Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Leraika
Jun 14, 2015

Luckily, I *did* save your old avatar. Fucked around and found out indeed.
Or Tenra, or Double Cross...

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund
Could someone give me a run down on the "without number" games?

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

SkyeAuroline posted:

I don't feel as strongly about it as Purple does but I broadly agree with this, with the exception of Godbound because the alternative is loving Exalted.

I mean, yes, Exalted of any edition is about as much fun as pounding nails into your dick, but the shambling OSR frankenstein that Godbound is stitched together with manages to be intensely boring and clunky at the same time, and leaves you only with very vague guidelines for some core mechanics.

I think that if you held a gun to my head to make me pick between the two, I'd ask you to just loving shoot me.

Just Dan Again
Dec 16, 2012

Adventure!
I think combining Worlds Without Number's expanded combat actions with Godbound would give a pretty solid result with some more choices to make in combat. I wouldn't call any of Crawford's content "borderline unplayable" unless d20s melt your flesh, but they are extremely barebones compared to the FITD or PbtA schools storygame-wise, and not very robust in terms of combat actions compared to 4e or Lancer. Crawford has done a lot of experimenting over his years of designing and I think every game he publishes provides some new tools to use. He's in the stratum of OSR developers who see their job as providing tools for tables to use or discard as they see fit. With that in mind, Crawford knows what his games are and what they do, and provides tools for games other than those he wants to play at his own table.

WWN is a good example. At baseline, it's a thoroughly unforgiving system where characters can easily come off the factory line made of tissue paper. But Crawford tells you this. He acknowledges it in the text of the book, and outlines how you can run games that are fun for the players even with the uphill battle inherent in getting out of level 1. He also provides lots of rules for more powerful characters. Between the Heroic rules for more durable and powerful characters from the start and the Legate rules for characters that can impact the setting's fundamental nature you've got a lot of material for making the kind of fantasy game you want to make.

I don't think every game he's made is completely perfect out of the box (high level combat in Godbound really needs some more mechanically distinct options to make it more interesting), but I've had a ton of fun with Scarlet Heroes and Godbound and am really strongly considering a high-powered WWN for my next Glorantha campaign. Also, as groggy as some of his sandbox-centric advice can sound I think he has shown a lot of growth as a designer over the years.

SkyeAuroline
Nov 12, 2020

PurpleXVI posted:

I mean, yes, Exalted of any edition is about as much fun as pounding nails into your dick, but the shambling OSR frankenstein that Godbound is stitched together with manages to be intensely boring and clunky at the same time, and leaves you only with very vague guidelines for some core mechanics.

I think that if you held a gun to my head to make me pick between the two, I'd ask you to just loving shoot me.

Reflecting on the one time I played and tried to figure out how the gently caress Dominion was supposed to work: yeah, actually.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Just Dan Again posted:

He's in the stratum of OSR developers who see their job as providing tools for tables to use or discard as they see fit.

The problem is that the generic OSR backbone just... isn't good, and frankly never was. We put up with it back when the only game we'd ever been introduced to was AD&D, but we've learned since then, that very few things in it are actually worth keeping and saving for other games, mechanically, plus even if we assume that it's not exceptionally bad it just... clashes insanely with something like Godbound. It's like if a focus group demanded that Exalted, inexplicably, be cross-compatible with a Moron Dirtfarmers Get Tetanus RPG.

Like just get the loving dirtfarmer part out of there and focus on the broad, storygamey powers that characters have been given instead, perhaps with 4E as a combat skeleton if you really need to glue it to something D&D, all those neat words and powers could almost certainly have given rise to a great amount of fun and varied combat abilities instead of seventy-two iterations on "does XdY damage, but with a different colour this time."

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry

SkyeAuroline posted:

I don't feel as strongly about it as Purple does but I broadly agree with this, with the exception of Godbound because the alternative is loving Exalted.

Absolutely agreed.

Just Dan Again
Dec 16, 2012

Adventure!

PurpleXVI posted:

perhaps with 4E as a combat skeleton if you really need to glue it to something D&D

What would this even look like? I'm trying to imagine scooping out 4e's combat system to use in something else and I'm picturing Lancer, which was a colossal undertaking that still had to leave everything outside of combat in a basket at an orphanage with a note that said "please do your best."

Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all

Josef bugman posted:

Could someone give me a run down on the "without number" games?

Maybe about 25% of the material is explicitly OSR rules, the rest is mostly system agnostic content generation tools and setting fluff. Stars Without Number has planet tags, and each tag has little blurbs about locations, complications, villains, allies, etc to give you a pile of ideas of what might be on that planet. Worlds Without Number has courts, where you can roll up details of the local power structure and their problems, etc. There’s generators for ruins and dungeons, stuff like that. There’s a faction system to run between adventures to help you simulate the local powers getting up to their own shenanigans unrelated to the players.

Personally, I’d say that SWN and WWN at the core are D&D with the skill system from Traveller tacked-on, with limited class options and mild character customization.

Everyone
Sep 6, 2019

by sebmojo

SkyeAuroline posted:

I don't feel as strongly about it as Purple does but I broadly agree with this, with the exception of Godbound because the alternative is loving Exalted.

I know that I'm all but begging for a rant/smackdown here, but what's wrong with Exalted? As I understand it, it's basically kind of an anime fantasy take on the old World of Darkness. Granted that the OWoD system was far from the best, but it didn't seem as "pull your loving toenails out" frustrating as some of them.

Froghammer
Sep 8, 2012

Khajit has wares
if you have coin
Exalted is a textbook example of a setting and system that's trying to do way, way too many things at once. The setting extremely high-concept and complicated, the system is complex with a very high skill ceiling, and there can be wild shifts in tone of any given game depending on which splats are being allowed and why.

Exalted is a mess.

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry
Also, the organization of stuff in Exalted is a mess.

illhousen
Jun 12, 2021
DragonRaid

Adventure Master Manual, Part 1

We’re in the final stretch here, with the last book of the game: AM Manual. Let’s find out if there are any tips on how to torture five people for 109 years straight without losing the enthusiasm for it.

After a brief introduction talking about what the role of the AM is (be a GM, but more spiritual, I’ll get into advice later), the book presents us with a short solo adventure meant to ease prospective AMs into the rules of the game: Adventure at the Castle of the Falls.

The adventure is very linear, with a lot of “do you want to do something that would take you away from the plot? No, you don’t” situations. Probably the funniest of them is the following one:

quote:

Now you see a road that winds up the steep cliff to the castle. The height is dizzying, and the road seems never ending. You are tempted to give up and go back to the Liberated Land.

Because you are a new LightRaider and want so much to be successful, this temptation is only DL 1 against Faithfulness. [...] If you are successful, skip to the paragraph beginning, “You set out . . . " and read on.

If you do not succeed, you turn and go back the way you came. After traveling a while, you become more unselsh if your Love rating is 4 or greater and turn again to the foot of the mighty falls. Go back and begin the last paragraph again. If your Love rating is less than 4, you hear the sound of howling wolves coming up the river trail toward you.

You run up the trail that leads to the falls, deciding that continuing your mission is the lesser of two evils. All this costs you an extra hour.

Better do as Christ says, or the wolves are gonna get you.

I shouldn’t harp too much on it, though, since it’s just a short adventure that’s meant to demonstrate the rules more than anything, and there is only so much you can do with the concept without writing a whole CYOA book. A session transcript would probably be an easier way to do it, though.

Anyway, the plot is as follows: you’re a newly graduated LightRaider sent on a mission to the eponymous Castle of the Falls, home to a dragon and his high-ranking slaves. You’re not told what the mission actually is, but you trust OverLord to reveal it in time. And indeed, once you arrive near the castle, you have a dream sent by OverLord explaining your purpose. I’m not entirely sure why OverLord couldn’t have just sent a message in the bottle beforehand. The timing doesn’t change anything, you don’t struggle to understand what God wants from you or anything.

Anyway, your mission is to rescue a high-ranking dragon slave from the curse of gluttony.

quote:

In your dream you venture out of your hiding place and steal toward the room from which you heard the glutton's curse. Through a crack in the door you see a fat, dark-haired woman, her eyes lled with greed, devouring a host of delicacies. She is alone in a room lit by candles and hung with tapestries that proclaim this to be the domain of a high-caste dragon slave. You wonder what she has done to be so well-rewarded by the dragons.

You think of the Discernment WordRune, but are disappointed because you did not memorize it at the Academy. However, you also recall the Possibility WordRune, which you did learn. As you whisper it softly, a mirror-like glass in a delicate frame appears in the air before you. (Of course, at the Academy a looking-glass never actually materialized, since the miraculous power of the WordRunes is reserved for times of the OverLord's choosing|usually only when there is denite need.)

Gently taking hold of the glass, you peer into it, just as you were trained to do. You see a different image of the plump woman. In the glass, she appears rather pretty, slim, not living to eat but eating to live. She has a torn page of the Sacred Scrolls in her hand. She will respond to the Call! Instantly, the glass disappears; she is again her greedy self.

So, yeah, your mission is specifically to make a fat woman eat less and become slim and thus more moral.

Anyway, the bulk of the adventure consists of you sneaking into the castle to meet the woman in question. Most of it is not particularly interesting, just stuff that could reasonably come up in an adventure and some advice on how it would usually be resolved.

A thing of note is that you meet a servant girl along the way,who’s described as shabbily-dressed and looking exhausted, and who cries once she gets out of earshot of her mistress. She is treated as an obstacle to be avoided, and at no point it is suggested that you could talk to her and try to save her, not even as a hypothetical for a real adventure omitted in this one for brevity (the way, say, dealing with an orc guard is discussed).

This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the laser-focused nature of LightRaider missions: the way the game presents it, you’re given a task to convert specific people, with the rest of dragon slaves being viewed as inherently untrustworthy potential threats. You’re not meant to kill them, but only because they may later be redeemed at OverLord’s choosing. In their current state, they’re the enemy.

(From what I understand, it was common for early Christianity to put an emphasis on converting heads of households with the understanding that they would then convert the rest of the household by themselves. It doesn’t work here as you’re going to run away with the rescued woman, though.)

Moving on, you get to the woman, and things go full Chick Tract.

So, one of the things people noted about Jack Chick’s works is just how easy evangelism works in them. The world is seemingly populated by people who have never heard of Jesus Christ but are eager to learn all about him the moment you quote the bible.

This is what happens here: you use a WordRune (which, as a reminder, require you to directly quote the bible) to free her from gluttony, then another one to free her from dragons’ bondage, at which point she’s converted and runs away with you to the Liberated Land.

This is reinforced in a later section that talks about Rescue WordRunes. You use them to, well, convert dragon slaves to the worship of the OverLord, and to do that you need to recite five bible quotes and explain the concepts behind them. Now, the section does mention that you can’t treat it as a magic formula, and another section provides possible counterarguments by dragon slaves against conversion. The response to them is… to recite different biblical passages, more fitting to the situation.

