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Count Chocula posted:Oh cool! Or have Valkyrie again. The Secret World has a US military officer offhandedly mention that there's a carrier task force in the north Atlantic hunting a rampaging kraken. 
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Feb 9, 2017 14:02
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I Am Just a Box posted:Re: Beast...  Hunter: Tooth and Nail – Part Three: Hunter: the Vigil Compacts and Conspiracies: What Do They Know [About Beasts]? Do They Know Things? Let's Find Out!  Fair warning: the beginning and end of this entry are extremely referential of Bojack Horseman. Cynical cartoons about a depressed, terrible horse man were a great help keeping me sane while writing all this. If that's not your thing, I am truly sorry. Or H:tVCaC:WDTK[AB]?DTKT?LFO! for short. This section is basically your bog-standard list of all the Hunter organisations (from the Hunter core book only, sorry VASCU fans) and what they know/think about/do with Beasts. It's also your first introduction to the three new Compacts Tooth and Nail presents, those being Yuri's Group, the Reckoners, and the Merrick Institute. It seems like odd formatting that we're learning about how these three organisations hunt before we learn what they are, what they believe, or what they do, but I'm not an editor, so really, what do I know? These sections are all written in-character, from the perspective of a member of each organisation, and assume that the member has a certain amount of knowledge about Beasts. Aegis kai Doru: Some stuff about how many of the great artefacts of history and legend no longer really exist in the real world, but you can find them in dreeeeeams, man; specifically mentioned is Excalibur, apparently “hidden away in the hoard of a nightmarish dragon.” Aegis kai Doru are after it, of course. But if the physical object doesn't exist, I don't know why it matters where the dream object is. Surely a dream object can be anywhere you want? Or anywhere where the idea of its existence is appropriate, at least? Just get a mage to take you to the concept realm of Arthurian legend in the Temenos, dude. Probably less work and less chance of being burned to death. Ascending Ones: Again, this is mostly about dreams, and using concoctions to explore dream space. Apparently some Ascending Ones have figured out how to use potions to meet up in dreams, and all the cool Ascending Ones hang out there now. It's kind of a neat idea. The PoV Ascending One admits Beasts themselves are a secondary concern, and the Conspiracy mostly leaves them to their own devices, but they act very quickly to destroy the ones that are already violent enough that they might attack when a bunch of Ascending Ones go day-tripping in Astral Space. Seems reasonable. Ashwood Abbey: Have you ever hosed a man who caused the world's most famous maritime disaster? quote:Let me start off by saying something provocative, to perpetuate the myth that “The Ashwood Abbey are the real monsters.” Let’s see. Where do we start? Thanks, Ashwood Abbey guy!  So as we established earlier, Beasts don't like Ashwood Abbey; they've no problem with a Beast who sunk the Titanic and killed well over a thousand people (  ), not to mention murdered dozens if not hundreds of other people in maritime or swimming accidents, but when a bunch of strangers on heavy drugs show up and try to kill, eat, and/or have sex with the monster that sunk the Titanic, that's crossing a line. Apparently there is at least one chapter of Ashwood Abbey that likes to hold big hunts for Beasts in the dream world; the other Ashwoodites don't approve of them, because it's too dangerous (not like everything else the Abbey does, or like that's the point of half of what the Abbey does) and because the Beasts will hunt you down for doing it, despite being one of the least organised – and therefore least capable of organised revenge – monster splats in NWoD. Seriously, if you're not worried about werewolves, mages, changelings, or other supernaturals that actually have societies and/or a sense of personal loyalty to others coming and wrecking your poo poo for messing with their fellows, why you're so worried about Beasts is beyond me.The Cheiron Group: I'm just going to post the whole text of this from the book, because it's fantastic:  So Cheiron's interest in Beasts, as you might expect, is entirely in chopping them up and selling their bits for money. So far so normal, but they pretty much state outright that what they do with Beasts is grind them up and inject them into, specifically, Donald Trump's orange penis. It's nuts, and it's one of the few things in this book that's actually worth the price of admission. Cheiron  The historical Cheiron was a Beast (of sorts) who was a teacher of Heroes. I was kind of expecting them to do something with that, given the Cheiron Group's weird past and its archery logo, but they don't. I'm not disappointed, because what we got was incredible, HOLY poo poo, but it still seems like it could have been interesting ground to tread.  The one relatable Beast I've seen so far in the whole game line. That is the exact expression I'd have if I knew the weird lumpy scientists were going to turn me into powder and stick me in Trump's Li'l Donny. The Lucifuge: So the Lucifuge have noticed this thing Beasts have about being kin, and all the expectations that Beasts will project onto them because of this. quote:Let’s just make this clear: We have no idea what in the hell they’re talking about, and we have no evidence whatsoever that we’re related to them. Apparently Beasts singling out Lucifuge Hunters as family is more-or-less special to Lucifuge; they don't so much do it to other Hunters. This is weird, because the Lucifuge's backstory is pretty clear on the fact that they're descended from or somehow related to demons, and about the only supernaturals that Beasts explicitly DON'T get along with or regard as kin are Demons. Maybe Lucifuge demons and Demon Demons are different? There certainly are a lot of entities in NWoD called “demons,” so it's possible... except the writeup that Demons get in the Mortal Remains book proper implies that a) there's not a huge difference between the Demons of Demon and the demons of Inferno, and b) the Demons the Lucifuge deal with, the ones they claim to be related to, are pretty clearly the ex-servitors of the God-Machine. So why do members of the Lucifuge trip Beasts' family-senses, while actual Demons do not?  Fortunately, the Lucifuge are pretty no-nonsense about that poo poo. They see the terror and trauma that Beasts cause, and react accordingly, by killing them. The Lucifuge perspective-person even says they think Beasts are worse than Vampires; a Vampire can feed on livestock if they so choose, but a Beast can only survive by terrorising human beings. Better to kill Beasts than leave them to wreck lives and degrade the fabric of society. quote:Very few of them are worth saving. It's nice that the Lucifuge have their heads on straight on this one. The Long Night: The Long Night are also pretty sane on this matter, surprisingly. Their stance is basically that of the Reckoners, if the Reckoners' stance actually made sense: the Beasts are the Beasts of Revelation. They are God's greatest foes on Earth. When the Long Night learns of the existence of a Beast, “they must become our first priorities.” The Long Night's goal with Beasts is to kill them, hard, and make sure groups they might ally with out of convenience (like Cheiron or the Ascending Ones) don't do any freaky poo poo with the bodies. quote:We cannot allow scraps of their bodies to spread damnation. We read ahead to the end of the book. We know what happens. The Beast must be destroyed in toto. Again, I approve. Loyalists of Thule: The Thule Society is, naturally, largely interested in researching Beasts. They too have noticed the Beasts' kin-sense thing, and are trying to study it. One of them, a Doctor Hans Voorman, is apparently trying to reach out to Beasts to live with and learn more about them; the Thule perspective-person name-drops Jane Goodall here as an example of scientists doing this with other creatures. It's a fun idea. Most Beasts haven't shown much interest. One apparently will only accept if the Hunter living with them is from Lucifuge, which brings us back to the weirdness of why Beasts are so attracted to Lucifuge members but not to Demons. This is all fairly normal and relatively sane stuff for the Loyalists of Thule, although the perspective-person mentions that the damage Beasts cause “tends to be localized and relatively nonlethal when held up in comparison with other, more common manifestations of the darkness.” Sure, buddy. Malleus Maleficarum: Their basic perspective is that Beasts aren't very common and the Church has bigger fish to fry. This is the shortest of all the Compacts and Conspiracies entries, and it's largely interesting because it's the first time Heroes get mentioned in these descriptions, although the word “hero” is not specifically used. quote:In all truth, it appears most of the real risk in these monsters comes from humans poking the proverbial hornets’ nest. Humans cannot leave well enough alone, and when they hear of legendary monsters, they seek to kill legendary monsters. Everyone wants to be Saint George. Most end up John Doe. It's a reasonable enough stance. It misses the fact that Heroes are created by the actions of Beasts, and that they are supernaturally compelled to hunt Beasts, but it's plausible that the Malleus Maleficarum might not actually know those details. If they did, I expect their view might be different. Also, I keep finding it slightly jarring that this book keeps mentioning Saint George as an example of a Hero, when there's a whole Conspiracy in Witch Finders that takes their name from Saint George and are really far worse for the universe at large than Heroes. Anyone else find that weird? Maybe that's just me. Network Zero: Network Zero's writeup is about Heroes almost to the exclusion of Beasts, although, again, the word “hero” is never used. Beasts, according to the Network Zero perspective person, basically make for great filming and fun videos that get a lot of views. Kind of a sadistic perspective, but okay. Trouble is, these videos also sometimes create Heroes out of the people that watch them. Not “create Hunters,” which the PoV person says is a normal and pretty understandable reaction to watching a video of a vampire killing and eating someone, but actual Heroes. quote:These people aren’t hunters. Not like us. They’re… Different. It’s like they’re supernaturally emboldened to hunt. They just go loving bonkers about it. You know the worst, most ridiculous and uncompromising hunter you’ve ever met? They’re all that guy. Now I'm pretty sure this goes against Beast's own word on how Heroes actually get made, but whatever. The PoV person takes this as a lesson that they should be careful about where and how widely they distribute some of the things they see, and muses that maybe Heroes are not normal humans but their own kind of monster. Should the Network be sharing information on Heroes, or letting them do their thing? Null Mysteriis: Null Mysteriis' entry reads like it was written by someone who was very tired of Beasts and their poo poo, and wanted to smack down most of their pretensions. Much like Cheiron's, I'm going to reproduce it here:  It's a pretty good takedown of much of the concept of Beasts. For all that they claim to be based on ancient archetypes, a lot of the Beasts in Beast: the Primordial are very pop-culture indeed. Their archetypes are also vague and ill-thought-out, but that's a bit off-topic. The PoV person advances the interesting idea that Beasts trail such violence with them wherever they go because they reify the violent stories in their heads; that they create Heroes (which we know, as does Beast: the Primordial) and that this is their own fault for being so trapped in these narratives of violence that they can't help but further them by their actions (which Beast: the Primordial doesn't want you to think at all – it wants to convince you that Beasts are the victims of Hero violence, not the cause – but which dovetails nicely with this thread and others' observations that Beasts deserve the revenge that the Heroes, created by Beast actions, bring down on them). The Null Mysteriis entry was almost certainly written by someone who had the same reaction to Beasts and Heroes that we have. It doesn't have the sheer hilarity of Cheiron selling boner pills made of melted-down Beast to Trump, but of all the ones in this list, Null Mysteriis' entry is probably my favourite. As a humanities student myself, it pleases me mightily to see someone in-game attacking the lovely themes and poor conceptual design of Beast. It's vindicating. Task Force: Valkyrie: Another short entry. TF:V's entry is one soldier to another, probably an instructor to a recruit, and entirely about how dangerous Beasts are when you're ordered to kill them. It doesn't spend much time discussing questions of “why?” or “is it moral to kill Beasts?” It's practical advice that someone fighting a Beast might need. Don't hesitate. Don't hold back. Bring everything you've got. Do not go in their lairs. The only space it devotes to the moral aspect of hunting Beasts is one sentence: “The work is absolutely necessary.” Says all it needs to, I think. The Union: I actually forgot this entry had a specific example of a Beast explicitly doing bad poo poo, so bump the number of examples in the book up to three. The Union's problem with Beasts is both moral and philosophical. The Union