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By popular demand posted:Hold firm your Sigmarblade as you cut into the tough flesh of the Sigmarstakes, the Sigmarcook overdid them a bit. In this case we use storm again. They apparently just use Stormblades for the elites and Warblades for the lower ranks.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:22
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Lightning is also a term you could use GW! Please use terms other than "Sigmar" because eventually the word will lose all meaning.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:28
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Josef bugman posted:Lightning is also a term you could use GW! Please use terms other than "Sigmar" because eventually the word will lose all meaning. Riding the Lightning is a term used for them going down from Azyr. And Stormcast that break free of reforging are called lightning gheists.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:30
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We should call them Thundercasts.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:38
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I do really appreciate the lore that states that a Stormkeep fell because the Commander was too big a jerk for his men to tolerate.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:41
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MonsterEnvy posted:I do really appreciate the lore that states that a Stormkeep fell because the Commander was too big a jerk for his men to tolerate. Always good to see "we aren't the imperium".
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Aug 4, 2020 19:43
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Hell yeah, 40K is supposed to be the grimdark ultraviolent satire. Everything else should really lighten up the mood.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:49
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Glad to see the Star Wars EU writer who came up with "mofference" still getting work.
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Aug 4, 2020 20:12
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 It’s time for the setting!  gently caress YOU ... .. Ok, while I’d have loved to end this post there, there’s an entire book on this, so it probably deserves a bit more. This is probably the most representative moment, though. Also, spoilers! I’m not just going to talk about everything in the setting; I’m also going to talk about the secret envelope, which contains several big reveals about the game world. I’m going to talk about it because it’s not very good, as with many other things here. It does mention that there are secrets hidden “elsewhere in the black cube”, which we have no way of knowing if they made it to the PDF or not (some did apparently involve actually dismantling parts of the cube); and apparently there were additional “setting secrets” used as bennies in the Kickstarter; one randomly given to each sun, one to each order, a whole series in the Directed Campaign, and one set of super secrets given out by Monte in person to the single sod who paid $9999 (!) for the ultimate Kickstarter tier. These of course would be totally useless except to the one group who plays with that guy, if indeed he (or she) still does anything but weep. There are a few of these that have been released by people analyzing the books. Would you like to know one of them? There was once a tenth sun. No, that’s it. How about another? This is a really rare one, which is a combination of one of the exclusive sun secrets and one that involved solving an elaborate puzzle in the books to get a phone number - (866)485-1799 if you care. Ready? There used to be an extra hour in the day in which magic worked especially well, but it was destroyed by a long-lost incantation. Oh, another good one is that there’s a custom alphabet used to write hidden messages in the margins of the books. I think all that needs to be said about those is that one of them is “deciphering the vislae language is a sign that someone is a vislae”. Here’s one of the dafter secrets:  So, let’s deal with the two easy mudpies first. One, there were always six directions, because up and down are a thing. Two, as pointed out by Angrymog, Stam sounds far too much like “Stimpy” to be the opposite of Ren. But I actually like this idea. I can see what Monte was going for here - something that allows you to redefine and reinterpret everything you’ve seen before, but in a way that allows further exploration, not just the dreaded “but they were doing X all along” plot twist. It just needed to be better done, to be some kind of mystical reflection arc, not just regular physical space. As it is, imagine you’re in your favourite city, and you walk up to a straight street that you know is actually an intersection, and you turn and walk one block stam. There is now enough space in your stam-ren axes to rebuild the entire city in both mundane dimension, but only a very few people can access this area. So yea. Basically 90% of anything off the origin line will just be wasteland. We also don’t even want to ask if random builders or building-conjurers have to know about Stam and Ren in order to put appropriate supports on their structures, or if regular buildings are just flat lines in the Stam-Ren direction and you can just push them over. But never mind. Ok, let’s kick off. The first section of the book is about cosmology. You can begin rolling your eyes now if you want a sneak preview. Remember that weird term “Qualia” from the first book? We learn here what it means. Qualia, or a singular quale, are experiences in the mind - as opposed to the physical sources that create those experiences. quote:You cannot see red but experience green, no matter how hard you try. Synaesthesia and colour blindness don’t exist, apparently. Well, ok, hang on. It would actually be a kind of cool setting detail to say that actually, no, those things don’t exist in Actuality, because that’s what happens when qualia are an actual intrinsic part of the universe. Unfortunately, that kind of idea of changing a small supernatural detail and then extrapolating from it is not a thing that Invisible Sun does. (Spoiler: Unknown Armies does.) While we can be generous with this one, there’s plenty coming up that we can’t do this with. Anyway. What all this ties into is the setting’s origin myth, which is that some unknown being called the Absolute appeared at a point in the middle of time (called the Emergent Point) and somehow brought the world into being spreading out into both the past and the future. Because the world contains qualia, there must be a creator being or at least a creator mind because you can’t have experiences without a mind to experience them. And since the world is just a bunch of qualia that change reality, they’re effectively the same as a spell - thus the belief that “the world is a spell” (and also because magic is basically considered the same as physics, and so nothing is “supernatural” - it’s all natural as far as anyone in Actuality knows, which I guess is more sensible than a lot of games). Pretty much nobody thinks that the Absolute is a God you can pray to, though, and many do think that the Absolute is actually just the universe itself, making the whole thing a loop. There is a Silent Church that pays homage to the creator, apparently without really knowing what they are. But more important is the Legacy. The Legacy are the items that appear to be deliberately placed in creation by the creator, usually to help particular beings within creation. There’s a whole section on how vislae don’t really believe in coincidence, only in connections that are too complicated to understand. Legacy items can be found anywhere, but they’re always interesting and appropriate to how they are found. In other words, they are McGuffins that are accepted as a literal and actual part of the setting. You are probably at this point thinking “oh, good grief. So the Absolute is the GM, right?” Nope. That’d actually make sense. We do in fact get to find out what the Absolute is, but it’s in the secrets envelope. So this is a kinda big spoiler. Ready? It’s souls. Every soul eventually migrates to the centre of time, and contributes to the creation of the world. Very few beings know this - most only know that keeping beings inside the Actuality safe is a good thing, but it literally keeps the world alive. Demons, however, want to destroy the world (since they live in the Dark, which was all there was before the world was created) and that’s why they’re so mad on destroying or stealing souls, because it’ll stop the loop. We don’t get to learn where the Legacy actually came from, but presumably it’s created and rearranged by the same loop. There is one group which does know the truth, The Order Of The Black Cube, who are the ones that created the Black Cube and are secretly trying to not just keep creation going but to learn to be the ones that influence its creation. ... Wait. Monte. Dude. You kept that secret? That rocks! I mean, leave off the fact that it also has the same effect as the Unknown Armies cosmology of tying up the magic of the world with the expectations within it (and I have no idea why you would ever want to hide a game’s resemblance to Unknown Armies). But more seriously. Just think of this printed on the back cover: “The players play as members of the Order of the Black Cube.” See? Now you’ve got a hook that’s 100x more appealing that going shopping for invisible chairs, a way in which they stand out, and a clear metagoal for the players that can encompass pretty much anything they try to do. It even fits with the physical prop. Oh, no, we don’t know where the first souls came from. That was asking too much. And.. um, I should probably mention this is now the third redefinition of souls in the set. In The Key, it’s said that there are only 13 “secret souls”, which all mortal souls are linked to. And in a later section of.. the Key.. it says that actually, everyone has a secret soul (in fact, it’s their only soul), and the thing there’s 13 of is “soul allegiances”. Also, shall we make up for it with a really awful secret? Remember the Labyrinth? The Labyrinth is some kind of magical realm that the Magisterium of Satyrine guard entrance too. Here’s what the Path has to say about it:  So, this has to be a deep secret, right? What happens if you manage to traverse this incredibly complex labyrinth (and there are no details given of what’s in the labyrinth or how it tests you!)