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LatwPIAT posted:Real-world tragedies is not something you should be appropriating for your game. When you say that all these horrible things, like the Mason family murders, and the loving Holocaust, may have happened because of magick, it sanitises the tragedies by claiming they're supernatural in nature. Genocide and mass killings become the stuff of fantasy, which is disrespectful to the victims. Disrepectful, yes. Also, the length of time in these "magic in the real world" games between when players start talking about the spell system and when someone drags Hitler or some serial killer into it is usually measured in seconds. It's so common that a UA Clicheomancer wouldn't even get a minor charge out of it.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:53
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theironjef posted:Disrepectful, yes. Also, the length of time in these "magic in the real world" games between when players start talking about the spell system and when someone drags Hitler or some serial killer into it is usually measured in seconds. It's so common that a UA Clicheomancer wouldn't even get a minor charge out of it. I think the worst case of this I saw was Psi-Watch by Chris A. Field, where he tried to make so many atrocities ones caused by his Evil Conspiracy, even loving Bhopal. It genuinely made me angry.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:12
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Even Onyx Path has moved away from that poo poo these days most of the time. Well, I say that, but the latest book they put out has Aokigahara in Japan (y'know, the forest where people go to commit suicide a lot) be caused by an angel of the God-Machine hanging out there encouraging suicide in order to have willing sacrifices to prevent Mount Fuji from exploding. Still not sure how I feel about that, since, like, Aokigahara is on the one hand spooky as poo poo and on the other hand actually a real place where people go to kill themselves a lot.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:40
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Mors Rattus posted:Even Onyx Path has moved away from that poo poo these days most of the time. Seriously, just reading the signs they have up in that forest is pretty heartbreaking. They don't even bother to be official "no trespassing" or anything like that, they're straight up pleas like, "think of your family."
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Jan 7, 2016 20:01
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LornMarkus posted:Seriously, just reading the signs they have up in that forest is pretty heartbreaking. They don't even bother to be official "no trespassing" or anything like that, they're straight up pleas like, "think of your family." Part of me thinks that if it's that much of a problem, maybe they should develop the land or something. Nobody will commit suicide if they put up a Walmart there, only just work themselves to death.
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Jan 7, 2016 20:15
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LornMarkus posted:Seriously, just reading the signs they have up in that forest is pretty heartbreaking. They don't even bother to be official "no trespassing" or anything like that, they're straight up pleas like, "think of your family." Not sure if that family sign would help or actually do the opposite and precipitate the suicide.
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Jan 7, 2016 20:20
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And some creeps thought it'd be bright to make a horror movie out of it. But really, attributing every atrocity to spoopy magic or an ancient conspiracy is disgusting, and offensive - it turns these real things into some kind of saturday morning cartoon incident. And there are many, many atrocities that have trouble gaining traction for people to acknowledge it actually happen, so by going "Oh Supernatural group started it!" undermines real life efforts to raise awareness or try to learn from said incidents, because players would think it's a made up thing. Sorry if I seem incoherent, but I'm pretty mad about this and I have a hard time expressing words to describe why.
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Jan 7, 2016 20:32
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Young Freud posted:Part of me thinks that if it's that much of a problem, maybe they should develop the land or something. Unlikely. Aokigahara is dense, sits on hard volcanic rock and caverns, and covers around 14 square miles. And it's right tnext to Mount Fuji. Speaking of Japan... (Splitting this up for the archive bot) Doresh fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 20:33
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Double Cross - Public Enemy Professor Caudwell and his supposed children - except for the girl with the teddy. She's a ninja or something. EDIT: Crap, no Professor here, and only one of his kids. Introduction - Terrorists Assemble Another thread, another Double Cross supplement. Corny Monologues (tm) posted:We are False Hearts. In what must be the most John Wick of all the DX supplements (man, associating him with DX in any way just feels wrong), Public Enemy is (almost) entirely about playing as a member of False Hearts, the main antagonists of DX. Unlike John Wick, Public Enemy doesn't go "False Hearts are actually the good guys!". It's well aware the FH members are self-centered jerks at best and mass-murdering psychopaths at worst, which is probably not the best setup for a long campaign (though that's not really what Japanese RPGs are about, anyways). Aside from rules for creating False Hearts characters and a couple FH-exclusive T-Loises and Equipment, we get more in-depth information about False Hearts than ever before, which is why I skipped all the FH stuff and characters from the last book. Some are just easier to explain and/or understand with this book's informations. As a little extra nugget, the book also introduces rules and guidelines for Random Scenarios. Those aren't your typical random adventures were the GM rolls up some goals and complications beforehand and turns it into something coherent. A good chunk of the randomness is rolled up during play, requiring input from both the players and the GM to make sense of it. I'm certainly looking forward to these rules, and the templates presented - especially a certain one with a bit of a The Thing vibe. False Hearts and You FH characters are a bit more restricted in their Work selection, as they have pick one of the FH-exclusive ones. Since they relish more in their power and life closer on the edge of becoming a Gjaum, FH characters also have to start with at least one T-Lois. This can be any eligible one from the Advanced Rulebook, but the FH-exclusive ones presented in this supplement are recommended, mainly because they have the added side-effect of granting the character access to FH-exclusive Equipment. As the pregen characters in this book cover almost all Works available to False Hearts members and all of the FH-exclusive T-Loises, I figured I can present all that stuff through them: Meet the Pregens Like the previous books, this one starts with a little comic, in this case 4 pages about the new pregen characters (all members of the same FH cell) having a meeting.   