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Yggdrasil Part Nine: Would You Do it for a Scandi-Snack? The Norse typically eat two meals a day: a hearty breakfast of bread or porridge with lots of butter and/or cheese, and an evening meal of meat, fish, and vegetables. Ale and mead are the preferred beverages, though children drink milk or whey. Water is generally only drunk while working. Food is also the centerpiece of holidays and festivities: pretty much any celebration or major event involves a feast. Providing a boatload of food to all your neighbors is a great way to both show off your wealth and generosity and also to build social cachet within the community. For inter-communal events, like the declaration of a treaty or a wedding between two noble families, both participants put on feasts, subtly trying to outdo each other, and the festivities can last up to eight days. Drinking massive amounts of alcohol is very much expected at these feasts, and entertainment comes in the form of skalds, musicians, and other performers. One of the most important yearly festivals is Jol (aka Yule) at midwinter. This festival is dedicated to Thor, who protects the world from the incursion of giants, and it's said that gods and evil spirits alike roam the world at Jol (sometimes they're even the same thing, as Odin leads his Wild Hunt through the night). For these reasons, people prefer to stay inside and celebrate the lengthening days and the coming end of winter. Like in Scandia is hard work, but people still have free time and find ways to spend it. Children play with wooden dolls and toy ships, woolen balls, and toy weapons. Among adults, a variety of dice games are popular, as is a board game called hnefetafl, which is a strategy game somewhat similar to chess. Lots of these games are also useful teaching tools--children at play start developing the skills they'll need as adults, and games like hnefetafl sharpen the mind and encourage lateral and abstract thinking. Communal music and poetry are also popular, as are any number of contests of physical skill, like footraces, wrestling matches, and even tug-of-war. Norse tug-of-war was probably played with the contestants sitting, facing each other, with their knees up and the soles of their feet touching--this posture engages many of the same muscle groups as rowing a ship, so being a tug-of-war champion might well have been a good way to secure yourself a spot on a ship's crew come expedition time. In winter, skiing and ice skating are also popular. Norse society is primarily an oral tradition--literacy in the form of the runes is known, but at this period of history was probably still fairly rare. Poetry is one of the main ways the oral tradition is maintained--Skaldic poetry in particular has a very complex structure involving alliteration, stress syllable patterns, and allusive metaphors called kennings. This complexity helps to ensure that the poem stays relatively unchanged as it's passed down the generations, since changing even a word or two can break the entire structure. The runes themselves are an alphabet of 24 letters, what we call today the Elder Futhark, which are typically engraved on hard surfaces like stone or wood. (Later in the Viking Age, literacy seems to have become more widespread, and excavations of Viking Age sites have turned up a fair number of writing tablets--shallow-lipped plates that would have been filled with wax, in which temporary messages could be scratched with a stylus.) There aren't really any rules for writing runes--they can be written right-to-left, left-to-right, top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, and even serpentine style. Word spaces and punctuation are likewise not generally used. The runes are also used in magic, and we'll talk about that more in its own section. Towns are built on major trade routes and are usually fortified with an earthen berm topped by a wooden wall. Inside the houses are packed close together, often with room for little more than a workshop and living space. Villages are smaller clusters, usually around six farmhouses, with larger ones including up to twenty. Each farm consists of a house for the family and various huts and lean-tos, usually dug down partway into the earth for insulation, as workshops and storehouses, with the whole compound surrounded by a fence or low wall. Houses themselves are usually rectangular and large enough for the whole extended family and their livestock--keeping the herd in the house in winter is a good, cheap way to add more heat. Houses are usually built on a slope so animal waste runs out of the house. Very few houses have anything like private rooms or spaces--the living space is usually a big, open, multipurpose cooking/working/sleeping/eating space. Trestle tables are brought out and set up at mealtimes, and while the masters of the house might have their own dedicated bed (sometimes in a small "sleeping closet" or with a fabric or wooden screen for a modicum of privacy), most people sleep on the benches or the floor. A noble's longhouse is more or less the same, but much larger--large enough to host feasts, and more likely to have interior rooms for various purposes. The jarl will have a high seat from which to receive formal audiences, and also a high table (which may be a permanent fixture or only brought out at mealtimes) for his family and honored guests. Agriculture is, of course, the principal work of everyone in Scandia. Wheat doesn't grow particularly well in Norse lands, so barley and oats are the more common grains, with hemp, flax, and grasses for making hay also taking up a decent amount of farmland. Most families grow vegetables and herbs in a garden near the house, including cabbages, peas, onions and leeks, and the like. Cattle are the most prestigious livestock, to the point that the word for cow and the word for wealth are identical in Old Norse. Pigs, chickens, sheep, and goats are also kept, and in the far north domesticated reindeer are also herded by Norse and Sámi peoples alike. Dogs and horses are also common--in fact, around this time period in history, the Swedes are at least as well-known for their horses as their ships. Fishing and hunting also supplement the Norse diet, and children are often tasked with gathering wild sea-bird eggs. Specialized craftspeople are rare in Scandia: most people are expected to make all the tools, furniture, buildings, and clothing they need. Smiths (whether working in iron or gold and silver) are one of the few trades where someone can make a living doing one kind of craft. Aesthetics are very important to the Norse, and it's rare to see even purely functional items without some degree of artistic carving, decoration, or engraving. Soapstone is called out as a favored material for making all sorts of small ornaments and utility objects like plates, bowls, and cooking utensils--but deposits in friendly lands are increasingly rare, so prospectors have to venture farther into hostile territory to secure new supplies of it. We already talked about travel and the difficulty of overland vs. sea travel, but Yggdrasil ends up repeating a bunch of that information here--I'm not going to do that, though. The Norse are generally a fairly healthy people, and they have pretty decent knowledge of natural medicine. They know a bunch of herbal remedies and, while injuries like the loss of an eye or hand are serious matters, they aren't an automatic death sentence. They also have some pretty clever diagnostic techniques. For instance, if someone takes a bad stomach wound, a healer will cook up a very strong broth of onions and barley, feed it to the injured person, then wait a little while before smelling their wound. If the healer can smell onions, they know that the wound has ruptured the stomach or intestines and there's little to be done but make the person as comfortable as possible before the end. Arthritis and rheumatism are common in older folks, and even though Norse midwives know their business, childbirth is still a very dangerous time for both mother and child. Next Time: Odin’s warriors wore no coats of mail, enraged like dogs or wolves, biting their shields, strong as oxen or bears. They slew, but neither fire nor steel could touch them. That is the fury of the berserker.
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Jun 4, 2020 11:23
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The most important dog, of course, being the Swedish Vallhund. Actually considering that breed is over 1000 years old, that might not be a joke. Just who doesn't want their PC to have a faithful, adorable little wolf-corgi?
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Jun 4, 2020 13:06
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Night10194 posted:The most important dog, of course, being the Swedish Vallhund. We also have the Norse to thank for Maine Coon cats, so for that I will always be grateful to them.
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Jun 4, 2020 13:38
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Let's not forget Norwegian Forest Cats, who can be adorable fluffballs (full of spite). I mean a pair of cats did pull Freya's chariot, which says how much they loved em.
Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 13:50
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Loxbourne posted:That just means he and his advisers need to get artful about how they conceal it (or spread rumours about how artfully concealed it is). That should be something the Grey Order are good at. A bunch of cloaked wizards standing around in the equivalent of dark sunglasses; who knows what they can do? But it's probably horrible. Even before the death wizard gets there. This is very much the case. The idea of the hammer is mostly that it's so powerful its wielder doesn't have to be a great warrior. Magnus the Pious was (probably) just a seminarian with good rhetorical skills and some basic training, and when it came down to it and he had to go toe to toe with Kul himself the hammer gave him a shot. The other duties of an Emperor are far more important than their personal power. Just if personal power suddenly becomes important in an emergency, here's the hammer. Which is also why Karl was completely comfortable handing the hammer to Valten to avoid a civil war or succession crisis at a time when that would be a really bad idea. Making the political move that kept the Empire together and handing the young hero type the magic hammer was fine. He wasn't going to use it, he was busy putting together allies and armies.
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Jun 4, 2020 13:56
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Night10194 posted:The most important dog, of course, being the Swedish Vallhund. Also Elkhounds! For when you want your PC to have a faithful, adorable, medium-sized wolf-corgi.
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Jun 4, 2020 14:14
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In every place, in every age, there are Good Boys.
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Jun 4, 2020 14:21
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Night10194 posted:In every place, in every age, there are Good Boys. On that note, somebody here who is not me really needs to do a deep dive into Pugmire.
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Jun 4, 2020 14:32
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They did already, I believe. https://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/kurieg/pugmire/
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Jun 4, 2020 14:38
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The Free Adventure for Soulbound is out. I might do I runthrough of it later.
