|
Ghouls in the cellar totally tanks the resale value, you're better off collecting the homeowner's insurance. Burn it
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2020 20:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 23:50 |
|
|
I love the lizard protoss, but I hate that they're fanatical isolationists because it makes it more difficult to use them outside of just models on a map that fight each other. Anyway, I'm going to disagree with the first two votes because as a DM I hate the 'burn everything' approach players take to games which is lame and antagonistic. So, I say we beat the ghouls to death with our fists.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2020 21:55
|
|
|
Ithle01 posted:I love the lizard protoss, but I hate that they're fanatical isolationists because it makes it more difficult to use them outside of just models on a map that fight each other. Good news: not all of them are isolationist, as we will learn. They’re all pretty bad at talking to people, though.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2020 22:14
|
|
|
Can't believe I never noticed the way the Agenda and Act cards line up. I have played... a lot of Arkham Horror.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2020 22:22
|
|
|
We've just beaten the poo poo out of a Ghoul King. Like gently caress are we burning the place, any other wanker wants to try take the house can come get some.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 00:19
|
|
|
I vote for https://youtu.be/_3eC35LoF4U
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 00:24
|
|
|
 Chapter 3: Geography (  ) In Chicago, “Elysium” applies to just about every museum and fine arts center in the city. The primogen controls them all, and its members, as much as they constantly squabble, come down like a sack of bricks on anyone who disturbs the peace. The book gives us a long subsection elaborating the rules and assumptions that govern any given Elysium but they boil down to “don’t kill each other, arguments are gauche, and be discreet entering and exiting”. In theory every vampire can come and go in peace, but these days only primogen partisans ever visit. We get an extensive listing of all the different areas and buildings that they’ve declared Elysium over the years, but the only big surprises the University of Chicago. I don’t know why. It’s historically important?  The Rack is Chicago’s primary hunting grounds; centered on Rush Street and extending into the surrounding areas, just about everybody hits up the clubs, bars, and alleys of the Rack at some point looking for prey. The book goes out of its way to assure us that Rush Street is much nicer in real life, then talks about how muggings and street violence are rare and limited to extremely stupid people. We get an extensive listing of clubs, a detailed breakdown of the best bars to reserve a shadowed booth at, and the most aggressively 90s thing in the book so far:  Look at that. I could’ve quoted it, but I wanted it preserved in its natural habitat  These two losers are Blood Dolls, members of Chicago’s newest, edgiest subculture: think goths, but like to drink each other’s blood. As in, they stab each other’s wrists and dig in at the end of that short story. No, they’re not not vampires, they just do that, that’s their thing. Naturally, vampires like them because they can just have a quick nosh and come across as merely mortal and stupid. God, just reading that I think about catching blood-borne diseases even if they don’t accidentally exsanguinate themselves. I know teenagers are supposed to be stupid, but I can say with complete honesty I’ve never met a teenager THAT dumb. If they want to risk their lives, they’ll use drugs and take extreme risks like the rest of us. Vampires call the Loop the Hive (it isn’t Vambur: de Maggerad unless ordinary things have pretentious alternate names). Well, I say that, but somehow Chicago By Night wants to convince us it’s also a crime hotspot where slums exist within blocks of art galleries. Like, this is Chicago, even if that were true the police probably would’ve razed the slums long ago. We get an extensive listing of both real and fictional businesses and buildings here – did you know that vampires buy all the books Marshall Field sells? – and mixes it with the obligatory references to Pentex and Black Dog Games (which runs a haunted Dave & Busters here).  The Barrens. The Barrens. Oh God, it’s as bad as predicted  . Okay, deep breaths, you can get through this in a couple paragraphs max.The Barrens are every place in the city vampires don’t want to visit. Some of these areas are just densely populated museums like the Field or Shedd where nobody wants to accidentally drain a tourist. But some of them are places vampires do not dare to tread. Kind of. I mean, they throw that label at the western outskirts of Gary. Man, I’ve been there. It sucks. The air is yellow. It’s not the post-apocalyptic wasteland this book makes it out to be. But  it details two specific places: Lower Michigan Avenue and Cabrini Green. I spent literally half an hour sitting here staring at my keyboard trying to figure out a way to present this. Like, look. This isn’t RaHoWa. It could be so, SO much worse. The people here are portrayed with genuine sympathy. Unfortunately, the book presents that sympathy with a heaping, healthy dose of bias and victim blaming that’s just  . For the first, go Google “lower wacker drive homeless” and read the first several news stories, then imagine they tip over cars that won’t stop to give money and reach in and pull people out of their cars if they do. Take that, add vampires using the whole region as a macabre blood bank and that’s what the book wants to get across. As for the second? Take every alarmist article about inner-city violence you’ve ever read, mash them together, blame it on developers bribing gangs to come in and murder everyone, and… you know what? I don’t want to spend the emotional energy exploring this. Disappointing? Probably. Why? Here, have a quote: The rest is just more of this.  I’m done. gently caress that section. The next chapter, as large as the rest of the book put together, is a list of character biographies that I have to process 
Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Sep 4, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 02:18
|
|
|
Falconier111 posted:
If it sucks that much you really don’t have to do a line by line Let’s Read just for us, just hit the high/lowlights and move on to the next.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 02:41
|
|
|
Midjack posted:If it sucks that much you really don’t have to do a line by line Let’s Read just for us, just hit the high/lowlights and move on to the next. Yeah, I’m exaggerating for comic effect, I learned that lesson with Rim of Fire. There’s a lot of solid material to cover but this will be a curated tour (edited the last post to tune the sarcasm before I read this post, lol)
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 02:44
|
|
|
oWoD's entire Thing with Gary Indiana makes a lot of sense to me, as someone who spent a lot of time driving from western Wisconsin to Ohio and back. You see, if you are only driving through Chicago going from the southeast (like, say, Georgia, where WW was based), to northwest (like, say, Lake Geneva, WI, where Gencon was until the early 2000s), you will go past Gary when you get just southeast of Chicago. This particular stretch is relatively badly-lit at night for the highway (or at least, was in the 90s/00s), gets close to street-level in enough spots that people may very rarely run cross it when it's not busy, and goes past the most mill-smelling parts of Gary. As a result, if you're only experiencing Gary driving from your hometown to Gencon and back, and have no interest in examining what it's like to actually live anywhere near there, you will be very inclined to characterize it as the "windows up" scene from National Lampoon's Vacation, and just spiral from there.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 03:39
|
|
|
Under the Dark Fist, Conclusion This is the only part of the module that really conforms to a standard adventure. It starts with a space battle and ends with the victory or death of the allied forces. Your fleet enters Vodoni space, finds a way through the web, and then fly directly toward Vulkaras for the final confrontation. Chapter Five, space battle The battle plan is for the fleet to engage the Vodoni ships in orbit and then land an invasion force in the Imperial City. This will distract the Vodoni security forces so the PCs have an opening to fly directly to Vulkaran's palace. The elven commanders have come up with what I will call a very "elven" plan in that it is both obviously flawed and built by narcissistic jerks who lack the self-awareness to see the flaws. I'll summarize: The openly treacherous faction (neogi) is tasked with providing the fleet with reinforcements and watching out for ambushes, the chaos factions (beholders and mind flayers) are tasked with patiently holding back and covering the flanks of the dwarven vanguard in case they overextend themselves, the dwarves are supposed to assist the elves in fighting the enemy fleet and will take the front lines, the two disposable races (humans and gnomes) have to land in and liberate the Imperial City, and the elves are going to fight from as far away as possible. What could go wrong with this? Surely, as fellow humans the Vodoni will welcome the human fleet - and its miscellaneous ogre, lizard-man, and giant allies - as liberators. Dwarves working with beholders and mind flayers? Sure, because as everyone knows they all get along and have no long-standing grudges with each other. Trusting the neogi not to betray you? Well, why not show them how much we trust them by having them cover our backs. The gnomes are being sent into the Imperial City because the elves assume that the gnomes are such a pack of screw-ups that they'll actually cause more damage by accident then they could on purpose so it's best to have them in the middle of the enemy when this happens. The fight starts when the neogi backstab the allied fleet before the Vodoni even engage the rest of the allies. The neogi are so keen to betray the allied fleets that they actually gently caress up Vulkaran's plan for the neogi to betray you at a more crucial point. A well thought out plan all around. As the dwarves charge ahead into the Vodoni, the mind flayers break away and take immediate revenge on the neogi, leaving the dwarves to rely on the beholders to protect them. The beholders join the battle by