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Incapacitating Wounds are the only wounds you get Complications on, so yeah you can't just lose half of your fingers when you get a book slammed on them. Flesh and Serious Wounds kinda just depend on RP description. And those are not actual examples, they are dumb joke examples I made. Although using Alchemy to make drugs is DR 11 for all drugs and it says that buying stuff at sticker price isn't a challenge at all because you're not haggling. I try to do my homework when I'm gonna be dumb as hell. Down With People posted:Candy Land Magic: The long-awaited Candy Land Magic lets you summon cutesy poo poo like puppies, chocolate and starshine. But watch out! All of these things have a sinister edge to them. Those puppies will distract your opponent. They'll eat too much of the chocolate and get a tummy-ache. Do you mean to tell me that your squamous unknowable deathbeast can defeat enemies by combining them both and summoning mushroom cookies to make your enemies trip out? Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Jan 24, 2014 |
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Jan 24, 2014 06:56
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Seriously, it just lets you make magic mushrooms.
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That is a lot of dumb colors. CHAPTER THREE PART TWO So we're gonna finish this chapter with some more RULES RULES RULES and then I've got a little example of character creation courtesy of a gracious friend. So let's get traumatic.  All of those issues with the Complications (massive blood loss, concussions, etc) are real conditions your character can deal with. Concussions lead to temporary status effects where you're basically rendered flatfooted and you have to make a Will roll at the start of your turn to see if you recover. You keep rolling until you succeed and basically being concussed is a Very Bad Thing in the wrong situation. Infections lead to making daily Vitality checks and failing leads to -1 Vitality. When you get treated, succeeding in a check restores 1 Vitality or lowers it by 1 if you fail. The checks end when you get back to base Vitality and seeing a doctor daily helps lower the DR. Getting knocked down forces you to spend an action getting back up. Getting hit hard enough on the head requires a Vitality roll to not pass out. A success resists the trauma, a failure knocks you out and then you keep rolling to get your poo poo together and wake up from the blow. Massive blood loss requires repeated Vitality rolls until someone stabilizes you, and then you should be bandaged and treated. From there you require 1 Vitality a week. A neat little thing they included is rolling 1d10 whenever a character is shot. On a 1 or 10, the bullet goes through cleanly and on any other roll it's lodged in the wound. What's not so neat is it has to be removed or you risk infection and you can't regain Vitality from the infection until the object is gone. If you want to be all realistic and technical, you don't have to have a bullet removed because the when a bullet goes in it's hot so it cauterizes the wound behind it but I really think they just want an excuse to make your character suffer. I'd definitely alter this rule for my own uses. SEVERED LIMBS: So it turns out that if you lose your arm or leg you're not doomed to deal with having a stump for the rest of your life. If you can't recover your original limb, or if it's been madly mangled and mauled and reconstruction is gonna be hard, a doctor can sedate you and sew a new limb on from a donor (or a corpse). This can also be done if the wound has already healed and the character has had a stump for a while. The book claims that medical technology has come a long way for them and it doesn't mention needing to take anti-rejection drugs so y'know your body isn't going to try to rot off your new leg due to Handwavium. No information on whether or not you can pop new eyes in like it's American Horror Story but personally I'd allow that poo poo. DESTROYING THE UNDEAD: Yeah yeah aim for the head and brain. But it's kinda cool how it goes out of the way to explain the rules for undead. Animates and vampires can take a beating and suffer no issues from Flesh and Serious Wounds and there's no limit for how many Incapacitating Wounds it can sustain. Incapacitating Wounds to the arms make them drop things and be unable to use their arms and hands, Wounds to the legs cause them not run or dodge or jump and reduce Coordination by 2 (down to 1). You can destroy the arms and legs of a Vampire or Animate and they'll still have Coordination 1. Somehow. Fatal Wounds to limbs destroy them, Fatal Wounds to the torso reduce Vitality by 1 (at 0 they die for good), shots to the heart kill Vampires and anything dies if a Fatal Wound is inflicted to the head. OTHER FORMS OF DAMAGE ELECTROCUTION hurts the undead and regular people, avoiding armor. Flesh Wounds cause minor internal muscular damage at the point of contact and muscles spasm, forcing you to drop what you're holding. Serious Wounds make you drop things, fall to the ground and you end up concussed by the shock. Incapacitation ups the pain by making you lose control of all bodily function BUT you don't get dealt a Complication for it. Fatal Wounds cook you alive. There's no info for recovering from this damage, so I'd say...assume based on previous injuries. EXPLOSIVES hurt anyone six feet within the blast and damage drops by 1 per three feet. You get a Flesh Wound minimum and shrapnel becomes a problem, Serious Wounds knock you down. You need Demolition to level a building without just putting bombs willy-nilly and enclosed spaces are a death sentence. Hand grenades and molotovs require two actions: pulling the pin or lighting the fuse and firing. Critical failures mean they go off in your hands or fall at your feet and anyone can run the hell away in response. Jumping to the floor and covering your head removes 3 damage from the blast's attack and jumping on the grenade doubles the damage. You can cook a grenade with a successful Will roll so when it's thrown anyone in the blast can't try to defend themselves. A failure means you hold onto the grenade and still have to throw it. A critical failure means goodbye working arm.  BEING SET ON FIRE requires a Will roll to not panic and run around screaming. You keep making Will rolls until you succeed or burn to death. Being on fire adds 3 damage to damage rolls and Flesh Wounds mean the fire goes out. You can stop, drop and roll or shed armor or jump in water (the Thames is not recommended) to put yourself out which turns the +3 into a -2. The rules for being on fire are rather...broken and they don't make a hell of a lot of sense. You take initial damage from the attack, the extra burning deals extra damage and it's not clear if anything higher than a Flesh Wound means that the fire stops. Maybe it means that it keeps doing Serious/Incapacitating damage until it dies down to Flesh. SMOG requires an actual gas mask or breathing mask for you to go outside with 100% safety. On a normal day you end up filthy quickly and it gives you -1 to Prowess and Skill rolls. If you're unprotected, you can handle the smog with no ill consequences for hours equal to your Vitality and at that final hour it'll be reduced by 1. Every hour after that, Vitality is reduced by 1 down to 0 where the victim passes out. If kept in the smog for another half hour, you die and reanimate. If you're at 0 and taken to a safe place you wake up in 20 minutes. After that you regain Vitality at the rate of 1 per day as long as you keep yourself protected from the smog. Real masks provide 100% protection for a set period of time, wrapping your head in rags and cloth doubles your safe hours dictated by Vitality. There are rules for Lost Days too: even protected exposure reduces Prowess by 2 and Skill rolls by 2. Unprotected exposure results in Vitality loss every five minutes until death or you're brought to safety. With these rules in place, you really would assume that a lot more people would choke to death. SAMPLE CHARACTER CREATION So James is running a game of Unhallowed Metropolis and Caleb is one of his players. Caleb asks to play a Criminal named Keith Reeves, a crook who dabbles in terrorism and anarchism from time to time. Warning that the other characters will probably want to kill him if they know their teammate is a terrorist, James accepts the character and sets about making the character with his player. STEP ONE: Pick a Calling. Caleb has already done this and provided a backstory for his character. Keith Reeves was born to middle class parents and was given a touch of education, but their untimely deaths and the machinations of his family resulted in him ending up poor and forced to toil in a factory to survive. The owner of the factory, Wolfgang Benedict Gibson, decided that it would be cheaper to have his workers killed rather than pay them. So a few days before payday, Gibson phoned in a false Animate outbreak in the worker's rookery where they stayed and Deathwatch shut down the district and firebombed the rookery. Barely able to survive, Reeves escaped the burning wreckage and took refuge in Gibson's empty house, truly realizing the disparity between the working man and their industrialist master. Years of planning later, Reeves burned Gibson alive in his sleep and put his anger and education to work as a one-man terrorist cell. STEP TWO: Caleb takes the 25 points and divides them up into Vitality 3, Coordination 2, Wits 3, Intellect 3, Will 3, Charm 2, Prowess 5. Reeves is a reasonably fit, strong-willed, smart and canny man, making him a big threat to his targets. He saves the spare point for later. STEP THREE: Caleb picks Reeves' skills from the list and adds others in he thinks are appropriate for a terrorist criminal who had a moderate education. Reeves has Streetwise 2, Acting 2, Melee Weapon 2, Thieves Cant 2, Alchemy 3, Demolitions 3, Thrown Weapon 2, Lock Picking 2, Shadowing 2, Forensic Science 1, Law 1, History 1. For Melee Weapons he selects Riposte and Snap Reaction, for Thrown Weapon he picks Improvisation and Trick Shot. Reeves can attack after being attacked or hold an attack to later inflict on someone who is about to attack and suffers no penalties for improvising and can hit people behind cover. He's also very good at what he does with explosives. For his Flash Thief bonuses he selects Alibi and Ghost to help cover his rear end. STEP FOUR: Caleb picks ANHEDONIA for Reeves. His treatment at the hand of Gibson still haunts him and he is basically kept ambulatory by his desire to seek revenge and inflict punishment on the corrupt and industrialists. Somewhere a part of Reeves is dead and rotting already and he knows what awaits him if he gets caught, so let death come when it comes. STEP FIVE/SIX: Caleb has seven points to spend on Reeves and picks Private Lab so Reeves can make his own bombs and Nondescript so Reeves can blend in and get around easier. He also buys Business to have his own shop for some extra money coming in and to be a Legitimate Business as a cover, staying above the shop and using his safe house from Ghost as his lab. For Impediments he takes Superstitious and Secret: Is a terrorist so he can pocket the extra points to use for later. STEP SEVEN: I'll go more in depth with equipment next time but Caleb spends his money on a respirator, some filters, a combat knife with attached brass knuckles in the hilt, some throwing knives, sinks some money into making his own flasks of alchemical fire and a few half-gallon containers of lab-grade ethanol as propellant, buys some clothes and saves the rest. And that should do it for Keith Reeves. Let's take a look at his sheet. KEITH REEVES CRIMINAL Attributes: Vitality 3, Coordination 2, Wits 3, Intellect 3, Will 3, Charm 2, Prowess 5. Skills: Streetwise 2 (Alibi, Ghost), Acting 2, Melee Weapon 2 (Riposte, Snap Reaction), Thieves Cant 2, Alchemy 3, Demolitions 3, Thrown Weapon 2 (Improvisation, Trick Shot), Lock Picking 2, Shadowing 2, Forensic Science 1, Law 1, History 1. Qualities: Business (The Lost Mate Pub), Criminal Associations, Reputation: Street, Nondescript, Private Laboratory, Safehouse. Impediments: Secret: Is A Terrorist, Superstitious. Wealth: 2 Money: 1 pound Corruption: Physical-None, Desire-Anhedonia 1, Drive-None. Equipment: Combat knife w/brass knuckles, throwing knife x4, respirator, filter x4, Alchemical Fire x3, 3 gallons of ethanol, assorted clothes. And that's all she wrote for mechanics and character creation. Next time we'll briefly discuss some of the weapons and armor available and then we'll get on to the bestiary of the dead, the half-dead and the artificially-alive. NEXT TIME: EVERYONE'S FAVORITE, THE CHAPTER ABOUT SHOPPING AND 85% MINOR THINGS YOU WILL NEVER NEED Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jan 25, 2014 |
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Jan 25, 2014 09:38
