oriongates posted:

Yawgmoth posted:

A minor point of contention: the tarrasque (at least in 3.5e) is really not that hard of a fight. I have a 12th level monk/kensai that could handle him solo in 3 rounds; our party casters could probably take him down on their own in the same or less time. As a party, it might take the majority of one round. He's just a big sack of hp and little else, sadly.

Kurieg posted:

it's their porn duty to protect and maintain the world's wild places.

Ratpick posted:

Yeah, if I were ever to bring a Ghoul to the table, I'd rather play a high Cold kind of Ghoul who tormented people they didn't like emotionally instead of being a merciless killer. That said, another angle I like for the Ghoul is the actually sympathetic guy or gal who just happens to be in the unfortunate situation of having an unnatural hunger they must sate. If you play it right you can make the Ghoul's drama about constantly fighting their hunger instead of relishing it.

Alternately I'd go with the Watchful Golem route of a character obsessed with another character (because that character reminds the Ghoul of the warmth of life and love and poo poo) in a really creepy fashion. Again, it's creepy and unsympathetic, but it's a relatable kind of unsympathetic, and one that lends itself to more nuanced drama than "My character is a murderous cannibal."

Night10194 posted:

I'd have more respect for that kind of thing if the authors just straight up said 'gently caress it, it works this way because I really want it to and I think it would make a cool story.'

Speaking of weird transhumanist furry stuff, I think it's finally time I begin my review of Albedo: Platinum Catalyst by Sanguine. Sanguine is an odd duck of a company. They make furry RPGs, but the furry RPGs they make are mechanically interesting (if complicated) and somehow less furry than something like HVD, if that makes sense, in that they don't really read like someone wrote them with one hand. The focus is much more on the classical sense of using anthropomorphic animals as shorthand for people groups than fetish work. Their debut game, Ironclaw, will always hold a place in my heart for being Redwall+Game of Thrones+The Renaissance with combat mechanics that were actually fun to play and a setting that got across the grit of a world changing over to a new era without being overly grimdark or making the PCs ineffectual shitfarmers, so when a friend said they'd made a sci-fi game as well, we picked up the rules for fun. I should also preface that I have never run a long campaign in this system, though I have played a few adventures and run a couple missions, myself.

Albedo: Platinum Catalyst is based on a comic called Erma Felna: EDF, written by a former Air Force technical illustrator named Steve Gallaci. Wikipedia tells me it was a foundational comic in the nascent furry fandom, which does not sound promising. Honestly, most of the stuff I've read about the comic in looking for background on the game doesn't sound especially interesting, but the basic setting is thus: One day a century or two before present, the random anthropomorphic animals of the setting achieved sentience. They simply awoke to already find they had histories, backgrounds, families, loved ones, jobs, all of it, but none of them could remember much beyond these pre-programmed backstories. They also discovered they had the Net, an omnipresent surveillance system that acts as both the internet and a general monitoring AI that will assist with inquiries and monitor the economy. Now, to their credit, they find the whole setup pretty fishy and pretty quickly come to the conclusion that they are an engineered people, and figuring out exactly who created them and why they were created, with theories ranging from the obvious (massive experiment in the development of cultures) to the insane (RABBITS UBER ALLES BITCHES!), and the Net quietly sabotaging any definitive attempts to discover why they exist. They're initially created with a cosmopolitan, atheistic, socialistic system of government, with a number assigned to a person called their Sociopolitical Intelligence (SPI) via automated personality testing, government performance evaluation and Net monitoring, and this number is used as someone's primary qualification in life. It values conformity and cosmopolitanism, preferring people who make no trouble and avoid questioning the general system, and the inputs from government performance assessment tend to ensure that this 'rational and objective' means of measuring someone's abilities promotes well-connected and relatively unimaginative people.

