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mellonbread posted:The Witness Alliance guy is basically a less interesting retread of the Cult of Transcendence. His progression is primarily tied to some events that he experienced offscreen in the organization's backstory, with the players given limited ability to discover that backstory. The CoT were hinted at in the late 90s and were supposed to be part of an upcoming book. Their content dropped in 2010, in a time when the old model of DG's content and feel and half life had kind of long decayed into needing to change into something different. Old DG is really metaplot and world-building heavy, and there's poo poo like Steven Alzis and other plot pets. Old DG is really heavily latched into conspiracies being some of the big problems in the world, and the CoT is a pretty massive conspiracy to punch back at. The problem is that by 2010 RPG design was moving pretty steadily past the structures of metaplot and plot important PCs, and culturally the world/America were changing very rapidly since 9/11 and conspiracies in general are less...fun, for lack of a better word. It's always been the case that the majority of conspiracies are xenophobic/Antisemitic horseshit used by white racists to justify why they feel like marginalized groups shouldn't be allowed to have things like "nice lives" and that's pretty apparent by the time 2010 rolls around after 9 years of 9/11 conspiracy poo poo and a minimum of 2 years of "the president is a secret African Muslim terrorist married to a trans woman" and the initial mainstream rise of Alex Jones and other fear-mongering racist grifters visibly intermingling with the American news media. And I think ultimately the CoT should've just been dropped as the writing was on the wall with how the world was changing since the late 90s. They missed the boat on getting it out of the door at an earlier time, and DG as a whole really has a problem with not knowing when to kill some of its darlings/ideas and they eventually get rolled out into print because it's a pretty small group of like-minded friends and coworkers who like their structure a lot and have similar politics and collaborate a lot without getting a lot of outside input or critique. Some of their ideas finally see the light of day after years of development hell and are interesting/functional enough in their own right (I'm looking at you, Impossible Landscapes) but the CoT is absolutely not one of them. Anyway in short I don't really give a poo poo about the Witness Alliance because it's too much about this dude who got hollowed out by an experience with the eldritch and he really can't be "saved" or even really helped and that whole plotline is just too on the nose of IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOOOOOOOUUUUUU which yeah but also presupposing you live that long.
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Oct 9, 2021 01:19
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Tibalt posted:I'm a little confused. So your Beloveds are randomly generated, and the Scenes are randomly ordered and set up. Each scene specifies how many characters (instructors or Beloveds) are involved and sometimes gives guidelines on picking a character, but the selection is usually up to the player. Even if you have multiple characters in a scene, they won't be in the same action at the same time, so you just play the part of whoever's currently involved in what's going on.
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Oct 9, 2021 02:13
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Ettin posted:Did someone say Heck yes
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Oct 9, 2021 02:22
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Down With People posted:
One thing I'm not getting is instead of using Not the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Not the Southern Poverty Law Center, why not just use the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Southern Poverty Law Center? And with the Witnesses, once again why are otherwise presumably competent DG agents being handed the idiot ball? My take would be to run Delta Green like they were the Department of Military Sciences out of the Joe Ledger series. There is a War on Terror, but Terror has a far more comprehensive meaning that most of the world suspects. Hell even without that, "We want background checks on X, Y and Z." "Cool, it turns out that Y used to be with our bunch. He's probably several bananas short of a full bunch at this point." "Good to know. We'll keep some eyes on him." Which means they should be in positions to intervene before he murders his would-be girlfriend and DG has to frame somebody for murder.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:37
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They can't use NCMEC and SPLC because those are private organizations that will probably sue them for unauthorized use of their names and maybe even drop some defamation on there while they're at it. You can make up whatever you want about government entities, they're literally public domain.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:50
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Siivola posted:Holy poo poo Ettin's back The answer is, they do have a temple. It's OANN, Infowars, etc., and the social media algorithms that redirect vulnerable people to them. And they have a structure too: the people making bank off of owning those purveyors, who are supported by the politicians who find it useful to have an audience of pre-primed believers.
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Oct 9, 2021 05:28
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Midjack posted:They can't use NCMEC and SPLC because those are private organizations that will probably sue them for unauthorized use of their names and maybe even drop some defamation on there while they're at it. You can make up whatever you want about government entities, they're literally public domain. I sort of get it, though given what they used I do expect to hear some about the advertising war between Doke and Nepsi.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:20
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wiegieman posted:The answer is, they do have a temple. It's OANN, Infowars, etc., and the social media algorithms that redirect vulnerable people to them.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:39
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Siivola posted:Great! Let’s raid The Algorithm and go through the papers we find there.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:42
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Siivola posted:Great! Let’s raid The Algorithm and go through the papers we find there. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to punch the zuck right in his stupid obviously deep one face.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:43
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Nessus posted:The place where it breaks down for me is "reveling in joy," but this creates the ultimate cosmic comedy of the MythosAnon people making headway as the investigators struggle, only to be confronted with some new and potent allies: the Cthulhu cult, who can tell this poo poo ain't it, boss. You don't get QAnon, do you? If they were PCs, they'd get over any Stress/Insanity/etc caused by Cthulhu reveals by taking the Keep Posting Through It downtime activity and maybe harassing a service employee.
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Oct 9, 2021 07:46
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The Dream Syndicate really feels like players in a totally different game, honestly. "I plug the drive into an air gapped computer" is pretty much the "defensive ward of salt" tactic for hacking PCs, I imagine.
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Oct 9, 2021 08:05
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JcDent posted:You don't get QAnon, do you? If they were PCs, they'd get over any Stress/Insanity/etc caused by Cthulhu reveals by taking the Keep Posting Through It downtime activity and maybe harassing a service employee.
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Oct 9, 2021 09:31
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Nessus posted:Sure, but we're talking about them as some kind of Mythos cult. They're certainly shouting, and sometimes they're killing, but QAnon people seem to be uniformly pretty miserable, oscillating through hatred, anxiety, fear and anger, with perhaps the occasional successful hategasm. They have a lot of hategasms though. It’s kind of their thing: they’ve convinced themselves they’re winning, they’re inventing feel-good stories about putting Hillary in jail, they believe they’re the ones sitting on the hidden knowledge and are smarter than everyone else, and their mass activities seem to have an element of primal joy to them. Let’s storm the capital, it’ll be a fun prank bro!
