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Libertad! posted:That's kind of the point. Although the EP authors are biased in favor of anarchism, the Autonomist societies they wrote are home to a lot of social problems. I forget who posted it, but someone responded to PurpleXVI's writeup of EP 2e's anarchist societies as "Mean Girls in Space." Mean Girls is pretty much a universal phenomenon, where in the absense of formal power structures with actual accountability and means to redress grievances, a community becomes dominated by informal, unofficial, unaccountable power structures where manipulative and abusive figures naturally dominate.
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Jul 21, 2021 07:00
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However the secondary problem is that as soon as people create formal power structures informal power structures build around/inside them. That and people start going "maybe the power structures are for my benefit and not the community as a whole".
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Jul 21, 2021 08:26
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Josef bugman posted:However the secondary problem is that as soon as people create formal power structures informal power structures build around/inside them. That and people start going "maybe the power structures are for my benefit and not the community as a whole". Ultimately the thing that truly prevents abuse, is a general feeling that the system works for everyone and includes everyone, and that this is a state of affairs that everyone wants to continue. All systems are vulnerable to some form of abuse, and the only thing that prevents that, in the end, is for people to not want to abuse them. So it's a matter of education, propaganda and political consciousness as much as it is creating the formal systems to back that feeling up.
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Jul 21, 2021 09:16
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And ruthlessly disposing of sociopaths who apply game theory to real life.
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Jul 21, 2021 10:08
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Servetus posted:This come up when people are trying to design Science Fiction settings without giving every freighter captain world ending power. It's fun when you realize that the acceleration generated by any Space Opera propulsion system means that Mal Reynolds could probably crack a planet open if he was willing to sacrifice his ship and crew, it's just a matter of acceleration. I think if you're using inertialess drives what happens if you accelerate to max speed, hit the planet, and bounce off harmlessly.
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Jul 21, 2021 10:18
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The key thing about science fiction is to make sure the rules are just vague enough to try to frustrate lawyers while having enough to keep things fun and not be broken. Like competitive balance. The obsession with 'hard' sci-fi sucks in so much effort for no real gain. I suppose it can be interesting in the cases where they use it to construct a particular paradigm that serves to write their stories in, but that still requires some compromise and the story having to come first, and not revolve around One Weird Trick every drat time that is basically just Star Trek 'reverse the polarity!' with more backstory. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Jul 21, 2021 |
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Jul 21, 2021 10:21
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Wasn't the whole split between hard and soft sci-fi the result of sci-fi authors trying to make literary/"realistic" fiction writers, the gatekeepers of that time period, take them seriously? Proudly stating you have no FTL engines to earn the approval of some guy writing about an English professor contemplating an affair while grilling a single portabello mushroom?
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Jul 21, 2021 12:39
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Symbaroum: Wrath of the Warden, Part4 Oof, it’s been a while since I last did one of these. Anyways, when I least left off our party had found all the clues necessary to track down Anadea, their anonymous quest giver who died from sudden sinkhole disease while the party was off fighting the mutated barbarians who caused said sinkhole. The PCs find clues that basically spell out that she was an agent of the Iron Pact, and that they’ll have to find a way to reach their headquarters to figure out what she was going to hire them to do. This is a problem, because not only is the Hall of a Thousand Tears a legendary place that few know how to reach, actually doing so is basically treason if you’re an Ambrian thanks to their views on the Elves trying to stop them from looting Davokar. This brings me to one of the major problems this line of books has. They’re mostly written with the PCs being Ambrian humans in mind, which kinda makes sense as they’re the dominant and strongest cultural group. (As an aside, sapient beings with a culture such as the Elves, Humans, Trolls etc are called “Cultural Beings” by the book for some reason.) A big part of the adventure is turning away from the Ambrian system of rapid expansion and exploitation of nature, and adopting a more symbiotic relationship with nature, one that doesn’t turn into a beserk rage mutant. The problem is, the book doesn’t do a lot to help or encourage Ambrian PCs to get from A to B, I mean rewards do occasionally get offered but the adventure just generally seems to assume that the PCs will be down for whatever comes across their desk. Thus, if you’re going to GM this, it’s quite possibly going to involve a fuckton of work figuring out a way to motivate your PCs to do the thing. There’s a bit of other poo poo you can do before the next chapter, some of the other less-involved factions like the Templars can give the PCs hints about bits of background lore, you can smuggle the two Witches into town where they can help with a later fight, and so on. Nothing really crucial, it’s mostly alternate path stuff, kinda. If the PCs haven’t put it together themselves, most of the other factions can look at the clues and tell them where they need to go. From there, all they need to do is speak with Mayor Nightpitch and his witch friend to figure out how to find the Hall of a Thousand Tears. Turns out it’s pretty easy. All you do is feed a bit of a special mushroom that grows near the hall to a Mare Cat or Jaakar (native cats of the Davokar), and follow the thing. Given that the PCs looted Anadea’s storage, they should have both. If they don’t, Mayor Nightpitch can give them some and a Mare Kitten can be purchased from the local gladiatorial arena.  