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99.995% of the game is saying that it has to be in London and honestly if it was outside of London it would require another book or at the very least a lot of GM planning. But there actually is that 0.005% in the game which I'll get to when I reach the GM chapter. That being said, the nature of the core rulebook basically provides no real info for doing that and doing so would require a lot of work on the part of the GM. For example: aetheric generators only exist in America and Britain so a lot of the galvanic weapons that don't have internal batteries wouldn't be able to function as well in Prussia, and because France is eschewing most technology for something they would probably not be available to a French character. Supply and demand, baby. CHAPTER FOUR: PART ONE So just a preface before we begin: UM uses British currency. Specifically, it uses pence, shilling and pounds. 1 pound equals 240 pence or 20 shillings, 1 shilling equals 12 pence. It's a little bit of a pain in the rear end because I'm so used to copper/silver/gold or cents/dollars or just straight-up credits but this is UM. If you can't find what you're looking for through regular stores and means, there's always the Black Market. It takes a Streetwise roll and a few ingame days of searching to find things depending on how illegal they are, or you can have a Criminal ally who can shake the tree of the criminal underground for some leads. The game says that supply and demand are important and depending on rarity and availability you should price stuff but blah blah blah I knew that already. And frankly unless you're discouraging your characters from flooding the market with their own products, that's rarely an issue. So, without further ado, the ingame market. Throughout this update I'm just gonna scatter some extra charts and segments that don't really need to be elaborated on, stuff that's your standard D&D style stuff-to-buy. FASHION  Black clothing is in because of course it is. First-hand clothing is generally fitted and expensive, it's not hard to pick up second-hand clothes that doesn't have too much blood on it. Rubber clothing or cloaks are also relatively in and common as are hats and things what cover heads. Gas masks never go out of style and come in eye-covering or mouth-covering style with filters that can be plain or perfumed or with a bit of ether inside because gently caress being sober. Depending on how much you spend on a respirator, they protect more and more and look fancier and fancier from rubber and glass to gold. Tattoos are also relatively popular and fashion for ladies involves looking doll-like or pale and delicate like a warm-blooded vampire waifu.  So let's talk about underpants. Specifically, corsets. Apparently for years doctors have been telling people "you're mutilating yourself wearing those drat things!" but everyone ignores them because thin waists and big bosoms are worth the pain. A lot of women have been using them for years, becoming literally reliant to not bend over without them, and some have actually had ribs removed by surgeons. And some guys wear them too. But then there's the combat corset, which is actually a somewhat effective form of armor. Sorta. See, the combat corset either has leather or rubber on top of spiraled steel and shifting plates that let the wearer be able to move and be flexible on top of having some chest protection. Mourner corsets are a guild secret and their design is kept a trade secret. The majority of combat corsets go from under the breasts to the top of the hips and provide a relatively solid form of protection for the torso. They're also not really nearly as tight as the fashion corsets; they're tied to fit and squeeze a little so you can have the look and flexibility. They're not perfect, of course, but they exist to help protect from disembowelment or lower attacks from Animates, Vampires and Thropes. See, Thropes tend to attack with punches and swings of their hands and Vampires might claw at a stomach or an Animate might grab someone's torso and if those fingers break the skin well you might get infected. Or maybe a thug is going to punch you in the kidneys or shiv you in the guts and you don't want them to know you've got armor. Or maybe someone is going to shoot you in the stomach to disable you for a spell. The point is that yeah combat corsets are actually kind of handy. If you want full-body protection, you want to invest in Deathwatch armor or getting a good set of gear an Undertaker would appreciate. Combat corsets are for people who want to conceal their armor and get a little protection for a really reasonable price compared to armor. Because armor is kinda drat expensive.  ARMOR The average Undertaker will wear reinforced leather armor which has some metal plates beneath it for protection. The leather protects against the bites of animates, the rubber helps keep it clean and adds some protection, the plates protect against the piercing teeth of the undead and some munitions. The problem? That poo poo is expensive. An Undertaker gets 5 shillings for an Animate's head, 10 pounds for a Vampire's ashes (and that can take weeks to properly determine if it's proof of a dead bloodsucker) and 12 for a bunch of Thrope bits. Most of the time you're going to be collecting heads or living zombies and a full set of reinforced leather armor costs 25 pounds. That's a down payment of 50 Animates, not counting operating expenses, and even from starting a new Undertaker that's half your money gone right there. So yeah, armor is expensive and also not entirely handy, sorta. You can only have 4 armor on one part of your body, armor encumbers you and can reduce Coordination and full sets of armor are pretty expensive. If you ever suffer an Incapacitating or Fatal wound to a certain area, the armor there is reduced by 1 until repaired. Armor comes in chain mail, Deathwatch, lacquered, leather, reinforced leather, plate, rubber and rubber reinforced. Chain mail and plate can be specially insulated to protect against galvanic weapons and leather or rubber can be worn under other armor as a thin supplemental armor if you buy it for that. Deathwatch armor is excellent, providing 3 armor to the whole body and you can put some plate on top of certain places. If you're a Deathwatch soldier with the right perks, you can just dick around with 4 armor all over your body and have no Coordination downsides. Rubber armor squeaks and provides -1 to stealth rolls and also you're wearing a full body suit so you tend to get...squeaky and wet and gross.  You can stack armor and that's generally a good idea. Specifically, you can wear some kinds of armor under pieces of armor that cover specific parts. You can wear leather and rubber under anything, reinforced leather and rubber, plate and chain can only be worn on top of something. This armor comes in helms, gauntlets, bracers, leggings and boots. You can also buy armored coats and of course corsets. A poorer citizen would buy a set of leather armor and corset and then wear reinforced leather on top of that in places, an Undertaker would wear reinforced leather with an armored coat, helmet and gauntlets, a Deathwatch soldier would get some plate installed on top of their gear. This can range from expensive to cheap, from plate to rubber, but underlying layers cost less to get. So how does armor actually look in play? Example: Jon is a Deathwatch soldier with plate-enhanced armor. He has 4 armor all over his body and he gets stabbed in the chest with a bayonet when another soldier fucks up in the heat of the moment. Bayonets have +2 damage and his buddy has 3 Vitality so that's 5 damage off the bat, and the GM rolls a 7 and a 3. That's 15 damage reduced by 4 to 11 so now Jon has a Flesh Wound from an accidental stabbing. Now, yes, you automatically suffer at least a Flesh Wound, but all armor really does is help reduce the likelihood of a Serious or Incapacitating Wound considering how Flesh Wounds are 11 and down, 12 to 16 are Serious, 17-20 is Incapacitating and 21+ is Fatal. In summation: armor is handy but don't go nuts and think it's absolutely mandatory, it really just helps tilt the scales a little between each possible wound you can get. 4 armor downgrades possible damage by one category automatically but it's really expensive to get that much protection all over. Weapons, though, are mandatory. I'll explain what some of these are and go into background fluff as necessary; I'm pretty sure you know what half of these are at the very least. MELEE WEAPONS  Combat knife w/skull crusher: Like a WWI trench knife, a knife with brass knucks in the handle. Good for brawling and stabbing. Combat Syringe: Used to put drugs in people in a melee fight. The effects depend on what you put in the syringe, they suck against armor. Exculpus: a drat kukri with a fancy new name.  Headsman's Axe: a six-pound head-chopper with a foot-wide head, favored against Reanimates by Undertakers. Holy Water Sprinkler: fancy talk for "bit of wood with sharp things in it". Polearm: five feet long, voulge/bardiche style. RANGED WEAPONS  Bows: with high Vitality, on a roll of 7 or more when using a bow you might accidentally snap the drat thing in half. WHOOPS. Derringer/Semiautomatic: Derringers come in two one-shot 22 cal. pocket guns and are pretty useless. Semiauto Derringers hold four shots and are still pretty useless. Elephant Guns: come in different bores and you need a brace or you might tear a muscle/hurt yourself shooting it for a -1 to using that hand. Flamethrowers: really heavy, really illegal. Grenades: also really illegal. They use white phosphorus or fragmentation.  Kramer 2013: discontinued five-shot rifle model, can use a sight. Still a favorite and pretty cheap. Kramer 2086: ten-shot .303 rifle, pretty accurate, a Deathwatch soldier's best friend. Can take a scope. Magwitch 10 Bore: An Undertaker's buddy, the Magwitch is a pump-action five-shot gun that uses slug or shot. You can also put a bayonet on and it's overall good for loving up the poo poo of the living and dead. Magwitch Reaper: A bunch of people decided to sell the same gun to Undertakers BUT WITH A REAPER BLADE ON IT THAT POPS OUT WHEN YOU HIT A BUTTON. It's...hard to use and a lot of Undertakers don't like it but some do because it looks cool. You have to empty the gun before you swing it because the way it's designed to be held lends to a lot of accidental misfires. Magwitch Terminus: The mutual friend of Undertakers and Deathwatch, the Terminus holds 9 12mm bullets and has a big trick up its sleeve: a secondary trigger that trips a compressed-gas cylinder that propels a metal-tipped stake from a secondary barrel at the target. It's good for using against Vampires or Animates but the gun is really heavy and needs two hands to wield and fire. Custom Revolvers: expensive and take a while to make but they're for you to use like it's a natural extension. As a result, you get +1 to attacks.  Balefire: a flamethrower easily available if you're licensed, but the cops hate giving out licenses because it's really easy to burn down a building with this. It doesn't need a back-mounted tank; the fuel comes from tanks on the gun. It's hindered by low ammo capacity and the fact that a flaming Animate still needs some time to die. Requieter: a pneumo-powered stake gun that holds ten stakes and can fire semi-auto. Handy for fighting vampires but the pneumo tank is only good for 20 shots. Syringe Gun: developed as an anti-Thrope weapon, it fires needles loaded with alchemical solutions pretty rapidly. Sounds like a poo poo weapon for anything else, yeah? Well the needles are made of steel, it holds ten and fires them semi-auto so it can tear up organs and break bones if you need to. Vickers Machine Gun: needs a bunch of people to operate, highly illegal, highly expensive, only for military use. It's the everyone's favorite trench-mower, alive and well. Executioner: Deathwatch's best friend, a 12mm pistol that's nice and accurate and clip-fed. Firebrand: single-shot 40mm grenade launcher, can shoot flares, grenades and nets. Ridiculously illegal because it's favored by Anarchists seeing as how even the flares can be used to burn down buildings.  So there's actually more to come in the field of Galvanic equipment and Alchemy tools and I intentionally skipped all of the general Fashion and Tools and Equipment sections because well they're pretty much your standard pants and ten-foot-long pole segments. Galvanics and Alchemy is weird it gets kinda cool (and really expensive) so hopefully that'll be easier to swallow than the standard fare. NEXT TIME: GALVANICS AND ALCHEMY e: wow Aletheia got nuts in a fun, awesome, abuse-your-powers for greater enlightenment way. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 26, 2014 00:24
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hectorgrey posted:Chapter 7 - Xoth I gotta admit, I like Low Fantasy/Sword and Sorcery Fantasy gods a lot more than I like High Fantasy gods. They're inscrutable, they might not be real and they're alien in nature. Makes it easy to run their followers as enemies or tentative allies. That setting looks pretty boss as a whole, I think I'm gonna check it out. Also it's been over a page and I still don't understand why the hell you wouldn't just fill that section of a dungeon with magma floes and instead decided to put a bunch of angry imps in boiling red paint. It's like they want to murder you constantly but then the production values of the whole thing slip up because they couldn't afford real lava.
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Jan 26, 2014 04:11
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WLD sounds like one of those things you talk about with your friends or a GM comes up with and they're not a fan of letting your characters live. I heard a friend talking about this a wild back and it sounded like a homebrew. Can't believe it's real and it's...not good.
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Jan 26, 2014 08:13
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I'm pretty drat interested in any of those. I have Hollowpoint already, though, so put me down for TechNoir.