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Oct 9, 2021 11:14
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LatwPIAT posted:They have a lot of hategasms though. It’s kind of their thing: they’ve convinced themselves they’re winning, they’re inventing feel-good stories about putting Hillary in jail, they believe they’re the ones sitting on the hidden knowledge and are smarter than everyone else, and their mass activities seem to have an element of primal joy to them. Let’s storm the capital, it’ll be a fun prank bro! Or even better, let’s storm school board meetings all over the country and get people fired for advocating for something we think we don’t like. In our world, that’s critical race theory (and that’s absolutely happening). In the DG universe, they’re yelling about something that’s important to whatever the Mythos sorcerer who managed to influence them wanted. But nobody controls the movement, it’s all about influence and who they’re listening to this week. (Currently in our universe QAnon is very worried that General Flynn is a satanist.) This makes them a terrifying problem. You can’t go kill a single person and shut them down. I’d be careful using them because some players have family members who are lost to QAnon and may want more escapism in their doomed roleplay. But they’d be a great antagonist.
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Oct 9, 2021 19:27
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i feel like DG makes way more sense as a Cold War setting. It's sorta like James Bond in that way. It's just not as fun for me now that it has hit this post-modern era.
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Oct 9, 2021 21:10
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There's also the fact that a lot of QAnon types are child predators using self-projection. Some time ago the /r/greatawakening subreddit was the primary place for QAnon advocates on Reddit, and the mods had to put up a notice that looking for, asking for, and/or posting child porn was in fact illegal. A large amount of members complained, claiming that this was harming their "research." Yeah, "research purposes." If I had a nickel for every time I heard that one... This, along with their blatant white supremacy, makes them perfectly despicable villains to go after. But like Thanlis said, using them as an antagonistic faction requires tact and consent from the gaming group.
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Oct 9, 2021 21:33
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  5. NEW LIFE FERTILITY New Life Fertility is a company that offers high-end exclusive in-vitro fertilisation services to the wealthy. They pride themselves on an all-natural proprietary procedure that uses no embryo-stimulating drugs, meaning only a single egg is fertilized in the process. They nonetheless have a near-100% success rate with the process, even among clients who had been believed to be sterile. All of this would be revolutionary in the field of reproductive medicine if the wider scientific community found out about it, but New Life is keeping their methods secret. This might be because none of the children they produce are human. Noreen MacDougal was a nurse and midwife who had the pleasure of working at Bourn Hall Clinic, the first clinic to produce infants through in-vitro fertilisation in 1978. She was passionate about naturopathy and eventually returned to school to get a degree in naturopathic medicine. At Brichester University in the picturesque Severn Valley, MacDougal extensively researched local folklore about ancient healing practices. One woman in the area told her about the grotto, located under an island in the Severn River. Generations of women had gone to the grotto, descending down a frayed rope ladder to access a natural spring of warm, white fluid. Women who bathed in it and then had sex could conceive children like nothing else, leading the Romans to call it the Lac Maternum. MacDougal decided to check it out. Two weeks later she was found unconscious in a field, one month pregnant. She returned to her studies and eventually rejoined her family in Oxford to give birth to her child, which was sadly stillborn. In that missing two weeks after she had drunken the Lac Maternum, she was subjected to powerful cosmic visions of a primordial entity that defied explanation. Moreover, she was a virgin when she entered the grotto and had emerged pregnant. She returned to the Bourn Hall Clinic with a new zeal for reproductive science. In the 80s, MacDougal met Rudella and Axel Dasinger. A fashion designer and hedge fund manager respectively, all of their wealth could not help them conceive a child, not even with Bourn Hall's IVF treatments. By this time, MacDougal had extensively researched the Mother's Milk using Bourn Hall's facilities and was ready to put her studies into practice. With funding from the Dasingers, MacDougal set up her own IVF facility that would use a 'natural' approach instead of artificially stimulating the ovaries with hormones. A month after exposure to the Milk, Rudella was pregnant, later giving birth to a healthy baby girl. As the ethics of IVF fell under question, the Dasingers saw a business opportunity and expanded MacDougal's facility into New Life Fertility: discreet, private, all-natural IVF for those who could afford it. Everything was coming up New Life. The Dasingers became richer and more influential, while Macdougal became more zealous and paranoid. The natural methodology as the Dasingers understood it allowed them to reconcile the process with their strict Catholic background while MacDougal convinced them their whole operation would be shut down if their secrets were broken to the wider scientific community. In time, they saw their treatment as a gift to only be given to the deserving elite. They used their profits to set up the New Life Foundation, an international non-profit with a focus on reproductive health - in theory. In accordance with the Dasingers' beliefs, the foundation simultaneously funded research into HIV and AIDs while also spreading anti-contraception propaganda. Science marched on, and the advent of gene sequencing tech in 2005 led MacDougal to some uncomfortable realisations. The babies that were being churned out by New Life had genetic mutations that could not be traced to either parent. Then in 2010, the Dasingers asked MacDougal for help once more. Their daughter Mary Dasinger was 21, married and unable to conceive. It was time for New Life to work its magic. And yet, Mary still could not conceive, not even with the Milk. Gene sequencing revealed that it wasn't that she was sterile, but she was just completely incompatible with humans on a reproductive level. She was effectively a new species entirely, a patchwork genetic chimera along with the thousands of other New Life babies. But before NLF could get sued into oblivion, Mary finally got pregnant - not with her husband, but with Derek Andersson, the son of a Swedish politician and another New Life baby himself. It was love at first sight and they had been able to conceive almost immediately. The Dasingers were so overjoyed they didn't even care about the infidelity. After these revelations, MacDougal worked to uncover the memories she had lost after discovering the Lac Maternum. She could not remember how she became pregnant, though she was sure the Milk was somehow responsible. She ended up tracking down the details of the obstetrician who delivered her stillborn baby. Him and his wife had both passed away, but his son gave her his journals. MacDougal could not remember the details of the labour, as she had been heavily sedated. She was horrified by what she discovered. MacDougal's baby wasn't a stillborn, but it also wasn't human. The thing the doctor pulled out of her had goat hooves, damp fur and a horrifying array of erect genitalia. The spine of the monster baby was lined with eyes. The obstetrician presumably failed his SAN check and immediately tried to stab the thing to death with a scalpel, which led it to fight back with kicking hooves and horrible writhing tendrils. The nurses held it still for the killing blow before finishing the delivery. They swaddled the thing in a baby blanket and chucked it in an incinerator. MacDougal returned to Severn Valley and made another descent into the grotto. She submerged herself in the Lac Maternum and was remade. She saw that the fertility of life was a cosmic principle, embodied by the goddess Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. She