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Speaking of weird trench wars, this one guy has made creepy holy trench war his entire thing.      
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May 13, 2021 05:09
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JcDent posted:Speaking of weird trench wars, this one guy has made creepy holy trench war his entire thing. I used a bunch of that guy's artstation art to make tokens and portraits for some of the Dark units in my Myth campaign on Sunday, it's good stuff. By good I mean oh no.
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May 13, 2021 05:24
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MonsterEnvy posted:The Happy Angler This whole place sounds like something straight out of a Dr Who episode. Complete with the twist of a party member or may or may not have been there all along. Come to think of it, it is also almost straight out of that one Rick and Morty episode.
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May 13, 2021 08:47
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It's an interesting concept but I doubt most player parties would be happy with the resolution. Or would just accept a Chinatown ending.
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May 13, 2021 08:49
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MonsterEnvy posted:If the party does this, the tavern will be reduced to ruin, and a chain reaction of deaths and territory squabbles will sink the region into chaos as the memories of the thousands of victims returns. The woman will then vanish, motives and allegiances unknown. This "oh, but preventing a terrible thing is actually bad" attitude is two sex slaves away from Ctech. Burn that loving inn to the ground. JcDent fucked around with this message at 10:22 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 09:24
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One Piece did that kind of thing better. Well, not too dissimilar results, but much more fun execution.
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May 13, 2021 11:29
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My response would be "Well how do we know that leaving the inn in place wouldn't have resulted in a chain reaction that plunged the realm into chaos? It's all butterflies and wings. Best to do what good we can, where we can. Like we did by killing all the Idoneth."
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May 13, 2021 12:04
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GimpInBlack posted:Part Fourteen: The Best Game Design in the Book I'm a couple of days behind, but: with the notable exception of the people behind 1.5.*:  I think they're also the people working on the spiritual successor Tian Shang, and IIRC the concept is cut from that entirely. Which narks me off, I won't lie. Loresheets are cool as heck.
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May 13, 2021 12:09
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As long as the party does not destroy the Penumbral Engine the mass chaos should not happen. It will mean no one will remember or care about the victims, but defeating the Idoneth will prevent any future victims.
MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 13:03 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 12:59
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Why are the Idoneth officially on the side of good, again?
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May 13, 2021 13:27
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Cythereal posted:Why are the Idoneth officially on the side of good, again? They’re on the side of order, not good. It’s still a stretch since they seem to prey on the other members even more openly than DoK, though. Recent lore could indicate that GW is slowly moving away from the Grand Alliance concept, but that might just be me hoping.
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May 13, 2021 13:41
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Justitian: The Righteous Fist, Part 7 We’re close to finishing this book, only 50 pages + another 300+ in the second book!   Notice how this largely looks the same as Downtown? Despite this being where all the rich and powerful folks live, it still looks like a warmed over turd. Just rusted metal and slate gray concrete, as far as the eye can see. If it wasn’t for that huge rear end statue you could mistake this place for just another district. That statue is the Colossus btw, the one that lady Jehammedan suicide bombed for reasons. Anyways, this is where the Protectorate began. After a bunch of choir boys kicked the collective asses of the nerds, they fled here and fortified this plateau into an impregnable fortress. Some time passes, they invite the Judges to join them, slaves get imported, stuff gets built up, and so on. There’s this whole other paragraph about how Uptown is so majestic and rich any folks from rival clans led up here are “shaken to the core by the realization that they’ll never achieve anything similar in a thousand lifetimes.” Apparently everything is so incredible they can’t wait to sell out their traditions and people awaiting them back home. Take a look at those scrap metal/ brutalist mansions and tell me if that’s enough to get a Neolibyan Prince to forget even just his summer cottage by the lake, which is literally just gold bullion stacked by white slaves.  That big ‘ol town square looking thing in the picture is Calendar Square. It probably won’t be a surprise when I tell you that there’s a bunch of plaques strewn about with various important historical dates and events inscribed upon them. People eat here, shop here, but mostly get from place to place as they cross the square. Every new arrival is rigorously checked by Observers, and Protectors randomly pick people out of the crowd for additional screening. The Chroniclers keep an eye on everything with 24/7 video surveillance as well. Uptown is a maximum security zone basically, ”Justitian” posted:Uptown is their fortress, a place aloof and distant, far away from the problems of Downtown. There are no brawls in the streets and no murders. Theft doesn’t exist. It is peaceful and safe, exhibiting all the features of the utopia the Judges had always envisioned. The fact that this condition can only be maintained through vigilance, mass surveillance, and excessive control does not cross anyone’s mind. The inhabitants of Uptown accept that their privilege can only be upheld by sacrificing their right to privacy and personal freedom. You heard it here first folks, facist police surveillance state equals no crime. Lets just ignore how literally every totalitarian government in existence has proven that to be complete and utter bullshit. I also want to use the above quote to address something I recently got accused of by this game’s fandom, apparently because the text lacks a big flashing neon sign saying “this stuff is bad,” I’m mistaking elements simply being present in a grim setting for the actual promotion of these values, so to speak. Bullenscheiße I say! The above quote is written in a largely third-person, neutral tone that reads as if it is simply stating the facts. Those facts being that facist police states work, at least in this particular instance. It comes across as a promotion of the actions/values that were detailed. Now, if you wanted to present that these values were present in the text without promoting them, you’d be far better served with a first-person, unreliable narrator. There would have to be an identifiable character speaking, they wouldn’t need a name per say, but we would have to be able to tell that these words were coming from a character within the text. For example, let’s say Bob the City Judge said all of this poo poo. That way, when Bob says this stuff it might not necessarily come across as promotion of these facist values, because it’s only Bob stating his views and values, not the text itself. This further lets you poke holes in the stuff Bob says by showing how he might be wrong in future entries, maybe with a narrative from Jim the corrupt Executioner for example. When I read stuff like this written as it is in a dispassionate, third-person perspective, it comes across like the author’s biases and beliefs bleeding into the text. Even if you grant the game’s fans probably aren’t goose-stepping Nazis (and tbh they’re probably lovely white moderates for the most part), they still seem to find themselves shaking their heads and going “yeah, I agree” when the collapse of modern civilization turns everything all Lord of the Flies. I hope that made sense at least, back to the book.  Why is everything rusted anyways? These guys have blast furnaces and they talk about melting down scrap metal all the time, why don’t they bother to remove the rust from their building materials? Judgement Alley is a street lined with big stone head carvings of the previous Supreme Judges, all except Archot because he wanted to be bigger and more important than everyone else (hence his big-rear end statue). The face of the first Judge is unknown so it’s just a blank head, and people project all kinds of values and ideas upon it. Judgement Hall is Judge headquarters, surprise surprise. Supreme Judge Archot lives here, the Senate holds its sessions here, and so on. Every morning at sunrise the Judges are woken up by a large artillery shell fired eastward at nothing in particular outside the city limits, which seems like an accident waiting to happen. Jurymen sweep the steps, light the torches, and a High Judge steps out. With a hammer in one hand and the codex in the other, he opens Judgement Hall for the day with the motto of the Judges “Per aspera ad astra!” I’m not entirely sure why the Judges’ motto is “through hardship to the stars.” Unlike the Jehammedans, they have no history or myth linking them to the cosmos in any way. Unless it's supposed to a cliche “reach for the stars” metaphor, in which case,  ”Justitian” posted:The radiance of it all is overwhelming. City Judges scurry along to attend their meetings, while Advocates aim toward the Scriptorium to attend the first lectures held by the resident High Judges. Light squeezes through the towering arch windows adorned with ornate stained glass illustrating the virtues of Judgedom and representing the deadly sins of the outlaws who defy the idea of a common utopia, and who must be brought to heel. Every detail of the architecture reeks of propaganda, a megalomaniacal display of power serving only to diminish a human’s soul and extinguish its persona. What is identity anyway? Aren’t we all the same before the law? What’s up with these tonal shifts? I think I might have a case to sue Marko for whiplash.. The rest of Judgment hall is boring, it’s all offices, living quarters, court rooms, etc. Nary a plot hook or reason to visit, unless for some reason you’re important enough (hah, fat chance) to get an appointment with a bigwig like Rutgar or Archot.  That’s the Senate. It’s basically what you expect, it’s mostly two different power blocs of Judges arguing at length with each other over policy and poo poo. Technically Archot has supreme executive power, but he’s old as poo poo now and Chief Protector Rutgar basically rules from behind the throne, while the other faction led by Senator Laakin tries to unseat the old gently caress. Your PCs will never be Senator’s according to Marko, just as an fyi. Interestingly, the stenographers apparently record everything frantically with quill and ink. I actually dated a court stenographer for a while, so this detail is almost as laughable as the mushroom aliens. You need to be trained on a very special keyboard to accurately keep up with all the speech that is spoken in a courtroom, you’d have an easier time developing mutant powers to see the future than you would trying to write it all down by hand. There’s a Bygone Museum, mostly a cross section of recovered Bygone cultural artifacts like instruments or the wing of a jet plane. I assume that there’s probably unique and/or valuable poo poo you could potentially steal, but the text doesn’t concern itself with how PCs might interact with it beyond getting really hostile if they dare contemplate the past, it’s really weird. ”Justitian” posted:You really enjoy pondering such philosophical questions? Well then, the Museum of the Judiciary is the place for you to wallow and find like-minded daydreamers, the spineless maggots who can’t get an honest day of work in before losing themselves in contemplation of conjuring a life they’ll never live. Go ahead, milk those reveries of grandiose revelations, feel like you’re meant to uncover some finite truth. You know what? The truth doesn’t need you. It’s better off not being discovered.  