Following the adventure, we have various tips for beginning AMs. I’m going to skip most of it because the advice here is perfectly fine if basic for the most part. You have stuff like “when role-playing NPCs, consider their established motivations and try to think about what would make sense for them to do in the moment” and “you want to host a game around a large table with plenty of space for props and rolling dice”. There is not much to say about it, but I’ll note some weird things as we move along.

It has to be said, though, that the game does lean heavily on the AM being a figure of authority: a guide and a host and a leader. It’s not too different from other traditional games, but does take on a new context when you remember that the game is primarily meant to be hosted by Sunday school teachers or other adult figures for a group of children. There is an inherent power disbalance here, and the game plays into it.

On the other hand, it does emphasize not being a tyrant, at least. The section on what to do when confronted with a situation not described in the rules, for example, suggests asking the players how things should be resolved and taking their opinions into serious consideration, even if ultimately it leaves the ruling up to the AM. In general, it advises to be ready to admit your mistakes, confusion or ignorance, and to work with the players to resolve game problems rather than against them, which is honestly a good attitude to have.

But enough praise. We’re here for silly things.

The Allegory of DragonRaid section asks the question of why bother with renaming everything Christian to silly names like OverLord and TwiceBorn. The answer is that many if not most people are familiar with Christianity to a lesser or greater degree and have established preconceptions about it, good and bad. The allegorical nature of DragonRaid, then, serves as a way to talk about Christian concepts with an open mind, unburdened by any preexisting baggage.

Which is fair, except, like, half of gameplay consists of literally reciting the bible, one of the mission statements of the game is to help kids memorize the bible, and also in general the allegory is very direct and obvious. It’s not even Narnia where at least Jesus was a lion. Anyone who has preconceived notions of Christianity (and even the specific branch of Christianity DragonRaid represents) is going to immediately project them onto the game.

Moving on, we have advice on how to make battles exciting, which consists of “be descriptive and encourage players to do the same”.

quote:

How do you avoid this? Don't let yourself or the players fall into the habit of thinking things like this: "My Sword Weapon Ability of 5 plus my StarLot roll of 4 will beat that goblin's Battle Ability of 4 plus his Shadow Stone roll of 4," etc. It is necessary to teach combat in this dry fashion, but consider how much more exciting it is if the player states the same facts this way: "Aldeth draws his sword and rushes the goblin! . . . Let's see, I roll a 4, plus the Sword Battle Ability of 5, so he gets a 9. The goblin got only an 8? Good! Aldeth hit him! He does . . . 6 points of damage to the goblin!"

Which, eh. I feel the problem with DragonRaid combat (and a lot of traditional games in general, honestly) is that the combat is detailed enough that what you do each round is well-defined, so you can’t just make poo poo up about how you swung on a candelabra and fell three orcs in one motion, but on the other hand it doesn’t give you enough options to be interesting tactically. Most of the time, your options are to attack or not to attack the foe, and by the fifth round of it your vivid descriptions of your mighty attacks are going to grow tired.

Next is the advice on whether to use the advanced combat system, which is essentially a rudimentary safety protocol:

If it seems distasteful to you, don’t use it.
Ask your players if they’re OK with blood and gore. If anyone says no, don’t use it.
If you’re still in doubt, pray.

quote:

Pray for guidance if you are still unsure. The Bible gives clear advice: “It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall." (Romans 14:21).

It’s not a bad advice in itself, but I’m once again compelled to bring up the goblins who want to torture you. Later, the book is going to discuss skills, Resist Torturous Investigation among them, and it provides specific difficulty levels for a beating, cutting of your arms, cutting off your legs (higher difficulty than arms), blinding, and death. No content warning on this one.

Another thing missing here is discussion on how the advanced combat moves will affect the gameplay. Critical hits can trivialize otherwise difficult fights or leave lingering scars on PCs, potentially even rendering characters useless in a fight (if you only took two-handed weapon skills and then lost an arm. Or if you just lost two arms). That’s a serious consideration that also ultimately ties into players’ comfort, but the game seems completely unaware of such implications.

How to organize a group section contains our first outright bad advice:

quote:

Begin with your friends - invite them to your home to play DragonRaid. You may wish to prepare them a little by telling them briefly what the game is about, or you may find it more interesting to say nothing until after they have read the New Player Briefing.

Don’t actually do the latter. Inviting new people for a game night without explaining what the game is about is kind of a dick move even with more mainstream elfgames. Springing “let’s memorize the bible and calculate weighted averages, but, like, in a fun way” on unsuspecting people would only lead to everyone suddenly remembering they forgot to turn off the stove in another city.

The section also mentions that DragonRaid is mostly meant for Christians, which is fair, but kinda contradicts the stated point of using an allegory.

Alright. So far we’ve covered introductions, including the adventure, and the tips for beginning AMs. There will be more advice later on, but for now the book breaks the flow with a chapter on additional rules for AMs because organization is not this game’s strong point.

The chapter starts with standard difficulty levels for tasks falling under various skills. Most of it is not particularly interesting to talk about, it’s stuff like “it’s easier to move quietly when there is loud noise” and such. There are some highlights, though:

Climbing a rope ladder is a task of difficulty 2. Climb Skillfully is an optional skill, so most PCs would have it at rank 1, giving them only 45% chance to succeed at the task.

Hatred of Evil actually does have an effect at each level, not just at 1 and 10. For some reason, it was omitted from the LightRaider Handbook even though it’s an entirely player-facing rule. Anyway, you get increasing bonuses to your weapon skills and damage the more ranks in Hatred you have.

This upgrades the skill to really drat good investment. Even rank 4, which is not hard to get, will give you +2 to weapon skills and damage, and higher ranks will ensure that you’re at least decent with every weapon. It’s also the only way to get damage bonuses.

(I’m still not sure if every PC enjoys +1 bonus to weapon skills, though, since you automatically get rank 1 in every optional skill you didn’t pick.)

Resist Torturous Investigation is also here, and apparently it’s easier to keep silent when your arms get cut off than when your legs do.

Righteously Mingle with Evil is, alas, not your bullshit skill. It’s literally a skill to not be contaminated with evil while being in evil surroundings, and no, I have no clue what it means. The difficulty chart provides examples of situations where it’s used (watch an unrighteous deed without taking part in it, work with dragon slaves, have dragon slave friends, etc.) but no examples of consequences of failing the test. Also, yes, being friends with non-believers or even working with them for a common cause risks you being contaminated, whatever that means.

Certain skills, like Knowledge and Wisdom, have no chart attached because their use is meant to be specified in an adventure.

But beyond the minutiae of skill use, there is something more important emerging. Between the use of primary stats and certain skills (Courage, Merciful Compassion), I have to revise my statement on how DragonRaid approaches role-playing. I still believe that it doesn’t make a hard distinction between the player and the character, and doesn’t expect you to play to your character’s weaknesses, but that’s because the game is going to do it for you.

In the introductory adventure, you couldn’t proceed without making a Faithfulness test, you would just walk back on failure. There was another test for Joy serving a similar function. Certain skills, likewise, serve to limit player agency.

Merciful Compassion is especially bad in this regard because it’s your skill for wanting to help dragon slaves. The difficulty chart looks like this:

quote:

1. Do good to those who love you
2. Do good to those who are your friends; draw from reserve funds to help the poor
3. Help strangers who need you
4. Pray for those who persecute you
5. Help someone who does not want your aid
6. Forgive when under verbal abuse
7. Give to the poor using money you needed to live on
8. Forgive when physically assaulted
9. Help an enemy who may turn and injure you
10. Help those who want to kill you

Note that Merciful Compassion is an optional skill. Most PCs would have it at rank 1, making it impossible to succeed at tasks of difficulty level 7 and above. Even difficulty 3 gives you only a 35% chance to succeed, so those strangers in need can get hosed.

Courage works similarly for doing risky things: you need to succeed or run away.

That changes my view of the gameplay. Before, I thought that primary stats were mostly used to resist sin enchantment, with most interactions with the world being done through skills. While I read the descriptions for Courage and Merciful Compassion, I figured there would be some mechanical implementation for them, like a debuff if you failed a Courage test but wanted to attempt an action anyway.

But no, they actually limit what you can do in a very direct way. So it’s less that the game treats players and PCs as interchangeable, and more that it expects players to act optimally within the context of the game, but also to pass mechanical tests to actually do what the game wants them to do in the first place.

Now, from what I gather, the use of primary stat tests as well as agency-limiting skills is meant to be specified in adventure modules, you don’t literally roll for everything that falls under one of them (which would be nearly everything, given how broad the stats are). By RAW, though, you can.

Moving on. The next section is the use of advanced combat by dark creatures. Mercifully, most dark creatures just use normal attacks even if advanced combat is enabled, so you aren’t going to be insta-killed by a sprite. On the other hand, the ones who do use critical swings are almost all serious combatants, likely to land at least a few hits before going down, increasing the danger of fighting them considerably. Either way, critical hits remain a bad idea to use against PCs.

Next section discusses killing dragon slaves. It makes a distinction between accidental and deliberate killing. Accidental killing occurs when you try to soften up the target before overpowering them (or hoping to knock them out), while deliberate killing is self-explanatory. If the advanced combat is enabled, all killings are considered deliberate, since half-swing should theoretically prevent accidental ones. (And you aren’t supposed to use critical swings on them to begin with.)

This is fair: Hatred of Evil only applies to dark creatures, so the max damage you can deal to a dragon slave is 10. The AM is supposed to tell you when a dragon slave’s HP drop below ten. The AM is not obligated to inform you how many HP they have left, but if they drop below 5, they wouldn’t be able to fight anyway, and if they are above 5, half-swing won’t kill them.

Anyway, if you kill a dragon slave, you suffer pretty severe penalties. For deliberate killing, all your primary stats are reduced to rank 1. For accidental killing, they’re only reduced by 1 rank. You can mitigate the consequences of the former by reciting a long-rear end prayer for forgiveness, which, if successful, reduces the penalties by half rounded down. It’s still going to hurt badly, though.

OK, so while I don’t exactly like the reasoning behind no-killing rule, and while the general attitude towards dragon slaves is what it is, this rule does ensure that nobody would kill one deliberately.

Next are dragon battles. I’ve covered most of the rules already, the only thing of note on the AM side is that what dragons do on a given round is determined randomly. They always start with mind speech on the first round, but then you roll a dice to see what they’ll do next. There are different patterns of behavior depending on how old the dragon is, further divided into easy and hard modes. The primary difference between them is that dragons use more mind speech and less physical attacks on hard mode, which, IDK. Given that you refute mind speech with a freeform argument while fire will just kill you, seems to me they got it backwards.

