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Loomer posted:Ideally you want two of the precise same height. Who are paid extra for every inch of height!
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Mar 16, 2024 11:35
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Height? *looks down to his pants* Sorry I appear to be at the wrong job interview.
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Mar 16, 2024 11:39
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LatwPIAT posted:Who are paid extra for every inch of height! It's such a gloriously stupid time period in so many ways. Absurdly modern until you turn a corner and bam, there's a guy still using a flintlock rifle to poach deer from a guy who's family has owned the rights to them for the last six centuries, or a ship still using goddamn muzzle-loading cannons (mileage may vary after 1850). Also the best point in time to run oMage, honestly.
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Mar 16, 2024 11:44
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Loomer posted:It's such a gloriously stupid time period in so many ways. Absurdly modern until you turn a corner and bam, there's a guy still using a flintlock rifle to poach deer from a guy who's family has owned the rights to them for the last six centuries, or a ship still using goddamn muzzle-loading cannons (mileage may vary after 1850). Also the best point in time to run oMage, honestly. This is where I can jump in. The British insistence on using Rifled Muzzleloaders is particularly loving insane because they kept getting bigger and longer and more ungainly and the method of loading them became more and more "Someone WILL die doing this," up until they rolled the dice too much and double loaded a cannon during gunnery drills. The Cannon exploded and killed a lot of people. At the same time, its easy to see why the RN were sticking with the RMLs- they had gone early in for Rifled Breech loaders, but they proved unreliable in use and were only adopted after the technology had matured.
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Mar 16, 2024 17:18
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LatwPIAT, Loomer, appreciate the breakdown!
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Mar 16, 2024 18:48
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Loomer posted:It's such a gloriously stupid time period in so many ways. Absurdly modern until you turn a corner and bam, there's a guy still using a flintlock rifle to poach deer from a guy who's family has owned the rights to them for the last six centuries, or a ship still using goddamn muzzle-loading cannons (mileage may vary after 1850). Also the best point in time to run oMage, honestly. Gloriously stupid time periods are great RPG material. I keep wanting to set a game in 16th Century Italy, with the players hired by a man to steal a dead mathematician's notebook that contains the secret formula for solving cubic equations, in order to bring down the dead mathematician's student, who's an undefeated champion of mathematical duels due to his mastery of the secret formula.
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Mar 16, 2024 19:09
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LatwPIAT posted:Gloriously stupid time periods are great RPG material. I keep wanting to set a game in 16th Century Italy, with the players hired by a man to steal a dead mathematician's notebook that contains the secret formula for solving cubic equations, in order to bring down the dead mathematician's student, who's an undefeated champion of mathematical duels due to his mastery of the secret formula.
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Mar 16, 2024 19:34
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By far my favorite setting to do dumb historical poo poo in is post-plague Europe/hundred years' war up to the early renaissance with the Ottomans showing up to flip the table. Everything is loose, there aren't really any megastates, and mercenaries are the biggest they'll ever be.
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Mar 16, 2024 19:37
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By popular demand posted:Alls I know is there's supposed to be a young handsome guy as footman. In bed with your wife.
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Mar 16, 2024 23:42
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LatwPIAT posted:Gloriously stupid time periods are great RPG material. I keep wanting to set a game in 16th Century Italy, with the players hired by a man to steal a dead mathematician's notebook that contains the secret formula for solving cubic equations, in order to bring down the dead mathematician's student, who's an undefeated champion of mathematical duels due to his mastery of the secret formula. Huh, just watched a two year old Veritasium video on that piece of math history less that an hour ago, neat synchronicity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUzklzVXJwo PoontifexMacksimus fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Mar 17, 2024 |
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Mar 17, 2024 03:09
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Huh, just watched a two year old Veritasium video on that piece of math history less that an hour ago, neat synchronicity. It's a very fun little story that involves so many weird historical details at every level. First you have Scipione del Ferro keeping secret the solution to the depressed cubic equation in order to protect himself in mathematical duels, because oh yeah mathematicians used to challenge each other to duels, with their jobs on the line. Then you have Nicolo Tartaglia challenging Ferro's student Fior in a duel and unleashing his own secret technique like it's the mathematical version of a martial arts flick. Then you have Gerolamo Cardano, sworn to not reveal the secret of the general cubic equation by Tartaglia, doing a bit of detective-work by searching the records of Tartaglia's duel with Fior and learning that Fior knew the solution to the depressed cubic, but probably learned it from his master Ferro, so he acquires one of Ferro's notebooks so he can combine the solution to the depressed cubic with a method to turn any cubic into a depressed one, all in order to get out of his oath to Tartaglia. Which leads to a second mathematical duel as Cardano's student Ferrari seeks to defend his master's honour from Tartaglia's attacks, because that's also a thing. Really, the only thing you have to do to turn this into a fantastically dramatic and exciting PC adventure is make them do some of the detective work and maybe a heist to steal a Ferro's secret notebook.
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Mar 17, 2024 08:23
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Loomer posted:Previously on... We return to the early 90s and Bob Weinberg’s Masquerade of the Red Death. Last time, we had bad attempts at tension-building and idiots falling for blatant disguises. This time? Let’s find out, as we return to...  Part Two, Chapters 18 to 20 Chapter 18 We’re back with the mafia, waiting to find a trace on Madeleine Giovanni. Don Lazzari is keeping busy:  Love it, no notes. Anyway, they’ve just had a tip-off from a two-bit New Jersey hood who’s found the insanely obvious MG truck. One questions the wisdom of giving random low-end wiseguys a direct line to the literal worldwide leader of the mafia, but hey, omerta or something. Bob’s aware of this too, to an extent:  Tony is of course logging the calls, though he puts in a frantic ‘stop monitoring the line’ call right after this not-so-subtle warning. That aside, this is interesting in one important respect. The Syndicate here is in reference to the American Mafia, contrasted with the actual Mafia, which shows Bob’s aware it isn’t a direct vertical line despite all other indications. It makes some of his other decisions, where he treats it as such, all the odder. Blanchard is dismissed to handle some logistics because Lazzari has important matters to handle:  RIP, Don Lazarri, you would’ve loved True Blood. Joey Campbell, the hood from Jersey, arrives to get his money. He’s… Not a great character.   Its nice to have a male character described by Bob for a change, but the guy’s painfully generic and too dumb to live. Naturally, he gets his head ripped off after informing Don Lazzari of the truck’s location, and its not entirely clear if Don Lazzari was ever going to let him leave alive. He makes a moral lesson of it but its firmly in an older model of Mafia understanding – that they rule solely by fear and not by making for good business for their subordinates (and also fear, but in moderation). This, though, is deliberate. As Bob foreshadows to close out the chapter:  Chapter 19 We swap POV to Alicia Varney and her newfound ally, Walter, with Molly Wade tagging along in the backseat. Walter’s driving, and Bob gives us one of his better moments right off the bat:  Dumb? Yes. Pulpy? Yes. Fun? Yes. And that’s what we want from Bob. Boulle gives us an attempt at actual literature, albeit sabotaged from the get-go by being a Vampire novel. Bob makes no such pretence, so stuff like this and Lazzari reading Anne Rice make me grin. Alicia’s none too pleased because ‘inconspicuous’ means ‘25MPH’, but in fairness, the idea is that speeding through the night is more likely to attract attention. ‘Obey road laws, keep to a reasonable speed, and do nothing exceptional’ is pretty classic grey man stuff, and Alicia is still thinking like Persephone Hazard. Which could be a problem, because…  To top it off, Bob likes his World is a gently caress quotient:  This remains Bob in his full swing: clumsy, poorly constructed, but internally consistent, self-aware, and hitting those ol’ pulp high notes. Two paragraphs later, we get another little nugget:  Unfortunately, things then turn serious and our road trip movie segues back to talking about the Red Death for all of five seconds, then back to road trip vibes with questions like ‘how did Molly and Walter hook up anyway’ (she likes to gamble and he made her a bet she couldn’t spy on Justine Bern), and then back to the Red Death. Its fairly real, I suppose, but it makes for an irritating reading experience. It doesn’t help that Bob’s at his worst when he’s getting high on the rules and his own not-so-mysterious mystery. He wastes words re-summarising what everyone already knows, like so:  Then more about the Nictuku rising, etc, etc. All