Davin Valkri posted:

I wonder if British tankers using that tank would wonder why the 18th U.S. President was screaming in their ears.

(It is a Lee/Grant joke)



(Same tank, except the one with the rounder turret on the left was used by the British and called the "Grant", while the one on the right used an American turret and was called the "Lee".)

tofuwizard posted:

Evil Mastermind posted:

I'd say they didn't have a lot of ideas with what to do with most of the content. If you read the cosm books, there's very little there about the tone of the realms. Instead, it was all locations and NPCs and equipment and mechanics.

I mean, the Living Land should be scary as hell. It's an alien landscape, where technology just does not work. Even simple things like matches can't work there, because it's not a case of the reality not having developed that technology yet, is that the Living Land's reality doesn't support that level of "technology". In fact, non-natural items will decay rapidly to the point where a car will reduce to a pile of rust in a matter of days.

Ataxerxes posted:

Indeed. Not only do they have the Cyberpope, they also have cyberwhales. Those fire torpedoes. And are awesome.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Life, the Mutliverse, and Everything - Let's Read TORG

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

You had better cover High Lord of Earth

dwarf74 posted:

I would never, ever suggest you actually try to make a spell. I'm not cruel.

20 years later, and that's still the one of the est things I've seen in an RPG book.

SynthOrange posted:

Oh yeah.... now I remember why TORG never really took off in my group.

Evil Mastermind posted:

It is, at least at the start. That's because, unlike Rifts, they actually stopped and thought about how all this stuff would interact with each other and tried to keep things balanced. You can't have a group of starting characters with both a Glitter Boy and a hobo, for instance.

Selachian posted:

In many ways, TORG feels like a reflection of DC Heroes, probably because Greg Gorden and Ray Winninger were leading designers on both. Both games try to measure everything in game units (APs in DCH, "values" in TORG) and use a logarithmic scale. Both games use exploding dice, although DCH uses acting stat vs. resistance on a chart instead of stat+skill. Both games use a Subplot system. And unfortunately, both have a system of bennies that can be used for either in-game bonuses or character advancement (Hero Points vs. Possibilities).

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Of course, here in the states, the chances of getting shot by an overzealous cop or citizen for waving around a more realistic weapon around is higher. It's not likely, but it's a potential concern.

Hedningen posted:

For those worrying - I intend to go through the various Mutant games in order, mostly concentrating on where things change, what sort of fluff comes up in this game, and the other awesomely neat stuff. There's also the reference to Roy Batty above - I swear to Satan that the guys who wrote Mutant had this really weird obsession with Blade Runner. Don't believe me? Here's a picture from Mutant 2:



Awesome.

Leliel the 12th posted:

Frankly, I would suggest a full rewrite, but at this point, it's better just to scrap the setting and create a better one with the same premise of Giant Robots in the Lovecraft verse. Maybe advance the tech and power levels of Eldritch Skies a bit, include asides about how cults of hyperspatial entities dream of arcane mecha designs that they may manufacture with an extreme minimum amount of needed resources, and pull out the old "how to construct a gameline in the Unisystem" instruction booklet. Hell, the cults would even be better antagonists: Just imagine the creepy factor of Yellow Signers greeting you over the intercom not with warcries and threats, but lullabies and reassurances. They're not here to kill you, after all-they're here to save you. From the pain of living, yes, but still.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Actually, Shane doesn't appear in the Torg credits. I was going to mention the similarities but I forgot. What's more interesting is that Deadlands came out two years after Torg ended.

HitTheTargets posted:

Well that's oddly specific.

ZeeToo posted:

Did I miss it, or did you skip the ongoing details of the Still World if that issue isn't resolved?

Also, next do Nippontech.

Selachian posted:

I used to have a copy of this, but I got rid of it a long time ago. As I recall, you played alien tourists who'd come to Earth to bag a few of the local wildlife (i.e. humans).

Pththya-lyi posted:

This letter establishes what we know scientifically about the Serpent. I’ll leave it to the boffins to interpret. There are also a couple of pop culture allusions in the letter as well, which I will also leave to the boffins.

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

Kevin Long has been working for Raven Software as a concept artist since at least 2002. He never told me why he left Palladium except a comment that Siembada is a complete and total douche.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

And that's all you get. No origin, no background, no details, just boring killamajigs that are out to murder everybody because that's what it says in the script. They are boss monsters that will take ages for your average party to kill - and take not heroism to defeat, but sheer force of numbers and dice. They have no weaknesses other than the order you're supposed to kill them in (Famine, Pestilence, War, Death) and the fact that Millennium Tree weapons do solid damage against them (ten times normal, or about that of a Boom Gun, so you can just use a bunch of rail guns instead). Of course, Pestilence can specifically destroy Millennium Tree components and does extra damage against them...

Coalition Navy posted:

BGM-109 Tomahawk Cruise Missile - CSN Version

Mega-Damage: Everything within a 1000 foot (305 m) radius of ground zero suffers 3D4x100 M.D. (so it is likely that gods and alien intelligences would survive the blast — although wounded terribly)! Damage is 1D4x100 M.D. to everything in a 3 mile (4.8 km) radius immediately surrounding ground zero.

