FATAL & Friends 2014-15: The Neverending Storygame

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Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Covok posted:

Also, and I'm risking getting too personal here, but Wick's friend sounds like a piece of poo poo. Like, a sexist, misogynist douche.

I agree, though of course he's definitely Wick That Didn't Happen, dot txt.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2015 10:11

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 04:11

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

The Lone Badger posted:

The obvious answer is that they already have better security and living conditions then they could get anywhere else in the world. There's no reason to leave unless you're ideologically dedicated to opposing the Zoneminds, in which case you're better off as an agent-in-place (using your Moscow-facilitated access and mobility to help out VIRUS).

By God, Badger, you can't have soviet superspies coming out of Russia who don't have a reason to dramatically defect, murdering themselves in the process! Do they know the truth about Washington?

# ¿ Dec 28, 2015 04:29

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

The eternal great conflicts that drive narrative. Man vs. nature. Man vs. self. Man vs. cyborgs.

Also, if I had to make multiple major ape cultures up, I'd definitely start ripping off such mythological icons as Gorilla City from the Flash and the Planet of the Apes.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2015 12:16

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I sure wouldn't expect anyone to pre-emptively apologize for a game that wasn't like "FATAL" or "Varg's RPG" or "RaHoWa", especially if the real heinous stuff is in a supplement rather than the core book or is something like the charm person spell. I too bought myself a copy of Cthulhutech's core system, though I regret the purchase in hindsight. (I also regret buying Shadowrun core that year, but for wholly different reasons.)

# ¿ Dec 29, 2015 04:33

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

In the one game of Delta Green I played, we had two hours of masturbating over a gear list followed by a furtive attempt at investigation, concluded with a running poo poo-show of a gun battle that was more hilarious than anything due to the involvement of Insects from Shaggai.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2015 01:50

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Bieeardo posted:

My big favourites have been mentioned, so I'll try to break newer ground. TORG. TORG really strikes me as what the Discworld eventually developed into, with its varying degrees of awareness of narrative causality and the rules that drive that set of secondhand dimensions... but in the most horribly earnest, anal-retentive way, like people discussing how peasant railguns have revolutionized warfare, without a trace of humour. I'd love to see the setting rebuilt in a way that ejects that cascading mess of Everlaws and scenarios that can only be won if certain cards are drawn in a specific order and made it a game about stories, rather than a game about being in a universe operated by the rules of a clunky 90s RPG.

Edit: I thought to say something about the Forgotten Realms, but no. Taking out Elminster and Friends would be cruelty for its own sake, and beyond that you need to dig really, really deep to find anything particularly original to salvage from that accretion of sidebars and mess.

I have this old paperback copy of a bunch of short stories which attempted with various degrees of amusement to integrate TORG and another West End Games product line... Paranoia.

Which is also, upon a cursory Google search, surprisingly valuable! Anyway, I remember it ended with an Infrared drone defeating the bad guy, whoever that was.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2015 10:02

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Kurieg posted:

1920's-ish Russia in search of Baba Yaga and end up killing Rasputin.

If it's 1920s-ish and I encounter Rasputin, I would have some serious questions.

Fun fact: He was allegedly assassinated 99 years ago yesterday.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 11:37

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Doresh posted:

I know, but in modern day? With a dude who can turn into a horse? The only way to keep this a secret is if this is some isolated hillbilly community where everyone's cool about this one bloke shanking every lady

It's gothic punk, dammit. Also, the premise of at least one mass market paperback novel.

Didn't Brucato have some kind of meltdown over a fear that Mage 20th will lead to people accidentally invoking Choronzon or some poo poo? I'm so glad that Wraith 20th appears to just be cursed by ghosts.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 22:38

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Kavak posted:

There's a sidebar about playing Nephandi in Mage 20 that implies that, or at least that he thinks the game can work actual magic.

I suppose if you believe in occult practices and are larping it out or providing extended detailed invocations, the concern would not be wholly groundless. However, a description of the scene and a snatch or two of eldritch chanting to the wakshaani would probably not do it, I would expect. I would trust even lovely players to be willing to elide details of their characters' performances of ritual magic, purely because they are very long and boring, if you aren't an active participant. And even then it's pretty boring.

It would seem that the hazards of playing Mage are "becoming a person who posts about Mage a lot" or, potentially, "becoming John Wick." While these are dire fates, it is clear that either can happen for wholly non-magickal reasons.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 22:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Count Chocula posted:

As above, so below. By changing yourself, you change reality. This is usually a metaphor, but when dealing with all powerful reality warpers than it stops being metaphor. I guess this makes most Mages those ones that live in their own personal reality bubble, which I'm okay with. Your navel can also be the Omphalos, the Navel of the World.

I think the issue with Mage is creating situations where mages have to go out and actually do poo poo rather than crawling up their own rear end and reading a book. You can do this in Ars Magica but Ars Magica advertises it on the cover and even if your magus is jerking off to make the elixir of life for thirty years, you have companions, you have grogs.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2016 23:19

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Kurieg posted:

W20 ran into some of those problems because they have things like "the irish tribe", "The Mystic Native American Tribe" and "The Angry Native American Tribe" but they're a lot harder to excise since they're part of the games premise and they did what they could to minimize it and break some of the stereotypes in the W20 core and subsequent books.

Brucato added that stuff in.

Tribes in W20 also had at least some flex in it - I think they did anyway. Was there a formal way to change tribes? Like over half of them seemed like you could join them from other tribal backgrounds or as a random lost cub. COGgies, Bone Gnawers, Black Furies (if female), Stargazers maybe, etc. I think you could even join the Uktena if you were an outlander. (Not the Wendigo tho, presumably.)

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 07:22

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

FATAL and Friends 2016: Black Leaf's Revenge

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 21:50

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 04:11

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Thesaurasaurus posted:

True, but was this an intentional writing device to establish ambiguity, or just White Wolf's time-honored tradition of writers never communicating and then the editor just Frankensteins whatever they give him into a book?

Are we talking about the unreliable narration of "are you playing Werewolf or Mage" or the different ancient accounts?

I figured that the Garou had the broad outlines of their own past right - the Impergium happened in the past, even if it was likely distorted by folk memory even among the Garou. They did a War of Rage, etc. What should come up, I think, as an interesting complicating factor, is ancestor-spirits, who presumably would know to set things right. And boy, wouldn't that be a gothic punk campaign if you had to go murder some ancestor spirits so your revisionist Child of Gaia historical narrative wouldn't be contradicted at some inconvenient point?

# ¿ Jan 6, 2016 00:47

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