wants safe and functioning communities in which people co-operate and look out for each other. I agree, and I find a lot of what the Union PoV person is saying resonates with me, so you can see the whole thing:  It embodies most of what is lovely about Beasts. The way they kill people, of course, but also the way they break people, get into your head and twist you, mess you up; the way the work they do breaks the bonds between people, makes people afraid of each other. The way you never recover from the poo poo they do to you. The Union being sort-of the Compact of average, everyday people, this entry is the one that deals most with the personal trauma that Beasts create through the things they do. For that reason, it's probably the most powerful entry in this list, because it's the one that speaks most to Beasts-as-abusers and the actual effects that abuse has on people. It also addresses the dumb hypocrisy of the idea that Beast predation is supposed to teach some kind of vague lesson about something. You don't teach people by abusing them, hurting them, or making them fear. You just traumatise them. Only a monster would think otherwise, and the type of monster we're dealing with here is one that's uncomfortably close to real-life monsters who think just that. It says a lot about the designers of Beast that they tried to create a game about social justice and living the experiences of people being persecuted in real life, and instead made a game about being not a victim of abuse, but an actual abuser. It's good that at least one person writing this book realised how hosed up that is. ... This would be a perfect place to end this part of the review, but there are three more bits to go before we're done here; the entries for the new Compacts. We've already met the Reckoners in some detail – they were the “protagonists” of When The Calling Comes, and I've alluded to the other two, Yuri's Group and the Merrick Institute. Again, this part isn't an introduction to the Compacts and how they think. It is specifically a guide to how the new Compacts do their hunting. Do note that of the three, only the Merrick Institute's name has even come up in the book prior to this moment, and that's just a couple of references to how they get about in dreams in the nightmare section I breezed through earlier; since When The Calling Comes never actually namedrops the Reckoning, the other two Compacts haven't even been mentioned yet. Is this terrible formatting? Yes. Should the editor have done something about it? Probably. But it's how the book presents them, so it's how I'm presenting it to you. Don't worry; I will also explain a bit of the background of the Compacts as we go, so you're not as totally in the dark as I was when I first read this part of the book. Yuri's Group Yuri's Group's entry is bizarrely short compared to the other two. When I complained about wasted space way back in part one of this review, it was this bit that I had in mind, because the other two Compacts' entries in this section get a whole page of print or more to themselves, and Yuri's Group gets three paragraphs. This is a shame, because Yuri's Group is arguably the most interesting Compact in the book. The other thing about Yuri's Group's entry (my god, that is clunky phrasing) is that it's almost entirely about Heroes. Yuri's Group seem to know what they are, and (surprisingly for a product associated with Beast)... are really sympathetic to them. You'll learn more about Yuri's Group later, but their general concept is that they are a survivors' support network and counselling group for the victims of supernatural abuse... who also go out and kill the things doing the abusing, of course, because this is Hunter: the Vigil, not Therapist: the Slow Process of Emotional Recovery. The language that this entry uses is good. It calls Heroes “survivors” a lot. The group acknowledges that Heroes are unstable, they have issues, they're monomaniacal about killing Beasts. It tries to help them as much as it can, but acknowledges their disease is supernatural and there's not a lot that counselling and group therapy can do for them. It also sees Beasts as dangerous phenomena that need to be put down, and this is where the group's moral quandary comes in. Yuri's Group know that Beasts call Heroes to them when they unleash their power, and so, to help in killing Beasts, the group has learned to goad Beasts into going loud, calling Heroes to assist in the fight. The PoV person seems guilt-ridden about this, but ultimately thinks it's worth it; Heroes would attack Beasts anyway, and the group is just making sure that they do so at a convenient time and with backup to help them if things go wrong. It's not only about maximising efficiency when killing Beasts, it's about saving both Hero and Hunter lives by working together. The PoV person compares it to a clean needle programme for drug addicts, and it's not a bad metaphor. Overall, I think I like Yuri's Group based on this entry. For all that they have a terrible name which makes it really awkward to talk about their ideals and methods in the possessive sense, they seem like they're trying to do the right thing under difficult circumstances; to balance the need to kill Beasts with the need to do right by the trauma survivors that Heroes really are. It creates an interesting moral dilemma for which I don't think there's an uncomplicated right answer, which in the space of three paragraphs makes it more successful than the entire Beast line so far. Let's watch the next entry gently caress that up, shall we? The Reckoning quote:We hunt the hunters. We hunt extremists. We hunt those outside of God’s plan. When last we saw the Reckoning (not named as such in the story, though), they were killing two of their own; one for killing a Beast, one for refusing to kill the man who killed the Beast. We've already gone over how this is pretty arse-backwards for a Hunter book ostensibly about hunting Beasts, so let's put that aside for a moment and see what they have to say about themselves in their own words. As a Compact that focusses on hunting Heroes, the Reckoning's entry starts out talking about Hero-hunting. After an entry that talks a lot about Heroes as survivors, victims, and mentally-ill people who need help, the whiplash in this part is frightening. quote:Heroes think they’re doing good work. So do the guys who bomb abortion clinics. Killing a bunch of people doesn’t solve anything. It just emboldens sinners and makes them right when they criticize you. It makes it harder for the people doing real good in the world. Remember what I said about how the language this book uses to describe Heroes is much harsher than that which it uses to talk about Beasts? There's a prime example; Heroes, directly equated with abortion clinic bombers. This is also a deeply ironic thing to say about Heroes given their stance on mass murder committed by Beasts, but we'll come to that shortly. Our PoV character has some stuff to say about Heroes; “they’re zealots. They’re loving bugshit nuts. There’s nothing you can say or do to convince them that they’re doing bad stuff.” Which probably describes most Hunters, really, and it certainly describes the Reckoning, as you will see by the end of the paragraph. The character says that they've tried to stop Heroes doing what they do before, but persuasion failed, even though, in the beginning, “we tried. We tried hard.” What kind of persuasion did they try? Capture and torture, of course, which presumably doesn't count as “doing bad stuff” because the Reckoning is the one doing it. This is not the last time the Reckoning will be so hypocritical. quote:That’s how frustrating these guys are; they made us torture them because they were just that loving obstinate. Charming. There is also a large section on the Reckoning's policy towards hunting actual monsters, which we will quickly move into. Their stance on Beasts is basically that they are a sometimes food; “the truth is, we hunt when it matters. If some kraken poo poo is attacking people, we take it down. We’re just mindful of the Hero that’ll come after it.” The PoV Reckoner thinks Beasts are a vehicle of God's judgement, so they don't believe they should lift too much of a finger to help anyone who's being targeted by Beasts. Here's the quote on that: quote:If a succubus kills a hellfire club full of rich perverts, that’s on them. Who are we to get in the way of God’s judgement? The thing is, if you take a good, long look at the people monsters kill, most of them deserve it. I’m not saying we should be out killing people because someone cheated on his wife, but we shouldn’t put ourselves in danger to save the filthy sonofabitch. Victim-blaming? In a Beast book? I never. Remember how Heroes/abortion clinic bombers killing a bunch of people is bad, even if you disapprove of what those people doing on an ideological level? How it doesn't solve anything? Presumably that's only if you're a Hero killing a bunch of people, because this person just gave a big old thumbs up to the idea of Beasts committing mass murder against people whose lifestyle the Reckoning condemns. Being a “rich pervert” is grounds enough for a horrible death in the eyes of these people, but being a creature that commits mass murder is not. Ironically, being a human who kills bystanders in the pursuit of killing a mass-murdering creature is also grounds for horrible death, but that makes no sense; why is accidental mass murder worse than deliberate mass murder? Presumably this also means that they only target Beasts which they see as targeting those unworthy of God's judgement, but that's incoherent; if Beasts are God's tools of judgement, even going after some Beasts means they think God's judgement can be questioned by humans, and even acted against, delayed, or denied. Which either means that their ideological stance against Heroes, for doing much the same thing, is absurd and hypocritical, or that Reckoners believe they are uniquely gifted with the ability to interpret God's plan and decide which monsters need to be stopped and which are allowed to do their thing. Not necessarily an uncommon stance among the preppers and survivalists that the Reckoning is modelled on, but still; if you believe Beasts are all God's tools, to stand in their way, ever, is to presume you know better than God. Which is partly what they're killing Heroes for. There's a theological rabbit-hole to go down here, but I'm not going to go too deeply into it, since I am not a theologian. All I will say is that this is incoherent and stupid. To address the hypocrisy, here is the PoV Reckoner, slightly earlier in this entry: quote:... is it hypocritical of us to kill Heroes? I don’t know, maybe. But I’ve met enough families we’ve saved, that if I’m going to Hell over that hypocrisy, I’m willing to make that sacrifice. It's nice that they realise it on some level. It's pretty bad though that they've got this much compassion for innocent bystanders accidentally hurt or killed by Heroes, but none for people hurt or killed by Beasts on purpose. Which usually includes the very Heroes (or their loved ones, friends, relatives, etc.) that the Reckoning primarily targets. So their stance, in sum, is that mass murder is okay if we think it's okay, but heaven help you if you're a survivor of a mass murder attempt who tries to take down a mass murderer we've given the green light to. Lovely people. They've got stances on other types of monster, too, which mostly boil down to “it counts as a mercy killing.” Werewolves? Kill 'em so they can't spread the disease. Demons? Kill the people they're possessing; God will know his own. Vampires? Make good target practice: “you can shoot a vampire eight or nine times before it goes down. You can’t do that with some guy robbing 7-Eleven. Not that I’m saying we should be doing vigilante justice against petty criminals... .” It wouldn't surprise me too much if you were, mate, since you're absolutely endorsing summary execution of “rich perverts.” Finally, there's a section on the other churchly Hunter organisations. The Reckoning's stance on these guys is mostly 'You stay out of our way, we stay out of yours,” unless they're protecting Heroes, in which case they're fair game for Reckoners. quote:That’s when we show them the righteous fury of the Lord. This paragraph repeats the abortion clinic bomber metaphor for Heroes from above by saying that, at least, “their hearts are in the right place.” Good stuff. Mal Mal mostly leaves the Reckoning alone, due to the respectable stance we saw earlier that they have bigger things to take care of than a pissant survivalist cult; they're busy killing actual monsters, and don't have time for this poo poo. Long Night “stay out of our neck of the woods.” The PoV Reckoner thinks this is a good thing as they seem to think the Long Night's beliefs about the apocalypse are crazy (stones from glass houses?) and they're not sure they'd get along. Given what we've already seen on Long Night's, shall we say, uncompromising stance on Beasts and people who try to use them for any reason, I think that's a fairly sensible concern. This entry is ugly. In many different yet overlapping ways. Let's leave it behind and move on to one that's mostly just a bit boring. The Merrick Institute The important thing about the Merrick Institute, or TMI for short, is that they're Hunters whose beat is more-or-less entirely in the realm of dreams. This might be more interesting if dream combat as described in this book wasn't really dull. Also, almost every paragraph has an out-of-character note about the exact mechanic the Merrick Institute people use to do the things the PoV person