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Night10194 posted: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 think the big selling point for OSR is "Hey, you know that gently caress-ton of D&D books you mortgaged your house to buy? You can use those books for this other game instead of spending even more money buying a different rules system." Personally, I'd prefer system-neutral stuff where I can just plug the adventure/world into whatever system I happen to own.
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Jul 5, 2020 18:12
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Cythereal posted: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. I think you should do it in Order. Save the best for last.
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Jul 5, 2020 18:18
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MonsterEnvy posted:I think you should do it in Order. Save the best for last. After the Outer Planes is a section on miscellaneous planes that don't fit into the default cosmology but might if you want to create your own, and a bestiary. So... the best probably won't be last. 
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Jul 5, 2020 18:37
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Cythereal posted:After the Outer Planes is a section on miscellaneous planes that don't fit into the default cosmology but might if you want to create your own, and a bestiary. So... the best probably won't be last. Ah ok. Then do whatever you want, it's your choice after all.
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Jul 5, 2020 18:41
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 Conclusion In the process of reading reviews of Glitter Hearts to get an idea of how it plays (also gently caress the precepts behind deconstructionism), I’ve noticed no one ever brings up mechanics. Granted, most of these reviews boil down to “wow we had so much fun good game” but even more critical ones skipped over the small set of mechanics that make me most excited about the game. I think this stems from GM-player social contracts, so I’ll get to that in a bit. I’ll admit, I feel kind of bad ragging on a PbtA hack for its mechanics, especially since a lot of my biggest issues with Glitter Hearts boil down to rule ambiguities instead of actual mechanical quibbles. After all, the system was designed to enable storygaming, providing a simple but reliable mechanical base for flavorful actions in flavorful situations. But that’s the issue. As has been noted in the thread, one of PbtA’s greatest weaknesses is how thematically restricting and stifling it can be dramatically if the designers don’t know what they’re doing. I’d say Glitter Hearts avoids this handily. But another is that the system has very little room for different power scales. The success-partial success-failure system only really works when bonuses range from -2 to +2. Anything else turns an otherwise elegant bell curve into a series of guaranteed successes or failures. That’s probably my biggest issue with the system, though that’s very much personal taste instead of an actual problem with the rules. It makes it difficult to accommodate games with different power scales – such as Glitter Hearts with its billion pluses. But I’ll get into that in a bit too.  I’ve mentioned this before, but I want to say again just how much I adore the relationship system in this game. It gives PC interactions a natural rhythm I absolutely adore. In theory, the loop works like this:
  It happens sometimes, given the kinds of emotion being thrown around, and it never stops being awkward - especially if people have to sit by and uncomfortably watch the scene resolve. While relationships reform naturally, they don’t strengthen mechanically after repair, which both runs against the tone of the game and can make those developments seem pointless. But for all of that the biggest issue with the relationship loop is purely mathematical: the +Elephant in the room.  Molly and Sam’s We Can Do This Together!-Touch Their Heart combo is ultimately a system exploit. It relies on digging up two potent abilities for each of them and combining their effects in an unanticipated manner. It is only situationally effective and it leaves Molly, especially, extremely ill equipped for anything other than spending every turn pumping out We Can Do This Together!. But unless the GM explicitly forbids it they can quickly overwhelm any midboss or villain in a couple turns with that combo, and I made them able to pull it off accidentally because Glitter Hearts is far too generous with bonuses. Neither of those characters are optimized, especially Molly; had I not given her +1 Mystical for character reasons, I would’ve used the plus for Physical to give her more health and staying power and switched her over to Defender to let her tank damage for Sam when they come under fire. Or just redone her entirely except for the bonus to We Can Do This Together! for better point efficiency and make all her relationships Cooperative. But as it is Sam can leverage their Mental – a stat they can use to great effect in combat with their Archetype – to use with a roll that would otherwise require Emotional, the least combat-capable stat, while Molly as is can bolster anyone’s next roll by at least +3 (factoring in Power Points) at any time as long as she gets even a partial success. And there are countless even more broken combos lurking in this game just waiting for someone to break them out and abuse them. Without the relationship system, it would be trivially easy to stack up pluses far beyond what PbtA was designed to accommodate. With it maintaining any kind of difficulty curve becomes nearly impossible. The game seems half aware of how easily it can be exploited, with several assumptions and rule quirks that try to reign it in – except those efforts are often clumsy and undermined by other assumptions, ambiguities, or mechanics. For instance, gaining experience still stems from failing rolls, which would incentivize players to avoid breaking the system in the pursuit of a more powerful character. But making players want to fail for mechanical benefits is awkward at the best of times unless that failure is thematically appropriate, and the implications that overpowered characters are thematically appropriate instead that pop up from time to time undermine it further. What actually holds the game together is the social contract it promotes between GMs and players. And that social contract is POWERFUL. The book overflows with language that promotes a healthy balance between GMs pushing and helping their players, consistently encourages players to think more about supporting the game world and each other than toying with the system, and feeds readers constant examples of GMs presenting players with difficult situations that they can think or fight their way out of without putting undue strain on the trust either side offers the other. That trust prevents system exploits on both sides, allows GMs to cut through ambiguity in ways that satisfy everyone, and lets every awkward mechanic get houseruled away or set aside. Granted, the fact that the book has effectively weaponized Rule Zero to cope with its mechanical flaws doesn’t make those flaws go away. But it makes them easily overcome through trust and teamwork, and isn’t that one of the most important themes of the magical girl genre?  At the end of the day, any tabletop role-playing game must be evaluated by asking the question “would you play this game” and for Glitter Hearts my answer is “gently caress yes.” Hell yeah I’d play Glitter Hearts, I’d customize Molly for whatever kind of campaign the GM chose to run and go hogwild, badgering them to include Captain Cleopatra every step of the way. I’d yell stupid catchphrases and use We Can Do This Together! to shout mildly sarcastic support to my teammates every day of the week. I wouldn’t run it, but that’s because I’ve proven mediocre at running PbtA games before instead of because I don’t want to. If you bought the twitch bundle I’d highly advise you download it just to take a look – it’s not a long book – and if you didn’t and like the genre, consider purchasing it on its own and also shame on you. And with that I declare this review over. I think I’m going to take a break from reviewing books for a little while; I’ve been doing daily 1000-word posts for nearly 2 months straight. I’ll be writing something else in the meantime; it’ll take me maybe a week? Two weeks? Or I’ll go without posting here for a year or more because I do that sometimes. If that DOESN’T happen, I’ll bring back something quite different – a review of a Savage Worlds campaign book accompanied by my notes from when I ran it, since that sort of thing seems to be all the rage these days. Either way, until next. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Jul 5, 2020 |
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Jul 5, 2020 18:55
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I'll be honest, I've given up on playing or running or making tabletop RPGs, and I keep reading Fatal & Friends in the hope that my love of it will return.
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Jul 5, 2020 19:26
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I said at the start of the Glitter Hearts review that I was interested to see how it shook out mechanically, so thank you for crunching the numbers and delivering an interesting verdict on the strengths and weaknesses of the PTBA system as applied to this specific game.
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Jul 5, 2020 19:35
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 16: FAIRIES, LYCANTHROPES AND VAMPIRES Today on Esoteric Enterprises, we’re still balls-deep in supernatural creatures. All three of the sections we tackle today will have some form of template application, and a couple will have random roll tables for generating special properties. Let’s begin with one of my favorite sections in the book: THE FAIRY COURTS In the world of Esoteric Enterprises, fairies are spawned by the collective imagination of humanity. In the underworld, the fey organize themselves into communities, divided into Seelie and Unseelie Courts based on whether they come from pleasant dreams or nightmares respectively. Mechanically, they’re immune to poison and disease due to their imaginary biology, but take double damage from “cold iron” weapons. Fairies are one of the possible underworld factions, which you create by rolling a few D20s on a table of both Seelie and Unseelie fairies. The Fairy Enclave always has a King and Queen, one of which is Seelie and the other Unseelie. They can also get their own themed dungeon area in the complex creation table, called the Fey Grotto, and it’s one of the most entertaining in the game. Maybe it’s just because I had so much fun with them in the first campaign I ran, but I really like these weird little bastards. Goblins are unseelie critters spawned by dreams of spite and resentment. They’re real dicks, but if you meet them in the Goblin Market (if you have a Fey Grotto it always has a Goblin Market in it) they’ll sell you all kinds of good poo poo. Mainly magic weapons, but also fey wine if you want to boost your Charm score and actually cast Mystic spells for once in your life. In return, they ask for things like years of your lifespan, attribute points, or payments of experience. Mechanically they’ve got good stealth and long knives to use with it, but otherwise aren’t anything to run home about. Redcaps are cutthroat unseelie fairies spawned by dreams of violence. They’re a recursive fairy, they go around killing people and spreading terror, so that the survivors will have nightmares and create more Red Caps. They not only have 4 in 6 Stealth, they automatically boost the Stealth of any allies accompanying them. If their attacks ignore Grit and go straight to Flesh (such as by a sneak attack) they deal bonus damage and automatically inflict the Bleeding Out condition. Red Caps are scary. Banshee Oracles are Unseelie Cassandras spawned by dreams of grief, who see only the worst possible future. Though their prognostications are usually wrong, they sometimes attract small cults of disciples. They have a scream that deals Charisma damage on a failed Save vs Magic, and instantly kills you (by predicting your death) if you roll a 1 on the save. They can also cast Augery and Divination, though there’s no description of how their only-pessimistic-predictions power interacts with the spell. Korred Scholars are goat-like Seelie gnomes, generated by dreams of curiosity and mystery. The text says their mannerisms “veer wildly between ‘eccentric German professor’ and ‘ruthless German interrogator’”. They have a 4 in 6 chance to know any secret you keep from them, a 1 in 6 chance to know the answer to your other questions, no matter how obscure, and can whisper the secrets of the universe to incapacitate everyone in earshot for D6 rounds on a failed Save vs Stunning. River Hags are Unseelie creatures created by dreams of drowning. Vindictive and territorial, but easily bribed for safe passage by canny adventurers. Automatically detects lies and broken oaths. Good Stealth, plus three attacks per round that can easily kill if they go directly to Flesh. Domovoi are Slavic Seelie spirits created by dreams of hearth and home. They look like tiny old men, wearing their enormous beards like clothing. If you find one in the undercity, you can adopt it with a payment of bread and milk. Which is a great idea because they’ve got 3 in 6 in Medicine, making them passable backup physicians if you don’t have a Doctor. Slaugh are undulating Unseelie abominations that arise from fear of the dark. They can barely defend themselves in a fight, but they’ve got good Stealth, Athletics, Perception, and can deform their body to fit through any gap. The Fairy Enclave uses them as spies and scouts. Trolls are enormous Seelie bruisers, spawned from humanity’s awe of nature. Lawful aligned, guileless, always keep their word. They hit hard in melee with three attacks per round and, because this is D&D, regenerate HP unless burned by fire or acid. Sprites are little butterfly Seelie, brought to life by dreams of flight. They treat everything like a game like little winged Kender, and didn’t everyone love those. They can turn invisible and fire sleep darts. Ogres are the Unseelie equivalent of trolls, generated by dreams of violence against people you care about. Tough, dumb as poo poo, smash things they don’t understand. Instead of regenerating per-turn, they recover their full HP if they eat someone they kill. The random encounter tables like to pair them with Trolls as an odd-couple comedy duo. Svartalfr are spawned by dreams of industry, and it’s not clear whether the game considers them Seelie or Unseelie (they appear on both tables when yo ucreate a FAiry Enclave). They’re black dwarves, like Duergar, obsessed with gems and industry and blah blah, you’ve heard this all before. Their mining tools deal a whopping D12 damage per hit. Sidhe are Seelie fairies that come from wet dreams. They’ve got 5 in 6 charm, fight with rapiers and dueling pistols, and can lock you in place on a failed Save vs Stunning by making eye contact. Bandersnatches are Unseelie bird-fairies who grow out of visions of greed. They fight by hiding in the dark, grabbing your items and then running away into the dungeon. They’ve got 5 in 6 “sleight of hand”, which isn’t a skill in Esoteric Enterprises. Thankfully it’s not hard to intuit from context what it means.  Now we get to the upper crust of Fey society. Fairy Nobles have four ranks, which get progressively better saves, HP, chance to hit, etc. Higher ranked fey can automatically command any fairy lower ranked than themselves. PC fairies get a save against this, except against the King or Queen.