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Jun 4, 2020 17:46
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Could use the premades they released a while ago for it as well.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:02
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 Mutant 2089 Newsflash, there’s something on your face. IT IS PAIN! Now that we know the basics of character generation for the system, let’s put these into use and show off what your average Mutant character might look like. As you may remember there’s seven different steps to character creation in this game: 1.Pick Race (Class) 2. Roll attributes. 3. Calculate Derived attributes. 4. Pick Previous profession 5. Pick Mutations or Cybernetic/Robotics 6. Pick Skill 7. Come up with a name, background and motivations Because I’m a glutton for punishment, and also working off knowledge from upcoming updates, I’m going to roll a PSI-Mutant. Let’s call him… Fizban in this case. Because Mutant does love slightly quirky names for a lot of their characters. Which might not come apparent until we deal with the premade adventure later on though. As we’ve already picked what race we’re going to use, let's continue with rolling for Fizban’s attribute. Let me just grab a bunch of D6’s and get to work on that. PSI-Mutants roll a mix of 2d6 and 3d6 for their attributes with a bunch of different bonuses to that. I’ll be doing straight rolls down the line in this case just so show how an average, non-adjusted, character will look like. *Dice clatter* In the end Fizban got STY: 6 (2d6+1) INT: 8 (2d6+6) PER: 17 (3d6+1) SMI: 9 (3d6) STO: 13 (2d6+2) FYS: 5 (2d6+1) MST: 20 (2d6+10) Well those are certainly results. So Fizban isn’t particularly strong, Nor is he particularly smart either. 8 INT only gives him a base background point value of 50. This can obviously be fixed by increasing his age later on. But On the other hand his PER value makes him really charismatic and sociable. And, if he was a normal human, let him pick a maximum of four cyberware. But at the same time he’s not really that graceful either with his 9 SMI. But he’s also pretty big, looking at the STO chart it puts him at somewhere between 166 to 190cm in height and 81 to 85 kilograms in weight. Due to his low STY value it means that his height will be in the upper ranges. But Fizban is very frail for his size due to his low FYS. Which means he’s going to crumble like a wet paper bag if he takes any kind of damage. However where Fizban truly shines is in his mental strength, with the roll falling short of the max result by two. This means he’s got really good control of his powers and his mental resistance is solid as well. Not to mention he’s also able to keep cool under pressure. Now that we know Fizban’s attributes, let’s take a look at his derived stats. He’s got a -2 damage bonus to melee attacks due to his low strength. On top of that he only has 18 KP (STO + FYS), which means if he gets hit during combat he’s most likely to go down fast. For instance a simple 2d6+1 pistol is very capable of removing over half his HP with one hit. He’s not that fast either, only able to move a maximum of 14 meters in a combat round while running and 7 meters otherwise. Fizban is… Right handed in this case. Which means he’ll get a -25 on any skill check on any skills requiring one hand and if he’s only using his left hand for it. We’re going to ignore the encumbrance rule completely because it’s optional anyway. Suffice to say I don’t think Fizban would be able to carry all that much. Fizban is a Psi-Mutant in his prime years, around 30 years old. This means he gets no attribute penalties. Considering his low STY value having him be older than that would be a terrible idea because at +46 you get -2 to STY and at 61+ you get -5. Which means he’d pretty much be wheelchair bound and unable to do much. On the other hand he’d get even more powerful mentally as at that point MST increases by +2/+4. He does get another 30 BP though due to his age. We could obviously increase that to 35 or 40 if we needed more of them to make up for his attribute shortcomings. Due to his age he only gets a times 1 bonus on his starting funds. To see how much EuroDollars he starts with before the campaign we first need to roll 1d10 to see what his general situation is. The dice ends up on a 50 in this case. Because I’m nice I’ll say he has a stable financial situation, which gives him 1000 ED to start with. Which perhaps isn’t much but it’ll cover the basics at least. Next up we need to determine Fizban’s previous, or even current, profession. Going by his attributes his choices are not great. We could obviously adjust things as the book tells us we can but for this we’ll go by RAW. Either way Fizban doesn’t have that much to choose from. He can either pick from being a Street Kid, a Ganger, a Nomad or a Merc. Because neither of them has any attribute requirements that are way above him. But at the same time he passes the PER 13 and MST 9 requirements for a reporter with flying colours. It’s also a profession with a number of solid combat and utility skills available to it. We’ll say that Fizban hasn’t left his job at the start of the adventure and is now working as an undercover reporter or correspondent. He doesn’t have to worry about any debts or anything but does need to write something that can be sent back to his editor in chief once and again to keep his job. Unfortunately Fizban’s 13 PER isn’t going to do him too good here. Because he’s a PSI-mutant that means he can’t take any of the career cyberware available. Which is a shame since he’d be able to pick four out of them and there’s only six available either way. His creditor is the media company he’s working for. But in this case let’s be specific and say it’s his Editor in Chief, the brusque and cigar chomping J Jonas Jansson. Who rules his floor with a firm but just hand. As I said before the career skill choices for the Journalist are pretty solid as they get: Fixer (INT/PER), Drive Air vehicle (SMI/INT), Forgery (INT), Hide (PER/SMI), Perception (MST/INT), Drive Ground Vehicle (SMI/INT), Maneuvers (SMI/STY), Language (INT), Persuade (PER/INT), One handed melee weapon (STY/SMI), Unarmed combat (SMI/STY), Pistol (SMI), Dodge (SMI/MST). Relevant attributes listed in parentheses. Then we get 50 BP to spend on these skills plus the bonus 30 from his age. Now for the thing that will make or break Fizban as a character. Being a PSI-mutant he obviously needs to pick a mental mutation. But also a mental defect as well as a trade off for this. If the dice decides to be mean we also have to pick a physical defect, but seeing as the roll for that in this case is 1d4-3 there’s a low chance he might get one of these. First we need to see how many mental powers that Fizban gets saddled with, for this we roll 1d4+1 and get 5. The dice clearly favours him in this case. And to see how many defects he gets we need to roll 1d2, to which we get a 2. Knowing what is coming ahead this might not bode well for him. Now that we know how many powers he has, let’s see what kinds they are. For this we need to roll 1d100 five times. And in the end he has the following powers; Fire protection, Psychometrics, Telekinesis, Emotional reading and Mental Identification. We’re going to be talking about what these powers actually do in the next update but overall the results aren't too bad. There are far worse mutations to get on the list. But also a couple of really good ones too. But now we need to see what kind of defects he’ll get. The quickest way to describe them is that they’re Perils of the Warp as they only activate whenever you fail to use one of your mental powers. And because he was unfortunate enough to get two of them we need to roll 1d100 twice and check the defect table. Fizban gets indecision and brain nova. And oh boy did he get the short end of the stick in this case. Because at the start of combat he first needs to roll for the first defect and if it kicks in means that he gets to act last in all combat phases. Considering his Initiative roll is only 1d10 + 9 means that his chances of actually acting first isn’t all that great either way. But the second one is much, much worse. Because whenever he manages to fail using one of his powers he runs the risk of going completely insane for 1d10 rounds. Which ultimately means character will be taken over by the GM during this duration. I’m going to be ranting at length about how much I really hate the defects in the game because there are some that are even worse. So thanks to Fizban for giving a taste of that ahead of time. After that it’s just a case of filling out all the skills basic levels based on what attributes they’re keyed to. Anyone listed with two attributes gets their values combined in this case. Then it’s a case of spending BP on the various career skills you have available. After that the character is pretty much done. So that’s Fizban the tall PSI-mutant undercover correspondent. Physically really weak and not that smart. But very charming at the same time and with great mental fortitude. Also with a couple of decent mental powers at his disposal, but at the same time even using them runs the risk of him going crazy for a while. Not too great in a fight either due to frail health and while his profession gives him some basic combat skills they’re not too great due to his weak combat attributes. A 9% chance to hit base with a pistol does not inspire much confidence and his incredibly low strength means that the best gun he can use one-handed is either a 32” or 38” revolver. Not that he could really afford either with his measly 1000 ED. He has a much better chance to stab someone, but only barely. Without sinking in a bunch of BP into the Melee weapon skill he has a 15% chance to succeed with an attack with a knife. But then he’d be rolling 1d6-2 due to his damage ‘bonus’. But let’s show the other side of things. Let’s say our undercover reporter needs someone to cover their back and make sure they can get out to report the latest news. Let’s make a robot character to be his sidekick. A masterless droid posing as the janitor of the local news editorial office that Fizban works in. Let’s call her Maria, which is a perfectly normal human name to have. Robot PC’s roll 1d6 down the line, with the exception for MST where it is 3D6, with a number of bonuses attached to them. *Dice clatter* As a statline Maria gets: STY: 22 (1d6+19) INT: 11 (1d6+5) PER: 9 (1d6+5) SMI: 11 (1d6+7) STO: 16 (1d6+12) FYS: 17 (1d6+13) MST: 14 (3d6) A rather noticeable difference in how things are laid out. So Maria is really strong and only slightly smarter than Fizban. She’s nowhere near as Charismatic as he is but also slightly more limbre. Her greatest strength is however her impressive STO and FYS score, which means she can take a beating above the natural armor bonus that robots get. And she can also keep her cool pretty well. Maria’s slightly higher INT score means that she’s moved into the next tier of background points and gets 60 as a base. On the other hand she’s not that charismatic and if she was a normal human she’d only be able to pick 3 cyberware to start with. But she doesn’t need to care about that at all because she’s a robot and they have a completely separate system. Her SMI score is decent, she’s far more agile than Fizban but not by much. But she’s a big girl though. Her STO attribute put her into the 186 to 210 centimeter height. Even if her high STY value doesn’t make her that tall. Although at the same time the game doesn’t provide an accurate calculation or anything to show how much STY influences that, only a mention that it does. So let’s say that Maria is just over 2 meters tall. While a normal human with a STO of 16 would weigh somewhere between 96 to 100 kilograms. But robots also weigh twice as much as the listed value so she’s 2.10 meters tall and weighing 192 kilograms. Meanwhile, Maria’s FYS score makes her very hardy against amage. Not to mention she’s impervious to both radiation and poison. Whenever she punches someone she does an extra 1d6 in bonus damage (STY + STO), as regular punches do 1d6 this means she can punch almost as hard as a pistol. And you don’t want to be in her way if she’s swinging around a sledgehammer either for that part as the bonus gets applied to any melee weapon, 2d10 + 1d6 is not to mess around with. With 33 KP she’s also able to withstand a great amount of punishment, especially her synthetic body also absorbs 4 points of damage. Perfect to stand in the way of anyone who wants to shoot Fizban and then cave in their skull afterwards. She’s also fast, able to run up to 28 meters during a single combat round. Much like Fizban she is right handed. Robots need to roll 2d20 for their age. Because this game is old enough that the D20 was more or less unheard of outside of D&D this game has a weird way of doing it that I didn’t mention previously. In this case you need to use both a six sided dice and a ten sided dice. First you roll the d6 and if the result is either 1, 2, or 3 then the d10 value is somewhere between 1 to 10. If the result is 4, 5 or 6 then the d10 result is between 11 to 20. But we can safely ignore that method and just roll a pair of regular d20’s and be thankful that a d20 roll in Mutant is very rare at the same time. And the dice result, after rerolling one that fell off my desk, is… snake eyes?! Are you loving kidding me here. You know what, let’s try again because the idea of an 11 year old robot does not jive well with me. A reroll (well two more since the other one ended up on 13) gets us 26, which is far better. Robots also get one BP per year they have lived so Maria gets 26 extra BP to add to her 60. As for starting funds she gets really lucky and rolls a 00, which puts her at the bottom in a list and puts her in a much better situation financially than her friend. On the note of odd things there is a mention in the race description that robots get less money but at the same time there’s also no mention in the character creation section about it. In fact they follow the same rules as everybody else and get more money the older they are. Even if the phrasing somewhat implies that they work outside of the chart when that isn’t the case. Either way Maria’s situation is normal, which means that she gets to start with 5000 ED. If I had chosen it to be stable like Fizban’s then she’d get 10000 ED. Which, despite the average costs for a lot of equipment available, is still a lot of money to have. Even with only 5000 she can equip herself pretty well. As mentioned before, robots can’t pick from the professions available for everyone else and instead have to pick from three different career backgrounds. Unbeknownst to Fizban, because she has been rather vague on the details of her origin, Maria used to be an advanced combat robot that was tasked with wet works for the corporations. Somehow she managed to break free of that and disable the explosive charge implanted inside of her as well. But not even Maria is sure how that happened, large chunks of her memory of that time is still missing. The fact that being a combat robot requires STY 24 and FYS 18, attributes she falls just under on both accounts so I’m just going to raise both of those to the minimum value. The book says it’s fine so I can do it. So she gets to start with a pick of 3 different pieces of robotics from the combat droid list. Three rolls of a d10 gives us: Hyper Sonar, Armor and Electrodes. Now here’s something fun, there’s nothing listed in the Robotics chapter that is called hyper sonar. There is Ultra sonar, but it’s also classified as forbidden and requires you to have the Sonar addon as well. So might as well reroll that and instead get a Tempo calculator. She gets Computers (INT), Electronics (INT), Maneuvers (SMI/STY), Technology (INT), All Combat skills (a mix of SMI and SMI/STY) as her career skill package. To which she can spend 60 BP, plus the 26 from her age. Of course we could just ignore those robotic rolls completely as robots get 3d4 x 1000 ED to equip themselves with. And with Maria already having a cool 5000 to start with we’re not exactly strapping for cash. So after a couple of rolls she has 7000 ED to use for robotic upgrades. But I’m going to skip all the shopping in this case much like I did with Fizban. After that step Maria, the combat droid now working as your average Janitor at a news office, is now complete. Barring some extra backstory and motivations obviously. In comparison to Fizban she’s an absolute monster, able to dish out and absorb a lot of punishment. Not to mention completely immune to both poison and radiation. And she doesn’t need to breathe or eat either for that part. Her biggest weakness is the lack of any natural healing and having to repair her own damage. Which is also made harder by the fact that neither she isn’t all that proficient in the necessary repair skills (Technology, Computers and Electronics) due to their generally low INT values. Fizban doesn’t even have any of the necessary skills to be able to repair her. Which does mean that she can take a lot of damage before going down but getting it back is going to take some time or be really expensive if she tries to find someone to do it for her. On the other hand with a base 33% chance to hit with a melee weapon she is far more competent in a fight than her friend. And that is without spending any BP on it. With some decent BP juggling and carefully selecting what skills to focus on she’s more likely to have higher degrees of success in her skills than Fizban might have. She does on the other hand have a lot less when it comes to utility skills. Not to mention she’s not that sociable either. But in the end they do complement each other pretty well. So that’s our reporter/bodyguard duo finished. I was only going to make one character originally but when I noticed how disappointing Fizban turned out to be I decided to go for something extra as well. Although to be honest I’d probably just make Fizban into a non-mutated human. As will hopefully become clear later on, playing a Psi-mutant isn’t all that great. It’s sorta like playing a Psyker in Dark Heresy, but a lot worse. Next time: Night of the Mutants. Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 06:18
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Oh man who doesn't love excuses for players to not play the game eitherb ecause they can't do anything or because the GM takes over their character? Prime bad game design right there.
