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Jul 2, 2020 07:49
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SIGMATA is at it again, lol https://twitter.com/LandNop/status/1274218852231065600
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Jul 2, 2020 09:10
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This take is blistering and contemptible and I hope the SIGMATA devs get completely and utterly ignored, as they should be.
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Jul 2, 2020 10:14
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JcDent posted:SIGMATA is at it again, lol I'm no big-brain grassroots organizer/resistance fighter, but maybe put the "cops are bad and media will vilify you" stuff on p. 2 and the "maybe you should think about allying with the religious right and anarcho capitalists to take down fascism" stuff
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Jul 2, 2020 10:29
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I can understand disliking the prospect of the PC protagonists in the game setting you wrote executing operations plans best summarized as "an open-air re-enactment of GWAR's immortal work, 'Slaughterama'," but this would best be accomplished by the following steps: * Do not write your setting in a way that parallels situations that do in fact lead to cycles of reprisals and tensions even in the best of situations. * Do not write things in a way that presents a permanent uphill struggle; say that after building momentum, yes, the bad guys can be beaten, or at least driven to the point of being an embattled enclave, with the great majority of former supporters turning their coats to the revolution * Do not write SIGMATA; instead, write a game that is good * If the former is beyond your power, write a D&D module.
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Jul 2, 2020 10:51
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Falconier111 posted:I… I have no idea I really cannot see it as anything other than a mistype (or like, notation misunderstanding) for "13 or higher" Since the one below explicitly reads 10-12, otherwise a 12 gets you both results
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Jul 2, 2020 12:24
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With a lot of PBTA, 7+ and 10+ result rather than 7-9 and 10+ does mean ‘do both of these’ unless an instead is used.
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Jul 2, 2020 12:38
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Xiahou Dun posted:...why is East on the left, against how all actual maps in the West work? That was my first thought, too.
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Jul 2, 2020 13:23
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Xiahou Dun posted:...why is East on the left, against how all actual maps in the West work? I’m betting typo since e and w are adjacent on most English keyboards and both words will pass a spell check and brain out to lunch level of proofreading. 
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Jul 2, 2020 15:00
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I reached out to the creator of Glitter Hearts for confirmation about pluses having no cap. I’ll let you know in the next update or two if I hear back.Mors Rattus posted:With a lot of PBTA, 7+ and 10+ result rather than 7-9 and 10+ does mean ‘do both of these’ unless an instead is used. I think that’s the case; a lot of 12+ results read better if you assume the book wants you to add them on instead of taking them separately. The fact that the book doesn’t clarify that is its own issue. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Jul 2, 2020 |
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Jul 2, 2020 17:18
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 Mechanics and Advancement Today we get a final rundown of the remaining mechanics, at least as far as players are concerned. We’ll only be covering a few topics here, though a few of them might prove vitally important.  So, combat. Glitter Hearts uses a stripped-down version of combat from Dungeon World (not that it tells you that), which in turn uses a slightly modified version of Apocalypse World combat. I won’t be going in depth, it’s similar enough that you know the basics if you know either system (and that’s why I linked the Apocalypse World review: to You get experience from two sources: failures and end-of-session questions. Every time you bring a session to a close, the players read through a list of five yes-or-no questions that amount to “did you conform to genre expectations” and answer them one by one; two yesses get everyone one experience, three or more get everyone two. You also get one experience point for every time you fail a roll, no questions asked. Every six XP gets you a single Advancement which you can spend leveling up your character; you can get a bonus from your Mundane Identity, Archetype, or Mystical Connection or add attack to a weapon for one, take one from another Mundane Identity or Archetype for two, or raise a stat with varying costs depending on how far the stat is from 0. You also have to write a single sentence reflecting what you’ve done every time you gain an Advancement, both to build a sort of biography for your character and act as a reference point for seeing how they grow over time (yes, I know those are nearly synonyms, but the book doesn’t realize that).  And that’s the basics of what every player should know before playing Glitter Hearts. We also get a rough schedule each session should follow:
 Greg, please work with me here. When I first read this book, I thought the way it flowed from topic to topic was borderline revolutionary, but now I just hate it because it makes it hard to track anything down. And speaking of hateable things, I’ve been looking over the rules on stats and bonuses to find out if the book does anything about those crazy constant plus for bonuses, and I think I’ve located the key passage: We get told +3 is the highest a stat can go. I can’t tell if that includes pluses on rolls. If it DOES, much of the math weirdness just goes away. Using Power Points for advantage suddenly becomes more relevant. Combat becomes more interesting since players are incentivized to use We Can Do It Together! to bolster weaker allies instead of buffing a few characters beyond belief for specific tasks. Challenges become more dangerous and interesting since you can’t just blow a bunch of Power Points to prevent failure. Molly and Sam’s We Can Do This Together!-Touch Their Heart combo can’t take any villain, no matter how powerful, out of the fight in two rounds. Granted, it would lead to things like players being actively incentivized not to assist powerful characters when they can use their boosts elsewhere – I mean, I’m not exactly an expert on the source material, but I THINK that runs contrary to the message. But it would balance a lot of the math out. If the book specified it. As it stands, RAW you can pile pluses nearly endlessly with a little effort and turn play into a series of victories without any kind of narrative tension unless the GM slides into the sort of adversarial GMimg the book actively discourages. God, this book. I mean, in spite of all its problems, I really do like Glitter Hearts; the We Can Do This Together!-Power Point loop encouraging teamwork and support, Rest and Relaxation naturally setting up opportunities for character development and breaks in the action, the flavor that runs through the Mystical Connections… there’s a lot to appreciate here. But there are so many oversights and so few ways to track answers down that it falters under critical review. I keep getting the sneaking feeling I’m missing something important in the descriptions every time I run into one of these gaps, but for the life of me I can’t find any answers. So far I’ve avoided getting too deep in the GM section since it takes the whole stream-of-consciousness organization issue to new heights. But that’s the next part of the book and that’s what we cover next time. We’ll see if it has any answers for us buried somewhere deep within.
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Jul 2, 2020 21:15
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Falconier111 posted:We get told +3 is the highest a stat can go. I can’t tell if that includes pluses on rolls. It does not include plusses on rolls; they go on top. This is why getting those plusses is kind of a big deal in original Apocalypse World - there are, like, two moves to do it spread across all the playbooks; Glitter Hearts is being a little too free with handing them out.
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Jul 2, 2020 22:37
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Glazius posted:It does not include plusses on rolls; they go on top. This is why getting those plusses is kind of a big deal in original Apocalypse World - there are, like, two moves to do it spread across all the playbooks; Glitter Hearts is being a little too free with handing them out.  I was kind of grasping at straws there, wasn't I? Oh well. I did learn from the dev characters can only get the benefits of one We Can Do This Together! at a time, so there's that.
