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Thesaurasaurus posted:Yeah the Realm is terrible but it's not actually much worse than its historical inspirations, the writing just doesn't elide those details as with D&D-style generic medieval fantasy. Its portrayal isn't static, either - the book goes into detail on how there have been real progressive/reformist movements, which if they aren't crushed are usually co-opted by the Empress and directed against her enemies, but even so hobbled the Realm is probably better for their presence. Of course, now the Empress has vanished and all bets are off - if your DB PC wants to make a real difference, now's the time. So far the Realm is actually better than contemporary empires and significantly better than historical ones. If the writers portrayed it accurately as an empire this thread would be a poo poo show of people screaming about the writers making it ridiculously evil.
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Jun 1, 2019 22:58
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There's multiple instances of the Realm crucifying entire peasant revolts; the cooption of peasant movements is directly comparable to Richard II's treatment of the ... I want to say levelers.
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Jun 1, 2019 23:03
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Did the Realm ever fight a war with a sovereign nation to force it to buy drugs.
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Jun 1, 2019 23:11
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Night10194 posted:Did the Realm ever fight a war with a sovereign nation to force it to buy drugs. Not that I can recall; that's really more the Guild's sort of thing. e: although I guess any war of conquest that led to a satrapy's incorporation under House Cynis administration would count.
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Jun 1, 2019 23:13
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Night10194 posted:Did the Realm ever fight a war with a sovereign nation to force it to buy drugs. Not explicitly, but I’m sure House Cynis enforces its drug monopoly on satrapies and doesn’t much care if they don’t want it. The main thing is that the Realm needs to be conducive to games where you can play decent DBs, who probably are reformers but who can stil, you know, let the players have the fun premise of being the princes of the earth.
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Jun 1, 2019 23:14
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Realm abolitionists are pretty much the same as British Imperial abolitionists, just with elemental magic.
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Jun 1, 2019 23:17
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Ratoslov posted:I think that's mostly because blowing up bauxite mines and ambushing flour trucks isn't very glamourous at all. anyone who said that has never seen the massive fireballs that flour can ignite.
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Jun 1, 2019 23:32
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Robindaybird posted:anyone who said that has never seen the massive fireballs that flour can ignite. Suspended organic dust is amazing. The sphere of fire at the heart of a coal fired power plant furnace is a thing to behold.
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Jun 1, 2019 23:34
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Night10194 posted:Did the Realm ever fight a war with a sovereign nation to force it to buy drugs. Is capitalism a thing in Exalted yet?
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Jun 2, 2019 02:22
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Libertad! posted:Is capitalism a thing in Exalted yet? The Guild is the closest thing, though it's more 1800s style mercantilism than modern capitalism.
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Jun 2, 2019 03:03
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Libertad! posted:Is capitalism a thing in Exalted yet?
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Jun 2, 2019 03:04
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Goblinville Gazette #1 2/x After dealing with a monster, the goblins will probably want to make camp to rest, recuperate, and repair. They have to make camp every four turns or start suffering conditions - unless they have some grog to quaff! The first requirement for making camp is a safe spot to set up in. Finding one, or getting back to a good one, might be risky, requiring an action roll.  Once encamped, every goblin needs to eat a ration or suffer a condition. After that they can choose between sleep or undertaking a camp action (recover, repair, forage, or make supplies). Sleep is good for your goblin. A ration and some sleep will remove the panicked and exhausted conditions. A goblin in worse shape, sick and/or injured can take the recover option. They will make an action roll (out of the normal marching order sequence) with the Danger of losing an inventory slot to a cool scar. They'll get their Action die, the Danger die, and can use a trait, title, or twist for more dice. On an Action die of 5-6 they clear their sick or injured track (not both !), on a 3-4 they reduce their condition to just exhausted or panicked as appropriate, and a 1-2 leaves them just as bad off as before making camp. The Danger of a scar resolves normally, on a 1-3 it happens. Besides resting and healing, camp is an opportunity to work on their stuff. Repairing is an Action roll with a GM-assigned danger such as being exhausted from working all night, breaking a tool, or making noise. If there might be food around, a goblin can forage. The results of this Action will vary depending on the current positioning of the group, but you aren't going to turn up a vast bounty of rations by poking around in the dark with a torch. You can also make stuff, more torches for example. Running out of torches puts you in a bad position. Avoiding that is worth losing alittle sleep. Making up some rope or something else handy would be worth an extra die later on. If the group is in real trouble they can camp twice in a row. Every goblin must eat another ration to get any benefit, and someone must keep watch as their camp action. There has been a lot of references to conditions so far. I'd suggest that they should have come before monsters and making camp in the book. Of course, that would only be two ophysical pages earlier so it isn't a major sin to leave them until now. There are five conditions: Exhausted - can't invoke titles Panicked - can't use traits Sick - add 1d6 to your Action roll, lose the highest die Injured - add 1d6 to your Action roll, lose the highest die Dead - dead If you suffer a condition you already have, an exhausted or panicked goblin marks sick or injured instead. A sick or injured goblin who suffers the same condition again dies. And that's why you camp every four turns ! I'm going to finish this update with... Sorcery ! "Sorcery is the art of commanding pixies to perform acts that goblins cannot. Any goblin can learn sorcery. To cast a spell, they must fulfill three requirements:" They know the spell - you can take a spell during character creation or learn them later. They have the spell materials - losing your spell components is a good Danger. You can try and make more in camp or buy them from a witch, if your town has one. They meet the spell's conditions - like with Iron Claw you have to keep staring at it. Here's the spells in the book, these are barely cantrips by D&D terms.  Casting spells is not an Action. If the conditions are met, the spell works. The Sorcery die (the one weird d6 you set aside when you started play) is rolled only to see what the spell cost the goblin. On a 6 they're fine, on a 3-5 the player marks a condition of their choice, and on a 1-2 they take Sick as a condition (and die if they're already Sick). You can add a Twist or risk running out of materials for an extra die, the possible Twists are in the "But Sometimes" column. There's an optional rule for Wild Magic. If you want a risky or unconventional outcome from a spell, roll an Action with the Danger being proportionate to how unconventional the spell use is. Add in the Sorcery die and resolve the Action roll normally, with the sorcery outcome as an extra space to allot a die to. Next up, Overland Travel ! And another sample goblin to tide you over until character creation. You're a green-ear Witch wearing an iron mask. You experienced a trial by fire and then your boss fired you. You are carrying 2 rations, 2 torches, some herbs, and a rat. You are wielding a sharpened stick.