immediately attacking each other. Again. Fortunately, they're the closest to the neogi and end up flying straight into the neogi fleet as they're attacking each other. All of the evil races in the alliance are now involved in a three-way battle to the death against (and, for the beholders, with) each other, the elves are under attack by their allies, the dwarves are probably the only ones actually fighting the Vodoni, and the gnomes and humans are on their merry way into a suicide mission. Once the PCs manage to escape this clusterfuck they fly toward Vulkaran's crystal spire. This tower is the only thing that Vulkaran has ever used the Eye of the Gods (the Vodoni gods' crystal prison) to create and its divine manufacture means that it is totally impenetrable in the physical, ethereal, and astral planes and also basically indestructible with only one weakness. In order to get inside you have to fly to its entrance and navigate your ship through a crystalline mirror maze. The adventure talks about the crystal labyrinth and its traps: A falling ceiling, a giant crystal spider matron and her diamond brood, arc lightning emitters, a double-crew loaded warship that stalks you in the hall of mirrors, and a wall of force dead end that you can crash your ship into. There's also a treasure vault filled with thousands of tons of gems, each worth at least 1,000gp, forming a horde so vast it is incalculable. Standard dungeon crawl stuff, but scaled up in size. After the ship-sized portion of the dungeon you make it into a landing bay where the adventure turns human-sized. The PCs disembark and enter Vulkaran's palace. There are four different doors that each lead to four different parts of Vulkaran's inner sanctum and each one has to be opened before you can get to the fifth chamber, the throne room, via an elevator. The elevator is locked and requires a specific series of spells to be cast on it to open. This is supposed to be a riddle, but it's incredibly weak writing because the spells correspond with the compass directions that are associated with each of the four chambers. One of the spells is neutralize poison (for the North door) and that's a cleric spell in a star system where there is no priestly magic above 2nd level. Anyway, this area is an actual dungeon so I'll briefly cover the rooms you'll find, organized by their cardinal direction. North: The Laboratory, contains the secret process of turning humans into Vodoni brand werewolves. Also tells you how to reverse the process. Two encounters here. The first is a force of Vodoni wizards and enforcers. The second is looting the bedroom of a high-level lady wizard who lives here. The bedroom is 'feminine' and the adventure suggests you imply that Vulkaran is a woman because that would be a surprise? The PCs find evidence that whoever lives here is working on a new and improved strain of werewolf called 'Conquerors'. Anyway, it's not Vularan's room. The wizard's name is Mongrelle, a 20th level transmuter who directs the Vodoni werewolf-soldier program and she hides her spell book under her bed like she's ten years old. She's in the throne room with Vulkaran. Mongrelle views herself as a co-sovereign to Vulkaran and she manages the political and magical affairs of Vulkaran's empire while leaveing the military conquest and administration to him. You've never met her before and your only interaction will be to kill her, but a DM might improvise on this a little bit if you ever have a reason to explore the origins of the Vodoni enforcers or go into the under city of the Imperial City where the Vodoni werewolves run amok. You can easily expand her role even further if the PCs ever infiltrate the Imperial City during chapter three and the DM creates conflicts within the Vodoni breeders' noble houses. East: A meditation chamber for evil wizards. Filled with an inky black darkness. Evil-aligned spellcasters that rest here have their spells enhanced (do they have to use a braille spell book?). Mongrelle regularly rests here. Have fun dealing with a 20th level wizard that has all of her spells boosted to have maximum range, duration, and effect. Non-evil people who enter save vs. death or die every round, but if you survive then you can commune with the gods of the Vodoni who can make themselves heard here. That's just what I want before a final battle, a save or die effect to remove a PC. South: Statuary + menagerie. An natural environment, but all the animals are made of (have been turned into) stone. Eight basilisks live here and will ambush the PCs. A pool in the room turns anyone that drinks from it into stone as if stone to flesh were cast. More save or die effects. West: Map room. Giant crystal spheres that are replicas of all of Vodoni-controlled space float throigh here. The three canon spheres are also present and Vulkaran is getting ready to add them to the display. This also serves as a war room, but it's empty right now except for its custodian an enormous senile crystal spider. After unlocking all of the chambers and solving their riddles you can proceed to the throne room. Chapter Six, fighting the emperor As soon as you enter the final crystal chamber at the apex of the Vulkaran's spire the whole structure begins shaking and then it blasts off into space. The throne room is an indestructible spelljamming ship made from god-glass and its heading right towards the elven command ship where it will ram right through it and kill the alliance's elven commanders. You have ten rounds to stop this - assuming you want to. This will be a very short chapter. Vulkaran taunts you and softens you up by letting you fight thirty of his newest minions, the Vodoni conquerors. Conquerors are a stronger version of enforcers that will eventually supplant the enforcers in Vulkaran's armies. Conquerors have 10HD and are fairly impressive melee fighters with multiple attacks and high damage, but they are soft to magic and spell casters can cut them down with layered AoE. Mongrelle, the 20th level transmuter, will also join the fight and she is a ridiculous challenge because she has high-level wizard gear and if that's not enough her favorite spell is shapechange. Good luck fighting a wizard that can turn into a giant dragon and regain all of her hp in the process. If you make it to the helm, which is the Eye of the Gods itself, you get to fight Vulkaran, but otherwise he's busy piloting the throne room. He also throws down if you kill Mongrelle or if she is forced to flee. Vulkaran is a 20th level fighter with a panoply of high-end magic items, but nothing too fancy, just regular big number-plus value stuff like platemail and a defender sword combined with a girdle of storm giant strength and a cloak of displacement. Vulkaran has 180hp, an AC of -9, attacks twice a round at a ThAC0 of 2 (technically lower), hits for 1d8+21 damage (doubled against lawful good opponents), and his greatest weapon is that he's secretly a maeder aka male medusa. This means he has both a petrification touch and a petrification gaze attack, save or die. The gaze attack is so strong that it works when he looks at you, not the other way around, so he can kill you by staring at you hard enough. Okay, so, you kill Vulkaran or at least distract him long enough to get to the Eye of the Gods or the ship's wheel (wait what?). The wheel is password locked (the password is "banzai".....sigh) so that's probably a no-go unless you are a really good guesser or hear Vulkaran say it somehow. If you get to the Eye of the Gods it's locked too and keyed to Vulkaran so that leaves us with the only real solution. You killed Vulkaran. As soon as you do the whole chamber starts shaking and looks like it's going to explode - remember that you are also hurtling through outer space. Vulkaran is what some might call a 'load-bearing boss' and because Vulkaran built his palace by using the power of the Crystal King locked in the Eye of the Gods his death causes the palace to fall apart as per the terms of service. The party have to escape before the whole place explodes. I hope you remember to grab that weird crystal ball that just happens to contain a pantheon of gods inside it before you leave or else it could be lost in space. More Stuff Once Vulkaran is dead his empire falls apart - or it doesn't. The alliance fleet might survive - or not. And the PCs can release the Vodoni gods or keep them hostage for stuff. Or maybe they lost the Eye of the Gods in the final battle. Lots of ways to go forward from here. Overall, I like that the adventure module gives you lots of options and despite its short-comings I feel that you can make a reasonable campaign out of this given what's here. My only problem with it is that the rogue's gallery is a bit shallow. Mongrelle and Vulkaran are totally absent until the end and the Vodoni breeders are basically faceless mooks despite being 16th level wizards each and every one of them. There are no named enforcers so each werewolf is just a generic bad-guy until you get to the end when you fight the slightly stronger variant of conqueror-strain Vodoni. Vodoni humans are also likewise under utilized. There are some minor cast members in the appendices and these are your NPCs allies: The treacherous neogi ambassador Griktha, the dwarven King Druin who has both anger problems and a sense of entitlement like a 'roided out frat bro, Prince Villithandra the pyromaniac illithid wizard, and the eight gnomish ambassadors who might sneak on board your ship for fun. The gnomes' names are Hoogley, Doogley, Loogley, Linkyn, B'linkyn, Knod, Horatio, and Pip Snodgras D'Algernon and they get involved in the kind of hijinks that can either complicate or save your lives. Players will either love them or hate them so I got no complaints about them. In the event something happens to a PC the adventure also drops in six ready-to-go PCs who can be substituted in. This will come in handy in the final dungeon with its multiple save or die traps. They are as follows: Denys of Shiningburg. His name alone tells you that he's a paladin. Selfless, noble, looks like Superman, slays dragons. Veteran of the War of the Lance despite the absence of paladins on Krynn. Dav the Butcher. Half-ogre racist caricature. 12th level Fighter, but has loads of magic items to compensate, including a ring of shooting stars. Melee murder machine. Just replace him with Brock Samson and you're good to go. Villam D'Corson. A transmuter. Would be cool if that weren't the most useless class you can imagine in a campaign against werewolves. 