Underaged FH members have issues. In order of appearance: Bloody Trump is the dumb fighter / main protagonist guy and essentially an evil, brooding version of corebook pregen Wild Card, right down to being a Chimaera Overed who kills stuff with a big claw. Unlike Wild Card, Bloody Trump also has the Bram Stoker Syndrome. This makes his claw look more evil, and gives him an excuse to weep blood when using his powers.  Not entire sure what "Joker's Blood" is there for, but it does sound better than Bloody Trump. Bloody Trump has the most common Work of a FH character: The FH Agent, which is a direct counterpart to the UGN Agent, if a bit less formal. His T-Lois is Super Soldier, which further amplifies his role as the big dumb fighter. All of his attacks deal more damage, but he's quick to go on a rampage and easy to mess with through mental powers since his <Will> is penalized. Purple Moonlight is your expy for Speeding Bullets, aka your long-range blaster support. Being a pure Angel Halo, she shreds stuff with purple laser beams instead of summoning energy pistols. She is also a FH Child, who is similar to an UGN Child and that she has been raised and trained by her organization from a very young age. False Hearts' training program is pretty brutal and has a high body count, in parts due to it focusing more about how awesome using powers is instead of how to control those powers. Add in a few cases of deliberate psychological torture and a few experiments, and you can see why most FH Children tend to be sociopathic killers.  Who said murder hobos can't be little girls? Unsurprisingly, her T-Lois is Destructive Child. Thanks to the above training from hell, our little mass murderer in the making can permanently beef up one of her powers. The Fanged Swordsman is a tough Exile/Morpheus/Balor dude who fights with a bone sword he can boost through gravity control and wield very efficiently thanks to his bendy and stretchy arms.  Sounds like a fun moveset for a Dynasty Warriors game. He also has the first Work that's not a direct counterpart to any of the UGN Works: The FH Merc. They are a bit like Illegals in concept, as they aren't technically members of False Hearts. Instead, they are tough mercenary Overed dudes who just happen to work for False Heart because the pay's pretty good. His T-Lois is a pretty interesting one: Undead. He's not a zombie or anything like that, mind you. "Undead" is just a term used for an Overed who somehow manages to sustain Encroachment Rates over 100% without turning into a Gjaum (up to 119% to be precise, but I assume NPCs can take a lot more, especially when looking at a few writeups). The reason you don't find Undead in the UGN is because their higher-ups refuse to acknowledge their existance. If you're Encroachment Rate is over 100%, you are a Gjaum to them, no matter of many UGN Agents you've had an encounter with swear that you can't possibly be an insane monster. Frozen Bullet is your cold-hearted, professional FH Agent. She specializes in ranged combat, and her Black Dog / Salamandra powers are all built around that.  The most sensible FH pregen so far. Her T-Lois is Item Master, which grants her a free FH-exclusive Item up to a certain Stock point cost. In her case, she settled for Rapid Fire, a heavy assault rifle that trades range for AoE damage. Lastly, we have Lord of Stratagem, who uses his Hanuman / Neumann powers to support the rest of the team. Is Work as the FH Cell Leader is little different from a UGN Branch Chief, except for not having to worry about higher-ups as much.  Real chessmaster villains wear scarves. His T-Lois is Spy, which is exclusive to Cell Leaders and allows them to user their 1337 spy sk1llz to hide or falsify intel once per Scenario. Need to get fake passports? Done. An UGN Agent found out the location of your hidehout? Now he's mindwiped. Want do have all traces of your former life erased? Just say the word! The only Work not covered by the pregens is FH Renegade Being, which is just a counterpart to the normal Renegade Being Work. Experience and Desire For fleshing out Personal Data, FH characters can roll on a new Experience Chart all for FH. If you are a FH Child, this chart is mandatory. Results include that you've always been a loyal member of FH, that you are a UGN traitor, or that several kinds of bad stuff happened in your past and you ended up with FH. Instead of rolling on the Encounter Chart (though there is one for FH members for random Lois generation), FH characters roll on the Desire Chart, which determines the character's ultimate goal in life and reason to hang out with FH. You might be in it for the money/power, try to seek revenge, kill everything or just find some love. Shiny New Toys FH doesn't half-rear end it when it comes to outfitting its members: Melee weapons include the Keen Knife that shreds the targets Armor bit by bit, the Cross Thrust which is a spear disguised as a cane for extra style points, the Innocent Blade that reacts well with powers, the Totsuka Sword which is either Cloud's Buster Sword or Guts' Dragonslayer, and an ultra-light Guard Shield. The most high-end of all melee weapons is the Rengeade-infested Blade of Destruction, which increases your Encroachment rate with each attack and gains a huge buff once your at or above 100% Aside from the above mentioned Rapid Fire, FH guns include the very accurate if strangely named FHG - 666 pistol, a friggin' Laser Rifle that pierces through Armor with ease, the R-Cannon which is an EX Renegade rifle reaction to the user's concentration, an EX Renegade pistol in the Devil Gun that increases the Encroachment Rate of both the user and the target, and a good ol' Mounted Rail Cannon for vehicles. The most powerful rifle is the cursed Heaven's Lightning, which let's you trade HP for accuracy. FH Armor range from the FH Armored Vest over the FH Combat Suit to the FH Battle Armor, with the FH Battle Coat offering additonal protection. The Combat Suit is especially nifty in that it boosts the user's powers, while the Armor and Coat reduce incoming damage from powers. The most advanced armor is the Evolving Armor which lets you boost checks with a Base Stat of cour choice. Connections consist of a FH Excecutive Member and Support Staff. Vehicle choices are pretty nifty: the Sky Kid is a jet pack, the FH Blade Bike a nifty bike, the FH Light Van an amored car, and the Steel Giganto is a friggin' spider tank that can walk over smaller