There’s 10 random encounters for the journey, some are fairly inoffensive combats that our Ogre would just sleepwalk through, while others are kinda neat, like the one where a seemingly normal group of settlers are actually a Lindworm cult.. The one with the Pixies though would probably just get your GM rear end punched. They’re just giant annoying dicks who try to release your guide animal while the party sleeps, thus requiring a trip back to town to get another. Overall, they’re fairly varied an aside from the drat faeries that gently caress with you, aside from that one you could do a lot worse as far as random encounters go. So, getting to the Hall of a Thousand Tears (or at least one of the locations that has a portal leading into it) is really weird and kinda easy. You take the mushroom (it only grows near to the where entrances to the hall are) and feed it to a young Mare Cat. Then you follow the Mare Cat for a few days. When you do arrive the cat gets all ansty and starts meowing constantly, and then the portal opens. There's a pointless Witchsight or -5 Vigilant test to determine that the portal’s strength is weak and it will close in a minute. The Hall itself begins with a straight hallway of vulcanized glass that is covered in all sorts of forest greenery, y’know, elf poo poo. About 10 paces in there’s a draped blanket of vines covering the tunnel. These vines react to corruption, and turn various darkened colours (ending with black) depending on the level of corruption displayed by the creature that touches them. This brings me to another thing that kinda bugs me, the option for Undead PCs totally exists, but the game rarely seems to acknowledge that they could exist. The corruption detector vines are supposed to change colour based upon how much numerical permanent corruption a character has. However, Undead characters don’t have corruption at all, that number simply isn’t a part of their character sheet. They are described as being “thoroughly corrupt” in their lore, but they’re also not senseless violent monsters like most Abominations. Now, a GM can easily rule that the Undead PC sets off all of the alarms, but it still bugs me a bit. It does at least tell us in a sidebar that if a Blight-Marked PC (again, Undead aren’t exactly Blight-Marked as such) enters the Hall, 25 summer elves run out of the side corridors and draw arrows on the party. If the PCs behave calmly nothing comes of it though. Anyways past the corruption-detecting vine curtains the hallway opens into a large chamber, where they see this guy along with a male and female elf weeper.  This is Ka’eroan, an Eternity Elf. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but elves start out their life cycle as small spring elves, or pixies as they’re more commonly known. After a while they enter a hibernation cycle and emerge as hot-blooded summer elves, which are what forms the majority of the Iron Pact’s elven forces. Those become Autumn Elves, which become Winter Elves, and at the last stage are the Eternity Elves. Each hibernation stage sees less and less elves successfully wake up, but with each stage comes more strength, size, and power. Eternity Elves are basically walking demigods with super high skills and stats. They’re extremely rare and kinda alien, very few elves survive this long. Big Guy could still bisect Ka’eroan in two with a single hit if the Elf didn’t have Polearm Mastery, but I digress. Getting into a fight would mean those 25 archers come down on you, I think our two tanks could solo them all but they’d probably kill the rest of the party, so it behooves the PCs to behave while they’re here. The two elves will ask you in Elvish why you’re here, with the right skills you can roll to crudely answer. Unless of course you happen to be an Elf, but the book doesn’t seem to consider that as a possibility. It doesn’t matter though, because if Ka’eroan can just speak to you telepathically. All you have to do is say that is some fashion you’re here to meet with Anadea’s master, and one of the Weepers will go off to fetch her. As an aside, here’s why they’re called Weepers. Apparently, waking up a spring elf from hibernation and into this losing war is seen as an incredibly tragic fate for that elf. The elves in Davokar are sworn to a forever war that they’re inevitably losing, and they will never know, nor can they ever return to, the Elven homelands in the West. Thus, the Iron pact has people dedicated to crying into a well over all of this. Yeah, Elves are such drama queens that they have dedicated professionals to cry over it. After one of the elves leaves to go fetch Teara-Teana, you’ve literally got a wait of several hours where all you can do is sit around and wait. You can’t go further in the Hall, but you can ask some questions and learn a bit of background lore, not a lot though. You need to pass a cunning test to even get the elves to talk, and they only offer short answers to very specific questions. There’s also a huge mural on the wall that depicts the founding of the Iron Pact, and someone with Loremaster can recognize one of the figures as one of Queen Korinthia’s ancestors. You can also overhear a conversation along with some alternating screaming and whimpering that implies Prince Eaeno (the current leader of the Iron Pact and a Winter Elf) deals with heavy mood swings and is manic as hell.  So after several hours the Elf you’re all here to see finally shows up and demands to know (in broken Ambrian) why you’re here and how you know her name. Incidentally, if the PCs give her any reason to doubt them, she fetches an artifact that will turn black if the PC knowingly utters an untruth. You can try to beat it at a -3 to your Discreet, but you only get one failed lie, two and she has you kicked out and the adventure grinds to a halt. ”You’ll follow out metaplot and like it!” posted:Hopefully the player characters will realize that the situation they are in provides no room for anything besides humble obedience – after all, they are all alone in an underground realm full of mighty elves without even knowing how, or if, it is possible for them to escape. After Teara-Teana is satisfied that you’re not cops, she’ll be more forthcoming and open up a bit. She won’t answer any questions about the Elves in general, for reasons the book doesn’t fully articulate or define. She will however explain what the Iron Pact is, what their mission is, and so on. She’ll also tell you what Anadea was trying to hire you to do. If the PCs agree to continue her mission and recover the skull of the dead forest spirit Eox, she’ll agree to reward the PCs. The rewards she offers are actually pretty good, but one is clearly better than all the rest. See if you can tell which one.  