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Jun 5, 2020 10:42
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That one could be fixed by letting the player choose to Fight, Flee or Freeze (from DRYH) but why bother with design this primitive.
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Jun 5, 2020 10:58
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Next update we'll be dealing with mental mutations and defects a bit more and I'm going rant quite a bit about them. Fizban got really unlucky with his rolls and got one of the worst ones available. But that whole list of defects is so bad. The physical defects one is tame in comparison to it. In future iterations of the game there's still a defect system but they've seemingly learned their lesson as none of the effects of resonance (as its called then) will relinquish control of your character to the GM. You'll be knocked out for a while (1d4 hours on average) but never turn into a temporarily NPC or anything. Although if you roll really badly you can suffer a internal brain haemorrhage and instantly die. But that's a 15+ on a 2d6 check and plus how many times you've failed to use a mental mutation. But yeah, the writers for Mutant really have some weird hang ups about psionic powers having some nasty side effects. Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 11:15
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 Chapter 4 (the Widening Gyre): Kamak The last two chapters covered nations in flux, their futures in question or likely to change soon. This chapter covers the more stable nations (relatively speaking), but stability now doesn’t mean stability in the future. These are the peaceful nations where poo poo is preparing to go south, where the characters can establish themselves and try to keep things intact for as long as possible. Intro comic! Emissaries from a city outside the Octet arrive in the capital of Gulak bringing gifts and asking for immigration rights and a meeting with the local leader. This is my favorite of the intro comics so far; well-drawn, relatively clear subject matter, it has a blimp in it.  The first thing to understand about Kamak is that it is cold. Kamak was probably the shittiest leader of the eight champions; he made his name in Creation being a player character instead of running a society. He picked most of his followers from Autochthon’s disoriented kidnap victims and managed to miss every hospitable place in Autochthonia before finally settling in a series of irregular chambers distinguished by how freezing cold they were (Kamak is the only part of Autochthonia to get snow, which forms out of water vapor vented from elsewhere into the ceiling). It lacks flat surfaces, its temperature swings can be extreme, and the exceptional stress fluctuating temperatures put on the metal in the area means the area sees periodic maintenance drone swarms that often kill humans they encounter. poo poo sucked until they discovered the region was extremely rich in magical metals, meaning they could both sell the metal for necessary supplies and, when other nations started sniffing around, they could build Alchemicals in great numbers. To this day, Kamak has the highest ratio of Alchemicals to humans. They even went through an Alchemical-led coup around 1000 years after arrival, followed by the Adamants quietly assassinating the ringleaders and the whole thing breaking down into independent towns that eventually banded together again so Autochthonia wouldn’t kill them all. Ever since, Kamak has remained relatively stable. It is prone to the occasional revolution (a couple thousand years ago they had a proper communist revolution that put a Populat council in charge, but that fizzled out eventually) and sometimes their neighbors try and fail to invade them for their metals, but for the most part Kamak’s been quietly doing its own thing for millennia. And since the combination of massive magical metal deposits and plentiful Alchemical labor means the country has the highest standard of living in Autochthonia, no one’s inclined to change the status quo. The second thing is that Kamak is rich. It isn’t just that it sits on several massive veins of everything from orichalcum to gemstones, but its relative distance from the rest of the Octet means it has access to more conventional resources that aren’t drained by seven other cultures harvesting them. Prosthetics are dirt common compared to other nations; the prevalence of magical metals means they can build advanced replacement limbs for everyone that needs. They also have access to a long tradition of rat breeding, both the sort of thing that takes time and investment and the sort of thing that provides value once it gets going. They keep rats the size of donkeys and use them for the same purposes people use cows elsewhere, rats that pull sleds, watchrats, rats that hunt other rats, even pet rats. They build robots of all kinds to do grunt work (part of how a population can live so comfortably) of all sorts of grades, too. The smarter an automaton is, the more they respect its personal space  . The sheer quantity of valuable materials they have access to means technology advances faster here than anywhere except Nurad in its progressive stages.Speaking of personal space, the third thing: Kamaki culture is divided by an inside-outside dichotomy. Away from their dorm mates and friends, Kamaki tend to be distant and standoffish. Unlike every other Autochthonian society they despise excessive noise; their factories usually carry special noise-canceling Charms and raising your voice to a stranger is gauche at best. Their buildings are colorless and utilitarian in design, they treat everything within a few feet as their personal space, and they avoid difficult conversation of any kind unless they already trust the other party. But that’s outside the home; inside the home is a different story. See, instead of the cramped single-room dormitories that characterize the rest of Autochthonian society, Kamaki live in dormitory communes, sets of 4 2-room apartments with at least four inhabitants each arranged around a central courtyard. The fact that at least 16 people (sometimes twice that) splitting eight rooms and a courtyard is considered personal space taken to an extreme says a lot about Autochthonian living conditions. Once you get within the dormitory communes you see the other side of Kamaki life; around friends they are boisterous, expressive, and anything you associate with stereotypical Russians, probably, because it’s fantasy Russia. Or Switzerland, it could go either way. The walls of the courtyard tend to be coated in elaborate murals, have a rich but unchanging storytelling tradition, and engage in special dances with their spouses (marriage is huge in Kamak, I’ll get to that in a bit). They take their food both seriously and personally too; they have honest to God ice cream vending machines and make copious use of rat lard in the cooking, eating it either with their friends in small dining rooms or at home (ever since the bad old days Kamaki have kept several days of food in their dormitory communes in case they get snowed in, but these days they mostly use that to cook meals for their dorm mates). Though they drink tons of synthetic alcohol (:russia:), their trademark beverage is “kaff”, which is coffee made with lard, salt, and “triple-roasted nutrient paste”  . They also lace it with synthetic cocaine.Their interpersonal relationships share that inside-outside dichotomy. Given just how inhospitable Kamak can be, they see hospitality as a key virtue, but taking advantage of it runs counter to the whole “keep your distance” ethos. On the one hand, once you’ve asked for hospitality refusing to impose further on your hosts is considered much ruder than taking advantage of their assistance (within reason), but their most famous folk song revolves around a woman who freezes to death on somebody’s doorstep because she didn’t want to impose. I honestly can’t tell how they meet new people. They get reassigned as often as anyone else in Autochthonia, so I guess they’re expected to bond with their new dorm mates wherever they go. Unless, of course, they’re married, at which point their superiors are legally prohibited from splitting them up. Most of the Octet lack a concept of long-term romantic relationships or family. Sovans have families, but they put little emphasis on romance within marriage. Kamaki care little about family care intensely about romantic marriage. They hold marriage in nearly sacred regard; they consider it a reflection of the mutual relationship between Autochthon and humanity and expect everyone to find a partner eventually, regardless of sexuality or even (as far as I can tell) caste. Being unmarried past 30 casts doubt upon the quality of your character and unmarried individuals get shut out of political positions. While Kamaki society doesn’t seem to care much about pre-marital relationships or even children born to them (Kamaki children head to the creches same as everywhere else, and the most interaction parents have with their kids is teaching them family dances), once you get married you’re married until death. You can remarry after your spouse dies, though, and it seems widows/widowers can climb up the ranks as normal. Divorces don’t exist, cheating is considered far worse than remaining unmarried and will tank your career, and getting married for non-romantic reasons gets you publicly ostracized at best; newlyweds have to “provide evidence of their union” to the Lectors, which can take the form of either a baby or I guess them having sex in front of them. Alchemicals can get in on the fun, but they have to deal with the psychological trauma of watching their loved ones die and inter-Alchemical relationships tend to die in Clarity-tinted flames.  Oh hey, it’s Eternally Vigilant Bell! Nice to see she’s still running her mining crews. Kamaki public life and governance, such as it is, tends to be as distant and quiet as the people are in public. Local governments have a lot of independence, to the point that the Grand Assembly spends more time resolving disputes instead of actually ruling. The Theomachracy has a much larger hand in the lives of the citizenry than the rest of the Tripartite, given the intimate nature of their relationship to society compared to the central government or technical support; they host plenty of festivals but on a smaller scale, and their role in resolving marriage disputes gives them a lot of personal sway. The branches that focus outward tend to have more power than elsewhere too; Kamaki Clerics maintain unusually good relationships with the local spirits by giving them frequent ridiculous bribes, while Preceptors are charged with violating social norms by slipping into people’s private lives to hunt for heresy. That… Doesn’t make them popular. On the other hand, while the Sodalities don’t have much pull, the combination of easy access to magical materials and the threat of a hostile environment and the various weird stuff they encounter traveling through the more obscure parts of the Pole of Metal makes Kamaki technology extremely advanced and well-crafted; it’s the reason they have all those automatons and prosthetics. And of course you get the obligatory setting time bombs waiting to explode. Kamaki privacy makes certain kinds of crime much easier, especially corruption and murder. But it means the rest of the Octet maintains cells that pressure local governments through various means to give them trade advantages. Kamak is a small country that both relies on trade despite rarely come into contact with other nations and lacks an established military structure to defend already-independent locals from raiders; it’s relatively easy to force settlements into protection rackets. It also hides a variety of secret societies among the Tripartite and more influential Populat, including another burgeoning communist revolution and at least one outright radical cult. But there’s a bigger issue beneath all of this; just like everywhere else in Autochthonia, Kamak is gradually running out of rare materials. Their economy, standard of life, and political influence all come down to their access to resources, and as those resources dwindle the nation risks collapsing in on itself like Sova unless it adapts (cough player characters cough). Gazetteer! Ein is awesome and a living demonstration of why Starmetals are Best Caste. She’s the oldest city in Kamak and its capital for millennia; the buildings are more brightly decorated, the citizens are more outgoing and emotive, and the city offers more and better creature comforts than anywhere else in a nation with an already high standard of living. She houses the biggest research centers in the nation, and most of the country’s high technology can be traced back to them; they invented the cow rat! And they also built a highly accurate mechanical simulation of Creation’s natural world in the city’s depths reconstructed from ancient texts, the only thing of its kind in the Octet. Of course, whenever she interacts with the world Ein barfs out hundreds of robot bugs that repair things or drown enemies in their mechanical mandibles, because no Starmetal is complete without the slightly creepy vibe. Then there’s Trantec, the last founder’s Alchemical successor to set down roots as well as the most pro-privacy Soulsteel