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Jun 2, 2019 03:32
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Joe Slowboat posted:There's multiple instances of the Realm crucifying entire peasant revolts; the cooption of peasant movements is directly comparable to Richard II's treatment of the ... I want to say levelers. It's an unfortunate thing that I think this is fairly tame by the standards of empires. Then again I'm an American.
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Jun 2, 2019 05:05
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Nessus posted:In my view the most logical explanation consistent with the Palladium Mega-Verse is that Megaroad One, carrying Zentraedi factory and cloning equipment, came back for repairs and was hijacked by Papa Prosek, who was a hard man and made the hard decision to murder a bunch of fellow humans to take their poo poo for his own ambition. The coalition armed forces are seeded with micronized Zentraedi - he can't clone an entire army because he has to grow giants, then shrink them, because science and technology are for nerds and queers and non-Aryans, so he can't adjust the settings. What he can do is grow strong guys who he can condition to be bullies and able to beat up most of the Micronian conscripts if they prove insufficiently hard and willing to make the hard decision to just, like, do war crimes for no loving reason. TBF, I was once going to make the second stage of a campaign evolve into the reason why the Coalition has access to resources is because they've set up outposts in various stable rifts portals and have been exploiting the less-technologically-advanced dimensions. Like, the Coalition sends a battalion of infantry with their MD weapons and full-encapsulated MDC armor with SAMAS support and some slave 'borgs into your generic fantasy realm and they'll basically be running the show there in short order, with easily defeating any major threat and setting up local proxy militias with SDC weapons. The thing is, one of the factions in Rifts Japan does something similar and I wanted to have the idea that the players and a Coalition detachment get trapped when the PCs collapse the portal, but eventually end up in Rifts Japan because they're in an inhabited corner of the world and manage to get back to Rifts Earth.
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Jun 2, 2019 05:39
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 The Realm: The rest of Chapter 2 The All-Seeing was Her Redness' Secret Service, and the rest of the Realm is very aware of their existence; errant Dynasts sleep with one eye open, while novelists write cool spy novels for city-dwelling teenagers. As stated before, it's only a few years younger than the Empire itself and serves to make sure no one thinks themselves beyond its reach. It extends out from the Blessed Isle to its satrapies and into other city-states beyond those borders, gathering intelligence, doing wet work, and guiding the Wyld Hunt to its targets. The All-Seeing Eye is much like the magistracy in that it lacks formal structure; there's no office buildings where the All-Seeing Eye makes its headquarters. Instead, it prefers to spread its agents out, infiltrating every other organization and social group in the Realm. There is no agent that knows every other agent as a result, and few can even point out their peers. The All-Seeing Eye is divided into individual cells, which are run by handlers (almost always a mortal sorcerer or a Dragon-blood) who manages the actions of their agents in gathering useful information and then reporting it back to their supervising intelligencer. Handlers rarely manage more than six individuals, preferring to keep things small and simple. The intelligencers, who would direct all that they learned to the Empress via coded messages, sorcery and so on, likewise follow suit and never know who their peers are, so that on the chance that they are compromised, the damage is kept to a minimum. There's rarely anyone who has the sole job of being an agent; most are encouraged to flesh out their own personal lives (or assumed identities) to provide a better cover for themselves, and some can go for years without being contacted by their handler. A few agents are Dragon-blooded field operatives, who are tasked with eliminating anything that a more direct or large scale response could not. Predictably, these assassins are pretty loving good at what they do, and like all agents are entirely self-reliant. Each agent maintains their own asset network, suborning others into being informants. Assets often have no idea that they're a part of the All-Seeing Eye and are picked according to what information they can get for the agent. Household servants are especially popular, due to their positions and their low social status making them rarely thought of by their patrician and Dynast masters. The All-Seeing Eye has a substantial presence in the Scavenger Lands, especially in Lookshy, where they try to get as much information as possible for what the Seventh Legion wishes and misinform Lookshy's own secret service within the General Staff. The All-Seeing Eye, unlike the magistracy, can independently recruit others to its cause. Intelligencers were chosen directly by the Empress, but now that she's absent, some intelligencers train their handlers to replace them when the time comes. Handlers likewise can recruit their own agents in a simple process; once a potentially useful agent has been identified, the handler leaves a single token of a closed eye where only the potential recruit can find it. The agent-to-be is then watched for what they do next. The handler will arrange to kill those who blab about what they have been given, and will recruit those who have the good sense to keep quiet about it. Because of this, this symbol has become interpreted as a calling card the Eye leaves behind when they assassinate someone, and occasionally the Eye does actually use it like that as a way of reminding the populace that miscreants are never safe from them. Anyone outside of the Eye using it gets disappeared very quickly.  