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pkfan2004 posted:IOU looks pretty neat and is shaping up towards being my default engine if I ever run a China, Il. game. I love IOU, but if you ever get serious about it, I have a few suggestions;
I could go on, but I think I'm just going to recommend you convert it FATE or a similar system instead of houseruling the system into oblivion. I love GURPS to death (it's how I got into RPGs), but it's the wrong system for IOU.
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Aug 17, 2015 22:45
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pkfan2004 posted:Some sample characters are in the book, but if anyone's interested in throwing me a character concept, I can whip up something before moving on to the deeper rules for Psionic Talents and the powers themselves.. Robert "Berty" Swangler, a semi-reformed pyromaniac now faced with some real deep temptation.
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Aug 19, 2015 02:37
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So, I bought Psionics on pkfan's recommendation, and I'm really enjoying skimming it. Though there are parts I'm not a huge fan of the conspiracies, the bestiary, and synchronicity, there are a lot of things I love, chief among them the attribute system. Wits and Will are obviously the most important stats - you need them to use your powers, plus handle skills - but if you skimp on Strength... well, good luck using telekinesis to fire three guns at once if doing it for more then a couple turns knocks you unconscious. I do have some issues with Speed, though. Pkfan, does it do anything other than determine initiative and govern a few skills? e: Never mind, it governs a bunch of combat skills. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Aug 20, 2015 |
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Aug 20, 2015 21:29
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Doresh posted:Does this one age people to death, or is that how the art of headsplosions is called? Nope, that's the one where you just stop a person's heart, instakilling them. It's one of the more boring TK powers. Also voting for Telekinesis, since Somakinesis is insanely good for a melee character and I can't wait to talk about it. Want to do more damage on average with your bare fists than with an AK47? Go for itI
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Aug 22, 2015 16:49
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Hey pkfan, do you mind if I go into the system a little bit to show off something from the TK secondary powers? I'd have to explain some of the basics of combat to do so, and I don't want to step on your toes. e: or should I save it for after you cover combat?
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Aug 22, 2015 21:40
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pkfan2004 posted:Sure, go ahead. So. Somakinesis. Let's say we have Angelina diCaprio, spoiled celebrity teenager turned telekinetic runaway. She has a standard stat spread for a beginning character - 6 Strength, 6 Speed, 8 Wits, 7 Will - as well as a bunch of skills that don't matter except for Brawling (Expert). She's also decided to gimp herself a bit in the long run by choosing only Telekinesis talents, TK 3 and Soma 3 specifically. As pkfan said, you get a flat bonus to your stats equal to your Soma, so she effectively has 9 Strength and Speed - according to the book, all four of her stats are now beyond real world human potential. Meanwhile, due to her strength, her Brawling skill is now at 11, which effects her accuracy; to hit in combat, you add 2d6+(skill bonus). Now, base damage for an unarmed strike in Psionics is 1d6+Strength, so she's already doing an average of 12.5 damage or so with every swing. She has a couple of things she can add to this; first, by using Power Boost, she can boost her Strength again by 3, then she can use Lethal Strikes to gain +1d6, making her total unarmed damage 2d6+12 damage (19 average). For comparison, in this game an AK has a base damage of 3d6+3 (14.5 average). Since the lowest to-hit score she can roll in combat is a 16 while even powerful Espers have Defense values lower than that, she can then consistently deal greater damage every turn than an AK-47 without missing while unarmed. Granted, automatics like an AK-47 can use automatic fire to close the gap, and she has to take 2 Strain and 2 Overflow every turn to support her abilities, but she can still go for around 20 turns like this before she overflows, dealing an average of 380 damage over that time. For comparison, a dirt-average human in this system? Has maybe 30 or 36 health. I might have read the rules wrong here - lord knows I've done it before - but I just want to make the point that Espers are really, really powerful in combat.
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Aug 23, 2015 04:19
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DNA Cowboys posted:Dreamhounds of Paris: Embrace the Cosmic Hubris I'm not sure whether I hate this for its pretentious tone and bizarre approach to history or love it for its creativity and bizarre approach to history. I think I'm going to end up in love, though. Does Dreamhounds have solid character creation? I'd love to play a Jarry that somehow survived decades of drug abuse to stumble head-first into Surrealism. pkfan2004 posted:PSIONICS: THE NEXT STAGE IN HUMAN EVOLUTION Not a big fan of this section. The Institute, Abraxis, and Zodiac are good and make sense, but the rest? What function does Aleph serve in a campaign besides being a nebulous corporate rival for Abraxis or the other way around (Also, why is an East Asian conglomerate named after a Hebrew letter?)? The two conglomerates are too similar - yeah, they have different structures and goals, but that's unlikely to matter for PCs. Red Orchestra's better - Soviet revanchists using psionics to rebuild their fallen empire is a cool idea - but the concept feels a little hokey to me (communists have INFILTRATED THIS COUNTRY and they're LISTENING TO OUR THOUGHTS) and, once again, they're redundant, this time when compared to the Institute. I understand that these organizations are supposed to be rivals, but... it just doesn't work for me. I guess I'd rather have a few well-defined conspiracies that interact in asymmetric ways than several similar entities butting heads. I may be misremembering what I read and the conspiracies are more different than I recall; it's been at least two weeks since I last cracked open that part of the PDF. And that leaves aside the geographic thing. Why are the conspiracies confined to geographic areas? For instance, why don't any of Aleph's or Abraxis's subsidiaries have outposts in other parts of the world? Does Eschaton have influence in fundamentalist communities in Africa and Latin America? And on that note, what's happening in the rest of the world? I don't know, and I'd like at least a hint. And then there's Eschaton. It's the weakest conspiracy in the book not just because it's lame and powerless but because it could have been so much more. The book presents them as desperate, scattered holy warriors that don't really have a chance of defeating espers. They might be a lot more intimidating if presented as a loose alliance of religious extremists hunting espers by siccing large numbers of locals on them. It's one thing to fight a few people who fire shotguns and pray at you. It's entirely another to be ambushed by dozens of militia with AR-15s and technicals. And then you can cast them as scared people who are trying to protect their families from an uncertain future! Bam! They're sympathetic. I'm trying not to rag on the conspiracies too much here, which I obviously failed at because see above, but at the very least every conspiracy is workable right out of the box. Even Eschaton has story hooks built into its structure related to the nature of faith, desperation, and defending the innocent. I just think, you know, they could have been better, which of course is a thought worth its weight in gold. There are a couple of real issues I have with this book, though. The description of the "Gangsta Thug" is, uh... PSIONICS: THE NEXT STAGE IN HUMAN EVOLUTION posted:This person is a violent idiot; a common, garden variety street criminal trapped in a cycle of urban poverty and desperation. This shithead is good for little except for petty crime, macho posturing, and firing a perfectly good gun sideways – sideways! (emphasis mine.) A muscleheaded moron that’s more, not less, dangerous for his lack of intellect. His character isn’t all bad; he’s much braver than he probably should be. And there is a certain romantic attraction to just plain loving poo poo up. Typically, this kind of thug comes in packs. It's a stereotype of poor urban black people is what I'm saying. I actually cringed when I read it. And the second is by far the worst... PSIONICS: THE NEXT STAGE IN HUMAN EVOLUTION posted:the name "Tomorrow's Starlight"  oriongates posted:Unknown Armies: Postmodern Magick Adept Rundown, part 3 Would... would internet celebrities count as Icons? That's a terrifying thought  .My favorite thing about IOU is reading the course names and making my own. Med253: Drug Company Payoffs and How to Secure Them! Hist616: Becoming a Trickster Figure! Bio124: Feed Me, Seymour; Introductory Carnivorous Plant Creation! It's like naming your Paranoia character 33-41-22-HIKE.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:23
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Kurieg posted:The book in question is Monstrous Regiment. Mors Rattus posted:Fellowship!