ever, who houses a museum of memory-containing spheres that record everything from recent history to stuff before the Primordial War, memories so potent that if their spheres break though escape and start attacking their surroundings. They get them by harvesting spheres from a nearby Crystal memory bank. He also contains the international headquarters of the Conductors because I guess they believe Kamak was there founder despite being Conan. There’s also a brief aside on a town that’s just as cold and distant indoors as it is outside and spreads its gloominess like a virus (story hook story hook). Finally, we get some notes on foreign relations (Kamak tries to remain neutral but the rest of the Octet thinks they’re decadent and also have stuff they could use, but since they want to keep trading they won’t attack it yet) and their relationship with Creation (they could use Creation to bolster their reserves as they run out or as a way out if the situation becomes untenable). We also have the obligatory batch of characters, but I’m tired of writing them out so I’ll be ignoring most of them in the future. They do follow through on the whole love is love thing they established earlier; like half the characters have spouses of the same gender, including the Autocrat of Trantec. Speaking of which, the only characters of the bunch I want to talk about are her, who received an experimental brain implant (plus have a body’s worth of prosthetics) after nearly dying in a blimp crash and seems to be gaining Clarity as she ages, and a master Surgeon in Ein who’s found a way to reliably overwrite personalities and is marketing it to the city Assembly as a rehabilitation method for criminals. I kind of love and hate Kamak. I like how its culture is familiar enough for players to latch onto it and get invested but strange enough to throw them for the occasional loop; it has a political situation ripe for player meddling, a looming threat over the horizon for the characters to prepare for, and easy access to enough resources to build cool stuff with. But it just does not have anything special going for it. It doesn’t have the compelling situation of Nurad and Yugash or setting hooks like Clamaki capitalism, Project Razor, or Ixut. The nation feels like Baby’s First Autochthonia, which is a good thing; it offers players uninterested in constantly staving off the end of the world time to prepare and build their power base until they can face down almost anything the setting can throw at them. It just doesn’t make the nation terribly compelling compared to the rest, though it’s plenty interesting on its own. I just care more about making Nurad survive one second longer than rich dudes drinking cocaine-coffee. Next up is Jarish, the place where if you talk to the gods, they talk back. And care what you say.
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Jun 5, 2020 22:58
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Mutant 2089 How 'bout the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away… with mind bullets! That's telekinesis, Kyle. In Mutant there are two kinds of mutations, mental and physical. They work as you might expect them to do. Physical ones alter your body whilst the mental ones unlock the full hidden potential of your brain. They also have a dark mirror in the shape of negative defects that you can take as well. But for now the book is still quiet about why you should and why it’s worth doing it. In order to succeed in using a mental mutation on someone you need to win a roll off using the resistance table included in the table booklet. Even if there are some that work automatically as well. A robot is completely immune to manipulation from mental mutations. Once again showing that they’re really meant to be the MVPs of the game considering they don’t need to breathe, don’t need to eat or sleep and are immune to someone trying to jab mind needles into their brain. There’s a table reminding us how many mutations and defects bout Mutants and Psi ones get. But also specifically mentioning that Psi-mutants get 1d2 mental defects as well as 1d4-3 physical defects. The latter one feels really pointless to roll because either you’re getting a one or a zero from that roll as a negative result counts as a zero in this case. A regular mutant gets the same kind of roll for their mental defects as well, and a 1d2 worth of physical defects. Also you can not have the same defect twice so any similar results gets rerolled. But why not just say they need to pick one defect instead? Because it’s essentially a coinflip in dice form. Once you have rolled to see how many mental mutations you get, you roll 1d100 that many times and consult the mutation table. Decryption - Lets you read various kinds of codes such as chiffers, foregin languages and also figure out entrance code for computer systems. Which seems a bit out of scope for this mutation. Roll against the code’s difficulty level to break it. Otherwise the chance to succeed is MST x 3%, the book doesn’t explain it at this point but it’s the skill difficulty level you need to roll under that to succeed. Distraction - By sending out “disturbing brain waves” you can make 1D6 opponents confused and halve their skill success chance after an opposing MST roll.. You can pick freely who gets affected by it. Animal Control - After an opposing MST roll (I hope you know whatever animal you’re trying to control has in that score) they’ll follow you for 1d4 hours. But they won’t follow any orders that would mean that they’ll get intentionally hurt, nor does it work against “intelligent creatures” as well. Not sure why this thing is even here if they’re going to laden it with various caveats. So would this not work against Dolphins or how far up does the consideration of “intelligent creatures” go? Death Thought - If you win an opposed roll against MST against your opponent they lose all their KP except one because you hate them so much. But on the other hand you go unconscious for 1D6 turns from the strain. While the name is metal as hell :black1010: I’m not so sure how useful it’d be ultimately. Fire protection - For 1d4 rounds you can protect yourself against all forms of fire. But only your body in this case and not your equipment or anything you’re carrying. So I guess at the end you’ll look like something out of a cartoon, blackened from soot and completely naked. Physical Reinforcement - For 1d4 rounds you can raise your STY and SMI by half your MST value. This also affects any skills that are affected by those two attributes. Funny enough the damage is listed as “Possibly raised SB”. Illusion- You implant a sensation into someone’s head and will last for as long as you concentrate on it after winning an opposing MST roll. While you can’t actively hurt someone with an illusion you can make them think that they’ve been wounded by it. The book then explains you can more or less Wile E. Coyote someone by making them believe that there’s a bridge spanning a chasm and they won’t realize it’s an illusion until they start falling. To which I’m imagining a smugly grinning Psi-mutant making them look down before they start falling. Concentration - You can double your chance to succeed on a skill check for a single skill. Force field - You create a shield that absorbs 10 points of damage that lasts for 2d10 rounds. It’ll be interesting to see how useful it’ll be compared when we get to weapons later on. Otherwise it’s mage armor. Force field reading - Lets you detect any force fields within a 10 meters radius. It isn’t related to the previous power but instead lets you sense things like magnetic fields or heat. So this means that you can walk into a room and detect things like hidden microphones or even living people. Or even cyberware that people use. So far one of the best utility powers available I think. Great way to spot an ambush early if you then manage to succeed with the power check. Emotional reading - You’re essentially Deanna Troi as it lets you read the vague emotions of someone. It’s for one specific target and you need to concentrate on them and can’t do much else. So in a way you’re an even worse Troi. Levitation - You can fly for 1d4 minutes Magnetism - You can pull metallic objects towards you. The max item weight is 5 kgs and your max range is 5 meters. You can pull weapons and such from the opponents hands if they’re caught by surprise, otherwise it’s an opposing roll of your MST against their STY. Mental Identification - This power lets you identify a person you’re in contact with, either through a phone or over a data net. If you beat the opposing MST roll you get an instinctual picture of how the person looks but you don’t get to know their name. But at the same time you know it subconsciously and can answer right or wrong if someone else leaves suggestions. While I could see this being used to ID some hidden nemesis or contact the special caveats it has are weird. Mental Fear - You can make someone run away in fear for 2d6 rounds. Or if they can’t escape, cower in fear in a corner. Metal Shield - You protect your mind from evil influences. For 2d10 minutes you get double you MST when resisting other mental attacks. Mental Attack - By sending “damaging brain waves” you can do 3D6 damage to your opponent. Psychometrics - Touching a create or an object you can “see” what happened to them/it in the past. Particularly powerful emotions or events can be felt as far back as 250 years. Which I think covers more than the actual timeline of the game since the timeline starts in 2010. So this feels like a power they lifted wholesale from the previous edition and didn’t bother changing much. Regeneration - You gain one KP per round. The chance to succeed is automatic and is permanently activated. While I don’t think it makes you able to pull Wolverine levels of bullshit it’s still a pretty good power to have since you don’t have to activate it like everything else. Mind sharpening - Your senses become twice as sensitive than normal. What this does is that your chances to succeed for both dodge and perception are doubled. As well as the modifications for range when it comes to firearms is doubled as well. Might be the second best active power you can have as a PSI-mutant because it does so much for you. Combustion - Through the power of your mind you light your enemies and fire and do 4d6 in damage. Intuition - You have the power to instinctively choose the right choice when given an option. I can see this one leading to all kinds of weird or dubious situations in the right or wrong hands considering it does leave the notion of what really is the right choice up in the air. Only that you are able to pick it. Stop - This power affects everyone in a 25 meter radius around you and makes them unable to approach you. And if anyone wants to approach you they need to roll against your MST. But at the same time it doesn’t prevent anyone from shooting you, nor can you make people back off by approaching them either. Anyone affected by this power is completely unaware that they’re under its influence. Telekinesis - Through the usage of Telepathy - You can read minds of intelligent creatures and also transmit your thoughts to others up to a range of 200 meters. If the target is willing to receive messages you don’t need to make an opposing MST roll. A mental defect can happen when you manage to fail the activation roll for one of your positive powers. They can be best described as a minor version of perils of the warp from Dark Heresy or one of the miscats from Warhammer Fantasy, the only difference here is that they will always affect the Psi-mutant and no one else and you only have a maximum of two. They can also never be removed through any means. Some of these defects are meant to be rolled whenever you fail a mental powers check while others are automatic. Acute Metal allergy - All of your skills are decreased by 10% if you come into bodily contact with some kind of metal. Amnesia - You get a partial amnesia for 1d4 hours and you can’t remember your name or your past. It does however not affect your skills levels. The book suggests that your character should be played by the GM during this, but that’s just dumb. Removing agency from a player through things like amnesia, regardless of it being temporary or not, is just poor game design. When the defect then stops the character has no memory of what happened during the blackout. Brain Nova - For 1d10 rounds you go crazy and attack everyone nearby, but not with mental powers. This one is instantly moved to my shitlist because not only it’s a terrible berserker power, but it also strips the player of any agency as their character is now being played by the GM. The only solace is that the character won’t do anything that willingly hurts them. Another really terrible defect that shouldn’t even be here in the first place because of the player agency removal. Introversion - This power does not turn you into an introvert, instead whenever you fail to use a power that causes damage it will activate on you instead. Which means that there’s a chance that you could combust yourself and quite possibly end up killing yourself as a result. If the power has no damage then you have to reroll this effect. Conflict - You’re crippled by internal strife between your conscious and subconscious and the survival instinct kicks into overdrive. This makes you only do weak and