Anyways, assuming you agree she’ll tell you that Anadea’s last report identified the cult leader who stole Eox’s skull as Erlaber Ambreagos, a supposed antiques dealer who hides his cult in an old tannery building. She had planned on striking the afternoon after she delivered said report, but got sinkhole’d before that could happen. With terms hashed and the plot hook delivered, she has the Eternity Elf open a portal back to Thistle Hold. Just a brief aside here. The Adventure itself began on page 100 of this book. We’re on page 157 out of 177 now, and we’re just now getting to the actual plot. This adventure feels like one of those games where the plot’s narrative seems to be time sensitive and is all “EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE”, but then it hits you with all this fuckin’ busywork along with a multitude of sidequests. It’s been at least a week since the PCs got roped into this, and if Eox’s skull isn’t returned to his still-living body soon he will die an actual death. However, you’ve really got all the time in the world, and the sensitive aspect is really just pointless window dressing. If the PCs have enough time to faff about walking a mushroom-tripping kitten in the hell-forest for a week, then stop pretending like the sky is falling. Once you get back to Thistle Hold with the aid of Elf-demigod magic, there’s still the matter of finding Erlaber and his tannery hideout. I’ll tell ya’ll right away you’re not going to find the former right away, he’s learned the ritual he thinks will turn him into an avatar of the Endless Night (it kinda does, but I doubt Erlaber wants to have his mind destroyed in the process), and has relocated to a more suitable ritual site atop the corrupted crystal isle in the sinkhole. We’re told that no matter what the PCs did, word about what is down there gets leaked, and thus our friendly neighborhood cult leader has already relocated down there. The book also says the PCs won’t fight this out until after a difficult fight at the Tannery. :sight: Choo choo motherfuckers Anyways, if you want you can do some digging regarding Erlaber. He’s never actually committed a serious crime, but he’s been connected to a few and the town guard captain keeps an unofficial file on him. You can also track down the location of his tannery and get a floor plan from the Queen’s Legation, but honestly none of that poo poo is really worth your time. Finding an old abandoned building that reeks of piss isn’t that hard, and learning that Erlaber buys freaky antiques or that his name is the name of an old Symbarom noble house doesn’t really help you kill him any harder. You know who he is, and where you think he is, so maybe move your bones and save a forest god from dying an ignoble death? In a solid touch the PCs can recruit allies from the various factions (some require diplomacy to work side by side, and the Iron Pact refuses to work alongside the Templars), but our players understand the system better than the designers and don’t really need the help.  Erlaber and his closest companions have left for the new ritual site, but he left behind the other two cults that have been harrying the PCs at various points throughout the adventure. There’s a couple guys outside the Tannery, and if you want you can stealthily take them out and/or try to get some info out of them, and thus have a better idea of what you’re getting into. Depending on how many allied groups you have with you, the party will face less cultists overall. Our PCs are This sounds bad, it’s a lot of dudes. However it’s still pretty much a cakewalk for our group. Most of them are melee fighters, which means they can’t really hurt our two tanks and our Polearm Master can effectively hold up in a corner with the squishes behind him/bodyguard one of them, which effectively makes our two mystics invincible. All of the cultists only do 4 damage, meaning our ogre Big Guy can effectively tank all 25 goons by himself if need be. I’ve said this before, but it seems kinda hosed that unless they have mystic powers or poisons, most man-sized npcs stop being threats once you can reliably ignore 4-5 damage. There’s two cults involved here, and one of the cult has a couple novice-rank mystic powers on its basic troop. However, the instructions for the fight also say they rush into melee, so eh?  25 dead cultists later, our PCs quickly discover the obvious former ritual site. It’s protected by the ritual Sanctum (which keeps poo poo like Clairvoyance out) but you can poke around with your eyes and ears just fine. The skull isn’t here, and there’s 3 ways the party can learn where Erlaber hosed off to. If a PC has the Witchsight skill (ours don’t) they get a vision of the crystal lake in the sinkhole. If you have the ritual Tale of Ashes, performing it will play out another vision in which one of Erlaber’s mystic subordinates orders the skull to be moved to the lake. And finally, you can make a Vigilant -5 test to notice a small hole hidden under a podium. it. In said crawl space you’ll find Gardai, a cultist whom you’ll have to intimidate into giving you the info. In our case, our undead wizard just uses Bend Will to force him to tell the party where the skull’s at. 50 Cent approves. Onto the final encounter! You know those allies you had? Gone. ”How convenient” posted:We suggest that the characters will have to climb down into the sinkhole alone, even if they have had several allies during the clash in the tannery building. That they suddenly are without companions can be explained by injuries suffered in the fight with the cultists and that the few who are unharmed are reluctant to leave the wounded without Unless you did what Erlaber did and set up a Mystic Circle which you could then teleport to using Seven League Stride, you have to get back down to the Crystal Lake via the old fashioned way. You also either need a letter from the mayor or you need to roll to convince the guards at the rim of the sinkhole that you should be let down, again. I hope you don’t flub the persuasion roll or else you’re going to be too late to stop the ritual, and thus end up chasing his flying rear end across town. Literally. If you’re late he takes wing and flies across town attacking various spots. The last bit is kinda timed, but also kinda not? There’s four phases, Erlaber is presently engaged with the ritual and as he hits certain milestones there’s reverberating effects you can pick up with Witchsight or if you have enough Corruption currently. Once the game hits Phase 4, Erlaber’s transformation is complete and he’s a full-on winged Abomination, in earlier phases he’s bigger and stronger, but still somewhat sane. If you get there quick enough he’s just a powerful Sorcerer, which is honestly his most dangerous form.  