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Cythereal posted: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 Huh. In the MotP they stated portals between the Prime Materials and Inner Planes form frequently in areas heavily associated with a given element. As in, if you want to avoid the Ethereal and portals, you can  your way in through the depths of a particularly large volcano or the eye of a hurricane. I didn't go in depth there because the book only barely touched on it, but it's interesting that they chose to deemphasize that here.
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Jul 4, 2020 00:01
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 14: OCCULT WEIRDOS AND CULTISTS I've got the day off for 4th of July Weekend. The County now has double the Coronavirus cases we did in the first wave, and I'm sure as hell not going anywhere today. So gently caress it, more Esoteric Enterprises! We’re still working our way through the monster manual in the back of the book. We’ve got past most of our mundane humans. From this point onward we’ll be working with magicians, machines and monsters. I know I said last post that we'd cover constructs in this post, but I was mistaken. They're a ways away, and we'll have our hands full just with... OCCULT WEIRDOS This section starts with NPC Occultists, who cast from a memorized list and have a spellbook with spells in it. They have lots of hit dice but not much HP, since they use a D4 hit die (the game doesn’t actually tell us this, but we can infer it from the player version of the class, and from looking at their HP values). Underground Librarians are respectable, independently wealthy academics who moonlight as low level sorcerers. They’ve got Shield and Sleep memorized for self defense, and carry three scrolls around by default: Sleep, Bookspeak and a random third scroll. Despite being Occultists, the game doesn’t give them a Translation score, but does mention they’ve got 16 INT, so it has to be at least 3. They also get a bonus to Saves vs Magic, which all the other NPC casters also get. Occult Assistants are Occultists in training. They have no spells memorized, but can read from scrolls without rolling Translation, like an Occultist. They get a scroll of Sleep and a random Scroll, along with a baseball bat to hit things with. Reanimators are low level Necromancers, just beginning their corpse-raising careers. They have Turn Away Undead, Darkness, Animate Dead and Invisibility memorized, as well as Zombie Plague and Eyes of the Dead in their spellbook. The stat block specifically says Animate Dead is memorized dangerously, meaning that it’s too high level a spell for the Reanimator to cast normally, and they have to roll a Save vs Magic or risk a miscast if they use it. That would imply that Zombie Plague is also too high-level for them to cast safely. A lot of the NPC casters we’ll meet in this section will have spells memorized dangerously, so look out for that. Pyromancers are fire based casters, burn-scarred and stinking of brimstone as they plumb the secrets of elemental flame. Prepared spells are Create Fire (twice), Wall of Fire (memorized dangerously), and Resist Fire. Spellbook also has Fireball and Heat Metal. I think Fireball should have gone in a prepared slot, since it’s what you’d most associate with a fire wizard. They can also toss molotovs, which are area attack weapons that deal half the damage of a grenade. Illusionists are masters of manipulation, capable of altering perception and disguising themselves. They’ve got Command, Message, Create Illusion (memorized dangerously), and False Sound in their prepared slots, plus Mirror Image and Feeblemind in their spellbook. You may be noticing a trend of NPC spellcasters who can’t cast their most thematically appropriate spells without rolling for a miscast. Just like the player characters! Arachnophiles are spider obsessed magicians beginning to transform into spiders themselves, “with chitinous plates beneath their clothing, and glossy black chelicerae and pedipalps within their cheeks, ready to unfold.” They get Spider Climb, Message, Parasitic Infestation (memorized dangerously) and Web in their prepared slots, as well as Speak with Animals and Remote Surveillance in their spellbook. Personally I think Spider Climb should just be an innate ability if they’re transforming into a spider already. They also get a bite attack that does bonus poison damage. Chthonicists rock. They’re attuned to elemental earth, and can both sense and shape stone. They have Spider Climb, Shrink, Octopus Flesh (memorized dangerously), and Heat Vision (memorized dangerously) in their prepared slots, and Turn Rock To Mud and Shape Stone in their spellbook. I’d throw out Octopus Flesh and Heat Vision and just give them Rock to Mud and Shape Stone memorized, since both those are the entire point of being a rock wizard. Oh and Flesh to Stone, if you want to be nasty. Technomancers have all those stupid Technology skill duplicating spells from the spell list. Guess Password, Mending, Spoof Identity (memorized dangerously), Erase Data, plus Techspeak and Anti-technological Shell in their spellbook. They also have 5 in 6 Technology skill, which makes most of those spells obsolete. Hypnotists have a selection of mind altering magic, and are usually defended by a group of mentally dominated thralls. The book calls them “Supremely dangerous but rarely acted against”. Spells are Command, Suggestion, Sleep, Gease (memorized dangerously), plus Fear and Mental Network in the spellbook. Sleep is your crowd controller, and Suggestion and Gease can both remove a single target each from the fight. Vivimancers are masters of meaty magic. There are lots of NPC fleshsmiths in the book, but these are the ones who do so using the Occultist rules. They have better physical stats than the other caster and a couple claw attacks. They have Cure Wounds, Shrink, Regenerate (memorized dangerously) and Flay memorized, plus Sculpt Flesh and Clone in their spellbook. Flay is their real terror weapon, dealing D12 damage directly to Flesh and potentially deleting a character in one action. Puissant Sorcerers are your top level wizards, with a huge spell list. Darkness, Bleeding Curse, Unseen Servant, Spider Climb, Invisibility, Disintegrate (memorized dangerously), Suggestion, Animate Artwork (memorized dangerously), Senescence, Spell Immunity, Protection from Weapons. Spellbook contains all these, and additionally Clone, Magic Jar, Permanency, Contingency and Mist Form. Potential access to any other spell they might need, too. I don’t like NPCs with huge spell lists, they demand too much mental energy from the DM to figure out what they actually do in a fight. I don’t love Pathfinder, but I appreciate how it gives “tactics” sections for all its high level casters, to explain how they best use their abilities. That’s all the NPC Occultists. The rest of the Occult Weirdos use other rules for their special powers.  Fleshcrafters are fleshsmiths who use biotechnology instead of magic to sculpt meat, searching for unblemished human specimens and strange mutants to use in their experiments. In combat, they can choose between making four claw attacks, or by injecting the target with a syringe. The syringe is the real killer, with a choice of truly nasty effects on a failed Save vs Poison. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 194 posted:• Complete paralysis 2d4 rounds. Urban Shamans are Mystics that gain their power from petty spirits which infest the city, like the small gods from Discworld. In exchange, they must constantly converse with and propitiate these minor deities, which makes them look insane to people not plugged into the occult underworld. NPC Mystics have an X-in-6 chance to cast a spell each time they try, without having to roll on the Mystic miscast table if they fail. loving cheaters. Urban Shamans get a 2 in 6 chance to cast Bleeding Curse, Unseen Servant, or a random mystery spell. I don’t like this design, it doesn’t do anything cool with the petty spirits swarming around them. Like if you attack an Urban Shaman, the spirits respond aggressively and you suffer death from a thousand magic cuts. Missed opportunity. Speakers for the Dead are Mystics who see dead people, tormented by visions of the damned. What does that mean, mechanically? It means a a 2-in-6 chance to cast either Command, Turn Away Undead or a ~mystery spell~ (tildes straight out of the book). Again, a missed opportunity. The descriptive text is cool and evocative, and the mechanical implementation is a yawn. Slashers are affectless serial killers who wear perfect blank masks. They get two hatchet attacks per turn and automatically inflict the Bleeding Out condition if they deal damage to Flesh. I like them mechanically, but I really don’t like emotionless monsters that attack you on sight and can’t be reasoned with. I think they violate the social contract that OSR games revolve around, and need to be used sparingly. Death-cult Assassins are like Slashers, but they also have a 3-in-6 chance to cast Silence, Invisibility or Bleeding Curse. They’re silent, but communicate through sign language, which is kind of neat. Murder-children are little mini slashers, but unlike their grown up counterparts they’re loud, boisterous, and love what they’re doing. They can also be reasoned with “so long as your reasoning doesn’t rely on appeals to their conscience”, which makes them more interesting from a gameplay perspective. Making the monsters kids is a cheap shock, but whatever. Sometimes cheap tricks are the most effective kind. Wendigos are cannibals who hunt in packs, using stealth and traps to surprise and corner prey before feasting. They don’t have any supernatural abilities besides the ability to track people by scent. Their inventory is full of bear traps. Latent Psychics are psychonauts just beginning their transformation into posthumans. They still view their powers as mental illness and have trouble controlling them. They’ve got garbage stats, but also a maximum of three powers from the following list: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 195 posted:• Know instinctively when they’re being lied to. Posthumans are the next stage of a Latent Psychic’s transformation. They’re comfortable with their powers, and a little egotistical as a result. They have a different pick-list of abilities to choose from. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 195 posted:• Breath water and swim with perfect manoeuvrability. Prometheans are super-beings, randomly generated by genetic inheritance. Some of them pass as normal people and achieve greatness in real life. Others can’t fit in and descend into the occult underworld. A lot of them get picked up by the Men in Black, and become Paladins and Abominations. Either way, they’ve got superb physical stats, 25 grit, and the following pick list of abilities: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 195 posted:• Create fireballs at will: all in the blast radius must Save vs Hazards or take d6 damage. And that’s all our Occult Weirdos. The NPC Casters are likely to end up in your Experimental Ritualist and Occultist Cabal factions, and less likely to show up in your Occult Artist Collective or Exploration Project. Altered Medics and Fleshcrafters usually show up in the Mad Surgeon or Science Project factions. Posthumans, Psychics and Prometheans can show up in a Tainted Bloodline.  CULTS Cults are generated using a template and a roll table. There are 30 Gods in Esoteric Enterprises, each with theming, spell lists, and monsters/NPCs associated with them. There are stat blocks for all the cultist ranks, each of which gets better stats and more spells from the cult spell list. The cultist ranks are
Let’s get those thirty Gods out of the way.
