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Alien Rope Burn posted:XM-300 "Terror" Mini-Tank If you're going to steal (and let's face it, RIFTS is roughly 84% theft), you might as well steal from the awesomedorable. Covok posted:Oh, that one. Well, I still feel that's more the GM's fault. He pretty much swim checked your character into oblivion. Hell, when I went to save ya, he made me roll like 4 swim checks because "the water was that turbulent." Should come as no shock that I failed one of them. I don't think the rules for Athletics (which is skill that governs swimming in this game) actually say anything about rerolling every round or anything like that. Feel that was more the GM being antagonistic than the system itself. Or, then again, maybe not. Having a binary pass or fail system does lead to annoying circumstances like that. Not to mention how they are further exasperated by long combat times. That's why I like Dungeon World and using Fail Forward so much. Either he was using a really crappy version of the Skill Games rules and didn't back down on them or he just felt like imitating John Wick's style of antagonistic GMing. Either way he sounds like he was a raging rear end in a top hat, especially if he was the same guy who started the mirror match pissing contest. And speaking of John Wick, I will be posting Part 4 of my Eldritch High review... eventually. Honestly, I've barely started it because work is stressful right now for me and I don't want to have to reread the worst 2 pages in the book. In the meantime, anyone who wants to can keep guessing what Homework is. And remember that accuracy doesn't matter, just how entertained I am. AccidentalHipster fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 18:26
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AccidentalHipster posted:If you're going to steal (and let's face it, RIFTS is roughly 84% theft), you might as well steal from the awesomedorable. Mirror match pissing contests are fun  Oh god, was I being that guy when I just kept foiling the combat monster guy by pulling him away from the group with a similarly monstrous NPC during battles?  I have yet to drown a PC for any reason, at least. Although I have had whole encounters in D&D3.5 where the Ranger can't quite manage to climb a tree...
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Oct 11, 2013 19:27
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FourmyleCircus posted:The next page has the thing we were talking about, Forumla No. 86. It turns people into mice. Even witches. You have to make a Hard magic roll or be instantly turned into a mouse forever. Only, not really. If you're magical in anyway, you can spend a Zap point to reduce the duration to an hour, or two to just out right negate it. 12 allowance points, or if you remember the last book, $551-$600 gets you three doses. This is a reference to Roald Dahl's book The Witches; there was a formula in that book of the same name that did pretty much the same thing. The witches in that book were also unrelentingly evil monsters, so that's another thing in common with WGA.
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Oct 11, 2013 19:30
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Given those laser fingers do a minimum of 1d6 x 10 S.D.C., I'd think that'd be a very short game to play with any pet. Terrific for cat-haters, tho. All of my cats are native to Wormwood. They're invulnerable to laser-fingers, plus I saved money on vet bills - instead of having to get them de-wormed, all their worms just curled up & died on their own when I imported them! Alien Rope Burn posted:WR-5050 Super Cargo Hauler APC The best RIFTS campaign?
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Oct 11, 2013 19:36
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PleasingFungus posted:The best RIFTS campaign? That... that RIFTS TRUCKIN post somehow made me want to play RIFTS. I want to play RIFTS trucks 
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Oct 11, 2013 19:37
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Looking at that thing why does it have a satellite dish if all the satellites are inaccessible to earth?
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Oct 11, 2013 19:40
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Midjack posted:Looking at that thing why does it have a satellite dish if all the satellites are inaccessible to earth? Maybe it's a badly-drawn radar dish? 
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Oct 11, 2013 19:44
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AccidentalHipster posted:If you're going to steal (and let's face it, RIFTS is roughly 84% theft), you might as well steal from the awesomedorable. Well, the whole mirror match thing...it's complicated. It was a lovely idea on the GM's part, but it was his (bad) attempt at addressing one of our complaints. Long story short, the player he did the mirror match with was a dick. We tried talking to the guy into not being so much of a dick. Then we asked the GM if he could talk to the guy about not being a dick. Then, when that didn't work out, we asked if he could just kick the guy. The GM didn't really have the cojones to just kick the guy so...the mirror match was his solution. It was a bad idea and me and Amercha quit the game the next day. And by dick, I mean the player was a rules lawyer who always had to be right all the time and min maxed like crazy. To be fair, me and Amercha weren't as direct as we probably could have been and should just been straight with the player that we thought he was being a dick. We dance around the issue too much when we tried to tell the guy he was being obnoxious. Anyway, all that's in the past and, obviously, had nothing really to do with the system itself. I mean I could point to the min maxing, but, well, when I looked over his character when preparing for this F&F, I realized he didn't make it right. So, you definitely can min max this game, but that player's example is not a valid example.
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Oct 11, 2013 20:42
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Spincut posted:I think my favorite part about the Rifts posts are Alien Rope Burn slowly losing sanity as they try to come up with interesting things to say about each carbon-copy vehicle. It isn't as bad as the Egyptian gods, at least, and their copy-pasted statblocks. Gosh, imagine if they made a book full of nothing but those deity statblocks?  deadly_pudding posted:That... that RIFTS TRUCKIN post somehow made me want to play RIFTS. I want to play RIFTS trucks All I can do is try and misdirect you to Dodges and Dragons.
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Oct 11, 2013 20:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It isn't as bad as the Egyptian gods, at least, and their copy-pasted statblocks. Gosh, imagine if they made a book full of nothing but those deity statblocks? That would be fun up until you blew your brains out in frustration. Also, is it expected that the players would actually fight the Egyptian gods? How long would it take to level up enough to actually take those things head-on?
