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Everyone posted:Figure at this point with Nagash you can never not hear: Speak for yourself. There is only one correct voice to hear Nagash in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd-YkMZs6Po
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Aug 20, 2020 01:22
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SirPhoebos posted:Speak for yourself. There is only one correct voice to hear Nagash in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd-YkMZs6Po Yup.
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Aug 20, 2020 01:40
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Josef bugman posted:Could you make a very strong mummy? An invincible mummy perhaps? One that cannot perish? Just you wait till Chapter 5. Hypnobeard posted:Hey, Falconier111, could you use spoiler tags instead of Yeah, I probably should, shouldn't I  . Will do and will have done so. e: keeping them where they're actually appropriate, though 
Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 01:44
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Falconier111 posted:Yeah, I probably should, shouldn't I No worries, wasn't sure if it was intentional. 🙂 Enjoying the review so far, keep it up!
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Aug 20, 2020 01:50
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The Illithiad Masters of Eternal Night  So in A Darkness Gathering, the party hosed up the Illithids' plans to take over Stormport by means of raising a cult to help the Illithids overthrow the local government. On top of this, the Illithids infiltrated and subverted a number of local authority figures, several of them extremely powerful. The PC's showed up because one of their friends got wind of it and was kidnapped by the Illithids, who started being extremely suspicious that somehow THE ADVERSARY was trying to sabotage their plans(the Illithids have what's basically a spooky story for scaring tadpoles about an Illithid that ended up still having the mind and personality of the human it was grown in, and became a sinister infiltrator loving up their plots. Also they usually blame THE ADVERSARY if there's no other way to salve their egos after a fuckup). Turns out their friend was getting clues from a mysterious outside source, though, a Strom who contacted her by dream and gave her a magic psi-tattoo that would guide her(it can be willingly transferred to a PC or done so in case she dies, if the GM does not want to deal with an extra NPC follower). As soon as the PC's finish A Darkness Gathering, the psi-tattoo doesn't give them a chance to rest. It informs them that Stormport was only one of many points under Illithid attack, along with the Illithids causing the literal darkening of the sun and extended winter the world is suffering. It tells them that the only solution is for them to travel out into the frozen wilds to seek a crater far northwest of Stormport, where they'll find a tool to help them ruin the Illithids' plans.  Journey to the Crater The long winter caused by the Illithids is not loving around. Everything is covered by frost and ice, and it's practically an apocalyptic landscape. Hungry predators are desperate and monsters are wandering farther from their lairs to find food. On top of that, an Illithid investigative team arrive in Stormport not long after the players depart. A trio of tacticool goons and their BATTLE THRALLS, there to check out why Shuluth's takeover isn't happening on schedule, to find out who lopped his head off, and then to hunt them down and deal with them. Once again shaking their fists and cursing THE ADVERSARY. There are, of course, also plenty of plain suffering civilians trekking towards nearby urban centers for shelter, and the GM is encouraged to give them XP rewards for attempting or offering to aid the civilians with supplies, medical care, etc. Aside from random encounters with these things and what the GM himself might choose to add, the one unique encounter is that the PC's might stumble across a village already taken over by the Illithids in much the same way as they planned to with Stormport. There's a band of plucky rebels, and a few survivors besides, and the PC's have a chance to team up with them to rescue as many non-brainwashed as survivors, gutting the traitors(or deprogramming them with charm spells is also an option) and killing their Illithid overlords so they have a chance of survival The center of the village also has a new chasm leading into the Illithids' underdark network, for ease of thrall transport and such, and if the PC's want to dive in and get some revenge on the Illithids, the module wholeheartedly encourages it(rather than having some bullshit "ah yes you walk two feet along the tunnels and rocks fall everyone dies"-cop out), even suggesting that the PC's might go underground to ally with beholders, drow and other non-Illithid undergrounders to forge a multi-species alliance against the squidheads. Freeing the town is also made easier because the three local squid fascists are squidler jugend and haven't developed their Mind Blast powers yet. This means they are hilariously weak and the party can punk them like there's no tomorrow, which may be a pleasant relief after the butt-clenching battles against tacticool squids in A Darkness Gathering. The pursuing Illithid revenge squad show up when the GM feels its dramatically appropriate, with the thralls out front and the illithids concealed in a nice warm sleigh. Not being idiots, the Illithids decide to gauge the situation before charging in. Their preferred strat is to wait until the party is troubled by a random encounter(ice trolls is one that might cause them some difficulty), at which point the thralls come roaring in and help save the day. Then, when appropriate, they'll attempt to abduct one or more party members for interrogation(or the party's NPC buddy with the psi-tattoo), prompting a chase after them to rescue the PCs' friend. Additionally if things go badly the Illithid pursuers will attempt to run away with as many of them as can make it, and then come back to harry the party later, for instance standing by to ambush them while they're excavating the crater. The GM is also instructed to not just have the sleigh show up out of nowhere, but to give the party glimpses of it once or twice in the days before it actually shows up on scene. So the party, if they're clever and paranoid fellas, could stage an ambush. Fighting them is actually made easier by the presence of their thralls, mind you, since the Illithid mind blast has friendly fire effects and can KO the Illithids' cronies just as easily as the party. Easier, in fact, since they're lower level. Thus positioning could matter a lot. Still, it's somewhat funnier, for reasons that will be revealed, if the Illithids just tail the party until they reach the crater and then wait for a chance to ambush them.  The Crater Eventually, though, the players will arrive at a large, snow-covered crater in the ground. It's obviously an ancient crater, literally thousands if not tens of thousands of years old, created by an impact shortly after the fall of the Illithid Empire. To cut through a bit of the secrecy and dramatics, what happened was that it was an Illithid escape craft, a "planetisimal," which from context I assume to be something like a hollowed-out asteroid stuffed full of slaves and psionic gadgetry. They coated it in Quintessence, AKA "Collapsed Time" for protection, but most of that got blown off during the impact. Among what remained protected, however, is a section containing an intact Spelljammer and several sections containing navigational data for it(four in all). Finding the Spelljammer and its nav data is the final goal of this module. Some of the damaged sections also still contain threats, including one that's been colonized by bullettes, others contain conflicts frozen in time, and the moment they're broken open, frozen proto-Gith slaves and their Illithid masters will rejoin their frozen battles. Saving the rebel thralls is not just a decent thing to do, it's also easier to kill the Illithids with their help, and the PC's may potentially be able to trade for their tinfoil hats(sorry, "headmeshes") that protect infallibly against a limited number of mind blasts. Extremely useful items. The most important thing to do, though, is to find the fragment containing the Most Elder Brain. See, there was an Elder Brain aboard the Planetisimal who survived the crash. Lacking any other way to survive, it connected itself to the Negative Material Plane and became a giant undead brain. And... oddly enough, a giant undead Elder Brain is the friendliest face they'll find in this adventure. Sempiternal, the Elder Brain, realizes that its existence is now heresy to all of Illithid-kind, and would very much like to not die. Thus, it'll forge an alliance with the PC's because the Illithids gaining control of the world almost certainly means they'll find it sooner or later and destroy it. If they ally with it, Sempiternal will give them one of the four pieces of nav data that the Spelljammer needs and offer the party one of its servants...