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I'm not sure if I'm missing something but I don't get what the hook for this game is supposed to be
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Jun 16, 2023 17:42
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Makes me feel like this was someone's pet project, but they forgot to sell that to everyone else that wasn't in on it as they were. Briefly glances at Neotech 2.
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Jun 16, 2023 17:53
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Man, I gotta say this current review I'm working on is a big old bowl of "Who Gives a poo poo". It's not poorly written or anything but I don't think I've ever been less interested in what the book is trying to sell me on than the Storytellers guide to the Sabbat. Also Haight is barely a cameo! 
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Jun 16, 2023 18:17
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joylessdivision posted:Also Haight is barely a cameo! Oh, I could've warned you about that, sorry. I think his next real appearance is The Book of Chantries which is a trip on its own.
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Jun 16, 2023 19:14
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Everyone posted:Assuming Taint isn't some Warhammer 2nd ed. Chaos-style save or suck thing, then a Tainted starts out with Taint/Corruption "points" or some poo poo but also gets some kind of "unholy power" or whatever. I'll detail it a bit more in the mechanics section, but essentially you have Spirit points that fuel some of your abilities, and which can also be lost by enemies zapping you real hard with some powers, and when your Spirit hits zero, you pick up some Despair and flip out for the rest of the scene, going berserk or sobbing or whatever. Spirit can be recovered, Despair can not be removed, and at five points of Despair you become Tainted and stop being a PC. You also take a permanent "Manifestation" when you pick up a point of Despair. But considering that there are only five of them(albeit four of them can be chosen twice for stacking effects), the effects of being Despaired will end up being relatively same-ish. Some Manifestations are very slight sidegrades, that's the closest you get to "unholy powers." Ominous Jazz posted:I'm not sure if I'm missing something but I don't get what the hook for this game is supposed to be You're supposed to be one of these very human people, who've got a pet village or county or something you care about, and you're supposed to protect it from bad things. Everyone posted:I mean, okay, Desecrators and Undead being "just Evil" (mostly, helpful NPC ancestor ghosts aside) kind of works. Though I do agree that doing "the enemy of my enemy" should be more of a thing. But the Tainted seem like they should potentially be a PC option. I also don't mind that they're evil, but literally their only motivations are to make people's lives suck. And it's like, yeah, we have evil as gently caress people in the real world, too, but their motivations are (usually) slightly more complex. Making people's lives suck usually isn't the end goal, it's a side effect they just don't care about while accomplishing something else(perhaps the Alu are from some other, collapsed eventuality, say, and the Taint is terraforming this world into one that's more like home, and they just don't care that it also happens to melt the locals or turn them into frog people), or sometimes they might even be convinced that they're doing the right and virtuous thing but no one's appreciating them so they have to go to the work camps(perhaps the Minister of Chains is convinced that industry is the greatest thing ever, the only thing truly worth working for, and that they're constructing a masterpiece, a wonderful society, but since the Kethians don't appreciate it, they need to be put on doubled whipping rations or Tainted until they start obeying). Those hooks give you something to work with beyond "roll up and stab their rear end." Perhaps you could roll back some taint to draw an Alu away from what it was doing, maybe you could lure the Minister of Chains into an ambush by claiming to have some new wonder of industry that rivals anything their slave society has made. Ways to trick, negotiate, trade and maybe even, in rare cases, find common ground or the first thread of redemption for some of these creatures.
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Jun 16, 2023 20:23
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joylessdivision posted:Man, I gotta say this current review I'm working on is a big old bowl of "Who Gives a poo poo". Also, didn’t those both suffer from big editing problems, like “oops we lopped off entire pages/paragraphs and didn’t notice” big? I remember a lot of “fan versions” of Bloodlines and Disciplines that got “page XX”’d in those books.
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Jun 16, 2023 20:24
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PurpleXVI posted:I'll detail it a bit more in the mechanics section, but essentially you have Spirit points that fuel some of your abilities, and which can also be lost by enemies zapping you real hard with some powers, and when your Spirit hits zero, you pick up some Despair and flip out for the rest of the scene, going berserk or sobbing or whatever. Spirit can be recovered, Despair can not be removed, and at five points of Despair you become Tainted and stop being a PC. You also take a permanent "Manifestation" when you pick up a point of Despair. But considering that there are only five of them(albeit four of them can be chosen twice for stacking effects), the effects of being Despaired will end up being relatively same-ish. Some Manifestations are very slight sidegrades, that's the closest you get to "unholy powers." Honestly it sounds like the game creators looked really hard at Blue Rose and decided, "Yeah, let's do the near opposite of that." Instead of welcoming newcomers, you'll end up with these creepy-rear end little "You ain' from 'round 'ere, are ya boy?" racist small towns where the second somebody looks a little depressed they shriek "Outcast! Tainted! Unclean!" and immediately stone them to death.
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Jun 16, 2023 21:56
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Everyone posted:Honestly it sounds like the game creators looked really hard at Blue Rose and decided, "Yeah, let's do the near opposite of that." Instead of welcoming newcomers, you'll end up with these creepy-rear end little "You ain' from 'round 'ere, are ya boy?" racist small towns where the second somebody looks a little depressed they shriek "Outcast! Tainted! Unclean!" and immediately stone them to death. I don't think it's intended to be quite that bad, but considering that the only way to tell how close someone is to becoming Tainted is how sad and antisocial they are, it would make sense, either that or the strict veer into the opposite where in-setting, people realize that being dispirited and hopeless is what invites the Taint in(which also just feels like a missed opportunity to me. Have accepting the Taint be a conscious choice, one that makes a lot more sense when you're desperate, sad or lonely. Have it actually give you something powerful, but temporary, that feels like it can solve your problems, when in fact it just makes more problems in the long run... which then drives people into yet another corner, and makes them more vulnerable to another hit of Taint, until they're stuck down the pit for good. That would have far more narrative impact! And tell you that every Tainted had some sort of deeper problem that needs resolving to put them back on the road to redemption and bah. Bah. Wasted potential.), so there's a big focus on including everyone, cheering them up and making sure no one is alone or suffering needlessly.
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Jun 16, 2023 22:06
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AmiYumi posted:Isn’t that meant to be a supplement/sequel to the Player’s Guide to the Sabbat from the same edition? It is a sequel to the Players Guide to the Sabbat, but other than vitae appearing several times as Vit-, this has been pretty light on major editing issues. Valkenburg had a whole chunk just missing from it that I addressed in the review because I had to dig into my digital library to find I had the eratta for it. And like I said it's not poorly written or offensive, it just does a really poo poo job of selling the idea of STing a Sabbat focused chronicle, hence my comment about it being a big bowl of "Who gives a poo poo?". I have plenty of commentary about why I don't love the book in the review but this is the first time I've reviewed one of these books and generally felt after reading it like "Well that sure was a book I read.  "
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Jun 16, 2023 22:10
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PurpleXVI posted:I don't think it's intended to be quite that bad, but considering that the only way to tell how close someone is to becoming Tainted is how sad and antisocial they are, it would make sense, either that or the strict veer into the opposite where in-setting, people realize that being dispirited and hopeless is what invites the Taint in(which also just feels like a missed opportunity to me. Have accepting the Taint be a conscious choice, one that makes a lot more sense when you're desperate, sad or lonely. Have it actually give you something powerful, but temporary, that feels like it can solve your problems, when in fact it just makes more problems in the long run... which then drives people into yet another corner, and makes them more vulnerable to another hit of Taint, until they're stuck down the pit for good. That would have far more narrative impact! And tell you that every Tainted had some sort of deeper problem that needs resolving to put them back on the road to redemption and bah. Bah. Wasted potential.), so there's a big focus on including everyone, cheering them up and making sure no one is alone or suffering needlessly. So basically the true realization of this idea would be Lord of the Rings meets Persona? ...sure, I'm down
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Jun 16, 2023 22:10
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PurpleXVI posted:I don't think it's intended to be quite that bad, but considering that the only way to tell how close someone is to becoming Tainted is how sad and antisocial they are, it would make sense, either that or the strict veer into the opposite where in-setting, people realize that being dispirited and hopeless is what invites the Taint in(which also just feels like a missed opportunity to me. Have accepting the Taint be a conscious choice, one that makes a lot more sense when you're desperate, sad or lonely. Have it actually give you something powerful, but temporary, that feels like it can solve your problems, when in fact it just makes more problems in the long run... which then drives people into yet another corner, and makes them more vulnerable to another hit of Taint, until they're stuck down the pit for good. That would have far more narrative impact! And tell you that every Tainted had some sort of deeper problem that needs resolving to put them back on the road to redemption and bah. Bah. Wasted potential.), so there's a big focus on including everyone, cheering them up and making sure no one is alone or suffering needlessly. And now I envision this town where smiling is required and sadness is against the law. I feel like pretty soon you'll get PCs that decide to switch over to the Desecrate side because overall they're less horrific than the towns trying to fight them.
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Jun 16, 2023 22:27
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Infinity RPG: TAGs Boston Dynamics The Snifferbot is designed for security usage, especially by cops. It patrols enclosed areas - train stations, spaceports, orbitals and so on - and comes in tons of shapes, most of them inobtrusive and designed to resemble an animal that people like. Dogs are most common. Most are quadruped designs, though some are hoverbots or wheeled, and their job is primarily to autonomously walk an assigned beat with only minor adjustments by the operator or integrated LAI. Usually they operate as part of a security team, alerting the rest of the team to handle anything weird they run into. They're relatively tough for a primarily civilian remote, but are armed only with a stun pulser. They are equipped with a bioscanner, and one of a number of sensor suites depending on the design - usually an explosives detector, weapons detector, or a drug or poison sniffer. Their firewall gains increased and focused security when they determine something to be suspicious. Spotbots are camera drones, often used by snipers. There are dozens of models, most of which are identical aside from the design aesthetic and are derived from loosened patent controls on the original, the Stellatech Spotbot Lapinette-3. When operated autonomously by a geist or LAI, the spotbot does absolutely nothing except move with its user and give bonus Momentum to their Observation and Attack rolls and Defence Reactions. They're pretty fragile, though they do at least have an armor casing, and are equipped with a recorder, an optical disruptor, and a stun pulser and flash pulser that will only be activated if the user takes manual control of the thing. Lunokhod Sputniks are one of the Sputnik series of Nomad military remotes. The Lunokhod dates to the Neocolonial Wars, and it improves the base model with expanded mobility, armor and quantronic defenses, but its most important new design element is actually in the fabrication process - the Lunokhod was designed for mass production and wide deployment, and so it streamlines the design, making Sputniks in general much cheaper to produce. The Lunokhod's name is Russian for 'moonwalker' and its specialty is outflanking enemies. It is meant for stealth, so it has good climbing ability, and operates especially well in zero-g. It is armed with an electric pulser, a heavy shotgun that can swap to AP rounds, and a heavy flamethrower, focusing on close-range combat to support those attacking openly. Tsyklon Sputniks ('Cyclone') have a similar chassis to the Lunokhod, but they're optimized for hacking support instead of close combat. They aim more for precision fire, with the LAI under near-constant review by Tunguskan programming experts to patch out any exploits that are noticed so the user can be prepared for the most cutting-edge infowar. Daily updates are promulgated via Arachne, with Lunokhod LAI updates being rater more sporadic. The Tsyklon does suffer a major flaw, however - its unique eyepaint vision systems are highly disorienting due to the sheer amount of visual data they throw at the operator, limiting how many people want to use it. In addition to serving as a functional repeater, it provides visual sensors in all directions, giving a bonus to Observation rolls, but increasing complication range without Pilot Focus 2+. It is armed with an electric pulser, an indirect fire pitcher gun and a spitfire shotgun. Tinbots are cute little robots designed to serve as a shell for geists. They are popular in hacker circles, military