Next is WordRune Level Test-Out Program, which is a mouthful for a simple concept. Basically, when a character dies, you’re expected to roll out a brand new character, which is a mechanic I generally dislike. I guess with the usual skill range being what it is, it’s not too bad here: you probably won’t be too far behind other PCs in a few skills at least.

The exception to this is your Sword of the Spirit rating. Since one of the purposes of the game is helping with bible memorization through the use of WordRunes, and since your Sword rating determines which WordRunes you can use, it doesn’t make much sense to go back to the material you’ve already learned because of an in-game event. So instead the AM is supposed to ask you to recite a couple of low-level WordRunes from memory. If you can do that, you get your old rating back.

Next is the section on character classes, and most of it really should have been in the Handbook, it’s all player-facing rules.

So, you can’t actually take any classes before completing at least three adventures. Sorry everyone, you have to surrender your lions back.

You can only receive benefits of one class, but you can switch to another after three more adventures if you want. You lose all benefits of the old class in this case. The exception to that are the “get a talking animal” classes: they’re permanent unless the animal companion dies, and you can’t be the one to kill them.

Once you max out all stats, you automatically become Guardian of the Light, which is actually a downgrade since they don’t get any benefits. I’m not sure how it interacts with the animal companions, though. Do they stick around anyway? Do they go away to someone else? Does God kill them? It’s a mystery.

Speaking of animal companions, we finally get full stats on them, and I’m sorry to say that wolves suck. They’re fragile and have low attack/defense and damage. They do have a decent tracking skill, but that’s about it.

Lions are better, about equal or slightly better than a starting PC in a fight, and have some good utility skills (Quiet Movement, Blend with Surroundings, Vision).

Bears are, of course, the best. Their attack/defense is 12, higher than you can ever get (at least without Hatred of Evil), their HP is 40, slightly below maximum for PCs, and they deal 2d10 damage. It’s like having two additional party members, and also you can ride them. Their skills are Courage, Endurance, and Vision, which are all fairly important.

Definitely get a bear if you go for a talking animal.

Also, don’t go for non-talking animals. AnimalMaster is discussed next, and it sucks because you actually have to roll Converse with Animals each time you want your lovely non-talking animals to do something. Doing simple tasks like retrieving an object or scouting an area is easy enough, but making them participate in battle is difficulty 5, which even with a maxed out skill gives you only 60% chance to succeed. They also have trouble entering towns and castles.

The final note in this section is on the Knight of the Way, in which the game attempts to make them less lame. You get a Vision check each time the party's about to get ambushed. Pass, and you spot it. Also, to drive home the ranger parallels, you specialize in one type of environment: desert, plains, forests, or mountains. In the chosen environment you can always find food and water, and can’t get lost. You still don’t have a bear, though, so maybe getting lost is actually for the better.

Closing off the rules chapter is the section on battle prayer. Basically, if the AM feels that poo poo got real and the PCs are badly outmatched, they may enable battle prayer.

Each player writes either their name or that of a fellow player on a piece of paper and passes it to the AM.

Players are not supposed to discuss who they pray for, which seems needless to me. The justification is that battle prayer typically occurs during tense moments when characters wouldn’t have time to communicate.

The AM then rolls on a d10 table appropriate to the situation. There are four tables in total: physical combat, fighting dragons, physical healing, and temptations.

The effects vary wildly depending on the roll. Fighting dragons, for example, can give you +d5 temporary bonus to the Shield of Faith or to automatically withstand dragon fire. Rolling 10 always results in some wild poo poo like OverLord just obliterating all dark creatures around and putting dragon slaves to sleep or sending a dragon back to the spirit world.

That actually runs into our old friend, the problem of evil: the OverLord is perfectly able and on occasion willing to just solve problems, but doesn’t most of the time. You’re literally rolling the dice to see if a miracle occurs.

Probably the funniest result is found on the physical healing table:

quote:

In a dream, shows the location of a plant which, if eaten, will add 5 Physical Vitality points.

Thanks, Jesus, that will really help me against 20 orcs (game example of an appropriate situation to use battle prayer) trying their best to kill me.

And on this bright note, that’s all for now. Next time we’ll hopefully conclude the AM manual and the game as a whole.

SkyeAuroline
Nov 12, 2020

Red Markets: a Game of Economic Horror

[b]Part 20: Negotiation/b]

You know how you can tell what a game is about by its page count? 31 pages just for negotiating jobs. Less art than usual. Yeah, this is hefty.

quote:

Playtesters have argued that negotiations in Red Markets constitute another game entirely. The skills and other mechanical trappings of the system get expanded to encompass new meanings. The themes of horror and violence are suddenly reprioritized in favor of political intrigue and psychological manipulation. Whereas many traditional RPGs encourage using grids and miniatures to track the minutia (sic) of combat, this game only breaks out the visual aides (sic) to keep track of price-fixing.

Believe it or not, negotiating jobs really matters here. This entirely determines what you’re getting paid beyond the initial dice roll, and there’s no stonewalling (including a ¾ page “sidebar” written in a nearly illegible handwriting font explaining why bargaining is mandatory with real-world comparisons; this section in particular is riddled with these “notes” and they’re a pain to read every time). Every client wants to pay as little as possible to hire Takers that can actually do the job, Takers naturally want to make as much money as they possibly can. So we go into a round-based narrative-game segment where one character acts as negotiator against the client, while everyone else gets to “cut in”. It’s telling that “at-a-glance” takes almost two full pages to explain the minimal version of these mechanics.

People playing Blades in the Dark and similar games will find Prep Work and Scams quite familiar. Negotiation opens up with one prep action for every player that lets them answer a few important questions - what work they can get, what it requires, how much is paying, and who else is looking for the job. That’s it for things prep is guaranteed to be able to answer, by the way - “a job gone horribly wrong is an interesting story, a bunch of people squirming with indecision and follow-up inquiries is decidedly less interesting”. Pushing you along into contracts you have no idea what they’ll entail, because losing is fun. At least once you’ve done work for someone before, you don’t have to keep making checks just to find that they have work again. The other questions are of varying immediate usability; what the contract requires can be inaccurate information as long as some of it is usable, not finding out the price means it’s rolled after you start negotiating (which can mean nothing or be incredibly bad news depending on the roll), and competition can be dealt with afterwards with more difficulty if it’s not found out earlier. How do you do all this? Whatever skill makes sense to check. Book recommends Networking as a fallback.


This is at 100% resolution. Yes, it’s near illegible to me too. I don’t envy dead tree users.
Time to introduce the visual aid of the Sway Tracker. The rest of negotiation consists of moving dice around on this chart till they reach the final result. Farther right is good, farther left is bad. Various negotiations move the dice around, but they can’t be on the same space till the end of negotiations, so you better be in a good position when the timer runs out. A few real fuckup circumstances can put you at As a Favor (completely loving the party out of pay - you get d10 Bounty and nothing else, AND the client gets an advantage in future negotiations against you), but most of the time you’ll start at “just” the d10. Every negotiation up from there gets you extra pay, starting from the second d10 and adding in extras every step. Manage to pull off Expenses and you’re rolling in the bounty… if you survive.

So how are we doing it? Negotiator leads every round (one push from the team and one push from the client), from 1 to 5 rounds total. The players may or may not know how many rounds they have to work with, depending on whether the first Leadership check passes. There are a few wrinkles in negotiation the negotiator has to deal with directly - no one else can step in, including References, and as usual the client always wins. Resolution is simultaneous as well. Every social skill is available to the negotiator - with a Bust rule wrinkle that limits the use of Deception or even sticks Self-Control checks in if the team’s weak spots are played on - with each representing different actions. Various skills push your Sway up, moving further right on the tracker, while playing on Spots gives you a bonus Sway once per spot (up to 3 or 4 on each side, depending on any past history) regardless of success. Of course there’s a bust rule to make them only work on successes, too. Intimidation, Sensitivity, and Deception can play the side game of finding clients’ spots or guarding against them using your own. In short, the Negotiator has a lot of tools to work with, but all they care about is moving that tracker upwards and protecting the crew’s rep.



What’s everyone else doing while negotiations go on? Scams. These are your flashbacks and montage scenes, taking place between negotiation rounds. Each Taker only gets to take one slot, and they can only do a few things with them - do a CHA check for the negotiator, give a flat bonus to one of the negotiator’s checks, sabotage the competition, add to the contract price, or bring in another spot. These can be anywhere from simultaneous to days or weeks beforehand, as long as they fit the requirements. Any skill works here once again, as long as the GM approves of it. Nice way to get to flex some non-social skills in social play.



So you’re through all your rounds and there’s no more Sway. How’s it going to sort out? If the dice are head to head, the Negotiator makes one last leadership check; on a success it’s the higher of the two, on a failure, the lower. If the dice are nowhere close, it’s a Boom or Bust choice again - either that mechanic keeps working no matter the spacing between the dice, or the price always goes down if the gap isn’t close enough. I’d lean towards the former personally.

If you didn’t kick the competition out, then they’ll come back and try to undercut the cost. This just kind of exists as a Scam and Prep tax, honestly, from a mechanical perspective; there’s no way to really do anything positive with competition, you just have to prevent them from making you drop your own price. Of course, you can potentially be the undercutters yourself, which… I guess is a benefit of the mechanic existing? I understand why it does exist, it’s just poorly implemented compared to the rest of the system, with no risk/reward to think about. It’s just always risk.

Don’t want to go in for the job? Backing out is fine, but you lose all the Scam slots per Taker you’ve already used and you start out As a Favor on your next job. Much less resources to work with the second time.

You can also skip straight over having a Negotiator at all by using the Fixer mechanics; you can outsource your negotiation to a pseudo-NPC played by the entire crew as a shared burden. They’re competent in social skills (and have no other mechanics whatsoever), but charge a hefty fee to be kept around - the number of players in Bounty. Miss it, and you’re on your own. You can invest in your Fixer, too, at the slightly absurd cost of “the regular improvement cost times the number of players” (meaning a single Potential improvement costs fifty Bounty each time, so don’t do it lightly). You still get your Scams that all work normally, of course!

Overall: interesting system with some weird decisions and overly harsh Bust rules (even for Bust as usual). From reading it, this looks like most of a session’s worth of work on its own to get through, which may be too hefty for some groups, but that’s capitalism, baby!

Next time: Running the Market (starting the GM section).

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Pvt.Scott posted:

Maybe about 25% of the material is explicitly OSR rules, the rest is mostly system agnostic content generation tools and setting fluff. Stars Without Number has planet tags, and each tag has little blurbs about locations, complications, villains, allies, etc to give you a pile of ideas of what might be on that planet. Worlds Without Number has courts, where you can roll up details of the local power structure and their problems, etc. There’s generators for ruins and dungeons, stuff like that. There’s a faction system to run between adventures to help you simulate the local powers getting up to their own shenanigans unrelated to the players.

Personally, I’d say that SWN and WWN at the core are D&D with the skill system from Traveller tacked-on, with limited class options and mild character customization.