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUhVCoTsBaM A dormant Illithid vampire. Yeah, you heard me right. A loving swole pillar man Illithid joins the party. As long as they keep it out of direct sunlight, nothing notes that it ever stops following the party and following their orders(though every fight has a 1 in 20 chance it goes berserk and attacks everything). Striking a deal with Sempiternal also gets the party the same XP as if they had destroyed the Elder Brain, which is a cool touch. So now that the party has a genius pillar man for backup, they can breeze through the rest of the wreck, like the ruined garden pod full of rampant killer fungi. Various Illithids trapped in time that emerge thinking the party is a group of slaves about to slay them, but which instead get choke-slammed by the Vampithid. Their new buddy will also be a harsh surprise to their pursuers when they expect a group of adventurers and instead that thing leaps out and owns them. By being immune to psionics and insanely strong in melee combat, it can probably take out all the pursuers by itself. Another piece of nav data is guarded by a psionic maze, the trail through which is marked by dead Cranium Rats. See, Cranium Rats are Ilsensine's spies and saboteurs throughout the Planes, but a colony of them, known as Us, has broken free and plot the downfall of Ilsensine and its spawn. Us is one of the groups that Strom has contacted for help foiling the Illithids, and one of Us' packs were at the crash site before, attempting to find a path through the maze to one of the guarded nav data segments. Unfortunately they made too many mistakes and got fried, but their crispy little bodies help indicate where the safe path isn't. If the players pay attention to this, they can just casually waltz through to collect parts 2 of 4. The rats also had a psi-tattoo from Strom, and touching it with the party's own Psi-Tattoo powers theirs up and makes it able to heal party members and gives the wearer a bonus to resist Mind Blasts. There are also some neat set pieces, like a flipped-on-its-ceiling segment of the planetisimal which re-enters the time stream as the party clears away the shielding quintessence, dropping a couple dozen mind flayers on their dumb heads and killing most of them, while the remainder are easily dispatched and will, in fact, use their psionic powers to just jaunt off into another plane and not return at all if the players dawdle about finishing them off. The third navigational segment is easy to collect because the Illithid that was supposed to put it away safely behind a collection of FIENDISH TRAPS AND PUZZLES instead procrastinated and now re-enters the time stream with it in his pocket about a minute before a vampiric illithid tosses him through a wall and the party rifles through his robes for it. Three of four! The fourth segment is gained by either aiding or murdering the proto-Gith rebels embroiled in a battle with Illithids in one of the larger segments. Butchering the Illithid makes the rebel leader hand over the lobe to the PC's. Though it strikes me as odd that the module kind of breezes over their re-introduction to the timestream. Like, they're stuck on a literally alien world slowly being destroyed by the Illithids. It would be nice to have a little post-script where they join the surfacer rebels and share their knowledge of Illithid tactics and weaknesses, or let the players bring them along on their new Spelljammer at the end. In fact I'll assume the latter because a Spelljammer needs a crew, and a bunch of cool Illithid-killing rebels is a rad crew to have. In general the crater is very big on cool set pieces, has some very useful loot(including stuff that helps counter psionics) and very low on bullshit encounters. The two exceptions are the Water Weird in the planetisimal's water treatment plant(water weirds are cool but literally only have a save-or-die attack) and two spectres of dead rebels, since level-draining enemies are never okay. Technically the party COULD be morons and pick a fight with Sempiternal's vampiric illithid minions, but that would be entirely on them as it's trivially avoidable and the module even points out that the smart thing to do is to not pick that fight. The last objective, after watching their new vampiric illithid buddy clown on their pursuers, is to dig up the spelljammer and use the four navigation data pieces to re-activate it, after fighting off three golems literally made of animate brain matter. Compared to actual Illithids they're kind of chump change. They do more punching damage, but can't just hoover your brain out of your skull, they're dumber and they have less magic resistance.  So now the PC's have a sweet ride, a cool rebel crew and a vampire buddy. Unfortunately their Spelljammer is pre-programmed to return to a particular point in Wildspace, in a particular Crystal Sphere, so the party can't just go for a joyride. Strom's psi-tattoo informs the party that they're headed out to find a super-weapon that can destroy the Illithids' schemes and liberate their homeworld. We'll conclude this in... DAWN OF THE OVERMIND
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Aug 20, 2020 02:38
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These illithid adventures seem super sweet.
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Aug 20, 2020 03:55
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That's awesome
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Aug 20, 2020 03:56
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Tibalt posted:Something visceral and terrifying in the duck call being used on you. It was the most effective scene in the recent Predators movies, in my opinion. The bear from Annihilation would like to tear off you jaw then continue the conversation in your voice.
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Aug 20, 2020 04:04
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mellonbread posted:
Sean McCoy highlighted this issue on Twitter and it's specifically because he wanted stealth to be a thing that the player made active choices about rather than rolling for it. Except as you've pointed out, there's no guidance on how the GM is supposed to adjudicate whether the xenomorph decides to check under the bed where the terrified PC is hiding, so you either: 1) Come up with some arbitrary ruled mechanic that in the end isn't any more satisfying than if the character had just rolled stealth. 2) Hope that the specific circumstances give you a straightforward solution, which can either feel rewarding ("The Predator relies on heat vision, time to smear cold mud and hope it works") or just be a form of illusionism (The Xenomorph has a really good sense of smell so it doesn't matter where the PCs hide)
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Aug 20, 2020 04:27
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Young Freud posted:The bear from Annihilation would like to tear off you jaw then continue the conversation in your voice. Gene Wolfe's alzabo getting a starring role in a hit movie is just nice to see. The alzabo deserves good things (no it doesn't).
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Aug 20, 2020 04:31
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Maybe if you wanted to emulate a "horror movie"-feel, just make "stealth" another form of HP. Like, you don't have hit points as such, if the beastie engages you before you're ready or you have something to ward it off with(space-silver to scare off the space werewolf, a space cross for space dracula), you're dead, and you can either sell yourself dearly or cheap. But instead you have X narrative points you can spend to go: "I hide under the bed and Space Dracula doesn't check there." or "sure is a good thing that the space werewolf is distracted by himself in the mirror and doesn't see me sneaking out the door behind him!"
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Aug 20, 2020 04:32
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Joe Slowboat posted:Gene Wolfe's alzabo getting a starring role in a hit movie is just nice to see. The alzabo deserves good things (no it doesn't). I was whispering this to my wife like a huge dork during the whole scene. Surprisingly, she was far less concerned that the spooky bear monster wasn't entirely original! Back on topic illithid adventure seems rad, gotta respect a module that says "Here's a great place to hop off if you like, along with a couple potential hooks for what might happen next." Big Mad Drongo fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 04:39
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Big Mad Drongo posted:Back on topic illithid adventure seems rad, gotta respect a module that says "Here's a great place to hop off if you like, along with a couple potential hooks for what might happen next." Oh, yeah, I should mention, each module has both a "here's how to intro this one if you didn't play the previous one"-section as well as a "here's a place to cut the adventure short if you don't want to play the next one"-section. For instance, one of the suggested "here's a way to cut the chain short"-bits for both Masters of Eternal Night and A Darkness Gathering is: "The sun flickers ominously... and then kicks back to full power. Turns out the Illithids were loving idiots and could not, in fact, just turn off the sun."