You figure that the All-Seeing Eye would have more funds (and more agents) if it didn't make its calling card out of highly valuable bronze and gemstones. Now that their one true spymaster is gone, the Eye's intelligencers have no idea who to report to in her absence. Some of them have turned to Bal Keraz for dearly needed funding and direction. Others have gone silent, and others still are using the information they gather for their own purposes, setting up criminal underworlds or suborning city-states to their own control. Others are now working for wealthier patrons in the Houses, serving them by turning their agents on the other Houses. Others are part of House Iselsi, who uses their intel to figure out who to slaughter on the promised day of retribution. Others have figured out their peers, and reach out to form alliances with each other. Some are even Sidereals, scrambling to figure out how to get the Bronze Faction's agenda back on track. The Deliberative was founded in RY 103, when the Empress was looking particularly weak after a series of failed invasions of the near East. Since she couldn't just slay every one of her critics, she founded the Deliberative as a way to mollify and neutralize them. One chamber was for the Dynasty, the other for patricians, and both served to make her critics and rivals waste their time on debating each other than actually directing their power towards deposing her. The Deliberative served as a rubber stamp for her own policies; anything the Empress didn't particularly care for was vetoed immediately, while policies that did reach her were either her own ideas to begin with, a good idea that floated up from one of the senators, or a compromise needed to save face. Now that she's gone, the Deliberative has actual power of its own for the first time in centuries. As mentioned before, the Deliberative has the Greater Chamber of senators and the Lesser Chamber of delegates. They meet in the ~*Palace of the Deliberative Senate of Exceedingly Judicious Nobles*~ in the Imperial City, where dozens of establishments have popped up to serve the needs of its politicians. Behind it is the Gardens of Peace and Law, a very soothing park where senators and delegates relax after long days of policy writing and ratfucking. The Palace's eastern wing contains all the various servants, guards, kitchens and so on that the Deliberative requires, while the west wing houses its grand entryway, as well as private quarters, libraries, galleries, and shrines for its politicians. The southern wing is the ~*Great Hall of Most Inspired and Noble Lawmaking*~, where the Greater Chamber holds court, and the northern wing contains the Lesser Chamber's ~*Hall of Contemplative and Prudent Debate*~. One gets the sense that the Empress wrote these names down while laughing her rear end off at the idiots who would be flattered by it. The Deliberative has many duties beyond legislation; it appoints judges, prefects, satrapial garrison commanders, high-ranked ministers, members of the Imperial Force, and other positions, as well as declaring which days are holidays, sponsoring graduates of Pasiap's Stair as legion officers, and a host of other things. They had a few limits; they can't change satrapial leases, raise a new Great House or strike an existing one from the ledgers, or really do anything the Empress considered too important for them. The Deliberative technically is in session all year round, but in practice the legislative season lasts from the start of the year in Ascending Air and ends in the final month of Descending Wood in the middle of the year. Sessions could be called out of season by the Empress, but again and again I will be forced to say she's gone. The size of each chamber varies; as of the current year, there's around 150 senators and 450 delegates. The Greater Chamber is where the Empress sent her idiot children to yell at each other. Senators are nearly always Dragon-blooded and were appointed by the Empress as a way to get them out of places where they actually were of import. New senators are voted on by the Deliberative and appointed by the Regent. Appointments are for life (oops), only terminating when the Empress wished it or on death. The Master of the Deliberative is elected for a yearly term by a two-thirds vote by the Greater Chamber, and is almost always a woman. The senators also elect an Incorruptible Secretary to tally every vote and a Guardian of the Enlightened Discourse to run the Guardians of the Greater Chamber (basically the security guards). A term can be ended prematurely through a no-confidence vote; Ragara Julinei, the current Master and an incredibly corrupt person, is fearfully awaiting the day one gets called on her. As always, there are political factions. Usually, members of the same House vote together, but since no House is overly represented, factions serve to bridge gaps between the others. The most major ones are the Yellow Banner reformists, the conservative Old Dragons, and Ragara Julinei's loyalist faction (insultingly nicknamed the Jade Eaters). While the Jade Eaters are first and foremost concerned with making sure their current Master stays on to enable their grift, the others fret about what candidate should seat the throne. The Yellow Banners are divided on the matter but lean towards V'neef, while the Old Dragons are divided between those who want to wait for the Empress to return and those who back her oldest daughter, Mnemon. Some, however, have broken ranks; there's a few Old Dragons and Jade Eaters wanting to support a dark horse candidate, Sesus Raenyah, who is the current matriarch of House Sesus. Legislation starts in the Greater Chamber as a ~*Declaration of Harmonious