After the PCs repel down into the Sinkhole they’re met by Erlaber’s four most prominent and powerful cultists before they can reach the crystal island. If you left the barbarian witch alive from your last excursion down here, she’ll have done you a favor by killing a couple of them before biting it herself. Our opponents consist of a a couple fairly dangerous mystics, and a pair of Changeling assassin-types. I say that the mystics are dangerous, and they are, but they have a quick of 7, and they can maybe take a hit at best. This means they’ll probably take an ogre-powered greataxe to the face before they can even choose the spell they want to cast. Static initiative values are really, really busted. It’s pretty hosed when you can count on going first/second the vast majority of the time. The pair of changelings are potentially capable of loving up our mages/archer, they go on a 14 and have two attacks and might put the hurt on a PC if they can get into a backstab position. The odds still aren’t great for them though. Our PCs stand a very good chance of just 1-rounding these fools, which means when they get to Erlaber he’s still just a man. Take 2-5 turns, and he turns into a taller, stronger monster with horns and blue-black leathery skin that’s still somewhat sane but not really capable of casting mystic powers anymore. Take any longer and he gets bigger and turns into a full-on demonic gargoyle monster.  The only scenario in which Erlaber lasts more than one turn is if you take too long and he’s able to finish the ritual. As a wizard he’s got a good Resolute and an array of high-rank mystical powers, but he’s got a quick of 10 and an armor of 2, his 11 toughness won’t save him. In his second form he’s actually got some armor and regeneration, which still won’t save him because our ogre ignores armour and hits for his toughness total of 11 on average dice. Now, his third form could pose some difficulties. Armour 10 and 18 toughness combined with regeneration means that Big Guy will struggle to one shot him (without a better weapon at least), and the other party members can’t really break armor 10. This means that if Big Guy gets unlucky with armor rolls and falls to the Erlaber, the party might be in trouble if our undead wizard can’t land Bend Will on him. Most of that is academic though, I figure most parties (even if they don’t build their characters very well) probably won’t take long enough for him to finish the ritual and assume his final form. So now what? Well, we’re assuming that our PCs are good guys (or at least they still want their reward) so they’ll carry the skull of Eox back to his grove in Bright Davokar. There Teara-Teena and a few elf mystics await, working rituals to keep his body alive. Healing the forest god is basically as simple as holding the head to the stump and waiting for everything to reattach. Eox looks at the party, stretches his neck, and then starts to graze as all sem-divine giant oxen do. Teara-Teena then asks the PCs a couple questions. Do they regret at least some of the death and destruction that they’ve caused, and do they think that they’ve earned their negotiated reward or is saving Eox reward enough? If you answer yes and then no, she’ll let you join the Iron Pact. She still values life (and thus doesn’t want trigger-happy murderers in her little club) and she wants selfless heroes not motivated by gain. You still get the reward either way though. I think it’s kinda dumb that she expects the PCs (who negotiated a reward) to turn down said reward because apparently we’ve started a Light Side playthrough in KOTOR, but I digress. The book wraps up with a little bit of postmortem stuff and some possible plot hooks for smaller adventures, which is a decent touch. You might not want to hop into the next metaplot book quite yet. Experience wise we’ll get 40-50xp (we’re supposed to give out 1 for every scene in which something significant happened), plus whatever reward you get from the elves. There’s actually a decent amount of loot to be had, and most of our PCs can likely afford to upgrade to some non-generic equipment now. And that’s basically it. So what do I think of this book? Well, it’s stated goal is to introduce you to the various factions, their outlooks, and the underlying narrative of nature versus civilization. Of that, it does an okay job. It could do it better, but for the most part it functions as a guided tour of who’s who. As a plot in and of itself, it’s pretty weak. It’s got numerous structural problems, and the actual plot itself takes too long to get to and doesn’t really establish its villain until the final chapter which is basically just a sprint to the end. You just get told who the evil cult leader is and where to find him, it feels a little too impersonal. It’s more like a hit job than a group of adventurers taking down the bad guy that’s been loving with them for a while. Let's hope that the next book, Karvosti - The Witch Hammer is better!
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Jul 21, 2021 14:33
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Ronwayne posted:Wasn't the whole split between hard and soft sci-fi the result of sci-fi authors trying to make literary/"realistic" fiction writers, the gatekeepers of that time period, take them seriously? Proudly stating you have no FTL engines to earn the approval of some guy writing about an English professor contemplating an affair while grilling a single portabello mushroom? I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me. Then again, nerds have repeatedly demonstrated to be perfectly capable of forming religions over misplaced and disturbing ideas of 'realism' entirely of their own accord.
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Jul 21, 2021 16:36
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Ronwayne posted:Wasn't the whole split between hard and soft sci-fi the result of sci-fi authors trying to make literary/"realistic" fiction writers, the gatekeepers of that time period, take them seriously? Proudly stating you have no FTL engines to earn the approval of some guy writing about an English professor contemplating an affair while grilling a single portabello mushroom? Otherwise, it is essentially a stylistic decision to make things some combination of "more grounded in scientific research" and "mean and nasty and brutal". You may well think, gee, those two things don't seem like they really go together. Exactly!
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Jul 21, 2021 16:49
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It should also be noted that “includes world-bending psychic powers” traditionally doesn’t make it not hard SF; see also Foundation.