outfits and civilian life equally as a way to give your geist a body. Inherently they have relatively few actual capabilities, mostly serving as a speaker for the geist and avoiding trouble. The original Tinbot model was a Moto.tronica design, but the term has lost branding usage and is now just a word people use for cute autonomous remote personal assistants. Most companies in the business produce at least one variant. Tinbots can be given minor deflector shielding or stun prod attachments, and the main thing they excel at is friendly support. Anyone assisted by a Tinbot can reroll a single die in any roll the Tinbot helps with. Tour Guides are drones designed to help tourists even more than AR or geist-borne Maya vids can. There are always places on a planet that are too dangerous, hard to get to or full of hungry wildlife for humans to safely travel. Tour Guides are drones that can visit these areas and transmit everything they experience to their user, allowing them to experience the environment vicariously through direct Maya connection to the person kept safely inside the vehicle-drone. Tour Guides are specially designed for specific environments, meaning they look different depending on where you plan to go. Svalarheiman designs have powerful tracked motors, insulation and heaters, while those meant for Paradiso tend to have climbing legs, heavy armor and a set of integrated weapons. The average Tour Guide, before upgrades, only has a stun pulser, however, plus a bonus to all rolls in its intended environment. Traktor Muls are Ariadnan remotes the size of a small car, managed with a big ol' two-handed controller rather than standard quantronic controls. The integrated basic AI is at least capable of simple pathfinding, at least. Traktor Muls are usually used as transports or artillery platforms, and they are remarkably fuel-efficient, maneuverable on their tank treads and pretty narrow and well made for Ariadnan wilderness environments. The remote control operates pretty well as a control system unless you're at Extreme range, with no penalties for remote control operation. However, the lack of a true LAI means that unless operated by remote control, they can take no action more complex than moving or shooting a gun they are given. They do not have any installed weaponry by default but are sold with two limb sockets for you to customize, though using non-identical limbs unbalances the machine, giving it increased Difficulty on Agility rolls. V.U.Bots, full name Very Useful Bot, are small quadrupedal remotes designed to carry things for people. While only around as big as a large dog, each is capable of carrying up to 200 kilograms with no trouble at all, provided it fits on the mounted carry platform. They are usually used as luggage carriers for tourists, pack "animals" for scientific equipment that needs transporting, or really anything where you need a walking robotic forklift the size of a dog. It has no weapons - it's a forklift with legs. The Yaokong is the most basic and widespread military remote of Yu Jing. It comes in many configuraitons for specialized usage, but the basic chassis can be found all across Yu Jing, often in military hands but sometimes just in the hands of trusted hobby tinkerers, as Yu Jing encourages remote experimentation. The Yaokong is designed to be pretty modular with some effort, and has integrated infrared sensors as a standard design. It is tough and pretty well armored, allowing it to use its own body as a melee weapon if needed, and is also armed with a combi rifle. It has two main loadouts, one which mounts a heavy machine gun and one which mounts a missile launcher. The Son-Bae Yaokong is a support variant of the Yaokong used by Yu Jing's StateArmy as a missile platform. It drops the armor plating of the standard chassis as it is not meant for frontline deployment, replacing it and the combie rifle with a missile launcher. The Son-Bae build is too light to leverage its own mass as a melee weapon, so it has a stun prod instead. The lighter build lets it move faster to get away from danger, and it integrates technology that makes it much more dangerous against targets marked for it by allies. It has an alternative build that uses Koryo smart missile systems, but getting ahold of that without military clearance is incredibly expensive. The Meteor Zond is one of a number of Nomad remotes designed as 'Zondbots.' Zond is a Russian term for UFOs, and Zondbot is a Nomad term for 'this one is a weird and quirky one,' so while they often share chassis design elements, they are more widely varied than many remote lines. The Meteor chassis design does vaguely resemble those found on the Vertigo and Reaktion Zonds, but it integrates a unique hover system that is not used in any other Nomad design. Meteors are meant for forward scouting, with advanced sensors and comm systems to allow it to feed real-time telemetry to its allies. The design also sees a fair bit of use by criminal groups and space pirates that need lookouts or scouts. It is armed with a stun pulser and a combi rifle, plus a jump pack to help it move around the field faster than its normal hover system allows. It is, however, quite fragile. The Reaktion Zond is a fragile quadrupedal design with a number of visual similarities to the Vertigo, but its job is different - it is a terrain dominator, meant to climb all over any vertical areas it can find to attack from unexpected positions. It is largely used as a guard by both Nomad military forces and Submondo crime organizations. It comes with an electric pulser and heavy machine gun, and it is especially dangerous when attacking those it detects trying to sneak around. The Salyut Zond is typically used either as a minesweeping robot or a light support platform that carries supplies. The Nomad Military Force extensively uses it to move stuff, as do a number of private corporations and criminal groups, as it provides secure and well-armed protection for whatever it's been put in charge of transporting. Plus, it has a number of concealed compartments to go with its stun pulser, combi rifle and repeater. The minesweeper variant also incorporates a deactivator kit and EOD system. While it isn't a very hardy device, it is pretty well-armored. The Stempler Zond is very similar in design to the Reaktion and Vertigo, but its feet have both claws and wheels. It is intended for deployment inside ships or city streets, and it is able to use its wheels to move quickly on the ground, while its claws enable it to climb buildings or ship hulls with ease. It relies on advanced sensors and satellite uplink to coordinate fire for other units from its perch, spotting concealed forces and spies easily. Private security and criminal groups often find the design useful as a mobile sensor, and it is generally sold at high prices wherever it's available. It is armed with an electric pulser, combi rifle, deactivtor kit and repeater. As might be expected for a spotter, it is not going to take fire well. The Transductor Zond is another chassis variant of the Zond design. It is a scout, meant to install a sensor field ahead of an advancing military unit or in a chokepoint. Its sniffer pods are programmable to detect specific things, such as hidden enemies or illegal drug labs, and it can perform chemical traces from very, very small amounts of material. While it has been used extensively by Nomad military forces, it is even more popular with cops, corporate security and crimelords. They are also, rather controversially, used as security guards on cruise vessels of the Weltenbummler Cruise company. This is controversial because they come standard armed with a combi rifle and electric prod along with their advanced sensors and optic camo. It needs it, being even more fragile than most Zonds. Vertigo Zonds are a support design meant to launch smart missiles that can track even concealed foes. They tend to operate in pairs with a spotter remote like the Stempler Zond, as while they provide highly accurate long-range firepower when guided, they do need someone to mark their targets. The Vertigo is officially only allowed to be used by the Nomad military, unlike other Zond designs, but knockoffs and salvage mean you can get one on the black market relatively easily. They come with an electric pulser and smart missile launcher, plus a repeater, and they become much deadlier if placed in a fireteam with a forward observer NARC Pod or a remote with sat-lock capabilities. Just don't expect it to take a bullet. Zondbots are the basic design, and considered something like a mascot for the Nomads. They are prominent in Nomad-authored games, Mayacasts and toy designs, and they're the first ever of the Zond line, inspiring all the other versions. It's a zippy little chassis that is easily altered and comes with few pre-installed weapons or systems, though there's a number of common loadouts. It's a lot more rugged than most Zond designs, and the one players are most likely to run into is the Moderator version used by Nomad cops, integrating a Modhand stunner, an adhesive pistol, an optical disruptor, climber claws, a repeater, and either a medikit or a bomb deactivator kit. Zondmates are our final remote, a specialized and armored Zond design made for the Zondnautica Rapid Offensive Unit. It is a vehicle, able to transform between combat mode and motorcycle mode to deliver a soldier quickly. The combat mode is a humanoid biped armed with an electric pulser, chain rifle and light grenade launcher, and has optic camo. The motorcycle mode can still access the integrated weapons but is more focused on protecting its passenger than fighting and cannot access the optic camo. Next time: Upgrading and customizing your machines
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Jun 16, 2023 23:05
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PurpleXVI posted:Out of the Ashes Well that's ... quite a setting. I like grimdark more than the average, but the vibe I'm getting from the setting is depression. It's been a while since I read Tolkien but (as you said) I'm certainly feeling some Silmarillion parallels to the world building before the magic nuke. I hope the mechanics are good because the idea of building a community from the ground up appeals to me as I like roleplaying/management games like that. Maybe I should stick to Six Ages, the Glorantha based video game and spiritual successor to King of Dragon Pass.
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Jun 16, 2023 23:24
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joylessdivision posted:It is a sequel to the Players Guide to the Sabbat, but other than vitae appearing several times as Vit-, this has been pretty light on major editing issues. Valkenburg had a whole chunk just missing from it that I addressed in the review because I had to dig into my digital library to find I had the eratta for it. Yeah, I think they were stuck in the mindset of the Sabbat as a purely antagonist fashion at this point. It's not until Revised that they come into their own as a group I'd say "Oh, sure, I could do that."
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Jun 16, 2023 23:44
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Dawgstar posted:Yeah, I think they were stuck in the mindset of the Sabbat as a purely antagonist fashion at this point. It's not until Revised that they come into their own as a group I'd say "Oh, sure, I could do that." Honestly they come off like a shittier diet Camarilla in this book. I was sold on the idea of terrifying, monstrous vampires who were worthy enough adversaries that the Camarilla could put aside stomping on the Anarchs long enough to say "Yo these mother fuckers over here though, they need to die, post haste", something like a mix between the crew in Near Dark and 30 Days of NIght. This is....not at all what this book offers, instead presenting them as just as backstabbing and idiotic as the very ivory tower that they rail against. There is some stuff I liked in the book, and I've definitely tried to call that stuff out in the review, but man was this a disappointing book.
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Jun 17, 2023 00:00
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joylessdivision posted:It is a sequel to the Players Guide to the Sabbat, but other than vitae appearing several times as Vit-, this has been pretty light on major editing issues. Valkenburg had a whole chunk just missing from it that I addressed in the review because I had to dig into my digital library to find I had the eratta for it. As a fan of the ĆON line it cracks me up how often special characters STILL get dropped without anyone noticing Dawgstar posted:Yeah, I think they were stuck in the mindset of the Sabbat as a purely antagonist fashion at this point. It's not until Revised that they come into their own as a group I'd say "Oh, sure, I could do that." “Okay, so this faction is obsessed with freedom and killed their elders so they wouldn’t have to follow orders anymore. What next?” ‘Uh, we need to work the Black Spiral Dancer and Nephandi connection, so they’re all infernalist demon-slaves?’ “Perfect, obvious next step for them. More cocaine?” PurpleXVI posted:I don't think it's intended to be quite that bad, but considering that the only way to tell how close someone is to becoming Tainted is how sad and antisocial they are, it would make sense, either that or the strict veer into the opposite where in-setting, people realize that being dispirited and hopeless is what invites the Taint in Everyone posted:And now I envision this town where smiling is required and sadness is against the law. I feel like pretty soon you'll get PCs that decide to switch over to the Desecrate side because overall they're less horrific than the towns trying to fight them. 
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Jun 17, 2023 00:17
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joylessdivision posted:Honestly they come off like a shittier diet Camarilla in this book. I was sold on the idea of terrifying, monstrous vampires who were worthy enough adversaries that the Camarilla could put aside stomping on the Anarchs long enough to say "Yo these mother fuckers over here though, they need to die, post haste", something like a mix between the crew in Near Dark and 30 Days of NIght. So, like…original flavor Anarch Monster Sabbat, animalistic Lupines, Arcadian Fae Folk, all those 1e corebook groups
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Jun 17, 2023 00:22
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AmiYumi posted:“Okay, so this faction is obsessed with freedom and killed their elders so they wouldn’t have to follow orders anymore. What next?” Don't forget the Shadow Court and I genuinely don't know what somebody would get from that alliance as the Changelings are pretty inwardly focused. Sicing a bunch of sidhe knights on somebody isn't the same as a pack of Garou. That said I do like in the Vampire CCG Gangrel could have an alley card called Renegade Garou so the Gangrel antitribu could have a Black Spiral Buddy.
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Jun 17, 2023 00:27
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AmiYumi posted:Great, I wasn’t getting enough enforced Toxic Positivity at work and from social media, thanks for adding it to my hobbies as well The happy illithids are here for maximum smile enforcement.