is describing, which is useful, I guess, but kind of jarring given that none of the other Compacts had them, even when talking about mechanical stuff (incidentally, the group therapy that Yuri's Group tries on monsters and victims of the supernatural is its own Tactic; you'll see it in the next part of this review). So most of the first section of this entry is about the roles that different members of Merrick Institute cells take in dream combat (and the Merits each member needs to do their role). Something that's not spelled out, but that you need to know to understand what the PoV person is talking about, is the Institute's method; they send a person into dreams to fight Beasts, but they're hooked up to various computers and monitors that both show people in the waking world what the dreamer is seeing and let those awake people influence the dream in certain ways. The Institute is has its origins in covert government experiments, like every second Hunter group, and has some weird technology that lets them do this, editing the Nightmare Realm in limited ways from without by computer. Again, if that doesn't make sense, don't come complaining to me. There are: one “dream warrior,” who actually does the dream combat, with a thought-body called an Avatar that she builds up via Merits; one “teller,” who reads the monitors they've got the dream warrior plugged into (apparently clearer and less confusing than what the dreamer herself actually sees), and whose job is to interpret what's happening around the dreamer in a more rational sense AND use his effectively 360 degree perspective to help watch her back; one “pusher” or “sandboxer,” who uses their technology to both investigate the dream world's properties and to influence it in minor ways to help the dreamer; and one “puller,” whose job is to heal the dream warrior of any injuries she takes in the dream world, using real-world medicine in the real world (don't ask how that works; maybe it's connected to the way in which dream damage spills over, slightly reduced, into the waking world), to give her temporary boosts in dream combat via the same method, and to pull her out of the dream world if things are going too badly. What struck me most here is how much this would encourage extremely rigid party roles in the climactic part of an adventure, the part where they actually fight the Beast in its lair. It's always possible that you'd have more than four Hunters in a cell, so you might have more than one person doing a given job (probably dream warrior, as it's the only one with much room for doubling up), but it sticks each individual member of the cell into a single defined role for the whole scene. Your puller can't suit up or jack in or whatever the term we're using is if the dream warrior is in a tight spot, because then there's no one to administer the drugs and he probably doesn't have many dream combat Merits, so he wouldn't be much help. Your teller can't take the puller's place unless he has the very specific Dream Medic Merit, and even if he does, that still leaves the group down a pair of eyes monitoring things from the real world, which are apparently much in need to make sense of the dreamscape. All the roles require a very specific Merit or combination of Merits, which means early specialisation if you want your cell to be able to do its job properly. It's almost D&D-like in its demand for clear party roles; there's a damage output person, a looking-around person (which by the way sounds like an incredibly boring speciality to have), a fine manipulation person, and a healer/buffer. Moreover, the fact that the party is effectively split across dimensions means most people will be stuck with very little to do for most of the time; only one person is doing the fighting, and all she can do in any non-combat dream scenes is walk around, watch the other party members interact with stuff, and sometimes push something the teller says she should push – still better than the poor puller, who has no role at all until the fighting starts. The teller and pusher, meanwhile, have gently caress-all to do in combat. So even when everyone's doing their job, it sounds like something that would bore a lot of players fairly quickly. Enough about the 'how,' though; let's talk about the Institute member's perspective on all this. The PoV character describes the system, but also points out it demands skill and talent and quick thinking and so on, which no one was really disputing. quote:We’re engaging Beasts on their home turf. We can’t just kick down a lair door, march in, and shoot the fucker. We do recon missions. We scout. We cripple defences in advance. We interfere in the Beast’s feasts so he’s hungry when we move in for the kill. We harry, stick, move, and flee. We try to do lasting damage when possible, then duck out before the repercussions. Truth be told, this whole section seems written from the perspective of someone who seems very insecure about their work. Makes a bit of sense, given that Institute members are mostly teenagers, but it does lead to some occasional hilarity. quote:But we manage. Far as I’m considered, that makes us bonafide badasses. Try saying that line naturally. You can't, can you? The next section, of four (not counting a very short fifth), is on fighting things in the real world. The Merrick Institute prefers not to do it. For one thing, a lot of its members are physically disabled in some way, so they're always down a few people in the physical world. They're also escaped government experiments who apparently weren't allowed much exercise while in captivity, so most of them aren't very physically fit. Their real-world tactics are thus based largely around outsmarting Beasts rather than straight-up outfighting them. So they're typical Hunters, really. They also seem to know a surprising amount about the supernatural world. quote:When we hunt in the flesh, we fight smart. We fight with traps, with diversions, with decoys. We use the environment. We use crowds to our advantage. Did you know, most vampires will do anything to get out of a fight in public? The Merrick Institute tries to get Heroes to engage Beasts in the real world while they lurk around in dream space waiting for the monster to try to flee into its Astral lair. An almost good plan, except that we've already seen that most Heroes can't do poo poo to most Beasts. Still, barring this one flaw, the pincer manoeuvre thing they've got going on is pretty sensible, and their justification for why it works is hilarious: quote:Sometimes, when confronted in the nightmare realm, a Beast will flee because they figure you can’t be in two places at once. That’s because they’re miserable shits who cannot fathom rolling hard with a real crew. They have their monster buddies, but their little dragon hoards are like fortresses of solitude. They’re the guy who wants to be friends with everyone but is kinda friends with nobody because of it. Nailed it. Much is made of the fact that the Compact is fairly small and entirely nomadic. If they mess up too badly, their tendency is to cut their losses and run, changing their identities as they go. The next section is almost entirely about this, and the various measures they have to take to keep their work going while changing their locations and identities near-constantly. quote:Most of us are teenagers. Legally, we’re dead. We didn’t have anyone to teach us to drive. We can’t step foot on a plane. Eight to twelve teens carrying backpacks full of classified electronics stick out like a sore thumb on a bus. You can’t Uber a cell of hunters – and yes, we’ve tried. You can’t get a hotel without a credit card (unless you’re willing to risk infection, and we have too many comatose members to take that risk), and those are hard to fake. We can’t work legal jobs. It’s a logistical nightmare, but it’s essential. There's a lot of emphasis in this and other parts of TMI's writeup that they're just teens and no one is around to teach them anything, but they admit to having older members among them, including (spoiler alert) a few turned members of the spooky government organisation that made them in the first place. Why can't those guys teach them how to drive? It would certainly make anonymous travel around the countryside a lot easier. Anyway. They make a lot of use of anonymous services like Craigslist (which I'm surprised to hear still exists, actually) and the postal service to get stuff around. They stay in hostels or with sympathetic Hunter groups. They hire a lot of freelance drivers on a very temporary, no-questions-asked basis to get the disabled members of the Compact where they need to go, which again raises the question of why they can't hire a few driving instructors while they're at it. Their IT skills mean they can gin up fake identities and even the odd credit card to pay for things, including the traditional Republican bogeyman of borrowing the identities of the dead for a while.  Escaped Government Experiments cast THREE MILLION illegal Votes for Hillary this Election! – NWoD Breitbart, probably The other chief target for TMI is their creators and former tormentors, the actual Merrick group, who are still doing their sinister experiments for nefarious purposes we'll get to in the actual TMI writeup (which is, incidentally, shorter than this passage). This is ideologically important for TMI, both for purposes of protecting themselves and freeing the other test subjects still imprisoned by their old captors. To find them, since all the official Merrick group's cells are self-contained, they scan the dreams of low-level employees who seem like they're being crushed by their working life: quote:There’s a certain kind of worker who is very qualified, often over-educated, and completely unsatisfied because they lack any real acknowledgement of what they’re doing ( Seems like an extremely hit-and-miss tactic to me, and I'd be very surprised indeed if you found anything relevant that way, but whatever. The next task is to take the labs down, which involves going up against small but heavily-armed security units with “advanced weaponry, like some stuff you might expect on a Task Force: Valkyrie agent or something” (just so you know what to arm them with, STs  ), and other experimentees who are still enslaved by Merrick proper and will defend the compound from dream attack. They try to sap the morale and combat effectiveness of the security teams by plaguing them with their dreams, but that would still leave a bunch of unfit teenagers and 20-somethings against a crack (but tired) team of very well-armed guards, so this still seems like a hiding to nothing to me. The most effective sounding tactic TMI uses in this situation is to get other Hunter teams to attack the compounds, because Merrick proper is a spooky supernatural high-tech government organisation and many Hunters would be fairly happy to help shoot up their labs, be it to save the kids, steal the tech, or both.Also Merrick labs have a habit of blowing up, sinking into the earth (!!!), or otherwise vanishing 48 hours after they get cleaned out, so you can't hang around in them for too long once you've taken out the people using them. Why? , and the book never really explains much about Merrick proper, so hell if I know the answer. TMI just focusses on liberating the prisoners and stealing as much sci-fi junk as they can before the place disappears (taking them with it, if they're still inside).Lastly there is a short section on other monsters. The Merrick Institute doesn't focus much on other monsters unless they think they're meddling in people's dreams. Sometimes they'll hunt changelings or mages in dreams, if that's what they think they're doing. But, while I don't know about changelings (since Changeling: the Lost Second Edition isn't out yet),* Mage's dream rules are pretty specific about how you can't actually kill a person by killing them in the Astral. So, while they could protect the dreams of others and fight off mages trying to invade or mess around with them, there isn't really a whole lot of damage they can do to a mage by killing her in dreams. *It occurred sometime after I wrote this that the Changeling 2.0 playtest materials have been released, so I went and looked through those. Apparently Changeling dream combat does the same thing as dream combat as presented in this book, with damage you take in the dream persistent on waking, but downgraded by one category. So are mages special in that they don't take damage from dreams, or is this just rules contradiction? I personally think that damage from dream combat affecting your real-world body is a bit daft anyway, but 'what Onan thinks is daft' is not exactly a coherent design principle from which to mechanically critique a role-playing book, so. They also hunt monsters in the real world, somewhat out of a sense of justice, somewhat because Beasts claim friendship with all the other monsters. quote:Besides, the Beasts of nightmare consider “real world” monsters to be family. If that’s not enough of a reason to fight them, I can't imagine what is. Way to go, Beasts. The Merrick Institute's writeup is very detail-heavy, but remarkably bare on why they're actually fighting Beasts, compared to the motivation-heavy Reckoning section. We'll find out, to a certain degree, what their deal is later on, but based on this part it seems like Merrick proper should be TMI's primary antagonist, not Beasts, and (spoilers) the actual TMI Compact writeup doesn't do much to change that impression. Why they hunt Beasts is almost an afterthought, but they do. And that concludes tonight's episode of H:tVCaC:WDTK[AB]?DTKT?LFO!    Next entry:  You said it, Pinky.