? What do you find in the bizarre new world that lies beyond?  gently caress YOU gently caress YOU gently caress YOU Also, note that it’s only “a rumor” and so has no business being in the secrets envelope. Unless it’s a.. secret rumor? How does that even work? We then get a bunch of pages worth of burble about science and atoms and how everything is changeable and regular science doesn’t work in the Actuality because everything changes and how there’s no point technologically inventing anything because magic is all that can actually change anything and how there used to be a number between twelve and thirteen but it’s not there anymore. Obviously, it is “a Shadow notion” (a phrase repeatedly used disparagingly in that section of the book) to point out that twelve and thirteen are just names, that you can name any number anything if you want to, and that twelve and a half is a thing. The one interesting bit in this is that because of that thing where the creation of the Universe actually happens in the middle of time, time expands in both directions; every day, there’s a little bit more of the past. Which fits even more with the idea that The Absolute is the GM and/or the group, but we know it isn’t, and it works pretty well with the souls thing as well. There’s the Noosphere. It’s the magic Internet, just like the Orus in Eoris Essence, right down to the “and non-mages need a wossname to access it” bit. There’s a special section of the Noosphere that’s only accessed while people are asleep, called the Deeps of Sleep. There’s analog clocks. There’s no computers. There’s gramophones and recorded music. There are radios and telephones, but people don’t trust them because there’s no radio waves, just “the aethyr” and creepy stuff lives there and might mess with your signal in head-explodey ways. Vehicles aren’t used that much because magic and other things work better - with the exception of trains. They run on tracks, you see, and in Actuality a huge-rear end train track is a great way of symbolically saying to reality “WE CAN GO HERE”. So, let’s get onto the actual setting. quote:Where will you go next? ... Whoops, that’s not from the book, that’s what GPT-3 generated when seeded with some book text. Although some of those do match the actual book. Each of the nine suns is connected to a concept, an aspect of the human soul, and to a realm of existance - actually, two realms of existence, because each one also has a “Nightside” embodying a “darker variant” of it, because calling it the dark side sounds too much like that movie or that other music album. Vislae can travel to the realms, and refer to them just by the colour of their sun; to enter a realm for the first time, you have to meet with the warden of that realm at their gate. They will ask you for stuff in exchange for entering the realm. Actually, most commonly, they will give you a quest to do in that Realm, which I guess is kind of a convenient structure even if it makes almost no sense. It’s also possible that the meeting with the warden happens only in your head. Except it obviously doesn’t. Because if you’re not a vislae and you want to travel to another sun’s realm, you have to get a ride on a sunship, which is an airship with a human face and enormous spectacles which speaks a language no-one understands and that stops at the gate of one realm a day. So it’s obviously not in your head because it’s a bloody bus stop. Honestly. Let’s deal with the easy ones first. First of all, the Invisible Sun itself. It doesn’t have its own realm; it just essentially beams magic to and through all the others. It also doesn’t have a nightside because it’s the transition point between the two sides. The Grey is Shadow, us, the “real” world. The only real people there are vislae who exiled themselves there in the War; everyone else is just there to keep up the illusion. There’s no warden of Shadow - or rather, there’s a belief that there is (called “the Demiurge”) but they focus on stopping people getting out instead of deciding who can go in, and as a result they don’t guard the Gate. Vislae tend to pass through the area as quickly as possible, as staying there for any length of time quickly results in them forgetting the actual truth and becoming trapped. The absence of any way to reach the other side of the Gate in the Grey is not explained. Nor is the notable absence of spectacle-wearing airships. I’m only mentioning this first because it’s simple, and also because there’s another secret here: who the Demiurge is. Sadly, it’s not a good one. It’s another one that ballses up the setting unnecessarily. The Demiurge is the Enemy. The Demiurge is the one the old War was against. See, the vislae didn’t win the war at all. They lost, and the Enemy conquered Satyrine, and then used powerful magic to rewrite its history so that everyone thought they’d actually won. The only reason it isn’t in charge now is that it found out about vislae exiling themselves to Shadow and thought, a-ha, this is actually better than just trying to wipe the buggers out. So it became the Demiurge, and now struggles to expand Shadow and to trap more and more vislae there. I don’t know why the detail of it having won the war is even necessary there. It’d work perfectly well if the Enemy has just headed to Shadow the same way the vislae did. As it is, it makes everyone seem incompetent and everything unnecessarily oppressive. Oh, also, I should probably mention that the real name of the enemy is “the Angular Serpentine”. That’s.. certainly two adjectives that sound kind of cool together and are associated with slightly evil concepts. That’s all we know about it, though. The Nightside of the Grey sun is just completely empty. Now we can get onto the actual realms of the path. First of all, the Silver Sun is about creation. Makers love it, as do creatives, and it’s also the most common place to find angels. It’s ruled by a 40 foot tall queen with anime hair and is also the keeping-place of “Al Ru Stam”, a bizarre shining shape with 17 facets which was the first Legacy item ever recovered. The Nightside of Silver is about destruction and endings, forced and otherwise, and is chiefly notable for containing the only chapel which can trace people who for whatever reason didn’t become ghosts or whose ghosts were wiped out - and which actual ghosts hate, because they think it’s also what causes people to be completely lost when they die, so it’s regularly attacked by regular ghosts. Which I have to admit is kind of neat. Here’s an encounter from the Silver: quote:A tall man stands by a tree. He will not (or cannot) speak, but if approached, he offers a drink from a bottle. If the PC does not respond, he will simply say "You don't drink here." He will not speak again until the PC approaches him again, this time offering a drink and saying "I'm sorry about your friend." Whoops, sorry. That’s GPT-2. But if you saw Monte’s actual version you’d probably think an AI generated it: quote:A tall man stands by a tree. He will not (or cannot) speak, but if approached, he offers a drink from a bottle. If accepted, the drink refreshes all the imbiber’s Certes pools. If the bottle is refused, his head cleanly splits in half vertically and a small figure that looks like the same man, only 3 inches (8 cm) tall, peers out. “Bless all you create, curse all you destroy,” he says, and then the head closes up again. The man walks off. The Green sun is about the cycle of life. Plants grow so fast you can watch them, and they’d take over the whole realm except that they also get eaten by animals growing just as quickly. Building anything is impossible; you can scarcely stand still without a copse sprouting under you or an animal laying eggs that instantly hatch and grow. There’s not anything too significant here, although there’s a garden that grows magic herbs if that’s your thing. The Nightside of the Green is exactly the same as the main side except the life is more obviously nasty - viruses, poisonous thorns, Audrey 2s, and so on. Which is strange, given that even the light side emphasis