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I mean, I've slowly come to realize that I'm spoiled compared to the average American food sahel, let alone British cuisine. I didn't know that most kale was green until my twenties because my parents grew a purple varietal. If my father weren't really territorial in the kitchen I probably would have learned a lot from him and his wall of cookbooks. What I'm saying is .
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# ? Feb 8, 2020 08:20 |
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# ? Jan 15, 2025 23:43 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:Also, Libertad!, I'm too lazy/busy/depressed to do full F&F's (hello my sad Torchbearer review), but I'm a pretty decent cook and would be happy to combine to do something on The Leaves of the Inn of the Last Home. I have the old one too so we could contrast. Although from what I remember the recipes are pretty drat sad. Like, Otik's famed "spiced potatoes" are basically just roasted potatoes with some rosemary or whatever. These amazing potatoes that the books will not shut up about are basically the most lame, white-bread attempts at doing something culinary where I wonder if the authors thought salt and black pepper were sinful. But it'd be short enough we could some kind of GWS/TG cross-over type dealy. Xiahou Dun posted:I'll look over my old copy and see how crazy the stuff is, and if Libertad! is willing to send me some recipes I'd probably be okay with doing that too. I'm not averse to a collaboration, although it may be something in the semi-distant future if my posting rate is anything to go by. I still have Al-Qadim and SIGMATA to do, and after that...I kind of got blind-sided by this new sourcebook for an Ancient Greece-styled D&D Adventure Path. It's 3rd party, but was written by some of the lead designers of Bioware's best video games, so in addition to a neat setting I'm intrigued to see how much of their design talents shift over to making 5e workable. But the future is uncertain, and I don't know how my reviews-to-be will look, so I'll PM you the Lost Leaves recipes (I'm afraid I don't have the older Last Home books). Libertad! fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Feb 8, 2020 |
# ? Feb 8, 2020 09:56 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:They spent hundreds of words on how good those potatoes are, but the actual recipe is basically "make it in the same room as a spice rack and sometimes look at it longingly like your Mormon god hadn't forbid flavors". honestly, that's... not too far off the mark when it comes to the kind of food you'd find in keep Mormon territory. the most flavorful thing is funeral potatoes, the legit good is what's known as Utah Scones (a kind of fry bread, which is pretty loving hard to mess up)
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# ? Feb 8, 2020 15:13 |
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You move your entire culture out to a desert where your only options are salt, sage, and onion and you end up with a cultural palette for little more than salt, sage, and onion.
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# ? Feb 8, 2020 21:23 |
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Well, they're also known for their jello salads...
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# ? Feb 8, 2020 22:32 |
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For the life of me I will never understand Jello salad
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 01:32 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:O god I pulled out the book and these recipes are hilarious. Like, an incredibly sad chili that warns you it's gonna explode your tongue with two teaspoons of chili-flakes and nothing else, not even garlic. If it was that simple, it would be one thing - but somehow the fact that it calls for "1 jar Tabasco" makes it even sadder somehow, like this is somehow a recipe brought back from prison or deployment.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 06:51 |
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Gun Jam posted:Does different point-buy for chargen and advancement works here, or it screws these who ain't experts in the system? Well, you can justify dumping one or maybe even two stats for a character (as long as you are comfortable with the fact that you dumped those permanently), but the GP not spend on your useful stats will have to be bought with AP eventually. And while a GP equals ~ 50 AP (or 100, or 30, who knows), raising a stat will set you back 200 AP at minimum, rising dramatically with the stat. PurpleXVI posted:The Goose Knights just sound like a heavily armed pub crawl.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 13:34 |
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...what exactly does Carousing govern, anyway? Being able to hold your drink? Being able to hold a tune while quaffing?