buildings and tower over every single BattleMech thanks to its height of 20+ meters. If you always want your vehicle ready when you need it the most, you can attach a Call System to it. Press the button, and your railgun-toting surprise spider tank is bound to be a riot at parties. General equipment is far too numerous to cover it all, though special mention goes to the Stealth Field (which does exactly what it sounds like), the Magnetic Field Generator (a deflector shield), CR Bullets (bonus damage vs Overeds, aka everyone of note), MASK-ED (a shapechanging mask that essentially makes you Fantômas 2.0) and Gray Sacrifice (makes you appear dead). If you want to punch harder, there are at least 3 different pieces of Equipment that do just that. The most expensive pieces of Equipment are the Flower of Truth (grants bonus damage and can destroy a anything used to guard against it), the Brainwashing Device (let's you instantly take over a non-Overed, even during battle) and Alpha-Trance from last book's Example Scenario. As Equipment, this powerful drug let's you temporarily use one specific power you can't normally use. Next Time: False Hearts Unveiled - World of DX. Doresh fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jan 13, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 20:33
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 Chapter 4: The World Beyond Chapter 4: Fancy places you can go! M20 posted:And although it’s not likely that you’ll walk through a foggy night and wind up in the Otherworlds, such things do happen more often than you might think. There are various ways to get to otherworlds. You can walk through Portals, or you can enter Shallowings. Shallowings are places where the border between the normal world and otherworlds is very thin. This is found mostly in remote places, where the Technocracy hasn't been able to board up the holes, and human banality hasn't killed it. "Banality" is the actual word used; (adult) humans are boring and banal, so they remove the wonder from the world or something Changeling-like. Though, frankly, given how dangerous otherworlds can be, I think we should be grateful for the banality of humans. There's also the Old Roads or Paths of the Wyck, which are hard-to-find roads that go places. The narrator says they can go anywhere, but only lists places on Earth and the mundane world like the Moon which is a) a very boring form of "anywhere" even for the mundane universe - if they can go anywhere, the Andromeda galaxy should be on that list - and it's thoroughly unclear whether that "anywhere" actually includes the otherworlds. This is probably something that should be cleared up when trying to explain the setting, no? There's also the Null Zone, which are a series of dull corridors that all connect together and can lead anywhere. And then we get our crossover with CtD: M20 posted:It’s been speculated that this zone is the form the Old Roads take in the modern world. If that’s true, our industrial perceptions have taken something wondrous and turned it into a sterile maze. Sigh. There's also Astral Projection, which lets you enter the High Umbra, Stepping Sideways, which lets you enter the Middle Umbra, and dying, which lets you ender the Lower Umbra. (There are also other ways to enter the Lower Umbra). I realise this is the definitive edition and it has to be comprehensive, but this is a lot of setting stuff that's being front-loaded on the reader here. Getting a setting overview is great, but the sheer volume of them makes me wonder if it hadn't been better to stick some of these in the back. Simply say "there are otherworlds, there are ways to get there, see Appendix F to learn more about them", instead of talking all about it up front. Some of this is accomplished by the regular world being described first, and then the otherworlds, but all these things still become before important stuff like "what the Traditions are", "who are the Technocracy", and "how do I make a character?". You can run a game set only on Earth, still in the canonical MTAs setting, if you know which factions are and what the conflicts are. It's much harder to do it the other way around. And then there's the Penumbra and the Tellurian and the Tapestry and   Brucato isn't economical with words either. Sometimes good descriptions can set the mood, which is important, but sometimes clarity and consciseness is also important, especially when the book is over 600 pages long and could probably be used to beat someone to death. Descriptions for rather unimportant setting details look like this: M20 posted:Past the edges of that fountain’s Domain, the ground coils I've left the original linebreaks in, so you can get an idea of how much space it takes up on a two-column page. A friend of mine characterised Brucato's writing as "the writing of someone who's working for early White Wolf and needs to get a 200-page supplement for every gameline out each month". There's tons of unnecessary stuff and spoken cruft that could be cut to make these things a lot snappier. Let me try my hand at one... M20 posted:
Speaking of editing, page 91 begins describing spirits, page 92 and 93 are devoted to a summary of the otherworlds and otherworld-related topics and an explanation of the "Tychoidian cosmology", and then page 94 resumes talking about the spirits. This is terrible! You have to skip two entire distracting (if useful!) pages to read a single passage. Now let's actually describe all these otherworlds! So far I've only been complaining about parts of the book that describe the otherworlds in general and how to get there... First, the Astral Realm, which has a Penumbra that looks like this: M20 posted:Symbolic elements of the landscape become quite – often blatantly – obvious. A public school, for example, might look and feel rather industrial: square, blunt, maybe with cattle pens, assembly lines, or even a giant meat grinder straight out of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Oh noes, the horror of public schools! Free education regardless of social class! Public literacy! Exposure to people with different backgrounds than you! Not leaving everything up to the whims of the market! The only chance at social mobility many people have! Unless, as supposed by the reference to Pink Floyd, he's talking about UK public schools, which are of course entirely like that. Your parents pay out of the nose to send you to a posh boarding school, and they have a giant meat grinder just set up in the corner.  