that “life isn’t always nice”, so it seems that all that matters here is a roughly Shadow humanocentric view of which animals are nicer. The Blue sun is about.. um.. well, we don’t really know, to be honest. Dreams, maybe? Or ideas? There’s not a whole lot of solid ground, since it’s all dreams and uncertainty, so again there’s not a whole lot built here. The Noosphere is connected to the Blue. The only interesting NPCs are the “Court of Nous”, a group of beings that claim ownership over all ideas and thought, although nobody really pays any attention to that outside itself. They’re described as “intelligent holograms of people” because we have no idea what a hologram is. It also contains the following fascinating and unusual location:  Because we don’t really know what the Blue is, we don’t really know anything about the Nightside of the blue. Except that its warden is the guardian of dreams and nightmares and an embodiment of non-reproductive sex. Huh. The Deeps of Sleep are connected to the Nightside, but we find out here that actually without magic, you don’t go to the Deeps of Sleep when you dream; dreams are exactly what Shadow folks think they are, creations of a subconscious mind. The Deeps of Sleep is where the dreams go when you stop dreaming them, and a good place to hunt for memories of things that were important to people. The Indigo sun is the big one, the one where vislae live by default. It’s the realm that Shadow is a shadow of. Its warden is a gender-fluid being called Quiss that nobody knows if they exist.. yet apparently vislae still have to communicate with them and generally manage to. I would think that kind of resolves the question of their existence, but hey. It’s where Satyrine is and is the major part of the setting, so we’ll leave it until a later update. The nightside of the indigo is “uncomfortable truths”, or things nobody wants to be true. This would be kind of cool if there was any more detail on it than that. And if, you know, there weren’t blatantly uncomfortable truths existing in Satyrine. The Pale sun is the afterlife. When you die, you go to Limbo, and from there you either move on to the afterlife in the Pale, and from there to "where nobody knows" (but presumably the centre of the timeline, as above), or you get stuck and just hang around in limbo until someone comes along who can either see or interact with or think about you, whereupon you become a ghost and you do ghost stuff. For some reason, the rules for playing as a ghost are presented out-of-context in the opening chapter of the setting book; you level up as a ghost, and the more you level up, the more solid and interactive you can be. Oh, and if you are really determined and end up in the Pale you can kick your way out of there and become an actual undead. Also in the category of “that’s a weird place to put that in the book” is a whole section on how vislae know that some animals have souls, but they don’t feel bad about eating meat, because most meat isn’t made by killing animals anyway - it’s conjured, harvested from the grounded, or even traded for with animals that sell their flesh by choice. Anyway, the two things people notice about the Pale are a) it’s pretty similar to the living world, since all the inhabitants basically colour their expectations of their afterlife based on what they did in life; and b) some things that you wouldn’t expect to have ghosts have them. Books, songs, buildings, that kind of thing. The only big restriction is that travel is heavily regulated, because of the tendency of the dead to want to leave (although becoming undead is risky because you often go mad in the process). The dead don’t age and can’t die again; if they get killed in the Pale, they reform some time later. Oh, and there’s also a big party. No, seriously. The Eternal Party is near the gateway between the Pale and the grey and has been going for as long as anyone can remember and never stops. Immortals and vislae sometimes therefore go to the Pale to just, well, chill and have a good time. The nightside of the Pale is.. uh.. another one with very little real detail. As far as I can work out, it’s the fearful side of death - all about the loss, regret, and loneliness, while the regular side is at least a form of ongoing life after death. Both sides have Queens, and both are constantly at war. The Red sun is about destruction and change. There’s constant natural disasters, the land splits and shifts, storms roar every moment, you know the kind of thing we’re going for here. Again, apart from that, there’s not a lot of concrete detail other than it’s one of the places where demons live. Red Demons just like destroying stuff for funsies while leaving the structure in which it exists intact (unlike the Dark Demons, who actually want to destroy the whole universe so that it’ll get off their goddamn lawn), and the thing that make them demons is that they can never really experience anything, only neutrally interact with it. The Nightside of the Red is.. exactly the same as the regular side, except for one detail that might or might not be supposed to be funny: apparently enough visitors associated the Red with “Hell” that a bunch of demons started trolling people by snatching the dead from the Pale into the Red Nightside and torturing them for laughs while claiming it was “for their sins”, and being amused by the frequency with which they just accept that. The Gold sun is also about change, but about regenerative change. The reversal of entropy, if you will. Rivers run uphill, and get cleaner. Occasionally, the wind blows time backwards by a few minutes. There’s a city of people who join themselves in a hivemind, and what’s claimed to be a mound where buried bodies can be resurrected, although some believe it’s all a trick and you actually get the buried person’s body inhabited by a nobrin. No, don’t ask what a nobrin is. Well, except it’s level 5, apparently. The Nightside is actually a bit more interesting, though. It isn’t negative change - that’s the Red - it’s enforced change. Authority and control which changes the people under it, but in positive ways as well as negative ones. Shame there’s not a lot of detail about anything there apart from a city built on the back of a giant ten-legged snapping turtle. Now, let me just share an example, and a theory that comes as a result: quote:A jewel-encrusted beetle named Clarrisa Almost-Two-Feet-Long—who is, in fact, almost 2 feet (60 cm) long—offers directions and advice to those in Gold, but only those who share a moving tale or significant secret about one of the other suns. Now, what does that sound like? Where does it belong? See, this sinks in as something I’m increasingly concluding the more I read: that Invisible Sun was written to be No Thank You Evil for grown ups. If you see it as a children’s setting then suddenly everything fits a lot better together and the contradictions and sillinesses become much more brushed off. It could easily be that Monte liked the idea of the positive surreal setting and re-developed it. And that’s actually kind of good, because I like that idea too. It just hasn’t come out right. Next time: Satyrine.
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Aug 4, 2020 20:13
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Is Monte Cook trying to usurp John Wick as the Godwalker of Smug Game Design? What the gently caress is going on here?
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Aug 4, 2020 21:11
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 Chapter 8: Starships (Exploration Campaigns); Chapter 9: Starship Design; Chapter 10: Starship Combat If you don't care about trade or the Vilani Imperium (then why are you playing this?), you might want to run an exploration campaign. Even as the Confederation goes toe to toe with the Imperium it sends exploration vessels out across the rimward stars in search of garden worlds to settle, resources to exploit, and aliens to discover. While the bulk of Terran settlement went towards the Imperium, enough Terrans went in the other direction to form entire nations later on. The book lays out the standard blueprint that Terran exploration operations throughout the period and implies GMs should follow it as closely as possible:
 The process stops there if you didn’t find intelligent life. If you did, though:
 So here’s the thing about Chapters 9 and 10. I have a few rules I follow writing these reviews, two of which come up pretty frequently: first, I don’t rehash things unless I have to and concentrate information; and second, I avoid discussing rule specifics, since if you want to learn the game’s system in detail you should probably just buy the book. Chapter 9 discusses ship design procedure and provides ship templates, Chapter 10 discusses how ship combat works on a technical level, and both fall afoul of both those rules. Neither contain we haven’t covered elsewhere as far as setting, mood, and detail goes, and both contain mostly specifics on ship design and function (mostly in the first) and ship combat (mostly in the second). Instead of trying to walk the thin line between giving an incomplete picture of how things work and giving away too much, I’ll just list a few last details the book hasn’t covered and profile a notable ship from Chapter 9 to show you what one looks like.