of this is repeated every fifty pages or so in case we forgot, and its tedious. There’s also more talk of Dire McCann – Walter knows his name, so obviously Lameth’s doing a poo poo-poor job of staying under the radar. Then, in case we hadn’t figured out what the deal with Galbraith is, Bob spells it out:   That’s how the chapter ends, and god its frustrating. It should be a cool and terrifying reveal, but by giving us the heavy Wink Wink Nudge Nudge with Vargoss first, there’s really no way to not see it coming during Galbraith’s actual appearance. Bob’s worst habit in this trilogy is building and then wasting tension, and then trying to cash in on it afterwards. Chapter 20 No switch this time – we’re still with Alicia. Dawn’s approaching so Walter and Molly are hiding out in a lovely motel, but Alicia, as a ghoul, feels free to continue in the daylight. She’s probably safer doing so, frankly, so points to her. The groundwork for an assault on her tower is fairly clumsily laid:  Aided by Presence and Dominate, she hitches her way into NYC by basically turning on the ‘dumb-rear end’ switch in a succession of male drivers, then uses the same powers to more-or-less rob six prostitutes, then to command a pimp to commit a particularly grisly suicide off-camera when he tries to do something about it. All that’s settled in two-thirds of a page, so we can get on to the actual meat. This is a rare case of Bob skipping sections and giving loose detail at the right time. Alicia reaches the Varney Building at 11AM for what will probably be the last time. She’s sad to have to abandon it, and fair enough:  Her plan is to get her poo poo, secure certain things, and ditch out rather than waste time and energy defending it. She wants to fight the Red Death, not Galbraith, and despite Walter’s beliefs, she has doubts Galbraith is under any kind of influence:  Take another shot in the ‘Did Bob actually read Chaos Factor?’ game. There’s a secret entrance to the tower, of course. Its in the backrooms of a small eatery across the street that caters to all the office workers at a shockingly low cost, subsidized by the Varney Corporation. Bob takes the chance to World is a gently caress it a little:  This does, of course, imply that Alicia is responsible for at least a couple of crack dens and bookies, but hey: that’s vampires for ya. There’s a ghoul eating in there, one the staff don’t recognize, so Alicia does what anyone sane would do: she walks over, says hi, and gives him a massive heart attack on the spot. How? Unclear, but its still pretty neat. It’d be even neater if ‘mysterious heart attack at dinner’ hadn’t already been used at the very start of the trilogy, which robs it of some of the ‘wow cool power!!’ effect. Access to the tower is via a Get Smart entrance sequence complete with hidden lifts and… this, which frankly seems gratuitous:  A second elevator takes her to the secret 13th floor, disguised by… having no windows and a mural covering the external walls of the 12th-to-15th floors. Okay, Bob. No furniture except cabinets of clothes and weapons, and four more secret elevators – one for each of the four secret escapes, plus one up to her penthouse and down to ‘far beneath the foundations’. What could be in there? Don’t worry, Bob tells us right away: Anis’s coffin, a silver sarcophagus.  Now, this is just me, but we’ve established vampires can sense power auras and poo poo. Maybe, just maybe, the best plan isn’t to abandon the torpid and vulnerable Anis to an enemy that is specifically hunting for her. Either way, Alicia has a pressing concern. She’s after Sanford Jackson, who’s probably up top. She’s worried about Sabbat ghouls having infiltrated the penthouse, so she decides to go without guns in case she hits Jackson by accident. She’s also a crack marksman – and you know, fair, even the best marksmen can hit a bystander. That said, it’s part of a pattern with Bob. His super special dolls can do anything whenever its helpful, but become idiots whenever he needs. But it does turn out she’s right to worry:  Six ghouls. She’s tired. She’s unarmed. They’re Sabbat ghouls, servants of the Blood Guard, so they’ll be tough to trick, tough to terrorize. So what does she do?  drat it, Bob.  drat it, Bob. Her plan is literally ‘strip down, open the doors, shout ‘Here I Am’, and then, well…  You know, its dumb horny, but I do kinda dig it. Its so absurd. Its even crazier when she then proceeds to kill all of them not with a gun, not with her hands, not with a knife, not with some Ultraviolet-style bullshit ‘shoot at me and hit your buddy’ gun-kata nonsense, but… by exploding their heads with her mind. Yes, really:  Sadly, she only explodes one head. She kills another with a heart attack, makes two of them shoot each other in the head, then makes the two survivors throw themselves down an elevator shaft. Did she need to be just about naked for that? No. Did she need to be doing cartwheels? I struggle to see how! Is it some anime-rear end bullshit? Yes. And that’s what makes it fun. Jackson is alive. We got to see his condition when Alicia burst in, and its implied that its actually her rage at what they’ve done to him that let her explode a guy’s head like her name is Gallagher and he’s made of watermelons:   Where’d they get the cross is what I want to know? Did they make it? Bring it up with them? Either way, he’s alive, and he actually played a minor role in the fight:  Jesus christ Sanford’s had a life, ain’t he? Of all the characters in this trilogy who I would’ve liked to get a spin-off series going on adventures together, its Snake-Eating Sanford Jackson and Flavia the Human Weapon. You could do some heavy pulp poo poo with that tag-team. Alicia gives him some basic first aid, and then Bob ends out the chapter, and this installment, on a half-way decent line:  Three not-too-shabby chapters, on the whole. Bob’s gotta Bob, but there’s memorable set pieces. Varney flipping out like some kind of acrobat-witch, popping heads with her mind while doing backflips around the room in her underpants, is legitimately cool even if the details of how she’s exceptionally good looking while stripping feel tawdry. Walter driving like an old lady makes me laugh, and even Don Lazzari liking dumb vampire novels is a whole vibe. Bob’s genuinely at his best when he’s self-aware about how silly this all is, and when he captures that hyper-ventilating fourteen-year-old vibe. Next time: The Death of a Child, some more Galbraith bullshit, The Inadequacy of Poetry, and Etrius: The Dumbest gently caress. Also would someone else, for the love of god, post a review? Otherwise this thread is going to have like 3 drat pages of me rambling about shameful nerd novels uninterrupted by cool art or neat poo poo.
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Mar 17, 2024 08:36
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Bob unironically doing the "my character takes off her clothes so she's more streamlined." 
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Mar 17, 2024 14:09
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All the smart hacks know to have the character wear a form hugging body suit for this kind of horned up action.
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Mar 17, 2024 14:29
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There's a whole other trilogy Bob wrote for the oWoD involving Mage, and as memory serves, it also has a scene like that. I'm guessing ol' Bobby owned a VHS tape of some 80s action movie with that sequence - one where the tape quality suddenly drops during it for some reason.
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Mar 17, 2024 14:56
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For young people: that's a sign the tape got worn by repeated rewinds and rewatches of the scene.
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Mar 17, 2024 15:18
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Is bob the one who had vampires fly across the atlantic superman style or was that another bad vampire author?
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Mar 17, 2024 15:51
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Kurieg posted:Is bob the one who had vampires fly across the atlantic superman style or was that another bad vampire author? That was the devil known as Brian Herbert and/or Marie Landis. That book is perhaps the [i]actual]/i] single worst oWoD novel, but its close - BoTSun is at least memorably terrible. 'Watcher', an early Werewolf novel, is... Not. There's also Pomegranates Full and Fine in the 'utterly forgettable' stakes, and the infamous As One Dead, featuring a Toreador-Brujah hybrid courtesy of one Nancy Kilpatrick, of regular vampire novel fame. My money, personally, remains on House of Secrets for being the single most egregiously racist thing White Wolf ever published.
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Mar 17, 2024 16:08
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LatwPIAT posted:It's a very fun little story that involves so many weird historical details at every level. First you have Scipione del Ferro keeping secret the solution to the depressed cubic equation in order to protect himself in mathematical duels, because oh yeah mathematicians used to challenge each other to duels, with their jobs on the line. Then you have Nicolo Tartaglia challenging Ferro's student Fior in a duel and unleashing his own secret technique like it's the mathematical version of a martial arts flick. Then you have Gerolamo Cardano, sworn to not reveal the secret of the general cubic equation by Tartaglia, doing a bit of detective-work by searching the records of Tartaglia's duel with Fior and learning that Fior knew the solution to the depressed cubic, but probably learned it from his master Ferro, so he acquires one of Ferro's notebooks so he can combine the solution to the depressed cubic with a method to turn any cubic into a depressed one, all in order to get out of his oath to Tartaglia. Which leads to a second mathematical duel as Cardano's student Ferrari seeks to defend his master's honour from Tartaglia's attacks, because that's also a thing. Just replace mathematical equations with magical spells and we're set. Or more preferably, make the mathematical equations have magical powers.
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Mar 17, 2024 21:21
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Loomer posted:That was the devil known as Brian Herbert and/or Marie Landis. Any relation?