The Odeon is a stage where they put on propaganda plays meant to glorify Archot/The Judges and terrify their possible enemies/rivals. Box ticked, moving on. Our section on Judgment Hall ends with the barracks. The Protectors train and live here, sometimes fighters from other Cults come to train and exchange fightin’ knowledge. Aside from acknowledging that female Protectors are a thing, there’s nothing notable or interesting to be found here.  The Offices are a collection of bureaucratic centres that handle most of Justitian’s administration duties. They’re also basically Paranoia but played straight. Better have your poo poo in order or you can get hosed. The Office of Hygienics is run by the Spitalians and handles/enforces all matters related to hygiene. They distribute the pesticides, impose strict birth control, check newcomers for spore infestation, fight the Burn trade with summary execution of any and all dealers, and so on. All sorts of bad poo poo can happen to you if you don’t take their hygiene laws seriously. The Office of Locality handles citizenship, without it you can’t own property, get married, have children, and so. They keep records on basically everything about you. Strictly speaking you don’t have to register, and most criminals probably don’t want to give the Judge a “yo I live here” sign. Good luck leading a normal life without doing so though. The Office of Certification certifies that stuff is free from Sepsis, otherwise it can’t be sold inside Justitian. That’s it. The Office of Culture is kinda nebulous, as best as I can tell it signs off on and approves all public art, most of which glorifies the Judges. If you do the opposite, they drag you here and strip your citizenship if you can’t prove your innocence. Guess you shouldn’t have written that naughty poem about Archot. The Office of Civil Economics is huge, and dwarfs all the Offices in size and scope. They basically handle everything that a municipal government would that’s not already covered by the other offices. Rural land grants, tax collection, urban planning and development, and so on. Guess what the Office of Internal Affairs does? Hint, you know what it does if you’ve ever watched a cop drama at least once in your life. It does have a couple interesting and potential plot hooks though, the guy in charge is a plant. His noble Advocate family put him there so he could feed them intelligence on their political rivals, which he does in weekly dispatches. Rutgar also has a filekeeper who gets rid of testimonies that would be inconvenient for Rutgar. It’s not much, but there’s something you could do with that. ”Justitian” posted:The Office of Protectorate Affairs does just that. It serves as Justitian’s foreign ministry and general military command centre. There, I just saved anyone who would read this a section a few minutes at least.  The Paper Factory is the largest piece of industry in Uptown, and so important it’s kept up here with all the rich folk rather than Downtown with all the working poors. Paper is incredibly vital to maintaining the kafkaesque bureaucracy of Justitian. ”Justitian” posted:Bureaucracy tames the people, written rules regulate them, give them a feeling of comfort and belonging. They don’t have to question what’s written, since most of them can’t even read. It is enough for them to know that it’s filed on a paper somewhere, taking the burden of free thought off their shoulders and cementing their belief in the system How much do you wanna bet that Marko uses the term “sheeple” unironically? Anyways, with how important paper is, the method they’ve chosen to make it is rather strange. It’s literally just paper made from the clothes of dead people. No, really. Every monday a cart arrives from the Knacker’s Office, while the Defilers (homeless people who live near the sewer canals) strip the clothing off of people who drank themselves to death or got stabbed that week. That uh, doesn’t seem very sustainable. Apparently it is though, they wash the rags, shred the fibers, and make new paper from them. This is actually a real thing you can do IRL, but I doubt you could produce paper on the scale they’d need with this method. There’s also a newspaper (mostly only read by a few literate citizens in Uptown) called the Righteous Hammer. It publishes high brow hitpieces critical of the Judges (like exposing corruption or false interpretations of the Codex), and for some reason it’s allowed to exist. The book doesn’t say why the Judges allow this kind of poo poo to happen, especially when the paper is owned by Advocates jockeying for more power over the Judges.  The Ambassador Quarter is what it says on the tin. Archot makes this place look really nice so he can impress and cow the other cults with all the power and majesty of the Judges, or some poo poo. Diplomats have diplomatic immunity and can travel freely so long as they don’t get up to any heinous poo poo. Tripoli’s embassy was paid for by themselves. White marble was ordered all the way from The Chroniclers aren’t too happy about the Ministry of the Broken Cross, but the Judges know where their water comes from so they let the Anabaptists have their Embassy. For some reason the city of Liqua (an otherwise independent enclave within Justitian territory) also has its own Embassy, even though the guy there theoretically just sends his reports to the big dogs. Pherxies is actually an Exalter, he hires people to slip past the Coackroaches to plumb the ruins of Exalt for secrets. If the war ends with a Judiciary victory, he’s planning on gathering his clanmates to resettle there. Kranzler’s Villa is more a fortress than an Embassy. The Provost of the Preservers lives here when he has business in Justitian. Subaltern Blosch hates his post at the Alpine Commission. He’s a soldier locked into being a pencil pusher, handling mercenary contracts for his fellow soldiers while he sits around bored as poo poo, wishing he could join them. Aside from recharging the Heavy-Duty Harnesses used to guard the Crack, the Commission isn’t good for much else. And finally, the Nupellian delegate Luren is a loving disaster. The Judges cannot afford for the Pneumancers to break their neutrality treaty and turn against them, but Luren is a man in a downward spiral. While the Judges do their best to prevent him from drinking and whoring himself into an early grave, it’s only a matter of time until something serious happens.  The Central Cluster is the basement to end all basements, even the apocalypse couldn’t kill the basement dwelling internet troll. This section is half just an expanded history of the cult itself, and half actual details on the Chronicler’s home base. It kinda pisses me off when they want you to pay a whole whack of money for the unfinished lorebook that is Primal Punk, especially with all the drat retcons that I’ve come across. The surface of the Central Cluster is the most anyone will ever get to see, witht eh rest being underground and under heavy security. In the age of the Bygones the CC was a maglev train cargo terminal with multiple floors, repair and storage facilities, and connection stations for destinations all over Europe. When the Chroniclers first arrived, the place was full of holes and generally very unstable. These early Chroniclers hired the first Scrappers (mostly unorganized loners at that point) to patch things with with concrete and sheet metal, the project was so massive it took them generations to complete, and by the time it was nobody other than the nerds really knew the full scope of what they had built here. ”Justitian” posted:Chroniclers never have to go looking for work; it always finds them first. Life in the Cluster is modulated according to an omnipresent set of rules and parameters which must be adhered to at all times. These automated algorithms were developed by the Fragments, and constantly run scripts that assign Cult members to their duties in the compound. Every Chronicler who scans their barcode at an entry port thereby logs into the system as an available unit, ready to be given a task. Focusing toward the completion of a task is awarded with upgrades to one’s personal Score: Achievement unlocked, access to a new Level granted. Dear loving god these guys are insufferable, they’re all in dire need of a collective swirlie. But yeah, everything the Chroniclers do is projected and directed by these ancient algorithms. They’re considered to be perfect and infallible, questioning them is tantamount to an act of blasphemy. Also, talking during work is to be reduced to a bare minimum. ”Justitian” posted:Passionate interactions such as heated debates, bouts of anger, or excessive displays of excitement are unwelcome and are considered surefire signs of emotional instability, often leading to reductions in Score. Anyone get the sense that Marko has never even so much as spoken to an autistic person in his entire life? Because I sure have. Next, we’re told that the Chroniclers universally agree that Supreme Judge Archot needs to go. He’s weak, old, and his erratic mood swings erode the trust that the two cults once shared. The Chroniclers used to maintain a lot of influence over the Judges, but now they’re openly being called into question in the Senate and by Chief Protector Rutgar. Observers are being restricted, long established protocols are being overwritten, and so on. To achieve their coup the Chroniclers are covertly supporting Senator Laakon with dirt on his opponents, with the hope that he and his allies will be able to seize power and establish a Judiciary more favorable to the Chroniclers. Apparently only the Enemoi truly understand the Stream like the Chroniclers do, that being one of the primary reasons the Chroniclers have a rivalry with them. The Convoy is effectively a mobile Stream at this point. Recent a small Chronicler team confirmed that the Enemoi were holed up in Noret, but found the first settlement that they saw to be abandoned and destroyed. They had to leave before the AMSUMO patrols arrived so that’s really all they learned. Two weeks late they heard that one Enemoi truck had arrived at A235 and was taken in by the Raven named Chagall. Fragment Omicron is convinced that without Noret, they will need a new fuel supplier for their trucks. This basically can only be the NeoLibyans. Thus, they have concluded that if Ambassador Wakili is terminated, Justitian” posted:the majority of Neolibyan fuel traders would lose their sales licenses and protection from Tripol’s Chancery, thereby drastically limiting the availability of Petro. This is Omicron’s chance to pin the Clan down, once and for all. I’m uh, a little confused? How does that follow exactly? Fears of infiltration have made the Chroniclers excessively paranoid. Their early history is rife with Sleeper infiltrators hijacking the cult for their own goals, and if it wasn’t for Aspera’s help they’d still be marching to the beat of Project Tannhauser. This paranoia has led their primary goal of restarting the stream and solving the 2^16 problem to become more of a secondary concern as they focus more on maintaining the status quo and operational security. The young members aren’t too found of this, and want the cult to refocus its efforts again; they're worried they could see another Schism like the Needles if they fail to do so. Nobody should be surprised by the fact that Chroniclers are constantly analyzed, everything they do is fed through algorithms that monitor their output, personality, etc. If a subject is marked by these algorithms with a possibility of the Chronicler going rogue, their profile is flagged and a Paradigma takes a look. Do they have accumulated stress, sexual inhibitions, personality errors, and so on. From there, they evaluate what measures must be taken to get the subject back in line. Demotions are common, as is redeployment to backwater alcoves or being blocked from certain parts of the static Stream. If those methods don’t work, one of two things will happen. They’ll be murdered and their body will be quietly disposed of. Or, they’re made into a Shutter, the psychopathic secret agents of the cult. Outwardly they maintain a secret identity as a regular ‘ol nerd, their true purpose only known to their backers. Essentially their Score gets overwritten and everything they do is obfuscated, while a separate profile handles stuff like their mission briefings, technology access, and so on. Apparently, this has been going on for so long that even the Fragments can only guess at who the Scalars (Shutter commanders/handlers) are, and they pretty much exist as a separate shadow society within the Chroniclers. As a side note, becoming a Shutter is the only way for a Chronicler to get lethal weaponry from his cult, it isn’t sanctioned for anyone else.  