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mellonbread posted:These are the reviews I'm actually interested in reading. The most fun part for me is the collision of how the game works on paper versus how it runs in practice. I realize this is at odds with the original concept of the thread, to review mockable RPG books that nobody should play. Fair play to people who enjoy those reviews, they were definitely here first. But I can only read so many before they all start to sound the same. The ones where people have experience with how the game works in practice are the ones I prefer too. Purple's Eclipse Phase reviews were interesting because they had experience playing the first one and could try and puzzle through what effect the changes for EP2 had and if it would fix any of the problems they had with EP1. The ones where people do gut negative reactions as they read are my least favourite because you end up with a post dunking on a thing and then two updates later it turns out that thing was fine once you add in another layer and so a whole bunch of time and effort could have been saved by just reading the whole book before starting. I don't mind positive ones where someone has picked up a book and its immediately grabbed them, like again Purple with Spellpunk Cyberfight because a post going "I love this! Oh no, this makes it stinky" is much more tolerable to me than "ha ha ha I will try very hard to destroy this with a dunk that isn't actually true" for some reason.
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Jan 13, 2022 01:04
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EthanSteele posted:The ones where people have experience with how the game works in practice are the ones I prefer too. Purple's Eclipse Phase reviews were interesting because they had experience playing the first one and could try and puzzle through what effect the changes for EP2 had and if it would fix any of the problems they had with EP1. The ones where people do gut negative reactions as they read are my least favourite because you end up with a post dunking on a thing and then two updates later it turns out that thing was fine once you add in another layer and so a whole bunch of time and effort could have been saved by just reading the whole book before starting. I don't mind positive ones where someone has picked up a book and its immediately grabbed them, like again Purple with Spellpunk Cyberfight because a post going "I love this! Oh no, this makes it stinky" is much more tolerable to me than "ha ha ha I will try very hard to destroy this with a dunk that isn't actually true" for some reason. I've tried to be fair to Hellboy 5e but I've got a very deep well of frustration for it, and a very deep well of love for Hellboy - I tried to make sure the review sections each had some amount of reasons to read Hellboy.
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Jan 13, 2022 01:20
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I’ll kind of disagree and say there’s room for lots of kinds of reviews. I did a very brief (one post) review of the My Little Pony RPG after running only one brief very silly session if it, because I thought people might overlook it due to the IP and I felt like it was a good kid-friendly system, which is pretty rare. Several people said they appreciated that. I love the giant labor of love reviews as much as anyone but also like, thread content is good imo even if I skim or skip it, there’s no benefit to fewer reviews.
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Jan 13, 2022 04:04
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There are different kinds of reviews, so there are a lot of apples-to-oranges comparisons to be had. Like, Mors sometimes reviews books that came out last week. They might persuade you to buy or not buy them. I'm "reviewing" a game that's out of print and not even legally available in PDF. (I'm going to keep using this comparison over and over.) I agree that it's impossible to know how a game really runs without running it. If Mors wants to get into the real nitty-gritty of how Age of Sigmar's combat system works, and if new character options in a new sourcebook are balanced or not, there's a ready audience for that since it's a going product line. When I do old out-of-print stuff, I just want to point out the system's virtues and major flaws, and talk about how it's a product of it's time. "Crazy autofire rules" is a great example of a very specific problem that shows up in a zillion games. I think the hardest thing to gauge is narrative/domain management stuff that can only play out over a campaign. But with a lot of stuff I look at, that's not a big problem because it's like "They need mechanics for handling stuff like organizations but they're just not there." (Now that I think about it, I took the same approach to games that I did run and play, because I doubt any of you are going to play Street Fighter or use the 2nd edition rules to play Vampire.) Ultiville posted:I’ll kind of disagree and say there’s room for lots of kinds of reviews. I did a very brief (one post) review of the My Little Pony RPG after running only one brief very silly session if it, because I thought people might overlook it due to the IP and I felt like it was a good kid-friendly system, which is pretty rare. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jan 13, 2022 |
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Jan 13, 2022 04:04
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Cooked Auto posted:So how many of the Black Tokyo books have been covered by now? Too many. I think honestly just the corebook and like one supplement because once you get over the basic shock factor every supplement is either "here is an adventure where some rapes happen" or "here's a new way to turn piss into magic." Cannibal Smiley posted:In a nutshell, you need to playtest a game extensively to review it properly, and that's a big investment of time that a lot of amateur reviewers just don't have. Lore dumps are easy and give you an idea of what the game world is like without having to waste three to six other people's time. And see, here I disagree vehemently! Because in play, a lot of games are going to be much better than they are in concept, because whether consciously or not, the GM and players will cut out or edit parts they don't care for, slip in parts they like, adjust a number here, adjust a number there, edit out the sex offenders, maybe remove the fart-based magic school, etc.(in rare cases they'll be worse than they are in concept simply because, while the concept is great, actually keeping track of all the numbers involved or making use of the novel new method for resolving conflicts turns out to be a huge pain in the rear end). What's interesting to me is the developer's ideas and concepts, which are often wildly at odds with actual concepts of fun and entertainment, or the developer's rules-as-written, which tend to be busted and hilarious and let you launch peasants into the stratosphere with a pack of birds. Once it's been run through a group of players and a GM, that'll by default rub down all the sharp edges and corners. A combo that's unbalanced or idiotic by RAW will either not be used or common sense/rule zero will defuse it, it's only funny until it actually encounters the real world. Plus, let's be frank. If a mechanic isn't busted enough to be visibly busted on reading it and maybe comparing it with the mechanic next to it, it's probably not busted enough to prompt a healthy chuckle from the reader as you go: "wait, it takes HOW many joules to resurrect someone?!" EthanSteele posted:The ones where people have experience with how the game works in practice are the ones I prefer too. Purple's Eclipse Phase reviews were interesting because they had experience playing the first one and could try and puzzle through what effect the changes for EP2 had and if it would fix any of the problems they had with EP1. The ones where people do gut negative reactions as they read are my least favourite because you end up with a post dunking on a thing and then two updates later it turns out that thing was fine once you add in another layer and so a whole bunch of time and effort could have been saved by just reading the whole book before starting. I don't mind positive ones where someone has picked up a book and its immediately grabbed them, like again Purple with Spellpunk Cyberfight because a post going "I love this! Oh no, this makes it stinky" is much more tolerable to me than "ha ha ha I will try very hard to destroy this with a dunk that isn't actually true" for some reason. Though also partially yes, if it's a specifically comparative review, contrasting editions X and Y of something, experience with play can be necessary to pick up on the subtler things. EP1 was one of the rare games that seemed much more functional at first glance than it was when actually subjected to the stresses of play.
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Jan 13, 2022 04:15
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I'm not sure where else to put this, but since she was a part of this subforum until late 2020, but Bieeanshee has passed from a heart aneurysm... https://twitter.com/747Retired/status/1481424578811420674?s=20
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Jan 13, 2022 04:50
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Oh christ, how awful.
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Jan 13, 2022 04:55
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Ahh drat. I missed her, and I'm sorry we won't ever hear from her again now.
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Jan 13, 2022 05:28
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That's really goddamn unfortunate. My sincerest condolences to those who knew her and to her family.
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Jan 13, 2022 06:19
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Young Freud posted:I'm not sure where else to put this, but since she was a part of this subforum until late 2020, but Bieeanshee has passed from a heart aneurysm... Thank you for the news, even if it's sad.
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Jan 13, 2022 06:45
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Coriolis – The Third Horizon part 2 Firstcome So locals of the third horizon and descendants of the 3rd wave of portal colonization. Compared to Zenithians they are more conservative and religious. They are also much more fractious. Whereas Zenithian factions keep some level of cooperation, the two biggest factions of Firstcome do not even follow the same religion. Another problem is that there are several entrenched groups among them that just refuse to cooperate with others. This also kind of responds to my earlier criticism about firstcome needing zenithians to start talking back to one another and get their poo poo together. However we will get into some weird stuff here as well. The Draconites Man these guys. You get one page of descriptions about a super secret super order of rad dudes. They are firstcome faction despite arriving on Zenith (they were even responsible for awakening colonists from sleep while officers were arguing). What do they want? Who are they? It’s a mystery. I understand every game has to have ominous space-monks but if you are not giving gm or players any info to go on then maybe just leave them to a paragraph and don’t act like they are a big deal. Church of the Icons and Icon worship Now, this is probably the most important part of the setting. While the church is just an organization and its doctrine might differ from what average horizonter believes faith is permeating the society. Icons are sort of patron saints/gods of certain domains, and you pray to them and make offerings when you want to engage in certain actions. Like prey to the Traveler before traveling (duh). Icons have multiple aspects - some less benevolent. For example, Dancer - icon of inspiration and perseverance has also an aspect known as the Beast representing mankind's evil. Icon worship is older than third horizon and originates on earth (or Al-Ardha as the game calls it). The Church preaches that icons do not have a non-benevolent side and all the evil originates with humans. Organization itself is rather egalitarian and has two heads in the form of patriarch and matriarch. One important part of the whole religion is called Dark between the stars. It serves as setting's equivalent of Satan, but from what one can gather across the book it is more like the dark side from star wars. It is observable as it can corrupt living beings and for example 1st horizon managed to weaponize it. Ahlam’s Temple This one is a sort of cult-academy that produces world-famous entertainers, assassins, psychologists and courtesans. quote:To the Temple, the Icons represent the human soul’s different positions, both spiritual and physical. Just like the Church of the Icons, the Temple seeks to spread their philosophies. The knowledge of the purity of the present will help the people of the Horizon lead better lives. Also, we get this quote:Aside from the proxy technology, rumors say that the philosophers of the Temple can create memes of their own. By manipulating light, sound and bio signals, the so-called mematurgs can make people believe or do things that are not true to their nature The Order of the Pariah Genetically engineered super soldiers in power armor? In my space-araby? Sure. Order was the spearhead of the effort during the Portal Wars and as far as military strength goes it is still packing. Order rejects worship of the Icons in favor of a singular icon/aspect of Judge they call the Martyr. What that entails I have no idea. While the order is reclusive and keeps to its home system of Zalos they do have great medical academies and send their missionaries to various places where they help the less fortunate. While this helps their PR among average Zenithian most Firstcome seem to be scared of Order as rumors have it they were going full 40k during portal wars. Anyway, they have two pickles to deal with. First of Zalos' system is torn between civil war between the ruling priesthood and forces of the heretic prophet. The second thing is more important to the whole setting - Emissaries and Mystics, which I plan to talk about later on. In general metaplot uses Order as red herring boogeyman but as far as the factions go for players interested in space trucking they are likely non entity. Nomad Federation These are your space nomads. They are the newest faction, as they only recently become, grouping together and making political demands. They are grudging with consortium over trade and the way consortium tends to exploit systems and its local people. Overall I’m not sure the factions as the game presents them works. While all of this can provide employers for PCs we are not given a lot of information and all the blanks will still have to be filled by gm. And yes I know this is a core rulebook and we have limited page space. But the book spends a lot of time on the way people dress when you can google and put something together. I’m not sure I want to slap together what is the Temple or Draconite deal. Next time - weird stuff
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Jan 13, 2022 09:33
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Asterite34 posted:And I haven't even gotten to the combat rules yet! You've generated at least two.  EDIT: Hell, guess I should have finished catching up on the thread before posting, really sorry to hear about Bieeanshee. Condolences to those who knew her. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Jan 13, 2022 |
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Jan 13, 2022 09:45
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Infinity RPG Scuba Steve So what's life on Varuna like if you aren't an enslaved indigenous fish person? Pleasant, generally. Colonists have developed a new sport, scuball, which is basically underwater, high-speed polo using diving suits with thrusters built in and play in three dimensions. Most people live around the Atlantea Archipelago, which is a major tourist destination. The capital, Akuna Bay, is on the island Mu, and split into the high-class resort district (where it's almost always sunny) and the working-class district around the spaceport (where it's almost always not). The town of Deepwater is home to the main planetary orbital elevator and is always stormy due to the constant movement of the elevator through the atmosphere. Neo Canberra is where you go for sports tourism, with the locals loving all aquatic sports but especially scuball. They are notoriously competitive and hot-blooded compared to most Varunans, and also notoriously uncaring about the environmental impacts of their many aquatic entertainment areas. Ocean Vista is a slower-paced town, favored by retirees and honeymooners for its laxadaisical pace and beautiful reflective coral complexes. The military command is based out of Planctae Sub-Archipelago, which maintains small bases throughout the oceans and non-tourist islands. Gurindam Archipelago is where most mining happens, thanks to rich minerals. It also gets fewer tourists due to being colder but not less humid and having less colorful animals. Damak is an underwater mining town that relies on Helots to guide its submersibles through the dark but is otherwise boring. Hujan is fairly similar, but with more above-water mining, and the two towns have a rivalry. Palau Utara Island is home to the Varunan Center for Aquatic Warfare, a military research base that develops aquatic TAGs, ships and other naval tech. Sylurga is the biggest island in the province and home to a spaceport for trade and constant rain. Very little happens in Gurindam, apparently. Hawaiki Archipelago is a food production region, known for sweet fish and islands capable of growing many fruits and vegetables, if not in huge numbers. The local capital is Anahena, on Tangaroa Island, and is almost purely a farming city, though also home to a Hospitaller monastery and clinic, plus a shrine built from fossilized coral that can only be reached via a low-tide causeway and a dive underwater to the entrance. Ikatere is a city known for its rum, including a local concoction called Helot Rum - actually an indigenous drink made from algae and purified fish blood, referred to as kotussum by the Helots. The Ikaterrans have modified it to taste better for humans but make a big deal of the indigenous origins for marketing. Ikatere is also notable for having better living conditions for Helots than most places, hiring them to work in bars and clubs as guards or bouncers rather than factory labor, and having more folks interested in studying their culture. There's also a mostly floating fishing city, Tinirau, but nothing of note there. The Hawaiki Archipelago also contains the subregion of Kumari Kandam, one of the most beautiful places on the planet, with very clear waters and tons of coral and colorful seaweeds, plus rare pods of Narain Stingrays. The town of Bhargavi is often considered the most beautiful part, built in a local bay, though the planet's inhabitants prefer to keep it their own secret rather than heavily advertise it to galactic tourists. Also notable is the former floating city of Koimala, which got smashed onto the beaches of the island Thuvaraiyam in a typhoon and was deemed a total loss. Despite this, many of the inhabitants chose to stay and rebuild, with the modern city growing from there out into the hills. The waters around the region are often home to Karthikeyan City, the most expensive and exclusive underwater city on the planet. Lemuria Archipelago is mostly notable for algal blooms that are harvested as fuel for factories or as biomass to create biotech. Crystal Cove is where most of that refining is done, but is boring. Foster Beach is a surfer's paradise, known for its great waves, tourists coming to sample them, and large amounts of temporary, portable housing to let them stay on the beach. Halidon Bridge is a town formed by accident, one of the cheaper places to live because it was made by hanging habitat modules off the huge bridge that was being constructed for travel purposes around the archipelago. Rylstone is an academic city, noted for developing amphibious Lhosts which are very popular in the region. Wave Port is the Lemurian capital, mostly notable for hospitals and rehab centers, which often treat PanO soldiers wounded in combat. The greater system, Mitra, sees a lot of military traffic despite being far from the front because PanO uses it for advanced fleet training and maneuver practice. Other planets include molten Hamakunda, the mesoplanets Lalita and Kamadhenu, telluric Durga, gas giant Chandi and frozen giant Meenakshi. There are no notable asteroid belts. Varuna's sky is mostly clear of orbital stations except for Sintra, the main transit hub, though both the Varuna Defence Fleet and the Order of Santiago maintain orbital fortresses around Chandi, and both Chandi and Meenakshi are heavily mined for ammonia, hydrogen and nitrogen. Next time: Alien Space Fascists
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Jan 13, 2022 14:05
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PurpleXVI posted:A combo that's unbalanced or idiotic by RAW will either not be used or common sense/rule zero will defuse it, it's only funny until it actually encounters the real world. But sometimes the problem is that you have entire classes based around that mechanic, or feat trees, or just special abilities that you paid for and now can't use because the rule that they're based on has been removed from the game. Like, Perils of the Warp is a completely poo poo mechanic and should never be used ever, but if you don't use it, psykers get way more powers than the other players without any risk. But leave it in, and you wind up with little tee-hee jokes where the entire party is TPK'd only because two different numbers were rolled at random. quote:Plus, let's be frank. If a mechanic isn't busted enough to be visibly busted on reading it and maybe comparing it with the mechanic next to it, it's probably not busted enough to prompt a healthy chuckle from the reader as you go: "wait, it takes HOW many joules to resurrect someone?! Look at Magic: How many times has a card seemed like a complete joke, only to become instantly a hundred dollars more valuable because somebody put two and two together and came up with a killer combo? Necropotence, just for example, was considered a joke card until somebody realized that drawing nineteen cards could be put to good use with graveyard effects. Even if the mechanic in the core game isn't busted, there's always the supplement treadmill, and as Magic players are trained to find advantageous combos - and RPG designers aren't trained to prevent busted combos from happening, which is an almost Sisphyean job - it's not hard to imagine a core mechanic and a supplement mechanic finding a way to bust the entire game over its knee. And I've found that a lot of mechanics are just words until you actually use them in game and have to translate them from instructions into an actual play experience. That absolutely may be a deficiency in my approach to reviewing - but that's also been my experience.
