|
THE SWORD AND THE FLAME PT 10: EPILOGUE, ERRATA AND WRAPUP Welcome to the last post of The Sword and the Flame. In this post we’ll chew through the rest of the rulebook, and posit some rules changes that could make the game better. EPILOGUE AND FURTHER REFERENCES We’ve got a credits section where Brom thanks everyone who worked with him and helped playtest the game from 1979 to 1999. He notes here that the 1999 game is the “5th edition” of the rules, which I didn’t know. There’s a web directory with URLs for a bunch of websites. Check those web 1.0 domain names.  I think The Miniatures Page is still up. While it existed, the Major General’s Page was the most effective advertisement for TSATF on the web. Not sure if any of these other pages are still around. And then there’s a bibliography of reference works that Larry Brom thought were interesting or valuable.   I haven’t read any of these and I’ve only seen a couple of the movies, so I can’t offer any commentary on whether it’s a good selection. One thing I will say, that explains a lot about the perspective and tone of the game rules and historical background: The Sword and the Flame is largely based on period accounts by British sources, and on movies and books inspired by those accounts. Said accounts are usually respectful of the native forces’ fighting ability, but never cast them as the protagonists. If there was a Zulu Josephus, writing contemporary accounts of battles from the other side’s perspective, his work never made it into the movies. I’m sure there are plenty of military history papers on the subject, but academic papers are not inspirational to tabletop gamers in the same way that firsthand accounts and popular media reinterpretations are. ERRATA There are a couple pages of errata included in the printed rules, and then a supplementary page that came with the book when I ordered it. These corrections were appended at the end rather than incorporated into the main body of the text. This sucks, but Larry Brom isn’t the first rules author I’ve caught doing it. There are game designers today who publish errata as separate pages, rather than doing a whole new PDF and having to go through the torturous layout process again. A lot of the errata is language clarifications that I’ve already incorporated into my explanations of the core mechanics. Rather than go over every correction, I’ll just post the alterations that change our understanding of how the game is played. Columns made up of multiple units can just roll once for movement and move everyone in the column that distance, rather than rolling for each individual unit. Saves you a little time. Jokers have been added to the deck. If you draw one during movement, you can move one of your units that already moved a second time. They just count as a normal red or black card during firing. Not sure about this one. I think a better use of the joker would be random scenario elements that are guaranteed to show up eventually - IE “for every joker that shows up, the abandoned boat drifts 4D6 inches closer to the bridge”. Visibility into areas of concealment has been improved, somewhat. When a British figure moves within 4” of a terrain object that provides concealment, they can see up to 6” into that terrain object. A whole two extra inches of vision! Pistols only get one shot if the firer is aiming at a target of their choosing. If a guy with a revolver fires two shots, you draw casualty cards at random like normal. Shaken Figures take D6 casualties automatically if they are charged, prior to doing their usual retreat. No word on how you determine these casualties, I guess just use the cards like normal. Point Costs for troop types not given in the base game are thus  As mentioned before, Indians get the same stats as Egyptians, and Colonial militiamen the same stats as Boers (aside from slightly worse melee performance). The rest are troop types who show up in the un-errata-ed game, but weren’t given point costs in the table. Since we’re not reviewing The Sword in Africa, all we’re left with is some quick reference cards and some art to finish up the book..    SUGGESTED RULES CHANGES These changes based on re-reading the rules today, rather than extensive play experience. It’s been over a decade since I played this game, and I never played that much of it. I’m trying to stick close to the design intention of the game and avoid adding too many bullshit special cases and exceptions. Harmonize phases so that fewer mechanics happen “out of turn” in the game system. Get rid of the pass through fire rule, so that nobody gets to shoot in the movement phase. Move all morale activity to the morale phase (except close to combat and stand-and-fight), rather than having some morale states tested in the movement phase and some in the morale phase. Either that or eliminate the morale phase and move the tests to the movement phase when they become relevant. Situational modifiers to the Close to Combat/Stand and Fight tables would give players a little more control over whether their units are able to get into melee, while still preserving the flavor of the original rules. The base game avoids using lots of modifiers in everything except the close combat rules, so we shouldn’t go overboard here. I’m thinking a bonus chance to press the charge home if you outnumber your enemy, a bonus to stand and fight if you’re defending a wall, and maybe an additional bonus to both if there’s a senior leader nearby. That way you have some benefit to your commander in chief leading from the front. Reduce British leaderless to move chances in order to bring the mechanical performance of the Imperial forces in line with the description Brom gives of their training and tactics. The British are less likely to be leaderless than the Native forces anyway because they get an NCO with every unit in addition to a Lieutenant. Reduce British starting ammo when using the optional ammo rules. By RAW they get 2D6 per unit, which is an average of seven turns of shooting once you equalize it across units. That’s enough ammo that your units aren’t likely to run out, which means it no longer forces interesting decisions. I say reduce it to 2D4 per unit, an average of five turns each. Better terminology for the forces would be nice. The book tries to break down forces into “British” and “Native”, but then has to come up with special exceptions to those terms. Egyptians count as Native when they’re fighting the British, and British when they’re fighting alongside the British. Boers count as Native, but aren’t really “Native” to South Africa any more than the British are, and anyway they use separate rules from other Native forces when it comes to things like carrying wounded and morale. Maybe change it to British and Opposition, with Native as a specific subset of Opposition. This isn’t a real rules change but it would make the book easier to read. I’m not going to touch the balance rules and the discrepancy between the suggested ratios and unit factors, because I don’t know which one I should trust. I suspect the ratios are more accurate to the author’s original intentions and the numeric factors were added in a later edition, but the ratios don’t account for special troop types (Fuzzy Wuzzies, Egyptians, Gurkhas, etc) that have significantly different stats from their force’s base troop type. WRAPUP Would I play TSATF, given the opportunity? Yes, absolutely. Would I paint up a miniature army and get a group together to play it with? Empirically, no. I was only ever peripherally interested in wargaming, and that was a long time ago. The lapsed hosting on the old sites suggest that the original dedicated TSATF cohort is aging out of the hobby, but I think the game still has a con presence. I think the upcoming 40th anniversary edition could be a great opportunity to clean up the rules text. Even without major mechanical changes, better organization would give the game a more modern feel. The system is fairly straightforward once you move all the special cases to the sections of the turn where they actually belong. How does TSATF stack up against other miniature wargames set in this time period? According to the historical wargame thread, the most popular colonial wargame of the last few years is The Men Who Would Be Kings by Daniel Mersey. I bought a PDF for the purpose of comparison, and the thing that immediately stood out is how similar it is to TSATF - both in mechanics and in the stated purpose of the rules. It reads like a modernized and streamlined version of TSATF, with enough similarities that I wonder if there was a direct line of inspiration. It could also be that TSATF was just doing stuff in 1979 that has become industry standard in the four decades since. The Men Who Would Be Kings is a much slicker game, but the clarity and simplicity comes at a cost of some flavor details that make TSATF stand out. You could port some of TSATF’s more memorable mechanics into the newer game, like casualty evacuation and card based initiative (TMWWBK uses a conventional and rather bland I Go U Go system), and maybe get something that combines the best aspects of both. That’s it for this review. Might do the GF9 Dune rerelease next. I still have to play some games with the latest expansion before I can comment on that.
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2022 22:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 5, 2024 04:28 |
|
|
Thanks for the TSATF review! Though if you don't mind me looping back to something you mentioned in the first post...mellonbread posted:Sadly, we won’t find any of those Victorian Science Fiction elements in the core rules in this review. Is there an expansion featuring this?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2022 23:04
|
|
|
Infinity RPG: Ariadna Can't Hack Gears We get a note that Ariadnans tend to be quite proud of their own industry, and so most megacorps find that they are unable to actually make much profit when selling equivalent goods on Dawn. The Nomads and Haqqislamites have begun forming trade partnerships with local producers to offer materials and design advice - it's still Dawn-Made, after all, and so it tends to sell quite well to Ariadnans. The Dawn-Made logo signifying Ariadnan homemade goods is also becoming increasingly common among Nomad and Haqq groups that deal with the Ariadnans. It is important to note that in Rodina and Merovingia, it is illegal to carry weapons, especially guns, though licensing is available for hunting, security personnel or anyone with enough power in the bureaucracy and willingness to pay. Caledonia permits weapons with authorization from a clan, which is especially easy to get for non-firearm weapons. USAriadnans consider weapons a right, though it is polite to keep them concealed in most northern cities. In southern cities, open carry is fashionable but it's rude to have them out when visiting friends. New Ammunition is pretty much all illegal or restricted access except for adhesive shells and H-12 rounds. Adhesive Shells: These were designed for the Loup-Garou as nonlethal ammo for stopping rampaging Dogfaces. They're modified fire shells that spray expanded quickset foam rather than jellied fuel. It's not an entirely reliable adhesive due to its thinner formula than most riot foam, though, which has meant that they haven't caught on outside Merovingia much, and often even the Loup-Garou will use viral-load Silver Bullets instead. They give Area (Close), Immobilising, Improvised 1, Nonlethal and Unsubtle. Apex Heavy Ammo: Apex rounds are designed for use in portable autocannons, made with a propellant blended from Dawn's rare earths around a core of Teseum. They are very loud, serving as a meeting point of armor-piercing and explosive ammo - they give Piercing 2, Unsubtle 2, Vicious 2 and Salvo 2 (Anti-Materiel 2). They are exclusively made and sold Rodinan corporation Kaztec, which is partially owned by the Rodinan government. As yet, no galactics or local spies have managed to steal the proprietary secrets of their construction, so there aren't any knockoffs yet. Eagle Rounds: This is USAriadnan make, obviously - a bullet with an unusually high powder load to launch a heavy, Teseum-tipped projectile, designed to fit into an Americolt Eagle. Less robust heavy pistols can fire Eagle ammo, but it increases recoil greatly, adding Backlash 1 and +2 Complication range for anyone with Brawn 12 or less, just like the Americolt Eagle. Eagle ammo gives Piercing 3 and Unsubtle - it ain't quiet. H-12 Rounds: These are heavy caliber rounds designed based on Old Earth's Holland-12 Grand Safari big-game hunting ammo. It gives Grievous, but it also has massive recoil. Anyone using one with a rifle or longarm gets Backlash 2 if they have Brawn 11 or lower, or if with a pistol, Backlash 3 if they have Brawn 13 or lower. Armor with the Exoskeleton quality can ignore either Backlash, as it helps stabilize the gun. Hopak Ammo: These are rocket warheads laced in Teseum, allowing for increased penetration but still having room for a guidance system. Hopak rockets are big enough that they can only be fired from Massive or Mounted weapons, and they reduce Burst to 1, but they give Area (Close), Grievous, Guided and Piercing 2. When used with an Urugan MRL launcher, they remove Non-Hackable due to the guidance system but can operate in either normal or guided mode. Katyusha Ammo: These are rocket warheads packed full of tiny Double Action bomblets, which blast open and disperse over the target in midair. They freefall down to saturate the target area for an overwhelming explosive barrage targeted by a mechanical orientation system. Recently, Kaztek added a compact bomblet guidance system to increase accuracy, but it means the missiles can now be hacked. They can only be fired from a Massive or Mounted weapon, but give Area (Close), Guided, Spread 2, Unsubtle, Terrifying 2, Vicious 2. If used in an Urugan MRL, they remove Non-Hackable but can be fired in normal or guided mode. Silver Bullets: This is ammo specially formulated to fight Antipodes, Dogfaces and Wulvers. It's a specialized form of viral ammo developed by the Loup-Garou for when lethal force is required. Dog Nation activists got it banned under the Consilium Convention, but the Merovingians continue to use it thanks to racist hardliners and lobbying from DNAriadna. Silver Bullets give Botech, Grievous, Knockdown and Toxic 3 against Antipodes, Dogfaces and Wulvers, but just Biotech against anyone else. T2 Slugs: These are Teseum shotgun slugs - basically solid metal darts of Teseum with stabilizing wings to help them fly and also shred whatever they hit. They give Anti-Materiel 2, Piercing 3, Vicious 2. New Armor Buffalo Powered Armor: The signature armor of the 10th Heavy Rangers Battalion, AKA the Blackjacks, this armor is the result of the most successful DARPS project to date. They're Dawn's newest response to powered armor and TAGs, and they've earned a great reputation since they were deployed in the Commercial Conflicts. They're archaic in design by galactic standards, with crude servos and only basic radios, but they have absurd endurance to field conditions. They're bulky, about as big as a TAG, which makes them slow and not very maneuverable, but they're extremely tough, and the archaic systems design incorporates a number of redundancies that can be cannibalized for field repairs, reducing its Armor Soak, Structure and BTS to heal all of its Structure damage and Faults. Each one is armed with a pair of Chest Mines, a heavy pistol and a teseum chopper, and then one of two loadouts of heavy weapons, which can be swapped out with a Tech roll and a day of work. Loadout Alpha includes a DEP and an AP heavy machine gun, while Loadout Bravo has an SMG Pod and a T2 Sniper Rifle. Cherkesska: The Cherkesska is the Cossack heavy uniform, designed to be lighter and easier to wear than most heavy armor by incorporating a lot of Teseum. It has a weaker helmet than most, though, to allow wider range of neck movement. Teseum is expensive, so Cherkesskas are only made for soldiers that have proven themselves or who have good connections. They incorporate a bandolier and come with a Teseum knife, but they're much harder to alter than most armor and cannot have additional equipment slots added. Dog-Bowl Armor: This is sports padding reinforced with Teseum - the only protection allowed to Dog-Bowl players against the fists, teeth, claws and heavy ball itself, all of which are permitted weapons in Dog-Bowl. Recently, the design has been changed to incorproate a helmet-mounted recorder so that fans can feel closer to the action. The armor is usually worn under a jersey, but will always have a powder coating of the team colors, as jerseys are inevitably destroyed in a game. Dueling Bracers: Caledonian duelists now train using light Yu Jingese fencing suits to better track movement and impact, but official duels are done in nothing but a kilt, Teseum dueling bracers and sandals, as a show of bravery and an affectation of the past. While duels are highly traditional, new techniques are always welcomed, and modern duelists use their bracers as both armor and weapons. When worn as a set by someone trained in their use, they provide +2dN Armor Soak to the arms and give +1+1dN damage, Parry 1 and Vicious 1 to unarmed strikes. Metros Armor: The Metros are formally the Troupes Metropolitaines de la Defense Nationale, the militias that defend the Merovingian trade network and the core of the FRRM. In peacetime they're largely relegated to cop duties, but in war, they are guerrillas, and their armor is designed to be reversible for better concealment and can be worn under clothing if necessary. It makes them very sneaky, though it means the armor's not very strong. Mormaer Armor: As a sign of Caledonian wealth, it's hard to find something better than a Teseum suit of armor. One suit usually takes the entire stock of a minor clan's Teseum holdings, and even for major clans it's a huge investment. These suits provide equivalent protection to modern heavy combat armor, but much less bulky. When worn by aristocrats or Caledonian military elites, they also give +2 Moral Soak due to the pride of being chosen for wearing one. They're also not hackable, because it's a suit of Teseum plates, but provides very good armor. USARF Fighting Uniform [Environment]: These uniforms utilize photoreactive e-ink and extracts of the maycust plant to create terrain-specific camo patterns, which combine basic light armor with concealment within a specific environment. Patterns include the Winter Sun uniform (for snow), the Sandstorm (for deserts) and the Forestland (for...forests). This is incompatible with other camo, but counts as a kit for Stealth rolls against targets at least Medium range away, as wellas giving bonus Momentum to such rolls. They are growing popular with offworlder mercenaries and can be bought in bulk off planet thanks to mass production by MRCY & Co after a deal with USAriadna's DARPS. (Which is like DARPA, but in space.) New Weapons Americolt Eagle: The bastard child of a heavy pistol and a shotgun. These guns are gigantic, designed as sidearms for Dogfaces and other extremely strong folks. They are hugely overbuilt and have massive recoil, which means using them one-handed is going to break your wrists if you aren't strong enough - they gain Backlash 1 and +2 Complication range for anyone with Brawn 12 or less. They do absolutely horrifying damage, though, they can't be hacked, and the hit hard enough to cause knockdown, among other things. Ariadnan HMG: What if you made a heavy machine gun with the intent of loading it up with extremely