I know people weren’t happy with the use of real-world Gods in the Manual of Planes review, but I like the spread of cultures, religions, fiction and nonfiction here. I think the author mashed up Sekhmet (Lion Headed Goddess of War) with Sobek (Crocodile Headed God of the Nile), and Google thinks some of the non-English names were spelled incorrectly. The bolding is mine. I wanted to highlight how some of these Gods have seriously powerful servitors, way in excess of the others. I like this list. Some of the entries are really evocative, like Voorm being the chief God of Morlocks, or Amanita cultists deliberately cultivating mycolid infestations. The problem is that there are too drat many Gods, a lot of which are duplicates of the same concept. The Black Goat and the Idea of Thorns are essentially the same Sex and Death nature Goddess, and both Yig and Jormagandr are Snake Gods. I know that real world pantheons usually included significant overlap in their deities’ aspects, but a smaller number of Gods here would have meant each could be developed a little more. Collapse some of them under the same title, say Idea of Thorns and Black Goat are two aspects of the same divine being. The cult spell lists make a dramatic difference in what fighting (or fighting alongside) them is like. Cthugha worshippers from Fanatic up get Fireball. Sekhmet cultists from Initiate upward get Flay. Leviathan cultists get Sleep as their first level spell. A single casting of Sleep can ensorcel enough hit dice to affect an entire party of characters, and low level cultists are often encountered in multiple D6s. Anyway, that’s it for cults. Up next: the Undead, Constructs and Ghosts. Night10194 posted: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. Maybe I'll come back to this one.
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Jul 4, 2020 00:20
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 NPC Creation and GM Advice Okay, enough despairing about mechanics. For now. Let’s just move to the GM section and see what it tells us about running the game. The book emphasizes GMs put a lot of thought into overall theme and structure and less into planning storylines or sessions. It HEAVILY emphasizes drafting out the way you want the game’s plot to run while also telling you let your players direct it so  . The book advises basing your campaign’s tone and format on a show or anime of your choice but with twists and curves thrown in to keep players guessing. Or you can just make the game up using influences of your own choice, same difference. Glitter Hearts as a whole can accommodate a darker or more parodic timbre then the rules assume, but as long as you keep the focus on the heroes overcoming that darkness and embrace the tone on an earnest as well as ironic level the system will work as intended; even if you twist the setting to accommodate other genres, the basic gameplay loop will function as long as you keep the tone consistent. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if I wanted to run a campaign based on the first Teen Titans cartoon, I’d use Glitter Hearts with a few tweaks; it complements the show’s themes of friendship saving the world quite well. Remember, tone, not genre. This is the only art in this section; I’ve taken the rest from elsewhere in the book. Take that as you will. You can assume transformed characters and enemies operate at about an order of magnitude greater than mundane forces when it comes to combat. A transformed character with Physical 1 can deal as much damage in combat as three mundanes with Physical 3 combined or endure as much punishment as 10 ordinary people before going down. This magnification (as well as Archetype and Mystical Connection bonuses) only comes into play when characters are transformed, but it’s always in effect when it comes to enemies; a combat-oriented miniboss’s HP and armor (which… the game only barely touched on, it negates points of damage one-for-one without armor piercing) can take the sort of damage that would turn a person into a fine mist without blinking. And since the rules assume most minions can be created and deployed en masse against anything that takes too long to organize, your characters really are the single biggest barrier between the villains and their goals. However easy victory might be, the stakes are quite real and should always be present. Speaking of minions, the game divides enemies into four categories; underlings, monsters, overseers, and villains, providing descriptions and lists of decisions to make or designing them for each. Underlings are cannon fodder, enemies with no more than 5 HP and deal no more than 3 damage that will individually evaporate under a party’s attacks but can overwhelm them in groups. Underlings are almost always unfailingly loyal (though in theory you can convince them of things as long as they don’t go against their superiors’ orders) and will usually throw themselves at characters until they die. GMs should always work out their names, their objectives, and the ways in which they fight, but never as individuals; these guys exist so you can have flashy battles. Of course, it tells us we should consider what would happen if one of them gets captured, which opens the floodgates for the sort of adoption players are famous for, and that could call the whole black-and-white morality things that makes underlings work into question, but  Monsters range from creatures as dangerous as a group of minions to minibosses; they usually start life as something else before being empowered or enhanced by a villain. They should have a few dozen HP and some armor, deal plenty of damage or dole out conditions, and generally move the combat from flashy minion fights to something more intimidating; they exist to force the party to work together. A monster should have a name, goal, aesthetic (whether borrowed from other media or invented), combat stats, and information on what happens upon their defeat; unlike underlings, monsters should be individualized and portrayed as unique threats. Oh, and you should think about what happens if the players catch one – decide whether you want to allow a Pokémon scenario or not beforehand. Midbosses are a villain’s lieutenants and commanders, the antagonists the party will most frequently encounter and interact with. Unlike underlings and monsters, midbosses are proper characters with motivations, backgrounds, and goals that may not align with that of the villain. These guys will likely end up your target of choice for using Touch Their Heart. However, the book advises you not to let one Touch Their Heart success neutralize them entirely, but instead force them to bow out of the battle for now or stand down for a conversation before picking back up or just any other result that represents the party getting through to the midboss until the GM finally decides it’s about time to let them desert or defect permanently. Nothing here changes the fact that mechanically a successful series of Touch Their Heart attempts will take down a midboss much more safely than combat and likely much faster too. I can understand ruling out use of Touch Their Heart outside of specific circumstances, but the book doesn’t tell us anything about that. Before using them, you should make sure every midboss has a name, description, combat stats, position under the villain, reasons why they’re working for the villain, and any motives they have that might factor into play at some point. No advice on statting them out offered.  Villains orchestrate everything the characters face over the course of the campaign; you usually only have one of them, and they usually have the kind of stats to take the entire party on and win without significant buildup. Tilt them towards darkly charismatic as far as presentation goes. While you can theoretically use Touch Their Heart on a villain, villains can explicitly have immunity to it; sometimes they’re just evil. Sometimes it works, though. It’s all up to the GM. Once they go down the campaign ends, so setting things up for that confrontation should take place over the entirety of the campaign. Villains should have their name, description, motivation, combat stats, relationships with their various subordinates, personality, and any secrets (i.e. whether they’re holding back some greater threat for the next campaign to build off of) worked out beforehand. Next up, advice on designing characters and locations which, if you read an RPG before, you’ve read this section. It’s very common-sense. But before the section ends it once again emphasizes will letting your players dictate the plot; your role as GM is to build a setting for them and make it react to what they choose to do. There’s a tension in Glitter Hearts between setting up your plot beforehand and letting your players dictate it and it’s not a healthy one; you need a strong line of communication with your players to make sure the campaign is heading where everyone is at the head. Granted, that’s always the case, but it doesn’t give you much advice on dialogue outside of emphasizing mutual comfort and providing the gaming equivalent of safe words for you to use.  After that we move into the section handling GM agendas and moves. I covered the agendas earlier and don’t have more to add, but I do want to talk about GM moves. The moves themselves aren’t terribly interesting; I mean, they’d be very interesting when you use them in a session, but none of them will are particularly shocking. You get some detail on the difference between soft and hard moves, how and when to use them, etc. Pretty solid stuff for the most part. My only issue? It doesn’t explain that the GM moves have no direct mechanical effects and should be used to frame GM actions. The wording in this section (and Glitter Hearts in general) reads like it expects you to already understand how PbtA works well enough to apply that knowledge here, despite giving every sign that it was written for people who’d never heard of anything Powered by the Apocalypse. I mean, ultimately the section works fine, the detail it leaves out isn’t strictly necessary, but as someone who hasn’t read a PbtA game for a while I had to frequently crosscheck with Evil Mastermind’s review to make sure I’d understood some of the mechanics and that doesn’t bode well for anything. Also we round this subsection off with advice on running combat, which infuriatingly answers exactly none of the questions I’ve raised in the review. Like, three quarters of a page of restating mechanics the book already covered. I appreciate them gathering most of the information you need to run combat from across the book into one place, though. I think we have one more post left to go, maybe two, before hitting the conclusions stage. Next time we’ll look over scenario creation, sample monsters, and possibly even how to form Voltron.