Then they have their waves of colonization, once they discover FTL. This is where poo poo starts to go wrong, because there's no Faster Than Light Communication, and so small FTL transmitters are used to beam Net data around the colonies, but otherwise it's easy to lose track of people. People who are dissatisfied with the gentle and vaguely sinister form of Net-enhanced surveillance-socialism strike out for the colonies, forming different sorts of government and independent planetary colonies. One such set of colonies is populated primarily by bunnies, and if you've read Watership Down, you know poo poo is about to go wrong, big-time. The Interstellar Lapine Republic starts out as crazy hypercapitalists, but the oligarchs quickly find their legitimacy is based solely on their ability to provide exorbitant amounts of goods and services to their people. They need something else to keep people happy and keep them from questioning the rule of their wealthy plutocratic masters. They discover that something when they start writing tracts about how incredibly awesome bunnies are and it gets people all jazzed up about the superiority of the rabbit race. Yes, the bunnies invent fascism from first principles and proceed to go on a tear of invasions, causing a massive war that forces independent colonies to band together with the inner worlds to form the Extraplanetary Defense Force, the EDF, which is essentially Furry Space NATO. The EDF fights the ILR back to its colonies, but the war is absolutely devastating to occupied colonies and comes down to the deployment of WMDs from orbit, with the EDF forced to choose between accepting an ILR surrender that leaves them in power in their core worlds, or risking causing billions of deaths to affect regime change. They decide to go with the former, and the war ends, about 40 years before the game starts.

Forty years of this has not gone well. The EDF's emergency powers never really went away, and the ILR hasn't really given up, either. They now resort to terror tactics and political warfare, trying to force brutal, limited EDF responses in minor proxy wars to gain the loyalty of 'Ethnic Lapine' populations, while corruption eats away at the EDF from within. Some of the EDF's highest commanders have figured out how to gently caress with the Net, which allows them to alter the SPI system, the economic monitors, and alter historical records (society is mostly paperless with the huge ubiquity of handheld devices and tablets, which considering this was written before the 21st century is pretty prescient) to suit their own agendas. Now, the problem with an AI monitored system of hypersocialism is that it sort of relies on the AI having accurate data, so all of this tinkering and upheaval is risking making their semi-benevolent but mildly sinister AI god have a meltdown and wreck the entire inner system economy. Meanwhile, the EDF's corruption means it bullies outer planets, which is doing the ILR's work for them. Into all this, your PCs are meant to be newly minted squad leaders, assigned to various peacekeeping and counter-terror operations to try to fight these fires, and maybe discover the heavy dystopian elements of the setting for themselves and try to help correct them as best they can. Worlds are leaving the EDF for totally legitimate reasons, but the ILR are psychopaths who you absolutely must stop if you can. Innocent lives and the lives of your troops are in danger constantly, proxy and brushfire conflicts are all over the place, and in the middle of all of it, a created people are still wondering why they were created and what exists in the universe to give a drat about beyond their own existence.

It's honestly not that bad a setup for a semi-hard sci-fi dystopia/mil-sci-fi game. Its justification for the furries makes a hell of a lot more sense than HVD, and why they were created and by whom is left ambiguous (which is much better, considering answering that question is a potential major campaign hook) in the core book, though the one solitary expansion book spells it out (If you guessed they were created by humans to study cultural development in the case of a historical vacuum, you get a prize). Next we'll get into the mechanics of the game, like the insanely complicated character creation, but also the very interesting squad and combat mechanics.

Nessus posted:

Even there, most of the company's wizards are portrayed as significantly weaker than the people with spooky names, aren't they? The Company just greatly benefits from having them - there were like, two, and that was exceptional.

FMguru posted:

Everyone always forgets Tom-Tom

Yeah, the fact they have even two mid-level wizards gives them a great advantage over almost everyone. Alas for them, their adversaries include Nazgul-equivalents, the woman who can create the Nazgul, and her ex-husband from whom she stole some (not all) of his power.

occamsnailfile posted:

That isn't a signifier of the author being a woman though. Honor Harrington is a ginormous Sue but David Weber is a beardy old dude.

Green Intern posted:

Nobody wanted to be a dik-dik about it.

Kai Tave posted:

Bam, title drop. So it's not just the sovereign who gets a magical background check, only those who pass the test of the Blue Rose Scepter are accepted as nobles. We'll get more into that in the coming section on Aldis' government. Also check it out, diversity and acceptance are the founding principles of the land. How could you not see the secret fascism lurking beneath the surface, I mean really?