The entire purpose of the Static Stream, folks. Horrific purple prose aside, the nerds are trying to use math to predict the future. The Apocalyptic tarot works in much the same way so checkmate nerds. The Fragments, if the Chroniclers were a religion these guys would be the High Priests. Considered to be vastly intelligent and nearly perfect in their wisdom, everything they say is analyzed and absorbed by their lessers. Most stay within the Cluster unless their mission is too important to be trusted to others. 16 went east and the four who survived became the Needles, 16 were lost when the metaplot said Aquitiane got nuked (lol gently caress PC agency amirite?), and 16 remain in and around Justitian. For some reason they believe that the 2^16 virus inflicted a consciousness on the Stream, and the burden of infinite knowledge caused it to crash seconds later. Therefore, restarting the Stream is the same thing as using a defibrillator on the heart of God himself, apparently. They’re not exactly unified in this goal though, and most work independently and on their own projects. The Central Cluster has 7 levels, each requiring a progressively higher Score to unlock. Level 1 is the Maglev terminal. It’s mostly used as a training ground for Bits (lowest rank of Chronicler) and as a place where they meet with the other cults. The working Maglev cars have been turned into mobile offices that can be operated remotely. There’s also a bunch of poo poo like solar panels for backup power, a huge-rear end radio tower, and so on. Level 2 is the hangar, a former major transshipment hub. It’s a loving massive, cavenrous structure that’s kinda a pain to navigate. Magnetic cranes move repurposed cargo containers that have been turned into things like offices, sleeping quarters, etc. This is where the bulk of the cult’s agents live and work. Level 3 is the Network. Basically all the data that the Observers collect is sent here, along with all the video/drone surveillance they collect. Mountains of information are analyzed, sent elsewhere, acted upon or discarded, and so on. It’s kinda overwhelming, so for the Mediators (the guys who interpret this info) have a sensory deprivation tank is kept nearby to clear their heads every so often. Level 4 is the Conclave. Basically, it’s a port to the system of underground rail tunnels, and as such its the most vulnerable part of the Cluster. As such, it’s also the most heavily defended. For some reason not really explained t’s also the place where large numbers of Chroniclers gather to decide the future of the Cult, stage large scale operations, monitor Sleeper activity, and do/plan a bunch of other important poo poo. Level 5 is the Mainframe, it’s where the Fragments live. They have all the best tech, like holographic screens and floating chairs. Also barely controlled tesla coils, for some reason. Level 6 is the Inventory. They put all their cool tech here, they have so much most of it has yet to be analyzed.   That’s the final Level, 7 is where the Orb is located. If you thought “boy that thing sure looks like a big important computer” you win no prize because that was painfully obvious. The majority of the power sent from the coal plant in Moblis is sent to this thing, which keeps the Static Stream up and running across the Cluster. ”Justitian” posted:But for the Fragments, the Orb is more than just a server. It is their final destination. If one of them dies, their remains are offered as a sacrifice to the machine. The corpse is tossed into a central shaft, where it is devoured by the reactor-like heat emitted by the Orb’s core, releasing the Fragment’s mind to become one with the Stream. I can’t really get over how out of character this is for a Cult that otherwise presented as highly atheistic, logical, and hostile to the other religious cults. It makes zero sense, and is completely at odds with their previous characterizations.  Marko spends way too much wordcount on describing what is essentially a maglev subway network. There’s exits to various parts of the city, they’re all hidden and fortified against attacks. The network divides the city up into a chessboard, with Exits representing specific squares like F-4. The Chroniclers keep this super duper seret, and not even the Judges know about this Bygone tunnel network. ”Justitian” posted:any unfortunate souls who found their way down here by accident were eliminated and disposed of by agents of the Cluster. Conclusion: Knowledge is power; therefore it mustn’t be shared. Good plan. It’s not like the knowledge we have could pull the world back from the brink of annihilation or anything.  This here is Kriegsmachine6, a custom AMSUMO put together with scavenged parts, upgraded further, and then reprogrammed with a custom Existence (what they call the AMSUMO’s AI for some reason). This thing is probably the most powerful NPC I’ve ever seen, and it’s probably also the coolest thing in this book. That isn’t saying much though.  For those not versed in the mechanics of Degenesis, allow me to translate. Very hard to hurt, has a fuckton of health for those that can, and is straight up immune to EMP attacks so you’re doing this the old fashioned way. Basically you better win initiative and have like 3-4 guys with Anti-Material rifles, or you are hosed son. He’s very fast initiative-wise, and his guns effectively mean he deletes 2-3 people a turn. If you have Free Spirit combat suits you might last another round or two. He’s also got several defensive protocols he can employ to further gently caress you over down in the tunnels. He can run excess electricity into the floor, doing 5 ego damage a turn, he can also charge the floor with magnetism. Anyone wearing metal needs BOD+Force (4) successes to even move (and that’s only at half speed if successful), although while this is turned on he can’t move either. He’s got gas that gives you a -D dice penalty for 3 rounds. His monofilament launchers string wires across the tunnels, they’re basically impossible to see (INS+Perception (8) is required to spot’em!), and deal 2 trauma damage to any armor rating less than 8. For the folks at home, that’s literally all PC armor (the highest PC armor is rating 7 and those are the Free Spirit suits), and trauma is the harder to heal serious wounds and the average PC has 6-8 of those usually. His glowing green eyes are lasers that target your eyes, PSY+Reaction (2) is required to look away in time, otherwise you take 3 ego and 3 flesh damage as they burn your retinas. (I wonder if eye protection is a factor here, the book sure doesn’t say so!) it’s last defensive protocol is it’s overloaded Tesla coil. Basically, if you get close you take 2 trauma damage. However, it takes 5 rounds to boot up again and during this time it can’t use it’s other protocols, so honestly it kinda sucks. The generator is its weak-point too, surprise surprise. “If targeted using an Aimed Attack with a Difficulty increase of (4) and dealt more than (8) Damage in a single Round, the coil becomes unstable and the chaotic magnetic fields tear it apart. It explodes, dealing (4) Structure Damage to the AMSUMO and disabling its Defence Protocols.” So yeah, don’t go into the sewers. That’s it for the Cluster.  The Carrion Birds, the Apocalyptics who are led by the horrific Mother of Ravens (the per-Eschaton leader of the Cult) are also headquartered underground, with their own system of tunnels, with blackjack, and hookers! As you can see in the picture, these tunnels aren’t cool future subway tunnels, they're foul-smelling, dank, vermin infested sewer tunnels. Sometimes the two factions run across each other when someone uses a jackhammer for a bit too long, but they mostly try to stay out of each other’s way. The Mother of Ravens has her lair here, nobody knows why she lives amongst a mountain of fetid pillows and decaying blankets in an old, damp sewer tunnel, and nobody is brave enough to ask. Sometimes she entertains visitors here and does spooky prophetic poo poo. There’s also a bunch of poo poo like baby skulls hanging like wind-chimes, apparently the Mother doesn’t like it when her children don’t display the attributes she wants. It’s gross and spooky down here, is the idea. She collects tribute in a nearby chamber, and is rather mercurial about which sort of tribute she favors from day to day, some think she values the ritual and the intent more than the gift itself. She; also punishes those who have hosed up but aren’t worthy of death at the hands of her son to a secret underground prison, where you’re basically tortured into compliance, or your brain breaks, whichever comes first. And speaking of her son, only a select few know of Joshua’s existence, and fewer still have access to his hidden laboratory. Here Apocalyptics sent to death have their organs harvested and place into other, more obedient birds, amongst other things. You see, Joshua is a Biokinetic Pyschonaut. The Mother keeps him starved of Sepsis except when she needs his powers, so without a full connection to his earth chakra she’s able to control him with memes. He’s the reason she’s immortal, and why some of her favoured servants are literally superhuman with poo poo like multiple hearts.  Our last entry in this book is on the Paler horde that invaded Exit C-3. Basically, they heard the folktales that had spread amongst the Providers about the immortal Mother of Ravens, and apparently these stories marked her as a God, aka a Sleeper. They want to find the Sleepers and serve them, so they went underground and started looking for her. They ran into the Chronicler presence in the Underground, got stuck for a while. Eventually a Demagogue came along and whipped them into shape. They smashed into Exit C-3, killed the nerds, fortified the hell of it, and even managed to hack a map of the underground from the Chronicler’s systems before they got shut out. There’s been a stalemate for 2 years. The maps the Paler’s stole aren’t good enough, mostly because the Apocalyptic tunnels aren’t on them, they were ridden for a reason. The Chroniclers would love to drive them out, but they can’t, they’re simply too entrenched. Meanwhile, the Palers don’t have enough firepower to blow past the Cluster itself. However, the arrival of the Needle who snuck into the Underground presents the Palers with an opportunity, and they’re trying to ally with him to take down the Chroniclers. The rest of the book is mostly just a list of Most-Wanted, which I guess is kinda useful if your PCs want to go bounty hunting. Take down one of these bad boys and your trailblazer shoots for another few months, that kind of thing. Despite being human enemies (for which the corebook refused to provide stats),there’s also stats for Cockroaches, Phosphorites, Mechanics, and Enemoi. 4 statblocks each for various roles and the like. Most are boring, but I’ve leave you with the entry for the Cockroach Kings. Spoiled for sexual assault themes.  Next time, Justitian: Book 2, Moloch
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May 13, 2021 14:05