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Jan 27, 2014 05:35
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Gimp: You're welcome dude. Now let's get galvanic. CHAPTER FOUR: PART TWO   So Galvanic Weapons are A: pretty expensive and B: varying in legality. A lot of them don't have internal batteries and just use the ambient aetheric energy provided by the coal-powered Tesla Towers, so as long as you're anywhere within London's walls you can just use galvanic tech. It's actually pretty neat, you can just whip a desk lamp out of its box and turn it on and boom, light. The weapons also deal extra damage against people clad in metal armor, like chain mail and plate. Galvanic technology and weaponry has some big limitations, though. First of all, they carry charges that need time to replenish. Second of all, they're sorta fragile, and a hard drop or impact can give them hindrances to hit without being fixed. Third, you generally need to wear aetherically-grounded gloves when operating these things or else you run the risk of electrocuting yourself when firing the weapon. Those extra galvanic capacitors are basically like batteries for if you ever take them out of the city or if you want to use them without waiting for a recharge.  Dr. Merrifield's Pandemonius Timidifier: Dr. Merrifield was an English scientist who was kinda bummed out by the fact that the army and Deathwatch were perfectly happy to kill rioters despite the whole decline of population issue. So Dr. Merrifield worked on inventing a gun that incapacitates its targets without hurting them or killing them. And it worked! Kinda. It was mass-produced after the first round of tests and then they started the second round...and it turns out some of the first test subjects were either catatonic, brain-dead or insane. See, it works by firing an invisible alchemical jolt of energy to the brain. Anyone shot with the beam has to make a will roll to simply pass the gently caress out. If you succeed, you go to sleep for a while. If not, you have painful seizures for a few minutes. On a critical failure, it results in instant catatonia or brain death. Any victims who don't die from getting shot have to make another will roll, and failure results in gaining a new or amplifying an existing mental disorder. And a critical failure results in permanent brain damage. So yeah, Dr. Merrifield was horrified and begged them to pull the weapon so he could make it safer. And the industrialists said "meh, no, too much work". And so Dr. Merrifield killed himself. The Timidifier doesn't work on the dead and it uses an alchemical solution as ammo. Every bottle of solution is good for five shots. So yeah, I think this weapon really sums up NeoVictorian England and their smug attitudes as a whole. Electro-Pulse grenade: a taser grenade that has a six-foot electrocution radius that shocks targets into submission. It recharges in a hour to be thrown again. It was made more for fighting people than robots so I don't know how well it works on Galvanics. Stun Cane/Prod/Gloves: A taser-cane, a stun baton and a pair of heavy gloves that have a battery pack on the user. Stun canes or prods can be used at light or full strength; light uses one charge, strong uses three, and the batteries of a cane and prod hold six charges and nine respectively.  Van Haller Death Ray: Remember the gun Simon Phoenix uses in the second half of Demolition Man, the blaster rifle or whatever? It's a little bit like that. The Van Haller Death Ray is a ridiculously illegal two-handed shitkicker that fires a large ball of energy at targets. It holds four shots and can be recharged at a shot per half hour, or you can use a built-in crank to recharge a shot in thirty seconds. The energy ball leaves a thirty-foot diameter crater when it collides with something and anything within fifteen feet of the blast is knocked prone and set on fire on top of feeling the blast. Anything hit by the energy ball tends to be vaporized. The main reason why it's illegal is because you can easy bring down a building without wasting all of the shots, and if they were to get into the hands of anarchists London would be screwed. I don't even know how in the hell a PC would end up with one of these things besides making their own, and without a government license your character would be sent to prison for life.  Van Haller Lightning Gun: The Lightning Gun is Deathwatch's favorite mad science buddy. As accurate a rifle, pulling the trigger forces an ionic corridor to open up between you and the target. In the time of a blink, the target is hit with a bolt of hand-made lightning. It tends to explode targets, cook them instantly, set them on fire or knock them on their now-flaming rear end. Like the Death Ray, it has a minor area of effect that Deathwatch gleefully uses to take out crowds of animates. Holds six shots, a shot recharges in ten minutes or can be cranked in thirty seconds.   SCIENCE AND ALCHEMY Alright so look at those friggin' prices. A Doctor starts with 40 pounds with which to spend. 40. And being a Doctor is a lot like being a Mad Scientist in Deadlands so making trippy poo poo is gonna be as important as performing back-alley surgery on your teammates. Unless your GM is gonna set some game time aside to run a few sessions where everyone takes missions for the explicit intention of getting money, you want to do two things. First, take the Qualities that let you have access to a private lab and private anatomy theater and the Doctor bonus that gives you government approval to experiment. Two, put some of your money aside for the ingame cost of upkeep of those facilities and stocking of reagents and supplies. Yeah, you actually have to spend ingame money to get the supplies you need and pay rent/upkeep of facilities and machines. If you have a reasonable GM (and I would do this), he would probably count some of the equipment necessary to artificially make life (like artificial wombs) as being included in the package and just make you eat the operating costs. For example: you're using a provided government facility with other doctors. If you don't, I would start stockpiling as much cash as you can. We'll look more in depth in the Alchemy chapter, but here's some of the stuff you might get to play with as a doctor.  Alchemical Lab: Everything you need to make potions, drugs and more. Has to be restocked from time to time. The travel version is, well, a travel version but also pretty delicate. Anatomical Preservation System: Jars and containers and tanks to keep limbs and organs and other important squishy bits viable for experimentation and transplant up to six months. Necessary for keeping the parts you're gonna use for galvanic reanimation or if you have amputation-prone buddies. Artificial Womb: These tanks let you grow artificial or living fetuses to term at whatever speed you want, letting you monitor and control gestation along the way using an artificial umbilical cord with an input on the outside. Anathema-grade tanks can be used to birth anathemas or normal human children as a surrogate, homunculus-grades are used to make homunculi. Biogalvanic Reanimation Lab: This sucker helps you create biomechanical stuff, like prosthetic limbs, Galvanic automata and this and that. It comes with an anatomical preservation system installed, but having your own is good for storing spare parts. It can hold up to the contents of one whole person at a time, depending on what you're working on. Interface Jar: Sweet fungi of Yuggoth, it's a Mi-Go jar! The Interface Jar lets you plop a human brain in that sucker and keep it on life support for transplant. The more complex the jar, the more it keeps the brain active and the more active the brain, the longer it takes to decay, deteriorate or go insane. The best jars can simulate all five senses and let the brain talk in a synthesized voice. Oraculum: Oraculums are prosthetic eyes. Ideally, they would just be eyes but that would be make sense. Oraculums let the user gaze into the spirit world and sense the presence of the dead. They can also be used to see auras and when first installed they have a tendency to cause sleeplessness and mild terror. There are detriments to living with the eye at first but after a while the wielder will get used to it, though they tend to wear their prosthetics behind eye-patches unless they need to see the spirit world. They're kind of distracting and creepy otherwise and most wielders don't like them unless they're into seeing ghosts. Rattler: Rattlers are like talk-boxes for people with esophageal cancer. They're small metal boxes that are slapped onto the throat of people who have black lung, throat cancer or a variety of smog-related diseases. They also sound really creepy with a dull, shaky mechanical monotone and most people with Rattlers prefer to never use them because they scare people. Using a Rattler gives you a -1 to all talking things besides Intimidation. Ticker: How much fun would a clockwork artificial heart be? Answer: not very. Tickers are very rare and weaker than real hearts and need to be wound every six hours through a dial on your chest. A lot of people with Tickers have watches they monitor their hearts with. Most people with Tickers tend to live for a year and half due to the fact that artificial hearts are not as strong as real ones, and they have to take anti-rejection drugs to keep going. Someone with a Ticker has to make a monthly Vitality check and failure means that eventually you'll die. The one upside? Not having a working heart messes with the prey sense of Animates so it's harder for Animates to find and eat you.  For kicks, here's some Undertaker gear to finish the chapter up. Animate Restraints: Restraints for Animates come in a rig of leather and iron that cover the hands, bind the wrists and ankles, hood the head and put a bit in their mouth. Then you can lug that dead rear end in a top hat to the local UOD bounty shop to get paid. The big problem with the restraints, though, is needing to grapple the Animate and wrestle it into submission before putting the bit in and going from there. A failure means it can bite you and that doesn't often end well. Side note: the game graciously informs me that aristocrats like buying the gear so they can play Sexy Zombie. I'll let you ruminate on that thought. Dust Kit: Dust kits are small kits of brushes and little bins used to collect vampire ash. They're pretty much necessary if you're going to ever hunt vampires because the streets are filthy and windy. Piercing Irons: Piercing irons are a pair of cast iron tongs that you can put on an Animate's (or person, or vampire) and squeeze together to destroy the brain with puncturing spikes. Handy for putting down immobilized zombies/anyone you want to kill gruesomely. Vampire Hunter's Kit: A regular kit comes with stakes, a mallet, a mirror, a cross, garlic, a bag of salt, some wolfsbane, knives, needles, rope, a saw, a crowbar, an electric torch, vials and two doses of Stitch and Warlock (which are alchemical solutions). The deluxe kit comes with a heavy revolver, six silver bullets and a mold to make more. Both kits have lots of storage space too and some secret panels. Vampire hunting kits are handy assets for the PCs to carry around. While most of the time you need a sharp bit of wood and a loaded gun to kill a vampire, the kits are stocked with folkloric odds and ends to give you a helping hand if the vampire is not the common London type or prone to various manias and phobias. One of these kits would probably be a big boon in India. And that's all of Chapter 4 done with. What have we learned? Apparently you do need anti-rejection drugs for certain things, Neo-Victorian doctors have managed to do limb transplants with no problems and can put a brain in a jar but they can't replace an eye with another eye, everything medical is really drat expensive and despite galvanic weaponry having tremendous potential it's pretty inefficient, fragile and expensive. poo poo only comes in small explosion or big explosion varieties if it's ranged and the melee weapons don't really have much of a charge arsenal either. They are handy and they do pack a punch but a knife or swordcane doesn't need a charge and metal armor can be reinforced to resist an electrical charge. There's still more fun to come, though. Next up is Chapter 5 which talks about the rules for Animates, Vampires, Ghouls and Dhampirs and then after that is the Mad Science chapter about Thropes, Galvanics, Anathemas, Homunculi, Mercurials and having your own magical Neo-Victorian science adventures. What are most of those things, you ask? Good question! I only really talked about them in brief because they're only mentioned in brief. Let's just say I hope you're looking forward to carnivorous second-class citizens that slightly smell of racism analogues and vampires being emotionally and physically abusive assholes. NEXT TIME: CHAPTER FIVE with HALF LIFERS, UNDEAD AND LOTS OF ANATOMY PICTURES
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Jan 28, 2014 01:43
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Yeah, you would expect them to go all Judge Dredd to a certain extent, right? Every district can lock down in case of an emergency using high walls, bridges and large iron doors, the entire city is surrounded by 50 feet of thick concrete walls, the Royal Navy keeps an eye on the city with loaded cannons and Deathwatch patrols the wall barriers. But nobody ever decides "hey, let's build permanent structures" seeing how rampant property damage is a big issue. I mean yeah you could argue that the eventual lack of demand for new infrastructure would lead to a big economic downturn especially among construction companies and the working class but that's already happened. The labor riots and food riots are happening for a reason and you could make hand over fist through constant infrastructure repair. But no, it's grimsteam darkpunk with heavy 19th century literature overtones so we can't invent environmental purification technology for the same reason you can't build a skyscraper for the same reason you can't make actual prosthetic replacements for the same reason not even the half-lifers can withstand the end of the world. Because they said so.
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Jan 28, 2014 03:23
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What's the password for the magic ring? Is it "will you marry me"?