A short overview of the High Umbra is that it's the sum total of all ideas anyone has ever thought. It contains all afterlives where people's souls actually go, it contains all places in fiction - often several for different versions - it contains imagined worlds, libraries of books people have only thought of, worlds that exist as abstract representations of ideas and concepts, etc. Very fanciful, but I suspect that it can be a bit hard to use coherently, and no part of the MTAs setting I've seen ever really deals with the fact that if all these afterlives actually exist, then people "don't really" die when they're killed. Someone's dead? Just go talk to their soul in their personal heaven, or whatever. I'll skip over the Middle Umbra, because it wasn't very interesting to read about. A bunch of words, but not enough description to really feel like there was much to do there. I'll also skip over the Low Umbra, the Underworld, since there's an entire gameline for exploring that place that is much cooler than a page of description. I will note, however, that there being an underworld where the dead go and all these afterlives in a completely different place is very confusing - where do dead souls go? Do people split up and go multiple places? I don't know, and I couldn't figure it out from reading these passages. There's also Maya, the dream-world, the Dreaming, which, too, has its own gameline. It's part CtD, part your own personal realm in which you are god if you learn to lucid dream, and part High Umbra-lite, since you can go visit the dream-collective-unconsciousness of places like Hollywood or the Land of Nod. There's the Midrealm, which connect all the otherworlds, and The Mirror Zone, which can appear anywhere, anytime, so you ST can make you fight bearded clones of yourself, the Paradox Realms, which is where you sometimes go if you cause too much Paradox, and Hollow Earth, which is basically just a place where the Etherites and Void Engineers (what are they, you ask? Well, you have to wait for the next book to explain you what they are) can have big battles amongst dinosaurs without Paradox and witnesses stepping on their fun. The same could be said of The Digital Web, but instead of half a page of description, it gets its own sub-chapter. It's really strange how everything about the Digital Web is pinned down and explained, while the High, Mid, and Low Umbra are barely explained. (It's also not all that interesting, being mostly real-world concepts flavoured in technobabble, making it just another generic otherworld, now with Tron-flavour.) Let me talk a little about the art, actually. There's a lot of art, much of it colourful and fanciful and MTAs-esque (some of it incredibly badass!), and so far there's been two naked ladies and not one naked man. There's also a hilarious passage where the narrator has to explain that she doesn't mean the Low Umbra Void, she means the other Void, space-Void, (but not the metaphorical space-void, but the metaphysical space-Void-with-a-capital-V). Oh yeah, that's a good idea! All these concepts thrown at the reader, and they don't even have distinct names. Good job! There's another sub-chapter on Horizon, which is probably more useful than the Digital Web since it deals with things like all the secret bases of the Traditions and Technocracy in specific Horizon Realms that may or may not have been destroyed by a magical storm in some metaplot-thingy (M20 says to choose whether you want that metaplot thing to have happened or not, which is pretty cool with respect to respecting some people's desire not to have metaplot and such!). There's also a note that each of their Nine Magickal Spheres have their own Shade Realm around a (dwarf)-planet, and a little rant about how science may have reclassified Pluto, but look, it's magickal just like the other planets, so what do the scientists and their cold measurements know? Well, actually... let me interrupt you there, Brucato. See, Pluto is not the first time a planet has been de-classified. Ceres, Vesta, Juno, and Pallas - the four biggest asteroids in the asteroid belt - were considered planets from 1807 or so onwards. They were then declassified in 1845, before the discovery of Neptune. Pluto was only discovered and classified a planet in 1930. If modern classifications don't matter, I want to see a Shade Realm on Ceres, but not one on, say, Neptune. Also, it's never mentioned where Data, or the Tenth Sphere stands in relation to this. Is Data obviously not a Sphere because it doesn't have a (dwarf)-planet? Is Ceres home to the Shade Realm of Judgement? Do Etherites and Void Engineers send expeditions to look for planets that might host the tenth Shade Realm? M20 posted:Oh, and speaking of jokes, here’s one on the Technocracy: the theory of Ether was supposedly disproved by scientific consensus around the turn of the last century. That disproval, in turn, was the reason the Etherites cited when they left the Order of Reason. Now, however, new scientific theory posits that the universe consists of a near-zero-viscosity superfluid. And although no one’s officially calling it Ether yet, the Technocracy may find itself hoist by its own metaphysical petard. For one, nobody's calling that superfluid "Ether" because Ether had specific properties that were disproven, so this superfluid is demonstrably not Ether. It's also kind of weird how the book tries to have it both ways; science is just a fiction created by the Technocracy, but they'll still end up eating humble pie because of something that, presumably, the Technocracy thought was perfectly OK? Can't the Technocracy just... vote to not have this superfluid be part of the scientific consensus again? Or doesn't it work that way, and the Etherites were a bunch of whiny babies when they tried to hang onto the Ether as a theory? Also, this is irrelevant and could have been cut to save space. That's the end of that book, finally! I've skipped over lots of boring and descriptions of otherwords though. It's really boring; not much to make fun of or to  at. The next book will hopefully be more amusing! At least I get to make fun of the Traditions and it has more bad art to critique. Like the sample Etherite. I get to mock the VA foci too! And I can talk about the history of the Sisters of Hyppolyta! Basically all the fun stuff is in Book 2 and 3, is what I'm saying.
LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 20:45
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MonsieurChoc posted:Not sure if that family sign would help or actually do the opposite and precipitate the suicide. Indeed I agree but that was the only sign I recalled being there in specific and I didn't really feel like looking up specifics on something like that so soon before I have to go to work.
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Jan 7, 2016 20:57
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M20 sounds like an even drier read than the Mage: The Awakening corebook, which is no mean feat.
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Jan 7, 2016 20:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'd like to point out that DrivethruRPG does in fact sell Gamma World 7th Edition on PDF. Awesome. Thanks for posting that; I never would've thought to search for these. I'm sincerely surprised they went to the trouble of doing up the cards for PoD.