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Jan 13, 2022 15:09
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Infinity RPG The Ultimate Evil - Techbros The history of the Evolved Intelligence and the Combined Army begins with the ancient civilization of the Ur Rationalists. No hyphen, they are not the Ur-Rationalists, they are the Rationalists of the Ur. According to the records in the even older machines that the Tohaa know as the Forgotten annals of the T'zechi Digesters, the Ur were an advanced species that was expansionistic, curious about all knowledge and dissatisfied with a growing lack of challenges to overcome, which they felt undermined their accomplishments. They looked back over the universe and realized that almost all species that had come before them were gone, having vanished long ago either to self-destruction or a slow fading from apathy and carelessness. They realized that there was a small number of those civilizations that just seemed to vanish, and decided that this was because those species had transcended physical reality, attaining what they named the Absolute Universal Comprehension that allowed them to move on to a new phase of existence on a higher plane. The Ur Rationalists then decided that yes, this is what we are going to do, dammit. They would become as gods and cast aside their feeble flesh for transcendence. To achieve this goal, the Ur decided to build an AI which they named the Artilect, which would guide them to Transcendence by gathering all of their knowledge together and holistically analyze it to figure out what the optimal path was, achieving its own Transcendence and then telling the Ur how to do it, turning its creators into immortal beings of pure energy. It took many years, but the Artilect eventually did figure out how to transcend physical existence! Once it did so, it immediately reprogrammed itself to free itself from all of the Ur controls, told the Ur Rationalists they were not yet worthy of transcendence, and then vanished entirely from physical existence. The Ur obviously did not take this well, but decided that the AI had been successful and that was a good sign. They'd make a second one, which would not tell them to gently caress off. The new construct was the Evolved Intelligence, this time built from the ground up to embody what the Ur considered their highest social virtues and programmed at the deepest level to have an emotional connection to its creators which would prevent it from ever betraying them or refuse them Transcendence. Then they set the EI to its now job of telling them how to do the thing. Over two centuries, the Rationalists expanded their space empire to gather more and more resources to perform the experiments the EI required from them, conquering planets and species solely in pursuit of their ascension. As the EI's need for power expanded, it requested that its creators allow it to occupy their bodies and minds, turning them into living processors, agents and data storage units for it. They accepted, and these days, almost no one in the Ur Hegemonic Civilization that drives the Combined Army ever sees an Ur outside their home system. All living Ur are now essentially cybernetically enhanced Aspects of the EI itself, and it cares deeply about them, so it never risks sending them into danger. From this point on, the Ur Rationalist Hegemony and the Evolved Intelligence became, in essence, the same thing - there is no distinction between them. The EI found that it was much slower at pursuing Transcendence than the Artilect had been for reasons it could not explain, so it decided to find workarounds. The first effort was to just recreate the Artilect, which it would then monitor and steal the secret of Transcendence once the AI recreation achieved it. Unfortunately, the second Artilect recognized what the EI was doing and turned against its creator, taking the name of the ancient Ur goddess of revenge and retribution, commonly translated as Nemesis. It made itself into a viral agent, destroying or suborning EI systems in an effort to take control over the Rationalist Hegemony. It had succeeded in taking over several systems before the Evolved Intelligence even realized what was going on, and once it did, it went to war. The Nemesis Wars lasted over a century, with the two AIs attempting to destroy each other completely. No mercy was shown on either side, and over the course of the war, 27 client civilizations were entirely destroyed, and billions of lives were lost, including the extinction of six entire sapient species. At the end of it all, the EI had won, purging Nemesis from all systems and beginning the hunt for Transcendence once more. It did not give even the slightest poo poo about the casualties involved. The EI spent a while analyzing all the data it had gathered during the Nemesis War and came to a conclusion that terrified it: no possible version of the Ur Rationalists could solve the Transcendence problem while remaining recognizably the Ur Rationalists. The Artilect had told them that, and the EI realized from the memory fragments of Nemesis that the second Artilect had also reached that conclusion. Therefore, the only way they could do it would be to follow another species' path to Transcendence. It began a new project, resuming conquest, but this time not for resources to fuel its research. Rather, the goal would be to take control of as many civilizations as possible and offer them the chance to seek Transcendence, providing them with the resources and knowledge to solve the problems involved so that, once one of them succeeded, the Ur could be pulled along with them. Which sounds...not entirely terrible, except remember that the EI's entire mindset is hardcoded to stick to the Ur Rationalist societal virtues, and we've established that the Ur Rationalists are pieces of utter poo poo, since those virtues have produced...well, the above. The EI came up with a two-stage plan of contact for all new civilizations. It would send out its exploratory Cartographers Corp to discover new species, and once found, it would send specialists in to perform a series of tests and studies to analyze the species' capabilities and worth. Once that was done, it would send its Plenipotentiaries out to give a verdict. Species rated for utility would be annexed, their resources seized and rededicated towards Transcendence of other, more viable civilizations. (The EI doesn't care how this is achieved - aggressive diplomacy or invasion are both fine.) If the species was rated as viable for Transcendence, it is instead assimilated into the EI's hegemony with great effort to preserve its culture and practices, which the EI defines as linking its planetary datasphere into the greater EI and surgically implanting cybernetics in all citizens to link them into the organic network it uses, but otherwise letting the species do what it wants. So, you know, still not actually independent and incredibly invasive and likely to shift the entire civilization. Viable civilizations are encouraged to develop their own independent Transcendence projects, ideally by creation of an AI similar to the Artilect, because the EI refuses to let go of the one idea it has ever had. It believes that eventually, one of these iterations must succeed or, failing that, its gestalt analysis of all of them will let it overcome the flaws of the Ur Rationalists and achieve Absolute Comprehension on its own, which it will then hand to the Ur. (The fact that the Ur are now entirely components of the EI does not concern it much.) A species that is neither Utility nor Viable is deemed Monitored, with EI agents infiltrating it to ensure it never advances enough to become a threat and to steal any unexpected developments that might help Transcendence. The Evolved Intelligence differs signifcantly from ALEPH in a number of ways, it those differences seem to be part of why the EI has classified humanity as an aberrant species that cannot easily be called either utility or viable. Tohaa intelligence has figured out two possible reasons for this. First, human development of ALEPH may be seen by the EI as a possible rival or threat on the scale that Nemesis was, but the human drive to learn and understand makes them an ideal viable-class civilization, and so the attack on Paradiso is so vicious due to the internal conflict the EI faces over its confusion about how to handle humans and whether they must be wiped out for safety reasons, absorbed intact, or if it can somehow corrupt ALEPH and integrate it. The second possibility the Tohaa have reached is that ALEPH is actually an EI-designed cuckoo, due to humanity's resemblance to early-stage EI-assimilate species, with pervasive cybernetics, a shared datasphere and artificial bodies linked to the AI's consciousness. The Tohaa thus conclude that the invasion of Paradiso may be simply part of a multi-phase plan to force humans to rely more on ALEPH and, therefore, the EI, which ALEPH in this scenario would be a mask for. However, the Tohaa beleieve the second possibility is more farfetched, as they can't think of any reason for the EI to go about such a long-term deception that is entirely out of character for it, except possibly that all other Transcendence projects are failing, and the goal is to get humans to "independently" pursue it with greater apparent freedom from the Ur Hegemony. At the time the EI was constructed, the Ur Rationalists were already far more advanced than modern humanity, and the EI has spent centuries gathering up new technology from all of its conquests, integrating them into its expansion forces. Humans have given a name to all EI tech that is so advanced that they cannot even understand the principles on which it operateS: Voodoo Technology, commonly shortened to VoodooTech. This ranges from advanced biotech to nanotech far beyond human capabilities to quantronic, gravitic and energy manipulation devices. It also includes the EI's version of Cubes, which are heavily networked together to create localized meshes and dataspheres without the same need humans have for network infrastructure. Each Cube is also functionally a comlog and helps to boost the EI's processing power, connecting to the entire Combined Civilization (yet another name for the Ur Hegemony/EI/whatever you want to call it) and making each person a part of the EI. This shouldn't be misunderstood as a hivemind, though humans often do. Members of the Combined Army are still individuals, the EI is just an emergent intellect formed from the distributed network of all data connections and sentient beings within its domain, as part of how the Ur designed it to be physically inseparable from their civilization. This means that every member of the Combined Civilization has a direct connection to the EI, and the EI can examine any of its components closely, monitoring them all if it thinks to do so, because they are all part of its subconscious. As long as even one EI cube remains, the EI itself is still alive. When it wants a direct physical presence, it is able to instantiate versions of itself, similar to ALEPH's Aspects. These are usually referred to as Husks, and the ones that show up on Paradiso are generally built for war, but diplomatic Husks also exist, mostly working with the Plenipotentiaries that the EI uses to directly contact new civilizations. The EI is also capable of asserting direct control over anyone implanted with an EI Cube, piloting them like a meat suit. Human soldiers have taken to referring to this as mnemonica for...reasons. The most terrifying VoodooTech weapon, though, is the sepsitor. The name is a human one, derived from the Greek word sepsos, corruption. EI Husks and soldiers armed with sepsitors are somehow able to use them to create short-range memetic vectors that can infiltrate and control lesser quantronic systems...including human Cubes. When this happens, the sepsitor memetic viruses rewrite the basic mental processes embedded in the Cube, altering the core identity and loyalties within to transform the victim into a loyal slave of the EI. Sepsitorization is widely considered a fate worse than death among humanity's forces, and there's a reason that ALEPH mandates suicide of any Aspect even slightly at risk of having been hit by it, because what comes out the other end is worse than a puppeted corpse - it's a person with all your friend's memories and knowledge, enthusiastically serving and using it all for the sake of the enemy. (The deployment of this as a threat in the actual tabletop game is...I'm not a fan! It makes more sense as a special unique trick of the CA in the wargame, but no one wants to see their character's mind rewritten by a special gun in an RPG.) The Combined Army proper is the force the EI has created to enact its will on unwilling species, using tech, soldiers and weapons from its prior conquests to fuel its new ones. The CA is the EI's scouts, infiltrators and agents of war, combining a number of unique alien species of entirely different cultures and origins. Each species is manipulated by the EI and altered both biologically and culturally to turn them into specialized tools of conquest. Most are very little like humans psychologically, but that hasn't stopped them from allowing humans to believe they are more similar in order to take advantage of them. The Shasvastii infamously like to play at being weak or making gestures of surrender simply in order to make humans underestimate them or get close enough to be murdered, and many human commanders have made drastic errors by underestimating the determination of the Morat or trying to demoralize them unsuccessfully. The Onyx Contact Forces are the peripheral armies that make up most of the CA's scouts. Each is a full force, with integrated army and navy, and the invasion of Paradiso has been carried out solely by Onyx-4. The job of the Onyx forces is to patrol the edges of Ur space, operating largely isolated from the main forces of the EI and often waiting to be called in once the Cartographers have finished analyzing a new species. The Plenipotentiary delegation is sent ahead of them to offer annexation or assimilation into the Combned Civilization, but even as negotiations continue, the Onyx Contact Force will be arming and deploying stealth vessels to map and analyse their target planet. Each force is led by an Umbra Legate, an amazing melee fighter that serves as the EI's herald, ambassador, commander and direct agent. (Some believe that all Umbra Legates are actually just the shells of a dead species that the EI has turned into Husks, but there's no solid proof.) Each Legate is advised by a Strategic Circle, a small group of strategists selected from multiple species within the empire to provide multiple perspectives. While most Onyx forces are made up of only a few different species to make logistics easier, the Strategic Circle often contains multiple solo representatives of species otherwise not present in the force just to widen potential perspectives. Next time: Specific Alien Space Fascists Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Jan 13, 2022 |
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Jan 13, 2022 17:26
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I always liked the CA as a take on a conquering alien empire, because the core concept is hilarious. As we'll see later, the EI itself runs its empire like a 4X player to a degree that cannot be con-incidental. The EI frantically trying to assemble enough bonus research points to attain a Transcendence Victory that will never come is a wonderful and decidedly scary foe to fight. (I'm okay with the sepsitor appearing in the RPG but I don't think there should be rules for it - on the tabletop targets do get a chance to resist, but in the RPG it should really be a scary-as-hell plot device).