Intent*~, composed by a sponsoring senator and backed by the composer and two other senators. Each Declaration must be hand-delivered to the Master at the start of a session; being first in line is considered a great boon, while being late makes people wonder why you even bothered if you don't care enough about your Declaraton to be early. The session can't begin until every Declaration is delivered and thus will often begin at night (no wonder senators hate late-comers), and flooding the Master with dumb Declarations is a tactic used to stall the opening of debates. Once every Declaration is received, the Master reads each one out to the Greater Chamber; while she cannot officially refuse to read a Declaration, she can just dump one as "unsuitable" for various "faults" in its writing. After one is read, a vote is called to bring it to debate. If a simple majority is achieved, the Declaration is burned in a ceremonial brazier (presumably someone makes a copy first) and the Secretary adds it to a list of topics. If the vote fails, it gets handed back to its sponsor to shame them. After all this is done, debate starts. The order of what gets debated is based soley on the Master's whims. A Declaration's writer introduces their legislation, and then after they conclude, the rest of the Chamber may speak (again, in an order chosen by the Master). There are no time limits, thus creating a horrible system in which an Exalted politician can filibuster for days through the power of the Earth's own Essence. If a debate stalls, the motion can be tabled for a later date, but otherwise once debate concludes, a vote is called. Simple majority sends it to the Lesser Chamber, where it's heavily expected that those mortal shits pass it or face the wrath of the Dragon-blooded nobility that pass it. A senator can ditch sessions, and it's not considered bad if its only a few days, but months of dereliction are punished; even without the Empress, the Greater Chamber will gently caress over anyone who dodges out on their duty. The Lesser Chamber is made up of patricians, wealthy peasants, cadet house members, and satrapial nobility selected by the Greater Chamber; a few are Dragon-blooded, but they're exceptions to the rule. The ideal delegate is a pliable and weak-willed patsy who will sign off on whatever comes down from the Greater Chamber. A delegate can only be dismissed by the Empress. They elect their own Master of the Lesser Chamber, as well as a ~*Scrupulous Monitor of the Will of the People*~ to tally votes and a Protector of the Debate to run the guards outside the place. The current Master of the Lesser Chamber is Tide Lojan, a patrician whose family has served House Peleps for decades, and her mother had the same post when she was a delegate. The Master reads every motion that comes from the Greater Chamber (the Lesser Chamber cannot introduce its own legislation and any member must petition a senator to do so), and then waits for a shouting match to begin as 450 rich dumbasses ignore her chosen speaking order. Once a vote is called, the motion passes (unless two-thirds of the delegates vote against it) and gets sent to the Regent, who immediately approves it and then returns to jacking off to Immaculate scripture (why is this still a thing the devs like). If the motion fails, it goes back to the Greater Chamber tied in black and red ribbons.  Delegates debate furiously over a mysterious motion passed in the Greater Chamber that only says "hot cube". While the Lesser Chamber is expected to be nothing more than a ceremonial speedbump, the delegates have no love for the senators and also love to show off their debate skills. Thus, even simple things n one has any real objections to can take forever as the various patricians and nobles yell at each other for days on end. If a matter is extremely important, it may be rushed, and senators often will bribe delegates if their patience runs out. As you can see, a system made to waste people's time with partisan nonsense doesn't actually work well once the real power at the steering wheel vanishes; back when the Empress was in charge, her veto was impossible to overrun unless every single senator and delegate (minus one for each chamber) voted it back in. Nowadays, the Chambers serve as their own stopping blocks. There's an astounding amount of money in the Realm. The Empress was the world's wealthiest person, after all, and she controlled the wealthiest nation's economy via altering pay scales to those in her service, changing tax rates, altering the stipends of Great Houses to make them change their prefectural taxes, handing out grain to alleviate famines, and sending out legions to get more nations to pay tribute to her. The Realm always demands jade tribute, but also would mandate other certain tributes; silver is common, as are other resources that the Realm desires, such as timber, cloth, spices, and so on. The Empress was also the biggest creditor, loaning her vast wealth out to whoever she wished and subsidizing businesses and entire governments she wished to see thrive. Thus, the Realm might shut out the Guild entirely from one location by making it too costly to compete, and rivals punished with higher interest rates. The Realm stimulated trade quite a bit, both with its incredible wealth and with its navy destroying piracy wherever it may be and its garrisons putting bandits in satrapies to the sword so that traders are more encouraged to travel its routes. Of course, this is also tempered by the fact that the Realm's fiscal policy is usually very aggressive. Those who it loans to cannot trade with the Guild or compete with the Realm, and usually they are commanded to contract with the Realm's merchants or purchase Imperial bonds. Raising interest rates to insane levels and then offering refinancing forced parties to offer concessions they otherwise would not have to the Empress. Satrapies could be destroyed by