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Sep 16, 2015 21:50
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theironjef posted:It was until right now. Thank Jesus Christ.
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Oct 31, 2015 16:48
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
 RANT TIME! As someone who's spent years working on creative projects, I understand what it's like to toil over a work of art and finally produce something worth reading. I also know what it's like for those efforts to fail and leave you with nothing for all the effort you put in. When he writes "blood, sweat, and tears", he's only exaggerating on the blood part, and even then not by much; creative work is harder than many give it credit for, and producing finished, saleable products - especially as many as he has as frequently as he has - is nothing short of a miracle. But I'm not paying for miracles. If I wanted to buy miracles, I'd donate to a seed church. What I want to spend my money on - money earned with my own hard work, maybe not as hard as Wick's but still hard - is something worth spending money on. I bought Houses of the Blooded recently to try and port its domain management mechanics for a game I'm running. What a mistake! The domain management rules take a base system so obvious it's boring and make it too complex to actually use without dedicating entire sessions to domain management instead of playing the loving game. I wish I hadn't bought it! Creative work is hard, but being an artist does not excuse you from making something worth buying. If it isn't worth buying, I reserve the right to tell other people that. If you get a bad review, it isn't because they don't get how hard it is to make a game. That's not a reviewer's job. Their job is reviewing! Likewise, most reviewers are biased, and every reviewer on Earth is a blithering idiot, including John Wick. None of that matters. A reviewer's job is to decide whether they like a game and tell readers why. If they're wrong, they're wrong, but their wrongness doesn't change the facts of the job. That job is evaluating games and telling other people about them. Pretending the excuses Wick gives change this is the height of arrogance. If your all your blood, sweat, and tears produce a turd, it is still a turd. I'm not going to eat it because pressing that loaf was an epic endeavor. It's still a turd. Rant over. Hostile V posted:Reign of Steel!  Third Ed GURPS settings are almost always great, and this is one of the best. My favorite AIs are Caracas, Washington, and Moscow, and I can't wait till you get to them; I'm going to eat this poo poo with a spoon. Speaking of which! I was almost inspired to review HotB, but then I realized I'd rather castrate myself. Instead, I thing I might review GURPS: Fantasy II, my favorite setting of all time. Reasons include:
I like to call Houses of the Blooded "HotBreaker" sometimes. Then I laugh because I am so clever
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Dec 23, 2015 19:31
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Bieeardo posted:Ooh, please do this. Adventures in the Mad Lands is like Ehdrigohr's bitter, even more obscure mirror. Your wish is granted! Presenting; GURPS: MADLANDS!  Asparagus is an ancient and storied vegetable, its cultivation dating back to Ancient Egypt in ~5000 BC. Asparagus is distantly related to lilies, onions, and garlic, and once it was considered closely related to those plants. However, today it sits in its own genus – the unintuitively-named, unguessable Asparagaceae. Asparagaceae Officinalis (presumably common asparagus) is native to the Mediterranean region and much of the rest of Europe, where it was apparently sacrificed to the gods in ancient times.  Asparagus does best in cool and wet climates, but if you can get it to grow, it’ll grow well in most circumstances. Cooking it isn’t particularly difficult; the average shmoe has maybe a 95% chance of getting it right, though he might overcook it if he’s unlucky or – gasp! – ruin it on a crit fail. At this point, the supplement introduces a new item to the GURPS vault; an Asparagus Cooker, worth about  . And you should probably get it, because our favorite plant might be useful for more than  Also, you can play as asparagus. I wouldn’t, though. For comparison, the point value of an average human weighs in at 100.  Finally, the supplement presents its own themed world for Infinite Worlds (GURPS’s canned setting, in which players hop from alternate timeline to alternate timeline to stop English Meritocrat Nazis and enforce the Prime Directive). Asparagus-1 is covered in asparagus and nothing else; no complex organism except for asparagus grows there. However, the plant is densest where Earth cities are today. Upon realizing this, the forward scouts promptly sealed up the timeline and never came back. Scary! And that’s that. Next time; GURPS: Mustelids! e: I'm still going to do real Madlands, just had to get this out of my system Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 24, 2015 01:29
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GURPS, as far as I’m aware, has a reputation for being so flexible and universal it becomes impossible to play in. You can represent truly anything with it – I’ve made functional mystical gunslingers, insane psychics, muscle wizards, and tons of regular idiots that all work in the system; however, since it lacks any real hooks, unless you want to run something you’ll never find anywhere else, it’s best to look elsewhere. Published GURPS settings, therefore, sometimes came out looking as weird as possible to snag that demographic. GURPS Fantasy II is an example of that philosophy, as well as how it failed; the common consensus on the intertubes is you can’t run a campaign in such a narrow, fixed world. They’re right. Sort of. While I can’t argue that the setting is real hard to explain to players without giving them homework, I think the setting’s a lot more intuitive than people give it credit for and the important elements can be explained – and campaign ideas generated – with little energy or time spent. I aim to show you how. Format wise, the book is laid out with a large column down the center of each page and a smaller column down the side (usually elaborating on a topic mentioned in the main text). It’s worth noting here that this book was written for GURPS 3rd Edition, while mechanically I’m only familiar with 4th; if we do get to making characters, I’ll use the rules I’m familiar with and kludge the info in this book together with my prior knowledge. All 3rd ed books use this format, including Reign of Steel (thank you for doing it that setting is baller), so if you see any misplaced text in a badly-taken snapshot, that’s probably why. Most pages have a picture on them somewhere, livening up the twin walls of text considerably. The introduction is short, just 1 page long. It talks about how the Madlands suck, gods are crazy, community is important, etc. etc. The most important take away is summed up in this paragraph;  Madlanders are stuck in a lovely situation, but they’ve dealt with it all their lives and want nothing more. The community is the most important thing to these people and they’ll do anything to protect it. And herein lies the problem of roleplaying in this setting; people who enjoy playing murderhobos are unlikely to get into the struggles of a small tribal community right away. I hold that explaining everything in this setting is unnecessary at the beginning, but at least getting your players on board with playing ordinary people is something you need before even beginning to plan the game. 1 – THE LAND The book starts out by describing the terrain in surprisingly modern terms. The Madlands are a small, cold continent underlain by igneous rock with a little bit of soil on top; some parts in the more inhospitable regions have all kinds of quartz. Glaciers have ranged over the land countless times, leaving fjords (described as “the fingers of an arthritic giant) and several strange landscape features including rocks hanging off cliffs (curiously, it doesn’t talk about the shorelines, which are very important to the setting). However, much of the Madlands owe their shape to a force much stranger – the gods. In most settings, the supernatural is beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, with gods mysterious and distant figures that can be beseeched for power, whether or not it’s a good idea. Here, the gods are not only actively wandering the earth but so crazy sensible Madlanders always, always fear and avoid them. They regularly warp the landscape by hopping, digging, or just loving with local physics, and everything strange and unusual in the region can probably be traced back to them – or to one of the magical creatures spawned by the special properties of the continent, all of which are destructive. Everything supernatural in the Madlands is ill-omened at best and probably actively malevolent; good Madlander hate and fear magic, spirits, and gods of any kind, usually for good reason. For instance, while the stars in the rest of this world behave like ours do, in the Madlands they move around and flip you off. That’s not much of an exaggeration;  While normally they just gently caress around, sometimes the stars form a shape – always a bad omen. There’s a lot of bad omens in this setting. It’s worth noting that the stars go back to normal once you go out to sea, so people can sail to and from here without too much trouble. Game Idea 1: You are foreign astronomers trying to figure out what the gently caress is up with the night sky. Can you convince the locals to tell you what they know and avoid the monsters that stalk the land long enough to figure something out?  