expensive Teseum ammo? They aren't as advanced as their counterparts in other nations, but the fact that Ariadna can field T2 rounds that easily makes them a contender for best armor-piercing machine gun. Each nation produces their own favorite variant - Rodina's got the AKNovy Drozhat, Caledonia prefers the Kilgour KGR (with Teseum barrel-banding to reduce heat fatigue) and USAriadna's got the Americolt RIP-SAW. Whatever they're called, they hit absurdly hard but are never going to be cheap to shoot. Chest Mine: What if you attached a claymore mine to the front of a TAG, vehicle or powered armor? They are very effective when fired in large numbers, but can only be used at close range and don't apply the user's stats to bonus damage. On the other hand, they're amazing one-shot traps to those who get too close, and if a bunch of people have them at once, they go from Area (Close) to Indiscriminate (Close) and do extra damage. Which, I mean, they do a lot of damage already. Cobra Baton: These collapsible batons are made by Bracco Limited for their private security, but they're also quite popular with cops and spies, because they're very sneaky little clubs that are good at knocking people out. DEP: The DEP is a single-shot kitbashed Panzerfaust, invented by the guerrillas of Corregidor. It stands for Descanse En Paz - Rest In Peace. Each one has room for one Reload, and once used it is empty and cannot be fired again until reloaded, which requires a Tech roll and a Standard Action. Great for a cheap antitank weapon, but if you miss, you're likely to get killed by the tank. Heavy Shotgun: These are vehicle-mounted, scaled up shotguns, occasionally integrated into remotes...or just handed to Dogfaces and Wulvers to wield. They are technically a form of man-portable artillery, so only the very, very strong can use them - Backlash 3 and +3 Complication range for anyone with Brawn 13 or less unless mounted on a vehicle, TAG or weapons emplacement. They hit like a train, though, and can load AP slugs as a secondary fire mode. H-12 Pistol: These are very rare weapons, used only by the extremely strong or extremely arrogant. They're reinforced to take H-12 rounds, which means if you have Brawn 13 or less, they have Backlash 3 - and they add Salvo, which if used ups that to 14. They also give +1 Complication range to attacks at Reach, Long or Extreme range. That said, anyone with Exoskeleton armor or with Ballistics Focus 5+ can ignore the Backlash. This is a gun for showing off. Mk12 Rifle: What if we made a military gun based on a mix of big-game hunting rifle and assault rifle? These guns shoot high caliber rounds with great precision, though they operate best at Medium range and get +1 Complication range outside that. They are designed for H-12 ammo, and on top of having Backlash 2 for those with Brawn 11 or less, they are also Unwieldy for those with Brawn 9 or less. As always, Exoskeleton armor removes the Backlash. They do some pretty nasty damage for all that, at least. Molotok: Russian for hammer, this is a machine gun designed to fire high-rate, lightweight AP rounds. It's designed for close and urban combat, and because it's compact and easy to carry, it's popular with paratroopers and scouts...and also the Bratva gangs. Decent damage and high rate of fire. Ojotnik: Military-grade hunting rifles, slow but powerful, and meant for Teseum ammo. Their stocks are light hardwood, the rifling is Teseum-coated, and they always have the best sights available at production time. Each is a hand-crafted heirloom weapon, passed on from marskman to student. They are very rare and a huge status symbol among the Cossacks - especially the Spetsnaz Scouts, who each get given a personalized one. Portable Autocannon: These weapons are compact, lightweight versions of primitive tank guns, made even simpler by reducing recoil suppression and ammo feed systems and relying solely on optical sights. They are designed by Kaztec to fire Apex rounds, making them effective antiarmor weapons despite how simple and even crude they are. They're heavy, hard to use and not particularly fast, but they can't be hacked and they do enough damage to harm even modern armored units. Sgian Dubh: Scots-Gaelic for 'covert knife,' this is a small single-edge blade carried as part of the traditional Highland formal attire, alongside a kilt and stockings. When worn openly, the handle is made visible at the top of the stocking on your dominant hand's side, but it's designed to be easily concealed as well. They are very common in Caledonia and sold in many styles, from ornate and showy to simple blackened blades meant to avoid detection. It's a pretty good knife. If you want to show off, you get it with a macrofeidh antler handle. This is doable with any knife, using the antlers of the giant Ariadnan deer, Megaloceros ariadnensis. Males grow and shed antlers annually, while females grow one pair over a long period, so female antlers are especially prized for their density and the fact that they often shatter during the deer's death throes. Knives or other one-handed weapons with Macrofeidh antler grips or handles are +5 Cost, but the wielder is immune to any effort to forcibly disarm them of the weapon or knock it from their hands, as the horns are *very* good at grip. T2 Boarding Shotgun: Most commonly used by the Caledonians, these rely on T2 shells rather than normal slugs, using subtle mods to maximize the effect of the Teseum ammo. Manufacturer AKNovy's Uzhas model is the top-of-the-line version, and does not suffer the common jams and barrel degradation of other weapons that use T2 ammo. These are MULTI weapons that use either Normal Shells or T2 Shells instead of Standard or Special Ammo. Teseum Claws: These are primarily used by Antipodes - special claw implants laced with Teseum to take on armored foes, including each other. Humans don't really understand the details of the ritual bindings used to attach the Teseum to the claws, but it seems to be a permanent thing that is done to all three members of a trinary over the course of a single day. The use of Teseum claws is widely known, but it is considerably less well known that the Antipodes used them far, far less often before humans arrived. Teseum Claymore: Yes, it's a giant two-handed sword made of Teseum. No, it's not subtle. These are the favored weapons of the Highlander elites, each one a handcrafted masterwork of the blacksmith's art. Teseum blades like this are passed down in clans for generations and rarely sold. Most have long histories, and even new claymores are terrifically expensive. The fact of the matter is it's worth it, though - they do terrifying damage. Teseum Hatchet: These are simple one-handed axes, common among frontier farmers and hunters. They were frequently turned from tool to weapon in the Commercial Conflicts, and now they are often seen as memorabilia for mercenaries that fought in them. They're useful and long-lasting, if expensive, and most Ariadnan mercenaries that spot a galactic carrying one are likely to get mad, or even try to kill them for it, if they don't seem able to handle themselves. Teseum Knife: It's like a knife, but made of Teseum. Holds an edge longer, cuts harder, throws easier and goes deeper than a normal knife. They're common among Ariadnan elite troops like the SAS, Spetsnaz or Devil Dogs, who receive them as a graduation present. Teseum knives are the most common Teseum weapons in offworlder hands, as their small size makes them relatively affordable. Uragan MRL: Hurricane in Russian. These are cheap multi-launcher artillery weapons designed for antitank fire and counter-battery. They're old, reliable and have very few electronic parts, making them essentially impossible to hack. They usually get mounted in pairs on Traktor Muls or other platforms, and each has a self-loading system for sustained fire. They can be used with advanced Hupak or Katyusha guided missiles, but these make them hackable due to the guidance systems. Normally, they operate in airburst or direct fire mode. New Explosives E/Mauler: Electromagnetic pulse mines made from a motion detector and IFF linkage to a single-use stealth pulse emitter. It's a Nomad design, but Ariadna bought huge amounts of them in the Commercial Conflicts, and they're easy to find even now if you know the right people. Making a non-hackable variant E/Mauler is deeply illegal almost everywhere, but Dawn's pretty lax about that stuff and tacitly allows them due to the relative lack of Cubes on planet, so you can find them. New Vehicles Ariadnan Utility Vehicle: AUVs come in tons of makes and models, and many people on Ariadna own one. The basic design is a sturdy and tall four-wheel-drive car with pretty big cargo capacity and passenger space. They are extremely fuel-inefficient compared to modern galactic vehicles, but they're overbuilt to the extent that little is able to damage them and they can go off-roading very easily. They have armor on par with a lot of military vehicles, in fact, despite being civilian make, and they're pretty easy to repair compared to more modern vehicles. Arroaz Skimmer: These are hovercrafts favored by the Irmandinho smugglers. They have self-stabilizing wings that let them move just over the surface of the water once they pick up speed, which reduces their sonar profile and allows them to carry more cargo without worrying about capsizing. The entire thing is designed to be stealthy, with a hull faceted to reduce radar signature, integrated heatsinks to reduce thermal output and photoreactive coatings to make them blend with the air and water at a distance. They're also pretty well armored, but if they don't keep moving, the ground effect hovering will fail and make them much slower. Backwoods ATV: These are a combination of lifted truck, four-wheeler and hydraulic nightmare, designed to allow travel in the woods and mountains of the Antipode Wilds. Trails and roads are quite rare in those regions, so the tires are studded to prevent puncture and have independent transmission and suspension, which allows them to climb rocks and boulders shockingly well. Each also is mounted on an extendable hydraulic strut that can be closed down to reduce profile for narrow gaps or extended to cross over pits. While less rugged and armored than an AUV as well as more cramped, a Backwoods ATV can jump gaps or climb mountainsides as if they were level ground, and reduce the difficulty of hazardous terrain rolls in the Ariadnan wilderness. Official Vehicle: Specifically, the official government vehicles of the Rodinan bureaucracy. In theory, they are exclusively for state business, but in practice, they're perks for the Russian bureaucrats of rank. They're luxurious, E/M shielded and surprisingly well-armored. They also have micro-LED strips in the outline of the bodywork that can be turned on to flash blue. When flashing, an Official Vehicle has right of way at all times in Rodina, can break any traffic laws, and cannot be stopped or searched by cops. While there have been scandals and protests over their use for private matters, they are kept as a firm reminder of the power of the Federal Service. Ore Hauler: Ore haulers are gigantic dump trucks used to move ore containing Teseum across the countryside. While Ariadna originally used normal cargo trucks for it, they developed the ore haulers to deal with the threats of banditry, both human and Antipode. Modern ore haulers are gigantic gas guzzlers that have very inefficient but very powerful engines, able to move at a very fast clip - usually fast enough to outpace raider vehicles. They're also quite well armored, and while the cabin only has room for two, there's gun turret compartments with room for six security guards, plus special ladders and bulkheads to provide cover and confuse boarders. Trail Bike: It's a popular offroading motorbike with reinforced suspension to allow for big jumps and tight cornering. Teens love 'em. They are poorly armored even by the standards of motorbikes, but they're easy to repair, and their suspension lets the rider make a Pilot or Acrobatics roll to reduce fall damage. New Tools Bandolier: It's an ammo belt you wear around your chest. This modern version has pouches and stick pads embedded to allow easy access, which means someone wearing one can swap ammo types as a Free Action. Binoculars: These are old reliables often built into armor, no electronic parts whatsoever. Using them removes range penalties to observe targets at Long range, but give +1 Difficulty to notice things in the same zone, because using them reduces your peripheral vision. Digicloak (Environment): Despite the lack of technological advancement, Ariadnans have had to get good at camouflage due to the Antipodes. Digicloaks are the result - thin cloaks that use digital ink panels, each specialized to a specific environment and which will display textures that blend with that environment. Mountain, forest and jungle digicloaks are most common, but none of them are easy to get outside the military. Digicloaks count as kits for Stealth against those at Medium or further range, giving bonus Momentum as long as you're prone while using one. If you are not Revealed, the cloak also gives bonus Cover soak against ranged attacks, even if you are Detected. Dog-Bowl Jersey X: Lightweight jerseys worn over Dog-Bowl armor to show team allegiance, though fan replicas obviously also exist. Designs vary, but a jersey will always have the team name and player number, and often also sponsor logos and a player's personal slogan or symbol. They have no protective ability, but they're very hard to fully destroy, and the remnants of those worn in games are usually signed and sold to fans as memorabilia. Rating is from 1 to 3 - 1 means it's a normal jersey sold at stores or similar. 2 is an exact replica jersey or special edition. 3 is a certified signed jersey that managed to escape a game in wearable shape. A jersey gives +X bonus Momentum on Lifestyle and Persuade rolls against fans of the team it's for, or X-1 to other Dog-Bowl fans...unless they're fans of the team's rivals, which means they give no benefit and instead +X Difficulty to such rolls. Fusebox: A generic term for a variety of brightly colored, soft-case tablets designed for interactive use by children as part of primary school - it's derived from the Russian name for them, which translates to 'little detonator' or 'little fusebox.' They also have a limited number of secondary education programs and basic lessons on most Ariadnan spoken languages, and they're often the only educational materials available in frontier settlements. Modern versions receive regular Maya updates and are often cracked by hackers to access Arachne content. Using a fusebox halves the XP cost to get Expertise 1 or Focus 1 in Education, and if you get both through the Fusebox, it also halves the XP cost of the Disciplined Student talent. It also reduces the XP cost to learn Scots or American English, French, or Kazak Russian, though you will have a somewhat limited vocabulary at first. Long Jehans: Made famous by Jehan Chastel, a Merovingian Commercial Agent, these are warm and comfortable sets of long underwear with silver-infused synthetic zeolite lining, plus activated carbon to reduce odors. As long as they are washed at least once a week, they give +1 Difficulty to track the wearer by scent, even against those with Keen Senses (Smell), such as Antipodes. Pet X (Tiny/Small/Large): Animals. Not special ones like the Nomads have, just...animals. If you have a pet nearby, you get a bonus die to Discipline rolls made to recover Resolve outside of combat. (In combat, you'd be too worried about your dog getting shot.) Pets are no use in combat at all, in fact - they're not big or scary enough to do much more than be a brief distraction; anything big and strong enough to fight is a working animal, like a guard dog or riding horse, which have core book stats. Tiny pets are small enough to live on the user or in a small portable habitat and have no more than the base benefits, but they're usually cheap to feed. Small pets and large pets take more space and food, but can do potentially useful things at the GM's whim, such as giving bonus Momentum on Observation rolls. Rating 1 pets are common animals for the area with no special pedigree or traits. Rating 2 is rare animals or common ones with a special pedigree or trait. Rating 3 is exotic or dangerous animals or those with extremely rare traits. A pet's rating does not have any mechanical weight beyond permission for the GM to give it more special bonuses, though. Photoreactive Coating: These are coatings that use special e-ink that responds to light in order to mimic its surroundings. Rebellious teens are fond of using photoreactive coating paint to tag slogans or obscenities on their clothes or as graffiti, but the stuff can also be used as budget camo. It's not the best for the job and is incompatible with other camo, but it's easy to apply, and it lets you reroll a single die on Stealth rolls. However, if you take any physical damage from an incendiary waepon, the coating automatically suffers a Fault and is disabled until fixed, as it's quite flammable. Portable Rescue Supply Kit: These cases are carried by every member of the 112 Emergency Service, and each one contains a length of rope, a grappling hook, a fire extinguisher, some basic medical gear, a crowbar, some nylex bags that can easily be filled with dirt to make improvised barricades, and a number of other tools. The case counts as a medikit for purposes of emergency care and triage and a survival kit for a single specific environment, chosen at purchase. A Tech roll can be made to convert the entire thing into a single Part or Pick. Rebreather: These masks come with three integrated Oxygen Loads, and they're designed to recycle exhaled air to help prolong the supply. When used, they give 1 BTS, as well. However, it takes a full minute to put one on - they're very bulky and complex, and it takes a bit to get the fit right. Rucksack X: These are reinforced bags with locks, worn on the back and secured by over-the-shoulder straps. Modern materials let you attach extra pouches for balance or organization, and for a small fee, they can have biometric locks, integrated locator beacons or other tools. Thievery rolls to steal anything in a Rucksack are at +X Difficulty, with a max rating of 3, and anything over rating 1 comes with a free integrated beacon. Samovar: Literally "self-boiler" in Russian, samovars are metal containers used to heat and boil water for tea. The Ariadna carried several of them in a collapsible design with built-in heating element and extremely efficient battery. Copies of the design are omnipresent throughout Ariadna, used by Rodinans to make zavarka, Caledonians to make a weak British-style tea, and Merovingians and USAriadnans to make coffee. (There are a lot of arguments between the two about the correct kind of coffee.) Tactical Webbing: This is a set of adhesive belts, braces and straps to attach gear for quick access. Any attached item can be drawn as a Free Action once per round. However, because they're just hanging right there, Thievery rolls to steal anything stowed in your tactical webbing are at -1 Difficulty, and the webbing is obvious military gear. Tracking Collar: These collars are mostly used to monitor the locations of pets, working animals or wildlife. They ping a local satellite network every five minutes, and a Hacking roll can make them send a ping on demand. Once attached, they are very hard to remove, requiring a difficult Athletics or Brawn roll to get out of. The Trakstar TC is the most common