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Aug 20, 2020 04:47
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PurpleXVI posted:Maybe if you wanted to emulate a "horror movie"-feel, just make "stealth" another form of HP. Like, you don't have hit points as such, if the beastie engages you before you're ready or you have something to ward it off with(space-silver to scare off the space werewolf, a space cross for space dracula), you're dead, and you can either sell yourself dearly or cheap. But instead you have X narrative points you can spend to go: "I hide under the bed and Space Dracula doesn't check there." or "sure is a good thing that the space werewolf is distracted by himself in the mirror and doesn't see me sneaking out the door behind him!" That's a neat idea and also one fundamentally unpalatable to the kind of OSR design that drives stuff like Moterhsip which believes that picking the right place to hide from Space Dracula is a skill you can develop, as ridiculous as that is for a number of reasons.
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Aug 20, 2020 04:52
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I actually got to use an alzabo on my players in one of my playtests of less bad Troika! rules. It was a lot of fun, even if the alzabo itself lost in a fight when it happened, the initial 'oh no that's the thing we're hunting, not a family of farmers' when they snuck around to a window out of suspicion (they'd come running when they heard a scream).
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Aug 20, 2020 05:11
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Sometimes I wish somebody would make a SRPG engine that ran off a version of DnD and gave OSR designers a bunch of coding lessons. That emphasis on randomization and probability manipulation that keeps coming up feels more suited to a video game where the computer can crunch the numbers for you. Granted, I gather running the numbers in your head and feeling smart when they work out right is part of the appeal.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:46
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Falconier111 posted:Sometimes I wish somebody would make a SRPG engine that ran off a version of DnD and gave OSR designers a bunch of coding lessons. That emphasis on randomization and probability manipulation that keeps coming up feels more suited to a video game where the computer can crunch the numbers for you. Granted, I gather running the numbers in your head and feeling smart when they work out right is part of the appeal. I don’t think that’s necessarily an accurate represetntation of the mindset behind OSR rules (which, granted, is a broad concept). The way I’ve seen it presented is along the lines of: anything that engages a rule should include an amount of random chance.
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Aug 20, 2020 07:29
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Falconier111 posted:Sometimes I wish somebody would make a SRPG engine that ran off a version of DnD and gave OSR designers a bunch of coding lessons. That emphasis on randomization and probability manipulation that keeps coming up feels more suited to a video game where the computer can crunch the numbers for you. Granted, I gather running the numbers in your head and feeling smart when they work out right is part of the appeal. That is actually pretty much the opposite of how OSR stuff works. Like, fundamentally OSR stuff is all about how to fairly adjudicate fiction-first roleplaying. Hard mechanics exist to give guidance, but are never binding in the way that they are in digital games. To put it to a practical example, let's talk about how you might manage the question of "does the xenomorph check under the bed"? Option A is to make it based off a stealth roll, possibly opposed. This is okay, but in some ways is a weak fit for OSR play because you're spending the encounter thinking about game rules and abstract numbers instead of imagining and manipulating the shared imaginary space. The more that doing stuff in the fiction can give you bonuses to the roll (or negate the need for it wholesale) the more OSR this is, but the more time that you're consulting your character sheet and realizing that you have a +2 to stealth in the Mushroom Fields biome you're doing the less OSR it is Option B is to give people a sort of narrative stealth HP and make a whole sort of alt-combat system for hide and seek between the player and monster. This is even less of a good fit for OSR systems since it just drags more and more attention away from the fiction and towards abstract math systems, and can pretty easily result in events that work well on a pacing level but make no sense on a common-sense level--basically no matter what you do at the encounter's start there's no chance the monster's going to find you for at least a few beats Option C is GM Fiat--the GM just decides if you succeed or fail. This is obviously pretty lovely and railroady and unfair--it turns big resolution system of the game into playing the GM's whims, and even if you're trying to be objective it's real hard to adjudicate "do I decide to gently caress them over this time or later" in a way that's fun or fair. It's also a strawman option--while there are probably plenty of assholes and teenagers who use this, nobody's advocating for it as a legitimate way for resolving conflicts in RPGs, and those lovely GMs are going to lovely GM. Option D is that the player describes how they're hiding and the GM just makes a snap "on a scale from 1 to 10, how good of an idea does this sound like?" judgement, then just sets that as the number they need to beat on a d10 for the xenomorph not to find them. It's not really a formal mechanic, more of a luck check with the odds set by how clever the player is being. It's in some ways similar to option C, since it is still very fiat-driven, but it's way easier to rule "what are the odds this would work" fairly than it is to rule "do I gently caress you over this time or not". You is pretty much the core of OSR play--if you don't know what should happen during a game you just think up a range of possible options and then roll a die to figure out which of them happens. Option E is that you have a bespoke mechanic or table or something that you roll on to determine where the xenomorph checks. The OSR loves poo poo like this, but it's real important to note that it's more meant to be a writing prompt than world physics. If Option D is that you just improv a range of things that might happen and then roll to see which happens, OSR tables are just this but prepped before the game instead of on the fly. They let you set a tone for the setting and some default consequences for certain types of actions without being binding. They're also extremely GM-facing, and not the types of things players should have knowledge of.
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Aug 20, 2020 07:52
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Joe Slowboat posted:Gene Wolfe's alzabo getting a starring role in a hit movie is just nice to see. The alzabo deserves good things (no it doesn't).