Naturally, weather is as nuts as everything else here. Winter is punishingly cold and somehow also humid; spring is sudden, widely variable in temperature, and causes floods and heavy rain, washing away valuable soil; summer is actually pretty okay (75 degree average temp, violent thunderstorms, and occasional heatwaves) and reminds me of where I live; and autumn is short, miserable, wet, cold, and ends suddenly with a plunge into the depths of winter. Flora isn’t too notable (we’ll get to fauna later) but tubers are important to the locals (who, by the way, live almost entirely in fishing/farming/hunting villages on the coast; the interior’s only inhabited by horrible outcasts). You can make these plants into everything from spices to staple foods to nasty alcohol. Game Idea 2: Spring floods have washed away most of the village? Rebuild your village and your society before winter or the monsters come! However, there’s more to the world than just this place. Four other cultures surround the Madlands, and Madlanders consider all of them of them crazy. Their denizens sometimes drop in to trade, explore, or get horribly murdered by local wildlife. TOGETH  Togeth is your dirt-standard fantasy setting. Togethians used to be raiding bastards so horrible they were driving themselves extinct, but culture hero/first king Srideen figured this out and tried to stop tribal warfare by conquering everybody. This failed and killed almost everybody. Next he prayed to the local god, also called Togeth, who promptly and unexpectedly turned rocky, inhospitable Togeth into a fertile basin, ordered Srideen to repopulate it, and hosed off. Modern Togeth is fantasy-style bland – knights and peasants, middle class growing, powerful families ruling the government, everybody worshiping Togeth, etc. etc. etc. However, their adventuring knights see the Madlands as a great place to adventure and kill things for glory. Madlanders, having no concept of history (we’ll get to this later), see the Togethians as the vicious raiders they once were and kill them on sight; in return, Togethians believe Madlanders insane savages and return the favor. Don’t be a Togethian lost in the Madlands. Game Idea 3: Be Togethians lost in the Madlands. Your characters have to pretend to be anything other than Togethians and fight, sneak, and con their way back to the motherland. Game Idea 4: There’s rumors going around of Togethian knights attacking hunters and raiding villages. Are you bad enough dudes/ladies to stop them? THE WHITENESS  The north pole, inhabited by  ) and the Sap Cid deal with it as a deity with multiple conflicting avatars (intelligent clumps of snow). Living in small ocean mammal-hunting bands, they have a complex system of taboos, morality, egalitarianism, and mutual obligations that ties them together; however, tensions do exist and sometimes boil over;“GURPS FANTASY II” posted:On the rare occasions when warfare does involve actual harm, it becomes very bloody indeed. They do enter the Madlands sometimes, but only to trade their dried berries, blubber, and ivory for iron tools, booze, and weapons. Madlanders find the Sap Cid pleasant enough for foreigners, and their accent, word choice, and demeanor are considered hilarious and they think the cold has hosed up their minds (the Madlanders call them Viwti E – “Frozen-brains” – which I assume is a lot more cutting in Madlander  ). Their most interesting hook is that they hunt seals, which are of human-level intelligence in this world; seals often try to turn Madlanders and Sap Cid against each other for revenge or just for funsies.Game Idea 5: Your tribe of Sap Cid has been driven out of the Whiteness by hostile rivals. Can you find a new home in the Madlands and survive its many dangers? NORTHERN TRIBELANDS  These guys suck. They’re an entire culture of Mary Sues who ~ seek out their own destinies ~ and ~ live in peace with their guardian spirits and nature itself ~. They barely have a society at all; instead, every Tribelander is born with a mission or quest they have to fulfill before they die. What sort of quest? Good question! If they fail, they’ll just reincarnate with a different spirit and mission. Nobody cares what you do otherwise in Tribelander society unless it’s really, really vile, in which case you’re either exiled or executed. Tribelanders come to the Madlands looking for spell components and to perform their various quests, but they hate it as much as perfect wonderful Mary Sues can hate anything; the supernatural weirdness interferes with their spirit guides and even the slightest hint of associating with spirits gets them murdered by a terrified Madlander mob. Otherwise, all Tribelanders are peaceful and friendly and accepting and spiritual and SAVARGINIA  An entire society of loving WIZARDS specifically designed to be a society of loving WIZARDS. Long, long ago, two wizards got bored of, quote, “smashing planets and turning gods into paperweights” (presumably in 3.5 ) so they decided to make their own setting, with mutant bat chess and hooker cities. The result was Savarginia, a collection of city-states so MAGICAL that occasionally a city is obliterated and replaced with an even weirder one without fanfare due to MAGIC. Savarginians love entertainment, novelty, and any kind of MAGIC, which they positively bleed from their pores (naturally pissing off Madlanders who find out); however, since the cities all so random, every conceivable rule about Savarginia is broken by some of its inhabitants. The authors kindly include a list of the current major city-states of Savarginia to give you an idea what this strange, strange place looks like; Spot the Oscar Wilde reference! Also, Yesye  Savarginians are so completely confident in the superiority of their civilization that they get gibbed pretty often when they visit. Madlanders consider them even crazier than most foreigners, largely because they have so little in common with each other and you can’t predict what they’re going to do; they do trade with them sometimes, but even the slightest hint of something out of the ordinary will get a Savarginian killed. This doesn’t prevent them from coming, however, because nobody gets to tell a Savarginian they have a bad idea  .Game Idea 6: A group of Savarginian pirates captured your fishing crew! Can you escape their clutches and head home? If not, can you survive a world wildly unlike your own? Game Idea 7: Mysterious Savarginian “traders” have set up a base on an unoccupied beach and are launching expeditions into the interior? What are they doing? What does it mean for the nearby village?  The chapter wraps up by discussing how to insert this setting into other settings – relatively boring stuff. Finally, it points out that Madlanders only have a limited conception of the outside world; to them, you’re either a human being living here, or a strange foreigner from somewhere else. THOUGHTS: So far, there isn’t much to process here. The terrain analysis of the land is useful but can be explained to players entirely through narration, while foreigners make interesting plot hooks sometimes but can be excised from a campaign entirely. The same can’t be said for the next section. GAME IDEAS: 7 Next time: Folk tales, crab fishing, and a surprising lack of transphobia for a book published in 1992! Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 22:19