Dawn brand due to its early adoption by the Rodinans, who use an implanted variant to track escaped Antipodes. USAriadnan Entrenching Tool, Custom X: Some folks just aren't satisfied with a normal shovel-axe, so they get custom variants crafted. Handles are reworked with exotic hardwoods or smart materials, the folding spade is redone in carbon steel or Teseum, and a sharpened or serrated edge is often added. Custom Entrenching Tools come in ratings 1 to 3, giving Armoured X and Piercing X to the tool and reducing the increased complication range for using one as an improvised weapon by X. (The normal is +3 Complication range.) Also, you can give the GM X Heat per Complication to ignore the first X complications generated when using one. New Drugs Baba: Baba is a euphoric that also induces fever, which is fairly longlasting. It's intended to help combat the effects of exposure to cold, but once it wears off it leaves you more vulnerable than normal. Basically, once you take it, you get a bonus die to all Resistance and Discipline rolls due to cold exposure for twelve hours, but once that's up, you take double damage from extreme cold or heat for four hours due to oversensitivity. Baba is mildly addictive, and withdrawal causes the same oversensitivity. Baba/Yaga: Mixing the euphoric Baba with the entheogen Yaga is synergistic. The user goes on a deep trip into their subconscious for 1d20 hours, entering a deep sleep and heavy fever for that period. Waking them before the trip is over causes 3+3dN Nonlethal Terrifying 3 damage. Each hour the user is under, they can make an Intelligence roll and spend Momentum to recover Resolve or heal Metanoias or, with GM permission, remove or gain Traits. However, Complications cause 2+2dN Nonlethal Terrifying 2 damage. Cod: Cod is the street name of any number of different protein powders and drinks used to build muscle. Dealers often cut them with cheaper materials to maximize profits, though, so allergic reactions are pretty common. One dose monthly, as long as you're doing regular intense exercise, will let you treat your Brawn as 1dN lower for XP costs. However, if you roll an Effect, you have a negative reaction to the filler impurities and suffer a Wound, plus you need to find a new brand of cod. Cod is not a food substitute, and if eaten exclusively you suffer 1 Wound per week. Yaga: Yaga is an entheogen and depressant created out of a fungus that grows in the Antipode Wilds. The Antipodes are its main users, frequently ingesting it as part of their Blood Tree rituals. It causes mild synesthetic hallucination and relaxing sensations for 1d20 hours, and then sends the user into an immediate deep sleep for an equal period. For each hour you're under the main effect, you heal 2 Resolve, and for every ten hours, you heal one Metanoia. It is mildly addictive, and withdrawal causes extreme sleepiness. New Remotes Traktor Mul: This is a crude kind of remote, about the size of a small car. They require a dedicated control device to operate, but are able to autonomously perform basic pathfinding to a destination. They're often used as military transports or artillery platforms, and they're known for fuel efficiency and adaptable treads that let them move quite rapidly in dense terrain. Because they are very specifically designed for remote control rather than being piloted by AIs or geists, they only get +2 Complication range for remote control if the user is at Extreme range of the thing. However, because they have no onboard LAI, they are unable to do much if not controlled besides move or fire basic equipped weapons. Certainly nothing complex. They're pretty strong and very hard to knock over but poorly armored and by default have no weapons - just a binocular viewport and a recorder. They do, however, have two manipulator armors which can be removed and replaced with mounted weapons. If both arms are replaced, it is balanced but has no hands, and if only one is, the thing is unbalanced and gets +1 Difficulty to Agility rolls. Next time: Ariadnan Lifepath
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2022 23:10
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Thanks for the TSATF review! Though if you don't mind me looping back to something you mentioned in the first post... E: The Hive Queen and Country devs wrote a variant called The Hive and the Flame. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Mar 22, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2022 00:33
|
|
|
Thanks for the review, mellonbread!
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2022 04:53
|
|
|
mellonbread posted:I don't think there were any official expansions, but a quick google search turned up these rules for The Landships of Mogdonazia. One thing I immediately noted on reading them, they handled power armor similar to my suggestion for how a fantasy variant could handle full plate: they ignore hits unless the casualty card is a face or ace. That kind of rules.
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2022 13:56
|
|
|
DUNE 2019 PART 1: INTRODUCTION, COMPONENTS AND PLATFORMS Leto II the Younger posted:I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist. The original Dune board game was released by Avalon Hill in 1979. It’s based on Frank Herbert’s novel of the same name from 1965, and came out well before even the first film adaptation by David Lynch. There was a rerelease based on the film in ‘84, a couple expansions, then the game went out of production for a few decades. Fantasy Flight Games released a reskinned version in 2012 called Rex, Final Days of an Empire, using their Twilight Imperium setting since they couldn’t get the Dune license. In 2019, Gale Force Nine got the rights from the Herbert estate to do a rerelease of the original game, even bringing some of the original designers back on board. The new version has totally new art and some rules updates, but is largely faithful to the ‘79 original. GF9 has since released two expansions, one in 2020 and one in 2022. GF9 also recently released a four player variant of the 2019 game, using the visuals from the 2021 movie and some greatly streamlined mechanics. In this review I’ll be discussing the 2019 game and expansions because it’s the only version I’ve played, pulling in comparisons from the original game in places where I know enough that I have something interesting to say. Some important facts about Dune
Unlike most of my reviews, this is a game that I expect people in this thread have actually played. I hope this will lead to a fun discussion about things like preferred houserules, faction strategy and actual play experience. THE GAME BOX First, let’s go over the components.  Photographed on the patented mellonbread gaming carpet, the place in my apartment with the best light Inside this box, you get a board, several decks of cards, some cardboard player screens that hide your pieces and double as faction quick reference cards, force tokens, leader tokens, spice tokens, and various other types of token that you use to track board and game states.   You also get these nifty “combat dials” which are used for the game’s battle system. They give battle planning a nice tactile element.  Captain Amramsham leads 5 of the Emperor’s forces into battle, for a total force strength of 10 Let’s talk about the size of the playing pieces. I suspect Gale Force Nine made a deliberate decision here to make a lightweight product that would be less expensive and take up less shelf space for the end user. The base game retailed at 40 dollars on release, although that’s gone up to 50 or 60 in the present day. And admittedly, it’s a pretty slick little box. The downside of this approach is that a lot of the components are tiny.  The force tokens are small. The spice tokens are small. But because the most important board spaces are also small, it’s easy for them to get completely obscured by piles of troops. Which means it can be hard to tell at a glance what the deployed force strength in a territory is, which is a serious issue when a battle can be decided by a single force token.  The Emperor squares off against the Fremen in Habbanya. What force strength can each side bring to bear, remembering the bonuses from Sardaukar and Fedaykin? Trick question, the Sardaukar don’t get bonuses against Fremen There are other build issues I’m less familiar with. I’ve heard of problems with the leader dials breaking, due to the little plastic thing that holds them together not working. This hasn’t happened to me, and to their credit GF9 will apparently replace this part free of charge. All this is to say, there’s a reason Dune has a thriving Etsy aftermarket for better components than the ones that come with the game. Bigger boards, plastic inserts that make the force tokens easier to grab and stack, larger spice tokens made of plastic that fit better in the hand, upgraded battle wheels that let you slot in your cards and spice as well as forces, etc. It’s a worthwhile investment for some people because this is a game they play a lot. I might never play my physical box copy and I’m still considering it. ART While I’m here, I’ll also mention an issue I’ve had with both the physical and online versions of the game: The Fremen force tokens are yellow, the Guild are orange, and the Emperor is red.  Easy to distinguish, in direct sunlight… The silhouettes on the tokens are different, but not enough to tell them apart at a distance. I don’t have any sight problems that I’m aware of, but I sometimes have to double check that I’m not confusing the pieces due to the similar shading. One of the expansion factions uses a shade of gray that’s also very similar to the Atreides green at a glance. I know from play experience that I’m not the only one to have this problem, and I imagine it’s worse for anyone with a vision issue. As for the rest of the visual design, it’s… fine. The new cards are better than the old Avalon Hill cards because they have better explanations for what they do right on them. 1979:   2019:   The leader art is where I think the original game has the advantage. Check the old school designs from the ‘79 game.  He may be a genetic eunuch, but this Count Fenring clearly fucks  The artist drew printed circuits in the silhouette of all the mentat characters I like these because they were drawn before there were any film adaptations of Dune, so they’re just based on the artist’s imagination. The 2019 leader tokens are alright, but they just don’t have that same visual flair as the old ones.  After assassinating the previous Emperor, Louis CK ascends to the Lion Throne  We’ll be using digital images of the pieces for the rest of this review wherever possible, rather than photographs. RULES TEXT Gale Force Nine has released the core rules and all the FAQs and errata to those rules for free online. You can read along with the review if you’d like to see how they work firsthand. Core Rules FAQ I have no issues with the typography or layout of the English language rules book. I’ve been told that some of the translations are quite bad, to the point that they give outright wrong or backwards explanations of how the rules work. Italian gamers beware.  A lot of rules explanations are not found in the core rules text, but rather in the card descriptions and faction special abilities. There are further clarifying explanations spread across FAQs and errata released with expansions. These are all free online, so it’s not like you have to buy expansions to get the fixed rules. But the model of “lightweight rules book, beefy FAQ” leads to rules arguments as people who learned one version of the text reconcile their understanding of the game with the ancillary documents. Dune 2019 is based on a 40 year old game, and many of the fine grained mechanics are specific interpretations or deliberate alterations from the original rules. They are based on forty years of accumulated experience, but they don’t always agree with the rules that true Dune veterans from the old days use. I know they differ in several places from the tournament rules that fans developed based on the original game. Some of these differences are called out in the FAQs. The changes that I’m personally aware of are largely for the better, but of course I’d think that having never played the original. ONLINE PLAY Leto II the Younger posted:What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger. Many people play Dune online using Tabletop Simulator. I don’t love TTS because I think the interface is clumsy and the physics simulation has a tendency to send pieces rocketing off into space or plummeting through the table into the void - both of which cause them to reappear at a random location in the play space. The undo function also doesn’t work very well, probably because it’s trying to recover the recorded positions of hundreds of physics objects across hundreds of “moves”. The big advantage of TTS is that it lets you do anything you could do at a physical table, in terms of rules. If there’s a mechanical dispute or a houserule that the group would like implemented, you can just do it the way you’d do it with the real board game.  There’s also a superb browser based version of the game called treachery.online, and this is where I play the majority of my games. This is an almost-fully-automated implementation of the game that makes it much easier to learn and teach new players, and for veteran players to . (Dune can’t be fully automated yet because many of the mechanics require natural language parsing by the players). It has built in support for the most common house rules and an options menu that lets you pick and choose which parts of the base game you want to play with - which is important since everyone has their own combination of preferred houserules for Dune.   It’s got a functioning undo function, which is great since people are going to make mistakes with the interface while they’re learning the game, or accidentally advance a game phase before everyone is finished doing something. It also has support for custom skins, including visuals, sound and music. It even lets you play practice games with bots. They aren’t very good at the game, but they’ve got some crude heuristics that let them imitate the behavior of intelligent players, and the game has enough hidden information and moving parts that it’s still difficult to win against them. Overall I’m honestly shocked the whole thing works as well as it does.  There are several downsides to treachery.online. It’s not perfectly reliable, although it’s better than it has any right to be and the save game function will usually salvage your game if you crash. Dune also has a lot of mechanics that let you interrupt someone else’s action, like cards that say “play when” another player does something. But because actions selected in treachery.online are done from a drop down menu and executed instantaneously, rather than by a player pulling out a card from a physical deck or making a verbal declaration, you can’t play a card “when” someone does something, only before or after. This means a table of experienced players using the karama card to negate each other’s powers will require a lot of rewinding to make sure the software executes the game functions in the correct order. To some extent this is a problem with the base game - the karama card is a source of rules arguments even at a physical table. And finally, you can only implement house rules that the developer has implemented in the game interface. You can’t pick and choose things that aren’t modeled in the software. The guy is very responsive to feedback and has added lots of cool features at user requests, but that’s not something that helps you in the scope of a single game. There’s also the chance that your game will be ruined by a bug, where the game forces a rules interpretation that’s clearly wrong, but can’t be corrected by the players in the moment.  Gale Force Nine does not appear overly bothered by the treachery.online dev’s (almost) perfect free online replica of their game. They even gave him early playtest access to the latest expansion so that he could start work on implementing it in the software, and have it ready soon after the physical box released. Perhaps they believe people who play the online game extensively will eventually purchase a box copy. That’s the reason I bought mine. treachery.online has really spoiled me by automatically implementing a lot of rules that are easy to forget at a physical table. Dune has many special cases and exceptions to its mechanics, and I suspect my opinion of the game is more favorable than it would be if I had to handle all of these by hand.  I don’t actually have a ton of screenshots of this game I have not used VASSAL or any other virtual tabletop not mentioned here to play Dune, and can’t comment on how good the implementation is. That’s a long introduction, and we haven’t even gotten into what Dune (both the board game and the original media property) is about. In the next post, we’ll go over the board, the object of the game, the turn structure, and the basic flow of play.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 16:03
|
|
|
drat, that original character art owns. It reminds me a good bit of when Libluini posted some art related to Perry Rhodan, the technological bits have these sorts of characteristic flourishes that sort of just give them a believable bulkiness. They're not sleek or elegant and they demand space.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 16:17
|
|
|
Awesome! Now I might actually know how to play this loving thing I bought.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 16:21
|
|
|
Dune is a superb game. It's from the same people who designed Cosmic Encounters, and you see a lot of that game's DNA in Dune (especially where every faction has multiple, seemingly-gamebreaking special powers, that all somehow balance against each other). I'd be hard pressed to think of a game that did a better job of nailing the theme of the property in the game design - it's the opposite of those lazy "take game system A, slap property B on it, done" approaches that leads to things like Harry Potter Munchkin or whatever. The shifting alliances really are key to enjoying the game, so it's much more enjoyable with 5 or 6 players than 2 or 3 (the recent 2021 redesign supposedly re-jiggered the rules to be more fun for smaller play groups; I haven't had a chance to test it yet). And mellonbread failed to mention another version of the game - the early 1990s french reissue by Descartes which included the two hard-to-find Avalon Hill supplements (Spice Harvest and The Duel) in it.  It's the version I own and play (and I guess is a big-money collector's item now), and it has its own euro-comic SF production design.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 16:48
|
|
|
DUNE 2019 PART 2: THE BOARD, THE OBJECTIVE, THE TURN THE BOARD That Floating Fatman, the Baron posted:It was a relief globe of a world, partly in shadows, spinning under the impetus of a fat hand that glittered with rings. The globe sat on a freeform stand at one wall of a windowless room whose other walls presented a patchwork of multicolored scrolls, filmbooks, tapes and reels. Light glowed in the room from golden balls hanging in mobile suspensor fields.  The thick black lines dividing the polygons delineate the different territories. The pie slices radiating from the polar sink across the territories denote the sectors within those territories. Territories are the primary unit of movement, battle, etc. The sectors matter primarily for spice placement and storm movement. There are four types of territory on this board.