Let’s roll up four of these weirdos and see how we do.
(In my first Esoteric Enterprises campaign, the Fairy Enclave was engaged in a profitable gin-for-children scheme with the local Smuggling outfit. The Unseelie Queen thought she was doing the right thing, selling magic liquor to buy kids from hopheads and raising them as sorcerers. The Royal Family got strong armed into letting the Men in Black use the Grotto as a dungeon entrance, during an operation to chase down some Paradox Beasts the players accidentally released into the dungeon. This made the Seelie King look weak, and he was eventually deposed and executed by a group of rebels, who nearly slaughtered the Queen and her adopted children, but were eventually foiled by a rival adventuring party while the players were out digging up corpses in the Necropolis for the Ponda Ray crime family. The Queen and her bastards escaped, and the remainder of the rebels were slaughtered by the Red Cap Gang)  LYCANTHROPES Esoteric Enterprises doesn’t use a generic template for were-creatures. It tries to, but ends up doing something more annoying and harder to use instead. It presents one form of were-monster, then for all the other entries it says “start with X but change A to B and Y to Z, and add C” and so on. It’s irritating enough that it’s stopped me from really digging into this section of the book. Were Rats are the base were-creature in Esoteric Enterprises, by virtue of being the most common. They can transform between rat, human and hybrid forms, but are always possessed by ravenous madness, though still capable of speech and reason. They’re also weak to silver. In human form, they’re an unremarkable normal person with a gun or knife. In rat form they’re a rat, and are probably trying to hide or run away. In hybrid form, they get a bite and two claw attacks that can infect the victim with the Were Rat syndrome on a failed Save vs Poison. If you catch the bug, it deals progressive CHA damage until you hit 0. Then the damage goes away and you reroll as a Level 1 Spook with were-rat powers. There’s also a Pack Leader template that raises the Were Rat’s stats numerically, and is intended to be transferable to other social Were Creatures. Were Wolves have the same hybrid form as rats, but become a wolf in their full animal form. I think the were-creature transformations are knocked off of Werewolf the Apocalypse, where you’ve got your human, animal and 50/50 transformations. Were Spiders get a poison bite in their hybrid form, and can choose between Spider Form (AC 16 but no attack) and Swarm of Spiders Form. The text says “The lair of a were-spider is a cunning maze of webs, snares, pitfalls and tripwires, with a larder of poisoned victims, comatose and wrapped in silk for the were-spider to feed on later, at their leisure” but they don’t actually have the ability to paralyze victims or shoot silk. Which is a shame, because that sounds way more interesting than the stat block we get. Were Bats are like Were Rats with wings, which means their hybrid form can fly, but loses its claw attacks. The curse makes them “alternate between enthusiasm and panic” because apparently that’s what bats do. Were Snakes get the same poisonous bite as Spiders when in hybrid or animal form. The text says Were Snakes are “manipulators able to shed their skin to take new forms” but they don’t actually have that ability either. The descriptions feel like they were written before the stat blocks, when the author had a bunch of more interesting ideas they didn’t end up implementing. Were Bulls get a tankier hybrid form and a tankier animal form, and always use the Pack Leader template due to their enormous bulk. Were Gulls are the other rats with wings. Almost identical to Were Bats, but the book gives them some interesting animal behavior at least: “ Hungry, pushy, never satisfied. Form huge raucous flocks. Think with their stomachs. Hair and plumage tend towards surprisingly beautiful patterns of white and grey. While gluttonous, they’re hardly greedy, and have a streak of generosity to them, happily sharing food and pretty things without really thinking about it.” Were Butterflies are obligate cowards, flying away or exploding into a swarm of butterflies at the first sign of danger. Like Were Spiders, but without the poison bite. This section closes with some alternate explanations for lycanthropy that would function differently than the listed mechanics. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 213 posted:• The descendants of previous generations of shapeshifters. These might naturally take Hybrid form, only taking human or animal form uncomfortably. Were Creatures can show up as associated NPCs for various cults in the pantheon. Some of them reference stat blocks that don’t exist in the book, like Were Bears. There aren’t any packs of Were Wolves or Were Gulls or what have you in the faction table, though they would be easy enough to throw together.  VAMPIRES The rules entry for vampires starts with a list of possible explanations for vampirism, along with mechanics for each: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 24 posted:• The walking dead. Immune to drowning, cold, poison, sickness. Double damage from holy things. Can’t be healed by normal medicine, and heal a maximum of 1 HP from any source. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 214 posted:• Lightning Speed, allowing them to go first in initiative and doubling their movement speed.
Finally, we get a 3D20 table of flairs for vampire bloodlines. Let’s give it a try and see what kind of vampires we create. A 19, a 16 and a 4 on the Mannerism, Appearance and Quirks tables respectively get us a Tasteful, Sensually Appealing Vampire Bloodline that can regenerate from even a single drop of blood. That’s a little played out. Let’s try again. A 9, 19 and 5 gets us Irrational, Transparent Skinned Vampires who are weak to Silver. The next step is to pick some powers that complement these quirks aesthetically. Let’s take the affinity for the darkness and weakness to the light as our first ability, to go with the transparent skin. That means all the vampires in the clan get those bonuses and penalties, no matter how young. The next logical step is probably seeing in total darkness, which young vampires and up will have. Then the ability to change their appearance to mimic their victims, which established vampires will have, and so on. All the way up to the oldest vampires in the bloodline, who will have all the powers their descendants have, and then some. I like the vampire creation mechanics a little better than the Were Creature rules. I think the powers could have been grouped together a little better rather than split into so many pieces. Again, though, having a creature on the random encounter tables that requires this many random rolls to generate is a bit of a pain. Some pre-baked vampires would have been nice, just like how we got pre-baked undead in the earlier chapters.  Up next: “Mundane” Animals, Chimeras, Bugs and other Weird Creatures. I’d estimate we’ve got four or five posts left in this series. Then maybe a wrapup with overall thoughts on the game, my personal experience running it, house rules to make it better, etc. Thanks for sticking with me this far.
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Jul 5, 2020 20:17
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A Wizard Spoiler Warning This is actually a good adventure and relies a lot on surprise! If you plan to play/run A Wizard, this review/readthrough is going to get into some spoilers. The first update will be avoiding spoilers entirely and just telling you whether or not this is a worthwhile adventure to purchase and run. It is an OSR/system agnostic adventure, and one of the nice things it does immediately is give you a useful list of content warnings (this is a horror adventure) and bill itself as horror immediately. It's got some really icky stuff in it, and I appreciate it being upfront rather than trying to preserve the 'surprise' entirely. The idea of the adventure is that a wizard has been causing some trouble for a charming little town from his tower up on the hill, and the town's put a small bounty on said wizard. The PCs are people who hear of it and take a stab at it. How bad can it be, anyway? They've probably dealt with pointy-hatted miscreants before. It's pretty bad! Content Warnings: gore and dismemberment, vomit, pregnancy imagery, mind control, bugs, unreality, trypophobia, self-harm, forced immoral decisions, hallucinations as per the Itchio page for the module, which should immediately give you an idea of what the heroes are in for. It's not a good time on the tower on a hill. Not a good time at all. But A Wizard is the kind of evil you need to deal with regardless of how safe or profitable it is, because that wizard is a dick. A total dick. You've got to get in there and stop him before it happens again. Even if the 40 gold pieces the town offered (and the weird way nobody could really describe what he did) is nowhere near enough for what's coming. This is not a dungeon full of treasure or pleasant encounters. This is a weird body-horror adventure where the players slowly realize they are not dealing with your average everyday wizard. Even though he has a proper pointed hat. What stood out to me when I first read the adventure is how none of it is someone's magical realm. The content warnings are responsible, the book itself has an extensive 'understand your players' boundaries, respect them, and back off if the game is bothering someone, discuss these things before and during and communicate openly' section, and it's also got advice on making the adventure easier if you want the imagery but without everyone getting murdered by A Wizard as much. There's one iffy encounter (the pregnancy imagery one) but none of the creepy encounters really dwell on themselves, and everything is avoidable. You always have a save, or you could think of a way around an obstacle. There's nothing like Thousand Thrones' 'you must really get in there and work it in hacking through the Chaos Butt, getting all covered in slime and goo' moment from Chapter 5. Nothing is unavoidable. It isn't gleefully dwelling on suffering and the imagery in it is horrific, but being used to cause horror, not because someone is being a creep. Similarly, the writing style is excellent. It's very economical, in order to avoid over-explaining and to give the GM and players a lot of room to improvise while still giving them a solid enough base to cut down on prep time and make the adventure fun to run. I cut the extra areas of the secondary dungeon, the Abyss, for time and to make the plot flow better but they're still well written if you want some weird cosmic horror fantasy to throw into the middle of this (or another dungeon to run). It gets across the horror while leaving a lot of room for imagination, which only makes it creepier. You also really want that dang wizard dead by the end of it, too, because he is a jerk. A total jerk. You get a great bit of characterization for him in the writing because he interjects seamlessly to talk to the GM through sections of the text that are bolded. For instance, in the bit where the local ranchers ask you to deal with him so it doesn't happen again (cattle mutilation) the Wizard interjects with it's going to happen again. He is also extremely insistent that he wears a pointed hat. It is important to him. It gives him a brief but effective characterization as a cruel jerk who does things for esoteric reasons and who has entirely too much power. You know, a wizard.. The system-agnostic writing is also very nice. A simple 'this should be a Very Hard save for whatever system you're using', etc is a useful guideline without being obtrusive. There's a lot of room to customize the numbers and the design supports that while still helping do enough work to cut down on prep time. I ran this in WHFRP because c'mon, it's me, what other 'Old School' adjacent system was I going to use, but the guidelines really helped. The tower is also evocative and works well without being too much of an actual maze, so players are always exploring and pressing forward (if they aren't dead as hell). The Abyss sections feel a little gratuitous and as I said, I cut them out to make things hang together better and save time, but the actual Tower is well-paced and has a lot of good room for players to come up with ways around traps or for them to stumble into terrible danger. So in short, A Wizard passes all my criteria for a good adventure module. It's not creepy (just horrific), it's responsible, it cuts down on prep time, it's creative and clever, and having run it it was actually great fun to run. If you have it from the Itchio Bundle I would really recommend giving it a look and thinking about if your group would enjoy a little awfulness some time. It even does some really fun stuff with its plot and while its characterization and writing tend to be economical and brief, they're effective, evocative, and give you enough to hang something on. Next Time: The Protagonists and the Trip Report, Spoilers Abound.