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Thousand Year Old Vampire The votes are in and it looks like we are looking at a nonbinary African gold smuggler from the Empire of Mali, in the reign of Mansa Musa! (Funny enough, this will be the second time I'm creating a vampire from ancient Mali) For some background of this fascinating time and place in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire One thing I really enjoy about TYOV is how it often leads you to deep-dives on Internet research to get some perspective of your character's history and culture. Let's call our vampire Hawa Oblim. Now we have enough material to build their very first Experience and Memory. Thousand Year Old Vampire posted:Memories and Experiences are important moments that have shaped your vampire, crystallized in writing. They make up the core of the vampire’s self—the things they know and care about. An Experience is a particular event; a Memory is an arc of Experiences that are tied together by subject or theme. While this seems a bit tight in terms of total space for Memories, your vampire can also record Memories in a Diary to free up some space, at the cost of creating a physical object that is at risk of loss. Once a Diary is gone, those Memories are gone too, a portion of your vampire's past gets effectively erased. We'll go more into Diaries as we play forward. So here's the start of Hawa's character sheet; it has their name and a single Experience to sum up the basics of their mortal life, to kick off the first Memory. Hawa Oblim (1021 CE - ?) Memories 1. I am Hawa Oblim, a smuggler from the city of Niani in the Mali Empire; estranged from my clan for not wanting the life of a housewife, I smuggle the city's rich reserves of gold and salt to foreigners as my trade. Now we need to generate Characters: 3 Mortals and 1 Immortal. These characters will form the basis of our next set of Memories. TYOV posted:Characters are the people with whom your vampire has a relationship. Each Character should be named and described in a sentence fragment, such as Lawrence Hollmueller, descendant of Baron Hollmueller or Sister Adelpho, a meddlesome nun. Add more descriptors each time you interact with them in the course of resolving a Prompt. Lawrence, from the previous example, might become Lawrence Hollmueller, descendant of Baron Hollmueller; I freed him from a Turkish prison. So we need 3 mortals to make Hawa's life interesting (Note: These are all people from their life before they become a vampire). Goons, each of you suggest 1 Mortal from Hawa's life. The best 3 will be chosen to add to the story.
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May 13, 2021 15:04
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 Part One: Bi, Bi, Biplane Guten abend, schläger! It's time to talk about what is probably my favorite game of 2020, Flying Circus by Erika Chappell, aka the forum's own open_sketchbook. (Hi Erika! I promise I won't abandon this one like I did PATROL!) Flying Circus is simultaneously a Powered by the Apocalypse queer relationship drama game, a small-business-ownership simulator, and an extremely deep tabletop flight sim focusing on the early days of air combat, World War I and the years immediately following. If that sounds like three wildly-different and probably-incompatable game experiences... well, I can't blame you, it's a lot, and the game is very mechanically dense, especially by the standards of PbtA. But this absolute mad lass pulled it off, and did so by creating frankly one of the tightest core gameplay loops I've ever seen in a tabletop RPG.  Also, "antifa catgirl" is a valid character concept, which is always an indicator of quality--see also Hard Wired Island. Flying Circus was Kickstarted in 2018 and initially released in April of 2020 in pdf format, but the core book has actually undergone several significant revisions based on player feedback in the intervening year. The most recent version of the core rulebook, v1.3, dropped a couple of months ago and is considered the final release that will be going to print, so now seems like a good time to talk it up here--hopefully by the time this review is done, the PoD version will be available and you'll all go buy a copy. (There's also a thread for the game here, but sadly it's been kind of dead since February. So grab your jaunty goggles and silk scarf, strap on your parachute (LOL you probably do not have a parachute), and remember: When the enemy dives upon you, do not flee, but fly up to meet him. Flying Circus is set on the continent of Himmilgard, a place whose elevator pitch can be summed up as "what if a Studio Ghibli apocalypse happened to 1920s Germany?" It's a place of vast mountain ranges, plunging valleys, and impenetrable, fae-haunted forests where humans discovered flight before the wheel. It's about two decades after the end of the world--imagine if World War I had dragged on for decades, only ending when the death-before-defeat maniacs in charge of the great powers bombed every major city into oblivion using horrifying occult gas weapons. If there's one thing worse than mustard gas, it's mustard gas that never dissipates, seems to move of its own volition, and reanimates the dead. So yeah, the larger industrial societies collapsed, the only* people who survived did so in relatively isolated rural towns and villages, and people are slowly picking up the pieces and trying to get back to their lives. But although this is definitely a post-apocalyptic setting, it's the "cozy apocalypse" of quiet, melancholy beauty seen in movies like Castle in the Sky rather than the grim, blasted hellscape of a Mad Max or The Road. Into this setting come the titular Flying Circuses, airborne mercenary companies that fly from town to town, taking on dangerous jobs like fighting off monsters, bandits, and tyrants in what amounts to a wood and canvas kite with an engine and a couple of guns bolted to it. In between jobs, they deal with the enormous stress this frankly stupid and suicidal career puts them under, usually in very unhealthy but dramatically-entertaining ways before moving on to the next job, scraping together enough cash to keep flying. Or, to boil it down even farther: "Someone has money and a problem that only a half-dozen idiots in aeroplanes can solve. You are a half-dozen idiots in aeroplanes, and you need money." After the brief and obligatory overview of "what is a roleplaying game" and "what will you need to play," Flying Circus jumps right into content and safety tools--which is a smart choice, because this is a game that is going to touch on a lot of very difficult topics, from sex and sexuality to addiction and self-harm to fascism and bigotry, so it's really good to talk about the ways to handle that responsibly straight off. This is, in my opinion, one of the hallmarks of an actual mature game, as opposed to one with "mature content." Content and Safety So, first off, we have to address the goose-stepping elephant in the room: A lot of the imagery this game draws on--that idyllic, rural Germany of the 19th and early 20th centuries and its attendent cultures and aesthetics, are the same images the Nazis used in their bullshit propaganda of an idealized, racially "pure" German ethnostate. Flying Circus knows this, and rather than taking the easy, dismissive route of saying "well, this is just that aesthetic without the fascist overtones!" it acknowledges that while, sure, you can say that, this imagery has context no matter what. So rather than sweeping the fascist propaganda under the rug, Flying Circus aims to tackle it head-on, both by explicitly refuting it (even though the aesthetic of the world's material culture is very much early 20th century Germany, it is very explicitly not phenotypically homogenous, and likewise the setting is explicitly multicultural, and that's baked into character creation) and by framing its "values" as clearly and unambiguously evil. (There are people in the setting who are way too into defining who is ethnically "Gotisch" and who is not. Those people are assholes, and it is your job to shoot their planes down and punch them in their stupid Nazi faces, in whichever order seems best to you.) And of course, despite the romanticization of those dashing knights of the air that came out of WWI propaganda, early aviation was absurdly dangerous even when pilots aren't shooting at each other. At some points in the actual, historical war, pilot life expectancy was measured in hours. People are going to die in this game, and they're going to die nasty. It's up to you how much you want to dwell on that fact--it's okay to gloss over the fact that there was a person behind the controls of that plane that just slammed into the side of a mountain while going 170 kph and on fire--but violence and death are kind of unavoidable. The book suggests bneing morbid and honest, but not lurid or exploitative--yeah, cool airplane dogfights are the draw, not an existential meditation on the inhuman horror of industrialized warfare, but you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, outside of a few fantastical edge cases, there are people behind the stick of those enemy planes. I said up top that part of Flying Circus is a queer relationship drama, and that's the next thing the book discusses. Flying Circuses (as in, the aerial mrcenary bands your PC group is assumed to be one of) are essentially queer communities, both metaphorically (the core story of most pilots is "I left home because people didn't understand me and I didn't fit in, and now I've found a surrogate family of people just like me") and literally (there's just a lot of non cishet folx in this game, deal with it, and also see above re: "deliberately giving a giant middle finger to the fascist ideal of German culture"). It also assumes that pilots tend to live hedonistic, thrill-seeking lives, and sex is a part of that. It's never something that needs to be played out explicitly, and it can be excised entirely if your table prefers--where Apocalypse World's "specials" are so explicitly linked to having sex that they became colloquially known as "sex moves," Flying Circus has "Intimacy moves," which trigger any time your character gets vulnerable around other people (this is, incidentally, also much more welcoming to ace and aro characters).  Be gay, do sky-crimes! Speaking of hedonistic thrill-seeking, pilots... well, as a general rule, pilots are not kind to their bodies and are not typically known for dealing with stress and trauma in healthy ways. They drink to excess, use drugs, have irresponsible sex, start brawls, and so on to blow off steam, and this is another area where you need to be extra careful, because there's a much higher chance someone in your play group has had traumatic experience with addiction than with flying a Sopwith Camel over enemy lines at the Somme. The book advises that, much like sex, this is a topic where it's okay to say "I don't want to see this vice presented in-game," and if that's the case, to simply strike it out of any playbooks and not feature it. The last of our content warnings is another heavy one: youth. Flying Circus generally assumes its protagonists are young adults who still have a lot of growing up to do, but it's also inspired by the experiences of historical WWI pilots. We know that some of those pilots were as young as 16, and it's entirely possible that some were even younger. This is obviously a potentially extremely fraught topic, especially given the previous content warnings, and the book says it's perfectly okay to simply decide that all characters are above the age of majority, but there are some potentially powerful stories to be told about people thrust into a life they're far too young for. With those content warnings out of the way, the game spends some time talking about how to ensure your players' safety at the table. First and foremost, of course, as mentioned in the content warnings, is to have a pre-game talk about comfort levels on these topics. What needs to be handled with extreme care, what should be excised entirely, and, conversely, what should be focused on--it's okay to want your games to go to darker places, after all. That last