 Several (though not most) pre-made ships in the book have blueprints like this. The Hero-class is an old Vilani design, originally intended for runs up and down branch routes. Cheap, tough, and ubiquitous, they were some of the first civilian ships Terrans really interacted with. They also provided one of the reasons why exploration missions take linguistic experts instead of relying on translation software: Terran dignitaries asked merchants what the ship was called, the merchants told them it was named after a type of sandwich loaded up with ingredients (because that’s how Vilani saw it, cheap and packed full of things), the New Yorker who wrote the most common translation software programmed it to translate that as hero, and the Terrans thought it meant that word how everyone else uses it and made it official. To this day, Terran-owned Hero-classes are named after various mythological or folk heroes and even the Imperium refers to the many Heros owned by Terrans by a translation of the English word. Because Terrans adore Heros. The Navy captured a ton of them in the Second and Third Interstellar Wars and sold them off to private interests, and the traders and explorers who purchased them fell in love with everything about them from their size to their low cost to their ability to pass for proper Vilani ships at a glance. By 2170 Terrans had started building large numbers of knockoffs for local sale, and by the end of the period, more Terran merchants flew Heros than any other single ship class.  A standard ship stat block. A Hero ideally requires eight crew: three officers on the bridge (probably the captain, pilot, and navigator), an engineer to maintain the systems, a flight attendant to take care of any passengers, a doctor, a stevedore, and a Vilani interpreter/advisor. In a pinch crew members can fill multiple roles. It has a jump-2 drive, equipment to the fuel the drive by skimming atmosphere off a gas giant, a maneuver drive with about 1.5 Gs of acceleration, two hardpoints to mount turrets on, enough life support for 20 people (way more than the ship is likely to carry) and enough power to run all of that. It also has enough rooms to carry six passengers (the stats say four passengers and one luxury passenger, I guess two of those staterooms got linked together) as well as enough low berths to store 14 people (which would be enough to preserve every on board with a full load of passengers) and also a sickbay I can’t find on the schematics. The rest of the ship’s volume, over 40,000 cubic feet, is devoted to cargo space.  And here’s a Hero in action. With this we finally finish discussing the rules. Next chapter is the last chapter, where we cover campaign advice and seeds. After that, I’ll probably get you an epilogue, then a conclusion.
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Aug 4, 2020 21:12
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hyphz posted:
This seems to be the overarching problem with Invisible Sun as a whole: it's full of ideas that (sometimes) sound cool, but no actual thought is given on how they would play out in-game either mechanically or story/setting-wise.
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Aug 4, 2020 21:18
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Falconier111 posted:Terran dignitaries asked merchants what the ship was called, the merchants told them it was named after a type of sandwich loaded up with ingredients (because that’s how Vilani saw it, cheap and packed full of things), the New Yorker who wrote the most common translation software programmed it to translate that as hero, and the Terrans thought it meant that word how everyone else uses it and made it official. I love this bit.
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Aug 4, 2020 21:44
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"Nightside the Long Sun" is a good book that has nothing to do with Invisible Sun, and is therefore better. I think the key issue with Invisible Sun is that Cook appears to have the mistaken belief that all secrets are equally interesting, and all weirdness is necessarily wonderful. There's a few bits of wonder in Invisible Sun, like the art of Lacunae, but so much of it is just dull, weird, and painfully obviously ripping off Chuubo's or Nobilis without any real comprehension. The Dark Demons, for example, are just Excrucians but without any of what makes Excrucians so much fun. It's also just tediously insulting how Invisible Sun is clearly built on the most minimal, uninteresting skim of occult literature. Monte Cook claimed to have synthesized together all these different traditions to make something that explicitly referenced none of them, but fit in among them - and what we got is nonsense and also name-dropping the Demiurge, so Gnosticism made it in but in a dumb and uninteresting way. E: I think Stam and Ren could have been saved if they were detailed slightly more, to make it clear they're not the same as mathematical dimensions. They are map directions that only exist in some ways, and the space you find through them is still three-dimensional and normal. That way you can have special secret streets and locations, hidden objects and monuments folded out of plain sight, and it'll feel like it doesn't quite make sense - logically all the problems you suggest exist. And then have a lot of Stam and Ren directions lead to weird cliffs, huge walls, generally odd cyclopean terrain that needs to be adventured in to be explored, so that if you take part in this secret cartography you discover why stam and ren were hidden and the compass rose sealed. Now I have a campaign idea for a weird fantasy game, purely based on spite against Invisible Sun. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 22:06
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It feels like Monte Cook made a big notes file and threw in every single idea that came to him, which is fine, except that he then skipped the bit where you rewrite those notes and synthesize them into something coherent or interesting. The poor schmuck who paid $9999 probably got handed a crumpled Denny’s receipt on which Monte, waking up in the middle of the night, wrote “ANGELS EAT STARS, HAVE “DOG” - NO RETRIES - +6???”
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Aug 4, 2020 22:15
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Cythereal posted:I love this bit. This book is just fantastically written. There's a reason I've tried to mine quotes. Big Mad Drongo posted:This seems to be the overarching problem with Invisible Sun as a whole: it's full of ideas that (sometimes) sound cool, but no actual thought is given on how they would play out in-game either mechanically or story/setting-wise. I can't think of a better way to describe Numenera. Who even are Monte Cook's supporters? It's not just what we discussed in the thread, I spoken to D&D players who seem to be at best neutral on the man and I have yet to meet someone familiar with his World of Darkness that didn't hate it. Is he just one of those "visionaries" who has his own grog fanbase?
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Aug 4, 2020 22:22
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Dallbun posted:Thieves begin with a base 20% chance to decipher I must admit, I find your kit reviews a lot more interesting than most of the anodyne scenarios 
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Aug 4, 2020 22:31
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hyphz posted:
 Challenge In traffic, signal a stamhand turn at an intersection.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:57
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You know honestly the randomly generated Invisible Sun samples you made seem more coherent and interesting than the real ones.
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Aug 4, 2020 23:13
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Falconier111 posted:Who even are Monte Cook's supporters? It's not just what we discussed in the thread, I spoken to D&D players who seem to be at best neutral on the man and I have yet to meet someone familiar with his World of Darkness that didn't hate it. Is he just one of those "visionaries" who has his own grog fanbase?
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Aug 4, 2020 23:41
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I cannot believe Cook stole the joke about Zorth from Atomic Robo but took it seriously.
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Aug 5, 2020 00:44
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Mr. Maltose posted:I cannot believe Cook stole the joke about Zorth from Atomic Robo but took it seriously. Community has "The North Wind, the West Wind, the South Wind, the one we keep secret, and the East Wind!"