14th level wizard makes him the highest xp party member by an absurd margin, but still crappy when compared to your enemies who are two levels higher compared to him. He has a ring of teleportation which is totally non-functional in Vodoni space. 35 hp, dies if hit by a strong breeze. Ande D'Vis: 13th level evoker. Fireball expert. I like this guy, but another NPC already does his schtick. Jewely Carseah: 13th level priestess of Hel. Can't recover spells in Vodoni space. Oops. Seductive goth lady. Has no problem killing foes trapped with Hold Person spells. Likes to animate the dead bodies of her allies. Nice magic gear, good in a fight. Marcus of the Waters: dual class 10th level cleric / 11th level Thief. I already mentioned the problem with clerics, but at least he has thief levels to back it up. Useful at all sorts of skullduggery. Features of the Imperial City The Imperial City is built to appear to be an enormous spider's web from overhead. There are 24 segments, each equal in size, that correspond to the twelve noble houses of the Vodoni Breeders who create the Vodoni enforcers and the twelve professional guilds who help the noble houses manage the empire. Estates of the major houses are surrounded by the estates of lesser houses and this creates a situation where anyone who might threaten Vulkaran is surrounded by rivals that are all looking for any way to elevate their position from minor to major house. PCs who sneak into this area in chapter three might find ways to turn the noble houses against the emperor. There is also a cult among the common folk i.e. slaves of the Vodoni that still worship the Crystal King and will do whatever they can to aid the PCs if it results in their gods being freed from imprisonment. This is the only time ordinary Vodoni are really mentioned, otherwise their labor is dedicated to satisfying Vulkaran's avarice. Beneath the Imperial City is the Undercity formed from the remains of a major metropolis annihilated by the star going nova. In the depths of the ruins newly minted Vodoni enforcers are turned loose and hone their killing instincts against each other. Those who survive are collected and inducted into Vulkaran's legions. If PCs can't find something to do here they aren't looking. The noble houses, and by extension Mongrelle, run the show down here. Vulkaran doesn't care where his soldiers come from, he just requires they be both strong and loyal. If anything the Imperial City should hammer home the point that Vulkaran's empire appears strong but is extremely fragile. That's about it for this adventure. These deep dives are really taking me a long time to slap together so I think I'm about done with them and I'll stop crapping up this thread now that classes are starting again. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Sep 4, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 07:37
|
|
|
 For what it's worth, I realize that I mispoke on a rather important game mechanic and made the appropriate changes in Basic Resolution Rules. When it comes to adding level to overcome rolls, they're added on top of instead of as a substitute for the appropriate attribute modifier. Here's the changed text: quote:Overcome Attempts represent opposing and contested actions, where the “overcomer” must roll a d20 + an appropriate attribute modifier equal to or greater than the opposition’s relevant attribute score; some situations allow one to add the level of a relevant profession* to the d20 result. We have a half-page worth of common Overcome results, ranging from spotting someone sneaking (overcome their Dexterity with your Intelligence modifier), Intimidation (overcome their Willpower with your Ferocity modifier), and even attack rolls (overcome their Armour Rating [a non-attribute exception] with your Ferocity or Dexterity modifier depending upon melee or ranged attack).
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 08:03
|
|
|
Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Seraphon Captain's Log Floating In Swamp Even the gods don't understand for sure how the temple-ships made their way to the Mortal Realms. The slann may recall, but they nver speak of it to anyone, even the skinks and saurus. Neither of these lesser subspecies remember the time before they emerged from their spawning pools, and even the oldest was born aboard ship. The peoples that have encountered the Seraphon have wondered often - as have the skinks, who are innately curious and enjoy talking to each other and other species, though rarely about anything the other species understand. Both skinks and the other peoples of the realms have developed a number of theories. Among humans, the group that know the most about the Seraphon are likely the Moon Monks of Hysh, who spend their lives observing the moons and stars of the void obsessively. Their endless meditations and observations have given them insight into the Seraphon entirely by accident - they just kind of end up watching the temple-ships as they study the skies. Even they know very little, but they have concluded that one thing is obviously true: the Seraphon do not hail from the Mortal Realms. They are alien creatures, from somewhere beyond. They may even predate the existence of the Mortal Realms entirely. And this is correct. The truth is that the Seraphon came from the World-That-Was, of course, but only the slann know this. Their temple-cities across the realms are merely the latest iteration of their civilization, and the vessels that were used to build the cities were launched into space to escape the destruction of all the Seraphon of the past knew. The saurus, skinks and kroxigor were unready for the journey. Many of them died in the lightless void between stars, their cold-blooded nature sending them into eternal slumbers from which they never woke. The slann made a massive effort to save their subjects, sending the majority into magical suspended animation. However, the effort of doing this drained much of the magical power that kept the temple-ships active. Many systems began to power down through the long voyage of the void, unable to absorb ambient aether to recharge themselves. The slann had to move slowly, their stellar engines nearly dead and their subjects bound in protective slumber. Their time was spent plotting vengeance against Chaos and reworking what they knew of the Great Plan, now that their world was dead. They were lucky, however: they were found in the void by the Great Drake, the godbeast Dracothion, as the ice nearly entombed their ships. When the stellar dragon found the temple-ships in the void, he sensed the life within them and breathed a massive pulse of starlight over them, awakening the Seraphon within. A small faction of skinks actually believe that the earliest Seraphon woken from slumber were literally reborn, formed entirely from the breath of Dracothion. Another order of skinks use the stellar cartography they've mastered in the skies of Azyr, tracking the first appearances of the stellar anomalies that they know are their own fleets. They claim that Dracothion merely re-energized the ships and gave them the power to independently travel the void, rather than fully remaking the Seraphon as his own. The difference is academic, they admit - the spawning pools of the ships were suffused with Celestial magic, and the Seraphon that exist today are not those that went into hibernation. They are a new thing, reborn through magical energy. One skink faction claims that Dracothion watched the fleets and formed a telepathic link with the slann. They say that the slann showed him the disasters that ruined the time before, and the sorrow made Dracothion weep silver tears, which became fiery comets and shooting stars that guided the temple-ships to Azyr. (Or possibly that's just metaphorical - there's argument over that.) Each story likely contains some truth, which is more than can be said for most of the legends of other cultures regarding the Seraphon. The Woad Lord tribes of Azyr's wilds, for example, say that the Seraphon come from a hidden kingdom in the most hiden reaches of Azyr, serving as the scouts and outriders of the true gods that live there. Some, skink and otherwise, claim that the Old Ones that made the slann are also responsible for creating the Mortal Realms. This is certainly possible - the Old Ones possessed immense control over magic and would have been capable, if anyone was, of forcing it into physical form. Certainly, the slann have intimate knowledge of the realmgates. Some skink legends claim that the original Seraphon were simply crude, primitive reptiles uplifted to true intellect by the Old Ones in order to serve a purpose, and that is why it is the nature of slann to manipulate other, lesser life in the name of the Great Plan. They merely follow in the footsteps of their creators, who may well have created the unvierse itself. The truth will likely never be known - the slann aren't about to give it out, even to the skinks. Whatever the truth, the Starborne fleets make their homes in the starlit skies above Azyr. They have explored it more extensively than even the children of Dracothion, and they fly higher and deeper than even Sigmaron itself and the High Star Sigendril that serves as Azyr's guiding light. Life aboard the stellar ziggurat-ships of the Seraphon is not what most other peoples imagine when they hear the word "ship." They are flying cities in the dark, filled with strange and mystical technology. The pyramids and obelisks that form the structures within pulse with star engines and realmshaping tools, each guided by the magic and will of the slann and the clever hands of the skinks. The armies aboard are sent forth to fight via miniature Realmgates, created using Old One technology. They flash blindingly bright when they open, which is why many other peoples misinterpret the Seraphon as being manifested of starlight entirely and being constructs of Azyr. Each ship is a geometric marvel, built in a way that humans and aelves cannot comprehend fully. The Seraphon have minds more attuned to the ordered patterns they use, and never got lost aboard the ship as the passageways and jungles within make innate sense to them in ways they would not for any guest. The shipboard life is a mix of highly advanced magical technology and primitive life, merged entirely seamlessly. Huge orreries and stellariums take up whole chambers, and within them the skink seers observe the stars and interpret their messages, recording all manner of prophecy and collating them for the slann overlords. The walls are marked with glowing glyphs and circuitry that pulse with blue and white light, like the stars themselves. Sigils ward the hatcheries where hundreds of eggs are kept in perfect