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Jun 17, 2023 00:29
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part 1 Who's ready to read what many WoD fans consider the worst novels ever published? Join our journey into... The Masquerade of the Red Death!  No lie – I love this cover. The chap is the titular Red Death and he’s got a great vibe going. Its very early 90s horror-aesthetic, very Skeleton Warriors, with a hint of real horror. That said, the guy is also too big since he never appears as a ten foot giant, but hey – artistic license. But, before we get ahead of ourselves – what the hell is The Masquerade of the Red Death? At its core, it’s an extremely loose retelling (which is to say, it steals some motifs and visuals) of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, set in the World of Darkness, but that doesn’t do it justice. A straightforward retelling of the MotRD is so obvious and easy to do with Vampire that it writes itself, but this trilogy is absolutely not that. It’s a sprawling hamfisted adventure involving multiple signs of the apocalypse, mages, the vampire mafia (if you remember way back when joylessdivision did his A World of Darkness read-through, the Brujah Don Caravelli is a major character), a completely unknown bloodline, the collapse of political stability in Washington DC, and the sudden death of crucial characters for the setting. Its also, for that same reason, broadly assumed to be non-canon. Most of its ideas are never directly used again, though thematic elements recur later and there are a couple of sneaky references. I’ve never actually seen proof it had a non-canon flag slapped on it by White Wolf back in the day, but as very little of it is ever mentioned again except in Weinberg’s second trilogy, the Horizon War (which itself contained the only canonical depiction of an extremely big deal event in Mage’s metaplot), it’s pretty safe to assume it was quietly popped over to the side as one of the many failed tonal experiments of White Wolf’s early novel runs, along with the Jyhad novels and the paired novels on San Francisco. They are, for want of a better term, very, very, very Weinberg. So, who’s Robert Weinberg? He was a real-deal author (unlike some of White Wolf’s writing stable), though not a terribly good one. Comic fans might know him from a run on Marvel’s Cable, horror fans for the prolific number of anthologies he edited or the awful horror stuff he did in the 90s, pulp aficionados for Pulp magazine and his sponsorship of pulp reprint volumes, weird fiction fans for when he helped run Arkham House. He’s one of Those Authors who aren’t necessarily that good as writers but who love their subject with a kind of infectious enthusiasm for it and whose contributions on the back end of the business are vastly more important than their actual literary output. Their stories might not be any better developed than a ten year old on a playground inventing a backstory for a game of cops and robbers, but where the joy of writing these ridiculous setups come through, there’s something endearing about it, even wholesome. Weird little fellas who write weird little lovely stories that, if you go into it with that spirit in mind, are liable to leave you with a goofy grin. Weinberg wrote a few things for White Wolf. The first was a short story for the rather off-the-wall Dark Destiny collection published 1994, where he wrote pulp bullshit in and really went for it. Dark Destiny was like that – it had stories that were conventional game fluff, but then a story about post-apocalyptic vampires the next chapter, a reprint of an unrelated vampire story about how Peking Man was actually a vampire, and by its third volume, multiple stories about what Dracula was up to in the American Civil War. The folks at White Wolf (which is important here – a lot of White Wolf’s early novels were published via Harper-Collins by better established authors than Weinberg, while Masquerade was an in-house affair) must’ve liked it because they hired Weinberg for not just the two novel trilogies, but to work on a very loose tie-in novel for the tv series Kindred: the Embraced. This is a bit surprising for reasons that will become obvious as we move through the novel, but which can be boiled down to ‘hand a 51-year old pulp author a substantial contract for a property he doesn’t fully understand and see what happens’. So, now that we know what’s going on and who Weinberg is, lets get pulpy. Lets get weird. Spoiler warnings are in full effect since I’ll be discussing stuff both for this series and later works without too much regard to how it might impact on twists. Prologue We open with a quote from Poe, to make it really clear this isn’t a coincidence of naming: “Blood was its Avatar and its seal - the redness and horror of blood” From there, we get a prologue to introduce us to the World of Darkness. Rome, 1992 – a meeting between a pair of twins and ‘Father Naples’ of the Society of Leopold. Naples is, notably, not a name people usually have. Napoli’s much more common, and for an Italian the one you’d expect. We never do learn where Father Naples comes from, only that he’s in his late fities but still ‘…an expert at both kendo and karate [who] could kill an attacker a dozen different ways...’ Oh Bob. They’re meeting to discuss the Kindred. Naples has been lured there by a promise of huge money, but really, the Society wants to know who knows they exist and what they do. So they get together at noon to make sure the other guy isn’t a vampire and eat at an outdoor restaurant. His dinner companion is a handsome young blonde named Reuben, who knows the bible back to front (Weinberg insists on capitalizing and italicizing. Its always The Bible, never the bible. See also The Old Testament) and makes vampire jokes:  As references go, it’s a little blunt, but gently caress it. That’s pulp for you. More wretchedly, he orders linguine with meat sauce and a coke. There are no pizza rules but there are pasta rules and linguine is not an appropriate pasta for a meat sauce (also – which one?) I mention this because a certain cultural bias is already emerging – from names to food, Weinberg was very American and didn’t spend a lot of time digging into other places for the trilogy, even where its detrimental to character. Reuben is set up as older and wiser than his years (though as we’ll see later – not so much: he and his sister Rachel are the children of Seth – as in, Biblical Seth – and probably the first ever Revenants, with a direct trace of Caine’s blood in their veins.) and very well educated, so ordering something a little more specific here would’ve been a great chance to show the man knows what he’s about. As it is, he’s just a bit of a blank slate. This is where we get our potted history. As ways to infodump go, its not a bad one, except for two things. First – the infodump covers way more than it needs to over its twelve pages, and is just a wall of exposition. Second, the Society of Leopold end up spending pretty much the entire trilogy doing gently caress all, so Father Naples here is wasted (paper-thin) characterization work in a trilogy over a thousand pages long. The history is accurate enough – Caine cursed by God, Caine begets childer who beget childer, those childer revolt, etc, etc. A neat tidbit is the Society of Leopold considers Revelation (though Weinberg calls it ‘The Revelations’) to foretell the return of the Antediluvians, which is our first sign that this trilogy is concerned with the apocalypse. We get ghouls explained, the Sabbat and Camarilla conflict, and the Clans get a brief rundown while Father Naples drinks multiple bottles of wine in a row. Then, more apocalypse stuff. Gehenna, and the idea all methuselahs and antediluvians are cannibals. That’ll come up again in the course of the trilogy. Where most VtM novels until the end danced around the idea of the pending apocalypse as an oppressive vibe with the odd omen, Weinberg’s work actively puts on one of those sandwich boards and shouts ‘the end is nigh, goddamnit’. Here, the apocalypse isn’t just looming, its already in motion, which frankly is part of the bugfuck crazy charm. Finally, we get an introduction to the Jyhad, which forms the backbone of the plot. It is, to borrow from Weinberg:  Reuben drops some cryptic questions about the Inconnu and ‘recent events in Russia and Peru’, which we’ll come back to later. That, finally, is where Father Naples doesn’t know anything, and the conversation ends. Reuben slips away with no one even seeing him, and no one can describe him after the fact. The audio tape from the surveillance team is white noise. And finally… Father Naples was dead all along! Gasp! He died of a heart attack shortly after sitting down. Reuben, suffice to say, is on some next level supernatural poo poo. So we come back to my quibble about Father Naples being a waste. As a character, he’s pretty thin, but no thinner than the main characters – and its precisely the kind of book that the Society of Leopold playing a more significant role in would fit neatly. Instead, we get a cheap trick ending to highlight how powerful and spoopy Reuben is: he’s practically invisible, he can keep the dead alive; he can order coke with linguine and not feel shame. Reuben, to be clear, is a bit player – he’s fundamentally not that important to the story and exists mostly for exposition, and his role (and Father Naples, for that matter) in both this scene and most of the rest could be easily substituted with my single favourite NPC in VTM, who we’ll meet later in this book. Chapter One We jump ahead for no particular reason to 10 March 1994, in St. Louis. This time we actually meet one of the protagonists – the fantastically named Dire McCann, private dick. McCann was the subject of the first thing Weinberg wrote for White Wolf, his short in Dark Destiny (along with most of the other St. Louis characters, including McCann’s role as proxy for a methuselah named Lamech, the most powerful sorcerer ever, who invented a Golconda potion 6000 years ago. See what I mean about the schoolyard story style? Everything is straight up to 11.), so this is stuff the folks there knew was coming when they hired him. There’s a tendency in the way people speak about this trilogy to try and act like it was so unexpectedly bad that it had to be thrown in the non-canon bin, but unless my chronology is completely mistaken, there’s no way the editors at White Wolf didn’t know what Weinberg was about during the writing of these books, so the odds that they were somehow trapped into publishing it and didn't have time and opportunity to correct its excesses are slim. To set the scene, its night-time in a sleazy part of town, and McCann is being followed. But how does Weinberg construct a vibe of sleaze and seam? I’m glad you asked, because now I get to show you this:  You can smell the goddamn scotch even thirty years later. That said, this is another recurring element of Weinberg’s approach to the World of Darkness. A lot of its authors skewed towards a more ‘our world but with vampires’ approach, but Weinberg went all in on the flavour text in the rulebook about how it’s a darker, dirtier, and more extreme reality. The streets are packed with vice and brutal violence, the halls of power are corrupt, you can buy drugs literally anywhere, country roads are crawling with bandits and rape gangs waiting for unwary motorists, 50 people a month are murdered in St. Louis, and even the high class sex workers are streetwalkers on bad corners. The individual instances are all very hamfisted but there’s enough of them to really build a sense of exaggerated grime that colours all six of his WoD novels and that a lot of the other writers working for White Wolf, for good or ill (largely good) ignored. To use a painting analogy, Weinberg and some of the other early writers are out here messily using a very bright and basic palette – what follows after they’re done and the next batch of hands take over to refine these loose and crude studies is darker, murkier, technically more proficient but less strikingly ugly. Moving on, we learn McCann works for Alexander Vargoss, wealthy industrialist – and prince of St. Louis. The Mafia runs the underworld in the city, which – sure, okay. Its not actually as unreasonable as it looks at first glance as St. Louis did have its own Mafia family for a long time, but it shared a lot of its turf with smaller gangs and by 1994 was dealing with the Bloods, Crips, and Gangster Disciples who were absorbing the locals into complicated transnational affiliations. So, who is McCann? At this stage all we know is that he’s a big fella (6’4”, 250lbs, to be precise – and this being pulpy, it ain’t fat) noir detective who’s spent six months travelling on business, has close ties to the Prince, doesn’t trust the postal service, and hates mysteries. He’s a man’s man, a hardboiled dick, and he carries a MAC-10. Why? Well, let’s let Weinberg explain:  We need to know this because he immediately gets jumped in an alley by someone who disarms him with a garotte, rendering it pointless. Fortunately, McCann is an expert martial artist! Because, y’know, of course he is. Get used to that, by the way: Every protagonist in Weinberg’s WoD stuff is an unstoppable badass who can only be, at best, moderately inconvenienced. It makes me wonder much of the cringe element people have towards it is reflective of seeing what are, essentially, PCs run wild and recognizing their own excesses. McCann takes out the bad guy and starts the interrogation, only it’s a trap! The real assassin is behind him with a gun! He dives out of the fire and gets ready to get up, only its too late and the real assassin is gone! Only he isn’t, because Vargoss and his bodyguards have suddenly arrived and caught him! Yeah. This is also something to get used to. There’s a lot of escalation and immediate tension builders that are immediately, sometimes within the same sentence, defused. Now to get one of the other glaring issues with Weinberg out of the way, let’s meet the Prince’s bodyguards: Flavia and Fawn, a twin pair of English Assamites embraced around 1815 or so. At the time this was being written in 93/94, there was still a lot of guff about Assamites never embracing women or westerners until very recently, so this is actually a spot where Weinberg not giving a poo poo is good. This little bright spot quickly fades, though. I’ll let Weinberg do himself here:  Expect nearly every significant female character to be hot, wear skintight poo poo, and be completely unable to pass for normal. We also don’t get it here but the two are basically ivory white – and you may be thinking ‘So? They’re vampires’. They’re also Assamites, and prior to V5, all Assamites darken with age, so we unfortunately skip right from ‘Weinberg has no time for this ‘Assamite = Muslim Man nonsense’' back to ‘Weinberg, being a Weird Lil Guy, is terminally horny and has a loose grasp on the material.’ The Prince and his Angels were out walking to visit McCann and spotted the kerfuffle brewing. Yes, McCann is so badass that the immensely powerful Prince visits him on the minor errand of requesting his presence at a meeting. Now’s a good time to mention that Vargoss is a 2000-year old Methuselah, so he can pretty safely walk the streets with or without a bodyguard, but its an odd dynamic, and Vargoss doing so is particularly funny given that he apparently spends ‘too many… nights squelching… ill-conceived plots’ from his ‘loyal subjects [who] believe that they should rule this city’. I suppose its nice he’s an active and engaged figure with an ear to the ground, but maybe if he delegated rather than walking around the red light district doing errands any ol’ ghoul or phone call can take care of while killing people right out in the open, flanked by his extremely obvious matching set of white-leather supermodel sisters, he’d have fewer of his subjects wondering if he’s cooked or not. We close the chapter out with an invitation to Vargoss’s nightclub HQ. He has a special guest he wants McCann to meet – a guest from overseas, with news about The Soviet Union. We’ll cover that next time, but basically: Baba Yaga is real, cool, and back, baby. The excerpts I’ve shared are pretty standard for Weinberg’s prose – none of it is exactly brilliant, but there’s worse out there. His characters are paper-thin cutouts with the emotional depth of a puddle, and his action sequences are muddled – but for all that, it still has some of that breathless energy of a ten year old describing the plot of a movie they saw half of to you in a parking lot outside a dentist’s office. Loomer fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jun 17, 2023 |