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Jan 7, 2016 21:19
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Robindaybird posted:Sorry if I seem incoherent, but I'm pretty mad about this and I have a hard time expressing words to describe why. It's diminishing. It's the flip side of those Ancient Aliens TV shows that claim 'primitive' cultures couldn't perform vast feats of engineering without something greater pulling the strings. It's worse than that, because it turns tragedy into nothing more than a prop. I think it's doable, but it requires a subtle hand. Make the monsters opportunists or profiteers, parasites, but not primary causes. A God Machine appendage hoovering up the souls of suicides because people are already disposed to go to Aokigahara is far more villainous than one psychically spamming people with offers of one-way trips there. It reminds me of an old X-Men special from the Eighties, where the team flies off to solve famine in Ethiopia, and there's all of this wretched Save the Children imagery, and they just can't do enough... ...until they discover that the famine is actually a loving mutant that they can track down and beat the snot out of.
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Jan 7, 2016 21:21
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Traveller posted:M20 sounds like an even drier read than the Mage: The Awakening corebook, which is no mean feat. This was a problem with W20 as well. But moreso because W20 couldn't devote time to exploring the world and instead towards "Hey here's every gift ever printed oh god please make it stop". The Rage Across the World and subequent W20 books a a lot better. Also I'm glad that Paths of the Wyck don't involve you getting stabbed in the back by a immensely beautiful ninja, followed by you being forced to thank said ninja for the experience.
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Jan 7, 2016 21:22
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 Strangely, diversity is not equally effective across all encounters Seems to be the best time to deliver on the two contracts that have the widest differences in application based on what you select... somewhat. Both the Beast and Elemental Contracts in the Changeling: The Lost corebook allow for the player to select what specific application of "animal" or "element" to specialize in. The animal subtype goes fairly wide, while Elements specifically prevent man-made applications1 from being selected- Electronic Data or Pottery are not allowed. Sadly, the book doesn't specify if an element of Wood is limited to dead material or not.2 Naturally, a purchase of one type (say Sand) proceeds up the chain, but any new types require starting from the bottom- but at a reduced cost. Elemental Seeming - Contracts of Elements Tautologically valid. This contract chain is both one of the more expensive contracts and one of the strongest for either Grand Wizard types or your basic thug combat monster. Cloak Of The Elements You are protected from the effects of the named element, so long as it is a natural form rather than a weapon-ized form.3 Dead simple Catch of possessing a symbolic representation means you'll often cast this Clause cost-lessly other than the instant action to cast it. Armor Of The Elements' Fury THE combat clause that works the same no matter what element you select. You get a flat +1 to armor that stacks with everything and deals half-your-Wyrd to people/objects that touch it, and get a Lethal conversion and a plus half your Wyrd (rounded up) to specific hand-to-hand attack4 that uses Dexterity & Brawling. This results in most Elementals being kung-fu masters. Control Elements Within double willpower range you can move an amount of an element around. Element-bending like crashing waves, but also electronic manipulation and rope animation. One of the major places where your element selection determines what you can do. Calling The Element Like control elements, but with a visual range to begin with and able to move anywhere within Wyrd x 10 yards afterwards. One of my favorite tricks to create a magic, self-moving motorcycle, since you're constantly moving with the element at rolling speed. Become The Primal Foundation You and the items you carry close to you become the element.5 Attacking you as an element is basically impossible and snuffing out your element in an unconventional way only costs 2 Willpower and a forbiddance to not do it again. Beast Seeming - Contracts of Fang & Talon A fairly under-powered clause, but as it typical with Beasts, most people interested in having these powers aren't really going for effectiveness.6 Tongues Of Birds And Words Of Wolves You can talk to animals of your type. Holy crap does this not matter. Beast's Keen Senses +2 to Wits and a special type of 'sensation' that you can use argue with the storyteller to give you more information using your always-useful bat echolocation. Pipes Of The Beastcaller Another typical White Wolf power, where you ask the storyteller to do provide a crack team of house-cat commandos to slay your enemies with their ability to trip and claw. Tread Of The Swift Hooves You get to move faster and more specially. The number of footraces you have ever been in that weren't pre-determined one way or another is probably nil. Cloak Of The Bear's Massive Form Nice of them to pre-state what this clause does most of the time. Changing into a blue whale to crush your enemies doesn't have the same ring to it as essentially turning into a werewolf. One of the more unbalanced Clauses, as turning into a bird often doesn't have the same panache as becoming a giraffe. Next time: Contracts for the Ugly and Pretty. 1 - Some of this might be niche protection between the Wizened and Elemental Contracts, or a deliberate point of contention between the "natural" form of the Wyrd and regular objects. 2 - I would like to vote no, because I'd like to protect the niche of the innumerable vegetable-affecting Contracts coming up in the Court section, but examples are given where living trees are effected by the clauses. Which means someone is going to ask for Contracts of Elements (Flesh) at some point. 3 - "Does the fire clause makes you immune to arson" you ask, 'or just flamethrowers'. My call is yes, but I'm uninterested in games where people burn each-other's houses down. I lean on the example given of a fire-poker being immune'd but a sword not here. 4 - As stated, this means you don't get any bonus to grappling attacks, despite being a Changeling surrounded by spiky shadows. Should your half-Wyrd armor damage stack with your Dex + Brawling + half Wyrd roll?  5 - Does this make you invisible if you're around your type of element, such as air or water? Yes, this is an argument people have had. 6 - My home-brew solve for this is to throw the summoning aspect into the tongue clause earlier and give it more specific timing rules, give the fourth clause a defensive bonus, and allow the fifth clause to be as weak/strong as the animal selected.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:09
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I really liked the idea behind the Catches, and the Contracts in general, but Lost is yet another WW game that showcases why "everything must come in lists of five discrete powers" is pretty dumb. There's something to be said of "siloing" information to make character creation and advancement easier, but you're already stuffing a book with 20, 30, 40 pages of just lists of highly idiosyncratic magic tricks, so that advantage starts to erode pretty quickly.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:20
