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And really, with some games - in-depth reviews are kind of necessary to understand how they function as games, which lead us to some amazing bit of silliness like Birdlord and roll a corpse down a hill to revive, or Abandon All Hope where every single enemy didn't have a health stat (and pointing out if the reviewer didn't do 'No health stat? they keel over' any PC party would've been hosed six ways by even the weakest enemies), and to catch problems in world building that a cursory summary wouldn't get,
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Jul 6, 2023 00:27
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Just to make that dude mad I'm gonna do a review of something the size of like Worlds Without Number, but review each /word/ individually in its own post.
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Jul 6, 2023 06:36
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sasha_d3ath posted:Just to make that dude mad I'm gonna do a review of something the size of like Worlds Without Number, but review each /word/ individually in its own post. What's your take on Crawford's use of 'the'?
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Jul 6, 2023 07:47
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Shh, we've still got 16 more posts before we get to The, no spoilers.
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Jul 6, 2023 07:58
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it's sort of part-and-parcel of a review that in order to be able to convey whether or not you think a thing is "good", you also have to be able to understand how it works that means having to explain to your audience, how it works with something like computer games, or perhaps movies, there is sometimes enough of a built-up cultural/institutional knowledge about how such things are supposed to work, and the meaning of in-hobby jargon, that you do not have to explain it from first principles, to your audience, as part of the review but I assume that it's less common when people are trying to review TRPGs. when I was still doing these, even when I actively tried to streamline my writing by assuming that it was only people from the TG subforum of SomethingAwful that would ever read it, and I could forego things like "how does one roll dice?" and skip straight to having an opinion on the merits of a dice pool system, I'd still have to explain the context in which the dice pool exists - how many dice can a player expect to have? and that leads to having to interrogate how a character is built, which then leads to having to go over the character creation process, and so on and I could just say something like "I like what they did to the Fighter in this alternate 5e rulebook by giving it additional abilities", but you'd have to trust my judgement if I left it at that, and I'm just some guy on the internet, who gives a poo poo, right? so to make a credible case, I'd have to go over exactly what those abilities are, and how they fit into defining the class as a whole does that mean having to go over large parts of the book, sometimes on a page-by-page basis? sure but that's what it takes
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Jul 6, 2023 11:47
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And if there was ever a game with complicated integrated lore/systems it's Infinity
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Jul 6, 2023 15:40
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There's no need to defend why F&F works the way it does. There's no need to address Speleothing, for two reasons. The first and most important is that the crank views on copyright, sincerely held or not, are ludicrous. The second is that while there might be demand for much briefer reviews, consisting of a few paragraphs, this is a loving forum. If you want to read brief reviews, you can find them on DTRPG and Amazon, where "reviews" are just comments sections with star ratings.
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Jul 6, 2023 15:46
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I present the abridged review of the Masquerade of the Red Death trilogy: stuff happens, vampires killed Lincoln, bob is horny and bad at sentence structure, why do we know all their generations, and Phantomas is real and cool and my friend. Now you know all you need to know.
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Jul 6, 2023 16:22
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Loomer posted:I present the abridged review of the Masquerade of the Red Death trilogy: stuff happens, vampires killed Lincoln, bob is horny and bad at sentence structure, why do we know all their generations, and Phantomas is real and cool and my friend. Now you know all you need to know. That's no good. How will I know what are the female characters wearing in excruciating detail!?
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Jul 6, 2023 16:31
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FATAL & Friends has as its origin, laughing and crying at the horrible contents of the worst games, such as FATAL. Going line by line through those games to discover and pillory all the horrible bits inside was part of the fun. Over time the thread started including reviews of actually good games, but often using the same detailed approach. You can look through the archive. I've clicked around in about a dozen or so random reviews marked as complete and all but one of them were quite lengthy and detailed. That seems to have been the norm. So I'll say it again: while polite constructive criticism is ok to post, there's no need to be mean, there's no need to pile on or create a big derail, and the rules in the OP are guidelines for making good content. I agree with them in principle, but we are not grading papers here, this is an open thread for anyone to participate in regardless of skill or ability at doing game reviews, and the thread cannot cater to every different goon's tastes. If you find one poster's stuff intolerable, just skip it. If you find most of them intolerable, well, then this thread isn't for you. There's ten thousand other threads on SA, I'm confident you can find some you'll like, and you can also make your own. I really hope that's the end of that derail and the thread can get back to just posting reviews and chatting about the games being reviewed.
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Jul 6, 2023 18:09
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Halloween Jack posted:There's no need to defend why F&F works the way it does. There's no need to address Speleothing, for two reasons. The first and most important is that the crank views on copyright, sincerely held or not, are ludicrous. The second is that while there might be demand for much briefer reviews, consisting of a few paragraphs, this is a loving forum. If you want to read brief reviews, you can find them on DTRPG and Amazon, where "reviews" are just comments sections with star ratings. True, but it's sometimes nice to take an aside and be able to articulate why the style of reviews in FATAL & Friends works while say something on RPG.net doesn't.