There are a few areas on the board, outside the map, used to track information and store pieces. You’ve got a turn tracker, telling you what game turn it is, and a phase tracker telling you where you are in that turn. You’ve got the Bene Tleilaxu tanks, which is where you put force and leader tokens when they get killed, and the Spice Bank, which is where you store any spice pieces that aren’t on the board or in a player’s inventory. You’ve got a place for the storm marker, and places for the player discs to show where the factions are positioned relative to the storm. (The old board was uglier, but it also made the four space types more visually distinct).  OBJECTIVE The objective of Dune is to end a turn with your forces in control of three or more strongholds. Controlling a stronghold means being the only one with forces in it. Forces in the same territory with enemy forces at the end of the movement phase fight automatically in the battle phase, so whoever’s left standing (if anyone) controls the stronghold. If you form an alliance with another player during a nexus (triggered during the spice blow phase), you need to control four strongholds between the two of you, instead of the usual three. There are a handful of faction specific victory conditions that we’ll go over later. GAME RULES - BASIC VS ADVANCED Dune has two variants in the core box, basic and advanced. Basic Dune boils each faction down to its bare essentials, shaves off some complexity from the economics layer, and simplifies a few other things. Advanced Dune is the better game. It unlocks all the faction abilities, but also adds a lot of easy to forget special rules, and a few that are easy to remember but very frustrating for new players. I think all the advanced rules are good, but a few are controversial enough (advanced combat in particular) that some groups play without them. If you’ve got an experienced group and one or two new players, advanced is the way to go. If you’re teaching the game to new players, or if your whole group is new and you’re learning yourself, start with the basic game. If you like Dune enough to play it again, then you can try the advanced game. SETUP Let’s talk about playercount for a second. Dune is designed and balanced for six players. This is the biggest barrier to entry for Dune, more than any of the rules complexity. For every person you add to a game night past like three or four, you increase the odds of someone flaking out. Normally that’s not an issue, because most games can be played with a range of players and still be fun. You can play Dune with as few as two people, and approach a semblance of balance with four, but for it to be good you need all six. The book has some recommendations for which factions to choose if you don’t have a full stack, and if you fall as low as two or three players you can use the alliance rules with each person controlling multiple factions from the get-go. But six players is what you need. You can go up to eight if you’ve got one of the expansions, we’ll discuss that later. But let’s just assume you’ve got the full six. Time for setup. The first step is to assign factions. Either let players choose freely and use random chance to settle disputes, or deal them all out randomly and allow players to trade. As a refresher, the base game has six factions:
Next, we draw our starting traitors. There’s a deck of cards, one for each leader in the game. Each player gets four cards from this deck, and chooses one to keep as a traitor. That’s going to be important for the battle phase later on. The three that they don’t pick are discarded - except the Harkonnen player, who gets to keep them all. Just about every rule in this game has a faction who gets to break or ignore it. The basic strategy here is to pick the highest level leader of a player you actually expect to fight. There are other ways you can play it, like deliberately choosing a low level leader and trying to bait the enemy into using them in battle. If you’re playing for the first time and don’t know what any of that means, just choose the biggest numbered leader who isn’t one of your own. The cards you discard are safe leaders (since nobody else can pick them as traitors), and you should remember who you discarded. If you drew any of your own leaders, you can use them with confidence. If you drew any enemy leaders, you can sell that information for a quick buck, or give it to your ally if you team up with another player. Example: Let’s say I’m the Emperor, and I draw these cards.  Captain Amramsham is one of my leaders. That means he’s guaranteed safe, and also that there’s no benefit in picking him. So I’ve got a choice between a mid tier Guild leader, the worst Harkonnen leader, or Stilgar, the strongest leader in the entire game. The obvious play here is to pick Stilgar, since that lets me auto win a battle if the Fremen ever play him against me. Honestly, that’s probably what I would do. Stilgar has a tendency to get killed early because the Fremen are often poor in defensive cards that could protect him, but it’s still a good bet. My second choice would actually be the garbage Hark leader. If the other player knows you have a weapon, and they don’t have a corresponding defense, they’ll usually play a low value leader and try to win on force strength. Which lets you manipulate them into doing that in a decisive battle, where you can call treachery and win. We’ll talk more about the strategy here when we go into battle. For now, I keep Stilgar and toss the other three, but note that they’re “safe” leaders - especially my own guy! Understand that “traitor cards” are distinct from “treachery cards”. The former are used to determine which leaders secretly work for you, the latter are special cards that you use to win battles and mess with other players. This is the result of a change in the playing pieces from the Avalon Hill game to the rerelease. My understanding is that Avalon Hill didn't have traitor cards, you just shuffled and drew the leader discs, wrote down the one you got, then put them all back in the main pile to be distributed to their respective players. Having a card that you can keep is simpler and easier, but also causes the terminological challenge. After traitors are handled, everyone draws their starting spice from the bank. The amount you start with is determined by your faction choice. We’ll discuss this when we go over the individual factions. Next we position our starting forces. Everyone has 20 troops, with some number of those troops on planet at the beginning of the game, and the rest in reserves. The Atreides spawn with 10 forces in Arrakeen. The Harkonnens spawn with the same in Carthag. The Guild get 5 forces in Tuek’s Sietch, down in the bottom right of the board. The Fremen must place 10 forces on the board, dividing them as they please between Sietch Tabr, false Wall South, and False Wall West. I’m not sure what the best strategy is here. False Wall West and Sietch Tabr are within the Fremen’s rally zone, meaning they can drop guys from their reserves there at any time for free. False Wall South puts your guys within striking distance of Tuek’s Sietch, which normally requires an additional move for the Fremen to reach. So False Wall South gives you the ability to strike Tuek’s whenever you want. BUT, if the opportunity to attack Tuek’s never comes up, those forces are stuck there doing gently caress-all, instead of rushing down any of the other strongholds in concert with the guys you rally on the left side of the board. (This will all make more sense once we get into the Fremen special powers). The Bene Gesserit start the game with a single force in the Polar Sink. If you’re playing advanced Dune, they also get to spawn a single additional force in any territory on the map, even a territory controlled by someone else. If the territory is occupied, that force spawns as a “peaceful advisor”. We’ll cover what advisors do when we get to the Bene Gesserit faction writeup. Once the dudes are on the map, shuffle and deal some starting treachery cards. These are secret tools that will help us later. Everybody gets one, except the Harkonnen player, who gets two. Last part of setup is to place the storm. You do this randomly. Start with the storm marker in the storm start space on the board. The two players on either side of the storm starting position dial numbers from 0 to 20 using their battle wheels. The storm is then moved a number of pie slices counterclockwise around the board, equal to the sum of the two dials. This is something you could just do with dice if you really wanted, but this way the box doesn’t have to ship with one. Since everyone on the board spawns in a protected territory, the storm doesn’t kill anyone when it sweeps around the board*. However it can cover up an occupied stronghold or rock territory, meaning the forces inside can’t move out during the first turn (and, nobody can move in). I never thought about it until now, but I guess if the advanced game Bene Gesserit place their free force in the desert, they could just get immediately wiped out by the storm. Good thing there’s no reason for them to ever do that. Here’s what the board could look like after setting up a game of basic Dune.  The Fremen have taken an intermediate position, sending half their forces to each False Wall. Note that with the storm in its current position, the Guild will go first on the first turn, followed by the Atreides, then Harkonnen, Bene Gesserit, Emperor, with the Fremen going last. Here’s what things look like behind the Emperor’s player shield.  The spice tokens, traitor card (Stilgar) and starting treachery card (worthless) go behind the player shield, since that’s hidden information. The leaders can sit out in the open along with the quick reference and alliance rules, to avoid taking up space. I realize now that I forgot to put any force tokens behind the shield when I took this picture. The Emperor has 20 force tokens in his reserves at the beginning of the game, because he doesn’t start with any forces on the planet. THE GAME TURN The game turn in Dune is divided into nine phases. I’ll start by just listing them here.
Know also that the default maximum length of a Dune 2019 game is ten turns. The original Avalon Hill game default was fifteen. The length of the individual phases varies greatly depending on the board state. Spice Blow can be over in thirty seconds if no alliances form, or take 5-10 minutes if people are negotiating alliances and scheming with their new allies prior to resuming play. The auction phase always takes a decent chunk of time. Battle depends on how many people are actually fighting. The total length of the game is highly variable because it’s possible to win on turn 1, or any turn after that all the way to turn 10. Some factions want the game to be short, others have a strong incentive to drag things out. Look forward to more detailed explanation of the phases, along with other important details explained when they become relevant, in the next post. PurpleXVI posted:drat, that original character art owns.       Thanks to Grandad’s Attic for these images. FMguru posted:And mellonbread failed to mention another version of the game - the early 1990s french reissue by Descartes which included the two hard-to-find Avalon Hill supplements (Spice Harvest and The Duel) in it. The leader art from the French version feels like a midpoint between the 1979 game and the modern re-release.   I like this Doctor Yueh better than either of the other versions. Jessica be lookin’ like a 2000 AD character The French player shields are better than both utter silliness of the Avalon Hill version and the blandness of the 2019 game.       Thanks to Colin’s Dune Page for supplying these pictures. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Mar 23, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 21:25
|
|
|
mellonbread posted:I've never heard anyone say a kind word about either of the Avalon Hill supplements. Have you played them, and do you think they're any good? The one rule from the expansions that I've been tempted to use has been the Faction Leader Tokens. Each side gets an additional leader who represents the actual leader of the faction (Paul, Shaddam, Baron Harkonnen, etc. - you can see them in the art samples). They can't be traitors and they have a strength of 10 - but if they die or are otherwise eliminated you lose the game on the spot. Which is brilliant, high-stakes, and very thematic.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 21:36
|
|
|
The French art style is brilliant, especially those player shields. Evocative and graceful.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 21:44
|
|
|
Paul Atreides menacing someone with a malachite dildo, Fremen proving that even 1000 of years in the future people can't wear a loving face mask properly and somehow the least disgusting image of Vladimir Harkonnen ever drawn. mellonbread posted:
Not very regal, but very cool. mellonbread posted:The French player shields are better than both utter silliness of the Avalon Hill version and the blandness of the 2019 game. These two shields are so rad I'd have them airbrushed on the side of a van.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 22:21
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:the least disgusting image of Vladimir Harkonnen ever drawn. Baron Guy Harkonnen, Lord of Flavortown.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 23:01
|
|
|
megane posted:Baron Guy Harkonnen, Lord of Flavortown. The Zestiness must flow...