Honestly, with lots of OSR games I think of all that system agnostic content gen stuff as "the game" more so than the play resolution rules. Many (but not all) OSR systems are designed as a sort of implicit bizarro-GURPS, where the meat of the game is a block of modular game-agnostic subsystems, and they just ship it with a set of "default" rules to run it alongside. If the core resolution system of something like SWN doesn't click for you, I don't think you're doing anything wrong by running it in another system.

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017
I was not a fan of the negotiation rules, and was very happy that we had an experienced player to handle them for us. They took a long time and were not especially interactive - aside from the "scams" where you find an excuse to roll your best skill, it's basically one person playing the game while the others wait patiently. There isn't even that much "negotiation" in the negotiation. You never give something up to get something else, or make a decoy offer to disguise what you really want. You just push as hard as you can on a single track, while the NPC does the same.

And, it's another case of Caleb bragging about ignoring playtest feedback. It's like a hat trick of things I dislike.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Everyone posted:

I know that I'm all but begging for a rant/smackdown here, but what's wrong with Exalted? As I understand it, it's basically kind of an anime fantasy take on the old World of Darkness. Granted that the OWoD system was far from the best, but it didn't seem as "pull your loving toenails out" frustrating as some of them.

Oh, no, no no no. Trust me, it's that loving bad, because in oWoD the system was made to handle "average joe" to "man who lifts a truck." In Exalted, the same system is used to handle "average joe" to "man who lifts the entire world, reshapes it into a tea cup, and drinks it." On top of that every character is likely to end up with a library in the double digits of active powers, and enemies are built exactly like PC's. 90% of the powers are just dice adders with fancy descriptions, and depending on which edition you read, it may or may not contain: rape, more rape, spousal abuse, creepy things about kids being abused in hell and/or the occasional rant about fiat currency.

Then when they were making 3E, the original devs tried to defend poo poo like having an entire tree of abilities about raping people with ghosts. They eventually got ousted, but this is the kind of garbagefuck pedigree the whole thing is built on.

It also has a lovely morality system, which is, yes, worse than the ones in oWoD, since here it's basically the GM getting to take over your character if you roleplay the wrong way and then fail a check. No carrot, all stick.

The other problem is also that yes, it's anime as gently caress, but it constantly insists that it isn't and that, in fact, it's very inspired by ancient myths and religions. But no, it's anime, anime, anime, more anime.

I've also met a total of one person who's an Exalted fan who wasn't an intolerable weirdo, but that's probably also why he eventually threw up his hands and refused to touch the system and setting any longer. The other end of the spectrum of Exalted players is I've met at least one person who went on a multi-hour, vitriolic rant about wanting to kill the people who took over from the Rape Ghost Developers of 3E because they STOLE THE DREAM, THEY STOLE THE VISION, THEY'RE THIEVES.

poo poo, and I haven't even approached the balance between splats. Even the ones ostensibly at the same power level(Solar, Lunar, Abyssal, Infernal, Sidereal, Alchemical) have immense power variations and some of them can't even really leverage their supposed iconic abilities and advantages in a meaningful way(Lunars, for instance, are supposed to be shapeshifters, except shapeshifting is probably their least useful ability. but even if you stack on their more useful abilities, they will never match up to a well-built Solar 90% of the time). Or hell the balance between anything. There's no balance. Anywhere.

There's also poo poo like the Fae book where every second paragraph either disagrees with the one preceding it, or says "MAYBE ITS X OR MAYBE ITS Y, WHO CAN SAY FOR REAL..." when it's like no, the book should say for real, so we know what the canon answer is to this splat that a player might choose to play. For gently caress's sake. I know some people dearly love the author of that one and will probably defend them, but I don't get the hype and I think they're just a bad writer.

By popular demand
Jul 17, 2007
Probation
Can't post for 21 hours!

PurpleXVI posted:

Then when they were making 3E, the original devs tried to defend poo poo like having an entire tree of abilities about raping people with ghosts. They eventually got ousted, but this is the kind of garbagefuck pedigree the whole thing is built on.

I don't hold interest for anime and mostly ignored Exalted, so I'm surprised and terrified it was this bad.
also please change the thread name, it has been forever tainted.

Warden
Jan 16, 2020

By popular demand posted:

I don't hold interest for anime and mostly ignored Exalted, so I'm surprised and terrified it was this bad.

Oh, it gets better. One of the original 3e devs was also outed as a sexual harasser and the other one tried to cover for him and downplay it. Which really destroyed their credibility re: publisher shenanigans about promising, shall we say, wildly optimistic delivery dates on their kickstarters, and paying their writers on time.

megane
Jun 20, 2008



I can’t speak about 3e, since I know almost nothing about it, but I played 2e Exalted for several years and it was fine. The thing is: the loving Infernals book. That book is a disgrace, and everyone who wrote for it should be ashamed of having done so. I’d say like 70% of the awfulness in Exalted 2e is that one book (and most of the rest is to do with Abyssals). The rest of the books aren’t completely devoid of creepy poo poo by any means - Exalted writers love hiding sexual violence in the middle of some throwaway background detail about magic ice or whatever - but it’s not significantly worse than like, old editions of D&D or Warhammer Fantasy.

So… we just didn’t use Infernals, barely used Abyssals, and ignored the little creepy tidbits. That doesn’t excuse those problems, of course; I just mean that Ex2e provides enough dishes at the buffet for you to skip all the horrible ones and still get a good meal.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!




Oddly enough Exalted was my first RPG where I played a serious campaign after the usual high school stint of D&D (and Mutant 87 and UA). In hindsight I'm glad it was with a solid bunch of people that wasn't weird about the game and admitted it had issues.
But I definitely wouldn't able to play it these days because of the system.
What's kinda funny is that in contrast I can't stand WoD in any iteration and never want to play any of those games.

Hipster Occultist
Aug 16, 2008

He's an ancient, obscure god. You probably haven't heard of him.


Symbaroum: The Wrath of the Warden, Part 3


When we last left off, our intrepid band of heroes had discovered the corpse of Anadea, an agent of the Iron Pact and their prospective employer. Aside from the letter from her Iron Pact handler, they also found a little sun medallion in her belt pouch. We’re told that this is the mostly likely reason for the PCs to approach the Sun Church for help. I kinda think it’s a little flimsy (having a cross on your person doesn’t make you an anointed priest for example), but in the interests of playing along we’ll run with it.




The book gives us a map of the Temple for reasons I can’t figure out, there’s no real exploration that will really take place here. It’s just teatime with NPCs.

The Temple is pretty busy when the PCs arrive. If they flag down one the initiates running and ask to meet Father Elfeno they’ll be told he’s busy with his prayers. If they show him the sun symbol they found on Anadea’s corpse, it’s a different story. The Priest excuses himself and runs off, he’ll return a short while later and lead the party to a meeting with Elfeno. So if you don’t have the amulet, nothing happens I guess? It’s easy enough to fix, but it is a strange oversight.

If the PCs are forthright and honest with the Father, he’ll tell them the following information.

The woman they describe was an initiate at the Sun Temple up until a month ago, if they didn’t figure out her name from the locket he can give them it now.


Neither he, nor anyone in the Sun Church has had any contact with her since then. This shou;d be pretty obvious if you have the letter, and anyone familiar with Elves will probably recognize that Anadea’s contact was an Elf for starters.
He doesn’t want to comment on why she left, and will only say that “Anadea lost her conviction.” Now, the book doesn call for this, but the subtext here is obvious (she’s a heretic in line with Father Sarvola’s faction) and I think anyone with Loremaster or a part of the Sun Church should probably get a Cunning roll to read between the lines here.
If a character is closely allied with the Sun Church and succeeds on a Persuasion roll, they can ask Elfeno his thoughts on the Sinkhole and the Abominations that emerged from it. He’ll basically give you a less detailed version of the story that the underground Witch does, he’s not sure that the Beast Clan is the former Jezora barbarian tribe, but he thinks it’s likely.

That’s all he’ll say, because question time is over! The Priest that brought the party here suddenly comes in and whispers sometime to Elfeno, who looks a little pissed. They’ll be brought to meet this lady.




This is Deserba the Old, the only person to have ever been named a Lightbringer (basically a Saint) while they were still alive. She’s kind of like the old, wise, semi-retired priest who sits above the orthodox/heretic split in the Sun Church and is both friendly with and respected by both sides. In a nutshell, she tells the PCs that she knows more about Anadea, and that they can look through the personal effects in her former room if they do a favour for her.

Deserba is concerned that Father Sarvola is about to be assassinated. The heretic priest (remember, Heretic in this case means view Prios as a warm and compassionate divine patriarch rather than the cold and judgemental giver of laws he became during the last war), has been hassled by groups that were clearly organized and hired by outside forces, and a couple attempts on his life have already been made. She wants the characters to find out exactly who is behind these threats to his life and expose/take care of them.. The Church is supposed to be hands off here, and thus she can’t do this directly, hence this is where the PCs come in.

If the characters talk about their concerns regarding the sinkhole and a source of corruption within Thistle Hold, Deserba will take the PCs down into the Church’s dungeons where they keep corrupted individuals. There’s one guy there in particular who’s almost completely insane, but he was a hired sellsword on the expedition where the Cult killed the forest god. If you succeed on a Persuasion roll, he mostly rambles like a lunatic but he’ll hint at the killing of the forest god and provide a bit of background for the events of the adventure. However;

”Wrath of the Warden” posted:

The information he imparts cannot help the characters move forward

*makes a long, drawn out fart noise*

It says it might be useful information later, but I jumped ahead and that’s a bit of a stretch. It doesn’t change how their plot moves at any rate.

Anyways, back to the main event. This assumes the PCs are on board with helping the heretic, which they might not be as devout Ambrians. Luckily, the Sister hangs around with an Undead Wizard so she’s got a pretty open mind. Father Sarvola operates a charity Mission House in Thistle Hold, so that’s where we’re off to first.

Father Sarvola is sitting in a chair as a long line of people approach him for comfort, confession, and so on. No, you can't cut in line, it just doesn’t work. If you try to explain you’re here on serious business it doesn’t work either. You’ve gotta queue up like everyone else. As you wait in line, Father Sarvola’s half-human-half forest spirit bastard son giddily approaches and shows the party the budding twig he literally made from nothing.




It’s uh, kind of a weird sidebar, we’ll see if it’s actually relevant at all later on.

Luckily they don’t have to deal with the tedium of the line or the magical kid for long. With a couple vigilant tests you can notice a few nervous people in the line. Those people wave a scarf as a signal after the watch patrol keeping an eye on things just up and leaves. About a dozen people emerge from the nearby alleyways, flaming lanterns in hand. They’re all masked up and scream about how the heretic Sarvola must burn, and so on. The crowd complicates things a little, but it’s pretty easy to stop most of them before they can hurl their lanterns at the building. As long as you stop 4+ lanterns from hitting the Mission House everyone else is able to put out what fires do start without issue, and nobody dies. If you only stop 0-3+, nobody dies but Father Sarvola inhales a bunch of smoke getting people outside and passes out for the rest of the adventure. Stakes are a little low, to say the least.