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Jul 4, 2020 01:29
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mellonbread posted:The Black Goat and the Idea of Thorns are essentially the same Sex and Death nature Goddess... I know that real world pantheons usually included significant overlap in their deities’ aspects, but a smaller number of Gods here would have meant each could be developed a little more. Collapse some of them under the same title, say Idea of Thorns and Black Goat are two aspects of the same divine being. The Idea of Thorns is a direct reference to the author's previous work Gardens of Ynn (I'm assuming the Great Librarian is this for the Stygian Library as well) and is almost an entirely conceptual entity while the Black Goat appears to be an amalgamation of every goatlike bacchanal figure you see in mythology, when you drill down they're pretty different concepts but without that prior context or a more in-depth explanation I can see that being something that's missed.
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Jul 4, 2020 02:05
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Maxwell Lord posted:
If I remember right, I think PCs and opponents caught in the blast radius of a rocket launcher or plasmathrower get to make a Save vs. Explosions roll to halve damage from these weapons. There are also no career-based weapons restrictions, so nothing's stopping you from giving your rogue or medic a rocket launcher (besides laser pistols being far more available and far less expensive.) Nothing also stops a warrior from picking three picks of Weapon Specialization: Rocket Launchers so they can do 5d10+3 damage with them... but that's just being silly.
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Jul 4, 2020 02:47
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If you have two rocket launchers can you fire them on alternate rounds?
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Jul 4, 2020 03:13
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You have to spend a round reloading them, but nothing's stopping you from: Round 1: Fire rocket launcher. Round 2: Swap empty rocket launcher for fresh rocket launcher, fire rocket launcher. Round 3: Swap empty rocket launcher for fresh rocket launcher, fire rocket launcher. Round 4: The terrines should be thoroughly blown up by now, but reload in case there's stragglers. Round 5: Give that terrine with 1 HP left a direct hit from a rocket launcher for 5d10 damage.
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Jul 4, 2020 03:25
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Snorb posted:You have to spend a round reloading them quote:However, the Launcher also can only be used once every other round, because the firing chamber needs to cool. It can cool without my intervention.
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Jul 4, 2020 03:30
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Snorb posted:You have to spend a round reloading them, but nothing's stopping you from: Regardless of whether this is strictly necessary RAW, I'm not sure why you'd have the opportunity to have a brace of rocket launchers and not do it.
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Jul 4, 2020 04:44
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Silent Legions is an awesome idea for a game and I like what Kevin Crawford did with it, looking forward to the review. edit: although I do feel some of the tables lean too heavily on the blood magic stuff and human sacrifice, but whatever if that's the least bad thing I can say about a game then that's a good sign.
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Jul 4, 2020 10:36
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What i'm learning from Fatal and Friends, as well as previous experience with Lamentations and anything touched by Zak S, is that OSR is bullshit and is bad.
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Jul 4, 2020 16:39
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Fivemarks posted:What i'm learning from Fatal and Friends, as well as previous experience with Lamentations and anything touched by Zak S, is that OSR is bullshit and is bad. There are some bright spots here and there, most of it's mediocre, but the luminaries most prominent outside the scene are burning garbage dump people. Kind of like TTRPGs in general.
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Jul 4, 2020 16:45
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Night10194 posted: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 4, 2020 17:04
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Fivemarks posted:What i'm learning from Fatal and Friends, as well as previous experience with Lamentations and anything touched by Zak S, is that OSR is bullshit and is bad. Edit: I consider game design a form of art, and don't condone reactionary politics, and I understand the two can be pretty tangled.
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Jul 4, 2020 17:58
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Fireball, the first of what might be a series of one-post F&Fs Something about light games I've never heard of, especially those that only appear in languages I don't know, piques my interest and Skavenloft (no relation) recently put out a "get everything" bundle that saved me about a hundred clicks. Put one and one together and you reach my current situation - in possession of nearly 400 MB of PDFs mostly written in a language I can't read without the assistance of machine translation. I suppose we should start at the top. Łukasz Kołodziej created the original iteration of the Fireball ruleset back in 2015 to celebrate the premier of the Polish gaming magazine Magia i Miecz, which the author transliterates as Sword & Sorcery. If you've been on DriveThruRPG for any length of time, you've probably seen Fajerbol (and, much more recently, Fireball) crop up occasionally in the free products list. After reading, I would say that these are the second edition of that first work. All of the elements were present back then but various mechanics have evolved in the meantime. That first edition is still available online with some searching but it won't be my focus. Fireball is as generic fantasy as they come - six abilities rolled in order, standard fantasy races, standard fantasy classes, and standard fantasy enemies. That sentence tells some of you all you need to know but, if you stick around, I'll be informing you of why you might want it even if it's not necessarily the game for me. Character Creation Characters are defined by their six abilities (strength, agility, intelligence, charisma, health, and mana points), some number of skills and pieces of equipment (determined by class), and 0-6 talents (determined by race and class). You determine pretty much every relevant aspect of your character with a single 6d6 throw starting with your abilities. I'll be making a character as we go. First up, my big character-defining roll. Rolling them bones, I get 6, 3, 5, 1, 6, 3. Noting them down and consulting a fantasy name generator, I end up with: Corgak Strength 6 Agility 3 Intelligence 5 Charisma 1 Health 6 Mana Points 3 Having read the race and class lists several times, I can immediately tell you exactly what I'll be making. This is a definite strength given the game's stated goals. We'll let that reveal itself along the way, though. After determining your abilities, you use the lowest value (excluding Health and Mana Points) to determine your race. In the case of a tie, you get to choose. Finally, if you don't like your result, you can choose to be human (netting you no talents whatsoever). Your race determines one of your starting talents and two additional talents that may be unlocked later. My first houserule if I were to run this would be to just let you pick a race. I'm not fond of the  , as... iconic(?) as they may be, but the game was intended to be a bar or convention game and one of its goals was super quick character creation so I won't fault it too much.Consulting our abilities, we can be an orc or a human. I'll go with orc. Orc - Lowest ability: Charisma - Talent: I roar menacingly - Locked talents: I smell a coward, I hit with my axe The final mechanical decision we get to make is our class. This time you consult your highest ability, again choosing if there is a tie or falling back to Adventurer (and its lack of talents) if you don't like your options. As a result of your race and class being based off of your abilities, certain combinations are completely locked off unless you manage to roll quadruples on the four "decision" abilities. No elf fighters, orc clerics, halfling wizards, or dwarf rogues here. Taking a look at our spread, we can be a fighter or adventurer. We'll go with the class that gives us talents. Though given our relatively few mana points, we won't really use them that often. Fighter - Highest ability: Strength - Talent: I stab with my sword - Locked talents: I overcome fear, I parry with my shield - Equipment: Weapon +1, Armor +1 - Skills: Weapons +4, Armor +3, Gadgets +1, Companions +2 Now that you've got your character, you use all six of your rolls to determine your starting quest. You can take the quest or not. I won't reprint the entire table but every quest follows the same Mad Libs structure - Go to PLACE and get attacked by CREATURE1 and CREATURE2 in order to PRESENT_TENSE_VERB a certain ITEM which was PAST_TENSE_VERB. In Corgak's case, his starting quest is to visit some frozen mountains, battling vampires and spiders along the way, in order to buy a family heirloom which was cursed. Finally, you can determine some general details about your character that don't influence gameplay but give a bit of life. Again, I won't replicate the table. Corgak is muscular, has a high pitched voice, and is quite ambitious. He has warts on his face, follows Father Sky, and originates from a desert oasis. You will eventually acquire gold by completing quests or selling acquired equipment but you start with none. Mechanics Fireball could be classified as a beer and pretzels game. Chuck a fistful of dice, write down the numbers, and take your collection of digits on a quest. As such, there are only combat and advancement rules. An encounter is segmented into turns. Within a turn, each character and monster acts in descending Agility order. What to do when there is a tie is up in the air but I'd allow the players to decide what order they act in and then have the enemies go. When you choose an action that everyone agrees is possible (codified in the rule text - "an action may be any activity, as long as the players agree that it is possible for the creature to perform it"), you pick a consequence from a list. Your target picks a counter-action (again agreed on by everyone) and a consequence. Both sides roll, with the higher roll taking effect. The list of consequences is fairly short as might be expected from such a short book. quote:- Lose/gain a point of health When you do something that requires a roll (like that action you just decided to take in the previous paragraph), you roll a d6, add the appropriate ability score, potentially add an equipment bonus, and then optionally spend a mana point to roll and add another die if you have a talent relating to that action. As a starting orc fighter, Corgak's talents are "I roar menacingly" and "I stab with my sword". If he stabs a creature with his sword, he can spend a mana point to invoke that talent and get an extra d6 on his roll. If he wants the enemy to lose their turn, drop an item, flee, or anything else you could come up with that you think roaring menacingly would help, he could invoke "I roar menacingly" for another die. But if he roars menacingly while stabbing with his sword, he can still only spends a single mana point and gain a single die. Skills and equipment bonuses are pretty simple to grok. Note that we have a +1 weapon and a Weapons skill of +4. The skill