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Joe Slowboat posted:The problem with the Ewer of Souls, btw, is that it eats the po soul and, due to this misjudgment, can’t recycle the hun soul. This isn’t a problem in Creation even though the po remains in the body, because in Creation po souls are produced anew with each reincarnation, and as the population grows more hun souls can be created as well. If this seems like an inconsistency created by shifting Autochthon from eating hun souls to eating po souls ("Why are po souls created anew whenever someone's born in Creation but not Autochthonia, also, if Autochthonia can't produce new po souls for people, what's with all the rats? They have po souls only, right?"), well, it is.
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May 31, 2020 20:51
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The last bit of Compass: Autochthonia goes into this in a bit more detail in a passage which I and, I think, most of the other writers thought was a mistake, because it basically introduces a large glowing button marked "push this to fix Autochthonia."
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May 31, 2020 20:51
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Anyway yeah the soul thing is kind of a mess, and can be instantly fixed if you just go back to "Po souls spontaneously generate with the creation of new life but Autochthon has finite hun souls and occasionally has to eat them," but then the reader might not be able to like the Great Maker I guess!
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May 31, 2020 20:52
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I mean I think the giant soulsteel hell tank full of ghosts with no po soul is a good addition to the setting that makes it clear Autochthon didn’t understand humans as well as he thought he did on a metaphysical level. I don’t think it was really a ‘fix Autochthon’ button for it to exist. The soul situation is inconsistent but I think retaining the thing where ghosts are completely Out Of Context Problems for Autochthon and Autochthonia is good.
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May 31, 2020 20:57
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean I think the giant soulsteel hell tank full of ghosts with no po soul is a good addition to the setting that makes it clear Autochthon didn’t understand humans as well as he thought he did on a metaphysical level. I don’t think it was really a ‘fix Autochthon’ button for it to exist. The giant hell tank is pretty cool, yeah. The general assumption at the time of writing and development was that making sure all of this is 100% internally consistent wasn't that important because it's some deep in the weeds metaphysical poo poo and most readers are just gonna understand it on the level of "Something something souls shortage, got it."
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May 31, 2020 20:58
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Ithle01 posted:I think Falconier meant the higher and lower souls. Everybody has a lower soul, the Po, which is basically your id and resides in your body and also the higher soul, the Hun, which is your intellect and what most people think of as 'themselves'. When you die your hun goes on to get reincarnated or goes to the Underworld if you stay behind as a ghost. Being a ghost sucks for a lot of reason, but I'll move past that for now. Meanwhile, your Po stays in your body and, if not properly placated with funeral rites might go on a murderous rampage at night (they are 'destroyed' by sunlight). Funerals and honoring the dead are a big deal in Creation because you want to placate and honor both souls. Old battlefields and massacre sites are often haunted by hungry ghosts, i.e. Po souls that haven't been treated properly and now hunger for human flesh. Thanks man, this is exactly what I needed. megane posted:It also means that you can bring the same person back as two distinct ghosts simultaneously. This is ALSO what I needed and has a direct effect on what I'm going to discuss. Stephenls posted:Also, in the context of Exalted 2nd Edition, animals only have po souls; also also, the Exaltation seems to root itself in the po, rather than the hun as might be expected and the hungry ghost left behind by a dead Exalt can be massively bloated with power.  Holy poo poo. For what it's worth, the book is impeccably edited, I haven't spotted an error or typo yet and I'm the sort of person who immediately twigs onto those. Only question I have is (if you remember) whether Celebrants and Autocrats have separate uniforms; the book lists standard clothing for every subcaste except those two. Also, if you have any information or commentary you would like to impart on how the book came together, I would love to include it in the review.
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May 31, 2020 21:06
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Falconier111 posted:Thanks man, this is exactly what I needed. You're welcome. And yeah Stephen said a lot of stuff that helps fill in why stuff is important in Exalted. Like the great funerals that were held after the Usurpation to placate the angry hungry ghosts of the murdered elder exalts. And that the developer thought that making Authocthon only eat lower souls would make him more likeable or some poo poo. Which is dumb as gently caress because it's obvious from even a cursory reading of ghosts and the Underworld that no, you do need a po soul to be a complete human being and a lot of emotion and feeling comes from the lower soul. I don't even know why they added the soul-eating at all, the Authochtonian environment is more than capable of causing a shortage of souls over time due to rampaging gods or accidents or lost soul gems and Gremlin-syndrome corruption so this is a really weird thing to add for no reason beyond stating that god needs blood to live. Which I guess works from a techno-Aztec point of things and that is definitely a facet of Autochtonia, but eh, it feels contrived.
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May 31, 2020 21:19
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Falconier111 posted:
I'll mostly stay quiet; I'm more interested in seeing what other people have to say about the book than bloviating about my contributions to it. I will mention that I shaved off about 10k words from the draft during editing, which brought us down to our absolutely-no-going-over-this maximum 100k wordcount limit, and then wrote a glossary which we couldn't include because I couldn't shave another 900 words out to make space for it. It was going to describe sodalities as "Crosses between trade guilds and mystery cults," which I think would have been helpful? EDIT: Also, I have to admit, stuff like whether this group or that group has a separate uniform is the sort of thing I can't remember to save my life, unless it's in the context of complaining about artists not following the art notes. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 21:34 on May 31, 2020 |
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May 31, 2020 21:23
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Ithle01 posted:You're welcome. And yeah Stephen said a lot of stuff that helps fill in why stuff is important in Exalted. Like the great funerals that were held after the Usurpation to placate the angry hungry ghosts of the murdered elder exalts. And that the developer thought that making Authocthon only eat lower souls would make him more likeable or some poo poo. Which is dumb as gently caress because it's obvious from even a cursory reading of ghosts and the Underworld that no, you do need a po soul to be a complete human being and a lot of emotion and feeling comes from the lower soul. I don't even know why they added the soul-eating at all, the Authochtonian environment is more than capable of causing a shortage of souls over time due to rampaging gods or accidents or lost soul gems and Gremlin-syndrome corruption so this is a really weird thing to add for no reason beyond stating that god needs blood to live. Which I guess works from a techno-Aztec point of things and that is definitely a facet of Autochtonia, but eh, it feels contrived. The soul-eating thing has been present with Autochthonia since Autochthon's first appearance in the very early 1e supplement Time of Tumult, much predating the details of life in Autochthonia. We didn't add it; it came pre-included.