selfish acts if things turn dangerou. Everything else but your own survival becomes irrelevant and lasts for 1d20 minutes. I’m starting to get a feeling that a lot of these are really poorly designed or just outright terrible in general. But I suppose that’s par on course for defects. Low Pain threshold - Every time you get wounded you need to check if this defect activates, if that’s the case you become unconscious for 2d6 rounds. I wonder how this would work in conjunction with regeneration. Mental block - You have a mental block that makes it hard to use one of your skills. It’s up to the GM to decide but the book is nice enough to mention that it can’t be Perception, Maneuver or Dodge. Each time you want to use this specific skill there is an MST x2% chance that you’re unable to do it and can’t retry until after three hours. This feels like something that could potentially make or break some character depending on how the GM feels. They could simply make you unable to use some important skill because they feel like it. Mental breakdown - When this defect happens all your mutations, including any permanent you might have, ceases to function for 1d4 hours. And for some reason the GM has to roll that length in secret. Unlike other defects this one has a chance of happening every time you try to use one of your powers. Indecision - Another special defect as it only happens in the first round of each combat. If you fail the roll it means that you are moved to the bottom of the initiative phase and thus have to act last. Annoying but not exceeding brutal. Reta- you know what no, not going to list this one by name. I’m sure you get why. For 1d4 hours, with the GM rolling the duration in secret for some bloody reason, the characters INT is lower by 3. quote:“During this time you are probably pretty stupid.” Telepathic Overload - You start sensing all thoughts within a 10 kilometer radius of you, and considering most cities have a minimum of 10 million inhabitants you can imagine how busy that might sound. This essentially knocks you and you’re unable to do anything but to rest until it fades away after 1d4 hours. Let’s get one thing straight here, the defects are loving awful and I hate all of them. While you only have two of them max they’re still mechanically awful on so many levels. All of them are specifically designed to remove player agency in some fashion or actively make them useless. Or quite possibly able to kill themselves if they’re really unlucky. The psychic mutations themselves aren’t too bad though. But they are hamstrung by the fact that out of 25 powers, 15 out of those can only be used three times a day while the rest are a mix of permanent ones or some that can be used 4, 5 or 1 time a day as is the case with Illusion. So in effect you’re a rather terrible wizard with a very limited bag of tricks at your disposal. Thankfully Psi-mutants have no real restriction on weapons so if I was stuck as one I’d probably just put my faith in a gun rather than my mind. That said there are some good ones in the list, Regeneration and Mind Sharpening are pretty good buffs. Not to mention Illusion can lead to some hilarious situations with what you’re able to do, which is probably why it’s limited to one usage a day sadly. But considering the power roll is random by default and there’s just a bunch of semi-useless chaff coupled with the defects I’m not sure why I’d even want to play a Psi-Mutant. Next time: Nothing moves the Blob! Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Jun 7, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 02:09
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Chapter 4 (The Widening Gyre): Jarish Almost every member of the octet has a real life parallel: Claslat is American, Yugash is (Revolutionary) French, Nurad is Arabian, Estasia is British, Sova is (I think) Chinese, Kamak is Russian/Swiss, and Gulak is Indian (which I’ll explore what we get there). Jarish is the exception; I haven’t found a culture that if maps to. Because you know how every fantasy setting has a faction that’s technologically behind everyone else and only survives through The Power of Faith and/or Magic? It’s that. Jarish the person was an outright priestess of Autochthon with a connection so powerful she could commune with his components. The proto-Jarishites had a much easier time than the rest of the initial settlers because she just undid obstacles and ignored environmental threats in their way. She died 40 years in throwing herself into a lava flow which turned into obsidian around her, trapping her clearly intact body in plain view of the rest of the nascent nation. When their first Alchemical showed up, she immediately fixated on Jarish’s body, neutralized the environmental threat she’d died to keep in check, and extracted the chunk of crystal containing it for storage; apparently, part of Jarish’s soul stuck around in her body until Jubilant Evangelist cut her free. Everyone else had spent that time frantically working on a solution and yelling at each other for not being religious enough, but Evangelist and solved it in a stroke. This story became Jarish’s founding myth and set the tone for 5000 years of cultural “development”; though they grow, change, and function like the rest of the Octet, they put their faith first.  And that policy is proved successful. Jarish is by far the smallest nation in both size and population, crammed into an intersection in Autochthon’s body without easy avenues for expansion or access to rare materials. Their technology consistently lags decades behind the rest of Autochthonia, not helped by their polite refusal to purchase more advanced technology from their neighbors; they rarely expand their territory, refrain from extensive mining operations, and disdain growing their population. And yet they stand on an even footing with the rest of the Octet, even successfully invading other nations at various points in history. The book presents their success as a natural product of their faith; they throw themselves into their work and Autochthon rewards their efforts with increased productivity. But once you start reading between the lines, that stops being advertising copy and becomes something concrete. Due to their continuing connection with the spirit around them, in Jarish labor just goes farther than anywhere else. They maintain excellent relations with the various spirits and gods that surround them by pouring out abnormal amounts of prayer, and they return the favor by ensuring industrial accidents claim fewer lives, environmental hazards show up less frequently, and expeditions hit lucky breaks more often. Jarishites correctly identify the stream of helpful coincidences as coming from divine sources and reward them by pouring in more hours than any other culture; in return, the spirits shower them with even more coincidences. They even embed the empty soulgems of heroes into the tools they used in life, and the resulting reverence boosts the tools’ productivity. These are people who can strap chunks of metal they need joined to the end of the stick, stick it in the nest of a particularly vicious local spirit, and pull them out perfectly welded. The average Jarishite worker makes fewer mistakes, faces fewer setbacks, and pushes themself harder without fear of injury or exhaustion than those of any other nation, and the resulting massive boost in productivity puts them on equal footing with any potential rival. Their disdain for technological advancement and laborsaving techniques stems from the positive feedback cycle their constant hard work and the resulting supernatural benefits creates. For their part, the rest of the Octet reveres Jarish for its clear dedication to and favor from Autochthon, pressuring each other to avoid threatening the small country and protected from threats. They also regard contracting out work to Jarish on terms better than they’d offer to anyone else as practically a religious duty. Not because they can offload goods so outdated the rest of the nations would turn their noses up at them onto Jarish in bulk in return for tons of high-quality goods. Definitely. These people are intense, and their culture teaches them to throw themselves into everything they do. When the rare opportunity comes around, they even party hard; Jarish’s one real holiday, Sparkmoon, lasts for three days of carnival games, prayer sessions, and people loving in alleys. Speaking of which, if players enter Jarish expecting a religiously conservative environment (which it is for the most part), they might be surprised to learn that Jarish is extremely horny. Like, the horniest culture in Autochthonia. They view romantic love as a form of faith and consider skill in bed as important as skill at work, and one of their biggest exports to the rest of the nations is oceans of their homemade porn. They take the romantic-love-is-love-for-Autochthon concept that showed up in Kamak to new extremes, but temper it by fetishizing the pain of separation; Jarishites value self-sacrifice as much as love, and to them the two are intrinsically connected. They have a whole complex nest of analogies to describe relations both heterosexual and homosexual as analogous to worship and half their folktales are tragic love stories, and the section features one of an Alchemical rear end-deep in Clarity dancing with her lover as she tries and fails to emotionally connect with her. People go nuts over it. For anyone willing to drink the Kool-Aid, Jarish can be paradise; simple, rewarding work, a positive atmosphere, and lots of sex. For those who aren’t? Innovators, contrarians, introverts, or just people who have trouble fitting in? Their lives are miserable. The intense focus of Jarishite culture leaves even less room for people on the fringes than the rest of Autochthonia and shoves them into some dark mental places, especially since the surrounding zeal leaves such folks internalizing their suffering instead of working through it. Despite being the smallest member of the Octet, Jarish produces more Voidbringer cults than the two largest combined. There’s a reason the first Apostate showed up there. While they are aware of this, Jarishite authorities tend to assume it’s just the Void trying and failing to break the icon of Autochthonian faith; every time they break up a cult they pat themselves on the back for proving themselves right yet again. It never occurs to that there might be something wrong with their society. It’s the same cultural inflexibility that makes Jarish so connected to Autochthon inverted. Any campaign set in Jarish will likely end up dealing with the nation’s deep cultural flaws and the resulting flood of Void. At least, it will start out that way.  Remember, this happened in Jarish Jast is the capital of Jarish, the incarnation of its founder, and one of the most important cities Autochthonia. It’s a holy place, definitely, but it also acts as the seat of the Jast Strip, a chunk of highway running through Autochthon that periodically syncs up with passing nations and connects them. Just under 1000 years ago, Jast saw the last stage of the battle against the Viator of Nullspace, an unimaginably powerful incarnation of the Void that spent years steadily breaking Autochthonian society - in large part because the Octet couldn’t organize themselves enough to take it down together. When it targeted Jarish and destroyed Jast, though, they finally pulled themselves together and defeated it with a massive joint task force. They found the city encased in crystal and submerged in a lava flow; when they manage to pull it out, they found the population alive and the city intact – mostly, some of the larger buildings were destroyed. They left those buildings in their ruined state as a mark of pride. Likewise, the neighboring city of Qune dug itself into the floor and popped out years later with an artificial sun that goes through a proper day and night cycle (the one in Nurad dims continuously before reigniting). Jarish has absorbed the scars of the war and turned them into icons of national pride. Issue is, in the last couple decades there’s been a rise in mechanical failures in Jarish, something the nation is unused to. These failures are always preceded by a sort of floating white portal or rift with minor corrosive effects on the psyches of observers. They vanish within a few hours of being spotted, but the failures persist. Right now, the rifts are a state secret, but the Grand Assembly thinks they might be the boundaries of the Viator’s metaphysical prison fraying and leaking into Autochthonia. If it breaks back in, it’ll hit right when the Autochthonian resource crunch kicks into gear and none of the nations will have the resources to stop it. Jarish is as much a prewritten campaign as it is a setting; establish the assembly, start rooting out cults, get characters started fixing society, break out the Viator and lead up to a boss fight. There’s plenty to do, but the looming threat of the Viator of Nullspace will drag Jarishite campaigns back into Void fighting sooner or later. Whether you think Jarish is a good setting for a game depends on what you want your game to be. If not, you can let Space Robot Bretonnia fall in on itself just fine. Shorter update than I expected today. Next time, we’ll take a look at Gulak, what happens when you put “Autochthonian” and “multiculturalism” in the same sentence.
