Banality is one of those things that made intuitive sense to me growing up. I figure oChangling is silly but harmless, though the SCA seems pretty limited compared to the way actual manic pixie dream poet hipsters act and think. It's all wish-fulfillment anyway.quote:So give me your concepts for characters recruited into a weird, secretive, privately-wealthy paranormal investigation society. Remember that everybody recruited into the Society has a psychic power of some kind. Powers, like most of character creation, are pretty freeform, but to fit with the game's mythology they should generally be related to space and/or time (e.g. remote viewing or precognition moreso than telekinesis or mind control). Or you can leave your concept's power unknown and I'll pick something interesting. If I get enough concepts, I'll make an entire Seven Dogs Society! A young Scottish comic book writer who, after a mystical experiace in Thailand, can predict or influence events through incorporating Burroughs cut-up techniques into his comics. Too meta? Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Jan 13, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 03:51
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Spoilers Below posted:Alright, to add some dynamic tension to the group... He is of course involved in a decades-long magical feud with my character. In real life, my character's power is changing his own life by writing those changes into his comic book avatar, but I don't think that fits the setting. But what would playing him as an RPG character do to him in real life? The janitor sounds like the Psychonauts character. Mors, one of the old names for Irish bards (according to my Joyce teacher) is 'guardians of the word horde', which I always loved. If I was playing Ars Magica Ireland, I'd probably include part of Finnegan's Wake as the ritual connected to Finn McCool, anachronism be damned. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Jan 13, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 07:56
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I remember NERO/boffer LARP. It was an excuse for nerds to get some sun. The spell packets were neat. I do remember really light weapons so you could tap people quickly multiple times.
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Jan 13, 2014 11:11
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The trippy movie Beyond the Black Rainbow could work as a Changeling escaping the True Fae.
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Jan 14, 2014 02:42
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Re: Changeling: The Dreaming: http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-313 quote:Roleplayers in the audience will probably know that White Wolf Game Studio used to publish, as part of their risibly-entitled World of Darkness line a game called Changeling the Dreaming. It was a game about, like, the loss of innocence and the death of dreams, man. Players took on the role of Changelings, fairy spirits in human bodies, who were slowly losing their beautiful-unique-snowflakeness under the crushing "Banality" of the modern world.
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Jan 15, 2014 10:23
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The Leper Colon V posted:The Thropes are genuinely a pretty cool take on the werewolf/Hyde thing, and I'm a huge sucker for The Reanimator. They give off a kind of 'best parts of OWoD' vibe that I can't help but dig. UM could be almost decent if run in, like, FATE, and with some actual hope in the world. I'm digging UM, to be honest. Instead of focusing on aristocrats in zeppelins and goggles it takes off from the 'dark satanic mills' part of the industrial revolution. It's all shot through with a very British pessimism and dark humor. I don't know if I'd want to live there, but I'd read a comic about it in a (imperfectly restarted) heartbeat.
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Feb 5, 2014 04:02
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quote:Yeah so you can set Unhallowed Metropolis somewhere besides London. You have the blessing of the developers. Go spread your wings and fly across the Wastelands for adventure~ I honestly don't see the problem with focusing the game on a city as iconic as London. There's hundreds of years of reality and fiction to draw on, from Dr. Johnson to Sherlock Holmes to the League of Extrodinary Gentlemen and Ian Sinclair's psychogeography. And I say this as somebody who's never set foot in England - if the authors are Brits it makes even more sense. The way to bring in the rest of the world would be to do what the original Sherlock Holmes stories do. There's always a disgraced German aristocrat or a brash American or somebody from the Colonies with a secret past. All that gets filtered through the atmosphere of London.
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Feb 10, 2014 07:51
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Cardiovorax posted:Dead Inside is a surprisingly fun and optimistic game for having the premise that you're a soulless abomination and life sucks and is sad and boohoohoo. I feel like it could work to help model the spiritual journey that Promethea illustrates, though it's less tied to the Kabbalistic paradigm.