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Mar 17, 2024 21:42
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  An HA Tokugawa(left) closes in on an SSC Monarch(right). Who wins this depends on if the Tokugawa can close before the Monarch blows it to hell with about 3 quintillion missiles. So, the Compendium. This is where all the good stuff in Lancer lives. Where everything cool exists. There's four main sections to the Compendium: Talents, Gear Tags, Pilot Gear Catalogue, and Mech Catalogue. They're pretty self-explanatory, so let me add my own rules to this. I will be covering all canon materials for Lancer that I am personally aware of, as well as three of the best Homebrew books for the game: Intercorp, Grimm & Sons, and GMS Crisis Catalogue. These three are well-balanced in general and contain a wealth of new mech frames and equipment, core bonuses, and sometimes even talents. When it comes to things that are from a particular book, I will label them as such. Any homebrew material will be listed separately so you can safely ignore them if you like, as well, though Intercorp and Grimm & Sons will eventually get their own series of posts, as those two have too much content to not dedicate at least 3 posts to each. Yea, I know. There's a lot. That aside, we'll go through the Compendium more or less in order, starting with Talents. I'll be using Comp/Con for all of these so as to not create confusion with formatting differences, and I'll primarily be using images of the book to show things off rather than typing it all out. As I go through the Compendium, I'll offer my opinions on the various things in it, giving my nay or yay on all that's here. There's very few things in Lancer that are just not worth using, so there will be very few nays, but I am going to skim over the Pilot gear stuff a little more than everything else, given that it's really not all that important to Lancer as a whole. That said, onward, starting with Talents! Talents are not something Pilots can use, they only apply to Mechs, so even in mech combat, if a pilot gets out of their mech, they don't get those Talents. Keep that in mind. Each Talent has 3 ranks, presented via roman numerals. A PC gets to choose three different Talents at Rank I when they're made at LL0, and from there, they get to either get a new Talent or increase the rank of a Talent they already have every LL they gain. As with everything else, you can totally swap Talents out whenever you finish a mission, changing them around however you like. If that means you want to go from having Rank I in three different talents to Rank III in one talent and Rank I in another as soon as you hit LL1, go ahead. Be Lancer's guest. Also, a warning: This section will be VERY image heavy. Without further ado: The TALENTS!  i'm using the HORUS Terminal theme for comp/con, by the way, I just like the coloration a lot. The silly banter on the front page is also pretty great. A Talent based around flying, Ace is one I'm pretty familiar with, as the DMPC I was using was in an Emperor with Ace, using it to zip around all over the battlefield to line up shots (at the player's request) and to provide support. It synergizes very well with Bonded, the next Talent on the list, as well. Acrobatics allows you to move whenever an attack misses you, so you can draw fire and use that to scoot all the way across a battlefield, basically stopped by nothing. It also gives you a nice boost to Agility in the bargain. Ace gives you extra movement speed with Rank II, but you should be careful: many sources of Flying already generate Heat, so use Afterburners only if you're secure in that you won't have reactor Stress as a result. Rank III is absolutely amazing, especially when combined with Bonded: With a Quick Action, you give yourself a Reaction that allows you to move up to your full speed AGAIN as long as you: end your turn flying, and your movement you next to a character. Thus allowing you to quickly get up next to allies or enemies alike. With full ranks in Ace, there's basically nothing on the field that isn't in imminent danger of having you in their face in no time flat.  Bonded is excellent if you're in a Defender mech, but it's also great for just about anyone, really. With Rank I, you get to pick a character who you're best buds with, and get +1 ACC if you're adjacent to them (see the synergy with Ace?). Even better, it stacks: If the other character agrees on best bud status, you get +2 ACC instead! Rank II gives you the ability to take damage for your bondmate if you're next to them, as well. Try that in a Drake or White Witch for extra laughs! Rank III more or less either forces enemies to target someone other than your bondmate, or give you a Reaction attack on them. It being a Reaction means you can Barrage AND still get this attack, which can be a weapon mount you've already fired. Kind of on the weaker side for a Rank III effect, IMO, but Bonded is still worth going all in on if you're planning on using this Talent particularly to make a squishy more effective.  Brawler is a bit of a hodgepodge. While Rank I only applies to grappling, Rank II and III can apply to multiple things. While it's a good Talent for any mech that expects to be up close and personal a lot, the ISP-N Blackbeard, ISP-N Empakaai, and G&S Volk can all benefit far more from this Talent, since they're mechs focused on grappling. To a lesser extent, the ISP-N Caliban and G&S Max get benefits from Rank III, with their focus on Ramming. Rank III is the first of many Talents that require you to do a particular thing 6 times before you get to unleash a devastating effect. In this case, Knockout Blow is a Full Action that forces a target to make a Hull Save or take 2d6+2 Kinetic damage and be Stunned until the end of their next turn, forcing them to have to skip a turn. Pretty nice, though the Hull Save means it's probably the weakest of these particular Talent effects, since if the enemy saves against it, you wasted your Brawler Die for nothing.  Brutal isn't a Talent I prefer. Rank II and III are nice enough, but Rank I has a 5% chance to proc. It's nice when it happens, but it has such a small chance that you might just be better off getting another Talent instead. If you want Rank II and III, and you might because they're really good, you might just want to wait until you can just put three ranks into Brutal in one go. Predator just can't cut the mustard as an effect.  Something to note here because I actually don't think I brought it up to this point: Protocols are a special kind of Free Action that must be activated at the beginning of your turn before anything else. You can activate any number of them as long as you don't activate the same one twice. So as long as you have a Rifle weapon with this Talent, you basically always get +1 ACC by default unless you have a reason you can't. Rank II lets you take +1 DFF for the hopes of doing extra damage with a critical hit, and that DFF just cancels out the ACC you get from Rank I. And Rank III lets you do called shots with crits, with special effects along the way. These are all very specialized effects, but if you're in an Artillery or Striker mech using rifle-class weapons, you can't go wrong with this one. If you don't want to use rifles at all, this Talent is utterly useless.  Centimane is an interesting Talent. Nexuses aren't particularly common, and while some mechs focus on them, they're still few and far between. I can only think of one mech in particular that makes great use of nexus-class weapons. At the same time, this Talent rules. It makes any Nexus, even the weakest ones, terrifying to be hit by. Keep in mind that there is nothing stopping a Lancer with this Talent proccing all three Ranks at once with one crit, more or less making a single target utterly helpless AND without any armor. And since Rank II can work multiple times a round, you can Shred another target on the way. When you get deep into Lancer, say, about LL8 or so, crits become more common than non-crits. It's easy to say why the Hundred Hands are so terrifyingly effective.  A must if you intend to play a melee/ranged hybrid role, Combined Arms allows you to ignore the penalty from shooting while in melee, and lets you become cover. Rank I isn't THAT great, a lot of mech frames give cover to adjacent allies. But Rank II is well worth it, and Rank III is excellent. The latter works especially well for the ISP-N Störtebeker, which is a mech designed to alternate between melee and ranged. It's a pretty boring Talent, but it's effective.  If Combined Arms was the big Talent for using both ranged and melee, Duelist is for focusing on melee. That said, only Rank III applies to Auxiliary, Heavy, or Superheavy melee weapons, instead this Talent focuses on Main ones. It does a LOT for Main Melee, though. Free ACC is only the most minor of effects. Unlike other Die-granting Talents, Blademaster works a little differently, since you can spend dice to have special effects rather than waiting to build one die down to 1. Duelist is solely focused on giving melee fighters more options, because more options are always helpful to keep them in the game instead of focused down.  The same kind of Talent as the last three, but for drones. This is actually important, SUPER important, to get if you want to play with Drones with more than just a passing interest. Shepherd Drone lets you move a single drone you control up to 4 hexes. It does not specify that the drone has to have a speed at all, just that you can move them. Which means you can move immobile drones like turret drones. This is ridiculous. Invigorate makes this even more ridiculous. Invigorate allows you to draw a line from your mech to an ally or allied drone within range 3. Any ally that are targets or in the line's path gain Overshield 4, enemies take 2 energy damage. Did I mention that you can keep doing this, forever, with the caveat of not being able to target the same ally twice? You can't connect the same one twice, but you can criss-cross the same target multiple times. Until you run out of friendlies to boop with your laser grid. This is astoundingly good if you focus almost entirely on drones.  All this to say you make your own custom weapon, gradually getting more ridiculous as it goes. And it doesn't take up a weapon mount. Because it's so customizable, you can make it a lot of different abilities, from Frame Traits to Talents. One thing to note of interest is that TECHNICALLY, Rank III can provide you less shots of this weapon than Rank I, since the minimum for Rank I is Limited 3, and the minimum for Rank III is Limited 2. Little bit of an oversight, there, but maybe the fact that you can end up with Limited 12 makes up for it.  You wanna use big melee weapons? Executioner has got you, fam. Executioner is a lot more focused on dealing with multiple targets than single ones, but it adds a lot to that particular field. This is especially powerful with Superheavy melees, since you can only use those with a Barrage Action. This removes an issue with this: If you miss, your chance to do damage is wasted. Not so with Executioner.  Sort of a support version of a Ranger's Hunter's Mark in D&D, Valiant Aid lets you use a Reaction so your Ally can reroll a missed attack against your marked target. Rank III practically forces your marked target to face you down, since the penalties for not doing so are pretty severe. That said, an enemy could attack you with one weapon, and then use another weapon on an ally without penalty, but that's still at least one attack your allies don't have to deal with.  If you use ranged Auxiliary weapons, and haven't forgotten the face of your father, this is for you. Return Fire lets you get a Reaction shot off on an enemy that successfully hit you, as long as your shot is from a ranged Auxiliary weapon they're in range of. And Rank III? Rank III is an absolutely monstrous amount of damage to add on. The ISP-N Raleigh's Handcannon can especially benefit from this, like it was MADE for it. But it works with basically any weapon to do a sudden burst of gently caress-you from weapons that generally don't do very much damage by themselves. Even better, if you use AoE Auxiliaries like Missile Racks or Thermal Pistols, every single hit with them counts for the Gunslinger die. Hit enough targets at once and you can get the die down to 1 in one turn.  This isn't a very exciting Talent, but it's great for missions with multiple encounters. Rank I is kind of me. It's really only worth it if everyone has a bunch of Limited gear, but Rank II and III save this Talent. Clearing almost all Conditions for free when Stabilizing is excellent, as otherwise you need to use that option over reloading, clearing burn, or clearing an ally's conditions. It's more or less just giving you a freebie! Nice. And Rank III is what Rank I wishes it was. Getting back Limited and repairing Structure for free every rest is incredibly helpful. At least one player should have this Talent maxed at all times.  