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Considering cats, a cat's most vicious dream would sure be something.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:02
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The whole "currency that contains thoughts and ideas" thing is an interesting concept that could be explored so much more. Like if you hoard money too long, do the ideas start infiltrating your own mind? Could you induce psychic visions by meditating in a bank vault? Or do you risk amnesia because the money absorbs your own thoughts? Can you generate money by thinking? But it doesn't seem to be developed past that throwaway mention of magical child labor.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:09
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SerialKilldeer posted:The whole "currency that contains thoughts and ideas" thing is an interesting concept that could be explored so much more. Like if you hoard money too long, do the ideas start infiltrating your own mind? Could you induce psychic visions by meditating in a bank vault? Or do you risk amnesia because the money absorbs your own thoughts? Can you generate money by thinking? But it doesn't seem to be developed past that throwaway mention of magical child labor.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:22
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I feel like Deja Vu would have been more interesting as the opposite; that these two doppelgangers are just following them around and constantly swapping to strangers but continuing on as if they knew them instead of person they were talking to randomly pretends to forget the conversation. Still kind of eh though.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:28
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SerialKilldeer posted:You forgot that the cat-dream coins are shaped like stellated polyhedra. Stellated polyhedra would be more convienent than spheres, because they don't roll as well. So it's gotta be something more impractical, like mucubes.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:32
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Ratoslov posted:Stellated polyhedra would be more convienent than spheres, because they don't roll as well. So it's gotta be something more impractical, like mucubes. Dice but you have to roll them when you spend them to determine their value at that moment.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:34
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I kind of like the idea of Deja Vu at least as far as a town having doppelgangers that they're pretty chill with.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:41
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I could have fun with the doppelganger prank town and I could buy that a small town in the middle of nowhere having a game whenever strangers arrive and that there being at least two doppelgangers who got tired of the pointless rear end in a top hat way of life. The challenge is to keep the players from escalating things.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:42
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Mors Rattus posted:Dice but you have to roll them when you spend them to determine their value at that moment. I’m pretty sure several eurogames use that concept.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:54
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Tibalt posted:Going on adventures is very rewarding, because XP = GP. Literally, when you get back to town you contemplate the fight with the goblins and begin extruding gold coins. As presented here!
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Aug 5, 2020 15:54
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A shower thought last night was that he should have made the Nightside of Indigo be “deliberate fiction” instead of “uncomfortable truth” and straight up embedded NTYE in Invisible Sun. It’d even explain the Fictive Form spell.
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Aug 5, 2020 16:51
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I don't think a town where they have doppelgangers as normal members of society is worth wasting everyone's time with a situation where PC intervention can only make it worse in boring ways. I'd not pass on that one, especially because there are so many more interesting things a place peacefully integrating magical monsters could do with it. Make it a major location and give it some thought IMO.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:22
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I like the idea of a community where some human-intelligence monsters have just settled down and are accepted by the population at large despite being shapeshifters or looking a bit weird or whatever. It feels like something you would expect to see in a D&D setting from time to time.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:53
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Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Stormcast Eternals Chambermage The Stormcast of the Sacrosanct Chambers are the most closely tied to the magic of the Celestial realm and the storm. They are weather mages and wielders of starlight and comets, and their research has helped developed powerful storm-fueled artillery. Their main work, though, is trying to repair the flaws of the Reforging, reducing the risks involved and keeping the Stormcast from losing themselves. The worst possible scenario, which they work hard to avoid, is the escape of a Stormcast soul from the anvil, confused and broken. These discorporated souls become lightning gheists, maddened storm-things that cause havoc wherever they go in their confusion and pain. The Sacrosanct mages have the task of recapturing the lightning gheists; when they succeed, they are often able to bring them home to finish Reforging. However, it is not always possible to do, and when they can't, the Sacrosanct must imprison or end the existence of the gheist, though they mourn doing it. The leaders of these magical warriors are the Lords-Arcanum, the greatest mages Sigmar could find from among the dead of the Mortal Realms and even the World That Was - it's heavily implied that the Lord-Arcanum of the Grave Brethren, a Chamber of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, was a major Gold Wizard in the Empire. The Lords-Arcanum command the Knights-Incantor, who wield lightning magic in the field in all kinds of ways. Beneath them are the warriors of the Chambers, who are not actually wizards directly. Instead, their mystical power is channeled through their bodies and sigmarite gear, charging them with Celestial power, usually in the form of lightning. The Extremis Chambers are the smallest and rarest in the Stormhosts. While even the average Stormcast is greater than any single mortal warrior, they face forces equally great and powerful. To deal with these foes, the Extremis learn to fight as the storm itself. They move in two formations, to break the enemy line and then tear the survivors to shreads. These are the Dracothian Guard, Stormcast mounted on powerful Dracoths. The Dracoths are guarded by Sigmar's aura, protecting them from attack before they strike and allowing these star-dragons and their riders to fight at top strength no matter what. They lead with the Lightning Echelon, waves of Fulminators and Tempestors with heavy lances and crossbows. Once they strike, the axe- and hammer-wielding Desolators and Concussors of the Thunderwave Echelon charge in to clean up. The most powerful members of the Extremis Chambers, however, ride flying Stardrakes, huge dragons that breathe crackling lightning and smash apart their foes. Their riders are no less terrifying, but smaller. Sigmar and Dracothion worked together in developing the Extremis Chambers, basing the program on their own unique bond of friendship. They were intended to be the counter to Greater Daemons, serving as unstoppable vanguards and siegebreakers. Sigmar intended each Stormhost to have an Extremis Chamber at least, but their formation was frequently delayed by the fact that the bonds between star-beast and Stormcast took a lot of time to form. When the war to reclaim the Mortal Realms began, not even one Extremis Chamber was ready to be fielded. Convincing the Dracoths and Stardrakes to swear loyalty and friendship to their riders was even harder than Sigmar's original task of creating the Stormcast. Part of the issue was that these children of Dracothion, prior to Age of Chaos, were immortal - their spirits were reborn in the stars in a process that inspired the Reforging. Chaos' growth disrupted this natural cycle, and the dragons were slowly dying out. Dracothion foresaw in the stars that his children would be destroyed by Archaon, if nothing was done...and that the Extremis Chambers might help save them. However, his obsession with Chaos meant the Stellar Dragon never foresaw the rise of Nagash and the Necroquake - all of his interpretations of his disastrous visions were focused on the Dark Gods. He did, however, help speed the bonding process by lending Sigmar some of his own celestial energies, fueling the connection between his children and Sigmar's chosen. The first Extremis Chamber, the Hammers Draconis in the Hammers of Sigmar Stormhost, were devastating, and were swiftly followed by the Blackbolts in the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, the Hammerclaws (another Hammers of Sigmar Chamber) and the Chamber Resplendent of the Hallowed Knights. Other notable Extremis Chambers include the Storm Draks of the Tempest Lords, who tore apart Khorne's infamous Skullfort, and the Daughters Draconia, who ended the threat of Chaos Gargants in the Eversprawl.  