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May 31, 2020 21:25
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Stephenls posted:Anyway yeah the soul thing is kind of a mess, and can be instantly fixed if you just go back to "Po souls spontaneously generate with the creation of new life but Autochthon has finite hun souls and occasionally has to eat them," but then the reader might not be able to like the Great Maker I guess! Yeah, it kind of sucks to not have a big goal to work toward in Exalted. I mean, the very idea.
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May 31, 2020 21:34
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 Mutant 2089 Welcome to the world of TOMORROW! It’s 1989; the 80’s are about to come to an end, the internet is still in its infancy and the first attempts at genetically modifying humans have been made. The year before saw the release of Cyberpunk 2013 by R. Talsorian Games and subsequently the beginnings of a whole new genre of games. But first, a small history lesson. Just to explain some things for international readers. In the world of Swedish tabletop roleplaying games there are three major cornerstones:. Drakar Och Demoner (Dragons And Demons), Eon and Mutant. Released in 1984, the first edition of Mutant is very much inspired by Gamma World. Set hundreds of years after the big catastrophe it puts the players in the shoes of humans, mutants (including talking animals) and robots who all try to rebuild society. A rules and setting expansion, titled Mutant 2, came out in 1986. That’s how it began, after that point things get a bit weird and the franchise morphs into a weird chameleon of sorts as Target Games starts experimenting or trying to adapt the franchise into what is currently popular in order to garner sales. This invariably leads to when you ask veteran players about Mutant they will ask a lot of the time ask you which edition. People abroad will most likely know about the franchise from Mutant Year Zero after Free League Press published a translated version of it in 2014. Especially now there’s also a video game based around the setting. Some may also know about Mutant Chronicles, which in turn was built upon a completely different version of Mutant. That also takes inspiration from the edition that I’m about to cover. I could go into more detail but that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit. I could probably talk at length about what I consider to be the really big entry to the franchise, and I might do that at some point in the future. Should be mentioned that the game is so fondly remembered that a book was released in 2018 called “Mutant. Memories from the Forbidden Zone” about the game and its cultural impact. Sadly not a book I’ve had to read yet.  The tagline reads: “An action role playing game in a dark future” Anyway, the second edition of Mutant was released in 1989. Nowadays it’s unofficially branded as either New Mutant or Mutant 2089 to distinguish itself from the first edition. From henceforth in this readthrough I’ll just be calling it Mutant. It’s the first cyberpunk RPG system released in Sweden, as people might remember from my Neotech 2 review. Thematically speaking the second edition is a clear departure from its predecessor in a lot of things. It’s a game where themes of dystopia, post-apocalypse and cyberpunk are blended together into a dark, brooding world where the mega corporations have absolute power, where the world has been devastated by nuclear and biological warfare and people are forced to live in gigantic megacities. In between these lie the so-called “Twilight lands”, where everything is so radioactive and polluted that only the most persistent or foolhardy may survive there. The game takes inspiration from a number of different sources; the Judge Dredd comics, Blade Runner and William Gibson's books among others in order to create a dark and dystopian setting with all the trappings you may recognize from the setting these days. Where class divisions are as wide as the Grand Canyon and the corporations rule above while the criminal underworld rules below. Where mutants are shunned and discriminated against. Cybernetic implants are common, as well as robots of various kinds. In the midst of this post-apocalyptic cyberpunk there are adventures to be had. The game is split up into two small books, Rules and the World (which also contains DM advice), that come in at 66 and 58 pages respectively. In stark contrast to Neotech the art is rather sparse but at the same time really good. It was one of the first things I saw of the game back when I was younger. Way before I ever got the chance to actually play it.  Pretty sure I still have the tracing I did of this one from Primary school art class somewhere. I plan to at least cover the two core books. After that I have several premade adventures that I could do, as well as a couple of supplements. Next time: It’s the end of the world and I feel fine. Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 21:42 on May 31, 2020 |
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May 31, 2020 21:38
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Ithle01 posted:edit: I don't want to start poo poo, but Epicurius is wrong when he says people only have one soul. People have two. Off topic a little, but as far as I'm concerned, definitely correct me if I'm wrong, especially if it's something like getting the number of souls wrong. If I'm getting stuff wrong, i want to know!
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May 31, 2020 21:49
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Stephenls posted:The soul-eating thing has been present with Autochthonia since Autochthon's first appearance in the very early 1e supplement Time of Tumult, much predating the details of life in Autochthonia. We didn't add it; it came pre-included. My mistake, it's been a while since I read Time of Tumult and I thought that was in 1st edition Alchemicals and got carried over into 2nd.
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May 31, 2020 22:09
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Oh sweet, Mutant. I think someone, uh, tried reviewing this a bit back and dropped it. I loving LOVED the goofy-rear end art posted and am looking forward to this second shot at it.
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May 31, 2020 23:19
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh sweet, Mutant. I think someone, uh, tried reviewing this a bit back and dropped it. I loving LOVED the goofy-rear end art posted and am looking forward to this second shot at it. Well it's Mutant and at the same time it's not Mutant as some might know it. Over the years the game has seen itself being adapted into a number of different post-apocalyptic settings and ideas. This is essentially Mutant 3.0. They just chose to call it Mutant for some reason. Someday I'll hope to do cover the big game of the series that came out a couple years after Mutant Chronicles.
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May 31, 2020 23:26
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Cooked Auto posted:Over the years the game has seen itself being adapted into a number of different post-apocalyptic settings and ideas. Would you say that the original game has... mutated?
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May 31, 2020 23:28
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I think the 2e devs really wanted people to get invested in Autochthonian culture and religion and not just decide that Step #1 was for them to ditch their covenant with the Great Maker forever, and having Autochthon munch on po souls rather than hun souls in his sleep was part of that. Ultimately I think it was a good idea to make that a priority, because "gently caress this" is a very natural reaction to a lot of what goes on.