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Jul 5, 2020 20:58
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RPPR did an Actual Play of the Wizard a week or two ago. They ran it in Monster of the Week, and the tone didn't really work at the start of the episode due to the power and level of resources available to the characters. It definitely fell into place once they actually began crawling the dungeon, though.
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Jul 5, 2020 22:04
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Manual of the Planes: 3.5E The Ethereal Plane Planar Traits: No Gravity, Normal Time, Infinite Size, Alterable Morphic, Normal Magic Simply put, the Ethereal Plane is where ghost stuff happens. The Ethereal overlaps with the Material Plane as a sort of higher dimension or alternate phase of reality, you can see into one from the other, but pass through harmlessly under normal circumstances, and movement through the Ethereal is no faster than travel through the Material. In itself, there's rarely much of interest on the Ethereal Plane. Portals to other planes do exist, in the form of colorful, shimmering curtains; but beyond that it's just 'the Material Plane but incorporeal and there's no gravity.' If you're messing with the Ethereal Plane, it's almost certainly in the context of violence with locals or with  using spells like Ethereal Jaunt. Ghosts are the iconic Ethereal enemy, but 3.5E has lots of critters that exist natively on the Ethereal and can pop in and out of the Material to hunt, like Phase Spiders and Blink Dogs. By default, most weapons and spells won't touch anything on the Ethereal, with special exceptions for certain enchanted items, magic force spells, and exotic materials that may or may not exist in your setting. The Manual suggests that at the DM's discretion, more mundane materials like gold or lead may block the Ethereal and harm critters on the Ethereal.As such, a sidebar admits that eliminating the Ethereal Plane from your cosmology likely won't affect much. Only a handful of spells interact with it and a few monsters like ghosts and the aforementioned Phase Spiders and Blink Dogs. By default the Ethereal Plane only overlaps with the Material Plane. At the DM's whim, however, the Ethereal could overlap other planes, including any possible alternate Material Planes - perhaps as a single Ethereal Plane, perhaps every 'major' plane as its Ethereal as a sort of sub-plane. If you do take any of those options, or want to add more to do with the Ethereal Plane, the Manual suggests possibly having a Deep Ethereal, a region or layer distant from the Material Plane where the fog is so dense you can't see into the Material Plane. Gulfs of the Deep Ethereal could divide different planar overlays of the Ethereal, or the Deep Ethereal could be used for stranger purposes like an afterlife or even possibly replacing the functions of the Astral Plane, in which case the normal Ethereal is where the Astral/Ethereal thins as it overlaps the Material Plane. Next time, the Plane of Shadow.
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Jul 5, 2020 22:40
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 17: ANIMALS, CHIMERAS, BUGS, WEIRDNESS I wrote this post, looked over it and then edited it to remove some boring stuff from the animals chapter. If you aren’t interested in a bunch of mundane and slightly-above-mundane creatures, skip down to the Weirdness Inhabiting the Undercity section. ANIMALS The animals section is a mix of boring real world creatures, real-world creatures given moderately interesting new roles in the dungeon ecology, and gross dungeon animals. I’m only covering the highlights, since this is the longest section in the book. Angler-Turtles are giant snapping turtles with a hypnotic lure. The creature disguises itself as an environment object, and its magic lure looks like treasure. Try to pick it up, and the turtle bites you, dealing damage straight to Flesh. You can save vs the illusion, but only after the turtle tries to bite you. Angler turtles are no joke, they’re the reason why my players poke everything with a stick before interacting with it. Black Goats are mutant satyrs, capable only of nonsensical gurgling and laughter. A Black Goat can smack you around with its horns for minimal damage, but its real headliner is its 3 in 6 chance to cast bleeding curse, darkness, spider climb, or parasitic infestation. They aren’t exactly durable, so if you meet them in a group of other monsters and can’t escape, the best play is to focus them before they start casting. Cave Bears are the descendents of Ice Age predators, once worshipped as Gods by primitive humans. They didn’t go extinct, they moved underground. They know in their 5 INT bear skulls that they were once masters of all they surveyed, and long to see those days restored. They get three attacks per round, and if they hit they can pin the target for automatic damage each turn after. They also get a bonus to their save vs divine magic, because of their residual divinity. Ferret Hydras are seven foot ferrets with three heads, giving them three bite attacks per round. At the end of a round, if they’ve taken any damage to Flesh, they restore back to full Flesh and grow an additional head, giving them another attack. There’s nothing here about using fire attacks to cauterize the stumps, but I’d certainly allow it. Giant Frogs are amphibians the size of bulls. The bufotoxin coating their skin deals Wisdom damage from a bad trip on a failed Save vs Poison. Their bite attack has a chance to swallow the victim, dealing additional digestive damage per-round until they escape. Giant Tadpoles are horrifying frogspawn. Why are they horrifying? Because if they deal damage to Flesh, they burrow inside your body and deal continuous damage to Flesh on subsequent turns, like the scarabs from The Mummy. Lampreys are parasites that can latch on to you and deal damage directly to Flesh, healing themselves proportionally. Did you know that Lampreys are like salmon, making incredible journeys from the ocean into inland freshwater streams and lakes to spawn? Did you know that they’re pretty sensitive to water quality issues, meaning they can’t actually wriggle around in the sewers? Nightmares are horses that spread madness and terror throughout the dungeon with their burning eyes, which deal Wisdom damage to anyone who look at them. The book gives them a grapple attack, which is weird because they’re horses and it doesn’t say they have hands or anything like that. They sometimes lead packs of Dero around the dungeon, ensorceled by the Nightmare’s infectious madness. Rat Kings are balls of rats, connected by their tails knotted together. Like the Rat King in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, the rats share a collective consciousness that makes them intelligent and lets them telepathically control other rats. 1 in 6 chance to summon a rat swarm every round. Rat Swarms are like bat swarms, or any other swarm in Esoteric Enterprises. They deal damage to things enveloped in them and take minimum damage from most attacks. No mention of Saving vs Poison to avoid catching the plague, which seems like the most natural place to put it. Salamanders are giant, fire breathing amphibians. The text says “where an axolotl has gill-like fronds extending from its neck, the salamander has a flickering ruff of condensed flame” which is adorable. Their bite deals fire damage, their fire breath attack also deals fire damage. Putting out their flames automatically reduces their Grit to 0. Surinam Toad Queens are another real life animal given special powers. You know those gross flat frogs from sudamerica which give birth out the holes in their back? Imagine one of those but a meter wide, and it spawns those horrible Flesh eating giant tadpoles from earlier. Which is bullshit, because froglings emerge from a Surinam Toad’s back well after they’ve completed their tadpole stage. The Black Dog is a terrible omen. The first time you see it, you get a choice: be stunned for one action by dread, or accept Doom. Doom means that the next time the DM says to themselves “no I can’t do that to the players, it would be unfair/bullshit/make no sense” they get to do it anyway. I like this mechanic, but I can see the DM just forgetting about it entirely, like everything else that takes effect after more than a couple rounds. Troglodytic Apes are cave dwelling orangutans that hunt in packs. They’ve got heat vision, and they know how to use simple tools and form simple ambushes. Basically just a White Ape from the B/X monster manual, ported to an urban fantasy setting. Venomous Snakes provoke a Save vs Poison if they deal damage to Flesh by biting you. On a failed save, take massive damage to Flesh. This is in contrast to how snakes worked in the old school edition, where you made a Save every time they hit you, and died instantly if you failed. Witch’s Cats are familiars, sent by their mistress to investigate strange occurrences in the undercity. There’s no “witch” stat block, so just use one of the other caster stat blocks from the Occult Weirdos section, I guess. They can cast Web, Darkness and Mist Form, all of which are useful for escaping a dangerous situation. A lot of these animals get multiple attacks per round, in an attempt to keep the players from just “action enonomying” them to death by weight of numbers. There’s also a bit of over reliance on “grapples you, then deals damage” which, again, is probably intended to stop the players from just immediately blasting the poor creature to smithereens with four/five attacks per round. Good luck shooting it when it’s wrapped around your legs. But what if instead of having separate stat blocks for all the animals, we tried to meld them all together, into a big superanimal?  CHIMERICAL MONSTROSITIES In-universe, Chimeras are created by mad science splicing animals together. In-game, Chimeras are created by taking a basic template and rolling D20s on a set of tables for body plan, head(s) and other features. Let’s create a couple example chimeras and see how they stack up. The text says 1D20 for body, 1D20 for head, and “a few” D20s for features, so let’s do 4D20 total. A 12, a 5, an 8 and a 16 get us a yak’s body (no special powers), a stag’s head (additional antler attack), axolotl gills (water breathing) and tusks (extra attack). Not too shabby. Let’s try again, with 5D20 this time. A 3, 8, 13, 20 and 5 get us the body of a vulture (grants flying), the head of a bat (echolocation), bat wings (can fly, again), a coating of slime (no mechanical effect), and the ability to grapple with its sinuous body in addition to any attacks it makes. Of note: the first four results on the features table grant the Chimera one to four extra heads respectively. That can increase the number of attacks it gets per round, as well as give it more special powers. What can I say about Chimeras that I haven’t said about every other monster creation system in the book? Cool, but do I want to do it on the fly when a random encounter table tells me to, in the middle of a game? It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s not exactly elegant. Speaking of doing everything with templates, BUGS The EE book uses the term “bugs” as a blanket for all arthropods. Entomologists beware. We get two “start with the template and apply special powers” stat blocks at the beginning of this chapter. Swarms of Bugs take the usual swarm rules we’ve seen with rats and bats, and load them up with one or more of the following special properties: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 220 posted:• Cockroaches are immune to poison, sickness and radiation. Next, we get a few invertebrates with their own unique stat blocks. Giant Spiders are Stealthy, and their venom deals DEX damage if any of their attacks hit Flesh. They don’t have any web shooting or other stuff you might associate with giant spiders. Did you know that spiders generally have poor eyesight? The main exception is Jumping Spiders, which use a visual trick to achieve better depth perception than their arachnid brethren. Each pair of jumping spider eyes sees a different color range of the visual spectrum. Because different colors of light blur and focus at different distances, the jumping spider is able to use the visual feed from its four pairs of eyes to determine how far away objects are from itself. Terrible Wurms are non-product identity versions of Purple Worms, which you might recognize from the last fifty years of D&D. Giant Cave Barnacles are creepy carnivorous crustaceans, which fix themselves to walls and ceilings, dangling tentacles and pulling food up into its maw. Like the ones from Half Life, but with an armored shell that makes them harder to damage. Swarms That Walk are insect swarms that work together to imitate human beings. They puppet a suit of “skin” that’s either made from silk or actual human skin, depending on the bugs that make up the swarm. They aren’t intelligent, but they can mimic humans surprisingly well. Their slam attack deals minimal damage, but deposits bugs on the target that deal damage over time. They take minimum damage from non-area attacks, like every other swarm monster in the book.  