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Jul 21, 2021 16:59
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Soulbound: Steam and Steel Drug Lab Phoenix Pinions are very hard to prepare, very expensive, and usually, well, made of phoenix feathers, though some similar preparations exist for phoenix ashes. Getting the feathers isn't easy, though - the Phoenix Temple collect every single feather their birds shed, and one in a thousand feathers still glows with power. These are easiest to work with, though enough dead feathers could be used to produce a re-energized pinion. Anyone bearing a pinion will feel both a literal and emotional warmth within their body, lifting them into the air. The bearer gains the ability to fly at Fast speed, rising into the air on wings of heat. However, the feathers retain the nature of the phoenix, and when the bearer is Mortally Wounded, the feather will flare up and burn into Phoenix Pyre Ashes - useful in their own way, but quite different. Phoenix Pyre Ashes are, like the pinions, quite hard to prepare and very expensive. Almost all of them are produced by the manner noted above, rather than deliberately made, though you could do it out of phoenix feathers if you wanted. They contain a fragment of the regenerative properties of the Ur-Phoenix, and occasionally warriors of the Phoenix Temple will smear the ashes onto their foreheads as protection and a reminder of the hope of rebirth. If you are wearing a preparation of Phoenix Pyre Ashes, when you recover from being Mortally Wounded, you return to max Toughness, too. If you spend Soulfire or are Reforged while wearing the Ashes, they will ignite and transform back into a Phoenix Pinion. Realmblood Tonic is a powerful potion intended for spellcasters, though it's not super hard to make and only moderately expensive. Most commonly, they are made from tiny amounts of realmstone mixed with pure alcohol. The essential part of the potion is heavily diluted realmstone, reduced down to a consumable state over various long, involved processes. Using the tonic will grant a deep and powerful connection to the realm of its origin, regardless of where you are or your distance from it. Once used, you are considered to have Realm Affinity with the associated realm for the next day, empowering magic of the appropriate Lore. Seerdust is relatively cheap and not too hard to make, usually made from powdered celestium or ground up Seraphon scales. The resulting powder is then added to tea or placed under the tongue, filling the user's eyes with twinkling light. This light can then be interpreted to foretell the future. It's become a very popular substance among oracles and seers, and some will go so far as to use flour to deceive their clients and offer them false hope. The user's eyes become filled with starlight for one full minute, causing Blinded for the duration, but they can make an Arcana or Theology roll to ask the GM a single question relating to a specific goal, action or event that will happen within the next day. The GM must answer truthfully, though within the game the answer takes the form of an omen formed from stars before your eyes - a hammer shattering a skull telling you a victory is likely, for example. Thunderstrike Gems are also relatively cheap and easy. They're usually made from stardrake hearts, bottled lightning, or sungem fragments. They're crystals roughly the size and shape of a grenade, full of barely contained electrical energy that is obvious just beneath the surface. They were originally designed by a Collegiate mage to contain and distribute spells on the frontline, but they proved to be too dangerous and hard to use, meaning they're almost never found outside Collegiate hands these days. When thrown or smashed into a solid surface, they explode into a lightning blast that damages an entire Zone and causes Blinded, Deafened and Stunned for a turn. Anyone in the Zone must also make a Might or Reflexes roll to avoid falling Prone. Anyone who is disarmed of a gem, knocked prone while carrying one, or who takes fall damage while carrying one has to make a Reflexes roll to avoid accidentally detonating the thing. Venela's Veil is very hard and expensive to make. Typically, it's made from umbral flicker-rose thorn, warpfire embers or tiny amounts of chamonite. These pills are originally from Ulgu, and they alter the user's physical appearance, which makes them popular among many people for many reasons. Once consumed, you may take on any appearance you can imagine, so long as it is within the natural capacity of your species. Vocal tone, height, hair color, gender expression - any physical features you want can be changed, though you can't change your species, alter your stats or heal yourself this way. The changes are gradual, requiring an extended, three-roll Determination check over the course of a day. If you get enough successes, everything goes perfectly. If you fail, something is off, and the more you fail by, the more wrong it is. The change is physical and permanent - to change again, even back to your original appearance, you're going to need another dose. So, rules for making your own! Step one: decide what kind of thing you're making. It can be a potion, poison or explosive. A potion is anything that is beneficial to the user, usually in the form of a consumable pill or drink, but not always. Using a potion requires an action and its effects hit immediately. A poison is anything harmful that you have to get inside your target somehow, whether from being stabbed into someone's bloodstream or being consumed with food or drink. Applying poison to a weapon is an action and it applies to whoever next takes damage from the weapon, which consumes the dose used. Alternatively, you can sneak it into food or drink with a Stealth roll, or you can try to throw a poison directly out to Medium range. Explosives, of course, are any aggressive, unstable thing that you throw to affect an entire zone, whether that's dealing damage as with standard grenades or applying conditions like with webbing grenades or flashbangs to apply Restrained or Blinded. Step two: Define traits. You are building up a total number based on the traits of the creation, with explosives being base harder than either poisons or potions. Potions can be used to heal Toughness, recover conditions or restore Mettle, to give skill or stat bonuses of various kinds. Mettle recovery, full condition recovery, attribute increase and large amounts of healing are the hardest things to add there. Poisons and explosives can cause conditions, decrease stats, cause skill penalties or deal damage, though due to a chart misprint the rules for dealing damage are actually missing from the original PDF, oops. The longer duration a buff or debuff is, the harder it is, as is conditional activation. You can also add special traits, like Covert, which makes it easier to hide the potion or poison in food without being detected, or Side Effect, which adds a debuff to a potion to make it easier, or Potent, which makes a potion cause wounds if stacked with another potion of any kind (again, to make it easier to make). And, of course, you