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Jul 6, 2023 18:57
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 The Bloodshadows chapter on gamemastering runs a brisk 7 pages, not counting illustrations. That’s fewer pages than the unnecessary adventure module at the end! The first section is on good guys and bad guys. Bloodshadows is a violent, unforgiving world full of cynical, self-interested people, but that doesn’t mean it’s all shades of grey. Heroes are people who “for money, or for a cause, or just out of a need to do what’s right, make sacrifices and take chances.” Heroes often have to take an “ends justify the means” approach, but they follow a personal code, if not the letter of the law. The text encourages players to think of their PCs in terms of what they will and won’t do, not just what they can and can’t do. Next is a section on the Party, which acknowledges that Bloodshadows is inspired by media that usually focuses on “lone wolves” while roleplaying usually involves an adventuring party. This section gives reasons for the party to get together: because the mission requires diverse skills, because everyone needs someone to watch their back, and/or because the PCs will have to split up to accomplish different tasks. This section is too short and frankly not great, but I’m almost thrilled just to see a 90s game even acknowledge the problem of taking all your inspirations from books, movies, and video games that mostly feature a lone protagonist. The next sections go over the Wilderness and the world in general and provide some big-picture guidance about what the world is like.   First, the extremely dangerous Wilderness is there to discourage the PCs to see their adventures through to the end and resist the temptation to skip town when they make enemies. I think it would be better for the gaming group to have an understanding about playing willful and driven characters, but I guess the dangerous Wilderness isn’t actually bad. Afterward is a more-or-less clear explanation of how dangerous the world is, and how people get around Marl. It’s not Arrakis; you’re not going to be swallowed whole by a Queskworm the moment you step outside the city gates. With the help of magic, city-states can farm enough land to feed themselves. But they’re out there, and it’s always a risk, and “everybody knows” that monsters are everywhere. There are explanations of traveling by magic gate, by ship, or by caravan. The book repeatedly mentions the possibility of working as caravan guards. Okay, but it’s not really what the game is about. If PCs do this, it should be on their way to a Lost City to do Indiana Jones stuff. Speaking of which, the book does emphasize that every city is different, and you can set your game in a new city of your own design with a culture wildly different from that of Selastos.  The next sections are on magic and the “denizens” of Marl. The advice on playing supernatural creatures, whether PCs or NPCs, is that they’re individuals first and foremost, though their nature shapes their experiences. They also point out that while you can play a vampire or a demon, any human can take magic skills that allow you to be as weird and spooky as you like. It’s nice to read them articulate their setting, but they seem to be forgetting that it’s a place for adventures to happen in. The actual content on designing and running adventures is only a few brief paragraphs. They tell you that you can go into the Wilderness and lost cities for a more conventional D&Dish adventure, or take a gate to any kind of weird different setting. Uh, okay, but how about some advice on running hardboiled noir pulp adventures? They propose three different basic types of adventures. “Molehill into mountain,” where the PCs are hired to do a little job that turns out to be part of a vast plot. “Mountain into molehill,” where the PCs think they’re investigating a convoluted conspiracy, but it all comes down to some simple thing like a murder or theft. Finally, “Every hand against him” where the PCs are beset by multiple factions who all want to prevent them from blowing the lid off some big secret.  Huh. Well. Let’s just move on to the sample adventure. It’s called “Whisper of Destruction,” in which the PCs are hired by a wealthy gunsmith from Galitia to track down the very important NPC from the novels, private detective Jack Deacon. The PCs are drinking in a decent bar when Dala Sanqui, a courier who dresses like Indiana Jones, hires them to investigate Deacon’s appearance. He disappeared a few days ago while working a divorce case, and the gunsmith thinks he might have been set up. He was last seen with a pretty blonde woman. The courier gives them a down payment and an allowance for bribes. If the PCs turn down the job, the evil henchmen trailing Sanqui will assume they didn’t, and get them into the adventure by attacking them later. The PCs can find out where Deacon and the woman went by asking streetsingers or sentinels at the city gates. If they're at the gates, a queskworm attacks an armored car as it's leaving. There's no reason for the PCs to join in the fight unless they feel like wasting precious runeslugs. The PCs will soon learn that Deacon went to the Blue Note Hotel, and that there was a firefight in the hotel soon after. Then they notice that a man is tailing them on foot–and ineptly. The “man” won’t respond to direct confrontation, because he’s a mindless crystal golem under the control of an insane wizard who calls himself Whisper. If the PCs attack the golem, it explodes in a burst of glass shards. If not, Whisper will just use the golem to annoy them before leaving them alone. He’s the kind of villain who toys with the heroes because they have no chance. He has Deacon tied up somewhere, and he's going to kill him for personal reasons that are never explained and not really relevant. The Blue Note is a fleabag, but the manager will gladly them everything he knows, rambling on about the shooting, the mess, and all the grief from the cops. He’ll even show them the crime scene. There are bullet holes, bloodstains, signs of a struggle, and the aftermath of a fireball spell. On their way out, a gang of three Taxim try to kill them in a driveby shooting. The PCs can get in a shootout, or a car chase, or both. The Taxim will run if they don’t think they can win easily. The Taxim always die in the end, either at the PCs’ hands or by crashing into a truck. They have to die, because one of them has a matchbook with the name of a Taxim bar, which is the only clue to the next scene.  