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Robindaybird posted:Sorry if I seem incoherent, but I'm pretty mad about this and I have a hard time expressing words to describe why. What it comes down to is that trying to relate an imaginary evil it as the cause of a real evil is a cheap way to try and give it weight. That's not to say you can't ever relate an imaginary evil to a real evil, but it really helps if it isn't the cause, and it also helps for it to be necessary to the setting or story you're telling. Now to be fair, from my reading of the quote, it's vague whether or not they're the cause or a side effect of those evil actions, which is slightly better, but bringing up Auschwitz is as cheap as it gets. It also runs into the general issue is that when you start getting into the deep time of human history, nearly everywhere has housed a tragedy. Within an hour of where I live there have been at least two serial murderers (both of which top the Mansons' count each), fires and explosions that killed dozens, unbelievable police brutality, and the death of American civilians at the hands of the military. Unless there's some cleanup or healing process, manmade or otherwise, blood-borne nodes should dot any landscape that's seen any level of population concentration. What bugs me just as much is just the outright rejection of modernism and the sense that technology or urban life or that darn bittiby-bop music has somehow poisoned our minds or souls, that there's no magic in them, metaphorical or otherwise. That a movie or a video game is somehow not art, that enjoying a quiet day indoors is sick, and that a faraway friend is somehow a false relationship. Because I'm sure the authors of Mage don't live in a loving cottage writing on a Smith-Corona before going out and living off the land with bow, arrow, pot, and fire. When people write that they seemingly don't realize "oh, this is exactly how I live my own life", but are perfectly content to dismiss everybody else as vidiots or dittoheads or whatever. It's tiresome and insulting and they should know better.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:21
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Kurieg posted:Also I'm glad that Paths of the Wyck don't involve you getting stabbed in the back by a immensely beautiful ninja, followed by you being forced to thank said ninja for the experience. It wouldn't work. Ninjas are stupid and don't exist except for the ones that do and are just cannon fodder with dumb weapons for dumbs. 
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Jan 7, 2016 22:33
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 Night's Black Agents! A 2012 game for use with the GUMSHOE engine, to be used for telling spy thriller stories in the style of Bourne Identity or the James Bond films. The hook: Vampires. My plan here is to walk through the system itself, assuming no knowledge of GUMSHOE, then do a less comprehensive overview of its massive, amazing new campaign book, Dracula Unredacted. INTRODUCTION The book kicks off with the setting premise and an overview of what kinds of things the The general expected flow of a campaign goes like this:
What are the vampires up to? What powers do they have? What do you need to do to kill them? That's all up to the  Skipping over a bit of high-level new-players stuff, we get to an overview of the book structure. Chapters waiting for us:
Modes In case you thought that "vampire spy thriller" was an awfully specific niche, NBA is here to narrow it down even more, to four sub-genres of vampire spy thrillers! Each has extra rules to support its flow, each has extra advice and content scattered throughout the book, and it's possible to combine them willy-nilly for your own particular style of game. In a Burn game, war is hell, and the emphasis is on the psychological toll it takes on the heroes. Stability (the SAN equivalent of the day) can't go above 12, and there are a hell of a lot more ways to lose it. In a Dust game, high-octane action takes a backseat to espionage and intrigue. Agents are smart and resourceful, but have less tools for fighting vampires head-on. Most abilities don't give extra bonuses at 8+, Health can't go above 10, most fancy combat rules are out. In a Mirror game, your allies are as big a danger as your enemies. Everyone's true motives are obscured by a labyrinth of shifting allegiances and hidden agendas. Players track Trust and Betrayal against each other as the game unfolds. In a Stakes game, you're not just trying to survive or complete the job - this time, it's personal. Characters have Drives that push them forward, rewarding risky or self-sacrificial behavior to serve a higher purpose. As the book does, I'll highlight where these four Modes touch the rules of the game, or inform the kind of things the Director might throw at you. Next: Chargen, and some of those keywords start to actually mean something.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:38
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Bieeardo posted:It's diminishing. It's the flip side of those Ancient Aliens TV shows that claim 'primitive' cultures couldn't perform vast feats of engineering without something greater pulling the strings. It's worse than that, because it turns tragedy into nothing more than a prop. It isn't even the act of diminishing that really gets to me, it's the attitude behind it. Someone taking great tragedies and casually stripping them of their real history for their own benefit is galling, but I doubt cynicism or profit ever crossed Brucato's mind. Instead, ol' Phil took a look at some of history's greatest tragedies, thought "Neat!", then stole them for his use. I doubt it ever even occurred to him that people would object to implying the Holocaust was caused by evil wizards 'cause if it had he wouldn't have loving wrote it. Phil Brucato doesn't care about the lives ruined by the Manson murders, or the horror Dahmer's victims must have gone through, or the countless lives claimed by the Holocaust. That's irrelevant. What is relevant is that he can use these events to totally make his book scarier and edgier you guys! He's trivializing tragedies because he doesn't actually give a poo poo them - they're just names for him to invoke. He's learned nothing from them. That's what I hate about him.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:43
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Alien Rope Burn posted:What bugs me just as much is just the outright rejection of modernism and the sense that technology or urban life or that darn bittiby-bop music has somehow poisoned our minds or souls, that there's no magic in them, metaphorical or otherwise. That a movie or a video game is somehow not art, that enjoying a quiet day indoors is sick, and that a faraway friend is somehow a false relationship. Because I'm sure the authors of Mage don't live in a loving cottage writing on a Smith-Corona before going out and living off the land with bow, arrow, pot, and fire. When people write that they seemingly don't realize "oh, this is exactly how I live my own life", but are perfectly content to dismiss everybody else as vidiots or dittoheads or whatever. It's tiresome and insulting and they should know better. Some of this comes from Bridges too, the mindset started in 1st Ed Werewolf and followed him to Mage when he took over.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:45