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Feb 21, 2014 06:59
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I've never actually played it, but it's a fun read just for how many of your expectations it subverts.
quote:The key to understanding what Stephen Brown is trying to communicate is understanding that his entire theory of mind revolves around the idea of "personal mythology." Everyone, he believes, has a personal mythology that is a highly individualized version of the mythology of their culture. Most people in the modern age really understand mythology because we're so inundated by cultural memes that we can't see the big picture. As a result, "long-enduring myths are not holding up." This is good and bad, because it allows for greater individuality, but leaves many people lost and with no understanding of why they do what they do. I've been on a big Grant Morrison kick, and between Supergods and The Invisibles (which obviously inspired oMage) this makes sense to me. Not that it's a substitute for therapy or that the book isn't laughable, but it ties into Grant's ideas about chaos magick. Batman and Superman are symbols that can be used to represent or embody positive things about ourselves, and they're as valid as anything people choose to summon or worship. I guess using your character to change yourself is like what Grant did with King Mob. It's bullshit, and Everlasting does it in a very cheesy way, but it's bullshit that could lead to something cool.
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Feb 26, 2014 07:31
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Kellsterik posted:I'm not much a fan of Flame Princess, but that is a pretty intriguing premise for an adventure. It reminds me of the Munster Rebellion: http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-48---Prophets-of-Doom/Luther-Reformation-history http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%FCnster_Rebellion A radical religious group took over Munster and imposed all sorts of odd laws before it was ended by a siege. I guess the best ending would be for one of the PCs to cast that big spell and sacrifice themselves to preserve the city as a sort of magical Temporary Autonomous Zone or a symbol of rebellion. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 04:48
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PleasingFungus posted:No, there's no save against this. A single PC goes down, and they're pretty much out of the campaign. The entire party goes down the passage, and they whole adventure passes them by (the Thirty Years War is over by 1648, and the Seven, the Citizen Peace Patrol cult, and Schwartz are all long dead). Actually, on days 8-11 the Swedish Army uses a lot of gunpowder to collapse the Infinite Tower, killing everyone inside and spilling their blood and guts out into the water supply. The river will run red for weeks. Which begs the question of whether or not PCs in the passage trap count as being inside, and if not, what they return to at its end. It's worse than that, if I'm reading it correctly: it looks like each person going down the hallway ends up arriving back at the start +-60 years from when they started... so if more than one person goes in, you end up with the entire party scattered between 1571 and 1691. Essentially, a guaranteed no-save TPK... even neglecting the fact that they're going to return, alone, to either a guarded entrance (specifically called out!), or a tower which no longer exists. Gygax's sphere of annihilation was at least considerate enough to let players know when they'd died. [/quote] I swear this comes directly from Neil Gaiman's Doctor Who episode, which was inspired by House of Leaves. There's a cool bit where Amy ages decades in a minute. This dungeon sounds fun in a brutal Dark Souls way. The Insect God reminds me of The Invisbles. It's better than the usual Tolkien stew.
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Mar 22, 2014 03:18
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quote:
It feels like you could retool the game to be about this book: http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php which claims that in the Ancient World most people had no conciousnsss and instead literally heard the voices of gods or kings telling them what to do in times of stress (because that was the only way one side of their brain could communicate with the other). You could set it in bicameral times or posit a return of bicamerality in modern days. ""When Julian Jaynes...speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence..."
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Apr 15, 2014 07:12
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Finally, a system for a Samurai Pizza Cats game!