The would-be arsonists are a group of Sellswords that call themselves the Sellswords of the Sun (as a quick aside, I’m not sure if its an ESL thing but names are often really basic and/or terrible), they’re concerned that all this heresy will lead Prios to abandon them, thus opening up Ambria to lawlessness that leads to bad poo poo. You can either follow the Sellswords as they run back to their hideout (requiring different tests if you want to do so quietly or openly), or you can capture one and force them to give up the location. Capturing one gives you a bit more intel. Besides giving you their mission statement, you can also learn that as of six months ago they acquired a powerful unknown benefactor who furnished them with a cool hideout. Mysterious!

If the characters follow the Sellswords to the house, they’ll find them all in the basement along with their leader, a former Twilight Friar by the name of Dolani. If they took the time to interrogate a Sellsword at the Mission, only Dolani remains behind for some odd reason. He generally only spills the beans if you use “very brutal methods” and succeed on a Persuasion vs Resolute test. Otherwise he just screams heretic and tries to stab you. He’s actually a reasonably dangerous foe against lightly armoured targets. Unfortunately, he’s slower than our Ogre and only has 10 toughness. As long as our Ogre rolls a 12 or lower to hit (easy to do with Advantage), he’s probably going to paste him in a single hit. This game kinda has the same problem as Degenesis has in that it really likes encounters with single npcs, but the narrow range band for stats + the hard caps means it’s hard to design a boss with staying power. Most just tend to get 1 or 2 shot, with a few exceptions.

If you don’t subject the man to some heinous torture, theres’s a couple other ways to find out who’s really behind their antics, one of which I really like. You can piece together several clues (like some fancy monogrammed chairs, a few war diaries, and some old well-patched uniforms) to figure out some particularly devout war veterans are behind them. If they pass a Vigilant -5 test, they can find some Waters of the Dusk under a loose floorboard. This is a huge find. Waters of the Dusk are a very powerful Sun Church artifact that’s one of the few ways to cleanse permanent corruption, and for non-undead folks that’s still a pretty key concern.

I’m a big fan of the alternate route. You see, Dolani has a very nosey neighbor who’s pretty sure that something weird is going on over there and has been watching the house for weeks now. He’s happy to gossip away at the PCs, and can even give them the names they need to track these war veterans down.

In a welcome twist, at the end of this section they actually provide an alternate route for the PCs to get into Anadea’s quarters without having to help Father Sarvola. Father Elfeno would prefer that the Sellswords continue to harass the heretic, so he hires a Changeling named Goriol to sneak a letter into one of their pouches. He tries to do so stealthily, and to be fair he’s actually pretty good at that, catching him is possible but hard. However, doing so is pointless even if you make multiple rolls at -5, catching him does nothing.

”Wrath of the Warden” posted:

In the unlikely case that they manage to catch up to him, he will act as if they have captured the wrong person.


The section literally ends there. No guidance at all for what to do if your PCs don’t believe him, and no person who went through all the trouble of catching him would. I guess they just expect you to buy an obviously blatant lie?

Moving on I guess.

”The Letter” posted:

What you seek is in the annex of the Sun Temple. Two times a day, at the mass held each morning and evening, the building is empty except for House Father Idaros. When you see him leave you have a short timeframe to get inside. Go through the gate facing Ofelya’s Road, take the stairs to the second floor, turn right and head for the third door on the right hand side. Act with haste!

Elfeno is basically just handing the PCs what they want on a silver platter, I guess he believes they’ll just take what they want and leave the Sellswords to their work of harassing a really nice guy. You could just skip all this business with these Zealots, get what you need, and bounce. However, this route isn’t watched, nor does Father Elfeno or an agent of his make contact with the PCs as they do so. He has no way of guaranteeing that the PCs will do what he wants after they get what they want from Anadea’s room. You could very well do this and then help Sarvola if you wanted to. It’s oddly structured, but I do appreciate putting in an alternate path at least. That being said, this isn’t the first time a mysterious letter has shown up in the PC’s possessions, and some parties may understandably be quite wary and think another ambush is afoot.

The war veteran Kargoi Salamos leads the Sellswords of the Sun alongside his war buddies Serex Attio and Roia Garlaka. They have 3 houses right next together in a quiet part of Thistle Hold. I think this encounter is actually reasonably structured, there’s a few different ways to approach it, complications that could arise from earlier that affect things, and multiple possible endings.

If any of the Sellswords escaped earlier, they’ll probably want Kargoi and thus he’ll be awake, alert, and on guard, making things a lot harder to resolve.

So, the easiest way to resolve this is to just kill all three of them. They’re actually reasonably tough with good equipment, but out party is faster and could probably sweep them without too much trouble. Their gear is pretty good too, Serex’s sword is especially good, so killing them is quite profitable.

However, there’s another way. If you manage to sneak into Kargoi’s house and down into his cellars, you can find the almost literal skeletons in his closet.




When Kargoi came home from the war to his estate, he found that everyone who lived in his manor had turned into an undead abomination. In a rage he killed almost everyone, but couldn’t bring himself to slay his wife and daughter. He took them with him to Thistle Hold, and kept them captive in the cellar, feeding them living flesh (animals) and dressing them every-so often. If you manage to discover this, you’ve now got excellent leverage for blackmail. He’ll agree to back down in exchange for keeping his secret, and Father Sarvola can go back to not worrying about zealots throwing lanterns at his charitable institution. However, if you’re dumb enough to do this negoation in person, he’ll remember your faces and probably try to have some other war vets silence the party permanently at a later date. However it goes down they’ll stop, and Deserba is satisfied.

However, most of the goodwill they earned from me is immediately squandered with this sidebar.




I really, really despise how this game keeps dropping information but then goes “oh yah the PCs can’t do anything with this get rekt scub.” It just keeps happening, and for everything interesting bit of lore or design they gently caress it up with groggy poo poo like this.

Anyways in Anadea’s quarters the PC’s find a rough map, a couple sketches of elves, and some written barbarian legends surrounding their taboos and the corruption that results from breaking them. If they hadn’t figured it out already, Anadea is entangled with the Elves of the Iron Pact in a big way it seems.


The next location we’re given to visit for clues is the Queen’s Legation, which caught me off my guard at first as the text describes this place as being more of an archive than anything else. A lLgation is like the little brother of an embassy, manned by a minister instead of a full-blown ambassador. They mostly got converted to embassies after WW2, and the term is kinda archaic now. Anyways, you can pay 1 Thaler an hour to search through the records, 2 Thaler an hour if you need a notary to help you search. The book says you’d likely come here after finding the key to Anadea’s strongbox. If she owned property, there would be records of it here. You can also see her name pop up in a recent witness statement taken after a huge bar brawl.

Our first option involves following up on the witness statement. Anadea and her fellow initiate and friend Arkel got into an argument over the doctrine of the Sun Church, with Anadea obviously being a lot more sympathetic to the barbarian/witch PoV. It got pretty heated, some tripped and accidentally bashed a large barbarian woman with a mug, queue massive bar brawl.

The PCs can figure out that Arkel left the church to rejoin his family on the farm near a village not too far from Thistle Hold. The journey itself is uneventful, and once you arrive at Arkel’s farm the party will be invited in for dinner. In a previous post, I mentioned that during this scavenger hunt for clues some Cultists are looking for opportunities to ambush the PCs. This is the first time this explicitly comes up in the text. As everyone is sitting down to dinner, they blockade the exits to the house and set it ablaze. You’ve gotta get out of the burning building, kill the cultists, and save Arkel’s family, roughly in that order. It’s not overly hard tbh.

Assuming you rescue his mom and siblings, Arkel is more than willing to talk about Anadea, otherwise you gotta roll a hard Persuasion test or he clams right up. He basically confirms that Anadea is a heretic, was coming around to how the Witches view corruption and nature, and that she found a tutor not connected to the Ambrian people.state whatsoever. It’s not necessary as I feel that anyone familiar with the setting has probably put the pieces together long ago, but if you’re playing with total newbies there's' nothing wrong with explaining things in a through fashion.

The other lead involves trying to get a hold of Anadea’s property records. This is tricky, as only the Queen’s Legate and Mayor Nightpitch have access to things like archived house deeds. I’m not sure why, but apparently their clerks can’t be trusted with that sort of thing. You can go to either NPC, it’s a little more difficult to get a meeting with the Mayor but either NPC can get you what you want, in exchange for another sidequest favour. 3 Templars are transporting a very important bronze tablet inscribed with something called Sarkomal’s Prophecy. Said prophecy concerns the Throne of Thorns, so naturally a lot of folks who want its power are seeking the prophecy.




One prob;em I have with this art style is that the lack of facial features makes everyone look kinda samey, unless they have facial hair.

Suria Argona, the Queen’s Legate, wants you to steal it because the Queen has ordered her to get her hands on it. In exchange, she’ll get you the records you seek. However, she refuses to tell you what you’re stealing or why (it’s in a sealed wooden crate you’re not supposed to open), which would understandably raise the hackles of any sufficiently paranoid adventuring party.

If you namedrop the tablet and reveal that it’s in town to Mayor Nightpitch, he’ll actually meet with the party and promise the same, except he is a little more honest about what it is. Either NPC will tell you that the 3 Templar brothers are staying at the Winged Ladle, a very expensive inn built amongst the branches of a great tree.




There’s a few ways to get in, and aside from a couple guards the only person here is Leohan, who took a nasty wound at the sinkhole and can’t really put up a fight. The PCs find the crate, which is empty. :argh:

The 2 other brothers have relocated the tablet to a safer place. At this point, I think if I were playing this adventure as a PC I’d be starting to get real frustrated with being yanked around all over the place like this. However, to their credit the authors do give you a few ways to find out where it’s been stashed. The easiest way is for Ash to simply use Bend Will on the cripple until it success and just force him to tell the party where his brothers took it. If you don’t have a similar power that can force the truth or search his memories, you could always just kill the man in cold blood. Once his brothers return and find his corpse, they’ll immediately assume that they’re under attack and make their way to the tablet. The PCs have absolutely no way of knowing this will occur, but they could potentially do so and then shadow them. The last method involves asking around, finding about an old Medicus that is treating his wounds, finding her, and then she’ll reveal she’s heard the name Alamei mentioned a lot around them. It doesn’t take much asking around to figure out who Alamei is, he’s an old Templar/war hero and finding his croft isn’t hard.




Alamei Sevio lives with a couple of young farmhands, and the two Two Templar brothers visit twice a day to reminisce and make sure that the tablet is safe. If the characters break into the room or kill Leohan, they only have a short window to secure the tablet. Otherwise the brothers find out, secure the tablet, and take off on horses. Plot thread ended.

