just more 'and also everything is covered in slime and maybe poo poo'. The reason this is bad is again, this is our chance to learn about Ruprecht. The house needs to have character to get across his character, the character of his father and his mother and his brother, etc etc. It doesn't. It's just more poo poo. All searching around does is uncover some threadbare clues like that ledger, or a Sigil of Flies, a magic amulet that will get the PCs into the hedge maze in the back and towards the end of the adventure. The next actual thing of interest is the kitchen, where the heroes find old bloodstains and a cleaver from where Lucius Hahn went insane and killed and ate his wife. She died so horribly that her ghost is still around, though all it can do is spook the PCs. It'll vanish when they kill Lucius, which will be soon. Lucius went insane because his son implanted a giant cockroach in his body that wears him like a meat suit and uses him to kill and eat people while feeding on him and keeping his increasingly gaunt body alive. The heroes run into this in the wine cellar, where Lucius actually tries to warn them to run, at great pain to himself from the insect punishing him for it. He tells them it's all his fault, that he failed his son, in between telling them to come closer because he can't quite resist the insect. He tells them the entire above backstory of Ruprecht Hahn. So...like, the mansion doesn't slowly tell you by environmental storytelling or something. His dad is still alive (if in hideous pain) and just tells you the contents of the backstory sidebar. Excellent storytelling! He then begs to die, and getting a look at him, uh, they really don't have another choice. He's treated like a boss fight with extra tactics like 'hitting him from behind can target the insect directly', except he has 5 wounds, the Insect has 7, and they're both pretty weak. As soon as the fight starts, Syphan hits him with her LASER EYES and just vaporizes man and bug in one Damage 7 wallop, mercifully killing them instantly. They decide this Ruprecht guy is gonna need some of the same when they catch up to him. Laser eyes are the cure for Nurglite bullshit. Upstairs, they find a crying thirteen year old girl, a giant mass of tentacles and flesh made out of two merged people, a mutilated woman's corpse, and a man holding a sword. The guy holding the sword is a random treasure hunter, 'lured' here by the little girl, who is actually trying to feed him to the Chaos Spawn, who is her parents. This is the fate of Erich Hahn, who leaves a backstory log full of 'MAN I LOVE MY WIFE AND MY DAUGHTER, SURE DO HOPE I DON'T GET FUSED INTO A CHAOS SPAWN WITH HER WHILE MY DAUGHTER BECOMES AN INSANE PLAGUE-BEARING ETERNAL CHILD' (not exactly, but about as unsubtle). The Spawn has poor stats, but it's still dangerous, can you guess why? You were right! It has loving NEIGLISH ROT, the loving disease these authors should have taken away from them while they get whapped on the nose with a rolled up newspaper like a naughty puppy. It also causes a Tough-10 or become Paralyzed and Helpless for *2d10 minutes* any time it makes a successful WS test (so even if it's parried or dodged) but it 'only' has WS 30. Does have 4 attacks, though. But it's also afraid of fire and they forgot to give it Fear itself, so when Johan lifts up the lantern it panics and freezes. The team then cuts it down. Still, it's basically a pile of 'save or die' moves. Unlikely to hit individually, but at 4 swings a turn, WS 30 is gonna 'succeed' on someone and then that Paralysis test makes them helpless which makes the next WS test succeed automatically and do +d10 damage and the loving thing still causes Neiglish Rot saves if it gets any wounds in. Save or dies aren't horror. Save or dies are just bad design. Anyway, dispatching the beast, they go to save the girl, obviously. Which is obviously a trap. She's evil, and screams 'YOU KILLED MY PARENTS' and bites Katarine for trying to help her. Can you guess what the bite automatically causes a save against? Do you have a basic sense of pattern recognition? If you try to help the girl in any way this happens, and it's loving Neiglish Rot a loving gain! Katarine makes her Save on the retest with Fortune and they naturally have to kill the child. But don't worry, she's not really a child! She's just eternally stuck as a 13 year old insane girl who feeds people to her fused parents! I'm still counting it for mandatory child murder on the principle that if you pull 'they look like a child eternally' that's what you're going for. The treasure hunter takes one look at this and books it. The heroes move on. Next up is a prayer room full of a shrine to Handrich covered in poo poo and smiley faces drawn in poo poo. Lots of poo poo in here. Nothing else. They also find Ruprecht's journal where he talks about happily imprisoning his family and torturing them all and forcing them to mutate. He also mentions how excited he is for the Storm of Chaos, but then has another entry immediately after going "OH gently caress WE LOST I GOTTA BOOK IT FOR THE WASTES". Never bet on Archy, buddy. He also has another journal confirming he learned his magic from the evil poo poo his dad smuggled. Good job, Lucius. If you'd just sent your kid to school instead of smacking him around, and hadn't been dealing in exactly the stuff that would teach him black magic, things might not have ended with everyone covered in poo poo. At least it's some character for Ruprecht. Falling because you hate your hypocritical father is something. With that, they finish the actual mansion and head out back. What awaits them there? Is it more poo poo? It's more poo poo. Next Time: Dare You Enter Nurgle's Magical Realm?
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Apr 18, 2020 14:55
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 18:49 |
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Poor Rose. This is her first adventure.
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Apr 18, 2020 16:29
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