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Oct 11, 2013 20:51
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FourmyleCircus posted:You're reading that right. They wanted eleven dollars for this 40 page 'magazine'. I can't say it isn't a cute way of doing it. But I've seen better. Cheaper too. When I was doing research, I read somewhere that 13 was meant to be a free quarterly supplement. But Harris is bad at running a business so they scrapped that and started charging for it. For those who are curious, they also finished the covers for what would have been the next two issues.   “Saint Joan’s Magical Reformatory”, according to the Witch Girls wiki (which looks to be entirely written by one person, possibly Harris), is a school for “young witches gone bad”. I find the idea a little odd, and am really interested in seeing the write up for it, if it exists. It’s been established that Harris and Co do not like consequences and that it is anathema to their idea of fun and how roleplaying works. A reform school is all about the consequences of one’s bad behavior (or lovely parents, in some cases). So based on what I know about this setting, I imagine Saint Joan’s has an “inmates running the asylum” type of deal going on. The fact that Reinhexxen, an entire school that has an entire curriculum centered around learning how to be the biggest rear end in a top hat you can be, is accredited by the Witches' World Council, makes its existence interesting and kind of contradictory too. quote:Basically, a 700 years ago guy is born to a Witch, keeps a diary of the weird stuff and lives and dies in Belgium. The book also mentions that Charles Victus is an "Enchanted". What's an Enchanted? Well, you need to buy and read Pirates of Buccaneer Hill to find out, because everything about that book hints that there might be important setting and rules in i-Oh wait... Pirates of Buccaneer Hill, page 32, tucked in the back with a character sheet posted:Enchanted are the non-Witch offspring or relations (brother and sisters) of Witches. They are ever so slightly magical and can see and perceive the world like a magical person. They are also immune to Mortal Avoidance charms. Enchanted usually have special talents that are also slightly magical. (see Moon Shadow Circle Supplement for more information) Yes, consult the supplement book that was never released.  Also, Pandora Spocks, the "editor" of the magazine, is the name Elizabeth Montgomery was credited as when she played Samantha's crazy cousin on Bewitched, because Harris can't go two pages in this game without making a reference to that show. Adnachiel fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 22:46
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Christ, that's some especially bad photoshop and I bet they didn't get permission to use those photos. And "Please refer to another" book is the bane of my gaming since, really, they're not cheap.
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Oct 12, 2013 00:15
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"Please refer to another book" is at its worst when it's books that haven't come out yet, or never actually come out. That certain game line I'm reviewing literally at one point has a 17 year gap at one point between when they referred to an upcoming book and when that book actually got written and released.
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Oct 12, 2013 00:27
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Alien Rope Burn posted:"Please refer to another book" is at its worst when it's books that haven't come out yet, or never actually come out. That certain game line I'm reviewing literally at one point has a 17 year gap at one point between when they referred to an upcoming book and when that book actually got written and released. "Please refer to another book" is one of the cardinal sins of RPG making. Two that really stand out in my memory for loving gamers over especially badly with it are the Dragon Age RPGs which split up the game line by level groups and never really got very far (or get there very quickly) because nobody wants to buy a blatantly incomplete game and Vampire: Undeath which (if memory serves) asked you to refer to no less than 9 other books that not only weren't even in production, but never will enter production because of a cease and desist from White Wolf. AccidentalHipster fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 01:02
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deadly_pudding posted:That... that RIFTS TRUCKIN post somehow made me want to play RIFTS. I want to play RIFTS trucks I read some random German or French comic about a long haul trucker battling weird bad guys and having sex with sexy witches. It could work.
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Oct 12, 2013 01:10
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Count Chocula posted:I read some random German or French comic about a long haul trucker battling weird bad guys and having sex with sexy witches. It could work. We can call it Ley Line Fever.