Rank I isn't as great as it sounds: a lot of Techs don't consume Lock On and I'm unsure if using Lock On to get ACC counts as the Tech Attack itself doing so. If it does, though, it IS as great as it sounds. If the Tech Attack is an Invade, this is 2 heat on top of the original 2 heat the Invade Action gives you, and this is an automatic effect that doesn't count as the Invade option you get to choose afterwards. A lot of mechs might just choose to soak the heat, though, so be careful. Rank 2 gives you some more options for Invade: Jam Cockpit prevents a pilot from Mounting or Dismounting a Mech, though they can still Eject; Disable Life Support gives them an ongoing +1 DFF until they succeed at a Systems Check as a Quick Action, forcing them to waste an action or take the DFF; Hack./Slash disallows a target from using any Tech Action at all until they pass a Systems Check as a Quick Action or Shut Down. All are good options, but they pale in comparison to Last Argument of Kings. A successful Full Tech Attack forces an enemy to take Burn equal to their current Heat! If this causes them to overheat, they have to get the Burn before their Heat Cap resets... Which means they take their full Heat Cap in Burn! For a lot of mechs, this is absolutely devastating.  This is a little complicated. Covering Fire is a Quick Action that lets you Impair a Mech in range of one of your Heavy weapons until the start of your next turn. If they move more than one hex during that time, they are no longer Impaired, but you get to attack them with a Heavy weapon as a Reaction for half damage, Heat, or Burn. You can make this attack any time during their movement, so you can easily wait until they're out of cover to do so. You can only affect one target at a time, and it ends if you get damaged by said target. Got it? So basically, you're suppressing the enemy, and if they move, they get hit. With Rank II, you can stop them dead in their tracks, and if they needed cover, they're now exposed to a lot more pain from your buddies. Rank III lets you have two targets with one Covering Fire action, so you only need one Quick Action to threaten two separate targets! This is an excellent choice for any Lancer who wants to play fire support.  Hunter is kind of like Gunslinger, but for melee Auxiliary weapons. Kind of. It doesn't get a die, but it does let you get a lot more for your buck. Auxiliary weapons don't tend to be all that strong, but with Hunter, you can ensure that anyone who thinks they're out of range aren't. Not to mention, any weapons you throw just come back to you, so now all your melee Auxiliaries are ranged too! I personally don't like depending on melee Auxiliaries, but there are some builds (and one Frame I can think of) that can really take advantage of this Talent.  A collection of buffs for Hidden characters, this Talent lets you ignore basically everything that would make it hard to hide. And if you get discovered? You flashbang the nearest sap that saw you, Slide away, and only lose Hidden when you're wherever you want to be in range. Keep in mind that attacking someone while Hidden breaks the Hidden status, so you can trigger Rank III with Rank II for extra fuckery. Stealth is pretty weak in Lancer... Unless you have Infiltrator. Then it's really, really strong.  Do you like hitting people with your entire you? If you do, Juggernaut is for you. You get a bunch of different options and ways of doing damage with Ram instead of just knocking people over. Rank III even lets you act like the mutant this is associated with, as you start just ignoring walls like they aren't there. 1d3+3 heat is a steep cost, but it's worth it to get right up in someone's face to start the mayhem. Ram is a nice Action already, but Juggernaut adds so much to it that you might be tempted not to do anything else!  Leader is a great support Talent offering a lot for any Wing composition. Issuing out orders is a Free Action with this Talent, so it doesn't hinder the operation of the user's turn in any way. Issue Order lets you tell someone what they should do, and if they decide to take that course of action, they use your leadership die as +1 ACC. Someone can only have one of these at a time, and they can give it back as a Free Action if they want to do something else. Otherwise, the die lasts until the end of the scene. Issue Command just lets you do the same thing at the start of an ally's turn instead of on your turn, giving you more flexibility to react to developing situations... And then Rank III lets anyone with a Leadership Die use it as damage reduction or enhancement. Giving people more damage is a great way to go totally bonkers in this game, just saying.  One huge piece of advice I like to give new Players to Lancer is to not think of Heat as an enemy. It's not a secondary HP bar that you want to stay low. Heat is your friend. Do not be afraid of accruing Heat. Nuclear Cavalier is a Talent for people who have embraced that concept. Of course, you want to be doing things that give you heat, like using weapons with the Heat tag or Overcharging. Getting hit with Heat is still bad, and that's exactly what you get to do to others when you shoot them with a superheated bullet. Somehow. Suddenly, you're doing a lot more Heat and Damage to enemies than usual, AND you get a special gun! The Fuel Rod Gun is a Range 3, Threat 3 CQB weapon that does 1d3+2 Energy damage with Limited 3 and Unique as tags (more on all that later). When you attack with it, you automatically clear 4 heat, which is a lot of heat to just get rid of. This just lets you build more heat so you can keep being terrifying.  The latest in a long line of weapons that focus on giving bonuses to one weapon class, Siege Specialist works with Cannons. Rank I is odd because it doesn't target characters, it targets objects. And then fucks that object up. Cover? What cover? And anyone who was using the hex previously known as cover will get thrown back from it. Even better, this Talent lets you use the recoil and backblast of your cannons as a tactical dodge. Rank III gives your cannons cluster rounds that do even more forceful movement-suggesting tactics. Siege Specialist is all about making sure anything that wants to hide from you or harm you has to deal with the fact that you're firing a really big gun and do not particularly care what they want.  Skirmisher is a great companion both to stealth builds and to tank builds. We can all agree that the best way to take damage is to not do that. The best part about this Talent is that nothing here is an action or reaction, just a set of three bonuses you get no matter what. Rank I might not sound too great, since you can't attack or force Saves without losing your Soft Cover, but the point of it is more to let you break Engagement without having to use a Full Action to do so. Just let them attack you, and miss. Rank III augments this further: that attack just misses, period. And if you're Engaged with multiple enemies, you can make one of them miss and force the other to have +1 DFF to attack you. And with Rank II, you can dart in (or out) of melee, giving an enemy a death of a thousand cuts... But be careful, some weapons have Threat 3 or more! This won't always keep you safe. We're about halfway through the Talent list. This covers most of the core Talents, but there's a bunch more from sourcebooks to come. We'll try to finish those off next time!
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Mar 17, 2024 23:23
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Dawgstar posted:Any relation? Yes, it's that Brian Herbert. He brought the same kind of rigour and attention to detail to Blood on the Sun as he did to his Dune novels, though somehow the prose is even worse.
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Mar 18, 2024 00:38
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Loomer posted:Yes, it's that Brian Herbert. He brought the same kind of rigour and attention to detail to Blood on the Sun as he did to his Dune novels, though somehow the prose is even worse. Now, what about Landis? Is she daughter to horrible person John Landis and brother to horrible person Max Landis? We need to see how deep the nepo baby rabbit hole goes.
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Mar 18, 2024 02:52
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Young Freud posted:Now, what about Landis? Is she daughter to horrible person John Landis and brother to horrible person Max Landis? Hard to track, since there's an unrelated Jill Marie Landis who's a much more successful author. Marie Landis was Brian Herbert's cousin, also known as Marie Landis-Edwards, apparently lived 1920-1999, though more likely from ~1938-99 if a 1999 obit from what I think is her hometown is to be believed. No relation, as far as I can tell. It also sheds a little light on why BotSun is quite so poorly executed - Marie was either seventy-five or, at the youngest, fifty-eight, while working on it with Brian, and didn't have a lot of novel writing experience prior. You could make a charming little movie about a pair of bumblers, one of 'em a nepo baby and the other his much older cousin, trying to knock out a bad vampire novel, so its a bit of a shame Brian is so unlikeable.
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Mar 18, 2024 03:08
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Loomer posted:Yes, it's that Brian Herbert. He brought the same kind of rigour and attention to detail to Blood on the Sun as he did to his Dune novels, though somehow the prose is even worse. Horrifying to imagine his work is cleaned up by Kevin J. Anderson.
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Mar 18, 2024 04:32
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Since so much of the V:tM metaplot seems to happen around the Chicago stockyards, shall we see a beefswelling, perchance?
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Mar 18, 2024 05:45
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Loomer posted:That was the devil known as Brian Herbert and/or Marie Landis. That book is perhaps the [i]actual]/i] single worst oWoD novel, but its close - BoTSun is at least memorably terrible. 'Watcher', an early Werewolf novel, is... Not. There's also Pomegranates Full and Fine in the 'utterly forgettable' stakes, and the infamous As One Dead, featuring a Toreador-Brujah hybrid courtesy of one Nancy Kilpatrick, of regular vampire novel fame. My money, personally, remains on House of Secrets for being the single most egregiously racist thing White Wolf ever published. I hesitate to ask, but what puts House of Secrets on top of the white wolf racism pile? That seems like a tall order, given some of the books I have read. I only know the one author from the penny dreadful stuff, which I remember as pretty standard white wolf fiction.
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Mar 18, 2024 08:52
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Explodingdice posted:I hesitate to ask, but what puts House of Secrets on top of the white wolf racism pile? That seems like a tall order, given some of the books I have read. I only know the one author from the penny dreadful stuff, which I remember as pretty standard white wolf fiction. So, it does the common White Wolf thing of inserting real people into the narrative as vampires. In itself, unobjectionable. One of the people, however, is Mary Ellen Pleasant, a rather significant figure in the Underground Railroad, abolitionism, and post-emancipation civil rights struggles. She was, by all accounts, a strongly spoken, fierce, and sophisticated woman, and hated the mammy stereotype and being called Mammy Pleasant. Moore and Murphy named her Mammy Pleasant and made her speak with a goddamn minstrel accent. In my book, its one thing to gently caress up on the basis of broad ethnic stereotypes. Its another to take a real person and turn them into a stereotype they hated - for no good reason, either, in the narrative. It moves from 'ignorant and will be real awkward about it' to 'actively, deliberately, and maliciously racist' when you do that.
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Mar 18, 2024 09:04
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Mar 18, 2024 10:04
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Yuuuup. It's not even a 'I don't like it but I use it to lull my enemies into a state of false calm' thing like the real Mary Ellen Pleasant strategically did early on in her career - just straight up, unflinching racist bullshit.