WEIRDNESS INHABITING THE UNDERCITY This section is a grab bag of intelligent but inhuman creatures, things that are probably intelligent but impossible to communicate with, and gross monsters that don’t fit elsewhere. Concrete Nymphs are mangled living statues that speak in impossibly beautiful voices. They love the ugly but functional elements of the city - the enormous flood control tunnels, the battered seawalls and concrete edifices that tip the rain into the whirling bay. They can cast Suggestion by singing, and shatter glass and other hard materials by screaming. If you’re wearing anything on your face, you get a Save vs Hazards to avoid being blinded. Lurking Lamps are like the little Pixar logo with arms. Other lights go out in their presence, and their flashbulb-eye can blind anything that looks at it for a round, or a whole ten minute turn on a failed Save vs Stunning. They like to collect trash and other meaningless objects. They’re intelligent and capable of language, one of the random encounter tables has one communicating with another monster using sign language. Mimics are nasty because they deal damage directly to Flesh when they bite you unexpectedly. In addition to treasure and containers for treasure, they can disguise themselves as random dungeon objects like doors, if the DM wants to really gently caress with people. Collectors of Eyeballs are hairless, blind mole rat people that collect eyeballs. If their claw attack deals damage to Flesh, they pluck out one of the target’s eyes, unless it’s protected by a mask or goggles. Also capable of language - they’re the monster that talks to the Lurking Lamp on the encounter table. Radioactive Vampires are nightmare monsters from the deep lithosphere, with ten foot limbs and a cerenkov blue skeleton that glows inside its translucent body. In addition to the standard vampire stuff, they also have a chance to give you radiation sickness every round you spend in their presence. Children of the Abyss are sort of like giant olms, swum up from the deep biosphere to hunt in the upper undercity. They don’t do much mechanically other than grapple and bite things, but I’m including them anyway, because olms are cool. Hopping Mouths are giant spherical creatures, basically a stomach on a pair of frog legs that let it leap up to 60 feet. Their modus operandi is to ambush a target, swallow it whole, then hop away as fast as possible before the victim’s friends can hack it to pieces. Chronological Aberrations are beings just barely outside the time stream, detectable only through the distortions they create in local spacetime. Their one attack deals no damage but ages the target D20 years. They’re immune to damage from most attacks, but any temporal magic is enough to ruin their day. The book provides a huge list of special cases for what happens when each temporal spell is cast on or around the Aberration, all of which seem super unlikely to ever happen in play. Rust Monsters are just straight up Rust Monsters from D&D, ported to Esoteric Enterprises. They break your items and eat metal. Magma Children are enormous ten foot lava creatures with near-human intelligence. Kept as pets and war animals by the Lithic Courts - mineral people we’ll meet in a future bestiary entry. Playful in a way that surface worlders find disconcerting, when the hundred ton magma dog wants you to rub its molten belly. There are some other weirdness creatures that I skipped because they didn’t have any interesting mechanical effects. Giant Olms and Giant Bat-Things that sound cool, but don’t do much other than echolocate you and then pounce on you in the dark. The book has a lot of monsters like that. Comin’ Up: Three Kingdoms of Life, Dragons, and Three Types of Cavemen
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Jul 6, 2020 05:13
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Are there any rules for adopting a giant olm as a pet, though? Also I remain somewhat tired of this "yes these creatures are intelligent but UNFATHOMABLE so their UNFATHOMABLE INTELLECT always makes them attack on sight rather than interact with the players in a more interesting way."
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Jul 6, 2020 09:11
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A Wizard Dramatis Personae Alright, now that I've got the responsible short review done for people who want to play A Wizard (which I strongly recommend you do, it's real good) let's get into how it went and the trip report. I think this is valuable because I think it helps show off how useful the system-and-setting-agnostic advice and room for improv the game provides are. Fair warning, I had kidney surgery like an hour ago so if I seem a little incoherent, it's the kidney surgery. But gently caress it. Once again, if you intend to play A Wizard as anything but the GM, I think you're better off reading no further. You'll have way more fun if you don't know exactly what's coming. Now, as I said, I ran this in WHFRP because it's me and what the hell else was I gonna run it in? Knowing this I also knew it was going to be a bit gentler on the PCs, especially in combat. WHFRP isn't that lethal once you know the system inside and out and I'd like to think I do. I was originally going to have five players, but one dropped on us so we went with 4 and altered enemy stats down a little. I used pre-mades because that way I could make sure every PC was useful to the adventure, and we'll be introducing all of them and explaining the reasoning behind their design in this post. I went with a party with about 16 advances; the idea was they were meant to be PCs who'd whacked a couple cults, been buddies for a year or so, and generally had time to become competent but not world-beating. People who'd had enough time to understand the contours of the normal horror elements of WHFRP's setting so they'd get blindsided by that pointy-hatted fucker. This worked great in principle, even if it made the combat side of the module a little easy up until the final encounter (which was pretty goddamn brutal, but winnable). I also figured a quick pre-made with a two paragraph backstory would be a good way to help players who hadn't played Hams before, which seemed to work for them. I was also careful not to give them anyone who actually knew magic. It would spoil some of the mystical magical surprises of the Wizard's realm! Our heroes were: quote:Name: Helloise (Henri) You might notice that little Special Ability. I thought it'd be fun to give everyone a little special trick, since this was a one-shot and they wouldn't get to gain EXP. Henri/Helloise up there rolled extremely high in Str (40 base) and 37 Tough with Very Resilient, and this was the beginning of a theme. All of the pregens were extremely physically strong. Which I thought was both hilarious and kind of fit with the party going to a tower to flex on a pointy-hatted rear end in a top hat. As you can see each PC has a short little 'who are they' and 'why are they excited to deal with A Wizard'. Helloise's special didn't actually come up, but one of the module rules is that if you're ever alone in a room the Wizard is watching, he picks you off like a horror villain (because he is). Having Fleet and Flee!, I thought it'd be fun if Helloise was quick enough to narrowly escape The Wizard if that happened. She mostly served as a strong, skilled melee combatant, which was very important for the few mandatory combats in the module. The other thing I noticed while writing these was adapting the adventure to Hams was really easy, because what was happening was totally outside of the normal Hams context but would seem normal enough to Hams characters at first. A warlock in a tower bothering a small community and doing horror poo poo? Normal day at the office for WHFRP characters until they get inside the tower and it's so much worse. quote:Name: Regina Fleischer Like Helloise, Regina was a skilled and effective melee combatant. She'd have been stronger if she was Soldier to Veteran or something, but the Militia thing fit her story really well and she's probably got my favorite concept of the premades. Her armor was a really nice addition to the team, and man did her combination of Sturdy and a good Dodge save her bacon during the dangerous parts of the tower. She had good weapons and great armor for her tier, and look at how drat tough she was. Regina was a hero who just didn't have the same kind of formal training as a professional soldier but she was talented enough to make it work. She and Helloise did the majority of the killing when killing was necessary. quote:Name: Leopold Bach What would a party dealing with a Wizard be without a young would-be Witch Hunter? Leopold's incredible perception abilities, trapfinding, and deductive reasoning actually really helped the team and he was no slouch in a fight, too. Don't sleep on people who aren't primary fighters if they've got good physical stats like he did; he could still pitch in and fight some hideous abomination, especially if it was already busy with Helloise or Regina. He also had an excellent hat and got to read multiple arrest warrants for the Wizard, which was critical. And what would an out of context horror game be without a learned, intelligent PC who had reason to believe he had an idea of what was coming? It's a lot of fun when a hero is stuck trying to adapt on their feet. quote:Name: Dr. Dolwen Seastrider, MD Dr. Dolwen Seastrider, MD, was hilariously, completely useless in combat and yet extremely useful to the adventure. He was actually set up to be okay at plinking away with his bow if need be, but goddamn did the dice want him to accomplish nothing in combat. On the other hand, he never failed a single medical or science check and discovered a great deal of useful information and got to spend time coming up with interesting plans and trying to save lives, so I think he was still a success as a PC design. Also, slightly creepy elven experimental surgeon who graduated from an excellent but poorly regarded medical school is a fun character concept. He was both repulsed and deeply excited by the terrible biological horrors they discovered, as a learned doctor should be. I set the story in Nordland, in a small town with a tower on the hill that seemed to be set up to look out for Norse raiders. The PCs were there to investigate the Wizard bounty, confident they could handle it. They could! I designed them so they could, even if it was going to be a bit unpleasant. A mixture of a skilled, learned surgeon, an expert investigator, and two physically fit and well trained warriors can get you a long way in WHFRP. It didn't really detract from the atmosphere that they were pretty capable, though, and some of the ease they had with the adventure came from the players playing legitimately very clever and very careful; for the most part they never bulled ahead, they thought about problems, and they tried to figure out plans around traps and potential hazards. Which I think helped me 'get' one of the appealing elements of this mode of play. As long as you go in willing to say 'yes' and 'yes and' and watch the interesting plans and ideas the players have, a crazy hell dungeon can be really fun if you aren't just out to kill everyone. Next Time: The Trip Report Continues with the Town and the Tower
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Jul 6, 2020 16:56
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mellonbread posted:I said at the start of the Glitter Hearts review that I was interested to see how it shook out mechanically, so thank you for crunching the numbers and delivering an interesting verdict on the strengths and weaknesses of the PTBA system as applied to this specific game. It would have been more impressive if I'd done any of the math myself . But still,  thanks, man. I kind of hope Greg L drops by the thread and fixes the issues I brought up; I really like this game and I'd love to play a more elegant version of it.Fivemarks posted:I'll be honest, I've given up on playing or running or making tabletop RPGs, and I keep reading Fatal & Friends in the hope that my love of it will return. I... I hope it wasn't because of us. 