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Apr 18, 2014 10:33
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Asimo posted:It's not something that comes up often in RPGs, no. Not even that often in fantasy gaming, except for the occasionally explicitly evil super-powerful empire thing that the PCs are allied against rather than refugees from. I was actually really, really annoyed when Exile never panned out, since I've always thought sci-fi gaming needed to pull more from Foundation than from Star Wars, and White Wolf's Trinity was ultimately a far more conservative, "safer", and frankly less interesting game. Honestly if it was worked on in the early naughts rather than the late 90's it might have fared a bit better, both for the game industry being in a different place but also by being able to better leverage its heavy web presence to build a fandom. But, well, so it goes. Is there a game based on Ian M Banks Culture books yet? The premise is tailor-made for gaming. You play Special Circumstances or Contact agents, either genetically superior posthumans or sentient AI drones, and you're sent on missions outside your posthuman paradise.
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May 23, 2014 03:36
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Asimo posted:That would be pretty awesome, yeah. I pondered doing them myself, but I haven't played Basic in fifteen years or so, so I'm not sure I could do the rule writeups justice. I like doing writeups for stuff that are older or more forgotten anyway; the history of RPG design and the industry is pretty interesting, but doesn't come up that often. The Culture books handle that, though. There's a whole organization that recruits people or AI with interesting talents (the PCs) and sends them on missions to make contact with more primitive civilizations. There's your game.
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May 23, 2014 04:54
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ThisIsNoZaku posted:This is why I'm no particular fan of Jenna Moran's; RPGNet even coined a word a long while back to describe people able to actually understand her writing. English majors? People who prefer words to numbers? So much of the hobby is charts and graphs; let the rest of us have our gorgeous, flowery prose. That's what fantasy was in the Lord Dunsany days before Tolkien and Gygax came along. And stop trying to 'understand' everything. Experience it. Nobilis set my brain on fire like nothing since Unknown Armies and Exalted's Shaping Combat is how I see the world sometimes - it's a narrative that we tell ourselves.
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Jun 19, 2014 03:13
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Grnegsnspm posted:Man, I have a degree in literature and I do not begrudge someone some flowery prose but Nobilis took that poo poo right over the top. Also, it's a game not a book or a movie, I kind of need to understand it. If all I do is "experience" the book and then one of my players asks me how a specific mechanic works I can't just tell him to relax and let the experience of not knowing what the gently caress you're doing wash over him. It's fine to give me all the foofy, flowery poetic stuff when you describe your setting or the characters or things like that but when it comes time to tell how the actual mechanics of a game works I don't want it to read like Bjork telling me about a dream she once had. In one of the FATAL & Friends threads I think I defended and explained Shaping Combat just based on the summary in the thread. Just think in terms of narrative and symbol.
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Jun 19, 2014 07:11
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Kai Tave posted:It's funny because I'm sure someone somewhere has made the same argument about The Everlasting: Book of the Unliving before. "No man, you just have to think in terms of narrative and symbols. And candles, lots of loving candles. No, more than that, more candles. Yeah, there you go. Now we're ready for some Legendmaking." Except Borgtrom has original ideas and expresses them in a cool way, which Everlasting didn't have. If people can defend Phoenix Command's lists of charts, I can defend the opposite extreme. And the strategy of viewing life in terms of narrative long predates Elfgames. See Ulysses or situationist psychogeography. It's a fertile ground for gaming.