The next scene is at Karrk’s, a filthy bar for Taxim miners and other undead. This is probably the best part of the adventure because it encourages the GM to really play it up. Undead patrons eating and drinking questionable viands, cigar-chomping ghouls pawing at cigarette girls who are half-rotten, a piano player whose hands keep falling off, that kind of thing. The PCs will eventually out one of the patrons as another of Whisper’s henchmen, and he’ll tell them about the warehouse where Whisper is busy torturing Jack Deacon.  The section on the warehouse comes with a map, fortunately, since it’s heavily defended and has multiple entrances and exits. There are 10 Taxim guards outside, all armed with revolvers and fireball runeslugs. The inside of the warehouse is very dark, so even if they have to fight the Taxim inside, they won’t simply be blasted to smithereens by a volley of fireballs. Whisper is an elderly man who uses a wheelchair, but he has powerful offensive spells. He also has lightning ward traps littered around the warehouse. He’ll play a game of cat and mouse with the PCs, but he’s also dangerously hinged, and has been working his way up to killing Deacon by torturing him for hours and hours. Whisper will probably blow himself up by being caught at ground zero of one of his own spells. Deacon is tied up, able to walk but too hurt to fight. Once the PCs win the battle or slip away with Deacon in tow, it’s just a matter of getting him to a doctor and contacting Danqui. The end! So yeah, it’s a real barebones detective story. The PCs will learn everything they need to know by just asking around, and then there’s an awkward moment where it uses the old cliche where the protagonist’s only lead is a matchbook from a bar. This entire thing really could have been scrapped in favour of more advice on designing and running adventures. The book closes out with a few sample PCs, complete with character sheets. In order, they are: Alchemist, Orris Barkeep, Private Eye, Sentinel, Streetsinger, and Vampire Contract Killer. They’re okay, I guess.   I expected to wrap up this review with a musing on why Bloodshadows failed, but I think the answer is obvious: it’s a good setting chained to a truly awful system. Bloodshadows is the only original published setting for Masterbook, it’s focused on magic, and the SFX rules practically ruin the game. It’s a real indictment of the Masterbook line as a whole. It’s not just that the Masterbook system, with its endless tables and nonstandard terminology, is a lousy ruleset in its own right. In order to have a decent list of magic spells for characters to use in this game about magic, the GM and/or players are going to have to spend many hours creating and calculating spells on SFX worksheets. Imagine how much work it would take just to replicate the spellbook from OD&D. gently caress, now that I think about it, I think Bloodshadows has more potential magic skills than OD&D has spells, owing to the stupid macroskill rules. Who wants to buy a system book, buy a setting book, and then have to spend so much time creating their own rules content? They did eventually publish a magic sourcebook, but it was the next-to-last book in the product line. Those lousy basic rules have a lot to answer for, too. Bloodshadows has some very interesting ideas for PC types, like the Tulpa and Relkazar, but “big winged gargoyle that possesses people” and “demon that reflexively shapeshifts into people’s fears” are beyond the scope of Masterbook character creation, which is geared toward concepts like “guy with a gun that’s slightly better than a regular gun” or “guy who is good at jogging.” I’m not going to let the writing off scot-free, though. “Midcentury pulp fiction with magic” is a great premise and the writing doesn’t always live up to it. For example, the list of weaponized potions that are just grenades, or the bits where they get jokey and punny about swapping in D&D cliches for detective fiction cliches. Another big issue with me was the focus on undead in the setting. The abundance of ghoulish PC types led me to expect that Selastos would be something like the London of Unhallowed Metropolis, where there are dead bodies all over the place and industries are based on it. Apparently there are other cities that are more like that, but they got saved for sourcebooks. It feels like they started with the premise of Magic Pulp and tweaked it to be “darker” because it was the 1990s. So that’s Bloodshadows: another memorable, imaginative setting without good underlying rules to support what you might want to do with it. Such games are a dime a dozen, but most of them aren’t released by companies with the resources to publish a setting book, eight supplements, and four novels without ever realizing that it’s all weighed down by a game system that barely anybody wants to actually play. It’s well-remembered enough that a second and third edition were published: a D6 edition under Eric Gibson’s ill-fated ownership of the WEG brand, and a third edition from Precis Intermedia using their genreDiversion system. Perhaps if West End had released a Bloodshadows game using the D6 system in 1994, things could have gone differently. Next time: Some dirty motherfucking secrets.
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Jul 6, 2023 19:57
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Halloween Jack posted:Bloodshadows has some very interesting ideas for PC types, like the Tulpa and Relkazar, but “big winged gargoyle that possesses people” and “demon that reflexively shapeshifts into people’s fears” are beyond the scope of Masterbook character creation, which is geared toward concepts like “guy with a gun that’s slightly better than a regular gun” or “guy who is good at jogging.”
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Jul 6, 2023 20:18
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Not so fast! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/battlefieldpress/bloodshadows-chronicles-of-guf/description It got funded and underway and going swimmingly, and then...Jonathan Thompson, the owner of Battlefield Press, Game Designer, and a really nice guy, suddenly passed away in February. The rest of the company logically freaked out, but his brother Adam Thompson came in and said, 'No this project is going to be finished'. It's going to be released hopefully around Gencon or so and in the mean time they gave all the backers copies of Eldritch Skies (one of the cooler mythos related products) as some compensation for Bloodshadows being delayed.