point is one I think it's easy to forget, and as long as everyone's safety trumps any one player's "fun," it's a good thing to call out here. Once play actually starts, the book suggests a "red-yellow-green" safety system (in previous versions this was called the 'safety roundel,' after the roundels commonly used on early aircraft as identifiers, but that terminology seems to be gone now). This is apparently a safety tool adapted from BDSM play, where "red" means "stop immediately," "yellow" means "this is getting too intense, please dial it back but we can continue playing," and "green" means "this is good, more of this." Again, I appreciate that there's a positive reinforcement here, and slightly more nuance than the X-Card, but just like the pregame discussion it does require that everybody be more on the ball that someone's green isn't overriding someone else's yellow or red. The book is clear that the GM needs to be prioritizing safety, not only for that reason but also because people who are overwhelmed might not be comfortable or able to call a halt on their own. This is good advice, but I do feel like it sort of downplays the GM's own well-being--certainly the GM has a lot more control over what happens in the fiction, but they can still be thrown for a loop by something a player does! I would have liked a little more talk about how the safety and comfort of everyone at the table is the entire group's responsibility. Another really solid piece of advice is to normalize the calling of periodic breaks from gameplay, for any reason, not just safety. If the only time you call a pause is when someone has invoked a safety tool, that's implicitly linking player discomfort to stopping play, and it can lead to people not wanting to speak up because they don't want to kill momentum. So take breaks often, for any reason--just finished a really intense action scene and need a few to let the adrenaline settle, not sure what to happen next and need 5 to brainstorm, just need to eat or hydrate or take a bathroom break, whatever. The more pausing is normalized, the less people will feel bad calling for one when they need it. Flying Circus Basics Okay, that was a lot of really heavy stuff! Let's go out on a lighter note by covering some basic rules. As mentioned previously, Flying Circus is a PbtA game with some significant tweaks--I'm pretty sure the vast majority of readers of this thread are familiar with PbtA basics, so I'm not going to cover stuff like "the conversation" or what moves are or what +X forward or hold Y mean. I'm going to focus on where Flying Circus differs. First of all, there are a lot of moves--they're split into specific arenas, so you'll generally only be engaging with one set at a time, and a lot of them are really just a formalized way of structuring simple rules, so when I say that air combat involves twenty-six moves, it's... well, okay, it's still a lot, and it's a lot to keep track of, but IMO it's absolutely worth it for the experience it gives. Along with some of these moves being more purely mechanistic, Flying Circus introduces the concept of pushing a move. This is effectively a GM move where the GM requires you to make a mechanical move in response to something in the fiction--for example, the normal trigger for the Stall move is "when your Speed drops below your Stall Speed," but the GM can Push Stall in response to, say, a miss on a Dogfight! move and describe you turning so aggressively that your wings lose purchase, or you catching prop wash at just the right angle to enter an uncontrolled spin ("Gooooooooooooooooose!"). Flying Circus's biggest change to the base PbtA system, though, is that it upscales the dice from 2d6 to 2d10, and along with that the range of values for stats (generally -2 to +5 rather than -1 to +3) and the results (16+ for a strong hit, 11-15 for a weak hit, and 10- for a miss; several moves also have a 20+ effect). In addition, some moves roll 1d20 instead, with the same result ranges, for when the game wants a flat probability rather than a bell curve. Often you'll be rolling multiple d20s at once, adding your modifier to each individual die and reading each as a separate result. It also introduces Advantage and Disadvantage, which only applies to 2d10 rolls and works as you'd expect--roll three dice, take the two best or worst. You should use a different-colored (or otherwise distinguishable) die for your extra, though, because if it comes up a 1 (for Advantage) or a 10 (for Disadvantage), it's a Fault, which means something unexpected happens. In theory. This is a cool mechanical lever to pull, but unfortunately it's only used in two very specific cases: The Help/Hinder move, where another character's assistance gives you Advantage or Disadvantage, in which case a Fault means they suffer an immediate hard move, and an optional advanced rule for flying through dense obstacles, wherein you get Advantage on rolls to shake a pursuer but a Fault means you have to deal with a sudden risk of colliding with something. This feels like a mechanic that was maybe more prominent in earlier drafts of the game but gradually got winnowed out except for these two vestigial cases, which is a shame, both because it's a good trigger for other moves and because when it's only used in these two specific cases it becomes really easy to forget. At the end of an aerial mission, you'll tally up just how much psychological trauma you inflicted on yourself by flying a motorized kite while other people try to murder you in the form of Stress. Acquire too much of it and you'll end up lashing out, unable to improve yourself, or even unable to fly at all. Then you'll probably blow all the money you just earned from that mission on booze, gambling, and trying to impress people of your preferred gender(s)and orientation(s) (or just paying them outright, sex work is work y'all) to try to blow off as much of that Stress as possible while hopefully dodging all the complications that come with a bunch of dashing young pilots descending on a town like a plague of drunken, horny locusts. This is Flying Circus's killer app: flying missions causes Stress but earns money, relieving Stress tends to cost money, but also every point of Stress you clear converts directly into XP. Like I said up top, this is hands-down one of the tightest gameplay loops I've seen in a game, and it is a masterclass in both driving continued engagement with the mechanical aspects of the loop and in creating the kind of stories this game wants to tell. Absolute :chefkiss:, 10/10. Speaking of money, the game recognizes two kinds: thaler are huge, beer-coaster sized gold coins that are used for big purchases and inter-town trade, and scrip, which is whatever any given town uses for daily spending. In keeping with "pilots are irresponsible idiots," scrip is barely even acknowledged as money, mechanically--it's not even real when you regularly operate in "feed an entire family for a month" units of currency. Scrip only matters when you roll up the final tally of your accounts payable at the end of a job, when it's very possible to realize that all those little nothing purchases suddenly add up to real money. We'll get into more detail on this when we get into the details of the Routine, but it's another great mechanic and also just fun thematically--I liked it in WFRP, I like it here, idiot adventurers routinely gaining and spending (or just irresponsibly losing) staggering amounts of money by normal-people standards is always fun.  A thaler. In the book the image is to-scale to give you a sense of how massive they are, but I have no idea how that will translate to an image hosted on imgur. But it's big. Trust and Injury are the last two general rules we need to cover: Trust is a simple, binary, non-reciprocal state between PCs. In other words, your character either Trusts or doesn't Trust every other PC, and it doesn't matter whether they feel the same way about you. Trust doesn't have any specific rules of its own, rather, it's a hook for moves to hang additional effects on. Injury fills the same roll as Harm in Apocalypse World, but it has a couple of differences. Firstly, there's no clock--while you pass out and can't act any more at 3 Injury, there's no actual upper limit to how much Injury you can take. In fact, Flying Circus PCs only die if their player decides they do. This is a very good thing, because early aerial combat is, uhh... unforgiving (see above re: lifespans measured in hours) and if this game had a traditional death mechanic you'd be rolling up new PCs with alarming frequency. That said, each Injury is also a -1 ongoing to all your moves, so it's not purely a narrative thing. Oh, and just like other PbtA games, NPCs have no such protection and even 1-2 Injury tends to be serious if not fatal. Session Zero and the Routine After the basic rules, we get a quick overview of Session Zero, which I'm not really going to cover. We'll make a character later in the review and go over the rules for creating your Flying Circus when we get to the rules for companies, and the only other sections of note are a brief discussion of paint schemes for aircraft (much like the real Flying Circus for which the game is named--Mannfred von Richtoffen's Jagdgeschwader I--Flying Circuses are so named because each pilot tends to paint their plane in garish, personalized colors) and sketching out, as a group, a rough map of the region your game starts in (Himmilgard is about the size of North America, so you'll probably want to focus in a bit). The Routine is what Flying Circus calls its gameplay loop, much like Blades in the Dark--it's split between "the Mission," which is where all the action happens (usually in aeroplanes, but sometimes you might have all or part of a mission on the ground, aboard a zeppelin, or the like) and Business & Pleasure, wherein you blow off Stress, spend a bunch of money, (hopefully) have enough left over to cover your debts, then find another job and do it all again. This is also where we get our few "Universal Moves" that will come up in all the different stages of the Routine. Intimacy moves we already talked about up in the content warning section, not much to say here except that the rules here are very explicit that intimacy moves do not exclude ace or aro characters--emotional and platonic intimacy are absolutely valid triggers--nor does it assume that there are only two participants (whether that looks like group therapy or group sex, or both at once, is, of course, up to your group). Press Your Luck is a great example of the "catch-all" move a lot of PbtA games feel they need, and I'm just going to quote it entirely because it's great: Press Your Luck posted:When you take a risk, you do it, and consequences unfold. Breaking and Restoring Trust are simple moves with simple triggers: When you decide you no longer trust a comrade, you either show them, directly and explicitly, that they're loving dead to you and recover 1 Stress, or you stew silently and take 1 Stress. When you show faith in a comrade you don't currently Trust, you take 1 Stress because opening up to other people is scary but you mark Trust with them again. We covered Help and Hinder up in the Advantage and Disadvantage section, so the only thing to add here is that Help automatically pushes Restore Trust and Hinder automatically pushes Break Trust if you weren't already in the relevant state of Trusting. Finally, Discover Beauty is a nice little move to help with that Studio Ghibli vibe: Once per routine, you can describe how you are moved by the beauty of the world or something in it and clear 1 Stress, no strings attached. And with that, we've laid the groundwork to dive into the really interesting stuff in Flying Circus. This first update was maybe not the most exciting, but I promise that now that we've eaten our basic-mechanics-and-safety-tools veggies, we're on our way to like seven courses of dogfighting dessert. I hope you'll all come along with me on this one, I have some ideas for a slightly different way to do an F&F for a core rulebook that I think will be a lot of fun. Next Time: Airplane go NNYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT BOOOOOOOM! 