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Aug 5, 2020 01:13
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I mean just look at how A Wrinkle in Time handles travel in nonlinearity for an example of how to do it right, imho. Also, add M:TG to the list of things ol' Cook ripped off.
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Aug 5, 2020 01:22
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I found a great location for my new coffee shop, it's just two blocks off the main square in a direction only 1% of people are capable of perceiving
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Aug 5, 2020 01:28
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megane posted:I found a great location for my new coffee shop, it's just two blocks off the main square in a direction only 1% of people are capable of perceiving Despite all the workers needing this rarefied skill, they still pay the baristas less than minimum wage before tips.
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Aug 5, 2020 01:37
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Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Stormcast Eternals Sigmar vs Storm: Place Your Bets On Which One Stops Looking Like A Word First The Stormcast are dvided up into Stormhosts, each with a unique name, heraldry and colors. A Stormhost has between 5,000 and 10,000 members, serving as an army in its own right, and most then subdivide into independent battle groups, called Chambers, which divide further into squads called Conclaves. These usually have a clear hierarchy, but that hierarchy is flexible to allow for quick implementation of any necessary tactic. The only person who knows exactly how many Stormhosts there are is Sigmar himself, as he has not allowed mortals into the floating palaces of the Sigmarabulum for some centuries, and the Stormhosts themselves are too busy working to keep track of each other. Each is led by a Lord-Commander, who serves as the supreme leader of the Stormhost and answers directly to Sigmar. Under the Lord-Commander is the Command Echelon, made up of Stormcast who have graduated from the temples dedicated to officer training. These are the Lords-Celestant, The Lords-Relictor and other officers, and they rely on the training temples to ensure their Stormhost is properly equipped and their soldiers ready for their assigned Chambers. Originally, Sigmar's Eighth Law states that whenever a Lord or Knight dies, they must pass the courses of their appropriate temple to prove their mastery once more before being permitted to reclaim their leadership position, and even lower-rank Stormcast must pass their concalve trials once more upon being reforged. However, the pace of the war with Chaos has proven so great that the law proved impractical and was repealed, meaning that many Stormcast go straight back to the fray without time to retrain or reorient themselves. Chambers can vary wildly in size, depending on their purpose. Extremis Chambers are often elite forces with perhaps thirty to fifty drake-riders, while the Strike Chambers tend to be much larger regiments of three to five hundred infantry. Chambers of a Stormhost are expected to be able to act together as part of a larger force or independently, depending on the needs of the mission. Often, a Stormhost is spread across multiple theatres rather than all working in one place, and Conclaves often act independently to achieve specific objectives. Even between Conclaves, it is common to see Brotherhoods form - specific formations hand-selected from across the entire Stormhost to form a more varied and effective force for a specific job. Each Stormcast is trained and equipped by their assigned Conclave after their first Reforging, and their Conclave's tactical role will determine their specialty. Each Conclave reports to their Chamber command, which is typically formed of Stormcast Lords and Knights that have proven their leadership skills in the Gladitorium. Within the command structure, the heads of the Strike Chambers typically form a subcouncil, the Lords of the Storm, which is led by a Lord-Celestant. The Lords-Celestant answer to their Lord Commander the Command Echelon, who answer to the Celestant-Prime and Sigmar. They are all supported by at least one Lord-Relictor, a Stormcast priest of Sigmar that may call on the god's stormy blessings. Most of the time, the rest of the leadership is Lords-Castellant, who specialize in defensive war, Knights-Vexillor who bear the Stormhost standards in battle, and the Knights-Heraldor that trumpet and shout the commands of battle across the din. Knights-Azyros typically serve as messengers, and Lords-Veritant operate as hunters and scouts, seeking out evil on long quests that take them far from their Stormhost much of the time. Other officers exist for specialised roles, such as the Lords-Aquilor of the Vanguard Chambers or the mages of the Sacrosanct Chambers.  The majority of a Stormhost will be made of its Strike Chambers, which come in three varieties: Warrior, Harbinger and Exemplar. The number of Strike Chambers in a Stormhost varies, but most often the Warrior Chambers are the most numerous, as they are the most adaptable infantry forces, divided into retinues of three to twenty Stormcast led by an officer called a prime. Typically, a Warrior Chamber of any sort will have a total of up to 21 retinues, divided between the Angelos, Paladin, Redeemer and Justicar Conclaves, to better offer tactical flexibility and choice. Redeemers serve as the defensive line, while the Paladins are the shock troops. Angelos Conclaves serve as the vanguard support, and the Justicars are rear support. A Harbinger Conclave typically has up to 15 retinues, with only three Conclaves - usually, a large Angelos Conclave at the core, supported by Redeemers and Justicars. Their goal is speed, maneuverability and fast response, allowing them to strike quickly and achieve objectives before the enemy is ready. The Harbingers serve as aerial attackers, with the Justicars and Redeemers supporting them, operating their airbases and moving to protect their retreats. Exemplar Conclaves are about the same size as Harbingers, but are built around a Paladin Conclave with Angelos and Justicar support. The Paladins work in large numbers, forming an unstoppable tide. Exemplar Chambers are some of the strongest units in a Stormhost, epxected to take on the most demanding missions. They often have the highest number of Reforgings of any STormcast. The next most common are the Tempest Chambers, specialists and oddities within the ranks. They vary heavily in function, and are ultimately support groups to the mainstay of the Strike Chambers. There are three open kinds of Tempest Chamber - the Extremis, the Vanguard and the Sacrosanct, though the Vanguard Chamber also falls under the umbrella of the Auxiliary Chambers. Other forms of Tempest Chamber exist on the rolls, but they are kept secret from those outside the Stormhost, with only their names known - the Ruination Chambers, the Covenant Chambers, the Logister Chambers. As yet, Sigmar has deemed them the Unopened Chambers, to be unsealed only at his command. Most Stormhosts have only one Extremis Chamber, as the stardrakes which serve as their mounts are quite rare. The Hammers of Sigmar, however, are notable for having several Extremis Chambers, being heavily favored by the children of the star dragon Dracothion. The Vanguard Chambers are the most self-sufficient Stormcast, also called the Rangers, and they have far more autonomy than any other Chamber. Their leadership is more about oversight than command, and every Ranger is trusted to make decisions in the moment - they have to earn their position, after all, by proving they can do it. Many are loners or recluses, seen as aloof by other Stormcast, and they primariyl work as outriders. Thge number of Auxiliary Chambers permitted to a Lord-Commander is limited to ensure they excel at the jobs they are actually good at, rather than serving as battle-line troops. All Stormhosts have at least one Sacrosanct Chamber, but until the Necroquake, they tended to be secretive and rarely seen, working at arcane research. Only now do the mages of the Sacrosanct Chambers head out openly, though their mission of recovering arcane secrets to fix the Reforging process is still classified. Next time: Wizards
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Aug 5, 2020 01:46
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Interesting enough there are no models for them nor has a single Lord-Commander been named yet.
MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 02:43
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These new directions aren't even morally fraught.