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Feb 9, 2017 14:13
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). They know they’re doing important work, they know they’re doing things that are changing the world, but they don’t know what they’re changing. There’s a depression that comes along with that. Every one of these people is like their own little Oppenheimer.
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Cythereal posted:Or have Valkyrie again. The Secret World has a US military officer offhandedly mention that there's a carrier task force in the north Atlantic hunting a rampaging kraken. Must've missed that line completely when I played. Always wanted to run a TSW campaign but I could never really figure out what system to use for it that felt just right.
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Feb 9, 2017 14:23
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Null Mysteris' spiel is even better than the Union because it gets at the stupid pretensions (and absolute lack of actual depth or intellectual weight) at the heart of this mess. Like, Beast is awful for being a game about glorifying abuse. Incredibly so. But its core premise about flipping scripts is done embarrassingly badly, too, and it's time someone in universe noticed. Even if it wasn't abuse-apologia, the game is basically 13 year old fanfic level reading of myth.
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Feb 9, 2017 14:38
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I Am Just a Box posted:Re: Demon and the Lucifuge, my impression of the Mortal Remains chapter has always been that it takes a firmly ambiguous position, as appropriate for Hunter. The weaker chapters of Mortal Remains are like Tooth and Nail in that they give a straightforward, point by point summary of the corresponding gameline, but the Demon chapter isn't like that. It has a version of greater demons which are definitely out of Descent, some lesser demons which are entirely unheard of from a Descent perspective, and a conflated merger of the Hunter core's elder demons and Demon's infrastructure and occult matrices. The Lucifuge section is sufficiently ambiguous that the God-Machines demons – or its angels, for that matter – could be relatives, a red herring, or part of a larger puzzle. I don't think I expect Hunter 2e to take the Lucifuge more firmly in the direction of Descent; they have their own associations. Fair. I didn't think Mortal Remains was particularly ambiguous in that regard, but I also didn't think the Demon chapter was one of the stronger ones, so maybe that's just a difference in interpretation. Either way, I still think it's weird that Lucifuge are the ones Beasts are close to. If I were writing Tooth and Nail, I'd have written that they kin-sensed (and were extremely magnetically attracted to) Cheiron agents without really knowing why. What's so special about these humans that they trip our family senses?
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Feb 9, 2017 14:41
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Aw yeah, that's the stuff. 
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Feb 9, 2017 15:16
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SirPhoebos posted:
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Feb 9, 2017 15:21
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Simian_Prime posted:Would it be too soon to request making a sample character based off of Mr. Peanutbutter from Bojack Horseman? I really know nothing about that show outside of what I've seen in Gifs and wikipedia summaries so... I don't know? The Sin of Onan posted:Hunter: Tooth and Nail – Part Three: Hunter: the Vigil Compacts and Conspiracies: What Do They Know [About Beasts]? Do They Know Things? Let's Find Out! The sense I get is if the Hunter group is fighting for the sake of humanity, they see Beasts as a threat. If they're fighting for some other reason, they probably don't give a poo poo. Regardless as an abuse survivor myself that Union quote hits pretty damned close to home. Cooked Auto posted:Must've missed that line completely when I played.
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Feb 9, 2017 15:36
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Oh, I like this one. The kid who looks like Elliot from E.T., and the ghost trap, lovely ersatz Stranger Things thing going on. Took me a minute to realize what that one kid's pulling out of his duffel bag; I thought everyone had forgotten about My Science Project. Still not sure where the boombox contraption is from.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:00
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Kurieg posted:I really like TSW I just wish the gear/difficulty curve was better tuned cause I hate almost dying every single pull while soloing just to force me to use potions. Huh, never actually had that happen to me with any real frequency. I'm mostly wishing combat was a lot more interesting instead.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:06
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I'm running elemental magic/shotgun and it happens to me with alarming frequency. I think I finished with Egypt before I finally got tired of it.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:10
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Kurieg posted:I'm running elemental magic/shotgun and it happens to me with alarming frequency. I think I finished with Egypt before I finally got tired of it. I guess it depends on the build. I ran with Chaos/Shotgun build for my second character that managed to get into Tokyo without too much issue. But then I figure it helped I got a bit carried by doing the Anniversary event a couple of times with a friend that gave me a ton of points so it might have tipped the scales a little.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:25
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Kurieg posted:I'm running elemental magic/shotgun and it happens to me with alarming frequency. I think I finished with Egypt before I finally got tired of it. It says a lot about how great Secret World is that 'Shotgun' is a power set.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:26
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I still play off and on and I last ran Elementalism/Pistols, which was pretty fun. Man a Secret World RPG would be dope. The closest thing I can think of that replicates the combat would be like Feng Shui.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:29
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Cooked Auto posted:I guess it depends on the build. I ran with Chaos/Shotgun build for my second character that managed to get into Tokyo without too much issue. But then I figure it helped I got a bit carried by doing the Anniversary event a couple of times with a friend that gave me a ton of points so it might have tipped the scales a little. It probably helps that chaos is one of the tanking builds. Night10194 posted:It says a lot about how great Secret World is that 'Shotgun' is a power set. One of the shotgun powers is calling down a mortar strike while one of the elementalist powers is bashing someone's face in with Thor's hammer. There's also a questline where you help save the students of Miskatonic University, and the headmaster is voiced by Weyoun from DS9. I really wish the game was easier to play because it ticks almost every box of things I like.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:36
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Kurieg posted:One of the shotgun powers is calling down a mortar strike while one of the elementalist powers is bashing someone's face in with Thor's hammer. I would have gone with Herbert West, but that works too. The fact that TSW is inexplicably an MMO and not a single-player RPG is mind-blowing. It would have been 1000x better.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:38
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Kurieg posted:There's also a questline where you help save the students of Miskatonic University, and the headmaster is voiced by Weyoun from DS9. Tuvok shows up too. The best part about Jeffrey Combs being in there is that he did a bunch of Lovecraft-related movies when he was younger.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:40
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Serf posted:I would have gone with Herbert West, but that works too. 100% this. A single-player The Secret World is basically my perfect RPG. TSW is honestly how I imagine a lot of Hunter. Albeit it's on a higher power scale.
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Feb 9, 2017 16:47
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Is there, like, active infighting at OPP over Beast? The difference between the sections that are "beasts are totally everyone's friends and heroes are the real enemies" and "beasts are full of poo poo, here's why" are pretty striking. I wonder how much of that is leading to tension among the writing teams, versus just differing in universe perceptions that everyone's cool with.
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Feb 9, 2017 17:33
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Desiden posted:Is there, like, active infighting at OPP over Beast? The difference between the sections that are "beasts are totally everyone's friends and heroes are the real enemies" and "beasts are full of poo poo, here's why" are pretty striking. I wonder how much of that is leading to tension among the writing teams, versus just differing in universe perceptions that everyone's cool with. I've been wondering that myself, some of the mentions of Beast in other non-beast books have not been kind. Their description in The Pack seems to regard them as little more than naive children who can be used by the Forsaken and Pure as weapons to ruin the spiritual resonance of places.
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Feb 9, 2017 17:49
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That's to be expected when you write your splat as Poochie. It's like if WW had actually let that Living Dolls fansplat guy make his product official.