value denotes the maximum bonus that you can get from a piece of equipment, meaning we could find or buy up to a +4 weapon if we wanted and save some coin or we could splurge on a future-proof +5 or +6 and use it as a +4 until we upgrade our skill. One of the paragraphs in the book is labeled "Challenges", which I suppose fits the contents but feels a bit weird. A challenge happens when you target an object with your action or try to help an ally. In such cases, the narrator determines what happens if the character fails and adds the results of up to four dice rolls together based on the perceived difficulty of the task. If the character's roll beats this number, they succeed. If you reach zero health, you die. If all characters die, you fail your quest. If all monsters die, your quest is complete and you head back to town. Should someone die, they can create a new character and decide with the narrator when the new character should be introduced. We did the thing, now what? When you finish a quest, the narrator is supposed to describe your arrival at a safe, civilized place. Travel times are a thing but this reads like you sort of skip the return trip to town. You can visit a number of locations in town. Academy Pay to increase an ability score or skill (up to a max value of six for each) or unlock a talent (up to a max of six talents). Roll a number of dice equal to your new score or the number of talents that you have and add them together to determine how much it will cost. It's unclear what to do if you have enough gold for a low roll and want to risk it - if you end up not having the cash now, I'm assuming this is a one-time-only price that gets rerolled when you go questing and come back. Adventurer's Guild If you've completed your quest, roll six dice to get a new one. This is a different table from the one that you consulted when creating your character - if Corgak got the same results on this table, his quest would be to visit the frozen mountains, getting attacked by hydra and wyverns along the way, in order to vanquish his cousin who has been dishonored. Inn Roll a die each night to find out how much this costs. Regain health and mana points equal to your strength and intelligence, respectively. If you want to camp for free, the narrator rolls a die after each night. On a 1, you fight a group of monsters. Caravan Pay some amount to travel to a quest area. Roll a die to determine the length of the journey in days. I'm unsure how much it costs but a die per day is probably a good starting point. If you don't want to pay, you can trailblaze off roads. Again, the narrator rolls one die per day and you fight a group of monsters on a 1. Marketplace Buy or sell stuff. If buying, choose the item type (corresponding to the four skills we learned about earlier) and its bonus (1-6). In either case, roll one die per point of bonus and sum the results to determine the buy or sell price. Temple Sum six dice to determine the price to resurrect a dead adventurer with full health and mana. Monsters The monsters that you roll when building a quest are the strongest or most common that you'll encounter in an area but you're encouraged to spice things up by adding others. Each monster here is made up of the same basic parts as a character - six abilities, equipment, and talents. There's nothing resembling a difficulty level so you've got to wing it until you hone in your guesstimates. There are 24 entries, ranging from kobolds to that hydra that Corgak rolled on his new quest. quote:Kobold You can tell one is much more difficult than the other just by comparing numbers but knowing how many characters can take on how many enemies is pretty much just an acquired gut feeling. That brings us to the end of the book. There isn't enough direction for me to see myself running an extended campaign but it's so simple that, after several read throughs, it'd be a great choice for one-shots, introductions to gaming, or playing at a busy spot like a bar. This might impact the lightness of the system but I'd like to see an editing pass that keeps an eye to usability during play, some examples of mechanics, a short list of spells (like the initial Fireball release had), perhaps some magic equipment that allows you to limit break past your skill level, and more limited ranges for most things. If you need more incentive to check it out, everything on Skavenloft's store page is free. With all of that being said, there are... consults the file list... 190 other PDFs in this collection. If there is interest, I'd love to discuss more of them. There are a crapton of Fajerbol addons and numerous genre hacks including sci-fi, cyberpunk, umpteen various types of fantasy, and spy shenanigans a la 007.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:37
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E: Oh hell, I didn't notice I double-posted for like two days.
Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Jul 6, 2020 |
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Jul 4, 2020 19:22
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Tibalt posted:I like Mausritter, Into The Odd, and KNAVE, and I think they make a positive contribution. I think OSR is a fundamentally reactionary movement, but I think there might be a place for reactionary movements in art. I like Beyond the Wall and almost everything Crawford’s published, myself, despite my deep distaste for the OSR. The thing about reactionary cultural or artistic movements (not reactionary political movements, which are very different although the two frequently overlap) is that, in their attempts to re-create and adapt something old, they sometimes create something entirely new. You see this a LOT in philosophical movements (practically every major ideology active today has some element of wanting to return to a golden age or the natural way of things), but it happens in artistic movements too; the Renaissance, after all, tried to do both. The trouble is that those movements need distance to give them that freedom to reinterpret. Gary Gygax is still within living memory, and some followers of the OSR actually remember the birth of the hobby. That reaction-reinvention switch needs a movement’s members to generate their own sense of nostalgia so they can decide what it means; as long as people feel nostalgia for what actually happened, everything they do will be a lesser reflection what they remember doing – and they’ll be able to use their experience to bring dissenters into line. The OSR came too early. It can’t actually reinvent anything if people can legitimately claim that reinvention has nothing on what they experienced. Granted there is so much more going on than just that, but the “Renaissance” in its name by definition can’t apply right now, because you can’t call something a “rebirth” if it isn’t dead. E: Flail Snail posted:With all of that being said, there are... consults the file list... 190 other PDFs in this collection. If there is interest, I'd love to discuss more of them. There are a crapton of Fajerbol addons and numerous genre hacks including sci-fi, cyberpunk, umpteen various types of fantasy, and spy shenanigans a la 007. Alien Rope Burn posted:Every so often the question comes up: "Should I write up-" and the answer is always yes, unless it's fantastically inappropriate in some sense. It doesn't have to be a bad game to talk about. If a review has been done before, you can do it again if you want. It doesn't have to be a professionally published game. Don't worry, people will love or hate your thing and trying to science what people will love is- you can't science love. 
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Jul 4, 2020 19:26
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I suppose I walked right into that one.
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Jul 4, 2020 19:35
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 15: UNDEAD, CONSTRUCTS AND GHOSTS Welcome back to Esoteric Enterprises. We’re still chewing through the monster manual, one of the most content-dense sections of the book. Let’s jump right in, with the first entry on our docket. THE UNDEAD Esoteric Enterprises separates undead into two types: Feral and Intelligent. Feral undead are either mindless or act like animals, while the Intelligent flavor can be reasoned with. We’ll tackle the Feral type first. FERAL UNDEAD The Feral section of the monster manual begins with a descriptive text explaining what happens when you use Animate Dead to raise a corpse as a mindless undead creature Esoteric Enterprises, Page 200 posted:The creature loses all Grit Dice. Their Flesh Dice becomes a d12 (average roll 7).• They gain an extra Flesh Dice. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 200 posted:• Stealth increased to 4/6 for ambush predators. In addition to rules for creating your own undead (remember last post, when I said there were a lot of creatures in the book that required the DM to pile templates together?) there are a lot of pre-baked undead for us to throw into our undercity. Most of them have no Grit but a lot of Flesh, meaning sneak attacks and other stuff that ignores Grit aren't especially useful against them. Crawling Hands have a tiny bonus to grappling, 3 intelligence, and little else of note going on. Ghouls are almost sentient, but their ravenous hunger for human meat renders them bestial. They’ve got a melee attack that paralyzes you with no save, just like every other D&D knockoff. If a ghoul kills you, you get a Save vs Stunning to resurrect as a Level 1 Undead Spook. Husks are your absolutely bog standard mindless undead, with no special properties to speak of, except that they get two attacks per round: a claw and a bite. Half Zombies are either a torso dragging itself along the ground, or a pair of legs running around mindlessly. Like a husk, but sillier. Skeletons are basically like Husks. This game doesn’t give them resistance to non-blunt weapons, which I respect. Special damage resistance types just mean the fighter has to carry around a golf bag of different weapons, which is just another punishment for not being a Wizard. Flesh Hulks are tanky undead piles of meat, with a massive 25 Flesh, great saving throws, and three devastating melee attacks per round. Don't fight flesh hulks up close. Bloat-zombies claw at you until you kill them. Then they explode, splattering you with gore and potentially infecting you with a disease. Stubborn Foetuses are in the game for some reason, but are basically incapable of dealing damage, other than creeping you out. Rules text says they “Crave warmth, life, vitality.” Plague Zombies are like Husks, but they also have a chance give you a random disease when they hit you. Angry Fossils are animate dinosaur bones. They act like they did when they were alive, hunting for prey and making dinosaur noises. They have a lot of flesh, a lot of grit, and between 2 and 8(!) melee attacks per round at the discretion of the DM. That does it for unintelligent undead. These critters have a chance to show up as servitors to a Lich Sanctum on the faction generator, but mostly appear in random encounters. INTELLIGENT UNDEAD A living creature resurrected or converted into an intelligent undead creature is subject to basically the same set of modifiers as a feral undead creature, save that it retains its mind. They have a similar capacity to resurrect with the same list of monstrous powers as feral undead. Revenants are you standard intelligent undead, without much to comment on other than the standard set of undead resistances and vulnerabilities. They died a long time ago, so their behavior and speech are filled with archaisms. They have their own insular communities and society in the undercity. Mummified Saints are holy healers, gilded skeletons animated by a religious duty that transcends death itself. They have a 3 in 6 chance every time they try to cast Cure Wounds, Light, Dispel Magic, True Sight, Animate Dead, and loving