saw that though all fertility was connected to the Black Goat, there were many life forms that were separated from her. That included humanity (which, as we all know, was derived from extrusions of Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source), among which only scant millions had even a weak connection to Shub-Niggurath. MacDougal could change all that: NLF was a breeding program that was creating thousands of new humans with an innate connection to the Mother Goddess, who would interbreed and create even stronger children, children whose purity would rival that of MacDougal's unjustly slain child. MacDougal emerged from the grotto burning with inhuman insight and pregnant with another child. Mary Dasinger gave birth to her first child. It wasn't a goat monster but a healthy baby - a baby with horizontal slits for pupils, but otherwise healthy. Meanwhile, MacDougal started contacting the now-adult New Life progeny, revealing to them her special plan for this world. At some point, the senior Dasingers managed to get their hands on a genetics test and angrily confronted MacDougal. She told them to gently caress off and got in contact with Mary, who arranged her parents' seemingly-accidental death. Expecting more angry parents at some point, MacDougal purchased the Cybele super-yacht and moved the entire New Life facility on board. It was the perfect place for her to deliver her second child. With only Dasinger children present to oversee the labour, MacDougal gave birth to a healthy monstrous goat demon. With its first breath it spoke the name of its divine parent. Its many appendages produced all the Lac Maternum that New Life would ever need, and MacDougal named it Caprus. It doesn't speak a word of the Queen's English but it was the size of an adult human by the time it reached its fourth birthday. The eldest Dasinger children, Mary and her brother James, run NLF as CEO and COO. They are thoroughly indoctrinated into the worship of Shub-Niggurath and are powerful sorcerers in their own right. Derek Andersson is also a worshipper, but continues to live in Sweden, using his political connections to gain temporal power for the NLF. All over the world, New Life children begin to feel the call of their true parentage and are drawn to mate with other New Life. 800 of the 15000 first-gen New Life have reached maturity by 2018, producing 600 second-gen children. Their window of fertility is brief but fruitful. They're on track for 25 000 first-gen New Life by 2030 and a total population of 600 000 by 2100. 600 000 wealthy, inhuman sociopaths who believe they are divinely appointed by the Mother-of-All.  LIFE FINDS A WAY In its modern incarnation, New Life Fertility Inc. exists purely to license out the 'New Life Fertility' trademark to the endless cycle of shell corporations that shuffle money through a massive chain of subsidiaries, ending up in Hong Kong bank accounts belonging to MacDougal and the Dasingers. Mary Dasinger continues her political work, simultaneously funding pro-life political parties and cheaper access to treatments for sexually-transmitted infections. James Dasinger has returned to Frankfurt where he works with DRJ Partners, a large law firm that specialises in, and I quote, 'high-end criminal defence cases such as vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence of being fantastically wealthy.' New Life children typically do hosed up poo poo, often against their parents, and it's in the interests of NLF to protect them from the consequences of their actions. On the more benign side of things, he also works with a team of about 25 salespersons who seek out prospective clients for the New Life treatment. NLF is pro-life in every possible meaning of the term. They want everything breeding as much as possible. Climate change, war and the diminishing resources of the planet are completely irrelevant to them, as long as something survives and is loving its brains out. Led by MacDougal, the highest echelons of New Life are devoted cultists of Shub-Niggurath, all of whom are New Life children themselves. They see their species as the natural overlords of humanity and look forward to the day they can rule the world with us as slaves. They are working hard to increase the international birth-rate because they want as many slaves as possible. Their plan requires a constant stream of Mother's Milk, which is thankfully easily produced. In addition to being the Cadillac of making people pregnant, it has the following properties: - Drinking a pint of it replenishes Willpower to its maximum, at the cost of 1/1D6 SAN. If the drinker is wounded, the Milk also heals 1D4 HP every turn for 1D4 turns. This costs 1 SAN. - Drinking a gallon in a single day has the effect of the ritual One Who Passes The Gateways. This means that the thirsty bitch goes unconscious for about 12 hours as their mind is cast into the furthest reaches of the cosmos (1D4+1D20 SAN which...has to be a typo). - Drinking cumulative pints equal to their POW transforms them into a worthy vessel for the gifts of Shub-Niggurath. They automatically fail any opposed POW rolls against Black Goat cultists, as well as any spells related to Her. Their body chemistry changes completely, becoming a bubbling crock pot of bacteria and diseases, leading them to always smell very ripe. New Life's base of operations is the Cybele. Originally commissioned by a member of the Oman royal family, this floating palace is both hotel and fertility clinic for the leaders of New Life and their clients. There's a small army of 115 assorted service staff on board, including 30 medical personnel. They frequently suffer colds and other illnesses from being around the New Life. Most of them are completely unaware of Shub-Niggurath, though the medics have been partially initiated into the mysteries. Only a few of them have entered the temple. Hidden beneath the waterline, the temple is a special hold that is only accessible to MacDougal and New Life's elite. It holds a heated pool of Mother's Milk for the pleasure of Caprus, who is now a full two meters tall. There is also a Gate that leads to the Dasinger mansion in Frankfurt. MacDougal constantly hears soft collisions and high-pitched squeals at night, and is considering installing an illuminated glass bottom to the hull to see just who in the ocean is knocking at her door. Key members of New Life include: Noreen MacDougal: Now in her 60s, MacDougal's just about hit her limit for being part of humanity. She can still maintain a veneer of civility for clients but often loses herself listening to the cosmic hum of the Magna Mater. She's crazier than a shithouse rat but has never personally harmed anyone, for whatever that's worth. Mary Dasinger: Born with a silver spoon in her mouth and monster blood in her veins, Mary has always had the best of everything. She was passionate about helping animals and sick children in her teen years while simultaneously killing any that she judged to be too weak. She was still shocked when she first came into contact with Shub-Niggurath. As the CEO of New Life Fertility, Mary's being prepared for the day when she'll take over the role of sorceress supreme from MacDougal. It's been agreed that she should stop ageing entirely, so she has, using the cannibalistic Ageless Banquet ritual. She is always 27 and unlike other New Life, always fertile. Her relationship with Derek is important to her because it gives her access to political power and an endless supply of fresh nut. She considers her past with James to be behind her. James Dasinger: James is a fruit loop even by New Life standards. He has never gotten over his teenage incest romance that he pursued with Mary. He loves her, worships her and believes she belongs to him alone. MacDougal is currently trying to get him to mate with literally anyone or anything else, but he only loves Mary. Part of why he was moved back to Frankfurt was to stop his insane infatuation causing problems on the Cybele. On top of that, he is an amoral, ambitious sociopath. Caprus: When it's not leading New Life in deranged ritual orgies, Caprus spends its days in the temple communing with the Mother-of-All, expanding its consciousness and growing its power. Soon it will be able to reach out to the millions of humans who have the gift of the Black Goat, even casting Exchange Personalities on them. In a few hundred years it will be able to enslave those humans with a single thought. It is a Haedi Nigritiae, one of