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Evil Mastermind posted:As bad as everything in Changeling and Autumn People is, pookah are worse. They're basically kender without the useful "good at thief skills" part. _That_ kith comes in another book. You only think I'm joking. Oh god I wish I were joking.
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# ¿ Mar 16, 2025 21:25 |
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pkfan2004 posted:From my heart and from my hand, why don't people understand my intentions? Huh. In the first ed, this section also had a playable anathema archetype in the same format as the characters in the front of the book. I guess they cut that out. Presumably because it's nearly impossible to successfully make one. And man, at least Deadlands scientists have the excuse that they were being driven mad by literal demons constantly whispering new ideas in their ears.
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Ratoslov posted:
Depending on the tribe they ran off to, this sadly didn't work out all that well for the blacks especially, as many had their own slave-taking traditions and just happily put the new arrivals back in chains. Which is why the Cherokee, for example, fought on the side of the Confederacy in the civil war. This bit of news came as something of a shock to twelve-year-old part-Cherokee me as it's not something mom's side of the family is exactly proud of, especially since it was a thing even into the nineteen eighties whether Freedman Cherokee (The descendants of Cherokee slaves) should be counted as 'real' members of the tribe.
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Wait, wait, wait. Y'all are telling me there's an actual -game- system for Living Steel? Maybe I should have read more than the sidebar quotes in those books. Or maybe I was spared a terrible fate.
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ProfessorProf posted:Once upon a time, a guy named Junichi Inoue sat down, took a long, hard look at all of the world's anime, and decided that it just wasn't anime enough for him. This was the result. It's not far off- as I understand it, the basic idea was that most tabletop Fantasy RPGs coming out in Japan at the time generally relied on the same school of Tolkienesque Western Fantasy as D&D with maybe some cosmetic differences here and there. So he sat down and made the most Japanese fantasy RPG he could, with an extra side order of all the anime.
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The way it starts out the section with all these setting details and then literally blows them up always confused me. I wonder if that was supposed to basically be a first ed/second ed transition. So all the stuff about the pre-explosion times was backstory for folks not familiar with the first edition that we never got. Or something.
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Yeah, character creation being as flippy as it is why I keep procrastinating on the Ayakashi writeup for the characters thread. (Since it involves special power bits from 3 sections and doesn't use an existing archetype.) Cyborg Grandpa was pretty easy though.
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, Endor was originally supposed to be the homeworld of the Wookies, which would certainly facilitate stormtrooper disarmament. Apocryphally, when writers in the late eighties/early nineties working on Star Wars novels asked for a setting bible, they'd get shipped a big box of WEG Star Wars books. So basically the entire EU is their fault. Except maybe the Mofference room.
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LatwPIAT posted:I saw some posts earlier in this thread talking about the horrors of Phoenix Command and Living Steel. Would there be interests in doing a commentary on Phoenix Command and its derivatives? I'm actually quite fond of the system in spite of its major flaws, so I would perhaps not mock it as relentlessly as other people might, but I imagine myself as having a fairly deep understanding of how it actually works and what absolutely hilarious interactions there are in the rules. I could write mockingly about that, at least. Share some of the better margin quotes from Living Steel too, they were basically the only good part of the book.
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Every time I see the words gun prawn I mentally picture a pistol shrimp.
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I always figured that the Butlerian Jihad referred to the robots themselves- it was a holy war to purge robotic servants- a Jihad against -Butlers-. This may have been influenced by concept art from sketches from Lynch's Dune showing the robots wearing black suit jackets, though.
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So, wait, RIFTS is the game that doesn't go the lazy route and make Hades basically the Devil in a toga? RIFTS? poo poo. Of course it makes Hera terrible, but mostly I'm just surprised Hades isn't an irredeemable monster.
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Wapole Languray posted:
Mike claims Tom's not a self-insert, but is based on a real person (Who wasn't always pleased with the depiction.) I am inclined to believe him, mostly because I am pretty sure that if it -were- a Mike Pondsmith self-insert, he wouldn't be a blond white dude, given that Mike Pondsmith looks like this: ![]() And at that point Mike had already had more than one incident of white people telling him that he couldn't be Mike Pondsmith, Mike Pondsmith was white. (And in one case showing up to a con he wasn't attending and passing themselves off as him.)