Resurrection. If this NPC thinks you’re worthy, it can bring you back from the dead with a max level spell. There’s no spellbook in the game that teaches Resurrection, this is basically it. Vengeful Wights are like regular old Revenants, except they’re animated by a desire for revenge on their killer, and they recover HP every time they cause someone fear. Death Knights are plate armored skeletons with longswords, who wander around the underworld looking for chivalrous quests to go on. When they engage a target in melee, nobody can deal damage to them or the target for the duration of the duel. Remember when I said Death Knights were awesome? Well, I stand by it. The text describes them as “prone to epic romances and dark grudges”, so I guess that obliquely addresses our concerns earlier about corrupt bloodlines. Somehow, in defiance of all logic, Death Knights gently caress. Liches need no introduction. These powerful undead casters use the Occultist rules, and resurrect at their phylactery whenever you kill them. They have Bleeding Curse, Disintegrate, Create Illusion, Protection From Weapons, Spell Immunity, Protection From Fire, Invisibility, Dispel Magic, Hurl Through Time, True Sight and Fear memorized, and their spell ilst also includes Contingency, Permanency, Resurrection and any other spell they want. Liches are bad news. Recall also the problems I have with high level spell casters from the previous update, and apply them here. And that takes us through the end of the Intelligent Undead. The Lich is the centerpiece of the Lich Sanctum dungeon complex. The others such as Death Knights can show up in a Necromantic Circle faction, or peripherally in places like the head of a Tainted Bloodline. Have I mentioned I like Death Knights? I like the idea of revanents having their own undead societies in the undercity. There's no "revanent town" entry in the dungeon complex generator, but there really should be.  CONSTRUCTS Robots, golems, and other artificial beings. Some animated by mechanisms, others by magic. Maintenance Golems are maintenance robots, created using magic to single mindedly perform a specific task. They get two devastating swat attacks every round, but they only use them if someone gets in the way of their work. Because they’re magical constructs, they automatically fail saves vs mind control, and have a 50% chance to automatically ignore any other magic targeted at them. Clockwork Men are like golems, but made of metal, and given the curse of sentience. They don’t understand who they are or why they exist. They also get two slap attacks per turn. Their stat block says they’re “Immune to cold, poison, drowning and everything else constructs are immune to” but the book doesn’t actually say what that means, unless we go back and reference the player Spook construct origin. Clockwork Chrome Crabs are itty bitty robots. They’re fast, hard to hit, and have good Athletics. The descriptive text says “A compartment on its back carries a sealed envelope” and nothing else. Are they clockwork chrome crab couriers? There’s no way to be sure. Homunculi are little artificial people, made of blood, fat and clay. They’ve got the signature of their creator stamped on their foreheads, and they display a “blend of childlike earnestness and sinister understanding”. Trash Golems are like maintenance golems, but made of garbage. If they had a purpose in life, it’s long gone. Electricity damage heals rather than harms them. Animated Tools are trinkets made by bored wizards. They can attack you for minor damage, but their true desire is to help you do whatever they were designed to do. They have a 3 in 6 skill at whatever that is, or they can grant a living user a +2 to their skill roll instead. You should adopt them if you find them in the dungeon. Stone Guardians are immobile statues, immune to most forms of damage but basically imobile. They’ll clobber you if you step within reach though. Pain Engines are killer crabs, made by serpent men to track down and torture escaped slaves. Serpent men are dicks. In addition to getting three attacks per round (one probe and two claws) it also has 3 in 6 in both Medicine and Forensics. (One of the possible dungeon complexes is the Serpent Man ruins, where Pain Engines and other assorted trinkets can be found). Repair Drones are also serpent man machines, but made for the more benign purpose of maintaining and repairing serpent tech. They continue to do so, long after their masters have gone extinct. Like several monsters on this list, this one is mainly here for flavor and set dressing, rather than to seriously help or harm the players. Constructs don’t show up very often in the faction creation rules. Trash Golems appear on several of the encounter tables, the rest on fewer. What’s missing from this section? Trick question, if something’s missing, just make it yourself! CREATING ARTIFICIAL BEINGS THROUGH MAGIC Making a construct is an arduous process, requiring both skills and spells. First, the body must be created, using Technology to prepare it and Medicine to make it suitable for magical animation. Once you’ve got the shell figured out, you start stuffing spells into it to make it walk and talk and so on. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 205 posted:• Unseen Servant is required for the construct to be able to move about. Without this spell, the construct will be immobile (although it may be capable of speech and so forth if other spells are bound into it). The construct gets dice of Flesh equal to double the number shown on the Technology roll used to create it, and dice of Grit equal to the Medicine roll. Then you subtract the number of spells you bound into the construct from the number of Flesh dice. If what remains is a positive number, you can upgrade the construct’s stats and abilities that many times. You can raise its damage, skills, armor class, etc. Every spell stuffed into the construct costs two random magical reagents and a day’s work. Once the construct is complete, the caster has to make a Save vs Magic to bring it to life, or roll on the What Has Your Hubris Wrought miscast table if they fail. The book mentions that multiple people can collaborate to make a construct, which is good since I doubt an Occultist or Mystic is going to have enough Technology and Medicine to do the job. It also mentions that Doctors can use their Experimental Medicine ability in place of binding spells into the construct, as long as they build, steal or grow the appropriate body parts to make the creature. Once again: at level 1, the Doctor gets the same powers as some of the highest level magic user spells in the game. Play a Doctor! GHOSTLY THINGS Like with Undead and Occult Weirdos, this section of the book has some entries that start with a generic template, then give you a list of special abilities to slap onto it. Ghosts are, by default, unable to interact with the material world. They float around haunting things, passing through objects and ignoring any damage not dealt by a magic weapon. Then they have the following pick list of powers that makes them a bit more interesting: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 206 posted:• The ability to become invisible, at will.
Gestalt Spirits are hive-mind spirits, blended together by proximity or some commonality of origin. Aside from some slightly bigger numbers, they have the same stats as ghosts, and choose powers in the same way. I wish there was a little more information on these things. There are a couple places on the complex generation table with mass graves (particularly the Plague Pit area) and some more flavor or an additional special ability would add a lot here. Ghost Cars are environmental hazards, created by the psychic leftovers of a violent, high fatality car accident. They follow the same route on a loop, crashing and then reappearing at the beginning of their dance with death. Their crash attack deals 2D10 damage, but the vehicle takes the same amount of damage. Then it regenerates and does it all over again. Ghost Trains are cool. They occasionally show up in abandoned subway stations, running the routes they did in life, before they were retired by bombings, budget cuts, sarin gas attacks, etc. They deal 3D10 damage if they run you over and is immune to physical damage sometimes and blah blah blah. Who cares about fighting it when you can ride it. Toss the conductor two bits and you can ride it somewhere else in the undercity. Another abandoned rail station? A Lich Sanctum? The book says you can ride it to other worlds, like “Stygia, Dis, and the Earth’s Veins”. I know this is mostly a reference to other OSR splats, but I wish ghost train travel around the undercity was given a bit more detail. Currently it only shows up when you roll this specific result on the encounter table. Shadow Folk are beings made of darkness. These are the end times for the men of shadow - their underground homes are invaded by strange creatures of matter, bringing light that dissolves and destroys them. Yet they feel a strange jealousy for these flesh creatures, driving them to fight back with lethal force. They’re immune to regular damage, take damage from bright light, and attack by ripping away the target’s shadow, dealing damage to STR. Fog Sylphs are particle storms whose gaseous interminglings host an alien intelligence. Their primary goal is to make more fog, but they can also create illusions in any area with suspended water in the air, like a steam tunnel. They can also hide in your lungs, which doesn’t deal damage but inflicts the Fatigued condition. Genius Loci are the spirits of places, with an appearance and personality that reflects their surroundings. They can manipulate weather conditions, plants and animals, and when all else fails, pick up objects and throw them telekinetically. Hosts of Petty Spirits are colorful shimmers made of hundreds of tiny nature spirits acting together. They have a 4 in 6 chance per round to cast a spell, depending on the type of spirits that make up the cloud. Chance of create illusion, senescence, web, hurl through time, dispel magic, false sounds, lightning bolt, bleeding curse, slow, or heat metal. If you recall from the Urban Shaman section, these are the spirits those guys spend all their time talking to. Would be nice if the book specifically called out the relationship here, how the spirits will cast all those nasty spells on people who harm the shaman, etc. Prismatic Children of Vor Glaurung are the opposite of shadow people - beings of pure transcendent light. They can blind you with flashing lights and create visual illusions that take up whole rooms. Bright light damages them, magical darkness damages them even more. I wish there was a little more info here about their motivations and behavior - the text says they’re “fascinated by things that glow or give off radiation” but that doesn’t tell me what kind of illusions they’d create around a character carrying a flashlight. And that does it for ghosts. I remember not liking this section, but on repeat reading I kind of dig it. The main problem is that too many of the weird intangible spirits don’t have a strong hook for what they actually do when the players encounter them. They have a handful of abilities like creating illusions, but aside from maybe the regular ghosts and shadow men, none of them have a clear motivation for actually using them. Next post, we’ll go over were-creatures, vampires, and my personal favorite: the fairy courts. Saguaro PI posted:The Idea of Thorns is a direct reference to the author's previous work Gardens of Ynn (I'm assuming the Great Librarian is this for the Stygian Library as well) and is almost an entirely conceptual entity while the Black Goat appears to be an amalgamation of every goatlike bacchanal figure you see in mythology, when you drill down they're pretty different concepts but without that prior context or a more in-depth explanation I can see that being something that's missed.