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 20:38 |
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PurpleXVI posted:...what exactly does Carousing govern, anyway? Being able to hold your drink? Being able to hold a tune while quaffing? In every RPG I've ever encountered that elaborates on it even a tiny bit, "Carousing" is used as a synonym for "partying." EDIT: That'll be 23 experience to…be Aleister Crowley, I guess. I'm sure that slays at parties. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Feb 9, 2020 |
# ? Feb 9, 2020 20:47 |
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That Old Tree posted:In every RPG I've ever encountered that elaborates on it even a tiny bit, "Carousing" is used as a synonym for "partying." Crowley's a four at most. At a five you're Oscar Wilde. Or this dude:
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 21:39 |
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Barely even reading between the lines, the point of that skill appears to be 'pushing people into crossing their own moral boundaries, such that you can influence their decisions, using hedonism to lower inhibitions.' It's pretty wild that the partying skill doesn't appear to have any sort of function to help people relax, have a good time, or feel more comfortable with people in a normal way - it's all sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and cult recruitment tactics. It fits the genre, maybe, and you could use it to get someone to let down their walls or to let go of prejudices, but it mostly seems like it's a tool for blackmail and recruiting people to your murder sect or something.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 22:11 |
Joe Slowboat posted:Barely even reading between the lines, the point of that skill appears to be 'pushing people into crossing their own moral boundaries, such that you can influence their decisions, using hedonism to lower inhibitions.' It's pretty wild that the partying skill doesn't appear to have any sort of function to help people relax, have a good time, or feel more comfortable with people in a normal way - it's all sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and cult recruitment tactics. It fits the genre, maybe, and you could use it to get someone to let down their walls or to let go of prejudices, but it mostly seems like it's a tool for blackmail and recruiting people to your murder sect or something.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 22:20 |
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In Awakening it’s not presented as a natural outgrowth of hard partying, though
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 22:32 |
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That Old Tree posted:In every RPG I've ever encountered that elaborates on it even a tiny bit, "Carousing" is used as a synonym for "partying." In Ars Magica, it's the skill for doing general social stuff with commoners and other lower-class folks, where Etiquette is the same for nobles and priests and other higher-class folks. Very handy when gathering information and convincing people to let you do stuff.
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 22:36 |
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You'd think a core application of carousing would be keeping your wits about you in a party situation. Heck, it could have useful defaults to other survival-oriented skills in a classic medieval fantasy (knowing how to brew and store beer being a crucial skill because it purified water, for example). Escorting a blackout-drunk NPC home is a perfect quest - heck, it kicks off stories going all the way back to Classical Greek comedy.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 00:52 |
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That Old Tree posted:In every RPG I've ever encountered that elaborates on it even a tiny bit, "Carousing" is used as a synonym for "partying." Every time I see Brucato's attempts at writing skills I die a little more inside. gently caress you and your complete inability to explain things. Not to mention the sheer ugliness implied by a skill for pushing the boundaries of other people having an explicit sexual application. There's a lot of people who should be very, very ashamed this train wreck of a draft was ever allowed to see print.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 01:32 |
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no surprise Brucato thinks Aleister Crowley known poo poo-stirrer and general blowhard to be the prime example for partying skills.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 01:38 |