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Jul 6, 2023 20:30
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PIG still has PDFs of the original game available, and they're considering a reworking of the original Masterbook rules. But AFAIK it's just something they've been publicly considering for some time now. I imagine it would be a lot of work to touch up a frankly bad game that wouldn't sell well.
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Jul 6, 2023 20:40
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The new Bloodshadows game is a Savage Worlds powered version.
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Jul 6, 2023 20:42
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This is very late but thanks for doing these Ravenloft reviews. Probably wouldn't have seen most of them otherwise.
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Jul 7, 2023 02:47
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:The new Bloodshadows game is a Savage Worlds powered version. Now that’s a system for some mildly crunchy pulp action.
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Jul 7, 2023 03:27
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part Ten, Chapters 35 to 40 Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight Part Nine Finally, Book 1 draws to a close with what will no doubt be a thrilling, well-written, utterly explosive finale. Chapter 35 Its Varney’s turn in DC – and its pretty much a mirror of Chapter 34, unsurprisingly. Her telepathy is still useless and she doesn’t have Sumohn, the panther – just Sanford Jackson. The city remains in chaos and teeters on the verge of Sabbat victory, which tickles her to no end because controlling the new Regent would be a nice trick to pull off. First, though, they need to deal with The Red Death, aka Seker. There’s a brief moment of genre awareness I like. Vampire warfare is a big, messy, indiscriminate matter in Weinberg’s book (and White Wolf's generally, honestly) – and so Jackson, being an ex-snake eater, poses the obvious question: why not just use surgical killteams when your total number of targets is rarely going to be bigger than ten or twenty people? This prompts a little dialogue about how someone’s done exactly that and framed each sect for doing so – which Varney, who remember is the pawn and partner of one of the supposed great players of the Jyhad, has to have explained to her by Jackson:   As far as reveals go, it’d be much more effective if it hadn’t been painstakingly explained to us throughout the book that that’s precisely what’s happened. A more interesting novel might have built up the reveal until now, and had the Red Death enter at the close of this first book – right on schedule to maximally exploit the existing chaos, with a genuine creeping dread as the trap begins to close on McCann and Varney. Alas, that’s not what we got. At this point, Seker repeats his telepathic ‘hey, listen’ routine. The dialogue is basically the same as in McCann’s section – greater enemy, it was a mistake to strike at you, etc, etc, come to the Naval Yards at midnight. Unlike McCann, Varney has the sense to share the details with Jackson, and tasks him with putting together a support crew - including some heavy machinery they can borrow from NASA. Chapter 36 With the momentum building, its naturally time to turn away from it and back to the Wonder Twins. We’re still in DC on the night of the 21st, and they’re eating pizza and having a coke. DC, you may recall, is currently best described as an active war zone with the national guard and army firing in the streets. This doesn’t seem to bother any of the other patrons or staff – and, in fairness, living in a conflict zone you do get on with your life… after the initial shock wears off. This, however, is day five – not week five. This entire chapter is unnecessary. All it does is infodump things we already know, confirming McCann and Varney are Masqueraders (as ambiguous as the term is – here, its confirmed Lameth talks to McCann through dreams, which doesn’t really clear it up), that they’ll both be going to the Naval Yard, that the Red Death is in league with the Sheddim, and so on. Naturally, its masturbatory as to how special and amazing Lameth and Anis are, and naturally, the two mysteriously disappear and no one can remember anything about them. I cannot state how much of an error this chapter is. It breaks the flow of the narrative for no real gain – it explains things that are hardly a mystery because they’ve been painstakingly spelled out to us repeatedly. The closest to interesting it gets is that it flirts around about who the Twins father is and outlines that they’re prohibited from direct intervention in the Jyhad. This is in the final 30 pages of the book. This is right after we’ve built the tension for the confrontation, and while a pause-and-reset moment can be an effective storytelling tool, this isn’t. A step to Phantomas or Madeleine might have provided one (a bouncing low in the rhythm, but one where things still take place to advance the overall narrative, is the best way to handle those ‘catch a breath’ interludes), but this one drags the narrative right down again into tedium. Chapter 37 Nearly Midnight, March 22: the Lincoln Memorial. This time, our POV isn’t McCann – it’s a limited omniscient narrator switch. Flavia is there waiting when a shadow suddenly arrives, flashing near-silently into the eaves – and snaps to a combat stance. Is this our Makish vs Flavia battle? No – its Flavia meeting Madeleine. The two immediately get along as icy professional assassins with a shared code of honour and established reputations, which is actually a nice touch. With an author like Bob it was always going to be a gamble if they’d immediately fall to stereotyped catfighting. Madeleine reveals she knew where to go to meet Flavia thanks to something unusual:  Now, this is where I confess the shameful truth: my unnecessarily extensive knowledge of the oWoD is incredibly lop-sided in favour of lore and statistics versus disciplines and gifts. That said, I don’t recognize this, so it seems Bob’s given Madeleine a unique discipline. They proceed to discuss Makish and immediately arrive at the same page: he’s working for someone, and it isn’t the Sabbat or Camarilla, and then Bob has one of his better moments:  Now, it’s a little blatant and didn’t need to be spelled out – but I’ll give him credit here. The relationships that develop between Madeleine, Flavia, and Jackson are halfway decent. Still very broad, shallow stuff that doesn’t come close to passing the Bechdel test – but unlike most relationships in this trilogy, they exist as more than an opportunity to whack off at how special everyone involved is. They raise certain questions around