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Jul 4, 2020 20:04
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 Wait, what? Yea, I'm changing it up a bit here. I was one of those people who was actually vaguely interesting in Invisible Sun when it came out, but not going to touch it for the asking price. I did enjoy Wapole's F&F very much, and was a bit sad to see it drop. And then, something odd happened: Invisible Sun actually sold for a nearly reasonable price in a Bundle Of Holding sale. So now, I too have a bunch of unnecessary images and PDFs on my hard drive and am in a position to try and mop up what remains of the shattered illusions of the Cube. (I did ask Wapole if I could do this and he was fine with it, but he's of course welcome to take over again anytime he wants!) So, let's get onto one of the more interesting mysteries. The Sooth Deck. Which, in turn, covers a whole bunch of the unnecessary props included with the original set. The Sooth deck wants to be an updated Tarot deck. It's a 60 card deck designed in the style of a divination deck, but weird and abnormal because Invisible Sun, I guess. The thing about the Tarot is that in many ways it's relatively subtle. Apart from the Major Arcana, the remaining cards all have simple numbers and suits - Swords, Cups, Pentacles and Wands - and ambiguous illustrations. This lends it ideally to being interpreted in many different ways. The Sooth deck, however, missed this. It's about about as subtle as a lead balloon. For starters, its four suits are "Secrets", "Notions", "Visions", and "Mysteries". Ooo, look how obvious we are about being a divination deck. And while interpretation of the cards is still a part of the game, instead of ambigious images, every card has a specific name and image describing exactly what it represents. There are 15 cards in each suit, with values running from 0-9 . There are five “royalty” cards in each suit, all of which also have regular values: a “Sovereign” with value 9, an “Adept” with value 8, a “Defender” with value 7, a “Companion” with value 6, an “Apprentice” with value 5, and a “Nemesis” with value 0. The book bizarrely lists all the cards in alphabetical order, which makes very little sense, so here they are in suit order. pre:9 Secrets - Revolutionary [Sovereign] 9 Secrets - Mysterious Rune 8 Secrets - Alchemist [Adept] 7 Secrets - Conspirator [Defender] 7 Secrets - Sealed Door 6 Secrets - Raven [Companion] 5 Secrets - Incriminating Skull 5 Secrets - Weeping Priest [Apprentice] 4 Secrets - Unknowable Truth 3 Secrets - Endless Maze 3 Secrets - Relentless Rumor 2 Secrets - Compelling Voice 1 Secrets - Crowded Tomb 1 Secrets - Hidden Moon 0 Secrets - Devil [Nemesis] 9 Notions - Monarch [Sovereign] 8 Notions - Hunter [Hunter] 8 Notions - Lost Star 7 Notions - Angel [Defender] 6 Notions - Cat [Companion] 6 Notions - Tyrannical Clock 5 Notions - Unwelcome Child [Apprentice] 4 Notions - Imprisoning Ice 4 Notions - Lucky Coin 3 Notions - Empty Gallows 2 Notions - Forbidden Game 2 Notions - Golden Ship 1 Notions - Dangerous Elixir 0 Notions - Misunderstood Beast 0 Notions - Vizier [Nemesis] 9 Visions - Imperator [Sovereign] 8 Visions - Ambassador [Adept] 8 Visions - Revealing Knife 7 Visions - Messiah [Defender] 6 Visions - Elusive Sleep 6 Visions - Swan [Companion] 5 Visions - Questing Knight [Apprentice] 4 Visions - Eternal Mountain 4 Visions - Inevitable Cataclysm 3 Visions - Savage Sword 2 Visions - Blind Guardian 2 Visions - Enticing Jewel 1 Visions - Whispering Lover 0 Visions - Doctor [Nemesis] 0 Visions - Suspicious Hound 9 Mysteries - Looming Shade 9 Mysteries - Watcher [Sovereign] 8 Mysteries - Assassin [Adept] 7 Mysteries - Driver [Defender] 7 Mysteries - Ghostly Presence 6 Mysteries - Rat [Companion] 5 Mysteries - Enveloping Darkness 5 Mysteries - Forgotten Prisoner [Apprentice] 4 Mysteries - Untrustworthy Mirror 3 Mysteries - Banished Serpent 3 Mysteries - Endless Woods 2 Mysteries - Harvesting Spider 1 Mysteries - Fleeting Moment 1 Mysteries - Misremembered Dream 0 Mysteries - Jackal [Nemesis] Each card is devoted a single page in The Gate explaining the image on it and its possible interpretations. However, since all the cards are explicitly named and their illustrations basically just show that thing, describing how they’re interpreted comes across as rather.. facile, to say the least. So given we’ve just had a dull list of all the cards, how about a list of some painfully obvious interpretation guidelines that go with the cards? Here’s a few highlights: pre:The Ambassador wishes to talk. The door holds more promise than a wall. The sword is a weapon of war. The Watcher watches. The moon comes at night. Got that? Ok. Now toss it all out. None of that is used for anything. Well, ok, there’s one exception. In Development Mode - that’s where the players come up with side quests or flashbacks to explain what their PCs did between, or before, session play - resolution is done by the GM drawing a Sooth card and either interpreting it in the context of the action or using the number on the card as a dice result (the suit doesn’t matter, and therefore the varying division of numbers between suits doesn’t matter - there’s six nines in the deck, done) When you’re actually playing at the table, you’re going to use this fellow:  That’s the Path of Suns. In Actuality, there are eight well-known suns, plus the Invisible Sun. Each of those symbols represents one of the eight Suns. The Invisible Sun itself, is represented by the Testament of Suns - that’s the big-rear end hand statuette that came in the Black Cube, and that apparently each PC is also lugging around with them at all times. You will notice that the Path of Suns does not list the name of each sun, which is awkward, because the cards have the names written on them. There is, however, a diagram of the Path of Suns in The Path book:  Which also does not list the name of each Sun. The names it does list - the "currents of magic" - don't do anything and are never referred to again other than on that page, other than that maybe they give you power ups if you manage to "tap into" them, but we're not sure how. In order to get that, you have to look at a separate, unlabelled paragraph in The Path, with no associated diagram, that lists them in the order they appear: Silver, Green, Blue, Indigo, Grey, Pale, Red, and Gold. Then you have to look at the Path of Suns diagram again to see which one is actually the start of the path. At the start of each session - and whenever something major happens, like a major NPC arriving, a PC getting wounded, and so on - the GM performs a Card Turn, which means they draw a card from the Sooth deck and place it on the next open Sun. If the PCs get into a fight - or “Action Mode” - then apparently the GM “should turn a card practically every round”. Hang on, those are circular spaces. How do we fit a card onto one of those? I mean, it's not like a deck of cards is circular or..  Oh, right. Of course. For the eight regular Suns, the most recent card is the only one that has any effect - the others just stay on the board to look pretty and help remember how far through the sequence we are. Once all eight Suns have cards, you play a card into the palm of the Testament of Suns to represent the Invisible Sun, and then start from the beginning of the Path again (I think. I’m not quite sure where it actually says that in the book). The card on the Invisible Sun then stays in effect as you play through the other eight Suns again, then replace the card on the Invisible Sun. What do the cards actually do? Not that much. Each card that’s not Royalty has two suns named on it, one of which it gives a +1 bonus to, and one of which it gives a -1 penalty to. These equate to modifiers to the effectiveness level of spells cast in the category of that Sun. In addition, each of the character Hearts is associated with one of the card suits, and if a current card’s suit matches your Heart, you get +1 to all your rolls (again, I think. The text actually says you get this if a card of matching suit “is played”, which taken literally would mean it just builds up and up all the time, since all cards are played, even if they are not active). And that’s it. Royalty cards either give greater modifiers to all actions or call further cards into play. Oh, and there's one major annoyance too. If a card is played onto the same colour of sun it names, its effectiveness is doubled. Remember how the cards refer to suns by name? Remember how the names of the suns do not appear on the Path of Suns? Yes, you're either going to have to memorise the drat things or constantly look back and forth at the book. Or, more likely, just chuck out the fancy mat and just get a bit of paper and write the Sun names on it with spots underneath. What makes this even worse is that even if we're bizarrely determined not to write the names of the suns on the mat, it would have been so easy to just put the symbol of the affected suns onto the Sooth cards instead of their names. So, let’s see how this works. The GM, who may have paid more than $100 for this stuff at some point, sets out the big ol’ playmat and a zocking great statue of a hand in the middle of the table, to the bemused looks of the players. He triumphantly attempts to shuffle the Sooth deck, in some discomfort from trying to shuffle circular cards, places the Sooth deck on the mat, and pulls the first card. The 1 of Visions, the Whispering Lover. It gives +1 to the Grey Sun, and -1 to the Indigo Sun. He plays it onto the first place on the mat, the.. Umm... He pulls out The Path and after some leafing back and forth, finds that that first place is the Silver Sun, so the card won’t benefit from being played in that position. One of the players points out that their Heart, Empath, has Visions as their card family, and so now they will get +1 to all of their actions. One of the other players asks if they can stab themselves to Wound themselves and force another card draw. The GM points out they’d be wounding themselves. The player replies that since there’s no time trigger they can simply all stay in their home stabbing themselves and healing until they have a desirable card configuration before they leave to do stuff. The GM says they’re being ridiculous. Another player asks if their PCs are aware of the cards. The GM starts to say No, but realizes that if that’s the case, then the PCs do not know that the Empath is powered up or that certain spells are going to be more effective. He waves off the questions and tells the players not to be assholes. A few minutes later, the PCs get into a fight. The GM draws a new card, the 2 of Secrets, Compelling Voice. This gives +1 to the Invisible Sun and no penalty (cards that give bonuses to the Invisible Sun are the only ones that do this). The GM does not bother to look up which Sun the card is resting on, since he knows it’s not the Invisible Sun. Because it’s a Secrets card, the player with the Galant Heart gets +1 to everything. On the next few actions, the players all have to be reminded that all of their numbers have now changed because of the different active card. Next round, the GM pulls the 6 of Visions, Elusive