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Jul 2, 2020 23:13
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GimpInBlack posted:I'm no big-brain grassroots organizer/resistance fighter, but maybe put the "cops are bad and media will vilify you" stuff on p. 2 and the "maybe you should think about allying with the religious right and anarcho capitalists to take down fascism" stuff Those 3 SIGMATA factions in question aren't representatives of their respective movements, but rogue holdovers who realized that the majority of their comrades are tyrants who think they're small-government freedom-lovers by instituting Saudi-style Guardianship laws for women or arresting minorities who refuse to give up their own languages and cultural traditions. This is not an excuse, but merely creates another inconsistency in the world-building. I mean, on some level I imagine that in a fictional fascist dystopia there are some free-market types who genuinely realize that the very corporations they empowered are pro-big government, but they'd be an astonishingly small minority who don't have the numbers to shoulder a national revolution. They'd be far outnumbered by a variety of leftists, genuine centrists, and people who'd be otherwise non-political but get pushed into the Resistance cuz their wife's Hispanic or they tried to sue the police department for freezing their bank account due to civil forfeiture. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Jul 3, 2020 |
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Jul 3, 2020 02:09
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 12: COMPLEXES, CULTS, AND OCCULT BLOODLINES In our last post, we created the big underworld map and some factions for The Spit, our imaginary Esoteric Enterprises city. Now we’ll look at the generation process for some individual dungeon complexes that make up the larger map, and get an in-depth look at a couple factions. We’ll handle the complexes first. COMPLEX CREATION Esoteric Enterprises, Page 150 posted:There’s a simple method for creating a randomly generated underground complex map for player characters to explore. We’ll make two complexes to demonstrate how the rules work. Underworld Frontier Falconier111 posted:The hell is an Underworld Frontier? Our underworld frontier is map location 9 on the big dungeon map. We’ll use 2 each of D4s, D6s, D8s, D10s, D12s and D20s for this, along with a single coin to make the chambers.  Like with the big underworld map, the passages between the rooms in the Underworld Frontier are determined by the size of the dice on either side. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 159 posted:The connecting tunnels in this sort of complex vary wildly. By default, a tunnel between rooms is a now-dry sewer tunnel, four feet in diameter. Look at the dice-size of the chamber at either end for variations on this.  Now I’ll add the chambers from the big table, corresponding to the numbers rolled on the dice.  I’ll post the descriptions from the table here. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 159, Table 98 posted:1: Empty save for ankle-deep water. Also look up the dice size on the table below for appearance… Esoteric Enterprises Page 159, Table 99 posted:D4: Dead fish scattered about. Finally, we need to add passages to the other dungeon areas. Our Underworld Frontier connects to the abandoned subway station to the North, the gang stronghold to the East, and the underground parking garage to the Southeast.  So, how did we do? I definitely see the logic in where the trapped rooms ended up - surrounding the entrance to the gang stronghold on the East side of the map, and the path into the area from the South. We can revisit our faction map and figure out whose graffiti that is, or just assign it to the gang that lives to the Southeast. Same with the impaled bodies, though I don’t know that a criminal gang would be dumb enough to dump their kills three rooms away from their own doorstep. What could be improved? Well to put it simply, this Underworld Frontier is boring. By using a mix of dice, we didn’t get higher than an 8 on any die. We missed out on several much more interesting chambers. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 159, Table 98 posted:14: Infested with some sort of fast-growing fungus or slime. A line of harsh chemicals painted in a ring across the wall, floor and ceiling of each entrance provides a barrier the slime can’t grow across, but if this line is broken, the fungus will be able to spread, taking over other rooms in a matter of days. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 159, Table 98 posted:3: Two sets of corpses , from two different factions, dead from the outbreak of violence between them. Roll on table 77 (I loot the bodies) a few times for what’s on them, and check the dice-size on the table below for the room’s appearance This is a bit harder to fix than the underworld creation section, because in this case you do lose something if you go to all D20s. The passages connecting the rooms are much more interesting on the micro scale of a single dungeon node, rather than the miles of identical sewers the overword map produces. Similarly, the chamber descriptors also rely on the size of the die that generated the room, and they matter for gameplay as well. You could always dice for the passages and room properties, but then you’re rolling a bunch more dice to get the same result. Let’s make another complex, and see if the rules-as-written don’t treat us better this time. Reliquaries Falconier111 posted:I'd like to see how you make a Reliquary an entire complex. I’ll use the same dice as last time. There are complexes in the book that have results from 30 to 00, requiring a D10 with a tens place, but not this one. Since I did the procedure step by step for the last complex, I’m going to skip documenting each stage and show you the finished map that our rules generated. Here are the corridor and chamber descriptors we’ll be working with. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 171 posted:The corridors in reliquaries are sturdy, skilfully constructed tunnels lined with brick or stone. Each is five feet wide, seven feet high with an arched roof. There are sconces every twenty yards or so to hold a torch or candle, but these are unlit when the PCs enter the complex. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 171, Table 124 posted:D4: Bare brick  What’s going on in our reliquary? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 171, Table 123 posted:1: Totally empty, save for dust… (I promise when we get to the bestiary, we’ll go over cave barnacles and shoggoths and angry fossils and all these other underworld inhabitants) Misc Thoughts on Complex Creation Despite all the rocks I just threw at them, I like the complex creation rules. I respect the attempt to use a single “overloaded” die to generate both a single room, a descriptive text for that room, and the passages leading out of that room. Compared to something like Castle Gargantua (a dungeon generator with a different philosophy that I might review some other time), the result is a lot faster to put together at the table, requiring a third as many die rolls. But, the Castle Gargantua results are much more evocative. The complexes will take some manual fine-tuning if you want them to make sense. It’s easy to end up with a cult stronghold where all the checkpoints and traps are stuck in a corner, with all the treasure stored by the entrance. You can easily end up with a route through a complex completely blocked by a room with an impassible hazard. While this can set up some cool metroidvania style “come back with fire immunity to pass through” interactions, you might also be stuck wondering how the smugglers get to the black market through the room filled with instant death spores. I’ll go over this in more detail when we get to the bestiary, but in brief: the game has different random encounter tables for different dungeon areas. Encounters in ruins, encounters in sewers, flooded places, holy places, abandoned infrastructure, the list goes on. You roll on whichever one is the most appropriate for the area you’re in. One thing the rules don’t tell you is how to populate dungeon areas that are owned by a specific faction. We have a gang stronghold on our map, how many gangsters from the gang go in the gang stronghold? All of them? Half? How do I distribute them throughout the rooms? In my home games, one thing I did when I got rid of the endless sewer tunnels between complexes is I switched over from one passage between complexes to two. A connecting line on the big underworld map means that there are two chambers in that complex that lead to the other complex, rather than one. The other way I cheat is to just set duplicate values to something else if I don’t like them. Obviously I didn’t do that with either of our examples. Keep in mind that we’ve barely scratched the surface of all the possible dungeon areas in EE. There are 29 different complex templates, although a few of those are variations on other (ex Shoggoth Lairs, Lich Sanctums and Morlock Pits are made from the same template as Underworld Frontiers, Sewer Clusters or Buried Ruins) EXAMPLE FACTIONS Enough shoggoths and sewers, let’s flesh out some of the factions who live in the Spit. The book has a list of faction types, some descriptive text for each, and some dice to roll to see how many of each NPC type there are in the faction. Sometimes they have a table or generator for additional information, like what powers a vampire has, or what God a cult worships. Speaking of cults... Avatar Cults Falconier111 posted:I'd love to see what an Avatar Cult is LeSquide posted:I'd also like to see an Avatar cult! We’ll cover this in the bestiary in more detail, but to summarize: cults in Esoteric Enterprises are generated using a random roll table laid over a generic template. The table has 30 Gods, each with associated aspects, associated NPCs or monsters, and a spell list that the NPC cultists gain access to as they increase in power. So in order to make our Avatar Cult, we first have to figure out what God they worship. A single D30 gets us a result of 13. That’s The Idea of Thorns, God/Goddess(?) of Plants, wounds, insanity, the green world, and the fall of civilization. First, let’s pick the avatar. The list says “various plant-monsters/Murder Children”. I’m going to skip ahead to the plant bestiary and make it an intelligent Shambling Mound, because Swamp Thing is cool. An 18 INT murder child would also be kind of cool, like Alia Atreides as a druid. But on the other hand, Swamp Thing! The rest of the cult is stratified by rank. Higher ranked cultists have bigger HP pools, better saves, and access to more spells. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 176 posted:There are only d6 each of Cult Novices, Lay Cultists and Cult Fanatics. However, there are a full 2d10 each of Inner Circle Initiates, as well as d6 each of the cult’s associated NPCs, and Magisters. 2 Cult Novices 1 Lay Cultist 6 Cult Fanatics 15(!) Inner Circle Initiates 6 Associated NPCs 4 Magisters I’m going to say the Associated NPCs are Murder Children - stealthy, amoral, knife wielding kids from the “Occult Weirdos” section of the bestiary. Maybe the avatar had them all specially created as potential messiahs, like in that weird Constantine/Swamp Thing crossover. (Something we’ll see later in the bestiary is that there’s a massive power gap between some of the cults’ associated NPCs. The Dionysis cult’s associated NPCs are assorted crackheads. The Leviathan cult’s associated NPC is a loving aboleth) If I was prepping this for use at the table, I’d copy down the cultist templates and fill in their spells from the Idea of Thorns list. The Magisters get Command, Speak with Animals, Silence, Howl of the Moon, Awaken Plants, Create Illusion. The ranks leading up to that get pieces of the list, with everyone being able to cast Command. NPC cultist spellcasting uses a variant of the mystic spellcasting rules that we’ll get into when we hit the monster manual, but a room full of people casting Command at you is a force to be reckoned with. Revisiting our social underworld map from last week, the Avatar Cult is engaged in all-out war with one street gang, controls another, and is being slowly infiltrated by spies from a local corrupt business, who probably views their insane insights and magic powers as a precursor to a marketable product. They’ve got a good relationship with another minor cult, but they rarely interact. I like this result. It wasn’t hard to take the random generators and come up with some narrative backing for the dice results. Let’s see if the tainted bloodline keeps it up. Tainted Bloodline Falconier111 posted:I'm also curious about how the game treats Tainted Bloodlines. To determine the nature of our Tainted Bloodline, we roll a D20, which tells us both the elders, and what monstrous creatures their descendents resemble. A 9 gives us two Death Knights, and their descendents, which have the powers of Vengeful Wights. Death Knights are intelligent, plate-armored skeletons who wander around the undercity looking for quests and challenges. If you engage one in hand to hand combat, you both become immune to damage from anyone else until the duel is over. Death Knights rule. How do they reproduce? Absolutely no idea. A Vengeful Wight is an intelligent undead animated by a burning desire to avenge its own death. Aside from the usual undead immunities and weaknesses it doesn’t really have any special properties, other than healing HP every time it scares someone. The trick to getting away from these guys is to climb to a high place and pull the ladder up behind you. Everyone knows wight men can’t jump. So our tainted bloodline has a pair of Death Knights, and 3D6 of their first generation descendents, Vengeful Wights. The rules text mentions that the “pure blood” monster people might not actually have the full stat block of the associated creature, but some abilities copied over. I think Vengeful Wights are plain vanilla enough that there’s really nothing to strip-out, so let’s just use their statline as-is. Maybe give them guns like normal people, instead of improvised bludgeons. In addition to the progenitors and inner circle, the corrupt bloodline also has 4D10 of of thugs and normal people, created by the dilution of their monstrous heritage through interbreeding with mundane humanity. Again, not sure how that works with Wights. Our total is 2 Death Knights 9 Vengeful Wights 13 Thugs 14 Useless Civilians A bloodline of undead beings, motivated by honor, chivalry and revenge. Sounds like someone sinned against their ancestors some time in the ancient past, and they’ve been searching for vengeance ever since. Kind of like House Montressor, with the snake biting the dude stepping on it and the motto “NO ONE WOUNDS ME WITH IMPUNITY” Who are they trying to get revenge on? Our faction table says they’re currently fighting the Corrupt Business in the streets, so the company is probably owned by a descendent of the bloodline’s original enemy. Or stole an ancestral magic item, or refuses to give back their estate, or something. I’ll admit the logistics of this one are a bit fuzzy, but I still like it. UP NEXT In the next post, we’ll dig into the random encounter tables and the game’s NPC list and bestiary. This is going to be another content rich section that will probably take a few posts to get through, even just hitting the highlights. We haven’t explored any of my favorite factions in the game, because neither of them showed up when we created our underworld. Thankfully, they’ll show up in monster manual. Their dungeon areas are also some of the coolest in the game, so maybe we’ll talk about those too when the time comes. Nemo2342 posted:So far, it feels like you would need to rip out and/or modify so much of Esoteric Empires that I don't know that much of the original would remain. BinaryDoubts posted:My feeling is that I'd just rip out most of the random tables and use them with Silent Legions, which, while not exciting, is at least functional. Plus combining the dungeon generation with the Cthulhu generation (from Silent Legions) could result in some interesting results. Looking forward to hearing more about Silent Legions. I had a couple players bring it up in contrast to EE, but I don’t think they themselves had ever actually read it. Xiahou Dun posted:...why is East on the left, against how all actual maps in the West work? Speleothing posted:That was my first thought, too. Midjack posted:I'm betting typo since e and w are adjacent on most English keyboards and both words will pass a spell check and brain out to lunch level of proofreading.
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Jul 3, 2020 04:17
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Into The Odd Part One of the Dungeon Crawl Trawl  For my next couple of reviews, I wanted to try something different. Rather than focusing my review on a single system, I wanted to talk about a specific play type and how well (or poorly) different systems work for it. The Dungeon Crawl is arguably the oldest play type in modern RPGs, and felt like a suitable candidate. While the classic pure Dungeon Crawl has become predominately a CRPG phenomenon with franchises like Diablo and Minecraft Dungeons, most games include Dungeon Crawl elements. It also acts as a stress test on a system's character creation and mechanics - I believe a Dungeon Crawl is going to put those part of the system front and center during a game. I plan to run games using Into The Odd, KNAVE, Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, Pathfinder 2nd Edition, and Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing 4th Edition. Those five systems have modules on Foundry VTT, which indicates that they're popular enough that a fan put actual work into making the module, and seemed geared towards the Dungeon Crawl play type. The format of these reviews are going to be pre-game 'first impression' reviews where I discuss the system's rules and presentation, followed by a post-game debriefing where I'll discuss the game experience and whether I'd recommend the system. This is all a bit ambitious, but I think I can handle it, and I think you all will enjoy the journey. But enough about that, let's talk about the first system! Into The Odd is a system by Chris McDowall released in 2015, and while it's generally seen as part of the OSR movement, it deviates significantly from the D&D source material. The rule book itself is very short at 50 pages, with most of that being taken up by the example adventure and random tables to generate NPCs and places. The actual rules themselves take up only 13 pages if you exclude the evocative drawings and examples of play. Mausritter, which I’ve discussed before, uses Into The Odd’s system as the core for it’s hack. Mausritter really appealed to me, so I’ll be referring to it a bit in this review. Chris McDowall also recently kickstarted Electric Bastionland, which I understand is a bit like Into The Odd 2nd Edition and seems to fix a couple of the issues I have with Into The Odd. The setting of Into The Odd is the first major deviation, as it's not a vaguely medieval European fantasy world. Instead, Into The Odd is set in an Industrial Revolution/steampunk world where Cosmic Weirdness lurks just below the surface - literally. The setting is focused on Bastion, "the last city that matters," where the streets are teeming with refugees and factories fill the sky with smoke. Underneath Bastion are unmapped tunnels leading to Secret Vaults full of monsters and treasure, so you don't have to go far to find a dungeon in need of exploration. While the characters are armed with modern equipment like rifles and flashbangs, a lot of the game is focused around Arcana - magical items with strange powers and mysterious origins. Most expeditions are for the purpose of retrieving Arcana, but characters who are too open about possessing them "will find themselves the target of collectors, thieves, and con artists." Into The Odd is also a class-less system, and eschews the traditional 6 Ability Scores of D&D. Instead, like Mausritter, there are only three attributes: Strength (Fighting, Fortitude, and Toughness), Dexterity (Stealth, Athletics, and Reflexes), and Willpower (Confidence, Discipline, and Charisma). Scores are generated by rolling 3d6, and you're allowed to swap any two of the scores. These Ability Scores are the central resolution mechanic for Into The Odd, as they make up the “Saves” that the system uses to determine success or failure. When rolling to Save against an ability, the player rolls a d20 and tries to roll below the ability score.  