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Jul 6, 2020 17:23
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 18: OOZES, PLANTS, MYCELIDS, DRAGONS, AND THREE TYPES OF CAVEMEN The next few sections of the monster manual are pretty short. We’ll clear out three kingdoms of life in this post: plants, fungi and protists (what do you mean that’s a “wastebasket taxa”?) and meet some intelligent underworld creatures again. OOZES The dungeon hazards section, way back at the beginning of the DM section, covers slimes and molds that are too sedentary to be considered monsters. This section covers ambulatory slime creatures. The chapter starts with (you guessed it) a generic template and some special abilities to throw on top of it. I’m not going to go over the abilities though, because this section has example oozes that use all of them. Giant Amoebas take half damage from physical attacks, but double from fire and electricity. An attack that breaks their nucleus kills them instantly, which is a nice touch. Grey Molds are Oozes that deal CON damage on hit. Shoggoths are huge, angry balls of protoplasm that get a massive damage slam attack versus everything in range each turn, regenerate HP, take double damage versus fire, and can sense vibrations and heat of living things. Neural Slimes are like Grey Molds that deal INT instead of CON damage. Gelatinous Cubes are straight out of D&D. If you’ll recall, our underworld map had a Shoggoth Lair on it. To make one of those, you take an abbreviated version of a Sewer Cluster, Buried Ruins or other dungeon area and slap a Shoggoth spawning chamber in the center. The rest of the rooms are covered with slime and filled with lesser oozes. PLANT MONSTERS This section starts with a primer on the ecology of carnivorous plants. They usually grow in oxygen and nutrient-poor soil with a high acid content, like the kind found in sphagnum bogs. The underworld has some of those qualities, and also no sunlight. Carnivorous plants are basically a trap or environmental hazard, rooted to a particular spot and unable to move. They get - are you ready for this - two pick lists of special properties to slap onto their generic template. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 225 posted:• 1-6 Flytrap Jaws (+4, d8). Each must attack a different victim. On a hit, the jaws latch onto prey, dealing 1 additional damage each round thereafter as the flytrap begins digestion, rather than attacking again. There are only two other plant creatures. Root Dryads are gardeners of the undercity, tending to lichen and roots that grow in the dark. They can swim through soil like it was water. They can cast Awaken Plants and Suggestion at-will. Every Root Dryad has a root-mass where she lives. If the root mass is dug up and destroyed, she dies. Shambling Mounds are another D&D import. There’s the plant kingdom. How about fungi? MYCELID COLONIES Mycelids are an infectious fungus that enslaves victims, turning them into zombies that serve a colonial hive mind. A bit like the things from Last of Us, or the fungus guys in the Weald from Darkest Dungeon. Mycelid Spawn are little mushroom people, spawned by Mycelid Hulks and Queens. They can slap you around with a low damage attack, shoot toxic spores everywhere, or merge together to make Hulks. Mycelid Hulks are bruisers with multiple high-damage smash attacks per round, more spores, and the ability to bud off Mycelid Spawn by spending Flesh. Mycelid Queens are the center of the hive mind. They’re immobile, they can spawn lower level Mycelids (or heal by absorbing them), and their spores have the ability to inflict a variety of effects besides just infestation with the mycelid poison. The spores can stun their enemies and deal damage to WIS, or heal the Queen’s allies. Mycelid Husks are fungal zombies created by infection with mycelid spores. They can infect you by hitting you with their melee attacks, and like undead they get a spread of other special abilities depending on what they were before they died. A mycelid spore infestation deals progressive DEX and INT damage as the fungal hyphae penetrate the patient’s nervous system, reducing them to mindless zombies once they hit zero and reanimating them as Mycelid Husks. Mycelids have their own area in the underworld creation table. Unlike Shoggoth Pits and other such areas, Mycelid Blights get a full size complex creation table. I’ve never had a player go inside a Mycelid Bllight, because they’re such obviously horrible places. DRACONIC BEASTS In the world of Esoteric Enterprises, dragons are the true descendants of dinosaurs, which survived in caves while the surface world choked and died after the KT impact. They aren't intelligent, unless rolled as an avatar of a God, worshiped by a cult. Then they have 18 INT, can speak, can cast spells, etc. Like Chimeras, dragons start with a template and roll for special powers on a D20 table. Let’s give it a try. 1D20 for body plan, 1D20 for skin/scales, and “a few D20s” for special powers. 4D20 get us 14, 1, 11, and 1 again. That’s an amphisbaena (serpentine body with a head at each end) with no scales, a fire breathing attack, and an acid attack that gets one spit per round per head. Now let’s try it with 5D20. A 5, 15, 7, 12 and 2 get us a four headed hydra with mottled green brown scales, petrifying gaze, a “thagomizer” tail attack like a stegosaurus (this is a real paleontological term, after the late Thag Simmons), and a frost breath attack. Mechanically, Dragons are a lot like Chimeras - a boss monster with a lot of attacks that you create by rolling D20s on a big table. Ctrl F Ctrl V all my commentary on them to this section. DERO Dero originate from the writings and ravings of American pulp author and artist Richard Sharpe Shaver, who believed a race of technologically advanced Lawful Evil cavemen who were the source of all humanity’s misfortunes. The Dero in Esoteric Enterprises are an inversion of that. Rather than being the nightmare beings at the heart of a conspiracy against the human race, the Dero are a subspecies of paranoid cave-dwelling humanoid that believes they are the victims of conspiracies by everyone else. Because the Dero are weakly psychic, these collective delusions do actually affect reality in the long term, causing things to happen by predicting them. And if they don’t, the Dero will make sure they do, because they’ve got plans of their own. Your basic Dero is a garden variety humanoid with a 2 in 6 chance per round to cast Sleep or Suggestion, the second of which allows it to alter the target’s worldview and make their weird paranoia more believable. They also get a 50/50 chance of resisting mind altering magic, though by doing so they have to make a morale test. Dero Geniuses take the base Dero stat block, bump up the numbers and and tack on Invisibility and True Sight to the spell list. They’re also immune to any mind altering magic used by their arch enemies, the Men in Black. As mentioned in the diseases section, Dero are also asymptomatic carriers of memetic viruses. Talking to them is a good way to catch something. Dero Conspiracies are one of the factions in the social underworld table. The book gives some tables here for both the beliefs of individual Dero, and what the Conspiracy is working on. Let’s roll up a couple Dero and see what they’re up to.
I’m… not sure how I feel about the Dero. Esoteric Enterprises is one of those settings like Delta Green or Unknown Armies, where all the old 90s conspiracy theories are true, and madness is reframed as a disconcerting but ultimately accurate look at the bigger picture. The treatment Dero get here veers between an interesting examination of the nature of paranoia in a world where wizards and aliens really are out to get you, and kicking some schizophrenics while they’re down. ELEMENTALS In Esoteric Enterprises, elementals can be made of any material and any state of matter. Fire, water, sure. But also ceramic, plastic, oil, latex, lead, chrome, paper, fat, the list goes on. Like so many other sections of the book, you start with a few generic templates that scale up in size and power, along with a few abilities common to all elementals: they can’t be poisoned, they can telekinetically control matter made of their element, etc. Then we get some guidance on how to stat different materials. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 229 posted:Gaseous elementals cannot touch or be touched, do no damage when they attack normally and are immune to physical attacks. Their best method of attacking is to suffocate their victims. They can re-shape their form to be whatever they want, flow through gaps, expand to fill spaces, and so on. A powerful fan or vacuum cleaner directed at them does d12 damage a round. MORLOCK PACKS Morlocks are taken from HG Wells’ The Time Machine, which hypothesizes a future where the working class has been reduced by eugenics into cave dwelling, cannibalistic animal people, who feed on the intelligent but hedonistic and oblivious Eloi, descended from the gentry. In Esoteric Enterprises, Morlocks are australopithecines, selectively bred as slaves by the ancient Serpent Man empire that ruled earth a million years ago. The Serpent Men are long gone, the Morlocks remain. They cast spells by tattooing and branding them on their skin, then reading them off at the opportune moment. They trade with surface worlders and other underworld inhabitants, swapping magic and secrets (Morlock Packs always know the layout of the entire undercity) in exchange for technology and trinkets. Your basic Morlock is a humanoid with all your classic underground senses (fluffed as tremorsense here) and the spells Sleep, Spider Climb and Suggestion tattooed on their body, each for a single use. Because they were specifically bred to be sacrificed to the Serpent Man Gods, the heart of a Morlock can be used in place of any magical reagent. Unscrupulous sorcerers and organleggers hunt Morlocks for this purpose, making them suspicious of magic users. Unlike some of the other scaling humanoid creatures, Morlocks don’t just go up in power, they come in a couple different subclasses. They all have at least 13 INT, making them smarter than the average player character. Crawling Killers get Silence, Invisibility and Spectral Step as tattoos. They also get the same ambush surgeon power as Red Caps, dealing bonus damage and inflicting Bleeding Out on a sneak attack. They don’t actually have a Stealth score, which I think was an oversight, although the Invisibility spell sort of makes up for it. Whispering Elders get Suggestion, Mirror Image and Create Illusion. They automatically detect any lies told to them. Eloi are a Morlock subclass, in defiance of the original source material. They’re savants, the other Morlocks care for them because they’re no longer aware that they even need to care for themselves. Their spell list includes Dispel Magic, Magic Blade, Animate Artwork, Antimagic Shell, Time Stop and Zombie Plague. The book says they can cast experimentally and invent new spells like Occultists, so you can really give them any spell the Morlock Pack needs. Morlocks can appear both as a their own complex in the undercity, and as their own faction. A Morlock Lair is a reskinned Sewer Cluster or Limestone Cave, with the rooms refluffed with Morlock stuff in them. The faction section for Morlock Packs says they’re friendly, trusting and love to trade, but use their knowledge of the undercity to make life hell for anyone who upsets them. TROGLODYTES Troglodytes are yet another cave dwelling offshoot of humanity, but one that never developed language or tool use. The Morlocks hate them and try to exterminate them wherever they can. The only thing the poor cavemen have going for them is their crude bicameral brains, which let them cast divine spells by talking to God in their heads. A regular old Troglodyte is a low level melee bruiser without any spellcasting ability, or weapons beyond their fist and thrown rocks. Troglodyte Mystics are Troglodytes with a 3 in 6 chance to cast Darkness, Erase Tracks, Shield or Silence. Troglodytes don’t show up in complex creation or faction creation. They appear keyed to rooms in some complexes like the limestone caves and the underworld frontier, or occasionally on random encounter tables. To be honest, I think their inclusion in the game at all is redundant. We already have a couple human offshoot caveman species that are more interesting, and we already have rock throwing cave apes in the mundane animals section.  We’re going to finish the bestiary sooner than I thought. I was counting remaining sections based on the headings, but most of them are only a page or two in length. We’ll cover lithic courts, aboleths and paradox beasts next post, and that should finish off the Monster Manual. PurpleXVI posted:Are there any rules for adopting a giant olm as a pet, though? PurpleXVI posted:"yes these creatures are intelligent but UNFATHOMABLE so their UNFATHOMABLE INTELLECT always makes them attack on sight rather than interact with the players in a more interesting way." The Goblin Punch guy suggested giving every NPC in an RPG book at least a single line of motivation, clearly labeled as such, on top of any other flavor text. I think this would massively improve not only Esoteric Enterprises, but most games. Granted, motivations are sometimes implied by a result on the random encounter table, which describes what the monster is doing when you meet it, but you can’t count on an NPC always being used in that context. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jul 6, 2020 17:45
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Pardon me while I make off with the concrete nymph.