exploitation, meaning, grief, vengeance as a purpose, and what it is to be turned into a (not-quite)-living weapon. In better hands, you could honestly do some really quite poignant stuff with them as characters, and this is where I get sad about Bob’s two trilogies. Not only were there some cool ideas, but there’s stuff here where you can see him reaching for something better, something with purpose – but never actually grasping it. The discussion turns to The Red Death and McCann. Both very mysterious, neither knows dick, McCann is great, etc. Then Madeleine uses her special discipline and the Red Death’s secret is exposed:  Immediately, they realize it’s a trap McCann isn’t prepared for, and race to get there in time. This is another good example of where Bob has a neat idea but fucks up the execution. This reveal, if it came mid-ambush, would be a massive uptick for the tension of the showdown. Imagine them talking, Flavia stalling to get a proper gauge on Madeleine – then Madeleine feels the arrival of one of these terrible enemies. Cue ‘The Red Death’ etc etc – and then the moment of realization that there’s two, three, four all arriving in succession once the trap is actually sprung. Chapter 38 We rewind to 11:45 – Varney’s about to arrive on site at the Naval Yards. She’s loaded for bear with armour and communications gear, with Jackson there to give an opportunity for a last minute explanation of motives. Everyone involved wants to kill one another and think it needs the personal touch – because we probably forgot that in the last thirty pages. That said, there’s a legitimately creepy moment here:  Remember – Varney is a ghoul who is, to varying degrees, possessed by Anis. But she’s also her own person… and the degree to which Anis has overridden her over the centuries is so high she’s content to view her own destruction as more-or-less unimportant because she’s internalized how expendable she is. That Bob doesn’t seem to grasp how horrifying it is makes it more effective. Its just matter of fact. Varney decamps for the Yard to trip the ambush. First, Bob lets us in on the secret from NASA:   Yes – escape pods! Exactly when and what NASA designed them for is unclear, and I don’t really know of any they ever actually did build that’d fit the bill (that is to say: Bob made these up whole cloth), but given the nuclear aspect I suppose they’re some classified Project ORION gubbins or something from the Void Engineers arsenal. McCann arrives 7 minutes to Midnight, and the two finally meet in the Naval Yards. For a change, we’re actually given a description of McCann:  okay, we’re actually given a proper one this time, but I couldn’t resist:  They talk shop – nothing too interesting, except an indication that the events of McCann’s first appearance in Dark Destiny were Anis’s doing. The conversation, of course, turns to the Wonder Twins – but before it can get anywhere, the Red Death finally shows. Do we cut the chapter there? No – they plan how to take him first. McCann will stop him turning to mist and teleporting away, and Varney will finish the job. Chapter 39 Finally, we come to the confrontation we’ve been waiting for. First, they have to talk like reasonable people. Seker tries to sell Lameth and Anis on cooperation because the Nictuku are back and doing things like eating every single vampire in Buenos Aires, but neither are all that interested because who gives a poo poo about the Nictuku – it’s a concern, but not all that pressing. I kind of love the glib ‘who cares, man’ replies here – we know Lameth and Anis both do because they keep close tabs and fund expeditions to keep an eye on them but there’s just something funny about the idea of them shrugging and going ‘not a nosferatu, not my problem’. Seker, in turn, reveals – or at least, pretends to reveal – his plan:   Yet again, there’s something about this I love. Everything else treats Gehenna as an absolute terror, an inescapable doom. Anis, meanwhile, is just going ‘We each had one of the Antediluvians murdered, I’m really not that worried’. Its dumb and lacks in the horror stakes, but there’s something charmingly stupid about it. At last, the confrontation takes the inevitable turn. If neither will cooperate, Seker will just have to kill them both – and he reveals his master scheme was to start a war just to get these two right there and kill them. They’re puppets, but it’ll take months or years for Lameth and Anis to re-establish new pawns, and by then, it’ll be too late… And now, disappointment. This bit could’ve been an effective twist:  Is it shocking? No. Bob explained it to us last chapter. There’s no twist, no surprise, not even a real escalation. Its such a waste of a cool moment. The actual confrontation is pretty lame. They march slowly at the two from four sides, casting Flaming Hands now and then, and McCann conjures a force field to protect him and Varney. The highlight is when Varney reveals her other bit of NASA tech:   I love that her secret weapon is just a bunch of nerds with joysticks steering mars rovers on a suicide run – and as things go, its actually relatively clever. The Red Deaths can’t be harmed in Body of Fire, but you can neutralize the heat and the flames and render them relatively harmless. So, is that the end? Well, there’s two more books, so… no. Seker cackles maniacally and disappears into mist, revealing that he too has a secret back-up plan:  Fin. But wait, I said 40 chapters… Chapter 40: the Afterword McCann’s head bobs up from the Anacostia river. The Naval Yards are burning down in the true red death of raw, unfettered fire. He’s been saved by the mysterious dark shape – who could it be?  Again, not Bob’s worst work – but my god, it’d be better if he’d ended it on ‘protect you’! Final Thoughts So, there we have it: Book 1 of the most notorious White Wolf novels (not counting Eternal Hearts) ever printed. Dumb, badly written – but not, as the internet would lead you to believe, so incredibly bad they lack any redeeming characteristics. Not even, in the scheme of the early novels, that badly conceptualized or written. I think now you might all have had a chance to see why I have a little immature softspot for them – those little moments of pulpy goodness in between the dreck, and the glimpse of what could have been instead of what is. As an aside, the climactic destruction of the Naval Yards is another of those moments that gets referenced in other works - specifically, Heckel et al, DC by Night , 1995, 37. This reference could also be to the 1984 bombing but the description better fits the scale of Blood War's bombing. Since there’s no game mechanics involved to get detailed with, no art to break it up, and this isn’t a fiction-oriented thread, I’ll leave it to you all what comes next: I’ll leave the poll up for a few days for the lurkers.