Evil Mastermind posted:

The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG




Lastly, we learn how Mobius gets along with his Middle Eastern neighbors. Spoiler: not well.

Ethiopia has pretty much disintegrated under Mobius' assault. The only reason Mobius hasn't just taken over yet is because the terrain makes it difficult to move troops in easily since his war machine wasn't designed to work at high alitudes. As it stands right now, Mobius keeps a few battalions on the Ethiopian border to keep them boxed in and to keep control of the Ethiopian gold and diamond mines on the country's border.

Dr. Mobuis was smart enough to realize early on that Israel was going to be a major threat, so he made it a point to move into their territory as soon as he could before they had time to assemble an effective defense. The western half of Israel is now under the Empire's control, but he's been unable to get in any further due to the Israeli forces not only putting up a better defense than Mobius expected, but also raiding into Empire territory.

Things are a little tenser with Libya. Remember, this game was written in the early 90’s, so Muammar Qaddafi was still in charge. The oil fields of Libya were an early target for Mobius, so Qaddafi made a bargain: if Mobius stopped trying to invade, accepted 45% of Libya's crude oil production, and give Qaddafi access to weird science weaponry, Qaddafi would not detonate the nuke he buried in the oil fields and irradiate the world’s main source of oil. Mobius has agreed, partially so he can concentrate on other battefronts, but also because he doesn’t know what a nuclear bomb is because they don’t exist in Terra or the Empire. Yet.

Lastly, there’s the Sudan. Sudanese forces have fallen back into a defensive position. Fortunately, they’re being supported by the Soviet Union’s “Soviet Psychic Group”, whose psychics have been able to predict attacks by Nile forces.

NEXT TIME: Pulp Powers and Gadgets...Torg style!

occamsnailfile posted:

Rifts very often gives population breakdowns of 'human' and 'various other forms of not-human' and it's very nice to think we're all over our racial hangups but the Coalition is sometimes accused of white supremacy since they're always drawn as such. From a country that had rapidly changing demographics before the Rifts came.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Bes the Depraved


_{Maybe it's the hat that turned him to evil.}

Which is more interesting? You decide.

Barudak posted:

I know I came in late but is there seriously a major Rifts character named after the character from Casablanca? To defeat Rama-Set do I need to convince Death to shoot him so we can start a beautiful friendship? What is the P.P.E necessary to only remember Paris? What is the damage roll for being shot in my least vulnerable spot?

ThisIsNoZaku posted:

Which of these games would people like to see:
Dresden Files RPG
Spycraft (So loving crunchy, like you won't believe)
A Song of Ice and Fire RPG
Iron Heroes (A "gritty" D&D variant from Mike Mearls back in the wild and wooly days of 2005)

I had a 3:16 write up going but I don't know where the hell it ended up and I, paradoxically, would rather do a much longer game than re-do part of the super short one.

Bieeardo posted:

Someone else around here, possibly in another thread, pointed out that EP's cortical stacks were strikingly similar to another setting's tech. So yes, they definitely take cues from other sources. Hell, one variety of described exsurgent infection turns you into a spiral mat of flesh that came straight out of a Junji Ito manga.

HitTheTargets posted:

Tread carefully, for down this path lies the lesbian sex scene in the Ghost in the Shell manga.

MalcolmSheppard posted:

But there's no mention of Guardians of Order's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai RPG, and man , people should know that it got made.

MinistryofLard posted:

Just as a note;

This;


is the flag of the Eureka Stockade. So, like, not just random geometrical shapes, and actually relevant to the accompanying chapter. Its meant to be a stylised Southern Cross, which is an Australian national symbol.



The Eureka Stockade wasn't actually that important to Australia's national formation or culture, it just gets played up a lot in our schools and media. Basically, a bunch of gold miners got pissed at the high cost of gold licenses in Ballarat and built a stockade in protest. The police attacked it, the miners shot back, and 27 people (police and miners) were killed.

It was one of maybe three rebellions (at most, depending on how you define 'rebellion') in Australian history and it gets played up a lot in the Australian national myth, but it is of questionable significance. Mostly it just gives nationalists a flag to organise around and get tattooed on themselves.

Honestly you just get the idea that the authors haven't really done a huge amount of research and have just grabbed a children's book on Australia and are going from there.

InShaneee posted:

Yrjo's prior research into stress has been completely standardized into a series of general scenarios, rated from 1.0 to 10.0 correlated to increasing stress put on the subject. To name just a few:

Drakyn posted:

Yeah, the deserted island doesn't even paralyze you or give you doctored photos. That sounds like a holiday.

Kurieg posted:

10.1 seems like one of those things that would get a 'psychiatrist' thrown in the loony bin.

Evil Mastermind posted:

You hit by...a smooth criminal.

She's not transformed though; her home cosm is the Nile Empire.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Oh man I just found the Japanese Nile Empire cover.

homeless poster posted:

Orrosh sounds sufficiently Ravenloft-esque, I'd love to hear that.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I'll admit that Nippon Tech is one of my favorite realms. Where the Cyberpapacy is basically Cyberpunk/Shadowrun except you replace megacorps with the 16th century Catholic Church, Nippon is Cyberpunk without the cybernetics.