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Jun 20, 2014 01:31
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My favorite Doctor Who blogger talks a bunch about the Doctor colliding into different genres, and I imagine he's hit a few AW-style worlds in his time. The idea would be how would the Doctor change AW, and how would AW change the Doctor? I can imagine you could do that with an existing playbook, though. I wouldn't even include the TARDIS, since the TARDIS just gets the Doctor from story to story. Assume he's stuck in AW, and explore what somebody who's clever with a strong moral code would DO in that setting. Would he try and reform the local gangs? Overthrow the worst bad guys? Say 'gently caress it' and roll with the least-bad people as a mechanic/clever guy (which I think is already a playbook)? There was somebody who tried to do a Doctor Who run of Fallout: New Vegas, mostly talking or lockpicking, and that would be cool. I mean, Tom Baker hung out with Leela, who's a Battlebabe if I've ever seen one:  And on the AW side you're dealing with a mutant who comes from the Maelstorm and talks to it and interacts with it. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Dec 26, 2014 |
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Dec 26, 2014 05:12
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Covok posted:Oh, definitely. There will ALWAYS be dudes in tabletop games who are just like "I want to play my favorite character from X series in my favorite game" regardless of how bad of an idea it is. It's a mix of not understanding game focus and the fact that is an idea that has been with the hobby from the beginning (a lot of the original, classic character classes were made to emulate characters from the creator's favorite book series). The idea of The Doctor IS that he jumps between genres easily, and Apocolypse World sounds like a perfect place for him to show up as a guest star. The Psychic Maelstorm even sounds like something from the new series. That blogger also reviewed the FASA Dr Who RPG.
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Dec 27, 2014 08:11
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I have no real interest in Pathfinder but the art and setting for Azure Abyss are awesome! You could run something based on Graeme Base's Sign of the Seahorse - deep-sea mobsters.
Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 23:46
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All this talk of RIFTS, TORG, and evil bunnies is giving me Sluggy Freelance flashbacks. Fallout was originally a GURPS license, so Exodus is a D20 hack of a modified GURPS?
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Jan 12, 2015 00:47
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The Deleter posted:TORG and HSD seem to have the same problem in that they are taking way too much time and effort to explain/simulate poo poo nobody cares about. TORG cars so much about its simulation it prevents players from doing anything cool with the setting, and HSD is typng its meme-filled Bitcoin Randian wank fantasy with one hand. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6i3Z1tmfMA Unless it became a Dinosaur Train!
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Jan 12, 2015 23:29
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Kavak posted:I'm voting for Orrosh, because why the hell not? This, and because I remember the Cyberpapacy from the last time around.
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Jan 14, 2015 00:23
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quote:Unlike most talents and feats that relate to Diplomacy, there's no minimum mood requirement for Smooth Talker, meaning you can say a bunch of meaningless platitudes to an arch-villain and win them over to being Friendly toward you without any further effort as long as you are at least 4 levels higher than them. This is how I remember playing Fallout. Maxing out SPEECH meant I could talk most villians into anything.
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Jan 19, 2015 02:45
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Kurieg posted:I did some research on this for you, No. He's apparently still working on the introduction as of April of last year, and he's now been tapped for Mage 20. This is my poo poo - anything that lets you use music as magical/physical power just makes sense to me, like Wild Zero or something. It was pretty easy to do that in oMage though, from a Dreamspeaker bluesman to a Son of Ether with a lightning-shooting guitar. Are there any other games that support that? I remember a cool glam rock game. And oMage was more Morrison. The Invisibles reads like a Mage campaign half the time, and even talks about paradigms and consensus reality. I'm not sure who cribbed from who, but Morrison's PopMagic fits oMage. Alan Moore is pretty much straight Hermetic and his magical views as explicated in things like Promethea are really traditional Crowley/Kabbalah. The magical war between the two of them would make a great Mage or Unknown Armies campaign. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Jan 28, 2015 |
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Jan 28, 2015 01:10
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Halloween Jack posted:My first impulse is to say that it needs a foreground element, where the PCs are given a cause and a mission, and a background element that looms throughout the campaign. For example, for the foreground, the PCs could be a government task force fighting the Wonderland on its own turf, a police unit hunting down CPDers who've been warped or possessed, or a company that stops terrorist groups from using chessboard-delving to attack their rivals. For the background element, you could have the government wanting to use Wonderland for nefarious purposes, the Underground spreading misinformation that needs to be combated, or corporations sowing advertising in Chessboard 1. From my memory of Wonderland, i'd want to play supernatural psychiatrists who heal people by hunting down the Wonderland manifestations of their issues and defeating/making peace with them. Or somebody trying to spread weirdness to the 'real world'. But I'd honestly be happy just chilling out and seeing trippy poo poo. Speaking of trippy poo poo, I'd love to hear more about the GURPS Prisoner book that FM Guru mentioned. I hope there's a different GM each game. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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Feb 5, 2015 01:31
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ForkBanger posted:Right, where was I? So the BBC went as far as to trademark the design of old blue police boxes, but they're cool with Eastman and Laird and Palladium throwing around all these Time Lords?