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I look forward to it, at lot of it felt to me like a lot of the cleverer settings of the 1990s. "This is cool, but what do I do with it?" I feel like it would make a better sort of game for Hillfolk these days than GURPS. The trick to Madlands (and GURPS in general, IMO) is to storygame it up. In this setting, if you're going out to find monsters to slay your asking to get slain yourself; instead, the game works best when you're dodging said monsters or dealing with village politics or making up scary stories (I'll get into that over the next couple posts). You shouldn't be doing much actual fighting, both for the danger and the fact that GURPS combat is poo poo, and instead rolls should only be made in important situations where roleplaying isn't enough to decide the outcome. There's two problems with this, though. The first is that tooling around in a village isn't inherently exciting. In my opinion, there are actually a lot of interesting hooks built into the setting, but few of them cater to standard roleplayers. You need a GM capable of making ordinary life interesting and players more into roleplaying than killing things for Madlands to work, and those are in short supply. Second, GURPS isn't a storygaming system. I find the skill check system elegant and character creation easy, but that's because I know character creation like the back of my hand and can tell you what to roll at a glance (I got started in this hobby by teaching myself GURPS, after all); but there are no mechanics to promote roleplaying and those that exist are obtuse and unintuitive (until you sit down and memorize them, at which point they make perfect sense). You're right; it's probably better to run Madlands in a system that supports it instead of GURPS. The only setting GURPS supports is Infinite Worlds, which I may review after I finish this one. It plays to GURPS's strengths, which is something I've never typed before. Come to think of it, I have story seeds for Madlands written down somewhere. I'll add them to the post after dinner (gently caress yes brazilian steakhouses)
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Dec 27, 2015 00:15
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Doresh posted:There are many games were one could talk about ethics in murder hoboing. Games were the concepts of Good and Evil are part of every statblock are not exactly among them. That... actually sounds kind of awful in the same way. Like, your average orc is likely to have a loving family, sure, but he's also murdered innocents and burned down villages. That's what moral complexity actually means; there are good and bad sides to everybody and they don't cancel each other out. I try to run my games that way, though I'm not always good enough to pull it off so  Doresh posted:This is like the weirder cousin of RuneQuest. Are there any rules for playing as snow? Not in the book, tragically. This being GURPS, though... TEMPLATE: SENTIENT SNOW (-85 Points) Characteristics: ST -10 [-100], DX -10 [-200], HT -10 [-100] Secondary Characteristics: HP +5 [10], FP +7 [21], Basic Speed +2 [40], Basic Move +5 [25] Advantages: Clinging [20], Doesn't Breath [20], Doesn't Eat or Drink [10], Doesn't Sleep [20], Flight [40], Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) [100], Mind Reading [30], Social Regard 4 (Sap Cid) [20], Telecommunication (Telesend: Broadcast, Universal) [60], Telekinesis 8 [40], Unaging [15], Unkillable 3 (Achilles Heel: Fire, Very Common) [75] Disadvantages: Bad Sight (Nearsighted) [-25], Cannot Speak [-25], Colorblindness [-10], Hard of Hearing [-10], Numb [-20], Oblivious [-5], Pyromania (CR9) [-10], Quadriplegic [-80], Stubbornness [-5], Weakness (Fire: 1d/minute, Common) [-40], Quirks (Pretends it's a god) [-1]
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Dec 27, 2015 17:21
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WaywardWoodwose posted:You don't have to be a cook to tell if you're eating poo poo.  You said what I tried to say with my earlier rant in one sentence.
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Dec 28, 2015 23:25
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Comrade Koba posted:You already invented Blimpleggers, what are you waiting for? Go write a goddamn sourcebook or something. That's your $400 pledge level reward right there. God knows I'd pay. unseenlibrarian posted:E-Indulgences. Toil as a virtual miner to pay your ancestor's way out of Godnet purgatory! But God's Mercy is Finite, so there are only so many indulgences that can be mined, with each getting harder to dig up....  2 – MADLANDER CULTURE  Hey baby, do my weird wink and uneven nipples turn you on? As far as material needs go, the Madlanders have it pretty easy; though extracting a living from the surrounding land is hard, there’s enough to allow them enough time for art and recreation. However, they have to deal with the prospect of supernatural disaster at any time. Madlander culture is shaped around surviving both the land and its magic. In a Madlander village, men do the hunting and fishing and women do the farming (which consists entirely of food or medicine tubers). Women also make everything except iron tools, weapons, and buildings, but both genders make a “pungent” kind of booze known as zoxibek. Everything made is shared by the community, though people do get to use specific items they particularly like; basically, you can take any item you want as long as the “owner” doesn’t object, and if you can argue to a neutral arbitrating party that you using something would help the community more, you get it anyway. As for things made outside the village, Madlanders avoid relying on foreign goods for anything to keep away from getting dependent on them. However, they happily trade for luxury items or unusual foods. By the way, Madlanders live in and identify with their villages; though they do help each other when they can, there’s no sense of nationality and every village fends for itself. Game Idea 8: A foreign trader (probably Savarginian) is trying to set up a trade route with your village, and several elders have become enamored of their goods. How will you convince them to give up their treasured items for the sake of the community? Or, will you protect the trade route and try to build your village into something greater? Game Idea 9: A villager, the friend of one or more PCs, is growing too attached to his spear and is refusing to give it up. Several villagers think his greed is attracting supernatural attention, and they’ve charged the characters to convince him to part with it. Why is he so set on keeping it? Does it have anything to do with his recently dead wife? And does it have anything to do with how his most fervent opponents are his dead wife’s parents? It’s worth noting here that the book’s depiction of village life is problematic in a few ways. First, there’s the obvious issue of gender; men and women lead very different lives that are somewhat defined by Western gender roles. Though it goes out of its way to point out how the genders do have balanced power – women are equal to men as elders, both sides have important roles in running and supplying the settlement, and as for those who wish to assume another gender role, well… we’ll get to that later.  Don't worry, be gutted and eaten by anti-magic barbarians! The primary division in Madlander society (which is between men  ) is fishers and hunters. Though everybody goes on both hunting and fishing expeditions at the appropriate time of year, most men identify with one group or the other and heartily mock their counterparts when they come with them – only for the favor to be returned later on. Speaking of which, humor is important to both sides (we’ll elaborate on that later); choice nicknames for fishers include “cod slayers”, “trail farters”, and “skunk attractors”, which are countered with stuff like “whale bait”, “sinkers”, and my personal favorite, “boat painters”. The book points out that these jokes actually serve a purpose; they diffuse anxiety on expeditions by reinforcing their “manhood” (“I may be poo poo at this, but at least I can give as good as I get!”), making them more confident. Also, it gets them riled up and competitive, making everyone work harder.Game Idea 10: The PCs are a group of fishermen sent in with a hunting party only to encounter a heightless (basically an invulnerable serial killer with an Achilles heel, see later). As their more knowledgeable companions are picked off, can the PCs figure out the monster’s weakness in time to survive?  