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Aug 20, 2020 08:34
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Mors Rattus posted:Occasionally, the Legions make alliance with the Ghoul Kings of the Flesh-Eater Courts, but they are never predictable. Nagash can't control most Mordants, as they are not technically undead, and many of the Ghoul Kings hate Nagash. All, however, recognize his power as the God of Death, even if they see him as a tyrant bent on conquering them. Some of the lesser courts are happy to work with him, as the lands where the Legions pass become full of delicious mortal meat for a time afterwards. OK, how the gently caress is this supposed to work when Ghouls are supposed to be "actually, we're brettonians?" Does their woo curse also refluff Nagash for them? Do they get to pretend to be hard men doing hard choices when they ally with the God of Death (but what prevents them from allying with literally anyone else then?) How does "these guys do a lot of killing, which leads to a lot of eating" work when you image that you're Leon Leoncoeur? Also, again, that curse makes no loving sense, because ghouls don't ever realize that they're cursed, so any fall from grace is only visible to outsiders. Ghouls are, however, having the time of their lives. Purple XVI posted:squidler jugend 
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Aug 20, 2020 11:21
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JcDent posted:OK, how the gently caress is this supposed to work when Ghouls are supposed to be "actually, we're brettonians?" Does their woo curse also refluff Nagash for them? Do they get to pretend to be hard men doing hard choices when they ally with the God of Death (but what prevents them from allying with literally anyone else then?) How does "these guys do a lot of killing, which leads to a lot of eating" work when you image that you're Leon Leoncoeur? The curse actively edits their own reality, apparently, so that the ones that work with Nagash they will see themselves working with a dangerous but worthy ally, and then afterwards will hold a grand feast to celebrate. Like, when one of them starts murdering some randos in another story bit, he sees himself as trying to talk bandits down from attacking. After they're dead, he has a moment of brief but intense cognitive dissonance, then realizes he must be at a feast or something and starts chowing down on someone's leg. e: meanwhile, the ones that decide to fight Nagash see him as...well, an evil monster they are defending the weak from. Sometimes they're not even wrong, though that usually involves some amount of luck and the people they're defending not sticking around for afterwards.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:20
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Call of Cthulhu, 5th Edition I Hope Chargen Is Quick To get our very basic rules out of the way, everything in CoC is d100 roll under a TN. You use other dice for damage, sanity damage, etc, but all skill checks and resolution mechanics are 'Generate a TN, roll under it on d100'. Strict pass-fail. So, generating a character will also give me a chance to talk about the skills and the stats of Call of Cthulhu. I'm not a huge fan of them. Stats don't actually do very much in CoC. Also Size as a stat is always bizarre to me. It was weird in Pendragon, it's weird here. The stats for a PC are Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Appearance (which basically does nothing), Intelligence (Very Important), Education (ALSO Very Important), Power (VERY Important) and Size. The physical stats are very 'nice to have but eh' while the stats like Intelligence and Education directly determine your starting skillpoints, and considering the advancement system in this game (and likelihood of living to use it), your starting skillpoints are going to matter a LOT. Power determines your starting Sanity, and considering a Sanity check is roll d100 under your current Sanity, you want a high Sanity. It's also used for magic, in case you get up to wizbiz, and determines your good luck, which you're going to need. Strength and Size determine your melee damage bonus, which is nice to have but not that important. Constitution and Size determine your HP, but it's more a 'can I take 1 bullet or 2' sort of situation for the most part. No PC is particularly durable. Mind, being able to take one hit and still be alive to escape is a useful thing to have in a PC's corner. Dexterity determines if you go first and helps with Dodge, which is useful for running away, so it's probably good to have! You determine most stats by rolling 3d6 down the line. Int is 2d6+6, partly to reflect it's insanely important. Edu is 3d6+3. Siz is 2d6+6. One of the issues is that none of these stats are directly used for most checks and they're totally disconnected from the skill system. Your GM can call for a 'stat check', where they determine a multiplier, run your stat through it, and get a TN for d100 that way, and these are usually Statx5. 3 of them are so common they're right on your sheet: Know (for your chance to know various trivia) at Edux5, Idea (for your chance to ask the GM for help when you're stuck) at Intx5, and Luck (The check of last resort) at Powx5. You also get 5 Sanity per point of Pow. Really hope you don't roll a 3 Pow! Alternate rolling methods are provided in the book, like 2d6+6 for all stats besides Edu (3d6+3 still for it), in case 'I seem to roll too low', because the stats (aside from Edu and Int) aren't that important and the game won't be disrupted much if the PCs are swaggering around with mostly 15s or something. The stats are odd in how vestigial many of them seem. App is especially poor for this, since it covers first impressions only, has no direct effects on anything at all, and is mostly supplanted by the skills Persuade, Fast Talk, and Credit Rating (Yes, Credit Rating is a skill. It's your ability to seem like/be a respectable person people should do business with). It's also specifically how attractive you are and a little bit of 'how charming', but again: It doesn't do anything. This isn't a point buy system or something so you're not harmed by lucking into a high App, but App is my go-to for 'stats are kind of weird in CoC'. Almost everything of note is handled by the skill system instead, and thus the most important stats are the ones that interact directly with the skill system. So let's start rolling our example Investigator. They have an excellent chargen example in the book, too, with the creation of Harvey Walters, who is later used as the example hero throughout. It's thorough, readable, creates a pretty fun and interesting character, and in general the use of examples in the book is well done as a teaching tool and a way to condition play. But I want to do my own because hell, I love making characters and it's a good way to show things off. Because this is CoC, we'll be assuming this is a 1920s PC. They begin with the rolls: 10 Str, 8 Con, 13 Dex, 14 Pow, 16 App (Arg!), 18 Int, 12 Edu, 12 Siz. According to the book, the 12 Education suggests a 'High School Graduate' but no further education, and will hurt a little, but the 18 Int is going to be a powerhouse stat. A decent Pow is also nice. Our Investigator is physically a little on the frail side, modestly educated, but a genius and very charming. You also get to choose your age (Edu+6 is your minimum age) and add extra years to add extra Edu if you wish, but at the cost of lowering physical stats if you're too old. Note one of the stats you can destroy with Age is App, and you get to choose your penalties. If we were minmaxing this Investigator, we'd make them old and trade that worthless App for sweet, delicious Education. We will resist this urge, though! I like where things stand. We will be Richard Nagai, a Japanese-American mechanic living in San Fransisco. He's brilliant, dreaming of making enough to go to college some day. These stats give him an HP of 10 (considering a .38 does d10 damage, he does not want to be shot), an Idea of 90%, a Know of 60%, a Luck of 70%, and 70 Characteristic Sanity. He's pretty emotionally stable! Very good thing to have in CoC. The next very important decision is your Profession. Many Professions are suggested, but you can make your own easily enough. A Profession merely gives you 8 skills that you can spend your Edu Skillpoints on, since these are the things your education and professional experience have taught you. The Engineer Career is close (and they tell you to shuffle professional skills if it would fit, anyway. Engineer gives Richard Chemistry, Electrical Repair, Geology, Library Use (Score! This is an extremely useful skill!), Mechanical Repair, Physics, Operate Heavy Machinery and any one skill of his choice. His 'personal' skill will be Spot Hidden, because I know what kind of game this is. This skill set also gives you a good look at another issue with Call of Cthulhu. You're playing a guessing game at which of the many Academic skills and things will come up, and you'd better guess right. There's a ton of skills, and many start at 1% (some start higher). Do you think Geology is going to come up? Physics? Chemistry is a good bet, though. Dynamite happens. Richard gets 240 Skillpoints (20xEdu) to spend on these 8 skills. A 50% is said to be good enough to make a living with a particular skill, and is meant to be the benchmark for competence. Now, Richard works in a dockyard, so he's very familiar with ships and they count as Operate Heavy Machinery. He's also primarily a mechanic, busy with the practical side of things rather than more abstract mechanics, so he takes a 50% in Operate Heavy Machinery (49 points), an 80% in Mechanical Repair (60 points, started at 20), and a 70% in Electrical Repair (60 points, started at 10). He's now spent 169 of his points, but he's genuinely very good at his job and probably would be a valued employee. He'll split the rest of his points between Chemistry (32%, spent 31 points), Spot Hidden (30 more points, for 55%), and a little Library Use, as a treat (His last 10 points, for 35%). Next, Richard gets 180 (Intx10) Personal Interest points to spend on anything. He also starts with English 60% (5xEdu) and he'll pick up Japanese at 60% too (59 points). He's fluent in both languages. Japanese will never, ever come up in Call of Cthulhu because every evil tome is in Greek, Latin, German, or Arabic and most adventures assume the east coast of the US and mostly white characters, or send you across Europe, but hey. You count as fluent/able to be a native speaker if you have Intx5 in a Language, so it turns out Richard doesn't appear to be a native speaker in either language despite growing up bilingual and being skilled enough to be characteristically fluent for his Edu in both. I guess his 18 Int just means people can tell he SHOULD be using bigger words and more complex sentences. He'll also slam his Library Use higher, spending 35 more points on it, for 70%. He'll also put some points in Persuade (40, to get