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 23:37
|
|
|
megane posted:Baron Guy Harkonnen, Lord of Flavortown. I said I would not feed them and I shall not. But the menu is the menu and the flavor takes the weak. This is my diner…my drive-in…my dive.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 02:08
|
|
|
Infinity RPG: Ariadna Roughneck We're gonna make two Ariadnans here. Jack and Beth, whose names may shift when we learn where they're from. Decisions 1-2: We know they're human and Ariadnan. Both receive Survival and Medicine from this. Jack favors Survival, Beth Medicine. Jack Faction: Ariadna Agility 7, Awareness 7, Brawn 7, Coordination 7, Intelligence 7, Personality 7, Willpower 7 Skills: Medicine Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 1 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Survival Talents: Self-Sufficient LP: 5 Beth Faction: Ariadna Agility 7, Awareness 7, Brawn 7, Coordination 7, Intelligence 7, Personality 7, Willpower 7 Skills: Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Survival Expertise 1 Signature Skills: Medicine Talents: Physician (basic reroller) LP: 5 Decision 3: Homelands are expanded for Ariadnans - we roll the normal table to get attributes and skill, and then each area has their own subtable for a more specific region and languages. Jack rolls 15: Rodina. His name is now Vanya. He gains +1 Agility and Brawn and skill in Discipline. We then roll on the Rodina table: 20, he is from Tsitadel in Tartary. He speaks Kazak Russian and we roll again on the Ariadna table to see if he has another. He rolls a 3: Caledonia, subtable roll: 8. He speaks Scots English as well. Beth rolls...16, USAriadna. She gets a bonus to Coordination and Brawn and skill in Survival. She rolls a 6 on the USAriadna subtable - she's from Jefferson, and she speaks American English and Kazak Russian. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Agility 8, Awareness 7, Brawn 8, Coordination 7, Intelligence 7, Personality 7, Willpower 7 Skills: Discipline Expertise 1, Medicine Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 1 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Survival Talents: Self-Sufficient Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English LP: 5 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Agility 7, Awareness 7, Brawn 8, Coordination 8, Intelligence 7, Personality 7, Willpower 7 Skills: Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Survival Expertise 1 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Medicine Talents: Physician (basic reroller) Languages: American English, Kazak Russian. LP: 5 Decision 4: Status. Ariadnans just use the normal tables. Vanya rolls a 9, Upper class. He gets a bonus to Agility and Earnings 4. His Home Environment is 1: a happy home. +1 Personality, Education. Beth rolls 7, Middle. She gets +1 Willpower and Earnings 3. Home environment is 2, violent. +1 Brawn, Acrobatics skill. We're getting two very different lives here. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Social Status: Upper Agility 9, Awareness 7, Brawn 8, Coordination 7, Intelligence 7, Personality 8, Willpower 7 Skills: Discipline Expertise 1, Education Expertise 1, Medicine Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 1 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Survival Talents: Self-Sufficient Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English Earnings: 4 LP: 5 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Social Status: Middle Agility 7, Awareness 7, Brawn 9, Coordination 8, Intelligence 7, Personality 7, Willpower 8 Skills: Acrobatics Expertise 1, Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Survival Expertise 1 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Medicine Talents: Physician (basic reroller) Languages: American English, Kazak Russian. Earnings: 3 LP: 5 Decision 5-6: Youth Event and Education. Standard table still. Vanya rolls 15, 5: Maya addiction. Which in this case means he's really fascinated by the idea of Maya growing up but generally only has access to it via public terminals, which he spends as much time on as he can. For education, he rolls 10: Technical education. His interest in Maya spurs him to head to engineering school. +2 Awareness, +1 Intelligence, -1 Willpower. He gains skill in Education, Observation, Pilot, Tech and Thievery, plus two of Hacking, Lifestyle and Extraplanetary. He grabs Hacking and Extraplanetary, with Hacking as his signature skill due to his obsession. He also gets a powered multitool, a repair kit and 5 Parts. Beth rolls 2, 5: She witnessed high level corruption. She rolls 19 - Orbital training. As a kid, she witnesses massive government corruption and is shipped literally into space to avoid her talking to anyone. She gets +2 Intelligence, +1 Awareness, -1 Personality. She gains skill in Discipline, Education, Pilot, Spacecraft, Extraplanetary, and two of Lifestyle, Resistance and Tech. She grabs Lifestyle and Resistance and takes Resistance as her second signature. Beth is getting tough because she has to - her family life hasn't been great and I suspect growing up on a satellite isn't helping. She also gets a Vac Suit with locator beacon and 5 Oxygen Loads. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Social Status: Upper Agility 9, Awareness 9, Brawn 8, Coordination 7, Intelligence 7, Personality 8, Willpower 7 Skills: Discipline Expertise 1, Education Expertise 1 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Hacking Expertise 1 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 1, Observation Expertise 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 1 Focus 1, Tech Expertise 1, Thievery Expertise 1 Signature Skills: Survival, Hacking Talents: Self-Sufficient, Hacker Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English Gear: Powered Multitool, Repair Kit, 5 Parts Earnings: 4 LP: 5 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Social Status: Middle Agility 7, Awareness 8, Brawn 9, Coordination 8, Intelligence 9, Personality 6, Willpower 8 Skills: Acrobatics Expertise 1, Discipline Expertise 1, Education Expertise 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Lifestyle Expertise 1, Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Resistance Expertise 1 Focus 1, Spacecraft Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 1 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Medicine, Resistance Talents: Physician, Sturdy Languages: American English, Kazak Russian. Gear: Vac Suit (Locational Beacon), 5 Oxygen Loads Earnings: 3 LP: 5 Decision 7: Ariadnans have their own adolescent event table and have a 50% chance to roll on that instead of one of the normal ones. Vanya is rolling on Table B, however. He gets a 1: While on a spacewalk, his tether snaps and he is knocked away from safety. So this kid who was in love with the wider galaxy gets to visit space for a field trip...and has a terrifying experience. He gains the Zero-G Terror trait and now cannot select Extraplanetary as an elective skill in careers, though he can still gain it as a mandatory skill or through other means. Beth is rollong on the Ariadna table and gets a 2: She gets stuck out on the frontier for a full month with no help at some point. By the time she is found, she's figured out what mushrooms are and are not edible...the hard way. She gains the Grizzled trait and Survival skill, but has +1 complication range on all Resistance rolls against poison. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Social Status: Upper Agility 9, Awareness 9, Brawn 8, Coordination 7, Intelligence 7, Personality 8, Willpower 7 Skills: Discipline Expertise 1, Education Expertise 1 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Hacking Expertise 1 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 1, Observation Expertise 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 1 Focus 1, Tech Expertise 1, Thievery Expertise 1 Signature Skills: Survival, Hacking Talents: Self-Sufficient, Hacker Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English Gear: Powered Multitool, Repair Kit, 5 Parts Earnings: 4 Traits: Zero-G Terror LP: 5 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Social Status: Middle Agility 7, Awareness 8, Brawn 9, Coordination 8, Intelligence 9, Personality 6, Willpower 8 Skills: Acrobatics Expertise 1, Discipline Expertise 1, Education Expertise 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Lifestyle Expertise 1, Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Resistance Expertise 1 Focus 1, Spacecraft Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Medicine, Resistance Talents: Physician, Sturdy Languages: American English, Kazak Russian. Gear: Vac Suit (Locational Beacon), 5 Oxygen Loads Earnings: 3 Traits: Grizzled Special: +1 Complication range on Resistance tests to resist poison LP: 5 Decision 8: Careers! Both our characters spend an LP to roll on the Ariadna table. Vanya rolls a 1: Special Forces. His hacking skills apparently got him recognized as a rarity on Ariadna, and he has been pulled into Rodinan military service. He gets +2 to everything except Coordination and Intelligence, which are +1, and Personality, which is +0. He gains Survival, Resistance and Ballistics skill, plus two of Close Combat, Hacking and Discipline. He takes Hacking and Discipline, and Discipline becomes his final Signature. He also gets Medium Combat Armor, a Combi Rifle, 5 Standard Reloads, a Combat Jump Pack and a Garrotte. His Earnings are 2+1dN, or 3. No change. His event is Table C, 5: Someone he trusted betrays him. He gains the Untrusting trait. I suspect that he got burned by one of his galactic friends, which may be what drove him to join the military. Beth rolls 10: Claymore Duelist. She's somehow gotten involved in the Caledonian dueling circuit, I guess. She gets +3 Brawn, +2 Agility and Willpower, +1 Awareness and Coordination. She's probably left home to get away from her family and USAriadnan politics...though now she's going to get embroiled in Caledonian politics. She gains skill in Acrobatics, Close Combat and Discipline, plus two of Athletics, Close Combat and Observation. She grabs Close Combat and Observation, with Close Combat as her final signature. She gains Light Combat Armor and a Teseum Claymore. Her Earnings are 0+4dN, for a total of 1 and 2 Effects. She drops to Earnings 1 and Underclass - she definitely abandoned her old life. Her career event is Table B, event 2: something forced her to evacuate, and she either gets -5 Assets or the Homeless trait. Since we know she ran away from home and left everything behind, we go with the Homeless trait. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Social Status: Upper Agility 11, Awareness 11, Brawn 10, Coordination 8, Intelligence 8, Personality 8, Willpower 9 Skills: Ballistics Expertise 1, Discipline Expertise 2 Focus 1, Education Expertise 1 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Hacking Expertise 2 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 1, Observation Expertise 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Resistance Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 1, Tech Expertise 1, Thievery Expertise 1 Signature Skills: Survival, Hacking, Discipline Talents: Self-Sufficient, Hacker, Stubborn Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English Gear: Powered Multitool, Repair Kit, Medium Combat Armor, Combi Rifle, Combat Jump Pack, Garrotte, 5 Parts, 5 Standard Reloads Earnings: 4 Traits: Zero-G Terror, Untrusting Age: 25 LP: 4 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Social Status: Underclass Agility 9, Awareness 9, Brawn 12, Coordination 9, Intelligence 9, Personality 6, Willpower 10 Skills: Acrobatics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Close Combat Expertise 2 Focus 1, Discipline Expertise 1 Focus 1, Education Expertise 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Lifestyle Expertise 1, Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Resistance Expertise 1 Focus 1, Spacecraft Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Medicine, Resistance, Close Combat Talents: Physician, Sturdy, Martial Artist Languages: American English, Kazak Russian Gear: Vac Suit (Locational Beacon), Light Combat Armor, Teseum Claymore, 5 Oxygen Loads Earnings: 1 Traits: Grizzled, Homeless Special: +1 Complication range on Resistance tests to resist poison Age: 25 LP: 4 Career 2! 1 LP for Ariadna table again for each. Vanya rolls 17: Militia Member. He has left the special forces but joined a stanitsa. He gains Ballistics, Close Combat, Observation, and two of Medicine, Pilot or Stealth. He gets Medicine and Pilot, plus an Observation Talent. He also gets a set of Armored Clothing, a dose of Painkillers, a Rifle and a Custom 1 USAriadnan Entrenching Tool. He gets 0+2dN Earnings, or 0. No change. He rolls on Table B, event 13: He somehow manages to get on Maya as a minor star during this, probably as part of a documentary. He now gets +1 bonus Momentum on successful social rolls, but +1 Difficulty on Stealth rolls when being recognized would be a problem. Beth rolls 16: Merovingian Commercial Agent. She isn't Merovingian, so she defects to Merovingia - this isn't a problem for her, she has no governmental loyalties, really. (Defection between homelands isn't really...a thing? But the rules say if you aren't from that homeland you automatically fail your defection check.) She gets a crash course in business and makes a good showing but isn't very charismatic. She gains Education, Lifestyle and Persuade, plus two of Hacking, Lifestyle and Stealth. She takes Lifestyle and Stealth, plus a Lifestyle talent - she'd like to make money. She gets a Fusebox, a Negotiator's Suite, a Pistol and a Rucksack. (Level is not specified so I'm assuming 1.) She earns 2+2dN Earnings, for a total of 4 and one Effect - she's bumped up to Earnings 4 and Demogrant. Her table is Ariadna, event 18: She gets fired for some reason - probably pissing off an important client. She gains an appropriate trait: Blunt As Hell. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Social Status: Upper Agility 11, Awareness 11, Brawn 10, Coordination 8, Intelligence 8, Personality 8, Willpower 9 Skills: Ballistics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Close Combat Expertise 1, Discipline Expertise 2 Focus 1, Education Expertise 1 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Hacking Expertise 2 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 1 Focus 1, Pilot Expertise 1 Focus 1, Resistance Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 1, Tech Expertise 1, Thievery Expertise 1 Signature Skills: Survival, Hacking, Discipline Talents: Self-Sufficient, Hacker, Stubborn, Sharp Senses Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English Gear: Powered Multitool, Repair Kit, Medium Combat Armor, Combi Rifle, Combat Jump Pack, Garrotte, Armored Clothing, Painkillers (1 dose), Rifle, Custom 1 USAriadnan Entrenching Tool, 5 Parts, 5 Standard Reloads Earnings: 4 Traits: Zero-G Terror, Untrusting Special: +1 Bonus Momentum on successful social rolls, +1 Difficulty on Stealth when being recognized would be a problem Age: 31 LP: 3 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Social Status: Demogrant Agility 9, Awareness 9, Brawn 12, Coordination 9, Intelligence 9, Personality 6, Willpower 10 Skills: Acrobatics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Close Combat Expertise 2 Focus 1, Discipline Expertise 1 Focus 1, Education Expertise 1 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Lifestyle Expertise 2 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 1, Persuade Expertise 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Resistance Expertise 1 Focus 1, Spacecraft Expertise 1, Stealth Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 1 Signature Skills: Medicine, Resistance, Close Combat Talents: Physician, Sturdy, Martial Artist, Socialite Languages: American English, Kazak Russian Gear: Vac Suit (Locational Beacon), Light Combat Armor, Teseum Claymore, Fusebox, Negotiator's Suite, Pistol, Rucksack 1, 5 Oxygen Loads Earnings: 4 Traits: Grizzled, Homeless, Blunt As Hell Special: +1 Complication range on Resistance tests to resist poison Age: 31 LP: 3 Career 3! 2 LP each - one for the career, one for Ariadna roll. Vanya rolls 12: Frontier Doctor. He's got decent medical skills so he heads out to the frontier to help people with them. He gains Analysis, Animal Handling and Medicine, plus two of Education, Medicine and Survival. We'll take Education and Survival, plus a Survival talent. He also gets a Ballistic Vest, Basic Medical Supplies, a Medikit, and a USAriadnan Entrenching Tool and 2+1dN Earnings (2). No change. His event is Ariadna table, event 12: He befriends a local Dog Bowl player and gets a Trait representing this - Dating A Werewolf. Beth rolls: 13. Hardcase. She's headed to the frontier as well, but to be a survivalist. She gains Ballistics, Observation, Survival and two of Analysis, Animal Handling and Pilot - we take Analysis and Animal Handling, plus a Ballistics Talent. She also gets an Americolt Eagle with 1 Standard Reload and 1 Eagle Reload, a Bandolier, Binoculars, and a leather duster that functions as a Long Modcoat. She earns 1+2dN (1 and Effect) and drops back to Underclass and Earnings 3. Her event is Ariadna table, event 4: Despite her life being lovely and her falling entirely out of touch with...well, the entire governmental system, she manages well, gaining the Ariadnan Grit trait. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Social Status: Upper Agility 11, Awareness 11, Brawn 10, Coordination 8, Intelligence 8, Personality 8, Willpower 9 Skills: Analysis Expertise 1, Animal Handling Expertise 1, Ballistics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Close Combat Expertise 1, Discipline Expertise 2 Focus 1, Education Expertise 2 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Hacking Expertise 2 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 2 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 1 Focus 1, Pilot Expertise 1 Focus 1, Resistance Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 2, Tech Expertise 1, Thievery Expertise 1 Signature Skills: Survival, Hacking, Discipline Talents: Self-Sufficient, Hacker, Stubborn, Sharp Senses, Provider (when trying to find food, water or shelter, each point of Momentum finds two days of necessities, not one) Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English Gear: Powered Multitool, Repair Kit, Medium Combat Armor, Combi Rifle, Combat Jump Pack, Garrotte, Armored Clothing, Painkillers (1 dose), Rifle, Custom 1 USAriadnan Entrenching Tool, Ballistic Vest, Basic Medical Supplies, Medikit, USAriadnan Entrenching Tool, 5 Parts, 5 Standard Reloads Earnings: 4 Traits: Zero-G Terror, Untrusting, Dating A Werewolf Special: +1 Bonus Momentum on successful social rolls, +1 Difficulty on Stealth when being recognized would be a problem Age: 34 LP: 1 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Social Status: Underclass Agility 9, Awareness 9, Brawn 12, Coordination 9, Intelligence 9, Personality 6, Willpower 10 Skills: Acrobatics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Analysis Expertise 1, Animal Handling Expertise 1, Ballistics Expertise 1, Close Combat Expertise 2 Focus 1, Discipline Expertise 1 Focus 1, Education Expertise 1 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Lifestyle Expertise 2 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 1 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 1 Focus 1, Persuade Expertise 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Resistance Expertise 1 Focus 1, Spacecraft Expertise 1, Stealth Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 2 Signature Skills: Medicine, Resistance, Close Combat Talents: Physician, Sturdy, Martial Artist, Socialite, Marksman Languages: American English, Kazak Russian Gear: Vac Suit (Locational Beacon), Light Combat Armor, Teseum Claymore, Fusebox, Negotiator's Suite, Pistol, Rucksack 1, Americolt Eagle, Bandolier, Binoculars, Long Modcoat (Leather Duster), 1 Standard Reload, 1 Eagle Reload 5 Oxygen Loads Earnings: 3 Traits: Grizzled, Homeless, Blunt As Hell, Ariadnan Grit Special: +1 Complication range on Resistance tests to resist poison Age: 37 LP: 1 Final career - 1 LP each for a basic roll. Vanya rolls 6: Technician. He heads back to civilization and gets back into a job working with machines at last, though he's still burned by space and galactics. He gets skill in Tech, Pilot and Hacking, plus two of Observation, Resistance and Discipline. We take Observation and Discipline, plus a Hacking Talent. He gets another powered multitool and repair kit, 5 more Parts, and a dose of Stims. He earns 1+1dN (2), no change. Event is Ariadna table, event 1: He ends up moving to Merovingia and gains a trait reflecting this: Love-Hate Relationship With Galactics. Beth rolls 11: Academic. I'm not sure how she got this job but she did. I guess she impressed someone with her practical skills, maybe saved a dean while she was out on the frontier? She gains Education, Medicine and Science, plus two of Discipline, Education and Tech. She grabs Discipline and Education, and a Medicine talent. She also gets a lab on a 3 month lease and 2+1dN Earnings (4). She's still considered underclass, but is doing well financially, at least. Her event is Table A, event 17: She volunteers for a medical experiment, which almost succeeds. This is probably how she got the job - and why she's leaving now. She gains the Curse of the Mayfly trait and can roll an aging test once per session to gain an Infinity Point. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Social Status: Upper Agility 11, Awareness 11, Brawn 10, Coordination 8, Intelligence 8, Personality 8, Willpower 9 Skills: Analysis Expertise 1, Animal Handling Expertise 1, Ballistics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Close Combat Expertise 1, Discipline Expertise 2 Focus 2, Education Expertise 2 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Hacking Expertise 2 Focus 2, Medicine Expertise 2 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 2 Focus 1, Pilot Expertise 2 Focus 1, Resistance Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 2, Tech Expertise 1 Focus 1, Thievery Expertise 1 Signature Skills: Survival, Hacking, Discipline Talents: Self-Sufficient, Hacker, Stubborn, Sharp Senses, Provider, Phisher (when making a Fake ID, your result gets +1 to its rating) Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English Gear: Powered Multitool (x2), Repair Kit (x2), Medium Combat Armor, Combi Rifle, Combat Jump Pack, Garrotte, Armored Clothing, Painkillers (1 dose), Rifle, Custom 1 USAriadnan Entrenching Tool, Ballistic Vest, Basic Medical Supplies, Medikit, USAriadnan Entrenching Tool, Stims (1 dose), 10 Parts, 5 Standard Reloads Earnings: 4 Traits: Zero-G Terror, Untrusting, Dating A Werewolf, Love-Hate Relationship With Galactics Special: +1 Bonus Momentum on successful social rolls, +1 Difficulty on Stealth when being recognized would be a problem Age: 36 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Social Status: Underclass Agility 9, Awareness 9, Brawn 12, Coordination 9, Intelligence 9, Personality 6, Willpower 10 Skills: Acrobatics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Analysis Expertise 1, Animal Handling Expertise 1, Ballistics Expertise 1, Close Combat Expertise 2 Focus 1, Discipline Expertise 2 Focus 1, Education Expertise 2 Focus 2, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Lifestyle Expertise 2 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 2 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 1 Focus 1, Persuade Expertise 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Resistance Expertise 1 Focus 1, Science Expertise 1, Spacecraft Expertise 1, Stealth Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 2 Signature Skills: Medicine, Resistance, Close Combat Talents: Physician, Sturdy, Martial Artist, Socialite, Marksman, Self-Treatment (no difficulty increase to treat yourself) Languages: American English, Kazak Russian Gear: Vac Suit (Locational Beacon), Light Combat Armor, Teseum Claymore, Fusebox, Negotiator's Suite, Pistol, Rucksack 1, Americolt Eagle, Bandolier, Binoculars, Long Modcoat (Leather Duster), Laboratory (3 month lease), 1 Standard Reload, 1 Eagle Reload, 5 Oxygen Loads Earnings: 4 Traits: Grizzled, Homeless, Blunt As Hell, Ariadnan Grit, Curse of the Mayfly Special: +1 Complication range on Resistance tests to resist poison, 1/session can roll an aging roll to gain an extra Infinity Point Age: 41 Decision 9: Final customization. We've got Vanya, a neophile who loves galactic tech but distrusts galactics themselves, and Beth, a USAriadnan with a troubled life split across many nations who deeply distrusts the government and is...a cynical survivalist who does weird medical self-experimentation. Vanya Faction: Ariadna Nationality: Rodinan (Tsitadel) Social Status: Upper Agility 11, Awareness 11, Brawn 10, Coordination 8, Intelligence 10, Personality 8, Willpower 9 Skills: Analysis Expertise 1 Focus 1, Animal Handling Expertise 1, Ballistics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Close Combat Expertise 1, Discipline Expertise 2 Focus 2, Education Expertise 2 Focus 1, Extraplanetary Expertise 1, Hacking Expertise 2 Focus 2, Medicine Expertise 2 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 2 Focus 1, Pilot Expertise 2 Focus 1, Resistance Expertise 1, Science Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 2, Tech Expertise 1 Focus 1, Thievery Expertise 1 Signature Skills: Survival, Hacking, Discipline Talents: Self-Sufficient, Hacker, Stubborn, Sharp Senses, Provider, Phisher, Jaded 1 (+2 Resolve per rank) Languages: Kazak Russian, Scots English Gear: Powered Multitool (x2), Repair Kit (x2), Medium Combat Armor, Combi Rifle, Combat Jump Pack, Garrotte, Armored Clothing, Painkillers (1 dose), Rifle, Custom 1 USAriadnan Entrenching Tool, Ballistic Vest, Basic Medical Supplies, Medikit, USAriadnan Entrenching Tool, Stims (1 dose), 10 Parts, 5 Standard Reloads, 8 Assets Earnings: 4 Traits: Zero-G Terror, Untrusting, Dating A Werewolf, Love-Hate Relationship With Galactics Special: +1 Bonus Momentum on successful social rolls, +1 Difficulty on Stealth when being recognized would be a problem Infinity Refresh: 2 Firewall: 12 Resolve: 13 Vigor: 11 Age: 36 Beth Faction: Ariadna Nationality: USAriadnan (Jefferson) Social Status: Underclass Agility 9, Awareness 9, Brawn 13, Coordination 9, Intelligence 9, Personality 7, Willpower 10 Skills: Acrobatics Expertise 1 Focus 1, Analysis Expertise 1, Animal Handling Expertise 1, Ballistics Expertise 1, Close Combat Expertise 2 Focus 1, Discipline Expertise 2 Focus 1, Education Expertise 2 Focus 2, Extraplanetary Expertise 1 Focus 1, Lifestyle Expertise 2 Focus 1, Medicine Expertise 2 Focus 1, Observation Expertise 1 Focus 1, Persuade Expertise 1 Focus 1, Pilot Expertise 1, Resistance Expertise 1 Focus 1, Science Expertise 1, Spacecraft Expertise 1, Stealth Expertise 1, Survival Expertise 2 Focus 2 Signature Skills: Medicine, Resistance, Close Combat Talents: Physician, Sturdy, Martial Artist, Socialite, Marksman, Self-Treatment, Quick Draw Languages: American English, Kazak Russian Gear: Vac Suit (Locational Beacon), Light Combat Armor, Teseum Claymore, Fusebox, Negotiator's Suite, Pistol, Rucksack 1, Americolt Eagle, Bandolier, Binoculars, Long Modcoat (Leather Duster), Laboratory (3 month lease), 1 Standard Reload, 1 Eagle Reload, 5 Oxygen Loads, 7 Assets Earnings: 4 Traits: Grizzled, Homeless, Blunt As Hell, Ariadnan Grit, Curse of the Mayfly Special: +1 Complication range on Resistance tests to resist poison, 1/session can roll an aging roll to gain an extra Infinity Point Age: 41 Next time: Dog Nation
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 04:20
|
|
|
DUNE 2019 PART 3: PHASES OF THE TURN It’s time for another post about the 2019 Dune rerelease. Ya hya chouhada! This update, we’ll be going over the nine phases that make up a game turn. There’s going to be a ton of faction abilities that violate these stated rules, but I won’t go into those in depth until we cover all the factions in their own posts. 1: STORM Stilgar posted:In the olden times, the birds were named for their songs. Each wind had its name. A six-klick wind was called a Pastaza, a twenty-klick wind was Cueshma, and a hundred-klick wind was Heinali – Heinali, the man-pusher. Then there was the wind of the demon in the open desert: Hulasikali Wala, the wind that eats flesh. How do we know the number of spaces the storm will move? It depends on whether you’re playing the basic game or the advanced game. In basic Dune, the two players who last used their battle wheels (meaning either the last two who fought a battle, or the last two who dialed storm movement if nobody battled) secretly dial a number from 1 to 3, then simultaneously reveal the number they dialed. The sum of the two values is the number of spaces the storm moves. So the storm will move from 2 to 6 pie slices counterclockwise. In the advanced game, storm movement is only determined by the random dials on the first turn, as described in the previous post. After that, storm movement is determined by drawing cards from the storm deck. Each card has a number of spaces on it, and the storm moves that number of spaces. Why do we switch methods between the basic and advanced games? That’ll become clear when we get to the faction writeup for the Fremen. There are a couple of cards you can play in the Storm phase to further manipulate the storm’s behavior. We’ll cover those later as well. 2: SPICE BLOW Once you’ve handled your storm movement, it’s time for the spice blow phase. This phase uses cards from the spice deck, which determines where it appears on the board. The number of cards you draw is determined by whether you’re playing basic or advanced Dune. In basic Dune, you draw one card. In advanced Dune, you draw two. The card tells you where to place the spice, and how much appears (the spaces on the board also tell you that information).  If you’re playing the advanced game, it’s important that you maintain two discard piles for spice cards, one for the first card each turn and one for the second. We just call those pile A and pile B. Why is the discard pile important? The spice deck is full of sandworms, mixed in with the spice cards. When a worm is drawn, all the spice in the territory shown on the first card in the relevant discard pile is destroyed, along with any forces in that territory. Once you’ve resolved that, draw another spice card and place the corresponding amount of spice in that new territory. If you draw another worm, discard it and draw until you get some spice. Yes, you can exhaust all five worms in the deck in a single turn, and it’s more likely in the advanced game.  If you drew a worm on turn 1, that’s the end. If you drew the worm on any other turn, you get a nexus. SIDEBAR: NEXUS AND ALLIANCES During a Nexus, players can make and break alliances. In the normal rules, both basic and advanced, the maximum alliance size is two players. Two players in an alliance need to control four strongholds between them, instead of the usual three. Players in an alliance can cover each other’s auction bids, revival and shipping costs, but not support payments in battle when using the advanced rules. By rules as written, allies are not allowed to give each other money outside of these parameters (normally you can give anyone at the table spice, which is placed in escrow and collected in the Mentat phase at the end of the turn) Allies cannot share treachery cards, but they’re welcome to share information about cards, traitors and safe leaders, etc. This is important, and trips up a lot of new players, so pay attention: you cannot end the movement phase with forces in the same space as your ally. That means you can end up blocking each other out of crucial territories if you deploy your forces inexpertly. This rule is especially painful when we get into the Bene Gesserit and their advanced game advisor ability. Finally, when you ally with someone, you get a special alliance power from them, and they get one from you. These range from tangentially useful to totally game breaking. Some factions are very popular alliance partners no matter what their board position, solely because of their bullshit special abilities. You don’t have to form an alliance. You can go it alone if you think your odds are better grabbing three strongholds solo. It’s a completely valid way to play and I’ve seen people win on their own against a table of alliances. Oh and once you’re in an alliance, you can’t break it until the next time there’s a nexus. After you’ve finished scheming, it’s time for 3: CHOAM CHARITY CHOAM charity is the game’s safety net, to prevent total player elimination. If, during this phase, you have less than 2 spice in your bank account, you can claim CHOAM charity and draw spice from the bank until you’re at 2 spice. This means you’ll never be totally unable to play the game. The one downside is, claiming charity lets everyone at the table know you’re poor, which means you’re weak to attack. ESPECIALLY if you’re playing with the advanced combat rules. You can commit tax fraud during this game phase by setting up a deal with another player: give them all your money, with the understanding that they’ll give it right back in the mentat phase, sans 1 spice for aiding you in your scheme. With zero spice in your account, you can then immediately declare bankruptcy and claim two spice worth of CHOAM Charity. So with the payment to the other guy for holding your money, you’ve made a whopping one spice. There’s nothing about this that’s against the rules, the main downside to it is that it leaves you with only two spice for the upcoming turn, meaning you’re pretty weak if you need to buy cards, ship forces, revive forces or support troops in combat. SIDEBAR: DEALS Any publicly agreed on deal in Dune is binding, according to the rules. If you take someone’s money and agree to do something in return, you have to do it as agreed on. You can no more cheat on a public deal than you can move your king into check in chess. It’s not bad form, it’s just straight up against the rules. This is a big part of why Dune ruins fewer friendships than Diplomacy. You can be as cruel as you like to the other players, but you can’t break your word. (This can cause problems when people agree to a deal that circumstances prevent them from fulfilling, like taking a bribe to attack a stronghold that then gets blocked with other people’s forces before you get a chance to move into it. It’s one of the things that ensures Dune can’t be completely automated, until we have a machine that can parse plaintext contracts). The only deals that aren’t binding are deals between people in an alliance. Those you can violate whenever you want. Now that you’ve conspired to defraud the Combine Honnate Advancer Ober Mercantiles, you had better be ready for 4: SPICE AUCTION Take six* cards from the treachery deck. Place them face down. Take the first card, give the Atreides player a chance to peek at it, and then, without looking at it, hold a blind auction. Go around the table in storm order, with each player bidding or passing according to how much they’re willing and able) to spend. When someone bids high enough that nobody challenges them after a full circuit of the table, they get the card - and learn what it is. The winner pays however much spice they bid, directly to the Emperor. Then another card goes up for auction and you repeat the process. Do that until all six cards have been auctioned.** *In the first turn it’s six. In subsequent turns, you auction cards equal to the number of players who doesn’t have a full hand of cards. That could be as many as six, or as few as zero. **In the unlikely event that nobody bids on a card, not even a single spice, that card is discarded and the treachery auction immediately ends, no matter how many cards were left to bid on. What are treachery cards, anyway? That’s going to wait until next post, because there are a lot of them and some of them have game breaking effects. For now, remember that treachery cards can be weapons, defenses, worthless cards, or special cards that do something not covered by the other three categories. 5: REVIVAL If you’ve got casualties in the tleilaxu tanks, this is when you bring them back into your reserves. Every faction gets a certain number of “free revives” every turn. Anything beyond that costs 2 per force. The revive limit is three, meaning you can’t revive more than that per turn, regardless of how many free revives you get and how many more you can afford to pay for. If all your leaders are dead, you can revive a single leader in this phase. It costs spice equal to the leader’s combat value. You can keep reviving until all your leaders are alive again. If one of them dies, they go back into the tanks face down, meaning you can’t revive them a second time until you’ve revived everyone else. So no reviving Stilgar over and over for that 7 strength. 6: SHIP AND MOVE This is the first phase that actually involves a strategic decision made on the game board. You go in storm order, counterclockwise from the storm. When it’s your turn, you get one shipment and one move action. Shipping means moving force tokens from your reserves onto the planet. You can ship as many forces as you have reserves, provided you can afford it, to a single space on the board of your choosing. It costs a single spice to ship one force to a stronghold territory, and two spice to ship to any other territory on the board. You can’t ship to a stronghold that already has forces from two factions in it, it’s full. Whatever you spend on shipping is paid directly to the Spacing Guild player. Once you’ve shipped, or passed shipping, you now have an option to move. The base movement speed is one territory. That means you can move forces from one black outlined space to an adjacent black outlined space. When you move into a territory, you choose which of the pie slices your troops will occupy, if there’s more than one. This matters for storm movement and spice collection. If you have forces in a city (Arrakeen or Carthag) when you begin your movement action, your forces can move three territories instead of the usual one, to represent the use of ornithopters to fly around the planet. This buff is granted to all of your forces on the planet, even forces that aren’t in the cities at the start of your movement action. The absolute best part is, you don’t need forces in the cities at the end of the movement action to get the buff, just the beginning. You can ship forces to an occupied city and then immediately move those forces three spaces away, without sticking around to fight the defenders. Your troops come running out of the spaceport with their carryon bags, hop in an ornithopter and take off before the bewildered defenders can stop them. This is a moderately controversial rule, since the original Avalon Hill game wasn’t clear about whether you needed to control the cities at the beginning of the phase in order to fly around, rather than just ship a guy there before moving. I 100 percent support the Gale Force Nine interpretation because it kicks rear end. Like with shipping, you can’t move into a stronghold that has two factions already in it. Going first in the ship and move phase is scary, because you’re committing your forces to the board before you see what anyone else is doing, leaving you wide open to a counterattack where you’re weak. But going before other people can also be a big help, because if you move into a stronghold that’s already occupied, nobody else can move into it. 7: BATTLE Count Glossu Rabban of Lankveil posted:Big Fremen village fuckin’ buried in the sand Battles are resolved by comparing deployed strength. Whoever commits more strength to a battle wins, with ties going to whoever is first in storm order that turn. Your strength in a battle is the sum of two numbers: your committed forces and your chosen leader. Committing forces is called “dialing” because you use the leader dial to visually represent a number of forces to send. You can commit forces to a battle up to the number of forces you have in that space. Whoever loses the battle loses all their forces in the territory, but whoever wins loses all the forces they dialed. That means you want to win as cheaply as possible, because every soldier you send into battle has to be revived, then shipped back to the planet before they can fight again, both of which cost spice. That makes leaning on leader strength attractive - one force