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Mar 18, 2024 10:13
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It's not racist or egregious, but I do love Call to Battle for having the world's dumbest progenitor and also double crinos.
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Mar 18, 2024 14:22
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Kurieg posted:and also double crinos. Please elaborate.
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Mar 18, 2024 14:28
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Loomer posted:Previously on... We’re back on to Boulle’s Victorian Age this time. Last time, we left off with Regina Blake dry humping her fiancée in the coach house while her creepy gently caress of an uncle stalks them with the intent to surprise, torture, and rape her - sexual violation is a pretty constant theme in this trilogy, as is the blurring of sex, pain, and violence. So, that’s a sentence and a half, ain’t it - good thing its a horror novel. Let’s find out what happens next in…  A Morbid Initiation, Part 1: Chapters 6 and 7 Chapter 6 Cut from Regina to Victoria Ash, making her way up to Bernan House in her hired coach, accompanied by two Ghoul servants – her maid, Theresa, and her coachman, Cedric, who is… Sigh. ‘A mountainous mulatto’. Period pieces get an exemption on language but only if they fully commit (and even then only to a certain limit – one that even the late, great Patrick o’Brian crossed too often), and suffice to say, Boulle does not, so the exemption is revoked. This is a point we’ll return to throughout the trilogy, as race is both a prominent element and Boulle’s handling of it varies quite widely. Either way, they’re on the road at night, which in the 1880s is no longer as dangerous as it once was, but is still treated with the appropriate caution – though all of a sudden, Victoria stops the carriage short with instructions to wait until dawn, and if she isn’t back from the house, to come up. She’s in a rush to reach the carriage house because she’s spotted something interesting. We then cut to Gareth Ducheski, creep spectacular, and get a dose of his mindset.  Seems cool and normal to me. Now you may be wondering – is Gareth Jack? No. But do keep your eyes peeled for an answer to the Jack the Ripper mystery. He’s looking forward to literally hunting Regina and Seward through the countryside, and idly contemplating literally eating Seward’s heart in front of Regina. Subtle is not his game. But when he’s about to enter, he’s interrupted.  It’s a little bit of a cliché, but the ‘cold porcelain’ line still works. And as an aside, this description of Victoria does put me in mind of Sugar from The Crimson Petal and the White – I’m not entirely sure why but it’s welcome all the same. Boulle slips in that ‘Mister Wellig’ is Gareth’s master – mark the name – then moves to scent, and maybe that’s why this section so reminds me of Faber.  Ever wonder what a vampire smells like? Interested in making a Toreador-scented candle? Well, now you can. Gareth, being an idiot, pulls his knife and tries to stab Victoria, which ends about as well as you’d expect for him. She moves too fast for him to see, steals his knife and stabs him. Only she gets to perv on Regina.And perv she really does. She’s the figure in the doorway, and not only is there a distinctly sexual character to her voyeurism, but she’s using Presence to stoke them on. Being seen, though, is no accident:  ‘Look to me’ is cliché, but its an acceptable one in a gothic Victoriana context even if it makes me think of that scene in What We Do in the Shadows. Seward squares up, then loses his fierce face when Victoria enters. Boulle gives us another description of her, because we need it really laboured how stunning she is.  sigh. Orbs. I despise this word. Beyond that, lol at Victoria wearing a regency gown with her tits right out. It’s very Hammer Horror, though the cameo is a nice touch – and if the choker is a ribbon, it carries a nice suggestion of immorality. Ditto, by the 1880s tits-out carries certain connotations outside of the right contexts, and the particularly stunningly low necklines of Regency gowns is very much something you’re not seeing often on ‘respectable’ women, especially not without some kind of frill or blouse underneath. Basically? Victoria is dressed like an expensive prostitute. As an aside, Regina digs it – she’s turned on, not off, by being seen by Victoria, and this isn’t Victoria’s doing. As mentioned earlier, Boulle tries – not particularly successfully – to weave the erotic in throughout the narrative. Part of that is an ongoing sapphic relationship between the two. It is, alas, no Fingersmith or Tipping the Velvet or even Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics. Victoria plays off finding them in flagrante dicto with the claim she’s lost and looking for Bernan House to pay her respects. At midnight. On foot. In a gown. Seward offers to show her up to the house, and with the spell broken, Regina manages to ask her name – and runs into an unexpected emotion.  End chapter. It’s competently written enough, and in principle the set piece should be charged, tense, and delicious. Unfortunately, it lacks the frisson you need for a good erotic horror – neither grotesque enough nor erotic enough to compel the lip-biting reaction sought. The POV switches are part of the problem, but so is Boulle’s general style. It tells without convincing, shows without signifying, and the end result is left feeling a little hollow. I’m peak audience for this kind of thing – I love vampires, I love sapphic Victorian and Regency romances, I love VtM and gothic horror pastiches – but it just doesn’t quite land for me. There are spots that do, but they’re heavily weighted to the grotesque, and we’ll come to them later. Chapter Eight We’re staying with Regina for the time being. She sleeps well for the first time in a week, or at least, she thinks she does:  I’m sure that’s all it is. As for the late waking – not uncommon, though unusually late to be uninterrupted without some prior arrangement. Elizabeth, the housemaid, helps Regina’s morning routine, ‘taking what was usually Mary’s place’ – an unusual arrangement, since it suggests Regina and Emma shared a lady’s maid. Not unheard of, but certainly unusual. During, she tries to work out how she became so wanton so fast, but of course, doesn’t connect it to Victoria. Pedantry note: I’m not entirely sure of what Boulle means here:  Crinolines are in again in the 1880s in modified form, but as I understand it, are usually worn under the dress, and I don’t think the black wool underlayer is her camisole and petticoat as undergarments weren’t usually dyed to avoid running on the skin. Bustles are more popular than crinolines, but Boulle’s actually on to something here on that front:  Again, a touch ‘not like other girls’, but its fine. Crinolettes were in in the early 1880s but aren’t so popular by 1888 – big-rear end bustles (pun intended) are fashionable instead. Regina’s clothes are a little outmoded, just right for a country girl who’s taken no interest in the trends. Unfortunately, this then swerves:  There are many things you can call young women’s fashions of the 1880s. ‘Designed to suppress every curve’ is not one of them. This is, in many respects, the peak of the exaggerated hourglass aesthetic. Your skin might be concealed, but even in a fairly plain mourning dress, that crinoline ain’t there to make your hips look small. Here’s a good example of a slightly-outmoded dress (circa 1880-85 – perfect for Regina’s ‘a little behind the times’ aesthetic):  By contrast, Regina views Victoria’s dress – aided by presence and deep attraction – favourably:  Again, I must stress that Victoria is dressed essentially as an expensive prostitute. Tits-out Regency Dress is not on the razor’s edge of style and scandal: it is outdated, old, and distinctly inappropriate. And to top it off, when we’re talking of curves – regency gowns have an extremely high waistline, right up under the bust, tending to flare lightly under then go straight-line. This is a style tailor-made to de-emphasize the very same curves that the late-Victorian silhouette is built to produce. Even a later 1820s dress, with a tighter cinched waist, doesn’t really emphasize the hips. This is all pedantry, of course – but dress is a huge part of a period piece, and this whole segment is, well… It isn’t great. But let’s move on before I spend twenty pages ranting about waistlines. There’s a scene cut to a dispute about what’s to be done with Emma’s mortal remains. Blake demands the right to make the choice, but Eleanor is a proper crone:  The whole sequence is quite effectively creepy. Blake made a deal with the devil for Ducheski lucre, and now he’s finally seeing it:   (Gareth’s fine. A light abdominal stabbing is all. He healed up adequately on Wellig’s vitae.) This device colours the rest of Blake’s arc, and it does so beautifully. Boulle doesn’t come out and say it this early, but there’s a wonderful dimension of the sins of the father coming home to roost that’s very, very Victoriana Gothic. Greed has doomed Regina before she was ever born. She pipes up to try and sway things towards a decent burial at Durham Cathedral, not at Lion’s Green, and in response Eleanor illuminates her on the family history.   It’s a long excerpt, but I’m sharing it because I both like it and think it highlights a flaw in Boulle’s style. It’s too long a monologue, without a compelling reason to listen to her babble on about the old country. Regina is headstrong, still buzzing from her night. An interjection silenced by a horrific glance would’ve fit in just fine, but she instead sits politely mute. We’re told at the end that Eleanor got up and closed the distance without her realizing, which is halfway there, but too late – and worse yet, Eleanor and Gareth then simply… walk off. At this point, things take a turn in the narrative. Blake is weak and defeated, and Regina pours him a brandy to rest with. Also a nice device – from strength to frailty as the unnatural relations invade his home like the shadow of death. Regina, in turn, goes to confront Eleanor in the north wing (again, see what I mean? We’re getting ‘she’s headstrong and willful’, but the execution is lacking) only to find she isn’t the only one who wants to know what the gently caress is with these weirdos. Easton and Pool are trying to storm the north wing and being held back by Uncle Thomas. Thomas, for his part, is a shrewd thinker and lures her off privately to discuss Emma’s burial arrangements. Pedantry time:  One: It’s winter. It can’t really be more definitively winter than Christmastide. Two, a north-facing room will not receive full sun at any point in the year as far north as Durham, unless it also shares a southern exposure. Three, I have a minor quibble with the ‘small drawing room’. Multiple drawing rooms is not unheard of – see Kerr’s ‘The Gentlema’s House’ (1865) for an excellent study of stately homes and townhouses drawn from contemporary examples – but a northern-exposure is a poor fit for one, and they’re usually attached to either the main drawing room or a morning room except in very eclectic houses, or sit on an upper or lower floor from the main while sharing a. This is probably the less important point of the three, admittedly, but again – these are details that do matter, that do make a difference to the story, that suck you in or pull you out, and in a period piece its especially severe. I might try and rough out the house from descriptions sometime just to see if I can make sense of it. Returning to the story, Thomas acts as a moderate peacemaker. His proposed solution settles the matter neatly, though it lacks the pomp and grandeur of a proper cathedral burial:  Blake is simply too tired to fight further, so a bare concession suffices. The presence of evil in his house is sapping his vitality. And things move fast. A scene cut and a few hours later, and the service is on at 6PM. The vicar turns up at short notice, and we get another glimpse of the building’s plan:  Admittedly, the intricacies of the floorplan may be of limited general interest, but fuckya, I’m writing this so you can put up with me trying to puzzle it out. The turnout is poor – the Ducheski freaks, Regina and Blake, the servants (including the returned coachman), and a few guests (the army boys, a few local luminaries, the solicitor), with one important exception: Victoria Ash, dressed in an elegant black gown, who makes her introductions.  This, of course, is a lie. We’ll find out more later. We’ll encounter Lady Winthrope later, too. Mary is conspicuously missing. Daniel, Regina’s brother, is also absent:  Daniel plays little role in the trilogy. We know he’s the older sibling, and that he refused to return to England and instead fled to the navy. I’m not an expert on the post-Napoleonic Royal Navy, to say the least (and I’m only in the league of a Patrick O’Brian nerd who had copies of the Navy Lists for that period, for that matter), but I am reasonably certain he can’t be a midshipman. He’s had a maximum of twenty months in the Navy, so unless he was put on the books as a lad, he hasn’t the seniority to be anything but a cadet, or given the urgency of his joining, worse: a mere rating, and probably not even an able seaman. It doesn’t especially matter, however, as Daniel’s only importance is as a plot device coming up next time. Victoria also makes her ‘proper’ introduction to Regina:  Smooth. A nice combination of ‘I could destroy you' with 'but I won’t.’ On the pedantry note, it’s rather odd they don’t have a chapel to use, given the house is of a scale to have multiple drawing rooms, but it doesn’t really matter. The service goes smoothly, and the procession leaves for Lion’s Green with Emma’s body safely ensconced in a carriage, attended by Eleanor and Thomas. It’s rather close to the house, conveniently. Its also a creeptastic place, as befits the stronghold of the Tremere in the region:  Proper witch country, that. And the Ducheskis are out in force to really sell the Hills Have Eyes vibes:  The Ducheskis, like all revenant lines, are both exceptionally inbred and twisted by dark curses. Beyond that, the motif of the grotesque-as-evil-sign is common in the gothic and the Victorian both, and fits neatly here. Physical deformity mirrors spiritual deformity, and so on. One, a girl with a limp, walks with Regina and provides some exposition opportunities:   Again, rather lengthy pulls, but sometimes Boulle’s prose is best left to speak for itself. These are effective enough, but still a bit clumsy and clunky. They simultaneously overdescribe and under-endow the scene with life. Sparser but more potent description would've worked much better At the top of the hill, Emma is interred in a ‘great crypt’ sunk into the soil itself. Father Duncan is not allowed to enter the crypt with them, nor do the Ducheskis other than Eleanor and Thomas. This, obviously, is unholy ground – and inside, it’s a vast mausoleum. Eleanor does some dark sorcerous chanting over Emma’s remain while the Blakes and Seward watch, with Thomas helpfully explaining that it’s just:  Its fine. Probably. Emma is placed in a floor-crypt, one of three ‘set into the floor of the room like a triangular altar’, which confuses Regina because surely her mother wasn’t that important. Thomas again provides a helpful lie:  There’s also a creepy watcher she didn’t notice before suddenly there. We’ll meet him again:  But then its time for a scene cut. We’re back at the house, and Victoria is preparing to depart. She has one final gift for Regina, in her mother’s memory:  What an abhorrent font. The card is a nice touch, though they don’t typically include an address – you can always write it on if you see fit, and most people you want to be able to visit you in reply will either know or be able to quickly find out where you live. Then she’s gone, and the stage is set for the next chapter and for the next act (though we don’t enter it for another two chapters):  That’s where we’ll leave it, since this is already quite a long part. By now we’re getting a good feel for Boulle – his ideas are solid, his sense of story is perfectly functional, but his actual execution is somewhat lacking. The prose is fine but often no better than that, and he’s prone to unnecessary description and to missing little touches that would break up the flow and provide a richer, deeper texture. He’s also not necessarily a great period researcher, but then, that’s forgivable: this is a VtM novel, after all, and more importantly he obviously had a lot of fun reading gothic novels in preparation. We’re about a third of the way through book 1. Next time – well, either more Red Death, or this. And if it’s this: Visitations, a murder most foul, and an escapade that would make Harker proud.
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Mar 18, 2024 15:32
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Dawgstar posted:Please elaborate. The world's Dumbest Progenitor is basically Hojo before Hojo was a thing. And somehow managed to crossbreed a Garou with a Khara, you know, the extinct were-smilodons. We discover this because Jay No-Name, our protagonist, frenzies so hard in Garou Crinos that he somehow also manages to go Bastet crinos on top of it. Not!Hojo orgasms over all the wonderful data he's getting and grabs a video camera to get some better shots before he gets turned into a fine red paste by the double-crinos. E: Lest you think I'm joking quote:Jay growled at Kevin, the sound growing lower, Kurieg fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 15:42
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This is what happens when you allow MageChat. 
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Mar 18, 2024 21:20
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Kurieg posted:
Check it out now, young clone brother
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Mar 18, 2024 22:55
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Pakxos posted:Check it out now, young clone brother What are you doing, clone-brother?
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Mar 19, 2024 08:34
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Loomer posted:Previously on... Chapter Eight Chapter eight kicks off back at Bernan House, and we start off with some dating. No, not Regina and Seward:  I’ve touched on the issue of dates a couple of times, but this lets us drill down into it. Emma is interred at the stroke of midnight (symbolic? You better believe it) on the 31st/1st. This means that Victoria Ash arrived on the night of the 30th, Seward on the afternoon of the 30th after catching an overnight train, so he and Ash departed London during the daytime on the 29th, which is confirmed by Victoria spending part of the trip in a coffin. London to Durham is around ~250-275 miles, so at around 20-30MPH, the trip is a ~12-14 hour affair not including the carriage run of a couple of hours from Shincliffe station to Burnan House. Poking about for further detail, I stumbled on this:  No notes, Mr. Carter. No notes. Back to our travel obsession – a route to Edinburgh, which is just a little further north than we need, could be done in ten hours on an express (and faster – but we’ll assume we’re not looking at an ultra-express for Durham.) Twelve hours seems a safe bet – a little slow, but the overnight often was, and contemporary routes doing the London>Newcastle>Edinburgh run of this one could make the London to Newcastle leg in 11 hours, with a four-or-five hour delay for an overnighter. Emma died two days prior to Malcolm’s arrival, so we have her date of ‘death’ as the 28th of December, 1887. All of this is, then, plausible, though it does render Seward’s invitation a strictly ‘after christmas’ affair and also precludes any exploitation of direct Christmas symbolism. Regina doesn’t sleep well that night, and no wonder. poo poo was creepy – and it probably doesn’t help that Emma’s come to pay her a final visit.  Not a dream, obviously, but of course Regina would conceive of it as one. Emma pretty much fucks off after that and we cut to the morning. Blake and the army boys are all sleeping in, the Ducheskis have hosed off back to Lion’s Green, and even the servants are quiet and withdrawn (as they should be!) This lets Regina puzzle over a few things:   It’s a fair conclusion. Its wrong, but Regina, of course, does not know vampires are real – only that her mother mysteriously died shortly after getting news from her relations. Being our protagonist, she does the only reasonable thing – she decides to find the truth and find justice, no matter how phantasmal it may seem:  It’s a nice, classic motive, and it also gives Regina agency. Unfortunately, Boulle will squander that a little, but at its core this is what informs the rest of the trilogy. Regina wants truth and justice, or at least a facsimile of both – and eventually, she gets it. To get there, she goes to investigate Emma’s bedchambers (separate from her father’s – a nice touch, as it goes. Very common arrangement in aristocratic households of the time.) Its all very genteel decay, very moody. A big old house slowly running down its clocks, devoid of life for long periods both before and after their time in Egypt, draped with heavy canvas curtains and so on. Its also nearly devoid of oddities save for the expected absence and a crack in the mirror, and Regina’s about to dig through the drawers when she realizes something:  Well, that’s weird, right? And it only gets weirder.  And weirder.  I love this entire sequence. Regina’s pretty on the ball for it, too – she immediately clocks how odd it really is and starts processing who did it:   On its own, this is a really nice touch, and I love it. It transforms Emma’s embrace into something sinister and properly premeditated, orchestrated, designed to bring evil into the very heart of Burnan House. What follows on is cool too but perhaps gratuitous. Emma manages to get a nail loose and look beneath the canvas:  Proper creepy, but this is one time I’d like more detail. Not a lot – just a brief mention of the marks standing bright and fresh, or old and worn, or worse – both. We scene cut to Regina returning to her room. Elizabeth the maid is scrubbing the carpet beside her bed, and not without reason:  In a modern piece I’d be ambivalent about these scenes, but they fit the Victorian gothic vibe nicely. We know the story, there’s no mystery, and where it’s quick – here, it’s a half page – it sets tone without unduly eating space. Regina has Elizabeth dress her instead so she can go see Mary and find out what the maid knows. We scene cut to the carriage. She’s sensibly taken Seward, though they’re unescorted and are not yet formally engaged which is slightly risqué. Seward’s adopted half-mourning dress, though he’s not under an obligation to do so, via a black armband. Regina’s twigged to the prospect Mary might have seen more than she realized:  Seward’s doubtful – the shock is likely just from witnessing her dead and her scars. He mentions Mary ‘hasn’t seen much of the world’, so we can add that to the idea that Mary is somewhat institutionalized and service-bound. Seward also raises a rather good point, as someone who’s seen death up close and witnessed horror:   They never say ‘let’s turn around’, do they? But cliché as it is, its an effective moment, and it helps establish the real dynamic of Seward and Regina better than the clumsy attempts earlier. Seward will warn her and give an opinion, but respect the decision – he’s ride or die. They arrive at the rented cottage of Mary’s family, the Blomes. The place is silent as the grave. Is this odd? Maybe, but Regina’s not worried:  That doesn’t last, though. When she knocks and there’s no answer, her sense for evil kicks in.  This is a staple – acts of evil that pollute a place, that render it ominous and dreadful even before you know why. It’s also a little cliché but again, it works – pastiche is always a matter of balancing cliches right, so there’s little gained by doggedly avoiding them at every turn. When Regina opens the door, it’s… A Lot.   This isn’t Regina’s first brush with a grotesque death. She recalls a dead beggar in Cairo, bloated and rotted in the sun. The stench in the cottage is worse.  Jesus christ. Its grotesque. Personally, I’d have written it differently with more of a focus on confusion. Regina is just a little too calm here for her arc. She’s together enough to hold back vomiting, ignore Seward’s pleas, and search inside for Mary. And boy, does she find her:   Chalk another up to the graphic sexual violence front – but hey, that position sounds familiar.  An occult murder? Well, obviously.  It turns out that it’s the sigils that make it hard to open the door, which honestly? It’s a miss. An elemental evil lingering in a place is cooler. Either way, Regina manages to get back out, spurred on by Mary’s head falling from her crotch ‘to hit the ground like an overripe apple’, and has a fit of extreme retching in the snow to close out the chapter. Boulle does this quite a bit in his white wolf work. The violence is routinely grotesque and monstrous. Here, I think there’s a sexual element despite the lack of it being directly in the text – the placement of the head and her nudity give it that vibe, and its also safe to assume it in the Victorian Age trilogy generally. That said, I think it works in it for the same reason – its part of the standardized vibe of the era. Twisted, monstrous intersections of sex and violence are part of the inheritance of the genre. That said, I’m tired of everything ‘Victorian’ defaulting to 1888 – and part of why we have that inheritance is, well, the rippings of the year. There’s more to the long period than monstrous sexual violence but Jack the Ripper lives long in the memory, I suppose. Chapter Nine Regina is now in full protagonist mode:  The dialogue that follows is fine – Regina tries to explain things and convince Seward, who though dubious of some things is coming around fast. Weird poo poo is weird, no sense denying that, and the two start to puzzle together that the Ducheskis as a whole must be involved. Malcolm is the first one to conjure an explanation:  Gasp! An intrigue!   Unfortunately, the device here is, well, wrong. Its unstated but highly likely that most of Blake’s property is tied up in an entail, and you can’t typically disinherit under those. If Regina does inherit, then marriage to Seward does not make him heir – his offspring with her, potentially. Him, no. Fortunately, it then takes a turn back towards the correct:  Anne would have a weaker claim, so ignore that bit – also, there is no Duke of Kent in 1888. However, the rest is possible – those uncles might well inherit under the terms of the grant of title and any entail. This in turn has arisen from an awareness that if Seward and Regina marrying was part of the plot, the timing is poor, so it must be something else. A disputed inheritance wouldn’t benefit the Ducheski’s directly with the Blake uncles in the mix, so it must be something complex and byzantine, and horrifying:   The marriage market is a legitimate source of goddamn horror and I applaud the decision to treat it as such. It also gives a very good reason to galvanize Regina into action, albeit of a weird kind. She demands they turn right around and drive to Lion’s Green, confront the Ducheski’s, and give Emma a proper burial, which will do nothing whatsoever to interrupt any such scheme. Seward suggests a slight delay to get Easton and Pool, and talk it through with the Colonel, and we cut to Blake’s reply:  The man has a point. The plan appears to be to… drive to Lion’s Green, break into a spooky mausoleum guarded by a village of twisted inbred Slavs, exhume his dead wife, and steal her loving corpse based on suspicions of witchcraft and a grisly mass murder they think the Ducheskis did. Regina points out that the Ducheskis are her kin and might wish her harm, and the rest of the brief cut goes as you’d expect:  Cue another scene cut up. Pool, Seward, Easton and Regina embark on the expedition. They do it in the daytime, sensibly enough, and leave at first light that next morning. Their coachman is a loyal sort – he saw the massacre and insists on coming with them, though they decide to leave him with the horses while they go to the crypt. The soldiers are armed – Pool and Seward with their sabres and revolvers, Easton with a literal blunderbuss, which is just a little outdated by, oh, fifty-odd years now. One being in the gun room is quite plausible, though, but its an odd choice. They arrive mid-morning and Boulle describes things in the daylight. It’s the usual thing – more prosaic, less haunting, by light than by night. Their first priority is cracking open Emma’s tomb to… make sure it hasn’t been desecrated. I’m spotting a slight problem with that plan, but anyway. There’s a complication: The place isn’t deserted.  They simply toss the corpse in, at which point the lovely shallow grave gives and it tumbles down the hill like its an episode of Coffin Flop. The shroud tears as the body tumbles near Regina, and, well:  RIP Anna. One cousin has come to collect Anna to rebury her and stumbles right on Regina, and things escalate, though not quite in the usual ‘explore the spooky cemetery site’ way. Regina instead storms up the hill, ignoring the cousin and his groans, to demand answers, which goes as well you’d expect.  Good thing she has back-up.  Now that’s more like the VtM games I’ve played. We’ve gone from breaking and entering to a hostage situation in about a minute.  I don’t love this, but its period appropriate I suppose. Regina wants answers, though, especially now she can see Anna’s corpse without the shock of it tumbling downhill.  Well, no mystery how she died, then. Thomas tries to play it off – she was kicked by a mule, the cuts are from surgery trying to save her life – but Regina doesn’t buy it. He natters on while she tries to figure out what to do, but then things take a sudden turn. The harmless mute lunges forward into sudden violence. The hunchback and Thomas run, but Pool manages to shoot Thomas in the head. It's not the only headshot in the scuffle. The large mute is freakishly strong and beating Malcolm about, which results in… Well, this.  That just seems gratuitous, but, whatever. The mute’s about to beat them to death and then we get our third headshot.  There are other places to shoot people, Philippe. Pool wants go after the hunchback to keep him from raising the alarm, but Regina takes a moment to cover Anna with her shroud and then sprints up to the crypt instead. Her soldierboys follow and as they enter, the bell tower rings in alarm. It’s a nice bit of atmosphere, especially since it means all four of them are liable to be trapped in a vampire tomb. Heedless of risk, they rush deeper, to the burial chamber. Seward again acts as a voice of modest reason:  Naturally, Regina won’t be dissuaded, and all four of them get the crypt open only to discover…  No, obviously its empty. But there is a surprise: Thomas Ducheski’s still alive. It was a shoulder hit, not the dome, and his priority is actually to warn Regina that she has to leave, and fast.  Instead, Regina grabs him and demands to know where Emma is. Seward holds him at gunpoint to heighten the interrogation, and that’s when the other uncle arrives. Gareth is ushered in by a taunting remark and the candles blowing out. Thomas warns them he can see in the dark, and this is not well received:  This distraction costs him. Pool strikes a match, shedding enough light to see, and the actual combat sequence begins. It takes a couple of pages, and the prose is fine but not that compelling. Easton tries to shoot him with the blunderbuss, but Gareth gets hold of it and uses it to brain him instead. The match goes out and Regina scrambles off in the dark to try and escape, terrified, and instinctively crawls towards the empty grave of her mother. How is it resolved? Does Seward rally? Does Pool reveal some hidden talent? Well, no.  Thomas has thaumaturgy, I guess, or a hedge path of some kind. It isn’t enough to keep Gareth from smashing his skull in with the blunderbuss, but it does save his great-niece. Things are a chaotic mess but Seward drags her out, past the burning Gareth. Pool brings Easton, who’s alive but wounded. They get to the carriage, and Regina blacks out. Cue a scene cut. This time, we move to Eleanor. She’s on a train, heading south, escorted by a whole bunch of relations. And she’s got something very valuable:  End chapter. On the balance, I’m not a particular fan of this one. It’s fine – it’s a little long for what it achieves, and some of the prose is stilted – but it has atmosphere enough to get a pass. The wasted opportunity of the crypt sequence is what really annoys me, though I do enjoy Thomas’s heroic sacrifice. The problem with it is that it feels unearned – he’s The Kindly Uncle, but he’s also part and parcel of the horror show, and we don’t really get a good sense of why he’s prepared to die for Regina, betraying what is almost certainly a strong blood bond to do it. It robs it of the emotional meat it should have. Interlude: London & Lisbon, February 1888 ‘In which accords are made and questions asked’ It’s a surprisingly big jump, given what just happened, but get used to that. The Victorian Age trilogy covers most of 1888 and things that should perhaps carry some urgency are handled off camera as a result. We now meet two new characters, though we’ve heard of one already:   Bainbridge has a write-up in London by Night, which is where that portrait is from. He’s eating specifically to gently caress with his elder, Wellig, the high regent of Lion’s Green chantry. Wellig’s also a right prick and tries to bait Bainbridge over the issue of Mithras and the tight leash he keeps on Tremere in the capital. One thing White Wolf loved is Tremere being dicks to literally everyone. This time, though, it isn’t just the Tremere.  Valerius also has VA:V art:  He and the Tremere are in league, united in opposition to Prince Mithras. This is a conspiracy meeting, and its being hosted in Bainbridge’s ‘astonishingly bucolic’ Bloomsbury residence, rather than a St. James manor. I mention this because Boulle makes a point of it:  Bloomsbury’s a nice place, but it declined in popularity with the right sort during the middle of the century. St. James, here, is in reference to St. James Square, the society area, rather better than Belgravia (albeit not quite as good as Park Lane – but still, very closely ranked.) From this we can infer that Boulle’s trying to capture the prestige dynamics, which makes the errors I keep pedanting on somewhat harder to overlook. The subject of the meeting is none other than Emma Blake. Wellig has prepared her for a special purpose, and brought her to London. He’s also insufferable:  It’ll be sweet when he gets his, won’t it? We have to wait, though, because Valerius doesn’t rip his head clean off. He does, however, do the Elder Trick, when Wellig gets uppity and asks for ‘the substance’ from him:  Before delivery, he wants to see Emma, and they trot her out like a horse for sale:  This is their master plan – to use Emma, aided by sorcery fuelled by The Substance, to ensnare Mithras and break him. It’s a bold plan, to say the least. This leaves just one question – what’s The Substance?  Oh, just Mithras’s blood. Smash cut to Beckett in London. London does not impress. It isn’t all that cold by winter standards, not compared to his expeditions to the arctic circle. Boulle uses this opportunity to give us a sense of London as a place of squalor.   He’s missed a trick here. London’s streets are basically paved with horse poo poo until the rise of the automobile, and even after the sewer improvements, the place is none-too-clean. A metropolis of beasts rolling in their own filth is an apt metaphor for the overall themes of Vampire, so it’s a pity to miss it. Beckett, we’re told, is in London looking for a rare pamphlet describing vampirism from 1795, recently surfaced in an estate sale.  Not a bad motive or macguffin, as it goes. I like the use of it as essentially a breadcrumb. Beckett, however, has a complication. Being a murderhobo, he’s killed two of the other vampires bidding on it, and one of them had the patronage of a powerful London vampire. This, of course, is a problem, because:  The agent of escape is the first ‘real’ Setite character of the trilogy, since Anwar existed only to die: Halim Bey.  Halim is an antiquities broker, and master of the mummy Nephran-Ka, who sadly makes no appearance in the trilogy. He’s the one who tipped Beckett off about the pamphlet and about the artifacts in the opening, and he has his own agenda and a smuggling ring to support it. He is, in other words, your standard Follower of Set, right down to operating an Egyptian themed business, the ‘Karnak Import and Export Co.’ in Southwark. His establishing moment is quite good:  I like it. It sets him up nicely as both a deceiver and quite scrupulously honest with those who would sniff it out – in other words, smart enough not to die horribly. He shows Beckett a catalogue of possible forgeries he can have custom made, and then the talk turns to escaping London. Halim seems to have expected it.  Halim gets this treatment throughout the trilogy, and it can be a little orientalist, but its carried off with suitable aplomb to not be too egregious. His role in the story is not necessarily as puppetmaster, but certainly as someone pulling some of the strings. Case in point – Beckett’s sale:   You may recall the intro quote. It’s now quite obvious this is a story about Kemintiri, and that Emma Blake is somehow tied to her via the cult in Cairo. The fun is how it unfolds, how we arrive at a conclusion to that mystery, and Boulle actually pulls it off fairly well so I won’t spoil it here. Boulle spends a few paragraphs explaining the Followers of Set’s deal as liars, opponents of other Cainites, etc, and then resolves it by having Halim mention he can hardly arrange an escape if he’s being strangled. Smash cut to sea.  The BT is not, as far as I’m able to discern, a real steamship, but its route is not implausible. From Cyprus it will dock in Alexandria, then proceed down the Suez and on to India. Beckett, of course, is on board, but he’s not the only familiar face.  Farewell, Easton. He’s played his role in the trilogy and does not reappear, but he’s gotten off quite lightly for a brush with true evil. A concussion, perhaps, but nothing worse. His narrative role wasn’t so much to be the muscle as to create a triumvirate with Pool and Seward that is now destabilized, placing Seward under Pool’s influence to a greater degree – a minor loss that mirrors the way the loss of Lord Blake’s stability allows Victoria Ash to exert influence over her more freely. And this influence is coming along quickly, to say the least:  There’s a back and forth about their respective poverty. Pool is, as Victoria surmised, the bastard of a baronet, and Seward virtually penniless. Then we hit another of those period snags:  The snag: The practice of buying commissions was abolished in 1871, and though it lingered in unofficial forms, is very much not a Big Thing by 1888. Nonetheless, Seward is quick to point out that Blake was a fine officer, and we taste the first consequences of the Raid on Lion’s Green:  This trouble also paves the way for Victoria to exercise more influence, so it was perhaps a poor choice on Blake’s part. Seward mulls the issue over for a minute while fixating on the many Chinese here at the Limehouse Docks, including this charming little moment:  Chalk up another to the awkward racial dimensions of the trilogy. A lot can be written – and has been written – on the sexual dimensions of colonialism, but Boulle’s work does not particularly interrogate so much as unthinkingly reproduce the attitude. At this point, Boulle introduces Seward’s sister and details more of this secret society. Both are important going forward.  We also learn the club is headquarted in Pall Mall, which does imply proper status. Pall Mall is Clubland’s very heart – and beyond a reputation for homosexual encounters at night, has about as fine a reputation as you can get for establishments. This is followed by another nice touch and another error:  Gretna Green marriages? Absolutely. The Season? Not quite. Its not wrong exactly, as the peak of the season begins after Easter, but Parliament is already back in session in March – indeed, in February, in 1888! This society also has an order for Seward already:  Seward agrees as they pass through Whitechapel, where he notices a synagogue. Boulle’s layering some Jack in already. We then scene cut to the ship, confirming that Beckett is aboard in a crate. The trip takes three days, give or take, from London to Lisbon. Departing Monday morning, Beckett spends two conscious nights in the crate, then he’s been unloaded by the third night, which does suggest that the maximum time at sea is around 60 hours. This seems optimistic to me, but its possible for a ship making a steady 20 knots. This would be a fairly fleet little steamer though, along the lines of the fastest liners with a favourable sea and wind thrown into the bargain. This isn’t the last steamship journey we’ll see, and I’ll be keeping track of how they all stack up. On arriving in Lisbon, Beckett is greeted by Halim Bey’s local correspondent, who offers him sustenance – and humour:  Beckett is not chill. He’s imagining ripping the guy limb from limb, then going back to London to do the same to Halim Bey, which… Seems like a slight overreaction to discovering his crate has been offloaded and opened. Part of it is that Beckett had hoped to wind up somewhere further afield, somewhere out of British influence, but this is where we hit on the importance of travel times again. Depending on the definition of British influence, this could take all of a few days (in fact, Lisbon's fine for that - hop on a train, you'll be out of the zone in no time, relaxing in Andorra!) or forty. Since Beckett isn't feeding each night, he's got a timer no longer than three weeks before he runs into serious trouble and will have no choice but to start eating the crew. In any case, the man who’s had him pulled from the ship for a chat reveals himself. He’s another signature character, and an infamous one at that.  Yes, it’s good ol’ Hesha. Hesha had the benefit of one of the stronger Clan Novels, written by Kathleen Ryan, so his development in this trilogy stands out less than Victoria Ash and Theo Bell’s does, but he’s used in all three novels and to fairly good effect. Now, what’s he want from Beckett?  Yes, Kemintiri is the macguffin for a good chunk of the narrative. We’ll get to know her soon enough, but that’s where the Interlude, and this part, ends. Next time? Part two. The London Season, Houses of Ill Repute, and the Taurus Club. Loomer fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Mar 19, 2024 |
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Mar 19, 2024 12:22
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It's a long-running cliche how World of Darkness games insisted that history was made by humans, but quickly went back on that by making historical people into vampires and wizards, and revealing that human history was all shaped by stuff that vampires and wizards did thousands of years ago. I think that "real historical figure was a vampire" works fine with interesting cultural figures like Oscar Wilde, and not well at all when the vampire in question is Hermann Goering.
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Mar 19, 2024 16:37
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Vampires are generally assholes, so if you make lots of historical guys vampires you either have to say that the historical character was secretly evil, or just pick a guy who's already considered to be bad. Did Vampire ever claim the same historical figures as any of the other WoD lines? Like VTM says Reinhart Heydrich was an evil vampire, but WtA says he was an evil werewolf?
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Mar 19, 2024 16:56
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