Vomit is always charmingly depicted in tabletop games. Speaking of humor (and language in general), the book goes out of its way to talk about Madlander jokes. The Madlands are loving awful, and humor is one of the best ways to deal with loving awful things. Such jokes tend to be super duper dark – the example given involves a guy getting all four limbs and his head bloodily torn off – but they don’t see it that way; instead, all the violence and destruction inherent in these jokes make the ineffable less scary. The same goes for proverbs; Madlanders love proverbs, trotting them out every time it seems even vaguely appropriate. They even use proverbs that no one understands anymore! They just use them whenever something weird happens and they don’t know what to say. Game Idea 11: This is more suitable for downtime in a Madlands campaign than a game.. The characters are sitting around a campfire at night when they decide to start busting out old jokes. Have the players come up with the darkest jokes they can think of, tell weird proverbs, and mildly insult each other for maybe 45 minutes. Also, instead of swearing with words for excrement or particularly blaspheming (a loving terrible idea), Madlanders use words with social meanings – stupid, lazy, drunk, etc. “Useless” and “liar” are both grave insults, and calling someone a Gaget (lit. Togethian) is fighting words. Racism! There isn’t much else to talk about here.  Pottery in the Madlands is made by jamming wet rocks into giant hunks of meat. But there’s plenty to talk about here! We’ve finally hit the timebomb that’s been ticking since I started writing this – gender. According to the book, Madlanders see women and men as fundamentally different but fundamentally equal. It doesn’t avoid western gender roles, though; those are woven into the book deep. The sexes divide labor according to gender, as mentioned above, and work interaction between them is scarce – most intersex relations are between family, relatives, and spouses rather than friendships. Women are more intelligent and complex than those silly, simple men and invent most new jokes and proverbs, which are then refined by the men into “hoary chestnuts”. As such, men find women strange and mysterious and mostly pursue the most mystifying ones. In return, women tend to condescend to men because they think they know them so much better than they know themselves (am I right, ladies ) and find their bravado cute and amusing, like a small child saying they’re a grownup. It then spends a couple paragraphs describing ideal appearances for both sexes, which are basically modern ones . This book goes so far to present women as equal to men that it ends up coming out coming out sexist in its own way, putting women on a pedestal and stereotyping them into mysterious temptresses. If I were to throw out any section of the book, this would be it; just rule that women can become hunters/fishers too, but they have to deal with a male-dominant culture.Sexual mores are covered here, and surprisingly they’re done pretty well. Basically, Madlanders understand the mechanism behind childbirth and such but don’t attach any concept of sin to fuckin’. In addition, you’re allowed to do whatever you want as long as it’s consensual, up to and including adultery (though Madlanders mate for life, they don’t mind extramarital relations as long as they’re discrete). So there’s that. Game Idea 12: Two villagers are cheating on their spouses. In and of itself this isn’t much of a problem, but every time they slip off together something bad happens in the village – someone falls over without provocation and sprains their ankle, an entire wavobek burns its meals, an elder spontaneously develops an illness, etc. Can the players find out who’s behind this recent string of bad luck? Who’s cursing the lovers; a malevolent force outside the village, or a malevolent force inside it? But then comes my favorite part of this chapter, squirreled away in a sidebar on the gender comparison page. Sometimes, transgender people (though they’re not called by that name) show up in the community, and society has a way to handle that. After convincing the village council they’re genuinely dedicated to switching sexes (which is implied to be both pretty easy and reliable for evaluating seriousness), they make a little announcement to the village meeting, put on different-gendered clothing, and that’s it. At that point, they’re treated as part of the other sex in all ways, not just economic but social as well – generally they take wives of their former gender. There are no homosexual marriages in Madlander society, though, so elders generally don’t allow married people to switch genders – unless the partner also wants to switch! This is specifically pointed out in the book. For a book written in 1992, it’s a little surprising to find this here.  A typical Madlander elder/mutated elf. It isn't an actual elf, though; those are way worse. The focus of Madlander life is the community, though they all respect other Madlanders to some degree. Everyone is expected to offer their distant relatives shelter and comfort, of course, but the village comes first. After the village comes the clans, which number around 11-13 per village and 50-75 members; they live in wavobeks (Native American longhouses) and each have an elder that represents it on the village council. Elders are hugely important; they have absolute say over all clan matters and decide issues on the village council (though of course they have to keep the interests of the clan in mind). They also settle disputes, either for their clan if the dispute involves only clan members or as a neutral party in an interclan dispute. The decisions they make are binding, but can be appealed to the village council; however, such an action is considered “unseemly” and rarely gets you anywhere. Afterwards, elders try to gently persuade everyone involved to accept the decision, after which comes a coordinated, organized teasing campaign (see Madlander humor). If that fails and people are being particularly ornery about things, a tribunal can be called by any three adults; those exonerated go free and might be able to call a tribunal on their accusers at elder discretion; otherwise, they’re either given an opportunity to reform or just exiled. Exile is horrible – no madlander will ever treat an exile as anything other than a monster. The worst offenders will be tied to a tree and left for the monsters. Game Idea 13: A villager convicted of burning fishing boats for fun was tied to a tree and left for the monsters. However, small fires have been found burning across the settlement – and one was spotted springing from nothing! Obviously, the criminal has become a shaman (a god-worshipper and spellcaster) and is trying to destroy the village. Can the players find and stop him? Or is there another force using him as a dupe? Age, no matter the gender or circumstances, is the ultimate source of respect and authority in Madlander society. It’s the only qualification for becoming an elder, after all! Respect for the aged runs so deep that old people are fed before children and pregnant women in times of famine (why would you do that ) and an entire village will risk life and limb to protect them. Some old folks question this position and try to convince their neighbors otherwise, and this is taken as proof of their wisdom, of course. Others are lucky idiots who abuse their station and lead their clans to ruin. However, skill and great deeds can also make a person important and respected, especially epic achievements and skill levels that no one else could achieve (the book gives no examples of great deeds). Pure rhetorical skill also gives people influence in the village, and provides an opening for characters with no outstanding traits to get involved in village politics.Game Idea 14: A clan elder has gone crazy; not the supernatural kind, mind, but the kind where she starts accusing villagers of things they couldn’t have done and insists on taking them to the tribunal, over and over and over and over again. One of the PCs is accused of theft and she won’t leave them alone. Can the party convince either her, her clan, or the village council to leave them alone? Or are her repetitive accusations forming a ritual, leading to dire consequences?  Somebody hosed up, 'cause that kid's obviously a mutant. The vast majority of cultures have formal ceremonies to celebrate life stages, holidays, and important events. Madlanders hate that poo poo because it draws the attention of the gods – and doing that is basically suicide. Instead, they have informal events at important points in a person’s life, such as the procedures following birth, where if a child is deformed or looks supernatural in anyway their head is bashed open by the clan elder on the rocks  . Otherwise, a child is named and considered fully human until it uses magic. Then it stops being human.By the way, no Madlander is allowed to use the same name as anyone in the village in living memory (including the living) or they run the risk of possession. Game Idea 15: A young child's naming is interrupted when a villager absent from the meeting realizes the child shares a name with her dead mother. With the help of that woman and the child's parents, can the PCs figure out if the dead woman's spirit is still around to haunt the village? Other Madlander “rituals” are pretty standard; initiation to adulthood (new adults of both sexes are taken to the shore and dunked in the water), marriage (the new couple joins the wife’s clan) and death. Death is the most important transition in a Madlander’s life because they can come back from death if improperly disposed of; their hands and feet are lopped off, their eyes and mouth are sewn shut, and they’re either dumped at sea or cremated. No post-death procedure is done exactly the same way (to avoid creating a fixed ceremony) and their “possessions” are given to others to keep the dead from coming back to claim them. If anything goes wrong, or the dead person is just a dick, they’ll come back and haunt the village.  