Provided they don’t cock it up, there’s a couple ways it can go down. If the PCs arrive while the 2 brothers aren’t visiting, Alamei defends the tablet to the death, and the PCs will likely have to kill/chase down any fleeing innocent farmhands. If the Brothers are there and they have promised Mayor Nightpitch that he can look over/touch the tablet in person, it is possible to negotiate a deal with the Brothers. You can make the case that the only way all 3 will get to leave Thistle Hold alive and continue their journey, tablet in hand, is to let the Mayor take a look. Otherwise you have to kill them all. Either way, you’ll get what you need from either NPC.

And no, there’s no mention of what the prophecy is, exactly. There’s a vague section on it in the core book, but no mention here of what might happen if the PCs steal it for themselves/try to get the ancient Symbarian runes translated.

After all that bullshit, the PCs finally have what they need to find Anadea’s storage. She has a small, windowless office-type space located within a warehouse. Aside from some scattered diary entries, the important things to be found here are a very stressed out and starving wild cat and some weird red mushrooms that only grow near the Hall of a Thousand Tears. Both are needed to gain entrance to the hidden hideout of the Elves. Yeah it’s weird, it’ll kinda make more sense later.

We’re told that now the characters have enough information to start figuring out where they need to go and how they might start figuring out how to get there, but they’ll probably need some more help to do so. However, before the chapter ends they include a wrap-up of what might happen if you encounter the other factions (like the Witches or the Templars) at some point along your search.

Next time, Act 2 wrap-up, then on to Act 3!

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund
I always thought that Warhammer was kind of "sexless" as it were. From what I have seen of Exalted so much of it seems very very edge lordy.

Also thanks for the "without number" overview!

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Josef bugman posted:

I always thought that Warhammer was kind of "sexless" as it were. From what I have seen of Exalted so much of it seems very very edge lordy.

Also thanks for the "without number" overview!

While it is not tremendously prevalent, I can point to multiple times in the 2e adventures that Our Friend Sexual Menace showed up (The option to trade a helpful female NPC to a necromancer in the sewers in Forges of Nuln, the young woman who is being menaced by the fat old merchant who wants to force her to marry him with a false sacrifice to a witch in Thousand Thrones) and with some of the worst written adventures, a tendency that the person who suffers horribly and gets mutated/killed will be generally be a woman.

It isn't always that way and does better in plenty of places, but the Empire's ambiguous sexism (where a female soldier/ruler/adventurer is a little unusual but certainly happens) ironically opened the Empire up to being the worst about gender and menace in the setting since some of the worst writers took that as license to go in on it.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund
Ohhh, got it. I've never read the adventures in person as it were, but "urgh".

Exalted from what I recall was even more skeevy, but that is no excuse.

Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Jun 27, 2021

Froghammer
Sep 8, 2012

Khajit has wares
if you have coin
Exalted exists at a very strange intersection between a bunch of different tones and game design ideas. It's very trapped in the late 90's / d20 era idea that the system needs to double as a fantasy physics simulator and that abstract game ideas like individual units of PC resource pools need to exist within the universe as discreet units of scientific measurement. Every single NPC, including gods so powerful they barely have physical forms anymore, needs to have stats because nothing can just be handwaved away by the GM and every interaction has needs to be represented via hard rules on charts.

The tone is super wonky? The PCs are assumed to be a weird kind of mortal-god hybrid that theoretically has no upper limits but are also slowly being driven insane, so games play out as a strange mixture of empowerment fantasy meets actually having the tools to theoretically fix a broken world meets tragedy meets a cautionary tale about the corrupting nature of power. The game could never make up its mind about whether or not stories within the universe should be triumphant or tragic.

PC options are a complete mess. Rather than classes or point-buy, Exalted takes the World of Darkness idea of having entire book dedicated to specific types of Exalt, each of which have their own conflicting backstories, motivations, and mechanics to play with. These are then broken up into five or six splat-specific subclasses based on fantasy caste or whatever that almost universally fall into fantasy archetypes (the sneaky one, the one that's good at talking, the one that fights, etc). In theory, like World of Darkness, the GM is supposed to only have one type of Exalt allowed at the table in order to nail down tone, establish consistency amongst PCs, and not require dozens of books to track PC powers and abilities because this is the 90's and searchable databases didn't exist yet. In practice, nobody ever wants to run or play anything other than a superfriends game because the entire system is theoretically compatible with itself. You know how there's always the guy that wants to play a Mage in your Vampire game? That's everyone in Exalted.

On top of all that, it's also a mature gameline for mature adults with mature adult themes, only it's the 90's so of course that means sexual assault is just loving everywhere. There are token nods to things like kink acceptance and LGBT inclusion, but for the most part it's rape as far as the eye can see, and as has been noted a chunk of the fanbase flips the gently caress out at the suggestion that "hey, maybe tone down the rape a little".

Exalted is a mess.

Froghammer fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Jun 27, 2021

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually
What really gets me about Exalted is that the core idea, the elevator pitch, is really strong: instead of playing zero-level shitfarmers who have to grind their way into having cool, cinematic, world-shaking powers, you start off with that kind of power level, and level your way up to storming the thrones of the gods. Be a Gilgamesh or a Cúchulainn or an Achilles, not someone fighting giant rats in a basement with a rusty dagger. Take that "Earn your fun" approach and stuff it in the dumpster.

It's still a great idea. The execution, OTOH...

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Every WW game has a 'strong elevator pitch'. Elevator pitch is the easy part.

Froghammer
Sep 8, 2012

Khajit has wares
if you have coin
Like, over quarantine I've been in a weekly 1e Pathfinder game with some friends because one of them is a former dev who adores the system, and there have been plenty of moments where the system gets in the way and people need to gingerly and carefully explain how the rules work to some of the players that are either brand new to gaming or used to simpler systems like 5e. We've got a good group, things are progressing roughly the way we all want it to, and everyone's happy with their character, their character's abilities, and their character's place in the narrative, but it took work getting us all there.

Exalted is a lot like that. "I wanna play as Lu Bu" is great as a concept, but the onboarding experience as a new player is insane.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

Night10194 posted:

Every WW game has a 'strong elevator pitch'. Elevator pitch is the easy part.

This does seem to be a continual theme. Has there ever been a fun WoD game?

SkyeAuroline
Nov 12, 2020

mellonbread posted:

I was not a fan of the negotiation rules, and was very happy that we had an experienced player to handle them for us. They took a long time and were not especially interactive - aside from the "scams" where you find an excuse to roll your best skill, it's basically one person playing the game while the others wait patiently. There isn't even that much "negotiation" in the negotiation. You never give something up to get something else, or make a decoy offer to disguise what you really want. You just push as hard as you can on a single track, while the NPC does the same.

And, it's another case of Caleb bragging about ignoring playtest feedback. It's like a hat trick of things I dislike.

It's honestly interesting, in a disappointing way, how Caleb's acknowledgements of playtest feedback go. Insights into design are neat to have but too much of it reads as "I know what I'm designing and I know better than my playtesters!". At least it's included in the book so the red flags are up front.

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry
I played Vampire when it first came out, then, as the splatbooks began to be released, I saw WW as the true pile of poorly written poo poo that it is. There are many poorly written games. There are many game dev auteurs. There are many edge lords. WW managed to have the perfect Venn Diagram intersection.

tldr; Play Godbound instead of any edition of Exalted.

sasha_d3ath
Jun 3, 2016

Ban-thing the man-things.
"rolling a d20 and add modifiers to it is literally unplayable (because I don't like that flavor of game" is certainly not the take I was expecting following that 13th Bureau post.

Ithle01
May 28, 2013

FMguru posted:

What really gets me about Exalted is that the core idea, the elevator pitch, is really strong: instead of playing zero-level shitfarmers who have to grind their way into having cool, cinematic, world-shaking powers, you start off with that kind of power level, and level your way up to storming the thrones of the gods. Be a Gilgamesh or a Cúchulainn or an Achilles, not someone fighting giant rats in a basement with a rusty dagger. Take that "Earn your fun" approach and stuff it in the dumpster.

It's still a great idea. The execution, OTOH...

I think this is part of what drew a lot of people, including myself, so strongly to Exalted. When it first came out the game promised things that were very different and appealing to groups that hadn't known much other than a small niche of the gaming market. The fact that the system has been broken since 1st edition wasn't that big a deal when every game you've ever played has also had a dysfunctional system. There was some definite edge-iness, but I guess I was more likely to excuse it back in the day and it wasn't nearly as bad as Infernals. I still like a lot of the ideas of Exalted, but the years have ground down any interest in the game and the issues it has are both more noticeable and less excusable and so it's basically been dead to me since 3rd edition.

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Josef bugman posted:

This does seem to be a continual theme. Has there ever been a fun WoD game?

When I was an edgy teenage goth just learning about leftist politics from punk rock, playing a Brujah in V:TM was fun as gently caress.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

PeterWeller posted:

When I was an edgy teenage goth just learning about leftist politics from punk rock, playing a Brujah in V:TM was fun as gently caress.

I came to RPG's late, so I missed out on this formative experience.

I do wish that there was some system that let you model the WoD without being either the White wolf "This system is all d10's and it isn't as fun or as smart as it thinks it is" or the Urban Shadows "made by a person who isn't very nice and the rules are a bit lacklustre" sort.

Just Dan Again
Dec 16, 2012

Adventure!
The Maze of the Blue Medusa - A Retrospective, part 11


The Grimspindle, an artifact hidden in the Archive

The Reptile Archive, Part 1

This area starts with another note, describing the lighting in the Archive (including a species of moth that emits infrared light) and the mummies who are its main inhabitants. It gives us a little hint about the characters of the ancient Reptile Empire that built the Archive and the Neonate Empire that spawned the Chameleon Women and the Negamancers, but only a hint.

Nominally the Reptile Archive is the original structure that the Maze grew out from, a real place that was expanded for the Medusa's use in agreement with the ancient empire. Nowadays it's full of... stuff? This is a 50-room area that, much like the Gallery, is just filled to the brim with random objects that may reward or punish interaction depending upon the whims of fate.



Quick aside before I go into the room-by-room: this module design philosophy regarding dangerous objects is part of why the D&D side of the hobby is full of deranged behavior. For most of the random junk in the Archives, telling whether it's dangerous or not before just sticking your hand in it is basically impossible. There's no documentation for a character to read, no investigation their characters can do, and no NPC who will willingly give them any hints. In an adventure video game, you can poke and prod things and reload an old save when you get reduced to a smoking pair of boots. In a tabletop roleplaying game, poking and prodding things can permanently kill your character and make you start a new one. The game may continue, but that character's story is over. The only way to advance is to poke and prod and hope for the best, even though logically you just shouldn't touch any of this stuff because most of it is terrible.