it to 55) and his remaining 46 into Fast Talk (which is naturally a wholly separate skill that does very different things) for 51%. Richard is a highly competent engineer and mechanic on the practical side of things, who's good at sating his curiosity in a library, speaks two languages fluently, he's good at finding details, and he's pretty good with people. He's useless in a fight, the non-English language he speaks is unlikely to come up because CoC, and who knows how useful or not his repair skills will be, but if you need someone to get up steam and ram a space squid, he can do it. This illustrates the issues of the Skill System without me needing to write out every skill, though. Hide and Sneak are different skills! Climb is its own thing, as is Swim! Rather than a general 'Athletics' skill! Your points are limited, you aren't likely to get much better at things, and while you'll probably be competent enough at your profession, you're trying to guess which of these dozen skills will come up. The two main ones you know are going to be a big deal are Library Use and Spot Hidden, since they're for doing research and finding things via detective work. But what else will you need? Skills are also often rolled bare, so say a 32% is just that, a 32% without any sort of metacurrency for rerolls or anything. Did you put 80% in Geology? I sure hope *that's* the Academic Skill that happens to come up. The book even says as much in 'which skills are useful'. "One or two academic skills may be useful, but can you guess which ones!?" is basically the gist of its own advice. Similarly, your pool of points is highly variable, and since these skills are what really determine your chances of success at most things, Edu and Int are clearly the two most important stats in the game. A character with poor Edu and Int will just plain be unable to succeed at things, and is going to have a bad time. Chargen also isn't especially quick, as you have to carefully pick out and individually distribute all these skills and they really, really matter. However, as the majority of a character's ability is decided in PC creation, this does make getting new PCs into the mix after the old ones have an accident fairly easy from a balancing point of view. The only advancement rules in CoC are that when you succeed at a check where you might learn something, you put a check next to that skill. At the end of the session, roll d100; if you roll above your current skill, gain +d10% in that skill. That's it. That's the advancement system. They clearly don't expect it to come up much. Hence why I say poor Richard Nagai's starting skillpoints are the biggest infusion of ability he's ever getting. This also means you're unlikely to ever learn much about skills you didn't start out decent at. Another reason these initial points are so precious. Like many d100 systems, CoC would benefit significantly from consolidating and paring down its skill list. A common problem, but a problem nonetheless. Next Time: How to Fight When You Shouldn't Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 14:32
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I need to check what edition mine is, but I remember the first thing they listed in the changes is "You can now actually make a Doctor without needing to spend all your points on the basic requirements to do your loving job" that is pretty telling how ridiculous the skill breakdown was.
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Aug 20, 2020 15:15
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I would be overjoyed if some of these things were fixed! The entire game runs on the skill system, and so the skill system being crazy over-detailed like this is no good. Hell, for Operate Heavy Machinery even though it only has a single skill, they tell you to penalize the player if it's 'a type they aren't familiar with', despite it being listed as being able to be used for tanks, cranes, ships, etc. So if Mr. Nagai had to drive a tank, since he's familiar with ships, RAW he'd get penalized. Same if he tried to take a huge crane or wrecking ball and smash it into a terrible being from beyond. Yes, I primarily think of Operate Heavy Machinery as a combat skill. It's textually supported, just look at Cthulhu's Famous Headache.
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Aug 20, 2020 15:18
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Night10194 posted:You count as fluent/able to be a native speaker if you have Edux5 in a Language Wait, am I reading this right that better-educated people have a harder time becoming fluent in a language? Like, if I'm an Edu 10 high-school dropout who studies German I'm fluent/able to pass for a native speaker at German 50%, but fancy-pants Algernon Honeycott-Abersweith III with his Miskatonic PhD at Edu 20 has a hilariously bad American accent until he hits German 100%?
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Aug 20, 2020 15:27
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Hey Night10194, I agree with you about the Abilities in CoC, and it's not really remedied in later editions. Do you have any thoughts on how to resolve these issues, or what kind of bonuses/maluses abilities could offer instead?GimpInBlack posted:Wait, am I reading this right that better-educated people have a harder time becoming fluent in a language? Like, if I'm an Edu 10 high-school dropout who studies German I'm fluent/able to pass for a native speaker at German 50%, but fancy-pants Algernon Honeycott-Abersweith III with his Miskatonic PhD at Edu 20 has a hilariously bad American accent until he hits German 100%? I'm pretty sure they changed this in later editions to just be like 25% is literate and can handle basic conversation, 50% is fluent.
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Aug 20, 2020 15:29
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GimpInBlack posted:Wait, am I reading this right that better-educated people have a harder time becoming fluent in a language? Like, if I'm an Edu 10 high-school dropout who studies German I'm fluent/able to pass for a native speaker at German 50%, but fancy-pants Algernon Honeycott-Abersweith III with his Miskatonic PhD at Edu 20 has a hilariously bad American accent until he hits German 100%? You have a harder time passing as a native speaker because they assume people with high Edu just innately use 5 dollar words all the drat time and will stumble a little when they don't know how to translate their Brobdingnagian vocabularizations into another language. E: Also, I got it wrong: It's Intx5 to pass as a native speaker. So Richard cannot pass as a native speaker in either language he knows, despite being fluent in both, because he's so smart that he should obviously be using bigger words more often. The way skill interacts with language proficiency is hilariously undefined. They say a 'few points' are enough to pick up the gist of conversations or read some in a language, and then don't really define where someone is proficient or skilled or when you call for a roll. Which is a serious problem for Call of Cthulhu, a game where learning a shitload of languages or playing a professor of Linguistics is actually a really powerful character option! Edited the review post to fix my error. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 15:30
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The flail snail is the only D&D creature NOT to appear in The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 42: The Deck of Manscorpions and Medusae 213: Slavers The PCs are in a desert bordered by high mountains. Pretty specific, but okay. They hear rumors that a dwarven stronghold has been raided and some civilians have been sold into slavery. “One of the captured dwarves is cousin to a PC dwarf.” Uh oh, someone forgot to specify in their backstory that all their family are dead. Anyway, an unspecified “high bounty” is offered to resolve this situation, so we’ve got our motives. The PCs can track the captors across the desert. The culprits are manscorpions, who are setting up a new colony location although they’re currently just a vanguard. So the PCs have to... fight eight manscorpions. A manscorpion lair sounds like a cool and unusual mini-dungeon, but the card provides ZERO information about it, instead devoting all its wordcount to setup and lead-in. I’m not that interested in going through all that and then saying “now fight!” Maybe this card needed to be a two-parter. Pass but put it in the “inspiration” pile. 214: Caught in the Act There are three manticores attacking a farm, which is now on fire and in ruins. The card says that “Even if the PCs choose not to interfere, the manticores have smelled them and will attack them as they pass by closest to the farm.” HOWEVER, if the PCs decide to help, they’ll get the drop on the manticores, who are “totally unaware of the PCs’ presence at this time,” and who are pretty distracted chowing down on their kills. So… wait, do the manticores smell them or not? Is this some kind of quantum ogre situation? Just drop the part where they attack automatically and it’s fine. Keep. 215: Poison and Stone A merchant hires the PCs to go find his daughter and two other girls who have been kidnapped in the last week. He can direct them as far as “the old castle outside of town,” abandoned because this is D&D, dammit! Castles need to be abandoned! Oh also, the last group of guys he sent in didn’t come back out. The PCs find a chamber with a couple rando kidnapped women; then another chamber with women; then a chamber with women who are actually medusae; and then, uh, the merchant’s daughter is in the next room. I understand how this functions as a trap. Very effective. What I want to know is why are medusae kidnapping women? What is the point here? I really don’t have an inkling of their motivation, and honestly I can’t think of anything I’m satisfied with off-hand, so pass. 216: Breeding Farm “After a recent run-in with medusas...” Dude, I’ve DM’d a moderate amount of D&D, and have never used a medusa. Which isn’t to say that people don’t, just that you probably shouldn’t set up your encounter assuming that they regularly do. Anyway, there have been a lot of medusa sightings in these parts recently. Medusas in the sewers. Farmers accidentally running over medusas in their horse-drawn carts. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a medusa! Okay, maybe not that many. But the PCs do get a messenger from the king commissioning (read: ordering) them to find and destroy the source. In exchange he will “commission them in his military and give them a generous salary.” Sounds like an opportunity for PC retirement to me. It’s easy to track the medusa back to their lair in a ruin on a hill. There’s a secret door in the back leading to a 50x50 foot hatching chamber filled with medusa eggs, guarded by a maedar. Anticlimactic. A plague of medusas upon the land is ridiculous and cool, but I’d expect something a little… more to resolve the situation. Pass but good for inspiration again.