This review is child friendly! Sidebars! Causation! Madlanders have two models of cause-and-effect. On land, everything happens for a reason because a supernatural force wants it that way. Good things are always caused by a negative spell failing, though there are so many hostile forces out there that identifying the cause of ordinary misfortune is impossible. Out at sea, everything happens at random ‘cause nothing supernatural can reach past the shoreline. History! Madlanders don’t care about it. In fact, they actively avoid remembering their past since that poo poo attracts ghosts like you wouldn’t believe. Instead, they regard time as circular; everything before living memory is purposefully forgotten and attributed to legendary characters, most notably Zo Do Wabda or Vigidi (see later). They don’t care about creation myths or anything because they see speculation on the beginning of the world either pointless or dangerous.  A housefly shaman on the other side of the continent sneezed and broke my pot! Still, Madlanders love storytelling, and their favorite characters are Zo Do Wabda and his wife Vigidi (always referred to in that order in the book); they’re stock characters so broad it’s impossible to attribute anything to them individually. In this way, and since they represent no real people, Madlanders can get around ritual prohibition to tell stories. Generally, one of the pair is wise and the other is foolish, though often they’re both terribly stupid, and they always always suffer in some way for their stupidity. There are other stock characters in Madlander stories (such as children or unmarried adults), but they’re not elaborated on in the book. The authors give a loving long shaggy dog story about the two as an example. Basically, Zo Do Wabda dreams a god will kill him, and his confidence in that death allows him to escape several otherwise inescapable deadly situations. He then goes home to his wife and comes to the conclusion that his lack of fear (not the dream itself) is what saved him… only for the god in question to come around and kill him horribly. They also give guidelines for making up your own stories – Zo Do Wabda/Vigidi tales come in cautionary, heroic, and tragic flavors – and gives summaries of other typical stories – my favorite is “the haunted wavobek”, which is an account of an ordinary day for a clan that grows more and more eerie until the inhabitants kill a group of travelers one by one to adopt their ghosts into the clan. Game Idea 16: A visiting storyteller’s tales seem eerily prescient; every time he tells a story, someone in the village ignores the moral and suffers from it. Who is causing these accidents; the storyteller, a rival, or a force using the storyteller as cover? Game Idea 17: A talented young storyteller – a relative or friend of the PCs – has a mad idea; collect all the stories of the Madlands and spread them to all settlements. The players are dragged along in their mad quest as they brave monster, god, and distance to deliver stories to all who will listen.  This thing used to be human. Can you spot the armpit hair? Finally, there’s a page and a half on Madlander language. The book doesn’t lay out grammar or syntax or anything as unimportant as that; it just tells you what letters are present in Madlander speech (there’s a near-silent glottal stop represented in the text as a space in names), how to convert English words to Madlander-sounding equivalents (it involves find-and-replace), and how Madlander gesture language works (gesturing and body language are super important and carry almost as much meaning as spoken words). And then, finally, we’re done with this chapter. THOUGHTS: This chapter must be well-kept gunpowder ‘cause this poo poo is dry. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, but the information is so densely presented it’s hard to hold it all in your head – not to mention how important so much of it is to the setting and how much doesn’t make sense without the context of later chapters. Had I designed it, I would have at least put the Gods section before this to give the reader an idea of what Madlanders fear, but I haven’t designed a game so I don’t have the right to criticize it . Still, most of what’s in here is suitable to be doled out to players when they get to the appropriate parts; of course, that requires a GM to memorize it all, so that might be hard. At the end of the day, this is the part that people complain about when they say GURPS Fantasy II is too hard to get into and understand, and I don’t really have an answer for that. Except, of course, to either acquire a working knowledge of the setting through experience, just wing it, or both.GAME IDEAS: 17 Next Time: Schlip, schlap, you really can't go wrong, vith traditional fish-schlapping game! FINALLY: I’d like to demonstrate how Madlander names and words work. If you folks wouldn’t mind supplying me with some names you’d like translated into Madlander, I’ll tell you how they’d turn out in Anti-Magical Barbarian.
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Dec 30, 2015 23:53
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You absolute fuckers. Voting's closed, generating now.
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Dec 31, 2015 02:24
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Forwarning; these would probably be multiple words in Madlander, as its words are pretty short, but the book recommends a substitution method that produces long results. Kavak; 1. Be Atkunbixbe Ek 2. Bigbizavebizibakode At 3. Bigdebtazgexuge 4. Botawtaxazdebxe Ewe 5. Bitawt Toxibeknebek 6. Bob Oxinwon 7. Botadbigkatank 8. Botvandezixuge 9. Bazibekaxazdede At 10. Bubeketankabixewt 11. Bukekedzinketotwa 12. Bukek Xazdbabek 13. Butubaxde Adtikt 14. Bixunkexe Ad 15. Bixunkeg 16. Buzudbonede At 17. Buzunbexbutatwete Ak 18. Dizekaxazdekeb 19. Kiwatzobkebone 20. Katink 21. Katintizonwetag 22. Kzidgetazgede At 23. Giziwtetedbatexoznibodga 24. Xabkatowkiwt 25. Xunk 26. Tudkebe Ekbezotux 27. Kunbexzobkagzoin 28. Kunbexwide Izon 29. Kunteke Edbuxunk 30. Ze Ekbatawtubodgo 31. Zotetkiztebe Ek 32. Zikewte Akukabe 33. Wutabobutkexe Ad 34. Wotabweku Atitexuzuwt 35. Wetad 36. Wetatekiwtebzunbex 37. Wetatewtabuzobki 38. Wadaw Xitadkaw 39. Wudokedanduwbete 40. Wiktintbexewtaxa Iz 41. Wetudkobe Ekiknob 42. Wetudkabxunkdan 43. Tuxibkedbizunkawt 44. To Ubixizuwtezod 45. Tuzunkwetadbixewt 46. Wixikwitagbuxe Ek Correspond to 1. Beat PunchBeef 2. Big, Brave Brick of Meat 3. Big McLargeHuge 4. Blast HardCheese 5. Blast ThickNeck 6. Bob Johnson 7. Bold BigFlank 8. Bolt VanderHuge 9. Brick HardMeat 10. Buck PlankChest 11. Buff DrinkLots 12. Buff HardBack 13. Butch DeadLift 14. ChunkHead 15. Chunky 16. Crud BoneMeal 17. Crunch ButtSteak 18. Dirk HardPec 19. Fist RockBone 20. Flink 21. Flint IronStag 22. Fridge LargeMeat 23. Gristle McThornBody 24. Hack BlowFist 25. Hunk 26. Lump BeefBroth 27. Punch RockGroin 28. Punch Side-Iron 29. Punt SpeedChunk 30. Reef BlastBody 31. Roll Fizzlebeef 32. Rip SteakFace 33. Slab BulkHead 34. Slab SquatThrust 35. Slam 36. Slate Fistcrunch 37. Slate SlabRock 38. Smash LampJaw 39. Smoke ManMuscle 40. Splint ChestHair 41. Stump BeefKnob 42. Stump Chunkman 43. Thick McRunFast 44. Touch RustRod 45. Trunk SlamChest 46. Whip SlagCheek Also 1. Moe Howard 2. Larry Fine 3. Curly Howard 4. Max Power 5. Johnny Murder 6. Ice Miller 7. Bartholomew Foxworthington 8. Bob Johnson 9. Adolf Hitler 10. Fluffy Weaselbeef 11. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. to 1. Do Ezowatd 2. Tatatgepine 3. Butategzowated 4. Daxipowet 5. Oznangidutdet 6. Ibedititet 7. Batatezotodewpoxwotutezingaton 8. Boboznawon 9. Adotepzitatet 10. Petupupgewe Awetbe Ep 11. Gabetietgatbi Adatpu Ez What a beautiful language Also Count Chocula posted:If you want the incredibly specifc TORG scenario of 'interdemensional business tries to buy up Japan and tangles with the Yakuza' done right, read the manga Tekkon Kinkreet. Looking back at my writeup, I may have been so familiar with the book I found it repetitive instead of fascinating. I think it says something that I consider this the most boring chapter of the book (outside the character creation section).