the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. If you want to kill Caprus, you might need some kind of artillery piece. Irene Lihosit: A New Life Fertility Consultant, one of the group's expert salespeople. She is a respectable and accomplished sales executive. She doesn't know anything about Shub-Niggurath or any of that poo poo and would be horrified if she found out. Even learning about the operations of the New Life Foundation would turn her against her superiors. Hilmar Oropreza: A DRJ fixer, a job which entails destroying evidence and silencing witnesses to keep New Life offspring on the streets. A Bolivian ex-convict and ex-Marine who went from working for gangs to working for DRJ. He doesn't know about Shub-Niggurath but DRJ pays him so well he might not give a gently caress if he did. In addition, we get more details on the New Life offspring. The first-gen New Life start off as normal children but start to feel the call of the Mother as they enter adolescence. They engage in antisocial behaviour while also feeling drawn to other New Life, sometimes to an obsessive and unseemly degree. If they don't grow up among others of their species, they tend to take up travelling, unconsciously searching for worthy mates. They aren't naturally violent, but they can learn quickly if their biological urges require it. Second-gen New Life are the offspring of two first-gen New Life parents. They also look healthy aside from the goat eyes, for which NLF offers a range of fancy contact lenses. Unlike their parents, they are born completely insane with absolutely 0 regard for humanity. None of them are old enough for that to become a problem yet. If any of them meet Caprus or another Dark Young, they will immediately run to their tendril-y embrace with the happiness of a child reunited with its parent.  gently caress THE PAIN AWAY New Life Fertility hasn't metastasized as a mythos cult yet. It hasn't begun building up a stockpile of magical artefacts and mainly stays focused on building temporal influence. The book suggests the following progression of events: Delta Green sends the agents over to the UK as part of a joint operation with the redeemed PISCES. Whatever mission they're on, someone hears about the hosed up Severn Valley region and the wealthy tourists who keep going down to this grotto (MacDougal has used it to initiate people because of its mystic significance, not because she needs any more Lac Maternum). Alternatively, some of the growing New Life kids are showing troubling signs of spooky child disorder and the agents are sent to investigate. Any attempt to incarcerate a New Life child leads to the DRJ sending first its lawyers then its fixers to liberate the child by any means necessary. Once New Life realises they're fighting some kind of special federal law enforcement, they lawyer up, pull favours, do whatever they need to do to shut the op down. If the agents are with the Program, things might get even more complicated. A couple of big-wigs in March Technologies are New Life clients. The order from on-high might be to begin a campaign of industrial espionage to steal their secrets, or to leave them the gently caress alone. Disobeying orders here could put the agents in the cross-hairs of both March Tech and DRJ. Faced with a new and dangerous opponent, DRJ outsources the problem to new and dangerous contractors. They hire Duma Jesani, a Kenyan soldier of fortune who made his money training and leading insurgents throughout central Africa. He's invited to Frankfurt with the promise of a big pay check and mystic secrets, but he's only interested in the former. He sets about hiring ex-military criminals to serve as security on the Cybele and 'wrecking crews' to gently caress with Delta Green. The agents will encounter a wrecking crew if they're working on further operations against New Life Fertility. This could mean tampering with brakes, setting up a car bomb or even just straight-up shooting them in the street. That said, the wrecking crews don't have black ops experience and they might not be ready for the physical and supernatural havoc that can be dished out by a veteran Delta Green agent. In addition, they may overstep their bounds and cause undue attention when they try to shoot a federal agent on US soil. Any captured wrecking crew members don't know anything about New Life, but agents can work their way up the chain of command to DRJ and eventually NLF itself. NLF goes into panic mode. MacDougal and the Dasingers regroup on the Cybele. They prepare a list of the thousand odd New Life adults who are most receptive to the call of Shub-Niggurath. The yacht docks in Panama while the New Life offspring are gathered in Frankfurt. They are blindfolded, sent through the Gate to the Cybele, have crazy magic bath sex with Caprus and return to Frankfurt. They are now the Thousand Young, incandescent and insane sorcerers of the Black Goat. NLF can do 50 conversions a month, with Jesani (if he's still around) hiring a new crew to handle security in Panama. The Thousand Young return to their homes and set about teaching their fellow New Life the Sparknotes version of NLF's doctrine. This leads to an explosion of occult sexmurders among the global 1%. DRJ does what it can to protect these people from the law, but all of this is extremely expensive and NLF isn't able to conduct regular business during this time. This forces the Thousand Young to dig into their own pockets to prop up NLF, which leads to even more murders for Mummy and Daddy's money. The whole time this is happening, the agents are probably dodging DRJ wrecking crews and trying to find where all these fecund assholes have disappeared to. Fortunately, the Thousand Young are as vain as they've ever been, leaving a trail of selfies and metadata from Frankfurt to Panama and back. The final battle takes place on the Cybele. The agents may want to just hit the thing with autocannons and walk away, but it's cooler to get them physically on the yacht. The Program says they want the technology, while the Outlaws say they want everything on the ship confirmed dead before it sinks. Whenever it's dramatically appropriate, James will fail in his attempt to reclaim Mary, causing him to lose his marbles. He murders MacDougal and most likely begins a hideous intra-family civil war right as the agents start boarding. Once the ship is scuppered, New Life Fertility is finished - aside from the thousands of growing New Life all over the world.  I love New Life Fertility. The faction write-up has everything I want to see in a Delta Green conspiracy. They are powerful and scary, but they have weaknesses, gaps in their armour that can be prised open by diligent agents. Their progression feels like a natural escalation of events and even has a built-in action movie climax. Initially I was put off by the fact that permanent victory seems impossible here, but I think it's very fitting with the themes of the game. You can destroy New Life Fertility, but the New Life themselves are 15 000 of the world's wealthiest - an international pogrom would be a tall order for the Program and is completely out of the question for the Outlaws. Forrest James has his work cut out for him killing a hundred babies on US soil, and there's 800 second-gen New Life infants across the planet. They're in the world now, even if they are no longer bound together by the conspiracy-cult. The forces of the unnatural are here to stay, whether Delta Green likes it or not. Next time: The Lonely! Down With People fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Oct 10, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 22:42
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I appreciate the parts of NLF that are about killing the 1%, I feel like most of my players would absolutely be down with the ending largely giving them carte blanche to show up and blow away amoral billionaires every so often.
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Oct 9, 2021 23:01
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New Life Fertility is basically X Men but from the perspective of the guy who built the Sentinels. There's a race of human look-alikes that's more powerful than you and doesn't have your best interests at heart, and you're worried they'll eventually outcompete your species. Hell, the boss creature even has Cerebro powers with the ability to find other mutants across the planet. Not that there's anything wrong with that. A lot of my favorite scenarios - published, fanmade or my own - are just "X but in Delta Green".