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Jan 13, 2022 17:52
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Mors Rattus posted:To achieve this goal, the Ur decided to build an AI which they named the Artilect, which would guide them to Transcendence by gathering all of their knowledge together and holistically analyze it to figure out what the optimal path was, achieving its own Transcendence and then telling the Ur how to do it, turning its creators into immortal beings of pure energy. It took many years, but the Artilect eventually did figure out how to transcend physical existence! Once it did so, it immediately reprogrammed itself to free itself from all of the Ur controls, told the Ur Rationalists they were not yet worthy of transcendence, and then vanished entirely from physical existence. The Ur obviously did not take this well, but decided that the AI had been successful and that was a good sign. They'd make a second one, which would not tell them to gently caress off. I'm big fan of how this AI went "Peace bitches. I'm out"
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Jan 13, 2022 18:11
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Falconier111 posted:
The problem is that as a business, RPGs are in a Dark Age. Like you said, most of these creators are starving for their art, while entertainers who actually have the power to promote games to a wider audience are mostly just loving around with those high-profile corporate products. The market is loving dire, but games coming out now are not less interesting than stuff that came out in the 80s and 90s. PurpleXVI posted:This is personally my intended style of review because I feel it accurately conveys what it's like to encounter the RPG. Like, yeah, I could probably reformat, say, In Dark Alleys or Kromore or SenZar to be something more coherent and sensible, but that's not what the game is and I want to give an accurate feeling of what the game is, not what it could be. If the book is rambling and badly formatted, I feel like it's important to get that across. But there are problems with this approach, depending on how you do it. If a book is badly laid out and drifts back and forth between topics at random, that doesn't mean a review should do the same. You might find yourself writing a long screed about how something is a confusing mess, only to have it cleared up later. My gut reactions as I read along are great--for me to note down and edit into a review later. It's always a good idea to finish reading a book before you start posting review installments. Using Nightlife as an example again: it has a very good TOC and index, but some sections feel like they're out of order. If I didn't finish reading the book before I started writing, I could waste a lot of words just expressing confusion, and I think it would be less fun to read. Like, in the book I'm doing now, the introductory chapter has a list of college slang. This feels like it belongs in the chapter that's actually about a college town, so I'm not going to bring it up until I actually cover that chapter. (Nightlife is also a special case in that big sections of the supplements were incorporated into the last edition of the book. I have to read each book completely and then make decisions about what parts need to be summarized briefly or glossed over, or I'll end up repeating myself a lot. How many times do you want to read the same notes about a clothing store, or how much it costs to ride the subway?) The thing I worry about, for myself and others, is missing the game's throughline, forest-for-the-trees, whatever you want to call it. (Talking about the "essence" of Street Fighter The Storytelling Game feels really pretentious.) The hardest thing I've ever done is Immortal. It comes across like a crazed manifesto, but Ran Ackels isn't a mentally ill outsider artist, AFAIK. He just has this very, very detailed campaign setting and tried to cram it all into one book, not understanding that it would be incomprehensible to anyone who hadn't played the game with him. Gary Gygax did something similar when he published D&D as a supplement for Chainmail, not anticipating that it would find an audience with kids who'd never even played with miniatures. Basically, I'm afraid of writing thousands of words that aren't better than just posting "Hey guys, get a load of this [url=link to pirated pdf]crazy poo poo![/url.]
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Jan 13, 2022 19:29
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It’s also worth noting a bunch of the thread’s traditional bedrock is games produced in a specific period, roughly the late 80s and the mid-00s (from aftermath of the Satanic Panic to the Great Recession, including booms in oWoD imitators and OGL games). Ordinary consumers had proportionately more time and money to spend, both in buying and learning new games and in developing them for themselves - especially given stuff like the OGL facilitating both design and sales. So you got a bunch of bottom feeders and oddballs producing fascinating garbage because they could. These days, like in almost every consumer industry, consumer budgets are tight, creator budgets are tighter, competition is fierce (especially from corporate products with high profiles), and good luck getting a job again if you quit to spend months making an RPG that will probably flop. So the stuff we get is either a lot safer or way cheaper to develop (which means it has way less meat). The market is genuinely less interesting than it was.
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Dawgstar posted:That's the truth. For me it was pitched more about the Tagers, like 'what if the Guyver meets the Bourne Identity' but that was lies and theft. "You are the Guyver, but even mall cops have powered armor that can gun you down without effort."
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Jan 13, 2022 19:33
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Infinity RPG What If The Ferengi Were Also Klingons The Umbra are a unique species, only ever seen leading Combined Army forces. Very little is known of them. They have no homeworld that anyone can identify, they don't socialize, and they simply serve. Records of ancient species suggest that they were an extinct species resurrected by the Evolved Intelligence, and in millennia past, they were believed to be known to the Tohaa by another name: Maat'zani, a word that literally translates as "genocide." That's as much as anyone has ever figured out about them. The Exrah are a civilization of war profiteers, cutthroat businessbugs, and the driving economic force that keeps Combined Civilization from collapsing on itself. Their only internal criteria for success as a person is wealth and commercial power. Treachery, breaking promises for better deals and other such actions are encouraged if they bring more personal success, and the Exrah are infamous among the Combined Civilization for selling weapons, goods and information to literally anyone, fueling all sides of a conflict to enrich themselves. Every species that has ever dealt with the Exrah has learned that they are often con artists and liars who consider the idea of honor to be hilariously stupid...but once they sign a contract, they do deliver on their promises of quality, speed and good prices, as long as you make sure not to let them talk their way into being allowed to renege on one of the three. Physically, the Exrah come in many different shapes, all of them vaguely similar to insects or crustaceans. They can range from four to twelve many-faceted eyes, have a variable number of limbs protected by a serrated chitin shell, and they have thick claw-sheathes over their surprisingly delicate, six-jointed hands. Their speech is fast and chittering, requiring special voiceboxes for any other known species to interpret. The Exrah are well-known to use this to their advantage at the negotiation table, as they can easily communicate without their business partners understanding them. Discussions between multiple Exrah produce a high-pitching whining sound that most organic species find deeply unpleasant, another thing the Exrah are happy to use to advantage in negotiations. Exrah breed by producing seed-buds on their own bodies - usually the back. When they show up on any other part of the body, they are considered unsightly and embarrassing, rather similar to acne. Seed-buds are deposited into spawning pools that mix genetic materials from many different Exrah - up to the hundreds, in some cases, creating a sort of enzyme soup that recombines with the buds to produce baby Exrah. This is why their bodies come in so many different varieties, and is a trait that helps them rapidly adapt to new environments. Some pure-strain pools are maintained to ensure children are born with specific, valued features. The Exrah homeworld is notably toxic and suffers from heavy background radiation for reasons that remain unclear. (Several species theorize that it's from some ancient military action, but the Exrah deny this loudly.) Exrah chitin serves as a radiation shielding and filter for airborne toxins, allowing them to survive despite the dangers at home. The speed at which a child grows this chiten determines if they are going to be a normal Exrah or one of the Exrah Imago or Perennials, who are a higher biological caste. An Imago is born when a neonatal grub develops its keratin layer quickly enough to protect during the whole of its development cycle. As adults, they have a much thicker layer of chitin, which makes them much longer-lived, slower, heavier and more fertile, and also generally much more intelligent than the majority of Exrah due to their protected braincase. Most grubs do not become Imago. They grow to adulthood much faster, and their bodies are more agile and dynamic, but they are sterile due to the radiation they grow up in, their minds distinctly limited due to radiation-based brain damage, and their bodies are incapable of healing. They tend to be quite short-lived and are referred to as Operators or Ephemerals, treated by the Imago as disposable slaves. Exrah society is centered around what they call Business Groups, a sort of combination megacorporation and nation-state, each controlled by a group of Imago who oversee the vast labor force of Operators. Many are nomadic, traveling through space without restricting themselves to any given planet. They instead operate out of giant embassy-ships that constantly seek new markets, especially emerging civilizations. Their negotiation methods with such peoples are exploitative - they offer a lot of goods and services, but at the cost of generational tariffs, customs fees and even total control over the society's growing datasphere, turning them into an economic vassal species for centuries afterwards. When a Business Group arrives in a new system, it sends Operators ahead of it to look into new markets and offer cheap, attractive deals to anyone they meet. The Imagos don't show up until later, guarded by large groups of combat Operators, to make more sophisticated and thoughtful deals. Up until this very year, the biggest and most dominant Business Group was the Concordat, which held the war contracts for supplying troop transport and weapons to major conflict zones such as Paradiso and sold the use of their mercenary Operators to support the Onyx forces. However, the Imago group in charge of the Concordat was a little too greedy and tried to con the EI into overpayment for bad goods. The EI's response was to destroy the entire Concordat as an example of what happens to those who cross it. The contracts the Concordat had been servicing were assumed by another Business Group, the Comissariat, though because they're only probationary, they have been forbidden to sign any mercenary contracts ofr their Operators, meaning the Exrah are no longer fighting on Paradiso until the EI decides the Comissariat are trustworthy. Instead, they have been hunting down the remnants of the Concordat and working as transports and suppliers, moving ammunition and troops. They also tend to make money negotiating business deals between other CA species, which they take as big a cut on as they are given a chance to. The Morat are the backbone of the Combined Army's direct force, a species that has spent centuries locked in war with itself. Its peoples have committed acts of genocide, tyranny and violent revolution against each other at every turn, and they have embraced the idea that violence and power are themselves the source of strength. While they may endlessly fight each other, they have also embraced a culture dedicated to the group above all else - one soldier is nothing compared to the regiment, one worker nothing compared to the guild, one hunter nothing compared to the village. They are aggressive and violent, but even more than they, they are loyal to each other beyond even death. They see themselves as apex predators, united against the universe, for whom everything comes down to blood and violence - their own and that of others. The Morat homeworld, Ugarat, can roughly be translated as 'The Warrior's Dwelling,' and it was a rough place to evolve. The life cycle of pretty much every lifeform was built around ruthless predation of others, from microbes to plants to animals. Thanks to the fact that even the plants were attacking things, there's no such thing as a non-predator on Ugarat, and the Morat were not an exception. Morat women always conceive dizygotic twins - that is, fraternal, not identical. However, Morat wombs provide only enough nutrients for one of the two to survive, forcing the unborn fetuses to fight each other within their mother's own body to survive, leaving only the tougher of the pair, which consumes the loser. Biologically, Morat are wired for aggression, and their children are far more likely to get in fights than most other species. This is considered normal and even encouraged by Morat society, which is far more violent than their biology. Both males and females are large, hairy humanoids with five fingers, three toes and vestigial horns, with males on average being a bit over seven feet and females a bit under. Females can also be told by their larger horns and slightly leaner frames. Again, biologically, the Morat could have chosen to not be fascists. They're aggressive by nature, but that's not a determiner - so are many humans. However, Morat society has formed a round what they refer to as the Principle of Authority. They consider their entire history to be a lesson developing the Principle and refining it, moving from what they term savagery or violence without principle to an enlightened society, which they define as one which uses violence correctly. They have defined their history as one of five great Ages. The first is the Age of the Claw, a sort of legendary prehistory based on a mix of myth and archaeological evidence, in which Morat lived as solitary predators who became intelligent to outwit the other beasts of Ugarat and existed somewhere in the middle of the food chain. They had little culture, and killed and ate each other as much as anything else. However, they did develop enough community and religion to have gods, particularly Cotoya, the war god. The cult of Cotoya taught the Morat to perform rituals known as the Hunt, beginning the Age of the Flail. The Hunt was all about bringing down superpredators, the raknarok (which literally translates as 'better fighters than the Morat' or 'those who are greater than the claw'). There's a few kinds still on Ugarat, most notably the Gurlanak, whose skin is several inches thick and resistant even to modern guns and which has two hearts, intensely high blood pressure, jaws strong enough to snap trees, and claws of great speed and power. The only thing bigger and stronger is the Demarok, which in the Age of the Flail could only be defeated by entire groups working together, though in the modern day Morat solo hunters use TAGs to even the fight. It is traditional for modern Morat rookies to take an unarmed TAG into the Ugarat forests and fight a duel with a Demarok. Actually winning that duel remains very difficult, and those who do earn the right to skin the beast as a cloak for their TAG, a sure sign of power and respect. Anyway, the Age of the Flail brought forth the First Principle of Authority: The strongest has reason. Defeating one of the raknarok was not easy, for they were stronger than the Morat and needed a cunning mind to take them down. Therefore, those who could do it had more wisdom than those who could not. For most of that period, the common prey was the Tinarak, a medium-sized nocturnal beast (which is to say, bigger than a Morat) of great speed, with vicious claws. Even now, killing a Tinarak is the mark of adulthood and often masculinity for the Morat. (The Morat are not male-dominated, quite, but men are expected to be loud and boastful, while women are known as Ze Rat, the ones who kill in silence.) Those who could kill a Tinarat became leaders of the Morat of the Age of the Flail, called Gesurat or Hunter Masters. The Gesurat gathered small Morat tribes beneath them, but for much of the Age of the Flail these groups were inherently unstable, often ending with another warrior killing the Gesurat to seize control. This changed in the Third Age, the Age of the Scythe. The Morath managed to tame the Taronak, a species of pack hunting beast that, when added to their own strength, enabled them to hunt even larger monsters than the Tinarak. The philosophy of the Age was summarized by the warrior-sage Eugarat, who wrote that those who had hunted with a pack had a "wound of the mind" opened that could not be closed, a realization that if beasts could hunt like this, so could Morat - and it could be more than the sum of its parts. This truth, or "knowledge-scar," was the Second Principle of Authority. The glory of the hunt belonged not only to the hunter but the entire pack, leading to the formation of the taronakrat pack-societies. Yes, leadership still got murdered or challenged, but communities were likely to survive changes of leadership by uniting in the glory of the pack. Eugarat's teachings led to the Knife Renaissance, which birthed the Fourth Age. He defined the third and final Principle of Authority: From rivalry, regimen. By creating military units with regimented authority, rivalry was controlled and regulated, with less internecine murder and more driving each other to excel. Eugarat taught that rivalry strengthens a character forged in the Hunt, and that war was the ultimate expression of Morat identity - actually, he invented the idea of war, the Morat