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Jan 28, 2014 17:43
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I like all that weird "spooky" art in The Everlasting. It looks like stuff I'd see in an early 2000s spooky flash game like ExMortis or whatever. While I'm here, have another type of vampire. CHAPTER FIVE The so-called "Anatomy of Horror" chapter has a LOOOOOOOT of fluff and in-character writings from the point of view of scientists doing presentation on half-lifers and the undead and for the sake of brevity I'm gonna just briefly address them. They're literally presentations or snippets from in-universe books and dissertations and as a result there's a lot of in-character stuff said that is immediately repeated. If you want to, I would try to share the actual write-ups with anyone, but I kinda doubt it. So let's get down to brass tacks. ANIMATES  The fluff is about a professor showing his anatomy class an Animate kept by the college that used to be another professor. He bequeathed his body to the university so they could study the gradual decay of the undead in a safe, controlled environment. But let's talk about the meat of the matter. Animates have stronger bone structure to a certain degree and their repeated biting turns their entire jaws into ragged, toothless maws of sharp jawbone. Animates swarm people and bite them and it's generally the blood loss or trauma that kills the victims. But there's also the chance a bite will kill your rear end with an infection that's a combination of gangrene and influenza. There's no cure for a Plague bite; drugs, amputations and cauterizing does nothing. You can either try to ride it out and see if you live or die or just have someone shoot you in the brain. In play, a Serious Wound or higher inflicted by an Animate automatically passes on the Plague. You're good for a hour before your body starts panicking in response. But you can make a Vitality roll (at DR 20) at the initial bite) to just let the infection not take hold. If you fail well then buckle up buttercup. You're in for seven straight hours of fever, chills, vomiting, tenderness and pain radiating from the festering, infected bite. But during the seventh hour there's a sort of brief intermission from the pain and you can make another DR 20 Vitality roll. Failure means you will die and reanimate, success means the fever breaks for good and you just have an infection and wound to take care of before you can recover fully. And should you fail the second round, the Plague commands the future Animate to run for it to ensure that you can reanimate in peace. In a nutshell, you have two attempts to not die and if you fail the second it would be a mercy for the other PCs to kill you. Also, Animates are fuckin' magical sons of bitches. See, Animates come in three forms: raveners, shamblers and husks. Raveners are recently turned Animates that run fast, grab everything in sight and do what they can to maul and eat. Animates actually have to eat too; though they can't digest it, they somehow are able to absorb the Vitality and meat of their victims to keep themselves going. So long as they're raveners they don't decay and they can keep running as fast as they want, putting no wear and tear on the body. Raveners that go a year without eating become shamblers and that's when things get gross. Shamblers putrify, shamblers rot, skin sloughs off in chunks and their intestines liquify and make gross messes everywhere. They swell up with corpse gas, hair and teeth fall out and the shambler is forced to shuffle instead of run. On top of that, their eyes rot out and their senses fail en masse, forcing them to rely on their inherent prey sense ability to hunt for food. From there, the husk stage takes years to achieve depending on the atmosphere. Insects avoid the hell out of Animates so it's really just the environment and bacteria going to town on the Animate until they become Husks. Husks are starving Animates who have lost a significant amount of their body weight through decay. Their bones are brittle and light, their tendons and skin become papery and thin, their senses will fail and they'll end up looking like dessicated mummies. They navigate very slowly using their prey sense and eventually they will be rendered immobile due to the structural collapse of their weakened limbs. A husk will finally sit there on the ground unmoving, occasionally using a burst of energy to try to bite any living beings that come close to them.  However, like I said they're magical. Kinda. The moment a shambler gets a mouthful of human flesh, their decay halts immediately and the Animate actually recovers damage sustained by decay, turning them right back into raveners. They cannot, however, recover any lost portions of their anatomy. Husks can eat their way back to shamblers but can never be raveners again. From a mechanical sense, a lot of information is being repeated here. Animates can only be destroyed with sufficient cranial trauma or decapitation and depending on where you die you may or may not reanimate faster. Their presence also causes a Will roll against fear unless you're one of the classes that doesn't feel fear in the presence of Animates. On top of that, Zombie Lords are statted out. One in ten thousand animates are reborn as zombie lords and they have a 10% chance of their bite creating a new lord. On top of that, they're sapient and can control all Animates in a five mile radius with their mind. They tend to hide amongst their kin as they control them and need to keep feeding to resist decay like the rest and they focus on grappling and wrestling their prey into submission for feeding instead of mindless grabbing and biting. Animates are, in short, plenty virulent, rather resistant to natural decay and most of the time they'll never have to worry about long-life rules because the game is set in London and Deathwatch is trigger happy. VAMPIRES  Vampires are rear end in a top hat sadists. I'm not being colorful, assholery and sadism run high in vampires. The fluff is really just everything I'm gonna go over, so let's get into it. Vampirism can be spread either through putting vampire blood in another person or through drinking vampire blood. On top of that, vamprisim can be contracted as a STD if you're penetrated by a vampire or put your dick in one. Luckily, a still-living person with latent vampirism can't pass it on to someone uninfected (otherwise London would have collapsed years ago) and it takes multiple sexual encounters with a vampire to get infected. Most people who are fed on a vampire against their will won't ever catch vampirism, because the vampires tend to strangle or stab them to death when they've had their fill to cover their tracks and not arouse worry.  Vampires look pretty much human except for the a tightening of the skin that causes their bone structure to become more pronounced, giving them a predatory, angular appearance. Their bones become stronger and tougher and the jaw muscles get buff fast, giving them a high tensile bite to let them break the skin of victims. The skin cools to room temperature and the larynx and lungs still work to let the vampire talk, albeit in much more reserved tones. Vampires only need to drink blood to survive and it's absorbed directly into their skin. If they try to drink animal blood, they slowly gain dementia and crippling insanity until they can get some human blood. They need to drink once every three days to maintain this mostly human appearance. With a willing partner it can be a gentle bite or it can be done forcefully on other victims. Doing it by force kinda involves a lot of heavy biting and flesh-rending. They don't decay like Animates; they just become more and more grotesque looking, their skin and organs drying and shriveling. Eventually the vampire will become borderline comatose, curling up in a hiding place and waiting for anything living to come by to grab and drain. Consuming blood rejuvenates the vampire, helping them regenerate some damage (but not lost limbs) and regain vitality lost to hunger. When sufficiently deprived, a vampire will curl up, go dormant indefinitely and can only be roused by having blood poured into their mouths. Oh and also vampires can't get people pregnant or get pregnant. I know, I know, you were so concerned, the question was burning in the back of your mind.  Vampires come in two flavors: feral and...not feral. Feral vampires are the most common, animalistic throat-biters who squat in abandoned buildings or the Underground. Feral vampires have some big defining characteristics. They get long, thick claws, tend to become filthy and wild-eyed and they eat chunks of human flesh. Because they can't actually digest things, they tend to smell terrible due to rotting flesh sitting in their full stomachs. They tend to be more openly sadistic as well, killing and drinking its fill from two victims a night before taking a third home to torture and nibble on. If a feral vampire creates a dhampir, it's because it got bored torturing some prey and let the victim escape. Feral vampires don't really live particularly long; they're sloppy, careless animals who bite off more than they can chew and easily attract the attention of heavily armed Undertakers or vigilante justice mobs.  Smart vampires are a different breed. See, all vampires are heavily territorial and they will gladly fight each other over turf disputes or if one becomes too powerful. Smart vampires will let you know that you are in their territory and therefor their property. They fall in love and tend to kill their lovers after falling into fits of melancholic violence, convinced their lovers want to leave them and kill them. They hang out with the rich and powerful and mark aristocratic families as "theirs". They're as social as they are vicious and because aristocrats love them it's not hard for them to find a steady source of blood and money to live comfortably. And all the while they hurt and torture people. They nurse blood from hookers and cut them with their claws and knives, using them as sex objects to mark and disfigure as they see fit. They become the center of attention at "Cirques du Sang" parties where aristocrats fawn over them, experience a gentle feeding from their party guest and watch the vampire hypnotize a cleaned-up abducted youth from the slums and feed from them violently and fatally. They even tend to get their pain and pleasure centers mixed up and delight in being tortured and hurting people around them. In short, they're sadistic, undead rear end in a top hat rapists. Mechanically, vampires get heightened senses and the ability to hypnotize victims, turning them into "brides" over time and psychic vassals that can be controlled by thought. Vampires are weak to sunlight but not killed by it. On rare days when the sun shines, vampires get a -5 to all rolls and act irrationally. A heavy caliber bullet to the head is enough to kill a vampire and it takes the destruction of the head or brain to kill them. Staking paralyzes them for as long as the stake is in the heart, cutting off all of their senses and making them immobile and easy to kill or take to the UOD for your bounty. And finally, there are rules for vampiric infection. If infected, a victim has a week to get a full transfusion of blood through their veins and they'll have no ill consequences. The GM isn't supposed to tell the victim this, though, and they have to figure it out for themselves. The first three days of infection are full of light aversion and interrupted sleeping patterns along with a reduction in Vitality and Coordination which is the sign you should have a doctor check you out. A successful check leads to treatment, a failure leads to continuing decline. After a week the victim loses weight and gains enhanced senses and it's too late to treat them. After two weeks the victim loses color in their skin, their eyes get shiny and bright, they lose more Vitality and Coordination and their surplus weight is gone. Every two days after the victim loses 1 point of Vitality and Coordination. When the victim reaches 1 Vitality they make a Vitality roll. Failure means the victim enters a coma and rises the next night as a vampire, success means the victim becomes a dhampir. DHAMPIRI The most common way someone becomes a dhampir is through the last minute success in fighting off a vampiric infection. The second most common way is for a woman in a late-term pregnancy to be turned. Pregnant vampires will, uh, eject the baby from their bodies and if the baby is saved from their early birth there's a high chance it'll grow up to be a dhampir. Born dhampirs progress like normal kids, albeit taller and thinner, until they turn 16 and hit Vampire Puberty. They basically become tall, slender and sexy with features like their vampire daddy and long teeth to boot. The infected-from-a-bite kind just become thinner, fitter and sexier. Dhampiri are half-lifers which means they're not entirely human. They drink, eat, breathe and sleep but they don't need as much of all four and they're a slight step away from humankind. They can exist without ever drinking blood , but a smidge of blood lets them heal fast and gives a mojo boost to their abilities (and can do it gently or violently and need a LOT less blood). On top of that they age a lot slower than humans do and some don't age at all. They also have some drawbacks: light sensitivity, sterility, being slaves to heavy emotion and the knowledge that when they DO die they'll rise as full-blooded vampires. Their other bonuses/hindrances are:
GHOULS  Ghouls are probably descended from people who lived in the Wastelands who were formed by a combination of the Blight, eating mutant food and inbreeding. They speak their own weird bastardized version of English that nobody can decipher but are actually still pretty smart (most are as smart as normal people) and able to speak the Queen's English if taught. They're half-lifers too and carnivorous in nature, able to eat drat near any meat and survive in the fog and Wastelands. They also walk like gorillas, about five-feet tall, and they're sorta buff like chimps. They can rip, they can tear, they can leap and they can climb with ease. They're like monkeys wearing Victorian clothes. They're also second class citizens and technically classified as pests so they have no rights under English law and are kinda stand-ins for weird "inhuman" immigrants if you think about it.  Ghouls also have some pretty major biological differences. For starters, they breed like rabbits and have two heat periods a year. Female ghouls can birth from two to ten children per cycle, though they let three survive on average and eat the rest for varying reasons. A ghoul is weaned at four months, grow to adult size in five years and can reproduce for the first time at age twelve. They have weak eyes but strong senses of smell and hearing, their eyesight slowly diminishing as their ability to smell the dead and spirits get strong enough to compensate. Ghouls have expandable stomachs so they can stuff themselves silly and let it slowly digest and as I previously mentioned they can eat ANY meat. They do generally prefer ghoul or human meat though, as eating Animates tend to have issues and it's very hard for a ghoul to eat vampire or Thrope. Ghouls slowly become more and more sluggish as they get older and they also get fatter; by the time a ghoul loses its eyesight it's gone from a light-sleeping nimble acrobat to a heavy-set, slow-moving adult. The longer a ghoul lives, the fatter and slower it gets until the point where they're immobile and need to be rolled around by younger ghouls. On top of that, their mental facilities start to decline, going from quick-witted and canny to obsessed with food and sleeping constantly and wanting more food and when did you last get me food FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD. Ghoul society is tribal/clan in nature and ghouls mate for broods of children. They're not particularly monogamous and it doesn't matter who you're loving because inbreeding actually has no detriment at all for ghouls. Ghouls live with an eye-for-an-eye code, the matters judged and sentenced by the fat elders of a tribe who also pick out who carries out the sentencing. As a result, ghoul societies are very insular but they're also pretty stable. The elders who are too old to think straight or require too much food are generally a hundred, and when that hundredth year rolls around the young ritualistically devour the elder to gain their strength and wisdom. City ghouls tend to also work for coin to buy meat from underground markets because Neo-Victorian society looks down on them and blames them for a lot of social ills (like the kidnapping of children) so some either get honest work as a laborer or become criminals to pay for meat. Oh also some ghouls picked up Catholicism because they really liked the idea of transubstantiation. In play, ghouls have some extra mechanics:
And that's Chapter Five all wrapped up in one single post. You know what would be cool? Being able to play as a ghoul, being a plug-ugly little monkey man with a taste for meat and a loping gorilla gait and a shotgun. The game actually encourages that ghouls be treated as (dangerous, possibly lethal) comic relief characters involved in slapstick and general monkey business. Well as luck would have it, there are stats for all of the people in this chapter. If you really, really wanted to, you could use them as a general template for what kind of stats and treatment a ghoul character would get, although there is no official rule for playing as any of these besides Dhampiri. I'm just saying, though, that having a ghoul Criminal teammate would be a good source of tension-reliever. But that's just me, I'm biased towards the little guys. NEXT TIME: CHAPTER SIX: MIRACLES OF SCIENCE or THE SMART, THE DEAD AND THE REALLY REALLY UGLY Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Jan 29, 2014 |
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Jan 29, 2014 09:38
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citybeatnik posted:I'm now picturing a Ghoul Detective solving mysteries in a little deerstalker while riding on the shoulders of a Thrope Doctor what just returned from the front lines. It is a good mental image. Now you've got me thinking about a ghoul as Igor in Young Frankenstein. (Frankenstein's fiancee would be a Mourner because ha ha Victorian Madonna/Whore complex)
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Jan 29, 2014 18:50
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From my heart and from my hand, why don't people understand my intentions? CHAPTER SIX PART ONE: MIRACLES OF SCIENCE So I would in fact like to print a public apology in regards to the complaining about Victorian technology. They can in fact transplant eyes and some other organs and bits. It's still drat expensive though. Anyway in case you forget what this book is about, the intro fluff sets a good tone for what's to come. It's framed as a partially-destroyed private journal. A Neo-Victorian doctor uses a pregnant woman's womb to help gestate reagent for creating Mercurials and intentionally poisons her to keep her body temperature up to help create different types of reagents to extract. He uses it to bring a corpse back as a Mercurial and it promptly responds by killing his assistant and he burns down his lab to make sure everything gets eradicated. This is kind of a running thing as you will see in Unhallowed Metropolis' section on Neo-Victorian super science. Yes the mad scientists in Deadlands may have created a neutron bomb that runs on the souls of the dead but a lot of them didn't intentionally poison pregnant women repeatedly for "alchemy". There is a general schism in focus in alchemy. The Vitalists believe that the Earth itself is depleted of energy and that's causing some kind of rot and decay and that's why Animates hunger for living flesh. The Vitalists have invented the anti-agapic treatments and experiment with half-lifers. Another school believes in Aristotelian science and in the importance of elements and that this bad poo poo is caused by an elemental imbalance. They tend to search for the Philosopher's Stone and use alchemy to make Mercurials and Galvanists, thinking that you can flush corpses with matter and correct these imbalances to make them live perfectly. Frankly, I'm with the Vitalists to a certain degree, especially when the alternative is going back to believing in humours. Either way you slice it, they both commit atrocities but it's generally done in a sunk cost/survival fallacy way. "We've already killed a bunch of children in the process of testing this Plague cure so why let their sacrifice be in vain by stopping?" or "We have to do whatever we can to survive, drat morality". ALCHEMY Alchemists are capable of making drugs out of herbs, bombs out of chemicals and a whole mess of hard opiates. A lot of alchemists experiment with natural materials taken from the Wastelands. Every alchemical solution has a DR to beat and needs a sterile environment to cook in or you take -4 to the creation. They also have a production time and you can make a roll to see if you have what you need out of a random assortment of chemicals to make stuff. The production has a price on top of time and a sales price; frankly, if you want to make money and have a good amount of time on your hands, you can make a bunch of highly illegal substances and have your Criminal friend hock it on the black market. Manufacturing the drug requires a successful Alchemical skill roll with use of a proper collection of materials to cook with. However, if you fail a roll to cook you can make another roll to salvage. A failure means a total failure and you need to remake the batch from scratch. A successful salvage means it comes with side effects and any future attempts to make the formula will include the side-effect unless you make it from absolute scratch again.