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Wait, why would 'You Only Live Once' be at the bottom end of the spectrum? It is literally the motto of an entire generation of partygoers, while I highly doubt quoting Crowley at someone has ever convinced anyone to take a shot.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 06:23 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:Also, Libertad!, I'm too lazy/busy/depressed to do full F&F's (hello my sad Torchbearer review), but I'm a pretty decent cook and would be happy to combine to do something on The Leaves of the Inn of the Last Home. I have the old one too so we could contrast. Although from what I remember the recipes are pretty drat sad. Like, Otik's famed "spiced potatoes" are basically just roasted potatoes with some rosemary or whatever. These amazing potatoes that the books will not shut up about are basically the most lame, white-bread attempts at doing something culinary where I wonder if the authors thought salt and black pepper were sinful. But it'd be short enough we could some kind of GWS/TG cross-over type dealy. I bought the original version of LOTIOFLH, and made Otik's famous spiced potatoes! Once. Once. I didn't make any mistakes! I did a pretty good job for an eleven year old! They just weren't...so good. It wasn't rosemary, it was some other slightly more obscure spice from the spice aisle that I can't remember off-hand (except that it was orange), but...that was literally the only spice involved in the recipe, I think. *Maybe* there was one or two more more really common ones. One of my larger early-life small-stuff disappointments. edit: Cayenne, that's what it was. I even went and bought some with my allowance just for this special occasion, since we didn't have any in the house at the time. Jeez. It was so lame.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 06:37 |
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Well Dragonlance is a barely limping along post-apocalyptic hellscape and Solace is full of idiots who live in trees, I would 100% believe everyone raved about those potatoes because someone found A Spice and put it in them.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 07:57 |
Ratoslov posted:Wait, why would 'You Only Live Once' be at the bottom end of the spectrum? It is literally the motto of an entire generation of partygoers, while I highly doubt quoting Crowley at someone has ever convinced anyone to take a shot.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 08:35 |
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Libertad! posted:I'm not averse to a collaboration, although it may be something in the semi-distant future if my posting rate is anything to go by. I still have Al-Qadim and SIGMATA to do, and after that...I kind of got blind-sided by this new sourcebook for an Ancient Greece-styled D&D Adventure Path. It's 3rd party, but was written by some of the lead designers of Bioware's best video games, so in addition to a neat setting I'm intrigued to see how much of their design talents shift over to making 5e workable. From a purely personal perspective (having backed it on Kickstarter) I think there are a few issues. For starters the ancient Greekiness (as it were) seems a bit like something added not something integral to the setting (probably out of necessity of course). Secondarily the fact that you can fight a CR 29 monstrosity at level loving 12 is madness.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 09:59 |
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Josef bugman posted:Secondarily the fact that you can fight a CR 29 monstrosity at level loving 12 is madness. On the other hand CR has always been a loving joke.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 10:00 |
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In any case, "party" seems like a skill of doubtful use in any game. E: Well, maybe somewhat better in WHFB if your GM is serious about the amount of partying Empire goes through.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 10:03 |
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PurpleXVI posted:On the other hand CR has always been a loving joke. They can do an action every turn up to a maximum of 100. It's bananas
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 10:25 |
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EimiYoshikawa posted:I bought the original version of LOTIOFLH, and made Otik's famous spiced potatoes! Yeah, Libertad! sent me the new recipes and I dug out my copy of the old book and... O god it's so much sadder than I even remembered. I've had to re-evaluate how I'm going to do this since doing a lot of these "correctly" is still going to just be... A casserole and I'm not going to buy all the stuff for a casserole I don't even want to make that no one wants to eat just for internet cred. I'll probably post recipes with in-line comments and a revamped recipe in case anyone cares, and then occasionally do something special for maybe the one-off ones that I can actually do something with. Because seriously, it's some a lovely meatball recipe. Yes I can do better. Easily, it wants you to put in biscuit mix for gently caress's sake. That doesn't mean I want to make meatballs on a random Monday when most of the people here are vegetarians.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 12:38 |