can reduce explosive difficulty by adding Unstable, which is the trait that makes it go off if jostled improperly that we've seen on stuff, or you can add High Yield to expand the explosion range...though High Yield comes with Unstable built into it automatically. Step three: determine DN. Difficulty is 4, and Complexity is based on the total you got from step 2, though it is minimum of 3. If the thing you're making has a purely narrative effect, with no mechanical bonuses or penalties, then the difficulty is based solely on duration, with permanent effects being the hardest and hour-long effects the easiest. You can take the difficulty and work it back through step two to figure out the trait value. Step four applies if you're making a poison or explosive that causes a Condition of any kind. You and the GM decide together what the resistance roll should be - commonly, this is Reflexes, Fortitude or Determination, but other rolls are possible, and is opposed by your Crafting. If you want to cut down on rolling, you can instead have it roll against a fixed difficulty based on your Mind and Crafting Training. Step five is optional - if you just want to make stuff mechanically and not deal with the narrative of crafting, you're done. However, if you want to make a story out of making it, it's now time to determine the key materials you're going to need. You and the GM figure out what the key ingredient or ingredients are - typically, you can ignore mundane details like containers, because you're focusing on the rare and difficult to get stuff that is key to the creation. You take your value from step 2. If that value is 4 or less, you can probably make it with relatively mundane materials found easily anywhere. Five or higher means at least one component is rare and probably not locally available. You can split the value over multiple components - and if your value is 7 or more, you must, as any individual component can only have a value of up to 6. Low-cost components include things like dryad sap, concentrated Aqua Ghyranis, spider fangs, bone marrow, deffcap mushrooms, or ochtar tentacles. Mid-range cost is stuff like the meat of a creature that can regenerate, phoenix claws, vulcharc feathers or Ghurish wildvine. Rare materials include things like Sylvaneth heartwood, squig teeth, bottled lightning, realmstone slivers, aether-gold, severed Kharibdyss heads or liquid shadow. Step six: cost to make. Cost can, as with weapons, vary based on location and what's easily available, but they provide a rough calculation of "default" cost. You take your number from step two and multiply it by 10. That's how much it costs to make a single dose. If you are skilled enough when doing a single Create Alchemical Concoction Endeavor to get multiple doses, you still only pay the cost of a single dose - your skill reduces waste and gets the most out of your materials. Now, obviously, the easiest way to get the materials is to just pay the cost. That's the default, though the GM may declare that exotic materials like monster parts or other rare things cannot be purchased and must be found by other means. This is where you use the Seek Materials Endeavor - you spend a downtime period getting the rare stuff you need. Of course, during an adventure you may run into rare materials! You can harvest it with GM agreement, using Nature, Medicine, Beast Handling or Arcana as appropriate. The difficulty to harvest a material is based on how rare and useful it is to crafting, as determined by step 5 examples. Each success gives you enough materials for a single concoction, which gives a 50% cost reduction to that particular creation. (The rest of the cost is still needed for basic reagents, bottles and so on.) We also get a note that if you run into any potion or poison or other concoction out in the world that doesn't have a crafting DN listed, you can reverse-engineer it with a Crafting roll using the exact same rules here to determine how to best replicate the effects of the thing. Next time: Fyreslayer Craft
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Jul 21, 2021 18:08
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Ronwayne posted:guy writing about an English professor contemplating an affair while grilling a single portabello mushroom? Ok, where have I heard this thing before lol
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Jul 21, 2021 18:20
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mellonbread posted:Yup, this is explicitly acknowledged in the Ringworld franchise. "A fusion drive is a weapon, powerful in direct ratio to its efficiency as a drive" There's a story in the setting that's all about this. An aggressive alien race (the Kzinti) actually has a reactionless drive (stolen), so they zip around at 0.9 lightspeed. One of their warships stops when it spots a human slowboat, chugging along at 0.1c with a photon drive. The human ship is unarmed and crewed by complete pacifists, which the aliens learn about because they have a telepath on board. They decide to slow roast the humans with a thermal inducer and are basically laughing as one of the crew frantically rotates the ship to, as they think, try and run away. Another name for an interstellar photon drive is "big-rear end laser". The Kzinti will eventually call this "the Human lesson" aka any reaction drive is a weapon in direct proportion to its use as a drive system.
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Jul 21, 2021 18:58
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Ronwayne posted:Wasn't the whole split between hard and soft sci-fi the result of sci-fi authors trying to make literary/"realistic" fiction writers, the gatekeepers of that time period, take them seriously? Proudly stating you have no FTL engines to earn the approval of some guy writing about an English professor contemplating an affair while grilling a single portabello mushroom? No, because the actual movement of SF authors adopting the style of non-SFF writing is the New Wave, and Delany and Le Guin were not concerned with SF 'hardness.' Hard SF is about constructing a valuation by which certain kinds of SF are valorized, without actual reference to 'writing quality' or 'characters' (See: Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+). That doesn't mean the hard SF aesthetic isn't interesting and valuable, but the original purpose was to argue that there's something unique and special about science fiction that can be located in its capacity for prognostication or the exploration of possible things, as opposed to fantasy and horror, which are denigrated. Or soft SF. However, hard SF was never more than an aesthetic, and loved some psionic powers, because they had the right aura of authentic technology-ness despite being more magical than most things in The Lord of the Rings.
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Jul 21, 2021 19:11
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JcDent posted:Ok, where have I heard this thing before lol https://twitter.com/tricialockwood/status/486930173498241025?lang=en I only just realised that that's the same woman who gave us "Jail for mother! Jail for 1000 years!"