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Oct 12, 2013 01:34
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AccidentalHipster posted:"Please refer to another book" is one of the cardinal sins of RPG making. Two that really stand out in my memory for loving gamers over especially badly with it are the Dragon Age RPGs which split up the game line by level groups and never really got very far (or get there very quickly) because nobody wants to buy a blatantly incomplete game and Vampire: Undeath which (if memory serves) asked you to refer to no less than 9 other books that not only weren't even in production, but never will enter production because of a cease and desist from White Wolf. And considering RPG books back when I was playing (before PDFs became more prevelant) were $20-$50 a pop, which made it a stupidly expensive hobby
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Oct 12, 2013 01:35
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Adnachiel, you know far more about WGA than is sane. I'm not surprised on a lot of that. I just didn't have the energy to go and do research about this abomination, and... Yeah, about the Enchanted thing, not going to lie, I glossed over that because it was term that never got defined to my knowledge and honestly? Charles Victus is the least important part of the whole Argus Society thing unless you're running around with a female version of the Master. Regarding the Reformatory, from what I can gather from talking to the guy that knows them and so on, it probably exists either for background drama and for epic prison break stuff. I say this because of Lucinda's tendency to kill cops while 'fighting crime'. That, and the whole assumption of "it's whatever you think would be fun this time." Sometimes you just want to be an oppressed little angst muffin. He figures it involves Mind Control, probably to be used on Goody Goodies and anyone who doesn't toe the party line.  Today on Witch Girls Adventures, we'll be covering Love Potions! With step by step directions on how to make your own love potions!  Hosted by Dr. Aimee St. John, Aimee the Alchemist is here to help young witches with their first potions, and what better thing to give a young child than the ability to control who is and isn't friends with them? But this goes further than simply friendship, you too can catch your own Hunky Humbert! Yeah, okay. That's getting a little too creepy for me to continue. Love Stock is an easy roll to make, and is necessary for all the other potions in this list. You need three inches of Unicorn tail, three cups distilled water, one cup of distilled Care, and the petals from a dozen red roses. Simmer for four hours and there you go! Friendship potions make people your friends! All it needs is some of your hair, a pink rose, and some distilled sunshine added to the above stock, and you'll be the belle of the ball! It's also an easy roll and can be delivered either in liquid, powder, or candy form, so be sure to put it on all of your friend's meals. Is there just a friendship that should not be? Someone little skank steal the love of your life? Feel like recreating The Death Of Family? Grade "A" Hate is here to help! Simply let your Love Stock go bad to create Hate Stock, cook it down into a charred black mass, rehydrate with swamp water and red cap spit, make a Hard Roll, and you've ready to ruin lives, you little homewrecker you! Anything they like, they'll dislike, anything they love, they'll hate! The more they loved it, the more they'll hate it. While you should be careful with this potion, you just add some hair that's been soaked in love stock and the hate will never come around to you! Love Potion #1 is just Love Stock, so you've already made it! Yay! You can then dry it out or turn it into a candy like Friendship Potions. It just increases the imbiber's ability to feel love, period. If they like something, they love it. If they love it, they adore it. Love Potion #9 is a great movie about the dangers of mi- Oh, wait. Love Potion #9 makes they imbiber fall madly in love with the first person or animal they see. Which can be both funny and horrifying, and occasionally involves making out with squids and mules. Simply add a finger length of whole ginger, a cup of crushed verbena(not crushed vertebra, you don't want to know what happens then) and 2 ounces distilled infatuation. Simmer for two hours, strain, and make your Hard roll, and you'll have your love potion. Now that we're done with the potions, it's time to cover the basics! This issue, Aimee covers bottling emotions. All you need is the emotions you want to bottle, and Mercurial. What's Mercurial? Why, it's distilled, clarified form of Ectoplasm. So just go get some ghosts to donate some... willingly or otherwise... or buy it at your local potion supply store for one to two Allowance points($1-$100). Aimee notes that you can make good money farming the terror of your loved ones and friends by slipping a quart of this stuff under their bed and summoning a Closet Monster every night to scare the crap right out of them. It takes about twenty hours of exposure to imprint a quart of the stuff with an emotion, and bottle emotions sell for 3-4($101-$200) a quart, so you can make decent money starting up your own terror farm. Or simply projecting your own emotions into it, if you'd rather have a part time job that doesn't pay as well. I'm... not sure exactly what happened there. I think writing up Pretty Poisoner Penelope, my Alchemist witch who's solution to everything is more chemicals may have made it impossible to not read this whole section with bizarre, sadistic optimism. Have an Image.  Twenty Spells every Witch Should Know just goes over some spells from the core book, but with added history and fluff. I really don't see any reason to cover this section, because, well... It's redundant. I comment, however, that Unlucky 13 makes a reference to Gypsies, and Lucky charms says that the Lucky Charms commercials are racist and silly. "We all know leprechauns prefer a more... liquid breakfast." Oh, and Zap-Finger includes a fat joke about a 200 lb ancient Japanese man getting blasted the length of a football field and landing on a 400 lb. ancient Japanese woman. So have a picture of someone being turned into a toad.  