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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century Setting Odds and Ends: Your Message Will Reach Its Destination In 10 Minutes, Please Deposit An Additional 10 Baronets to Continue So there’s a lot to cover over the next few pages. The first big section is Talking Between Two Worlds. This is all about the nuances of interplanetary communication. There are videophones and radios capable of transmitting between planets, but they’re way more expensive than what most civilians buy. All their signals travel at the speed of light, natch, which means there’s a certain delay between planets. The distances between planets- and thus the time delays involved- are changing all the time, so there’s a big table for all the distances and times between various bodies in the inner Solar System. Each entry- say, “Earth to Mercury”, “Mercury to Ceres”, etc.- shows the distance and time for the closest approach of the two bodies and the farthest difference between them, and you can use the Solar System Map to work out what number it is. The delay between Earth and Luna is about two seconds, the delay between Mercury and Hygeia is somewhere between 22 and 32 minutes, and the Asteroids themselves have the biggest variance- getting a message from Ceres to Aurora can take as little as 3 minutes or as long as 49. There are no numbers given for the outer worlds, sadly, but you can imagine it’s just plain not practical to hold an actual conversation with someone on Titan. Computers can compensate for small time delays, but the greater the distance the more it’s like a telegraph system than anything else. It’s not as bad as say, the Age of Sail, but it can be a problem. I can imagine this coming up in game in some situations so it’s nice to have the info. Next is a short section on Criminal Justice. It’s hard to sum this up when there are multiple ruling governments, so this just runs down some of the info we got earlier. Ishtarians do a kind of mind alteration to offenders, RAM does everything from mind control to execution to throwing you in an asteroid prison, etc. Mostly redundant but I guess it’s nice to have this in one place? Now, money. Most commerce in the 25th century is electronic, of course, but you still need hard cash to bribe people or pay for those black market drugs. And during the Last Gasp War, electromagnetic pulses from the bombs wiped out a lot of stock exchange systems and the like, so people are conscious of the need for hard cash sometimes. Suck it, Bitcoin! There’s a bit here on how some people predicted energy would be the main currency, and the Sun Kings pushed this a bit, but energy-as-currency is hard to store and takes energy to transfer so yeah. In fact, from the description, hard cash has kinda gone retro. Paper money’s unheard of outside of RAM’s work camps which issue company scrip; instead, it’s all about coins made from gold, silver, and/or copper, which are recognized so long as they’re issued by a legitimate mint. I suspect there’s a bit of a nod to D&D here. Mostly only affulent people have access to credit/debit cards, but Mercurians are very much cash only. (No word on the fate of Traveler’s Checks.) There actually aren’t a lot of banks in the 25th Century, at least not large ones with multiple branches- some are local to their city and your money is there and nowhere else. The two big exceptions to this are Coprates Bank, Ltd., which handles most of the RAM accounts, and Firste Luna Geschaft-Zollstelle GB, which is the biggest Lunar bank (which like Swiss banks are good for discrete transactions.) Now, you may recall, all the money for equipment was listed in terms of credits, and that’s still the universal denomination. The common currencies of Mars, Venus, and Mercury are listed with their equivalent value in credits, as well as their composition- a Mars Dolarube is 1cr and made of silver, a Mercurian Marquis is 10cr and made out of gold, etc. (Earth, Luna, and so on don’t issue their own currency, and use of a mix of everyone else’s, hence the credit standard.) For the sake of gameplay the game lists everything’s value in credits, and you’re assumed to hand over the equivalent in Dolarubes and Taks and so on. It kinda makes me wonder why they even bothered with these unique currencies, but it adds some color I suppose. The DPs are back! We talked a little about Digital Personalities waaaaaaay back in chargen but let’s go over them again. They come in two forms, Constructs and Translated Personalities. Translated Personalities are based on the encoded brain waves of a living person, basically digital clones. A Translated Personality basically has no legal rights until the original person is dead, at which point it inherits all the original’s rights. A DP which tries to murder its original can be executed for the crime. Constructs, meanwhile, are completely original computer-generated personalities. The original program which ran Masterlink was a primitive Construct; the modern example is Dr. Huer, who is inspired by a person Buck Rogers knew in the 20th century. Constructs can vote, but can’t own property. The naming of these characters is also dependent on what type they are. All Translated Personalities have the suffix “.dop”, Constructs have “.dos”, hence it’s Holzerhein.dop and Huer.dos. People generally use the pronoun “it” when referring to them, unless their personality is particularly convincing. DPs live inside mainframe computers- even in the 25th century smaller machines just can’t contain all that data. (And to be fair it’s never said outright how much data a single DP constitutes.) However, they can move about to other mainframes via communication lines, basically at the speed of light. The world they inhabit they call “Computerspace”, which is described as being kinda dreamlike. They typically interact with people via telephones, TVs, radios, etc., but holograms are their preferred method of “manifesting.” The game kinda handwaves some of the issues that would arise with being able to clone personalities as data- apparently Digital