While Dracoths and Stardrakes look to be mere savage beasts, they are the children of the godbeast Dracothion, a noble and eager species empowered by Celestial magic and a desire to fight Chaos. Their progenitor is a living constellation, and across the Mortal Realms, astronomers have been able to note the movements of the Great Drake in the night sky to help guide their prognostications. The Stardrakes were born of meteor showers when he shifted, falling stars granted powerful life. They resemble the true dragons of the Old World, but the celestial power and lightning energies that are part of their flesh and bones mark them as something different and new. They require meat to survive, but also starlight to empower their magical natures. In their natural state, they largely hunt monsters of the high mountains for food. They have an innate hatred of Chaos, and attack any Chaos-corrupted creature they find, but will never eat corrupted meat. Dracoths are smaller creatures, without wings, but they are ferocious, clever and powerful. Each night, their bodies absorb the energies of the stars above, which they channel into bolts of lightning they can spit. Like their larger cousins, they hate Chaos, but they are pack hunters rather than solitary predators. They are mainly found in the wilds of Azyr, and are rarely seen outside it. It isn't clear to mortal scholars how Dracoths are related to Stardrakes. Some believe the Dracoths are distant descendants of the original Stardrakes, evolved to be smaller pack hunters without wings. Others say they are the hatchling form of adult Stardrakes, who will some day return to the stars to undergo a transformation to their adult form. In either case, both Dracoths and Stardrakes do not die in the same way other creatures do, being reborn as stars in the sky. They fall once more from the breath of Dracothion...at least, when the aether they die in is not Chaos tainted. These days, Chaos is common enough that many souls of dead Dracoth and Stardrakes become trapped indefinitely. Both species are very intelligent and able to easily learn mortal tongues. They can't speak them, though, and only communicate in their own crackling language. Before now, they preferred to avoid dealing with mortal races, appearing only when they felt a call to fight Chaos and then leaving as quickly as they came. Dracothion convinced his children to work with Sigmar, though even he could only convince them to bond with those they found worthy. Lord-Celestant Vandus Hammerhand of the Hammers of Sigmar was the first Stormcast to bond with a Dracoth, but since then, there have been hundreds. Perhaps the most famous Stardrake-rider, though, is Lord-Celestant Imperius, who in life was a human emperor who gave up his rule and authority to fight Chaos, only to be betrayed by his brother. In Reforging, he bonded with the Stardrake Loxia, whom he rode into battle against the daemonic Bloodthirst Kul'rhex. Kul'rhex mortally wounded Loxia, but was destroyed in exchange. Imperius' fury over the death of his beloved partner led him and the Hammers Draconis to tear through the Spined Hydras, liberate the mountains of Yjinxia and reclaim the Balefire All-gate, where Imperius finally died as he defeated the daemon Skarbrand, which proved critical to the battle. It is unclear if either Imperius or Loxia returned to life after. Next time: The Rangers of Sigmar
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Aug 5, 2020 18:01
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PurpleXVI posted:I like the idea of a community where some human-intelligence monsters have just settled down and are accepted by the population at large despite being shapeshifters or looking a bit weird or whatever. It feels like something you would expect to see in a D&D setting from time to time. In Eberron, this is the premise of the whole nation of Droaam.
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Aug 5, 2020 18:03
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PurpleXVI posted:I like the idea of a community where some human-intelligence monsters have just settled down and are accepted by the population at large despite being shapeshifters or looking a bit weird or whatever. It feels like something you would expect to see in a D&D setting from time to time. Honestly it is the kind of thing you should expect to see frequently, as soon as you decide that human-intelligence "monsters" are both relatively common (unlike say Greek Myths where they are all one-off or few-off cursed people, results of Zeus being an awful sex predator, etc) and relatively geographically proximate. Pre-modern states generally tend to incorporate people, especially people with useful skills. This isn't always peaceful and often comes with problematic power imbalances, but it doesn't always, and those sorts of things can be interesting, too. LOTR itself has several areas that are multiethnic, feature different groups living nearby, etc., like the Lonely Mountain/Dale situation, or Bree with its mixed human and hobbit population, and probably some more that we don't hear about, like whatever's going on around the Grey Havens. One of the worst things about D&D is that you end up with all these unconvincing ethnic enclaves and most folks shaking out into purely species/race groups even though that doesn't really make much sense. Things like a human state surrounding a highly distinct elven woods seem like they should be short-term situations - over multiple generations they're going to develop really close cultural and political ties. And of course we have lots of evidence that people migrated pretty frequently and over long distances even in pre-modern times. So the idea that it'd be unheard of to have some centaurs in your city or whatever is both less realistic and less interesting than it could be. So bring on the doppelganger townsfolk, but like, as a thing that just happens, IMO.
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Aug 5, 2020 18:43
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 Conclusions  Format Nicely laid out, as expected for a GURPS book. This book is FULL of text; nearly 200,000 words in this thing. We’re talking three columns on every page in like 10-point text plus sidebars and art. But as much room as all of this takes up, it’s still relatively easy to follow. Very attractive, too, the symmetry is aesthetically pleasing. The columns aren’t always consistent in how they end before sections and the text desperately needs copy editing at a couple points, but altogether a solid A-. Art They got the same artist in that does the art for most major GURPS books and… I’ve described their style at “unnerving”, I believe, and I still hold that to be the case. There is something unpleasant about how they draw faces; they all look weathered and eerily similar. But outside of that they do a fairly competent job of illustrating the surrounding text and giving everything a passable aesthetic basis. Except for spaceships and planets; either the artist or the editors knew drawing those was one of their strengths and commissioned a billion of them. Since this is Traveller, all those ships and planets are appropriate and look excellent (except when the action in space combat gets too frantic and a bit confusing). All in all, solid B+.  