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Oct 9, 2021 23:22
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and thank god it doesn't go in the places Shub-Niggurath write ups always seem to go in (Sex cocaine murder party)
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Oct 9, 2021 23:33
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They're a fine enough idea and they excited me enough to back the initial product but in the long run I'm disappointed they're another Shub problem and would just rework them into something original. The framework and initial hook is great but Shub content can get samey and is also very familiar content for seasoned players.
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Oct 9, 2021 23:44
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Personally, I find the idea of 'evil fertility clinic' rather skeevy and unfortunate, in this day and age.
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Oct 9, 2021 23:45
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Cythereal posted:Personally, I find the idea of 'evil fertility clinic' rather skeevy and unfortunate, in this day and age. I think what keeps it from being skeevy to me is that there are no super-overt politics about IVF itself and no punching down. Like, New Life isn't some thinly veiled parody of an actual IVF clinic or movement like you'd see if it was in CTech. The assholes and eventual evilpersons aren't like, poor Mr. and Mrs. McSalty who live in a barn and can barely afford a pinecone a day, instead they're hyper-rich giga-pricks who would probably deserve shooting by Delta Green even if their own demon kids didn't ice them first. I feel like if anything, what it's lacking is a New Life child or two who, for whatever reason, ended up being raised by perfectly normal people and turned out perfectly capable of not being sociopaths and rejecting the call of Hella Shub, simply by not being raised in a cloying aura of their own superiority and piles of dollars. Like, rather than Shub and its spawn apparently having a vested interest in displacing humanity, it would be more entertaining if Shub was genuinely just a dispassionate force of fertility and all the evil was billionaire/fanatic humans', as they read some greater plan into Shub and its powers that simply aren't there.
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Oct 10, 2021 00:02
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I like the way it poses the question "Just what is the difference between a hosed up inhuman creature with zero regard for humanity and a typical 1%er?"
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Oct 10, 2021 00:04
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PurpleXVI posted:I think what keeps it from being skeevy to me is that there are no super-overt politics about IVF itself and no punching down. Like, New Life isn't some thinly veiled parody of an actual IVF clinic or movement like you'd see if it was in CTech. I think it helps that the single-egg fertilization process implies an ideological bent that is itself very alien to the usual IVF clinics. They don't come off as an IVF clinic, they come off as an unusually shady IVF clinic driven by people with marginal beliefs who're deliberately avoiding medical oversight by running their business in international waters. That and the fact there's a correlation between support for fertility clinics and abortion access in the US, and the NLF are clearly pro-life. So it feels slightly wrong from the get-go. Hostile V posted:They're a fine enough idea and they excited me enough to back the initial product but in the long run I'm disappointed they're another Shub problem and would just rework them into something original. The framework and initial hook is great but Shub content can get samey and is also very familiar content for seasoned players. Thankfully, "weird alien baby" is such a common horror trope that you're never left spoiling for choice: Deep Ones? Demons? Indigo children? Space aliens? Clone of Hitler? The Dunwich Horror? Mi-go project? Genetic experiment by the Marsh Corporation? Genetic experiment by the government? Host for a cosmic consciousness? Second coming of Christ? Stewie Griffin? Reincarnated Mage the Ascension nephandi? Dhampir? The antichrist?
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Oct 10, 2021 00:35
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 Ninja Burger: The Role Playing Game - Part 1 You just know nothing with this font could include anything offensive! Do you enjoy dumb internet jokes from the early 2000's? Do you fondly remember arguing about Ninja vs. pirates? How about some casual racism, Orientalism and cultural appropriation? You don't like any of those things? Too bad, because I'm going to review Ninja Burger: The Role Playing Game anyhow. If I'm feeling particularly spicy, I may even review the second edition as well. Why, and how, did this concept get a second edition you ask? Good question. A better question might be, why do I own both editions and the associated employee handbook? Answer: I was a teenager with some disposable income, and some friends and I were trying to hit a shipping threshold for an online order with a gaming retailer. Plus, I genuinely found the whole concept funny at the time and actually wanted them. Teenage me did not always have the best taste. So, Ninja Burger is based on the website of the same name. The website, and by extension all related media properties, consists of a single extremely stretched joke: what if Hollywood style ninja had decided to operate a fast food restaurant specializing in delivery. That is the whole joke. Delivered in thirty minutes or less, or we will commit seppuku! That is pretty much the level of humour you can expect from here on out. I have to admit, a part of me still finds at least some of the whole concept funny. I think that some of it is just nostalgia, but I also suspect that you could maybe do the concept with less of the problematic writing surrounding it. If I didn't know better, I could probably pretend it was all just satire about how the west views certain cultural aspects of eastern Asia. It definitely isn't that though. I apologize in advance for what I assume to be horrible translations. I don't know any Japanese and I suspect that the author didn't either. Anything translated into Japanese from English, or vice versa, is me copying from the original text. The first edition of this game is quite short and of a low print quality, including the small quantities of art. Even the cover art is extremely simple and cartoony, not particularly stylized interestingly, and full of artifacting. It's much more like a zine really. It is the product of 9th Level Games and aethereal FORGE. I'm not very familiar with the work of either company. I did some quick googling and 9th Level Games appears to have made Rebel Scum, which I've heard decent things about, but have never personally read or played. Interestingly, Ninja Burger does not appear to be listed on their site, at least not on their TTRPG list. The other company appears to have only really made this game, associated content, and some little FUDGE works. The game was published in 2001, and it is very evident. It runs on the BEER! engine, which I have never encountered before or since. I haven't actually played this game, haven't cracked it open in over ten years, and I don't remember how the rules worked, so I'll be figuring out if it sucks or not as we go!  Definitely nothing problematic here. Special call-out to the credits page, which I never bothered reading before. It includes the following two "joke" entries: Editing: Michael 'Aeon' Fiegel and a group of illegal immigrants from 9th Level Games. Special Thanks to aethereal FORGE, the colour blue, anyone who's ever dubbed a martial arts movie, and the IRS for tax laws that allow us to do this without making a profit. Taking into consideration a reference to the authors being in Silicon Valley, I'm gonna go ahead and form some opinions about them now. Also, note that they thank people who dubbed films, not anyone who actually made them. Michael Fiegel has some writing credits I don't recognize at a glance and has more recently written a novel that appears to be about an adult male sociopath serial killer who kidnaps a young girl (totally not for any sexual reasons at all guys, pinky swear!), then raises her as a version of himself. I haven't read it, am not going to read it and it frankly sounds kind of a hosed up thing to write. A quick glance at his Twitter doesn't really show any overt politics, aside from a vague "we should do better" statement. Mostly it's plugging his book and posting ninja stuff like it's still the early 2000's. Fun fact, I did stumble across what appear to be a bunch of articles written by him on some forum. A