demanding they repay "damages" suffered by the legions or by predatory loans given to the satrapial nobilty; the ensuing crippling of infrastructure, mass starvation, and so on would do the rest. The Empress could cancel or pay the debt of others, freeing them to work on new projects and consume the Empire's many products. Amnesty could end peasant and satrapial revolts in a heartbeat. House Ragara always hated it when the Empress did this, and worries constantly about a new factor getting that power. Now that's she gone (gently caress me I've typed this like 20 times), trade suffers for her absence on the whole; while there's no longer a giant predatory rear end in a top hat at the reins, there's now multiple assholes offering the same types of loans among House Ragara and the Guild as the Imperial Treasury is no longer able and willing to make riskier loans and investments. Since Peleps is now focused on warring with V'neef in the West, the pirates of the other Directions are freed up to hoist the black flag and capture vessels as they wish. The legions are almost all recalled to the Isle, allowing banditry to prosper and enabling countries to raid their neighbors and their caravans without much fear of retribution. Of particular note in the Realm's economy is salt. Salt's pretty useful in Creation; apart from being a good and tasty food preservative, it helps deal with pesky ghosts and other incorporeal undead as they cannot cross lines made of the stuff. Where there is salt, there are salt gods, hundreds of which dwell in the Realm overseeing its salt flats, marshes, and salt mines. Since salt is so valuable and these gods are so wide-spread, these gods were offered a deal by the Empress: a flat rate of two percent of the worth of salt extracted given as sacrifice to them. Over the years, the salt rate has fluctuated and changed, which is important since loan rates were pinned to the salt rate. By 763, the rate was four percent, although now that the Realm's gone to poo poo, various gods are deviating from the rate and demanding more which in turn causes banks to demand more. Since the Blessed Isle doesn't have the fangs it used to, many satrapies have stopped paying tribute altogether. The Threshold is getting quite rich as a result of this, and this of course frees its city-states up to go trading and conquering. They're not idiots though, and all keep a close watch on the Realm in case it gets its poo poo together under a new leader or its civil war spills out into the Threshold. All the creditors on the Isle are calling in their debts now before they or the debtor die. Peasants, no longer able to keep up with more and more exorbant exploitation, get dispossessed en masse and become hordes of bandits, cheap laborers, or rebels. Fear of the Realm's collapse is making more and more people demand jade or silver over credit. The few satrapies that are still under firm control make up the difference, their mines being sucked dry and their workers dying in droves to meet demands, while the Houses search for more areas to meet demands. As any idiot noble can tell you, uncertain times can make for good business, and this is a perfect time for foreign Dragon-bloods and other kinds of Exalted to make bank; a Dawn Caste pirate lord can take advantage of weakened patrols to build up an armada off the stolen treasure, and a Wood Aspect caravan master can take routes no mere mortal can and fend off banditry with her prodigious skils as an archer. Next up: Chapter 3 - The Might of the Realm. Let's talk about legions.
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Jun 2, 2019 10:24
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 Rifts Coalition Wars 4: Cyber-Knights, part 9- "The individual(s) stolen away may be earmarked for slave labor, torture, food (as in, to be killed and eaten), rape, sale into slavery, human sacrifice, and so on."  "We demons will save these people from you awful knights!" And now we can wrap up all the adventure hooks in this book. Do the Right Thing: Wars are grey, which makes it tough for white knights to keep the stains out. The "Sorcerers' Revenge" resulted in outright slaughter of Coalition troops. Some knights helped! Some knights tried to stop it! Others decided that the truth was somewhere in the middle! The middle being "serving anywhere else", anyway. So these are hooks about that! But not necessarily.
 "Don't worry, we're the armored goons you can trust." The Great Crusade: While Coake's loyal Cyber-Knights have been banned from taking sides in the way, many have set up border camps for refugees. The Tundra Rangers have taken on an agreement to shepherd some to safe refuge in Canada, but in general the refugee situation will grow out of the Cyber-Knight's control. Some tragically return to Tolkeen after the "victory" against the Coalition. A town called Serenity is their central rally point, and it presumes the PCs will be helping with this.
Cyber-Knight Armor Lastly, there's some guidelines on classic futuristic armor produced by Bandito Arms or the Black Market (gosh, working with some really upstanding folks, Cyber-Knights!)... or Northern Gun. Some are environmentally sealed, cheap ones are not, and they vary from 25 for "Light Cyber-Knight Armor" to up to 100 for "Modern-Looking Heavy Cyber-Knight Composite Plate". Pithy. Also, some are Techno-Wizard armors and might have silencing magic, lightweight enchantments to avoid penalties, etc. We're told Coalition Wars 6 will have additional TW features for armor. It will not. Conclusion Well, this has been a complete tangent. Moving on. THE END OF "CYBER-KNIGHTS". 336 PAGES REMAIN OF THE COALITION WARS.
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Jun 2, 2019 13:44
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Lord Coake comes off as a giant dick. "Help innocents? NO! That would be taking a side!" What's next, saying the CS has some lovely people?