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May 13, 2021 15:16
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Cythereal posted:Why are the Idoneth officially on the side of good, again?
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May 13, 2021 15:38
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Hipster Occultist posted:the motto of the Judges “Per aspera ad astra!” I’m not entirely sure why the Judges’ motto is “through hardship to the stars.” Unlike the Jehammedans, they have no history or myth linking them to the cosmos in any way. Unless it's supposed to a cliche “reach for the stars” metaphor, in which case, Because that's the loving official motto of Starfleet in Star Trek and is written on the logo for Starfleet Academy. 
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May 13, 2021 15:41
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JcDent posted:This "oh, but preventing a terrible thing is actually bad" attitude is two sex slaves away from Ctech. (Maybe a lot, if the PCs themselves keep getting more powerful. I dunno.)
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May 13, 2021 15:47
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Gatto Grigio posted:Thousand Year Old Vampire An uncle who is also a city official that facilitates their smuggling.
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May 13, 2021 16:23
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Winklebottom posted:They’re on the side of order, not good. It’s still a stretch since they seem to prey on the other members even more openly than DoK, though. This. In WWII Russia under Stalin was (eventually) on the side of the Allies. That did not make him "good." So, figure occasionally killing the poo poo out of soul-stealing elven fish Stalins is no bad thing.
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May 13, 2021 16:28
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Cythereal posted:Because that's the loving official motto of Starfleet in Star Trek and is written on the logo for Starfleet Academy. It's seriously the loving Starfleet motto? That is some grade A hackery
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May 13, 2021 16:34
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Cythereal posted:Because that's the loving official motto of Starfleet in Star Trek and is written on the logo for Starfleet Academy. It's also a motto for a bunch of universities. And air forces. And shows up in a bunch of other sci-fi, both before and after Starfleet. It's a popular phrase.
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May 13, 2021 16:39
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Royal Flying Corps started using it in 1912, and it's used by the RAF and a lot of other Commonwealth air forces
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May 13, 2021 16:43
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Night10194 posted:It's also a motto for a bunch of universities. And air forces. And shows up in a bunch of other sci-fi, both before and after Starfleet. It's a popular phrase. And it's the motto for the state of Kansas, which has gently caress all to do with space travel (though it's reversed, ad astra per aspera).
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May 13, 2021 17:33
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Admiralty Flag posted:And it's the motto for the state of Kansas, which has gently caress all to do with space travel (though it's reversed, ad astra per aspera). It's a mission statement. If you work hard you too can get as far away from Kansas as humanly possible.
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May 13, 2021 17:34
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I'm a couple of days behind, but: with the notable exception of the people behind 1.5.*: I think they're kind of right, loresheets are one of those things that look cool as hell but often don't work as nicely as you want in practice - they're a cool mechanical innovation that I think is unfortunately a little bit underbaked/supported in practice, and while I'd have liked the 1.5 team to have done more work on them I think that the decision to largely excise them by default makes sense as a matter of expedience loresheets are generally formalizations of social/historical aspects of a campaign setting, which is great in some respects but also has some obvious downsides if your campaign focuses on or becomes about things that aren't already formalized (which happens all the time), and what organizational ties/relationships/interactions mean when they are/are not tied to a loresheet purchase that's the kind of thing that can mess up both GMs (because they either feel obligated to develop excessive amounts of loresheets or hew too closely to the ones the game provides) and players (because of differences in what their loresheet expenditures get them based on the GM's narrative emphasis, differing levels of loresheet support for their stuff, etc.) to my mind entanglement and how it interacts with the system is the much larger issue though - it's a supplementary source of xp that is both fiddly, has relatively few guidelines on how much should be awarded, and can be spent on both non-mechanical setting development and significant (and important) mechanical bonuses its absolutely the sort of thing that produces wildly disparate and sometimes unfun experiences between and within groups imo the game would have really seen significant benefit from additional rules/advice on cooperatively generating and expanding loresheets through play and having had all of that stuff handled via a purely narrative currency, while mechanical benefits would explicitly need to be purchased via regular xp/destiny (and probably guidance on/an explicit menu of mechanical benefits the cooperatively generated loresheets previously mentioned could/should be providing you) LGD fucked around with this message at 17:44 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 17:36
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JcDent posted:Speaking of weird trench wars, this one guy has made creepy holy trench war his entire thing.
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May 13, 2021 17:51
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Halloween Jack posted:Warhammer 1914. That's pretty much half the Imperial Guard.