Alien Rope Burn, were you the one that hated demonic children stories? Because it's time for the section on Babysitting! It's a pretty standard take on baby-sitting for the first couple paragraphs. And then, just to remind you that it's Witch Girls Adventures, it warns you that if you piss off the wrong rival baby-sitter, she might eat you. I don't know if any of you know anyone who ran a baby sitting service, but my mother did when I was a kid. A twenty four hour service that was notable for getting even the worst behaved kids to behave. If this chart were realistic(and remember, one allowance point is roughly fifty dollars), she never would have quit. Baby-Sitting Payment Chart posted:Mortal Child: 1 Allowance Points a night (about 2-3 Hours) I transcribed that directly, all mistakes are from the book. So, for my "little sisters" the three kids with ADD who were over all night every weekend, and almost always dropped off when their mother was working would be getting my mother 3(Bad Mortal Children, good reputation) allowance points each for every three hours... Yeah, I don't think mom would have quit an become a baker if she was making a thousand dollars a night. The next page is dedicated to all the ways the kids are going to make your life a living hell. Rigging your wand to explode, simply being stronger than you, getting kidnapped by Jareth, eating people, and so on. It breaks it down by species. After a quick bit about how the parents might react to how you treat the kids, highlighting that the usual witch girl strategy of turning them into pillows and watching TV using them as a cushion until their parents pull up might be a bad idea, it gives you a way to strike back. SassySitter.wtch gives you a way to talk smack about problem clients, and avoid them. And then it has an interesting and useful idea that's tainted by being in this drat setting. There are Hex Scout merit badges, for doing various things related to baby-sitting, and if you manage to get all six, you get a special power. Okay, so it's just +1 on resistance rolls for all spells cast by Witchlings and +1 to all social rolls dealing with kids. Two new Cliques, Creepy Kid and Witchling. Creepy kids get a +2 to being scary and creepy, and can spend a point of zap to give you a -1 penalty to resist their spells as well as all rolls. Witchlings can spend a point of Zap to give the innocent eyes and... something. Aside from getting more allowance, it leaves it up to the GM. They get a +2 to being mischievous or doing things they think would be funny. Two new mundane skills, Charlatan and Sitter. Charlatan lets you pass off magic as tricks. Sitter is what it says on the tin. Given the way the skill system works, if these are introduced mid-campaign you'll probably never pick them up. One new Magical skill, Animator, which lets you animate plushies and other objects. The more Zap you put into it, the longer they last. They can be recharged for only one Zap at any time, but it only adds the original duration back on. If you animated it for a day, you just give it an extra day of life. You can't add past that. Supposedly, they cover the different types of animated things in the cast section but... no, they don't. Three new talents, Big Stster which gives you a +2 to all social rolls involving kids that are four or more years younger than them, but doesn't effect teens. Brat give you a +1 to any roll(including spell casting) to make things go your way. Mundane gives a +2 to any roll to convince, trick or coerce someone into believing you're not a witch. Heritages... Animator gives you the ability to animate at range(10 FT. without a wand, 20 with) a +?(It doesn't say...) to the Animate skill, and all the lifespan of animated things is doubled. Twin gives you a identical twin. Twins can pool Zap, and read each other's minds for free. They, however, also share damage. If your twin gets hurt, you take half damage. It's also next to impossible for them to have secrets, which in this case means a Hard Will Roll. There are a couple variation, Good Twin Evil Twin lets one take Goody Goody and the other Wicked. If you go with this, you don't get the ability to pool zap, but you still read each other's minds. These bonus talents don't count against the starting maximum of two. Identical Cousin takes away the mind reading, but lets you keep the zap pooling. New equipment! Oh boy! Things to spend my hard earned money on, so I can earn more money! So I can buy more things! How realistic! The Nanny Trinket costs two Allowance points for the nanny charm and one charm for a kid, and five points for every kid after the first. It lets you eavesdrop on them, and glows if they're in danger. Practical. The Big Box of Games holds every mundane game ever, so long as it's not dangerous, you just need to spend a zap to change games. 5 AP. The Diaper Djinn is, thankfully, a Djinn that changes diapers, not a Djinn whose diaper needs changing. 10 AP Ever Lasting Bottle or Sippy Cup will hold milk or formula, and infinitely reproduces it. At least until you empty it. It's kept at the perfect temperature. 2 AP. Jelly Meals are Jelly Beans that act as a full meal. 4 AP gets you a bag of 24. Perfect Picture is a pentacle that holds 12 holograms. 3 AP. Who's The Witch game is a board game that uses either moving pictures or holograms, not sure which, to show the kids someone getting burned at the stake. It plays like Hangman, in a way. There are questions on how best to hide your magic, and for each one you get wrong, the mob grows and eventually the person is burnt alive. 8 AP and a life time of therapy bills. There's an invisible Pet for 10 AP. It's an invisible pet. If you're around it, you can spend zap to become invisible. Remote Control Brooms are... well, exactly what they say on the tin. 15 AP. And now we get to the thing that made me go... WHAT?! Have an image.  I just didn't want you thinking that I was making up the child seat designed to smear your kid all over the nearest building... and instead of fixing the design problem, they just slapped invincibility on it. My First wand is a want that prevents you from taking damage from your own spells, makes all spells cheaper, and has a safe word your parents can use to turn it off. 10 AP And now we get to monsters! There's Boogie Men, who change shape, can hurt you by scaring you(And banish you into the world of nightmares forever), can teleport through shadows, penalize all rolls(-1 to all rolls because you're creeped out) and take half damage. Luckily, they're banished by sunlight and magical sunlight. Booger Men, however, are made of snot. They're sticky, they shoot sticky blobs, and give you the sniffles. Changelings are four foot tall fat little... things with no motivation beyond capturing people and copying them to have a purpose in life. They cocoon people and copy their attributes, abilities, and skills. The cocoon individual falls into a deep sleep and don't need to eat, drink or age. Which causes the amusing and terrifying mental image a kid getting kidnapped, and the changeling living to a ripe old age, "dying" and finding someone else to copy, letting out this six year old some seventy, eighty years later in a world they don't understand, where everyone the know is dead. Closet Monster. The closet monster makes me head hurt. The proof-reading is non-existent, resulting in this sentence: "Closet Portal: The Closet mortal can instantly enter a clioset and appear in another closet anywhere in the world" The Closet Monster is immune to Alteration, Mentalism, and Time And Space magic. Also has a +2 to damage. Description. "There is only one Closet monster. It is all closet monsters. The Creature resembles a Hairless Wolf man with blue green skin and oversized maw with metal blade