At Least Highest Attribute Score I’m a bit curious about the math there. To me, it feels a bit like you could replace “Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower” with “Fighter, Thief, and Magic-User,” and that players are going to naturally focus on their best ability score when able. As you can see from the graph I linked, most characters will have at least a 13 in their highest ability score, and 95% of characters will have at least a 10. Into The Odd doesn’t seem to have a mechanic for adjusting the difficulty of Saves, which I appreciate from a design standpoint. Adding variable difficulty seems unnecessary to me, and doesn’t change the core of the system. However, I’m curious to see how it works out in play - with a Ability Score of 13, a character will succeed 65% of the time when they’re able to utilize their strengths. If they manage to roll an 18, they're going to succeed 90% of the time. This seems like a rather high rate of success, especially when Saves only come into play during risky or unfavorable situations. For example, characters only have to roll to avoid traps if they’re being chased, blinded, and so on. Otherwise the system assumes they’re being cautious and will avoid it. Isaac Williams seemed to agree with Mausritter, as that system uses 3d6 drop lowest instead. This produces a slightly lower but much more bounded result. The other mechanically questionable area is HP and combat. HP is rolled on a d6, and determines the amount of damage a character can take before they start suffering Strength damage - as in, their Strength score actually goes down. On top of this, when you take Strength damage you also have to Save against Strength to see if you're knocked out of the fight. HP completely recovers after with a short rest, so characters don't have to worry about going into a fight at less than full health. But with an average HP of 3.5, it doesn’t take a lot of damage to potentially knock down a character. Armor and a shield each reduce the amount of damage you take, but only by one point each, and most characters won’t have either. Attacks aren’t rolled in Into The Odd. Instead, they automatically connect and deal damage, usually d6 each round. As a result, most characters can only take one or two hits before they’re taking Strength damage and potentially passing out. HP can be recovered with a Short Rest, Ability Damage can only be healed by a Full Rest - a week spent recovering in a safe location, away from the dungeon. While I understand that OSR generally treats fighting as a failure state, this feels a bit unfair. There doesn’t seem to be much room to recover or stabilize if things go wrong. As soon as a fight breaks out, there’s a reasonable chance your character could be knocked unconscious immediately before they have a chance to react. For a meaty character with a high Strength, this first hit probably won’t knock them out, but the ability damage will linger and reduce their effectiveness from that point forward. If my high ability is Strength, having that reduced by 1-3 points is going to make it much harder for me to succeed. The final part of the system is items. Into The Odd doesn’t have an inventory or encumbrance mechanic - you just carry anything you have, with no problems. Each character starts with basic expedition gear (torches, rations, etc.) along with random gear and abilities determined by your highest ability score and your HP. Everyone starts with a weapon at least, but the helpfulness of the other items are inverse to how well you rolled. For example, if you rolled poorly (Highest ability score is 9 or less, 1 HP) you start the game with a Sword, A Pistol, Modern Armor, and the ability to sense nearby supernatural beings. On the other hand if you rolled hot (Ability score 18, 6 HP), you start the game with a Mace, a pigeon, and a disfigurement - it's up to you to make that pigeon and ugly mug useful. Some characters start with Arcanum, which are randomly rolled and function like a spell. For example, you could start with “Gavel of the Unspeakable Seal” which allows the character to seal one door, window, etc. until they re-open it. Other Arcanum have a more combat focus, such as “Heat Ray” which does d8 Damage that ignores Armor. Overall Into The Odd achieves its design goals - character creation is very fast and very simple, which pairs well with the dangerous setting and unforgiving combat mechanics. The rules are very simple, with the only subsystem being for Enterprises and War. That said, it feels like the simplicity goes too far. Combat boils down to rolling damage dice at each other until someone loses, Saves and Ability Scores feel a bit flat as a resolution mechanic, and character creation doesn’t give enough personality for the players to latch onto. Arcana, while fun and evocative, isn’t something that everyone gets to play with. It just feels like Into The Odd needs a little bit more to make me love it. While I really appreciate Into The Odd as a core system, I think Mausritter improved on it by adding the item-based starting careers, and the conditions/inventory interaction is genius. But! I’ve been told that combat is very fast, but not actually as lethal as it seems. The creatures you encounter aren’t supposed to be immediately hostile, and with a bit of luck a character can keep fighting even when they’re at 0 HP and take multiple hits. The “rulings, not rules” ethos also means that the simple “Roll d20 against your ability score” acts as more of a framework for the “I tip over the barrel and light the oil on fire” actions that players love to do. All of this points to the gap between reading the rules, and playing with the rules. It's entirely possible that Into The Odds light mechanical framework helps achieve exactly the sort of play type it's trying to create. In fact, I suspect that Into The Odd will do much better at this than most of the other systems I intend to review. As such, I’ll be ending this review with a call to action - come help me out by playing a one-shot session, and filling out a short survey afterwards. I’d really like to see Into The Odd in action, and I’d appreciate your help. After all, I can't play alone.
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Jul 3, 2020 04:28
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I was worried “tainted bloodline” would mean “isolated poor people commit incest until they stop being human” since that’s something even some woke people fall victim to, but... I don’t even know what to make of this situation. Trying to consider the logistics leaves me somewhere between  and 
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Jul 3, 2020 05:17
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That tainted bloodline rules. One option seems to be "this is a cursed lineage that turns into wights after death" so the normal humans are like, pre-wights, and you could have a fun subplot where going full murder is way harder because the thugs turn into wights if you kill them. But it seems like there are lots of fun ways to take it and they don't have to be creepy if you don't want them to be. I'd use that hook pretty happily and think there are several fun options with it.
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Jul 3, 2020 05:40
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Yeah, Death Knight family is cool. The Tainted Bloodline just being cool monsters and their magically powered kids and buddies is better than a lot of the places it could have gone.
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Jul 3, 2020 05:41
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Into the Odd is a neat game. I don't love it, but I think it's a step in the right direction from the D20 system. Half the ability scores, no ability score modifiers. I don't love the combat system, but I at least appreciate the effort to streamline all the tedious rolling-to-hit. Trouble is that once every attack automatically deals damage, any action that doesn't deal damage is a waste of a precious opportunity to end the fight sooner - which ends up undermining all the creativity and player innovation and so on that the game tries to foster. I played a little Agents of ODD, a hack for running the game in the BPRD, SCP or Delta Green settings. I think it had a rule that when multiple characters or NPCs attacked the same target, only the highest damage roll counted - maybe an attempt to mitigate this problem. The other issue I remember is that advancement is primarily through finding magic items. Which is fun because it means you have more options without necessarily just becoming more powerful. But also means progression depends entirely on the DM continually thinking up wacky artifacts that aren't boring but don't totally break the game.
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Jul 3, 2020 05:42
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I don't think this rule is in OG Into the Odd, but it definitely is in Electric Bastionland - if multiple attackers all target the same enemy, everyone rolls but only the highest die actually deals damage. It's not a bad way to prevent ganging up on a target being the most sensible choice in literally every fight. In all honesty, if and when I run Electric Bastionland, I think I'm gonna rule in advantage/disadvantage on Save rolls (it's already sort of present in combat rolls, where attacking a protected target deals d4 and attacking a vulnerable one deals d12). I'm pretty sure I remember reading on Chris McDowall's blog that he was opposed to adding any kind of Advantage or bonuses to the game, saying that good thinking or positioning should be rewarded with narrative effects only - instead of getting Advantage on climbing a wall if you have a grappling hook, maybe you just climb the wall with no roll needed. I'm not unsympathetic to that take, but... sometimes you need a middle ground between "you get a plot advantage/succeed immediately" and rolling straight.
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Jul 3, 2020 05:58
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, Death Knight family is cool. The Tainted Bloodline just being cool monsters and their magically powered kids and buddies is better than a lot of the places it could have gone. The classic tainted bloodlines are almost always Lovecraft stuff or sometimes vampires, so it's cool to see other options on the random table.