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  ”The great carved dragons of Argonnessen emerged from the mist on the horizon as the Seren longboat cut through the waves…” Part 9: Melf Brooks’s “History of the World, Part 1” Chapter 7, “Life in the World,” is the largest single chunk of the book - at about a hundred pages, it’s nearly a full third of the pagecount. For all that it is about “the world,” this chapter is by far primarily about Khorvaire and its nations. We start with a broad overview of what kind of things are common to find across the continent, then swiftly narrow down into distinct profiles of a few pages for each nation. The core Five Nations still get the most thorough write-ups, but the newer nations that splintered off from them over the course of the War also have some tasty detail. Each write-up also includes a few paragraphs on the general adventurer experience in that nation, concluding with a range of adventure ideas usually building on something from within the profile. Some are stronger than others, but they’re a useful exercise for the DM. It’s also been taking me a long drat time to get anything written because there’s so much to cover. It’s actually kind of paralyzing how much, how to order it usefully and also say what I want to say about how I interpret it. But anyway. While it’s not really explicitly said, the world (or at least Khorvaire) is generally low/mid-level but not of minimal level. There are a number of NPCs with double-digit levels wandering around - the famed “adventurer king” Boranel of Breland is aristocrat 2, fighter 8 - but they are relatively rare and usually tied up with important responsibilities. The closest thing to Elminster or Mordenkainen is a magically-awakened tree. As you might surmise, the tree is not particularly mobile. At the same time, far more people have a few levels under their belt, and many have gotten into PC classes to reflect higher educational standards and the demands of the War. A lot of people have been through some poo poo. As such, I’d start characters in an Eberron game as at least level 3 unless there was some specific reason why the PCs are a bunch of rank amateurs. Setting aside how level 1 in D&D/d20 sucks in general.  Stolen from the 5e Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron, as the world map in the 3.5 ECS is a dull brown splash over two pages. The World We start off with some basic stuff about the world that I’ve already outlined earlier: the three “layers” of the world (Siberys, Eberron, and Khyber), the dozen moons, the various continents. Broad details and common legends that people would know. The Ring of Siberys is visible year-round, but contracts and expands over the course of the year so that during Khorvaire’s winter it is a narrow but bright band and during summer is a diffuse glow in the southern sky. The moons dance around the planet in complicated orbits such that one comes closest during each month (and is the namesake of that month). Traditionally, different dragonmarks are associated with each month and moon as well because the people in the world have taken notice of the pattern of 12+1. Not everyone believes in it, ascribing it to confirmation bias and pattern-seeking (if not exactly in those terms) kind of like the so-called “23 Enigma” or any other bit of folk numerology, but it has been noticed. There in fact was a thirteenth moon and mark, once upon a time, so the folk numerology is accurate here. We get the first note that some of the major constellations recognized in Khorvaire are some familiar names from other settings: the dragon gods of D&D such as Io, Bahamut, and Falazure. To most people these are merely constellations named by vaguely-known “ancients,” but they are objects of worship to the dragons of Argonnessen entirely separate from the creator wyrms. They don’t exactly map one-to-one, but there are some suggestive hints through the game line that the dragons may have inspired at least some of the Sovereign Host and Dark Six off of their own gods and what Khorvaire has now is the result of millennia of a dozen or so different games of Telephone slamming together. The book also outright declares the diversity of Khorvaire to be a great strength. I greatly appreciate the writers putting that in plain terms. They do invoke the “melting pot,” but they also go on to the more idealistic interpretation of cultural and intellectual enrichment instead of assimilationism. The peoples of the continent, even with all their differences, exchange and meld ideas to create something greater. Something which can cause friction but also allows problems to be tackled from many angles. The Last War was a nightmare sparked by “Great Men” (and Women) trying to hammer everything into the exact shape they wanted, while the renewed multicultural pluralism of Khorvaire is a better hope for an ongoing peace than any treaty or royal declaration. Beyond Khorvaire are several other continents. Xen’drik, directly to the south, used to house a powerful empire of giants and is the ultimate origin of the elves - the drow are still found there. Southeast of Khorvaire is the island-continent of Aerenal, the current elven homeland. North is the Frostfell, an arctic continent plagued by undead of unknown origin and believed to be the long-ago homeland of the dwarves. Across the oceans to the east or west of Khorvaire is the continent of Sarlona, where humanity originated and now under the oppressive rule of the Inspired. Finally, south of Sarlona is Argonnessen, secretive land of the dragons. Outsiders are able to visit Seren Island just off of the northwest of Argonnessen, whose peoples worship the dragons. The Prophecy In a half-page “sidebar,” we finally get our first real explanation of the Draconic Prophecy, and I’m going to let the book speak for itself:  The Prophecy is a loving mess and I love it that way. The short version, explained better later, is that the Prophecy is not some glance at a proscriptive destiny but rather an elaborate prediction guide of probabilities. This condition must be fulfilled to provide that result. It is valueless (in the “moral values” sense) and indifferent to the results of what it predicts. It simply is, and it is entirely up to people living in the world to fulfill any particular foretelling. Learning it grants you more agency, not less. You just know that some dragons game the Prophecy to clear their gambling debts. Ancient History Now, the ECS has a two-page timeline summarizing the ancient history of Eberron up to the present day, but it shoves it at the end of chapter 7. Not necessarily a bad place for it, but a fair few historical events and concepts still impact the present day directly and indirectly. Since the book is already talking about the world in general and the history of Khorvaire, I’m jumping this part ahead to fit in with the rest of the history stuff. Also this is a litany of events without a whole lot of context. I’ll try to add some, but if I do so for everything we’ll be here all day. Context will mostly come later, but this is here to have a rough idea of the order of such events. Feel free to skip ahead a ways if you don’t care that much, I understand. Numbers are about to get wacky, almost everything inflated by an order of magnitude or two. Now. Eberron’s historical timeline stretches back more than 10 million years. Fortunately, it glosses over a lot of stuff up until just over 4000 years ago, and still skims most of the following time pretty lightly. This timeline is divided into a set of Ages, though these are ages of peoples instead of technologies. Each is significantly shorter than the one that came before it. These are the Age of Dragons, the Age of Demons, the Age of Giants, the Age of Monsters, and the Current Age. This scheme is very Khorvaire-centric, in much the same way that Western history tends to neglect what was going on in Asia (and Australia, and 99% of Africa, and...). The Age of Dragons has already been largely covered. It’s the mythic, timeless past when Siberys, Eberron, and Khyber shaped the cosmos and had their deadly battle. After that came the Age of Demons, as Khyber was still full of venom and hate for Eberron and so “spat out” the ancient fiends of the world. These fiends made the surface a hellish realm and enslaved the children of Eberron and Siberys, the dragons and couatls. This lasted millions of years until the dragons rediscovered the Prophecy and used it to successfully fight the fiends. The couatls ended the war decisively when they collectively sacrificed themselves to trap the demon lords and many of their followers in the depths of Khyber. This was the origin of the Silver Flame - the living power of a whole magical species’s self-sacrifice to protect others. Versions of its worship have cropped up around the world. The dragons, meanwhile, retreated to Argonnessen to study the Prophecy. The Age of Giants followed, starting an estimated 80 thousand years ago as the giants of Xen’drik developed the first of what anyone in modern Eberron would recognize as civilization among the mortal species. The rising giant kingdoms enslaved the ancient elves, which is noted to have… sigh… “the inadvertent effect of pulling the first of the common races out of their primitive state.” I’m just gonna… let that sit for a time. Anyway, the dragons visited Xen’drik and taught magic to the giants. The giants were able students, as were the elves. The giants happily offloaded the boring bits of building their arcane wonders onto their slaves for tens of thousands of years. But then about 40 thousand years ago, a stable, natural connection between Dal Quor and Eberron opened and literal nightmares flowed through into Xen’drik.  The war between the quori and giants lasted a good thousand years or so. Forced together by desperation, the giants’ greatest archmagi employed their greatest powers to end it. Whatever they did broke the planar connection and forced the Realm of Dreams into a permanently distant orbit. However, giant civilization and Xen’drik itself shattered - the cataclysm “plunges large chunks of the continent beneath the sea.” Devastating plagues and curses spread, followed by mass slave revolts. The desperate giants once more prepared the same magics to quell the revolts, only this time were halted from repeating their arcane cataclysm by the dragons themselves, who finally got off their scaly asses and intervened. The giants’ kingdoms collapsed into violent tribalism. The Age of Giants died and the Age of Monsters began a “mere” 2000 years after the quori invasion. Now, the Ages of Dragons, Demons, and Giants relate heavily to plot and adventure hooks around ancient arcane secrets and lost pre-history. High concept, high-level stuff full of wizard poo poo. The Age of Monsters, starting 38,000 years ago, begins the period most relevant to adventures focused around modern-day politics and how the present reflects the past. It’s the time in which several of the common races gradually filter into Khorvaire and the earliest forms of various modern states and traditions (religious, martial, and cultural) are established. This was the time the elves fled to Aerenal and established the Undying Court, moving away from worship of ancestor spirits to worship of deathless ancestors still walking the world. For some unknown reason the dragons also took issue with something about the Aereni, and regular skirmishes every few centuries started between Aerenal and Argonnessen. This was also the time of the goblinoid empire of Dhakaan in the south of Khorvaire and the appearance of the Gatekeeper druids among the orcs. The dwarves also came to Khorvaire from the arctic continent of the Frostfell and settled in the Ironroot Mountains, an area they still live in to this day as the Mror Holds. The end of the Age of Monsters began with another cataclysmic war, as the alien plane of Xoriat came close to Eberron and crazy cosmic horror bullshit started spilling into Khorvaire. The strange and mighty daelkyr entered the world at the head of legions of aberrations and crafted legions more from the raw materials they found in the world. Beholders were shaped as living siege engines, illithids for terror and psychic domination. The goblinoid peoples of Dhakaan were also a favored material and the Daelkyr War saw many taken and bent to murder their own kin.  Somehow the denizens of the Plane of Madness look less alien than the denizens of Dream. Why? Don’t worry about it. The Daelkyr War raged across much of southern and western Khorvaire until the Gatekeepers built a network of powerful druidic seals - similar to but less destructive than the powers used by the giants - which forced Xoriat into a distant orbit away from the world. They also bound the daelkyr and many of their minions into the depths of Khyber along with the fiends. This was something of a curse on the orcs’ own lands, however, as the seals have never been absolutely perfect and so little bits of power and occasional voices leak out. Many Cults of the Dragon Below have since taken root in the far west of Khorvaire as a result. Gradually, across thousands of years more, the Dhakaani Empire fell apart in strife and turmoil. It was a slow death, slower even than that of the giants’ kingdoms, but inexorable. Mind, the time scale is still absurd - it’d be like describing modern Egyptian politics as part of the slow collapse of the Old Kingdom. Now, all of this has been covered in just under one page of somewhat terse double-columned text. Hitting the big points, giving you a basic framework. I’ve expanded upon it some because I don’t know when to stop typing. Three of the next four thousand years, the Current Age, is the rest of this first page and a third of the next. The Current Age The first Big Event of the Current Age was the magical awakening of Oalian, a greatpine who is to this day the venerated elder of most of the non-Gatekeeper druid traditions in Khorvaire and current technical ruler of the Eldeen Reaches. But the early Current Age was just as importantly marked (ha-hah) by the emergence of dragonmarks on the common races of Khorvaire. The dragons are noted as watching “in awe and horror” at the Prophecy coming alive on what they saw as lesser beings. The first marks appeared among the Talenta halflings and Aereni elves. One of these elven marks was the Mark of Death, carried by House Vol. Around this same time, the first waves of human migration from Sarlona reached the east coast of Khorvaire and the Mark of Sentinel appeared on some of them within a scant few centuries - after the gnomes gained the Mark of Scribing but before even the Mark of Warding appeared on the dwarves, who had been in Khorvaire for millennia already. During humanity’s early spread across Khorvaire, House Vol was exterminated and the Mark of Death wiped out. The exact reasons why and how are not expounded upon here. The only survivor was the young Erandis, who became a lich and went into hiding. Totally not at all scared off by the complete destruction of a marked house by their own kin, House Phiarlan went to Khorvaire to live among the burgeoning human populations. Over several centuries the marks continued appearing among the common races and led into an event known as the War of the Mark, waged “to end the threat of aberrant and mixed marks.” What this actually means is left hanging, but suffice to say, dragonmarks are not as immutable as the houses pretend, and the War was very much a political action taken to solidify the houses’ hold on power. As this was going on, the kalashtar appeared in Sarlona and were soon followed by the quori, who began empire-building. Just as important as these events was the attempted conquest of Khorvaire by Karrn the Conqueror, distant ancestor of King Galifar. Karrn named his first nation after himself and sought to bring the rest of the early Five Nations under his rule. He failed, but the imperial dream would stay with his line forever after. When Karrn’s many-times-great-grandson began his own campaign to conquer the continent, Galifar made the canny choice to get the marked houses on board in exchange for unprecedented political freedom in his empire. This made the Kingdom of Galifar possible, but has had consequences down to the present day. A Thousand Years in Summary The Kingdom of Galifar and the Last War are the two greatest defining features of the political and social landscape of Khorvaire today. The official start date of “the campaign” is 998 YK (Year of the Kingdom), a heartbreaking two years short of what would have been a millennial anniversary, rubbing salt into the wounds of the Last War. Well, heartbreaking for the sort who think a sprawling human-run kingdom was a genuine good thing. That’s not actually to say Galifar was a tyrannical ethnostate. Galifar ir’Wynarn was reportedly a far-sighted and intelligent leader, just that he also thought it was for the best if everyone answered to him above all else. To build up support for his grand conquest at home, he intentionally evoked the failed historical hero, Karrn the Conqueror. Galifar learned from Karrn’s mistakes, though, as his distant ancestor’s empire-building had failed as he was too much of a tyrant for such a far-flung empire to tolerate. Though he demanded fealty, as an actual ruler he kept a light hand. This was helped by Galifar knowing he had to delegate. When he took one of the early Five, he then appointed one of his children to be its governor. This allowed Galifar himself to be the fair yet distant king who was