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Jul 6, 2020 19:34
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Bieeanshee posted:Pardon me while I make off with the concrete nymph. It took me a while to realize you meant making off with the idea of it and was imagining a party of adventurers just legging it with one of them on a dolly.
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Jul 6, 2020 21:07
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PurpleXVI posted:It took me a while to realize you meant making off with the idea of it and was imagining a party of adventurers just legging it with one of them on a dolly. Let's be honest, both is good.
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Jul 6, 2020 21:09
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Bieeanshee posted:Let's be honest, both is good. I just thought that meant you were really into statues, tbh
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Jul 6, 2020 22:06
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 19: LITHIC COURTS, ABOLETHS AND PARADOX BEASTS We’re in the home stretch, this is going to be the last monster manual entry for Esoteric Enterprises. It’ll be short, but we’ll meet my other favorite faction in the game, besides the Fairy Enclave. REPRESENTATIVES OF THE LITHIC COURTS The Lithic Courts are rock people who live beneath the earth’s surface. There are whole civilizations of geologic creatures at the Mohorovičić discontinuity. The actions of the tectonic plates are the result of their underground wars, subduction zones and faults their front lines, volcanic hotspots their foundries and fortresses. The rock people of the Lithic Courts maintain embassies in the Undercity, populated by diplomats and low ranking lithic nobility - the only ones small and light enough to even move around without a cushion of supporting stone or magma. Envoys of the Lithic Courts are diplomats, in the undercity to deliver important news or have important meetings. They look like giant squids made of crystal, lit by a great heat that burns inside them. They’re hard to hurt and will slap you to pieces in melee with powerful slam attacks, but are weak to electricity, a trait all Lithic creatures share. Flint Songbirds are animate shards of sharp rock, which flit around in gilded cages carried by Lithic Envoys. In a fight, each songbird can shoot a spray of D4+1 shards, each of which gets its own attack roll, so a flock of them get a whole lot of dice. Seismic Knights are Lawful Neutral sandworms made of magma, with mouths like powerful augers filled with magma. Being bit by one does a whopping 3D8 damage, and anyone near them takes 1 point of damage per round automatically from the enormous heat radiating from their bodies. They can challenge a single target, granting them +5 to hit that target and the target +5 to hit them. At least they’re slow moving, and unlikely to be hostile by default. Igneous Peons are little basalt starfish, the lowest ranking rock people. Not terribly bright, they’ll automatically obey any order from any being made of metal or rock - including a player Spook with the Construct or Mineral origin. Lithic Nobles look like jellyfish made from interlocking gems. The fact that they’re this close to the surface indicates a low position in the Lithic domesday book, but they’ll never tell you that. They get three tentacle attacks per round, but they can forego those and cast Shape Stone instead. Like Fairy royalty can command lower ranked fey creatures, Lithic Nobles can command any being made out of stone, including player Spooks with the mineral background package. Lithic creatures are Esoteric Enterprises at its best. Evocative, fun, weird, and I don’t have to roll a bunch of dice and copy values from a table to make the drat things. The Lithic Courts have their own entry in both the faction table and the complex creation table, and the Lithic Embassy is one of the most fun dungeon areas to generate and explore. Gamma ray gardens of radiotrophic echinoderms. Black smokers supporting complex silicon ecologies. Birthing chambers where new rock creatures bubble up to the surface of superheated magma spawning pools. Science labs where stone scientists experiment with vats of fatty acids, trying to reproduce the conditions that led to surface life. The Lithic Courts rock. ABOLETHS Yup, there’s Aboleths in Esoteric Enterprises. The text gives the usual ancient-seafaring-empire speech, but an alternate spin on why they initially died out: their enormous lifespans and perfect understanding of reality eventually led to a species-wide malaise that led most of them to take their own lives or enter a state of torpor, awaiting heat death of the universe. If you encounter an aboleth awake, it means you hosed up, or the random encounter table hates you. They get four tentacle attacks per round, but that’s the last of your worries. They can sub any number of tentacle attacks for casting spells from a couple spell lists. They can cast Command, False Sounds or False Images up to four times a round, and Flay, Break Curse, Water Breathing, Gease or Sculpt Flesh once per round. Gease and Flay are the real killers here. Gease can instantly remove a character from the fight on a failed Save vs Magic, while Flay can potentially delete one character per round by dealing D12 damage straight to Flesh. Or potentially more. See, Esoteric Enterprises gives spells scaling power based on caster level, but it’s never clear what level the NPCs are supposed to be casting spells at. Based on the spell description, is the Aboleth supposed to get Flay targets equal to its hit dice? If so, it can delete nine characters per turn. We’ll never know how this is supposed to work (or how it works with any other NPC caster) because the NPC stat blocks in Esoteric Enterprises are so rules light that sometimes they don’t have any rules at all. Aboleths also have a unique disease that they spread in an area around them, and by slapping things with their tentacles. The victim’s skin sloughs off, replaced by a thin layer of mucous underneath that dissolves and kills them if not constantly immersed in water. Gross! Then there’s some descriptive text about how Aboleths will biomechanically engineer servitors for themselves, and are often worshipped by cultists as Gods. PARADOX BEASTS The game’s miscast tables, encounter tables and a host of other rules references have been teasing these things for 200 pages now. These things appear when someone fucks around with magic and accidentally damages the weft of reality. Some people think they’re intruders from another dimension, always lurking in wait for an opportunity to enter our world. Others say they’re reality’s defense mechanism, deployed to exterminate sorcerers who tamper with forces that could endanger creation. What we know for sure is that Paradox Beasts are the mother of all randomly generated creatures, with tables for hit dice, forms, special powers and special effects - all of which have the potential to be very, very nasty. They have a short list of common features, like weakness to Dispel Magic, Antimagic Shell, and other forms of antimagic. Then we get a set of tables and it’s off to the races. First off, we’ll generate our Paradox Beast’s hit dice. Most sources of Paradox Beasts in the game will tell you how many hit dice to give them, but if you don’t have a number, you roll a D12. That gets us 8 hit dice. Next, we roll a D10 to see how many of those dice are flesh, and get a 7. The number of hit dice tells us that our Paradox Beast rolls +8 to hit, does D10 damage on a hit, and Saves against everything on a D20 roll of 7 or higher. The number of Flesh dice tells us it’s the size of a truck. Next, we roll up some a body plan using 2D20. A result of 12 and 16 gets us a manta ray with sticky skin, granting it a bonus to grappling. Next, we roll for special abilities. The book just says to keep rolling until you feel you’ve picked enough abilities, but if you can’t decide how many to give it, just roll a D6 and then roll that many D20s. A D6 roll of 4 gives us 4D20. A 5, an 8, a 9 and a 19 give us corrosive acid drool that increases the beast’s damage and Vandalism skill, a 2-in-6 chance cast Time Stop, Hurl Through Time or Senescence each turn, a breath attack (rolled on a further D6 for what) that shoots glass shards, and the ability to heal any time it deals damage to Flesh. Finally, we have to roll for what happens to the environment around the creature. Again, the book says to either keep rolling until you decide to stop, or roll a D6. Our D6 says to roll four times, again. A 20, a 4, a 7 and a 9 get us a swirling fog, an acceleration of entropy, an increase in humidity, and the stink of ”ozone/tar/paper/blood/sulphur/brine” So our paradox beast is a giant sticky manta ray that lurks outside line of sight as the air fills with damp fog that smells like mold, until it successfully casts time stop. Then swoops in and beats the poo poo out of you with a combination of acid spit and shards of glass. A pretty cool Kaiju, but maybe a bit too many special properties to keep track of at the table. Let’s try to generate a more minimalist Paradox Beast. Our D12 roll gives it 10 hit dice, and our D10 says 1 of those is Flesh and 9 are Grit. It gets +10 to hit, does D12 damage and saves on a 5 or better, but is small enough to fit inside a shoe box. Its body type is a giant bleeding stomach, which halves its speed but upgrades its damage die to a goddamned D20. Let’s just roll 2D20 for powers this time. A 17 and a 14 give it the ability to walk on walls or water, and (with an additional D6 to see what special senses it has), sense gravity. Finally, we roll 2D20 for what happens to the environment around it as it approaches. With a 12 and a 15, there’s a constant sound on the edge of hearing, and liquids increase in volume subtly, causing vessels to overflow and blood pressure to rise to comical levels. So this minimalist Paradox Beast is a stomach that oozes slowly around the dungeon, making squelching noises wherever it goes. It has incredible dodging abilities but you can kill it in one shot if you surprise it. And you had better, because if it gets a shot off it instantly removes you from existence. I like Paradox Beasts. I think these tables are weird and nonsensical in exactly the right way for the role of these creatures in the game. But there are a lot of ways to make Paradox Beasts, from miscast effects to accidentally releasing them from containment in dungeon rooms. And they have to be laboriously generated using all these roll tables. A DM rolling and writing, rolling and writing behind the screen when you roll your miscast on Hell Shall Follow could increase suspense dramatically, or totally murder the game’s pacing depending on your table.  Anyway, that does it for the Monster Manual. Up next: we’ll finish off the book with the inspirations and backwards compatibility sections. Bieeanshee posted:Pardon me while I make off with the concrete nymph. PurpleXVI posted:It took me a while to realize you meant making off with the idea of it and was imagining a party of adventurers just legging it with one of them on a dolly. Bieeanshee posted:Let's be honest, both is good. Falconier111 posted:I just thought that meant you were really into statues, tbh
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Jul 6, 2020 22:52
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mellonbread posted:You know, every OSR game wants the players to obsess about how to get the treasure out of the dungeon while respecting encumbrance limits. But I've never once seen a game include a wheelbarrow, hand truck, travois, rickshaw, luggage cart, or any other hand-pulled carrying device. Not like it would be that hard - acts as an extra five equipment slots when pushing it around on flat ground, but provides no bonuses when dragging it over rough terrain or carrying it up and down stairs. And you can't be stealthy while pushing it, because everyone just tosses the loot in and lets it rattle around, and nobody oils the drat wheel(s). You're supposed to the loot around, because s are just superior to everyone else.