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Jul 3, 2020 17:48
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 1. Introduction Silent Legions is “a game of supernatural horror” by Kevin Crawford and Sine Nomine Publishing (which, I’m pretty sure, is just Kevin Crawford’s shingle; I don’t think there’s anyone else involved in Sine Nomine). It fits pretty comfortably alongside Esoteric Enterprises as an OSR take on modern occult horror, although where Esoteric Enterprises is focused on dungeon crawling, Silent Legions is much more about cosmic horror and mystery in the Call of Cthulhu mold. I won’t be going into too much detail about the specific rules – if you’ve played any old-school D&D, you won’t find much here that’s different, aside from a handful of Crawfordisms that he’s imported from some of his other games. What I will be talking about are the incredible cult, mythos, and alien generation rules, which I’ll use to roll up some new interstellar goblins for the thread. I’ll let Crawford start this review with his description of the game’s themes from the introduction: quote:Silent Legions is a game of modern-day Lovecraftian horror, one designed to allow courageous investigators and luckless would-be victims to strike back against the horrors of an encroaching darkness. Where the ineffable abominations of foreign realities bleed into our world, these heroes are ready to do what they must to drive them back. When terrible truths and forbidden sorcery boil up from hidden places, they break the cults and stifle the black revelations that madmen would force on an unwilling world. Most of these heroes die in the process; some suffer worse fates. A very few live to be examples to those who will come after. Where the game differs from your Calls of Cthulhu is that it’s intended to be played as a sandbox (fans of Stars Without Number or basically every other game Crawford’s ever written will find this approach familiar). Rather than following a pre-written adventure, the intention is for players to be dropped into a world that’s already in motion, one that won’t wait for the players to pick up the right clue before the stars turn right. Another key difference between Legions and the rest is that the game provides you the tools to create a novel mythos (along with attendant cults, aliens, and even suitably Lovecraftian names). I appreciate it, not only because Cthulhu stopped being scary forty years ago, but because it lets you play in a world freighted with Lovecraftian themes while still avoiding using the work of a noted racist and general piece-of-poo poo. Another thing I appreciate about Legions is that it’s very free of fluff; the introduction is all of one page and skips over the usual “what is an RPG” throat-clearing. Crawford’s writing throughout is to-the-point without being dry, and despite being the product of (seemingly) one person, it’s largely free of editing or layout errors. Many much-bigger and better-funded RPGs could learn a lot from the overall presentation and clarity that Crawford manages to hit in every one of his releases. All that said, let’s jump into Character Creation!  The interior art is all black-and-white illustrations of decent-to-good quality. There doesn’t seem to be a list of what artist did what piece, but the six names credited at the start of the book are Nikola Avramovic, Luigi Castellani, Earl Geier, David L. Johnson, Joyce Maureira, and Miguel Santos. 2. Setting Expectations quote:Heroes in Silent Legions are acutely mortal. It is all too easy to perish under the fangs of some unspeakable abomination or be slashed to pieces by the knives of cult assassins. There is no special protection for player characters and many of them are likely to pay the final price for their defiance of the outer powers. Even a veteran of a dozen successful investigations is always at risk of a sudden, savage end. The Character Creation chapter opens by emphasizing that characters are both heroic and mortal. Given the focus from most OSR games on player characters that are little more than grubby treasure hunters, I appreciate that Silent Legions is willing to say, nah, you might die, but at least you’ll be going down fighting the good fight. The next section emphasizes that the expected mode of play is sandbox, that you, the player, will be expected to drive the action and seek out the next adventure. The final section (before we hit the actual rules) reminds the reader to focus on making “characters that work”: no lone wolves, no traitors, and no characters who display an “obstinate refusal to learn” the truth of the occult world (especially when they are joining a campaign in progress). Again, it’s all just expectations setting, but the more games I play and read, the more I realize how absolutely key it is for a game to provide, in the baldest terms possible, exactly what kind of play it expects and the kinds of stories it aims to create.  Not the best piece in the book, but a lot of the other illustrations are vertically-oriented, so enjoy this very normal-looking fight instead of the much nicer art that’s on the page below. 3. Roll for Charisma You’ve played D&D before, right? Silent Legions characters start out just the way you’d expect: rolling 3d6 down the line for the classic six stats. There are optional rules for rerolling if your modifiers total to zero or less, or just using a stat array. I’m not a huge fan of the Big Six stats, especially since we just end up using the modifiers, but it works fine. Even if you stick with the 3d6, later on you’ll be able to set one of your class’s key scores to 14, so you’re at least not totally screwed if you really want to play a fighty-type guy but totally biff all your physical attribute rolls.  The ability score to modifier spread is much narrower here than in D&D, so rolling low is much less punishing than usual. Next, you pick a background from a list of 40 options (or roll for it), which will give you a set of starting skills. Most of the options are pretty standard: Bodyguard, Engineer, Scientist, Soldier – although there are a few more colourful options: Bum, Private Eye, Stay-At-Home Spouse, Trust Fund Kid. Regardless of what you pick, you’ll end up with a set of four skills from the svelte two-page list. Here, we see the first actual rules information: skills range from level 0 (basic professional competence) to level 4 (near-supernatural mastery). Skill rolls are 2d6, plus the skill’s level, plus the most appropriate attribute’s modifier, and you have to meet or beat the GM’s chosen target to succeed. If you have no training (not even level 0), you suffer -1 to the check, and might not even be able to attempt it depending on where it falls on the “driving an unfamiliar vehicle” to “open-heart surgery” spectrum. I won’t recap the entire skill list, it’s pretty much what you’d expect for a modern horror game: stuff like Athletics, Business, Engineering, Medicine, Persuade, Survival. Some skills have specializations, areas of focus – for example, you might have Vehicle/Land, so you can drive most cars, bikes, hovercraft, and riding animals (yeah, that’s the exact list from the book – hit me up if you ever manage to find and use a hovercraft in an occult horror game), but not planes (Vehicle/Air), ships (Vehicle/Water), or spaceships (used by alien races or “secretive human organizations”, Vehicle/Space).  4. Class Act Once your skills are decided, you pick one of the four classes: Investigator, Scholar, Socialite, or Tough. You can probably guess the rough archetype each class corresponds to (aside from maybe Socialite, which is basically just a catch-all for “good at people stuff”). After picking a class, you get to raise one of the class’ key attributes to 14 and get a few bonus skills (if you already have them, you bump up the skill level from 0 to 1). You also get a resource called Expertise – two points max, with one regained per good night’s sleep. Expertise is mostly spent to use your class abilities, but they also let you re-roll failed skill checks if the skill is one listed in your class’ description. For extra fun, Toughs (fighty boys) can use Expertise to re-roll attack rolls, too. You roll for HP using your class’ hit die. Scholars get 1d4, Toughs get 1d8, and everyone else gets 1d6. The game says “don’t worry if your roll is low… two or three hit points are unlikely to make a difference,” which really begs the question of “why roll for HP if it doesn’t really matter?” I mean, I get that it’s another point of exciting randomness in the character creation minigame, but it’s just one more bit of D&D cruft that could easily be replaced by something more interesting. Speaking of uninteresting, you have a base attack bonus that goes up every level and you have an Armor Class (that starts at 9 and descends as you get better armor and Dexterity). Skipping ahead, you make attack rolls by adding your own bonuses and then the enemy’s AC (hit on 20+), which nicely avoids having any roll-under mechanics, but is still another type of roll in a game that really only needed one. Your class grants you four unique abilities (at 1st, 3rd, 7th, and 10th level), hit dice progression, attack bonuses, and save progressions in the five saves, renamed from the standard Polymorph et al. to make more sense in a modern context: Physical Effect, Mental Effect, Evasion, Magic, and Luck. The save numbers go down as you level since it’s a value you need to match or beat on a flat d20 to protect yourself from incoming harm. Usually I’d rather get all the rules out in one go and then do character creation, but because the game is pretty simple overall, I don’t mind having short snippets of rules intermixed in the character creation zone. Oh, last thing: there’s a Sanity score (here called Madness) that starts at 0 and tops out at 100. I like that Crawford emphasizes that Madness is different from real-world mental illness: quote:Unlike conventional mental illness, Madness is not strictly a mater of brain biochemistry or unresolved mental traumas– it is a mental infection, a toxic enlightenment as to the true nature of the cosmos. PCs that suffer from high Madness are not simply suffering from posttraumatic stress, they are understanding things that human minds were never meant to comprehend. There’s another section like that later in the book that I’ll highlight when it comes up. Thank God the era of “seeing Cthulhu gives you real-life depression” complete with random mental illness tables is mostly over. For the next update, I’ll take the first few names and/or character concepts people post and use them to roll up a sample party as we go through the class list!