 Alchemical creations, drugs and not-drugs, are:
MEDICINE  If Neo-Victorian medicine is so drat advanced, why haven't they figured out that penicillin cures syphilis. Oh well. Basically hospitals do quality work for a high price and a lot of doctors and students cut their teeth working on patients in hospitals attached to colleges. Hospices are run by Mourners who keep an eye on the terminally ill; the Hospice of the Quiet Sleep, run by the Sisters of the Quiet Sleep, caters to the poor of the city. Transplants and organs are taken from corpses that have been cleared of the Plague (mostly) through hospitals but if you can't get what you need, try the black market. You can in fact clone organs and limbs but it costs a good deal. On top of this, anti-agapic research continues using half-lifers as the basis for immortality serums. Basic treatment costs 10 pounds per month and reverts the age by 15 years down to age 18 without prolonging life, only smoothing it out. Advanced treatment requires six days of treatment at 300 pounds a pop and can take 20 years off, but repeated use loses its oomph and only does so much. Bryant Center treatment costs 1000 for a three week treatment and must be topped off monthly at 100 pounds per visit but slices off 30 years and completely halts all aging for 10. And on top of that, madhouses and sanitariums are prevalent. The mad are used as free labor in places or subject to experimentation and lobotomy in others or given actual therapy and hypnotism in others still. There's no gold standard of care and most of it sucks because why wouldn't it.  I'm gonna gloss over diseases (they're still there and everyone's shockingly ineffective at curing poo poo like loving syphilis) and reproductive technology (they're sooooo over hysteria and wandering womb, good for them, but some people still think contraception is immoral) to get to the good stuff that I want to focus on for the rest of this update: Anathemas, Homunculi and Lesser Homunculi. ARTIFICIAL LIFE Artificial wombs are used to A: make new life and B: grow babies outside of the woman's butt. It's apparently "more of an art than a science" which I consider to be...not reassuring at all. And I did some playtesting with other players to demonstrate all this ensuing babble. For starters, all artificial life are created with the Bad Taste quality; the walking dead hate to eat them. Anathemas are near perfectly identical to human beings but are prone to mental instability due to "the artificial womb and nutrients lacking something". Why you can't just put an anathema embryo in a surrogate mother's womb is never explained and frankly would save you expenses for the ownership and use of artificial wombs and material. It takes a month to design an Anathema embryo and twelve hours to assemble it. Homunculi are humanoid and generally used as servants and helpers, looking like humans but off. The game says that homunculi look disfigured and ugly, but I personally like to think that they just look like they're a little deep in the Uncanny Valley. It takes three weeks to design a Homunculus embryo and eight hours to assemble it. Lesser homunculi are basically made of human DNA with other DNA slapped in as filler and are generally animalistic and kinda dim, used as test subjects and grunt labor. They're designed in a week and made in six hours. Both forms of homunculi have the bonus of not being born with a mental illness and only needing five months to gestate instead of nine to ten for anathemas. All of these forms of artificial life are discriminated against and feared, painted as insidious intruders who want to gently caress up your society and poo poo. But in reality, they're probably going to inherit the Earth, especially if you put the time into designing them right.  It's a DR 16 to make an Anathema, 14 to make a Homunculus or 11 to make a Lesser and you make an Alchemy roll, needing a minimum of Alchemy and Medicine 3 and the proper facilities and materials. Using compromised materials and a dirty workplace adds a -2 modifier to the roll. You can rush the time it takes to research to create the embryo which halves the time but adds a -4 modifier to your roll, or spend time and a half to make sure the research is right and get a +2 modifier (which you lose if your research is ever interrupted by, say, plot). Further altering the DR is genetic tampering, which can let you change how the life form turns out. The main adjustments are Accelerated Decrepitude, Accelerated Maturity (born fully grown and reaching intellectual maturity in months), Ambidextrous, Animal Appearance (lesser homunculi only), Clone (of the creator, anathema only), Flawed Senses, Gigantism, Haunting Beauty, Immunities (to smog, the Wasteland and toxins), Mindless, Tailored Addiction (being is hooked on substance creator makes for loyalty), Tailored Appearance (looks exactly how you want), Tailored Attributes (allows for enhancement/limitation of Attributes) and Wild Mutations (randomized mutations that add +4 to the DR and give the GM license to kill your creation). Each tampering raises or lowers the DR of creation and it can be pretty easy to create an impossible DR for yourself pretty fast. And from here you make your roll.  Now a failure doesn't mean a failure. A failure means you can roll again to salvage the creature as Flawed Life. Flawed Life means that the creation is wrong somehow and you don't tell the player that they failed or created flawed life. Flawed Life:
 So say you made a good embryo or a flawed embryo. You can do two things here: either pop the sucker into a tube or divide the zygote. Dividing the zygote lets you create up to eight cellular cultures you can put in an artificial womb, but each division has a DR of 16. If failed, you can roll again to salvage the division as a Flawed Life. If you succeed and it was a good embryo, the ones that are salvaged are simply Flawed Life different from their brothers. If the original embryo was Flawed, salvaged zygotes have an extra mutation. All mutations/flaws incurred from splitting are relevant to the resulting entities and not its other siblings. When all's said and done, an Anathema needs thirty hours of attention per week while gestating, a Homunculus needs 20 and a Lesser Homunculus needs 10. You also need to pay upkeep and cycle out ALS2(6) monthly or they will die.    So let's see how this actually works in play. Doctor Geiger, Doctor Devin Conwell and Doctor Laura McHale are all doctors in the employ of the Royal College. They all have Medicine 5 and Alchemy 5, can reroll failed rolls for making life and work for the Royal College so this is legal and they have access to a lot of artificial wombs. Geiger decides to make an Anathema, Devin decides to make a Homunculus and Laura decides to make a Lesser Homunculus. Geiger rushes his development and design, taking a -4 to creation. He uses a collection of genetic material taken from servants and workers to create a pale, slender, androgynous anathema beauty in the popular style of the day. He doesn't tamper with the embryo, so the DR is 16. His first attempt, an 8, is a failure. He rerolls and gets a 13, another failure. He gets a 17 on the attempt to salvage so his Anathema design is Flawed; the GM rolls and gets a 17 so his design gets an extra Mental Condition and a 4 on the Mutation chart means they get Haunting Beauty. Geiger decides he wants to cultivate six Anathemas so he splits the zygotes five times. Four of the five divisions are successful except for #3, but another roll succeeds and gives #3 the Defect mutation. So Dr. Geiger set out to make six servants and ended up making six emotionally disturbed, so-hot-it's-a-curse assistants and one of them is wildly different than the others. Devin takes his time and a half, getting a +2 to his roll and he decides to make a fit, tan, healthy worker homunculus, giving them Ambidexterity and Accelerated Maturity. That's +1 DR for Ambidextrous and +2 for Accelerated Maturity for a total of DR 17. His first roll comes up short with a 16 but his reroll succeeds with a 21. He decides to split the zygote only once, succeeding with a 19, creating twin worker homunculi that emerge fully grown and need a few months of teaching before they can be on their own. Laura decides that she likes ghouls so she grabs a handful of monkey DNA, mixes it in with a dash of ghoul DNA and fills the rest with random human DNA. She takes Immunity for the monkeyghouls and Tailored Attributes, raising their Intelligence so they're not so limited mentally. She beats the DR of 15 with a 16 and decides that she wants as many monkeys as she can, splitting the zygote seven times into eight monkeyghouls. Of them all, half end up flawed and the rest end up fine. The flawed monkeyghouls end up a mutant and three Flawed ghouls. The mutant ends up deaf and an evil eye, one of the flawed gets Chronic Fits, the second gets Leprosy and the third is Lame. Laura set out to make eight identical monkeyghouls and only half of them ended up according to plan. This is a thing that takes months. This is a thing that is harder to do if you don't want them to take months. When an artificial life form is born, unless it has Accelerated Maturity it has to grow up like a normal person so you have to make sure it doesn't get a damaging education that causes it to go crazier. And these suckers are gonna be the probable future of mankind, inheritors of man's throne and education. Maybe they'd all be better off dying. NEXT TIME: MERCURIALS, THROPES, GALVANISTS AND OTHER ERRATA, I PROMISE TO NOT BE SO GODDAMN VERBOSE AND SPACE-CONSUMING
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Jan 31, 2014 07:17
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unseenlibrarian posted: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.
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Jan 31, 2014 15:46
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Or maybe you could have an inspiring campaign where the PCs go in and smack the elves around as instructors to teach them about how to defend themselves and keep up their mediocre existence in the World's Largest Dungeon. Or just set that to a montage.