Personalities are too complex for backups to be made. However, they are difficult to kill; if you destroy the mainframe they’re in, they’ll detect that right away and zap off somewhere else. “Killer virus” programs are mentioned as a way of destroying them but we don’t get much detail. We did get some rules on digital combat in the first book but since it was an NPC-only deal there’s really not much point. Life suspension tech is important for this game, not the least because it’s the reason Buck Rogers is around. Granted, what happened to Rogers is so far unique. When Rogers was fighting the Masterlink satellite, a cooling chamber around his ship’s laser was broken, and coolant flooded into the cockpit as a life suspension system was activating. The coolant penetrated his body, and in combination with various other things, kept Rogers’ cells from rupturing even as he was frozen by the vacuum of space. Think of it like antifreeze. To date nobody’s been able to replicate this process (called “wet suspension.”) Instead there’s “Dry suspension”, which was being tested in the 20th Century and is now more reliable. The patient is hooked up to a computer which overrides their nervous system, reducing life functions to the minimum. This method is considered 100% reliable for preserving someone in suspended animation for up to a year, with the percentage going down 10% every year after. This doesn’t quite scan with the difficulties stated for PCs using Life Suspension tech, where there’s a very real chance of killing the patient each time. Once you’re out of suspension you can’t go back in for at least six months, and so far nobody’s ever survived four suspensions. The cost of this service is 2,000 cr a month, payable in advance. There’s a short section on food. Fresh food is pretty much only available to the very rich. Most people rely on packaged food; this tech has advanced to the point that most packages have a tiny microwave generator which cooks the meal inside in at most a few minutes. There are also your stereotypical food pellets, but those only get used in extreme survival situations or when RAM wants to cut the cost of feeding Workers. (Who need special food anyway.) This is a nice little detail, won’t come up often but I like it. Rounding off this section is Cybergenetics, which is a blend of the traditional sci-fi RPG’s focus on cybernetics and XXVc’s focus on genetic engineering. It’s vaguely described here as “the process of creating organisms that are human, not human, and more than human all at the same time.” Basically it’s a question of fusing biological parts with computer parts, for example you could give a gennie enhanced sensory organs and ALSO a computer brain programmed to process that information in a certain way. The Belters described earlier are sort of a case of this, they’re biological organisms but dependent on their suits to live. Despite this cybergenetics is described as being in its infancy, it’s extremely costly and even the entities that can afford it can’t get dependable results. As best I can tell it’s here as a plot hook, this may be something RAM or some other group is toying around with that has bad implications unless the PCs stop it, etc. So yeah this entry has just been a bunch of small things that help fill in parts of the setting that aren’t handled by the entries for planets and gennies. Some of it's neat but it's not as cool as the planet guides. Next, we enter the GM’s section of the book, starting with Making Your Own Gennies!
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 12:56 |
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Nessus posted:Crowley probably partied hard but I wouldn't say that it was definitional... using him as an exemplar for Occult or Rites or some kind of Write Magical Manual skill would make sense. I'm starting to think this Brucato guy ain't that well read! Crowley was well known for his parties. Mainly his curry parties. Oh, he experimented with drugs and got up to a variety of other things, but some of his best known gatherings were curry cooking parties. Dude loved curry. A friend of mine who practices Thelema actually uses that as something of a litmus test when interacting with other occult practitioners he's never met. He'll raise the topic of Crowley and partying, and see what they know about it. If they start babbling about libertine philosophy and vague allusions to tantric magic, he figures they're full of poo poo and mostly the kind of creepers who lurk around occult/pagan circles looking to get laid. If they mostly talk about Crowley liking to cultivate an image of notoriety, but then focus on his contributions to ritual magic, he figures they're worth talking to in more depth. If they bring up curry, he figures he's found kindred spirits. I'm guessing Brucato mostly babbles about libertine philosophy and tantric magic, and doesn't get invited out for indian food very much.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 14:52 |
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I gotta admit, I always thought Crowley was kind of a chode, but he did just get three points in my estimation now that I know he also enjoyed a good vindaloo.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 15:15 |