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Feb 9, 2017 17:59
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Warhammer Fantasy: Night's Dark Masters Strigoi: The Unluckiest Vampires Of All So, the Strigoi. The second 'ugly vamp', Strigoi got their start with Ushoran, younger brother of Nefereta. You may remember him as 'Hahah, oh, silly Abhorash, that'll never come back to bite us. Everyone ignore that lame idiot' guy, and thus one of the people directly responsible for the fall of Lahmia. Originally he wasn't supposed to get the elixir at all, but he stole the last dose of the elixir himself and insinuated himself into the city's nobility. The story of his failed second kingdom is, of course, considerably different from the Strigoi perspective. They describe it as a paradise on earth where vampire and man lived in symbiosis, undermined by the jealous Nefereta and her schemes and slanders. Obviously, despite the Crown of Nagash figuring heavily into Ushoran taking control of the kingdom, there was no truth to the stories about how he may've risked putting everyone back under the Great Necromancer's thrall! It was all the treachery of the other lines that rent Strigos asunder and sent its rulers scattering to the four winds. And once scattered, they were unjustly hunted and mocked by their fellows in darkness, and found themselves unable to settle and feed like a normal vampire. Forced to feed from the cold blood of the dead and animals to avoid notice, the Strigoi began to twist and warp, becoming ghoulish and impossibly strong. Now they wait in the dark places, surrounded by courts of the outcast and the mad, reminiscing about the paradise they built and planning their revenge. As you might be able to tell, madness, bitterness, and an exceptionally rosy (and likely inaccurate) view of the past are essential to the Strigoi line. They are an entire line of exiles, each a great lord in their own mind, waiting in the dark and quiet places and teaching their progeny and their followers about how the world once was and how it should be again. Most who encounter a Strigoi hardly even believe the thing is a vampire; surely it must be some other kind of mutant. Everyone knows vampires are beautiful women, black knights, and arrogant nocturnal lords. Not a nine foot tall mass of sinew and muscle with claws that can rip a minotaur in half. Strigoi do not have a society like other lines; each is a court apart, surrounded by ghoulish cannibals and mutants, raising armies of the dead and plotting their great revenge. They take their children from among their followers and those who show proper respect, bringing them into darkness to show them the great ways of Strigos as they endlessly drive their undead creations to relieve the faded glory of lost times. Strigoi are known to sometimes lose centuries in their dreams of the past, spending ages replaying old celebrations and battles from when things were better (or when they heard of how things used to be better from their creator). Every now and then, though, one will become lucid enough long enough to rise up and seek their revenge. Vorag the Ghoul King is one of the inspirations of the Strigoi line, having enslaved and destroyed multiple clans of Orcs and creating a great (and short lived) kingdom of death and bone in the badlands before the green tide overwhelmed him. All dream of doing the same some day (albeit with more long term success). A Strigoi that has finally rallied their followers and stirred from their ancient hiding places can be a terrifying foe, and half the reason they still find themselves hunted as fervently as they do is that the Lahmian Sisterhood especially fears the disruptions they can bring. Not to mention the fact that Nefereta was the one who convinced the other lines Ushoran might be influenced by the Crown, and thus got them to turn their back on the original kingdom. The obsession with the past means that insult and that betrayal is still fresh in the mind of every Strigoi who knows of it, and they want the entire Sisterhood dead for it. A Strigoi's endless dreams and madness can be just as dangerous as their waking, though; one who sees every passerby as intruding on their realm could start to slaughter every last one for not giving the proper greetings in High Nehekaran, for instance, and thus showing immense disrespect. A Strigoi might lack the skill and arms of a Blood Dragon, but they are by far the physically strongest vampires and any target for their wrath would do well not to let them get within reach. There's also the unfortunate bit we have to get into. The survivors of the kingdom of Strigos became a traveling people known as Striganny, itinerant nomads who deal in fortune telling, performances, and odd jobs and who the Empire mistrusts as witches and thieves. Yes, it's our very own embarrassing Roma analogue (complete with a -10% to Fellowship checks because people see them as thieves) who often shelter and aid the Strigoi. The idea of the surviving humans of their kingdom still trying to help their old masters is fine, but I don't really think Warhammer needed Roma stereotypes wandering around (especially given this is the only place they are ever mentioned or dealt with). Another important sort of follower for the Strigoi? Ghouls. Ghouls in Warhammer aren't actually undead, even though they are often found in undead armies. Ghouls are what can happen when someone violates the strictures of Morr against cannibalism, eating the flesh of other humans to stave off starvation. Instead of getting brain diseases, Warhams humans will slowly become more degenerated, hunching over and growing long predatory claws and sharper teeth, and beginning to drip with venom and disease. These mutants are driven out of human settlements or killed, and surviving ghouls often find the court of a Strigoi. The two see a kinship between them; a Strigoi was forced to feed on the dead and become warped and strange, just like a Ghoul, and so they make fitting followers, friends, and partners as they protect and work with one another. The notable Strigoi are actually pretty cool! The first one would be absolutely perfect for a PC vamp: Gashnag the Black Prince is a young Strigoi thrall who lives in the Border Princes, a lawless dumping ground for dispossessed nobles and usurpers. He has carved out a walled settlement for himself as a military veteran because he's strong enough to rip off an ogre's head with his bare hands, and he's also been clever enough to spread romantic stories of how he's a handsome hero cursed by dark magic to be tragically ugly and strange. He goes everywhere in a dramatic mask and cloak, visibly facing threats to his people and spreading his legend as he tries to get new settlements and serfs to enter his protection. And he really does fight terrible monsters, often returning to stake the heads of awful things to the public square of his town to show his people they are safe under his rule. Playing as this guy and his advisors as they build the border princes into a kingdom like Vlad did for Sylvannia would be a great campaign, or he'd be a neat NPC to work for or fight. Urzen the Unrelenting is a very, very old Strigoi. One of the original children of Ushoran, he has hidden away to plot for ages, trying to decide which target most deserves his ire. In doing, he has discovered the Lahmian fortress at the Silver Pinnacle and is doing everything he can to build his forces to assail it directly. In the meantime, he uses what human agents he has to tip off Imperial Witch Hunters and adventurers to the presence of Lahmian Sisters who might discover his marshaling forces and warn their mistress that he isn't planning a suicidal attempt to sweep away the Empire for himself. PCs could easily run into him either at the behest of the Lahmians (if you have a Lahmian-friendly group, or one being manipulated by someone like Baroness von Culper) or by his agents happily pointing them at Lahmians to kill until they discover that there's a huge army of ghouls and undead prepping nearby and that that can't mean anything good. I like the Strigoi a lot. They manage to pack the classical vampiric arrogance into a very different package, and the ambiguity of their origin and their pining for the golden days long past come together to make a Line you can make as sympathetic and justly pissed off as you like, or as insane and misguided as you need them to be. They'd be hard to fit into a normal campaign since they can't pass for human, but Gashnag gives a pretty good idea for how you could do that all the same. A campaign as a Strigoi's court of misfits and outcasts (led by a young vamp, of course) would be pretty fun as a Monster Party game, too, plus it's got a solid overarching plot already ready to go with plenty of mysteries (in discovering how idealized their view of the past is, exactly) and room to be cynical or oddly noble as you prefer. Their in-game abilities don't quite live up to their description once we get to the rules, sadly. A Dragon will murder one in open combat pretty much all the time and they don't get any direct buff to physical statistics, which is a shame. I'd have given them more strength and toughness to make up for the massive Fellowship hit they take and fit their fluff, as well as more Wounds. Still, if you want a forgotten enemy lurking in an old tomb or a tragic monster for players to face, Strigoi are great. Next Time: Saving the Best (From Their Perspective) For Last: The Great Family of the Von Carsteins! Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Aug 4, 2017 |
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Feb 9, 2017 18:32
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Wait so they're giant murder machines who don't get a physical stats buff? That seems like a "you had one job" situation
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Feb 9, 2017 18:46
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Serf posted:I still play off and on and I last ran Elementalism/Pistols, which was pretty fun. Man a Secret World RPG would be dope. The closest thing I can think of that replicates the combat would be like Feng Shui. Yeah that does sound like a good contended for running a TSW campaign. I was stupidly enough considering 13th Age just for a brief second because I was plugging away at a World of Warcraft hack for it at the same time. I quickly realized how dumb that was.  Serf posted:The fact that TSW is inexplicably an MMO and not a single-player RPG is mind-blowing. It would have been 1000x better. Yeah, once you hit the later areas that become more and more apparent. Especially when you do the Side Issue plots which just reeks of them desperately wanting to do a cRPG instead of an MMO considering how much plot is crammed into them.
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Feb 9, 2017 19:05
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Wait so they're giant murder machines who don't get a physical stats buff? They get Blood Gifts that make them very strong and had to kill, just no base stats. It's lame.
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Feb 9, 2017 19:32
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 The Whispering Vault, Another One The Unbidden  So, as previously mentioned the Unbidden are the world-dreaming Aesthetics who create the Realms Of Flesh on behalf of the Primal Powers. Occasionally (well, it seems quite often) one of them gets obsessed with the Realm of Flesh and will leave their post in the Realm of Essence, coming to our world and becoming one of the Unbidden. Now despite the book’s creepy description (“indulging their passions” and “unnatural lust”), things fortunately do not seem to go all Black Tokyo with the Unbidden, they mostly seem to just kill people. When the Unbidden come to the Realm of Flesh they go through a “life cycle” as they adapt. They start as Beasts, basically flesh eating monsters who consume mortal life force to survive. Once they’ve eaten their fill they become Strangers, where they regain enough clarity to start acting on their Passions rather than mindlessly killing. Strangers who “mature” enough can become Architects, who are more master-mindy and start developing long-term goals and ambitions as well as more influence in the mortal world. Essentially, each stage is meant to be a different sort of Hunt, a Beast is a ravening killer on the loose, a Stranger is more of a serial killer that must be hunted down and the Architect has imbedded themselves in mortal society, becoming harder to assault directly. Before getting into more detail we’re thrown into a sidebar about Aversions. An Aversion is a typical “cross to a vampire” style weakness that some Unbidden have. There is no clear answer on why...it’s just a thing that happens. Likewise intensity can range from mild discomfort to paralyzing fear. Oh and apparently many (but not all?) Unbidden have an Aversion for the Keys Of Humanity, which is a powerful tool since it could allow Stalkers to do a kind of ‘turn undead’ move on the Unbidden. Except there are no actual rules for it. The game devotes two paragraphs to telling us about it but forgot to actually provide any rules for what will happen if you try and shake your Keys in Cthulhu’s face. Then we’re told about Fetishes, which are called “Lesser Passions”...well, they call them that but the term seems to be synonymous with Passions. There’s nothing to clarify what a Passion is if the Fetishes are “Lesser Passions”. There are also no rules here, it just points out that all Unbidden have at least one and may develop more as they grow. Finally we have Idiosyncrasies which are basically the behavioral signs that the Unbidden are supernatural weirdos. Again, no rules, but this section didn’t really require even mentioning. I think by now it was assumed that the Unbidden would be strange in a variety of ways. If there’s one thing this game doesn’t need it’s another Capitalized Word.  Now we get back to the Unbidden life-cycle. The Beast The Beast is the first stage of the Unbidden life cycle. Right after crossing over to the Realm of Flesh, the Unbidden finds the nearest Mortal and goes all “edgar-suit” on them. This kills the Host and destroys their soul. The Host body starts looking traditionally undead (referred to as The Ashen Mask) and becomes supernaturally strong and killy. Every 1d6 days the Host loses a permanent point of Vitality as the Withering causes the Unbidden’s stolen body to decay, unable to bear its Immortal Essence. The Withering can eventually destroy the Host entirely and if the Unbidden hasn’t managed to evolve to the next stage then its Avatar will go on a rampage until it starves in a few days (usually killing everything nearby). The Beast feeds on Mortals using its Vampiric Touch, draining 1 point of Vitality every 3 rounds (so not really useful in combat). Humans who aren’t killed can recover with rest, so long as their spirits haven’t been broken (Driven Mortals recover twice as fast. This is important for some reason). Those who survive being drained have a kind of mind-link with the Beast, dreaming of them and their doings. So yeah, basically Beasts are non-sexy vampires.  