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Jul 3, 2020 18:20
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Diogenes Fluffernutter, himbo supreme and emotionally intelligent ditz.
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jul 3, 2020 |
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Jul 3, 2020 18:53
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Archimedes "Arch" Brabrand, lawyer with a gun
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Jul 3, 2020 19:02
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Richard Parker, hand-to-mouth college student and would-be historian trying to make rent and drawn into the occult by happenstance.
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Jul 3, 2020 19:05
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Awesome, I'll take these three and add one of my own for a nice four-person party!
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Jul 3, 2020 19:14
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Jamie Kamil, a dropped out med student and amateur athlete. E: drat, too late.
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Jul 3, 2020 19:15
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Emmett Jackson, recovering alcoholic who was expecting to see fewer weird things, not more. e: aw dang
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Jul 3, 2020 19:17
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BinaryDoubts posted:The final section (before we hit the actual rules) reminds the reader to focus on making “characters that work”: no lone wolves, no traitors, and no characters who display an “obstinate refusal to learn” the truth of the occult world (especially when they are joining a campaign in progress). Now that I think of it, some OSR games have the same problem. Think of how many Lamentations modules are packed full of cursed treasures that delete your character when you pick them up. How many of those can you throw into a game before the players just refuse to touch anything? How much fun is that?
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Jul 3, 2020 19:38
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Don't forget everything to do with Chaos in WHFRP, where the game both insists you will occasionally need forbidden knowledge to combat the forces of darkness but also provides no mechanical backing for that and kicks you in the dick any time you try to engage with those elements on a level beyond 'stab/set on fire'.
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Jul 3, 2020 19:40
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mellonbread posted:I appreciate this. Part of the problem with Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green et al is that both the mechanics and setting fiction encourage you to burn everything and read nothing. This is entirely sensible in-character,, but it also makes it hard to run when the players know better than to interact with anything. Well, I dunno. Having that warning of what is expected for a player-character is nice, but I worry that it will be paired with Cave of Wonders design. I've seen plenty of games where there's a big gap between what it says is a viable player character and what is actually a viable player-character.
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Jul 3, 2020 19:47
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90% of all OSR dungeons are just that scene from Cabin in the Woods where the main characters go down into the spooky basement. It's full of random items, every single one of which will determine what monster gets activated to murder them all.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:07
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 13: ENCOUNTERS, COPS, CRIMINALS AND CIVILIANS In this update, I’m going to tackle the encounter tables, along with the beginnings of the monster manual. Esoteric Enterprises’ base wandering monster chance is 1 in 6 every 3 turns, that is every 30 minutes. This chance is also rolled when the players do something noisy, or when they enter an area likely to be populated, like a gang or cult stronghold. The chance of an encounter goes up to 2 in 6 if the players are noisy and leave evidence of their presence, and 3 in 6 if they’re deliberately attracting attention. LOCATION BASED TABLES When this D6 roll calls for an encounter, the DM rolls on one of the encounter tables appropriate for the locale. All these tables use a D12, and can send you to other tables that have specific themes. There are ten location based tables.
THEMED TABLES There are 16 of these and many them use a D20 instead of a D12, so I’m going to hit the highlights instead of giving them in exhaustive detail. Some of them include a little descriptive text for what the people and monsters are doing when you encounter them.
The flaw with these tables is that some of the results are themselves things that have to be randomly generated. Paradox Beasts, Chimeras and Dragons are all creatures that Esoteric Enterprises creates by slapping random roll tables onto basic templates. Fine if you’ve got one in a keyed room, prepared in advance. Less so when you have to generate it on-the-fly in the middle of the game. That’s something I’ve found about Esoteric Enterprises in general, though. Sometimes the players just have to wait while the DM creates some part of the world that sprang into being because they decided to visit it today. I keep a playlist of Loading Screen music in the Roll20 I use for this game. Speaking of delaying while you come up with stuff on the fly, time for the moment I’ve been teasing for this entire review: the actual NPCs and monsters themselves. These are broken out into sections, so we’ll chew through them one at a time. LAW ENFORCEMENT Remember that big table of law enforcement encounters in the rules section? Note that under their protective layer of Grit, all the regular old police officers in the book have a scant 3 Flesh, because they’re mundane humans. If you get a surprise round on them, you can kill them with a stiff breeze. Otherwise, be ready for a tough fight. Security Guards have a “stab vest” (the author is from the UK, where these are more common) and a nightstick, but the greatest threat they pose is their radio, which they use to call the actual police. The game says they’re poorly armed, but their nightstick deals the same damage (D8) as a handgun. Police Officers are your regular old beat cops. They have WIS and STR 13, meaning they get a +1 above the base Athletics, Forensics, Perception and Vandalism. The text notes that depending on which country your game is set in, the cops might have stunguns and batons, or actual handguns. Plain Clothes Officers also include undercover police, although the two concepts aren’t quite the same in real life. They wear a stab vest and concealed carry pistol under their clothes, giving them the same armor and attack as a beat cop, but trade their STR bonus for CHA instead. Police Dogs have 4 in 6 Perception and a bite attack for D8 damage, giving them the same damage output as an armed officer. Riot Cops wear heavy armor and carry shields and stun batons. They get a STR and DEX bonus (both of which should be negated by the riot armor) and wear gas masks, but interestingly the game doesn’t give them tear gas grenades or launchers. Or have any rules for those at all. Firearms Officers are what we in the US call SWAT teams - guys with heavy armor and military style firearms, called in to deal with armed suspects. They’ve got long guns (though in the US so do beat police, kept in the patrol car) and heavy armor. If they’re armed with the automatic rifle, their four hit dice allow them to potentially spray four targets with the covering fire action. Again absent are flashbangs and tear gas grenades, the two things most associated with police raids. Police Marksmen are snipers. The same stat block as a firearms officer with a different weapon. They have a rifle that gives them massive accuracy bonuses if they use an aim action before firing, or a massive penalty if they don’t, so they effectively shoot every other round. The other thing missing from the Law Enforcement list is a Detective of some kind - a police officer who pursues the player characters based on the specific crimes they commit. Probably with high Forensics and Perception, as well as above-base INT. Then you could give the detective a personality, making them a rival or nemesis for the players.  