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Jul 7, 2020 00:01
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Manual of the Planes: 3.5E The Plane of Shadow Planar Traits: Normal Gravity, Normal Time, Infinite Size, Magically Morphic, Enhanced Magic (shadow spells), Impeded Magic (spells involving light) The Plane of Shadow is the first and only completely new plane in the 3.5E Manual of the Planes, and it's a Transitive Plane along with the Astral and Ethereal. Of those two, the Shadow is most similar to the Ethereal in how it's intimately tied to the Material Plane and is more like a traditional alternate dimension than a separate plane in the DnD tradition. That's because the Plane of Shadow is here to be your creepy, surreal, dark alternate reality. The plane closely resembles the Material Plane, but everything is dark and gloomy, it's perpetually night with no stars in the sky, locations in the Material have reflections in the Shadow but they're warped or crumbling, etc. This is your place for Silent Hill or Stranger Things shenanigans, though the Manual stresses that the Plane of Shadow is merely spooky and dark, not evil. Color is entirely absent from the world, the Plane of Shadow is a world entirely of black, white, and grey. While it's not an original setting, notable game Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer made excellent use of the Plane of Shadow, including the Manual's suggestion that by default there should be natural vortices between the Material Plane and the Shadow in places of deep darkness. Contributing to the eerie, surreal feel of the Plane of Shadow is that distances here are... flexible. Though the plane can be dangerous, you can cross enormous distances in much less time than it would take on the Material Plane before transiting back, despite seemingly not have traveled as far as you have. This is in fact the main reason why most mess with the plane, it's super convenient for getting around the Material Plane quickly. While you're here, the shadow conjuration line of spells can also mess with the plane much more effectively than similar spells can mess with the Material.Despite the Manual's insistence that the Plane of Shadow is merely dark rather than evil, just about everything that lives here is evil and wants to kill you. Most prominent are the undead, like shadows and wraiths, but there's also a template to turn creatures into shadow beings, and the infamous skiurid. That being said, surviving on the Plane of Shadow is no harder than it is on the Material Plane. Locally procured food and drink may look and act creepy and unsettling compared to their Material Plane versions, but they have the same nutritional value as normal. That being said, there are parts of the Plane of Shadow that do have the minor negative-dominant planar trait, invariably areas where the corresponding area on the Prime was a site of immense suffering, death, or evil. And seriously, almost every entry on the encounter table is some flavor of being of living darkness that wants to kill you. The Manual also provides the first adventure hook with the Plane of Shadow! The Plane of Shadow may not have always been the way it is now. It was probably always a slightly dreamlike mirror to the Material Plane, but it may have been full of color and non-shadowed life. Tales from planar travelers speak of the so-called Shining Citadel, a place where in a past age a god, or being of comparable power, created a fortress or palace of such magnificence and radiance that it bleached the entire plane of light and color to fuel its glory. If the Citadel does exist, it probably lies deep in the heart of the weirdest and most hostile magically morphic part of this plane - a daunting challenge even for experienced planewalkers. And even if it does exist, what pray tell would you do (unless you're a Sensate, in which case the entire faction would probably instantly relocate there en masse)? As for the DM, potentially removing the Plane of Shadow from your cosmology wouldn't change much, just change or delete a bunch of spells that have the word 'shadow' in the name. And other stuff in other splats, no doubt. Like the Ethereal, you could add a 'Deep Shadow' to perform similar expanded functions should you be so inclined. Next time, air and earth.
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Jul 7, 2020 00:07
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Yeah, but with a shopping cart you can do Jackass stunts.
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Jul 7, 2020 00:07
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wiegieman posted:because This could be the title for A Wizard and how that bastard feels about everything.
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Jul 7, 2020 00:07
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mellonbread posted:You know, every OSR game wants the players to obsess about how to get the treasure out of the dungeon while respecting encumbrance limits. But I've never once seen a game include a wheelbarrow, hand truck, travois, rickshaw, luggage cart, or any other hand-pulled carrying device. Not like it would be that hard - acts as an extra five equipment slots when pushing it around on flat ground, but provides no bonuses when dragging it over rough terrain or carrying it up and down stairs. And you can't be stealthy while pushing it, because everyone just tosses the loot in and lets it rattle around, and nobody oils the drat wheel(s). Ultraviolet Grasslands, because it's Oregon Trail, has carrying capacities for different vehicles measured in 'sacks' and 'stones' - and when you find treasure, it's sometimes specific valuable objects but sometimes weird materials that can be valued at, say, '10 cash per sack.' This particular part of the game is a fun system that is also basically begging to be a spreadsheet; the rest of the system is less exciting, so if I did run UVG I'd change some things but leave the mercantile encumbrance rules.
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Jul 7, 2020 00:34
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Night10194 posted:This could be the title for A Wizard and how that Incidentally, are you going to post some of the art for A Wizard? It's got some real good art that adds a lot to the atmosphere. 
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Jul 7, 2020 00:57
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I can't, sadly, since it's only on the PDF and I don't know how to get any of it off. If I did, I'd have *definitely* revealed the image on Page 31 when They held up the magic light grub, which I'd changed around a little, and actually saw every part of A Wizard during the final battle. Because drat that is a good picture of a wizard. E: Also, thank you for the eye-blacked Smugwizard. That is the good stuff. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Jul 7, 2020 |
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Jul 7, 2020 01:06
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Night10194 posted:I can't, sadly, since it's only on the PDF and I don't know how to get any of it off. Screenshots (as in, hold power + volume down on Android, Windows+Shift+S on Windows 10, etc) and liberal use of the crop tool haven't failed me thus far.
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Jul 7, 2020 03:07
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Here's the Wizard in all its glory (captured at fullscreen at 2560x1440, spoilered because gross): https://i.imgur.com/3deYNeU.png And here's its eyes which stare into thy soul: https://i.imgur.com/8ghWa8e.png BinaryDoubts fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jul 7, 2020 |
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Jul 7, 2020 03:20
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Ryuutama addresses the "toting poo poo around" system pretty well, although the focus there is more "carrying rations, plus a submechanic for the Merchant character class." e: Christ! Someone shoot that wizard with a laser
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Jul 7, 2020 03:47
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Yeah, Ryuutama is a game that is sort of about toting poo poo around so the mechanic is straight forward and there's always someone that gets really into it in every game I've been involved in.
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Jul 7, 2020 04:06
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BinaryDoubts posted:Here's the Wizard in all its glory (captured at fullscreen at 2560x1440, spoilered because gross): Thank you for both posting these but also spoilering them. There's a reason the first update is 'here's the spoiler free this is good, you should give it a shot' review and I think it's genuinely better to play the game unspoiled. The rest of my writeup is to demonstrate that the system guidance was genuinely helpful and to talk in depth about why I think it's writing style is real good in case people are more interested in reading than playing or are thinking of running it rather than playing it. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Jul 7, 2020 |
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Jul 7, 2020 04:17
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Night10194 posted:Thank you for both posting these but also spoilering them. There's a reason the first update is 'here's the spoiler free this is good, you should give it a shot' review and I think it's genuinely better to play the game unspoiled. The rest of my writeup is to demonstrate that the system guidance was genuinely helpful and to talk in depth about why I think it's writing style is real good in case people are more interested in reading than playing or are thinking of running it rather than playing it. I bought it after reading your first review and can't agree more - the writing is truly great at being gross without resorting to classic OSR shlock horror tropes. If you have any chance of playing this adventure, do yourself a favour and don't look at those images!
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Jul 7, 2020 04:31
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Sorry for the double-post, but here we go: Silent Legions: Making Characters (Part 1) Let’s make some characters! I’ll be using random rolls down the line, but with the optional rule to re-roll if we get some really lovely results. Diogenes Fluffernutter, of the New England Fluffernutters, is a truly kind-hearted man with a rockin’ bod and a flagrant disregard for what you’d call “appropriate dress sense.” But just because he refuses to wear anything but crop tops and booty shorts doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of befriending literally anyone. Grandparents love Diogenes. Kids love Diogenes. And most importantly, Diogenes loves Diogenes. He’s got a thousand-watt smile, an rear end you could bounce a quarter off, and a surprising way with words. He grew up in the Fluffernutter estate, a place so dark and gloomy that anyone without his natural zest for life would have grown up pallid and miserable. Instead, as soon as he turned 18 and took ownership of the estate (dead parents, house in trust – you get it), he carted away all the weird books in languages he’d never heard of (French, German, and Old Enochian), tore down the gargoyles, and installed the world’s first “double infinity” pool. It was during the disposal of what he called “all that creepy stuff from the weird secret library or whatever” that he met our next character, Archimedes “Arch” Brabrand. But first, his stats: code:I picked Trust Fund Kid for his background, which grants him Culture/Home (which isn’t actually explained in the skills section, but I took it to mean “the city and more generally the nation he lives in”) and three other skills. We get to pick the other three skills, so I decided to give him Leadership (his himbo magnetism is undeniable), Persuade (ditto), and Athletics. Even though his Dexterity isn’t great (he’s beyond clutzy), his Strength is really high – he’s got a 12-pack and the skills to match. Class time! Obviously, we’re going with Socialite. First off, we can raise one of the two class stats (Intelligence and Charisma) to 14. Since Charisma’s already there, let’s bump his Intelligence and say he’s super smart (but doesn’t know it) when it comes to people, and that the last book he read was Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader at the age of 8. As a Socialite, he gets Culture (I’m specializing it with “High Society”), Persuade (which gets upgraded a level since we already have it), one of the class skills, and any one skill of our choice. I’d pick Persuade again but we’re limited to level-1 skills at creation, so instead let’s upgrade his Leadership. For the wild-card skill, I’m giving him Occult. Growing up in the creepiest house in existence left its marks on his psyche, even if he doesn’t know it yet. He also gets the first-level Socialite ability, Folie a Deux, which allows him to spend an Expertise to “compel a friendly or intimidated reaction in a human, if either are remotely plausible under the circumstances.” I like that there’s no extra roll needed, although there is a qualifier that supernatural-tainted humans get a saving throw to resist. As he levels, he’ll get three other abilities, which in short allow him to intuitively sense the emotional state and general thoughts of another person, blend in perfectly with any social group or organization, and finally be able to manipulate someone into doing nearly anything that isn’t counter to their self image. Given how often the game emphasizes “YOU WILL DIE,” I’m not sure if he’ll get to try out anything beyond the first level ability, but overall the socialite abilities are all fun and flavourful without too many limitations. Finally, he gets 1d6 HP, +1 to his attack rolls every other level (starting at 1st), and five saves. He’s best at resisting mental effects, has decent luck, but is awful at evading or resisting physical effects (I guess his muscles are for show, not for go. And he has a weak stomach.) I haven’t covered the stuff after the class selection, but basically you get to pick your starting Wealth rating and grab whatever gear you can afford. He’s obviously Affluent, which lets him buy Expensive goods and services at the cost of starting with 10 Madness. Diogenes's final stats code:Escrow & Sons were hired by the Fluffernutter estate to help with the disbursement of funds and property after Diogenes’s 18th birthday. Arch ended up getting stuck with categorizing “all Tomes, whether Occult or Otherwise,” from one of the estate’s secret libraries. What they saw in that library changed their life forever, and when Diogenes called and asked if they’d help get rid of the “creepy books,” for good, they were only too happy to oblige – if only to get another chance at uncovering the library’s secrets. They’ve brought their off-and-on boyfriend Richard Parker along for the ride in the hopes that he’ll be able to help pick tomes that are worth quietly setting aside for later reading or sale. Let’s roll for Arch’s stats: code:Background: Lawyer, obviously, which grants Arch the skills Business, Culture/Home, Law, and Persuade. (I also considered Con Man and Soldier, but I like mix of half-useful skills Lawyer gives them). Class: I’m going to play a little against type and give Arch the Tough class instead of Investigator or Scholar. For all their willful disdain towards their brief military service, they’re actually really, really good at killing people who are trying to kill them. (Or at least, hitting targets. They’ve never fired a shot in anger). The key stats are Strength and Dexterity, and I’m gonna bump Dexterity to 14 to better represent Arch’s sharp-shooting talents. Tough grants the skills Athletics, Combat, one class skill (I picked Gambling, because Arch loves playing poker with the firm’s senior partners after EOD on Friday), and any other skill (Perception). At 1st level, Arch gets Ravenous for Life, which lets them automatically stabilize when reduced to 0 HP with no need for medical attention. The next three abilities let them spend Expertise to ignore Slaughtering damage, turn successful hits into Slaughtering hits, or even use the Slaughter die for every enemy in a fight, even ones who’d usually be immune to it. As you can tell, the Tough’s abilities are entirely combat-focused. The game hasn’t explained what Slaughter damage is yet, but it sure sounds nasty. After seeing all the fun possibilities with the Socialite’s abilities, it’s a bit of a letdown that the fighter equivalent is… just another boring fighter, especially in a modern-day occult game that emphasizes how rarely you want to be fighting. It’s also a bit weird that some abilities specifically mention spending Expertise while others don’t, even though there’s text at the bottom saying “everything costs Expertise to use.” Finally, we get our hit die (1d8), our attack bonus (+1 every level), and our saves – Arch is best at resisting physical effects and being lucky, but not so hot at dealing with mental or magical threats. Arch's final stats code:Next time: Three more characters to round out our party!