Writing I’ve written about it before and stick to my guns on it: this book is fantastically written. In the main text, it strikes the difficult balance between evocative language and useful information better than any book I’ve reviewed so far, and that’s a high bar to pass. I especially love the quotes peppered in at the start of subsections and in sidebars; they do have only two voices between them (free trader and anti-Vilani) despite being attributed to all sorts of people, but they still feel appropriate and bolster the text they support. Mechanics-wise, the writing is as competent as GURPS writing always is, so the book doesn’t get points for that. Easy A anyway. Mechanics I’ve come to understand GURPS character point values have inflated a bit over the years, so I’m less bothered by it now then I was when I covered the Characters chapter. I will say it’s a lot more expensive to build certain archetypes than others – engineers especially need all kinds of skills– but that’s something troupe play or careful coordination can handle. I’ll also complain about how free trader campaigns can be frustrating if players can’t agree on where to go, but given how successful this model seems to be when it comes to RPGs, I’m probably missing something. I have a lot of issues with campaign structures as the book sets them out, actually. Why all the emphasis on exploration campaigns? I feel that just doesn’t jibe with how the rest of the book focuses its attentions on the Interstellar Wars themselves. Why are there planetary fewer trade classes than in most versions of Traveller? How much of the background are players expected to know? Are we supposed to just draft out all the setting NPCs ourselves or crib from the biographies or characters sections? Lots of little nitpicks that I feel the book could have better addressed. But the whole thing is solid and consistent and a lot of these issues may just go away during play, so I’ll give it a B.  Setting The reason I’m here and probably the reason you’re here, too. I can’t think of anything quite like the Vilani Imperium in another game. That mixture of high technology and stagnation doesn’t show up anywhere except 40k, but the Ziru Sirka lacks all the poo poo that clings to that setting. Ancient, decaying empires challenged by rising powers are a dime a dozen, but both sides being human is pretty rare. Very few games explore what happens when two very different cultures peacefully fuse, and while I wish this book had gone further into how that works, it did open new ground that I’d love to see elsewhere. It’s nice, you know? But the setting does have its problems under the surface. The distance between what the book tells us about the Terran Confederation and how it might actually work is a great place to start. We are assured, repeatedly, that the Confederation is accepting and benevolent, a bastion of individuality and freedom in a galaxy dominated by conformism and dictatorship. But then you look at the details. The Confederation can be downright Orwellian at times; it monitors and moderates every news source its citizens read, it periodically overthrows member governments that don’t toe the line, and we never find out what kind of powers it actually has – the book implies it rules with a light hand, but all we know about how it interacts with member states is that the government’s built to keep them away from power and has the right to invade them. And yet the whole setting is predicated on the positive effects it has on the galaxy, effects often realistically critically examined in ways the government’s dark side just isn’t. There’s a sort of almost innocent optimism the book projects that the Terran Confederation couldn’t stay the good guys without.  That innocence permeates the whole book. While not everything is sunshine and roses, most of the real horrible military things in the book – atrocities and crimes against civilians, for example – are performed specifically by Vilani specifically because Vilani policy said it’s appropriate. The emphasis the book puts on Vilani traditionalism shifts the blame off them; “I was only following orders” becomes a justification and Vilani culture is placed at fault. Likewise, wars are almost always declared by individual Vilani intent on some political goal, absolving their followers of responsibility for planning and prosecuting the war. When it comes to actual war, the book presents it as clashes between militaries and nothing more. Almost every conquered Vilani world peacefully submits to Terran invaders, and none of the brutality occupations usually bring with them ever materialize. Likewise, commerce raiding is treated as a romantic option for Terrans trapped behind enemy lines that only hits the Vilani logistical structure, but that’s not how commerce raiding works; it hits all sorts of commercial enterprises behind enemy lines – including civilian ones. After all, they’re the juiciest targets. Did you know the Vikings spend more time running trade missions than raiding settlements? I bet you didn’t, because one of those things left a far louder legacy. The book portrays every aspect of the Wars themselves in ways that build that narrative of Terran liberators bringing a higher form of civilization to receptive Vilani and oh man does that have awkward echoes. You even get a comparison of past Vilani glories and conquests with their modern indolence, something a lot of colonial empires trotted out. I’m a historian, folks. Imperialism is never this clean. This triumphant narrative of victory and growth smacks uncomfortably of something much realer and darker. Terran culture is presented as manifestly superior, too. Even as the book makes the repeated point that the Vilani have plenty going for them and as much as the book tries to play up the precariousness of the Terran position, you get the sense the Interstellar Wars were destined to end as they did. After all, apparently Vilani universally embraced Terran culture whenever they ran into it and clamored to overthrow their oppressive rulers. Meanwhile, of all the names of Confederation leaders and important figures, exactly 2 are identified as assimilated Vilani and neither of them have much power; as much noise as it makes about Terran values those only partially seem to apply to Vilani. And that’s leaving the fact that almost every major Terran figure in the book is male and either European, Japanese, or Arabian, with any exceptions to one side made up on the other. Yeah I know, those contradictions toward the Confederation apart but [i] the book doesn’t say that[/i[. It ends at the final peace treaty and cuts off abruptly. You’d be forgiven for thinking this period was a prelude to a bright new era instead of the prelude to disaster it really was. It almost sounds like something you’d imagine a Solomani propaganda corps might pump out.  Conclusion And yet I still like this book. I like it a lot less than when I started the review, definitely; the more I think about it the more the setting looks like a giant piece of imperialism apologia. Every time I think of something from the book that might counteract that idea, I can think up some equivalent a colonial empire came up with to justify itself. But, well, there’s that innocence beneath it, the sort of deep optimism that characterized the Golden Age of Science Fiction Traveller draws from. As long as you are willing to accept that optimism, the setting’s sharp edges slip away. You don’t HAVE to focus on the worst parts of the setting; you can run free trader campaigns, use the exploration outline, engage in ship-to-ship combat, whatever. This book is loaded down with subsystems you can easily lift and transfer the other settings and ways to just fly around and have strange adventures. It I just wish it didn’t make me feel dirty sometimes.  Like I said, I like this book. I don’t think it was in any way malicious, there’s a lot to play with here, and it’s entirely possible to skim out the worst of the setting’s implications. It’s a fine game. I think I might take a short break now, but I do plan on hitting up Ring of Fire in a bit. First, though, I want to take a look at something far, far different: 
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Aug 5, 2020 19:21
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After chewing on all the Invisible Sun bunk about "The two secret magic directions" I realized that was sort of what was happening in one of the stories in nWoD's Horror Identification Guide. That story was much better.
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Aug 5, 2020 23:17
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Tsilkani posted:Is Monte Cook trying to usurp John Wick as the Godwalker of Smug Game Design? What the gently caress is going on here? Hey, now, don't bang on John Wick. I heard that one time at Gencon, he once killed three rules lawyers with a pencil. A loving pencil.