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Jul 7, 2023 14:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:Now that’s a system for some mildly crunchy pulp action.
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Jul 7, 2023 14:26
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This was somehow both worse than I thought and a bit better. I'd definitely watch the crazy fire vampires battling big fuckoff NASA chemicals sprayers. PAY ATTENTION HOLLYWOOD
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Jul 7, 2023 15:12
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Speaking of Varney's potential Discipline the only thing it comes close to is maybe some high level Auspex but there's no telling because they seem to love to throw around proper nouns in this novel.
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Jul 7, 2023 15:26
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As someone with no emotional attachment or deep knowledge of the world or lore of the World of Darkness beyond that one Bloodlines video game: This book seems dumb, but not in a way that makes me mad at it. It has enough cool things in it I could read it on a cross-country flight and not want to die.
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Jul 7, 2023 15:30
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May do some quick RPG tie-in novel reviews once I'm done with UA3 Book 5. Mostly Delta Green with a little Unknown Armies and Call of Cthulhu sprinkled in.
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Jul 7, 2023 15:38
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I was going to say some stuff about Paths but, uh, JD, unless I missed something, I think you've mentioned Paths a lot but you haven't gotten to the section that explains what Paths are.
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Jul 7, 2023 15:41
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mellonbread posted:May do some quick RPG tie-in novel reviews once I'm done with UA3 Book 5. Mostly Delta Green with a little Unknown Armies and Call of Cthulhu sprinkled in. It'd be neat to see Stolze's own Godwalker reviewed.
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Jul 7, 2023 15:58
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Halloween Jack posted:I was going to say some stuff about Paths but, uh, JD, unless I missed something, I think you've mentioned Paths a lot but you haven't gotten to the section that explains what Paths are. Correct I've only touched on the Path of Evil Revelations because the other paths were in the players guide which I haven't reviewed yet. Asterite34 posted:As someone with no emotional attachment or deep knowledge of the world or lore of the World of Darkness beyond that one Bloodlines video game: Friend, most of the WoD is DUMB AS gently caress in fun and stupid ways. Except when it's gross. But mostly it's a lot of dumb poo poo that's pretty funny. I've only had a chance to read some of the old short stories and one of the novels, Gehenna, and that's a good book. The short stories vary in quality but I can't remember any that were really bad off hand.
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Jul 7, 2023 17:05
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The original run of the world of darkness was made by a bunch of very earnest guys in Georgia who hadn't really traveled much outside of the United States. Most of what came out around that time is mostly just well meaning ignorance rather than malice. This does run into some problems because there was basically no one on their incredibly white and mostly male staff to tell them that magikal natives are actually offensive and No the Romani aren't actually like that and Oh dear god what is Phil Brucato doing in the break room with that cucumber? When they moved to a more global freelancer model that stuff got better but that also meant less direct oversight, particularly when a book director went rogue like Brucato or McFarland did.
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Jul 7, 2023 17:18
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joylessdivision posted:Correct I've only touched on the Path of Evil Revelations because the other paths were in the players guide which I haven't reviewed yet. And they don't get interesting until Revised Player's Guide to the Sabbat anyway in my experience.
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Jul 7, 2023 17:28
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Kurieg posted:The original run of the world of darkness was made by a bunch of very earnest guys in Georgia who hadn't really traveled much outside of the United States. Most of what came out around that time is mostly just well meaning ignorance rather than malice. This does run into some problems because there was basically no one on their incredibly white and mostly male staff to tell them that magikal natives are actually offensive and No the Romani aren't actually like that and Oh dear god what is Phil Brucato doing in the break room with that cucumber? Minnesotans and guys from Georgia. MRH and Jonathan Tweet met at St.Olaf, remember. The Weicks were born in Illinois and originally did some work for the V&V product line for FGU.
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Jul 7, 2023 17:41
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Speaking as a Minnesotan. That doesn't make them any less incredibly white.
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Jul 7, 2023 17:45
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Man, between those guys and TSR in Lake Geneva, why do so many seminal works in the RPG industry come from the Upper Midwest? Is the sheer banality of existing here just conducive to an overactive fantasy life?