MEN IN BLACK The Men in Black show up when the occult underworld spills out into the real world. They’re here to maintain the masquerade, by arresting, containing, coopting or destroying the supernatural when it attracts too much attention. Like the police, they have a scaling response that spits out more powerful foes the more trouble the players cause. Men In Black Field Agents are 5 hit-die badasses who show up in suits, shades and earpieces to take command when the normal cops see something they shouldn’t. They have 13 in every stat, a pistol that does as much damage as a shotgun, their attacks ignore supernatural damage resistance and deal double damage to undead, and each turn they spend brandishing their badge, they have a 3 in 6 chance to cast Command, Sleep, Silence, Dispel Magic, or Antimagic Shell. Even a couple of MIBs is cause for alarm. Oh and their single die of Flesh gives them 6 points, because not all hit dice are created equal. Men In Black Paladins wear masks over their scarred faces and speak in a whisper. They do everything a field agent does, but their spellcasting chance is upped to 5 in 6, and their spell list includes Suggestion, Dispel Magic, Protection from Weapons, Spectral Step, Spell Immunity, and Time Stop. If they spot you and start casting, you’re in some real loving trouble. Drop time stop, use the extra few seconds to apply all the buffs, then drop a time stop again and kick your rear end while you’re frozen. They have 2 dice of Flesh, indicating they’re no longer human. Men In Black Abominations wear black glass masks, crackle with electricity, and never speak. Looking at them for the first time has a chance to stun you for D4 rounds, and they can provoke that again whenever they want by taking off their mask. They have a touch attack that wipes your memory of the last 5 minutes. And that’s it. Honestly these guys are less scary than the Paladins, despite their ability to disable the entire group by looking at them. CAREER CRIMINALS These loveable rascals come in two categories: petty criminals and mobsters. Their stat blocks get used for a lot of factions. Everything from street gangs and crime families, to mercenaries and tainted bloodlines. Thugs are the generic low level criminal statline. They carry a pistol or a knife. They get 5 HP from their one die of Flesh, but only 2 from their one die of Grit. I guess they have a D10 for one and a D4 for the other? Anyway they’re only two hit dice total, so not exactly the Napoleon of Crime. Drug Pushers are one HD criminals, one step above “useless civilians” in their stats. The only thing to note here is their selection of drugs, rolled on a D6. Chance of weed, acid, salvia, opium, mushrooms, or cocaine Smugglers lack the staying power of Thugs, but have 3 in 6 for Stealth, Perception and Athletics. If rolled as part of the Smuggler faction, you’ll have already figured out what goods they’re interested in transporting. If you just got them from a random encounter table, you roll a D6 to see what they’re carrying. Chance of 2,000 dollars in cash, LSD, d4 random spell scrolls, a random grimoire, PCP, or d4+1 cold iron rapiers. Muggers are almost identical to Thugs, and I’m not sure why they’re in the game as their own stat block. The Thug stat block specifically says That thugs commit muggings. Organ Harvesters have a +1 to Dexterity and a 5 in 6 in Medicine, which they use to cut spare parts out of living or freshly dead victims. Mobsters are the criminals you worry about. They’ve got 16 STR and DEX, giving them good Athletics and Stealth, and they get +5 to hit with both guns and hand weapons. There are also stats for Mob Lieutenants and Mob Bosses which are just upgraded mobsters with better chance to hit, hit dice, saves, etc. Hitmen have the same stat block as mobsters, but the book calls out their more expansive equipment list, including scope rifles, night vision goggles, caltrops and “other tools of the trade” as necessary for the job. Bodyguards are tanky hoodlums here to protect their clients from harm. Like the player character class, they get a boost to Perception. Unlike player Bodyguards, NPC Bodyguards get the ability to step in front of attacks that would hit their client, eating the damage in their place. For all the emphasis the game’s spell list puts on hacking, there isn’t a cybercriminal template. I don’t know what you would actually do with an NPC that specialized in that, but the game seems to think it’s important. MUNDANE CIVILIANS Regular people, misfits and troublemakers who don’t count as career criminals. Some are vaguely aware of the occult underworld, others aren’t even supposed to be here. Junkies have garbage stats, the only reason they get their own stat block is that every time they shoot up, they have a 1 in 6 chance to manifest one of the following powers from the Spook powers list: Ambush Surgeon, Lie Detector, No Reflection, Tremor Sense, Slippery Mind, Mesmerizing Gaze, Smell Magic, or Mental Communication. I think this list could be better chosen, half this stuff would never actually come up in play if you rolled it in an encounter. Exploring Kids are teenagers wandering the undercity on a dare, leaving empty cider bottles and crisp packets as they go. They get a bonus to save versus traps and environmental hazards. Exploring Kids show up as hangers-on to the Exploration Project faction. Urban Explorers are exploring kids all growed up, with better stats but nothing else worthy of note. They make up the bulk of an exploration project faction. Hoboes are the Useless Civilian stat block with slightly more Flesh and a knife. They don’t want trouble and will only defend themselves as a last resort. Graffiti Artists are Useless Civilians with a spray-can flamethrower as an area attack. Don’t try this at home, kids. They can show up in an exploration project or occult artists’ collective. Repair Crews are here to maintain and repair the city’s infrastructure. I really like the book’s descriptive text here: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 191 posted:The crews that deal with the deep underground quickly learn that there are things down there that their employers won’t talk about. They become insular, superstitious little teams; each repair task treated like a dangerous mission. Emergency Responders are firefighters and paramedics. They don’t check morale for anything non-supernatural, and are the least likely of any Mundane Civilians to panic when something horrible happens, but also the most likely to die horribly. They have a 4 in 6 in Perception, Drive, Athletics and Medicine, and get a bonus to saves vs traps and hazards. Professional Doctors have 5 in 6 medicine and a pool of 10 “healing points” they can use to repair Flesh injuries. They aren’t afraid of blood and gore, but most have never been shot at. Professional Doctors show up as retainers for factions like Corrupt Businesses, Crime Families and Mercenaries. Useless Civilians are the catch-all for mundane humans not covered by any other entry in this section. They’ve got 2 HP and no attacks, and they respond to danger by running away or hiding. What would I add to this section? I think we’re missing a sleazy business executive type, someone with high Charisma and Contacts who doesn’t know much about the occult underworld, but is very good at turning unexpected opportunities into profitable business ventures. That’s going to do it for this post. Coming up next: Occult Weirdos, Cults, Undead and Constructs. Falconier111 posted:I was worried “tainted bloodline” would mean “isolated poor people commit incest until they stop being human” since that’s something even some woke people fall victim to Ultiville posted:That tainted bloodline rules. Night10194 posted:Yeah, Death Knight family is cool. The Tainted Bloodline just being cool monsters and their magically powered kids and buddies is better than a lot of the places it could have gone. Speleothing posted:The classic tainted bloodlines are almost always Lovecraft stuff or sometimes vampires, so it's cool to see other options on the random table.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:17
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There was one Feng Shui PC possibility/NPC like the Repair Crew. A Hong Kong sewer worker who brained an Abomination with a steel pipe and realized all kinds of weird poo poo was getting up to trouble on his turf. So time to get an illegal shotgun, not tell his wife, and try to save the city.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:20
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BinaryDoubts posted:90% of all OSR dungeons are just that scene from Cabin in the Woods where the main characters go down into the spooky basement. It's full of random items, every single one of which will determine what monster gets activated to murder them all. Probably best to consider how hazardous materials and places are treated in real life, you need ways to detect and identify dangers. Doesn't have to be as refined as a modern dosimeter, a canary in a mine situation is okay too.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:21
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mellonbread posted:I appreciate this. Part of the problem with Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green et al is that both the mechanics and setting fiction encourage you to burn everything and read nothing. This is entirely sensible in-character,, but it also makes it hard to run when the players know better than to interact with anything. Sure, but this is also a problem that's only partially addressed by suggesting what kinds of characters to make. It's never going to be good roleplaying to just pick up or interact with everything, especially when you expect a situation to be dangerous. And it's hard for me to view most RPGs as the right kind of design to make most players enjoy actively seeking bad outcomes for their characters. A lot of the fun of the interactivity of gaming is to build connections to your character, lots of games punish death by resetting advancement making it less likely you get to content, etc. At the end of the day I agree it's great to set clear expectations like that, but it hardly solves the problems with that kind of adventure design. IMO you should either design a different kind of game where the mechanics support the kind of play you want better, or you need to also reward people for interacting and do so in such a way that they have some reasonable basis for deciding if interaction is wise in any specific case.