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May 13, 2021 17:52
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Age of Sigmar: Daughters of Khaine Blood Queens The leaders of the Khainite sects are largely drawn from the sisterhood of the aelven members, and each is selected by Morathi, which usually means they're loyal, but doesn't always. She usually picks the most zealous and dedicated, but sometimes others earn her favor, and she sometimes misjudges them. They most pass bloody and dangerous initiations, which ends with the initiate being dunked completely in a cauldron full of shadow creatures. Those who fight their way out are granted great power over blood and shadow magic, channeling the nature of Khaine. The Hag Queens are the high priestesses chosen to lead temple rites and protect the divine mysteries of the religion. They learn magic, secret rites and prayers of power, allowing them to call forth the divine energy of Khaine. They also are taught the art of poison-making and alchemy, which they use to make the sacred witchbrew that drives Khainites into battle frenzy. Witchbrew is made primarily from the blood of Slaughter Queens who die in service to Khaine, mixed with a number of chemicals and herbs in a great rite that channels magic only the Hag Queens know. What comes out has the rough consistency of clotting blood and causes a massive heightening of the senses at the cost of equally massive bloodlust and a loss of self-preservation. The drinkers' eyes roll back into their heads, their teeth are almost always bared, and they will fight even while horribly wounded. The greatest duty of a Hag Queen, however, is to care for the Cauldrons of Blood used in the rites of rebirth. These magical rites ensure that no matter how old they are, the Daughters retain a youthful appearance fitting their god. While all Khainite aelves but the leathanam have a much longer lifespan than most other species, the Hag Queens often outlive even the rest of their kind. This is managed by regular application of blood magic, which rejuvenates their aged bodies and ensures they do not die of old age. Morathi uses this as another way to ensure control, since she controls the supply of cauldrons. Slaughter Queens, mentioned before, are the high priestesses who lead the war covens and martial groups of the Cult of Khaine. They rarely lead temple rites, as their place is the battlefield and their offering is the arterial blood of the enemy. They fight with dual swords, weaving and dancing through the enemy in a haze of blood. One hand wields the Blade of Khaine, which moves with terrifying speed and power, and the other the Deathsword, enchanted with a fraction of Morathi-Khaine's scorn and hate, so that it cuts through anything. They don't wear much armor, but their speed means they rarely get hit. Slaughter Queens must be both good at fighting and charismatic, able to rally their coven on to greater violence or keep them from fleeing by sheer force of will. They are usually inspiring figures who know exactly what to say or do to get Khainites hyped up. They also tend to be good at killing in impressive ways, because that can be just as inspiring as a speech. While they tend to prefer fighting to magic, they do learn the prayers of Khaine and are skilled at channeling them in the field. They know the names of Khaine that, when spoken correctly, will kill a foe or break a spell, and they are happy to use them. Cauldrons of Blood are brought into battle when the Khainites expect a good fight. These are giant cauldrons with iron wheels, mobile shrines to the Murder God that move according to the magical chants of their riders. Their machinery is keyed to the prayers and magic of Khaine, and each is deeply enchanted to both empower and inspire the cultists. When Haq Queens ride them into battle, they cause the blood in the cauldron to boil and shoot off in clouds of red steam, which protects Khainites from wounds that would otherwise kill them. They sometimes offer drinks of the blood in the cauldron to their followers, sending them into blessed frenzies of violence. Their magic can even animate the statue of Khaine atop the shrine to fight for them, wielding a giant iron sword. These golems can even be sent onto the battlefield on their own, though that happens slightly less often. It is widely believed by the cult that the Cauldrons are gifted by Khaine himself, granted only to the most dedicated Daughters. Morathi repeats this claim every time she hands a new one over. In truth, they're made in the Khruthu under the First Temple, and only Morathi and her most trusted servants know the magic needed to create them. The Khainites also assume that the reason that the cualdrons never overflow is because the excess blood poured into them is taken by Khaine as an offering. Again, not actually true. Morathi's magic in the Cauldrons draws the blood back to the Mathcoir, where it is absorbed and its energies repurposed for her magic. The Mathcoir itself was made to store the soul energy that Morathi had taken from Slaanesh when he was first imprisoned. She mixed shadow magic and her own blood in to create physical bodies for the souls in the Mother Cauldron, and by using it as a power battery for Khainite blood magic, she was able to turn it into both a tool and a power source for her. During her rite of ascension, Morathi filled the thing with pure varanite, channeling thousands of souls of Chaos cultists through it. This turned the Mathcoir into a portal into Slaanesh's belly, which Morathi used to steal potent king-souls to fuel her apotheosis. The process damaged the cauldron, and it is unclear to Morathi if it can ever be fully repaired. It seemsz unlikely. The iron of the thing splintered and cracked during the ritual, releasing a flood of Varanite. Only Morathi and her most loyal lieutenants know the full extent of the damage, but everyone in Hagg Nar knows damage happened. The attempts to fix it have not been going well, and have resulted in the creation of a number of hideous monsters that have been locked inside the Khruthu and kept alive with a supply of leathanam sacrifices.  The Witch Aelves form the majority of the professional cultists. They have dedicated their lives to Khaine, and most of their days are spent training. They practice with weapons and spar with each other day in and day out, though this also doubles as religious worship and ritual. The rites of combat are approached with total devotion, just as they read the holy texts of Khaine and offer sacrifices. Ritual combat fulfills their need for violence andd skill, and gladiatorial fights against prisoners, mosnters or other fighters fill the need to spill blood for Khaine. Even so, it is only in battle that true unity with the Murder God can be achieved. The Witch Aelves use long knives called sciansa, which are made from steel tempered in blood and then blessed by the Hag Queens. A sciansa is a sacred item as well as a weapon, and they are kept razor-sharp to easily cut. Some have a special notch that can be twisted to increase the pain of the wound and encourage bleeding. They are wielded paired or with a bladed buckler, and in either case they are exceptionally fast and deadly. Like the Queens, the Witch Aelves wear little armor, though they do have magical bracers and pauldrons that can block blows they don't dodge. Armor larger than that would get in way of blood landing on the flesh, which is a sacrament. Before battle, the Witch Aelves tend to be quiet, reserved and serious. Once it starts, they explode into a frenzy of emotion and movement. They seem to dance across the field, chanting and shrieking as they push themselves to a devotional frenzy. They go from ordered movements to clouds of blades, losing their self-control in joy and worship. They tear out hearts, paint their skin with runes of blood and revel in the carnage they cause. Many stories tell of them losing themselves in battle and even attacking their allies, though Morathi and the high priestesses deny that this happens. The Sisters of Slaughter are a subgroup within the Witch Aelves, considered to be extremist and obsessed with fighting even by the rest of the cult. They believe that it is only through mastery of melee combat that Khaine can be properly worshipped, and they practice a special, highly exaggerated fighting style involving jumping, dramatic posing and using whips and knives to carve runes into their victims. Every member of the order takes the vow of druharu, putting on masks made from living metal. In the past, these masks were used only in the ritual Khielt-gadh, a recreation of the mythic battles of Khaine against Chaos. The Sisters of Slaughter permanently fuse the masks to their flesh in horribly painful rites, enchanting them to help scent blood. The process of fusing with a druharu mask is disfiguring, and most Khainites reject it because it mars their bodies, which are weapons of Khaine. The binding ritual takes hours and cannot be completed without successfully fighting a series of ritual duels against older Sisters without fainting or dying of blood loss. Their favored weapon is the kruip-lash, a long whip that requires many years of practice to wield with any precision. The Sisters of Slaughter are able to cut flies in half with them even when the flies are hidden by mist and fog, and the weapons are no less devastating against larger foes. They tear out eyes, pierce flesh and find the gaps in armor with great ease. Some prefer to go into battle also armed with a sharp dagger, while others use a bladed buckler to block attacks and counter strikes. The Sisters of Slaughter are relatively rare in most sects, but the Kraith field them in great numbers. They believe the Sisters of Slaughter are worthy of greater respect than any other Witch Aelf, and the majority of their Hag and Slaughter Queens are drawn from the ranks of the Sisters. Morathi tends to pick them for pulling off really amazing acts of violence. The Sisters spend most of their time on pilgrimages to join into whatever battles they can find, the deadlier the better. Only true combat, unbound by law or society, can satisfy Khaine in their eyes. Next time: Snakes
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May 13, 2021 17:55
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JcDent posted:Speaking of weird trench wars, this one guy has made creepy holy trench war his entire thing. Franchina does good work and it's a visual touchstone I'd recommend, though not pulled completely directly, for someone looking to amp up the supernatural elements further.
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May 13, 2021 18:00
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Froghammer posted:The Grand Alliance of Order straight-up does not have the luxury of turning down potential allies. Individual Idoneth enclaves can be powerful allies in war efforts, because war is a commodity the Idoneth need as much as food and oxygen. What happens when the war ends is a problem Sigmar and co. will solve when they get there. Along with this the Idoneth are not a monolith. The different enclaves have different policies, and vary in friendliness, some being straight up enemies to Order, while others are quite loyal and only target enemies of the Alliance. The Idoneth using the Happy Angler are cautious ones that go for easy victims, and are little more then parasites. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 18:48 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 18:46