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May 31, 2020 23:29
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PurpleXVI posted:Would you say that the original game has... mutated? Heyoooo!
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May 31, 2020 23:34
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Rand Brittain posted:I think the 2e devs really wanted people to get invested in Autochthonian culture and religion and not just decide that Step #1 was for them to ditch their covenant with the Great Maker forever, and having Autochthon munch on po souls rather than hun souls in his sleep was part of that. Ultimately I think it was a good idea to make that a priority, because "gently caress this" is a very natural reaction to a lot of what goes on. It's interesting because a lot of the late 2e stuff seemed to really lean into the extremely unpleasant and frankly deeply uninteresting 'Autochthon as school shooter' model for interpreting the Great Maker joining the Rebellion by the gods against the primordial creators of the world. Though possibly that's just I was on the White Wolf/Onyx Path forums for a while there and a weird 'actually beings with many souls are inherently more morally valuable than beings with fewer souls' opinion was popular and discussed. Not like, a majority opinion, but popular enough that people really acted like it was a useful approach to talk about Autochthon 'killing the other schoolkids because they broke his ant farm' and poo poo like that. I wasn't a fan of that tendency in the discussions, as might be apparent.
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May 31, 2020 23:57
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Rand Brittain posted:I think the 2e devs really wanted people to get invested in Autochthonian culture and religion and not just decide that Step #1 was for them to ditch their covenant with the Great Maker forever, and having Autochthon munch on po souls rather than hun souls in his sleep was part of that. Ultimately I think it was a good idea to make that a priority, because "gently caress this" is a very natural reaction to a lot of what goes on. Yeah, that's one of those situations that's going to make at least an energetic minority of players orient themselves towards "this needs to be fixed/this needs to be ended" in what may not be a particularly productive way if you want to do anything else with the setting. I think that 2e suffered for many details mechanical and historical that it brought forward from 1e, and I'm happy with how willing 3e has been to just change things that worked out poorly or no longer work smoothly with the game as a whole.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:00
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Joe Slowboat posted:It's interesting because a lot of the late 2e stuff seemed to really lean into the extremely unpleasant and frankly deeply uninteresting 'Autochthon as school shooter' model for interpreting the Great Maker joining the Rebellion by the gods against the primordial creators of the world. Though possibly that's just I was on the White Wolf/Onyx Path forums for a while there and a weird 'actually beings with many souls are inherently more morally valuable than beings with fewer souls' opinion was popular and discussed. Not like, a majority opinion, but popular enough that people really acted like it was a useful approach to talk about Autochthon 'killing the other schoolkids because they broke his ant farm' and poo poo like that. So that would - by this logic - means that the Yozis are technically more morally valuable?
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Jun 1, 2020 00:10
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Dawgstar posted:So that would - by this logic - means that the Yozis are technically more morally valuable? There were a handful of regular posters on the old forum that would advance this idea, yes. The Yozis/Primordials in general were "right" and the aggrieved party in all things, because after all they created everything* and were so complex. Often simultaneously they were so complex they were more like "the weather" than a character or whatever, and so beyond moral judgement, but you still shouldn't try to control or defeat them outright because actually yes they are like characters since they have distinct personalities and desires of their own and it's bad to take away their agency. Moral arguments about Exalted were some of the worst things in the internet during 2e.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:41
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That Old Tree posted:There were a handful of regular posters on the old forum that would advance this idea, yes. The Yozis/Primordials in general were "right" and the aggrieved party in all things, because after all they created everything* and were so complex. You know, my group came up with this exact argument to be the self-evidently vicious, banal, and stupid bullshit that an alien empire in another game was using to justify enslaving and mass-ritually-slaughtering the peoples it created to maintain its standard of living. No matter what villainy we can come up with, someone's said it unironically, I suppose.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:44
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They tended to be Yozi revanchists, yes. Because Infernals was a very popular splat.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:44
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The primordials mostly used their complexity and agency and vast power in the way a child would use tweezers to slowly pull parts off of a butterfly.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:45
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You can have two seperate ghosts and the reincarnation of their celestial shard.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:47
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Since first circle demons aren't really the yozi who generated them in any real sense, well just count 2nd and 3rd circle souls. Iirc, each level had 5 to 15 branches, so let's call it 100 souls in a yozi. Since humans have 2 souls, that means a yozi is 50 times more morally important than a human (assuming you take the dumb argument at face value) Controlling, limiting or destroying the primordials saved WAY more than 50 lives per primordial. Therefore, it was still the right decision. Yozi supporters didnt even make sense if you granted their premise
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Jun 1, 2020 01:45
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Kaza42 posted:Since first circle demons aren't really the yozi who generated them in any real sense, well just count 2nd and 3rd circle souls. Iirc, each level had 5 to 15 branches, so let's call it 100 souls in a yozi. Since humans have 2 souls, that means a yozi is 50 times more morally important than a human (assuming you take the dumb argument at face value) They preferred to compare humans to animals to Yozi, where humans eat more than two animals apiece in a non-vegetarian society in their lifetimes, so in the same way, a Yozi has qualitatively higher moral worth than a human. It's bad and dumb but it's just the standard bad and dumb of an unsophisticated theodicy.
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Jun 1, 2020 01:52
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Joe Slowboat posted:They tended to be Yozi revanchists, yes. Because Infernals was a very popular splat. That's a little surprising. I remember when art for their iconics NPCs dropped nobody much liked them. I mean, one was literally 'person who bought 'sexy nun habit at Party City' in design and then their book came out and yikes. I know we'll latch onto anything sometimes but there did not appear to be much meat on them bones.
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Jun 1, 2020 01:55
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Dawgstar posted:That's a little surprising. I remember when art for their iconics NPCs dropped nobody much liked them. I mean, one was literally 'person who bought 'sexy nun habit at Party City' in design and then their book came out and yikes. I know we'll latch onto anything sometimes but there did not appear to be much meat on them bones. The mechanics were pretty exciting under the cruft and Jenna Moran wrote a really good hell that the Infernals were drawing on, so I can see why it happened. Also, they seemed to get a lot more support than other Exalted lines, other than Solars?
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Jun 1, 2020 02:12
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The Charms were supposedly very mechanically interesting and thematic. The fluff chapter... the less said the better.