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Jul 21, 2021 19:38
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potatocubed posted:https://twitter.com/tricialockwood/status/486930173498241025?lang=en UNACCEPTABLE. 1000 YEARS JAIL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzT6NGUs7Js
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Jul 21, 2021 20:14
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https://mobile.twitter.com/tricialockwood/status/1108102037072433153
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Jul 21, 2021 21:21
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Joe Slowboat posted:No, because the actual movement of SF authors adopting the style of non-SFF writing is the New Wave, and Delany and Le Guin were not concerned with SF 'hardness.' Mors Rattus posted:It should also be noted that “includes world-bending psychic powers” traditionally doesn’t make it not hard SF; see also Foundation. edit: I mean the psi thing specifically was among the smallest of his sins, just one of the most hilariously hypocritical - the man had the award named after him renamed in 2019 because the winner accurately and thoroughly pointed out he was a huge piece of poo poo. Drakyn fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jul 21, 2021 |
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Jul 21, 2021 22:32
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Didn't she win a Hugo for that acceptance speech, too?
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Jul 21, 2021 23:05
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You are entirely correct. It was for 'Best Related Work.' Incidentally, here it is in its entirety. quote:John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists. Yes, I am aware there are exceptions. edit: apologies for the extended derail on my part.
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Jul 21, 2021 23:16
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Servetus posted:This come up when people are trying to design Science Fiction settings without giving every freighter captain world ending power. It's fun when you realize that the acceleration generated by any Space Opera propulsion system means that Mal Reynolds could probably crack a planet open if he was willing to sacrifice his ship and crew, it's just a matter of acceleration. idk, I've been doing some worldbuilding and came up with a space drive that scales up your size by a factor of 10 million and doesn't interact on the physical plane, so you can travel through space at FTL speeds without incurring relativistic effects, radiation build-up, etc. OTOH, planets and other celestial objects are downscaled at factor of 10 million: Earth comes out to something like 1.27m in diameter and the Sun is shifted to 139m, so someone could literally build a fence in hyperspace around the solar system and prevent ships from approaching.
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Jul 22, 2021 04:35
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Young Freud posted:idk, I've been doing some worldbuilding and came up with a space drive that scales up your size by a factor of 10 million and doesn't interact on the physical plane, so you can travel through space at FTL speeds without incurring relativistic effects, radiation build-up, etc. OTOH, planets and other celestial objects are downscaled at factor of 10 million: Earth comes out to something like 1.27m in diameter and the Sun is shifted to 139m, so someone could literally build a fence in hyperspace around the solar system and prevent ships from approaching.
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Jul 22, 2021 05:36
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Best way is when you enter the hyperspace dimension and it's literally Hell.
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Jul 22, 2021 06:58
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Best way is when you enter the hyperspace dimension and it's literally Hell. One project I'm considering is this, but the hyperspace dimension is bullet hell.
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Jul 22, 2021 07:19
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RE: hard vs soft sci-fi An excerpt from Monday Begins on Saturday by Strugatsky brothers, in which the protagonist uses a virtual time machine to travel to a "described future" based on various works of fiction, utopic theories, etc. quote:Looking about, I discovered that I stood with my machine on the surface of a moving sidewalk. The people swarmed around me, and it was a most variegated crowd. Mostly, however, the people were rather unreal, much less real than the powerful, complex, and almost silent mechanisms. Consequently, when one of these machines collided with a person, there was no crash. I had little interest in the machines, probably because on top of each one sat, inspired to semitransparency, its individual inventor, engaged in voluminous exposition of the configuration and purpose of his brainchild. No one listened to anyone else and no one seemed to be addressing anyone, either.
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Jul 22, 2021 07:41
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wdarkk posted:One project I'm considering is this, but the hyperspace dimension is bullet hell. illhousen posted:RE: hard vs soft sci-fi
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Jul 22, 2021 18:35
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Nessus posted:I wonder if that particular turn of phrase is straight from the Russian. Russian quote: quote:Оглядевшись, я понял, что стою с машиной на ленте движущегося тротуара. Народ вокруг так и кишел – самый разнообразный народ. В большинстве своем, правда, эти люди были какие-то нереальные, гораздо менее реальные, чем могучие, сложные, почти бесшумные механизмы. Так что, когда такой механизм случайно наезжал на человека, столкновения не происходило. Машины мало меня заинтересовали, наверное, потому, что на лобовой броне у каждой сидел вдохновенный до полупрозрачности изобретатель, пространно объяснявший устройство и назначение своего детища. Изобретателей никто не слушал, да они, кажется, ни к кому в особенности и не обращались. I didn't check the translation in detail. It's actually kinda bad (feels like machine translation?). The bit in quotation marks would be better translated as "the door opened, revealing a lean muscular man wearing a shabby cap and sunglasses".
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Jul 22, 2021 19:47
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Honestly, the first thought that strikes me is “okay, but literally no one needs to read a story in which every character’s full outfit and appearance is discussed in detail, regardless of how important any of it is or is not.”
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Jul 22, 2021 20:20
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Mors Rattus posted:Honestly, the first thought that strikes me is “okay, but literally no one needs to read a story in which every character’s full outfit and appearance is discussed in detail, regardless of how important any of it is or is not.” Same. Like... the idea that you need to fully and specifically describe every detail about something, rather than find ways to encapsulate them briefly, leads to interminable and unreadable writing. Now, the joke could be about 'science fiction as predictive' because then, yeah, if what you're trying to do is use fiction to model the future world... you'll be missing endless numbers of crucial details, because fiction is fiction. It's not clear that's the intention, though.