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Aug 5, 2020 03:39
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Chapter 11: Campaigns; Epilogue In the intro fiction this time, we get a follow-up for the ship that left Nusku back in the intro fiction of the first chapter; it came back with half its crew dead but a wealth of information for Terran command. The new captain, a Nusku Vilani and former first mate, marvels at how resilient the Terrans on his crew are when one of them asks when they next head out. He decides “that’s just how he likes them”. This book was designed from the ground up to support free trader campaigns; half of the GM advice section just offers insight on running them. When running one, GMs should start by deciding the timeframe: anything earlier than 2170 puts Terrans at a technological disadvantage and limits their freedom to act; any later makes them more likely to get caught up in politics and torn away from free trading. But then, some players want more dangerous campaigns or campaigns on a bigger scale, so you do you. The book recommends you choose the timeframe based on how difficult you want your game to be; the later the date, the easier the game, and vice versa. The default play area should have more than enough worlds to support a campaign, but the GM should sketch out several worlds in more detail to add a little depth to the play area; only if the campaign gets grander in scale should they branch out into new subsectors (altering the results to fit the GM’s ideas, and isn’t that nice to see again). They should have a basic overview of everywhere the players are likely to go (at least at first) done by the first session.  The book advises your party use a Hero-class if you want to keep your crew small, and advises you avoid larger ships unless you plan to run a campaign heavy on privateering; those things are expensive to run in peacetime. It implies players shouldn’t design their own ships and offers no advice on them doing so; I guess the GM’s supposed to do it for them? It’s not like something you can do at the table easily. We then get a bunch of notes on the sort of characters the party needs to run the ship; basically any ship needs a half dozen different role’s s filled at different times, beyond what you can reasonably expect a party to do with one character each. The book advises either taking a few of those characters to play as and leaving the rest as pregenerated NPCs you can sub in when somebody dies or having each player play a few characters at once. Also consider whether of player should be allowed to be captain. You can always sub in an NPC authority figure if the power dynamic would be unstable. Once you finish up building that ship, crew, and starting conditions, you can launch your campaign. Free traders have three major goals: trade, exploration, and survival. While you get most of your money from trade, you can also earn rewards from the Terran government for information on market conditions, demographics, any military intelligence you can get without dying, whatever (the book doesn’t specify how). You also need not to be arrested for breaking the law or blown up when war breaks out. Simple enough. Free traders often have missions assigned to them by various outside forces or patrons, mysteries to explore, or specific obstacles to knock down to serve as long-term goals; while you can keep a free trader campaign going forever if you want, eventually you’ll either get so rich it doesn’t matter anymore or have to bug out anyway (or your players will get bored). You get some advice on how to end the campaign gracefully and start a related one up later.  Alternate campaigns! You get advice here on how to run:
Then we get a series of campaign seeds (play as Terran assholes and criminals instead of the stalwart patriots the book assumes PCs are, try to make it to Vland and back just to say you could, have the Vilani invade earth 1000 years ago before they stopped exploring and figure out what happens next) and adventure seeds (smuggle something valuable, reenact The Heart of Darkness, deal with the Terran Plagues, solve one of those party murder mysteries, escort Vilani nobles on a hunting expedition gone wrong, try to convince a Terran businessman’s heir who’s assimilated into Vilani nobility to come home, discover one of the PCs is the prophesized savior of the planet) and that’s it. We’ve completed the book!  Since I have the time and space, a brief epilogue. The Terran Confederation lived up to the old ideals of the United Nations fairly well, but its flaws ate it alive. It did not have to end when it did. The concepts of equality and egalitarianism it embraced had proven wildly successful everywhere they had time to take root, and had it been able to fully integrate those ideals into its governmental structure it might have survived and even flourished. But remember how, way back when, I discussed how the Terran Confederation was built on responses to crises? It rarely ever changed unless responding to another crisis, and the moment crises stopped coming it internal contradictions torn apart. By the end of the Confederation the Big Five on Earth were completely irrelevant on the Galactic stage, but as long as they held control of the Advisory Board, they could dictate terms to the rest of the known galaxy. And they did, consistently, putting lie to the egalitarianism their own governments forwarded by proving just how unequal the system was. It failed to adapt. When the Confederation died, it went unmourned; the ideals it and its successors had promoted for nearly 400 years vanished with it. Remember Hiroshi Estigarribia? He was Grand Admiral five years after the formal conquest of the Ziru Sirka. That year the Advisory Board voted to integrate the conquered Vilani worlds as full members of the Terran Confederation – effectively placing the former Imperium under the control of the Big Five. Since the odds of a single other nation putting a delegate on the Board for a year were already remote, the vote meant no single member could reasonably expect to have any pull in the national government. It was the fear of colonials made manifest, especially since they’d be ruled from Earth, too far away from the fringes of the former Imperium to hope to offer them any meaningful governance – especially since by that point the coreward part of the Imperium was trying and failing to hold off incursions from a wolflike alien race called the Vargr. So Estigarribia acted. Later that year, 2314, he declared the Terran Confederation dissolved and announced himself both Regent of the Vilani Imperium and Protector of Terra (a title he seems to have invented), uniting them into something called the Rule of Man. The fleet, at that point entirely colonials and assimilated Vilani, sided with him. Without any options the Confederation peacefully accepted its destruction. Unfortunately, well, the Rule of Man sucked. After his death, his successor and former chief of staff declared himself Emperor Hiroshi II and set up a Second Imperium, but he and his successors proved all-around incompetent. Though the Rule of Man flourished for a little while (it conducted a lot of exploration and colonization), its hereditary nobility (evolved from portions of the Terran military) constantly fought each other over the throne and never managed to solve the cultural and economic stagnation that the First Imperium left behind. It lasted about 400 years before it finally broke apart in a gradual process that plunged the galaxy into darkness for nearly 2000 years. The next time a major interstellar government arose, it emerged in the depths of the former Vilani space on a world whose population had roots among both peoples; it dubbed itself the Third Imperium, acknowledging both its past and its supersession of that past. The Third Imperium lasted far longer than the Second ever did.  The Terrans changed as well, and as always happens with cultures fervently trying to hold on to their past, they changed quite drastically. In a speech shortly after declaring the Rule of Man, Estigarribia used the word “Solomani” to refer to the population of both parts of his new empire; he was definitely referring to all humans in its borders when he said it and he probably was trying to invoke some sense of joint descent from Earth. However, as Terran identity grew beyond Terra, they adopted that term as something uniquely theirs, something that described those who trace their ancestry back to Terra without being bound to the planet. In exchange, they dropped to the ideology that had driven them for the last century and a half in favor of a sort of joint ethnic identity. The Solomani developed a sense of superiority that came to define them even after the Rule of Man (by that point nicknamed the Ramshackle Empire) collapsed. In the assumed Traveller setting, in the 5600s AD, the independent Solomani state has become famous for its authoritarianism, exclusivism, and sheer racism. This, then, is a quiet fact underlying the entirety of the Interstellar Wars: the Terran Confederation and everything it stands for will be inverted by its own success. This doesn’t have to be the case; GMs don’t have to explore the far future or anything, players don’t need to know or care about later versions of the setting, and as far as the book is concerned the future may play out entirely differently. But if your players do care, if they really do want to change the future, this is their golden opportunity – late enough that their actions can have visible results, and early enough that they can hope to avoid the Long Night, 2000 years of misery and darkness before something resembling peace returned to the galaxy. Next time will be a conclusion where I wrap everything up and give my opinions! Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 03:43