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Jun 2, 2019 15:49
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Young Freud posted:TBF, I was once going to make the second stage of a campaign evolve into the reason why the Coalition has access to resources is because they've set up outposts in various stable rifts portals and have been exploiting the less-technologically-advanced dimensions. Yeah. I'm reminded of being very young and loving Rifts, but playing RPGs with college students, one of which complained that the Coalition's infrastructure made no sense... out of the corebook in the 1990s. As Night mentioned, it seems to be built on the notion of evil empires rarely having to worry about this sort of thing in genre fiction, despite the fact that the Coalition explicitly is working to keep its citizens ignorant and illiterate. You'd think they'd need armies of technically proficient people to keep their highly mechanized forces in working order, but apparently they must teach things like maintenance by repetition and videos alone? That's without even getting into actually getting the resources they would need, chiefly nuclear materials by the truckload. Granted, nanotech is a technology in Rifts, but generally only for medical purposes rather than material manufacturing. You could use that to justify some of it, but that would be a big enough technological jump that it'd mean a lot of ramifications for the Coalition and the setting. Dawgstar posted:Lord Coake comes off as a giant dick. "Help innocents? NO! That would be taking a side!" What's next, saying the CS has some lovely people? He's an in-character example of Rifts' toxic centrism.
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Jun 2, 2019 16:02
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If I was to be a lot less charitable I'd suggest that 'fascist empire of unending resources that can throw its people away like they were nothing and never has to worry about things like running out of tungsten or rationing fuel for its ultra-heavy 11 cannon building sized hypertank' is specifically a fantasy that appeals a lot to the fascists. Given that the opposite was true in reality. More charitably, and more usually, it's much more 'They have infinite overall resources so that the main way to stop them is for your small group of heroes to have a really dramatic, personal showdown with the Emperor during a daring fools-mate adventure.'
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Jun 2, 2019 16:08
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The nonsense logistics would be a lot easier to take (and handwave away) if Rifts wasn't so full of hyper-detailed setting information about numbers and costs and resources and populations and unit sizes and a zillion other pieces of ungameable garbage. Here, have book after book of tedious almanac data that actually makes your game worse and harder to credibly run the more deeply you engage with it.
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Jun 2, 2019 16:18
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Don't forget that the Coalition is built on land where 99% of the valuable stuff has already been mined out today and has no meaningful allies to trade with. And yet they can afford to throw away millions of tons of military-grade steel on a whim. I don't think Kevin Siembieda understands how numbers work. e: More to the point: giving the evil empire endless resources is fine as long as they're the evil empire; they exist to provide targets for the PCs to shoot at. But the Coalition are (apparently, impossibly) supposed to be viewed as kinda good guys, which makes giving them this trait blatantly idiotic "nuh uh, cuz my tank has anti-shield laser beams" pandering. megane fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jun 2, 2019 |
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Jun 2, 2019 16:24
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Things Kevin understands: That manual formatting machine.
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Jun 2, 2019 16:27
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megane posted:Don't forget that the Coalition is built on land where 99% of the valuable stuff has already been mined out today and has no meaningful allies to trade with. And yet they can afford to throw away millions of tons of military-grade steel on a whim. The issue is, the 2nd reason I gave can unfortunately become fodder for the 1st without even meaning to, and can eventually slide further and further into that as its norm, as it seems to with the Coalition. A bit like the Star Wars Empire: You start out with the skull zeppelins and endless robot armies, but then some people think those are rad and want to play as them. You give the Evil Empire actual demons to shoot, and suddenly some portion of your fanbase starts saying 'well they're awful, but at least they're killing the worse guys'. And then suddenly where once was an Empire designed to let you fight Prosek or something and save the day (though I don't think the Coalition was ever really like that, given how the setting treats them) suddenly becomes 'Heroes of Humanity' and oh dear. E: This whole thing is something I think about an awful lot while working on the Hams Fantasy stuff, because I think for the most part their Empire avoids it, primarily because it's a tradition going all the way back to 1e that Witch Hunters are kind of lunatics who are (unless they are PCs) generally more likely to cause you trouble than actually fix much. Like how the Witch Hunter Trio of Hard Men do absolutely nothing but make things worse by being arrogant jackasses in Ashes and can make a return appearance to do the same in Forges if you aren't careful and let them in on the mission. That, and 'We fight demons' is portrayed as the absolute bare minimum for being sane, rather than moral. Of course you fight demons. The demons want to kill everyone. It's never really given as an excuse for other excesses, because the excesses are usually portrayed as actively helping the demons. Even when they were intended to fight them. Burn down the whole village to be sure you got one heretic? Those peoples relatives are pissed and also, you uh, burned down a whole village. So the heretic's plans still destroyed a village, and they still kind of won. Good work. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jun 2, 2019 |
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Jun 2, 2019 16:31
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FMguru posted:The nonsense logistics would be a lot easier to take (and handwave away) if Rifts wasn't so full of hyper-detailed setting information about numbers and costs and resources and populations and unit sizes and a zillion other pieces of ungameable garbage. No joke. We just got the racial but ethnic breakdown of Cyber-Knights. Dawgstar fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Jun 2, 2019 |
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Jun 2, 2019 16:39
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In general you have to be really careful adding no poo poo evil demons who want to kill everyone to a setting. The same way you have to be careful about massive swarms of unreasoning killer bug aliens. ''Huge swarm of dehumanized enemies who want nothing but death and destruction." is how you end up with Heroes of Humanity. The RIFTs Coalition States are really a huge example of pits not to fall into.