Bella!! Because of the Beast’s constant Hunger there’s not much it does other than feeding on Mortals, although when it’s fed it becomes slightly more lucid (possibly with some of the Host’s memories and personality leaking through). This stage of the Unbidden is a straight-up monster hunt for the most part. It’s also the shortest stage, the Unbidden either learns how to feed on Essence rather than Flesh within a few weeks or they die from the Withering. If you catch an Unbidden at this point you have a chance to nip things in the bud. Stat-wise the Unbidden follow an interesting pattern, the more integrated they become the more powerful their Host is but the weaker their Avatar is. So the Beast has a relatively weak Host body but once defeated as a Host their Avatar is exceptionally strong. This actually makes a Beast really difficult to deal with, since they have the most extreme stats once their Husk is wrecked and they are forced into Avatar form, largely their massive resolve of 23, which is going to be the target number for the Binding action used to seal up an Unbidden. Keep in mind that the highest TN a normal task goes to is 18. Assuming a character is absolutely focused on Binding might have a presence of 6 or 7 (so rolling that many dice) with a +6 bonus to the total from a maxed-out Binding skill, meaning you need a result of 17 or higher in order to Bind a Beast. I...think that’s nearly impossible? I say “I think” because figuring out the odds for a roll in Whispering Vault is really tough. If you don’t remember (and I don’t blame you), a roll is done by rolling a number of d6’s equal to the stat your roll is based on. You take the highest single result or you add together any matched results. You then add a flat bonus from skills on top. So, assuming you’ve got Resolve of 7, you’re rolling 7d6s and in order to beat a 17 or higher (assuming that +6 bonus from Binding skill) you’ve got to get either three+ 6’s, four+ 5’s, five+ 4’s or six+ 3’s. Those are the only results that can give you enough to succeed. I don’t know the odds, someone with better dice fu can feel free to work it out but I have a strong feeling that it’s not a reasonable difficulty for an essential roll. And keep in mind this is for someone with maxed out Binding, a skill that has no other use. It’s an important skill, but this is the only time you’ll be doing it. Oh, and remember that Binding is a Strenous skill which means that it costs you Vitality to use, so if the Bind-monkey has been taken out or badly hurt already your team may find it impossible to Bind your opponent even after beating them. Of course, copious Karma spending can get you through, but again you run into the problem that this is the last thing you do in the Hunt more or less, you’ve just finished your “boss fight” and may not have the karma to spare to beat a number this unreasonable. Ironically this leaves the only option to be killing the Unbidden, which results in you losing your Karma reward for the whole Hunt. The Stranger  This is what happens if you sit on your hand too long If the Beast manages to adapt to the Realm of Flesh and starts absorbing Essence to sustain itself its hunger is sated and it becomes The Stranger, ready to indulge in its Passions. The Stranger can absorb Essence by feeding which slows the effect of the Withering (1 point of Vitality every 1d6 weeks) and even more dangerous it can transfer its Avatar to another Vessel whenever it wants (although the process requires about 30 minutes of uninterrupted contact with its new body). The Stranger can also spend Vitality to strengthen its Vessel, increasing its Strength and using the Avatar’s defence, attack and initiative scores instead of its Vessel. For two vitality strength goes up further and it gets to make two attacks per round. The Stranger can also start Binding Shadows to serve as Minions (3 points of Vitality). It’s arguable how worthwhile this is since each Minion bound reduces the Vitality or Resolve of both the Vessel and the Avatar by 1. Although once the Minion is banished or dead the lost points return after 1d6 hours, making it okay for short term servants. Behavior-wise the Stranger is more serial killer than rabid monster. They don’t properly understand mortal society or behavior and largely just act to fulfill their Passions, moving to a new Vessel once it gives out or the Stranger attracts too much attention. Moving to the next stage requires the Stranger to come to understand the mortal mind, something that can take decades, if it ever happens. Stat wise the stranger’s avatar is stronger than its Vessel but not to the degree of the beast, giving it a slightly more bind-able 20 Resolve. The Architect  He who controls the Spice, controls the universe! The final stage allows the Unbidden to fully accept the Realm of Flesh as their home, which features several useful adaptations and some weaknesses. First, the Vessel no longer suffers from the Withering and is effectively immortal. The Unbidden can even recover Vitality with meditation. The Archetype has the strongest Vessel stats as well, sometimes even higher than their Avatar’s. The downside is that they can only transfer to a new Vessel if their current one is destroyed and their Avatar stats are significantly weaker than the Beast or Stranger stages. This makes the Architect the easiest to defeat in combat. Second, the Architect regains the power of the Dreaming and can create a Domain (often linked to the Enigma they generate) which is under their control. They can also Bind an unlimited number of Shadows as Minions. Given the fact that most Architects have been around decades or centuries this means they usually have dozens of Mortal and Shadow servants to defend itself and a private realm with conveniently altered physics. Having completely adopted the Realm of Flesh, Unbidden in this stage usually engage in very long-range plans: getting more Unbidden into the world, forming Mortal cults, etc. Special Abilities These are the Unbidden equivalent to Stalker Disciplines.They get more the longer they stay around: Beasts may develop one just before transitioning to Stranger while an experienced Architect may have more than 6. Of course only six powers are provided but it’s encouraged that each Unbidden have a custom power made by the GM anyway. Chameleon: Exactly what it implies. Stalkers can only perceive the Unbidden with a Difficult Sensitivity challenge...which I guess must be an editing mistake because there is no such thing as a Difficult challenge. Challenges have a Difficulty which ranges from Routine to Very Hard...and challenges can be Strenuous (costing Vitality)...but a Difficult challenge is just not a thing. Anyway, no actual rules or bonuses are provided for this invisibility, which is also kind of a big deal. Healer This lets an Unbidden fix up their Minions, spending 2 Vitality to heal 5 if you can touch them or 1 Vitality to heal 2 at a range. Parasite The opposite, you can eat your Minions to heal yourself, gaining 2 Vitality for every 5 drained from a Minion (or 1:3) at a range. The master gets a bonus vitality if this kills the Minion. Be very careful fighting an Architect when they’ve got a swarm of Minions to provide for them. Puppetmaster This lets an Unbidden piggyback a Minion, sharing their senses and controlling them. Beyond knowing what is happening there are no real benefits to this, especially since the master loses a point of Vitality whenever the Minion is wounded, and 1d6 vitality if the minion is killed. Heck, this could potentially kill a Stranger’s Vessel all on its own. Shapeshifter This lets the Unbidden change the shape of their Vessel, the bigger the changes the more Vitality this costs and the shorter the effect lasts. Changing to a different person costs 1 Vitality and lasts a day or so, while turning into an object costs 3 Vitality and lasts a few minutes. Summoner This power will summon Minions, teleporting them to the Unbidden’s side. This costs a point of Vitality and inflicts 1d6 damage to the Minion. Making this kind of terrible. It’s worth noting that so far 3 out of 5 of the powers all focus on Minions, all cost a lot of Vitality and aren’t very interesting. Nothing even basic but useful like Rend or Frenzy from the Stalker’s disciplines. Weaver This lets the Unbidden Weave a Husk for a Minion which will make them appear human enough that they are under the protection of the Veil. This lets your Shadow Minions pass for human. Life Link This refers to an Unbidden’s link with the Enigma that they spawned when they left their post. This has no real effect until the Architect stage, which turns them into super-bosses for experienced Stalkers to fight. The Life Link gives several big benefits: *Bonus vitality, from 2-6 depending on the strength of the Enigma, halved if further than a mile away but doubled within a hundred yards. *Custom anomalies. Vaguely defined but seems to cover changing reality in the area of the Enigma in ways that suit them. *Unlimited minions. This gives the Architect unlimited Minions. An ability they already had. It also apparently allows them to prevent their Minions from Reawakening, something that has not been discussed yet but costs 1d6 Vitality. *Regeneration. Another ability the Architect already has...I guess this version is slightly better? 1 Vitality every 10 minutes rather than 3 Vitality every 10 minutes of meditation. The big thing is regenerating a Vitality every round if they are within 100 yards of the Enigma. If in physical contact the Unbidden can drain 1d6 vitality...but a roll of 6 screws up and inflicts 2d6 vitality instead. So...useful but not as dramatic as the game plays it up to be. 
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Feb 9, 2017 19:42
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Fight! - Round 2 Looks like Rock Howard got himself a new outfit. Chapter 1: Basic Qualities, Qualities, and Techniques (Blaz, the Blueing) Fight! was one of the first RPGs I've covered here, so let's take a look at the supplement. But first a little refresher: Fight! is a RPG meant to capture the spirit of fighting games, similar to the old Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game or Thrash. Unlike those two, Fight! is a lot more effects-based (aka the game doesn't care if you're the only dude with armor and a sword; that probably just means that you're slow, durable, and hard-hitting), and instead of trying to adapt the general concept of fighting games into your standard RPG, it instead tries to essentially emulate fighting games through dice rolls: There are combos and hit stun, the "map" is just a one-dimensional grid, and even duels to the death are fought out in typical best-2-out-of-3 structure (though that doesn't actually happen in-setting. Rounds just break up the fight for narrative purposes). Also your Special Moves' relative strength can me correlated to their hypothetical button inputs, which is pretty helpful for conversions. And if you want to get really crazy, you can treat the characters and everything like a video game. Your Fighter aka player character can totally have a crappy sprite, or an awesome theme. Probably the most unorthodox thing Fight! does is make combat more unpredictable: Not only is your Control (which is best described as "How much time you have to input moves and combos") rolled each round (with most modifiers being die shifts), but the amount the timer (of course there is a timer) decreases at the end of the round is also rolled, which can be pretty important if you - or your opponent - have buffs going on, as they care not about rounds, but about timer counts. It's a bit like a mashup between Hybrid Heaven and Grandia 2, to use a completely different genre of video games. The game is not without its oddities. The layout could need work, and some of the terminology can be confusing at first (there are "Basic Qualities" which are stats, but also just "Qualities" that are advantages). Getting into the combat rules - the meat of the game - can also seem a bit daunting, but there's the optional Dramatic Combat system that streamlines things while giving you additional things to do in combat besides hitting dudes. It's basically less Street Fighter and more Street Fighter: The Animation. Now most of the pages of the corebook were taken up by Elements and Liabilities (the stuff you bolt onto your Special Moves) and lots of optional rules to tinker the "engine" to your liking. This book has a lot more where that comes from, many of which are directly inspired by games such as Samurai Shodown, Guilty Gear and Mortal Kombat. So, let's get ready to rumble! Basic Qualities Round 2 introduces two options to tinker with the Basic Qualities, aka the stats of the game. One of them is about Speed, a stat that fuels two sub-stats: Initiative which is pretty self-explanatory and Control, which affects your base Control Roll. Each increase or decrease of Speed only affects one of those sub-stats. The optional rule let's you further deviate from each other, so you can have a very fast guy that can most likely only pull off simple moves or combos, or a slow grappler who can do 360°s all day. There's a bit of warning for potential abuse however, since unlike Initiative, Control can actually gain static bonuses as you level up, making it tempting to always go for higher Initiative. The other optional rule removes Ki as a Combat Skill. Ki not only determines how good you are at cancelling enemy Hadokens with your own Hadokens, but also the damage they do. You can also use an Element to apply your Ki damage to a normal Special Move, which is how you get Ken's fiery Shoryuken that is just better than Ryu's. The optional rules basically boils down to turning Ki into another Basic Quality akin to a situational Strength. This streamlines things and makes Ki more consistent across the campaign (heavy Ki users can be pretty scary later on, but then again the points put into Ki are missing somewhere else), but it leaves the option for a dumb stat if you don't care about ranged attacks. New Qualities, Weaknesses and Quirks Aka advantages, disadvantages and, well, quirks. There are not a lot here, but they're quite fun: Stage gives your Fighter a pretty neat stage. Should you find yourself fighting on your home turf - or in an area that looks similar enough - you gain slight Fighting Spirit (kinda sorta combat-only Fate Points / Willpower, except used much more often and available in bigger quantities) regeneration. This is again tied to the random timer count, which means you will want to draw the fight out, while the other guy will probably want to KO you ASAP. New Weaknesses give us Deficiency (your like Guilty Gear's Potemkin in that you lack options available to everyone else, like say double jumps) and Hidden Abilities (you're like Tony Stark, Kamen Rider or Sailor Moon in that you need to henshin it up before you're at full fight capacity). The Quirk Sexually Ambiguous makes you androgynous to the exreme. Just like say Shion from King of Fighters XI, nobody is sure just what you are. Techniques Techniques are a bit like combat feats in that they offer little options for your Fighter, like say the ability to do a back dash or a wall jump. Some Techniques are set as the default for the campaign, while each Fighter can add further ones through their