There's not a good reason that I can see for setting things up this way. In the dungeon-crawling playstyle, player characters should be able to die if they if they make bad decisions. Not giving the players any way to know whether their decisions are good or bad before they make them means that they can't actually engage with the scenario in good faith. It also means that they stop even trying to interact with the cool stuff you make- why should they? There's a chance that the weird spinning wheel will make something cool for your PC to use, but there's just as good a chance that even though it's hidden behind secret doors and guarded by NPCs it'll just spindle your flesh into yarn for a demon to floss with. If the players can't trust that the scenario will play fair, they'll stop engaging, and that's possibly the worst thing that could happen in a game like this.

Anyway, on to the rooms. I'm going to try to burn through a couple dozen of them today as the sun burns my entire region to a crisp.

Room 123: Shifting Hall
The floor tiles in here are supposed to show a blue-on-blue sunset, but are all shifted around. No secret panels, no trap, just some weird tiles.

Room 124: Minor Glyph Maze
A mosaic of a serpent on the ground that will summon librarians (who are the lizard-people mummies) if you cross without reciting aloud from a book. Not that you'd know that, though you might be suspicious of mosaic-snakes after the one waayyyyy back in Chronia's halls tried to eat you.

Room 125: Broken Alien Moons
More floor tiles, these ones made by Torgos Zooth for something in Archive 157 but apparently not good enough. They absorb light but otherwise don't do much.

Room 126: Lamps
A bunch of lamps of various types, including one big one that will glow more brightly the more intelligent the people who pass under it are, even if they're invisible.

Room 127: Fireproof Room
A relatively safe room behind secret doors that holds empty oil casks, known only to Room 141's Lampen Proletariat. There's an ancient Reptile Empire lamp hidden amongst the garbage that's worth some cash.



Room 128: The Fortress Koolhaus
Koolhaus is a stone gorilla behind a secret door who is a living architectural plan for the Maze. If the castle on his back can be removed and unfurled, then it makes a visual map of the dungeon- you can show the players the painting map with the abstract visuals for everything in the dungeon. Given the number of weird pathways in the dungeon that aren't illustrated this still may not be that helpful, but hey, way up in the top-left corner of the dungeon the players might finally have a map!

Room 129: Naja Natrix, Patriarchal Manserpent Mage
Our first mummy! This one is full of cookbooks, has become obsessed with food, but can't eat. He has a spell that can make the PCs try to eat each other. Stop trying to make the PCs try to eat each other! Looking back at the NPC descriptions much later in the book, apparently he wants to show how superior he and his ancient culture are.

Room 130: Empty Cages and Dead Snakes
Snakes that starved to death but came back undead. Each snake is also a necromantic spellbook. Neat!

Room 131: Emys Orbicularis
Apparently the "least insane, most aware" of the lizard people mummies, stuffed full of theoretical mathematics papers. If you enter through room 124, this one will try to demand that you have permission from an NPC like the Torn Sisters, the Liches, or Psathyrella herself to enter (this is a reasonable request, and gives the PCs something to care about and do, but actually getting back to any of those NPCs sounds like a real pain in the rear end). He's a pretty tough opponent, and divides to reveal a smaller version of himself each round like Matryoshka dolls.

Room 132: Chiromantis
Another mummy, this one stuffed with the prologues to speeches. He'll address people by the title they give him without question. "Players may like this." It might be fun to get an NPC to address your character as "Lord High Protector of the Waffle Kingdom" but otherwise not that interesting.

Room 133: A Lamp of Cryptic Rays
A lamp that can cast any kind of light from any kind of stellar or lunar object, teleported from the source. Only worth 500 GP, but priceless to those who need alien light for their spells. The book notes very helpfully that "this may have consequences."

Room 134: A Tall Door, Its Nature Unknown
Scripta Elegans is also here, another mummy, stuffed with strategic maxims and very curious about the outside world. She knows that the door leads to a "hall of strange images." Passing through it requires solving an incomplete equation carved into the door's lintel. See-Me-No-More in Archives 165 has a complete copy, and the door leads to room 115 and 1/2 back in the Gallery. Kind of a lot of hoops to jump through for a bit of fast travel.

Room 135: A Bridge of Stacked Stone in Blue & Gray
Stacked up shards of slate, left over from the slate golems that were used to make the Maze. Some still have faces that mutter about the Semi-Empress of decay, Psathyrella. Crossing the slate is super dangerous since it's slippery and sharp.

Room 136: Skin-Mutiny
Another of the crack-beasts like the one that has enthralled Chronia, this one is just wandering around looking for someone to feed off of.

Room 137: Negamancer & Chameleon Women
Named chameleon women and a named negamancer, with no more explanation as to their motivation than when we've seen them before. They're gathering information on the Archive and hate mammals, and that's all we know.



Room 138: The Hall of Unverifiable Teapots
PCs can hear the Seeping Chimes in room 170 as well as the sad music of another mummy in room 139. The space itself is full of teapots where remnants of the Reptile Empire brew weird tea from weird plants and from adventurers' remains. The pots are super old and extremely valuable, with a flat 50% chance of shattering in any encounter with no way to reduce that chance. Lots of backstory for something that you can't really interact with except to loot it.

Room 139: The Organ's City
Acontias Skink is another lizard mummy, this time stuffed with musical scores, who plays an organ that produces the echoes of forgotten things. There's a grill in one wall that looks into room 143. Skink won't really do anything but play music, and has no interest in doing anything but playing music.

Room 140: Scorodron
The Scorodron is a shabbier mummy who is full of scores to Reptile Empire Opera. He doesn't care about anything but letting Acontias Skink keep playing, and will defend him from people who try to interrupt him.

Room 141: The Lampen Proletarian
The Lampen Proletarian is a golem made of max who keeps lamps lit but fears fire. He wants to overthrow the power structure in the Archives and will tell players how to do that, but the second something goes wrong he'll run to a mummy and sell the players out to them. The problem here is that I don't know what the power structure in the Archives is supposed to be. The mummies are in charge, but they're basically the only people who live here and they don't really do anything. This is the first thing we've seen that might actually provide a plot in this area but it relies on drama that doesn't really exist. Kind of like the whole "when the Medusa dies" thing at the back of the book- why would you kill her? Who cares?



Room 142: City of Dead Bees
Swarms of undead bees who occupy a miniature city, and attack ghosts or undead on sight. There's a stub of a candle just like the ones in Room 190 that send ghosts to their afterlife. These bees seem like they would possibly provide a goal for PCs to get from the lizard mummies, but... they don't. The mummies don't seem to care about them at all, and the only thing it'd be hard to reach by passing through this area is the Lampen Proletarian, who doesn't really do much.

Room 143: The Silence Engine
A big stack of tubes and chains that absorbs the forgotten echoes that come out of Acontias Skink's organ looking to recreate forgotten sentences. There's a mummy in here, Gekko Polyphemus, who is full of children's books and is taking notes to hand over to Salamandra in room 144. If the grill between this room and Acontias' room is removed, the engine will overload and explode, creating both a fireball and an expanding silence aura (that is only temporary and doesn't spread that quickly).

Room 144: The History Golem
Home to Salamandra Puntata, a mummy full of history books. She's always muttering to a History Golem (I think it's made of ink and paper, but I can't really tell) behind a pane of glass. The golem flips out if it's not being asked questions and will try to attack everyone if that happens. Getting a crit on the golem drives you insane as you get covered in its ink and the weird combinations of half-forgotten ideas.

Room 145: Skin Hall
An old hallway full of braille-covered adventurer hides which the next room's needlebirds use to communicate back and forth with the Tyko wight wayyyy back in the Dead Wedding.

Room 146: Clockwork Needlebirds
A whole mess of clockwork bids that, I suppose, have needles for beaks and want to turn the PCs' skins into another braille message to Tyko's wight. They used to send other messages, but the mummies forgot how to program them. Glad these random goobers have some kind of backstory instead of a motivation or a reason to care about them.

Room 147: The Grimspindle
Every door into this room is secret, and none of the mummies will tell players about it. They don't want anyone to use it. It takes hours to make anything with it, much like a regular spindle, as it weaves thread from light itself, then leaves behind a darkness that needs to be bound into a living thing. The clothes it makes are as good as plate mail, improve charisma, and never age or tear. This would be really good for Chronia, but she's not mentioned here. Hope you remembered that she wanted indestructible clothes!


Do you believe in the power of shadows?

Room 148: Sheltopussik
A room full of darkness, home to a clay golem who is full of living shadows that emerge from the Grimspindle. If the golem gets stressed, several shadows will escape from its body. The shadows are incredibly strong, actually get stronger in bright light unless it's coming from all directions, and their attacks cause level drain. Clerics will know inherently that the ectoplasm they leave behind when they die can still cause one more level drain if touched, and can be bottled. There's no note of how many more shadows Sheltopussik can hold, so maybe the PCs can make all the fancy pure-light clothing they want or maybe they will unleash a horde of shadows if they try. Up to you, GM!


That's probably enough for now. Even moreso than the Gallery, this whole area seems superfluous. There are some objects and people who might be able to cap off a story started elsewhere, but putting that story together would be so much work for a GM to do on their own. There's not really any kind of story in the area itself, either. Maybe the players would be interested in helping the wax golem kill the mummies? There's not really a reward to doing so, or any consequence of the mummies being destroyed. This whole area just kind of exists.

Just Dan Again fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jul 10, 2021

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Josef bugman posted:

I do wish that there was some system that let you model the WoD without being either the White wolf "This system is all d10's and it isn't as fun or as smart as it thinks it is" or the Urban Shadows "made by a person who isn't very nice and the rules are a bit lacklustre" sort.
One of the neat, completely unintended effects of White Wolf's success is that there are a bunch of systems that have an Attribute and a Skill rated 1-5, while all using different dice mechanics. It's not that much work to just port anything in WoD over to e.g. Unisystem and see how the dice math works out.

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Josef bugman posted:

I came to RPG's late, so I missed out on this formative experience.

I do wish that there was some system that let you model the WoD without being either the White wolf "This system is all d10's and it isn't as fun or as smart as it thinks it is" or the Urban Shadows "made by a person who isn't very nice and the rules are a bit lacklustre" sort.

Yeah, that's getting to my point: even the most mechanically garbage games can be hells of fun when you play them at the right time with the right people.

If I were to try to capture what makes RPing in the WoD fun, I'd either look into "storygames" that are more about social conflict and interaction (Fiasco comes to mind) or just start a LARP group and find some empty local parking garage where we can hang out.

If I wanted to do something lite with dice pools, I'd look into SWD6 (which is my go-to lite dice pool game) or one of its successors.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

illhousen
Jun 12, 2021
DragonRaid

Adventure Master Manual, Part 2

OK, let’s finish it.