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Jun 2, 2019 16:45
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That's without even getting into actually getting the resources they would need, chiefly nuclear materials by the truckload. Granted, nanotech is a technology in Rifts, but generally only for medical purposes rather than material manufacturing. You could use that to justify some of it, but that would be a big enough technological jump that it'd mean a lot of ramifications for the Coalition and the setting. My guess is that the reactors are fusion running off deuterium or tritium, which you could get supposedly readily from water. But the Coalition genociding beings from other dimensions while looting said dimensions feels extraordinarily relevant that it probably should have explored. It would also give them the ability to discriminate human DBs from Rifts Earth humans like measuring radioactive isotopes vs. people who live on Earth.
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Jun 2, 2019 18:33
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What are two great tastes that taste great together? I don’t know either. You get this instead. Introduction and  In 1995, Chaosium licensed Call of Cthulhu out to Steve Jackson Games for use in their own GURPS game line. But not for a direct adaptation, no; got to avoid direct competition, you understand. Instead they decided to mash it up with Cyberworld, GURPS’s pet cyberpunk setting, for reasons that remain blessedly obscured to mortals. After conducting foul ceremonies culminating in the ritual sacrifice of a Wizards of the Coast employee, probably, they summoned another GURPS awkward marriage like Zombieland, USA – except this one seems quite a bit better put together. Let’s take a look, shall we? “the first two lines of GURPS Cthulhupunk” posted:CthulhuPunk. The Cthulhu Mythos meets cyberpunk. At first glance, it might seem an unlikely combination. Yeah, book, no foolin’. The author’s reasoning goes like this: fiction about both the 20s and 30s and about cyberpunk both feature impoverished and oppressed masses, flashy and dramatic criminals, revolutionary new technology, and creeping, authoritarian power structures. When you throw Lovecraft in to that first category, both genres deal with fundamentally hopeless worlds where the efforts of the individual don’t truly matter and where incomprehensible, distant forces shape their lives with or without their knowledge. Protagonists can’t hope to overturn those forces (and usually don’t even try), but they can fight those forces and win; after all, even Lovecraft had Ol’ Squidly himself meet his (temporary) end at the hands of a motorboat, and the Treasury Department disappear Innsmouth’s population and dynamite the Deep Ones’ reef off the coast. That, then, is where the PCs figure in: while complete victory is beyond them, they can go up against local threats and take them down, keeping themselves and the people around them alive a short while longer. Fair enough, let’s see how the premise holds up.  Hey, it’s Vampironica! The art in this thing is amazing – real gonzo, lots of blood and tentacles and cybernetic bits, appropriate stuff to the setting. The layout, on the other hand… ehh, it’s fine. It combines the standard GURPS Third Edition main-column-and-sidebars I’ve run into elsewhere with the occasional unexpected lurch into a two-main-column format; a bit confusing, but I’ve seen worse. As for the typography, it’s pretty obvious they scanned the book with word recognition software when converting it to a PDF; the text seems to switch font every few words and creative misspellings pop up wherever the software got confused (either that or they call the continent flfrica). I mean, praise the Gate, Key, and Guardian that I can copy and paste text from it, but it sure looks hilarious. I feel bad about taking points off for this one, given it’s a mechanical error rather than a mistake on the part of the writer, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll list my favorite misspelling from that section at the end of each part of this review. See if you can tell what each one used to be! There’s the legally-required short story at the start of each chapter to introduce you to the setting, but…  Yeah, no. The first chapter covers the Cthulhu Mythos in general in a brief 20 pages. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you know the general outline, so I’ll gloss over most of this. After explaining the existential horror that underlies the whole thing, the author lists out notable gods, grimoires, locations, and artifacts, blazing through its history as a concept and advice for GMs trying to role-play incomprehensible ancient monstrosities before culminating in a timeline that links everything together. By far the most interesting part of the chapter lies in the last set of sidebars, which examines how and why this stuff could’ve slipped under the radar past modern information technology and remained secret – and it appears to have been written in isolation from the next chapter.  World-class home defense technology. Let’s take it from the top. Provided information is in normal font, later setting information is in italics.
I get the feeling the author stole most of this chapter from CoC’s setting bible and reworded it for public consumption. Oh well, it gets the job done. As an aside, I just realized: most surviving copies of ancient, forbidden texts in Cthulhuoid settings were printed, not hand written – not just here, but in general. Can you imagine? Taking a look at a book about summoning demons from beyond the stars and deciding, "I'm gonna sell this on the mass-market!"  A picture of idols/worship aids for various cults. I like it, gives a visual reference point for GMs and players Typo of the Day: hov e ; Next Time: Cyberworld setting information; you can fit an entire color magazine into 500 kB.
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Jun 2, 2019 18:36
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here]. On the other hand, a few subcultures do know a bit about Mythos stuff, enough for a fake Necronomicon to make the rounds on shadier parts of the web.
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There's something ironic about the fact that the unknowable horrors from beyond the stars get mashed up with everything specifically because they're so well known.
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Jun 2, 2019 18:40
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megane posted:Don't forget that the Coalition is built on land where 99% of the valuable stuff has already been mined out today and has no meaningful allies to trade with. And yet they can afford to throw away millions of tons of military-grade steel on a whim. Well, it's not clear what "Mega-Damage" materials are made of, but presumably it's not easier than steel to make.