teeth and Over sized hands with metal blade Claws. The Closet monster is a notorious coward it will run if at tacked or if someone shows its not afraid of him" Can't make this up folks. It then provides a spell to lock out the closet monster. It's a Time and Space spell, which the Closet Monster is immune to. But I guess as it's cast on the closet, it doesn't count. This whole thing leads to some weird mental images. Kid: "There's a monster in the closet!" Witch 1:"What color was it?" Kid: "It was orange and bumpy!" Witch 2:"OH THANK GOD. Little poo poo's making it up." Witch 1:"That or… a non-closet monster somehow got inside the closet." ….. Witch 2:"Wouldn't such a monster become The Closet Monster?" Witch 1: "Marissa, I don't loving know. Wipe the kid's memory, we don't want the parents knowing I said gently caress." Witch 2: "On it." Cooties are small invisible beetle like creatures that live under your skin. They eat 1 life point and d10 zap points a day until cured or they move on. The spread by touch. Luckily, the spell for curing them and granting immunity is only a level two healing spell, and we all know it. Say it with me "Circle Circle Dot Dot, Now You've Got Your Cootie Shot". Jennie Green Teeth is a class of creature. Hags that eat kids while living in swamps. They're ugly, aquatic, and have a paralytic bite. Mortal kids are mortal kids, and I'm giving them about as much as they did. Red-Caps are super fast kids that live under buildings. They run at 60 MPH and have two actions a turn. Their boots are made of cold iron, making their feet and only their feet immune to magic. The boots give them a +1 to damage when kicking and allow them to run up walls. If you take their hat, they die after a minute, and while they're dying they get a -2 to all rolls and can't use magic. They tend to run in gangs of three to six. Sock Monsters are monsters made out of socks who sneak into houses to replace lost The Tooth Fairy! The Tooth Fairies in this are monstrous little shits. If your resist magic is under 13, you're unconscious. They cause tooth decay, and can mind control you twice per tooth they get. And they can eat Witch Teeth for zap. They're trying to take over the world by building houses out of teeth. And now, I'm going to do the adventure hooks, before closing this file for the night... A changeling will do you no good is a about a "croup" of changelings replacing local kids and adults, ruining the star's babysitting business. Interesting. The planned resolution is the stars find a way to detect changelings and find the cocoons before the changelings take over the town. Alice's Adventure is Alice in Wonderland, with the stars having to play dodge ball with armadillos to rescue the kid they're babysitting. Cootie Outbreak! Spell resistant cooties pop up, and the only cure is eggshell from a freshly hatched dragon egg. So your players are off to kidnap dragons! Painfully Perfect has your players getting baby sat by a good-natured and swee magic nanny. "The Nanny a powerful goody-goody witch and over protective prevents the character from having any fun." But secretly she's an evil witch who kidnaps kids and brainwashes them into being socially responsible! I mean, Goody-Goodies. Seeing Red: A gang of redcaps extort kids. You're free to kill them, they're only fae, after all. Sitter war. A rival group of Mortal Baby Sitters set their sights on your turf. FourmyleCircus fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 04:20
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FourmyleCircus posted:Alien Rope Burn, were you the one that hated demonic children stories? Because it's time for the section on Babysitting! I think that might have been me. These write-ups aren't improving my disposition toward them one iota, either! quote:And now we get to the thing that made me go... WHAT?! Have an image. And it's even more expensive than a remote-controlled broom and... well, gently caress. Instead of adapting an actual bicycle child seat, since the visual/riding metaphor for both are very similar, they... decided that witches would just sling bucket carseats underneath on ropes and let inertia play. Genius. quote:Changelings are four foot tall fat little... things with no motivation beyond capturing people and copying them to have a purpose in life. They cocoon people and copy their attributes, abilities, and skills. The cocoon individual falls into a deep sleep and don't need to eat, drink or age. Which causes the amusing and terrifying mental image a kid getting kidnapped, and the changeling living to a ripe old age, "dying" and finding someone else to copy, letting out this six year old some seventy, eighty years later in a world they don't understand, where everyone the know is dead. No lie, something like this could be an awful, effective Changeling: the Lost character background. quote:The closet monster makes me head hurt. Mine too. Why have a boogeyman and a closet monster? Is it related to this specimen?
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Oct 12, 2013 04:47
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Bieeardo posted:I think that might have been me. These write-ups aren't improving my disposition toward them one iota, either! I know, right? The broomseat's like this one-off gag that they some how screw up, and the Changeling and the Tooth Fairy are artifacts from a much better, darker game. Like if they actually followed through on the "It's Addams Family inspired!" chant that they pull out whenever people criticize the tone. Also, I didn't post the numbers because, well... Why bother, but the Boogie Man is a rank 3 monster and the closet monster is a rank 2. So presumably, the Closet Monster is there to provide a challenge to less skilled witches who would be forever banished to nightmare dimensions by the Boogie Man... or Boogie Women, as they note that there are female boogie men. After all, the Closet Monster will run if you put up a fight, where as the Boogie man will wreck your poo poo. On an related note, I have gotten shanghaied into running WGA... possibly using Mystic to do the GMing because they want me to play my alchemist. I'm not sure who to curse for this. Probably myself.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:17
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FourmyleCircus posted:On an related note, I have gotten shanghaied into running WGA  Why would you do this Why would you consent to this
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Oct 12, 2013 08:44
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quote:I know, right? The broomseat's like this one-off gag that they some how screw up, and the Changeling and the Tooth Fairy are artifacts from a much better, darker game. Like if they actually followed through on the "It's Addams Family inspired!" chant that they pull out whenever people criticize the tone. Was the Discworld book with the creepy tooth fairy who lives in a palace made of teeth the same one where Susan Sto-Helit is a monster-hunting babysitter?