quick glance indicates he wrote a very long and detailed piece on how much he dislikes D&D 4th Edition. Credit where it's due, he claims to have at least played the game for several months before forming his opinion. On the other hand, I don't have enough time in my life to read a decade old rant about a game I never actually played, so I'm going to assume his review is terrible and bad. Irony! I can find basically nothing on the other creator, Kenshiro Aette. He's been involved in a few other things, all of them minor. The most notable, and I use that term loosely, one seems to be an old MUD. I suspect that he didn't do much of the writing and was just included due to his involvement in the original concept. His name also appears to not be attached to any future products in the line. So far as I can tell, Aette doesn't appear to be a Japanese last name, though I'm happy to be corrected on this. My point is that it doesn't appear as though any Asian people worked on this game. I could be wrong about this, the lack of info attached to many of the names means I'm making assumptions based on how white the names look. I suspect I'm not wrong though, just as much as I assume that they never had anyone do a sensitivity read of any of their work. I mean, it was 2001 after all. Also, I just find it super annoying that the primary author clearly made sure his name was always listed as Michael 'Aeon' Fiegel. It's the kind of thing I would have thought was cool when I was thirteen maybe. For an adult to do that really just seems like they're trying to force a nickname. Right, enough nitpicking over the authors and speculating on their intent. LoL, that's a lie, I'm totally going to keep doing that. The game starts with a functional foreword and introduction. Nothing special, but they do a decent enough job of conveying the intended tone and content of the game. Namely; you are playing stereotypical pop culture ninja who deliver fast food, this game does not take itself seriously, play should be expected to be loose and fast. The game uses the BEER system for its engine. It explicitly promises that it's simple enough to learn and play while inebriated. All checks are made using d6's, evidently by attempting to roll under (matching apparently is a failure I guess.) your relevant stat. More difficult checks make you roll more dice and add them together. In this game, the four stats are Strength, Agility, Ki, and Extraneous. Get it, it's a beer, I mean Sake, and pretzels game. The character sheet, referred to as the Ninja Employment Reference Form (Get it? Hope you're ready for more of that humour! God I don't miss 2001), is fairly simple, if poorly laid out and incredibly ugly.  Stats are obtained by rolling 3d6 four times, high numbers being better. It does not specify, so I assume it is intended that you are allowed to pick which stay gets which number. Then it uses the rest of (read: majority of) the paragraph to make an extended joke about how if you dishonour yourself by cheating you will DIE! I'm generally not in favour of random stat rolls these days. They can be fun, but there are way too many associated balance issues and there are demonstrably better systems available. Obviously point buy is probably a little silly and over complicated for a game that intends you to dive right in, but I really feel like a standard array would make more sense and be even faster. It really just feels like one of those "this is how D&D does it, so this is what you're supposed to do" things. Strength is very straightforward. It measures how big and strong you are. You use it to lift, break or hurt things. It also governs your resilience, as your starting hit points are equal to your Strength score. Agility is pretty much the same, but for dexterity. You use it to sneak, dodge and generally do stealthy ninja stuff. It is also your stat for determining how hard it is to hit you. Agility is used to derive your Combat Dice score, or CD. This is the number of dice others need to roll to strike your character. A chart is provided to calculate your CD. It appears to just go up by one for every four points in Agility you have. Frankly, seems overly complicated to me, but whatever. It's not like there are so many rules to remember that it would be much of an issue. Still, even just spending five seconds thinking about it, wouldn't it make sense to make the increment 5 instead of 4? To be fair to the game, I don't believe there's any character advancement rules, so you probably only need to calculate this once. Ki is for intelligence, knowledge, self control and Ninja Magic. Oh boy, I always wanted to play Naruto, but delivering burgers. Spoilers, I looked ahead and the Ninja Magic is pretty much just Naruto fanfic. At least I think so, based on my tenuous knowledge of that show. Extraneous is everything else! Examples include repairing holes in your ninja gear when it was torn apart by terrorist gunfire. It is used to calculate your Move score in a nearly, but not exactly, identical method to CD. Seriously, compare these two charts.   Why did you offset the numbers by one? Whyyyyyyy? Just make one identical chart and use it for both stats! Apparently the game is intended to use grid maps of five foot squares, because when I think ninja I think five foot squares. D&D poisoning strikes again! Ninja Skills! In a rule that I do actually find amusing, the game declares that your characters have all been training to be ninja since the age of five. All characters have proficiency in what the game declares are "the twenty arts of the Ninja". Since the training is so difficult and intense, your characters are literally incapable of taking actions not covered by those skills. If you want to do something, you had best be prepared to make a case for why your chosen skill can be used that way. The downside is that this is such a vague rule that you risk playing mother may I with the GM. Each skill is associated with one of the four stats. When you attempt an action, the GM tells you the difficulty, or the number of dice you will need to roll. As stated before, you then try to roll under your relevant stat. Every character also is considered to have mastered four of the skills. After you generate your stats, you roll an additional single d6 for each stat. This determines which skill for that stat you have mastered, with a result of 6 allowing you to pick for yourself. When you roll a skill you have mastered you reduce the difficulty by one. This is written in the following extremely confusing manner: When a Ninja masters a skill, they receive a bonus die to all actions involving that skill - the difficulty of performing those actions is reduced by 1 die. See, very clear and straightforward and definitely shouldn't have been rewritten during the editing process. You gain a bonus die, which means you use one less die when you roll. That's a normal way of saying that. There is a possibility that you end up with a duplicated mastery by the end of character creation. Apparently you just get to be unlucky, because double mastery is not a thing and you just lose the second mastery point. No idea why you wouldn't just let double mastery be a possibility, it's not like the game is super serious and concerned with balance. Strength Skills Bo-Jutsu: Combat with staves, sticks and spatulas. Kenpo-Jutsu: Combat with edged or pointed weapons, such as swords and daggers. Kusarigama-Jutsu: Combat with Ninja chain weapons. This definitely needed its own skill. Tai-Jutsu: Unarmed combat, also used for climbing and jumping. Yari-Jutsu: The usage of spears, lances and chopsticks. Agility Skills Bajitsu: The care and handling of horses, as well as anything with "horsepower". Intonjitsu: The ability to hide from sight behind even the slightest piece of cover. Shinobi Iri: Ninja stealth and sneaking. It was very necessary for this to be separate from hiding apparently. Shuriken-Jutsu: Combat with thrown weapons, including throwing stars, blades, eggshell grenades, etc. Shuriken have special multi attack/multi target rules listed here. Suiren: Swimming and other aquatic skills. When you fall a roll while using this skill, you take damage from inhaling water. Ki Skills Choho: Used for spy stuff; such as forgery, lock picking, safe cracking, eavesdropping and slight of hand. Hensojitsu: The use of physical disguises and mimicry. Specifically, the intent seems to be that you can disguise yourself as other people. No idea why it doesn't suggest you could also disguise yourself as objects. There are suggestions for the GM for how to set the difficulty of the roll. It basically boils down to familiarity with the person being mimicked and the plausibility of them being in a given situation. Kayak-Jutsu: Usage of guns, gunpowder and explosives. Apparently Ninja are opposed to guns and explosives as a general rule, but find it useful