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Jun 7, 2020 03:26
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Viator of Nullspace has a really great stat block and writeup. For one thing, Jarish is wrong: The Viator is not a creature of the Void. It's... worse? Better? It's a whole thing.
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Jun 7, 2020 04:40
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Joe Slowboat posted:Viator of Nullspace has a really great stat block and writeup. For one thing, Jarish is wrong: The Viator is not a creature of the Void. It's... worse? Better? It's a whole thing. Do they ever really come up with a uniform name for Autochthon's sickness? I've been referring to it as the Void even though the term's technically inaccurate but 
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Jun 7, 2020 05:38
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Jarish also features the piece of art where the art notes did ask for nudity. You can tell it was on purpose because it went to Melissa Uran and focues mostly on a pair of hot men.
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Jun 7, 2020 05:53
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Falconier111 posted:Do they ever really come up with a uniform name for Autochthon's sickness? I've been referring to it as the Void even though the term's technically inaccurate but I'd use 'blight' or 'gremlin syndrome' or just good ol' Robot Cancer. Viator's a special case in that it hates the blight as much as it hates humans in Autochthonia and also the Yozis.
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Jun 7, 2020 06:14
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Cooked Auto posted:There’s a table reminding us how many mutations and defects bout Mutants and Psi ones get. But also specifically mentioning that Psi-mutants get 1d2 mental defects as well as 1d4-3 mental defects. Guessing one of these should be physical?
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Jun 7, 2020 13:36
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Guessing one of these should be physical? Eeyup. 
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Jun 7, 2020 13:49
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Soulbound War Gods  Gorkamorka, the Greenskin God, is also the Greet Green God, the Sun-Eater, the Great Hunter, the Roaring Beast, Gork, Mork, He Who is Cunning but Brutal and He Who is Brutal but Cunning. The two-headed god has no temple-city or shrine, but instead claims the realm of Ghur in total as his home, when he has a home. Gorkamorka is a natural disaster that walks, a force of raw destruction. For worshippers, any spectacular or strange natural event is proof of his presence - a sign of favor, disfavor or other omen to be called on to march into battle. Thunder is his laugh, earthquakes are his footfalls. Prey species migrating unseasonally is a sign he is hungry, and that means good things are coming. When he appears physically, Gorkamorka is a giant orruk with two heads...but Gorkamorka is rarely united. Instead, he is most often split into his two warring halves - Gork, the brutal yet cunning, and Mork, the cunning yet brutal. Gork and Mork feud constantly, and so Gorkamorka routinely tears himself in half to allow the two to fight properly. When they reunite as the completed dual being, it is a sign that a Great Waaaagh! is coming, uniting the followers of the Great Green One in battle against all others. It is said that Sigmar first found Gorkamorka in Ghur, trapped inside (but still fighting) a divine living ooze named Drakatoa. When Sigmar intervened to free Gorkamorka, the Greenskin God became enraged at this killstealing and punched out Sigmar's friend Dracothion before going into battle against Sigmar himself. The battle with Sigmar lasted twelve days, flattening mountains and tearing seas into the earth. At the end, both were exhausted, unable to defeat each other, and became friends. Many stories speak of Gorkamorka's endless competing with Sigmar, how he drank whole seas and devoured kingdoms, how he climbed the greatest mountains simply to prove his might and shout at the world. The Firebelly clan of ogors say he ate the sun, but vomited it back up to give Aqshy day and night. The Moonclan grots say he once tried to eat their god, the Bad Moon, but broke his teeth on it, which became the mountains they live beneath. The Dom-Hain Enclave of the Idoneth of the Black Trough are believed to live in a sea left by his foot as he chased down and fought the Father of Krakigon. While Sigmar respected Gorkamorka's might, the gods Tyrion and Malerion always hated him as a savage, and Grungni saw him as his worst foe. Sigmar asked Gorkamorka to remain in Ghur, defeating its beasts to tame the land and keep him out of fights with the other gods. Eventually, Gorkamorka got bored and forgot what he was doing, turning to random violence that is said to have made Khorne jealous. Ghurite Human worshippers of Gorkamorka, who lacked the fuller understanding of the god's nature that the Greenskins feel innately, eventually even became corrupted by Khorne. At last, frustrated, Gorkamorka decided he wanted no more part of the Alliance of Order and led a great Waaaagh to rampage across the Realms. He did rejoin with Sigmar for one last fight, the Battle of Burning Skies, but even his savage fury and the help of Sigmar and Teclis were unable to stop Archaon from claiming the Eightpoints. Gorkamorka has not been seen united since then. Gork and Mork have shown omens, but that's about it. The prophets of the Wurrgog orruks, however, believe a new Great Waaagh is coming to unite their forces against all existence. The worship of Gorkamorka remains widespread but entirely disorganized. Followers tend to seek to emulate their god(s) with deeds of cunning and brutal might. The orruks of the Ironjawz focus on strength, while the Firebelly cult of ogors attempt to devour the hottest things they can. The orruk tribes known as the Bonesplitterz abandon all civiliztion to consume themselves as nomadic warriors and hunters, painting with symbols of the Waaaagh! The gargants claim their ancestor, Behemat, was the champion of Gorkamorka and so seek to emulate him by becoming the biggest and strongest. The Gulping God of the ogors is an aspect of Gorkamorka, as is the giant foot worshipped by the Sons of Behemat. Even humans worship the Greenskin God if they feel the call of war, plunder and battle-joy in their souls. The main theological debate of the Gorkamorkans is simple: is he brutal but cunning, or is he cunning but brutal? Their god(s) never gave them any real commands, and their debates are generally violent - that is the way of Gork, Mork and their united form. There has only ever been one stricture to the worship of Gorkamorka, and it is this: 1. Fight good.  Grimnir, the Shattered God, the Berserker and the Doomseeker, was in life known as the Protector of the Duardin, a god of warriors and battle. He was easily offended and never forgot a grudge, he was ever-loyal and honorable in all things, and he saw no problem in going to his own death in pursuit of honor. When he was alive, he appeared as an immense Duardin of great muscle, with skin that glowed like lava and a beard and hair of fire. His life in the Pantheon of Order was short, and his faithful know it. He never entered Azyrheim. He never sat with the other gods on the Grand Alliance. Had he lived, his followers say, then Chaos would never have won. His followers remain strongest in Aqshy, and they guard the Axes of Grimnir jealously. Sigmar found Grimnir chained to the highest peak in Chamon, alongside his elder brother, Grungni. Neither ever spoke of how it came to happen, but both immediately swore oaths to Sigmar as their liberator. Grungni would serve as his right hand, but Grimnir lacked that patience. He wanted to settle his debt as soon as possible, so he asked Sigmar to name a foe worthy of him. Sigmar named Vulcatrix, the Mother of Salamanders, whose breath kept living entire volcanos. Their battle is one of the best-known legends there has ever been. It lasted many days, shattering the landscape and remaking it with the heat of their flames. Where Vulcatrix's blood fell, volcanos erupted. Where Grimnir's axes landed, valleys were torn out. It is said by the followers of Grimnir that he struck the killing blow on Vulcatrix, but that he died in her final act of spite, the fiery explosion of her death. Grimnir's death fundamentally altered the Mortal Realms. His essence was fused with that of Vulcatrix, both flowing deep into the flames of Aqshy. His bones fell as molten slag, a rain of golden comets across the Mortal Realms. Only the Fyreslayers knew the truth: that where they landed, they cooled and became ur-gold. The Fyreslayers remain Grimnir's chief worshippers, learning to hammer ur-gold into runes and to hammer those runes into their flesh to channel the god's spirit in battle. However, each use diminishes the power within the gold. The Fyreslayers believe that using ur-gold in battle honors Grimnir and releases his spirt into the world. One day, when enough is released, he will return. Thus, they must acquire and wield ur-gold to channel his might in worthy battles. Even before his death, Grimnir had many followers - frequently Duardin that claimed blood descent from him, as the gods of the Duardin were closer to their people than many others. After his death, their faith was rebuilt around ur-gold, and these Duardin became the first of the Fyreslayers. Taking and fulfilling oaths, as Grimnir did, became a religious act, and the use of ur-gold a sacrament. Worshippers of Grimnir fight without cease and without fear, for it is the best way to honorably collect gold, and that is the best way to find ur-gold hidden among mundane ingots. Others see them as greedy mercenaries, but in truth they seek to prove themselves worthy of the Shattered God. Almost all worshippers of Grimnir are Duardin. Those that are not are typically people who have lost everything to war and now seek only a worthy death. These non-Duardin doomseekers often wander as warriors seeking only food, a good bed and enough money to see them on their way until they can find a place to make their final stand. The strictures of Grimnir's worship are: 1. Your oath is your bond. 2. Betray no fear in battle. 3. If the follower of another god expects your aid, they should expect to pay for it. 4. Seek out ur-gold and collect it wherever it may be found. Next time: Grungni and Malerion
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Jun 7, 2020 17:50
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Gork and Mork have always been fun. Glad they also pointed out the difference between them and Khorne. Namely that Khorne wants bloodshed done in rage and hatred, Gorkamorka just wants a good old dustup. There is no hate or anger at the ones the followers of Gorkamorka attack. This speech the primary orruk character Gordrakk is a pretty good statement on his gods opinions. Gordrakk the Fist of Gork posted:"The Hammer God never understood Gorkamorka, never saw. Gorkamorka wants to fight forever, but the Hammer God doesn’t. The Hammer God wants to build walls and towers and castles... But what’s the point of that if you never knock them over? Even the Chaos-things don’t understand. They think the point is to kill everyone, but then who’d be there to fight? Nobody understands but Ironjawz, because we’re the smartest and the toughest." MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 7, 2020 20:08