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That Old Tree posted:I really liked the idea behind the Catches, and the Contracts in general, but Lost is yet another WW game that showcases why "everything must come in lists of five discrete powers" is pretty dumb. There's something to be said of "siloing" information to make character creation and advancement easier, but you're already stuffing a book with 20, 30, 40 pages of just lists of highly idiosyncratic magic tricks, so that advantage starts to erode pretty quickly. Discrete powers do give the advantage of having very specific limits and applications to those powers, but even when it comes out to a dozen-and-a-half pages in the core book you're always a two-pages-and-an-art away from having another Contract stuffed into another book. Honestly, I've been using it for a decade and so much of the buy-in is already paid off by now, but new players have at minimum three buckets of power lists they can peek through and typically have to get a degree of hand-holding by the storytellers. And man do I really not have time for tawdry references to lived human tragedies in a nerdy hobby book.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:What it comes down to is that trying to relate an imaginary evil it as the cause of a real evil is a cheap way to try and give it weight. That's not to say you can't ever relate an imaginary evil to a real evil, but it really helps if it isn't the cause, and it also helps for it to be necessary to the setting or story you're telling. Kenneth Hite gets into this in the Acthung! Cthulhu core book, where he talks about how to integrate the Cthulhu Mythos with the Nazis, and he notes that to not do disrespect, you have to frame it carefully; Heinrich Himmler is not a power-hungry bastard because he summoned Yog-Sothoth, he summoned Yog-Sothoth because he's a power-hungry bastard. All his worst crimes must have happened before he got involved with the Mythos, or you're just devaluing the horror of WWII. Likewise, Delta Green, covering much of the same material, is almost always careful to frame things as effects or incidental; some Holocaust victims were sacrificed to the Mythos, but these are explicitly noted to have been picked up at Auschwitz, so there's a real sense that even if the Karotechia wasn't sacrificing people to the Esoteric Order of Dagon, all the horrors of the Holocaust would still be there. And even then, Delta Green treads a fine line, on the very edge of what is disrespectful.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:55
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theironjef posted:Disrepectful, yes. Also, the length of time in these "magic in the real world" games between when players start talking about the spell system and when someone drags Hitler or some serial killer into it is usually measured in seconds. It's so common that a UA Clicheomancer wouldn't even get a minor charge out of it. I was not happy when Fly to Heaven was sprung on me by my Unknown Armies GM. Even though it was written pre-9/11, the game took place way after it. I don't want to say 'you can't use any real-life atrocity in your horror game', though, mostly because I enjoy things like American Horror Story. New Orleans especially made good use of that. I think the key for me is that it should be REAL LIFE ATROCITY leads to SUPERNATURAL CONSEQUENCES, not the other way around. So Charles Manson wasn't a demon, but what he did messed with reality so much that if you bought his copy of the Beatles' records that inspired him that was recently up for auction you can use it for messed up Unknown Armies magick. On a totally unrelated note, there was just a massive auction of Margaret Thatcher artifacts... I think that is needed to tie things into 'real world' history, especially when it comes to modern horror or urban fantasy games. quote:There's also the Old Roads or Paths of the Wyck, which are hard-to-find roads that go places. Paths of the Wick should be the name of the thread. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 23:33
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Count Chocula posted:I don't want to say 'you can't use any real-life atrocity in your horror game', though, mostly because I enjoy things like American Horror Story. New Orleans especially made good use of that. I think the key for me is that it should be REAL LIFE ATROCITY leads to SUPERNATURAL CONSEQUENCES, not the other way around. So Charles Manson wasn't a demon, but what he did messed with reality so much that if you bought his copy of the Beatles' records that inspired him that was recently up for auction you can use it for messed up Unknown Armies magick. On a totally unrelated note, there was just a massive auction of Margaret Thatcher artifacts... I think that part of the issue with going HITLER WAS A VAMPIRE, 9/11 WAS WIZARDS(because fireballs can melt steel beams) or BHOPAL WAS CAUSED BY THE ILLUMINATI or whatever is that it kind of cheapens the whole thing, turns it into some big, simple atrocity caused by a big, simple evil that needs punching in the snout. Which disguises the lessons that actually need learning from those sorts of events, if anything it's scarier that relatively ordinary people and their human mistakes/motivations can drive them to these extraordinary atrocities. If a dragon did it, it's a lot less spooky and requires far less introspection(and has a much simpler solution).
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Jan 8, 2016 00:28
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PurpleXVI posted:I think that part of the issue with going HITLER WAS A VAMPIRE, 9/11 WAS WIZARDS(because fireballs can melt steel beams) or BHOPAL WAS CAUSED BY THE ILLUMINATI or whatever is that it kind of cheapens the whole thing, turns it into some big, simple atrocity caused by a big, simple evil that needs punching in the snout. Which disguises the lessons that actually need learning from those sorts of events, if anything it's scarier that relatively ordinary people and their human mistakes/motivations can drive them to these extraordinary atrocities. If a dragon did it, it's a lot less spooky and requires far less introspection(and has a much simpler solution). Oh yeah, I agree with you 100%. Maybe it's best to deal with them like ghost stories - BAD THINGS HAPPENED and now there are SUPERNATURAL CONSEQUENCES. I mean I first learned about Bhopal because of a an X-Files episode about a tiny man who hid inside other people and killed them as revenge for Bhopal, but you can do that same sort of thing much more sensatively. Even if it's just basic 'if you want to go to the underworld, you'll need to do it at a cemetary, and if you're in a city where a famous murder happened you should start at the crime scene'. Like nMage is set in New England, an area I know well, and when I read that I start thinking things like 'when I lived there there were always Civil War graves in odd places, that's probably a plot hook'. I think tying in the real world is what makes settings like oMage and Vampire and UA 'sticker'. Speaking of Vampire, I'd be interested in the supplement that nVampire put out right after Katrina to update the setting.