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Aug 5, 2020 23:49
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Everyone posted:Hey, now, don't bang on John Wick. I heard that one time at Gencon, he once killed three rules lawyers with a pencil. A loving pencil.  Bravo.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:14
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Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Stormcast Eternals They Call Me Strider The Rangers of the Vanguard Auxiliary Chambers are Sigmar's scouts, spies and independent agents. They hunt out weaknesses in the foes of the Grand Order Alliance, and they are often also the best equipped to exploit and target those weaknesses. The Rangers are expert trackers all, stealthy hunters who excel at picking off enemy targets and harrying them on the move or ambushing them. Theirs is a war of cunning and attrition, avoiding the enemy's strength to target their supply lines and rookies. Despite this, each is no less skilled in actual battle than any other Stormcast. They have been operating in the field since the beginning of Sigmar's Tempest, particularly the Vanguard-Hunters and Vanguard-Raptors, who often serve in the gathered forces of the Stormcast as aerial assault troops under the Lords-Aquilor, or the Vanguard-Palladors that serve as cavalry forces atop their Gryph-chargers. The Rangers favor mobility and fluidity in their tactics, and they are rarely found in the Stormkeeps or the fortresses of Sigmaron in Azyr, and they rarely attend strategic war councils unless specifically requested. Instead, their home is the wild lands, where they hunt for shards of civilization to protect and link into the greater network of Order or threats to note for elimination. They operate many small lodges across the Mortal Realms, more way stations and shrines than any fortified position, and use these to go to ground and avoid enemy detection when needed. Trickery, preparation and stealth are their watchwords, but they are not assassins. They are ambushers, yes, but when they attack it is with full force, raining the rage of the storm down on their enemies, then pulling back quickly to force the foe to overreach and reveal their weakness. They are frequently found freeing slaves of Chaos bands, and the tribes that serve the Dark Gods have developed many superstitious legends about their abilities, as they seem to strike from nowhere and then vanish just as quickly. Of all Stormcast, the Rangers tend to be the closest and most connected to the mortal people around them, as they spend so much time among humans and other mortal souls rather than surrounded by Stormhosts. Regardless of type of Chamber, however, the Stormcast form true meritocracies. Each Stormhost is designed to be populated by likeminded Stormcast, and they are trained to view each other as brothers and sisters, to avoid the political infighting common to many mortal armies - at least within their own Stormhost. They are, after all, the bastion against Chaos, the great heroes of humanity reborn to defend their descendants once more. Superiors are taught to listen to their subordinates and avoid bias when their expertise is greater, and Stormcast that show strong intellect, spiritual strength and leadership skills are chosen to be elevated in rank, often coinciding with their next Reforging. This allows them to be transformed spiritually as well as elevated in rank, granting them greater access to Sigmar's power...though it does mean high-ranking Stormcast often have inhuman characteristics that make them offputting to be around. These promoted Stormcast often have a bit more trouble integrating into their units than those forged to lead to begin with, but it rarely lasts long - their new subordinates just have to get used to the newcomer. Stormcast leadership is from the front. Especially with their effective immortality, there are few Stormcast commanders that are happy to sit back while their men and women take all the risks. The Lords of the Storm is the general name for battlefield leaders, and most Stormcast leadership counts. They fight as heroes among their units, fearlessly offering up their bodies and souls over and over to ensure victory comes to their forces and their subordinates do not suffer needlessly. This means that the Lords of the Storm are typically the most frequently Reforged Stormcast, making them grow ever closer to the elemental ideal their Stormhost strives for...but also the least human. The lords of the Hallowed Knights, for example, often glow from within with a golden and holy light, stronger with each self-sacrifice, until it shines through their armor's joints. The Knights Excelsior, whose hate of Chaos is phenomenal, often grow more strict and black-and-white in how they view good and evil, and some say they become able to perceive evil intent. The leaders of the vengeful Celestial Vindicators find their rage forming a blue, fiery aura around them as they charge, and it's said that Lord-Celestant Ossiach Vanderghule of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer is always surrounded by amethyst wisps that resemble tiny homunculi or spectres, with a new one forming each time he is Reforged. Some of these leaders grow colder and more analytical as their minds diverge from human standard, while others embrace the traditions they followed in life as an emotional anchor, celebrating mortal indulgences and partying hard to remind themselves of what mortality was like.  Next time: The famous Stormhosts.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:28
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Ran A Wizard in Esoteric Enterprises. I thought about running it in Delta Green, but the investigative elements would have taken a lot of legwork to build out into something worth the players' time. Plus my EE campaign already had an unresolved plot element involving a powerful magic user who transformed himself into something inhuman. It was an epilogue game on an off-day, so I only had two players. Both were decently tough, with weapons, magic items, and NPC gangsters to back them up. I was interested to see how both the players' power level and the different setting assumptions (availability of gas masks, automatic weapons, flamethrowers and explosives) would affect the difficulty of the dungeon. While they were able to trivialize several of the challenges, they never felt safe or at-ease. Ultimately they lost one player character and one NPC follower to the Wizardling fight at the end, after the group got split up by the revolving door puzzle. Like in Night's run, we had a character whose abilities allowed her to ignore the Wizard's instant kill condition. With a maxed out stealth score, she was able to evade detection by the Wizard while alone, provided she didn't draw attention to herself. This ended up saving her life after the team got separated. Also like in Night's run, there were a couple places where the module could have offered more useful detail. There are a bunch of occasions where the text says the Wizard punishes the characters, or won't allow something to happen. But there's no explanation for how he does this while he's slurping around in the vents, watching them gently caress up his eggs. I decided he would shoot spores out of the vents at them (which inflicts one of six debilitating "curses"), but that the players could drive him back with suppressing fire if they were prepared. The grotesque elements really hit home, even though the players should have been desensitized by crawling through an entire office building filled with gore at the climax of the campaign. I left the abyss in, but had the NPCs who gave the players the job warn the players not to enter the "borderworld" they detected inside the tower. I think the abyss is fine tonally, but I didn't want the players chewing up our four hour session rolling around in it - unless they made a conscious decision to do so. They stayed far away from it and never went in. I rarely run published modules for RPGs, but this one was pretty good. It's a solid recommend. Play report here if anyone's interested. Part One Part Two mellonbread fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Aug 6, 2020 |
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Aug 6, 2020 01:03
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JcDent posted:
A question is why would it be 5.56mm? First, it's hundreds of years into a post-apocalyptic future and you'd expect things might change a bit to where subcalibers might no longer be effective weapons or be hard-to-produce. Secondly, Switzerland, where the Hellvetics descended from, don't use 5.56mm NATO, they use 5.6mm Gewehrpatrone 90, which is 5.56mm NATO, but it's Swiss-made.
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Aug 6, 2020 03:16
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Ultiville posted:And of course we have lots of evidence that people migrated pretty frequently and over long distances even in pre-modern times. So the idea that it'd be unheard of to have some centaurs in your city or whatever is both less realistic and less interesting than it could be. So bring on the doppelganger townsfolk, but like, as a thing that just happens, IMO. Elizabeth Moon's Paksennarion series gets a certain amount of flak for just being someone's D&D campaign down to the Village of Hommlet and being able to follow Paks as she levels up as paladin and gains abilities. But it's a well-thought out D&D novelization, down to, you guessed it, the deep ties between the elves and their human neighbors that are major plot points in the series. It's not as original as her science fiction (especially Remnant Population) but they're solid books that hold up, and they're better than almost all of the licensed D&D novels.
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Aug 6, 2020 03:24
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mellonbread posted:Play report here if anyone's interested. The Spinning Doors room is 100% the most dangerous room in the module, for all the reasons you go into here. The party just all grabbing onto one another and charging like hell for the nearest door immediately the second it started saved them a lot of trouble in my run. I'm glad to read a different run through in a different system! It was neat.
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Aug 6, 2020 03:35
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Cooked Auto posted:
A low-hanging fruits go, that one was practically on the ground.