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Jun 1, 2020 02:13
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Mutant 2089 Fallen on hard times. The year is 2010 and the society that the 20th century created has begun to crumble. The development is very similar all over the world. Hospitals, schools, military, police and more are privatised and exploited. The power invested in the state decreases to almost nothing and instead it’s the companies that rule. A massive divide between a small group of extremely rich company executives and a massive group of poor ‘can slaves’ is created. The poor countries of the world begin to borrow money from the companies instead of the banks, and are forced to pay with their own assets, their natural resources. Meanwhile pollution and emissions are having a noticeable effect on the natural balance. Oil and other important resources are starting to run out, and overpopulation is becoming a serious issue. Here and there awkward attempts are made to try to reverse the gloomy events that are unfolding, but without cooperation it is the corporation's hunger for profits that makes itself felt. For being a book published in 1989 it’s amazingly precogniscient on some things. When the Earth’s natural resources and capacity is no longer enough the companies escape to the ONE place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism… SPAAACEEE! A place where they can enforce their own laws and get all the resources they want for free. As a consequence the rich elite escape the misery on earth and left on terra firma are the poor, the eldery, the weak and the dissidents; about nine tenths of the population. In the wake of the space colonization things go from bad to worse. As the company's interest for earth decreases pollution and overpopulation runs rampant. Starvatition, epidemics, and nuclear accidents have become commonplace as a result. The governments completely lose control of the situation and can’t offer much help as the corporations move into space, where the money is. Under the burdens of disaster the weak are removed immediately, whilst the strongest are gathered in ruthless, lawless and increasingly desperate gangs. And the majority of those are drawn towards the relative safety of the city. The countries of the third world, who never really managed to recover, go completely bankrupt as their resources disappear into space. These countries essentially become colonies for the corporations. Several years of crop failures, caused by nuclear testing and climate change, manage to kill two thirds of Africa’s poor multi billion population. Large areas around the ‘novas’, the places where the radiation levels, caused by nuclear accidents, Radioactive waste dumping and nuclear testing is incredibly lethal are declared ‘Forbidden Zone’. Massive fences are erected around these with advanced surveillance systems. But no one lifts a finger in consideration for the poor people living inside these zones. The year is now 2030, the cities have expanded into massive swathes of urbanized land, home to 10 to 30 million people. State and government are history, The cities are ruled by the smaller corporations. Who in turn govern as skillfully maneuvered puppets by the megacorporations located in space. This upper cruft, as well as their security forces, are the ones who have ready access to the best technology that space can offer. Meanwhile, the common people have to make do with the by products. The technological standard is higher, vastly superior to anything that the 20th century has to offer. It helps make things a bit easier for a lot of people, but what is really missing is cooperation. Vigilance committees keep order in the habitation blocks, meanwhile the corporations take care of things inside the city. With the help of “InterPol’, Internal Police forces, high tech surveillance and rigid ID checks they enforce their rule and care little about anything but their own employees. Beneath the cities lie massive underground complexes that are home for the people who for various reasons don’t want to be moving around in daylight. Gangs of similarly minded individuals such as skins, loonies, mob syndicates, religious fanatics, hippies, ex-cons and others jealously guard their turf from intrusion. This is an age where AI sees the light of day, but even they never managed to compete with the human brain. Some companies equip their InterPol forces with androids. As the 2040’s roll in things suddenly change. The situation in space is not as great as people might think, underneath all the ostentatious wealth and technology is a world of locked negotiations, fierce competition and ruthlessness. Then suddenly the cup runs, and in the span of ten minutes several space stations and bases are reduced to dust. Investments worth 3000 trillion Eurodollars are suddenly gone. Earth can’t intervene because when they get the messages about the fighting it is already over. An eerie silence settles across the globe as everyone realizes what had just happened far above their heads. A total anticlimax of decades of powerlessness erupts and in the cities massive victory parades are held as the death of the megacorporations are celebrated. The 2050’s are marked by change, the cities begin to stabilize and some even talk about a new sense of optimism for the future inside them. The city corporations, previously ruled from above, form cartels that rule the cities jointly. An air of compromise permeates the cities and some joint security forces are established, such as the MetroPolis and SWAT (Special Weapon and Techniques). Cyberware and new robot technology is a direct result of the corporation's new eagerness to work together. Within a few years the technology is available for the public and these new advancements lead to a noticeable increase in both production as well as consumption. But sadly, that optimism wouldn’t last for long. The forbidden zones, previously kept under watch by the megacorporations, were now left unsupervised after their destruction. And with the prison guards gone something begins to stir, mutants. Previously ignored because of the isolation they join together in large gangs who are well armed and equipped with what left behind technology the zones have. These groups began to actively compete with the human locals about the scarce resources that are available. Those who win become even stronger than before. The term ‘Twilight lands’ is coined to describe the areas between the cities bathed in neon light and the dark zones. The sudden appearance of mutants leads to an exodus to the cities, that no longer can handle the sudden income of more people. This leads to the creation of ‘Pioneers’, heavily armed formations of people who no longer are allowed inside the protected by heavily overpopulated cities. They are exiled to the twilight lands where they live inside walled-in villages in order to protect themselves against desperate mutants. These Pioneers have a burning hatred against the city people who have turned their backs to them; the hate is mutual. The law of the fittest rules in the twilight lands, every man for themselves and power comes from the end of a barrel. Then things go very, very wrong. No one knows exactly what happened but badly coded computers combined with a number of weird decisions leads to a sudden nuclear war. Thirty percent of the cities are destroyed, whilst the relatively few inhabitants of the twilight lands survive mostly unscathe. The Catastrophe is what everyone ends up calling it. As a result the background levels are raised, which in turn leads to more mutants being born. Even inside the surviving cities the number of mutations on newborn babies start to increase. For a while there is some research being made that aims to remove them with the help of the latest medicine technology. But in the end most of these programs are shut down as there are not enough resources to handle the amount of mutants being born. The environment has finally had enough punishment and finally collapses, earthquakes and other changes