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Jul 7, 2023 17:48
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Detroit was another center with the Detroit Metro Gaming Club, TriTac, StarChilde, Timeline and Palladium all came from there. Then there was Champaign, Illinois with Judges Guild, and Normal, Illinois with Game Designer's Workshop, The big push was the heavy wargaming culture in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota. (source: I was part of that culture in the mid-70s)
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Jul 7, 2023 17:58
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Asterite34 posted:Man, between those guys and TSR in Lake Geneva, why do so many seminal works in the RPG industry come from the Upper Midwest? Is the sheer banality of existing here just conducive to an overactive fantasy life?
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Jul 7, 2023 18:28
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Kurieg posted:The original run of the world of darkness was made by a bunch of very earnest guys in Georgia who hadn't really traveled much outside of the United States. Most of what came out around that time is mostly just well meaning ignorance rather than malice. This does run into some problems because there was basically no one on their incredibly white and mostly male staff to tell them that magikal natives are actually offensive and No the Romani aren't actually like that and Oh dear god what is Phil Brucato doing in the break room with that cucumber? I'll be honest, of the stuff Brucato has written that I've read so far, he's not terrible* And yeah, most of the not great racial stuff in the early books I've encountered (other than anything dealing with Asia because good lord is that poo poo just racist as hell) has been "Oof, I see what you're going for, but this ain't it chief." Misguided ideas of being progressive is what I'd call a lot of that stuff. Like good that you're talking about indigenous peoples but...uhhhh....They're not just magical because they're indigenous. It's like reading a Stephen King novel and coming across his magical black characters. Not great but you can tell his heart is in the right place, even if now 30+ years on we go "Oooof man" *I'm aware he gets worse later.....and I'm not looking forward to it 
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Jul 7, 2023 18:33
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It’s too cold to go outside 35% of the year, too hot and humid to go outside another 35% of the year, and everyone has basements. So child and man child alike would just get sent down to the basement to entertain themselves more than half the year. And there’s an abandoned pingpong and/or pool table that you can use to spread out a bunch of minis. ——— I do love the liquid nitrogen squirter rovers because I can easily imagine that happening in a (his kid’s) game. 6 dots in Resources player: I buy us some battletechs with freezing lasers. Storyteller: That’s not a thing. Moneybags turns to nerdiest player beseechingly. Nerdiest player: Um, actually, it’s a battle mech. Battletech is the name of the game. And…I guess you could kind of imagine a cold laser as a jet of liquid nitrogen, so what if maybe….
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Jul 7, 2023 18:44
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joylessdivision posted:Misguided ideas of being progressive is what I'd call a lot of that stuff. Like good that you're talking about indigenous peoples but...uhhhh....They're not just magical because they're indigenous. There's a certain line in Rage Across New York I genuinely can't wait for you to get to related to Native portrayal. And the earliest full book you might get to by Satyros Brucato is the original Black Furies Tribebook and it's very short because it was the old style splatbooks but boy howdy is it a good primer for Phil the Thrill's work.
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Jul 7, 2023 19:26
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Dawgstar posted:There's a certain line in Rage Across New York I genuinely can't wait for you to get to related to Native portrayal. And the earliest full book you might get to by Satyros Brucato is the original Black Furies Tribebook and it's very short because it was the old style splatbooks but boy howdy is it a good primer for Phil the Thrill's work. I've had a minor eye twitch from seeing native Amazonians referred to as "Indians" while reading Rage Across the Amazon because.....that's just so incorrect lol, but aside from my general dislike of the whole "Pure Ones" label, I've actually been impressed with the book and it's generally good handling of the indigenous peoples in the book, and specifically referring to a Get of Fenris characters actions as "Imperialism" was a real good line. I may not be wowed by the Balam as a group (or the Bastet as portrayed so far) but I kinda love that the main Balam character in the books motivation is specifically "gently caress all of you, get out of my jungle" and is loving up Pentex and Garou alike because he's not going to stand for this imperialist bullshit.  Also MOLKOLÉ!  love the Molkolé.