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Aug 20, 2020 15:39
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Call of Cthulhu, 5th Edition Dive Kick The Mythos Mr. Nagai is the character that Call of Cthulhu wants you to make. Like with Hunter, we are also going to make the character Call of Cthulhu does NOT want you to make. Allow me to introduce the impossible power of Hilda Kicksman, the woman who seeks to do a Big Kick on all of the forces of evil. Hilda has probably lied about her stats (or rather, should be assumed to have rerolled forever until she got 18s in Str and Size on 2d6+6, before I rolled the rest legit with 2d6+6 method): She has an 18 Strength, 18 Size, and 16 Constitution, plus a 14 Dexterity. She has a 15 Pow, a legit 21 Education (holy poo poo! I rolled an actual 18 on 3d6!), and a 14 Int. Plus a 17 App. Hilda Kicksman is the overwoman, with a PhD in martial arts. For our purposes, what really matters is Hilda has a 99% in Kick (yes, Kick, Punch, Headbutt, and Grapple are all entirely separate skills!) and Martial Arts. Nothing actually prevents a PC from doing this. You also supposedly gain 2d6 Sanity if a skill hits 90% or higher 'in course of play', but I assume that means in play, not PC creation. Hilda also has a 99% in Dodge, courtesy of her enormous number of skillpoints and custom career, the Kickman. She also has an impeccable credit rating; everyone knows of the Kicksmen. She is here entirely to demonstrate a ridiculous murphy's rule, namely that Martial Arts and Unarmed act in conjunction and if your attack roll is beneath both, you double your base damage dice. Kicks are the best martial arts attack, as they do d6. There is no reason to use others besides Fist/Punch starting at 50% and Kick at 25%. Headbutts are sadly rather weak, or I would have obviously made her have a PhD in headbutts. Her immense Size and Strength give her a +d6 damage bonus. With all of this together, she does 3d6 damage with a kick. It also doesn't count as a firearms attack (despite doing the damage of a shotgun or larger caliber rifle), which is going to be very important later. VERY important. Combat in Call of Cthulhu does not take up very much of the book. CoC really isn't a combat engine, it's there in case it comes up, but most of the time if you're playing in its spirit you'll be running for your life or thinking of other ways around monsters. Combat is very simple. You act in Dex order, if your gun has multiple shots you can shoot again on lower Dex ranks, if you Dodge you can't attack this turn, guns ALWAYS go once before melee when combat starts, and guns will kill your PC but not many of your enemies. Many of the enemies in CoC are nearly immune to firearms. Many weapons are 'Impaling' weapons. This gives a chance that if you roll 1/5th what you needed to hit, you Impale, doubling your damage. You also keep rolling to see if you Impale harder. That sounds cool, right? Most enemies are specifically near immune to weapons that can Impale (often taking automatic minimum damage from them). You want to stick to doing big kicks, using shotguns with high minimum damage, or hitting things with a wood axe/chainsaw. There's the obligatory table of guns, though most are listed by caliber (and what year they're available) and it's only one page long. It's there out of obligation. You can tell it's a little ashamed of itself. There's also a few grudging spot rules about guns: You can 'with laser sights and specific training' dual wield pistols without penalty in the 1990s if you have a 60% or better Handgun, which is hilarious. Automatic weapons are immensely dangerous, as every extra shot fired adds +5% to hit (user chooses how long their burst is) up to double chance to hit, and then when you hit you roll a dX where X is how many slugs you fired and that's how many times you hit someone. Alternatively, you can hit multiple someones, though that removes the +5% to hit per bullet. But still, someone with a tommy gun can whack you 20 times in one turn, which will turn most minor mythos monsters into soup (d10+2 damage per slug, so minimum damage 3? 60 damage will kill most mythos critters dead). If an enemy is firing a thompson at you, loving run! Your tender meats are much more vulnerable to guns than your enemies. You can also get armor, which straight subtracts from damage done, but again this is mostly a thing for enemies. Really, though, I appreciate that combat really isn't a focus. There's rules for it, it's probably going to come up sometimes, and there's a use for combat. Someone like Hilda up there can dive kick a surprising amount of the Mythos, and she's mostly here to compare against monsters when we get to the Mythos chapters. But it's mostly something you use on cultists and certain specific monsters you know you can kill. If you try to fight a God, things are probably going to do badly, and killing them doesn't even do anything. This isn't Arkham Horror style pulp, Sandy Petersen's idea of the Mythos is set up to discourage pulpy action and gunplay as much as possible. If you do kill a monster by violence, chances are you do it with a trap or dynamite or something. Considering that the game wants to be about investigation and puzzles and getting turned into soup by monsters, I think it's fairly appropriate that the combat rules are almost vestigial. It's an interesting change from 'no, we swear this is about careful politicking but here's 80 pages of combat rules'; here there's about 4, and much of it will be familiar just from knowing the basic lexicon of combat in skill-based RPGs. If you run out of HP, you die, etc. Next Time: The Other Big Mechanical System: Sanity
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Aug 20, 2020 16:20
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Night10194 posted:This isn't Arkham Horror style pulp, Sandy Petersen's idea of the Mythos is set up to discourage pulpy action and gunplay as much as possible.
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Aug 20, 2020 16:28
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mellonbread posted:I have some bad news for you about Masks of Nyarlathotep It's racist
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Aug 20, 2020 16:34
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mellonbread posted:I have some bad news for you about Masks of Nyarlathotep I haven't read the adventure books beyond a few scenarios, so I'm just going off everything this book says about itself and what rules it has in it. I can't imagine trying to run an actual pulp campaign with this rules system without modification.
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Aug 20, 2020 16:34
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Night10194 posted:This isn't Arkham Horror style pulp, Sandy Petersen's idea of the Mythos is set up to discourage pulpy action and gunplay as much as possible.