and a six strength leader is the same as six committed forces and a one strength leader. Except if your leader gets killed, their strength doesn’t count in the battle. And they’re dead, you can’t use them for more battles. So there’s a serious risk to sending top level generals into the fray. How do you kill leaders? How do you protect them? With treachery cards. When you fight a battle, you can include up to one weapon card and one defense card in your battle plan, provided you’ve got those cards in your hand. If you play a weapon, and the opponent doesn’t play a corresponding defense card, you kill the enemy leader. If they play a weapon and you don’t defend against it, the same happens to you. Both sides can kill each other’s leaders, leaving force strength the deciding factor. So the better prepared you are for battle, with weapon and defense cards, and an idea of what the opponent has in their inventory, the more you can lean on leader strength and the fewer forces you have to commit to overwhelm the enemy. Committed force strength, leader, weapon, defense. Both sides decide their battle plans and then reveal them simultaneously - presenting their dials with inserted leaders and cards in hand. After leader kills are calculated, the bigger number wins. If you’re playing the advanced game, you’ve got another choice to make before whipping out your battle plan: how much spice to spend supporting your troops? A single point of spice is enough to support one soldier. Any committed forces not supported by spice count at half strength. So now you’ve got to spend spice to ship your dudes, spend spice to support them, then spend spice to revive them after sending them off to die. Big Daddy Vladdy posted:"Expensive, eh?" The advanced combat rules push you even further toward the paradigm of small commando teams supported by elite badass leaders - exactly how wars in the Dune setting are fought. Regardless of whether you’re playing the basic or advanced game, the loser in a battle loses any cards they played, along with all their forces in the territory. The winner gets spice from the spice bank equal to the combat value of all leaders killed in the battle, even their own. Losing a battle doesn’t automatically mean losing your leader, they only die if you get hit with a weapon and don’t have a defense ready. If the enemy reveals their battle plan, and they picked a leader you hold as a traitor, you can forget everything I just said. You can call treachery, they lose everything, you get paid for killing their leader, and you don’t lose any committed forces or your leader, regardless of what you deployed and what weapon the other player used. This is why gathering information about safe leaders is so important. The real galaxy brain play is not to call treachery if it’s not a battle you really care about. Then your enemy thinks that’s a safe leader to use against you, and you can call treachery next time they come at you. When you fight a battle, the leader you committed to that battle can’t be used in any other battles that turn, even if they survive the fight. You put their leader disc on the board to symbolize that they fought in whatever territory they fought in. At the end of the battle phase you can scoop them up and put them back in your reserves with your other leaders, they aren’t permanently committed to the board. You have to play a leader in each battle, unless all your leaders are dead - or enough of them are dead and you’re fighting in enough battles that turn that you run out of leaders before you run out of fights. If you don’t have a leader to play, you can’t play any cards, which means you can’t kill the enemy leader either. Better hope you brought plenty of troops. I love the Dune combat system. The main thing that trips new players up every time is losing all the forces you commit to a fight, even if you win. You can explain this to someone a dozen times, and they won’t get it until they throw away a win because they sent every single soldier they had in a stronghold. Oh yeah, battle is one of those phases where going first rocks, because you win ties. SIDEBAR: BATTLE EXAMPLES Let’s do some example battles to make this a little less abstract. I just booted up a treachery.online game versus some bots for this example. Basic rules, no expansion. By default, the site uses the 1979 Avalon Hill skin, but I loaded the Gale Force Nine skin for continuity with the rest of the review. Here’s the board at the end of the movement phase.  I picked a fight with the Guild so that I’d have some combat to show off, but the bots also all decided to attack each other The first battle is between the Bene Gesserit and the Atreides in Arakeen. Both the Atreides and Bene Gesserit have very strong special powers that they can use in battle, but in this case neither of them proved to be the deciding factor, so I’ll save the explanation of those abilites for later. For now:  The Bene Gesserit commit 8 forces, led by Irulan. They don’t have a weapon or a defense, because the Bene Gesserit struggle to get cards in the early game due to their poverty. The Atreides send Gurney Halleck armed with a pistol, and four forces to back him up. The Bene Gesserit leader gets clipped because she doesn’t have a projectile defense against the Atreides’ projectile weapon, leaving eight BG forces to face off against the Atreides’ combined strength of eight (four forces and a four strength leader). Because the Atreides are first in storm order, they win the tie and the battle, and collect five spice for their trouble for the leader kill. Note that even if the BG had won, they would have spent all their forces in the attempt, since they only had eight forces in the territory. Battle two: The Spacing Guild and House Atreides face off in Sietch Tabr.  The Lady Jessica and the Guild Representative gun each other down with pistols. With no leaders alive, the battle is decided by force strength. The guild committed seven troops, the Atreides only three. The Guild wins, but loses all their forces in the territory in the process. The bots do like to over-dial. Battle three, the one I initiated as Emperor against the Guild in Tuek’s Sietch. I shipped seven forces to the territory, the Guild had five there, but the real question is how many forces each of us will commit to the battle.  I saw in an earlier battle this turn that the Guild had a projectile weapon, which I could safely counter with my shield card. I also saw that they had no defense, meaning I could kill their leader with my projectile weapon. That effectively meant they had a maximum strength of five and couldn’t harm my leader, so I didn’t need to commit any forces. Count Fenring, a shield, a knife, and no forces were enough to win the day against Soo Soo Sook, his stungun, and five Guild forces. Last battle of the phase, the Fremen raid on Carthag. Eight desert dwellers versus ten water fat offworlders.  Feyd Rautha brings a poison weapon and a worthless card, probably because the Harkonnens didn’t pick up any defenses during the bidding phase. The Fremen bring a poison weapon and a shield, which isn’t any good against a poison weapon. Both side’s highest value leaders kill each other, leaving the battle to be decided by the committed forces. The Harkonnens spend eight of their ten soldiers, the Fremen only four of their eight. Eight is bigger than four, and the Harkonnens win. They gain thirteen spice from the death of both leaders. The Harkonnens are left with two forces in Carthag, less the eight they committed out of their original total of ten. Hope that helps make the battle system a little clearer. Some factions have special powers that affect the battle minigame, we’ll talk about those in the faction writeups. 8: COLLECTION In the collection phase, any forces in spaces with spice get to harvest that spice. By default, the spice collection rate is two per force. So if you’ve got two forces in a territory with eight spice on the ground, you pick up four spice, leaving four left. The exception is if you control Arakeen or Carthag when the collection phase rolls around. If so, you can pick up three spice per force instead of two, thanks to your access to caryalls from the city. I should note here that the basic game tends to produce more fighting in the desert over spice, since there’s only one spice blow per turn instead of two, and four of the six factions need to pick up spice manually. The advanced game gives you two spice blows to distribute your dudes across, and also some other ways of earning income. In the advanced game, controlling Carthag or Arakeen gives you tax income of two spice per turn, and controlling Tuek’s Sietch gives you one per turn thanks to smugglers using it as a base. Combined with the greater cost of combat in the advanced game due to the advanced battle rules, and the basic game can actually be a lot bloodier by comparison, especially in the early turns. 9: MENTAT Does anyone on the board control the requisite number of strongholds to win when this phase rolls around - either three solo, or four in an alliance? If so, they win the game in this phase. Probably. More on that in a future update. If you set up any deals in prior phases, the money goes to the receiving player’s account in this phase. At a physical table, when you make a deal you actually place the spice in front of their player shield, and in the Mentat phase they scoop it up and hide it behind the shield. We made it! We finished a turn of Dune 2019! And we only had to ignore most of the faction special powers, and what all the treachery cards do. Those cards will be the subject of the next post, with the factions getting their own series of writeups after that. FMguru posted:The one rule from the expansions that I've been tempted to use has been the Faction Leader Tokens. Each side gets an additional leader who represents the actual leader of the faction (Paul, Shaddam, Baron Harkonnen, etc. - you can see them in the art samples). They can't be traitors and they have a strength of 10 - but if they die or are otherwise eliminated you lose the game on the spot. Which is brilliant, high-stakes, and very thematic.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 04:23
|
|
|
mellonbread posted:You know, I remember reading in a set of tournament rules from the early 2000s that 10 strength leaders weren't allowed, but it didn't occur to me until now that this was a rule from one of the expansions. What happens if you instantly lose the game, do all your forces just disappear off the board? If all the leaders (including the main leader) are dead at the same time, then the player is out of the game. All tokens removed from the board, all spice back to the spice bank, all treachery cards discarded. The Descartes version also has rules for three additional factions (Lansraad, Ix, and Tleilaxu) which had been published as variant rules in Avalon Hill's house magazine THE GENERAL. You have to build your own counters and whatnot. FMguru fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Mar 24, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 05:01
|
|
|
A lot of things in the game seem to be used and then lost, does the same count for the attack and defense cards? I might've just missed it if you said so, but my impression is that they're kept? It feels like that means after the first few encounters, everyone will have a pretty good idea of how to counter a given opponent, or whether they can counter them at all.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 11:28
|
|
|
DUNE 2019 PART 4: TREACHERY CARDSGuldur, the Tyrant, the God Emperor, the Old Worm posted:Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.” But what do they do? You can divide treachery cards in Dune into four basic categories.
WEAPONS are used to kill leaders in battle. They come in three flavors: poison, projectile, and lasgun.  It’s a Maker  The high handed enemy - a needle coated in metacyanide  ”Maula” means “slave” or “criminal” in standard Galach, meaning a Maula Pistol is presumably a cheap firearm for lowlifes  A blade held in the off-hand, often paired with a kindjal or other heavy blade  A type of dart pistol  Poison in the food  Poison in the drink. Shaddam IV is rumored to have dispatched his father Elrood using this method  The fumes of burning Ellaca wood induce a suicidal disregard for one’s own personal safety  The most fun weapon in the game If you play a weapon in battle, and the enemy doesn’t defend against it, you kill their leader. If you win the battle, you get a choice to keep your weapon or discard it. If you lose, you automatically discard it. There are one of each of these weapons in the game, for a total of four projectile, four poison, and one lasgun. DEFENSES are used to protect your leader from weapons in battle. There’s a corresponding defense for projectile and poison weapons.  The slow blade penetrates the t-pose  SnooPING AS usual, I see If you win the battle, you get a choice to keep your defense or discard it. If you lose, you automatically discard it. There are four snoopers and four shields in the deck. The only way to “defend” against a lasgun without a special faction ability is to play a shield card. That causes a nuclear explosion that eliminates all forces and kills all leaders in the battle on both sides, plus any Bene Gesserit advisors hanging around. This also happens if the person playing the lasgun in a battle plays a shield. Gurney Halleck posted:Sardaukar Bashar put his shield on wrong WORTHLESS CARDS are exactly what they sound like. You can get worthless cards in your starting draw, or buy them in the bidding phase. Remember that the bidding phase is a blind auction. Unless you're the Bene Gesserit player, or deliberately trying to stop the Bene Gesserit player from getting them, worthless cards aren't something you deliberately seek out.They do nothing except take up space in your hand and waste your money. The only way to get rid of them is to play them in battle in place of a weapon or defense, then discard them when the battle is over.  Gurney Halleck was a legend on the baliset  Fremen cry of grief, equivalent of “why, God, why?  A man’s flesh is his own. His cloak belongs to the idiot who spent ten spice on it in the bidding phase  According to the Dune Glossary in book 1, people sometimes equipped their kulons with custom stillsuits  Gamont - the pervert’s paradise Worthless cards can really hurt, if you’re one of the poorer factions desperately trying to acquire anything you can use to defend yourself, and you get one of these fuckers as your only draw. They can also act as a balancing mechanism against people buying up a fuckton of cards, like the Harkonnens. More than anything, they’re a reason to buy card prescience from the Atreides. More on that later. Oh and worthless cards aren’t worthless to the Bene Gesserit player. SPECIAL cards do things that aren’t killing and protecting people in battle. I’ll go through them individually. They’re all one-and-done, you play them and then discard them. Weather Control is a card you play during the storm phase, and it lets you choose how far the storm moves instead of random movement. You can move it anywhere between 0 and 10 sectors. That means you can park it on top of a stronghold you don’t want anyone moving into, which is a great way to protect your territory when you’re going for a win attempt. You can also use it to kill exposed enemy forces if they’re within 10 spaces of the storm’s location.  Arrakis didn’t actually get full weather control until the Scattering era, thousands of years after the events of the original novel when the board game is set. Boy, I sure hope someone got fired for that blunder. Family Atomics is a fun one. If you’ve got forces within one space of the shield wall territory, you can use this card in the storm phase, before the storm moves, to destroy the shield wall. Once the shield wall is destroyed, Arrakeen and Carthag no longer protect the troops in them from the storm. A truly nasty play is the family atomics weather control one two punch. Nuke the shield wall, then send the storm through both cities to exterminate all life. Awesome if your enemies control them, but it makes holding them on future turns harder for you as well. Unless you’re a Fremen.  Hajr lets you double move one unit, or move two units. Dune’s action economy is ordinarily pretty strict, and this card is very scary in the right hands. Naib Mouzone of Sietch New York posted:You know what the most dangerous thing on Arrakis is, right?  Cheap Hero lets you fight a battle without committing a leader, using the cheap hero in place of one. By rules as written, you MUST play a leader in battle if you have any leaders left alive. If you know your leader will die, because the enemy has a weapon you can’t defend against or because you’re planning on suicide bombing the territory, a cheap hero can save your bacon. By rules as written, in the base game, I’m pretty sure the cheap hero can’t be a traitor either. Regardless of if they survive, you gotta discard them after use.  In the Avalon Hill version there was a cheap hero card and a cheap heroine card, which had slightly different art but did the same thing. The 2019 GF9 game just has multiple cheap heroes. Tleilaxu Ghola can be played at any time, regardless of the game phase. Instantly resurrect either five forces or a single leader. This card is pretty useless in the early game, and will pull your fat out of the fire in the late game. Hang on to it. Getting back a top tier leader, or even a crappy leader you know isn’t a traitor, can be a game changer in the endgame. So can getting back five forces over your revival limit.  Truthtrance is a fun one. Play it, ask someone a yes or no question, and they must answer truthfully. Truthtrance is a great card, but also exposes the limits of game design based on contextual natural language parsing rather than predefined mechanics. It’s easy enough to use a truthtrance in battle, to ask “will you play a poison weapon in your battle plan?” or “is Thufir Hawat one of your traitors?”. But then you get into more conceptual stuff, like “will you attack Sietch Tabr this turn?”. Well, will I? By answering the question, I’m locking myself in to doing it or not doing it. By observing the future, the player using the Truthtrance card causes it to happen. But what if I ask about two turns in the future, or three? Who plans that far ahead? Can you commit to something by answering, when board circumstances can completely change and make it impossible? This is the source of rules arguments among novice players and veterans alike.  Karama is another fun one. You can play it to stop someone from using a faction special ability, or to gain one of a small selection of predefined advantages.  This card has generated pages of errata and rules arguments, delineating exactly what you can and can’t stop with it, and when you do so. The waters are further muddied by the advanced game rules, which give most of the game factions a “superpower” that they can activate by spending a karama card. I explain the Karama to new players by telling them it either negates someone else’s special powers, or supercharges their own. You want to start another fight? Ask someone if they prefer full phase Karama or single round. That is, when you negate someone’s powers, do they lose them for the entire game phase, or just a single round? This is both a question of which FAQ from GF9 you read, and also which you prefer mechanically. Full phase lets you completely neuter a faction for a whole turn if you negate the right power, but it also enables some really interesting plays that would never be worth spending the card on if they only took effect for a single round. Stopping the Emperor from receiving income for one treachery card basically doesn’t matter. Stopping the Emperor from receiving income for the entire bidding phase knocks the Emperor out of the game for a round, letting you pull off whatever scheme you were planning without Mr Moneybags loving up your master plan. I like full phase Karama and play with it on whenever possible, but it’s not a deal breaker for me. More on Karamas and what they do when we go into the faction powers. Hey, look at that. We made it through the treachery deck. Kul Wahad! That means it’s time to pick a faction to examine in depth. We’ve got six to choose from.