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Aug 6, 2020 14:17
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The population of your average fantasy city is 75% human, 10% halfling, 8% dwarf, 5% elf, and 2% people from The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 28: The Deck of Continuing City Encounters 142: Save a Friend There’s a confrontation going on as the PCs approach an inn, with a group of men preparing to lynch another… and the victim is an old friend of one of the PCs! The crime is cheating at cards, for a large amount of money. Which the friend is implicitly unable to return, though the card doesn’t go into the details about that. It’s not a bad intro, but I don’t know if I want it to happen randomly. Because if you don’t have a plot hook ready for a PC’s crappy hustler friend to try to drag them into, what’s the point? It’d just be “OK nice to see you again bye.” For that reason, pass for my random encounter deck purposes. 143: Out Late One Night The PCs are visiting an elven town with good elven ale and entertainment. However, at 10:00, they’re rounded up for breaking curfew, put in jail for the night, and given a fine the next day. The curfew applies to all minors, meaning, anyone less than 100 years old. The law is cute, the execution is kind of dumb. I mean, nobody would have warned them about this? There’s a 10:00 curfew for minors but they’re cool with minors running around with swords and getting drunk? Keep, but have the PCs informed about the local laws when they arrive. It could be amusing for the party dwarf or whoever to have to be everyone’s chaperone. 144: Shopping Trip In a busy marketplace, the PCs are passing by a weaponsmith’s when a burly, heavily-armored warrior comes up to them and starts swinging around his unusually-designed bastard sword, speaking in an unknown language that sounds like “guttural gibberish”. He is not actually attacking, he is a weapons fanatic who is very excited to show off his newest acquisition to the party’s warriors. Hmm. I’m not sure why he’s confidently speaking his language in a region where people have never even heard it before. Shouldn’t he be speaking halting Common if he’s a beginning CSL learner? I dunno. Seems a little contrived, and a little “gotcha” if the PCs accidentally murder an innocent man. Then again, he is a man who swings large swords around in busy marketplaces, so maybe “innocent” isn’t the right word. Eh. Keep but have him clearly not be attacking, and let the party make the acquaintance of this F9 weapons nerd. “Doesn’t talk much” and “enthusiastic about one specific thing” is exactly the correct amount of personality for a D&D henchman. P.S. The guy’s stat block lists his damage as “Damage by weapon (bastard sword).” That is where you put the damage for the bastard sword. That is the point of the stat block. 145: Mage vs. Mage, Part 1 of 2 The PCs have gained treasure and accompanying fame from their adventuring exploits. A local wizard named Mundin (W10) comes to speak to them in private. He says that he knows they’ve returned from a dungeon, and asks them to sell him a certain (apparently nonmagical) item they’ve brought back from it. He offers 10 times its price. He claims to need it to complete spell research, and he’ll badger them until they agree. PCs being the most contrary beings imaginable, there’s no way they’ll actually agree to this. But the card-writer thinks they will, so let’s continue. 146: Mage vs. Mage, Part 2 of 2 The PCs sold Mundin the item. Let’s take that as read. A “middle-aged elf” named Therdu (W10) accosts the PCs and wants to know what happened with Mundin. If they tell him he gets upset at them for selling him “the final component for the spell,” and says he would have paid twice what Mundin did. “Therdu tells the PCs that the town and the surrounding territory is now in grave danger, as Mundin will use the spell to gain control over the region and spread his evil.” Okaaaaay. What spell is this? No detail at all? Okay then. Anyway he’ll try to convince the PCs to recover the component, including offering to pay them, of course. He’s desperate and stuff. This encounter badly needs some other kind of twist. Like, neither Mundin nor Therdu are cosmically evil, but are both rear end in a top hat rivals trying to one-up each other on some bit of incredibly niche, geeky wizardry that nobody else would care about. I can’t quite decide what would be funniest, though. As the card is, pass.
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Aug 6, 2020 15:21
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Everyone posted:A low-hanging fruits go, that one was practically on the ground. Maybe, but still a pretty good fruit either way.
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Aug 6, 2020 15:22
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I honestly enjoy the Elf Curfew idea, with a few edits, but maybe have it generally as "you're too young for that, sport." and have the elves put the human PC's in elf kindergarden while they ask around to figure out where their parents are, of course temporarily confiscating the highly dangerous items they're carrying around like weapons, spellbooks, potions, etc. It could either be played as a temporary misunderstanding OR as the players actively needing to work to break out.
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Aug 6, 2020 16:19
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Dallbun posted:This encounter badly needs some other kind of twist. Like, neither Mundin nor Therdu are cosmically evil, but are both rear end in a top hat rivals trying to one-up each other on some bit of incredibly niche, geeky wizardry that nobody else would care about. I can’t quite decide what would be funniest, though. As the card is, pass. Both wizards are actually deluded commoners with no magical ability whatsoever, GM's challenge is to drop small hints here and there and wait for the players to figure this out. 
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Aug 6, 2020 17:06
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HOW TO HOST A DUNGEON - PART 1: THE PRIMORDIAL AGE Hey FATAL and Friends, let’s read How to Host a Dungeon, the Solo Game of Dungeon Creation, by Tony Dowler. This is the second edition of the game, and I knew nothing about it when I bought it, other than it was recommended by Falconier111 and mllaneza in this thread. How to Host a Dungeon, Page 1 posted:How to Host a Dungeon is a solo game of procedural dungeon creation. It’s a game, but it’s also a pastime. How to Host a Dungeon is a game of creating maps, stories, and worlds. Since it’s a solo game, there’s really no wrong way to play. THIS REVIEW Here’s how this review is going to work. We’ll go through creating a single dungeon step, from the Primordial Age, through the Ages of Civilization, Monsters and Villainy. We’ll evaluate how interesting and fun each stage is to play, and whether the end result is the rich narrative promised by the text. Then I’ll create a couple more dungeons alongside our first example. I’ll just show the end results of those, to see how they compare. Finally, I’ll go beyond the parameters set by the game, and try to spin one of the dungeons we create into a map I can use in an RPG. I’ll run a couple sessions of that and see how it stacks up. WHAT YOU GET I bought a PDF of the rulebook and ordered print-on-demand versions of the cards and civilization sheets that you use to populate the dungeon. The rules are laid out in your usual double column format, with plenty of illustrations and tables.  An Alien city  A Deep Elf mining colony. Note the image has occluded the page header in the upper left.  Demonic architecture There are typos on both the cards and the rules text, but nothing that affects usability. I have no complaints about the printing of the cards, but the civilization sheets are a little disappointing. They have the lore of the civilization on one side, and a repeating pattern on the other. In the rules text, every civilization gets two pages - a page of instructions for building their dungeon and a page of lore. I don’t understand why the author didn’t print the instructions on the civilization sheets as well. They’re already double sided, it’s not like it saves printing costs to omit the instructions. (We’ll inspect the cards more when we get to the Age of Monsters) PRIMORDIAL AGE We begin with a blank page, on which we scribe the basic template for our world. To get this template, we roll a D6 on a list of possible options.  We rolled the most basic option. That’s fine. 1 will be our surface, the others will be our underground layers. There’s also a table of world origins to roll on, if you’re interested in the world’s creation myth. Our world was created and exists in some kind of cosmic game. So it’s a Discworld episode. Next, the game gives us an option to roll for a Nexus. This is a bonus area that can have potential cascading effects on world gen later on. We roll and get a plague zone in layer 2. This will harm anyone who digs into it during subsequent phases. Now, we Populate the Strata by rolling on a series of tables. D6 to see what each strata is, and D10 on a separate table to get the specifics.
There are descriptive tables and options you can choose for your strata. Our full floor vein is a coal bed. Our connected caves are lava tubes but our giant tunnel was left by a massive boring worm in an age past. The magma lakes are surrounded by a desert of pure fused glass, while the water lake is almost glacially cold. The caves at the bottom of the map operate on a sulfur based ecology, fed by geothermal vents. The gems fell from space. Finally we roll for our surface. Two biomes, separated by a lake. Good thing we put a divot in the middle. We’ll toss a steppe on the left side and a forest on the right.  I swear this seemed like it was in-focus when I looked at it on my camera Unfortunately I’ve already done the next stage of worldgen, so I can’t take a better photo of the primordial world. Don’t worry though, the later pictures are much better and will still give you the lay of the land. Overall thoughts on the Primordial World: Dwarf Fortress this ain't. Still, the descriptive text and suggested details do just enough to make it interesting. And this section largely exists to set the stage for the next one, where the real game begins. Coming up next: the Age of Civilization.