The final two chapters provide advice for resolving game problems and becoming a better AM. Again, there are plenty of perfectly fine tips that I’m mostly going to skip. You get stuff like “when you become confused and don’t know what to do next, admit it to the group and take five” and “when there is a dispute about the rules, listen to the players, consult the Rulebook together, and if you still can’t reach the consensus, flip a coin”.

I’m going to call out one particular advice that I actually think more games should follow:

quote:

When a Player Does Not Participate

Once in a while, you may have a player who does not seem to get into the spirit of adventure learning. He may be quiet and shy, but may still be enjoying the game. Never force someone to act in a way he is not made to act. This will only result in embarrassment for that person and frustration for you. Nevertheless, you can encourage him by saying that his involvement is needed by the raid party.

Honestly, it’s good for a game to recognize that there are players who are content to just be present without much participation while still enjoying the game, and that it’s fine to let them be.

Of course, that being DragonRaid, some advice is worse than others.

quote:

When a Player Wants to Leave

Occasionally, you may find a player who is not enjoying the game and would like to stop playing. What do you do? First of all, make sure that you are running the adventure in a competent and interesting way. If the other players are enjoying themselves, you probably don't need to worry about that.

Next, try to determine if the player is frustrated. This may happen because the player feels he is not in control of what happens to him. Some people are very cautious about taking risks. In that case, point out that we do not know the future in real life. Encourage him to use his best judgment and tell him to remember not to worry about things, but to enjoy himself as much as possible. Be understanding; do not make the adventure too hard for the players.

Occasionally, a player may be frustrated simply because the character he is using is too weak and cannot ght properly. In that case, he should be given the opportunity to play with another character.

If you have tried every possible means of helping the discouraged player and he still wants to get out of the game, you can arrange to have his player captured or killed to avoid embarrassing him. Of course, if he wishes, he can just leave the game.

If the player is being childish or sulky, the group will probably be better off without him, and he should be allowed to leave with as little fuss as possible. You - or someone else - may want to deal with his behavior outside the game setting.

I can’t quite put my finger on what bothers me here. I think it’s that the advice is oddly narrow? Absent is the mention of interpersonal problems or the player being uncomfortable with the content of the game (like, once more, torture goblins. Or, you know, fluster beasts, selfoes and so on). The second paragraph, about the player becoming frustrated, sorta addresses it but in a rather dismissive “well, we all have to deal with stuff” kind of way.

Also, the last paragraph is just petty.

The advice on how to deal with disruptive players is a rather mixed bag. There are four suggestions. Two of them are good: talk to the player, see if there are any problems you can help them with. If they continue to wilfully disrupt play after you’ve tried everything to resolve the issue, tell them to leave. Simple, straightforward, nothing objectionable.

The other two suggestions, however, advice you to deal with the disruptions in-game, to punish the PC for player’s transgressions either by having a talking animal to walk out of the woods and tell them off, or by injuring/killing the PC and make the player sit on the sidelines for the rest of the session. Needless to say, it doesn’t work as it doesn’t address the root cause of disruptive behavior and would, if anything, provoke it more.

Also, we have this delightful passage:

quote:

Usually, public humiliation in front of a group of friends is sucient to help keep such a player in line. Dismissal should be considered only after all other options have been tried.

Please don’t publicly humiliate your players. Just let them go, everyone would be happier.

The section on spiritual problems finally addresses the problem of evil and why PCs can’t just pray the dragons away:

quote:

But many times God says no to our prayers. There are, of course, many reasons for this, most of them probably unknown to us. It may be because we are asking for easy deliverance from hard things that have been sent into our lives so that we might grow in the likeness of Jesus Christ.

The same is true of rebuking evil. Often it is God's will for us to wage an active battle against it, rather than simply to escape it. God wants us to be strong Christians, so He does not always grant our requests for miraculous deliverances, nor does He always grant us power to rebuke evil in His name.

I’m generally suspicious of this argument of hardships in our lives being godly trials. Far too often it’s used to dismiss the suffering of others (if they couldn’t overcome their troubles, God wouldn’t have sent them in the first place, you see) and to personalize problems that are systemic in nature.

Also, player cheating is under spiritual problems for some reason. The advice for that is to give them penalties to stats.

Then we have a justification for railroading:

quote:

When Players Try to Leave the Written Narrative

In many role-playing games, it is common - and sometimes even desirable - for players to leave the written adventure and go off in some direction of their own choosing. However, this is not always the case in DragonRaid. Since the system is designed to teach certain truths, a departure from the text may cause players to miss out on valuable spiritual lessons. So you must help them stay as close as possible to the material in the Adventure GuideBook.

This need not hamper your creativity, or theirs either. You can even be innovative in the way you bring them back to the text. Tell the players that a talking magpie flies down in front of them and advises them that what they are about to do isn't in the OverLord's will! As a general rule, keep each adventure running fairly close to the GuideBook. If you do not, DragonRaid may become just another game - fun, but without educational value. And imparting Christian truth is what DragonRaid is all about.

Spiritual lessons aside, I feel that railroading is a matter of degree a lot of the time: if players want to leave the confines of an adventure entirely and go be pirates or whatever, that’s a people problem and should be resolved as such. They’re either bored with the main narrative or disrupt it for personal reasons, and either way you should actually, like, talk to them and figure out what’s wrong.

If they just approach a problem from an unexpected angle, that’s not really an issue and should be allowed most of the time, unless it’s disruptive for other reasons.

Either way, a bear walking out of the woods to tell you that you’re going the wrong way is not the best solution here.

How to become a better AM chapter contains a section on possible responses to conversion attempts from dragon slaves.

OK, so first, I’ve touched before on how “rescue” works: PCs confront a dragon slave and go through five steps of conversion. Each requires recitation of a specific bible verse and an explanation of concepts behind it. Stuff like “God loves you and wants to be with you in spirit”, “accept that you’re a sinner and only faith can save you” and so on.

Once you complete all five steps, the dragon slave is rescued (if it’s the OverLord’s will, as some people are not destined to be saved) and is ready to go to the Liberated Land.

This section expands the basic framework to include possible arguments for why dragon slaves wouldn’t want to convert that must be addressed before the conversion can proceed.

The weird thing about included arguments is that most of them seem to assume that dragon slaves want to become TwiceBorn, but are held back by fear and self-loathing. You have stuff like “I’m too great of a sinner” and “I’m too weak to follow this path” and “I don’t believe I will ever understand the bible” and so on.

Some of the arguments are more on point for the established setting: fear of losing your friends or position or material goods if you turn away from the dragons, though that gets into how the whole allegory of DragonRaid is sorta constructed around the persecution complex. Christians are not exactly lacking material goods or access to good jobs.

The only openly confrontational argument against conversion is “The OverLord seems too cruel and unjust for me to serve Him."

Anyway, the way to address all those arguments is to correctly quote the relevant bible verse.

The response to the final argument is Romans 9:20: “But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?”

That sure will convince someone who sees God as cruel and unjust.

Concluding the book are game aids. Most of them we’ve already encountered earlier: success grid, critical hit chart, battle prayer tables, etc.

One section, Special WordRunes, is worth delving into.

There are four in total. We’ve already covered the Transgression WordRune, it’s a long prayer for forgiveness you say if you killed a dragon slave to reduce penalties.

The next WordRune is the Ultimate Hope, which can be used once in a character’s lifetime and obliterates all dark creatures around. It’s honestly not a bad idea for a pretty lethal game if you want to keep that lethality while ensuring that PCs don’t die too often.

The next two are just bad, though.

Life Verse WordRune requires you to recite a bible verse of the AM’s choosing. It’s used if the player becomes confused or overwhelmed and pauses the game for five minutes.

And, like, if a player is overwhelmed, it’s just a decent thing to do to take a short break. That was the advice for when the AM becomes confused, even.

It also can only be used once per session, so if you get overwhelmed often, well, sucks to be you.

Back on Track WordRune can be used twice during a character’s lifetime, and allows you to take back any decision you’ve made that took you off-course. Specifically, it takes you back to the moment the decision was made, allowing you to choose differently. There are no stated restrictions, so potentially it can take you back to the start of an adventure or possibly even earlier in the past.

This has the usual problem of time travel: it invalidates everything that happened after the point of travel, which can be greatly dissatisfying to other players, and it’s a pain in the rear end to figure out mechanical consequences (especially since stats change frequently enough and you aren’t expected to keep track of their past values).

And on that bright note, we’re finished, DragonRaid is done, there is nothing more (that I have access to) to cover.

Final thoughts

DragonRaid is an odd game that really could only have been created when it was: during the Satanic Panic when concerned parents would take away kids’ D&D books but might be more amenable to a Christian alternative. And it is, structurally, a Chriatian alternative to D&D: you can see it in randomly generated stats, the battle system, the awkward conversion of thematically resonant primary stats into mostly standard skills, the high lethality… Dick Wulf has envisioned a game of spiritual growth that would confront the players with problems of the mind and soul, but he couldn’t see far beyond the traditional gameplay, dooming the game to be an oddly-flavored fantasy heartbreaker.

Like many heartbreakers, the game does have interesting ideas worth salvaging: the focus on mental threats, the dragon battles, stats that reflect characters’ inner life rather than physical condition, even the counsel system, rudimentary as it is, could all be potentially used to great effect, once they’re rescued from this game.

And divorced from the game’s ideology, of course, which can’t go unmentioned. DragonRaid is a product of a very specific branch of Christianity, which holds a number of regressive, abhorrent views that permeate the game. The whole game, after all, presents Christians as a persecuted minority at war with the world overrun by demons and their servants, which is a view completely divorced from reality yet held by many people with power to affect the world. Beyond that, I’ve talked about the implications beyond some dark creatures that push the game from ideologically dubious into outright bigotry. That, above all else, makes me wish the game remained as it was for decades: a relic of the past, mostly forgotten, only occasionally brought up for mockery.

However, it was not to be: the game has seen a recent (though pretty modest) revival, with new adventures being published for the system and new boardgames being made for the same setting. So perhaps the new author of DragonRaid will have his own opportunities to show us his whole rear end in the future.

Further Reading

Speaking of. James R. Hannibal is the current lead writer (and possibly game developer?) for the DragonRaid products under the Lightraider label. His Amazon bio claims that he’s a former stealth pilot, and his portfolio mostly consist of political thrillers starring a CIA agent. Somehow, this is both surprising and completely what I expected. Currently, he’s working on a book titled Wolf Soldier (aka, the shittiest of the “get a talking animal companion” classes), which is supposed to be the first in a trilogy of Christian YA novels, so look forward to it, I guess.

He’s also writing a free online novel set in the world of DragonRaid, which can be found here, in case you’re brave enough to check it out and bring back your impressions.

As for me, I’m done with DragonRaid. Next time, I’ll talk about something short and actually good. Thanks to everyone who commented on the review, it made the ride enjoyable.

Hail Satan!

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply