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wiegieman posted:Anyone who wants to do Glorantha would have to first pick which Glorantha RPG to do, and if they picked the older ones they would have to find a bunch of rare-ish books. There's only two or three books for the current heroquest release, with the new runequest coming. That, or they'd have to summarize the Guide. I dunno, I've never been a fan of dissecting rules instead of going rear end-deep into weird settings; it's why I (partly) did Madlands without touching on GURPS rules. Hell, I might try to do some kind of readthrough of the Guide! Lessee, the first half of the guide is... 398 pages 
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Aug 4, 2016 02:51
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Hostile V posted:Yeah, that's the one. The premise and the world sound sort of silly (and it all definitely sort of is) but I'm honestly liking some of the design decisions, mostly in regards to the approach they take with augmentations and keeping your players in line. Huh, I have Greg Porter's game CORPS, but not Corporation I don't think.
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Aug 4, 2016 02:58
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 CHAPTER FOUR, PART TWO Sample Game Situations There are five premade games that are bare bones and come in different tones. Most of these scenarios don’t have easy answers or solutions, leaving the GM and players to change things as they see fit. There are two real components to each game: what the PCs are tasked with and what’s really going on. There are also a few premade PCs without all of the Traits filled out so the players can add their own, but I won’t be including them.  "Wrenched from their own time and space and thrown into our world, Incursors run the gamut from slithering, tentacled eldritch horrors to strange, nebulous creatures as substantial as the wind". OPERATION VIOLINE Tone: Dark horror. The players are tasked with investigating a murder in the British part of Berlin. An ex-Kriegsmarine and current black market operative by the name of Hubert Ostermann was shot to death and ritualistically mutilated. The RPA believes it’s the work of an Alternative, one they haven’t seen before. In actuality, it’s the work of 15-year-old Karl Schumann. Karl was a part of the Hitler Youth and he’s never wavered from those beliefs. His father, Hauptsturmfuhrer Schumann, disappeared near the end of the war. Karl’s older sister, Mikaila, took care of him for those five years by taking menial jobs but eventually turning to prostitution. Karl would play piano for tips at the brothels and bars near the bases. And then one day Karl started hearing his father’s voice in his dreams. The elder Schumann was involved in experiments with scientists of the Reich and they had all fled through an Incursor machine altered to let them through. The machine was part of an emergency defense system in case Germany lost the war and Schumann and the scientists are stuck in a German fortress on a dead alien planet. Karl is their ticket to returning home. As part of his Hitler Youth training, Karl was trained in guerilla warfare in case of occupation. His dreams initially were just telling him where to find the parts to assemble the gate, then how to put the machine together. Now his father is telling him how to power the machine: by causing pain and suffering near an uncharged capacitor. Karl picked Ostermann to die after Ostermann beat Mikaila. It would have been a simple murder, but Karl has a lot of unresolved rage towards his sister, his father, his country and himself that manifested with a flurry of post-murder mutilation. And he will only continue inflicting these savageries on the people he selects to be targets, all of whom are ex-Nazis that have moved on to other careers. It’s not explicitly mentioned why they’re the ones he chooses, but it’s implied that it’s mostly because he feels they’re traitors who abandoned their Fatherland when they lost. It’s up to the PCs to get to the source of the murders and stop Karl from killing more people. But what to do with the machinery and his father?  Future Victims
Other NPCs and Groups
 INSIDE YOU Tone: Arthouse with elements of body horror. Major Vernon Kite works for the RPA, a veteran of the war for the English. He’s been consigned to a desk for a while now after he was presumed to have cracked under the strain of the later years of the war. He’s a quiet man, very inoffensive and unassuming. The PCs may know him through political dealings at the office or just generally being friendly to him. They may barely know he exists, really just seeing him as a background character. He’s a nice man when you get to know him. It’s just a shame that Vernon isn’t Vernon anymore. He was an infiltrator for the British nosing around in Germany back during the war, focusing on the Brocken base in the Harz Mountains. Brocken was built into a cave system, completely self contained and dedicated to research into Incursion machines. Nobody knows how Vernon got in; nobody knows how Vernon got out. Nobody knows that one day the thing that came through the machine implanted a piece of itself into everything alive and all the machinery in the base. The infected Vernon escaped the base and radioed British bombers to bury the entire base in bombs. It worked, but over time the infection within his body ate away at his mind and soul. Vernon Kite exists only as a body now, his mind and soul consumed by a piece of the Incursor that lives on the other side of the veil. Now that it has complete control, the puppet master is using Vernon’s body to create a new portal to bring the rest of the body through and make itself whole again. Now things are starting to go missing and people are starting to get hurt, all part of the plan to build the gate. It might not be hard to stop Vernon, he’s only one man. The problem is figuring out who is to blame to begin with and if Vernon could be disconnected from the Incursor.  Other NPCs and Groups
  OUR MAN IN BERLIN Tone: Black comedy. The PCs have to escort a member of British Parliament around Berlin. The MP, one Bert Stanshall, has gotten suspicious about the ties between Porton Down and the RPA. He has no idea what’s going on and the higher ups of the RPA want to keep it that way. Not helping things is that Stanshall is an oafish, blustering knucklehead with a middle class view of the world and a dislike of foreigners and “welfare parasites”. The crux of the mission is to bring Stanshall around on mundane things like busting smugglers and raiding clubs while keeping him away from the more supernatural, top secret elements. The plan is to make him think that the RPA is a boring police organization. Also along for the ride is General Brian Robertson, High Commissioner for the British Zone who is leading a security detail of soldiers protecting the MP. Complicating things is the fact that Stanshall is often looking for trouble, poking his nose where it doesn’t belong and blundering his way into things. He’s convinced that the Labor government is funding nefarious things and finding any proof will help his political career. And then someone tries to kill him. The SIS is the main antagonist for this mission. They know that someone is feeding Stanshall info linking Porton Down and the RPA and Stanshall’s “investigating” is heavily rocking the boat in Germany and London. The spies are perfectly willing to kill him to shut him up and to this end a bunch of ex-Heer soldiers are lead by Agent Gareth Carey to carry out the assassination. Their plot is to make it look like a hit by some ex-Nazis out to stick it to the British, throwing the ex-Heers under the bus and giving the SIS an excuse to crack down in the area. Regardless of whether or not the assassination attempt succeeds, the PCs are tasked with figuring out who’s responsible so the RPA doesn’t get the blame. Other NPCs and Groups
 THE PRODIGAL SON Tone: Tragedy and horror, maybe with the lightest touches of black comedy to help elevate things from being too dark. There are rumors of STs in Charlottenburg after a young child disappeared and his clothes were found two days later. Magda Bremmer debriefs and doesn’t have much to go on besides a light outline of the mission: investigate the area, try and find the child, see if there are STs in the area and keep the public calm. The actual culprit is an American soldier named Sergeant Dan Kramer. Kramer received a head wound in the Battle of the Bulge that he managed to survive at the cost of his sanity and ability to control himself. Sometimes Kramer just gets the urge to kill and when he does, he kidnaps someone and kills them. No torture, no sexual assault, just the blind urge to take a life. The poor child is the last in a line of ten other people Kramer has killed and he just can’t stop himself. Sergeant Kramer, however, is not the focus for this mission. Yes he’s the true culprit, but his activity is accidentally being overshadowed by Werner Diephof and his parents. Werner is the source of the suspected ST activity. He was killed on the Eastern front in 1943 and his body was considered intact enough for reanimation. He was brought back, given a gun and sent back out into the fight against the Russians. But he survived and was still intelligent enough to figure out how to make his way back home, taking six years to shuffle his way to Charlottenburg. His parents were horrified when he showed up on their doorstep, but they quickly decided to keep him in the air raid bunker in the basement. Frau and Herr Diephof were not willing to give up their returned boy, not after their other son was killed (fighter pilot, shot down). Werner lives in the basement. He’s no threat to anyone, spending his days in silent depression. Seriously, unless you’re wearing a Red Army uniform he won’t be any kind of threat and even then it’s just a mild tired sort of anger. His occasional moans and crying have been heard by the people of the neighborhood who have begun to whisper and gossip. The neighbors will point the investigating PCS to the Diephof household, where they will do their best to hide Werner from the PCs. Even if he’s found, they won’t resort to violence but they will do everything in their power to keep their son and convince the PCs to let him stay.   Other NPCs and Groups
  TRANSFORMATIONS Tone: Noir with swirls of bloody horror or body horror. Someone has been murdering members of the black market in East Berlin. Arkady Kazakov thinks that while it may look like gang warfare, there’s something else going on. The VoPos and the Stazi have been taking an interest in the killings which has only been making Kazakov’s job harder. He will tell the PCs not to rock the boat too much and assign them a VoPos officer (Heinrich Gerlach) to accompany them. Their job is to find the murderer and let Gerlach just think that the RPA is a multinational wartime police force. Unfortunately, the murderer is an Alternative by the name of Greta Stauber. During the war she was experimented upon in an effort to create covert supersoldiers in case of enemy occupation. Whenever Greta is scared, tense or stressed, her body transforms. She gains big bulging eyes, long sharp teeth that make her mouth bleed and spurs of bone that shoot through her fingers into wicked claws. In essence, she resembles a shaved werewolf. When Greta is transformed, she can’t be reasoned with or stopped until she no longer feels she’s in danger (whereupon she will revert back to normal). The reason that these black market salesmen are dead is because Greta has been taking muscle relaxers and tranquilizers to keep her calm. She’s killed other people, but the black marketers have died because they pushed her too far in a deal or asked too many questions, causing her to inadvertently panic and transform. Then, to make things worse, there’s the matter of her six month old son. She hates herself and she hates the Nazis who did these things to her, but she’s holding on and trying to live a somewhat normal life for the sake of her son. But the PCs are coming for her, and the drugs don’t always work at keeping her calm and relaxed.   Other NPCs and Groups
 I really like these sample missions a lot! They highlight the ambiguity of the job pretty well and I like how Our Man In Berlin feels like a reskinned Paranoia mission in a good way. They’re engaging, they’re flexible frameworks to build on and they help paint a good picture of what it’s like living in a city with monsters just barely out of sight. It feels a little like Men In Black but in a good sort of way. CHAPTER FIVE Appendices  The appendices are pretty brief because the book is pretty much over. I’ll just go over their content, it’s nothing too deep.
 That’s it for Cold City. Again, I like it quite a lot. The setting is pretty compelling to me and I like the mechanics. They’re pretty versatile and you can easily strip out the system for a story-driven sort of game. So there’s a sequel to Cold City. Well, not exactly. It’s more of a sister game that accompanies the plot and the story established here, prefaced with a “what if?”. You could very well have the divergence from our world end with the inglorious destruction and sabotage of all Twisted Technology. Ultimately, I think it would be a good choice if you took that route. The world had a brush with weirdness and that was it, it all went away in the long run. You could have your somewhat standard alternate history where all of this weird technology becomes commonplace or revolutionizes the world. That doesn’t really compel me nearly as much because Twisted Technology is bad. You can’t compare it to experiments in nuclear power because nobody gets tortured to death to start a reactor. The French goal of using it for agriculture is noble but laughable because at some point there’s gonna be committee hearing on whether or not the French agricultural industry should allow ritualistic flaying for better crop yield and most people sitting at that table are going to be confused and horrified. However, those are your own paths to take. The sister game doesn’t take either of those “what if”s. The one chosen is “what if the governments of the world continue to research Twisted Technology and then it’s actually used?” I’ll see you guys in 1963 and in the shift from noir and monster hunting to horror and desperate survival.  
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Aug 4, 2016 05:27
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Hostile V posted:So there’s a sequel to Cold City. Well, not exactly. It’s more of a sister game that accompanies the plot and the story established here, prefaced with a “what if?”. You could very well have the divergence from our world end with the inglorious destruction and sabotage of all Twisted Technology. Ultimately, I think it would be a good choice if you took that route. The world had a brush with weirdness and that was it, it all went away in the long run. You could have your somewhat standard alternate history where all of this weird technology becomes commonplace or revolutionizes the world. That doesn’t really compel me nearly as much because Twisted Technology is bad. You can’t compare it to experiments in nuclear power because nobody gets tortured to death to start a reactor. The French goal of using it for agriculture is noble but laughable because at some point there’s gonna be committee hearing on whether or not the French agricultural industry should allow ritualistic flaying for better crop yield and most people sitting at that table are going to be confused and horrified. However, those are your own paths to take. So, this is like The War Game meets Monsters or exactly Threads except it ends with that girl giving birth to a Cthulhu instead of a stillborn mutant.
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Aug 4, 2016 05:49
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Young Freud posted:So, this is like The War Game meets Monsters or exactly Threads except it ends with that girl giving birth to a Cthulhu instead of a stillborn mutant.
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Aug 4, 2016 05:56
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Hostile V posted:The designer describes it as a blend of the societal collapse of Day of the Triffids and the wide-spread consequences of On The Beach with a dash of Threads, yeah. Yeah, that image of the poster reminded me a lot of the images of bobbies loading up with Webleys, Enfields, and Stens to shoot looters and rioters in the post-attack Rochester of Peter Watkin's The War Game, which I believe heavily inspired Threads. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 06:18
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Christ, that sounds bleak as Hell.
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Aug 4, 2016 06:20
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Falconier111 posted:I dunno, I've never been a fan of dissecting rules instead of going rear end-deep into weird settings; it's why I (partly) did Madlands without touching on GURPS rules. Hell, I might try to do some kind of readthrough of the Guide! Lessee, the first half of the guide is... Ahahahaha... yes. Welcome to the worlds longest manual of a setting. Seriously it is batshit.
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Aug 4, 2016 07:50
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theironjef posted:So I'm pretty sure that this has also been covered in here, so it's a good thing I don't care about that(Especially since our last care package from listeners had Talislanta 4e, Brave New World, and Godlike in it)! Anyway, here's Testament D20: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era, which is right off the bad a bad sale, since it terminates pre-Jesus! I wanted to play as a singing dancing Judas, dammit! The bumper song is obviously appropriate, but I was wondering if you knew that there actually was a Mesopotamians RPG. A two-pager, part of the Indie Mixtape series. But it's not just a Mesopotamians RPG. TMBG did some promotional stuff where they dubbed the old Monkees cartoon over some of their music video-style animation. It's an RPG of the theoretical low-budget 70s era Mesopotamians cartoon.
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Aug 4, 2016 14:17
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Cold City actually sounds like something I should check out.
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Aug 4, 2016 14:28
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Do the Mesopotamians have a talking lion that helps them solve mysteries?Hostile V posted:Yeah, that's the one. The premise and the world sound sort of silly (and it all definitely sort of is) but I'm honestly liking some of the design decisions, mostly in regards to the approach they take with augmentations and keeping your players in line. But it seemed like the game had a great premise: each of these megacorps is exploring a different type of transhumanity, and they're mutually incompatible, with the UIG trying to keep a lid on things. But it didn't seem to really explore that. And the list of psychic powers I saw just had stuff like "you can make a psi-sword" which doesn't bode well.
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Aug 4, 2016 14:36
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theironjef posted:So I'm pretty sure that this has also been covered in here, so it's a good thing I don't care about that(Especially since our last care package from listeners had Talislanta 4e, Brave New World, and Godlike in it)! Anyway, here's Testament D20: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era, which is right off the bad a bad sale, since it terminates pre-Jesus! I wanted to play as a singing dancing Judas, dammit! You mentioned in the review that all characters can become Ex-Class if their Piety falls too low. What happens to Ex-Fighters? Do they lose their Bonus Feats or something?
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Aug 4, 2016 14:50
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Josef bugman posted:Ahahahaha... yes. Welcome to the worlds longest manual of a setting. Seriously it is batshit. Yeah, I've gotten halfway through it before I just went limp and started emitting steam.
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Aug 4, 2016 16:43
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, I've gotten halfway through it before I just went limp and started emitting steam.
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Aug 4, 2016 17:13
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gradenko_2000 posted:You mentioned in the review that all characters can become Ex-Class if their Piety falls too low. Sadly only the new classes (and even then not spy). What's the worst thing that could really happen to a fighter that falls in an OGL game, anyway.
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Aug 4, 2016 19:19
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A Wizard, Cleric or Druid automatically join the party controlled by the GM or another player.
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Aug 4, 2016 19:32
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theironjef posted:Sadly only the new classes (and even then not spy). What's the worst thing that could really happen to a fighter that falls in an OGL game, anyway. Forgetting how to use your spiked chain and just slapping yourself with it until you are clean again.
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Aug 4, 2016 19:42
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Glazius posted:The bumper song is obviously appropriate, but I was wondering if you knew that there actually was a Mesopotamians RPG. A two-pager, part of the Indie Mixtape series. There's also the Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia campaign setting (kind of thing?) for D&D 3.5, from Necromancer Games.
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Aug 4, 2016 19:44
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INTRODUCTION Hot War is the followup/sister game to Cold City. It takes place in Britain in 1963, one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis goes horribly wrong due to the fielding of Twisted Technology instead of nuclear armaments. I won't be going too deep into detail here, this is just the introduction. What Hot War does different from Cold City is that it uses a lot of in-universe documents to tell a story and it keeps the specifics of the story on the vague side of things. I like the approach they take to it, so before I get into the guts of the game and the setting and environment, I'd like the first update to be a collection of these documents. The following all preface the current setting, from roughly October 1962 to November 1963 give or take. These pictures are taken from Chapters 1 and 2. COPY OF CONTENTS OF RECOVERED DIARY  PUBLIC BULLETIN  UNPUBLISHED NEWS ARTICLE  PUBLIC & PRIVATE ARTICLES, 1962-1963      NEXT TIME: the beginning of the review proper.
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Aug 5, 2016 00:34
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Hostile V posted:
 If there's anything that tells me about a game or anything, it's nihilartikel.
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Aug 5, 2016 00:56
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Well I learned a new word today.
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Aug 5, 2016 04:18
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Why do these "everything is hosed time to die slowly" games always take place in London? Can we do it in Chicago? Wait, that's too much like real life.
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Aug 5, 2016 05:01
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wiegieman posted:Why do these "everything is hosed time to die slowly" games always take place in London? Can we do it in Chicago? Twilight 2000 is largely set around Poland. Yes, I would consider Twilight 2000 one of those games because I realized that there's a whole mechanic around dealing with fuel consumption and use. Not just for vehicles, but there's largely no stable electricity in most of the world, so you're likely running everything off multi-fuel generators. And you might have to brew up your own ethanol to use as fuel.
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Aug 5, 2016 05:18
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What we really need is one of these set in West Virginia, and make one of the mechanics "how long does it take for your characters to actually notice the apocalypse happened."
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Aug 5, 2016 05:24
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Young Freud posted:Twilight 2000 is largely set around Poland. It's a shame the T2K writeup is abandoned. I really want to know if the Polish in the game is as bad as Warhammer's fake German.
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Aug 5, 2016 05:30
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Traveller posted:It's a shame the T2K writeup is abandoned. I really want to know if the Polish in the game is as bad as Warhammer's fake German. I'm considering doing one now that my living situation has stabilized a bit and I have plenty of free time. I'd want to at least get all that sweet Tim Bradstreet artwork, even the ones where it's obvious he used reference from a well-known source...  Also, there's not really a lot of Polish, at least in the base books, mostly because it's from the perspective of U.S. soldiers who have ended up in Poland, so everything is in English. I'm not sure about the adventure books dealing with the initial campaign setting and the later "Return To Poland" campaign.
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Aug 5, 2016 05:38
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NGDBSS posted:The community also isn't so great at actually examining the system's design choices and mechanical knobs. They're 40k players so that goes without saying
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Aug 5, 2016 07:02
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wiegieman posted:Why do these "everything is hosed time to die slowly" games always take place in London? Can we do it in Chicago? Alternately, it's an estimation that the government of the United Kingdom would be so feckless and incoherent that conditions in London would become profoundly shittier than were the case in god drat Leningrad under siege by the German army. Then again, the mysterious REFUGEE TIDE seems to be the real intervening factor here. How timely for Brexit!
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Aug 5, 2016 07:25
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theironjef posted:Sadly only the new classes (and even then not spy). What's the worst thing that could really happen to a fighter that falls in an OGL game, anyway. They become an even worse monk because they've lost the ability to use their sword.
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Aug 5, 2016 09:35
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Halloween Jack posted:I find that some kind of Resources mechanic, like what Fragged Empire and some other games use (have I fellated this game enough yet? No, I haven't, it's amazing) No you haven't. You should give it some more lip and throat service. or start a PBP game or something...
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Aug 5, 2016 09:43
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wiegieman posted:What we really need is one of these set in West Virginia, and make one of the mechanics "how long does it take for your characters to actually notice the apocalypse happened."
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Aug 5, 2016 11:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, I've gotten halfway through it before I just went limp and started emitting steam. Kralorela broke me. After all those interesting, unusual interpretations of real-life cultures, I wanted to fall in love with GlorChinatha. I, uh, the opposite happened.
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Aug 5, 2016 20:35
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Halloween Jack posted:Do the Mesopotamians have a talking lion that helps them solve mysteries? They have a goat that helps them solve mysteries. The goat may or may not talk, the rules aren't sufficiently granular to care.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:18
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GURPS FANTASY II 5.5 – MORE GODS It’s been a goddamn long time since I made the last post and Madlands is complicated and involved; you may want to check the archives and skim the rest of the review before reading. Or don’t. Or ignore the post   Madlander TV is pretty wild. Vuvuti, like many mythical owls, represents knowledge and wisdom. Vuvuti, like all Madlander deities, represents poo poo you want to stay away from. He tends to manifest as a big honking horned owl, usually human-sized, with massive dishpan eyes. If you come too close to him, your gaze will slowly drift towards those eyes – and in them, you’ll see something that fucks you up. Sometimes, you see an image of your doom; sometimes, what you see causes a realization so horrible you go crazy; sometimes, you learn a secret that’s dangerous to act on – how to become a shaman dedicated to him, for example. As far as Madlander gods go, though, his particular brand of shamanism is light; in exchange for the ability to see the future, find hidden objects, and learn secrets, he just wants to peck out your eye. Every power he grants you comes at the cost of a body part, but that’s all Vuvuti wants from his shamans; you don’t get the tasks and personality bleed you might from other gods after signing up. In Madlander stories his personality is unclear (he never talks), but he’s said to have “a jeering contempt” for humans; he’s also, you know, an owl, and he hunts like an owl does, including hunting human children (not like an owl does). As far as Madlander gods go, Vuvuti is pretty good for games; his visions are great for sparking quests to save doomed villages or go adventuring deep into the Madlands, while his shamans make great villains. Since they only have to give up body parts with no further strings attached, Vuvuti shamans have freedom of movement and incredible intrigue potential; the only way to identify one (aside from catching one casting a spell) is to look for lost body parts, which are pretty common in a place as dangerous as the Madlands. Until then, the shaman has spells that can tell them who’s after them, what they know, and how to gently caress them up, but typical Madlands magical corruption gives them reason to slip up enough that the PCs can outsmart them. A-, would use. Madlands gods, for all their inherent violence and insanity, seem to actually get along pretty well. According to the storytellers, when they show up together the gods usually act in some kind of parody of Madlander behavior; they’ll race beetles, play that sticky-fish game from earlier (and occasionally temporarily kill each other with sticky killer whales), go on picnics, or just have conversations. Sometimes they’ll play pranks on each other or use their powers on eachother, always to disastrous results. You’re still as hosed as usual if you run into them when they're hanging out.  The book doesn’t include pictures of them, so here’s a highly accurate depiction of Kikavo Vo and Kikavo Dat from the internet. The Kikavos are unique among gods; they don’t resemble any known animals, they have an obvious familial relationship, and Kikavo Vo is the only female goddess. In the stories, their appearance is consistent: ”GURPS FANTASY II: Adventures in the Madlands” posted:[T]hey have the heads of deer (without antlers) mounted on long thick necks. Their chests and torsos are like those of big potbellied grizzly bears. Their postures are upright, like a man's. Mounted on their shoulders are tiny arms like those of a small child. On the end of each arm are the sharp claws of a wolverine. Their powerful legs are designed like a toad's, but their huge feet resemble those of no known beast, long and flat like planks from a ship deck. With these fearsome appendages they bound across the landscape, leaping miles at a time, smashing anything they touch down on. They anchor these leaps with a thick tail, resembling a shortened squid's tentacle, protruding from their hindquarters. Their freakish bodies are covered from head to toe in thick brown fur like a moose's. Kikavo Vo, the mom, usually tries to be nice; of course, being a Madlands god, she’ll "help out" by dissolving your broken bones or smashing your burning house flat. The only time she gets angry (as opposed to her normal malignant benevolence) is when Kikavo Dat, her Kikavo Dat is specifically described as a sadistic seven-year-old with phenomenal cosmic power. He’s hyperactive as hell and spends most of his time running around and loving with things, often catching people and taking away parts of their essential natures just to see what happens. You can reason with him to get him to stop, sort of, and you can sometimes keep him happy until he gets bored and hops away (or he’ll turn your balls to butterflies); either way, you might catch his ADHD like the flu, get akathisia, or even regress to childhood. Some stories have his shamans turned into kids or just be children straight-up. I’m not a huge fan of the Kikavos. They just don’t do jack as far as stories are concerned; everything Vo does is covered by another god, while Dat’s association with children is just uncomfortable. I’d avoid them if you want to put a Madlands campaign together, but, well, whatever.  Aww, lookit dose widdle claws  Madlanders don’t see Zewa Zab much compared to other gods (not like the gods are common), but they do stumble across his tunnels constantly. He’s described as a gopher, which in this universe means he spends all of his time digging tunnels through the landscape; he doesn’t seem to give a poo poo about anything else, to the point where stories involving him have him talk about only tunnels at lightning speed. His tunnels might follow a pattern, or they might be random, or some mixture of the two (nothing is mutually exclusive for Madlands gods), but nobody knows because nobody risks haunted tunnels or godly attention to enter an unexplored tunnel network. As far as gods go, he’s pretty harmless; sometimes he’ll eat people in his way or nab a tuber harvest on his way to wherever he goes, but he usually ignores you otherwise. Hooray for lesser evils! Not for his shamans, though. They use tons of earth magic and hide out in his tunnels when not doing whatever it is shamans do in their free time. Zewa Zab, game-wise, is mostly useful as a background character. His tunnels make reasonably good hiding spots for various monsters and his shamans make for solid opponents with ready-made hidey-holes. What else can he contribute to a campaign? Nothing! Least as far as I can tell. So, gods are pretty rare as far as encounters with Madlanders go (most Madlanders never meet a god); also, if they stuck around all the time they’d have driven everything extinct a long time ago. So where do they go? Nobody knows, of course! Storytellers can’t agree on this, which is probably a good thing, since someone who knows where the gods live is probably a shaman. The book forwards theories about them living above the clouds in some kind of heaven/hell, distant realm beyond even the Whiteness, a pebble in the Madlands interior, or some cold, dark place where dimensions shift constantly (the book connects this to the Soulless, one of the weirdest parts of GURPS Fantasy II). One story has a shaman philosophizing that the gods are quantum particles and only exist when folks want them to deep down, but his speech is cut off mid-sentence by Zo Do Wabda, natch. GM’s can choose one or more truths; as I said earlier, nothing is mutually exclusive for Madlands gods. The last god in the Madlands is Zuutak, the only name (or word) in the entire Madlander language to use a double vowel. Why?  That’s why. Zuutak is a giant pig that loves crops. Which is great, because he’s the most likely god to show up in a village. The double vowel in his name is the speaker shouting a warning to everyone within earshot. While tubers aren’t necessarily the most valuable food source in Madlander society, they’re a key source of flavoring, alcohol, and most importantly, nutrients. If Zuutak swings by, your entire tuber crop, months of hard work for your alcomahols, is hosed (also possibly your tuber storage and wavobeks if he feels like it). But that’s not the worst part. Like any god, places Zuutak visit tend towards plagues of monsters and hauntings. Unlike any other god, Zuutak mostly shows up in villages (though he occasionally wrecks stretches of landscape hunters stumble upon). The book doesn’t touch on this, but if those parts of the wilderness Zuutak fucks up develop paranormal bullshit, the same probably goes for villages! A Madlander village sits on a razor’s edge in the best of times; the destruction Zuutak leaves in his wake, even if he just eats some crops and disappears, might just be enough to scatter the village entirely. According to the book, a village has 11-13 clans, each with 50-75 members in its extended family. This means the minimum population of a village is around 550. The total Madlander population, also according to the book, is around 25,000; therefore, there are, at maximum, roundabout 45 and a half villages in the Madlands. And, once again according to the book, Zuutak attacks “only one or two villages a year”. Granted, this is math applied to population figures in a game world, so its naturally hosed and probably inapplicable. But if it is, that means most Madlanders see Zuutak at least once in their lifetime! And some encounter other gods too! And the book says most Madlanders never see the gods once in their lives! If I had to guess, it’s just a minor math error a GM could handwave away or straight-up miss while reading this section through. There’s little else to say about him; he doesn’t show up much in Madlander stories, and his shamans mostly spend their time stealing food from villages like a grimdark cartoon robber. Zuutak is, I suppose, mostly useful as a threat or source of anxiety for campaigns; did the next village over get hit by Zuutak? Did a friend of yours run into him disguised as a normal boar in the woods (according to the book, no matter what size Zuutak is “all of his destructive power remains intact”; imagine running into a boar that can gore a person with enough strength to crush large buildings  ). I can’t imagine using him as much more than that, you don’t want to kill your characters too fast.Incidentally, this creature associated with anxiety will sometimes show up as tiny and bright pink. I can’t imagine why  This chapter has run out of pictures, so have Popeye’s angry cousin next to rules for training beetles. A dirt-average character needs to spend 8 out of 100 starting points to successfully train a beetle more than 2/3 of the time! :gurps: Before we leave the gods behind, it’s worth quickly noting that their domain is limited to the Madlands; foreigners unfamiliar with the Madlands tell the locals they’ve never heard of the gods (the book doesn’t note whether the xenophobic and suspicious Madlanders would believe them). No god can travel beyond the coastline under any circumstances, but the book doesn’t say what happens if a god approaches the coast chasing someone which I imagine would be important if it happened in game but  . Nothing, at all, supernatural crosses the shoreline; gods don’t, monsters don’t, shamans can but their powers don’t work. What happens if you bind up a monster and load it onto a fishing boat? Good question! That’s probably a terrible idea, though, so that’s unlikely to come up in game. As it so happens, this border stretches around the Madlands across land borders with other cultures as well; the mountain range that divides the Madlands and Togeth and an indistinct line somewhere up in the Whiteness also seal out the supernatural, sort of, though those seals aren’t as impermeable as the sea. Some gods and monsters can cross them sometimes, but they avoid doing so if they can for whatever reason.Alright, Chapter 5 is over. The whole section’s utility in gameplay is questionable; the gods are good for setting background and some story seeds, but every single one of them is powerful enough to wreck campaigns if your GM is sadistic enough to set up a godly encounter - and, of course, the forethought that characterizes a lot of this book wore out near the end because even the authors started to figure out this part wasn’t worth the effort. Meh, I guess. I’d complain about wasted page space, but my copy is a 31-meg pdf so who cares. It occurs to me that, since GURPS is (obviously) the complete wrong system for Madlands, PbtA would handle it a hell of a lot better. Or maybe some kind of King of Dragon Pass mod. That’d be neat! Next time: 
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Aug 5, 2016 21:27
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Falconier111 posted:GURPS FANTASY II Don't doxx me, thanks.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:49
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FMguru posted:It's also incomplete. The real meat of Glorantha is in the details of its gods and religions, and there's a companion product to the Guide (that should be about the same size) covering that topic which will be along in a year or three. Speaking of things set in Glorantha that are coming out soon(ish) check out the art work on Six Ages: http://sixages.com/blog/ I may well attempt a starter piece to introduce people to Glorantha.
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Aug 5, 2016 23:36
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Josef bugman posted:Speaking of things set in Glorantha that are coming out soon(ish) check out the art work on Six Ages: http://sixages.com/blog/ What is this? A game? An anthology book? A supplement?
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Aug 5, 2016 23:47
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Why the gently caress do people live in the Madlands again?
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Aug 5, 2016 23:49
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Covok posted:What is this? A game? An anthology book? A supplement? It's a game, like King of Dragon Pass.
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Aug 5, 2016 23:56
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Covok posted:What is this? A game? An anthology book? A supplement? Its a new game in the style of King Of Dragon pass.
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Aug 6, 2016 00:05
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