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Desiden posted:I'm guessing Brucato mostly babbles about libertine philosophy and tantric magic, and doesn't get invited out for indian food very much. This seems accurate, given everything.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 15:20 |
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Desiden posted:If they start babbling about libertine philosophy and vague allusions to tantric magic, he figures they're full of poo poo and mostly the kind of creepers who lurk around occult/pagan circles looking to get laid. which sounds exactly like a description of Brucato - he's That Guy.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 15:31 |
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PurpleXVI posted:...what exactly does Carousing govern, anyway? Being able to hold your drink? Being able to hold a tune while quaffing? „A hero may be invited at any time to a feast that brings him to the limit of his endurance. Hard drinking usually improves Courage and lowers several phobias, but lowers other good attributes and may raise bad ones like Superstition, Curiosity and especially Violent Temper. A successful Carousing Check helps the hero to resist these effects. The hangover next morning can also be overcome with a successful check.“ So yes, basically being able to hold a drink and still act somewhat normal while drunk. You could also make an argument that it helps with the penalties of poison. I never understood RPG Cookbooks. They always seemed like desperate and cheap attempt to publish one more book in a setting.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 17:23 |
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Moldless Bread posted:I never understood RPG Cookbooks. They always seemed like desperate and cheap attempt to publish one more book in a setting.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 17:29 |
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Moldless Bread posted:„A hero may be invited at any time to a feast that brings him to the limit of his endurance. Hard drinking usually improves Courage and lowers several phobias, but lowers other good attributes and may raise bad ones like Superstition, Curiosity and especially Violent Temper. A successful Carousing Check helps the hero to resist these effects. The hangover next morning can also be overcome with a successful check.“ Consume Alcohol is one of the skills Resistance to Poison boosts in WHFRP, for precisely this reason.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 17:34 |
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Josef bugman posted:From a purely personal perspective (having backed it on Kickstarter) I think there are a few issues. For starters the ancient Greekiness (as it were) seems a bit like something added not something integral to the setting (probably out of necessity of course). Secondarily the fact that you can fight a CR 29 monstrosity at level loving 12 is madness. I think I know what part you're talking about, and yeah, it seems crazy. As for the Ancient Greekiness, I think that it's most apparent in that it has the typical PHB races as "settler races." Doing a CTRL + F search on things like orcs and tieflings yields far fewer results than the "native races" like sirens and centaurs. It's a shame, in that I think the new options have enough heft to be innovative, although I can imagine there's some entitled gamers out there who insist on playing an elf in every setting. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Feb 10, 2020 |
# ? Feb 10, 2020 21:08 |
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Nessus posted:Crowley probably partied hard but I wouldn't say that it was definitional... using him as an exemplar for Occult or Rites or some kind of Write Magical Manual skill would make sense. I'm starting to think this Brucato guy ain't that well read! I think the best example I can think of of Brucato just not being well read but trying to come off as cool and erudite on pop culture was that he attributed "more human than human" to Rob Zombie.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 22:15 |
Desiden posted:Crowley was well known for his parties. Mainly his curry parties.
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 22:45 |
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Maxwell Lord posted:
The communication differential between Earth and Mars is a minor plot point in one of the published XXVc adventures; one of RAM's executives threatens you from Earth, and you're able to communicate with her in real time on Mars. If the players notice that shouldn't happen, you can have them make Wisdom checks to realize that if they're on Mars and talking to someone without waiting minutes for a response, the person they're talking to is also on Mars.
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 02:49 |
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# ? Jan 15, 2025 23:43 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:Because seriously, it's some a lovely meatball recipe. Yes I can do better. Easily, it wants you to put in biscuit mix for gently caress's sake. We have got some wildly different copies or something, because that's definitely not in my copy. These are the "Dwarven Tide-Me-Overs", right? In mine they're a pretty basic meatball, albeit one that's probably oddly sweet since it calls for evaporated milk.
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# ? Feb 11, 2020 03:06 |