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Aug 20, 2020 16:43
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OtspIII posted:Option D is that the player describes how they're hiding and the GM just makes a snap "on a scale from 1 to 10, how good of an idea does this sound like?" judgement, then just sets that as the number they need to beat on a d10 for the xenomorph not to find them. It's not really a formal mechanic, more of a luck check with the odds set by how clever the player is being. It's in some ways similar to option C, since it is still very fiat-driven, but it's way easier to rule "what are the odds this would work" fairly than it is to rule "do I gently caress you over this time or not". You is pretty much the core of OSR play--if you don't know what should happen during a game you just think up a range of possible options and then roll a die to figure out which of them happens. This is how Machine of Death works: you are given a description of a target, their location and how the Machine has declared they will die, draw a bunch of cards/writing prompts that represent stores with a broad set of potential tools (for instance "The Good Kind of Bad" sells stuff like motorcycles, cigarettes and leather jackets) and you use the items you come up with to stage a three-step assassination. Then the whole table collaborates on how likely each step is to work, based on the both target's behavior and their foretold doom, which sets the difficulty for each roll. It's tons of fun in quick unconnected rounds, but I'm curious how it plays out in a formal scenario.
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Aug 20, 2020 16:47
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Night10194 posted:Call of Cthulhu, 5th Edition The Call of Kickthulhu Kickman's Model The Shadow(less Kick) Over Innsmouth The Dreams in the Witch-Roundhouse The Electric Executioner From Shaolin Nyarlathinstep The Thing on the DoorSTOMP! I could go on. (Shame she's not a boxer, The Statement of Rubin Carter is right there.) GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 17:02
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Night10194 posted:I haven't read the adventure books beyond a few scenarios, so I'm just going off everything this book says about itself and what rules it has in it. And it's one of the first campaign books released for Call of Cthulhu, back in 1984. I'd say it's representative of a general trend that's continued in horror games (and several other genres) for decades after: the rules text says "don't get in fights" and the published scenarios say "here are a bunch of fights, good luck".
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Aug 20, 2020 17:14
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mellonbread posted:Masks is a legendary meatgrinder of high lethality pulp combat. The players spend the entire campaign flying to exotic locations and getting in gunfights with cultists. yeah it literally ends with a James Bond style invasion of a super villain's lair, along with a small military force backing you up. Pretty over the top combat.
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Aug 20, 2020 17:16
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Night10194 posted:I haven't read the adventure books beyond a few scenarios, so I'm just going off everything this book says about itself It's good that the ways to fight monsters are shotguns, Tommy guns, axes, chainsaws, and putting the boot in. Those are all extremely cool and good ways.
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Aug 20, 2020 17:17
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Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Legions of Nagash Vampire Idiocy  Queen Neferata is the peak of vampiric aristocracy, effortlessly achieving the elegance so many lesser bloodsuckers aim for but miss. She is the ruler of the kingdom Neferatia, which she has fashioned to resemble the Nehekhara she once ruled. The capital, Nulahmia, is a beautiful but monstrous city, ruled over by savage and hedonistic vampires that keep their mortal subjects as mere livestock. Neferata herself approves - she craves control and loves to manipulate her subjects and even her master. She can remember when Nagash was just a man, after all. Some say she was the first to bear the Soulblight curse, the first ever vampire, from whom all others descend. Her control over the minds of others is greater than any other of her kind, as is her ability to play on the hunger for power and glory that her kin suffer from. The courts of Nulahmia are a playground for the treacherous, and ambitious nobles seek ever to increase their power and prestige. A vampire that has held high position for decades on end is still not safe, though - they must ever be on the lookout for rivals that want to cast them down, especially when Neferata is feeling bored and wants to see chaos to amuse herself. The constant competition and infighting is something she encourages. It keeps the other vampires focused on pleasing her to earn rank, and further it keeps them from becoming powerful enough to threaten her, as the courtiers will always try to tear down anyone that seems to be getting too powerful. Those rare few foolish enough to challenge her directly are torn apart by her steed, Nagadron, or paralyzed by her aura of dread beauty before she burns them with the magical power contained in her Staff of Pain, Akan-seth or cuts them with the soul-rending power of the Dagger of Jet, Akmet-har.  Mannfred von Carstein...well, he's bald and ugly but his Armor of Templehof is classic vampiric knight, at least. His abyssal steed, Ashigaroth, the armor and his unholy sword Gheistvor help him pull off the terrifying vampiric warlord, and the blade drinks the souls of his victims and pours them into him, making drinking actual blood largely optional and giving him plenty of fuel to burn on his necromantic magic. He specializes in firing off shrieking ghost lasers that chill and freeze those they strike. His domain is the underworld Carstinia, which was his attempt to recreate his native Sylvania. It is a place of dark forests, hunting hounds and screaming victims, and in theory, Mannfred rules it from his castle in the city Sternieste, attended to by corpses that resemble his old rivals and overseeing a populace of servile, pathetic living souls and mindless undead. It has long since grown stale for him, a pale reflection of a world he wishes was still around. He has spentm ost of his recent years away from Carstinia to avoid the bitter feeling of loss and failure that it evokes in him. It is nothing but a shadow of Sylvania, a reminder that he betrayed his family to become a mere slave to Nagash, and he prefers the sense of slightly greater freedom he gets at war. Nagash is fully aware that Mannfred hates his guts and would betray him instantly if he could, but is confident that his magical bindings will remain strong - and also is happy to inflict painful and humiliating punishments when Mannfred finds some way to actually perform an act of rebelliousness. Mannfred von Carstein has taken to at least playing the role of a willing servant, grudging as it is. He hides his plots now, aware that he can only push Nagash so far and survive. Only once he can find a way to break his chains for good will he allow his hatred and rage to show once more in front of his master, whose throne he plans to usurp. Nagash's actual reason for putting up with such a disloyal general is simple: Mannfred is really good at killing people. He personally led the Flyblown Legion of Nurgle into Rotsoul Mire and saw them all choked beneath its waters. He destroyed the Citadel of Blades by building a tower of corpses for his army to climb into it from. He spent several decades fighting and, ultimately, winning the War of the Nail, in which he pushed two duardin empires to war with each other by bloodily murdering key leaders, then wiping out the rulers of both in the chaos. This kind of thing is the only thing that makes him feel better, and then only briefly. At least, he tells himself, he can still savor the terror that mortals feel when he appears from the dark.  Arkhan the Black is the only person that Nagash can totally and completely trust. (Until Mortarch Katakros is raised, at least.) The Mortarch of Sacrament has been a willing servant to Nagash since before the World That Was ended, and he has learned many of Nagash's greatest secrets without ever betraying him. In return, he has been granted immense necromantic power and a unique position of influence in his master's empire. Only the lich truly understands the sheer scale of Nagash's plans, and he is tasked to take care of those things which Nagash cannot trust to less skilled or cunning minions. Arkhan commands the Black Disciples, a retinue of necromancer-priests whom he teaches personally in the ways of necromancy and Nagash's personal faith. To be even considered for membership in the Disciples is considered one of the greatest honors a necromancer can receive, requiring total dedication to the study of Amethyst magic and necromancy as well as a stomach for horrific atrocity. Even these mages cannot match their leader, though. Arkhan is second only to Nagash himself in understanding of the magic of death and unlife, and his flying steed, the abyssal Razarak, allows him to launch it from anywhere he likes in battle. He wields control over aging, corpses, shards of amethyst and souls, and anyone he kills quickly has their soul consumed to repair any damage he may have taken. He lacks the charisma and passion of Neferata and the rage of Mannfred, fighting with a cold and unemotional manner that comes from his total certainty in Nagash's ultimate victory. Next time: Armies of Undeath
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Aug 20, 2020 17:23
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MOTHERSHIP PLAYER’S SURVIVAL GUIDE - Part 5: Gear List In this post, we’re going to look at some of the equipment available to Mothership characters. Ordinarily I’d just skim a section like this, but there are a few interesting mechanics mixed in with the goods.  WEAPONS If you have the appropriate skill for the weapon you’re using (probably Firearms or Close Combat) you get a bonus to your Combat roll. Otherwise, it’s down to any bonuses or penalties applied by the weapon itself. AMMUNITION Weapons use ammunition when you fire them. The book recommends tracking this with a handful of tokens or counters, since expending a precious resource can be a source of tension and drama. There’s no word on how many magazines or rounds each of the starting loadouts gets, which is kind of important if you’re trying to enforce scarcity. RANGE Weapons each have three range bands.