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MonsterEnvy posted:Gork and Mork have always been fun. Glad they also pointed out the difference between them and Khorne. Namely that Khorne wants bloodshed done in rage and hatred, Gorkamorka just wants a good old dustup. There is no hate or anger at the ones the followers of Gorkamorka attack. I admit that this makes the "greenskins" much more interesting. I wonder if there's a way to "roll up" an Orc/half-Orc in WHFRP 2ed. Maybe some kind of Gladiator type who refuses to kill certain opponents because they're so much fun to fight. I mean, if nothing else, it'd be fun to change "Your characters all meet up in a tavern" to "Your characters all meet up in a tavern... brawl." Everyone fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jun 7, 2020 |
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Jun 7, 2020 22:34
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Mutant 2089 A mutant I’m born, but an X-men is always torn between two worlds. Physical mutations work in very much the same way as mental mutations, a lot of them are permanent but there are some with limited uses per day. You also need to randomly roll them out with a 1d100 roll and look at a table. How screwed over will a normal mutant be compared to a Psi one? Let’s find out. Elemental Resistance - Makes you immune to the elements such as heat, cold or fire as long as you concentrate. Interestingly enough it also makes you resistant to lasers as you get natural protection up to five points of damage from lasers. How effective will this be? Who knows! Energy body - Instead of immune to the elements you’re now immune to electricity and various kinds of radiation. As long as you concentrate of course and you can only do it 4 times a day as well. You also get 5 points of damage reduction from lasers. Photosynthetic skin - You don’t need to eat anymore your body converts sunlight into energy. But you need to double your liquid intake though so have fun being stuck in a desert. Also much like Poison Ivy your skin is now a light shade green. But don’t think you can escape this by being a mutated animal as your fur will also turn green. All you need then is some black highlights to turn you into your average furry OC. Gills and webbing - You’re now Aquaman and can breathe unhindered underwater and have 100% on all swim maneuvers. I hope you’re playing a campaign that has water involved or else you’re kind of pointless. Fangs - You can now bite someone for 1d6 damage. But you can’t bite and use a weapon at the same time. Nor can you bite and punch someone by the looks of it. So what’s the point really? Immunity - When you get this mutation you need to roll 1d4. On a 1 you’re immune to radioactivity. On a 2 you’re immune to all kinds of poisons and gases. On a 3 you’re immune to all kinds of diseases and on a 4 you get to roll twice and reroll all fours. Only ones I can see being useful are the first two, otherwise it’s rather pointless. Infravision - You can see in the dark because Chameleon - You get a +50 bonus on your hiding skill because your skin adapts to the environment. Unfortunately you need to be completely naked to be able to blend in. Claws - Your fingers end with sharp claws that do 1d6 damage per hand and lets you do two attacks instead of one. Unless you have a weapon in your hands. Compared to fangs this is a much better choice. Multi limbs - You have four arms. Both new pairs have the same main hand and if you’re properly ambidextrous you can use all of them at the same time. But if you’re double handed you can only use either both your left hands or both your right hands, but never both at the same time. No idea if you can be Spiral or not and wield weapons in all your hands or not. Invisibility - You can become invisible, but only if you concentrate on that. So you can’t do anything but walk and talk. Also only your body becomes invisible; none of your clothes, cyberware or things you’re carrying in your hand will be. Also anything that can see IR or UV rays can still spot you. Terrible caveats strike again and thus making this mutation mostly useless or highly specific. Armored skin - You gain 5 KP’s worth of natural armor. Normal armor can be stacked on top of this. Precision - You have keen elven eyes and you get +25 to succeed with ranged and melee attacks. But not unarmed ones. Flame breath - You can blow a 20 meter long gout of flame from your mouth that is a meter wide and does 2t6+2 in damage on everything in its path. Oddly enough it uses the rifle skill, probably for the lack of better options, and is otherwise counted as a normal projectile attack. Regeneration - Works exactly the same as its mental mutation counterpart in that you gain one KP per round. Speed - By tapping into the speedforce you can increase your reflexes and reaction times and let you act twice as fast as others. In game terms this means you can pick two actions during the start of the combat round without being penalized. The drawback is that it isn’t a permanent power. Sonar - This mutation works in two different ways. Either you can use it as a sixth sense that lets you see in complete darkness for up to 10 meters. Or you can use it as an attack where you sonically attack someone to disable them. Anyone who fails an MST challenge chest within a 10m radius around you gets paralysed. While you’d think this is a one time attack you’d be wrong because it's instead an ongoing debuff that you need to maintain and therefore can’t move more than a meter per round while you concentrate to keep it active. Also the sonar field itself moves with you so you’d need to keep track of that as well. And you can’t use the two different versions at the same time. Strength - You get extra swole and increase your strength permanently by 1d6+2. Suction Feet - You get gecko hands and feet that lets you climb most flat surfaces. Their maximum weight is 50 kilos plus your own bodyweight. A Maneuvers skill check is required to be able to hold on when things get tricky. It can also be used in unarmed combat as the small suction cups on your fingers can do 1d2-1 KP in damage per round (2d2-2 if you use both hands) if you touch someone. Anyone grappled by them has to roll their STY against 2 points per suction cup attached. So if you’ve given them the full hand on face treatment they need to beat 10 with their STY check. Certainly one of the better circumstantial mutations listed. Tail - This mutation gives you a meter long, powerful tail. It gives you +25 on Maneuvers skill checks because you control your balance really well with it. But it also gives -5 on your movement speed. For some reason. You can also attack with it, using the unarmed combat skill, and it does 1d8 damage. Making it a pretty solid choice if you want natural weapons. Wings - You have wings to fly with. They let you move up to 10 meters per round and you can lift your STO value in kilos as well. In order to use any skill while flying you need to roll a Maneuvers skill check. If you fail you can’t use that skill and if you fumble you crash and take normal fall damage. Which I can only imagine is big enough to just turn you into paste if you were up high enough. Also much like mental defects there are a number of physical drawbacks. And much like before they’re both permanent and only affect you. Allergy - You have developed an allergy against something in your surroundings. Roll a 1d6 to determine what it might be from Iron, Exhaust fumes, Alcohol, Leather, All Metrals, Some plastic material. As soon as you come into contact with one of these you get a rash and get nauseous for 1d5 minutes, during which all your chances to succeed with skill checks are halved. Hemophilia - All your wounds are healed half as quickly and any medicinal drugs have half effect on you. Also anyone who tries doing first aid on you gets their chance to succeed halved as well. No problem you say but you have the regeneration power. But they did think about that so instead of 1 KP/round you heal 1 KP/minute with this defect. Infirmity - Your mother didn’t drink enough milk when carrying you and you have developed weak bones and a sensitive nervous system. This means that you take double damage from any exterior impact such as falling and hits. But normal damage from things like poison, radiation and fire. The damage is doubled after damage reduction from armor has been calculated. Club foot - Your movement speed on land is halved. Revolting appearance - Radiation has not been kind to you and given you a rather off putting appearance. Your skin now paler and you’re also bald. You also have to decide on 1d4+2 further mutations alongside your GM. Pick from a 1d10 list of Sticky Emissions, Stench, Enormous Nose, Big poison green eyes, warts, black nails and lips, distorted facial features, hunchback, pig snout or trunk instead of a nose. Each of these give you -1 PER but no lower than 3. This is probably the most mean-spirited physical defect on the list because you have a possibility of becoming really unlucky with the rolls. Also, black nails and lips being considered a defect? Have the writers never seen goths before? Refractive Errors - Due to bad vision you get -20 on all ranged attacks and -10 on any melee weapon attacks. The GM is completely free to give you penalties up to -25 to reflect your poor vision to have you bumble around like Mr. Magoo if they feel like it. If you have the precision mutation you get to reroll. Lowered attribute - What it says on the tin, one of your basic attributes is decreased by 1d6+2 but no lower than 3. Roll a 1d10 to consult the chart to see which one that gets hit. Hypersensitivity - Roll 1d6 to see what you’re sensitive to: Radioactivity, Sunlight, Poison, Metals. When you get into contact with one of these you get -50% on all skill checks. Even if that can not go any lower than 5%. You’re also not allowed to be sensitive to something you’re immune to so if you have the Immunity power you need to reroll that check. Compared to the PSI mutations the physical ones are a considerable step up even if a lot of them do feel like special abilities due to their limited usages per day that you’ll just end up saving for a special fight instead of using constantly. But even then some of the permanent ones are pretty good. I guess the drawback is that you have to roll these out by random instead of simply deciding what you have on your own. The physical defects are a step above in general because none of them remove player agency and they’re more of a general nuisance than something completely obstructive. Also no chance for someone with flame breath to blow themselves up because there’s no backlash defect. The appearance one is perhaps the most egregious one since if you get really unlucky you’re saddled with something worthy of a horror movie. Oddly enough it doesn’t say anything about using the previously aforementioned cosmetic cyberware to negate some of them. Either way I’d probably just play a normal mutant instead of a Psi one. Even if they do feel a bit like bargain bin X-Men. Next time: Chrome.
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Jun 7, 2020 22:37
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Cooked Auto posted:
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Jun 7, 2020 23:10
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Oh just you wait until we reach the second half of the core books.