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Jul 7, 2020 04:47
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 20: INSPIRATIONS AND BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY This is going to be a short post, since it’s just cleanup from the back of the book. You can skip it unless you’re interested in media inspirations or fine grained differences between grog games. APPENDIX N - MEDIA The author was probably inspired to write this section by the inclusion of Appendix N in the original D&D book, which had suggested reading. The inspirations are broken out by medium, and listed in no particular order. Comics posted:Ghosted, which provided the initial inspiration for the game all things considered. Movies posted:The Descent, basically dungeon crawling on cellulose and bloody brilliant. TV Shows posted:The X Files. Music posted:I was mostly listening to a mixture of doom metal, under-ground hiphop, black metal and classic triphop when I wrote this stuff. In particular, Electric Wizard, Dopethrone and Batoushka set the tone pretty nicely. Games posted:Dungeons & Dragons while TSR was still in charge, and the broader OSR thing in general. Books posted:The various works of HP Lovecraft, references to which are all over this game. APPENDIX 0 - COMPATIBILITY This part of the book tells you how to transfer content between Esoteric Enterprises and other D20 games based on the TSR editions of D&D. I’m going to give this section a brief treatment, because I think some of the mechanical differences from other games are interesting. Hit Points and Hit Dice Esoteric Enterprises divides HP into Flesh and Grit, something most other OSR games don’t do - save for other games by the same author, like Wolf Packs and Winter Snow, I think. Humans shouldn’t get more than one die of Flesh, the rest being moved to Grit. Monsters can have between one and half of their hit dice as Flesh, but no more. Undead and other creatures with no vital organs can have all their dice as Flesh. Damage Esoteric Enterprises uses a higher base damage die than most other games knocked off Basic D&D. A knife usually does D4, here it’s a D6. A sword that does D8 damage does a D10 in EE. This has the effect of making fights slightly faster, but also increasing the likelihood that low level characters get oneshot. Saves The EE saves are just the Lamentations saves reskinned, which are just the Basic saves reskinned. Armour Class Esoteric Enterprises assumes a base 10 AC, while the game it’s based on, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, uses a base 12 AC. This isn’t a trivial distinction, it has real impacts on gameplay. Reducing the base unarmored AC makes combat much faster and reduces the game’s whiff factor much more than you’d think, based on a numeric change of only two points. (I don’t love Lamentations if that’s not obvious. It’s a competent retroclone but I personally find it slow and boring, which is funny considering all the modules for it are grindhouse horror) Morale In Basic and related games, most enemies get a morale score that they check against a 2D6 roll when things get tough. Esoteric Enterprises just uses a D6 for all enemies, and counts on the DM to adjudicate if and when characters check or ignore morale. To Hit In Esoteric Enterprises, the Mercenary is the only class that gets to-hit bonuses. Personally I think this is irrelevant, since +1 per level is likely to equal +1 flat when nobody ever lives long enough to level up, given the game’s stingy-rear end treasure tables. But if you’re converting between EE and other games, just give everyone the to-hit bonus of the closest equivalent class. Classes This section tells us what we already discovered in the character creation section.
Skills Basic used percentile skills, and a D6 is basically just a D100 in increments of 17%. Converting one to the other is easy enough, as long as you don’t mind a little rounding. Spellcasting Occultists cast like Magic Users. Mystics cast like Clerics. Just add remove stuff like turn undead, experimental magic as necessary. This part of the book doesn’t mention the other big change from typical OSR games: giving the Occultist the ability to cast spells for free by spending a dungeon turn. This dramatically changes the dungeon resource management game, and is one of the biggest reasons why the Occultist is more powerful than the Mystic, even though the Mystic gets “infinite spells”. XP Most OSR games use either gold or silver for XP, which translates 1 to 1 into Esoteric Enterprises’ dollars/euros/pounds/rubles for XP rules. Multiclassing ...is not allowed in D&D. The author says that “AD&D multiclassing makes my head hurt, and other versions are minmax-friendly silliness.” PARTING WORDS I'll let the book speak for itself here. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 247 posted:Well Then. That’s the end of the book. Next post, I’ll collect my overall thoughts on Esoteric Enterprises, list some of the house rules that I think make the game better, and quickly survey how people actually run and play the game in practice. wiegieman posted:You're supposed to Bieeanshee posted:Yeah, but with a shopping cart you can do Jackass stunts. Joe Slowboat posted:Ultraviolet Grasslands, because it's Oregon Trail, has carrying capacities for different vehicles measured in 'sacks' and 'stones' - and when you find treasure, it's sometimes specific valuable objects but sometimes weird materials that can be valued at, say, '10 cash per sack.' Nessus posted:Ryuutama addresses the "toting poo poo around" system pretty well, although the focus there is more "carrying rations, plus a submechanic for the Merchant character class."
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Jul 7, 2020 05:22
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My plan for UVG is to run it as a real-time Oregon Trail on Discord, with players mostly interacting via voting on the next caravan destination and making involvement decisions at oases and such, and with pretty significantly simplified rules to accommodate that. We'll see if I ever get around to it.
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Jul 7, 2020 06:27
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mellonbread posted:You know, every OSR game wants the players to obsess about how to get the treasure out of the dungeon while respecting encumbrance limits. But I've never once seen a game include a wheelbarrow, hand truck, travois, rickshaw, luggage cart, or any other hand-pulled carrying device. Not like it would be that hard - acts as an extra five equipment slots when pushing it around on flat ground, but provides no bonuses when dragging it over rough terrain or carrying it up and down stairs. And you can't be stealthy while pushing it, because everyone just tosses the loot in and lets it rattle around, and nobody oils the drat wheel(s). Unless everyone just dons a hardhat and a pair of overalls with "Bob's Dungeon Maintenance" stencilled on the front. Just nod at the monsters and say you're taking the Jewelled Altar of Nyx Shubloth away for maintenance, gotta get those facets sharpened, dontchaknow, now if they'll just show you where the master disable for the dungeon traps are so you can get them all re-loaded and calibrated, especially the ones next to the treasure hoard.
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Jul 7, 2020 10:14
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Manual of the Planes: 3.5E Just a quick overview of the Inner Planes in general before I do a more detailed look at them tonight: First, the para-elemental and quasi-elemental planes are gone. Magma, Ooze, Lightning, etc have all been removed from the cosmology, though parts of each Inner Plane may resemble the old para-elemental and quasi-elemental planes around naturally occurring planar vortices or, at the DM's discretion, naturally occurring planar border regions - potentially including a fire-water boundary (the Manual suggests real steam as a theme) and an earth-air boundary (the Manual suggests sand). Second, the Manual's bestiary features elementals of various kinds as templates. These are meant to let a DM rapidly come up with new locals by saying you've encountered 'X, but made of fire/water/earth/air.' There's also a half-elemental template, but fortunately for everyone's sanity the Manual suggests that these are not in fact the result of a humanoid and an elemental getting it on. Rather, these are more likely the work of powerful experiments, divine blessings from gods strongly tied to a particular element, magical mutants born to mundane parents who had children in an Inner Plane, etc. Third, the DM should probably decide who, if anyone, rules each Inner Plane. There could be elemental lords, an internal hierarchy among each elemental type ruled by a king or queen. There could be genuine elemental gods (the Forgotten Realms opts to combine both, the Elemental Lords are worshiped as gods on the Material Plane). Or, for a stranger option, the planes themselves could be sentient. One other thing for the DM to consider is how different elementals react. The default assumption is that elementals of different types hate each other, with vortices between the Inner Planes being battlefields if not sufficiently claimed by a third party, but the book suggests the possibility of the opposite, that elementals respect each others' purity and it's composite creatures (like, say, adventurers from the Material Plane) that draw their ire. Edit: One other thing I should probably note since it's briefly talked about for most of the planes, the 3.5E Manual assumes the possibility of humanoid races from the Prime settling in the Inner Planes, given their lack of alignment traits. Possibilities are suggested for most of the Inner Planes, but it's left as a DM exercise. The book does suggest that if you go this route, the extraplanar colonies might not reflect the normal alignments and cultures of their Material Plane counterparts - even if the colonists weren't some kind of exiled outgroup to begin with, they've probably begun to diverge from the Material Plane motherland and likely begun to manifest physical and magical changes as they adjust to or are changed by the planar nature of their home. This is where I got the idea for the Thalassa group I mentioned earlier. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Jul 7, 2020 |
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Jul 7, 2020 13:33
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Night10194 posted:A Wizard This may sound weird, but I find few things as relaxing and enjoyable to read as Night's reviews, and especially his descriptions of the characters he puts together. Something about the combinations of personalities and seeing the mechanics work is like settling down to a cup of tea and a biscuit while listening to the Archers. They hit everything that I want WHFRP to be, and make me sad that my attempts to get a game off the ground have faltered, both for people who know the setting assuming it's going to be far more grimdark, and those who don't know the setting at all being put off by the amount of material.
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Jul 7, 2020 13:54
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