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Oct 12, 2013 10:20
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Count Chocula posted:Was the Discworld book with the creepy tooth fairy who lives in a palace made of teeth the same one where Susan Sto-Helit is a monster-hunting babysitter? Yes, it also involved Death taking over for the Hog Father, as well as the birth of the Oh God of Hangovers 
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Oct 12, 2013 10:40
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Down With People posted:
Because the other guy is too incredibly enthusiastic, thinks it would be hilarious to mock the the setting from the inside, and generally wouldn't shut up, and kept going on for two hours after I asked him to shut the gently caress up. And they're the third person, at least, who went "Man, I would play with you!" even after I said I had no intention of playing it. Ever. Most of the others went Ew! and stopped after looking at the quickstart rules. Usually, it was that the quickstart rules don't contain that section on playing older witches. This guy got so wrapped up in little setting details, he read the intro comic in the quickstart and spent nearly half an hour asking me about the Unicorns and Pegasus because there were things that were implied and needed that weren't quite said. After seeing the broomseat, he started asking if there was a way to de-age someone without them losing their powers, so that they could use the broomseat and mind control someone else to pilt it.... and then when I pointed out the remote control broom, he went on to create a invincible armada of brooms with child seats. And surprisingly this isn't the friend that created the supervillain that summons an entire evil planet. Or the one I got into a Superbabes Min-Maxing match with. Mainly though, the guy won't give up.
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Oct 12, 2013 17:05
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FourmyleCircus posted:On an related note, I have gotten shanghaied into running WGA... possibly using Mystic to do the GMing because they want me to play my alchemist. I'm not sure who to curse for this. Probably myself. ABORT ABORT ABORT NOOO Edit: your other post makes it worse.
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Oct 12, 2013 17:06
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Worse? Or BEST? 
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Oct 12, 2013 17:39
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Rifts World Book Five: Triax and the NGR Part 9: "All that they know is that the 'new' or 'special' ammunition they've been given seems to be extremely more effective against the enemy and that's good enough for them." Weapons Apparently we start with a note that laser weapons are popular because they're long range. I'd argue, but there are no range penalties in Rifts, so everybody can be a sharpshooter at 4000 feet. The NGR will tend to confiscate Black Market items (yes capital letters are used again) in the Republic, but tend to overlook them on the fringes of NGR territory. We also get new kinds of e-clips, one that loads from the front and a shorter e-clip. The first unbalances the gun (but somehow makes it more accurate when fired two-handed?), and the second gives you fewer shots. The latter may seem useless, because there's a rules loophole where weapon bursts use a percentage of the clip, so you can fire full-auto on the cheap on the few old weapons that allow the normal burst rules. It notes that in the wilderness a lot of merchants will gouge travellers. As a traveller, I would suggest just shooting merchants that try and gouge you for the ultimate discount. You're out in the middle of the nowhere! Just take your trigger finger discount. Depleted Uranium Rounds "aka DU-Rounds" that do 25% extra damage, roughly speaking, or convert a railgun from 1d4 x 10 to 1d6 x 10, which is actually more like 40% extra, because math is hard, math is so hard, math breaks bricks on its cock. Uranium Rounds "aka U-Rounds". The NGR has come up with a special type of round that hinders supernatural healing... such as the regeneration had by dragons, werewolves, and even the Splugorth by making rounds out of pure uranium!  This deserves a list of the things wrong with it.
  In anycase, the ammo is mainly only used by cyborgs, robots, and robot vehicles with sufficient shielding. It's apparently too dangerous for people in environmental armor to use in quantities large enough to fire off*. It also, of course, presents a pollution hazard, so often they will send out clean-up teams to pick up as many rounds** as they can with "a 50% TO 80% clean-up rate", and they're generally banned from being used within NGR borders. Apparently they're top secret, even though they're littering uranium whenever they use them, and soldiers are not told what the bullets are made out of (and apparently aren't even slightly curious enough to open up a clip or belt to look). They affect just about any supernatural creature except energy beings like elementals or entities. Yes, this means vampires and werewolves are vulnerable to uranium. Is this is the stupidest thing in the book? It's certainly in the running. We have something really, really stupid coming up, so you'll get to be the judge. * Actually, uranium can be handled safely with gloves and a mask; a protective suit would be more than fine for prolonged exposure. ** Sending out teams to pick up uranium litter seems like they would be quite vulnerable to gargoyle ganking, given that they're only used in the "Monster Zones" and Similar areas. Pistols  Front-loading clips: German ingenuity goes too far.
 The WR-10: continuing German innovation in lovely clip placement. Rifles  The TX-42, as seen in "First Timer"
 The WR-17: Why does a laser weapon have a muzzle brake? Explosives
 Less of a 'borg and more just like a Borg.
Time for the last page of "First-Timer!"  Yeah. You'll never get to find out what happens to Sir and Kid. Sorry!  Next: The military Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 18:00
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I remember there being a lot of noise about the Americans littering Iraq with DU penetrators during Desert Storm, with a half-assed cleanup effort afterward. I always figured Kevin read one of those articles and wrote them in... though I was never sure if it was for verisimilitude or to provoke some kind of moral debate. All I know is: ammunition based weapons? Pfft, gently caress 'em.
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Oct 12, 2013 18:29
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Bieeardo posted:I remember there being a lot of noise about the Americans littering Iraq with DU penetrators during Desert Storm, with a half-assed cleanup effort afterward. I always figured Kevin read one of those articles and wrote them in... though I was never sure if it was for verisimilitude or to provoke some kind of moral debate. All I know is: ammunition based weapons? Pfft, gently caress 'em. Yeah, the book was written around the time that questions started to arise about the used of depleted uranium ammunition in Iraq, though this was some time before "Gulf War Syndrome" started to emerge as a phenomenon in the media. Ultimately, given the situation the NGR is facing, the idea that it would be morally questionable for them to pollute the Earth a bit when staving off complete genocide and annihilation doesn't really work.