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Jun 7, 2020 23:22
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Cooked Auto posted:Oh just you wait until we reach the second half of the core books. It's not a lovely day?
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Jun 7, 2020 23:57
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Josef bugman posted:It's not a lovely day? It's a VERY lovely day. This game is not shy about its references when we get to the world section.
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Jun 8, 2020 00:04
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Everyone posted:I admit that this makes the "greenskins" much more interesting. I wonder if there's a way to "roll up" an Orc/half-Orc in WHFRP 2ed. Maybe some kind of Gladiator type who refuses to kill certain opponents because they're so much fun to fight. Orruk's are stated to be able to be reasoned with. They are even allowed in the Free Cities if they relatively behave themselves, and a fair number of them do go to trade for stuff they can't normally get, or to hire themselves out as mercenaries or bodyguards.
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Jun 8, 2020 01:28
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Chapter 4 (The Widening Gyre): Gulak Have you ever had somebody tried to explain Hinduism to you by talking about how all the gods are at once separate entities and reflections of Brahman? Scale that up to an entire society and you get Gulak. Most nations revolve around a central cavern or set of caverns, or they just fit themselves in wherever (looking at you, Sova and Jarish), but Gulak is a massive constellation of chambers at most a couple dozen miles wide. When Gulak, another priestess of Autochthon with a thing for art, led her followers into the area, she encouraged them to set up settlements and paint the walls with reminders of Creation (to this day the visual arts are huge in Gulak). Her Alchemical successor was probably the first to turn into a city, and Thutot quickly started drawing Gulak spent the next few centuries flying under the radar and drawing in refugees from other nations; while the rest of the Octet broke down into civil wars, Gulak was too busy rebuilding itself to turn its nose up at potential workers or suppress differences of opinion. By 3600, despite a few spats caused by reactionaries uninterested in integrating different cultures, Gulak had settled into a new cultural norm, the one it embraces to this day; a coalition of distinct but cooperative subcultures, each in their own district or chamber but loyal to the whole. Jarish then decided Gulak was too heterodox for their liking and invaded with Estasian mercenaries. They just drove them out a few years later with a national identity hardened by the experience. A mixture of further peaceful development and accepting refugees from all corners (including Estasian pacifists and former tunnel folk) kept the population growing until only Claslat matches its numbers.  Gulak is divided into clades, separate communities with their own laws, culture, and even language (sort of, even the most obscure Autochthonian dialects have enough in common that you can’t really neatly divide them; think Chinese or Arabic). While clades get huge latitude in choosing how they dress, how they organize themselves, and even what they believe, within clades few people get to choose their their fate; whoever leads the clade decides what happens within it and everyone has to put up with them. As far as I can tell you can’t even split clades if they grow too large or dysfunctional, you just have to tough it out. If you don’t fit in with your clade, Gulaki life can be devastatingly stifling. Despite how insular clades tend to be, members work outside of the clade and interact regularly with Gulaki culture in general, meaning that cities end up fantastically diverse. Every clade has its own clothing and name structure, but the arts tend to be wild and more customized to taste; all sorts of visual art show up on buildings, plays cover subjects of every kind, and music tends to be unusually complex and involve instruments not found anywhere else. And speaking of taste, Gulaki cuisine is legendary throughout the Octet; Gulaki rarely deign to eat anything as bland as pure nutrient paste and if a culture earlier in this write up had an interest in any kind of food or drink, they probably called in Gulaki chefs at some point to make it happen. Like elsewhere, the Lectors manage all of this cultural expression, but their cultural functions often take precedence over their religious or social ones. Sort of. While many clades maintain conservatories that preserve ancient, half-forgotten art styles, most part combines a mixture of contemporary fashions and religious feeling (the Lectors at work); you get a lot of mystery plays, hymns, and the like. While Gulak’s population lives mostly in its seven cities (where the cosmopolitan worldview described above holds sway), almost every tiny chamber has a town of its own; each of these houses a clade of its own distinct from its neighbors. These clades tend to be clannish, conservative, and staid compared to their city-dwelling cousins, but they share that appreciation for the arts. Unless they decide it’s decadent. Gulak is the only nation in Autochthonia to promote religious diversity. While the core of Gulaki society has its own religious system (they regard the Divine Ministers simultaneously independent entities and parts of Autochthon and worship them it’s shrines), they had to adapt to the religious leanings of all the cultures they took in way back; instead of wasting valuable manpower bringing them into line, the country collectively decided to shrug and let everybody do what they want. But Gulak doesn’t practice religious freedom. Every clade is expected to follow the basic social structure the Conclave laid out and avoid heresy, though the definition of heresy in Gulak is unusually wide. If your sect gets declared heretical or a Voidbringer cult, you get the same mercy you’d find anywhere else (none). You can still find everything from people who regard reproduction as a holy duty to people who think the oncoming Robot Cancer is part of Autochthon’s natural rise and fall of power to outright Gnostics (though the last are heretical). Theomachrats from across Autochthonia meet in Thutot when they try to work out the boundaries of acceptable orthodoxy, since they can trust the locals have seen it all already. However, there are a few elements that run through the vast majority of Gulaki clades.
 Stephenls posted:Jarish also features the piece of art where the art notes did ask for nudity. You can tell it was on purpose because it went to Melissa Uran and focues mostly on a pair of hot men. Gulak’s cosmopolitanism falls apart in its government. Gulak has the closest thing Autochthonia has to a party system, with the bulk of the Tripartite identifying with one of several competing schools of thought (the big ones right now very roughly map to conservatism, European liberalism, and social progressivism). In theory, these schools refine disparate opinions into concrete plans of action. In practice, Tripartite members get promoted as much on their clade and ideological affiliation as on their merits, leaving Gulak the most corrupt member of the Octet. By Autochthonian standards, that is; incompetent Tripartite members tend to be spotted and removed within a few years, and most leaders work just fine, however they got the position. But while the Regulators exposing a corrupt Supervisor or Adjudicator is always a major scandal in Autochthonia, in Gulak it’s the sort of scandal that dominates the news every few years instead of once in a lifetime. The Tripartite’s need to accommodate the ideologies of countless subcultures has led to a labyrinthine network of sub-castes, brevet positions, and special roles, each with its own identity and agenda; the Theomachracy, especially, struggles with administrating countless mutually exclusive belief systems. The insularity of the clades combines with the sheer complexity of the government to make rooting out corruption even harder. It’s not falling apart like Sova’s is, but the Gulaki government exists to throw up roadblocks and delays whenever players start poking around where they don’t belong. As arguably the most important city in Autochthonia, Thutot gets first billing in the gazetteer – and surprisingly the book doesn’t have much to say. Just visual descriptions and notes on just how aggressively social everyone is (and also that the first city in Autochthonia was a Starmetal). I guess the book told us everything we need to know already. We also have writeups on Mogeta (Gulak’s second city, the only manufacturer of specialized food products in Autochthonia), Sata Ka’est (a town descended from Estasian pacifists dealing with a six-year-old Messiah), foreign relations (other nations raid Gulak for resources sometimes but mostly just let their population take pilgrimages or move in, and Nurad is trying to unload as much as a fifth of their population onto them), and, of course, half a dozen characters. For once the most interesting characters are both Alchemicals; one is a reformer gradually stumbling into the concept of representative democracy who be able to persuade investigators she’s got the right idea, and the other is a bored investigator on his way to becoming the Riddler. I feel Gulak is where you set your campaigns if you really like reading your own flavor text. Their society sounds like it’s always two minutes away from a Bollywood number (fitting, considering) and gives a GM the opportunity to come up with some baroque imagery. On the other hand, it offers a platform for stories about culture clash, mixed loyalties, and cultural alienation. I don’t have strong feelings about it compared to the rest of the Octet, especially Nurad and Claslat. But I can see why you might run a campaign there. And with that we close the book on the Octet. Sort of. The next chapter covers two Alchemical cities first on the edges of the Pole of Metal, while the one after that goes into the deeper functions of Autochthon’s body and its component Poles. I’m not a fan of how the book introduces those cities without describing the terrain they rely on, so I’ll reorganize things and work through the next few chapters Pole by Pole. Next time, we cover the Pole of Metal, a massive network of spirits and machinery even the Autochthonians scarcely comprehend. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 02:57
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I did not expect Autocthonia overall to be so thirsty. I mean, it's fine, I'm just saying.
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Jun 8, 2020 03:10
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Dawgstar posted:I did not expect Autocthonia overall to be so thirsty. I mean, it's fine, I'm just saying. It's Exalted.
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Jun 8, 2020 03:13
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I like the Gorkamorka stuff. I especially like the idea of human worshippers struggling with their base human natures, knowing intellectually that they shouldn't give in to hate but finding it awfully difficult to avoid.
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Jun 8, 2020 09:47
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"We are here to kick rear end and chew bubblegum" as a religious stricture is quite interesting. Also Falconier, I really like you taking the time to go over these cities. Autocthonia was the only bit of Exalted I ever really liked, and I appreciate it getting a fun write up.
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Jun 8, 2020 12:27
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MonsterEnvy posted:Orruk's are stated to be able to be reasoned with. They are even allowed in the Free Cities if they relatively behave themselves, and a fair number of them do go to trade for stuff they can't normally get, or to hire themselves out as mercenaries or bodyguards. Did anyone ever put together a roll up for them? I've got a Dwarf, Wood Elf, Hobbit and Norscan in my made up party. It'd be fun to toss an Orruk in there as well for even more culture clash. Oooh. An Orruk Priest of Shallya who doesn't use weapons and won't kill, but just lovvvves getting into scraps. Everyone fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 13:34
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Dawgstar posted:I did not expect Autocthonia overall to be so thirsty. I mean, it's fine, I'm just saying. Mix the lack of inheritance laws, need to provide for children, sex taboos, and microorganisms that cause STDs with a high stress environment and the horniness that forms the background radiation of human experience to get Autochthonian sexual mores. Just wait until half of Jarish catches fantasy herpes within a year of Yugash breaching Creation. E: oh man, Creation diseases are gonna loving butcher Autochthonia. Plot hook for Creation exalted to carve a safe place in Autochthonia as doctors? Josef bugman posted:"We are here to kick rear end and chew bubblegum" as a religious stricture is quite interesting.  I think of Autochthonia like I think of Glorantha. Both of them are rich, complex settings that mix and understanding of the human experience both deep and unusual with a setting both beautiful and complex enough to turn off potential players. My goal here is to either find someone who played an Alchemical or inspire someone to run an Autochthonian game. PS thank you for your service StefanIs 
Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 15:30
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