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Dec 31, 2015 03:00
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Hostile V posted:How in the gently caress do people end up with the same name as their ancestors, is it just random chance when they pick the letters out of a bag of Scrabble tiles? That is...one hell of a language. In fairness, actual Madlander names are much shorter, more along the lines of John than Johnathan Sedgewick Darrington-Brunel III, Esq. Actual names given in the book include Agexa, Pa Upet, Bapex Bowev, and the longest I could find, Akik Takivodd. It's your fault you gave me long names  .JackMann posted:To be fair, you're writing it out in a fairly informal, easy-to-read manner. From what you were saying, the book is considerably denser.  Also, you're right. Let me give you an example. That update I just put up? The one that weighs in at 6 pages long in 12-point font, single-spaced, not counting pictures? It covers 20 pages in the book. inklesspen posted:[*] Force and Destiny is the latest in Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars line. Learn how to use a lightsaber, if you can figure out their crazy dicepool system. (May feature a bonus appearance from ProfessorCirno to tell us about dice probabilities.) Oh sweet fancy Athe, tell us about Force and Destiny. I had no idea it was out and if I knew I would've blown my hanukkah on it.I have a little more experience (I backed the Complete Guide on Kickstarter), and the stuff you have seems right. The only things I'd add would be to change "Roman" to "Greek" and mention the incredible racism involved in Kralorela (seriously, that section broke me when I read the guide).
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Dec 31, 2015 05:42
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GURPS FANTASY II 3 – DAILY LIFE  House for sale, upside down boat with cozy living spaces, fire pit, and hardrock floor, 1 room 50 bed 0 bath 36x18 sq. ft. The characters are assumed to do a lot of hunting, so details are laid out here. All hunters go out in parties (easier not to get hosed sideways by the environment that way), usually about 2-3 hunters to 2-3 fishers (a perfect party size). The skills necessary to hunt are listed (exactly what you’d expect). Bears and dear are considered the best targets, but they’re not always available; small animals like squirrels and rabbits are also collected, as well as valuable medicinal herbs and occasionally lumber or iron ore. The wilderness is crawling with monsters, but encounters with them are actually rare and most hunters injuries and deaths are caused by mundane animals, especially bears; however, monster encounters are much more deadly and greatly feared. The same goes double for gods. Also, outlaws and exiles live in miserable camps in the interior and raid any hunting parties they come across, while deceptive geography and weather also kill their fair share of Madlanders every year. Game Idea 17: A hunting party has encountered a group of outlaws desperate for weapons and food! Can the players outsmart the hardened criminals and destroy their camp, navigating past traps, ambushes, and dangerous wildlife? Game Idea 18: A giant bear is threatening the village. The players are tasked with hunting it down and killing it, but must also face its enraged mate and near-mature offspring.  Aww, it just wants to cuddle  Fishing is the other main type of expedition, and though it lacks the supernatural bullshit that plagues the land it’s still plenty dangerous. Mostly, fishers go out in much larger crews – 15 to 20 people are common (I’m not sure how this would work with an average-sized party). There’s plenty of fish to be found during fishing season (when’s fishing season? Good question) as well as squid and crab. Crabs deserve special mention; crabbing boats are smaller and have a much easier time than their fishing-focused cousins, and hunters scramble to claim a position on them and avoid the more dangerous open water. And dangerous it is; though the water is actually warm enough to prevent hypothermia, drowning is a concern and storms are frequent and often devastating. Whales (mostly killer whales) are considered excellent prey but can wreck a boat or even a fleet; giant squid sometimes surface and behave exactly like you’d expect; seals, though nonviolent and civilized, will ruin catches and misdirect boats out of spite; and sometimes Savarginian pirates will raid the area for goods, food, and slaves. Game Idea 19: A storm has swept your crabbing boat out to sea, into the shore of a mysterious island. Can your party, the mixed hunters and fishers who survived the wreck, find out where they landed and eke out survival? Game Idea 20: Fishers have spotted a fleet of Savarginian pirates out at sea – and they’re heading for the village! The party must prepare their fleet for war, building warships, collecting weapons, and even calling on neighboring villages for help.  This may look like hard work in the field to feed their families, but these tubers are for booze makin’. Food is a huge deal in the Madlands; pleasure needs to be found wherever it can, and food and drink serve that purpose admirably. Madlander food is strong in taste and smell beyond belief due to heavy use of many different kinds of tubers, all of which grow fast (in village plots tended by the women) but need intense care to protect them from weeds, insects, and the lovely, sandy soil the women grow them in. Once grown, these tubers are carefully stored, then shredded and dried before use. The authors then list the varieties of tuber grown by Madlanders: bozatu (not-potato), kakew (spice plant with many uses), kawi (not-carrot), pi ev (mega-horseradish), katti (sweet and sweetener), nuwidap (not-sweet potato), te ekke (flavorless plant that absorbs tastes from the soil it grows in) and nivi (preservative). There’s also an option for healing substances made from rare tubers and weird poo poo like squid brains and hallucinogenic mushrooms; the book tells you that these substances stretch credibility (“this cocktail of ground tubers and squid oil cured my alcoholism!”) but are probably necessary if you don’t want to make new characters any session. If these are to be used, the book presents a healing salve (not a health potion, just helps you heal faster), an addiction cure and universal antidote, and a short-term memory loss drug. I’m somewhat unsettled by the last one; though the book emphasizes that it’s usually used to treat traumatic experiences, the potential for its use to do awful things is not addressed. Game Idea 21: The healing salves so important to the village have stopped working! The characters are tasked by the village council with finding out what supernatural forces are foiling these vital brews. By the way, the Madlands are extremely deadly and without medicinal brews your characters have a good chance to die in every combat. I’ve said before that combat is something to be avoided in this setting is at all possible, and that’s absolutely true; it’s the reason why the seeds I’ve been writing emphasize non-combat adventures. Still, since it’s so deadly, combat can be extremely exciting; just be prepared to make a new character when yours bites it, which is a hassle unless you have half an hour or more to spend picking advantages.  Is it just me, or does that fish have the face of Danny de Vito? Cooking is important to Madlanders but less important to me. Basically, they have little oven-pots they heat up in the fire and then use to grill, boil, or fry food; said cooking is done in the wavobak and served communally. There really isn’t anything exciting when it comes to Madlander cooking unless you like food porn, in which case…  I now want to taste marinated whale blubber. Speaking of zoxibek! It’s a wildly strong alcoholic beverage described as “thick, dark and foamy… with a throat-constricting sweetness and a sour aftertaste.” I have no idea if it’s supposed to correspond with a real drink; I dunno, tequila? Stout? Somehow I managed to go through 3 years in a fraternity without learning poo poo about alcohol. (In fairness, all I drank there was Jameson’s, Fireball, and lovely, lovely beer. Also, we spent more time on nerd things as we did on booze; I played my first tabletop RPG there and when I left there were 3 active campaigns and 2 homebrew systems under construction. In other words, typical frat life ) Both genders brew zoxibek and brewers gain great prestige; their products are usually too strong to drink without watering down and super-watered-down versions are given to kids. Though booze is beloved, being boozed up