temperature, each ready to hatch one of the saurian monsters that serve the Seraphon in battle, cared for by gaggles of kind and ever-worrying skinks. And yet, right outside these highly advanced areas are the world-chambers. The Realmshaper Engines aboard the ship are focused on the world-chambers, reproducing the sweltering jungles that the Seraphon love so much. Thick plantlife, wandering rivers and wild beasts roam these areas. When the saurus, skinks and kroxigor are not fighting, they live here, hunting prey and training in perfect harmony. It is a life they enjoy deeply. The jungles are filled with terraced pyramids and beautiful obsidian walkways, and the skink priests that lead their people watch from above, noting which saurus excel at the hunt, which kroxigor have leadership abilities, which other skinks seem cleverest. They mark these out for greatness, preparing them to be leaders. Even further in, at the heart of each ship, there are the spawning pools. These are bright green lakes that shine with stellar energies. Starlight flows across their surface, playing out constellations in the twinkling of light on water. Immense wheels turn in the walls and chambers around the spawning pools, channeling magical energies into them. Golden plaques are pressed in key sequences, shaping those energies in the depths of the pool. The energy takes shape in the depths of water, and new Seraphon are born, swimming to the surface to see light for the first time. Saurus champions guard all entrances to the sacred chambers of spawning at all times, and several Starborne fleets do not take part in military activity ever, to help ensure that there will always be safe spawnings and that daemons and greedy mortals will never be able to wipe out the Seraphon, even if the worst comes.  Next time: Seraphon Outside The Ships
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 17:41
|
|
|
MOTHERSHIP PLAYER’S SURVIVAL GUIDE - Part 8: Ships and Space Travel It’s time for more Mothership. In this post, we’ll go over the rules for space ships, space travel and space combat. TRAVEL TIME Ships travel through space in two ways: thrusters and jump drives. Thrusters are used for local maneuvering, usually within a solar system. Ships have a Speed stat that determines exactly how fast their thrusters are. A ship with good thrusters can get from a star to its oort cloud in a few hours, while a ship with poor thrusters could take weeks to make the same journey. You can use thrusters to travel between star systems, but even the fastest ship takes months to do so. Jump Drives transport a ship from one point to another at faster than light speeds by entering and exiting hyperspace. Jump Drives are rated on a scale of 1 to 9, based on how far they can go in a single jump. How long a jump takes and how far it gets you are entirely up to the Warden. It’s annoying that they don’t give more guidance for this. Part of the ship creation mini-game is choosing what level of Drive to equip the vessel with. It’s never good when something has detailed incremental costs in resources, but zero information on the benefits each of those increments gets you. When you enter hyperspace, anyone who’s not an Android had better be in cryosleep, or suffer “strange and terrifying experiences”. What does that mean, mechanically? I don’t know, and neither does the book. Seems like the kind of thing a game with a detailed subsystem for Stress and Panic should have rules for, instead of a vague narrative description. CAPTAINS In order to own a ship, you need to go into your skill tree and purchase both the Vehicle Specialization for the vessel you want to own, and the Command skill. Alongside having an Android, this is the other skill tax you have to pay in order to use the space ship rules. I assume if none of the players have the skills to pay the bills, you’re supposed to make them crew of an NPC captain’s vessel, working for a corporation or something. I assume that because it’s thematically fitting for the setting Mothership wants to emulate, but maybe I shouldn’t assume it at all, because the book provides no instructions or support for how to handle that. EXAMPLE SHIPS The book lists some example ships, along with the minimum hull a ship of that category might have, the maximum hull, what modules it carries (plus what level and how many), and some notes about what the ship does. There’s a good spread of options for different types of game, both if you’re looking to give the players a ship to start with, or if you want to give the NPCs something. You’ve got freighters and frigates for miners or teamsters, couriers and blockade runners for smugglers, troopships for marines, research vessels for teams of scientists, a template for a colony ship, etc. There are also vessels like shuttles that don’t have jump drives, because they’re meant for local movement around a solar system via thrusters. Some of the ships don’t have life support or cryocapsules, which is fine because they’re fighters and utility pods, meant to be used with a space suit for short tasks. But some are missing stuff like values for their thrusters or the ship’s computer, which the ship creation system says are mandatory for every vessel. The example ships have weapon hardpoints listed, but not the weapons mounted to them by default. SHIP FINANCING Ships are vastly beyond the purchasing power of all but the wealthiest private citizens. A single point of hull (the universal measure of ship cost in the ship creation minigame) costs 10 million credits, and most of the example ships have between 30 and 60 points. If the players start the game with a ship, they have equity equal to 6D10 percent of the total cost, with the rest of the vessel mortgaged from the bank or some other financial institution. Rather than tracking interest rates, the book suggests that 10% of all credits earned by the crew go toward paying off this debt. I like the debt mechanic because it encourages the players to do dangerous poo poo in order to get money and pay off their loans. But I’ve said before that I have no idea whether such costs are reasonable, because the book has no guidance on how much money anything the players do is worth. I’m saying it again here. FUEL AND REFUELING This section lists how much fuel space travel takes. A day of thruster use uses one unit of fuel. A hyperspace jump uses fuel equal to the distance of the jump (which, again, is undefined). Various other things like space battles and orbiting planets can use more or less fuel depending on the circumstances. Refined fuel costs 10,000 per unit, and is available at starports. Unrefined fuel is more widely available, but takes twice as much to pay the fuel cost of doing any of the above activities. The more of this section I read, the more it feels like a Traveler-esque game of interstellar commerce. Take on a millions credits in debt to fuel your ship, hope the cargo is worth more than the price of admission at the other end of the trip. Think carefully about what you buy and who you hire, because every cost you take on comes out of your margins at the end. What’s missing are any rules for buying, selling and trading commodities, or any other enterprises that could support this playstyle. UPGRADES AND REPAIRS Anyone with “Mechanical Repair, Engineering, or a similar skill” can make an attempt to repair a damaged ship. That’s an Intellect test which, if successful, repairs hull points equal to twice the tens digit of the successful roll. If you paid attention a post or two back, you might notice that this is a different margin-of-success rule from healing and first aid. If a ship has been reduced to three quarters, half, or one quarter of its hull points, you can’t restore it past that number using a repair check. Everyone with the appropriate skill gets one attempt, and after that, any remaining damage must be repaired professionally at a starport. Repairs cost 10,000 credits per point of hull damage, while upgrades cost 10 million per point of hull added to the ship. Starports generally let you pay some of the cost upfront (as little as 30%) and the rest in installments. If you can’t pay, they hold the ship as collateral until you come up with the money, possibly by hiring yourself onto someone else’s vessel as a mercenary. This, at least, is an interesting playstyle that’s actually supported by the rest of the book. Getting stuck doing a dangerous mission to pay off your repair bill fits tightly with the rest of the mechanics in the book. SHIP CREATION I’m not going through this section step by step because it’s a pain in the rear end and there’s an image that explains it.  PDF Here It’s like the character sheet for player characters, sort of. Except instead of being lightweight and letting you make a few choices at key junctures, it requires you to crunch a bunch of numbers to compute ever increasing point costs for a series of mandatory modules and a small handful of actual decisions. Oh and remember when I said earlier that there would be mechanics that punish having too many crew on your ship? Here are those mechanics. I understand that they wanted to make things like overtaxed life support systems and limited space in the cryocapsules mechanically important. I understand they wanted to convert every cost on the sheet into a single generic “hull point” total so that there was no need to compute shifting exchange rates. But the way they got there just sucks. And there’s no way to actually build a ship within a given budget using these rules, because the rules for increasing hull points have equations that retroactively go back and change the total cost of other elements when you add new things. Which means that this intricate minigame can’t actually be player facing. Oh and there are no prices listed for shipboard weapons. Just for the hardpoints you attach them to. So the minigame is both overcomplicated and incomplete. You’ve got three options for ship creation.
Here’s the example ship the book gives you. It suggests you use it if you don’t want to deal with the ship creation rules. I agree wholeheartedly.  Not sure why this one was so much higher resolution on the developer blog SHIPBOARD WEAPONS The main difference between ship mounted weapons and regular weapons is that ship weapons deal megadamage. If you ever use ship-based weaponry against people, a point of megadamage equals a hundred points of regular damage. The book doesn’t say whether a person size target gets an armor save against the mega-weapon to avoid being insta-deleted. This section also mentions that weapons can be automated, instead of manned by player characters.