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b]From Hell pt. 10: Purgan Clans[/b] Degenesis Rebirth Katharsys Chapter 10: From Hell Flayers – Pilgrim Clan, Tech II  When you notice that someone dropped a coin Hey, if the “pilgrim clan” only exists in a single region, then- ah, you know what I mean.  Anyways, these are flagellants, if flagellants were all former criminals who sometimes start flogging other people as well. The Penitent Pilgrims go to Bergamo to look at the lava flows or some other Reaper's Blow nonsense and think about God. It's a popular destination for people trying to start their own sects, but only one of them was ever reallysuccessful. quote:He preached mercy. Every sentence went straight to the audience’s heart. This happened 20 years ago, and the man became known as the Penitent. His message found the most purchase with hardened criminals, because they are known to feel especially bad about what they do. Marko, on the other hand, feels nothing at all about forgetting that Anabaptists are actually supposed to be Gnostics, not Christians.  Protests quote:It is not the baptism with water that brings redemption, says the Penitent, whose hands are red with his own blood. People have a superstitious love for these lunatics and women collect their blood (there's quite a lot of that flying around) as components for gout and fertility cures. Dead Flayers get their own mummified shrines, because we're cramming this square medieval Christian peg into a round Gnostic hole with the force of a thousand suns.  quote:The Anabaptists dislike this, but they cannot do anything against it. If they were to chase away the Penitent, they would alienate the people. The reasons why various Degenesis groups tolerate something clearly dangerous are as insane as ever.  However, they do at least try to nip any splinter movements inspired by the Penitent in the bud, openly dragging down and beating up would-be preachers. People seem to be fine with that while also somehow venerating Flayers as saints.  Purgare is a land of contrasts!Ecstasy As I mentioned before, Flayers sometimes will start whipping other people they perceive to be sinful. Those people all agree that they deserve it: quote:The Purgans offer no resistance. They are ashamed of the stain their village now carries. Soon, the neighboring villages will know. With heads bowed, they take the hits from the whips.  : “I don’t think I’ve done any sins, but the crazed fanatics that Anabaptists beat up in the streets from time to time can’t be wrong, so, uh, I’ll just have to deal with it.”poo poo’s dumb, yo.  Great Man Clan: 5 Legacy Clan: 2 Non-Interactive Clan: 4 Not A Clan: 3 Adriani - Adriatic Baisin, Tech III  Guy previously seen giving you an underwhelming quest in Horizon: Zero Dawn Intergenerational religious conflict AND sex weirdness?! Where can I sign up?  Home The people of the Adriatic Baisin got caught in the war between Anabaptists and Jehammedans. quote:Most chose a side. It seemed impossible to join the Jehammedans, so they offered their services to the Anabaptists… Quite a few things may seem impossible if you’re racist! At any rate, all this “killing and dying” thing got stale eventually, so they… surrendered to the Jehammedans.  Family The defectors became the forefathers of the Adriani clan, going from “it’s impossible to join them” to “Jehaboo”. quote:While the Jehammedans met them with distrust, they were not hostile. Ismaelis watched the strangers sowing; in the evening, they all drank tea together. The outcast Delilas found a new home and a family with the Adrianis Aw, isn’t that nice, they even accepted the women that Jehammedans discarded!  However, thing took a decidedly Marko twist as Adriani strated aping the Jehammedan family structure: quote:The boys first had to prove themselves with the hoe on the field and help their parents before they were allowed to have their own family. The girls were raised separate from them and prepared for marriage and hard work. The first resistance flared. Buckle up, kids! Return quote:Today, the old ones want nothing more than to please the Jehammedans and to mingle their own blood with theirs. Adriani girls are presented like cattle in the Jehammedan camps, while the sons are forced to ask an Abrami for the hand of a Hagari. The young Adrianis are confused and nraged. They see themselves as a pledge for a dream they don’t share. A soupcon of miscegenation here, a heaping of objectification there, and we’ve brewn a Degenesis! Bravo!  Three Dots Kids are giving themselves Anabaptist prison tattoos (you know, three dots on the forehead). This doesn’t sit well with the Jehaboo adults. quote:Clan is torn. The young ones imitate the Anabaptists, while the old ones see themselves as Jehammedans in spirit. The trenches that the ancestors overcame are now torn open within the families. Well, ain’t that a tragedy.  All in all, the Adriani is horrible loving Clan where the only real feature is the internal conflict (and the side to favor is blatantly obvious). Great Man Clan: 5 Legacy Clan: 2 Non-Interactive Clan: 4 Not A Clan: 3 Romanos - Rome, Tech III  I see we're upcycling rejected Disney villains The intro has Didaco, a Romano, doing his sleezy merchant best to sell poo poo to Lambasa, a Neolibyan. All is norm- quote:then asks if the man has already seen his daughter and tasted her grace. She would definitely excel in the Tripolitan schools; her sharp intellect regularly takes her mother’s breath away, and maybe master Lambasa would like to make her part of his retinue. The whole family would forever be indebted to him and would offer artwork from… Ok, b- quote:“You have been offering Mafalda to me for six winters now. She had the grace of a cow in the beginning; she’s starcrossed and has been married 10 times.” HAHA, THE ROMANO KEEPS TRYING TO SELL HIS UGLY DAUGHTER WHO MEN KEEP DIVORCING!!!1!  Busy West Purgan cities are dead and strewn with ash. The Romanos are the ones looting them because... IDK, Scrappers hate the Mediterranean climate or something? quote:They raid city after city, robbing the land of its cultural past and dragging paintings, golden pageantry, friezes and mosaics hewn out of walls, pillars, and statues to the great bazaar in Roma. Raiding tombs and killing tribals protecting their temples to steal golden idols is only good when we’re the ones doing it! Of course, only one buyer exists in the world of Degenesis, so Romanos sell everything to the Neolibyans.  quote:A wall painting by this Rafael person would look great in the antechamber of the Bank of Commerce. Do you get it? They’re uncultured philistines who don’t really care about art, only that it looks impressive, dohoihoihoi.  The Eternal City Rome is split between a whole bunch of Romano families, all bearing bombastic titles and proclaiming the grand status of territories that can be as small as a corridor at the Vatican: quote:...in the Sistine Chapel, two self-proclaimed kings face each other in the Alcoves, surrounded by their courts of toothless whores, Scrappers, and cousins maimed by accidents. See, this would be kind funny if not for, you know… I'm also fairly certain that "alcoves" wasn't meant to be capitalized, but either translator or editor did a find+replace to capitalize all the Chronicler Alcoves, so... The Romano love swag above all else, so they make clothing out of Bygone curtains and fill their homes with “dusty baubles.” quote:The Romanos love pageantry and evocative titles that are mostly self invented. They love power, yet still they only sit on the ruins of a great past. It is explained that the Romanos like Neolibyans because those guys live with as much opulence as they would like to. The biggest hope is to get a child in a Neolibyan’s service to divert money their way. Cutthroats The Romanos only look friendly and jovial; if you steal from them, you get shanked. They’re also good friends with pirates from Corpse since they steal back the treasures the Romanos sell to the Neolibyans so they could be resold again. quote:The Neolibyans would call that “optimization of profit,” right? If I ever make a game, I’ll pay the editor extra to beat the conversational tone out of me. And that’s it for the Romanos, the clan legally distinct from the Romani, we’re not racist, we promise! All in all, Purgare is 3/3 for lovely Clans. Great Man Clan: 5 Legacy Clan: 2 Non-Interactive Clan: 4 Not A Clan: 3 Next time: worst thing to have befallen Africa since 'African Child'
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May 13, 2021 19:10
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It's funny how Clanner is one of options for a PC cult, but nearly every single one is not really suited for adventuring, much less following the metaplot
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May 13, 2021 20:03
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Hipster Occultist posted:It's funny how Clanner is one of options for a PC cult, but nearly every single one is not really suited for adventuring, much less following the metaplot I think the intent is to push the player towards "my OC clan"... possibly so that existing ones are left alone to be used as railroad ties. Then again, with how hostile the game is to player agency, probably not.
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May 13, 2021 20:12
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I'm irrationally angry at how everything this books presents about the Enemoi goes counter to their depiction in Katharsys. New trucks? Trucks splitting off from the convoy?! Also, how the gently caress is "Exalters in reestablished Exalt" the whole Exalter background in Katharsys, but the Justitian book is all "ah, we might be getting to it" quote:Conclusion: Knowledge is power; therefore it mustn’t be shared. God drat I hate him injecting quote-like stuff into the into the text, they loving annoying in their feeble attempts to be cool. Hipster Occultist posted:It's funny how Clanner is one of options for a PC cult, but nearly every single one is not really suited for adventuring, much less following the metaplot Same could probably be said about Palers or Hellvetics or Scourgers or Hipster Occultist posted:Most are boring, but I’ve leave you with the entry for the Cockroach Kings. Spoiled for sexual assault themes. The fact that you don't have a Marko quote where gloats about how awesome of an idea Cockroach Kings are is amazing. BIG DUMB HAVE SEX has been repeated like 6 times in Katharsys and Primal Punk, and it didn't end there.
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May 13, 2021 20:13
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How much more Degenesis stuff is there?
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May 13, 2021 20:43
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JcDent posted:I'm irrationally angry at how everything this books presents about the Enemoi goes counter to their depiction in Katharsys. New trucks? Trucks splitting off from the convoy?! As far as the Enemoi go, basically all but one truck left Noret to sneak through the mountains and get to Danzig. The power being cut to Noret means Gusev couldn't produce "blue granulate" which is apparently the fuel for their trucks. They sent one truck though early as a decoy (the one that arrives at A235), so the Chroniclers would all look at it while they snuck into Danzig. (I actually thought the city was in Germany, it's in Poland, whoops!). It's still a bunch of lovely retcons though, nowhere are they mentioned as champions of democracy or whatever the gently caress. As for the Exalters, maybe some are there already but the Liquan Ambassador has another group? It's hard to say, everything is written so poorly. JcDent posted:Same could probably be said about Palers or Hellvetics or Scourgers or Hellvetics at least do a lot of mercenary work so they have reasons to travel, Palers are pretty poo poo unless you can convince your GM to let you play one that's broken their memetic conditioning. All of the African cults though, those don't really work with the Euro-Centric metaplot. Hell, the Anubians are probably going to end up as the big-time villains of the whole thing. Josef bugman posted:How much more Degenesis stuff is there? Another whole book at least, Moloch is 310 pages of NPC rosters, metaplot forecasts, and like 10 pages of bad GMing advice for characters in Justitian. After that, I might just wait until Marko shits out his next book. After that, I'd have to consider if I wanted to cover their smaller adventures that are meant to fill in gaps in the Jehammed's Will Trilogy. I'm not going to do Artifacts, that's just 200 odd pages of optional rules. Spoilers, they gently caress up grappling and the rules of controlling people with Memetics are dumb as poo poo.
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May 13, 2021 21:05
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I really like that you are Doing all of these read, but it's reached the "Beast: The shitening" point for me and I can't take in any more awful things. Just being so overloaded on endless, grinding post-apocalypse.
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May 13, 2021 21:28
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Okay, okay! I'll post the Tank Girl review! Jesus!
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May 13, 2021 21:30
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Josef bugman posted:I really like that you are Doing all of these read, but it's reached the "Beast: The shitening" point for me and I can't take in any more awful things. So... Wrap up Never Going Home and wait a while to resume Red Markets. Got it. It is kind of a lot though, yeah.
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May 13, 2021 21:42
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It's not even Red Markets. Is Degenesis in particular because even in red markets there is a sense of agency and life. Degenesis is an endless cavalcade of rubbish architecture wrapping itself in "egdey" trappings. There is nothing to do in Degenesis, only things to watch and what you are watching is someone suffering.
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May 13, 2021 21:46
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