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Chapter 8: Bazaar, pt. 4 Degenesis Rebirth Katharsys Chapter 8: Bazaar HELLVETICS Trailblazer The quote:The butt stock can be turned into a bayonet, a combat knife, or a rifle bipod. I may not be a LatwPIAT, but this sounds dumb. Anyways, it also has an integrated system to track maintenance and ammo consumption, as well as to match shooting times to missions. Because, as you remember, Hellvetics are extremely dumb about ammo consumption. The “Specialty” bit tells us that a Trailblazer can be modified without using up the mod slots. A bayonet can be take out of the stock (ah, so it's not THE STOCK ITSELF being turned into a knife, is it?) and “mounted to one of the barrels in no time”, making a melee weapon that causes as much damage as a stiletto. This just raises questions like “what if I put three bayos on it,” “how much damage would the bayo cause on itself” and “are the combat knife and the bayo two distinct pieces of equipment?” :iaam: Taking the bipod out of the stock (seriously, how spacious is it?) allows you to turn the Trailblazer an ersatz SAW, giving +2D to fire when supported and -2D when standing up. You can reallocate the mod slots (whatever that means) as you rise in level and get the gun fitted to you at the Fortress. Considering the travel times in post apocalypse... oh boy.  Ammo >High Frequency Full Metal: standard ammo, fired from all barrels(?). >High Frequency Hollowpoint: +2 damage, halved if the target has Armor 3+. >Shotgun shell: quote:All three barrels can be loaded and fired separately. Reloading takes 1 round. This gun makes no God-drat sense.  Stubbed Trailblazer Shorter barrel: great for fighting indoors, turns a loving RIFLE INTO A HANDGUN. Tunnel shield A collapsible(!) heavy shield for Sappers. +2 passive defense, +4 active, at the cost of 3 encumbrance and only being able to use one-handed weapons (and even then it's at -2D). Harness The magical asbestos armor! quote:In the time when the Hellvetics bridged the Reaper’s Blow, this armor was perfected, and another function was added: refractoriness. It's a magical word: sounds fake, but the spellcheck doesn't pick it up. The “specialty” is ability to harden and... enamel? the armor plates, increasing armor value, but giving it the “Brittle” quality. Or, in the book's own words: quote:The armor plates of the Harness can be hardened and enameled in the fortress plants. The finish increases the Armor rating, but also the risk of the plates breaking (permanently -1 armor after 12 points of damage with one hit; see “Brittle” quality). Me, a loving idiot: you should write out the rules for hardening the armor in exchange for the “Brittle” quality. Game designer, genius sex-god: we shouldn't say anything about the the costs or the benefits of the hardening process, but deffo write down half of the “Brittle” rule there. Recon Harness Recon version trades ceramic plates for flexible materials. quote:The armor is lighter and tighter. Clothing. can be worn over it as camo. This is a dumbass way of saying that the armor gains Camo quality, which is explained in the usual way in the “specialty” section. And no, it has nothing to with what you'd expect from the world "camouflage."  Here's the single illustration to break up the wall of text Heavy Duty A modular exoskeleton clad in “Harness plates.” Gives the user Force +3D, but all attacks, active defense, and fine motor actions are at -2D. And it says that “modules can be combined as long as they fit in the armor slots,” which is rather... duh? Unless there's implication you can double-up. >Heavyweight: takes 2 slots, give user Force +6D. Is it instead or above even the usual exoskeleton bonus?  >Hydraulic scissors: go above the hands – but don't get too deep into visions of tearing Apocalyptics in two, they're too slow and cumbersome to use in combat. Instead, they do 20 damage/round to obstacles. HOWEVER, they need a grip to function, so they don't work against steel hatches – I guess this is to prevent you from using this to cut into bunkers and whatever. 3 slots. >Cooler: enough cooling systems to allow you enter the depths of Reaper's Blow, leaving behind your group, which isn't made of Hellvetics and wouldn't get such armor without campaign-defining criminality and heists. 1 slot. >Arc welder: you can try to use it in combat, but if someone lands a difficulty +2 hit to the tank powering it and deals 4 damage, it ruptures the tank, destroying the exoskeleton and killing the wearer. Used as a tool, it deals 15 damage/round to metals (so it exists basically to make sure that the hydraulic shears aren't OP). Used as a weapon, it helps you discover that your DM is a shithead, because that tank has to be targeted specifically. 3 slots. >Tunnel driller: a big cool drill and massive reinforcements to the drill arm turns this into the premier cave-in search and rescue tool that does 10 damage/round to poo poo (while it while go through nearly anything, real efficiency aficionados will microdose and use either the arc welder or hydraulic shears for their more suitable tasks). If you're some peace of poo poo rear end in a top hat gently caress who wants to use this as a weapon, it gives -6D to attack and defense, and the Petro tank on your back can explode just like with the welder. Brief aside: folks, this sucks. Can we all agree on how much this sucks? The whole exoskeleton thing is layered with No Fun Allowed. Look, who doesn't want to use an industrial drill to turn some Psychonauts into Aberrant tartare? gently caress, I even took the breaching auger in Deathwatch as a Tactical Marine despite it being a terrible choice (much like playing DW) because that sounds cool as gently caress. Instead, only two of the armor modules serve any sort of purpose. The exciting attachments are put both behind use penalty gates and chances of getting instagibbed (by an rear end in a top hat GM, because he's the one animating the enemies). It's just loving dumb. Why do you have three different modules for clearing obstacles? Clearly, the Degenesis devs sough bALaNcE when they gave them different clearance rates. Oh, the drill does 10 damage/round to everything, but wouldn't it be more efficient to use shears to clear regular barricades instead of rubble? No, gently caress you. Nobody cares about engineering tasks in a game like this. Nobody is going to go out of their way to max out their rubble clearing efficiency. NOBODY CARES ABOUT DAMAGE TO OBSTACLES PER ROUND because who's going to be drilling rock in a firefight? “Oh, everyone is fighting for their life against these Palers we're trying to rob, but I'm gonna spend 8 turns in my super power armor suit and macro drill standing in place, drilling” God, this sucks so much. Radio Backpack It's a radio with 200 km reach. Forager Uplink A robust Bygone era computer that allows Foragers to access hBay and requisition ammo, food, and weapons (but not armor, vehicles, or add-ons). Gives Resources 6 when doing that. Probably of great interest to Chroniclers. Explosives Engineering-type boom. Limited to 2 per Soldier, 4 per Sapper. Does it imply that nobody else has access to industrial explosives? Binoculars Ancient stalker devices gives you +4D to INS+Perception “when watching from afar.” You pervert. Pathfinder 10-inch monitor, built-in compass, a receiver. Basically a Pip-Boy map, with pre-Eschaton maps updated with new markers (which are... like things that work like radio beacons given out to Hellvetics to mark spots and ?). +4D to Orienteering. You'd think it would be more useful for tracking looting spots by looking up locations of Bygone cities. Transponder Bracelet quote:The transmitter looks like a coiled cable. Spotters intertwine it with leather cords to camouflage it and wear it around their wrists or necks. From 20 paces away, a Pathfinder registers the transmitter signal and shows it as a dot on the map. In this way, Hellvetics can identify Spotters in the crowd and spare them when attacking. Garbage. Next time: This is the judgement of the righteous, scum!