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Aug 6, 2020 17:22
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Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Stormcast Eternals The Golden Boys  The first Stormhost to emerge from the Anvil of Apotheosis were the Hammers of Sigmar, also called the Golden Ones, the First to the Fray and Sigmar's Champions. They're your standard issue golden armor with blue highlights, and they have seen more battles than any other Stormhost. They serve as the model for all the other Stormhosts, having seized the Brimstone Peninsula from the forces of Korghos Khul, at the cost of the existence of their original Lord-Celestant, Jactos Goldenmane. They are rarely seen in the cities, however, as they are almost constantly moving to new fronts. Many see them as more angels than men, which isn't helped by their frequent deaths and Reforgings. They are more prone to rushing back into the field than other Stormhosts, especially their current Lord-Celestant, Vandus Hammerhand. Reforgings bring forth the power of the heavens in the Hammers. Their eyes and faces crackle with lightning, and they are plagued by starlit visions. When they are angry, some of them find celestial energies form around their fists. The frequency of Reforging means these signs are widespread among the Hammers, and that only fuels their reputation as inhuman, angelic warriors. They are also one of the largest Stormhosts, and they have the largest Extremis Chamber, having had the most time to bond with the Dracoths and Stardrakes. They are, however, more formal and rigid than other Stormhosts, with a stiffer and more military mindset, due to their job of being the prototypes. They also operate under an intense fear of failure, because they know they are built up as the greatest and brightest. If rumors spread of them not being equal to any task they are given, it may undermine the hopes of millions. The Hammers take on ever more impossible odds because they refuse to accept the possibility of failure...and while it often pays off, often isn't always. It's part of why they die so often. The Hammers of Sigmar officially operate out of Hammerhal and the first Stormkeep founded, but in general they don't tend to feel comfortable in cities. They are prone to ignoring politics and being rude to mortal rulers and nobility because they have too much work to do, and so many among mortal leadership would prefer they just stop meddling in mortal affairs beyond their work fighting outside. Several Hammers have even been assassinated by ambitious or corrupt rulers tired of having to talk to rude, moralizing supermen. Their true leader, even above the Lord-Celestant, is the Celestant-Prime, the very first of the Stormcast. He is practically a true demigod, the one that all of them strive to be like. It is possible that this is accelerating their growth into inhuman figures - the Celestant-Prime is by far the least human of the Stormcast.  The Hallowed Knights, fourth-founded Stormhost, are also called the Faithful, the Silver Saviors and the Soul Guardians. Their colors are silver and blue, and they are the most devoted to Sigmar's religious ideals and the protection of mortal lives. Even by Stormcast standards, they are a religious order as much if not more than a military one, with prayer, ritual and hymnal song so much a part of their existence that even Sigmar is occasionally uneasy with the fervor they hold for him. They take their nature as Sigmar's chosen to be a gift, and so they would do anything to prove worthy of it. They go to the most troubled battlefields, where the most danger lies, because they do not fear death or corruption. Not without cause, either. The Hallowed Knights have proven extremely able at fighting the forces of Nurgle, to the point that several have emerged from brief forays into the Realm of Chaos entirely uncorrupted. Not a single soul within the Hallowed Knights has ever been tainted by Chaos, and dark magic seems unable to hold on them, melting away from their armor like it was nothing. Many carry, sealed within small reliquaries, the remains of some horrible, foul monster they have slain - the bones of Blightkings or plague-thorns of Nurgle removed from the armor of those who returned from Nurgle's Garden. They reason that it proves their purity to be able to withstand the taint of such objects, and it helps immunize them to the dark magics of Chaos. It doesn't always work, of course. Some of the Knights are cursed, blighted or sickened by Nurgle's efforts despite their best hopes. However, the bodies of the Hallowed Knights are redolent with Azyrite energy, and these blights burn themselves out in a (horrifically painful) process of rot and rebirth. It leaves the body scarred and ugly to look at, but pure inside. This purging can even bond their silver armor to their flesh, causing near-constant pain. These Stormcast tend to volunteer for the most dangerous assignments, welcoming martyrdom in a good cause. Reforging, in their minds, distills their purity and brings them closer to Sigmar. They tend to develop a nimbus glow around their heads or faces, or emit a celestial light through the gaps in their armor. Of all the Hallowed Knights, the holiest is universally agreed to be Lord-Celestant Gardus the Steel Soul. His purity of spirit and strength of mind keep any Daemon's curse from touching him. In life, he was a man named Garradan of Demesnus, a simple healer and leader of an order of doctors and healers. He spent decades tending to the sick and accursed of Demesnus Harbor, always putting their needs over his own. He never became infected by any of the diseases he treated, and even before the Skinstealer tribe attacked Demesnus, he was beloved by his people. Garradan stood in defense of the colony, wielding two massive iron candlesticks. He stood at the gates and held them for hours, until at least the defenses broke elsewhere and a spearman was able to kill him from behind. In his final moments, he prayed to Sigmar for the strength to strike down those who would be cruel. Sigmar chose him to become Stormcast and elevated him to Lord-Celestant immediately for his heroic soul. Shortly after, he led the attack on the Gates of Dawn, to push Nurgle's forces back from the heart of Ghyran. Only Gardus, as he was now called, was able to pass through the Gates, drawing off the Great Unclean One Bolathrax. The two were drawn into the Realm of Chaos...but Gardus emerged from it sound of mind and soul. His defeat of the Daemon sealed the alliance with the Sylvaneth that remains to this day. When Alarielle was reawakened, she honored the Hallowed Knights with her blessing. Ever since, the Stormkeeps of the Hallowed Knights have been haunted by a glowing figure that appears in reflections and bodies of water. They call it the Silvered Saint, and it is an androgynous winged figure that blesses those in great need, mending their doubts and pains. The Hallowed Knights carry the faith she reflects into battle, and while they have not always win, they have never faltered in defense of mortal life. They see it as their sacred duty to preserve mortal life over their own, and to bring justice to the dark with a burning zeal. Next time: The Angry Ones
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Aug 6, 2020 17:48
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The first edition of HtHaD had you throw dice on the page to pick where features are and had fewer options (and much less lore). Does the book still have you measure things in fingers and thumbs?