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Feb 2, 2014 18:23
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Tasoth posted:Hey PKFan, if you feel like tormenting yourself further and you have more money than self control, IPR is selling damaged copies of Unhallowed Necropolis for 17 bones. Joke's on you, I ALREADY BOUGHT IT. Seriously, when I got halfway through the core book I found it out it was there and I had some DriveThru RPG coupons to redeem. While I did in fact pay full price for the core revised rulebook, I only did that because I picked up the original for free somewhere online, and if I'm gonna be an rear end I'm gonna pay the price of admission. This does not apply to supplement books in my mind (seriously, $32.95 for a PDF). You can argue that Unhallowed Necropolis is not a supplement book but it's basically letting you play mages and letting you learn more about ghosts, stuff it already hinted at in the core. It also has a lot of pictures of women who are crazy, covered in blood, naked or a mixture of the three. So I bought it for ten dollars and I'll gladly be moving on to Unhallowed Necropolis when I'm done with Unhallowed Metropolis. Also Cyphoderus, I'm really interested in where your RPG is gonna go.
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Feb 3, 2014 05:19
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My loving browser crashed in the middle of typing this drat update in the browser (like the idiot I am) so now I'm nice and mad at UM. In the perfect friggin' mood for this now. CHAPTER SIX PART TWO  MERCURIALS So, Mercurials. Mercurials are undead who have been preserved and injected with an alchemical reanimation solution in an attempt to purify the body of elemental imbalances that cause death. It's absolutely full of fringe science and a lot of other scientists would rather focus on things that might not end in failure. Mercurials are pretty big rip-offs of the walking dead from "Herbert West, Reanimator" and they follow the fresher=better rule. The big issue is procuring a super fresh corpse and that's where people like the Lux Ex Morte come in.  The Lux Ex Morte are a secret society whose members operate independently. They have a signature weapon called a Tiger's Claw that lets them inject alchemical solutions in hand-to-hand combat. While most people either keep corpses fresh using ALS6 and preservation systems, pay a Resurrection Man or corrupt cremator or by dragging vagrants into their workshops to kill them before preserving them, the Lux Ex Morte have a variety of alchemical tricks up their sleeves. Their main tools are Serum #29 and #57. #29 is basically rohypnol that shuts down memory and makes the subject pliable and #57 is a poison that kills the subject and is circulated through their dying heartbeats to preserve the body. They use both tools to get absolutely fresh test subjects to create people resistant to Plague by killing them and trying to reanimate them. Of course the Lux Ex Morte has its opposition, the Order of Reason. The Order exists to basically arrest and kill anyone making stupid experiments involving harming innocent people and acts where the law can't. Both are pretty good summations of the state of science in London. Mercurials themselves are true undead not beholden to the same laws as Animates. Some desire to eat flesh, some don't. They have no heartbeat, no need for any sustenance. Every Mercurial is decaying, though. They're always inherently breaking down at a rate depending on how they came to be after death. A normal Mercurial is good for a few weeks, needing to make a Vitality roll weekly, losing 1 point of Vitality or Coordination per failure. At 0 the body goes inert and can't be used to work again. So a reanimator needs a way to store and keep the body fresh, a place to whip up a serum and hold the body and they also need supplies to make the serum. Every reanimator has a different serum; you can buy it but it's illegal so most make their own. It's DR 14 to make your own reanimation serum and if you mess up you can salvage it as a flawed serum.
THROPES  Thropes were invented as part of a super soldier program in the 1940s. Ideally, they were resistant to damage, Plague-immune and tireless, able to be deployed against heavily populated areas and clear out Animates. The original Thropes were soldiers dropped off with a vial of Thrope serum that they could chug to transform. They would basically just keep groups of soldiers around to take them back to base after their transformation wore off. But then they stopped needing the serum and started regenerating from injury while human. And then they started biting their allies while transformed, and THEIR wounds knitted shut in a day. And then they stopped being able to turn back into human form after five years. By 1951 the Thrope program was discontinued when the majority of the Thropes escaped into the Wastelands, and the scientists and army most of the notes and the original formulas. This hasn't stopped people from trying to make the "true serum" again, mind.  True Thropes are crosses between Mr. Hyde and werewolves, as evidenced by the pictures. They're big, they're burly, they regenerate from drat near anything, their bites are infectious and they can't be human anymore after ten transformations. They also are functionally immortal short of overwhelming force or an accident (like suffocation or starvation). The Thropes of the Wastelands can have multiple kids per pregnancy which are called Purebred who will never have a human form and have a feral animal intelligence. They live in packs with literal fights for dominance and spend their days hunting and feeding and fighting. If the ghouls don't inherit the Earth, the Thropes sure as hell will. But a lot of human knowledge and creation will be lost in the process. Because it's hard to make the true serum, the only way to become a real Thrope is to be bitten by a Wasteland Thrope. The DR to make the true Thrope serum is 28 and frankly you might as well just say "you'll never make it". Any attempts to make a serum generally require a second roll (DR 20) to make a flawed serum. The big thing about Thrope serums is that A: there's a ton of them and B: the first time you drink the serum always has the same effect. The drinker gets huge, regenerates any wound, wrecks poo poo and then transforms back to normal. The real killer is the second transformation unless otherwise stated.
 Being a Thrope sucks. Every time you gain a Serious Wound or feel sufficiently threatened you have to make a DR 11 Will roll to not transform. Every time you fail the DR goes up by one, and willingly transforming to help others or free yourself counts as a failure. And every time you transform it lasts longer and longer and you're harder to control and transformation is faster and easier. After you transform ten times you abandon society and go out into the Wastelands to find your own path. Maybe it's better out there for someone like you, someone damned like you. GALVANISTS  What are Galvanists? Shoehorned. I think they forgot they needed to have an overt Frankenstein reference so they threw this in at the last minute. Galvanists are people reanimated through aetheric energy. They're a lot like Mercurials but with galvanic technology filling gaps instead of using alchemical solutions. They come in two forms: Prometheans and Post Cadaverous Automata. PCA are what happens when you make a Victorian Manchine a la SLA Industries. PCAs are brain tanks in mechanical bodies. If it's organic and still attached to you, it's because it serves a purpose like using a heart to pump nutrient preservative fluid through your body. For the most part, though, they're walking life support systems that are 90% mechanical and used to do things normal people can't do, like construction or mining. PCA Galvanists are still technically alive though, but they're still treated as machine men. Most of the time they have one limb wholly replaced with a tool to work with or don't even get anything more than a Rattler to use to talk. Prometheans are different. Prometheans are made when a doctor preserves and stitches body parts together to make a whole body. A PCA has an internal aetheric energy system that requires batteries or hand-cranks to recharge or it just draws on the power grid. PCAs need maintenance weekly. Prometheans are 100% alive. Not half-lifers, alive. They have beating hearts, they can age, they need to eat, they don't need aetheric energy. Either way making a Galvanic is hard work. You need to collect the parts, store the parts, build mechanical parts if need be and then figure out how to deliver the spark of life properly to the soul. The other big problem is getting your hands on a suitable brain. It's a lot harder to keep a brain in a preserved state than an arm, so you generally need a jar to help keep it alive for a while. The process of making any sort of Galvanic is to make a few Galvanic or Medicine rolls to assemble the body, perfect the body, smooth out scars and make adjustments. From there you put the brain in and make the proper rolls to see if it gets LIFE. Unlike all other experiments, failure means that you have to fix the body a little bit before trying again. Another failure means the whole thing is a wash and you need to start over again. Which is a problem because it can take ten hours a day for at least a month for work, even more if you're gonna sew it without scars and push yourself to the limit to get it done faster and done right  Galvanists can get experimental enhancements installed that raise the DR of the task of animation. Such enhancements are Armored Form, Beautiful, Dead Ringer (make the Promethean look exactly like someone), Giant, Graceful, Hardened Skeleton, Heightened Senses, Industrial Equipment (for PCAs only) and Reproductively Viable (Prometheans only). Yeah, that's right. You may have brought them to life with 100% life but they can't actually make babies unless you want them to. PCAs can be taught skills, look hideous, need maintenance and need life sustaining things. Prometheans come back to life with any possible mental issues and may have problems with memories of their past life flaring up, but galvanic reanimation isn't necessarily harsh on them and they don't come back gaining any extra baggage besides a touch of melancholy. They come back as blank slates that need some education and some care, and if the maker took the time to do it right they can even come back without stitches. It's not the best kind of second life...but when you consider some of the other options, it's not that bad of a deal. Also your creator may be a naked woman in a leather apron, so there's that to look forward to.  NEXT TIME: CHAPTER SEVEN, THE GM CHAPTER and REVISIONS BETWEEN EDITIONS and MY THOUGHTS ON THIS WHOLE THING NOW THAT I HAVE READ THE FULL drat BOOK Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Feb 4, 2014 |
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Feb 4, 2014 09:40
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Ratoslov posted:Generally, American history education doesn't cover anything in South American history aside from Hernan Cortez and maybe the construction of the Panama Canal. We're completely ignorant of the era.
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Feb 4, 2014 23:26
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This is how London ends; not with a bang, but with a whimper. CHAPTER SEVEN: SMOKE AND MIRRORS or THE GM CHAPTER Before I get into the actual substance of the chapter, let's talk about the fact that this is in fact the Revised/2.0 edition. What exactly changed in between Unhallowed Metropolis and this edition? Well, for starters, there's some mechanical issues. There are new classes in the form of the Detective and Deathwatch Soldier, every class gets some extra bonuses they can take and there's some new equipment and changes to it. There's no changes to the actual mechanics or anything, it's all pretty much the same. And you can originally play as an Anathema but you have to have one Mental Disorder, one extra unremovable point of Physical Corruption, two benefits and one mandatory defect. Animates can be Modular, which means that they can split up into ambulatory parts to run around and attack. The sole changes to Corruption is the addition of Ravenous, Craven and Obsession. There's two big changes: rules for having installed galvanic prosthetics and therapy through galvanic shocks, and the elimination of a LOT of of fluff text. There's an assload of just fluff and text that they excised, like Neo-Victorian politics and what their political parties do and a lot of text about Animates and this and that. They just cut out a TON of background info and throw it away wholesale and that's really all that's changed. The chapter proper pretty much starts off with this.  Yeah so you can set Unhallowed Metropolis somewhere besides London. You have the blessing of the developers. Go spread your wings and fly across the Wastelands for adventure~ Except your GM would have to make up the majority of what the hell is going on in most of those places. We have a gist, sure, but broad strokes do not a good setting make. You can have your adventure elsewhere but it's sure as hell not gonna be 100% true to the core rulebook experience. For example: you know how the smog of London is a giant deadly force and gas masks are super cool life-saving fashions? The smogs only apply to London. You can go a few miles outside of the walls of London into the Wastelands and taadaa, you can breathe easily. The Welsh, Scottish and Irish still living in their homes don't have to wear respirators and never go batshit nuts on days where you can see the sun. London is, frankly, a goddamn crazy place so wrapped up in its delusions it thinks it's the best place on Earth and shares the madness with anyone who wants to call it home.  So this chapter is full of GM tips and how to use different things as different antagonists. How to make parties, how to scale encounters, how to scare your players, it's all full of that standard "how to run" flavor. And for the first time it really starts to acknowledge just how lousy things are in London, but never focuses on them for particularly long. And it does want you to play some kind of long-term campaign, but that's if you want to. And they do include some campaign seeds.
Rand Brittain mentioned A Manual of Ambition a while back on page 10 and that really feels like what a long-term campaign and project would be like, especially if you're using science. If you didn't look at that, the point of A Manual of Ambition is that you have an idea, and it's about the road to hell being paved with good intentions executing it. Over time your goals and ambitions get warped and you get more and more corrupt as your morals are thrown by the wayside to accomplish your deeds. The three example scenarios in the book are about a commander going insane with paranoia and zeal when trying to retake a lost colony on Earth in the future, a doctor trying to make humanity free from sin by removing their higher mental functions, and a scientist trying to figure out if zombies can regain their souls through experiencing religious epiphanies through chemicals. This idea would be right at home with Unhallowed Metropolis, but the creator decided to make it separate with its own mechanics and own forms of Corruption. Some example scenarios using A Manual of Ambition as a base:
FINAL THOUGHTS Unhallowed Metropolis is a game that always manages to stick with me. I don't like how they want me to play it but at the same time...I just can't forget some aspects of it. Maybe I'm a sucker, maybe I'm interested in crap, but there are some genuinely good ideas here, just presented pretty badly and incompletely. I want there to be source books for France and Prussia and I want there to be a shot at happiness. But I guess in the end, that's up to me and anyone else who'd like to give this a shot. So if you're interested in this game, go ahead. Go forewarned with knowledge. Breathe your own life into London and hope it blows away a little bit of the smog and stale death. For me and my presentation, this is where it comes to a close. But even in the end of Unhallowed Metropolis...something undying, something immortal still stirs and lurks, and it's coming for the living. 