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Jul 3, 2020 21:19
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Looking forward to the colossal number of random tables SL gives you. I remember the spell generation tables being particularly wacky; I rolled on them for giggles a few years back and ended up with a spell that turned a house into a TARDIS after three days of sprinkling it with the blood of rival cultists and serial killers, and another that turned people into zombies by sewing rotting animal guts into their torsos.Ultiville posted:Sure, but this is also a problem that's only partially addressed by suggesting what kinds of characters to make. It's never going to be good roleplaying to just pick up or interact with everything, especially when you expect a situation to be dangerous. And it's hard for me to view most RPGs as the right kind of design to make most players enjoy actively seeking bad outcomes for their characters. A lot of the fun of the interactivity of gaming is to build connections to your character, lots of games punish death by resetting advancement making it less likely you get to content, etc. I dunno, I feel there's something to be said for using an inadequate system for your game as long as its playable, especially if it's a system you understand and you don't have the design chops to make a new one or seek one out. I mean, I am reviewing Glitter Hearts, a game I accidentally broke during character creation, because I love its tone and some of its mechanics; I highly doubt it would have come into existence if they needed to design it from scratch. But that perspective steps outside good game design, so  It isn't that you're wrong (you aren't), but that getting too deep into optimizing design can be a trap that can consume a game before it can hit the market. But honestly expecting game designers to use appropriate design principles for their games is a shockingly high bar to clear
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Jul 3, 2020 22:37
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Manual of the Planes: 3.5E The Material Plane Planar Traits: Normal Gravity, Normal Time, Infinite Size, Alterable Morphic, Normal Magic Known to Planescape specifically as the Prime Material Plane, the Material Plane is the default setting for any Dungeons and Dragons game. But what does that mean in the context of a planar campaign? First and foremost, by default the Material Plane is the single most diverse location in the multiverse. It may not be as fantastical, but there's no unifying theme here, no dominant element or alignment. No other plane has the sheer variety of environments, and the book suggests that if you have any characters native to the planes, this should probably be the thing that jumps out at them as the most alien. One thing I like that the book points out is that while the general assumption for the Material Plane is that you're playing on one planet in a physical universe similar to real life that just happens to have magic, this need not actually be the case. If you want to get weird, the rules of the Material Plane work just as well as a ringworld, the interior of a dyson sphere, a flat surface, or even a disc riding the back of a giant turtle (the book suggests that, yes). As for how the Material Plane is linked to the rest of the cosmos, with the default cosmology the assumption is that the Material Plane simultaneously lies roughly at the center of the cosmos, it's where all the outer planes and all the inner planes blend and so represents the entire cosmos distilled and balanced. Travel to other planes is possible only via magic, and perhaps rare portals created by extraordinarily powerful  On the other hand, that need not be the case when designing your Material Plane - perhaps there are natural portals to the inner planes in the deepest ocean depths and the hearts of volcanos, or perhaps in places of extraordinarily powerful alignment activity portals naturally occur to the outer planes. This is all more similar to how the rest of the planes act, and it's suggested that if you want to, the Material Plane could even replace the Outlands as the metaphysical neutral ground of the planes and sees far more planar activity than the default assumption. Another possibility the book suggests is the existence of alternate material planes. These could be anything your imagination dreams of - mirror universes where everyone's alignments are opposite, air-dominant planes of floating islands and sky ships, planes identical to the 'main' world but further in the past or future (the book warns a DM that if you have a future plane, the players will almost certainly try to steal guns and bring them home), and so on and so forth. Reaching alternative Material Planes is likely to be tricky, unless you establish a new spell for the purpose (or the players invent one), but it might be possible to travel to them via the Astral or Shadow Planes, or demiplanes that exist as specific planar corridors. Or, of course, alternate material planes could be other published campaign settings (though that might open up a huge can of worms if, say, you're somehow traveling to Eberron and its orbital planes). This isn't a long chapter, but in a planar campaign remember that just because the Material Plane is the default doesn't mean it has to be boring. Next time, the Astral Plane.
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Jul 3, 2020 23:15
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 Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century Weapons, Part 2: America's Favorite Corn and Rice Cereal Next are a couple of exotic weapons (or at least they’d be called that if Exotic Weapon Proficiency had been invented yet.) I talked a lot about the Desert Runner Crossbow during chargen, and here it is again. This is basically the only non-electronic ranged weapon listed in the game. There isn’t even really an explanation of the technology, it’s a crossbow, it can fire either streamlined bolts or explosive shells- the bolts do 1d4 damage, the shells 1d8. It’s a cheap weapon at 100cr and only has a range of 200 feet but again that covers *most* combat situations. Non-Desert Runners have a -4 penalty to their attack rolls when using the crossbow, though it’s not really explained what’s so special about the design that makes it hard to use- it says Desert Runners use it a lot and are especially proficient at it, but that makes it seem like it should be a bonus for Desert Runners, not a penalty for everyone else. The penalty can be reduced if a character uses it exclusively for a while, but why bother? The big advantages of this weapon are that the ammo is cheap, and you never need to recharge anything.  The kryptx (which I mentioned only briefly) kinda fits the mold of the classic weird sci-fi weapon that doesn’t make a lot of sense but it looks neat. The kryptx is used exclusively by the Venusian priests of the Ishtar Confederation. It’s a long staff with a sphere at the end, and metal knobs channel electricity at the end. There’s a laser at one end which does 1d6 damage and has a range of 400, less than a normal laser pistol, but that’s not the real attraction. When used as a melee weapon, it can administer a powerful electric shock. The user actually modulates how much damage the shock does, from 2 to 12 points, and the target has to make a saving throw vs. stun or be knocked out. For every point of damage above 7 the target gets a penalty to their saving throw, and for every point below they get a bonus. You can’t buy a kryptx- none of the priests would ever sell one, and even selling a forgery would get the Ishtarians on your case. Even if you could somehow get your grubby hands on one, you wouldn’t know how to use it- the whole thing’s controlled by a keypad and only the priests know how to operate it, and they would literally die before telling you. You cannot have one and stop asking. A bit extreme, maybe; couldn’t a smart enough character work out the process given time to experiment? But I do like the Ishtarians having something like this and it reminds me a LOT of the weird Vulcan weapons in the “Amok Time” episode of Star Trek, so cue the music.  Mono blades come in two varieties- the knife costs 200 credits and does 1d6 damage, the sword does 1d10 damage and costs 2000. (It also has twice the reach.) These blades are cut from synthetic diamond and have edges one molecule thick, meaning they cut very fine. The mono knife is sometimes called a “laser knife” because of the laser beam that is produced on the blade’s edge to make it stand out. Mono knives automatically retract when you’re not pressing the activation button. Swords don’t retract, but have a diamond hilt and also a laser. The laser beams don’t do any damage but do produce little char marks or melt substances on either side of the cut. Mono blades can be used as a very slow cutting tool, and they have a small battery powering the laser. The battery can last up to 60 days if the blade’s used 20 rounds per day, and it can be recharged by a charging unit or just leaving it in sunlight for an hour, so realistically you’ll never have to track this. Now we go to heavy weapons. Grenades require a bit of backtracking since some of the rules were in Characters & Combat; they come in many varieties, from straight up explosive grenades which do 4d10 damage to anyone in a blast radius of 10 feet (saving vs. explosion means you take half), to sun grenades, dazzle grenades, and gas grenades. Okay, by many I meant four. A PC can throw them as many feet as their Strength times 5, with a 100 foot maximum and 30 foot minimum. You make an attack roll as per usual, but if you miss, you roll 1d4 to determine the direction you missed in, 2d20 to determine how far it was from the target, then use the blast radius to decide who was affected. Anyway, all the non-explosive grenades require a saving throw to avoid being knocked out for 1d6 rounds. Stun grenades require a save vs. paralysis/stun/fall, dazzle grenades are vs. electrical shock, and gas grenades are vs. gas/poison. All grenades cost 50 credits each. The Grenade Launcher, purchasable for 500 credits, lets you chuck grenades as far as 200 feet. It works by using compressed air, and between shots you have to pump up the pressure chamber, meaning you can only use it once every other round. It also can’t normally be used in a vacuum, unless you have some kind of air tank. Still it’s a useful thing, weighing only 3 pounds. I imagine it looking like a portable bicycle pump. Rocket Launchers fire “smart” explosives as far as 1000 feet. Rockets do 5d10 damage to targets within a 20-foot blast radius, and there’s no indication of any saving throw. However, the Launcher also can only be used once every other round, because the firing chamber needs to cool. The cost is 1000 credits, and the rockets cost 100 credits apiece, but the memories are priceless. Plasma Throwers work a lot like Grenade Launchers, with a compressed air system, except they launch canisters of explosive, flammable gel which spray plasma over a 25 foot blast radius for 4d10 damage. Again, same rate of fire, and no apparent saving throw. The Plasma Thrower costs 800 credits and its canisters cost 80 credits a piece. And that’s weapons! We’re 3/4 of the way through this book! Next up, armor!
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Jul 3, 2020 23:28
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