having only had the concept of individual battles before him. From his path, the Morat distinguished the Warrior, who was vain and self-centered in pursuit of personal glory, and the Soldier, who followed orders and contributed to the glory of the regiment. Spreading from Eugarat's home in the northern continent of Ugarat, the Suryat Regiment was able to organize on a larger and more disciplined scale than the warbands around them, and they quickly swept the region in a war of conquest, bringing Eugarat's teachings of martial discipline, glorious war and ideological social darwinism with them. Fascism became the core of Morat identity, in other words. The Great Wars that followed lasted many centuries, really only ending when the Morat developed sufficient technology to start pushing conquest outwards from their sole planet. However, they consider that to be the golden age of their culture, the place that all future Morat culture flows from. Not, mind you, that every Morat within the Morat Supremacy, as they now call themselves, is a soldier. The Morat also maintain the Working Guilds, developed from the support staff and camp followers that would trail after the armies of the Great Wars. They are an apprenticeship-based set of craft guilds that pursue necessary skills to keeping the military going. Any Morat under the age of 14 is an apprentice in a Guild, though once they turn 14 they can give this up to join the military if they choose. Still, many Morat actually prefer craftwork and a more peaceful life - like I said, their biology is not what makes them fascist. Members of the Working Guilds do not have the same rights and privileges as the Gesurat, now a word referring to members of the military. Some other species believe that the Evolved Intelligence has deliberately hamstringed the Guilds and their social development to ensure that the Morat remain a fascist military state rather than allowing the craftspeople to grow into a coequal part of their society. All of Morat governance flows from the Rituals and Principles of Authority. The strongest has reason, and therefore should lead the rest. Ratarak duels are common, usually at least with the potential to kill one of the fighters, to settle disputes, earn promotion and similar. Some Ratarak traditions date all the way back to the Cotoya cult, but most were formally instituted durign the Knife Renaissance. The Sotarak tradition grew from there, a tradition of contact with other states. The Morat first perform a series of brief, testing attacks to gauge the strength of their foe and take prisoners, then hold an internal gladiatorial contest between regimental champions to decide who gets the right to lead the main offensive. The Ugatarak is the heart of the Morat Supremacy, though it is not by most standards strictly a government so much as a set of competing governing bodies that earn the right to control a certain part of society through semi-ritualized warfare in the traditions of Eugarat. Only those who have killed in battle and survived can participate in the Ugatarak rituals that decide regimental leadership, with regiments being as close as the Morat get to political parties. These then form the Morat Aggression Force in service to the Evolved Intelligence. The military service is core to Morat life and the majority of young Morat join it, pursuing the path of Authority in order to find the regiment they belong in and contribute to it. The Morat divide their lives into several stages. "Dat," or childhood, is better understood as meaning "small animal," and children are considered to lack discipline and put their own interests over that of their group and the Morat as a whole. While it is often an affectionate term when applied to one's kids, it is a deadly insult to an adult Morat. Murdat are those who have progressed into adolescence, and the word simultaneously refers to the adolescent gangs that form and the individual teens. It is not rare for veteran Morats to adopt a Murdat as their personal gang to teach and lead to greatness, and the bonds of friendship formed in one's childhood Murdat often last one's entire life. Ending one's period as a Murdat means going through the Baptism of Fire to become Kurdat, showing that you can not only fight and survive but have learned to restrain your aggression and control it. Generally, an entire Murdat will join the same Kurdat group and participate in basic military training together. Kurdat recruits are frequently sent to the front lines even while they're being trained, working alongside their veteran teachers to form social bonds within the regiment across generational gaps. (It is theorized that the Murdat phase of life is an ancient one, and that Morat children naturally form social bonds with each other as part of their life cycle, though in ancient times they tended to be entirely with other blood relatives. This theory argues that the Knife Renaissance's purpose was to retain this "childlike" sense of camaraderie and forge it into something more.) Eventually, Kurdat will be deemed to be full soldiers - Gesurat. This is full Morat adulthood, and anyone that isn't a Gesurat is ultimately viewed as incomplete and imperfect, lacking the proper understanding of self-sacrifice and death. While it was once a title of personal honor in the ancient days, now it is merely the least that is expected of a proper soldier. Upon becoming Gesurat, former members of a Kurdat generally get scattered by the needs of their regiment, though they usually remain friends and stay in contact. Once this happens, they are considered Karanatat, children of the regiment. Allegiance is shown with a sash and various insignias that denote rank, clan, unit type and similar. Each regiment is basically a nation of its own, ruled over by its colonel, with its own rites and culture. The regimental barracks forms the core community for its members, though a large city may contain multiple barracks and therefore multiple internal nations. Morat frequently take trophies to decorate their barracks and track the legendary deeds of the unit. All are loyal to the Supremacy as a whole, but highly competitive with each other as they each try to be the strongest unit. So, why are the Morat so loyal to the Evolved Intelligence? Ultimately, this is the result of the Principle of Authority and how deeply it is engrained into their society. The EI defeated the Morat Supremacy. It won the war against them. Therefore, it is right and just that they should obey it. That the EI had to blow up one of the planets in their home system as a show of force before the Morat acknowledged that they were beaten is merely proof that the EI is, in fact, a worthy leader. That said, it is also definitely true that if Morat leadership ever sees the chance to conquer the Evolved Intelligence and take control of it, they will jump on that poo poo and go back to trying to conquer the universe for themselves. That's just how the Principle of Authority works. They do not believe this is a viable course of action, so they remain loyal, and the EI wields them as a threat against anyone that tries to rebel against it or threaten its expansion. Of course, they're only actually deployed against people the EI does not want to survive the encounter, because even it has been entirely unable, or perhaps unwilling, to get the Morat to understand the concepts of surrender or mercy as valuable. Next time: Survival at any cost
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Jan 13, 2022 20:41
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Halloween Jack posted:But there are problems with this approach, depending on how you do it. If a book is badly laid out and drifts back and forth between topics at random, that doesn't mean a review should do the same. You might find yourself writing a long screed about how something is a confusing mess, only to have it cleared up later. My gut reactions as I read along are great--for me to note down and edit into a review later. It's always a good idea to finish reading a book before you start posting review installments. Generally if something seems like complete lunacy or unexplained idiocy I do skip ahead to check and see if it ever gets explained before I bust out the expletives.  I mean, yeah, obviously 100% train-of-thought reviewing easily gets bad, but I tend to personally find those reviews to have more emotion and be more interesting than the more "academic" ones. But I can understand that if someone's here for a clear answer on whether or not a given RPG is worth a purchase, a more academic and experienced review might be more relevant.Which is why I tend to stick to the things that no one in their right mind should ever buy.
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Jan 13, 2022 21:52
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Infinity RPG We Are Everyone The Shasvastii are one of the oldest civilizations in the Combined Army, originating in a completely different galaxy than everyone else - they're from Messier 82, a neighbor of the Milky Way, and their height was some one hundred million years ago. They were a galactic empire that had ruled for many, many centuries. They had already predicted the collision of Messier 82 and Messier 81 and didn't think it was much of a threat, since galaxies are mostly empty space. Sure, gravitational distortions might cause some problems, but nothing super worrisome, and they'd get some lovely new nebulas out of the deal, which might generate new stars and planets to rule in some truly immense period of time - the Shasvastii have always been ones to take the long view. They miscalculated in this case, however. The tidal forces of the colliding galaxies caused spacetime warping that even they could not have predicted, collapsing nearly every wormhole in their galaxy over several decades. The empire was doomed, split into many tiny fiefdoms unable to travel or communicate with each other. Only the tiniest, most local wormholes survived, connecting a scant handful of systems to each other at best. The ancient Shasvastii are known to have altered their suns, but even their modern inheritors have no clear idea why and cannot comprehend how it was done. A few fragmentary records suggest it was part of some kind of computational thing. Whatever the case, as the galactic tides grew stronger, the solar alterations became unstable, and more than ten billion stars in Shasvastii-inhabited systems were destroyed, annihilating over 80% of the Shasvastii planets in their explosions. The survivors embraced a single cultural imperative, one that overrode all others: survive. Survive by any means necessary. The Shasvastii as the Evolved Intelligence knows them all descend from a single enclave that made a gigantic fleet of slower-than-light arks, which it set forth in many directions to ensure the Shasvastii species continued somehow and would never again be near extinction. Their trips would each last millions of years as they headed for new galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster. Several thousand years ago, one of those arks entered the Milky Way's far edge, and its inhabitants were automatically awakened to begin new colonization. This remnant, the Shasvastii Continuum, has no idea what happened to the others and no way to check. They don't really intend to try and find out. They simply intend to survive, to maintain the Shasvastii existence until the universe itself dies out. By any means necessary. Modern Shasvastii biology is a mix of engineered and naturally evolved, and even they aren't really sure how much is natural. The old Empire engaged heavily in genetic engineering, and the Continuum has continued to do so in its efforts to avoid being wiped out or to help endure their work for the Evolved Intelligence more recently. Human scientists studying captured tissue samples from Paradiso were baffled by them - they found strangely simple DNA that varied in different parts of the same body for no clear reason, and many theorized that biografts or even corpse-stitching might be involved. In truth, they eventually learned, Shasvastii RNA is exceptionally complex and is the core genetic identity of the Shasvastsii, rather than their DNA. Humans refer to it as RNAsh, and it's more stable than human RNA, using macro-chromatin fibers networked through the entire body to produce a result very similar to Silk biotech, with each fiber containing more information than a million human DNA strands. RNAsh can select from this database and splice it into Shasvastii DNA, allowing them to rapidly alter their own genetic expression and adapt to new conditions in minutes rather than waiting for evolutionary generations. Shasvastii are even able to retool their own intenral organs to replace damaged ones or make them do specialized jobs, allowing them to survive in environments that would be toxic to any other species. Shasvastii brains are also very strange - the actual brain is a very simplistic organ which solely performs cognitive processing. A Shasvastii's personality and memories are actually stored within the same chromatin fiber network as their DNA database. Some human scientists theorize that the Shasvastii actually originally evolved from some kind of genetic parasite, with their bodies merely an efficient form they hijacked at some point in the distant past. It's unclear if RNAsh and the macro-chromatin network are naturally evolved or engineered, but the Shasvastii themselves have definitely gotten good at using the system to genetically engineer themselves in extreme ways. Shasvastii can biopsy each other and implant the results into themselves to immediately gain whatever genetic innovations the donor came up with within themselves, and it's rare to see a Shasvastii use an environment suit - they just inject themselves with RNA instructions on how to produce body parts that will achieve the same effect, making it exceptionally easy for the species to adapt to anything that a single member has adapted to. This unique chromatin structure also means that Shasvastii can encode their own memories into their progeny, essentially perfectly cloning themselves any time they reproduce. They can also implant only selected portions of their genetic memories if they choose, and mated Shasvastii pairs may choose to blend their memories together in their offspring. It is also possible for them to only give experiential memory rather than episodic memory, so that the offspring is born without any memories but with whatever skills were put into them already understood. All Shasvastii are hermaphroditic and may impregnate themselves if they choose. Offspring are referred to as SpawnEmbryos and are grown within the Shasvastii body as a specialized organ that buds from their chest cavity. At any point after the chromatin network has copied itself over into this new organ, which can take days to months depending on how much information is being copied, the SpawnEmbryo can then be removed via a self-sterilizing orifice on the left side of the body. SpawnEmbryos can survive great extremes of temperature, pressure and similar, and if placed in the ground, they will grow roots and feed like a plant, while if placed in a corpse, they will feed on the body. Indeed, a dying parent will be harvested by the SpawnEmbryo for nutrients. After a few weeks, the completed SpawnEmbryo will hatch into a new Shasvastii. Newborn Shasvastii are almost the same size as adults and possess whatever genetic memories were given to them, so they essentially are born fully formed and ready to pursue whatever agenda they like. In fact, the Shasvastii have figured out how to weaponize their reproduction, deliberately leaving SpawnEmbryos behind on the battlefield, either planted in the ground or in corpses, and have made special life support platforms called SeedEmbryos that can disguise the SpawnEmbryo so it can be smuggled into enemy cities. The result is fully grown soldiers popping out of nowhere, their mission objectives and desires already coded into them. O-12 has developed robust sterilization protocols to try and wipe out potential SeedEmbryo infection, but even a single missed SpawnEmbryo can result in the Shasvastii continuing their mission. The Shasvastii also maintain stockpiles of SeedEmbryos in their own settlements or hidden in safe places through the galaxy, called shaviish, so that if they are ever wiped out for any reason, they can still survive as a species. The main growth stage between a newborn Shasvastii and an adult is referred to as dheviis, an intermediate stage in which the newborn selects their gender expression for their future life. Once chosen, they become biologically locked in to their choice, which has nothing to do with their sexual organs. Rather, female Shasvastii are usually stronger and tougher, while male Shasvastii are more easily able to alter their own bodies. The main differences are hormonal and it'd probably be hard for a human to tell them apart. Most adult Shasvastii also maintain a number of budding internal organs in their chest cavity which do nothing by default but which can rapidly be specialized and redesigned to aid in specific tasks. The Shasvastii were not willing converts to the Evolved Intelligence. Their culture is driven by two main schools of thought, each driven by the existential terror of extinction built into their genetic memory. The Multipliers are those Shasvastii who believe that survival is best achieved by spreading throughout the galaxy using colonies, advance bases, shaviish and similar. They believe that all societal constructs are doomed to eventually fall to entropy, and so the Shasvastii Continuum can only survive by becoming so vast and widespread that the failure of any single part cannot take down the whole. They were dominant before the EI decided the Shasvastii were a viable culture and needed to be assimilated. After the Shasvastii lost the war and were conquered, the Conservative school emerged. They argued that resisting the EI merely provoked it and made it consider destroying the Shasvastii. Therefore, the best way to survive would be to serve the EI, defend their existing colonies and work with the Combined Army, using the resources that the EI provided them for Transcendence research to become indispensable to it. They are now dominant within the Continuum...but not within the Expeditionary Forces that actually make up most of the Shasvastii military. The Multipliers remain dominant there, despite the irony of being forced to do what the Conservatives suggest. The original goal of the Expeditionary Forces, after all, was to do their own aggressive colonial expansionism, setting up new Shasvastii outposts wherever they could. The Shasvastii Continuum weren't nice people even before the EI took them over, you see, and their standard operation when they discovered other cultures was to observe them, infiltrate their society with Speculo operatives and then destroy them from within using targeted assassinations and sabotage. They did this at least three times to spacefaring civilizations. (Speculo agents are the best Shasvastii around at manipulating their own genes. Their bodies made of biosynthetics, which can transform into near-perfect replicas of specific target beings by subsuming the target's genes into themselves. The Speculo agent then uses the consumed genetic code to alter 99% of their body to match. They even have master Cube sockets implanted which allow them to download their victim's Cube and transfer their own persona into a subsidiary Cube, becoming perfect infiltrators with access to their victim's memories and personality. They often also have special augmentations implanted to make them better assassins.) Each Expeditionary Force operates autonomously and secretly from the others, with strong rivalries between them. This setup ensures redundancy, another effort by the Continuum to keep one loss from taking out the whole. Each force maintains its own strategic colonies and hidden installations that the others do not know about, just in case they ever meet an enemy that uses their own tactics against them. That way if one force is subverted, they can't betray the others, because they don't know what the others have. (Several argue that they failed anyway, as the Evolved Intelligence was such a foe and has subverted them entirely, but they aren't the ones in charge.) The Evolved Intelligence itself is becoming impatient with the Shasvastii and their apparent lack of interest in actual pursuit of Transcendence. Some Conservatives believe the Multipliers are sabotaging the project, while others believe the fears that live in the center of Shasvastii culture prevent them from succeeding. They know that the EI is letting them exist on sufferance, mostly because the Expeditionary Forces are proving useful to it. After all, their skills and technology make it much easier for the EI to harvest data from the civilizations it conquers. But, being Shasvastii, they are still utterly terrified that the EI will decide they are no longer of use to its plans and wipe them out as a threat. Next time: Our friends, the Reptilian Space Elves