is not; drunks are shamed and censured by the community. Of course Madlanders use static blueprints and build their buildings in exactly the same way! Wavobeks are where every Madlander lives; each clan occupies one by itself. Resembling upside-down boats, these longhouses are divided up into little alcoves for each family (Madlanders like it crowed). Those wooden platforms in the diagram are used as storage in summer while people live on the rock floor; in the winter, those switch so people can stay where it’s warm. Cooking is done on wood fires in a trough down the center, while smoke holes let woodsmoke out and can be plugged to keep the heat in. Apparently, sleeping areas are covered in a periodically-changed layer of wood chips and shavings, which I believe people have to sleep in . I hope you like splinters!Boats are built much in the same way as wavobaks, just, y’know, flipped the other way. Speed doesn’t matter to Madlanders as much as stability and resilience, so their boats are built like floating brick shithouses and have both a sail and oar stations in case one is compromised. They also have spikes under the waterline to discourage orcas from ramming and overturning them, but there are too many ways for a particularly ornery whale to avoid them; the authors give here a proverb that is literally “build a better mousetrap”, just with anti-whale spikes. The book points out that a character could invent a new type of spike and make themselves greatly respected in the village; however, the idea isn’t alone enough to make an adventure with. Speaking of which… Game Idea 22: A particularly large and vicious killer whale has been hunting down the village’s boats and sinking them. Can the players come up with a way to fight back, using any means at their disposal to kill the whale? By the way, a sidebar talks about carpenter stereotypes; Madlanders consider carpenters arrogant pricks who think they know everything and have stories to back this up. It’s a nice bit of characterization to stick in a campaign.  Madlanders aren’t much for technology outside of railroad construction. Madlanders don’t really have much technological expertise. They do use iron to make weapons and a few tools, but they don’t use it in construction, crafting, or armor creation. Mostly, Madlanders build poo poo out of wood or bone, depending on the object, with a few objects (such as cooking pots) made out of clay. The book tells us that the reason iron tools aren’t more common and advanced is because, while women make everything else, ironworking (and boatbuilding, incidentally) are men’s work. It outright informs us that women are more creative and would totally innovate with metal if they were allowed to smith, once again reinforcing gender roles while trying to break them .However, they do love their arts and crafts, which are mostly used for decoration. Both genders wear jewelry, men preferring necklaces and bracelets and women preferring hair ornaments and piercings; all jewelry is made with animal byproducts – or human or monster byproducts, if they’re particularly fearsome. Madlanders take trophies from monsters and intelligent beings, but they alter them before using them as decoration so they don’t cause possession. For some reason, the book gives us an entire 3-paragraph sidebar on hairstyles; men shave their heads before fishing season and sometimes wear a ponytail, women wear braids or multiple ponytails with decorative things woven in, and both genders dye their hair. Moving on. I’d go into detail on Madlander clothing, but you’ve already seen it. There really isn’t much to talk about here, just that Madlander men also wear hats in summer (something the pictures don’t depict), most clothing is made of deerskin, and people wear heavy fur coats in winter! How interesting  ! This image is too boring to give a funny caption. Finally we get to Madlander pastimes; we’re nearly done with the chapter! The music section opens with telling us instruments are made by women and played by men, Thanks, game!  Madlanders use wood flutes, drums, and a 3-string double bass; some songs are purely instrumental and improvisational, others include singing and follow a more set form – and this time women are included as singers! (Only men can play instruments. ) After telling us that songs tend to focus on mundane emotion instead of great events like stories and are often used to cope with death, a sidebar gives us some examples; a pair of lovers are separated when one is kidnapped by Savarginians and they die longing for each other ( ), an outlaw is so miserable he provokes some hunters into killing him ( ), a tribunal is called against a couple accused of shamanism in which it’s revealed the elder that called the tribunal is guilty instead ( ), and, jarringly, a comic song where two guys compete over a girl’s heart and get so caught up in the contest they lose the girl to someone who’s actually accomplishing things ( )Game Idea 23: The details of a villager’s songs describe another villager too closely for comfort – a sure way to invite possession. Why are they doing this? Are they a shaman? Are they just stuck in their ways? Will the target villager do anything about it?  The disadvantage of loincloths. Games!  and just have somebody with a good memory keep tract of them all. As games serve the purpose of diffusing tension through fair competition, cheating in a game is viewed as a possible indication of possession or shamanism which can lead to execution or exile . Beetle fighting is popular; villagers take not-stag beetles, train them and paint them in clan colors, and have them fight until one gets flipped over. Foot races (pictured) and not-Mahjongg are also common, though not-Mahjongg mystifies me; the book tells us straight up that they use traditional patterns as the scoring method, but doesn’t repeating any pattern in anything invite possession? The book also mentions not-hackeysack in some detail, and not-chess, not-dice, vole racing, and wrestling without detail. But there is one game that outshines all the others, a game I saved for last.  These two like getting each other sticky. Normally, the games described in the book have their name given in Madlander, often with a translation. This game is just called Trouble Fish, with no translation given. Before the game, each villager is given a basket with three of those useless fish mentioned earlier coated in glue. The idea is to run around the village slapping each other with fish, as a slapee is visibly fished and out of the game; no physical contact is allowed between players outside of fish-slapping but otherwise anything goes. Stealth and cleverness are rewarded with victory except in two situations; the glue can be dissolved in seawater, so any wet player is automatically disqualified, while leaving village limits also disqualifies you. You’d think that means someone could cheat by dumping water on a rival, but the authors already indirectly covered that; cheating is bad and a sign of supernatural fuckery, children! Finally the book points out everyone of every age and gender plays Trouble Fish (as long as they want to). And we’re done! THOUGHTS: A lot of this stuff is really interesting and would make a fun addition to a game, but there’s just too much material to work in to keep a game moving. Of course, you have the option to ignore some parts and just through in what you want and keep the rest separate; however, so much in this chapter is intertwined that many parts can’t function without other parts, which can’t function without other parts etc. etc. Despite this, this chapter is really valuable for fleshing out Madlander society, providing context for the players, and giving people hooks to latch onto and understand the culture they’ve been thrown into. I give it a B+. Game Ideas: 23 Should I stop doing these? I think I've made my point. The next chapter is about making characters, and since nobody cares about GURPS’s mechanics except for me I’ll skip it. However, I’ll use it to make characters for you all! If you have any ideas, give me an English name or indicative phrase, character concept, and level of ability (one of village hero, local leader, ordinary shmuck, or poor unfortunate soul) and I’ll whip something up for you. Then, we can get to the gods that make the Madlands so, well, mad. Next Time: JESUS CHRIST
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Jan 5, 2016 20:12
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FATAL & FRIENDS 4TH EDITION CORE RULEBOOK
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Jan 5, 2016 21:13
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