SHIP COMBAT Ship combat is like regular combat, but on a ship. All the players still use their Speed to determine whether they go before or after the opposition. However, your ship also has its own Speed stat, which is used to “determine relative speed between ships in a fight, as well as determining the success of complex piloting maneuvers”. If a weapon is manned, the person crewing it uses their Combat skill. If it’s slaved to the ship’s computer, it uses the ship’s Combat skill. The Ship’s computer can take as many actions as it has computer modules (purchased during ship creation). I’m not sure if that means it can fire the same weapon multiple times. The mining laser shoots every other round, but none of the other weapons have a rate of fire listed, only limits on how much ammunition they hold. Remember that player characters get two actions per round, and can use both of those to attack if they’ve got a weapon that doesn’t need to be recharged or reloaded. It’s also not explicitly stated when the ship’s computer acts in the initiative order. I assume because the ship has a Speed stat that you use that for the computer’s initiative. If you want to spend your action on something else besides attacking, you can use your individual actions to move around inside the ship, do boarding actions, repair stuff, administer medical treatment or other stuff that you could normally do in combat. The text says you can leave the ship in a “powerful exo suit”, but there’s no such thing anywhere in the book. CRITICAL HITS When a ship gets hit with a weapon attack and fails its armor save, it loses hull points. When a ship
The critical hit table can damage any of the systems on the ship sheet, removing cryosleep caskets or life support modules or things like that. It can disable systems like steering or weapons. It can also do things that gently caress with the crew, like blowing up a random room and killing everyone inside. Oh and my earlier claim that the game has no rules for decompression is wrong. One of the results is a hull breach, which sucks everyone in the affected room into space if they fail a Body save with disadvantage. Some of the results just deal additional hull damage, on top of what you already rolled. Of note, one of the results on the table is artificial-gravity failure. This is the only place in the book artificial gravity is mentioned, and it’s kind of important. A setting where people can walk around everywhere on a spaceship will have dramatically different engineering and aesthetics from one where gravity only exists in spinning hab-modules or rings. Critical hits on ships can explode. If you roll doubles on the critical hit table, you roll again and add that result to the pile. And so on, if you roll doubles again. In addition to any other effects, everyone in a room affected by a critical hit must make a Body save or take D10 damage. THOUGHTS ON SHIPS I have mixed feelings about this section. The mechanics on starship finance, oxygen consumption, cryosleep, etc do a good job of reinforcing the game’s blue-collar space horror aesthetic. But the level of detail given for creating ship subsystems is excessive, to the point where it actively discourages the Warden from using it. I can only speculate about the space combat rules, I’ve never used them. They use the same skills, attack rolls and saving throw system as the personal combat rules, so I have to imagine they have the same problems. Next post, we’ll handle character advancement, and then we’ll be ready to wrap up the Mothership Player’s Survival Guide.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 17:45
|
|
|
Does Under the Dark Fist have a recommendation for PC levels?
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 18:14
|
|
|
Call of Cthulhu 5th Edition Driven half mad by cloying vulgarity, I plotted to rid myself of this lurking threat. But as the moment of dive-kick drew nigh, the moon revealed the thing's features in all their stultifying hideousness! It is finally time. The catalogue of WEIRD FISH is upon us. We will not be going over every single danged monster in the Cthulhu Mythos, we'd be here all day. We're just going to hit the highlights, and talk about how CoC writes up its bestiary, because I find it one of the more baffling parts of the game. Creatures will also be defined by if they can be rendered into soup by a tommy gun or are capable of being dispatched by a Big Kick by our heroine, Hilda Kicksman. One of the most baffling parts of the monster entries is the large stat range, complete with dice, that you're provided with to roll for them. Future adventures in this book will in fact provide wide stat ranges for, say, a unit of Mi-Go trying to clear away a small mountain town so they can mine in peace, with all of them having individually rolled/generated stats. This is bizarre, because it's completely unnecessary, but I think it's another relic of CoC being designed in the 80s. It doesn't really matter effectively for the players if one of the Mi-Go is a clever mining engineer and the other is a security officer or alien marine, outside of the fact that the marine probably has anti-dive-kick armor and is more aggressive. Their exact statistical ranges don't really matter much. The other baffling bit is that almost everything is presented like it was a monster in a game like D&D or WHFRP. By which I mean the majority of their rules are about how they try to kill the players in combat, with a lot of attention paid to HP damage, combat behavior, attacks, etc. Monsters are written as if players are going to fight them, in a game that has explicitly constantly discouraged you to fight them, and with numbers that mostly spell 'you lose' should you attempt such a course of action. Even the mighty feet of Hilda Kicksman are insufficient to destroy many of the lurking horrors of the Mythos, in part because she still only has 17 HP and dodging/parrying removes your ability to strike back. She won't miss, and many monsters will, but she's mostly capable of kicking the poo poo out of stuff that's mostly human shaped, or relies on having resistance to firearms and impaling weapons, rather than armor. After all, she does an average of 10-11 damage per kick, and many monsters have 8-10 'armor', which subtracts from damage directly. Hilda does not have the same advantage. Still, the monsters being written primarily as combat threats just feels off; I'd have expected some on what they do if they're attacking the players, sure, but I'd have also expected a little about other possible ways to defeat them or behaviors. Facts and knowledge the PCs might yet discover and use against the terrible things lurking in the shadows. The book also takes the time to note that losing Sanity from encountering a monster is a function of encountering it, not seeing it, and so it does not matter if you close your eyes Mr. Smart Guy. Yes, the authors are aware of the whole 'hide in the back, keep your eyes closed, burn all the books' meme nonsense, and no it will not protect you from the mind-shredding terror of The Weird Fish. We begin with the Byakhee, a boring bat monster that is mostly useful because you can tame them and use them to fly you through interstellar space at incredible speeds and what! Yes, this is going to be a common Mythos thing! Lots of winged monsters are capable of interstellar travel. They're strong, but not especially skilled or scary, and Hilda can easily kick one of them into oblivion. I mostly mention them because interstellar winged flight, what the heck!? The next contestant is the Cthonian, not from the original works of Lovecraft. These are massive gribbly critters with tentacle faces and worm-like bodies that burrow through the earth, gently caress with people with telepathy (they have a hilarious spell called Bait Human that generates a beautiful illusion of a diamond and then keeps yanking it just out of your reach as they fish for idiot PCs), and cause earthquakes. They're basically big alien jerks. They have extremely detailed combat rules about exactly how many 75% to-hit tentacle attacks (each of which will probably one-shot a PC, even Hilda) they get to make per round, for some reason. This beast is unstoppable by the forces of the Big Kick, but its 5 Armor value means that a team of heroes with tommy guns could probably waste one. The other danger is this thing costs d3/d20 Sanity to see. Meaning even on a success you lose d3, and on a failure, oh boy. This is what I mean by the bestiary being a bit baffling, though; the Cthonian has rules and text over a full two page spread, but very little of it is particularly useful for having an adventure with them. It's all about how they kill you with their tentacles. The Color out of Space is an evil sentient color that takes over a place and starts draining it of all life. The Color is insubstantial, and it binds people to the area where it feeds by mental compulsion. It's our first example of a monster that takes away stats; every time it successfully feeds (by matching Pow vs. victim's current MP on the Resistance Table) it knocks 1 off Pow, App, Dex, Str, and Con permanently (you cannot heal from color wounds! That's science) and does d6 damage. It also has a 100% to-hit disintegration ray if it's feeling threatened, so there is that. Its noted to be immune to any physical force, because it is a magic color, but it can be imprisoned by strong magnetic fields and is 'vulnerable to magic'. Well, excellent, I'll just go get the easy to use attack spells and...I'm being informed that the Investigators are mostly doomed. Though I suppose if you can get a bit of Baneful Dust of Hermes (the junk Rice, Morgan, and Armitage used to gently caress up the Dunwich Horror) that would kill it; that stuff works on all aliens. The magnetic forces thing is the kind of information I wish these bestiary entries gave more often; that now suggests something the players can learn by investigation and use against the horror. The Dark Young of Shub-Niggaruth are our first truly surprising contestant in the game of kicks. Because with a little luck, Hilda can defeat one! The Dark Young are giant evil tree monsters made up of 'non-terrene' material, which renders them nearly immune to firearms. They're big, black ropey masses of tentacles that try to pose as trees, but also have big hooves and like to trample and kick. They are the 'thousand young' in the 'Black Goat of a Thousand Young' appellation applies to the dark god Shub Niggurath. They rely entirely on the whole 'can't shoot them' thing for toughness, and only have 30 or so HP. Their tentacle attack will suck if they use it (80% accurate, 4d6 damage and lose d3 Str permanently) but they may also foolishly engage in a kick-fight themselves, as they can kick or trample at 60% and 6d6 damage. Hilda needs to get lucky enough to be missed once, and a little lucky on her damage rolls, but with some good fortune she may conceivably kick a giant evil tree to death. Odds aren't in her favor, but it's possible, and that's what matters. Who could ever forget the original Weird Fish, the Deep Ones? I actually think Deep Ones are kind of cool once you strip away the miscegenation metaphors and the incredible horror of discovering you're