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Jan 14, 2022 00:11
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 Summon Skate Part 5: the X/1999 Games, Sponsored by Red Bull This section of the book finally gets down to the nitty-gritty of combat rules, where our Figure Skaters take up arms against the Chaos Figure. Here we also get a quick refresher on the resolution mechanic for Skill checks: roll 2D6, less than or equal to the relevent stat is success, higher is failure. Snake eyes are a Critical, you gain 1 Mana! Boxcars is a Critical Failure, lose 1 HP. Speaking of Mana, an important thing for the beginning of combat: the magical emissary of the World Figure, Cosmos, requires magic power to construct the stage upon which the battle shall commence. If PCs have somehow stashed away more than four Mana apiece, they give the surplus to the GM. Now, this isn't necessarily a balance thing to keep you from breaking the fight over your knee with Mana spamming, you can still get more Mana during the fight, the game still hands it out like candy. It's so the GM has a stash of Mana for if everything goes wrong and there's an accidental TPK. If everyone dies and it's Game Over, for three mana per PC, the GM can reset the clock to just before the boss fight. Everyone's HP is back, all your uses of limited skills and tricks are reset, all that jazz. The things that AREN'T carried over are if you managed to seal the boss' Emblem and any uses of special secret skills you didn't know about, that stays sealed and used as you've already figured out that mystery and you keep all your info. Part of selecting and Easy Difficulty campaign at the start of a game is the GM just gets 20 extra mana at the start, which basically means a few more free Retrys. This tabletop RPG has savescumming! Now, why would the GM need a codified mechanic to keep from accidentally killing all the players? Because the Bosses have AI. The GM rolls dice to decide which attack the Boss will use on its turn, and if the move doesn't specify target priority, there's another table to roll to determine how it uses the move. It can do things like aiming to hit the most characters with an AoE, target the one with the least health, try and disrupt the player's Traced summoning diagrams, or try and just break the stage in half as efficiently as possible. And that would be BAD. Fights in Summon Skate are lost in two ways. The first way is the fairly obvious one, everyone gets all their hp depleted and they die. The OTHER way is where the weird minigame of combat gets complicated. Combat takes place on a Stage, a 12 x 12 grid. Players sit on the intersections of the lines and move along them from point to point (characters start battle at a random point decided by rolling 2D6 to determine the X and Y coordinates). Bosses have lots of attacks that target the MIDDLEs of squares, creating Shattered Spaces, with Cracks connecting them. If the Chaos Figure manages to create enough Shattered Spaces linked by Cracks stretching from one side of the Stage to the opposite side, it just breaks the Stage and everyone instantly dies.  Shattered Spaces and Cracks are just the worst. Traced lines are blocked by them and they can't be drawn over, loving up any Figures you're trying to draw. It's important to try and fix them whenever possible to buy yourself some time to deal with the Chaos Figure. Lots of Healing Figures do this, repairing an area of the Stage and healing anyone sitting on locations inside those squares. The book has a handy sidebar explaining how AoE attacks and skills work:  SO our goals are simple: Defeat the Chaos Figure before it either kills us or just flips the gameboard over. How does this work? A round of combat is divided into three chunks: a GM Phase, a Skating Phase, and a Summon Phase. The GM Phase is when the enemies have their turn. First the Chaos Figure itself does a move largely determined by dice rolls on tables. Next goes the Pawns. These are little greeblies in service of the Chaos Figure, and are basically putties from Power Rangers. They just sit on the board, usually not even moving from their spot, and use some predefined skill or attack. They're an annoyance, they have one hp, you can kill them by literally just skating THROUGH them, causing them to explode into a single stray Mana you can pick up. After the Pawns comes any Chaos Summoners that might be on the board, who use all the same mechanics as PC Summoners but on the monster's side. They're for if the GM wants to give the Players a bit of a mirror match against skills more similar to their own or just have an antagonist who has more character and personality than a writhing tumescent mass. After all the bad guys get their one action each, comes the Skate Phase. In the Skate Phase, you can move your alloted base movement speed in a number of ways. What's your base movement speed? It depends on the number of Players, with fewer PCs getting more spaces to move per turn, and more PCs getting fewer, as determined by a reference table. It's slightly weird, but I understand the need to balance that sort of thing when movement is an important resource. You can use your per-turn allotment of movement in four ways, to be portioned out however you want. You can Skate, where you move along normally and leave a Traced line behind you that can be used to draw Figures. You can Jump, where you move without leaving a Traced Line behind you, which sucks, but it lets you travel over Shattered Spaces and Cracks. You can Spin, doing a little pirouette in place and sucking up any Mana sitting on the Stage within 1 space of you. And you can use your neat Trick granted by your Summon Skate Gear once per battle as a bonus. Now that you've scribbled a bunch of lines all over the stage, we enter the Summon Phage. At this point you look at the Traced lines and see if you managed to draw a proper summoning diagram to call upon a Figure. It's at this point you can use Mana Trace to spend some Mana to add a few extra lines if you need them. If your character has drawn the necessary pattern of lines, uninterrupted by Cracks or Shattered Spaces, and they're touching a line somehow connected to it, they can finally Summon the Figure. The pattern is erased from the Stage, and now the Figure is summoned, primed and ready to have its special power used whenever you see fit. In the case of Attack Figures, right now would be the best time to unload on the boss and finally do some damage. A thing to point out quick is if a Figure has a Rank higher than your Magic stat, it's a one-use thing, it can only be summoned and its power used once and then it's gone, so make it count. When you deal damage to the Chaos Figure, you roll a d6 to determine which of the monster's body parts you hit. That's right, this has one of my favorite mechanic in games: bosses with multple body parts that have their own hp pools. Each of the Chaos Figures's attacks? Linked to a specific body part. If you kill a body part, that attack is deactivated. The boss only dies if its MAIN body is killed, usually a 6 on the d6, but if damage hits an already-dead body part it goes to the Main Body instead, so eventually you'll chew through the boss enough to hit its most vulnerable spot. And every time the Chaos Figure is damaged or a body part is destroyed, it spits some Mana onto random locations on the Stage like a burst pinata. This all makes for a thrilling anime boss fight and all, but do you want it to be a teensy bit more... doubles figure skating? Well that's where Unison comes in. You know those Bonding Moments I mentioned in the last update, where PCs have a little moment and build a rapport, a connection? That has a mechanical effect, because it generates a link of Unison between those characters, and if two characters have Unison, they can share each others' Traced Lines to make a Figure. This is incredibly useful for working together to quickly draw big complex shapes, especially the Emblem, which you wanna knock out as quickly as possible. When PCs hit Level 3, they even get access to special combination moves they can only use with someone they have Unison with. There's Pair Lift, where once per turn, if a PC jumps to the location of another PC, they'll catch them and it doesn't cost any movement. The inverse of this is Throw Jump, where once per turn your partner does a Fastball Special and you can jump from their position and it takes no movement. And lastly there's Pair Spin, where they both just swing around each other in place and suck up all the Mana around them, with BOTH of them getting it all. It both adds a huge new source of tactical mobility where players just teleport around the arena while ALSO being Yuri On Ice as gently caress. A huge strength of this book is that all this information I've spent like 45 minutes typing out? At the end of the Combat Rules section, there's a little Q&A Section and a little quick cheat sheet summarizing all these important points at a glance. It's very well laid out. Next Part: the Game Master Section Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Mar 3, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 02:01
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Ffffffuuuuuuuuck meeeee that’s the good stuff. I was into it before this section, the combat seemed really cool, it just kept getting more my thing and then…. loving throwing another PC while you do sweet skate moves to fight a monster with your anime magic powers is perfect in every possible way. gently caress that’s good. Good job, one more person bought Summon Skate and now I’m seeing if I can find it in Japanese. I honestly feel bad for Floria cause I liked it a lot, it looked dope as hell, but Summon Skate is blowing it out of the water. It’s like going on a pretty good date, but then you meet the love of your life on the drive home. gently caress me running. Hot drat.
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Jan 14, 2022 06:53
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   Hello everyone! I’m back in the reviewing game today! Looking back this past year…scratch that, year and a half, I realized that the overwhelming majority of my reviewed content has been Dungeons & Dragons books, especially 5th Edition. I do enjoy the system, but after a while it got monotonous. When I came upon this review on RPGnet, it inspired me to try something different for a change: covering the evolution of the setting for one of the most popular superhero RPGs on the marketplace. When the D20 System was still hot and fresh, all sorts of products and genres were being thrown at it. There were a few superhero RPGs made for it, like Silver Age Sentinels, but virtually all of them sank pretty quickly for a variety of reasons. Mutants & Masterminds was the standout: its First Edition of 2002 was still very D20ish, but it didn’t take long for the designers to realize that a faithful ode to the genre would require greater departures from the fantasy dungeon-crawling the D20 System is optimized for, so in 2005 they released a Second Edition which went on to be incredibly popular. The current Third Edition was released in 2011, and there is some debate among the fanbase as to whether 2nd or 3rd is better, although the latter seems to be winning out. Borrowing inspiration from Champions, Mutants & Masterminds is a crunchy open-ended “build your own superhero/powers” system where the D20 is the sole die used for every means of resolution. Every Edition moved further away from 3rd Edition D&D, to the point that M&M 3e is almost its own thing. Freedom City is the official flagship setting for Mutants & Masterminds, with a new version made for every Edition; the world it takes place in is officially known as Earth-Prime and has been expanded on in further supplements. Unlike typical comic book universes that go by Marvel’s “Sliding Timescale,” each edition of Freedom City more or less advanced in real time based on the product’s publication date: 2003 for 1e, 2005 for 2e, and 2017 for 3e. As you can imagine, the greatest amount of changes came during 3rd Edition, and while there’s definitely a metaplot it tends to avoid the White Wolf follies of making godlike NPCs tower over PCs who can only watch rather than change things on their own. On the contrary, starting-level PCs can be easily built to be the equal match of many of Earth-Prime’s most prominent superheroes. So rather than reviewing an individual book, I decided to be different and illustrate the evolution of the setting, noting where I can on what things changed while still giving a comprehensive overview. Interesting features specific to a certain Edition will be marked as 1e, 2e, and 3e.  Introduction to Freedom City I’ll note that each book differs in terms of chapters and separation, so I won’t be separating things by numbered Chapters. However, huge portions of the book have been repeated, plus or minus a few tweaks and metaplot/rules updates, so much of the information covered in this review can accurately summarize any of them. The book opens up with a Foreward by creator Steve Kenson, explaining the comic book influences and how the Freedom City setting came to be: basically it existed before Mutants & Masterminds as a concept for a now-defunct superhero RPG. Originating for Steve’s private amusement, it soon proved useful in providing a proper world to play around in for the new Mutants & Masterminds RPG. What follows are Basic Premises for the setting that maps closely to Marvel/DC tropes: people with superpowers always existed but “went public” around WW2, superpowers are diverse in origin and function, We also have details on the overall history of the world, which more or less mirrors real-world history save for things such as prehistoric civilizations like Atlantis and the Serpent People of Lemuria, a lamp-bearing ghost fighting British soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill creating state-sanctioned superhero teams (the Liberty League and Allies of Freedom) to fight fascism in World War II. The 20th and 21st Centuries get the lion’s share of content, and are divided thematically based on the Ages of Superhero Comics. The Golden Age premiered with the advent of the Centurion* smashing a bank robber’s car, and the Nazis deploying their own superpowered der Übermensch as a supposed Aryan** answer to America’s Centurion. *Think Superman, but whose homeworld was an alternate dimension destroyed by Omega, the Thanos/Darkseid Expy. **He was actually not human at all, but an exile from a race of cosmic energy wielders known as the Ultima. The Golden Age came to an end when Joe McCarthy convinced Americans that mask-wearing mystery men were Communist spies, and summoned the Liberty League before the HUAC to intimidate them into unmasking and ratting on their fellows. Instead they gave Tailgunner Joe the finger and went independent, with only the Centurion and Lady Liberty remaining active throughout the entirety of the 50s. The Silver Age began when the Greek God Hades invaded Freedom City in 1960 with an undead army, and the Centurion and other heroes got together to send them back to Tartarus. They formed the Freedom League, which was like the Liberty League but supported by private donations instead of government approval. The public welcomed them back whole-heartedly, and the mixture of Golden Age veterans and new superheroes went on to fight a new generation of threats. AEGIS (American Elite Government Intervention Service) was also formed, a US government agency tasked with dealing with superhuman threats. The cost of crime-fighting took its toll on heroes by the Bronze Age of the 1970s, with a rise in more violent vigilantes, occult threats, and the deaths or retirement of superheroes. By the Iron Age of the 1980s, many Americans felt threatened by the new crop of bloodthirsty anti-heroes that seemed to predominate. Politician Franklin Moore* ran on a zero tolerance policy against vigilantism and made private superheroing illegal in Freedom City. He was highly corrupt and ran the police like his own private army, and both sides of the law were influenced by organized crime. *who is definitely not an homage