alter the geography. The slow thawing of the poles lead to large parts of the world slowly but surely drowning. Even if Scandinavia is raised a few meters and is therefore spared the worst of it. (This is the most authorial bias I have seen in an RPG.) Parts of the US, South America, Great Britain, Benelux and France are completely submerged. Elsewhere experiments with gene manipulation in conclusion with increased radiation levels gives the rise of Psychic mutants. The inhabitants of the twilight lands begin to plunder the burn out remnants of the catastrophe. Mutations, coupled with desperation, makes them defy the radiation, which in turn leads to even more mutations. I’m just going to quote the first paragraph wholesale because it’s both funny and neat as an introduction: quote:“Forget the world you’re living in right now, and everything you’ve imagined about its future. This is a dark future, where cynicism, pessimism and the hard city’s view of life are the current philosophies of life. Don’t think realistically - think big! Don’t believe - state! Do not question - realize!” Just looking at that statement, and without flipping over to the world book, raises a lot of questions. Would this mean that the whole main island of Japan is populated or just that Tokyo survived and is now synonymous with the country? The former seems very weird, even for a massive sprawling city like Tokyo. And looking at some prewritten adventures it's not even true, Tokyo in Mutant Japan is called Dai-Tokyo. Towering skyscrapers with polished glass facades are dwarfed by the supercomplexes, the mega skyscrapers, hover platforms and networks of roads. Communication is mainly done through robot controlled, electrical cars all of them controlled by magnetic signals in the roadways and guiding them to where you need to go. Everywhere you look you see neon and advertising. In the sky there’s holovision; free and easily accessible by everyone. The air down between the city complexes is relatively clean but sunshine is a rarity. Fresh drinking water, real meat, milk and tobacco are all luxury goods. Going on a shopping trip is a long gone memory, everything is controlled by your home terminal. The cities are still under the rule of the corporation cartels, but they have to a large extent lost control over the overall situation. The majority of the population are born, live and die within one and the same company. They have become like small isolated units in the mass that is the city: small and alone. Competition prevents most, if not all cooperation. And SWAT forces and metropolis is the only thing keeping them together. Turf gangs, brats, form ‘states within the state’ and uphold their own order. They each keep their own blocks and live primarily off racketeering. Not even the corps InterPol or SWAT forces have any power inside the areas controlled by the gangs. Some of them are even sponsored by the corps to sabotage their competitors and their employees. The relations between the various gangs can best be described as two rotating saw blades meeting each other. Mutants now live freely inside the cities, lured there by the corps who are in need of labor. They’re accepted by the rest of the population, but that’s about it. Many of them have sought refuge in old 20th century subways where they avoid showing themselves to the public. Cybertech is commonplace for people living in the city. But only the ones under corp employ, in particular SWAT members, have access to the more sophisticated stuff. If you exclude the black market, of course. Drugs are rife. Alcohol, narcotics and stimulants are common amongst the city's stressed out inhabitants. Some corps even demand that their employers use uppers or downers in order to be maximally efficient at work. But in truth the cities make out a negligible part of the surface of earth. Out in the twilight lands both pioneers and mutants live in well defended villages and have little to no contact with the cities themselves. Any transportation between cities is done with heavily armored convoys. Mutants face even bigger discrimination here than inside the cities proper. In the outskirts of the cities one can find mins and power stations, all of them heavily fortified and usually subterranean. The old ‘Mutant danger’ still hasn’t been forgotten yet. Beyond the Pioneer villages lies nothing but wilderness, all of it marked with remnants of the Catastrophe. Gigantic craters, some up to ten miles in diameter, are a testament to the nuclear explosions that wiped out a large number of cities. The thinning of the atmosphere has caused localized climate changes, barren tundras replaced with teeming jungles among other things. Cracks, faults and volcanoes are evidence of earthquakes and other troubles deep inside the earth. The great plains between the various zones are dangerous thanks to mutated and desperate predators looking for prey. The forbidden zones, the novas after nuclear accidents, warzones where combat robots still conduct missions they received decades ago and geological danger zones are all avoided like the plague. They’re surrounded by electric fences with two purposes. One to keep whatever is inside out, and two keep plunderers out. Especially to avoid having them bringing back any incurable diseases that might fester inside. All of this serves to make the Forbidden Zones mysterious and unknown. Occasionally a group of ‘suicide plunderers’ manage to get behind the tall fences and get inside. But in the end only a fraction of these manage to return back. Either returning empty handed or loaded with rich spoils of lost technology. It’s kind of amazing that Mutant manages, in only four pages, to do ten times as much world building as it took half a book for Neotech 2 to do. Opening up with this timeline right from the beginning helps a lot in establishing the tone of the game. Once it talks about the world in 2080 you can spot all the obvious inspirations from things like Judge Dredd and Blade Runner, but even then I don’t consider that to be a bad thing. As it gives the reader some solid ground to stand on to have an idea of what the writers are striving for. Not to mention it has themes. Contrast this to the incredibly bland, cliché filled setting that N2 had on offer. Where there was a clear lack of theme to the game and the setting was a half measured effort bolted onto an ‘action based’ system there is a clear tone to Mutant’s writing. Unlike N2 it didn’t need to explicitly tell about its vision because you can clearly see it permeating into the writing of the introduction. I think the only hang up I have is the forbidden zones, they’re a staple of the franchise in many ways. But in this case having them being lostech caches seems weird when they would serve better as an expy of the Zone from Stalker. Granted the game is 18 years in the future, but at the same time the movie did come out in 79. But I imagine they didn’t want to digress too much from the core themes. Next Time: It’s all pretty Basic.
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Jun 1, 2020 02:25
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The Lone Badger posted:The Charms were supposedly very mechanically interesting and thematic. The fluff chapter... the less said the better. Yeah, I wasn't trying to bring that up, sorry. That's been gone over enough.
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Jun 1, 2020 02:31
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The Lone Badger posted:The Charms were supposedly very mechanically interesting and thematic. The fluff chapter... the less said the better. In a game as complex and rules-focused as Exalted, the fandom was relatively starved for good content between all the outright abysmal poo poo. Infernals were incredibly creative and mechanically robust, and there was enough implied or explicit non-poo poo setting information that you really could just ignore the first couple chapters and use the rest of the book as-is, a rare strength of letting a book get written by people who don't coordinate with each other.