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Oct 12, 2013 19:33
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
That looks like it would be insane uncomfortable, if not painful, to use. You'd be holding it with your fingertips.
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Oct 12, 2013 19:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ultimately, given the situation the NGR is facing, the idea that it would be morally questionable for them to pollute the Earth a bit when staving off complete genocide and annihilation doesn't really work. Yeah. There are some vague gestures toward morality with the displacement of D-Bees earlier in the book, but this is just an awkward solution to an interesting question: how do you deal with an army that can regenerate impressive amounts of damage that quickly? Vampires at least had some built-in vulnerabilities, and the go-to for regenerating things in D&D was typically fire or acid, but I don't think I ever came across a note on bio-regeneration that read 'damage from these sources is healed at human-normal rates'. A then-topical solution, but the first thing I thought of were the SOBs just pulling the rounds out of themselves when their bodies mysteriously stopped doing it for them.
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Oct 12, 2013 20:14
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I guess the use of DU and U rounds kinda explains why so many NGR vehicles/borgs have crappy piddly-damage machineguns, I guess. EDIT: I mean, it doesn't explain why they aren't GOOD machineguns, slugthrowers, railguns etc but it at least kinda explains why every build seems to have at least one thing that shoots metal bits at people
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Oct 12, 2013 21:18
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Angrymog posted:re: Homework Both interesting and has almost half as much  potential as the truth! Congratulations Angrymog, you win! Enjoy your prize of being told you won during the opening toJohn Wick's Eldritch High PART 4: HOMEWORK I hope it was everything you ever wanted. So, Homework. I've been building this thing up as something that shatters sanity like the Necronomicon. Would you be disappointed if I told you it was character advancement? Because it's character advancement. Homework is described as thus quote:At the end of each game, it’s time to decide how your character will spend the downtime. You can spend it studying, practicing or goofing off. Really. Those are your three choices. The first paragraph is completely superfluous and exists only to mislead the reader (those 3 options are actually groups of options) and treat them like a moron and the third paragraph is in pretty much the same "you're stupid" boat. "What, you were expecting tons of options out of a game marketed as a flexible storygame? Then you are obviously too stupid to remember what I said in the previous paragraph or count to three.  " The use of the word "game" also implies that theses are handed out at the end of every campaign instead of every session like they actually supposed to. I haven't even gotten past the third paragraph of this chapter and I already feel my blood pressure rising. Ugh, let's just cover what each option does.The game starts by describing studying but I'll start with Practice so that you can have a better idea of what does what for you. Practice lets you buy either Specialties for 1 Homework Point per rank or Spells for 3 Homework Points. Specialties are specialized versions of existing Courses that add 1 card per rank when using the Course in that certain way and Spells are pretty much the same thing except they apply to Magical Courses and provide 3 cards. Why are they split if they do the exact same thing for the exact same price at maximum rank? Specialties don't even have to be invested in non-magical Courses! Goofing Off is a catch all for everything else and is described as providing special benefits at the cost of giving you fewer point to Study with (no duh) and that it can get you in to Trouble. The oh so important Trouble mechanic that this section alludes to doesn't exist. Anyway, the Goofing Off options are Dark Magic which earns you a rank in a Dark Magic Course and a Dark Magic Point for 3 Homework Points, Demerits which gets rid of 1 Demerit from you record for 1 Homework Point, Explore which lets you say one thing about the school and make it true for 1 Homework Point, Magic Item which let's you build one of the items described in the previous chapter for 3 Homework Points, and Willpower which let's you increase your willpower by 1 for 5 Homework Points. Note that there is no rule stating that you can invest in an option over time so you can never increase Willpower by the RAW. And now we roll back to Studying for the big finish. Studying is essentially studying for midterms (or finals if you're in second semester) and earns you Study Points in different courses that determine your grade in the class. This section is stupid for so many reasons. First, it mentions how each session is supposed to represent 1 week and that each semester is 12 weeks. Helpful here, except that this tidbit is completely missing from the GM section meaning that an important pacing rule that's hardcoded in to the system is in a largely unrelated chapter. Next, each Study Point provides 1d10+5 to you grade on the exam, making the benefits of Studying random in a game that is carefully designed with a largely predictable and easily measurable power scale. Next, the roll is done during the exam, not when you do the actual studying so you have no idea how well off you are in terms of grading until it's too late. Next, the grading scale (and therefore the benefits) are heavily backloaded with anything below a 60 to 69 earns you a Demerit, anything above an 70 earns you a Specialty and every 10 points beyond earns you extra ranks in the Course at a maximum of 2. This makes Studying extremely all-or-nothing in a storygame built around give-and take mechanics. Next, the grading scale is missing the entire 0 to 59 range and since the Demerit punishment is only handed out at the 60 to 69 range that implies that getting below a 60 lets you dodge the Demerit. Next, why does Studying do nothing for you until you take the exam? The exam isn't what's teaching you, it's the Study! Lastly, the backloading is so bad that unless you are stupidly lucky Practice and Goofing Off are far more efficient methods of improving yourself. Let's say that over the course of 3 sessions Martin studied Alchemy as much as possible buying a total of 9 Study Points to get as good as he can get at Alchemy that semester, spending his remaining 6 Homework points on various Specialties in Alchemy. Meanwhile Daisy buys 2 ranks of Dark Magic (Necromancy so that she can impress Castella), a Specialty in Necromancy, and her remaining 8 points on various Specialties in Crafts. This gives Martin a