part Welsh. Weird immortal fish people who live in a parallel civilization under the ocean, cold and unattached to one another but geniuses with biotechnology and strange science? Who keep growing their their entire lives and eventually become something so immense and strange it can be called a demi-god? That's pretty cool. Stats-wise they're mostly human-like, though they're bigger and stronger and can live under the ocean and have 1 point of natural armor. They also naturally have their lust for producing human deep one hybrids, which slowly become deep ones in d20+20 years (that sure sounds like a relevant thing to just roll a d20 for, 80s design). Hilda could trivially dive-kick one of these terrors. They're not especially hard to kill. Still, Deep Ones are fun. You could do a lot with a weird parallel civilization under the seas, and when I was running Spycraft Mythos stuff I had a lot of fun with them as an enemy, specifically the threat of them getting a character into the water to put the fight on their turf. Not to mention they're an enemy with goals and plots that go beyond 'kill people', so you can uncover webs of conspiracy and humans working with them for their strange magic and technology. Really, there's a lot of fun to be had with the headlining Weird Fish once you get around the initial 'oh no race mixing' metaphor from Innsmouth. We're gonna skip around a little and round out this first post with the Elder Things and the Shoggoths at the same time. The Elder Things are 'degenerate' creatures, a shadow of their former selves, and this kind of language and thinking runs through the Mythos. The Elder Things are a bunch of weird barrel-flower people with interstellar wings who came to Earth ages ago and probably accidentally created the biosphere. Most of them are dead, having been driven back to their last cities in Antarctica or under the ocean, in part because of the revolt of one of their created slave species, in part because they kept getting in wars with all the other weird fish of the Mythos. Some of them are left, and they're quite powerful and dangerous (Hilda probably cannot kick one to death, but tommy guns could do it), but there's little about what they might be plotting to return to power after being mostly eliminated. Their slave species is the Shoggoths, and I love Shoggoths. You're meant to be horrified by their uprising against their scientific creators and all but gently caress that, you go slime people. Shoggoths are giant slime molds of incredible power, capable of forming organs at will, who often end up serving other species but 'grow more intelligent, rambunctious, and imitative' as their contracts go. Considering many of them live in Antarctica, if you should encounter a Shoggoth my most urgent advice is to do everything in your power not to resemble a penguin. They can be neither dive kicked nor tommy gunned; they are too powerful and resistant to all physical weaponry. Trying to kill one is going to require the final argument of CoC: Explosives. A lot of them. I make no secret that I would play the hell out of a Shoggoth revolutionary who despises the various tyrannical aliens of the Mythos. Their whole hook with the 'slowly became more intelligent than intended and then kicked the poo poo out of the alien slavers who made them in a massive revolt' is real good, and suggests many interesting directions you could go with them rather than just 'evil amorphous slime'. CoC does not suggest going in any of those directions, and it is poorer for it. Next Time: Bigger Weird Fish!
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 18:23
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Does Under the Dark Fist have a recommendation for PC levels? poo poo, I might've forgot to include that, but it's a high level campaign for 10-14th level PCs. The fights are fairly appropriate for characters in that level range and by the end you should be high enough level to fight the end bosses. Encounter difficulty isn't really an issue, it's just the final area has a series of save or die effects that lead up to the final fight. Some of them are petrification, which can be reversed without a lengthy down time, but you really need to pack a lot of stone to flesh spells before you go into the last area.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 18:40
|
|
|
Ithle01 posted:
Thanks so reviewing this adventure. I got into Spelljammer when I was a young teenager after it was basically done, and while I saw a bunch of references to the Zhodani, we never had a copy of the original adventure. Which, given what it ends up being, might've been a blessing in disguise. One minor note I wanted to point out is that Clerics aren't entirely boned in foreign spheres (or even the evil overlord's here). There are a few deities who can grant spells anywhere (P'Tah, the Celestines), but there's a 2nd level spell called Contact Home Power which basically lets a divine magic user dial home for the good stuff. In practice, this means that higher level clerics will mostly be down a 2nd level slot instead of all their level 3+ spells...but still draws into question what the net goal of the restriction was in the first place. (I've seen suggestions that it was to prevent PCs from trying to spread the worship of gods to the "wrong" spheres, specifically so you couldn't get Faerunian gods on Oerth or Krynn, but in practice I think it mostly goes to show that Spelljammer's engagement with the other campaign settings was more of a hindrance than a reason to use the setting like TSR wanted it to be.)
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 18:54
|
|
|
Deep within the Isle of Dread is a hex containing The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 58: The Deck of Rakshasa and Ropers 292: Quickly Though the Woods The PCs are sitting down for lunch in a pleasant deciduous forest. They hear a drumming noise off in the woods, and can follow it to a huge oak tree in the middle of a 50-foot radius clearing. It’s a quickwood which will drag them out with their roots. The card is really just a summary of the Monstrous Compendium entry. That’s probably an improvement over the whole-page version, but still, pass. 293: Mom? A kudzu-covered jungle. The PCs are They reach the shrine. The holy woman is there. She’s an old woman wearing “gypsy” clothes, and she looks exactly like one PC’s mother. She’s also a rakshasa. She tries to perform a reading for one PC at a time, telling the others that her readings attract wild animals and they need to stand guard outside. Really she’ll drop her disguise so she can charm the solo PC. It’s hard for me to decide. If you drop the hermit-seeking quest, it should be fine for the PCs to just wander into this shrine. You have to walk carefully with the charm effects on PCs, but only one PC is likely to be exposed to it, and the rest of the party should be able to deal with that somehow. But I wish it had a little more. Why the “mom” appearance? Is the rakshasa’s goal just to eat the mortals, or is there some different plan? Presumably it didn’t build the shrine, so what’s the deal with the place? I guess I’ll keep this particular woman-in-the-wilderness-who’s-actually-a-monster, but it’s a close thing. Definitely changing her wardrobe, too. 294: Swamp Fever The PCs are travelling through a swamp and some of them almost certainly come down with malaria. (Three saves vs. poison per day of travel). A tree approaches, turns into a druid, and offers to help. The druid is actually a rakshasa with a crappy plan. See, “he asks that they bring the afflicted members to his grove,” then treats them privately for hours, and comes back to the party to report that sorry, they died and he had to burn the bodies. “The PCs have noticed no smoke.” Uh, ok. Then if the rakshasa is confronted, it turns invisible and escapes… right back to the grove, the first place the party would check even if they fail the Tracking roll that the card says they can make! AND the sick party members are still alive for some reason, AND “if the party reaches his lair, the rakshasa attacks.” I really don’t understand what the rakshasa is trying to accomplish here. If you want to kidnap or murder some sick party members, do it and get out of there. If you’re not willing to take on the PC party in a fight, don’t start a fight. I’m just confused. Pass. 295: Hot and Cold The party is traversing an “ice-covered plain or glacier,” like D&D parties so often do. A blizzard is stirring up, and the party needs shelter, and soon. They spot a large cave which is obviously a trap by the DM. The mouth is iced-over recently. There are new bones of some creature scattered around the entrance, so it’s clearly inhabited. If they break their way in through the thin ice, they find the inside is pretty warm. A huge pile of snow and ice melts into steam, as they disturb the sleeping remorhaz, which attacks. There’s an ivory scroll case as treasure, with two mage scrolls, two priest scrolls, and one protection from acid scroll. If the players don’t chomp the obvious bait and head out into the blizzard instead, “consult the DMG for the rules about handling exposure to cold.” Okay, card, I’ll bite - what are those rules which I have never, ever consulted or used? I went looking for them. I saw in Chapter 14: Time and Movement that moving through a blizzard will cut their travel rate to ¼, but I couldn’t find anything at all about the harmful effects of exposure. So I guess the PCs will be just fine, merely slightly inconvenienced. Anyway, I'm not a big fan of these “You’d better take shelter in that cave over there!” encounters, but at least this one isn’t trying to trick the players. The cave is obviously dangerous from the get-go. I guess I can keep it. 296: Revenge There’s a rather brutalized body crawling down the road. It should be dead, and, uh, it is - it’s a revenant. If the PCs pass by or investigate, the corpse cordially but choppily informs them that it has been the victim of murder most foul. Apparently it was a former good fighter who was killed by an ogre mage, which stopped them from fulfilling a vow to “a local good temple.” It wants help being transported to the ogre den, at which point it will fight the ogre-mage while the PCs fight the ogres. OK, but no treasure is listed, and no details are given as to who this fighter was, what their vow was, or anything like that. I would need to make up some stuff just to make this feel like a satisfying side-quest. The imagery is neat, though. Keep...? 297: Roped In The PCs are in an underground grotto with a stream flowing through it, “awash with the glitter of precious stones.” (which can be mined and sold for 1 gp uncut, 10 gp when cut; the card doesn’t mention how many can be mined, so I guess the DM is going to make an executive call.) While the PCs are probably preoccupied with that, the “owner” of the grotto, a roper, returns and ambushes them. Plain, but keep.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 20:49
|
|
|