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Jan 8, 2016 00:45
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Count Chocula posted:Speaking of Vampire, I'd be interested in the supplement that nVampire put out right after Katrina to update the setting. The supplement actually came out right before Katrina, leaving it in a very awkward position. The age and size of the event is always going to play a factor. I wouldn't have any problem with someone adding a supernatural motive to, say, Hinterkaifeck because it's basically out of living memory, but there's a WtF lodge in one book that developed out of the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Like, even if there was absolutely nothing supernatural ascribed to it, just Uratha trying to deal with the wounds left behind and their own guilt for not doing anything to stop the Hutu death squads, I think that's still too soon.
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Jan 8, 2016 00:58
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Yes, thank you guys for putting things into words I was too angry to form coherently. It's one thing to play with the 'location have memories, memories and emotion can leave scars upon the world' - that can be extremely compelling, and easier to keep within the lines of acceptable. But saying the Armenian Genocide was caused a hungry vampire, or the Mansons were trying to summon Shub-Niggurath, or the Witch trials of Salem was caused by The Spirit of Patriarchy - now that's as said, offensive, cheapens, and can be harmful - especially given most of the time they don't actually look at what happened, or just make poo poo up on the fly (If I have a dime every time someone said witches were burned in Salem...)
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Jan 8, 2016 00:58
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I really love Reign of Steel. This thread introduced me to it and I've been reading the backstory. I tend to like grim settings, but this one is so bleak it actually made me kind of depressed and I had to quit reading for a while-- still, it's a well-written campaign book, the AIs are powerful but not omnipotent foes with relatable, complex flaws, and I'd like to port it to a system that's not GURPS. A note: I think the reason Zaire is named after a (defunct) nation instead of a city is that, in its paranoia, it has hidden itself away so that nobody knows exactly where it is. Just somewhere in the former African Union nation of Zaire. Zaire derives from nzere, the Kongo word for the river known as the Congo River, so it kind of makes sense that a resurgent pan-African union might want to return to that name. Anyways. Not here to debate the relative cultural sensitivity of 90s GURPS writers, but I do like the setting and appreciate the writeup.
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Jan 8, 2016 00:59
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Weren't the witches in Salem hanged? Burning was a uniquely European punishment, IIRC. Oh, and that one dude who was pressed to death.
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Jan 8, 2016 01:01
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Mors Rattus posted:Weren't the witches in Salem hanged? Burning was a uniquely European punishment, IIRC. Exactly, and the ones that were hanged were those that refused to admit they were witches, the ones who did lived because they would start pointing out other people as members of their coven. The man pressed to death was because he refused to enter a plea, and the pressing was meant to be a pressuring method, but Giles Corey both was a stubborn old man, and knew if convicted, his property would be seized so he just held out. EDIT: Person below me: That's actually kind of cool. Robindaybird fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 01:05
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Mors Rattus posted:Oh, and that one dude who was pressed to death. Giles Corey, my ancestor. He refused to plead guilty or innocent knowing that a conviction would deprive his children of their inheritance, or to just gently caress with his accusers, accounts vary. Kavak fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 01:06
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Given that apocryphally his last words were "More Weight", I think the answer is probably 'All of the above'.
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Jan 8, 2016 01:37
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Kavak posted:The supplement actually came out right before Katrina, leaving it in a very awkward position. More than that, it's actually so awkward that it becomes quite... exceptional. Especially the first sentence. I'll quote the somewhat infamous sidebar from it, in fact, in its full glory. This is from City of the Damned: New Orleans, published 30th of May 2005. quote:IN THE WAKE OF THE STORM
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Jan 8, 2016 01:38
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:A note: I think the reason Zaire is named after a (defunct) nation instead of a city is that, in its paranoia, it has hidden itself away so that nobody knows exactly where it is. Just somewhere in the former African Union nation of Zaire. Zaire derives from nzere, the Kongo word for the river known as the Congo River, so it kind of makes sense that a resurgent pan-African union might want to return to that name. For what it matters Reign of Steel was published in March 1997, just before they changed the name back to DROC later that year.
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Jan 8, 2016 02:58
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I just realized you could probably use Changeling to play Beasts of the Southern Wild. Or would that be Werewolf, for Beasts of the Southern Wyld?
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Jan 8, 2016 03:00
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This is super rad but the rarity would be way off unless they print five commons for every rare. Then again, it's not like you need to cube draft the drat things, and it was stupid that they used rarity in the first place. In fact, I am strongly considering getting them printed.
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Jan 8, 2016 03:01
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theironjef posted:This is super rad but the rarity would be way off unless they print five commons for every rare. Then again, it's not like you need to cube draft the drat things, and it was stupid that they used rarity in the first place. In fact, I am strongly considering getting them printed. So, there are 120 unique cards just in the expansion? I'd just as soon have a complete set and everyone be guaranteed unique powers, rather than cobbling together however many hundreds of cards I bought into a deck that's maddeningly only 90% complete. Also, while the cards are a fine tactile game aid, you could just turn out a rolled table if you couldn't or didn't want to use cards, right? The key thing is having wacky random Frankenstein's characters after all.
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Jan 8, 2016 04:36
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I'd just like to say that I'm super chuffed that "John Wick pulling a bait and switch" mockery has taken off and become a thing 
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Jan 8, 2016 05:17
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