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Aug 6, 2020 18:19
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HOW TO HOST A DUNGEON - PART 2: THE AGE OF CIVILIZATION Welcome back to How to Host a Dungeon. In this post, we progress from the Primordial Age to the Age of Civilization. That means we raise a mighty fortress that will form the core of our dungeon in subsequent ages. There are five civilizations to choose from
We’ll use coins to represent the contents of our Dwarven Civ. Pennies for people, Dimes for money, and Nickels for “Epic Treasures”. In the setup phase, the Dwarves enter the map edge near the closest source of mineable ore. They build dormitories to house their population, and vaults to house their treasure. The Fortress ANGUISHEDWIRES is founded.  I’m using a brown pencil for the salt-of-the-earth Dwarves and their constructions Now that the Dwarves are on the board, their civilization’s life cycle begins. Every turn, the Dwarves gain one population, explore or exploit something, and build a new construction. When the Dwarven Civ reaches ten population, it automatically collapses into one of three end states. On our first turn, we add one population. Then we exploit the ore vein directly below our incipient Fortress, increasing its wealth by 1. Finally, we build a Tomb. Dwarves love Tombs. The constructions open to us are gated by how much population we have. As the Dwarven civ grows, it gains access to more and more wondrous creations. While we’re at it, we also add more vaults and dormitories to hold the expanding hoard and population.  The Fortress at the end of turn one Next turn, the cycle repeats. We add population, mine out more ore, and build a Drinking Hall. There’s a page of flavor text for Dwarves, which talks about the different spins you can put on structures. The Drinking Hall also serves as an Agora, or as the Dwarves call it, a “grudge market” for endless circular arguments. Sounds like the Forums. Throw in some more dorms and vaults while we’re at it.  The chevron on the Drinking Hall indicates it doubles as a fortification Next turn, we start to see where the simple if/then rules for the Dwarven civ might need fine tuning. By RAW, the Dwarves don’t ever Explore if they have ore to Exploit. That means they’ll just sit around this coal bed, mining away and never doing anything with the rest of the map. I decided to break the rules and let the Dwarves Explore AND Exploit in a single turn. The Exploit action lets the Dwarves tunnel a “finger” in a direction of your choice. I had them tunnel downward into the big tunnel below. Recognizing the importance of the tunnel, the Dwarves raise a Citadel there.  At this point I’m looking through the tech trees and I have an idea I really like. One that uses all the pieces on the map to explain why the Dwarves came here in the first place. In order to make buildings from the Industry Constructions table, the Dwarves need a power plant. So next turn, I decide that they Explore downward from the tunnel to reach the magma lakes in the desert of glass. Throw in some housing for the power plant workers and we’re all set.  Note the water supply drawn from the surface lake Now that the Dwarves have an (almost) inexhaustible power source for their mighty engines of construction, they construct an Underground Highway across the enormous worm tunnel, from one map edge to the other. ...Which I just now realized I didn’t photograph by itself. Whatever, it’ll be visible in every image after this. The text calls it an Underground Highway” but with all the pieces in play, I’m declaring it a rail line, and the Citadel a fortified train station. The Fortress ANGUISHEDWIRES has now accomplished what the Mountainhomes founded it for. It will continue to serve as a maintenance and refueling stop, but for the most part its purpose is served. ...Or has it? The next turn takes us up to seven population, meaning we have only three moves left before our Dwarven Civ collapses. The Mountainhomes obviously don’t know this. They have an idea, for how to squeeze a little more value out of ANGUISHEDWIRES. It’ll require a smelter to access the Craft Constructions table. A magma smelter will do the trick, across the glass desert from the power station.  The pipes lead up to the surface, because I thought it would be cool to have chimneys rising above the forest, belching magma smog Our population grows to nine. The peculiar smelted ores are used in the construction of an Impossible Engine - an experimental complex of machines on the shores of the frozen lake below the citadel.  Building an Impossible Engine lets us immediately build another construction for free, so we throw in a Doom Weapon for good measure.  Yup, it’s gonna be one of those The Doom Weapon counts as an epic treasure, which we mark on the map with a Nickel. On our final turn, we hit ten population. We get one construction before choosing an ending for our fortress. I’m going to toss in a Throne Room near the cold lake - the Mountainhomes sent one of the Ore Dukes to oversee the experimental weapon. Placing a Throne Room gives us another epic treasure.  At the end of our last turn, we must choose a suitable end for the Fortress. From the pieces on the board already, it’s not hard to figure out what happens next. The accidental ignition of a prototype warhead releases a neutron burst that penetrates the surrounding rock, passing through the entire fortress in a wave. The majority of the Fortress dies within a few hours, of horrific burns and liquified GI tracts. The survivors linger for a few days longer, perhaps a few make it out alive. The Dwarven Fortress ANGUISHEDWIRES looks like this at the moment of its collapse.  The Dwarves never found the gems, or the plague zone How did we do overall? I certainly had fun working through the phases of Dwarven Civilization. You have to bend the rules a little to get an interesting outcome, and it takes some imagination to tie all the elements together. It didn’t take very long either. Which is good, because our next phases will be much more time consuming. The ending was a little cliche. I chose it because it provides a plausible explanation for the remains of the Fortress’ inhabitants being strewn about the complex in attitudes of life, Pompei style. The rules say we should remove all the treasure markers as well as the population counters, except for Epic Treasures. Not sure about this design decision. I don't think the Epic Treasures actually do anything in later phases, while regular treasure tokens actually do have an effect. With the Dwarves gone, our dungeon enters the Age of Monsters next post. Falconier111 posted:The first edition of HtHaD had you throw dice on the page to pick where features are and had fewer options (and much less lore). Does the book still have you measure things in fingers and thumbs?
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Aug 6, 2020 19:43
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By popular demand posted:I could have fun with the doppelganger prank town and I could buy that a small town in the middle of nowhere having a game whenever strangers arrive and that there being at least two doppelgangers who got tired of the pointless rear end in a top hat way of life.
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Aug 6, 2020 21:18
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Silent Legions: Aliens (2020) Let’s make some aliens, shall we? I should say up top that I’m not the biggest fan of adding aliens on top of cultists and gods and things – it makes the world (one that thematically should be unimportant on the cosmic scale) feel a little busy, like Earth somehow ended up being a locus for every major intergalactic civilization. That said, the tables in this section are fun, so let’s get rolling! First off, we have a page of tables to determine what effect the aliens have had on human history. Rolling on all the tables gets us the following results:
 I realize now that our aliens need a name. I’m absolutely not rolling on those loving syllable charts ever again, so a quick trip to Fantasy Name Generators dot com gets us the appropriately-guttural name Ughuxha for our survivor-warrior aliens. Next, we’ve got a bunch of tables relating to the Ughuxha’s modern-day involvement and psychology.
What do they look like? Well, I’ve got a table for that, too. They’re apparently a “congery of geometric shapes” (congery meaning “aggregation” if you didn’t know – I sure didn’t) with squid-like aspects and chitin spurs. Based on those results, I’d say they look like a shimmering agglomeration of higher-dimension geometry; an amorphous mass of rubbery flesh covered in spikes of chitin that’s in constant, sinuous motion. Pieces of their biology phase in and out from our perceivable universe as they move and breathe across higher dimensions. In their “resting” form, they’re a roughly human-sized egg of pulsing chromatophoric tentacles. As they awaken and expand, they can fill a room with their half-perceived physiology, flickering colours dancing along razor-sharp spines. There’s another table that lets you roll for weird traits on each body part – arm/leg, hand/foot, head, torso, etc., but I think these guys already have enough going on physically that we can skip it.  The body-parts-chart I skipped Finally, there’s a few additional traits to roll for. A few d10s later, I’ve discovered that an Ughuxha feeds by swallowing prey whole, has a “fluting and tonal” call, moves through “alien angles”, and prefers to hunt by raising “livestock” (uh-oh). They get an optional special ability from a d100 chart, and I roll a 68, meaning they possess enormous strength and get +4 to damage rolls (and can throw a car if they want). Thoughts so far: Like I said, I’m not the biggest fan of aliens in cosmic horror, but the tables as always provided plenty of great fodder for imaginative world-building. I might roll up the enemy species later, just for fun, since there are so, so many cool results on some of the tables. Next time: Kelipot creation! Wait, I did that already. It’s cult creation time, then.