Night10194 posted:Call of Cthulhu 5th Edition I think the cthonians are the work of Brian Lumley. I only have a modest collection of CoC adventure material, but they showed up an awful lot. I suspect that note about magnetic fields and the Colour comes from a Cthulhu Now (now being the nineties) adventure where a wrecking yard electromagnet turns out to be the only way to defeat the thing. Pretty sure that's the first place it pops up in the game material, too. The old "At Your Door" adventure book includes an ongoing villain shoggoth who spends most of his time crammed into a human shape.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 21:18
|
|
|
Big agreement on the shoggoths being over-utilized as spooky monsters and under-utilized as fellow sapients who may be allies. You could imagine that their cultural background generally gives them a hatred for dictators and oppressors, so once some of them realize humans are sapients, too, they could absolutely be behind-the-scenes revolutionaries who try to help the oppressed without giving themselves away. Which could in fact be a cool hook. "Oh no! The big industrialist was killed by some freak accident or assassination in his mansion! Investigate it!" And the investigation leads the players to toppling a bunch of local cults, suspecting it to be a magical assassination, when in fact it was just a pro-union Shoggoth that flattened the guy.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 21:30
|
|
|
One thing I should have noted from the GMing advice. It isn't just that they're sticking to the texts by making every sentient alien uniformly hostile and kind of in lockstep about being dicks, they tell you specifically that if an alien does anything that might be humanizing or recognizable, make sure the players never, EVER see it. One wonders how the cultists even get in contact with these beings, really. It's one of my eternal frustrations; everything being uniformly evil and generally in lockstep on what it wants to do diminishes mystery gameplay an awful lot.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 21:40
|
|
|
The best Cthulhu bestiary is the version of the Malleus Monstrorum where all the illustrations are weird artifacts. Medieval woodcuts of migo, Greek vase paintings of shantaks, sculptures of dark young made by mad artists shortly before their disappearance, etc.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 21:47
|
|
|
Lovecraft's racism aside (and maybe not entirely), the idea behind the Cthulhu mythos is that the Great Old Ones and their servants, like the shoggoths, are inhuman, and don't operate according to human morality or even any sort of moral code that humans can understand. It's not the type of setting that lends itself towards the idea "we're all the same in spite of appearances". It's the type of setting that lends itself towards "everything that isn't human is hostile, either intentionally, or because its so incomprehensible, it's hostile without even meaning to be".
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 21:49
|
|
|
That kind of falls apart when most of the aliens have perfectly recognizable motives even in the canon stuff, though. Deep Ones, Mi-Go, Elder Things, and Yithians are all pretty comprehensible. As are Serpent People and Ghouls. Moon Beasts are just kind of assholes and deserve to get murdered by an army of magic moon-jumping cats.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 21:59
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:Lovecraft's racism aside (and maybe not entirely), the idea behind the Cthulhu mythos is that the Great Old Ones and their servants, like the shoggoths, are inhuman, and don't operate according to human morality or even any sort of moral code that humans can understand. It's not the type of setting that lends itself towards the idea "we're all the same in spite of appearances". It's the type of setting that lends itself towards "everything that isn't human is hostile, either intentionally, or because its so incomprehensible, it's hostile without even meaning to be". Sure, but RPGs are all about importing your own story. It'd be pretty easy to enable that kind of subversion without costing much, particularly when you've got long details on exactly what die rolls cause the the monster to inevitably wipe the entire party. That's not gameable in any way, compared to either "here are some ideas for what researched solution might work" or "here are some ideas for subverting this if you're into it." Being able to capture the feeling of Lovecraft's writing is important, but being unwilling to support any other mode of play, particularly when the feeling of his writing is not imminently gameable, not all that unified, and wrapped up in a lot of of nonsense, seems like a wasted opportunity. Especially when the "uncaring" part of the horror seems to me to be as important as the "incomprehensible" part; creatures like the Deep Ones have pretty understandable motivations when you adjust for their being immortal and detached compared to humans, for example. For better or worse the root of a lot of the original's horror is "maybe the universe doesn't revolve around me" which just isn't equally horrifying to everyone.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 22:01
|
|
|
Night10194 posted:One thing I should have noted from the GMing advice. It isn't just that they're sticking to the texts by making every sentient alien uniformly hostile and kind of in lockstep about being dicks, they tell you specifically that if an alien does anything that might be humanizing or recognizable, make sure the players never, EVER see it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 22:05
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:Lovecraft's racism aside (and maybe not entirely), the idea behind the Cthulhu mythos is that the Great Old Ones and their servants, like the shoggoths, are inhuman, and don't operate according to human morality or even any sort of moral code that humans can understand. It's not the type of setting that lends itself towards the idea "we're all the same in spite of appearances". It's the type of setting that lends itself towards "everything that isn't human is hostile, either intentionally, or because its so incomprehensible, it's hostile without even meaning to be". The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, wherein the protagonist is perfectly capable of cooperating with ghouls and cats, and where giant toads from the moon and their satyr henchmen can trade(albeit evilly) with dreamworld humans. Shadow Over Innsmouth, where Deep Ones and humans are capable of having an, albeit unholy, alliance. Yithians can possess human bodies and pass for human and even treat humans relatively humanely while they're away from their home time zones. In the Silver Key stories, the protagonist manages to pass unnoticed as a member of yet another alien, far-distant society of sorcerers. Elder Things are similar enough to humans that their society can be described in human terms, they've got their own social units, their own currencies and trade. Mi-Go are capable of communicating with and trading with humans. Like... it feels like the "oh no! none of them can be spoken to and negotiated with and you just have to shotgun them all or run away!" is something imprinted on the mythos works by later fans, in much the same way as OSR fans tend to translate AD&D as being about save-or-die traps and dying of tetanus. I.e. magnificently wrong. It's similar to how a lot of people go: "oh no! everything lovecraft has to be hopeless!" while ignoring the numberable victories against literal gods(Nyarlathotep being partially foiled in the Dream Quest as just one example) or various mythos creatures by perfectly mundane humans. Plus, "Lovecraft's racism aside." If we're going to be using the Mythos at all, we have to recognize and excise Lovecraft's racism from it. And the idea of everything that's not Western Whitey being something we can't even try to communicate with, is pretty racist. Secondly, from the perspective of making an interesting or actually playable RPG, there is nothing more dogshit than "THIS MONSTER IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE. IT JUST DOES THINGS. NOW ROLL FOR INITIATIVE BECAUSE THE FIRST THING IT DOES IS TO ATTACK YOU." It gives neither the GM or the players anything to work with. Even if a monster cannot be negotiated with or allied with, giving it comprehensible motivations(food, prestige, victory, wealth, destroying enemies, gaining knowledge, etc.) at least gives the players a basis for planning their actions and how to foil what it does. EDIT: Oh right and let's not forget in Through the Gates of the Silver Key in which Randolph Carter talks to and negotiates with Yog Sothoth who explains that all sapients are reflections of the greater divinity-level beings of the universe. Thus explaining that A) their motivations are comprehensible because they are literally ours but on a greater scale and that B) humans can have beneficial and non-destructive interactions with them. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Sep 5, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2020 22:58
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, wherein the protagonist is perfectly capable of cooperating with ghouls and cats, and where giant toads from the moon and their satyr henchmen can trade(albeit evilly) with dreamworld humans. Arkham Horror LCG once again provides, at least in one scenario where you can team up with this guy:  Along with being a big name canon Lovecraft character I appreciate the mechanic of the card being having a ghoul friend to vouch for you and say "yeah, these guys are cool" to get them in your corner. In fact the campaign he's in is based extremely on Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath to the point of having Randolph Carter hanging around and you absolutely can and should get in good with the cats of Ulthar. And now I'm remembering the write-up someone did of Horror on the Orient Express where during the Dreamland section you rode on a fancy cool friendly monster train and met the Beings from Ib who were genuinely decent despite looking like slimy swamp monsters and man were the Sarnathians the absolute worst. And honestly your point in this post is one of the things that always stood out as creatively bankrupt and annoyingly horny in Cthulhutech, namely in a setting with a bunch of non-human alien races who could be playable allies with a vested interest in not dying horribly when The Stars Are Right the base set choices for PCs were "Human" and "Sexy Drow". I suspect that level of not getting grimderpery it is why Cthulhutech also obliterated the Dreamlands. Relatedly Harvey did officially burn his house down 3 to 2, so I'll have an Arkham Horror LCG coda soon.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 00:20
|
|
|
From what I understand, the official reason the dreamlands got nuked is because they had no idea what to do with it, so yeah basically.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 00:55
|
|
|
There's also a strain of early Mythos story with a noticeable good vs evil bent, that carries on into some more latter day stories as well. I'm pretty sure there was a note in my 3E CoC book where someone says 'Look, figures like Nodens exist in the Mythos and are at least... neutral to humanity, but that's not the style of game that we're trying to put forward.'