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Jul 22, 2021 20:33
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Oh wow, never heard of that Campbell POS beforequote:Campbell was also responsible for the grim and controversial ending of Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations". Writer Joe Green recounted that Campbell had The story is set on a colony rescue ship transporting emergency medical supplies when they discover an 18yo stowaway who just wanted to meet her brother. The ship only has enough fuel to set down safely with the stated weight, so the girl has to be convinced to step out of an airlock. Apparently, these kind of non-existent margins made some engineers and Corry Doctorow really upset, and also the way the story had to be contorted to make sacrifice the only option, which is thing we do love to see in published RPGs, don't we? Mors Rattus posted:Honestly, the first thought that strikes me is “okay, but literally no one needs to read a story in which every character’s full outfit and appearance is discussed in detail, regardless of how important any of it is or is not.” *stares GRRMartinishly* Oh hell, how did I not retweet the Miette post the first time...
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Jul 22, 2021 21:22
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JcDent posted:Oh wow, never heard of that Campbell POS before I don't understand the idea of Sci-fi nerds wanting Engineers to be these HARD MEN who make stuff with NO SAFETY MARGINS for OPTIMUM PERFORMANCE. You always put a comfortable safety margin into things, because otherwise you get, well, the Tesla Death Factory.
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Jul 22, 2021 21:43
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Fivemarks posted:I don't understand the idea of Sci-fi nerds wanting Engineers to be these HARD MEN who make stuff with NO SAFETY MARGINS for OPTIMUM PERFORMANCE. You always put a comfortable safety margin into things, because otherwise you get, well, the Tesla Death Factory. There's some of that, but I don't think that was the main idea behind The Cold Equations. Science fiction before then (and to a large extent after), had been been pretty relentlessly optimistic. Things might look bad during the story, but in the end, good would triumph over evil, the hero would come up with a clever plan and end up with the girl, the threat to mankind would be defeated, and so on. The idea behind the story was that good doesn't always win. Sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, tragedy happens and the innocent suffer. It was sort of a push back against conventional science fiction. As for Campbell, I don't know that he was fascist, but he was racist. Isaac Asimov says that the reason that he didn't generally put aliens in his science fiction was because the only type of alien stories Campbell liked were once where in spite of the technological superiority of the aliens, the natural superiority of mankind would save the day. Asimov's problem with writing those stories was that Campbell sort of implied certain types of mankind were naturally more superior, and those more superior types didn't have names like Isaac Asimov. Then, of course, there was the time that Campbell rejected Samuel Delaney's "Nova", because he said that people wouldn't want to read and couldn't identify with a story with a black protagonist.
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Jul 22, 2021 23:45
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Epicurius posted:Then, of course, there was the time that Campbell rejected Samuel Delaney's "Nova", because he said that people wouldn't want to read and couldn't identify with a story with a black protagonist.
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Jul 22, 2021 23:52
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Nessus posted:Aha, so that's where that DS9 episode got it. It did. That DS9 episode was pretty full of almost direct references to science fiction writers. Sisko was Delaney, O'Brian was Asimov, Bashir was Kuttner, Kira was Moore, Quark was Ellison, and Odo was Campbell. There's even a joke in there near the beginning about how O'Brian's character finally got his novel about robots accepted for publication by Gnome Press, who in real life, in 1950, published Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot".
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Jul 23, 2021 00:01
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Yeah, Campbell was a real piece of work, and his malign influence echoes through SF even today. My favorite thing about him was his dedication to rock-hard real science in his science fiction - which, of course, meant that he was a complete IRL sucker for things like ESP/psionics, the inertialess "Dean Drive", and the Hieronymous Machine. He published a lot of early Dianetics material, too.
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Jul 23, 2021 00:02
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FMguru posted:Yeah, Campbell was a real piece of work, and his malign influence echoes through SF even today. I mean, I think his influence was complicated. He was racist, and pretty right wing, and in his personal life an rear end in a top hat, and a lot of that influence continues down into modern science fiction in not always the best ways. However, at the same time, Astounding and Unknown basically invented modern science fiction and fantasy and gave a platform for all the people who would become giants in the Golden Age....Asimov, Moore, Kuttler, van Vogt, del Ray, Sturgeon, Heinlein, etc, all got their start thanks to him, and he did a lot to boost already published authors....Moore, Kuttner, de Camp, Williamson, etc. In short, he was a land of contrasts, and I can understand both naming an award after him and also some people being uncomfortable about receiving an award named after him.
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Jul 23, 2021 00:26
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Fivemarks posted:I don't understand the idea of Sci-fi nerds wanting Engineers to be these HARD MEN who make stuff with NO SAFETY MARGINS for OPTIMUM PERFORMANCE. You always put a comfortable safety margin into things, because otherwise you get, well, the Tesla Death Factory. I've always been surprised at the lack of desire to be the Kalashnikov of whatever. To build for durability and endurance, to design a machine that can keep working even after their own death. I can't think of a stronger way to leave a legacy. It's a shame that his name got attached to weapons when he wanted to design tractors or other non-war things, absolutely, but nonetheless Mikhail Kalashnikov left a design legacy which has become a byword. It's become cultural shorthand. THAT is immortality.
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Jul 23, 2021 00:28
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Redeye Flight posted:I've always been surprised at the lack of desire to be the Kalashnikov of whatever. To build for durability and endurance, to design a machine that can keep working even after their own death.
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Jul 23, 2021 00:48
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It's because they're techbros, not engineers. Engineers look you straight in the eye and say that the elevator needs a safety factor of 14.
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Jul 23, 2021 01:13
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