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Jun 1, 2020 02:38
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Hey GimpInBlack, you don't have PMs but since you asked earlier, I've got a slot in the Hams game I was planning to run in XD's discord at https://discord.gg/ZPYeSB2 if you want to join us. Sorry to put this here but it's the only place I know of to contact you. It's even a Bretonnia game!
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Jun 1, 2020 03:01
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 Man, that is a boring banner, but the alternative includes Lissome Avid Engineer’s disembodied head, which just looks messy. I’ll leave her to rep Starmetals on the cover in peace. Chapter 2: First among Equals (Claslat and Yugash) No intro comic this time. I guess the two most powerful nations in Autochthonia are far too busy to bother with comics. The Octet calls Claslat the First Among Eight for a reason: it’s the largest, wealthiest, and most politically influential single nation in Autochthonia. It can be divided into two sections: the central part, situated in a massive cavern occupied by no fewer than nine cities and dozens of towns, while the outer section sprawls into what used to be the Far Reaches with two cities and as more than 30 smaller outposts. Keep in mind, with around 50 cities between the eight nations, a nation has a bit over six cities on average; Claslat has 11. Central Claslat is a relatively safe area bound by extensive infrastructure, but outer Claslat has to deal with spirits never intended to interact with humans; the locals have a lot of clerics. I said Claslat was fantasy America and I meant it, not just because of its competitive culture, but because it accidentally invented capitalism. See, a few centuries back Claslat had to deal with a series of scandals involving important figures requisitioning valuable things they really shouldn’t have had access to. The Oglotary responded in part by instituting a system where citizens could exchange glass tokens (called glots) they earned for exceptional work for various items. They thought workers would just spend them immediately or collect them to spend later, but soon enough people figured out you could exchange glots for goods and services without having to bother turning them in. In other words, they now had small, portable objects with a fixed value that could be easily exchanged. By now maybe one in 10 Claslati participate in the “glass market”, a system characterized by the sale of luxuries and services instead of basic goods (the Tripartite still provides for everyone’s fundamental needs). Every Claslati city or town has an informal market square where you can find people offering everything from slightly improved meals (the most common service) to gloves to paintings to haircuts to even a shift with a prostitute, who have developed a system of indicating who they’ll sleep with and what they offer by how they stand. The authorities put up with it because the need for glots drives productivity up; workers after glots to spend work even harder to meet production goals, and since they make goods, perform services, and sell their work during off shifts, participation in the economy even for people not seeking to pull in glots doesn’t cut into productivity. Also because the vast majority of workers still don’t participate. However, a few workers are setting themselves up as mob bosses, dominating trades that were already present but frowned upon by the authorities (like gambling and selling illegal goods), intimidating competitors, and using their wealth to buy themselves up to low-ranking Tripartite standards of living. These guys living sumptuously without contributing to society runs counter to every part of the Autochthonian ethos, but for now the practice is entirely legal (even if what their subordinates do isn’t). Quick aside on clothing. While all nations produce certain amounts of every good their citizens need, Claslat is the Octet’s major exporter of textiles and cloth products. The most common material, an analog of linen, is harvested from a kind of cables that serve as Autochthon’s nervous system (with the Divine Ministers’ explicit blessing) before slapping basic repairs on it and coming back in a few months to harvest the regrown material. They weave the flax-analog into cloth which they then make into clothing of various kinds, especially handkerchiefs, which most workers have half a dozen of. They also have shrouds in every work area with a hole cut into it approximately the size of a soulgem. They use these to cover the faces of people who die in accidents; most Claslati believe the dead can see out their soulgems before the Luminors return their soul to the reservoir and those shrouds strike the balance between letting the deceased see and preventing them having to see what their friends and coworkers look like when they look at the face of a recently dead loved one. As brutally utilitarian as Autochthonian society is, it shows the same respect for the dead all human societies do (as a side note, human bodies are recycled into food products in most cities). They also make “silk” products from the harvested bristles of spirits that clean air ducts and “cotton” products are made from the shaved manes of a certain kind of metal elemental. They always take care to leave enough bristles/mane to leave the spirits functional, and the clothing they make from them closely resembles those made of similar materials in Creation. The sidebar exists, it tells us, to show us how industries we’re familiar with can look entirely different in Autochthonia once you dig under the surface. Next up is basically a gazetteer of important towns and cities; to break the entries up I’ll switch between city writeups and the sections on other issues that follow them. Its capital, the centropolis of Harmegis, and the nation’s founder Clastlat both seem to have lacked genders when they were still active, so the latter receives the generic title of centropolis. Claslat never became a city in their own right; instead they were entombed in a special sarcophagus within their own cathedral where visitors can come and pray to Autochthon in their presence. Most of the eight heroes underwent similar treatment, but as Claslat’s nation has the largest population (and is the only one that puts its hero on display) the cathedral sees thousands of pilgrims every year. Legend has it Claslat used to occasionally speak to Theomachrats before finally falling silent a few hundred years ago; naturally some people have concluded this is because their nation has drifted from their plan/has disappointed them/etc. Harmegis, the city formerly known as Harrowing Meteoric Aegis that houses both their cathedral and the Grand Assembly, is the geographically smallest city in the country, consisting of a densely packed industrial outer ring, an administration-focused inner ring, and a spire at the center dedicated to worship. Despite its size its industries are the most efficient in Clastlat and it exports industrial goods across the country; Harmegis has decided building other cities is more important than building themselves.  Stephenls posted:Also, funfact: That picture above that's censored? The art note did not instruct the artist to draw the middle priest topless. That was a surprise when the art came back. Claslati take their food deadly seriously. The nation has both the largest workforce and the largest industrial sector in the Octet (over 90% of its population produce goods of some kind), meaning demand for food is high and the supply of potential flavorings or food types can match it. While the Harvesters gather all the raw materials just like everywhere else, a mixture of Harvester and Populat chefs use a variety of techniques to convert the basic nutrient slurry everyone lives off into breads, soups, and even a sweetened jerky equivalent. The fact that they treat the giant cafeterias they eat in as holy places is probably unrelated. Ironically, despite how much they love their fine food, most of the good stuff is either exported or sold on the glass market; most of the week they eat the same stuff you find elsewhere. Arat, formerly the Soulsteel known as Arms and Armor Triumphant, forms a counterpoint to small, devout, traditionalist Harmegis. Of all the cities in Claslat, Arat has the most active glass market, leaving its buildings coated in bright paints and the local equivalent of neon signs across every district advertising goods, services, and (in Tripartite districts) the benefits of serving the state. The cyberpunk aesthetic has gotten so omnipresent the Luminors have given up on maintaining the lighting system because all the neon lights the city for them. The “pilgrims” it attracts are as much tourists as people on a religious journey, and Arat’s 500,000 citizens both pity their provincial nature and gleefully take them for all their worth. It also has the deepest criminal underworld in the country to the point that some factories have formed street gangs that out fight regulators sent to bring them under control. Arat himself, who’s been chasing progress compulsively for thousands of years, loves the glass market and encourages it, but the city’s heart and purpose has always been the manufacture of war materials; it produces high quality weapons and armor in colossal amounts and the other nations fall over themselves to buy them whenever they can. The fact that criminals can disappear weapons from production lines and use them in gang wars does not help the city’s crime problem. Since Arat is the sort of person who ignores things the moment they get outdated, the city has an extensive Old City under the surface where Lumpen and some unfortunate Populat perform unpleasant labor above a network of abandoned tunnels and nonfunctional infrastructure. Gangs are strongest in the Old City and Regulators only occasionally visit, but at least they contribute to the city; below them live communities of tunnel folk and vagrants that live off scavenged materials. In recent years groups from the Old City have started trading surface goods (including some weapons) for rare tools abandoned in the tunnels, which has led to some of those gangs actively fighting off tunnel folk raiders or even invaders. Rumor has it one of those communities has turned to Void worship. The other two locations covered in the chapter are the Metropolis of Jandis (a minor manufacturing center that runs the country’s biggest and most famous Gladiate arena), and Cinshan, a town occupying a tunnel in the cavern wall of inner Claslat that serves as a transport hub; 182 tram lines run through the area, carrying goods and people across the nation. Given the amount of people and cargo that pass through and its many quiet warehouses, the town is the center of Claslat’s black market. As resources dwindle and the soul shortage becomes more and more visible, the nations are scrambling to find solutions that might keep their countries together. One group of Claslati Tripartite members that calls itself the Resurrectionists think they have the solution to both; they identify resource strain with rising populations and soul shortages with, well, death, so they believe by removing both they can stabilize their country. To this end they have all committed ritual suicide in such a way that their souls get trapped in their soulgems while still animating their bodies. So far the procedure has proven generally successful and they successfully pass as alive, relying on the Surgeons among their number to repair any decay or damage; they know their bodies won’t last forever, but they plan to have the Scholars build them robot bodies later on. Until they become powerful enough to take over, they use a mixture of careful recruiting and frequent murder of loose ends to keep themselves secret, since they know the Theomachracy would take one look and declare them tainted by the Void. Naturally, the Resurrectionists don’t believe they have anything to do with the Void, but the thing about that? They will. Autochthonians don’t actually know how souls work; by trapping their souls in their bodies, without they’ve turned their bodies into walking corpses possessed by both the human hun and animalistic po parts of their souls without realizing it. megane posted:It also means that you can bring the same person back as two distinct ghosts simultaneously. They are what happens when you force those two distinct ghosts together. After a while the downsides of their state will overtake their personalities; already the extreme emotional swings that characterize ghosts in Creation have begun impacting their judgment, and their po souls are growing increasingly hungry as a consequence of not being properly severed, gradually coloring their decisions and dragging them towards erratic behavior. It’s why they resort to murder so quickly; the combination of exaggerated emotion and viciousness inclines them towards violence. Soon enough they’ll degenerate until they register as Void creatures to anything that can sense them.  Next up is Yugash, a nation that defined itself by its daring or arrogance, depending on who you talk to. What it defines itself by now as its victory in the Elemental War. See, maybe a decade ago the soon-to-be-neighboring country of Sova (covered next chapter) underwent a massive resource shortage – they’d entirely run out of magical metals - and asked Yugash for help; unwilling to reveal that they, too, were undergoing a (less severe) resource shortage, the Yugashi rejected every request without providing reasons. Eventually the major Sovan city of Ixut dug too greedily and too deep in search of new metals and got itself wiped out by the Autochthonian equivalent of white blood cells. Sova went to war with Yugash immediately after, blaming them for the loss. Despite only lasting two years, this war proved the single most destructive in Autochthonian history; though the countries fought on an unprecedented scale, the real trouble came out of the resource shortage. Desperate for war material, both sides mined their surroundings way more audaciously than they’d ever risked before, provoking the wrath of the spirits and elementals in the area; by the end of the war they spent more effort fighting off spirits and keeping inter-spirit conflicts from destroying everything around them than they did fighting each other. That’s why the Yugashi city of Ot nearly destroyed itself when an experimental weapon it had used to remove an exceptionally powerful elemental from existence broke containment and nearly took the city with it. The chaos spread to Autochthon’s internal geography as well; instead of gradually pulling apart like normal, when the nations began to separate, their organ-continents started slamming into each other and causing serious earthquakes. Yugash ended the war by having its forces scavenge hundreds of soulgems from Ixut, embed them in the walls of an invasion route, force the souls in them to manifest as the last major Sovan army passed through, and while they tried to deal with the resulting horror they fell upon them and slaughtered them. It ended the war, but the war left both countries devastated with their resource shortages even more acute. It also meant the Estasian mercenaries under Sova’s employment, who’d avoided the slaughter, got to carry away news of how exactly they won – they had both violated the sanctity of the soulgem, something previously unthinkable, and won a decisive victory. The conflict had so embittered the two nations to each other that they separately decided to continue the war when they drifted back together less than a decade later (within a few months of the given start date, in fact). Yugash was left in shambles. While theoretically the victor, Yugash had exhausted its remaining reserves without gaining access to more, traumatized an entire generation, and dropped the population by almost a quarter right when soulless stillbirths started cutting it down further. And that’s not to mention entire towns ripped apart or separated from the homeland by Autochthon’s suddenly unpredictable geography; for instance, the Yugashi town