never personally at fault if something went poorly, understandably off on campaign. His children were also apparently unified in this scheme, recognizing that even if only one of them could be the actual heir, it was still a really good deal to be in on forming the nobility of a continent-spanning empire. To solidify his status above and encompassing the various regions, Galifar placed his capital of Thronehold on an island in Scions Sound, which four of the five early nations bordered. The core Five Nations took the names of Galifar’s children while the kingdom was Galifar’s own. The eldest child was Karrn ir’Wynarn, named after the Conqueror, and took the governorship of his father’s home realm when Galifar went campaigning. His siblings Aundair, Brey, Thrane, and Cyre were appointed over the various provinces as the kingdom expanded. Karrn was meant to be Galifar’s successor, but by the time the elderly king finally abdicated in the 40th year of his reign over a unified kingdom, the four eldest scions had passed on. This left Prince Cyre the heir, and from him the nation of Cyre became the traditional fiefdom of the crown prince or princess to learn their trade. Cyre I was followed eventually by Galifar II, and so it went for nearly nine centuries. The Kingdom wasn’t perfect, not by far, but it was relatively stable. The nascent Dragonmarked Houses were also a key part of securing Galifar’s hold over the people. They’re also almost certainly why the monarchs of Galifar all seemed to live loving forever. (A note on names: ir is a particle for nobility and royalty in Khorvaire, akin to the Germanic von, though all nobles across Khorvaire affect it instead of just Karrnathi. Similarly, members of a marked house will often add the house name prefixed with a d to their personal name depending on context, so a Cannith scion might go by John Smith, John Smith d’Cannith, or John d’Cannith depending on how they want to emphasize or downplay their association with their house. Again, the marked houses have long been just another kind of nobility.) The Kingdom ostensibly ran the whole continent, but mostly the farthest eastern and western reaches were perpetual “untamed frontiers” that the Galifarans regularly projected force into, seeking profit but never able to solidify their hold. The ECS surprisingly makes no bones about this - there were idealists who wanted to learn more about the world for its own sake, but as a rule the Kingdom explored and expanded to find resources to exploit. And as with the lycanthropic purge, occasionally to exterminate. We don’t know too much about the intervening 900 years mostly because the specifics don’t matter (except when they do, such as the emergence of the Silver Flame in Thrane). If you want something out of Galifar’s history to come back and haunt someone, then as a DM you’ve got a fairly free hand to decide the details. We do know that Sivis message stations and the Orien-run lightning rail were developed and spread within the last century or so of the Kingdom’s reign. Otherwise, the Kingdom exists more to set a tone - a “golden age” lost just a bare century ago, entirely by mortal caprice. It is within living memory for plenty of possible characters, especially elves (a reminder that the minimum starting age for an elf in 3.5 is 114 years), but long enough ago and through the lens of a catastrophic century of war such that even people who lived then only have nostalgia by which to recall it. Few truly remember what the Kingdom was like, and if they say they do then they’re trying to sell you something. The game-relevant history picks back up in the mid-800s, when King Jarot ascended to the throne. This was the height of the Galifar golden age, and Jarot seemed like he would continue the upward trend. He invested heavily in infrastructure, funding massive expansions of the lightning rail lines. He funded Cannith research and stepped up Kingdom involvement in the port city of Stormreach, the “Gateway to Xen’drik.” Goblinoids became more common figures around a Kingdom which once heavily marginalized them, though many spread as part of the mercenary trade under House Deneith.  At the same time, Jarot was haunted by strange visions and nightmares of coming doom. Was he plagued by quori assaults or fiendish influence? Was he touched by a heretofore unheard-of gift for true foresight? Or was he unfortunately afflicted with some mental illness? Nobody knows, one of the many questions left open for a DM to answer for their own purposes, should it ever matter. Whatever the cause, a great deal of the investment in the Kingdom under Jarot’s reign had a grim purpose - Jarot feared some unknown enemy coming to shatter Galifar, and so much of the Kingdom’s treasury went into preparing for a terrible war he believed was coming. The lightning rail expansion? To move soldiers and weapons. Cannith research? The combat golems that would become the warforged. Stormreach? An obsession with warning signs of collapse from the Xen’drik giants. Goblinoid integration? A side-effect of the demands Jarot placed on Deneith to bolster the Kingdom’s armies. When Jarot died after a reign of more than 50 years, his visions of a shattered Kingdom came to pass. Primarily because his power allowed one paranoid man to turn the continent into a powder keg. It had a good run, but one of the “strengths” of Galifar’s united kingdom was what tore it apart. In 894 YK, Jarot’s daughter Mishann ir’Wynarn of Cyre stepped forward to claim the throne… and her siblings Kaius of Karrnath, Thalin of Thrane, and Wroann of Breland all laid their claims to the throne as well, backed up by their shares of Jarot’s armies. Wrogar of Aundair stood with his eldest sister at first, but over the coming century of war alliances would break and be reforged numerous times. The Last War ended two years ago in 996 YK with the signing of the Treaty of Thronehold, but in truth had been winding down for two years before that ever since the Day of Mourning. Nobody knows exactly what caused it, but one day early in the year a horrible light lit up the sky over a battlefield in northern Cyre, blinding spotters just over the border in Thrane. A terrible explosion simultaneously rocked the Cyran capital of Metrol, and survivor accounts tell that a thick gray mist billowed out of the royal palace. This mist spread inexorably across the land, anyone caught in it lost to the world as survivors rushed to stay ahead. Most who escaped were either lucky enough to get on the last rails out of the cities or lived near Sivis message stations that received the final warning. Most of Cyre’s population and the armies fighting in the northern plains were claimed by the mists, however, including the heads of House Cannith and all but one of the Cyran royal family. The mists of the Mourning stopped at the rough borders of Cyre, which had already been diminished by the revolt of the breakaway province of Valenar. If the mists had continued east, they would have swept across Valenar, the Talenta Plains, and the south of Karrnath. If they had continued west, millions more would have died in Thrane and Breland. Instead they settled, as if a judgment and a warning. The Jewel of the Five was gone, and in its place a mist-shrouded wasteland thrust into the heart of the continent like a blade. The Treaty of Thronehold was a formality and a funeral. Some of this is me editorializing, but the details are all there. Galifar endured for nine centuries and was by all accounts a reasonable enough place to live (for the common races, anyway). Serfdom was still legal but had been weakened by changing social convention and the needs of the developing economy. (The War would regress matters in some places.) Many of the royals seemed to actually understand that happy, healthy people were also productive and loyal. It was politically archaic and self-interested but it wasn’t, for the most part, intentionally cruel. But it’s also clear that a lot of what we know about Galifar is through the lens of Galifarans mythologizing their lost Kingdom. Because another important thing to remember is that the Five are very much first-world style nations, whose people lean toward the well-meaning but are also morally complacent and care little to know the details about how their country maintains its high standards of living. The Talenta halflings have a different story to tell about the glorious history of Galifar, about Karrnathi interlopers demanding a fealty they considered meaningless and getting violent when it wasn’t proffered. The goblinoids of Darguun (and many Five city slums) will tell you about getting shoved into the margins by invaders who picked at the remains of their own Khorvairan empire. The Daughters of Sora Kell, rulers of Droaam, will rightfully point out that even to this day the Five call their citizens “monsters” as an excuse to ignore the new nation.  Modern Life Modern-day Khorvaire exists in the shadow of violence. Only the very youngest children have no concept of loss or death in their families and communities. The battles did not happen everywhere, but their effects were widespread. And everyone fears the potential for the Mourning to happen again. If Khorvaire had modern psychiatry, PTSD diagnoses would be everywhere. Everyone is at least a little hurt, many are going to have some kind of mental or physical disability from the war even if magic makes it easier to “solve” them. (It’s not like regeneration is commonly available, though you’re also much less likely to lose a limb to a wound gone gangrenous.) At the same time, there is a certain mad exhilaration that the horrors have finally ended - or at least gone into abeyance. Some are already getting a head start on a local version of the Roaring Twenties (the Roaring Aughts?), complete with organized crime. drat right my Eberron campaign has Elf Capone and a thri-kreen gangster named Bugsy. (drat right I’m making that Elf Capone joke again. I will never be stopped.) Everyone in Khorvaire, from the highest royal to the meanest laborer, is desperate for distraction. “Adventure” is a reckless yet oddly respected calling, as adventurers go out and bring the world back home. It’s romantic and flies in the face of everything about industrialized warfare. The publishing industry has exploded to serve the public taste for tales of heroic action. Some of the stories are even mostly true! That’s an excellent bit, really. Of course the pulp world is full of pulp fiction. It gives more socially-minded PCs an avenue to manage their fame and reputations. The income from selling your stories is basically meaningless to player characters in any edition, but getting to influence how people perceive you? Better than gold. It also conveniently gives an excuse for enemies to know more about you and how you fight, so the DM could reasonably provide NPCs who know how to counter some of your abilities and spells without it just being a bullshit move to shut the PCs down. And the reverse, where someone assumes they know the party’s tricks and then learns to their woe that their knowledge is months out of date. Most people in the Five are still just farmers or common laborers. A significant slice of them are also veterans. As mentioned, many farmers are still legally serfs (though what that means anymore varies from nation to nation) but a sizable and growing percentage are landowners or tenant farmers not bound to the land. As well, a growing proportion of the populace are congregating in the cities at a faster rate than ever before. More and more are skilled tradespeople and the middle class is resuming its growth that had stagnated and declined during the War. The upper classes are still almost entirely composed of those who already started well-off, with the high nobility and may-as-well-be-nobles of the dragonmarked houses up top. Even if the lesser nobles and lower families of the houses have to work for a living, things are still usually comfortable for them. This overview is interspersed with some loose numbers on how large each social class broadly is. It’s noted, for example, that for every professional in a city, there are still going to be at least three common laborers - few jobs have been cut out by any form of automation even as many of them have changed, creating a constant demand for mass labor and transport to support “skilled” work. Even this mass labor is difficult to innovate out of the way. (The closest they ever came turned out to be people themselves.) One out of a hundred people have direct blood ties to a dragonmarked house, while half of those might have a mark (most with just the Least form). The book also estimates that maybe 3 out of 10 people make up the middle class, while 1 out of 10 people count as “wealthy” - including mid and high-level adventurers, amusingly enough, who still remain adventurers despite that. The writers know what’s up with our favorite adrenaline junkie weirdos. (An aside: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s commentary on prospectors and gold will never stop feeling like one of the best encapsulations of D&D adventurers to me. I used to use quotes from it as little taglines on IRC room names for online games. An adventure or two could see you through to enough money to retire modestly in the countryside or to buy a small business in the city, but adventurers are a bunch of idiot addicts. That’s gold, that’s what it makes of us.) This leaves 6 out of 10 people firmly “poor.” The aforementioned farmers and common laborers across the continent. Many are serfs, but even serfs have codified legal protections and surprisingly high educational prospects. Schooling was considered a right and a necessity in Galifar, such that every lord was expected to organize a manor school to teach basic math, reading, and writing to the children of their serfs. I suspect the dragonmarked houses were a big part of this attitude. They were a constant reminder that power could come even out of the “common” people, and also emphasized the necessity for the Kingdom to secure their own magical assets (AKA, wizards and artificers) instead of letting the houses gobble them all up. Public education became a good way to suss out potential wizards. As for legal rights, the Five all ostensibly subscribe to the Galifar Code of Justice, a system of laws and standards that should sound very familiar to US readers (and, frankly, most everyone else because of how aggressively we export our culture). Even serfs have basic protections under the Code. It’s mostly intact in the Five, if only because it helps a nation’s claims to legitimacy to keep up the legal system of the old Kingdom. The actual execution, of course, varies. Much of Karrnath is still under martial law, suspending almost the entirety of the Code while pretending to still subscribe to it. The Code started relatively simply, with foundational maxims like the presumption of innocence and the right to judgment by one’s peers. It’s also been growing more and more complicated over the centuries, so you’re well advised to hire a solicitor when accused of a crime. The increasing layers of complication also mean more and more loopholes for a canny (or rich) person to exploit. Such a legal system, with enumerated rights which apply to every person, is rather awkwardly at odds with the Kingdom yet maintaining feudalism and serfdom. This is one of those areas where I’m less enthused about the potential and instead just sigh and get on with it. To my knowledge, the historical case was much more the reverse - it wasn’t that you had a modern legal code blunting serfdom, but rather that where serfdom was finally eroded by changing circumstance or shattered by uprisings, more modern codes were put in place to help bury it for good. There’s just no idea here of how you square the circle between “modern freedoms and protections” and “literally bound to the land and a feudal lord.” Added to that, an overcomplicated legal code is just a plot device to wave at certain events like you would magic, with little way for players to directly interact with it aside from the most basic ideas since it isn’t actually written down anywhere. I understand why things have been written this way. The Code exists to let you run The Untouchables or The Usual Suspects. Meanwhile, the Last War and the current political state of Khorvaire are written to play up the idea of a tragic falling-out in a centralized family power, literally a case of siblings turning against each other and dragging everyone down after them - forced to participate by the vagaries of feudal obligation. And now that the war is over and the empire has fallen, people in some places are starting to make eyes toward burying the old rules with it. But these elements butt heads if you stop to think about them at all. In the end, the legal situation is not blissful and idyllic but it’s also not so bad that you should be thinking “guillotines in Aundair” too terribly soon. Unless you want that for your game, of course. Though if you do, might I instead suggest Karrnath or Breland? There are good reasons why, I promise. Next time: The First of the Five!