Sleep. It gives +1 to the Blue sun and -1 to the Red. The GM again has to look in the book to see which Sun it’s played on. It turns out that the third Sun is actually the Blue Sun, so it’s giving +2 to the Blue Sun and -1 to the Red. This is promptly forgotten by at least 3 of the players. A bit later in the session all of the Suns are full. The GM draws the 2 of Notions - the Forbidden Game - and places it in the Testament of Suns. It promptly falls on the table. After a few more tries, he managed to get it just about nestled in there. This means there will now be an ongoing, stacking, bonus of +1 to the Blue sun and -1 to the Red. This also means that the players keep bunny-hopping out of their chairs in order to remind themselves which card is on the Invisible Sun, because they can’t see the face of a card in the big-rear end hand statue from a sitting position. After about the fifth time, the GM pitches the Testament of Suns across the room and just lays the card on the table next to the mat. Later, the GM plays the 0 of Notions, the Misunderstood Beast, onto the first Sun again. It gives +1 to the Green Sun, and -1 to the Pale Sun. The GM has to look at the chart again to remember that the first position is the Silver Sun and therefore gives no bonus to either of these. “Wait, so now there’s +1 to the Blue sun, -1 to the Red Sun, +1 to the Green Sun, and -1 to the Pale Sun?” asks one of the players, and the GM nods. “Are you sure?”, asks someone across the table. “It says that the card on the Invisible Sun remains in effect until another card is played on it. It doesn’t say that another card can be in effect at the same time. Maybe we just have to wait for 7 draws before the card changes again.” They’re interrupted by the group power-gamer calling “So now I get +2 to all my actions?” since they took the Ardent Heart. There’s a bit of a row. “Hang on, which card are we on again?” asks another player, looking at the board which still has at least one card on every Sun and now has nothing to indicate which is active. The GM sighs and tosses all the cards previously on the Path into a discard pile. "Hang on, they're still played, aren't they, even if they're not active?" calls the power gamer. "Hey, aren't we supposed to sort them by suit and put them on the edges of the board?" calls another, pointing to the names of the suits written on the edges of the Path of Suns. The GM frantically starts flicking through The Gate looking for the point where those edges are described. They are not, and there's no reason for them to be there at all. The GM gradually begins to realize that a significant part of their $100 investment has gone into a mechanism that provides awkward-to-track and completely random bonuses between +1 and +2. Granted, those aren't totally insignificant in the Cypher system, but still, it's all very much ado about nothing. And speaking of that, we'll actually look into some magic in a moment.. hyphz fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Jul 5, 2020 |
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Jul 4, 2020 21:23
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Scenario Creation, Bestiary, and Alternate Rulesets Next up we have some advice on actually creating scenarios, as well as more in-depth campaign design. Like many games, Glitter Hearts can be run either as a one-shot or a longer campaign. I’d go with a campaign, honestly, but it looks like most people use the system for one-shots. For any session, one-shot or campaign, you need six elements worked out: an adversary, their goal, the setting, NPCs (friendly and hostile), a rough outline of the plot, and some hook to arrive your players’ attention. We get a respectable walkthrough of the process here that hits all those bases, even though the villain is a nefarious lunch lady. For a full campaign you need to do that every session as well as planning out the villain: you need their identity, motivations, methods, minions, and means of achieving their goals all drafted out. From there you can let the plot line of the campaign developed naturally as the villain and players react to each other’s decisions, making it easier to let the players decide what happens next and the GM set the course simultaneously. I really like this, it doesn’t solve the GM-player plot direction issue entirely, but it helps keep the tension from overwhelming the game. Nice bit of mutualism, like with the relationship loop. The book follows that up by implementing a campaign outline using those rules that also looks quite healthy and usable. We get a bestiary next that details the stats and behaviors of a couple dozen opponents of all ranks. Some highlights:
 gently caress. Yes. Next up we have a sample adventure that covers a villain invading Earth for workers in her space mines and how the players stop her, complete with a midboss they can turn, friendly NPCs, multiple enemy types, and plot developments to throw in to keep the pressure up as the players try and figure out what to do. Whatever Greg’s design chops, he knows how to build an adventure. And then the rules finish. Well, the rules proper. We next get the first of two alternate rulesets, this one for using giant robots instead of magical girls. Character creation works similarly to the base game for the most part (pick your Mundane Identity same as always, your Mystical Connection describes your robot’s theme), but instead of choosing one of the earlier Archetypes, players choose between five robot Archetypes: the Sturdy, Quick, Flyer, Stealthy, and Compact. You can probably guess what each does from the names. Instead of one level of transformation, with this you get three, each of which should be broken out only when the last falters; a costumed fighter form that will boosts the effect of your stats like transformation does in the main ruleset, your actual giant robot (that grants you Archetype and Mystical Connection abilities), and a final transformation into a single giant robot that uses all your powers combined. Your pseudo-Voltron functions as a character of its own; it has its own stat spread, move list, combat abilities, and even a unique basic move that it rolls to stay together when it by a particularly massive attack (failure breaks you apart, but though thematically you should at least stay apart for a little while, RAW you can immediately reform with full health. Rules ambiguity in this book  ). While fused, actual control of the robot rotates from player to player but other players can use appropriate moves at the same time; think using Glimpse the Truth to provide targeting information. On the other hand, while the combined robot gets its own pool of health, any damage it takes hits all of its pilots at once for the same value; if somebody deals it 6 damage and a character only has 4 HP they’ll go down for the count. Leveling up the combined form works like leveling up a separate character except you need two advancements from any two players to purchase one giant robot advancement.  gently caress. No.  Last and sort of least comes a page on how to play Magical Girl Captain Planet; players don’t transform independently, they use a group of items to summon forth an avatar together. That avatar has its own Archetype and a significantly more powerful stat spread, but each player chooses a Mystical Connection and gives the appropriate moves to it as well. It functions as an independent character controlled by players coming to a consensus on decisions, and damage to player characters bounces onto it until it gets unsummoned. I’m not sure how it advances, I think like giant robot above. Then we get the credits, the list of Kickstarter backers (because of course this was a Kickstarter production), the index, character sheet, and back cover. We’re done! Next time we take a look back Glitter Hearts in its entirety, evaluating whether or not the whole thing pulls through and stands on its own or if all the little issues drag it down. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jul 4, 2020 |
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Jul 4, 2020 21:29
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No, no, the point is to get the space pirate captain to switch sides to your side. After hearing their tragic backstory and having multiple mirror matches.
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Jul 4, 2020 21:44
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Night10194 posted:No, no, the point is to get the space pirate captain to switch sides to your side. After hearing their tragic backstory and having multiple mirror matches. Cue rolling Touch Their Heart over and over until statistical probability forces them to join you.
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Jul 4, 2020 21:52
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You also got to keep them away from their shark-shaped spaceship or they'll have more juice than they know what to do with. All the juice.
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Jul 4, 2020 21:58
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Night10194 posted:You also got to keep them away from their shark-shaped spaceship or they'll have more juice than they know what to do with. All the juice. So how are you enjoying Wonderful 101, Night?
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Jul 4, 2020 22:12
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Tsilkani posted:So how are you enjoying Wonderful 101, Night? Very much! It's wonderful!
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Jul 4, 2020 22:17
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Fivemarks posted:What i'm learning from Fatal and Friends, as well as previous experience with Lamentations and anything touched by Zak S, is that OSR is bullshit and is bad. My experience is generally that anything OSR which is interesting, inspired or decent would be much better if it had the same concept but wasn't OSR. Like, Godbound's absolutely weakest aspect is the OSR-related skeleton that the otherwise-decent organs and skin of good game are wrapped around.
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Jul 4, 2020 22:27
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Thank you, hyphz, for this bounty of mediocrity, I was desperately curious to know how bad the fake tarot would be.
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Jul 4, 2020 22:30
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PurpleXVI posted:My experience is generally that anything OSR which is interesting, inspired or decent would be much better if it had the same concept but wasn't OSR. Like, Godbound's absolutely weakest aspect is the OSR-related skeleton that the otherwise-decent organs and skin of good game are wrapped around. Like, I'm preparing to run A Wizard tomorrow. I'm excited to do it. That has nothing to do with it being OSR (and in fact, I'm glad it's system-agnostic and happy to just suggest guidance like 'make this save Hard for whatever system you're using') and everything to do with it being an interesting horror story. I agree that I don't think 'OSR' is actually bringing anything to the table in what makes it look interesting to me.