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Jun 2, 2019 19:06
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, it's not clear what "Mega-Damage" materials are made of, but presumably it's not easier than steel to make. Well, it's RIFTS, are you gonna tell me there are no Mega Damage trees?
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Jun 2, 2019 19:26
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I know 'canon' Cthulhupunk is set in the Cyberworld... world. I'm pretty sure the chapter POV characters are the same ones too. Unfortunately, so is the slang.
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Jun 2, 2019 19:35
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PurpleXVI posted:Well, it's RIFTS, are you gonna tell me there are no Mega Damage trees? Well, you have to get past mega-druids or mega-elves or mega-indigenes to get at them. Also, I haven't seen any wood-paneled skull robots in the art.
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Jun 2, 2019 19:55
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, you have to get past mega-druids or mega-elves or mega-indigenes to get at them. That would be a cool setting conceit, though. If the Coalition's hyper-tech was all made of wood and bark from alien trees they farmed.
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Jun 2, 2019 19:57
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Night10194 posted:That would be a cool setting conceit, though. If the Coalition's hyper-tech was all made of wood and bark from alien trees they farmed. This reminds me of Norman Spinrad's Iron Dream. It was a 1970s story within a story book in an alternate universe where Adolf Hitler gave up on politics in the 1920s and became a sci-fi writer in the USA. Barring some epilogue news articles and reviews it is entirely written in-character of his novel, Lord of the Swastika. Alt-Universe Hitler's setting was a lot like Rift's Coalition. Their technological know-how was all over the place: in less than 3 years they went from using wood-burning fuel for 19th century style locomotives to motorcycles and space rockets. This was all handwaved in-universe as the master race of "pure, unmutated humanity" being Just That Good. Although the book had an in-setting bias, it was quite clear that the sci-fi Nazis were still evil thugs, unconcerned about civilian casualties of their own, even being contemptuous of humans unlucky enough to be psychically enslaved by the Dominators (Jewish stand-ins) through no fault of their own. There's also the fact that barring the Dominators the mutants overall are not evil or even violent, just literally too stupid to survive on their own. The Sons of the Swastika are the instigators in the inevitable race war. RIFTS' treatment of the Coalition sound a lot like this, but without the level of self-awareness in that said book had epilogue articles and reviews pointing out the flaws in Hitler's work. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Jun 2, 2019 |
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Jun 2, 2019 20:08
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Spinrad also wrote a recent novel called Osama the Gun which is in many ways a more refined way of telling a story through the viewpoint of the villain.
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Jun 2, 2019 20:29
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Libertad! posted:RIFTS' treatment of the Coalition sound a lot like this, but without the level of self-awareness in that said book had epilogue articles and reviews pointing out the flaws in Hitler's work. That's basically Spinrad's point: that there are a lot of parallels between Nazi mythologizing and common pulp narratives, and that we have to be mindful of the message our "simple fun" tells. RIFTS is that kind of ignorance of its own message: uncritically repeating pulp ideas in a way that ends up legitimizing a fictional fascist government and the narrative that runs with it.
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Jun 2, 2019 20:43
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Remember that like every Kevin Siembieda book rants about how he doesn't think it's possible to be true neutral?
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Jun 2, 2019 21:04
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OF COURSE Kevin will be the absolute last person to enshrine the alignment system. Why did I ever doubt.
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Jun 2, 2019 21:24
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Wrestlepig posted:Remember that like every Kevin Siembieda book rants about how he doesn't think it's possible to be true neutral? Well, he just cut and pastes the same alignment system over and over, even though alignment usually only comes into play as a means to keep PCs from stealing the baddies' magical goodies. Night10194 posted:That would be a cool setting conceit, though. If the Coalition's hyper-tech was all made of wood and bark from alien trees they farmed. Rifts spawns a lot more cool ideas than it actually has.
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Jun 2, 2019 21:29
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Stephenls posted:Play venues, then. Well, I'm not proposing that there be a "Dynasts but good guys" faction, I'm saying that there's no noteworthy group of Dragon-bloods whose good traits outshine the bad apart from maybe the Forest Witches. While each big organization is heroic and would do everything they could to repel, say, a massive scale Fair Folk invasion or an army of the undead, that's tempered by the fact that the Realm is a rapacious and cruel empire, Lookshy is a slightly less cruel Sparta, and Prasad is a caste-restricted empire that likes to make its Dragon-bloods into god-kings. I think the Sisterhood of Pearls is a good start, but they have a few rough edges that make them hard to play as, being pacifists restricted to only one island tends to make it hard to justify why they're out adventuring with a bunch of violent assholes. Also I feel like you guys maybe sweat it too much that you HAD to have big reasons for why gay and trans people are accepted in the Realm? China was perfectly fine with gay people so long as they did their duty and produced heirs in between loving around with their consorts, and many Asian and Native American ethnic groups had the concept of there being more than two genders. It's not that much of a stretch in a society where sorcery is common enough among the nobility that reproduction between people who are normally incompatible in that way is possible, being gay or trans is fine, especially now that the phobia against sorcery has been toned down to where everyone is fine using their services but no one is fine with inviting them to parties.
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Jun 2, 2019 21:44
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