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Jun 17, 2023 03:38
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I always thought it weird that they put so much work into Argonessen and Sarlona when they're profoundly hostile to normal adventures. Like an adventuring party from Khorvaire is not getting anywhere near the interior of Argonessen or *anywhere* on sarlona.
Kurieg fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jun 17, 2023 |
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Jun 17, 2023 03:45
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Argonnessen seems to be where they squirreled away the epic level content, for the most part, since everything in D&D supposedly had a place in the game world. The Epic Level Handbook was 3.0 and the only 3.5 specific rules for it were five pages in the DMG, but it was there and had to be used, dammit! As far as Sarlona, I think it works best if some or all of the party have a hook in already in some way - generally, by having a kalashtar along. The nation of not-Tibet is their sanctuary on Sarlona and could be a good base of operations for sneaking in. I noted way back when I was talking about faiths that the Meditation domain's spell selection looks more like an espionage domain, so a cleric of the Path of Light would also go a long way to guarding a party in a land of psychic overlords.
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Jun 17, 2023 04:06
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Man you know this is a 90s book when the drink of choice to a bad meal is a regular Coke and not a Diet Coke.
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Jun 17, 2023 04:23
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That is....wow. I thought people were exaggerating how bad Red Death was. Bless you Loomer. Also Baba Yaga is cool and good 
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Jun 17, 2023 06:41
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joylessdivision posted:That is....wow. I thought people were exaggerating how bad Red Death was. Bless you Loomer. Also Baba Yaga is cool and good Honestly, its far from the worst thing they ever published for Vampire. For fiction (thus setting aside the Gypsies book), that's torn between As One Dead, with its hybrid vampire who needs to breathe, and House of Secrets, which contains the single most racist thing White Wolf ever published involving the depiction of a very real, very important figure in the early post-Civil War civil rights movement.
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Jun 17, 2023 07:11
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Loomer posted:Honestly, its far from the worst thing they ever published for Vampire. For fiction (thus setting aside the Gypsies book), that's torn between As One Dead, with its hybrid vampire who needs to breathe, and House of Secrets, which contains the single most racist thing White Wolf ever published involving the depiction of a very real, very important figure in the early post-Civil War civil rights movement. What novel or series talked about a blood plague? Because that blindsided me as apparently it was a novel only thing and they were talking about it in I think the Clan Novels like I should know about it.
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Jun 17, 2023 10:33
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Dawgstar posted:What novel or series talked about a blood plague? Because that blindsided me as apparently it was a novel only thing and they were talking about it in I think the Clan Novels like I should know about it. That was 'Gherbod Fleming''s Trilogy of the Blood Curse, which were pretty solidly mediocre, a bit confused in parts, and suffered from a forced tie-in with the execrable Grail Trilogy for Dark Ages. Gherbod/John H. Steele also wrote and masterminded half the Clan Novel series (Gangrel, Ventrue, Assamite, Brujah, and Nosferatu - so some of the big hitters in the metaplot side), a bunch of short stories, most of the Predator & Prey series, two tribe novels, and the rather bizarre Tower of Babel where he (not terribly successfully) attempted a postmodern novel about novels in the context of Mage, featuring a character, who writes a character who enters the world from the book, but also John H. Steele himself as a character. Unless he's also a now-dead marine biologist who would've been in his late 60s and 70s writing most of these, he never published elsewhere under either name, so who they actually are remains a mystery. Depending on where I'm at after the MotRD trilogy I might keep at the novels, if there's interest.
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Jun 17, 2023 11:51
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I still wonder if I should do an F&F of Rite of Passage just so I can expose more people to glorious Double Crinos
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Jun 17, 2023 15:58
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part 2, Chapters 2-5 Chapter Two We return to McCann. He has the standard PI office – tiny reception, small office, bad part of town. He’s from a dime novel, basically, but he’s also switched on and tuned in on the global scale. He monitors the Giovanni’s major financial dealings on a week by week basis and skims from the profits which, while a big risk, makes more sense when we learn McCann is the puppet-avatar of the Methuselah who arranged the diablerie of Cappadocius to fund his long life. He also has a clipping service pick up weird news around the world, though this is where we spin into the unfortunate again.  Yikes, in so many loving ways. Though, fair dues: The reaction of most white Australians is unfortunately gonna be ‘when are they going? Get rid of them!’ so the last line is pretty on the money. Nuckalavee is, by the by, a Scottish word – not exactly an untranslated Warlpiri or Djaru word, and one you can literally just look up in an encyclopedia – but in the Vampire context, its also one of the Nictuku. Apparently its in Australia and stirring poo poo up – which McCann understands. For a private dick in St. Louis he knows some deep cuts of Vampire lore. Another clipping from Peru talks about a weird rear end statue found by an expedition by the private Explorer’s Club. There’s not a lot of delay in the foreshadowing here – we’re maybe fifteen pages in from the first reference of the trouble in Peru. McCann used the money he stole from the Giovanni to fund the expedition to locate another Nictuku – Gorgo – who has now escaped and roams the earth. This is another of those plot points that gives Weinberg’s trilogy a breathless quality – mysterious terrors that may or may not even exist in later work are just plain facts of existence, roaming the world and ushering in the apocalypse. Finally, McCann gets a bunch of top secret intelligence agency documents from a friend in Switzerland. We’ll come back to that, but if you’ve read Joylessdivision’s reviews, you’ve already met them. More weird poo poo follows – an answering machine message that calls him ‘Lameth’ and warns him of the Red Death, then erases itself (gee, who have we met who can erase tapes? It’s a fuckin mystery. Where’d the call come from? McCann has it traced – he knows a guy, very pulp dialogue – to… the payphone in the lobby of the building he rents space in, which has been out of service for months. Nothing to follow up there, so its on to chapter 3. As you might be noticing, these are very short chapters. Chapter Three Still with McCann. We now know he drives a ‘late-model Chrysler’. This being 1994, I can only picture a ridiculously boxy Lebaron, and I can’t help but laugh at our hardboiled private dick cramming himself into one of these shitboxes to go meet an ancient vampire:  The destination is Club Diabolique – an abandoned warehouse turned into a disco in 1984 by some dudes with terrible timing since disco is already dead. And its explicitly disco to boot, because ‘when that craze had died, so had the club’. Oof. Now its been turned into, because this is early VtM and the entire aesthetic is basically just [url= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe5q_TdKbsk]this video[/url] on loop. It is, naturally, the hottest place in town as well as the Elysium and primary court of Prince Vargoss. A tongue-in-cheek approach to this would be to have Vargoss actually love modern music, if only because he’s constantly drinking from people high on coke and molly, but rest assured: he does not. Now, who actually goes to a place like this? Let’s ask Bob:   Punk, infamously, had no attitude. That aside, this is also par for the course for early VtM. Club Elysiums are always crawling with rich yuppie pricks slumming it and aggressively edgy goths. It was before my time so I honestly don’t know how often that happened outside of the top-end of the most well known clubs. We also get a long and basically acceptable description of goth fashion (read: ‘black’, ‘frills’, ‘loose fits’, and ‘lots of velvet, lace, and leather’), and find out McCann likes the kids and hopes they never actually encounter the darkness they romanticize. The club’s guarded by a 400 pound ex-wrestler dressed as an undertaker named Brutus. Brutus is one of Vargoss’s ghouls, which again begs the question of why the Prince is personally roaming around the streets delivering messages. The music is live heavy rock at the threshold of pain, because punk, rock, and goth are all interchangeable. Now, we get to meet another vampire and enjoy Bob’s sterling dialogue and the high standard of editing:  Eddie here is 'Fast Eddie' Sanchez, the fastest knife in town.The Elysium itself is soundproofed to keep out the rock music because Vargoss hates it. What kind of music does an ancient methuselah prefer? Well, in one of the most wonderfully bizarre bits:  I legitimately love the idea that in St. Louis’s limited vampire population of, say, 25 (15 in attendance that night plus these 3), an undead jazz band is a significant power bloc. It’s a noir stereotype smashed into a vampire one, but instead of blindfolded jazzmen these are some of the greats kept alive forever, and not even just as ghouls. loving Louis Armstrong might just be chilling on stage doing his thing in between munching on yuppies. This, for me, is one of those big dumb grin moments. Vargoss isn’t Toreador, incidentally, but you might expect him to be if he’s decorating his court with the musical greats, who he presumably has to either bloodbond or pay handsomely for their services because Vampire Louis Armstrong can go anywhere he likes and get a warm reception. Joining the band tonight is a mysterious redhead with ‘the bluest eyes’ and a perfect voice. Her name is Rachel and she’s another sex-bomb, naturally. McCann finds her face strangely familiar at first glance, which we’ll come back to later. We spend a couple of paragraphs there, then its on to the meeting with the visiting vampire, a rude Tremere going by Tyrus Benedict. There’s some back and forth where Vargoss big-dicks Benedict over his disrespect to McCann, and then we finally find out (part of) McCann’s deal:  Nice to know it’s a lie as soon as its established. Part of this, in fairness, is that Bob expects us to have read his story in Dark Destiny before this, so we already know that McCann is the pawn of Lameth. In early VtM stuff, the active role of the methuselahs pulling everyone’s strings is a way bigger deal than in later stuff, so the idea that almost all of them can possess humans is a reasonable extension, though not quite how Weinberg does it. Benedict fills us in on Russia. Basically, when Yeltsin came to power all the supernaturals in Russia went dark and the borders became borderline impenetrable. Vampire fact-finding parties disappear into Russia and never return, for both Camarilla and Sabbat. The Army of the Night now controls Russia – all this gets covered in Rage Across Russia from December 1993, so Bob got briefed on that or had a copy – under the control of the terrible Baba Yaga. For Weinberg, Baba Yaga is one of the Nictuku, and her return a signal of the apocalypse. Now, to prove its true, the Tremere have managed to obtain a photograph of Baba Yaga herself. Unfortunately for Benedict, this is where we encounter The Red Death, who teleports on in:  So – the Red Death here is not a metaphysical representation of greed, deceit, and disease, but a very physical entity and a powerful magician. The description is neat, if rather literal, but doesn’t really stack up to Poe’s namesake. He radiates heat and fire but doesn’t burn. Eddie Sanchez, the lethally fast vampire we met earlier, tries to take him on and bursts into flames, because the lava around the Red Death is real. This is actually one of the better descriptions in the book:  RIP Eddie, we hardly knew ye. It’s a little clunky, but it has a Vibe that works. Pulp horror stuff but in a good way. Also, yikes: the Red Death works for the Sabbat. At that revelation, everyone runs for it while the Red Death walks around slowly turning people to ash because its magic is barring the doors. We get an extremely lame fight scene between it and Vargoss that further establishes how powerful the Red Death is (it can shrug off Dominate from a 5th generation, etc), while McCann tries to shoot it (why use the magic he’s demonstrated five minutes earlier, eh?) to no effect. The Assamite twins try and their swords go right through the Red Death, and McCann finally uses some magic to try and get an edge:  So, this is a new bloodline and discipline that’ve never appeared before or since. We’ll come back to that as we move on. McCann doesn’t recognize the Red Death, but it recognizes Lameth behind his eyes, and the fight continues. Fawn gets murked by the Red Death and Tyrus Benedict gets murked by someone other than the Red Death – and as soon as Benedict dies, the Red Death disappears… and so does the singer, Rachel, who’s left behind a single green sequin from her dress. Mysteries afoot! Its an eventful chapter. It highlights just how unsubtle Weinberg is, but also some of that gonzo charm. The new big bad is the biggest bad ever; Armageddon is here because Baba Yaga ate Gorbachev; guys with knives who seem vaguely racist to me rush to their gallant doom in a pulpy way. A supposed wizard casts Gun on an eldritch horror and wonders why it isn’t working. Also, I’m going to start a counter. McCann likes his Mac-10 because its very effective, so let’s track that. Times his Mac-10 might be useful so far: 2. Times it was actually any use whatsoever: loving zero. Chapter Four This time, we’re jumping to Washington DC’s Union Station. 