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Feb 10, 2014 |
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Feb 10, 2014 05:47
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 GARO is a MATURE TOKU FOR MATURE AUDIENCES about a guy named Kouga Saejima, a man who takes up the mantle of Makai Knight to slay demons called Horrors who are born from the dark desires of regular people. It's a little like Kamen Rider OOO but without the Greed controlling/creating the Horrors. Kouga ends up rescuing a girl named Kaoru who has been stained with the blood of a Horror. Without help she has a hundred days to live but during that time she's a giant beacon of energy for Horrors, and using an innocent girl as live bait would sure make Kouga's job a lot easier. A lot easier. So the big dilemma is to have feelings for her and save her life, or keep using her as bait (without telling her of course because this is toku and gently caress talking over problems) and dispose of her corpse/fix her problem at the last minute.
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Mar 3, 2014 06:21
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Your older cousin Tim who's kind of a gruff jerk to the others and makes extra pocket money selling home-made cherry bombs and firecrackers but when push comes to shove he'll stand up for you and your buddies. He likes to pretend he doesn't believe in ghosts because it's dumb kid stuff, but he scares easily. He also drives you guys around because you're not old enough to drive yet.
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 05:33
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Simian_Prime posted:Has anybody taken a look at the LotFP freebie for Free RPG Day, "Doom Cave of the Crystal Headed Children?'' It would make a hilarious review because holy crap it is Peak Raggi. Imagine an adventure that desperately tries to emulate Weird Tales, but ends up coming out more like an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Kavak posted:I would kill for an Aqua Teen RPG.
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Jul 11, 2014 18:26
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ThisIsNoZaku posted:Can someone post a link to the list of reviews? I lost all my bookmarks in an OS reinstall. Table of contents for all of the reviews are on the first page in the first post.
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Jul 29, 2014 23:15
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Aw look it's not Master Splinter, it's Master Wood Fragment In My Thumb. I like how Sargon the Hunger has animal fangs. Like, he is gonna eat minds and how else are you gonna eat minds? Sharp teeth, duh! I'M SPOOKY AND EVIL! Also come on. "The Hunger"? Not "The Hungerer"? He doesn't hunger, he is hunger?
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Jul 31, 2014 17:45
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I just... should have triple-checked for typos. It should be "Hunter". Of course, it should say something about Rifts that such didn't register as a typo in my mind until I double-checked the book. Ah poo poo, sorry. Yeah, blame RIFTS.
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Jul 31, 2014 19:16
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Galaga Galaxian, Warbirds looks pretty sick, definitely keep it up! London waits. It gasps for air, the city filthy with polluted fog, its gutters and alleys thick with filth and blood. Its citizens are no better. London waits to die an undignified death, be it by bombs or the walking dead or a slow starvation. This is the world of Unhallowed Metropolis, a world with no hope. Last time I went over the core rulebook and all of its classes, monsters and technology. For the expansion, they decided to focus on something they really just briefly glossed over the first time: the ghosts of London. UNHALLOWED NECROPOLIS  For a quick recap: Unhallowed Metropolis is a d20 based tabletop RPG. The game takes place in 2105, 200 years after the dead rose up in 1905 and threw the world into turmoil. The dead walking was just a symptom of some greater cosmic disease that resulted in the Earth being taken over by a necrotic Blight that mutated plant life and tainted soil. Despite the spiritual death of Earth, mankind stubbornly clung on, resulting in things getting worse and worse. There are vampires, ghouls, werewolves (in the form of chemically/bite induced Mr. Hydes), reanimated corpses (through plague or mad science), brains in jars, genetically-augmented soulless humanoids and melancholic Frankenstein's monsters. The tech and cultural level is an incredibly lopsided mixture between goth pulp future and traditional Victorian society. The result is a fortress city of London surrounded by giant concrete walls, policed by a WWI-styled army who resolves any outbreak by razing the block and building a new one on the ashes. The other major world powers are a league of Prussian airships, an immortal French god-king who might be the Devil or a dark god who closed the borders of France, a smattering of other European nations and old colonies and everything east of the Rockies in the US. A lot of London's problems are self-inflicted and the game is about playing trouble-seekers in the city. The word of the day is "hopeless" and it's not gonna get better in this book. Like I said: they mention that ghosts have been roaming London since the early 20th century and they did absolutely nothing with that in the core book. And that always struck me as weird. I mean, ghosts and demons and all sorts of supernatural monsters got a few mentions in the New World of Darkness core book and they all got a few pages dedicated to mechanics and how they work in play. How do you say something like "oh yeah there are ghosts everywhere" and then not expand on that? The book is already ~400 pages long. Unhallowed Necropolis isn't nearly as long. It's literally a little under half the length. But it does have a lot to add to the core campaign. And, admittedly, there's a lot more to Unhallowed Metropolis than just adding ghosts. Here's a preview of nightmares to come:
 Also I was thinking about adding some extra content to the reviews by attaching some short stories taking place in the metropolis of London. Frankly, Necropolis is more of the same pointless Gothic bleakness and "realistic"/rough rules and it would be boring to give you more of the same. If anyone's interested, let me know and I'll attach them when I come back with Chapter 1.
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Aug 15, 2014 20:50
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CHAPTER ONE: Visions & Revelations Part One So Chapter One has a chunk of in-universe text, kicking off with "The Origins of Parapsychology" which is the history of parapsychology in the real world up until the Plague Years. If you're super interested in the field, you probably know the history. I'd recap but this is a tabletop RPG and I'm here to share the fake history of a fake science in a fake society and the fake events herein. There is a lot I'm gonna be skipping over, so I'll be breaking up the paragraphs with pictures of timelines provided in the book.  During the Plague Years, there were lots of survivor settlements away from the armies of the world. Sometimes the protected zones would willingly dump people in the wasteland for crimes or to make room or for fun. And as a result of being forced to live directly in the middle of an apocalyptic nightmare, a lot of people developed mixtures of PTSD, depression and more. But a rare few got more than years of emotional turmoil and grief and began to develop unnatural abilities they could exercise with their minds. They were brought to the attention of scientists and the military and were researched.  On the other side of supernatural stuff, the mass deaths of the survivor settlements started leading to weird supernatural phenomena, especially if they bordered the wastelands or cities. Hauntings and general ghostly activity began to really step up, especially when death was imminent. A lot of ghosts were confused and disruptive, some were just malicious, and some didn't fully manifest and just threw poo poo around. On top of that, some people are able to talk to the dead and interact with them.  From here it gets really specific about instances of hauntings and psychics unleashing their powers. So let's just jump ahead to 1917. English scientists start taking some of their psychics and their mediums and experimenting on them en masse. A lot go even more insane, a lot of them die, but a few end up refining their powers. The ones that make it through the tests were used for Operation Valkyrie and were assigned to command posts along the wasteland. The idea was that friendly psychics and mediums would be able to help detect major plague outbreaks and help the military coordinate or just help the military destroy Animates and other supernatural monsters.  What happens when you use emotionally-disturbed disaster survivors to operate without giving them stability and therapy? Nothing good. The precogs and the other psychics were often inefficient or wrong and they were always understaffed. But they kept intentionally exposing people to mind-breaking situations and they kept pushing. From their pigheadedness came the Special Strategic Branch of Project Valkyrie, controlling squads of similarly-powered psychics who were trained in concentrative techniques to help hold their minds together. Despite having an appalling mortality/insanity/termination rate, the SSB was able to help Britain reclaim London and defend the survivors. What were the mediums doing? Uh. I dunno. Great question. They're mostly used by the government for a variety of reasons or working privately. Why answer that question more thoroughly when you can just talk about ~PSYCHIC POWERS~?  So now that the sources of psychics are understood, and there's a way to get them to control their powers, the British parapsychologists decide to work on means of inhibiting and inducing psychic phenomena. It's kind of hard work to just let a potential asset to the Empire live a life of crushing despair in the wild until they can move stuff with their mind. Both induction and suppression is incredibly costly and hard to research. For suppression, they come up with: 
 Induction was a lot more sinister. Officially, psychosurgery was used to stimulate the brain in the opposite of suppression surgery. In reality, a group of government workers and private investigators ended up revealing a government conspiracy called Dominion. Originally called Project Archangel before it was shut down, The Psychic Defense Bureau (aka Dominion) was established to help control psychics for the Empire and induce powers in normal people. Much like the MKULTRA experiments, their real purpose was to operate covertly in asylums and workhouses experimenting on the poor and destitute. On top of that, they often employed heavily-armed kill teams in their labs to help control the test subjects. When a pyrokinetic killed two orderlies by accident, a kill team chased them into the bowels of a sanitarium as the others worked on evacuating the staff. What resulted was the entire asylum burning down, hotter than any normal fire and visible from anywhere in the city. Dominion panicked and set about terminating test subjects and destroying labs to cover their tracks, and it was officially blamed on arson by anarchists. Later, an inquisitive reporter tied together several leads and would interview the disgraced project leader being held until watch in a hospital room and publish his findings in all newspapers. As a result, scandal broke out and accusations fly in the government, support is lost for the ruling party and people start trusting the government less about psychics. Dominion is not shut down.   And I'm not done with the chapter yet. Remember how I said this was all about ghosts? Well, I was wrong and Halloween Jack was right. This isn't really about ghosts. This is about whatever the hell the creators felt like adding past the core game. Ghosts themselves really get the short end of the stick compared to psychic powers and Neo-Victorian shrinks. And like I said: I'm skipping a lot of the more specific stuff. I skipped a whole section on how the London stock exchange came to terms with precogs using their powers for insider trading (spoilers: it's illegal to use psychic powers to make a killing on the stock market). But I'm keeping some of it to remind you that they go into an insane amount of worldbuilding sometimes even if it's stuff I really could not care about or would not be used in a plot hook. I could get behind being rogue psychics and adventurers fighting against Dominion. I don't think most of you guys care about Parliament's attempt to come up with licensing and laws regarding psychics. Next time: GHOSTS! AETHERTECH! PSYCHIC DETECTIVES! MEDIUM DETECTIVES AND THE STEPNEY HORROR! STUFF LIKE IN THIS PICTURE BELOW!  This chapter's short story: The Lowenthal Case Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Aug 20, 2014 |
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Aug 20, 2014 01:57
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CHAPTER ONE: Visions & Revelations Part Two So what is Britain actually like with all of these ghosts running around? Well, ghost hunting, talking to the dead and banishing spirits is a brisk, thriving business. To some, it's a safer alternative to being an Undertaker or joining the Deathwatch. To others, it's a big money sink for technology or a thankless job that requires a lot of free time or charity. So unless you're hiring a medium to talk to Aunt Josephine, most people's experience with ghosts boil down to containment or avoidance. Unfortunately, London is built on top of the Underground, and the Underground is full of old dead things that keep coming to the surface. These ghosts are no longer anything remotely close to what they once were, howling creatures of malice and spectral energy in misshapen forms.  After years of accidentally disinterring ravenous ghosts, mediums, parapsychologists and exorcists started making their own private firms to deal with the restless dead. The business is legal and recognized and controlled by various national rules. Parapsychology is booming and an accredited science to study, with most ghost hunters capturing spirits and bringing them back to research. While it's far from perfect, more often than not Neo-Victorians are looking to capture ghosts or detain them. To them it takes more effort to actually go about exorcising them, and general belief in religion has gone down due to the apocalypse. And more often than not, they do more good than the police or military can.  While the police employ precogs and various other psychics in their service, as paid consultants or as actual policemen, more often than not they're a novelty or another tool to be used. A few lucky mediums are employed as forensic pathologists. Occasionally, they will end up picking up and averting an assassination, an anarchist bombing or an Animate outbreak but most of the time they're just used to gather clues or interrogate suspects without touching them. They don't always have to deal with the real monsters.  The most notable of these monsters in recent memory was a incident called the Stepney Horror. Stepney was a slum in the city, notorious for being violent and crime-ridden enough to regularly attract feral vampires looking to set up hunting dens or Plague outbreaks. On top of those threats, Stepney was famous for people disappearing in the night. Not just one or two people either; on some nights, around a dozen men, women or children could go missing. The Psychic Branch dispatched some psychic officers to the slum to inspect the area. They found nothing but left with terrible headaches from scanning the area, and after they left the disappearances increased. After the investigation, scientists, psychics, homeless began to flee Stepney and avoid it. When unregistered psychics in the area began killing themselves, the military dispatched some Deathwatch soldiers to help the police. 58 soldiers, policemen and natives were torn apart by an invisible force and the military locked down the block. One of the head investigators allowed a personal friend, a highly skilled empath, and her Undertaker bodyguard to enter Stepney and investigate. They were given a day to look around before the gates were locked permanently and returned in eighteen hours. What they found inside was an unstoppable horde of Animates centered around a factory deep within the slums and a psychic maelstrom trying to pull them closer. The factory was staffed with Automata (brains in jars operating galvanic bodies, built to do manual work) force-feeding chained captives into the mouth of a furnace. The furnace was pumping something into bottles in the factory and the rest was released into the sky by a smokestack, making a black coal fog of psychic screams and ectoplasmic energy. The duo burned down the factory, returned to the gate and that was the end of the Stepney Horror. The taint of something remains in Stepney and many psychics or scientists refuse to go near where the factory once was. Nobody knows who built the factory or what it was doing, but I'm pretty sure you guys can hazard a guess and come up with something the creators would approve of. Oh hey, this picture is actually kinda relevant.  This is the face of the supernatural in London; it's an omnipresent force that preys on the weak and the desperate, just like the city itself. And sometimes, people tamper with it and very bad things happen. NEXT TIME: THE FIVE PEOPLE WHO TAMPER WITH IT AND HOW YOU CAN PLAY AS THEM Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Aug 23, 2014 |
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Aug 23, 2014 04:57
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I like Monsterhearts and I'm never really able to parse the Serpentine's mechanics and style, so by all means keep going with the Skins. They're pretty great and you're doing a good job with them.