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 01:09
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:Lovecraft's racism aside (and maybe not entirely), the idea behind the Cthulhu mythos is that the Great Old Ones and their servants, like the shoggoths, are inhuman, and don't operate according to human morality or even any sort of moral code that humans can understand. It's not the type of setting that lends itself towards the idea "we're all the same in spite of appearances". It's the type of setting that lends itself towards "everything that isn't human is hostile, either intentionally, or because its so incomprehensible, it's hostile without even meaning to be". Not saying you’re wrong about the racism or the hostility, but there’s even precedent for running against that grain: At The Mountains of Madness posted:After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them—as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming. For context, he was talking about these things. That whole “everything is horrible and incomprehensible and lose 1d100 Sanity” thing comes from nerds taking the most objectionable parts of an already objectionable whole and magnifying them even further. Meanwhile, you could, say, recast that cosmic, almost malicious apathy as an embodiment of the impersonal, grinding, dehumanizing process of systemic oppression. Actually, perfect example of that? Litany of Earth. Story based on Lovecraft where the central character is the last Deep One survivor of the raid on Innsmouth, featuring queer protagonists, deep-delves into the racist nature of the source material actively contrasted with real-world discrimination, and a circle of protagonists that resembles a group of PCs too closely to be a coincidence. Perfect for the thread, and bizarrely it only costs a dollar right now.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 01:27
|
|
|
That one's the short story that started things off. Definitely worth a buck though!
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 02:03
|
|
|
Ultiville posted:Sure, but RPGs are all about importing your own story. It'd be pretty easy to enable that kind of subversion without costing much, particularly when you've got long details on exactly what die rolls cause the the monster to inevitably wipe the entire party. That's not gameable in any way, compared to either "here are some ideas for what researched solution might work" or "here are some ideas for subverting this if you're into it." Sure, but it seems pretty clear to me that CoC doesn't want you to subvert things. They want you to enforce things. The point of CoC is cosmic horror, the idea that nothing you do matters that much and that humanity is a collection of bugs that will soon be splattered by the oncoming universak windshield. If your marine biologist PC can sit down with a Deep One scientist to discuss clean up ocean pollution, that's not cosmic horror. Once shoggoths, elder things and cthonians become relatable and understandable, then cosmic horror kind of ceases to be a thing. Honestly one of CoC's biggest mistakes was giving game statistics to anything like Cthulhu, Hastur, etc. Especially in the 80s, the "if it's got HP it can die" era. All of the above said, as others have noted there's plenty of room for negotiation and the like within Lovecraft's Mythos - especially within the Dreamlands. The biggest obstacle to that is the Sanity mechanic, which creates this constantly diminishing, not adequately replenished resource that it required in order to continue in the game. Everyone fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Sep 5, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 02:06
|
|
|
Bieeanshee posted:There's also a strain of early Mythos story with a noticeable good vs evil bent, that carries on into some more latter day stories as well. I have a couple of 6e books and the monster manual equivalent tickled me because they had a little semi-in universe note next to some of the good gods going "BUT ARE THEY REALLY?" Fuckers, in a big giant cosmic universe you could just let Kthanid be good guy Cthulhu AND STILL have humans are insignificant in the grand scheme of things and Earth is in for a reckoning once The Stars Are Right and anyways someday Azathoth is going to wake up and that's that. The idea that most Mythos gods are apathetic to mankind is fine, having big powerful giant alien things that don't give a crap about people fits with what Cosmic Horror is arguably supposed to be. Similarly the rules have to reiterate that Tsathoggua is supposed to be some horrible ancient god and not a big lazy Mythos Snorlax even though he is and moreover he has my absolute favorite line of rules text in possibly anything ever and I hope Night highlights it if it's there in 5e which I suspect it is (I know it's there in 7e). 7e has a paragraph at the start of the Gods section that I don't remember for 6e where it points out that if the PCs run into a Mythos god there's a real chance said god won't even notice them, let alone go out of its way to kill them because why should it? If you're Yibb-tstll sitting in the middle of time watching the universe revolve what's one random ape thing in all of creation? Omnicrom fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Sep 5, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 02:10
|
|
|
Part of the issue is that a bunch of Hovecraft Povecraft Lovecraft's fans and correspondents took all of his disparate works and bound them together under one greater unified canon due to his repeated use of themes, names and visuals. In actuality they're pretty tonally disparate and trying to put them all under one roof creates something pretty incoherent that is ostensibly all in greater service of the big picture theme of Cosmic Horror, which makes it hard to find an answer when people rightfully question the created canon or how these things co-exist.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 02:18
|
|
|
Omnicrom posted:Similarly the rules have to reiterate that Tsathoggua is supposed to be some horrible ancient god and not a big lazy Mythos Snorlax even though he is and moreover he has my absolute favorite line of rules text in possibly anything ever and I hope Night highlights it if it's there in 5e which I suspect it is (I know it's there in 7e). If it's what I'm thinking of If T is not hungry he ignores Investigators and pretends to be asleep then it's in the 6th Ed. pdf as well. And yes, that's kind of hilariously adorable.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 02:24
|
|
|
Falconier111 posted:Not saying you’re wrong about the racism or the hostility, but there’s even precedent for running against that grain: 
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 02:34
|
|
|
If you want another example of a Lovecraft-related (short) story that's a bit less about incomprehensibility and a bit more about empathy and a lot more about giant jelly escapees, Elizabeth Bear's 2008 Shoggoths in Bloom is another contender. Used to be freely available online on her site back in the day but at some point seems to have slipped away. I believe the wayback machine still has it, but I'm not sure if that'd count as  or not, morally speaking.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 03:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 23:50 |
|
|
Hostile V posted:Part of the issue is that a bunch of Hovecraft Povecraft Lovecraft's fans and correspondents took all of his disparate works and bound them together under one greater unified canon due to his repeated use of themes, names and visuals. In actuality they're pretty tonally disparate and trying to put them all under one roof creates something pretty incoherent that is ostensibly all in greater service of the big picture theme of Cosmic Horror, which makes it hard to find an answer when people rightfully question the created canon or how these things co-exist. yea this is really the core issue. People say poo poo like 'Lovecraft mythos' but that's not a thing, really. He had a loose general umbrella of themes and concepts, and a 'universe' in the sense that these great, alien, cosmic horrors have similar styles/methods but very different descriptions/agendas/etc. The reason it's hard to imagine the 'mythos' as poo poo like 'so does Cthulhu, like, serve Dagon or are they rivals or what' is because...that's not how they were written really. Like, it's just these two horrific beings both have completely alien agendas of corruption and seemingly wanton destruction of humanity that we don't understand, there's no 'coexistence' they're just two different stories. Deep Ones and cultists and junk don't have a 'relationship' because there's no real reason to ever think of them together in the base materials. That said I would argue there is a 'worth' in exploring those questions. Cosmic Horror is more than just the most obvious elements. It can involve a lot of philosophical questions, questions about your place in the world and the dread of an inevitable doom that you can't even fully understand let alone fight. I think you can explore that with the more 'human' sides of things, creating a sympathetic offshoot to an entirely alien greater force and all. If you want an example of this the book The Ballad of Black Tom really nails the whole 'taking Lovecraft and exploring not just its themes and all but its actual characters'. I almost don't want to explain because it's such a genuinely good book but it takes the perspective of 'isn't it weird how in The Horror at Redhook Lovecraft made a super concentrated effort to talk about how the locals in Red Hook were 'an enigma' of assorted ethnic minorities (who it turns out are being led and exploited by a white guy), but his protagonist as a literal investigator seems to have no interest in studying that 'enigma'?' The exploration of why a minority in Red Hook may be willing to turn to 'dark magics' just on the basis of 'well at least loving Cthulhu doesn't care about what race we are when he eats our souls' is exactly what some are talking about here while remaining pretty strong Cosmic Horror.
|
|
#
?
Sep 5, 2020 03:07
|
|