11 March 1994. Our new viewpoint is Makish:  We also get another of those over-the-top touches. Union Station is a safe beat because it’s well lit and ‘no more than one or two killings took place there in a week’. If that’s a safe beat, what’s the rest of DC like? Well, since you asked…   This is, it must be noted, before the events of the book kick into overdrive. But back to Makish. Makish hates the gangs because they kill wrong, and ‘murder needed to be done with style, with panache.’ He is in fact ‘the supreme assassin in the world of the undead’, because Bob doesn’t do mid-level figures. He’s there at Union Station to meet his client, another vampire, who appears at precisely the stroke of 2AM, which’ll become important later. Immediately, we learn that Makish sent the assassins for McCann, because there’s no way that storyline could’ve been used more effectively. Likewise, we immediately learn that the client is… The Red Death. Because of course it is! And of course there’s no reason not to reveal that immediately! We also learn Makish is a rogue Assamite, who split off because his sire was killed by the Society of Leopold and the elders wouldn’t let him take revenge lest he endanger the Masquerade. He went rogue and killed 114 people (the inquisitors responsible, their friends and colleagues, and their families), and then six Assamites sent to bring him in. Weinberg really likes Assamites because they have the Cool Factor going for them, but there’s something slightly unfortunate about this whole mad Arab shtick to say the least. Makish has the bones of something neat in him, it's just wrapped up in a very poorly built and uncomfortably raced carcass. So – back to that bit about Father Naples and his misuse. We’ve met the Society of Leopold. We had a named member. Now we get this bit about Makish having beef with his clan over them. Does that get developed? Does the Society play any kind of role of substance going forward? Not in the loving slightest. A few mentions here and there, but that’s all. Back to the story. The Red Death spends all of five minutes before explaining, in nice clear terms, that its playing both the Sabbat and the Camarilla against each other. This is… 8 pages after it appears. Wouldn’t want there to be any tension, would we? To stoke tensions, the Red Death and Makish go after a Sabbat pack dealing drugs. DC is a Camarilla city but the Sabbat infest various nooks and crannies, which is a nice change from the novels that assume its possible for twenty vampires to completely control a city of millions. It’s a fairly standard action sequence, but it does introduce a slight issue. Weinberg’s grasp of the setting is… Better than a lot of the stringers White Wolf had at the time, but not brilliant. Finer nuances (not helped by the setting itself still being actively iterated with each new publication) aren’t his thing. So the Sabbat and their ghouls are:  …which is fine, except Weinberg also mixes them up with anarchs, and marks out 'dresses like punk = anarch = sabbat' and 'dresses like goth = camarilla'. But, the fight scene goes on – Makish has celerity, he’s lethal with his bare hands and might have Protean, etc. We also learn he likes to kill with 'Thermit' (which Weinberg describes as an 'explosive'. This kind of error makes me wonder if the '.375' earlier wasn't a typo - and either way, the editor should be catching them), but he doesn't break it out here. They leave one of the Sabbat alive and declare themselves agents of the Camarilla, so that he’ll escape and spread the word and cause a massive retaliatory attack, which will escalate into the titular Blood War – an open state of conflict between the sects. This is where we again lose all subtlety. Playing the two sects against each other? Great, classic. But it takes more than a single shiteating low-end Sabbat being mirked to cue up a full-scale attack on a secure domain. The idea is good, but the execution is lacking, and everything just sort of ‘happens’ regardless of whether it should or not. Why is it happening? Well, ask the Red Death:  I do like that last line, though. A little crude, but effective at what its going for. We're still in awkward early edition Assamite territory, though. By this point I think we have enough to really have a grasp of Weinberg’s style. Things happen, characters pop up like cardboard standees, then some more things happen, and none of it will ever really feel all that connected except where its been very explicitly connected through mostly very bad dialogue. We can’t be trusted to understand the plot so it needs to be explained to us promptly and in plain language. Chapter Five We’re back to McCann and St. Louis. He’s home and resting after Vargoss finally calmed down and went to his haven… in the basement of Club Diabolique. I know I personally like to hunker down in the same place my enemy has shown they can teleport in and out of without difficulty. We flash back to the aftermath of the attack and get to see how McCann comforts Flavia over the murder of her sister – by saying it was an honourable death, which gives you some idea of the awe-inspiringly deep and profound level of characterization going on for Weinberg's Assamites. Flavia is vulnerable, grieving, and bitter at the disregard showed to her loss by her employer – so what do we need to emphasize? Well, Bob’s answer to that is…  We also get to find out the sister’s origins as Assamites! Which, uh…  jesus christ bob Setting aside, just for a second, everything else – its such bad dialogue! No one speaks like that! And returning to those issues, where the gently caress do we start? The idea of Turks roaming Europe and stealing the blonde women (a real Orientalist classic right there)? The bit where they’re under fifteen? The implied incest? The bit where they had the kind of reputation that the kind of people who can afford to go on the tour are destroyed by at the time (a nicher quibble, I know, but I also dabble in writing Regency and Victorian romances so my eye twitches at this sort of thing)? It’s a gross mess on so many levels. None of this adds to the story in any meaningful way, and its so loving tastelessly and poorly done it even lacks shock value or any kind of twisted seductive tension (though frankly, given Weinberg’s abilities… Thank god for that.) It doesn’t really get engaged with in the rest of the books, either – we don’t really get a moment of reflection from Flavia about the conditions of her childhood and how they shaped her, for instance, into being an appealing candidate for the Embrace not just because she was so sexy the Assamite had to have her, but as someone groomed to already accept depersonalization and objectification, which'd allow us to extend a line of critique between the implied child abuse and their transformation into killers who utilize sexuality as an offensive and defensive tool and who are literally owned by a much older and more powerful patriarch figure who doesn't really consider them as people. Not that Weinberg would be the right man for that job, but at least there it wouldn't be solely a matter of titillation - and the bones of it are literally right there! Then just as quick that passes and its back to the dictates of the plot. Flavia swears revenge – you’d think she might have focused a little more on that here – and they discuss… The Path of Evil Revelations, which Flavia suspects the Red Death follows. Every major character in the trilogy has copies of the storyteller’s handbook, I guess. Flavia, at least, recognizes that its weird how McCann knows so much about vampires and tests him after all of two paragraphs of dialogue – and immediately works out his deal:  This is obviously something we should know at page 62 of a 1000+ page trilogy, because we couldn’t gain anything by stringing out hints and allowing the reader to come to a terrible realization on their own, now could we? Flavia then immediately kisses him and offers herself in exchange for Lameth’s patronage, complete with Taut Nipples. Flavia actually gets a little better in her writing as the books go on, but gently caress me her introduction is about as uncomfortably horny as it comes. Its very noir pulp, but not well executed. The grief-stricken reflexive nymphomaniac is not something someone at Bob’s level should attempt to write. Back to the present moment. McCann, being Weinberg’s PC character, clearly has Resources 5 and Contacts 5, because within an hour – at 3AM – he’s able to organize two teams of researchers to… research the Path of Evil Revelations and the Nictuku. I suppose the night time aspect doesn’t matter there since you’re not exactly going to get a couple of history grad students at UCal to tackle Sabbat infernalist rituals without a couple of ghouls or vampires running the show, but these are highly specialized skillsets so its still an impressive feat. We also discover someone’s stolen all his reports on the Nictuku he got earlier that day – and McCann find another green sequin. And that’s the end of Chapter Five! Half of it is spent being uncomfortably horny for Flavia, and while her writing gets a little better as we go, no one should expect nuanced or even vaguely considered representations of women as people in these books. The men barely warrant that either, but there’s that very specific kind of creepy old dude fetishization going on here that’s often very uncomfortable – particularly the fixation on adolescent sexuality which is not the kind of horror we’re here for - and which is difficult to overlook even with my unreasonable fondness for Weinberg’s dumb stories. Next chapter, though, we meet my single favourite character in the entire VtM run – for reasons WoD thread regulars who know about my weird Project will immediately appreciate when we get there.  Not Bob, but gently caress me if Giamatti's L. Marvin Metz doesn't give me Weinberg vibes.
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Jun 17, 2023 16:08
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Nukelavee! Oh Nukelavee You're big and evil and heinous Who could it be who set you free? He really must be an anus.
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Jun 17, 2023 16:17
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Lol he made up a discipline for Red Death that sounds really really close to "Body of the Sun" from the 1e players guide. This book kinda rules for how batshit stupid it is 
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Jun 17, 2023 18:57
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Cooked Auto posted:True. But I was aiming more for something like joyless' World of Dorkness for address so that works really well. Snappier title too. If the focus is on failed projects how about Cyberflunk?
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Jun 17, 2023 19:08
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Loomer posted:We also get to find out the sister’s origins as Assamites! Which, uh… Oh my God, she's speaking in Describe Your Character. Also just oh... my God.
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Jun 17, 2023 20:13
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:If the focus is on failed projects how about Cyberflunk? Probably not just failed, as I kind of liked Mutant 89 in comparison to N2.