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Feb 8, 2015 04:24
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occamsnailfile posted:I read several of the Elric books as a kid and my reaction to them was kind of a bored shrug. The prose was kind of leaden, Elric was a whiney douche who was incapable of solving his own problems and had to call on his chaos-god deus ex machina constantly. Moorcock had some kind of entertaining weirdness in some of his plot setups but it never felt cohesive enough to click with me. Mind you, this was a very long time ago I read them at this point but that is my general recollection. I sort of want to go read the first one again as an adult just to better understand their influence on others, but I can't help but feel other authors have done it better since. I'm sorry, but I got into Moorcock in the late 90s and he's still amazing. His fantasy is actually FANTASTIC - weird and strange and surreal. Read Elric sure, but also read Blood or Mother London or especially the Jerry Cornelius books. His New Wave anthologies brought 'literate' sci-fi like Aldiss and JG Ballard into a market that needed it. Seriously, you can pick up one of his paperbacks for next to nothing, and they're all good. If you need a guide, start here: http://ferretbrain.com/themes/59 Plus he wrote for Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult and designed the 'chaos' logo Warhammer still used. Is there a good Jerry Cornelius RPG? I want to play a universe-hopping glam rock musical assassin who fights Margaret Thatcher with his friend Lemmy. Over The Edge, maybe? Yes, Lemmy is a Moorcock character. I haven't even got into the adaptation he wrote for the Sex Pistols movie.
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May 3, 2015 03:25
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quote:So the Jungle Elves are ruled by the Tree Council. This is not just a name; it is literally an arbocracy, government by trees. More specifically, the Trees of Wisdom, which are telepathic, and may come from biomancers transmuting themselves into trees. Like you do. I know everything in this chapter is dumb as written, but I'm just seeing the Parliament of Trees from Swamp Thing and they were awesome. I'd modify all of that to be like Swamp Thing, where when nature elementals and bio hippies get pissed they can choke off a city or use plants to gently caress with the oxygen levels in the atmosphere.
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May 10, 2015 02:01
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quote:Autocthon, Vulcan, Planet X, and Nemesis are barely existent bardos, various visions of planets in the solar system that don't exist - an alternate Earth on the far side of the Sun, a rogue planet beyond Pluto, the planet that shattered into the asteroid belt, etc. Little is known about them, for they flicker into existence only briefly ever so often, and only might become real if they somehow obtain a source of Mania. They forgot Nibiru, which I totally didn't learn about from Scooby Doo: Mystery Inc. Bardos are a great idea, and a bunch should have appeared when the 2012 Apocalypse failed
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May 18, 2015 01:32
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Genius: The Transgression reminds me of half the plot of Age of Ultron.
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May 24, 2015 10:30
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quote:You could see the notches on his ears through the barroom haze. The smoke didn't seem to bother him at all. An LED cast lit his pantherish features, its green glow accentuating his mahogany skin. He smiled as Race stretched towards the deejay booth, up on her toes like a curious mouse. "Emile Autum?!?" she shrilled through the thumping roar. Ghost nodded, still smiling, but said nothing. His eyes held hers like destiny fulfilled. She took the bait, a goner. I knew then where she'd sleep it off tonight. Why am I not surprised that Emilie Autumn got namechecked in a WoD book? Right, because she's a quirky goth princess who spits tea into her fans mouths at shows and has a devoted, creepy fanbase.
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May 26, 2015 05:32
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I don't watch much anime, so I just saw a Princess Bubblegum splat.