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Jul 4, 2020 22:37
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Manual of the Planes: 3.5E The Astral Plane Planar Traits: No Gravity, Timeless, Infinite Size, Alterable Morphic, Enhanced Magic: all spells and spell-like abilities are considered to be quickened as per the Quicken Spell metamagic feat but do not consume higher level spell slots. Warning: travel in the Astral Plane is determined by thought, anything without a brain has to be pushed and can't move under its own power. The Astral Plane in 3.5E remains the gap between dimensions, the cosmic substrate underlying the cosmos, and most of the Astral Plane is a featureless silver void. Strange clumps of matter drift through the void, but the only color typically present in the plane comes from travelers, or the brightly colored circles of 'pools,' gateways out of the Astral to other planes that are rarely permanent. Also common are the strange, dark tunnels through the void that are planar portals that pass through the Astral, which skilled and daring (or just desperate) travelers can hitch onto for a ride to the conduit's destination. You need to make intelligence checks to move in the Astral, similar to the subjective directional gravity rule. Also, there's stuff about silver cords, something I've never seen any campaign, ever, mess with. Objects here are typically left behind by travelers, or are dumped here by accident (tip: don't put a bag of holding into a portable hole), very little actually lives here. Beings native to the Astral tend to be rare and extraordinarily dangerous, like the astral dreadnought. Much more common are visitors passing through on one errand or another, and the githyanki. The Manual gives a brief overview of the githyanki, including stats for their astral ships and for Vlaakith, but doesn't give them much detail beyond being astral pirates that are buddies with red dragons. But really, about 80% of the random encounter table for the Astral Plane is people or beings passing through on their way elsewhere. As for the githyanki's habitual digs on the Astral, the bodies of dead gods? The Manual gives a few alternatives to that idea. Perhaps the bodies of gods don't exist - not applicable for whatever reason. In that case, the githyanki have settled strange, coral reef like growths, or have lashed together clumps of random debris into a scavenged stronghold. Or perhaps there are monoliths in the void, cosmic gravestones for dead gods. Those would work, too. And you may very well want shelter on the Astral, because in 3.5E this is the plane linked to psionic power, and strange storms of psychic energy sometimes sweep through the plane. Tables are provided for if you get hit by one, but suffice it to say that they're irritating, if unlikely to actually kill you. In general, the Astral Plane is much more likely to be a plane you'll pass through on your way to somewhere else than it is to be a plane you'll actually visit. Unless you're here to gently caress around with the githyanki or the corpse/gravestone of some dead god, there just isn't much here by default. If you are on the Astral for reals, even then it's more likely to be the result of some kind of planar accident than coming here on purpose. At least the plane is Timeless so aging, thirst, hunger, and fatigue don't happen here (DM fiat whether it applies retroactively when you leave or not). As such, if you're building a cosmology you may want to do without the Astral Plane. A fair number of common spells, like the Summon Monster series and Dimension Door, use the Astral by default, so you'll either need to rework them or they just don't exist. Eliminating the Astral also makes interplanar travel more complicated with the default assumptions, without a plane for being between planes you may need to hopscotch across the planes to find your destination or some such. Next time, the Ethereal Plane.
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Jul 4, 2020 22:41
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PurpleXVI posted:My experience is generally that anything OSR which is interesting, inspired or decent would be much better if it had the same concept but wasn't OSR. Like, Godbound's absolutely weakest aspect is the OSR-related skeleton that the otherwise-decent organs and skin of good game are wrapped around. I'd really love a Godbound that kept its system light, but had a bit more game under the hood than the six-stat OSR basics provided. One of the issues I ran into with my own game was how combat should have been all of these huge wild abilities getting thrown around, but more often turns into pure numbersmash. Folks tend to alternate between their most powerful attack and their less-powerful but still reliable attack, and using anything else runs the risk of getting overwhelmed by lucky damage rolls.
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Jul 5, 2020 01:54
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PurpleXVI posted:My experience is generally that anything OSR which is interesting, inspired or decent would be much better if it had the same concept but wasn't OSR. Like, Godbound's absolutely weakest aspect is the OSR-related skeleton that the otherwise-decent organs and skin of good game are wrapped around. The OSR is this weird tension between people having very good and interesting ideas but have bought into this revisionist idea of what the hobby was. Like, there's absolutely a lot to be said for emergent sandboxes and rules light design with narrative allowances, but they've swallowed a bunch of propaganda that grogs perfected this art back in the late 70s so they're always going to be hampered by that.
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Jul 5, 2020 02:25
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The six dnd stats are dumb as hell, I'd much rather take Soulbound's Body/Mind/Soul, or a Fate-style skill only system.
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Jul 5, 2020 08:07
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Just Dan Again posted:I'd really love a Godbound that kept its system light, but had a bit more game under the hood than the six-stat OSR basics provided. One of the issues I ran into with my own game was how combat should have been all of these huge wild abilities getting thrown around, but more often turns into pure numbersmash. Folks tend to alternate between their most powerful attack and their less-powerful but still reliable attack, and using anything else runs the risk of getting overwhelmed by lucky damage rolls. With Godbound specifically, considering the big narrative abilities player characters have, the game could have really benefited from more system-wise focus on them(because they are INCREDIBLY hard to adjudicate in play, from my experience, with the very vague guidance and limitations provided) and solving problems/confrontations with them so rather than "you use RAIN POWER to hit Stone Guy for a hojillion dice of damage" it'd be more about puzzle-solving, like you use your rain power to flood the battlefield so Stone Guy is mired in the sudden marshland and it all just turns into a JJBA fight of plays and counter-plays limited by your thematic options, planning and creativity more than your dice. Saguaro PI posted:The OSR is this weird tension between people having very good and interesting ideas but have bought into this revisionist idea of what the hobby was. Like, there's absolutely a lot to be said for emergent sandboxes and rules light design with narrative allowances, but they've swallowed a bunch of propaganda that grogs perfected this art back in the late 70s so they're always going to be hampered by that. Yeah this is the other problem with OSR. Half the users are just "gently caress NARRATIVE SYSTEMS! BECMI GOOD!" and the other half are "ah yes the ORIGINAL SPIRIT OF ALL GAMING was for players to suffer under save-or-dies or just die-no-save-because-you-did-the-wrong-thing from a mercurial and sadistic dungeon master. I will now make a system where they have six stats that will help them kill a goblin but will in no way help them avoid the bullshit the core rulebook encourages the GM to ladle on." And it's like, yeah? Sure, I love me a crunchy system sometimes and I dislike a lot of the early experiments in narrative gaming(and a lot of the later ones, to be frank), but I still think we can do better than AD&D if we try to.
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Jul 5, 2020 08:56
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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, one thing I will say about Call of Cthulhu is that it took a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" approach. Will reading the weird-rear end tome bound with the skin of Something Not of this World possibly drive you nuts? Sure. However, if you don't read the tome, take the insanity and boost your Cthulhu Mythos Score a bit, you're not going to learn the Eldritch Spell of Please Get This loving Thing Outta My Face. Guns, Swords and even dynamite might suffice to deal with cultists and lower threats, but when some pack of hood 'n' cloak nutballs calls some Nightmare From Beyond that looks at your rifles and snickers with contempt, you pretty much need to reach for the Cthulhu Spellbook, however crazy it will make you.
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Jul 5, 2020 09:45
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wiegieman posted:The six dnd stats are dumb as hell, I'd much rather take Soulbound's Body/Mind/Soul, or a Fate-style skill only system. Soulbound's Body/Mind/Soul has been very elegant for me so far in my game so I agree. Though I don't mind the Six D&D stats, I wish they were reconfigured a bit. (Namely I think odd numbers need to do something again, rather than the modifier being the only thing that matters.)
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Jul 5, 2020 14:26
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MonsterEnvy posted:Soulbound's Body/Mind/Soul has been very elegant for me so far in my game so I agree. Though I don't mind the Six D&D stats, I wish they were reconfigured a bit. (Namely I think odd numbers need to do something again, rather than the modifier being the only thing that matters.) As far as I can tell people justify that by having the odd numbers act as brakes for stat decreases, which really isn't something that can't be more elegantly covered in like a billion different ways.
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Jul 5, 2020 16:01
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Falconier111 posted:Huh. In the MotP they stated portals between the Prime Materials and Inner Planes form frequently in areas heavily associated with a given element. As in, if you want to avoid the Ethereal and portals, you can Removing interesting mystical things from the world in favor of is completely in line with 3e design philosophy.
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Jul 5, 2020 17:34
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Speleothing posted:Removing interesting mystical things from the world in favor of  This book so does seem at once a lot more playable and a lot less interesting than the MotP. I’m really hoping the Outer Planes make up for that, though.
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Jul 5, 2020 17:56
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Speleothing posted:Removing interesting mystical things from the world in favor of To be fair, the mystical things is suggested as an option. This book really wants to be a 'build your own planar cosmology' toolkit while also giving an overview of the Greyhawk cosmology as an example - which itself is an update of the previous editions' default cosmology. Falconier111 posted:
I think I'll do the book out of order, then, and cover the Outer Planes next before the Inner Planes.
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Jul 5, 2020 18:06
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