AIMING By spending both your actions per-turn aiming your weapon, you get advantage on your next roll-to-hit. That means you’re throwing out two attack rolls for the possibility of making a slightly better attack roll next turn. Unless you are critically short on ammunition, this is not a mathematically smart thing to do. RELOADING Reloading takes an action, unless you’ve got the Military Training or Firearms skill. Then it’s free, as long as you’re wearing load bearing equipment that puts the ammunition in easy reach. AUTOMATIC WEAPONS If you shoot an automatic weapon and you don’t have the Military Training skill, you empty the magazine with a single attack roll. If you’ve got the skill, you know how to shoot controlled bursts, and instead get the listed number of attacks before reloading. Combine this with the rules for reloading, and the Military Training skill makes a huge difference in combat effectiveness. A normal character with a Pulse Rifle gets one attack action each round, and has to spend their other action reloading. A Marine with Military Training gets to shoot twice per round until they exhaust all ammunition carried on their person, never pausing to reload. It’s a neat way to port the Fighter getting bonus attacks into a different setting and ruleset. Any character can buy Military Training with a skill point, it’s not exclusive to the Marine. SPECIAL PROPERTIES Some weapons automatically boost your Combat skill when you use them in the right circumstances. Some boost your Combat skill only if you have the Firearms or Close Combat skill. Some have other properties, like reducing the target’s Armor Save with an armor piercing attack.  GUNS Now we get to the weapons themselves. The game presents them in an interesting format:  Note that the diagrams doesn’t include range bands for the weapons. Those are found in a separate table inserted on the inside cover of the book, which displays the same information. Note also that rather than having a single mechanical effect for critical hits, like double damage, Mothership hands out critical effects based on which specific weapon you’re using. Weapons which aren’t guns aren’t included in the illustrations, but are instead spread through the rest of the gear list. They still appear grouped with the guns in the table at the start of the book, though. Let’s briefly cover what’s on offer
The weapons all have costs in credits. An SMG or Laser Cutter costs 1,200, a Combat Shotgun and a Pulse Rifle both cost 1,400, a Flamethrower costs 2,000, and a Smart Rifle costs 12,000. I bring this up because the game never gives any indication of how much money should be flowing through the players’ hands. There are no treasure tables or rules for salvaging derelict ships, nor are there guidelines for how much a given job should pay. The only time the game gives you money is your starting credits. ARMOR Like weapons, armor is given in an illustration, then again as a text description in the general gear list. Take a look at this image, though.  The armor in the image is the Advanced Battledress, but the one the Exterminator kit grants you is the Standard Battledress. This irritates me. If they’d put the regular old battledress in the picture, along with its text description, they’d have had all the armors available at character creation in a single two-page spread. Instead, they put a variant version of the basic equipment that nobody is actually going to use. But that’s not all. Look at the description in the image. Now here’s the text description given in the equipment table Advanced Battle Dress posted:Heavy combat outfit worn by marines in battletorn offworld engagements. It confers a +15% bonus to the wearer’s Armor save. It has a small exo-skeleton that allows the wearer to carry twice what they normally could. Anyway, the Standard Battle Dress only gives you a +10% to your Armor Save, but doesn’t impose disadvantage to Speed. This is kind of important, since it means that the ABD virtually guarantees you’ll fail Initiative.  The Vaccsuit gives you disadvantage to Speed, but lets you survive in a vacuum, which is a big deal. The image says it provides a 5% buff to your armor save, but the table entry says 7%. The image also says “If punctured, internal monitor will sound announcing decompression within 60 seconds” but there’s nothing that says how this works mechanically.  We’re HAZMAT dudes, in protective HAZMAT suits. Yeah, oh yeah The Hazard Suit doesn’t protect you against vacuum, but if you’re in atmo it’s got its own air supply and can protect you from toxins and contaminants, both chemical and biological.  The Standard Crew Attire has no mechanical effects, other than maybe the pockets serving as load bearing equipment for the aforementioned Military Training rules when reloading. EQUIPMENT The equipment list is a mix of staples and more exotic stuff. Of note here are things like Electronic Tools and First Aid Kits, which give a percentage bonus to your rolls. I think the designers made a deliberate decision not to hand out advantage via specific items or mechanics. Because if a mechanic gives you advantage on a roll, and advantage doesn’t stack, you no longer have an incentive to think of a cool fictional reason why you should get a bonus. I’ll pull out some highlights from the gear list.
STARTING CREDITS Ordinarily, you get 5D10 times 10 starting Credits with your loadout of choice. If you choose not to take a loadout, that gets bumped up to 5D10 times 10 times 10 again, and you get to buy your gear manually. This is presumably for experienced players who have actually read the book and know what they’re after, which is why it’s buried here instead of presented in chargen. ADDICTION Stimpaks and Painkillers carry a risk of addiction. If you engage in “excessive use” you have to make a Body save or get hooked. While addicted, you take D10 Stress for each day you go without a fix. Go a whole week taking one a day, and you become numb to their effects, requiring twice as many to achieve the same effect. The only way to beat addiction is to spend experience buying it off. We’ll talk about that in the advancement section. Oh and if you ever take more than one pill or stimpak at a time, you have a 10% chance per dose you took of ODing. Then you make a Body save, and if you fail that you get sent to the critical injuries table from the Combat chapter.  That’s the gear list. Next up, we’ll cover hiring NPC crewmates. It’s more amusing than you might think. Saguaro PI posted:Sean McCoy highlighted this issue on Twitter and it's specifically because he wanted stealth to be a thing that the player made active choices about rather than rolling for it. Except as you've pointed out, there's no guidance on how the GM is supposed to adjudicate whether the xenomorph decides to check under the bed where the terrified PC is hiding, so you either: I do appreciate getting the highlights though. If you have any others that directly address things that come up during the discussion, don't hesitate to share.
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Aug 20, 2020 18:01
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