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Whups, double-posted, so instead I'll also point out with three Thor illustrations, I can only imagine there was some jockeying to see who got to be the "real" Thor artist. The coolest is Zeleznik, but I imagine because gods can't be cyborgs, it didn't fly for Siembieda. Poor Nuada Airgetlám, he -can't exist-.
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Kai Tave posted:I'm glad I could have a part in getting Ettin back on the Cthulhutech wagon. The sad thing is, the Tager-upgrade thing could have been a neat idea- it's essentially an Achievement based advancement system. Except it's the bad sort of achievement, where you have to do thousands of lovely repetitive tasks and -then- pay in-game resources to get your prize which may or may not actually be worthwhile. It's the tabletop equivalent of the Assassin's Creed II feather cloak. unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 21:21 on May 7, 2014 |
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:GURPS Falkenstein had an Ottoman Empire sourcebook too. Not so much 'too' as "The same book"- The Ottoman Empire book was Dual-statted with GURPS and the regular rules. There was apparently a "Tom Olam goes to visit China" sourcebook planned, but never released.
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Davin Valkri posted:Where in KOTOR did you get to use poison to kill slaves? I can't remember this happening. Closest would be the Korriban training room area. Unless there's some other KOTOR that isn't Bioware (probably not Obsidian's) that you're talking about? They mean the MMO, and it's an Empire quest, so the light and dark side options are...relative. Basically: Sith lord gives you a quest, tells you to talk to his underling. His underling is like "Okay, the dosage he's prescribing would drag this out for weeks and cause vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. I mean, that his thing, he's a sith, and they're all cackling murder wizards. No offense. But we're under orders to get this done quickly and cleanly, so here, up the dosage, kill them without the suffering and let's get this over with, goddamn." (The Underling's real motive is that doing things his sith boss's way is killing his career, so, uh...yeah.)
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ZorajitZorajit posted:I remember that quest! Writing a whole society of Sith has to be one of the dumbest things in the Star Wars EU. I finally settled on explaining it to myself that the entire rest of the population was trying desperately to keep things together and clean up after whatever Sith Master wanders through and decides to murder half the popoulation to re-upholster his speeder. This is pretty much canon if you play an Imperial agent, who keeps having giant wrenches thrown into carefully laid secret agent plans by cackling space murder wizards and having to clean up after them. ETA: I think at one point one of your dialogue choices when dealing with a sith is literally just to sigh and not say anything. unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jul 16, 2014 |
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Mr. Maltose posted:The best part of Dark Force powers is that IN CANON one of the Jedi Elders campaigned to have Force Lightning recognized as a not-evil use of the force. He called it Force Justice or something similarly EU. New Campaign idea: He's a cop, working undercover in a bad part of Coruscant! She's a Jedi fresh from the temple, cutting a swath through the underworld and messing up his investigation. But if they ever manage to see eye to eye, they'll be an unstoppable team. Together they'll be...FORCE JUSTICE.
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Be fair, sometimes it's also "A hint the GM is providing that he's got an underwater adventure planned'"
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I can forgive the Ghostbusters RPG for a multitude of sins for basically being the game that invented Plot/Brownie/Drama/Hero etc etc points as a -thing-.
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theironjef posted:Not too late to run Prime Directive. If you can get your group to play that, then they haven't read it AND you're an actual wizard. I have a dumb soft spot for Prime Directive's setting if only because their rationalization for why Original Series Klingons and movie klingons look different makes more sense than the explanation we eventually got. (Basically: Klingons are an Empire. They are all still called Klingons, they're just different species, under one banner. with the human-looking Klingons being one client race and the the klingons from the movies being another.) Also there were Klingon gorilla-bears.
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I saw "Nexus" and 'things no one has ever heard of' and was all "Oh, hey, a Nexus: the infinite city review!" Then I reread what was after the colon and saw the cover art and was sadly disappointed. And also kinda frightened.
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I remember some early concept stuff for Dark Heresy before the release that implied it was going to be a -lot- more Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 2E with more headtubes. Like there were apparently designs for a space ratcatcher with 1d10 space rats on a space stick. There were folks both thrilled and disappointed that this turned out to not be the case.