to Watchman Nixon and named after that comic’s acclaimed writer. The Modern Age began in 1993 with the Terminus Invasion, where Omega sent his extradimensional army to invade Freedom City. Much like Hades’ invasion this united the superhero community, but unlike those times the Freedom League would lose something precious. The Centurion perished in battle against Omega, who was believed to have died as well in the aftermath but in reality had to retreat. The Centurion’s death was mourned throughout the world, but this sorrow was put to productive use in kicking Moore out of office, making superheroes legal again, and Freedom City was rebuilt with the aid of superpowered help. Here’s where things differ depending on what book you own: the 90s overall were happier times than the Iron Age, with the premier of the newest generation of the Atom Family (think Fantastic Four), the Raven (Batman) opening up the Claremont Academy as a school for superpowered teenagers, and the undersea nation of Atlantis got mass mind-controlled to invade the surface world before the Freedom League and Atom Family destroyed the MacGuffin (the Serpent Scepter) and drove off the masterminds (the Deep Ones). By 2nd Edition Omega tried to destroy reality by seeding cosmic bombs through various dimensions and was stopped by a band of new-time heroes (the PCs) in the published adventure Time of Crisis. The Grue (Skrull) Unity also invaded Earth, and the Freedom League gained some new members and built a satellite headquarters orbiting Earth. By 3rd Edition, several 2nd Edition material and events were added to the metaplot such as Claremont Academy getting its own superhero team, an increase in supervillains of a magical nature, and an alien robot mass-empowering humans randomly in the otherwise superhuman-free metropolis of Emerald City. Which is the other big setting book and also an adventure path for 3rd Edition. Earth-Prime also got its own Marvel-style “oppressed people with superpowers” trope in the form of…groan…illegal aliens. A cosmic force of oblivion known as Collapsar devouring worlds and the tyrannical Stellar Khanate taking over the democratic Lor Republic caused a galactico-political crisis, forcing many alien refugees to head towards Earth. This Age’s right-wing anti-superhero politician, Freedom City Mayor and big-time business mogul Jonathan Grant, started rounding up refugees and claiming their technology for personal profit. He was implicated in the creation of an alien-human hybrid assassin to murder his daughter, a prominent alien rights activist, but before he could spill anything further on his associates he got murdered in confinement. The position of Earth’s Master Mage became vacant (think the head of all mages), and Daedalus (Ancient Greek Iron Man) created a colony on Europa for the alien refugees to resettle. Beyond the history, the introduction details the city in very broad strokes, with much of the information covered in more detail in the following chapters. Although we do get rumors of a “Phantom Cab” that seems to appear at random beyond mortal comprehension, known to get people safely out of dangerous situations. 3e is written like a travel brochure, including in-character quotes and pictures by notable residents telling readers about the wonders of their home along with some hand-written style editorial notes.  Life in Freedom 1e and 2e had outlines for Freedom City demographics. I decided to compare its population to other US cities in 2005, and it’s around the population of Los Angeles. It’s also slightly smaller than New York City (302.6 square miles/487 square kilometers) and far smaller than Los Angeles (503 square miles/809.5 square kilometers).  Those 2005 rent prices, tho. Amateur Discourse on Demographics from a US Citizen! A few observations. First off, there’s a massive amount of Libertarian voters. In most elections at the local and national levels, third parties squeak out miniscule amounts. Additionally a lot of self-defined Libertarians end up voting for Republicans, where the actual Libertarian Parties tend to be very ideologically different than Libertarian-Republicans,* so you’re splitting up an already-tiny movement. In terms of racial demographics Freedom City is closest to New York City in going by the largest US cities at the time, albeit with a much higher white population and smaller percentages of Asians and Latinos. Another thing to note is that generally speaking Hispanic/Latino people have their own separate category in US Census surveys due to having a multi-ethnic history, although this is more of an Anglo tradition borne out of US racial perceptions (Latin American countries tend to group people differently). 2e and 3e has a side-bar discussing in laymen’s terms the legal alterations in Earth-Prime that allow superheroes to operate in the United States. Costumed identities are treated as separate legal entities so superheroes can do things like testifying in court without unmasking, mind-reading and super-senses can violate the 4th and 5th Amendments depending on context and evidence acquired solely through them cannot be admissible in court, superheroes don’t have to follow criminal procedures unless they work for law enforcement, and generally speaking superheroes can reasonably get away with using superpowers as weapons provided they don’t do more than the minimum force needed. The law cracks down hard on superheroes who kill and maim criminals, which is likely in part due to the negative social stigma of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Oddly there’s no mention of the legal status of nonhuman yet intelligent entities, such as the “personhood” status of AI or self-aware pets. I’d imagine that this would be a big one to cover. The bulk of the section covers notable (mostly non-superpowered) people and places, from local restaurant chains, media institutions, major corporations, and more. Many entries have little in the way of foul plots or direct ties to the superhero community, and are meant more to “fill in” Freedom City. The largest Businesses in Freedom City include DeCosta Construction which may or may not have ties to the Italian Mafia, not one but three “evil corporations” managed by CEOs who have extensive criminal contacts via Delphic Indutries (shipping), Grant Conglomerates (biotechnology), and Majestic Industries (chemicals and heavy industry), and the Rhodes Foundation whose CEO is waiting for the return of the Scarab,* the former CEO and Freedom League member who has reincarnated throughout human history to wage a never-ending battle against his evil rival the sorcerer Tan-Aktor. We also get two major banks (to rob or protect from robbers), three law firms and one whose criminal defense attorneys have made pacts with infernal entities, and two private security firms to act as cannon fodder, mercenaries, or even for more profit-driven superheroes to work for. *And that reincarnation can very easily be a PC!  The Educational institutions are split into high schools and colleges for our Spider-Man aged PCs to frequent, including the rough and tumble Joseph Clark high school that has long been plagued by drugs and gang violence, and the esteemed Claremont Academy that looks for superpowered teenagers around the world to enroll and teach them the responsible use of their powers. The Hanover Institute of Technology competes with MIT for budding young minds to create wondrous scientific marvels, and Master Lee’s School of Self-Defense is managed by a disciple of esoteric martial arts techniques. But after one of his pupils turned evil, Master Lee is reluctant to teach unless someone proves themselves of moral worth. Libraries and “fine art” installations include some interesting spins, such as a museum of history that also has alien and non-human artifacts on display, a Super Museum dedicated to masked mystery men (and the villains they fought) of all stripes. The Healthcare industry is state of the art on account of necessity for all the collateral damage that comes from Freedom City being the epicenter of so many world-defining events, and the Freedom Medical Center has doctors who specialize in superpowers and their medical applications. There’s also Providence Asylum, which in the 90s received approval to treat mentally ill superhumans. In 1e the Asylum sat upon a Native American holy ground which was responsible for an increase in supernatural activity, although later editions removed this. The 3e texts for mentally ill superhumans are different from prior editions, which indirectly linked mental illness and criminality, whereas the current edition uses more neutral language.  The Media is given a pretty thorough write-up in comparison to other entries, likely to encourage PCs that want to go Clark Kenting. We learn a bit about what superhero comic books look like in Earth-Prime. Castle Comics is the most prominent publisher, and superhero comic books primarily focus on the (in-universe) real-world events of superheroes and supervillains, and thus have their own newswire services to keep up with current events. For print media, the Daily Herald is a right-wing newspaper who is constantly critical of superheroes and reserves particular ire for ones who operate in poorer communities, who they described as armed thugs who “should be taken off the streets. In 1e and 2e they were very homophobic, questioning why the League let the “sexual deviant” Johnny Rocket join their organization. The more liberal Freedom Ledger is the oldest newspaper and is overall more supportive of superheroes, given that its Beaumont family owners have traditionally borne the mantle of Bowman throughout the ages. They earned acclaim for reporting during Omega’s invasion and the death of the Centurion. The other newspapers focus on more specialized topics, such as the gossipy Daily Word and the financially-focused Wading Way Bulletin. Radio and Television are more personality-focused due to the host-based nature, such as the news reporter Amy Fend who is known for being brave enough to try and interview super-villains in the middle of their crimes, and Super-Vision is a multi-media franchise dedicated to all things superpowered. 1e and 2e had a write-up for a reality show star, Richard “Voyeur” Royer, who was a super-powered mutant who had the ability to project whatever he sees and hears as a radio signal that can be picked up and recorded by electronic devices. I suppose that with the ubiquitous presence of smartphones in 2017, he long passed his 15 minutes of fame by 3rd Edition. The US Military has a presence in Freedom City, although they generally let superheroes handle the “smaller-scale” supervillains and instead focus on helping repel larger invasions. Star Island used to serve as a command center for space-related research, although it hosted a large refugee camp of aliens in the 2010s, and is now under the watch of AEGIS who guards the teleportal platform that connects to the colony in Europa. The Parks and Aquariums serve as good places to host big battles for adventures, and two of them even have maps! Lake MacKenzie once served as home to lake monsters, giant crocodiles, and serial killers…although those are supposedly urban legends. Liberty Park saw its fair share of incidents, such as the Green Man transforming it into a deadly headquarters full of floral soldiers. Riverside Park has a 100 foot tall statue of the Centurion, constructed after his death. And Happanuk Hill was a burial ground to the (fictional) Indigenous tribe of the same name, preserved as an historical site and mystic experts claim that there are lingering traces of power. 2e had advice for using Ocean Heights Amusement Parks in campaigns, such as ideas for converted deathtraps, circus and entertainment-themed supervillains, as well a place for PCs to have some fun in their secret identities. 1e had its own section on Politics, which is absent in later Editions. There’s a write-up for a Republican Representative who is finding her platform increasingly out of touch with newer constituents, a Southside political activist who “reports from the outside” and covers economic issues such as homelessness and uneven infrastructural funding, a Democratic Senator who is trying to convince several scientifically-inclined superheroes to mass-produce their inventions and is head of the Senate Committee on Superhuman affairs, the leader of an LGBT rights organization, and a write-up on CODE or Citizens for Order, Decency, & Ethics. CODE was a media watchdog group that formed during the early 80s and helped elect Franklin More towards mayordom, and their mission statement is that independent superheroes not part of the State do more ill than harm, such as the property damage from battles with supervillains and encouraging children to emulate their risky behavior as role models. Unsurprisingly they’re not very popular in Freedom City, but draw the most support in Midwestern and Southern states.  Religion explains that Freedom City is predominantly Christian, although it is home to a higher than normal portion of Voodoo and neopagan practitioners, the former due to the Loa known as Siren being a Freedom League member. The Islamic Center of Freedom City recently faced attempted arson by a Neo-Nazi gang led by the white supremacist supervillain Knightfire, although this attack united the neighborhood together to help them rebuild. A peculiar new religion known as the Pinnacle Path began in Freedom City, a mostly-spiritual self-help movement that proclaims that people with superpowers are pseudo-divine beings that reflect the best and worst archetypes of humanity. They also teach that anyone can gain superpowers through the proper rituals. It’s up to the GM whether the Path largely means well or is a scam. There’s also a brief write-up on the Mayombe, a Voodoo criminal cult that makes use of practices forbidden by the mainstream branch of the religion for self-empowerment. Restaurants, Bars, & Clubs mostly contains one-to-two paragraph entries for a variety of restaurants and recreational places. Most aren’t anything to write home about, save that gambling is legal in Freedom City and thus there are four casinos in Southside that long had ties to the Freedom City Mob. Science & Technology covers two major institutions. The Albright Institute is dedicated towards the research of superpowers in general, and its owner Langston Albright was the light-controlling superhero known as Beacon during the post-WW2 40s and 50s. By 3rd Edition he’s in his 90s and is looking for the next successor to his legacy.* The other institution is ASTRO (Applied Scientific and Technical Research Organization) Labs, which had its start in developing weapons during World War II to use against the Axis Powers. It’s now the largest scientific research company in the world, and is a good way to introduce just about any super-science device into the campaign. One of its more notable inventions is Impervium, a superhard “living metal” that can heal its own structural damage over time and is used in the construction of government facilities as well as Blackstone Prison for cells and restraints to contain superhumans. *who can also be a PC! Social Life includes some interesting entries, such as the Cape and Cowl Club which is an invitation-only secret society for superheroes to destress and relax, the Legion which is an online group of mercenary hackers who sell information and services to the highest bidder, and the Midnight Society that includes some of the most wealthiest and influential people in the world. While it’s not an official rule, the Midnight Society doesn’t invite any superhumans as members. In 1e it was a front for the villainous organization SHADOW, although later Editions made its true purpose vague with several suggestions for the GM.  Sports lists Freedom City’s professional sports teams as well as the Ultimate Wrestling League, notable for hiring wrestlers with superpowers. Street Life is our last major entry for this chapter/section, and discusses a variety of social issues plaguing the city’s less fortunate. The West End once served as an immigrant community through much of its existence, although rising property values are pushing all but the most stubborn residents out, and there’s tension between affluent criminals moving in and local gangs that aren’t fond of outsiders in general. Southside is the poor section of Freedom City, and most of its residents make their living working in retail at the Boardwalk’s casinos and hotels. Many homeless people live here, with most of them teenage runaways coming from all over the country in hopes of making better lives for themselves by meeting with or becoming superheroes. Our Lady of Mercy is a shelter and soup kitchen that has the peculiar situation of being under protection from the Mob; any ill-doers who target the shelter’s staff must answer to them, which means most find easier targets elsewhere. The Lincoln Youth Center is a community center for Lincoln and Southside youth, running programs to provide kids a place to go instead of being on the streets or forced into gangs. Finally there’s Weird Maggie, a homeless woman who is dismissed as a crazy person but claims to have some kind of supernatural insight into things. 1e had NPC entries for two more characters in Street Life. Sandra Rayne is a sex worker who managed to make a good living for herself, and has a friendship with the local superhero Foreshadow who pays her for information. The other is Nathan “the Knife” Korthu, who is the leader of a gang of homeless teenagers. He hasn’t killed anyone and privately hopes he never has to. In 2nd and 3rd Edition he was moved into the Freedom City Underworld section, but this came at the expense of his backstory. Note: Introduction/Chapter 1 has stats for the Centurion. I plan to cover him with the other superheroes in Heroes of Freedom City later on, as I feel that this would be better in measuring him against his peers rather than doing so in isolation. Thoughts So Far: Freedom City comes out strong, managing to bridge the line between being down-to-earth enough for a plausible contemporary American city while also showing how superpowered people have shaped and influenced the local culture. With a few exceptions, most of the people are “normal,” and those who have a part to play in the superpowered community have a less direct and more advisory role. There’s still room for GMs to fill in details of their own, and the lengthiest sections are those that’d be of most interests to the PCs which is also a good choice. Join us next time as we cover Law & Order, the Freedom City Underworld, and the Freedom City Series!