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Aug 6, 2020 22:00
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That seems like a decently fun alien table. I don't think "aliens" ruins a game like this so much as the probing gray kind does. As long as the alien feels like a mythos monster it feels just as natural as all the other mythos beasts and old ones that ended up or phase into earth at random. I guess the difference is mythos aliens can't share their tech with humans/don't care about humans directly while game derailing aliens have tech humans could backsolve and want to talk to us and chat. In my mind if you want to use these ones in your campaign they're just another pawn in the mystery of the cult the players are investigated, a higher level species dimly aware of the old ones machinations who have been swept up and are being obliterated by it. Now your players fight cultists, cult mythos creatures, and these folks.
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Aug 7, 2020 01:33
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Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Stormcast Eternals ANGER MANAGEMENT IS A LIE  The Celestial Vindicators, sixth Stormhost to be forged, are also called the Vengeful, the Hate-Fuelled and the Hurricane of Blades. As you might guess, they're one of the less friendly Stormhosts. Their colors are teal and gold. In mortal life, they were those who fought to avenge wrongs, usually wrongs done to them personally. Their anger is unabated in their second lives, and each member of the Stormhost must, in Reforging, pass through the Sturmdrang Gate, which burns any who pass through it without a terrible fury that burns equally as hot. Many of those who choose to take this test do not survive it, but those who do are refined, their anger given a holy power by Sigmar. They can channel this power through their war-chants, finding focus in shared recitations that keeps them on task and helps keep their rage banked until the right moment. The right moment is defined as "when battle starts," at which point the Vindicators go berserk, unleashing their rage and losing much of their rational thought in the process. Their fury is pointed directly at Chaos, and their shared hatred for their dark foes allows them to move together even in the midst of their blind fury. Once they are unleashed, they forgo complex strategy in favor of charging forward and killing any enemy in their way until every spark of energy is driven from their corpses. They are reckless, prone to overreach and often get trapped by their anger, but their power is such that they consider this a worthwhile flaw. Their theory is that sheer power is the best way to defeat an enemy, and their leaders are always at the front, the mightiest and angriest of the lot. They work as linebreakers, battering enemy morale with their chants and reputation before attacking without mercy. Every one of the Vindicators can recite a long history of pain and woe that drove them to this point. They are intense, driven and single-minded, even before multiple Reforgings. Those who have died often are more like walking storms, smashing apart everything before them, than tacticians or warriors. They revere the Father of Blades, a mystic spirit said to lie in twelve pieces within the Runefangs, gifted to Sigmar's chieftains in the World That Was. Certainly, they seem to have an almost religious fascination with their own swords, and many prefer to dual wield in order to maximize their attacks. Their monomania has cost them lives permanently - their first Lord-Celestant, Thostos Bladestorm, discovered the location of the hammer Ghal Maraz in Anvrok and fought to retrieve it without a care for anything but the battle. In the process, he was transformed into a creature of living metal before Tzeentchian magic snuffed out his life, and in Reforging he became even more grim and emotionless than he had been before. His bravery was no less, though, and at the Mercurial Gate of Chamon, he once more charged forward alone to challenge Archaon to single combat. It went poorly and he was eaten by the Chaos Champion's steed, Dorghar; his soul remains trapped inside the daemonic creature. His successor, Ortus Drakehewer, has learned that Thostos' personal Chamber, the Bladestorm, is largely uncontrollable once they start fighting, and no longer really tries to rein them in, just steering allied forces away from them in battle.  The Anvils of the Heldenhammer are also known as the Ancients, the Sepulchral Sons and Those Who Claim Death. Their colors are black and gold, and unlike most Stormcast, they have all had at least three lives, not two. Each one of them is from the distant past, having lived long before the current age, and each one has spent much of that time as a ghost in Shyish before being plucked from the afterlife by Sigmar and given a third new life. They preserve their ancient rites and traditions, myriad as they are, and combine ancient knowledge with modern technology. Most have existed for centuries before their first Reforging, and as a Stormhost they are prone to archaic dialects and speech patterns, speaking of the ancient past as if it were recent and telling tales about old battles. They are resolute and forthright, heroes drawn from afterlives across Shyish who managed to survive the ages intact and free of slavery to Nagash. Many have descendants still in the Mortal Realms, often descendants who have long forgotten their ancestors, though meeting one is always a source of nagging deja vu. This is especially true around their home base in Anvilgard on Aqshy and Stygxx, home of their forward Stormkeep in Shyish. The Anvils tend to be quieter and more introspective than other Stormcast, and also more curious about the nature of their existence, having been drawn from one immortality to another, far more violent one. Most are happy at the change, but some have complained that Sigmar had no right to take them from their deaths without their consent. This Stormhost, more than any other, has enraged Nagash by its very existence - an affront to his authority and a theft from his kingdom. Many of the Anvils feared they would once more fall into his domain on their first death and would be tormented for it, but that has proven not to be the case - they are Reforged as easily as any other Stormhost. This convinced many of the skeptical members of the group to forgive Sigmar. Now, for them, death is a refuge and a weapon. The Black Sepulchres are a group within the Anvils, Stormcast mages who study the raw power of death and make use of its energies in their magic. They have become a monastic order as well, teaching a religion that reveres death and taking on the role of guardians of the afterlife. This faith is now common in the Anvils, as is the goal of freeing Shyish from Nagash, to shatter the chains of the necromantic tyrants that enslave the dead. Many of them worship the god Morrda alongside Sigmar, revering him as the Pale Rider and the Master of the Bleak Raven. They say he is the only god of Shyish who defied Nagash but escaped his torments whole, and that makes him a powerful symbol for the Anvils. Their reverence for death flows through their Reforgings, however, and many become corpselike, pale and unable to speak in loud tones. Their faces lack expression, and their flesh becomes cold and waxen, a trait that many have used to gain entry to the courts of the dead in Shyish to seek out those ghosts who might be turned to rebel against necromancers. The Anvils tend to see mortals as their children, beloved children to be protected from harm. Even above Chaos, they despise the Necromancer God, who would see their souls reclaimed and tortured for eternity as punishment for their insult to his majesty. With the Necroquake, he has proven that he is able to capture their souls in the right circumstances, as well, and the Lord-Relictors of the Stormhost spend a lot of time pondering the problem of Nagash and how to escape him. They develop weapons that can capture souls, head into the depths of Shyish to find lost knowledge and work tirelessly to discover the secrets of true immortality in the labs of their large Sacrosanct Chambers. They are even willing to risk their own souls to do so, because they have seen the price of failure. Next time: One For All
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Aug 7, 2020 01:53
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A notable Anvils Stormcast is Balthas Arum the reborn Balthasar Gelt.
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Aug 7, 2020 02:02
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Barudak posted:That seems like a decently fun alien table. An alien from outer space is little different in tone than a demon from another dimension if handled right.
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Aug 7, 2020 02:03
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