repertoire with the Technique Quality (or remove ones with the above Deficiency). Delayed Wake Up revolves around one of my favorite bits of source material emulation. You know how getting knocked down in a fighting game makes you pretty much untouchable until you stand up again? This is trze in Fight!, right down to the part where your character has to stand up again if it's his turn again. This Technique let's you stay down for longer, though you can't really do anything while you do so. But don't worry about characters surviving all-out brawls because they laid down and played dead, cause this supplement also introduces some of those rare ways to hit a guy that is knocked down. Fury Mode simply makes you hit harder if your Life Bar (aka Hit Points) are low. A variant turns this into the T.O.P. system from Gaoru: Mark of the Wolves, letting you "move" this damage boost to the start or middle of your Life Bar and increase or decrease the boost istelf based on how big of a percentage it covers. You can either have it like in Garou where you can change up your Fury Mode "setting" before a fight, or you can make it permanent. I especially like the idea of a character who has that permanently in the middle: He feels the need to give it his all when he appears to be losing, but then it fizzles out when he notices that he probably is going to lose. Pre-Set Combo is for characters who have fixed chains of moves that easily flow into each other. Fight! normally doesn't care about this level of detail (many fighting game characters would have way too many of these pre-set combos), but you can use this anyways if everyone's on board with it. This lets you create a pre-defined string of Moves that are treated as a single Move for combo purposes, letting you make combos within combos. Super Armor and especially Hyper Armor make you more resistant to damage and Hit Stun, while at the same time making you less mobile. The former can be used for really big characters, while the latter is so extreme it should only be used as a Temporary Technique (aka one you gain from a specific move that lasts till your next turn). This is basically Street Figher 4's Focus Attack, which lets you eat a hit from the enemy and keep going, damage be damned. Campaign Based Techniques This rule gives every Fighter in the campaign access to a unique kind of Technique for free, one that can have a pretty strong impact on the Fighter's overall combat style. This rule requires a lot of work for the GM to make up new Techniques and ensure that they are roughly equal. If you're familiar with BlazBlue, this is pretty much entirely based on that series. The example Techniques are even based on BlazBlue characters: You can curse the opponent and hit them with all sorts of stuff from every direction (Arakune), manipulate wind or gravity to your advantage (Rachel Alucard), gain a permanent tag buddy that owns a good chunk of your move set (Carl Clover), or use the power of chains or magnets to keep the opponent close to you (Iron Tager). Overall a cool option, but this requires quite a bit of houseruling by design because this stuff can do just about anything. Next Time: Basic Moves - air dashes and more! Doresh fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Feb 9, 2017 |
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Feb 9, 2017 20:07
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Warhammer Fantasy: Night's Dark masters The Von Carsteins: The most Castlevania of all Alright, this will be the second to last fluff update because right after it comes the glorious country of Sylvania. But first, its rulers: The Von Carstein family. The heart of the family has always been the first, even though he's been dead for centuries: Vladimir Von Carstein. Originally Prince Vashenesh of Nehekarah, Vlad was born the bastard son of a deposed dynasty and narrowly escaped his own death by posing as a common soldier of the usurper Setep. He devoted everything he had to finding a path to avenge himself on General Setep, for the murder of his dynasty and the usurpation of his birthright, and the rumors of the power of the Queen of Lahmia sent him there. While we've already covered what happened next, and it didn't quite go to Vlad's plans, he would spend the next 4 millennia biding his time and looking for the right time and place to make his true mark on history, finding it in Sylvania. Ever since, the Von Carstein family has been deeply tied to the gloomy, warpstone ridden province and its dark magic. To a Von Carstein, their name is all. A Von Carstein who swears on the family name means what they say, and will move heaven and earth to accomplish it. They tend to think of themselves as shepherds and stewards of their human flock, but in return they demand that men die like sheep at their order. A Von Carstein finds the idea that their food could fight back, or be anything but grateful to be asked to bare their neck, an insult to the family and their personal honor. Similarly, unlike other vampires, the Carsteins are tied directly to the feudal order and hold that land (and the people tied to it) is the true source of legitimacy and authority, two things they crave almost as much as blood. Similarly, a Carstein might travel incognito while abroad (what charming noble doesn't find that exciting?) but would consider any suggestion that they hide their nature out of necessity to be a personal insult; a Carstein is proud of what they are. Not only that, more than any other sort of vampire, Carsteins delight in theatricality and drama. A Carstein won't consider a battle complete until they've had a chance to make a speech about it, nor would they ever have a duel without banter and witticisms with their foe. They love to pick out exotic suits of armor and striking clothing, making their presence on the field or in the ballroom as plain as possible, and they'll adhere to the 'rules' of a good drama up until the moment they might actually come away the loser; then they cheat like there's no tomorrow. Being consummate aristocrats, the Carsteins quite enjoy warfare. Proving your superiority on the field, but more importantly, being able to order others to fight and die for you? This satisfies their immense megalomania. Of all the Lines, they are most likely to fight within the family; a Carstein accused of failing to uphold the standards of the family is a serious problem, after all, and needs to be rectified by their relations. If those relations also seize the wayward's properties and enrich themselves, that is only proper. Similarly, their neighbors in Stirland and the League of Ostermark clearly have been poor stewards of their lands and they would be better placed under the care of a more prestigious name. And of course, after that, other, new neighboring lands should probably be added to Sylvania's borders. It would only be right. The love of theater extends to everything in their lives. A Carstein chooses who to embrace as a vampire partly by who will be a worthy heir or pupil that will bring honor to the family, but also by who possessed the breeding and authority necessary to be admitted to the club as a human. A Carstein will almost never give the Kiss to someone of common blood...unless it would make for an enrapturing scandal, in which case they might try it to make it the talk of the social season among their kin. Embracing a stableboy for his keen mind and talents is a bore and an embarrassment. Embracing a stableboy for an illicit affair with someone 300 years his senior and so you can entrap his cousin, who is a Witch Hunter from Ostermark and lead him to his death at the hands of his own cousin? THAT might be applauded and forgiven. Assuming he doesn't shame the family, of course. Similar to theater, the Carsteins love large and impressive public works. Symbols of their creators' will, wealth, and authority, they also allow the vampire to point to the fiction of being a good shepherd to their flock. In the same vein, they enjoy administering justice and the other trappings of royal authority; some are even fairly good rulers, if their people are lucky, and this is generally considered laudable within the family. Most are, of course, petty tyrants who mistaken the terror of their subjects for quiet and orderly rule. In all things there is a calculated observing of the forms and norms of rulership, but also the calculated breaking of those norms, both for one's advantage and to prove one is powerful enough to get away with it. Naturally, Count Manfred von Carstein is in a position rather akin to trying to herd a large group of very couped up and extremely murderous cats. The actual Count of Sylvania has very little authority over the rest of the family, considering the uniform megalomania of the nobility. Manfred is also a coward, as we'll go over, and somewhat impatient with the forms of rulership, so he mostly lets the others rule their petty fiefdoms as they will so long as they provide him troops if he wants to line up for a new battle to run away from later. The book notes that most vampires don't wish to overthrow Manfred primarily because they don't actually want his position; most are happy pursuing their own schemes and tending their own homes, enjoying their own eccentricities and leaving him to develop ulcers and flail ineffectually away at getting everyone moving in the same direction. As for Manfred himself, he is obviously one of the example characters for the line. He is a Lord, and well beyond most Lords stats-wise; aside from 'only' having as many attacks as a 3rd tier fighter (3, unlike the 5 a Lord can get) his stats are ludicrously high, with some hitting the 90s. He is also a Wizard Lord level necromancer and learned about a wide variety of subjects, and is clearly intended to be an absolute final boss for a very long campaign. His character is the interesting part; as I've alluded to, Manfred has fled from or backed down from nearly every decisive moment in his career (some of them wisely, some of them not). He has none of the sense of theatrics of the rest of his line and is solely focused on making winning a sure thing. While he is still arrogant, he is much less so than most vampires and is keenly aware that he can be killed or defeated; this may make him hesitate but it also makes him hard to bait out. The one true pleasure he takes in life is his reading and studies, traveling the world to see new places and find new lore. He still intends to take over the world, one day, but tells himself he is merely patient rather than afraid. I actually really like Manfred as a villain. He's extremely easy to hate, he has some very real psychological flaws that sufficiently brave heroes can exploit, but a few hidden tricks up his sleeve that a vampire hunter wouldn't normally expect out of a Lord. He is well aware of his own weaknesses and tries at every step to mitigate them, but this makes him awkward and politically damages him with his own family, and their support for him is only lukewarm. There are plenty of ways your PCs can go after him, while he remains a legitimate threat to the Empire and your characters, if you want to use him as a villain. The other example Carstein is an interesting young Thrall. Lady Ariette von Carstein is Manfred's right hand woman and favored Thrall, and hides a dark secret: She's a peasant. She was present when Manfred was recently raised from the dead and was originally intended to be his first meal, but was rescued by a pair of adventurers (Gotrek and Felix, long-running novel protagonists for Warhammer Fantasy). Realizing a chance at the Blood Kiss, she escaped from her rescuers and invented a story for the newly raised Count, claiming to be a young Sylvanian noblewoman who had been captured for ransom by marauding foreigners, and who had come back to warn him they intended to return with reinforcements. Impressed with her bravery, Manfred decided to take her on as his own, just as she'd hoped. Now, the clever and brave former charcoal burner has everything she ever wanted: Wealth, influence, a great patron, immortality, superhuman strength, and the right to play the intrigues and games of the nobility. She will do anything to defend her new position and keep her real origins a secret, and she is both ruthless and cunning. She'd make a good PC for a Von Carstein campaign, or a good early foe for PCs gunning for Manfred; she has his confidence and loves to travel, so she's often incognito abroad in the Empire. Being a former hard laborer, she's also quite a bit stronger and tougher than PCs might be expecting out of a pampered noblewoman. Next: The Native Soil, then finally, time for rules and making our very own blood sucking abominations against God. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Aug 4, 2017 |
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Feb 9, 2017 21:18
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Night's Dark Masters A few more thoughts about the most famous of vampires Also, my own thoughts on the Marquee vampires for the setting: The Carsteins are what most people think of when they think of the Warhams Vampire Counts. They're why they're called the Vampire Counts, even. And they work, especially in this incarnation. At some point GW decided having a bunch of hammy hammer-horror Draculas was bad and tried to reinvent the line as all wearing weird clamshell looking armor and looking like extras from Lord of the Rings rather than making them flamboyant transylvannian oppression lords, and it didn't work at all. Thankfully, this version retains the capes, widows peaks, and gloomy castles. We've already covered the joke at the heart of the line, that they aren't that much worse than human nobles (and are sometime better), but it's a good one and it works well with the themes of the setting, where the old feudal order in the Empire is starting to strain against the rise of the Burgher class and developments in technology and economics. Here, you have a villain who embodies everything wrong with the old order, who literally feeds on the blood of their people and treats them like sheep. The theatricality and ambition also make them fun as PCs or as enemies; A Carstein will totally play with your PCs until they make a mistake and open themselves up to being beaten, because they're enjoying the back and forth and because they can't conceive of how a bunch of rag-tag rat catchers and university dropouts could ever defeat The Count. They also hold actual territory and need to hold it, so your PCs have something to attack as well as things to defend. If you want a conventional, flashy big bad guy for a campaign, a Carstein count is a great choice. The Carsteins fit in great with Warhammer's love of taking something that's a common genre cliche and then mashing it up against other cliches and concepts in such a way that they all become more fun again. And really, who doesn't want the chance to go try 16th century German Castlevania? Night10194 fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Aug 4, 2017 |
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Feb 9, 2017 21:52
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The thing that irks me most is how they got turned into ugly bald people, making them look like Necrarch with muscles.