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Aug 5, 2020 05:43
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The Gyro-class is the best thing to come out of GURPS Traveller. Not that GURPS Traveller is bad, it's just really good.
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Aug 5, 2020 07:43
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How did they manage to make a triple-barrelled shotgun/assault rifle boring?! also if you ignore all the mechanics, being able to have a huge arc welder, hydraulic shears and massive drill as part of a suit of power armor sounds cool as gently caress. Like a repurposed industrial mech suit you're using to cleave spore monsters in half with. loving Degenesis.
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Aug 5, 2020 08:30
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Juggalo Baby Coffin's Invisible Sunquote:Few people know this, but the thermometer has not two directions, but four. In addition to Hot and Cold there are Rungus and Blode. Many vislae feel twitchy in a room that is too Rungus, or sleepy in a room too Blode. You can counter extreme Rungus by burning snook-rope, which burns Blode with a Noops (the secret colour between brown and green) coloured flame. Snook-rope can only be purchased from the Snook-man, who appears to Vislae in the room between the toilet and the kitchen. is this how you do game design?
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Aug 5, 2020 08:35
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Dallbun posted:117: Beauty and Death Old DnD: women asking for help is a trap, sexy women asking for help is a supernatural trap, and if you see a supernatural lady naked, you die. I dunno why nerds have so much angst about girlfriends when DnD has spent decades telling them that women are just IEDs in lipstick.
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Aug 5, 2020 09:42
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"Oh she left, pick up Dave's corpse and let's go pawn her bathrobe" is the most murderhobo d&d thing.
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Aug 5, 2020 11:00
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In a world depopulated by mass die-off or blindness of talented artists trying to draw nymphs from real life reference, man who can draw stick figure with tits is king of erotica.
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Aug 5, 2020 11:13
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JcDent posted:Old DnD: women asking for help is a trap, sexy women asking for help is a supernatural trap, and if you see a supernatural lady naked, you die. 
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Aug 5, 2020 13:08
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Juggalo Baby Coffin's Invisible Sun I couldn't tell if this was an actual quote from the game or not so yes. Invisible Sun is an entire RPG of Bad Gaiman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cK-8jnub5Q
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Aug 5, 2020 13:16
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Parents who are concerned about their children’s strange pastimes can get a taste of an ACTUAL GAMING SESSION by perusing The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 28: The Deck of City Encounters (The card said the NPC had blue eyes, but I decided I wanted grey eyes.) 136: To Enter the City The PCs need to enter a large city. It has two gates. There’s a long line. People who are being refused entry are setting up camp at the side of the road. When they get to the front, they’re told entry fees are 500 gp per person and 250 gp per mount! Also, weapons need to be checked, for a fee of 10 times their price. Hahaha what. Obviously the guards are angling for a bribe, and bribery is the solution. Sure, sounds good. Give the PCs a moment to get upset if they don’t get what’s going on. I can also imagine some lawful-stupid paladin PC insisting that they actually pay the stated charges, and the guards freaking out at such a breach in decorum. Keep. 137: Party On! A pub inside an inn. A bunch of boisterous, rude off-duty city guards come in, at which point other locals quietly leave. One of the men challenges a PC to a game of some kind, or harasses a female PC, and reacts violently if rejected. After the inevitable fight, another city guard patrol will come by, pick them up, apologize, and pay for the damages. Not an unrealistic encounter (down to the men not really facing any consequences), but is that fun for anybody to play? Pass. 138: Forced to Fight I can already tell from the title that this is not going to be my favorite card. The PCs enter a city where the authorities and guards are super suspicious and distrustful. The PCs will be watched, their rooms searched (but not stolen from) while they’re out, etc. The common people seem friendlier, but trust their peace-keeping force because there was “lawlessness” before they were instituted. But then one night guards kick in the door to the PCs’ room and try to rough them up. For unclear reasons. Even the card says so. More guards will arrive, an angry mob will gather, and the PCs will be forced to “make a quick exit out of town.” You know, if they don’t decide to go down swinging and see how many level 4 fighter guards they can take with them. I don’t want cards to have a highly-specific setup, but I do want them to have enough information that I understand why things are happening. Pass. 139: Deja Vu, Deja Vu “The PCs notice the inhabitants of the town seem to have a strange sense of humor. As they travel down the street. townspeople point and laugh at them.” Honestly, even I’m not sure why they’re getting laughed at, and I’m the DM who read the card. Maybe they’re laughing… preemptively? Because they know these strangers are going to be pranked? In this town, the PCs keep having weird incidents where they talk to someone (like an innkeeper or “serving wench”), then that person leaves the room, comes back in, and acts like they never had the conversation. The townsfolk laugh at them when this happens. Eventually the sherriff will explain that they’re being the butt of jokes from “two local dopplegangers who are practical jokers.” Is this the same town with the mimic bouncer from Set 1? That was cooler, though. This is just some weird set-up for a punchline that falls flat. I guess it’s intriguing to see some “out” doppelgangers in a community? I guess? Jury? 140: Bulls, Bulls Everywhere The PCs are in “a strange town with narrow, winding streets” that’s decked out for a festival. There’s music and stuff coming from the town square, but the streets on the way are practically deserted, the doors shuttered, etc. It’s because it’s a “running of the bulls,” and the PCs going to run straight into a bunch of young men followed by a herd of angry bulls running through the streets. This is implicitly very dangerous, but the card doesn't give any suggestions about saving throws, damage, etc., just the statblock for 25 bulls, like you're going to fight them or something. Umm… local festivals are good flavor, but is this interesting gameplay? I guess it’s fine if I don’t play it as too much of a “gotcha, now you’re trampled to death,” but, let anyone who throws themselves to the side escape with mere scrapes. Sure. Keep. 141: Hanging Tree The PCs wander into a public hanging, attended by most of the town’s citizens and guards. But the one being executed is… one of the PCs’ old friends! Accused of theft from “a prominent local person”! If the PCs want to intervene peacefully, they might be able to if they “pay for the items stolen (were they not retrieved?), pay a substantial fine and take charge of the prisoner.” If they want to intervene non-peacefully, I’m sure they can figure something out. Turns out the friend is a doppleganger, though. It’ll reveal that to the PCs, thank them, and leave. Who is the prominent local person? What did this friend steal and how much was it worth? Why is a doppleganger impersonating this one specific person and using that identity to steal stuff? It’s all so fuzzy! Definitely needs to be heavily fleshed out, if it’s used at all. Pass.
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Aug 5, 2020 14:58
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Juggalo Baby Coffin's Invisible Sun You forgot that the cat-dream coins are shaped like stellated polyhedra.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:00
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