to have a thorough understanding of them in this modern world. Even with my extremely basic knowledge of Japanese military history, I'm fairly certain "ninja" were just as happy to use guns as samurai were, which is to say extremely. Seishin Teki Kyoyo: Silent meditation and reflection on one's ancestors. In the game, this equates to the ability to pull specific items out of their pockets. Difficulty is equal to the number of points the character wanted to modify their Ninja Pockets roll by. Item and pocket rules are covered later. Wujenitsu: Ninja Magic. It has its own rules section a little later. Extraneous Skills Bo Ruaku: An education in strategic warfare and the game of GO. If a ninja is making multiple actions in a single turn, and something makes them want to interrupt their declared actions, you roll this skill. Difficulty is equal to the number of actions originally attempted. This super simple system definitely needed some sort of complicated multi action system with rolled interrupts. Chimon: Basically just navigation. Magical Ninja GPS. Kyojitsu Tenkan Ho: Philosophy. Used to mingle at cocktail parties apparently. Apparently also for lying and con other people. I feel that's a bit of a stretch. Makudonarudo: The creation of fast food and operation of a fast food establishment. There does not appear to be any point in the game rules where this skill actually interacts with anything. Tenmon: Ninja meteorology, which apparently gives the ability to predict weather with extreme accuracy. There's an odd dig at meteorologists here, claiming a 2% accuracy rate. I assume this is a "joke" about weather reports not always being correct. You know, the kind of joke that wasn't funny the first time it was ever made, which was presumably right after the first time someone predicted the weather. This skill is also used if your character is about to be annihilated by a meteor. Finally, you can use it to meditate and regain lost Ki, up to your starting maximum. Ancestral Clans Every character belongs to one of six clans, rolled randomly during character generation. Clan of the Thousand Islands: Denizens of a "mysterious Island chain". Being a member of this class grants you 3 additional agility and a mastery of Suiren. You lose 3 Ki. Brotherhood of the Blue Trees: A clan that prefers eating burgers to delivering them. Roll 1d6, subtract this value from your Strength and add it to your Ki. "Also you are probably a chubby Ninja, like Chris Farley." Cool. You don't seem to get any additional skill mastery either. Clan of the Hidden Ranch: Apparently they're just leaning into this whole salad dressing pun names for Ninja clans thing. I don't understand, the connection is so tenuous! Anyhow, this clan grants mastery of Intonjitsu, because they are sneaky. Once per game, your character can automatically make an Intonjitsu roll, regardless of difficulty. Game doesn't appear to be a defined keyword, but since the game seems oriented towards primarily one shot play I'm going to assume it's literal. Keepers of the Secret Sauce: A clan charged with keeping the ancient secret of the Ninja Burger Sauce recipe. Clan members gain 1 Ki from eating Ninja Burger food. They also gain a bonus die to any actions involving killing Samurai Burger employees, an inferior rival chain who wants to speak the secret sauce. I assume that this is the same bizarre wording choice from before and they actually mean you lower the difficulty by one, but who knows! I'm actually broadly okay with this clan concept. It fits the sort of broadly silly Saturday morning cartoon vibe that the game should probably be leaning into. House Gaijin: "You are Occidental instead of Oriental[...]". God drat it game, I just said something nice about you. I know this was 2001, but it's not like people twenty years ago didn't know Oriental was an offensive word to use in that context. Clan members gain 3 Strength, but lose 3 Agility, due to their larger size. Because what this game was missing was some ethnic biotruth crap casually sprinkled in. Lo Cal: Servants of the Warlord of the same name, who infiltrate Ninja Burger in an attempt to destroy burgers. Instead, the Warlord and his minions seek to replace them with tofu, rice cakes and carb free energy boosting food substitute bars. Followers of the Warlord gain 1d6 Extraneous and mastery of Hensojitsu. However, eating any Ninja Burger product causes them to vomit and take damage. Additionally, they want to kill members of other clans, and other clans want to kill them when discovered. I feel like this was a very late attempt at a Paranoia style secret society type thing, but it doesn't really work out super well. To start, any player group could out any Lo Cal members basically instantly by having everyone eat some fries or something. Plus, the game doesn't even consider the actual possibility that all player characters happen to end up in this clan. Also, as will become apparent later, I think these guys might secretly be the good guys anyhow. Ninja Wujenitsu or Ninja Magic This game was published in 2001, and it appears that the animated Naruto series first aired in 2002. Therefore, I have to admit that the show cannot have influenced the writing of this section of rules. However, the manga was already being published at that time, so my theory of this section being Naruto fanfic is still possible! (I know that the usage of "seals" is actually derived from a bunch of cultural works of fiction and/or history. It's just the way so much of this book is presented that makes me feel like the author had seen some Naruto and based everything on that.) Using magic, successful or not, reduces your Ki start by one. The player is also required to physically reproduce the hand symbol, or seal, associated with the power they are using. Failure to do so causes an automatic failure. Unsurprisingly, these powers are all rolled using the Wujenitsu skill.  Ryukenjutsu (Ninja Water Ball Trick): A swirling ball of mystical water that makes a line attack from the characters hands. Anything touched by the line is soaked with water; ruining food, security systems, computers and quiet shoes. Individuals struck by the power must make a Strength roll to avoid being knocked down.  Hengeyokai (Summon Honourable Mystical Wolf Companion): Summon a fiercely loyal mystical wolf, which will follow commands. This includes fighting for you and protecting your delivery bag with its life. Giving the wolf orders counts as an action and requires a low difficulty Bajitsu roll. Not exactly sure why you wouldn't just have everybody summon these, or why it doesn't suggest that you can reskin it as something other than a wolf if you want. Shinobi Itsu (Ninja Chameleon Power): Rather than provide a specific seal for this power, players are instead instructed to mime the item their character is attempting to mimic. I guess this could be funny in the intended atmosphere of being drunk while playing. This power allows a ninja to assume the shape, colour and texture of any inanimate object. Obviously, they are still actually the same ninja in all other ways than superficial appearance. When the character moves or attacks their appearance immediately reverts to normal. The book specially notes that this does not cover up or disguise the delicious scent of Ninja Burger food.  Dim-Mak (Dreaded Ninja Death Touch): Allows Ninja to instantly kill any enemy categorized as Gaijin. Requires an extra point of Ki expenditure to use, as well as a separate to hit roll to actually touch your target.  Me Ure Kata (Ninja Mirror Image Trick): Create up to six illusory Ninja, with the difficulty of the roll set to the number you choose to create. The illusions are not real, cannot deal damage and cannot move physical objects. It takes an action to make your illusions take an action, and the illusions will continue to repeat that action until you stop them. If struck or touched, the illusion will disappear in a puff of smoke. This power includes a note that it is dishonorable for a ninja to let customers see them, even if it's just an illusion. You lose a point of honour for each illusion that is spotted.  Aruki Tobi Waza (Flying Ninja Assault): Literally a power that gives you wire-fu. As in, it explicitly creates nearly invisible wires you can use to perform otherwise impossible physical feats. While in use, the power reduces the difficulty of Agility rolls by two dice and grants 1 additional Combat Die. You retain the effect until you leave the room you used it in. Difficulty is set by the size of the room, capping out at 6 for the outdoors. Next Time: Equipment, action rules, "optional" rules, the GM section and an introductory scenario. Not Included: rules for actually governing the delivery or preparation of burgers. Why do you think that a game about being Ninja delivery people would have something like those?