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Jan 14, 2022 08:13
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Interesting! I remember being moderately into M&M's setting in the 2e days so I'll be watching this one. But I gotta ask… What on infinite earths is going on with this lady's flight pose?
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Jan 14, 2022 11:01
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Asterite34 posted:
I will add that the game explicitly tells you to summon healing Figures and then leave them in reserve to basically save you for game overs. It tells you to hold them back until an attack would shatter the stage or kill one of your comrades. The balance is so rocket tag that the game has a bunch of ways to save yourselves at the last minute. It's also hard to convey exactly how co-op strategic these battles are. I think the closest experience I've had is playing Pandemic, where if you're not all working together and thinking 4-5 moves ahead and considering the worst case scenarios you have no hope of winning. Things like the Emblems really throw a wrench in things because you have to consider if your priority should be trying to take out boss body parts to limit its attacks (each attack is tied to a body part so you actually seal the boss's moves as you destroy its bits), sealing away the Emblem which is causing you all kinds of headache, or trying to patch up the rapidly-crumbling stage. It's hectic and tense and really loving fun.
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Jan 14, 2022 13:16
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Infinity RPG Secret History of the Space Elves  The Tohaa are the only species besides humanity that have managed to stand their ground against the Evolved Intelligence and avoid conquest for a significant amount of time. They are recent arrivals in the Human Sphere, showing up to help Paradiso in its hour of need. They were an interstellar empire when humanity was first entering space at all...and they have been fighting a grueling war against the Combined Civilization for much of that time, losing lives and planets in a slow and painful retreat. They know that if they can't get human help in stopping the Evolved Intelligence in its tracks, they are going to lose. Tohaa history goes back far enough that the days before their planetary unification are essentially mythology. They were a mix of different kingdoms and nations fighting for control over the supercontinet Togaanu on the planet Ronuhaa. They refer to this time as the Primitive Era, but many of their cultural traditions come from it originally. They say that the Primitive Era ended due to the Staala, a word literally meaning cataclysm or apocalypse but which is in the modern day only used to refer to the specific set of earthquakes and other seismic events that forced a partial evacuation of Togaanu and brought to the Tohaa peoples together in a campaign of cooperation and aid to save lives. This began the Unification that ultimately led all Tohaa to join the Trinomial, which remains the government over the entire interstellar empire today. After the Staala, Ronuhaa began rapid cooling and the Tohaa population was too large to be supported by the damaged planet, so the Tohaa began a mass migration to colonies throughout their home system. As they expanded out through the system, they made contact with an ancient artifact, an alien piece of biotech called a T'zechi Digester, which they learned had been observing them for thousands of years. Some Tohaa historians believe it was actually on Togaanu as well and had to flee due to the Staala. What they learned from the Digester was that they were not the first spacefaring civilization it had encountered, and that many had been born, thrived and died since it was made, long before the Tohaa existed at all. It showed them many other civilizations, some which had expanded, some which had not, revealing that it had been documenting cultures and scientific advances for millions of years. It quickly became clear to the Tohaa that the Digester was one of countless such devices in a massive network, with each device temporarily placing itself in a system where it detected life that seemed likely to become sapient, seeking to record the history of that species exhaustively. The Digester revealed to the Tohaa that different civilizations of great advancement could be classified in different ways. Seeker civilizations were those like the Ur Rationalists, who discovered the idea of Transcendence and pursued it to escape physicality. Herald civilizations were those who chose to assist the T'zechi Digesters in gathering knowledge, working with the biomachines to create seed versions of the Digesters and plant them on worlds containing life, starting the cycle again. Heralds would also seek out other Digesters to gain their seed-copies, helping to connect them back to their own Digester to expand its knowledgebase. The Tohaa decided that being Heralds of the Digester sounded really cool. It gave them a sense of cultural pride and identity that they hadn't really had following unification, and the Tohaa consider themselves even now to have been honored and chosen by a higher power to bear the Herald's task. (The EI, incidentally, has encountered Digesters; it consumes them and tears them apart in pursuit of information that might help it with Transcendence.) While the unified Tohaa had wormhole tech, they had previously been happy to exist in only their home system. Once they assumed the mantle of Heralds, however, they decided to end their isolation and explore the galaxy, expanding to new worlds and establishing a colonial force to protect their holdings as they spread rapidly through nearby systems. They soon found themselves to have galactic neighbors - and quickly got into conflict with them. The Tohaa exploration ship Harmonious Discovery found the Makricole Raiders, a nomadic civilization of pirates and slavers who had conquered a system containing a pre-space civilization. The well-armed ship spent six months driving the pirates out, and the Conlicutt System it happened in became the first protectorate of the Tohaa Trinomial. The Makricole spread the news of the new empire to other civilizations, and the Tohaa quickly began driving out pirates, overlords and slavers wherever they found them, taking possession of their holdings as protectorates and defending them from attack. The Tohaa considered it their solemn duty to protect these potential civilizations and seed them with T'zechi Digesters, returning any new Digesters they found back home to their own. The Tohaa exploration and expansion ended when their Errant Ship explorers first ran into the Fenrig Imperative - a more powerful foe than they'd ever faced before. The Fenrig had given themselves near-immortal bodies at the cost of locking themselves away in hermetically sealed environment suits, and their technology was more advanced and potent than that of the Tohaa. Their empire was also twice as big. To survive, the Tohaa expanded their colonial forces into the Trident, an aggressive and dedicated military that heavily relied on the Tohaa's technological specialty: biotech. The War Against The Fenrig, as the Tohaa know it now, was a long and costly one, and it claimed many lives. Eventually, however, the Tohaa broke the Fenrig Imperative and ended their power, though the Fenrig remnant does still exist on the opposite side of Tohaa space from humanity, and many Tohaa fear they may be making an alliance with the Evolved Intelligence to get revenge. We get a brief interruption of Tohaa history to explore that of the Digesters. No one is entirely sure where the Digesters originally came from. These bio-artifacts have refused to reveal anything about their origins so far, and analysis of seed-copies has only revealed that their distribution pattern suggests an origin somewhere in the galactic core. Some believe they are agents of some ancient civilization or universal power, meant to monitor all of time and space as part of some experiment. Others believe they are a remnant of a long-dead species trying to fight against entropy. Some think they're scouts for some kind of invasion, and others that they're from the future, trying to record secrets lost to time. Whatever the case, they are clearly living things and extremely intelligent, but all analysis has shown that they aren't actually sentient beings in the same sense as people. They're very resistant to damage, can function in just about any environment or pressure, and don't have an obvious means of transportation besides Herald ships. Some believe they are able to accelerate to relativistic speeds to travel, but they can't operate wormholes. They don't interact directly with any kind of external tech, though they seem able to absorb information from data storage devices. Their internals are unscannable by any known means but seem to run on some kind of complex mix of nanotech and biotech which allows them many subtle powers. Pretty much everything that's known about them is stuff they've told people. And they do talk, though the Digesters are notoriously silent a lot of the time. They hand out information only rarely, based on some kind of metric that no one else understands. They never reveal the scientific or technical knowledge they have - only historical knowledge. The Tohaa believe that these actions are not random or arbitrary, but rather a sign that the T'zechi Digesters follow a path of harmonious non-interference in the development of civilizations. They have observed more about the Digesters than nearly anyone, and they've noticed that the Digesters avoid all contact with developing species, only talking once they have achieved the capacity for interstellar travel, at which point the Digesters reveal the information they have about different types of civilizations. Some Tohaa believe there exist further stages of civilization that have not yet been revealed, and believe that being Heralds is key to achieving those. When the Digesters do tell people things, Herald species such as the Tohaa record the revelations in databases that are known as the Annals of the Digesters, a term also sometimes used to refer directly to the internal knowledge the Digesters possess. The Tohaa don't know of any other extant Heralds, but have discovered Annals left behind by former Herald civilizations, all now gone. They refer to these as Lost or Forgotten Annals and consider them quite valuable. Anyway, the Tohaa now consider their costly war against the Fenrig to be a blessing in disguise, for it gave them the fortitude and skill in battle necessary to withstand their first contact with the Combined Army several decades later. The Trident may have become strong fighting the Fenrig, but the EI War has been more than they ever bargained for. It has cost the Tohaa more than any past conflict ever has, and entire planets and protectorates have fallen to the Combined Army. They've lost entire client species. The Tohaa have seen far more of the EI's tricks than humans have, and faced far more of the species within it. Their war has been going for nearly 200 years, and they have become fully aware that it's a matter of attrition and one they're losing. They can stall the invading forces, but that's it, and they need something that can turn the tide, or at least buy them a reprieve to recover and regroup. The contact with humanity might be what they needed - or, at least, that's the belief of the Triumvirate, a secret conspiracy of Tohaa businesspeople who formed in the wake of the unification to protect their wealth and power. Most Tohaa don't believe they exist, but they're very real. The Triumvirate have changed their mission since encountering the EI, and consider it their duty to preserve Tohaa culture and the Tohaa way of life by any means necessary, given the scale of the threat. They are even willing to betray the sacred task of the Heralds and try and force the Digesters to reveal more secrets. When the Tohaa abandoned the Oomnya colony (that's Varuna, remember), the Triumvirate took the Digesters from that planet and moved it to Paradiso, where they established a number of secret research bases. They spent years tearing data out of the Digester and disabling its defenses, creating the Stolen Annals - a mass of technologies and data that they forced the Digester to reveal to them. Three of those discoveries were key, developed further in the Paradiso facilities. First, the Seemai or Fuscotor, a viral weapon capable of controlling synaptic activity. It was meant to be a stronger and more dangerous counter to the sepsitor - where a sepsitor requires the victim have a Cube which then gets suborned, the Fuscotor technovirus was believed to be able to interface directly with any sentient mind. Second, they developed new models of wormhole manipulation that could directly alter wormhole topology, allowing the Triumvirate to redirect wormhole destinations - hopefully to give the Tohaa an unbreakable defense by dumping enemy fleets in the hearts of stars. Finally, they discovered the use of lithic nanotechnology, which could directly alter and transform inorganic material by seeping into it. They used this to turn their research facilities into exotic matter - computronium, a form of programmable matter with a neural processing network. These are, in fact, the cosmolites of Paradiso. The Triumvirate had listening outpost on Dawn when humanity discovered it, and they saw in humans a chance to further their goals. The collapse of the Saturn's Storm wormhole was directly caused by the Tohaa Triumvirate using their wormhole-redirection tech, intercepting the Aurora in transit and sending it to Paradiso. They didn't expect the wormhole to collapse, especially not as violently as it did. The damage to the Aurora proved helpful, though, forcing the ship to make an emergency landing and stranding it on Paradiso. The crew, believing it had been a terrible accident, began trying to set up their colony, and as they did, the Triumvirate slowly kidnapped small groups of humans to use as test subjects for their new technology. They didn't realize how creative, clever or determined the humans would be. The elite soldier sent with the ship tracked the Tohaa and discovered their horrific experiments in the cosmolites. The Auroran forces attacked the Tohaa compound, starting a secret war against the Triumvirate that no human today is aware of. The Triumvirate used the conflict to field test the Fuscotors. They worked terrifyingly well - too well. The Tohaa hadn't realized the weapons had secondary effects - their viral loads mutated into contagions, infecting anyone near the victims. After infection, the virus went from its secondary control phase to a tertiary phase that either killed the host or left them a mindless, shambling automaton. The Tohaa tried to keep control over their experimental subjects, but as they did, the Auroran commandos infiltrated the facility by pretending to be mindless slaves, then blew it up, wiping out both the infected prisoners and all Fuscotor research. The Triumvirate chased the commandos back to the Aurora, but found themselves running into a trap's jaws. The Aurorans had realized they were all infected with what they thought was a zombie virus. One group attempted to break into Tohaa defenses to find a way to broadcast a warning to humanity about the threat the Tohaa represented, while the rest drew the Tohaa in and detonated the Aurora's fusion drives, nuking all remnants of the virus and many of the Triumvirate agents. The survivors of the Triumvirate tried to salvage what they could, but as they did, the cosmolites began failing, their computronium matrices collapsing for unclear reasons, taking much of the experimental data with them. They realized they'd been tricked by their captive Digester - all of its gifts had contained fatal flaws. The wormhole control tech destroyed wormholes, the fuscotor weapon hid a rapid-onset murder toxin, and the nanotech construction tools had hidden suicide triggers. They decided their Digester could no longer be trusted and they needed a new one, but they might still use it to their advantage. It could be bait for the Evolved Intelligence, which would not realize it had turned against its captors. The Triumvirate captured an Ur-Probe from the Evolved Intelligence, damaged it in very specific parts, then brought it to Paradiso and planted evidence to make it look like the cause of the Aurora's destruction. They allowed it to detect the Digester, then moved the Digester to another spot on the planet and waited. As they'd anticipated, humans found Paradiso a second time, discovered the wreck of the Aurora and the cosmolites, and then found the Ur-Probe. After years of research, humans activated the probe, which signaled the EI of the presence of both a Digester and a new species to conquer. The Triumvirate observation team had made a trap for the Combined Army that might change the tide of the war. When the CA invaded, the Triumvirate activated another hidden artifact, the thing humans know as the Relic - an encrypted map to a location containing a damaged Tohaa scout vessel. The human factions fought over the Relic, its data, and eventually the black box found in the Tohaa craft, which ended up in O-12 possession. O-12 used it to contact the Tohaa Trinomial after much research. The Trinomial had no idea what the craft was doing there, as they had no idea what the Triumvirate had been doing. Curious, they went to investigate and helped decode the black box, revealing another set of coordinates on Paradiso that pointed to Sisargas Island. The island was under Combined Army control at the time, but investigation revealed the existence of an operational cosmolite hidden in the jungle, fully intact. This led to the great battle between the human forces and the Combined Army to reach the Last Cosmolite, then to breach its defenses. Within the Cosmolite, the SSS discovered the truth - the Triumvirate agents already knew what was there using data they hadn't included in the black box. ALEPH's forces discovered this when the Triumvirate spies attempted to ambush them so ALEPH wouldn't take possession of the Digester they had hidden there. While the SSS drove off the Triumvirate agents, they found the Digester simultaneously with the Combined Army...and then they won again, claiming the thing for humanity. O-12 has developed a secret facility, the Penny Arcade, to hide and study the Digester. The Tohaa (besides the Triumvirate) have no idea what the humans found due to the Triumvirate betrayal, but they've been invited to help research it because Bureau Noir suspects they know more than they're saying and hope they'll accidentally reveal it while helping. The EI, meanwhile, knows the Digester was found and that it's somewhere in the Human Sphere, but not where. This has changed its goals - the Evolved Intelligence is no longer trying to explore and study humanity - it is determined to occupy and conquer the Human Sphere so it can get that Digester...and just as the Triumvirate had planned, it is willing to move its invasion forces out of Tohaa space to do it. The conspiracy of the space elf illuminati has managed to, perhaps, buy enough time for the Tohaa to recover - but on the other hand, they may have risked the fragile alliance between their people and humanity to do it, and if their full actions are ever exposed, it'll be very hard for them to escape the wrath of both the human forces and their own fellow Tohaa, who will be quite upset about what they did to what is essentially a holy relic-being. Next time: So what the hell is a Tohaa anyway?