of Ilyensa was trapped behind enemy lines when an earthquake knocked it out of position and its population are currently being brainwashed by Sovan authorities for use as double agents. It’s gotten to the point where the authorities have started encouraging marriages and allowing parents to help raise their children as an effort to both boost morale and increase population growth, and (in a move that will piss off any queer gamers in your group) they’ve started institutional discrimination against homosexuality to force people to have more kids. Then a miner named Sirin of Het came back from a failed expedition to the Reaches claiming Autochthon himself had guided him away from destruction, including taking him through what the book implies was the Core. He immediately started demanding the Grand Assembly fund his attempt to return to the Reaches and contact Autochthon again, responding to Tripartite attempts to quietly discourage him by cobbling together an ideology, the first in living memory to meaningfully challenge orthodoxy; he preached that Autochthon wanted his followers to survive and flourish and in order to do so they had to find somewhere else to live and worship him. The ideology grew and spread until it infiltrated the Tripartite; when the authorities finally found a team of Regulators willing to arrest him instead of defect to him like the last several had, they found him floating in the town square, covered in glowing circuitry and speaking the language spirits used. Over the enthusiastic objections of most of the Theomachracy (the rest agreed), the Grand Assembly took the unprecedented step of declaring that the Luminors had assigned Sirin (who at that point half the country saw as a prophet) to the wrong caste at birth, shifted him into the Theomachracy, granted him the permission and resources he needed to lead his expedition, and promptly killed him when they tried to switch his Populat soulgem out for an appropriate Theomachrat one. The cause of Sirin’s death remains obscure, but the rest of the country saw it as the Tripartite assassinating him because there’s no way they wouldn’t, and the resulting civil war turned every part of Yugashi civil society against itself – including Alchemical assemblies. Eventually a young Oglocrat and follower of Sirin named Unless they take that drastic step, Yugash is screwed. At this point the country’s surroundings are both depleted and hostile, making attempts to scavenge vitally necessary resources in necessary quantities futile; even if there was enough to go around, enough of the maddened elementals that gave the Elemental War its name are still wandering around and attacking passersby to make resource collection impossible. As such, every day that passes the country channels more and more resources into Project Razor as the rest of Yugash falls into ruin. And even then, not only is Project Razor running into delays as the Sodalities struggle to figure out how to make it work, but the moment they complete the Municipal Charm it goes into the cloud where other nations can access it. Claslat in particular has a plan in place to destroy Project Razor the moment it goes active and rapidly build their own equivalent. The only upside to their situation is that the country, despite losing so many young people to two separate massive wars, is actually undergoing a population boom. With Creation just over the horizon and a desperate need for warm bodies, Yugash has invited pilgrims inspired by Sirin, exiles, and tunnel folk willing to work for it to become citizens. The resulting influx of people both gives their industries the manpower they need to stay afloat and drives up their paranoia of infiltrators and spies. At this point it’s practically the only thing keeping the nation afloat.  Gazetteer! Yugash has four cities. The Metropolis of Het liked Sirin as much as anyone with Clarity 8 or above can like anyone, but she has grown politically isolated from Kerok and brought her citizens with her. She opposes him because she has solid evidence he killed Sirin and sent his soul back to the reservoir before the anyone could question it, but her citizens have embraced traditional Yugashi culture and ideology, growing suspicious of his promises of a mythical paradise and attempting to reclaim a past lost after years of war. Ot, on the other hand, has practically reconfigured himself into a support structure for Project Razor (at least its upper section, his lower section lost most of its population to the war and is now inhabited by huge numbers of un-assimilated and unassigned immigrants living in citywide shantytowns). The capital of Kadar is currently stable for the most part, despite the constant The last section of the chapter gives us a pair of characters to pepper into Yugash campaign; one is the religiously conservative Alchemical in charge of security for Project Razor who suppresses her opinion that the whole thing is heretical out of patriotism (way to get into the project), and the other is the Celebrant of Ot, a mystic fascinated with the workings of the soul who wants to learn how they work in creation, but who would really rather not do so by participating in an invasion (way to fix the Ewer). Then the chapter is done. Right now, Yugash only counts as one of the two most important nations in Autochthonia due to the prominence of Project Razor and their victory over Sova. It is two steps away from being a failed state, and the political and economic aftershocks from a botched attempt to get into creation would probably push it over the edge. It is also has probably the most dangerous military in Autochthonia outside of Estasia between all the gruesome experience they’ve gained over the last decade and the influx of desperate people used to doing anything to survive. If Project Razor goes off without a hitch, you really will get a Locust Crusade. That doesn’t mean GM’s have to let Yugash into creation, though; the endeavor is complicated enough that it might fail entirely or get preempted by some other nation’s attempt. At this point huge chunks of Autochthonia believe Creation is nothing more than a religious metaphor. You might decide they are right. Who knows. Anyway, next chapter covers the three nations most characterized by conflict; militaristic Estasia, desperate Nurad, and traumatized and revanchist Sova. E: I wish this book had more illustrations because goddamn that’s a wall of text. I think I’ll just be stealing spare ones from the last book. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Jun 1, 2020 |
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Jun 1, 2020 03:13
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That Old Tree posted:a rare strength of letting a book get written by people who don't coordinate with each other. Good heavens. Really?
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Jun 1, 2020 03:19
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Yeah the thing about the Infernals book is that after the horrid first couple of chapters the rest of the fluff, the parts that are attached to explaining the mechanics, either ignore or outright contradict the other stuff.
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Jun 1, 2020 04:10
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Dawgstar posted:Good heavens. Really? As far as I know, Exalted's management was... very hands off at the time. The kind of hands off where the freelancers writing the back half of Infernals had to independently get in contact with each other to plan it out.
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Jun 1, 2020 04:46
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Lurks With Wolves posted:As far as I know, Exalted's management was... very hands off at the time. The kind of hands off where the freelancers writing the back half of Infernals had to independently get in contact with each other to plan it out.  What the gently caress kind of way is that to run a company?
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Jun 1, 2020 04:55
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