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Jun 17, 2023 20:29
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Out of the Ashes Mechanics and Chargen So, to be blunt the setting isn't super impressive. Aside from the broad overview there are also a few more detailed locations, and some example communities, listed, but few of them have any hooks that particularly interested me. The only one that really caught my eye to any extent was an old Vespan outpost that had become a refugee city after the Vespans pulled out during the Third Age wars, and now the Vespan central government is trying to demand they have ownership of it again even when their people represent barely ten percent of the city's population and feel more loyalty to the city than the great city of Vesper. Everything else is mostly just "there's a spooky thing here(giant pillar that can't be interacted with, invent your own plot)", "there's taint here" or "there's a Tolkien reference here(Moria except it's Crab Shelob, not a Balrog, that's moved in)." But what about how the game actually plays? The basic mechanic is that you roll 2d10, add relevant modifiers(usually your applicable skill) and then try to hit a TN of 15. Tougher challenges may have a higher TN, the book suggests adding +3 to the TN per "complication," which is somewhat vague but at least some kind of guideline. There are also opposed rolls, but rather than having both sides roll it just defines the TN as being 10+Target's Static Modifiers, which is a decent enough compromise. Since the most common roll of 2d10 is slightly higher than 10, it does give defenders a slight disadvantage, but only very slight. The game's writing encourages "yes, but" failures rather than "nothing happened" failures(though acknowledges sometimes they're the only appropriate result), but never codifies it with any kind of rules, so it remains as a helpful guideline for GM's. Our Spirit pool can also be spent for bonuses, either 3 Spirit for a D10 or 1 spirit for a D4 if we can see a use for a Key(to be detailed later).  some of the art is just BAD Creating a character is done by filling out the following slots: Fluff: Name, Concept, Origin, Personality, etc. Focus: Determined, Magician or Tough. The closest thing we get to "classes" in Ashes. Determined characters get a larger Spirit pool, an extra Drive and access to Determination talents(feats). Magician characters get to learn magic, have more Spirit, access to Magician talents and an extra "Key"(minor magic talent that all PC's have). Tough characters have more Endurance(hit points) and access to Endurance talents. Skills: Skills are split into Physical(Athletics, Fight, Shoot, Sneak, Survival, Vigour), Vigour and Athletics have some amount of overlap largely solved by arguing about whether something is a feat of strength or dexterity, and Vigour also gives bonus health, Mental(Battle, Craft, Heal, Investigate, Lore, Notice) and Social(Conviction, Deceive, Persuade, Insight, Song, Taunt), which feels like it has the usual Social Skill Grouping issue of having skills which overlap in ways that are hard to untangle, Persuade, for instance is "affecting the thoughts and reactions of others," how does this not cover a hell of a lot of social interactions, for instance everything that would also be covered by Deceive? Most of these are pretty straightforward, with a few exceptions and footnotes. Fight and Shoot are also used for resisting attacks of the same type, and Song can also be used for resisting magical attacks. The game tells us to "choose" ten skills(which are automatically increased to rank 3) and then that we have fifteen points to spend on increasing them, which is a weird way of handling it rather than just giving us 45 free points to spend(it's worth noting that a couple of the example characters gently caress up this calculation and instead spend 44 or 46 points). To have a decent chance of succeeding with a skill use(i.e. 50+%), we'd want a +5 in it. Basic maths tells us we can do this to nine skills at most, and since we probably have a few more skills we want to be good at, not just capable at, defining skills we want to be able to break out even when the going gets tough, we're probably going to have to sacrifice some skills down to the level where we're mostly good for helping others or need others' help to use them reliably, so most characters are going to be shuffled relatively hard into a given niche. Skills are capped at 8(~85% chance of success) at chargen, though, and there are no real benefits to rolling super high, so there's no reason(or option) to hyperspecialize Talents: Talents are just another word for feats, perks, etc. I will give Ashes that more of its Talents give you new options than in, say, 3.x, it doesn't fall completely into the "spend feats to gain a small +1 bonus"-trap. Some of them are pretty cool, even, like "Always To Hand" which allows you to spend a point of Spirit to say that you packed a given useful piece of equipment before the journey(grappling hook, rope, etc.), Master of the Culinary Arts that allow you to cook meals that restore Spirit(only once per expedition, but I feel like it still qualifies for Tolkien points), Song of Power(use your Song skill for countermagic), Words of Opening("When you say them, any door opens, no matter what the lock, and any bond, shackle, or rope will release or untie."), etc. there are a good few cool ones there! And these are just the General ones that anyone can pick. My only complaint is that the ones for combat are pretty unimpressive and uninteresting number-biggerers. There are also smaller pools of talents specific to Determination, Toughness and Magician, depending on your focus. The ones for Determination are pretty boring, even if conceptually cool, they're just Spirit-related number-adders, and the ones for Toughness are even worse, plus being super narrow. There are 4 Determination Talents and 3 Toughness Talents. Magicians, on the other hand, have 6 Magical Styles, each with between 4 and 6 sub-Talents. Picking a Style gives you some general abilities, rather like a watered down Word from Godbound, and then the sub-Talents are more specific applications. Earth Speech lets you learn what happened in the past, shape stone and hit people with rocks. Light Bringing largely lets you do zappy things to evil things. Rune Wizardry lets you hammer temporary bonuses into objects(+3), but you can also sacrifice permanent Spirit to make permanent boosters(and you can "eat" magic items to gain more maximum Spirit) and sub-Talents let you tattoo runes on to people, too. Shadow Shaping is sneaky wizardry, it largely obviates the need for anyone to invest in Stealth as long as the party stays together. Wind Song is weather powers. Words of Power are a general grab-bag of remaining abilities, largely related to commanding others. While the Magician talents don't explicitly make Magicians numerically more powerful than the other options, it does mean that they have a far more varied toolkit to solve problems with. There are also a few schools of magic that player characters don't get to interact with, in particular Ice Magic and Necromancy, which once again feels very Tolkien. But mechanically it feels like a missed opportunity to give players access to powerful, corrupting magic options, once again giving them a temptation to embrace some degree of Despair or Taint for power, rather than just having it be something that gets applied by bad rolls. There are also a number of monster-only Talents which, once again, why not have those be "benefits" players can gain on the way to becoming truly Tainted? Temptations of power that draw them away from being human and able to interact normally with others. It seems like such an easy recipe for a bit of drama. Perhaps Joe Bob the Kethian gains the cursed gaze of a Cyclops, but every use of it risks dropping him into another step of Despair, so he has to restrain himself from just using EYE BEAMS to resolve every problem. Perhaps they come with the drawback that if he fails to Persuade or Convince someone, he has to roll against something or just BEEMU them out of existence in a fit of fury, representing his slide into becoming an arrogant creature of power rather than someone who accepts that his fellow humans might not agree with him. But no, instead he just becomes sad when a ghost looks at him or he has to work really hard to accomplish something. Keys/Drives: Keys are the minor magic that all PC's know. The options are Calm, Storm, Light, Darkness, Life, Death, Change, Stability, Community and Wilderness. Their primary use is that if you can connect something you're doing to a Key(i.e. "I use my Light key to light up the area so I can better search for stuff," might be relevant to a Notice check) you get to spend 1 Spirit and add a +d4 to your roll. Everyone gets 3 Keys and Magicians get 4 Keys, which means that you can pretty much always find a way to have an excuse to do a Spirit spend to boost your rolls. Meanwhile, everyone also has two Drives, a Passion and a Duty(Determined characters have three, the third can be either a Passion or a Duty). Something they want to do and something they feel they have to do. Passions are generally self-serving(but not necessarily damaging to others) while Duties are generally serving others(but not necessarily harmful to the self). Drives allow you to go: "I am doing something related to my Drive. This is good." and regain Spirit a couple of times per adventure. I am generally distrustful of these sorts of mechanics because my experience is that if you pick "wrong" at chargen you lock yourself out of a bunch of mechanical interactions because you picked too narrow a Drive or the game ended up going in a different way than expected. Connections: Players have one Connection in their Community and can invent a new one ex nihilo whenever they reach a new location or social group, to a maximum of four total. Connections have an associated Resource Die, which gets bigger the more characters have a Connection to that specific person(I want to point out that I feel like what this loving die does should have been placed somewhere more openly, it's among one of the mechanics I had to loving chase through the .PDF to find out what it loving did). What "resource" dice do is that you roll them when asking for a favour or calling on them somehow, and if they roll a 1, they get reduced by 1 step(d8 to d6, d6 to d4, d4 to 0, etc.), worsening or possibly destroying your relationship with them. Miscellaneous Maths: Calculating Endurance, Spirit, etc. Endurance is 16+Vigour, so if you invest in, say, 8 Vigour, that's a massive boost, basic enemy attacks usually do in the range of d8 to d10 damage(armor functions as an ablative layer of HP, rather than a permanent damage reduction, which I greatly like, so at best you're gaining +9 extra HP for wearing a huge clunky suit of plate), so you're never very far from being downed. Spirit is 8, plus half your Conviction and a bonus for being Determined or a Magician, this is a relatively low pool, making Spirit spends not irrelevant. If the players are also fighting non-human enemies, a good number of them have abilities that directly sap Spirit, which feels like a badly tuned mechanic since these Spirit saps are usually around 1d6. An unlucky roll there can not just whomp a character with a whack of Despair, but also deprive them of any of their abilities that depend on a Spirit spend to function(like essentially all Magician stuff does). You also have to spend Spirit to resist a successful use of Social skills by an NPC against your character which... I really hate this? Considering that it's a D4 loss of Spirit, it means I have to spend a very limited resource to be allowed to roleplay my own character. Instead, how about we say that characters that choose not to resist, instead gain Spirit? You know, reward people for playing along! For gently caress's sake. Aside from a few talents, like one specific Song talent that allows a character to spend Spirit to recover another character's Spirit(or sap an enemy's, which is only useful in some niche applications where powerful enemies fuel their abilities with Spirit points of their own), Spirit is recovered by calling on Drives, by downtime between adventures and by falling into Despair, which gives you a small Spirit boost after your character's done flipping their poo poo in whichever way is appropriate. I don't fundamentally mind the idea of having Mind HP, but I feel like it should be separate both from your Fancy Power Points and your Corruption Points. At the very least it should only do duty as two of them. Like the idea of having only so much mental energy and, if it all gets drained, by maddening encounters, terror, exhaustion, etc. your character has a default form of acting out(fleeing, lying, attacking, etc.) seems fine to me. But that it then also causes permanent damage just doesn't really feel like it jives to me, either mechanically or thematically. Mechanically Despair can really only be forced on you, you can never really choose it, unless you intentionally overspend on Spirit. I feel like it would work better if Despair was something you chose to pick up to learn/use forbidden powers, to gain a full Spirit refill(and free Spirit use for the rest of the scene), to use a piece of powerful cursed equipment or otherwise as the cost of choosing power as more important than humanity(even if you explain to yourself that it's necessary to safeguard other humans). It would also add a bit more pathos and emotional punch to when Jimmy Johns the Wizardman chooses to bust out his Lightbringer skills even though it would tap out his spirit, he's digging into Despair as a source of power to safeguard the party, or the community, sacrificing himself, perhaps putting himself permanently outside of the very social circles he considers important enough to defend. It would be a classic tragedy! Whatever. Let's look at these much vaunted communities.  the combatants look sleepy rather than intense Communities Making a community is relatively mechanics-lite, most of it is conceptual work: Where is it? Who lives there? What are the nearby threats? When was it settled? There are only five hard, numerical stats attached to a community: Education Hope Prosperity Military Territory All of them are pretty self-explanatory, except for Hope, which is like the community's HP. If all the Hope disappears, it stops being a community and just starts being people living in the same area, with no connection to each other. At community-gen, each attribute is rated at a 0, and the players can invest five points in them, increasing them in the steps of: 0>D4>D6>D8>D10>D12. A few Talents, like Person of Importance, Inspirational and Trade Network, also offer boosts to these(Territory, Hope and Prosperity respectively), these don't stack, by the way, so it's not super-easy to min/max your community. You might also ask: why do I care about these Community stats? What do they do mechanically? And as a fun note, when reading the book, you won't have any idea either, because you're asked to assign these stats as the very first thing, before you even really know much about the setting or anything at all about the mechanics, as the book's ordering runs: Communities > Undetailed chargen(for instance it won't tell you that the community-boosting Talents don't stack here) and vague cultural notes > General GM'ing advice > Specific mechanics details > Community mechanics after all the others > Actual setting details > More GM advice. Anyway, since this almost certainly means at least one attribute will start at 0(Hope, for obvious reasons, cannot start at 0 and must have at least one point invested): quote:Education 0: In a community with an Education score of 0, most children are not taught how to read, and the few existing skilled specialists cannot be replaced. Technology and magic are both regressing. Obviously this means that pretty much anywhere the players are starting out is going to be somewhat tenuous and challenged, which is supposed to be the point. That the place is having a rough time of it, so they need the players to un-roughen it. Most of the community mechanics seem to be in the service of eventually making use of the mass combat mechanics(I'd say about three out of five Community Actions are IMPROVE SOLDIERS or MAKE WEAPONS. ), which simultaneously feel fiddly and bland, making me deeply disinterested in touching them. There are a few others, like using the community's Education to help you investigate things or their Prosperity to buy things, but ultimately the whole Community's mechanical underpinning feels kind of vestigial. That's not to say that it would be hard for the GM to go: "Oh, yeah, you can bring some buddies from Villagetown to help you do this, add the Hope die to your action" or whatever, but it just feels undercooked, for a game that's supposedly all about the community. Ultimately your goal in a given game of Out Of The Ashes is to deal with whatever threats and adventure hooks the player group communally designs during the communitygen part of setting the game up, then in the process of that the community either gets hosed up and destroyed(Hope 0) or ends up better off than when it started, or at least without a Lich Lord for a neighbour or whatever. Final Tidbits Two last things that stuck out at me while dealing with the .PDF. Firstly, it never really occurred to me that a .PDF could be badly optimized, but whenever I try to search in the Out Of The Ashes .PDF, my .PDF reader seizes up for almost thirty seconds, very weird. It has no problems with anything else. Secondly, the .PDF mentions the X-Card. Now... I am a bit of an X-Card skeptic, but I think that's also because I generally play with people I already know, and in that regard it's easier to just talk to people, I can see the use of it if you play with complete strangers especially. The developer of Ashes, on the other hand, holds the opinion that the X-Card can actually make things worse, arguing that when people know someone else has an option to speak up if bounds are overstepped, they have a tendency not to brake themselves and just thunder onwards with stuff that might upset others until an X-Card is deployed. Ultimate verdict is that Ashes is just... not particularly impressive. It doesn't seem to really succeed at anything it tries to do, it doesn't deploy any novel mechanics or particularly fine-tune any existing ones, nor does it really stagger me with its art direction or anything else.  Also I thought some folks might want to see the fungiclops
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Jun 17, 2023 21:28
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I just realized what Out of the Ashes reminds me of: It's Wish.com Birthright e: the fungiclops art is pretty dope though, I'll give it credit for that Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Jun 17, 2023 |
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Jun 17, 2023 21:55
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For such a good setting I wish Eberron had better (i.e. more interesting) geography. The oblong blob continent is not very evocative by itself. Asterite34 posted:I just realized what Out of the Ashes reminds me of: Now there was a setting with some fun pieces of geography, if only because of the strategy layer need to map everything out down to the county-sized provinces.
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Jun 17, 2023 22:00
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Now there was a setting with some fun pieces of geography, if only because of the strategy layer need to map everything out down to the county-sized provinces. I would kill for an updated Birthright divorced from D&D.
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Jun 17, 2023 22:24
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PurpleXVI posted:Out of the Ashes I think I'd rather play Out of the PurpleXVI Ashes AKA the version of this where you've spent a few weeks tweaking the rules and setting to do the stuff you mentioned in the review. As is the game seems to be on the less interesting side of "Blah." Just, "Hmm, we could do this interesting thing, but... naaah." Asterite34 posted:I just realized what Out of the Ashes reminds me of: Except that for D&D original Birthright was pretty cool. Along with actively running your own kingdom at any level, I recall that Birthright had some weird mechanic where if you killed another ruler you got some of their strength/power. Like in Highlander.
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Jun 17, 2023 22:27
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