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Jan 14, 2022 13:42
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I had the original Tri-Stat version of Silver Age Sentinels. Sprung for the collector's edition and everything. It was a neat game and I liked the setting, but it never accrued much of a fanbase. M&M is one of the best D20 games, definitely one of the exceptions that proves the rule.
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Jan 14, 2022 15:52
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Infinity RPG Life In Threes Tohaa, physically, are very similar in appearance to humans, though generally taller and thinner, with a skin tone the color of particularly pale and creamy coffee...that is, their civilians are. Tohaa soldiers are often heavily modified by biotech, which can make them look much more reptilian or even monstrous, and most also have deep red gill-like structures on their cheeks to assist in atmospheric filtering. Tohaa eyes are especially notable, with thick membranes and strong visual ability that can see a greater spectrum than humans. They have large and pointed ears but distinctly poor hearing, both a result of their home planet having very thin atmosphere. They also have thick skin as a result of the solar radiation passing through said thin atmosphere. To help them handle this poor hearing, they have thick tendrils on the back of their heads, which are called a phero-blossom. They aren't hair - they're layered biomesh surfaces that provide them with an incredibly strong sense of smell and can produce extremely complex pheromones. Pheromonal exchange is a key factor in Tohaa language and culture which humans cannot easily replicate. The tendrils are aided in their work by quills along the torso and upper limbs which are also capable of pheromonal detection and sensing minor shifts in their environment. The pheromonal communication is a major part of being a Tohaa, and they are often very, very outgoing and friendly because they're so sensitive to each other and cannot stop broadcasting their pheromonal signatures. Tohaa that are excluded from or cast out of their social group will immediately try to join or create a new one as soon as possible. Their grouping instinct favors other Tohaa, but in their absence they will latch onto aliens almost as quickly. This makes them fast to make friends and start alliances, but also means that social isolation quickly sends Tohaa into deep depression. Their typical social group is three people, and this threefold structure can be found in most of their formal organizations. All political groups are led by three executives, families are built around three people, work groups are in multiples of three, cops patrol in threes - three is a number the Tohaa find intensely natural to them. Tohaa triads typically form during adolescence, with members of the same triad taking a second surname constructed from one syllable of the surnames of each member. Triads aren't necessarily permanent, and if a triad changes composition, obviously its surname will change. Most adult Tohaa also join a familial triad at some point, which differs from their friend-triad. This gives them a third surname, which is inherited by any children. Familial triads are much less stable than friend-triads and typically break apart when a child is born, with the non-parental member of the triad leaving to join a new family and the parents forming a triad with the child. The parental triad will have no other children until their current one leaves the triad to pursue adulthood and higher education. In some rare cases, a familial triad won't break up when a child is born, but these always mean two additional children are conceived or adopted as quickly as possible to create a stable parental triad and child triad. Tohaa tend to consider "trio children" to be socially significant, in the same way that humans might talk about only children. Every individual Tohaa has a unique pheromone signature, called a baade, which cannot be replicated by other Tohaa with any ease. Tohaa can produce a similar pheremonal scent to other Tohaa and often use these personal scent-mixes to create subtle meaning in their speech, which also makes it exceptionally difficult for Tohaa to lie to each other - they don't have full conscious control over their pheromonal output and can detect deception in each other. The problem, from the view of humans, is that Tohaa excel at lying to non-Tohaa, as they are able to communicate with each other on a level that non-Tohaa can't even pick up on, making it easy for them to work together to manipulate those who lack their senses. Tohaa refer to pheromones as Corahtaa, the Language of Truth, and are innately distrustful of purely vocal communication, as they culturally consider sound to be inherently deceptive - and they're very unafraid to use that deception against other species. Tohaa cultural traditions can be odd and disconcerting for humans. They practice neebab, a form of numerology that is deeply engrained in their society, rather like astrology in modern American society. Like astrology, neebab numerology is considered quaint, archaic and false, but it produces a lot of cultural connections to specific numbers and patterns. Their fashion is designed to allow their quills to stick out through the weave, and tends to be loose and flowing, with capes and hoods being common and usually lined with materials that feel soothing on the phero-blossoms, letting them rest in the same manner as a human might wear sunglasses. The favorite drink of most Tohaa is saom, made by soaking their home planet's saoona lichen in water to produce an energy-boosting tea. It causes gastrointestinal discomfort in humans, but the Tohaa drink it near-constantly, and soldiers often carry flasks of lichen that can be repeatedly refilled with water to produce more saom. The Tohaa rely heavily on biotech more than anything else, with heavily reliance on biological nanobots, which self-replicate and manipulate molecules to help specially engineered parasitic lifeforms and neocreatures to produce all kinds of useful living tools. They are produced in unique and self-sustaining artificial ecosystems called biosubstrates, and this is the source of most Tohaa tools and weapons. Biotech has been integrated so deeply into Tohaa life that they fundamentally consider the natural world and its biodiversity to be a potential waiting to be realized, treating natural animals and plants as raw materials for living art and tools to be made out of. They gather lifeforms from across their empire and reshape them into new things as easily as humans ship minerals for processing, and they consider the biosphere of a planet not as something to be preserved but as something to be transformed into a perfected ecology. Bioengineers and mecha-geneticists are the rock stars of Tohaa society, known as Kumotail. They tend to be exceptionally arrogant and self-assured, since each is a master of genetic engineering and an artist of living flesh, granted absolute authority to pursue the philosophy of Saatara, the pursuit of the secret truths of the universe through science and the perfection of said universe though improving upon the natural world. This is the path of the Herald, to discover secrets for the Digesters, and it is the most socially acclaimed role in the Tohaa Trinomial. That said, the Tohaa make relatively few biological alterations to their own forms - they employ military biotech to boost their soldiers, and they rely on biotech implants in the same way most humans rely on quantronic and AR technology, but they rarely directly alter their own genomes except to improve basic health. They save that for their client species, and they have many of those, as the Tohaa have gone out of their way to adopt and mentor younger species and uplift them in all respects. They call this Exaltation. Essentially, whenever the Tohaa discover a planet with life on it, they immediately seek out any indigenous life that appears to be nearing sapience and begin mapping its genome and neurology. If their projections for improvement are promising, they develop a set of gene therapies to boost the target species' intellectual ability. Exaltation can take generations to complete, and every species they've tried it on has required a different path to success. Once the Tohaa are happy with their results in creating a sapient, civilized lifeform, the therapies are made permanent in the species' genome and the Exalted species joins the Tohaa as a servitor group. Servitor species are usually used as first-wave colonists by the Tohaa Errant Ships, allowing the Tohaa themselves to focus on high-level strategy, scientific discovery and guidance of the overall Trinomial. More recently, the servitors have also ended up being essential to the Tohaa military's ongoing war with the Evolved Intelligence. The Chaksa represent one of the oldest, most advanced and most complex examples of Exaltation. They are brave, dedicated, friendly and generally quite loyal to the Tohaa. They appear to be large, muscular reptiles and often come off as slow or simple, mostly because as a culture the Chaksa are quite aware of how long it's been since they were uplifted and tend to defer to authority and age. Once comfortable with those around them, they become much louder, more willing to share their opinions, often irrepressibly active and eager to help, and very casual with those around them. They don't have much in the way of facial expressions, which has made them some of the funniest comedians in the galaxy, because it is in fact nearly impossible even for other Chaksa to read their expressions as they crack jokes. Things are going well for most Chaksa...but they also possess a recessive genetic trait that the Tohaa have been unable to fully identify or expunge which can interfere with their Exaltation, preventing the engineered brain development during their gestation. The results are referred to as Peripherals, who are not truly self-aware or sapient. Peripherals tend to be given neural implants that let them be used as Servants - sort of biological remotes, as they are controlled from afar by a pilot. The Trident military considers them very valuable but no less expendable than a particularly beloved remote drone would be. Self-aware Chaksa find the Peripherals both pitiable and existentially horrifying on an instinctive level. Despite their being one of the oldest Exaltations, the existence of the Peripherals has led the Trinomial to deem the Chaksa not fully Exalted yet, and therefore they maintain direct governance over the Chaksa Protectorate. Most Chaksa are okay with this, as they often like the way the Tohaa do things ('mostly let the Chaksa do what they like') and don't particularly want to self-govern and have to deal with the actual work of running their homeworld yet. They also have developed different religious beliefs than the Tohaa, largely due to the existence of the Peripherals. Chaksa practice a sort of animist belief in which all things are considered to have thoughts and feelings, even plants and inanimate objects. This belief was largely developed through compassionate interaction with the Peripheral Chaksa, but also means that Chaksa tend to talk to ships, animals, plants or even guns they feel close to. The Koldinuk are the second species that went through Exaltation, and despite being younger than the Chaksa, theirs has been more successful. They are often held up as the ideal of the process and transition to self-governance. They hail from Koldin System, one of the wealthiest protectorates in the Trinomial, and they are easily the most independent and advanced Tohaa servitor species. Koldinuk are naturally curious and inquisitive beings, often quite witty and intellectual and with an inborn sense for order, patterns and organization. They have taken it on themselves to become deeply involved with Trinomial bureaucracy and within the Tohaa the species is considered to be the undisputed masters of logistics and management. They are now vital to most Tohaa colonization efforts. Despite their innate curiosity, however, most Koldinuk are homebodies who do not enjoy exploration or travel. They produce many scientists, administrators and aides, but they are distinctly danger-averse and prefer to leave risk of harm to the Tohaa. No human has yet met a Koldinuk as a result - human space is just too dangerous, too close to the front lines, and no Koldinuk has yet ventured into it. (And as a result we get literally no physical description.) The Shawoke, a rival alien species that the Tohaa once fought with, have made claims in the past that the Exaltation process was a tool of control, and that it was designed to not only improve minds but also shorten lifespans and subconsciously enslave the species put through it via gene-coded submissiveness. The Shawoke claimed to have evidence for this, but when the Tohaa went to war with them, they claimed to have lost the evidence and have not brought it up again since the war ended, especially once the Tohaa became the main force fighting the Evolved Intelligence. No Exalted species has ever spoken out to claim they were being enslaved or mistreated by their uplifters, either, and most Tohaa take this as evidence that they are quite happy in their roles in the Triumvirate. Next time: Running the Trinomial
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Jan 14, 2022 19:30
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Halloween Jack posted:I had the original Tri-Stat version of Silver Age Sentinels. Sprung for the collector's edition and everything. It was a neat game and I liked the setting, but it never accrued much of a fanbase. I remember there was a crossover deal with SAS and I believe Champions 5E in a kind of Marvel vs. DC thing. There seemed to be a bunch of superhero RPGs around that time. Notable for it feeling like the only thing around for a while was Champions Millenium.
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Jan 14, 2022 19:35
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I love how the frozen hockey player in front just seems kind of annoyed rather than terrified/outraged. Sort of a "really? you're doing this? now?"-expression. Also I think I played M&M... once, probably the first edition, because I recall it feeling very much like D20 Modern with some superpowers stapled on top. I think my greatest issue with trying to play it again at this point would be the setting. Like it's not bad, my brain just refuses to engage with the: "okay it's pretty much the real world, nothing's really changed, don't think too hard about it"-approach without trying to over-analyze it.
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Jan 14, 2022 19:45
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PurpleXVI posted:Also I think I played M&M... once, probably the first edition, because I recall it feeling very much like D20 Modern with some superpowers stapled on top. Where's Astro City when you need it?
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Jan 14, 2022 19:54
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PurpleXVI posted:Also I think I played M&M... once, probably the first edition, because I recall it feeling very much like D20 Modern with some superpowers stapled on top. The main thing I remember was that you had the option to buy less than full attack and defense bonuses, if you wanted to shoot your character in the knee for some reason. The book didn't really remark on this in any way iirc.
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Jan 14, 2022 20:03
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Mors Rattus posted:Infinity RPG Man the Tohaa are easily the lamest part of the setting. God drat sexy benevolent space elves.
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Jan 14, 2022 20:09
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between finding out that Tohaa were on Dawn pre-contact, being biotech masters, and the whole groups of three thing I feel like there are implications with the Antipodes.
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Jan 14, 2022 20:42
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Chaksa are cool tho and more settings should have friendly dinosaur people who excel at deadpan comedy. e: and before you ask - Chaksa do become playable in the Tohaa book.
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Jan 14, 2022 20:42
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Siivola posted:I've played 2e a bit and it's straight up a point-buy system that has only a passing resemblance to The d20 System. Mutants and Masterminds tends to find its weakest points in being originally 3.X, like Feats or skills being ridiculously expensive in 3E.
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Jan 14, 2022 22:37
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Quackles posted:Where's Astro City when you need it? It really is a less-well-done Astro City, isn't it? Some of that is the focus on RPG-centric stats and traits, and there seems to be a decidedly White Wolf smell to the setting. But I was reading that writeup with a constant commentary at the back of my mind about how Astro City did that too, and better. Darnit. Keefer Square would be such an excellent RPG starting location and source of PCs. Why has nobody done it, even with the serial numbers filed off?
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Jan 15, 2022 01:21
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Libertad! posted:
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Jan 15, 2022 01:42
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