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Jul 7, 2023 20:12
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Infinity RPG: PanOceania Internet Illiteracy PanOceania's obsessive embrace of AR, comlogs and ALEPH mean that taking part in society literally requires Maya access pretty much constantly. Without access to Maya, you can't use banks or financial services, can't get schooling, can't access most entertainment, and can't do most jobs. However, people who do not have continuous Maya access, a geist and high tech hardware or wetware do exist - the Ateks. They are poor and disenfranchised people who are denied the access to PanO's extensive social safety net that full citizens have. They don't have the money to stay up to date with tech and generally do not have constant or even regular Maya access, rendering them unable to materially improve their circumstances in a very vicious cycle. Some Ateks choose this life for ideological reasons, either because they are Luddites who fear the march of technology or because they fear that over-reliance on ALEPH will remove some key trait in humanity, while others are Ateks because they have been rendered destitute, often due to chronic physical or mental conditions that they were unable to effectively treat before their funds ran out. While healthcare is generally speaking a basic right in PanO, some conditions are still too expensive to manage longterm, and some mental conditions are resistant to treatment and exacerbated by the panopticon of Maya, driving sufferers to live as Ateks. Others are criminals who choose the Atek life in hopes that it will make them harder for the law to track. (It does, but the cost is high.) The majority of Ateks, however, are generational. Their parents and grandparents were Ateks for one of the above reasons, and from childhood, they were not given the opportunity to access the technology and resources that would let them escape the status. Some organizations within PanO do exist that attempt to provide services for Ateks seeking to integrate into mainstream PanOceanian society, but these charitable groups are generally small, overtaxed and unable to provide for nearly as many people as they want to, especially with the costs involved in getting even a single Atek to technological parity with the average PanOceanian. The Atek population is growing, not least because birth control implants and other medical technology are one more thing Ateks often have limited access to, and having large families is one of the few ways they can manage to have enough labor on hand to provide for themselves. Even with the aid of a charitable organization, however, the systemic pressures that prevent Ateks from improving their social standing are extensive, and most PanOceanians have little to no empathy for them. Often, PanOceanians do not understand the difficulties of Atek life or the barriers that stand between an Atek and even the demogrant lifestyle. PanOceanians as a whole tend to be extremely prejudiced against Ateks, assuming they have chosen their lifestyle and deserve it for their past decision to reject modern technology. Most PanOceanians simply assume Ateks do not want to integrate or change their lifestyles. A number are deeply bigoted about this and have invented stereotypes for why this is the case, usually based on crime and the desire of criminals to avoid notice. A typical argument by anti-Atek groups is that if Ateks wanted to change, they would, and that it'd be simple to just pick up the same basic tools as everyone else. This is, as we've noted, untrue - but it is an argument that is used by these groups to advance policies that further marginalize Ateks and drive them into slums on the fringes of PanOceanian cities. So what do Ateks actually do to live? For most, it's a daily struggle to find any kind of work. Atek slums operate on cash, barter and favors to each other, and most Ateks can only make a living as manual laborers and migrant workers who are often deeply exploited by their employers in agriculture and industry. The slums are rough, makeshift housing that often lack good sanitation, plumbing and even electricity. They are transported to and from their labor sites in large buses and other transports owned by the factories, orchards and farms that employ them. The pay is abysmal, and often Atek workers must purchase meals from their employers out of pocket. They cannot easily speak out against the abuses they face, as they will simply be blacklisted and replaced by another worker. Criminal organizations are commonplace in Atek slums because they are free of the normal monitoring that PanOceanisn face, but also because organized crime groups and gangs often provide a better and more capable support network than PanOceanian law and governance do. The organized criminals of PanO are very aware that they can trust Ateks to protect them if they provide what are, for the criminals, essentially cheap and easy support. This means cops and detectives seeking information in an Atek slum generally get no answers at all - the Ateks are more than aware of who is more likely to actually help them, between the state and a mobster. Our other PanOceanian subset that gets a more detailed look is the Space Exploration Division, an extensively funded government agency with the largest exploratory fleet in the Human Sphere. Their main job is, obviously, exploration, and the Division is technically speaking an empresa, backed not just by government funds but private enterprise. They work closely with corporate exploration and mining efforts. They are primarily looking for habitable worlds, but exploitable natural resources are also high on their agenda, after all. They primarily rely on unmanned probes and small ships with skeleton crews, chosen for a mix of scientific and military expertise. Missions for SED crews are either exploration or survey missions, and the two require different skills. The job of an exploration mission is intentionally loose and largely left up to the crew to self-determine. Typically, a system will be subjected to spectral analysis to determine the presence of planets or proto-planets, and with some luck maybe even details on what might be present on those worlds, but the details are hard to get from simple scans. Mission objectives for an exploration team are typically to first confirm the scan results and then decide for themselves what points of interest to explore more closely. Survey missions, on the other hand, are typically sent when a probe reports interesting data back. These missions are more specific in nature, with specific details requested from the team, generally related to particular orbital bodies or minerals within accretion disks or asteroids. Survey missions usually have a mix of corporate and government backing, while exploratory missions are more purely governmental, and survey missions are often explicitly seeking areas where settlements can be built, where resource extraction facilities will operate best, or so on. Next time: Acontecimento
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Jul 7, 2023 21:43
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It's crazy that Masterbook/Bloodshadows is a game system with an entire worksheet for repeated interaction with a core mechanic. You build your character, and that doesn't seem fun; but then the bookwork doesn't stop there. Spells take the worksheet to get off the ground, and the worksheet is required for every spell your players might want to use more than once. Magic is everywhere, but it's mostly a pain in the rear end. There's a lot of accounting and record-keeping in this system, but it results in mediocre player characters. Your character isn't really allowed to be a Doc Savage polymath in this pulp-themed game, which is fine, but it doesn't seem like trying to play a Humphrey Bogart or Joe Shishido type of noir cool guy is often all that great either. The rules seem to suck all the life out of play, but I especially hate the table(s) you have to consult just to roll your drat dice. I'm glad the setting was appreciated and got rescued though, it's neat. I love the idea of petty demons willingly settling somewhere lovely because the zombie Hooverville where they work blue-collar jobs for peanuts is still better than Hell.
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Jul 8, 2023 00:14
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