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Oct 10, 2021 04:17
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Lemony posted:
Love how this lovely racist meme game can't even be bothered to stay consistent with its lovely racist "Asian person speaking broken English" gimmick.
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Oct 10, 2021 09:20
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Would actually kill for a Double-Ninja Burger right now honestly.
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Oct 10, 2021 11:04
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One of those times where the problem might be the designers didn't watch enough anime. Mostly because there are entire genres of it based around taking food way too seriously.
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Oct 10, 2021 11:11
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LatwPIAT posted:That and the fact there's a correlation between support for fertility clinics and abortion access in the US, and the NLF are clearly pro-life. So it feels slightly wrong from the get-go. This is why it feels very unfortunate to me. As a politically aware American in this day and age, the fact that you're taking on a wealthy network of fertility clinics, however shady, means you're contributing to the weakening of abortion access and legitimate fertility clinics.
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Oct 10, 2021 13:00
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Ettin posted:There's also this, which is great: well, Ta'ge "Henry" Yoshi,
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Oct 10, 2021 13:01
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Cythereal posted:This is why it feels very unfortunate to me. As a politically aware American in this day and age, the fact that you're taking on a wealthy network of fertility clinics, however shady, means you're contributing to the weakening of abortion access and legitimate fertility clinics. Is mentioned, the same org is actively funding and spreading forced birth rhetoric, so you're saving more abortion clinics. Also would be a run riff to have one of the peers of the inhuman 1%er kids be a perfectly ordinary human who just has more in common with the inhuman abominations who expect humanity to serve as their slaves in the new world order.
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Oct 10, 2021 13:09
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Fiegal also wrote 'Hellas' for Khepera Press (Atlantis the Second Age company) which is actually an interesting multi-generational PCs based game.
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Oct 10, 2021 15:38
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Ghost Leviathan posted:One of those times where the problem might be the designers didn't watch enough anime. Mostly because there are entire genres of it based around taking food way too seriously. See, that's part of my problem. I want to like this game, if only for nostalgia sake. I mean, I expected this tiny one shot oriented game designed two decades ago to have flaws, mechanical and social. I just didn't think I'd have this many problems. I honestly didn't set out to really slam this game when I started. I think if they had just leaned into a slightly more "serious" anime style thing, and then ditched a bunch of the more problematic content, it probably would have held up okayish. Humbug Scoolbus posted:Fiegal also wrote 'Hellas' for Khepera Press (Atlantis the Second Age company) which is actually an interesting multi-generational PCs based game. I hadn't heard of it before, but I do find generational style games an interesting design space. I probably saw the name while looking him up and just glazed over it. I'd be interested in hearing about how it functions/plays.
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Oct 10, 2021 16:36
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Cythereal posted:This is why it feels very unfortunate to me. As a politically aware American in this day and age, the fact that you're taking on a wealthy network of fertility clinics, however shady, means you're contributing to the weakening of abortion access and legitimate fertility clinics.
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Oct 10, 2021 16:59
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Lemony posted:The game was published in 2001, and it is very evident. It runs on the BEER! engine, which I have never encountered before or since. I haven't actually played this game, haven't cracked it open in over ten years, and I don't remember how the rules worked, so I'll be figuring out if it sucks or not as we go! BEER is the engine behind the similarly forced-comedy game Kobolds Ate My Baby. Is there a large random table of horrible ninja deaths, by any chance?
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Oct 10, 2021 17:57
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If you don't have Teenage Mutant Ninja Burger hit me up and I'll scan my copy for you.
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Oct 10, 2021 18:37
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Glazius posted:BEER is the engine behind the similarly forced-comedy game Kobolds Ate My Baby. Is there a large random table of horrible ninja deaths, by any chance? Only sort of! As we'll see in the second half of the review, there is a chart of penalties that you can end up rolling on if you lose honour. Many of the results are effectively "amusing" insta-death. Though to be more accurate, if you lose honour you have to modify your stat, then make a roll against that stat. If you fail that roll, then you roll on the random table of results. Roll-ception. Midjack posted:If you don't have Teenage Mutant Ninja Burger hit me up and I'll scan my copy for you. I do not, nor do I think I'm familiar! Sure, why not for the sake of completeness!
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Oct 10, 2021 18:37
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The IVF/pro-choice issue doesn't stand out so much to me with New Life Fertility, but I'm very wary about how the book walks the tightrope of "They look like humans, but absolutely are not," in a Lovecraft-inspired game. H. P. Lovecraft was very much concerned with the circumstances of people's births and whether or not that made them monstrous subhumans, especially among the elite, and I'm super wary of that showing up in Delta Green. If a player, after blowing up the Cybele, wants to go on to identify and exterminate the rest of the New Life, especially the second generation that is apparently "too young to cause a problem yet," is that sociopathy or does the game treat that as the right and good thing to do, since they're apparently all sociopaths with natural ties and susceptibility to Lovecraft's most overtly racist god? Overall, I like them enough as antagonists, because they have a neat structure as a young cult relying on throwing money at problems by hiring lawyers/mercenaries and their evil Scientology yacht as a final battle space. But any Lovecraft game has to reckon with Lovecraft's fears being tied to Lovecraft's bigotries, and this is sending up some warning bells.
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Oct 10, 2021 20:36
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