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Bieeardo posted:"And where do you live, Simon?" Man, Session 9 doesn't deserve to be lumped with that poo poo.
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The main thing with Rogue Trader is that it's setting itself up as sort of the opposite of a lot of previous sci-fi RPGs. in that a lot of previous games figured that PCs would be in the Han Solo/Firefly/Traveller mode, just poor dudes on a lovely ship barely scraping by. Rogue Trader, you've got a massive ship, thousands of people working under you, and instead of trying to get away with smuggling space bear asses to from the space bear planet to a planet where they just loving love bear asses, you're negotiating the contracts to strip mine an entire asteroid belt or landing on a lost colony to explain how no, their shining throne king is another aspect of the emperor of mankind. So I think it gets extra-gonzo in actual play just as sort of a reaction to time served as space bear rear end-haulers. unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Nov 23, 2014 |
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I think the very first "Play as monsters" game was, well, "Monsters, Monsters" which came out in 1976, so it's basically something that's been around since the dawn of the hobby, yeah.
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This is why I like Mutants and Masterminds complications the best, since it doesn't directly award XP- when the complication triggers, you get Hero points, instead. So you get better rolls or can power stunt without tiring yourself an extra time, but you don't get more XP than your buddy who didn't have one come up.
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One thing to keep in mind with Japanese RPGs in general, not just Maid, is that they generally assume you're playing in a public space. Like at school, or a a rented location in a store (Karaoke booths are pretty common since there's a table and chairs and a drink service) . So that kind of encourages to keep things low key, or at least, not much past the level of "Same sort of dirty jokes people start telling with a couple of drinks in them."
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Weirdly, the Bloodshadows tie-in novels weren't all that bad, despite coming from the same company, but possibly it's easier for game fiction writers to write to the level of 'potboiler detective yarn with magic in'
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'd say it's more like it was designed by a conspiracy nut; some guy with a wall full of index cards, articles cut out of the newspapers, and labeled strings connecting everything together because everything's connected, man. Well, the guy running West End at the time certainly believed everything was connected. For example, he believed the profits from the Star Wars license were connected to bailing out his parents' failing shoe company, which is why eventually West End went down super-hard.
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I know Shane Hensley's done some blue-sky talking about wanting to do TORG in Savage Worlds before, since he used to work on the line (And on Bloodshadows for Masterbook.)
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From what I remember, the reason for Mobius to stop the earth was because he has an artificial sun and plans to corner the market on light on the dark side of the planet. Which is just a dumb enough pulp villain scheme that I forgave it.
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JackMann posted:You might be interested in Pinnacle's next Kickstarter. I actually loved Stone's only "appearance" in Deadlands: Noir. His guns show up at an auction! They go up for sale and are bought! The buyer is mysteriously killed and the guns are missing! The PCs are hired by a third party to investigate and... The guns were fakes, the auctioneer panicked and killed the buyer to avoid his reputation being ruined because he found out -after- the sale and Stone was never really involved at all despite the person who hired you being convinced he was. And nothing actually supernatural happens in the adventure at all.
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:This. This why I love Torg. The rules are poo poo on toast, but the grand concept and the majority of the invading realms are so loving cool. If I were to ever try to run the game again (And absolutely with a different system) I'd probably just straight up replace the Living Land with the Land Below, because "We're being invaded by the Hollow Earth!' is pretty great. There would totally still be lizard people/Eidenos though because Sleestaks. Possibly blind albino cave Eidenos.
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The other alternative for nineties fighting games: "Constant squatting low kicks"
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He's also back on board to work on Mage20, IIRC. Did he ever actually release Powerchords? Because last I heard it was still down as "Only RPG kickstarter delayed longer than Far West"
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Count Chocula posted: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. You're probably thinking of Starchildren: Velvet generation: http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=363
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Being fair, if they're writing him up as an NPC for WEG Star Wars they're just being true to the books because even Luke Skywalker at the start of the trilogy had numbers higher than any starting PC.
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# ¿ Mar 16, 2025 21:25 |
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Tarnowski is Pundit (And also Nisarg, back in the day) but gets really mad if you say his true name, because he gets to claim someone's first-born child if they don't guess his name in time after he teaches them how to spin straw into Amber diceless clones, or something.
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