FMguru posted:The Descartes version also has counters and rules for three additional factions (Lansraad, Ix, and Tleilaxu) which had been published as variant rules in Avalon Hill's house magazine THE GENERAL. I've admittedly never played with the Landsraad, so maybe they're actually great, but the whole faction seems based around negating other people's ability to play the game by ordering them to do nothing during specific game phases. Which in board gaming seems like the least fun possible thing. Leader art was cool tho.  PurpleXVI posted:A lot of things in the game seem to be used and then lost, does the same count for the attack and defense cards? I might've just missed it if you said so, but my impression is that they're kept? It feels like that means after the first few encounters, everyone will have a pretty good idea of how to counter a given opponent, or whether they can counter them at all. Remember also that you don't need weapons and defenses to win battles. You can overwhelm the enemy with sheer force strength even if they kill your leader. It's expensive, unless you're a faction that gets a discount on one or more of revival, shipping, and spice support.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 17:53
|
|
|
Harkonnen please and thanks
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 18:12
|
|
|
The Universe's special boy Paul ATREIDES
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 18:25
|
|
|
Very interested in the Spacing Guild. I assume that the ghola tanks were the Tleilaxu aspect which were turned into general mechanics rather than a faction, but what about Ix?
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 19:16
|
|
|
Sha-drat right we want to find out about the Emperor. (IV) Is there a specific reason to discard a weapon or shield card after you've used it victoriously? Just general trickery reasons? (I'm slightly unclear on if you reveal the cards to the whole table or just your opponent in a battle. Also, this is a great review because I've been interested in the game for years, but haven't felt like I've ever had to good chances of getting it to a table. Thanks a mill ; between this and TSATF, you're really on a streak with reviews!
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 19:29
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Is there a specific reason to discard a weapon or shield card after you've used it victoriously? Just general trickery reasons? (I'm slightly unclear on if you reveal the cards to the whole table or just your opponent in a battle. Unless I've always played it wrong showing dials & cards is public. e: my vote is for the Bene Gesserit because that's the one faction I was never able to figure out how to make work -- and neither was anyone else in my group.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 20:23
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Is there a specific reason to discard a weapon or shield card after you've used it victoriously? Just general trickery reasons? (I'm slightly unclear on if you reveal the cards to the whole table or just your opponent in a battle. Since there's a finite number of weapons of each type, maybe you'd discard a shield or snooper after victory if every other card it can block is discarded/in your hand
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 20:29
|
|
|
Admiralty Flag posted:Extreme corner case but you might have been lucky enough to have pulled two shield cards. You discard one because "I need hand space oh God I hate to lose this but I really need these other cards" Are you allowed to sell/trade cards with other players? Because then selling "your only shield" to someone else, and then someone else comes at you with a melee weapon or a lasgun not expecting you to have a second shield, seems like it might be a pretty solid tactic.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 20:29
|
|
|
Bene Gesserit
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 21:30
|
|
|
Spacing Guild
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 21:35
|
|
|
Bene Gesserit, because they have my favorite alternate win condition. Also, would it be possible to use the Truthtrance card and logical paradoxes to finagle out a win for yourself somehow?
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 21:43
|
|
|
Quackles posted:Also, would it be possible to use the Truthtrance card and logical paradoxes to finagle out a win for yourself somehow? If I asked you to surrender after resolving this card, would the boolean value of your response be the same as your response to this question, given that yes=true and no=false, and treating any ambiguous responses as no?
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 21:50
|
|
|
Kaza42 posted:If I asked you to surrender after resolving this card, would the boolean value of your response be the same as your response to this question, given that yes=true and no=false, and treating any ambiguous responses as no? This is why Dune will never be fully automatable - no machine can respond to a situation like this correctly (ie taking the player responsible out back and teaching them to fear God)
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 22:19
|
|
|
I'm just glad this card says "About this game". The same general effect has appeared other places without that, and it leads to some funny RAW*. * of course, nobody should ACTUALLY abuse a game in this way, and it should stay purely in the realm of hypothetical murphy rules
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 22:32
|
|
|
Kaza42 posted:If I asked you to surrender after resolving this card, would the boolean value of your response be the same as your response to this question, given that yes=true and no=false, and treating any ambiguous responses as no? This sounds like thinking machine talk. Boys! We got a thinking machine over here!
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 22:33
|
|
|
Tsilkani posted:This sounds like thinking machine talk. No, no, I swear, I'm just an rear end in a top hat Mentat!
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 22:36
|
|
|
First faction written up will be the Bene Gesserit.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 23:00
|
|
|
disposablewords posted:No, no, I swear, I'm just an rear end in a top hat Mentat! Oh yeah? Then how is it you set your mind in motion, wise guy? Those stains there are looking a lot like machine oil, to me.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 23:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 5, 2024 04:28 |
|
|
Infinity RPG: Ariadna Wolves at the Door So, let's talk about the Antipodes. They are canids that are the indigenous sapient lifeforms of Dawn, and they don't plan to give it up to humans. Both sides occasionally have heroes who attempt diplomacy, but the long conflict has bred hostility on both sides, to say nothing of the internal politics of both species. Peace seems to be impossible, though at the moment the hostilities are kept at a dull roar. The Antipodes have grown, in the human mind, to be defined by their hostility and violence towards the colonizers, and they endure onwards through sheer grit and stubbornness despite human technological advancement. In this way, they are actually quite similar to their Ariadnan enemies, though the humans are loath to admit it. Antipode names generally refer to an entire trinary - individual members of a trinary do not get a name, because they aren't seen as full people. Rather, the person is the full set of three, and any identification of an individual body is practical - Third Lightfoot, Smallest Tearing Claw, and so on. Antipode names are often derived from deeds or reputation, or else taken from the features of the landscape around their tribal home. (There is an exception, however: an Antipode that has lost their original trinary and is integrated into a new one often gets given a compound name formed from the old trinary and the new one, to honor the fallen and as a mark of distinction and survival. Ariadnan soldiers have learned that Antipodes with compound names are usually the most dangerous and terrifying.) There is not an exhaustive list of Antipode tribes, but the Ariadnan militaries attempt to track the ones near their borders for safety reasons, as do some historians and scholars. The Bitter Leaves are perhaps the most famous, because they are the source of Gentle Leaf, the trinary that made contact with Amanda Greene. Both human xenoanthropologists and the Antipodes keep the memory of Gentle Leaf alive, and there is great debate among the Antipodes over whether or not the Gentle Leaf memory line remains in the Bitter Leaves - a debate even the Bitter Leaves have not settled. The Bitter Leaves have internalized two basic facts from the story of Gentle Leaf: first, that while it was brief, coexistence with humans was proven to be possible. Violence is not the only solution. Second, however, the primary means of interaction humans have with the world is trickery, betrayal and deceit, and this must never be forgotten. The Bringers-of-Peace are a new tribe, formed by alliance of of the Night Stalkers following the trinary Long Shadow and the Ironbloods following the trinary Deep Voice, which has ended up creating the largest Antipode warband that has ever existed. They gather north of Caledonia, and they have a very simple goal. They are going to end the war with Ariadna, once and for all. Long Shadow argues that peace cannot exist while Ariadna retains a military, though Deep Voice believes coexistence with Dogfaces and Wulvers is possible. The two have debated and come to a conclusion: both is good. The Bringers-of-Peace perform some of the biggest raids of the modern era, targeting military infrastructure deep in Caledonian territory and working to deliberately spread the cuckoo virus as much as they can. They are brutal, efficient and extremely thorough in their violence. The Gentle Embrace of the Sagacious Progenitors is...as good a translation of the name of this tribe as humans have managed, but it's not a great one. Because the Antipodes have such large claws on their forelegs, even if they stand on their hind legs and embrace, it is not an idea that contains the concept of safety - all embraces cause injury. The 'Gentle' in the name implies that the wounds are mild, made out of compassion and love. The 'Sagacious Progenitors' specifically refers to mythical ancestors of the Antipodes, a trinary said to have been born of the sun itself, though this myth is not commonly believed outside the tribe; most Antipodes instead embrace animistic spirits or worship of the Blood Tree. But the invocation of the Progenitors implies that the embrace is done with divine authority. That is to say - the Gentle Embrace are religious zealots who believe themselves to be given authority by ancient gods, and they are willing to torture others that disagree - but out of love, or so they say. They are one of the most outgoing and diplomatic tribes, but even other Antipodes find them frightening and unpredictable. The Ice Fangs are notable for their distinctive fur coloration, a pale blue-white...though it's only obviously so when they aren't using their natural photoreactivity to blend in, so it's mostly known to other Antipodes. They are aggressive, violent and good at hiding from counterattacks, making their home in the mountains near Merovingia. The Merovingians known them as the Crocs de Glace, and the local patrols hate and fear them. They are, however, quite hard to find, likely due to bordering the territory of the White Knives. Humans know less about them than any other known tribe, except that they're very violent and more likely than anyone else to attack other Antipodes, and that they are devout followers of the Blood Tree cult. They attack without warning or explanation, terrorizing the USAriadnans, Merovingians and other Antipodes with little distinction. Last of the major northern tribes is the River Tribe, the first tribe to meet humans, very long ago. First contact was disastrous, and many of the River Tribe were killed as part of it. They have not forgotten. They live near Coldspring, east of USAriadna, and despite their best efforts, the USAriadnans have been unable to wipe the tribe out. They survive and continue their raids even in the massive shadow of Fort Apache, though they are largely contained to the area around the fort...for now, anyway. They do not consider themselves to be fighting an old feud, either - their memory lines stretch back to first contact and the First Offensive, and the deaths remain as real and painful to them as the days they happened. The tribes of the southern subcontinent are considerably less well-studied. Humanity has never made any major settlements there, and it remains wild and uncharted...by humans. There are, however, dozens of nomadic Antipode tribes in the south, largely focused in the fertile areas between Rodina and the Lost Sea. They travel across the entire subcontinent, though, and are even more focused on hunting to survive than the more sedentary, den-living northern and eastern tribes. The southern tribes are wild and free, and idealized by many other Antipodes for it. They are still generally rather hostile to humanity, however - while they meet humans much less often, it's been no more friendly when they do than it was in the north. The southern tribes have always been culturally and geographically distinct from the others, and to a certain extent they're even biologically differentiated. The arrival of humanity has only exacerbated it, separating them from the other tribes. They tend to be leaner and more wiry due to their nomadic lifestyle, and because the landscape of the south is more flat and requires less climbing, they are less likely to walk on two legs. Their culture has developed to consider anything that sits still or lives a sedentary lifestyle is prey - cattle, humans, even other, less nomadic Antipodes. The cuckoo virus is also worth special mention. Obviously it works on humans, creating Dogfaces from the children of those infected. All other lifeforms currently known are either immune to it or react so badly that offspring of the infected are stillborn or nonviable at birth. As far as humans know. However, the stories of the Omerzeniye spread anyway. They are also known as the Bukavac, the Chupacabra, the Jackalope, and any other cryptid an Ariadnan cares to name. They show up in journals and logs dating back to the earliest settlers, monsters of great power and violence that emerge from the woods and kill entire units. Most of the stories about them are pure campfire fiction, though hunters continue to seek proof of the creatures. The truth is simple: about one in every ten thousand births of infected species that are normally nonviable to the Cuckoo virus is viable. Most of these die to Antipode hunters, and those that survive are generally the biggest, toughest and meanest of the lot. The game provides a template that can be applied to any animal, giving it Dogface-like abilities and increased health. Dogfaces (AKA homo sapiens lupus), meanwhile, live as second class citizens in human society. Their warrior forms are oversized for human designs, and getting homes and clothing that fits them can be quite a challenge. They are the targets of the slur "metisy," Russian for 'mongrel' or 'half-blood,' along with their Wulver children. Vanya Rotten and other Dogface activist groups have occasionally tried to reclaim the word, though even within Dog Nation, its use as a reclaimed term is still controversial. Jobs are hard to come by, if you don't want to join the military, and not every Dogface wants to be a soldier, especially for people who hate and fear them. Service hardly makes the discrimination go away even if they do. That said, it's better than many alternatives - becoming a criminal, stadium security officer or construction worker are the most common other paths. Physical labor and violence are the constants of Dogface employment. Wulvers have it even worse. Officially homo sapiens lupus mulus, they are unable to pass for human even as much as non-transformed Dogface does. They are larger than other humans, on average, and larger than most non-transformed Dogfaces as well. Even the sorts of places that cater to Dogfaces tend to have difficulty providing for the needs of Wulvers, even if they go to the effort of doing so. Wulvers are a small minority even within the Dog-blooded community. On top of the normal bigotry that faces the Dog-blooded, they have the curse of most people never even meeting one, let alone designing clothes for them. Most Wulvers never even manage to find a good outfit that really fits. And where a Dogface can pass for human before transformation, a Wulver is dense and heavily muscled at all times, with fur or heavy hair along their face and limbs, plus obvious canines that extend out of their solid, powerful jaws and mouths. One of the few ways for the Dog-blooded to become accepted is to excel at Dog-Bowl. It's a big business sport these days, but they started on the streets, in Dogface ghettos. There, street scrimmages are still played, often by kids or amateurs. It mixes rules of American football, rugby, basketball and sports combat, using teams of five. The rules are generally fairly loose, and score counts tend to be pretty high, as are injuries. The sport has proven popular with offworld audiences as well, and most official games now stream on both Maya and Arachne. Variant rules include the Full Scrum, which is used for tournaments, settling overtime ties or exhibition matches. 21 players make up each side in a scrum, with three balls in play at once. Scrums are very hard for most people to follow, but still popular to watch. Professionally, Dog-Bowl is played in a three-lane arena-style stadium, as street games often spread over multiple streets and alleys, creating a naturally divided playing field. The formalised version has one main lane in the center and two side lanes, though Caledonia also has a variant that uses two equally sized main lanes and no side lanes. "Buildings" are used to divide the lanes, though their form has become more and more abstract over time. They are simultaneously obstructions, climbing walls and art pieces, with different stadiums using different designs that can greatly alter the flow of play. This creates a verticality to the game that is rare in most sports, and skillful use of the high ground can swing a match. Most stadiums are modular, able to change configuration to be used as concert spaces, political conventions or similar. So why is this sport being covered in such detail? Because of social acceptance. Dog-Bowl has had a massive impact on the lives of Dogfaces in Ariadnan society, because as is common among humanity, bigotry is given spot exceptions for star athletes a lot of the time. Getting onto a Dog-Bowl team is a massive payday, which is already lifechanging for most Dogfaces and Wulvers. Even moreso, though, it takes a normally despised member of a species minority and turns them into a celebrity. Any city with a Dog-Bowl team is going to treat the players on that team like kings and queens. This is especially true of teams that make it to the Dawn Cup. The Ariadnan league schedule runs for about 3/4 of the year, ending with the Five Nations Championship or Dawn Cup, a round robin tournament that pits the most successful teams of each of Caledonia, Merovingia, USAriadna, core Rodina and Tartary Rodina. Next time: Dog-Blooded PCs
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2022 01:40
|
|