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 00:12
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Cythereal posted:Edit: In particular, the dynamic the Witch calls to mind for me is that the Witch is both more and less powerful than he thinks he is. Suddenly this kid has power, power to act out his fantasies and avenge every humiliation, every perceived slight. But he almost certainly isn't thinking about the consequences of his newfound power and what he's doing. He doesn't appreciate, or perhaps care, that he now has the ability to seriously hurt people physically, mentally, and emotionally. It's every "prank" that's sent someone to the hospital. The interesting thing about the Witch is that it's like a more specialized version of the Infernal. The Infernal really has power. It absolutely has power to call on, at the cost of said power taking a moral and ethical toll on everyone around them. The Infernal really has to consider if what they're about to do is worth moving a step closer to the edge. Witches, on the other hand, get a hammer. The only downside of using a hammer is that something get bent or broken most of the time. You can use your hammer all day and all night if you want to, and spell-casting eye-to-eye with people is akin to beating them with the hammer in public. It's not subtle, it's completely obvious and everyone has just seen you hit the school bully with a hammer. And as cliche as it is, eventually everything starts looking like a nail to the Witch.
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Sep 16, 2014 18:40
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The Serpentine is neat because it represents families where there's a lot of inherent indoctrination and I feel like people can relate to that. Like, the Angel and the Serpentine both come from controlling homes. But the Serpentine is still in good standing and adheres to some aspect of their family's commandments while the Angel has been cast out of the home until they can regain their good standing...but is lost without guidance. The Angel is a Serpentine who has hosed up royally or just decided to break free but not attach themselves to a new home. You could probably transition pretty well from Serpent to Angel, mechanically and thematically. Plus the Serpentine is open enough so that if Southern Gothic isn't your thing, there's other ways to rework it. Like, maybe the family has a local business on the decline and they'll be damned if it's gonna go to the bank, it's been in the family for 150 years. Or mom and dad are strict disciplinarians who know where you're going for college and you're going to be a lawyer like we tell you to. But instead of another heritage that clashes with your environment, or a religious influence...you're snake people, literally or metaphorically.
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Sep 21, 2014 16:55
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Bieeardo posted:Good point. I've had more exposure to Lovecraft than I have Southern Gothic, I'll admit. That may be a Canadian thing, since we have our own uneasily cohabiting cultures to be fascinated with. If you want to check out Southern Gothic but don't really have the time, check Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" and Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find".
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Sep 22, 2014 18:07
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Saguaro PI posted:I'm not the only one who thinks that dude's hat looks like a butt, right? Just so we're clear. His hat looks like some drat tasty bread.
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Oct 22, 2014 06:16
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Xelkelvos posted:I do like the idea behind The Fury, even if the moves aren't the best. It's a shame because I can probably relate to some of the themes behind it. Same. I'd change the Fury thematically into basically "what if the Werewolf's Darkest Self and their main person were not separate". Like. Think of it this way. Push a werewolf too far and you've got the wolf to deal with and that will result in blood and tears. Push a ghoul too far and they have to satisfy their hunger and that will result in blood and tears. The Fury can totally be the kid who's bullied, ignored or neglected. Hell, the Fury could even be the clinically depressed kid who just has severely bad days. But the power should not be separate from them. Their power is part of them. It doesn't get them addicted to lifting stuff with their mind, it's not the shoulder devil that demands they get their pound of flesh. The Fury should be the kid who knows what they're capable of and they're loving terrified of losing control. There won't even be a moment of Hulk-like "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry". You look at the people treating you like poo poo and you tell them, point blank, terrified, "I'm so sorry" as the locker doors tear off the walls and start flinging themselves at them. What if one day my depression is so bad I can't resist coming into school with a gun and shooting everyone before shooting myself. What if I'm crying my eyes out as I set fire to the library with my mind. I am so scared of my brain and keeping myself in control and I want them to know that when I say I'm sorry for what I did, I absolutely mean it. Then change the trigger for turning off the Darkest Self into someone accepting their apology or trying to break through to them and emphasize that yeah, this is part of you, but it's only one facet of you. Granted, now you have to absolutely rewrite the Skin from the ground up, but. Also please share the mechanical aspect of the Proxy, because that seems like a great idea done absolutely terribly and I want to see the nitty-gritty.
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Nov 9, 2014 08:05
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I get it was a local nerd badge of honor to "survive" Wick's games. Like his CoC would apparently pride themselves on missions survived (17 was the record, on account of the character walking around with a bomb vest, like you do). ...a bomb vest, like, he's wandering around wearing C4 strapped to his chest and a detonator all the time?
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Dec 3, 2014 02:55
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theironjef posted:That's probably just because most people start in those systems. Lowest common denominator and all. Plus I bet that the more fiddly math they deal with the better they are at hiding the fact that sexual titillation among like-minded fetishists is pretty hard to do without being creeps at each other. If you were trying to play "Drink your own breastmilk out of your squirtgun sized nipple" in FATE, you'd be more regularly forced to confront the reality that you're just saying sex stuff, out of your own mind, to Don, who you have to play Magic with later this weekend. With D20, at least you can say "Sorry Don, the chart says you have extra dank sweat and automatically slide past the door of the donut shop into a pile of turkey offal." But I do agree that the reason so many fetish games run on d20 is because that's what people expect from tabletop RPG. People use d20s for Pathfinder, for D&D, for this and for that. And the people who get into the hobby for the first time, they get brought in through those mainstream d20 games. God knows my first game was playing a barbarian in 3.5. I play Pathfinder Society. And I keep finding so many indie games that give me the experience I really want. Pathfinder Society ends up just being the adventures of a traveling mob of poo poo-kickers and if you don't build a character who could kill, you don't do much. And there's mechanics and clunk to d20 systems, modifiers and probability curves, feats that aren't worth poo poo and feats that split the game in two. There are much better, lighter systems to run fantasy adventure games through. I love indie games because they're generally by people who want the emotion and story delivered through lighter gaming means. But they're not necessarily the games you get introduced into the hobby from. The folks who end up making their own homebrews often end up adopting the trappings of d20 because they A: know it and they B: know d20 sells, especially with the licenses. And they imitate the trappings of it so well that you end up with useless feats, overpowered feats, clunk and numbers. It's kind of sad and unfortunate, really. Fetish games, original ideas, doesn't matter. There's better ways to make and play what you want.
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Dec 8, 2014 20:22
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theironjef posted:One of the things that comes up a lot for me when reviewing licensed games is the silliness of adapting combat from a film and giving the players a big chance of failure. For example, Chewie fixes the hyperdrive by roaring and throwing wrenches around and getting bonked on the head for 30 seconds but in the game it takes a month and a bunch of high skill rolls. Indiana Jones rolls to whip the Nazi but instead whips his own eye real bad and has to take three weeks of gametime off. It also doesn't help that sex is super awkward to handle in games, especially in games that meet in person. I had a guy who kept joking that every time my character was getting healed with a wand of cure light wounds, it was being put in my character's rear end. I've got nothing against anal but it's like "man I don't know you, don't loving tell me you're putting stuff in my character's rear end to heal me, even if you're kidding that's just weird because I don't know you and you just think you're being funny". If you want to include ~MATURE THEMES~ in a game you just gotta really sit down and talk to everyone about their limits and that can be awkward too! Everyone's got their own kinks and hangups and they would mostly like to keep them to themselves, so asking them to lay them bare for the purposes of a group game is kinda on par with asking intimate details. And is any of what's going to happen in the game real? Hell no. But our own boundaries can stop us from having fun, just like real intimate contact. It's hard. It's hard to make a game more than just "I see the fat girl. I am aroused by the fat girl." "Roll for arousal." "Can I add my CON modifier?" "Sure". Using a storygame means you have to open up to each other and talk to each other and respect boundaries, and if one person isn't on board or is offended and you're not playing with people who are open-minded (or at least tolerant) then that can spiral out of control fast. But playing Point-Counter gently caress Master: The Penetrating, while being a lot more clinical and subdued and doesn't necessarily lead to as much vulnerability and exposing of your desires and personality, isn't that healthy either because you're trivializing something important and objectifying it. It's hard to find a comfortable middle ground. But I guess that's why it's so easy to make fun of Black Tokyo and furry fetish RPGs and this and that. They're already doing the job of making what they like seem so weird and finicky and trivial that it feels like they aren't taking their own interests seriously.
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Dec 8, 2014 21:13
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D&D Mechanics you say? I better see some Mummy Rot. 
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Dec 12, 2014 21:31
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Gazetteer posted:There is literally a move called Fungal Rot, which is what I was referring to there.
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Dec 13, 2014 00:25
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Kai Tave posted:There's an STD joke in there somewhere but it seems a little too tasteless. Hyper Crab Tank posted:I was thinking "this better not be a kid with HIV" because that sounds both on-theme and really loving horrible in a lot of uncomfortable ways. They're always wrapped. 
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Dec 13, 2014 02:09
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Maid pretty much got me into roleplaying in tabletop games. It holds a dumb little soft spot in my heart, especially if you run it on a PG-level. Is it perfect? Hell no. It's got a formulaic set-up and it can go off the rails pretty fast if the guy running it has no ideas (and that happened a lot). Can it end up creepy? Sure. Can it end up way too wacky? Sure. Is the book super clunky? Oh yeah, yeah it is. But I like the system, on a mechanical "run with it, run with it!" level. I like the randomized characters and I like having to run with what you rolled, and it's not perfect by any means at all. And I've stolen the mechanics (sans Affection and doing stuff for the master) because it's a fast simple system even if it gets bogged down by all the optional stuff you can roll. And I like "if you can explain why you should use this stat for this problem, go for it". I've since realized there's a lot of other indie games that use fast and light mechanics. And there's some games that do them better. I gently caress around with a lot of those now. It's not the best game, and it can be downright weird. But like I said, there's still a soft spot for it.
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Dec 19, 2014 04:32
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