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May 26, 2015 07:02
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Doodmons posted:There's room there for a big speech from a low Morality hunter with a maxed out Hunter's Code about how they'll be damned if some witch's magic crystal is going to declare that they're on the naughty list and not fit to save other human beings' lives from predation by monsters. Like most of Hunter, I can see this as an episode of Supernatural.
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May 28, 2015 00:39
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Cythereal posted:And the funny thing is, they're relatively good guys set against the whole of the World of Darkness. Demons are lovely customers and entities from the Abyss do bad things to property values. I've always thought Cheiron could make a great antagonist for a vampire or werewolf campaign: you think you're king poo poo of the world? These humans don't give a crap about you, and see you only as raw resources. You think yourself a predator, but you have nothing on this human corporation (excising or ignoring the truth about the Board). I could imagine running Chieron like Monsanto - lots of people think they're evil and run propaganda campaigns against them, but the medicine they make from monsters actually does help lots of people. Task Force Valkyrie sounds kinda skeevy to me, but government agencies like that usually are in this kind of fiction. I can't see much joy out of playing government thugs, though I admit they're needed in WoD. How much did Supernatural take from Hunter, or vice-versa? 'Cause on that show they're always talking about being capital-H Hunters like its a calling and a job, and in the later seasons you even see more Hunter style conspiracies and cults.
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May 29, 2015 06:40
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I love that this thread is writing up Unknown Armies again. I was thinking of doing it, but I loved that game so much it broke my brain for awhile. I played in a few UA campaigns, and I started seeing UA in everything. I wanted to write up my favorite songs as Unknown Armies adventures. It had so many concepts that mapped onto reality. I did lead to one of my most uncomfortable role playing experiences, when our GM flashbacked us into the 9/11 style scenario from one of the sourcebooks without warning. I know it was written pre-9/11, but I didn't expect to encounter it.
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May 29, 2015 07:12
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Cythereal posted:My tabletop gaming group runs a Task Force Valkyrie game, but I've mentioned before that we run it as a light-hearted beer and pizza game. More X-COM than X-Files. Personally I love the Advanced Armory thematically versus any of the others: no magic, no mysticism, no fighting the supernatural with the supernatural, just an R&D department with a budget of "yes," a scientific understanding of how the monsters tick and how to use their own altered biology against them, and raw firepower. I loved oMage enough that I assumed the Advanced Armory was just like Technocracy 'technology'. I don't know why, but since I've been sick your 'beer & pretzels' game is running through my head and I'm seeing SWAT style no-knock raids against dotty old witches and whacky Changelings. I'm sure that's not how you run it though.
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May 29, 2015 13:38
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quote:The interstate highway system was actually laid out as a giant magickal glyph to enable the summoning of a demonic legion in case of a Soviet attack. This may be plot of the next season of True Detective Night10194 posted:The Morality system always feels like it's unnecessary. If you have players who are on board for the idea that hunting monsters is going to slowly drive them insane and cause them terrible problems, they'll play that out themselves. You don't necessarily need a big ruleset for it. If you design something and the first thing you have to design afterwards is tons of ways to get around it, it is a hint the thing you're designing doesn't really contribute. Just steal the system from Unknown Armies. When you do something bad you roll on one of four Madness Meters. If you fail, you can't do the thing and it fucks you up. If you succeed, you get Hardened and more sociopathic. I do feel like Hunter needs something like that, since the mental toll of being a Hunter is one of the big themes in Supernatural: Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 05:44 on May 30, 2015 |
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May 30, 2015 05:31
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Mr.Morgenstern posted:So is it me, or is Hunter the best White Wolf game? I've never had an interest in vampires or werewolves, but playing a southern minister kicking rear end for the Lord seems pretty awesome. You can do that in oMage too. And you can do everything else. I really like Genius. Those far-future timelines are great.
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May 30, 2015 07:51
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