chance at earning 2 ranks and a specialty in Alchemy when midterms roll around, but Daisy has a guaranteed 2 ranks and a specialty in Necromancy that she gets right away as well as 2 points of Dark Magic (which as we'll soon see are huge boons that are only risky if used) and 2 extra points of specialty. This means that studying is little more than a millstone around the player's necks that eats up advancement and punishes them harshly for not being lucky! This is so bad that just 1 is not enough. I must call upon something not seen since the last thread.And so, as I pray, UNLIMITED PSYDUCK WORKS  Only 2 pages and I need another break. I can't think of another RPG that has had so much stupid in only 2 pages. I'm going to try drowning out my memories of this chapter in cheesy actions movies with my little bro. total: 5 (1 this chapter) total: 30 (10! this chapter)Unlimited Psyduck Works total: 1 Pages read: 20/34 Next time, HEADMASTER or The longest chapter in the book. Pacing! I would like to credit Dareon for the Unlimited Psyduck Works image. I hope he doesn't mind that I reused it from his review of the Nasuverse RPG AccidentalHipster fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Oct 17, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 23:22
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That almost works. If you have 60 points per term to spend on poo poo, but need to have a 70+ in the exam at the end, then there's a balance you'd need to achieve. So if I do a study session for each of my courses every week I have 60+12d10 exam points, a range from 72-180, averaging 126, 12 points to do "other" things with. If I skip study two weeks out of a term, I could have 50+10d10 exam points, 60-150 (105), with 22 dossing about points. Skip four weeks, 40+8d10 48-120 (84), 32 doss points. There's potential for a power now vs. power later vs. character "death by being kicked out of the school" decision, which isn't necessarily bad. Could do with some of the edges filing off though, and some checks to make sure that the outside activities don't overwhelm the required stuff.
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Oct 12, 2013 23:43
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How are you supposed to increase Willpower with 5 Homework Points in Goofing Off, when it's explicitly stated that you can only spend three in any given category?
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Oct 13, 2013 01:15
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goatface posted:That almost works. If you have 60 points per term to spend on poo poo, but need to have a 70+ in the exam at the end, then there's a balance you'd need to achieve. My big problem is that in its current state Studying is way too underpowered to the point where it's just a point sink (I actually think it's more efficient to just barely pass 2 classes and work off the Demerits) and that even if it was buffed it would still be a luck based layer of complexity that a 34 page game doesn't need game doesn't need. And the whole thing could be fixed (and actually make sense because why the gently caress does studying a subject do nothing until you take midterms?) if they just made it work like pretty much every other Homework category. Bieeardo posted:How are you supposed to increase Willpower with 5 Homework Points in Goofing Off, when it's explicitly stated that you can only spend three in any given category? I thought that you could "save up" points by investing ahead of time so you could Goof Off for 3 Points to invest in Willpower and then invest another 2 to get 1 Willpower out of the deal. Nope! There is no rule saying you can invest in an option over time! I'll edit my post to add that as well as how nonsensical in universe delay in reward for Studying is.
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Oct 13, 2013 01:58
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If there is some obscure or missing mechanic, then buying Willpower like that sort-of works. It's still a heck of a risk, putting that many points into limbo with no immediate benefit. Exploring could be interesting, assuming that anything a player declares about the school is allowed to affect the GM's plans. The whole study point thing just feels weird. Is it supposed to be simulating favoritism? Grading on the curve? Why would it be simulating anything in a storygame, anyway? Oh, right: there's that fifty-percent failure rate he needs to support somehow. I know this is Wick, but turning time irrevocably declared as spent studying into a random roll on the Booklarnin' Taybulz is pretty drat cynical, even for him. Assuming that not being kicked out is a stated goal of the game, he could have done it with some basic trade-offs. You spend the most you can on studying, and you get two things: a good record, and a mechanically serviceable education. You don't get whatever benefits come from immersing yourself in the dark arts, or learning the layout of the school, or the ire of the people you probably should have asked to mindwipe you and your family when you were first enrolled.
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Oct 13, 2013 02:51
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Oh, and some wondered "why all the leg missiles?" The answer is: Robotech. Super Dimensional Fortress Macross dammit!  Although it's definitely because of Robotech that those designs are there. It should be mandatory if you rip off Macross's designs you have to include pop music in their usage somehow. It's just not the same otherwise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxnC6jkJyEM And the artist really loves him some Shirow doesn't he? Where's the fuchikomas I wonder.
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Oct 13, 2013 03:21
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a kitten posted:Super Dimensional Fortress Macross dammit! Has the Robotech game shipped yet ?
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Oct 13, 2013 03:38
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a kitten posted:Super Dimensional Fortress Macross dammit! It's easier to type "Robotech". Also, that's what Palladium had the rights to, so Kevin Long ended up doing a lot of Macross and other Robotech-licensed designs for Palladium before doing work on Rifts. In fact, if you do a Google image search for "veritech", the first piece of art that comes up is a Kevin Long piece. a kitten posted:And the artist really loves him some Shirow doesn't he? Where's the fuchikomas I wonder. The reason is most likely that Ghost in the Shell wouldn't be released in the US until a year after the publication of Triax. mllaneza posted:Has the Robotech game shipped yet ? Nope. Supposedly they're shooting for a December ship date, but I'd be impressed if they actually made it.
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Oct 13, 2013 04:25
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