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Feb 9, 2017 21:56
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Doresh posted:The thing that irks me most is how they got turned into ugly bald people, making them look like Necrarch who have been doing workouts. "We need to make our hammy vampire aristocrats villains people will take seriously!" said GW, and then made them completely lame. In the game that my GM runs, it's a running joke that Manfred shaved his head and tried to show off his biceps in a bid to get people to think he was tough, it ended in embarrassment, and it's now illegal to mention the 'clam shell' years in Sylvania.
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Feb 9, 2017 21:58
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I admire Konrad for never wearing pauldrons bigger than his head, even when everything else about him looked ridiculous.
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Feb 9, 2017 22:26
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thatbastardken posted:you dont need to make shady poo poo up about the surf life savers: ZeroCount posted:Once a year they drown a tourist as sacrifice to the Great White Shark Spiritfather as part of a bargain to keep him and most of his spawn away from the red and yellow flags that are symbolic of their truce. Wow, both of you hit on the exact idea I've had for a short story/movie I've had forever, but I'd dismissed it as just paranoia. One of us should write it. Harold Holt's drowning (or did he?) is involved too.
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Feb 9, 2017 22:36
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 Rifts World Book 8: Japan Part 11: “Perhaps it is not surprising that the Japanese, with their long tradition of attributing nature with supernatural aspects, would be among the first to recognize ley line energy.” I'll be seeing this review to the end from here on out. Man. This book. Well, you were asking about the Republic of Japan, and now we have the: Republic of Japan  The Republic is where the coffee spilled on this drawing. Rifts World Book 8 posted:The events that led up to the Great Cataclysm were a series of incredible coincidences. Man, you're telling me. It seems like every other book it's like "And then there's another group of amazing survivors who found a turtle shell and all tucked themselves inside!" I swear, it's like nobody remembers that an apocalypse happened when writing these things. And so, speaking of nations that made it through 300 years of nightmare completely intact, it's the Republic of Japan! So, thanks to Japanese being more in touch with nature and mysticism and not being as tied to "humankind's myopic pursuit of science-"  - I'm sorry, I had to get some of that Orientalism out before I swallowed it. So Japanese scientists were experimenting with ley line energy and trying to teleport a vase, but instead put a one hundred mile radius around them into a pocket dimension, transporting Kure, Iwatani, and Ichto (ugh, that name is like a thorn in my paw) and letting the next 300 or so years pass over the course of three of their days. Ooops. There was some panic, but it was mild compared to what happened when they rifted in and oni and demons rushed the city like Red Rover. Continued raids killed hundreds of thousands before they fortified and militarized, becoming able to hold off the oni hordes. So, we're told 20% of the Republic's population are cyborgs, which... why? I don't know. Maybe people have tragic steakhouse accidents all the time, or maybe cyberarms are just fashionable. Of course, in the military, enhancements are common and the number jumps to 33%. Military cyborgs are required to have a lot of their weapon systems decommissioned to transition to civilian life. And, of course, there are illegal body chop-shops that will make you into the cyber-samurai of your dreams. Of course, we're told that Shinto religious authorities object, but that feels like an oversimplification of Shintoists as basically just hippie druids, but it's not the first time Rifts has fumbled its way around a living religion, nor will it be the last. It's been 15 years since they popped back into existence and they're still adjusting. A few thousand local Japanese people seemingly died when the cities popped back in (tossed into some other dimension), and for awhile the superstitious bumpkins nearby thought that the cities were home to monsters or gods, and some still don't think they're quite human. Oh, those bumpkins! However, some migrated to the cities and have begun to settle in. Meanwhile, Ichto broke off and formed its own state, while the Otomo Shogunate instantly resented them. The New Empire would come to see them as "lost children of Japan" - i.e. spiritually as well as literally, because they blame machines for the current state of affairs. (Technically true, but I can't help but notice all their threats are magical.) And so they have preachers and protesters that go to the Republic cities to try and convince them of the danger of using digital watches. And about 2% of the Republic's population has gone over to the New Empire, presumably discarding their digital watches on the way. The Republic has also become more spiritualer which to Siembieda & Co. means having more art and gardens around and a samurai sword hanging on the mantle. There is a tiny percentage of psychics and wizards, actually surprisingly small given the fact we know how many people become psychic in post-rifts Earth (about 1 in 4). Maybe all of the psychics took the next carriage to the New Empire, or more likely, the writers just forgot. Of course, a lot of young cyberoids-  Cyberoids? Really? That's the word we're going to use from here on out? Sigh. Do you even know that the "oid" suffix means? It means "like" or "resembling" a given subject. Technically, a "cyberoid" should be somebody who's similar to... cyber? Well. Anyway. Nearly half the population are cyberoids, which is just a way of saying they have significant cybernetics, and a lot of young people embrace it and technology and reject the old ways. 2% of them, we're told, commit violence against New Empire protesters and their ilk... which, uh. 2% is still 300,000 people, Rifts. There shouldn't be any New Empire protesters that aren't dead in alleys or filling up emergency rooms at that rate. Occamsnailfile: So 20% are cyborgs, and 50% are “cyberoids”. Does that mean 70% have to get hand-scanned at airports? Alien Rope Burn: Well, the exact number of “cyberoids” are 40%. So presumably. Of course, by Rifts standards, I think having a cybernetic clock-calendar and compass makes you a “cyberoid”.  ”Welcome to your new life as a cyberoid.” “Is that what I’m called now? I hosed up!” People Out of Time It notes that the Republic is mostly progressive (aside from the 2% of people punching mikos, I guess) and is willing to accept D-Bees cautiously and "do not feel bitter or besieged" despite being literally besieged. In general, they're supposed to be optimists, and have essentially reformed their democratic republic. The use "credits based on the Japanese Yen", which is a contradiction in Rifts terms. Ultimately, they use credits, but their credit system isn’t compatible with America / Europe / Atlantis. We're told their government is efficient and generally honest. A lot of life revolves around the surviving corporations, of which there are more than 30, we're told. Other than Armatech, Ichto, and H-Brand, (makers of an equipment section coming soon) though, the only corporations mentioned are Cybercomp (media and telecommunications) and Kiramitsu Motor Company (vehicles and transportation). Salvage of ancient ruins in fallen cities and also mining and raiding Korea and China is a big deal for them. (No details on the latter other than that they're full of monsters, of course.) They rely a lot on hydroponics and fishing to supplement their food supply. We're told "Industrial espionage is a way of life!" and that ninjas and cyborgs and other agents run in the shadows, as it were. Many corporations essentially have militarized security as a result, and farmers and travellers can similarly apply to be able to carry weapons. The writing kind of has a whiplash effect like this in regards to the Republic - it wants them to both be an enlightened Golden Age republic and at the same time have them being a cyberpunkian dystopia and the two don't mesh well. For example, ninjas basically buy off government scrutiny by volunteering their services to the government. Even so, wouldn't they be arresting corporate leaders every time they catch something like this? It doesn't quite work. Occamsnailfile: They also leave out Japanese Nationalism completely--and not that I want to encourage even a little bit of that stuff, but we get HUMANS FIRST GERMANS FIRST (or Chi...people, etc) from our other large technological human nations and the Japanese are like ‘nah, immigration be cool, even for dragons and aliens and poo poo’. The Cities The main cities of the Republic are Hiroshima, Kure, and Iwakuni. Nagasaki will be mentioned repeatedly as another one later on, but is never mentioned under the actual writeup, because Rifts doesn't really plan its words in advance. Suburbs are "a thing of the past" somehow, either you're in urban sprawl or mechanized farming, nothing inbetween. Naturally, it gives us the typical Tokyo depiction of video screens and neon everywhere... I guess all of Japan is like Tokyo by that point. Also, there's crime, mainly having to do with gambling, bloodsports, and other vices, as well as illegal human enhancements like juicing and cybernetics. Education is a big deal and all citizens automatically get a skill package including literacy in both Japanese and American (English), even though there's no reason to speak American much anymore. I guess it makes sense with them being time-lost. "They have never heard of Euro...", that is, the language, despite the fact that they just warped forward in time and should be perfectly familiar with the former nations of the world, unless it's a new invention of post-rifts culture (which given the state of Europe, seems highly unlikely). Thankfully, the New Empire speaks the same sort of Japanese and seemingly has not had their language change at all in three centuries, so they can talk back and forth with the Republic normally. Hurray for simplicity in game linguistics, I suppose! Human Augmentation in the Republic of Japan We're told that the Republic has the highest level of technology on Earth, which seems... puzzling. I mean, sure, they have access to the old Golden Age technology of Earth, but there are other groups (Triax and the New Navy, to name just two) that also had access to some level of Golden Age technology and then three centuries to develop it further. But Japan is special and the Golden Age of Rifts Earth is like the word "prototype" in fiction, where glitter boys are the height of war technology because they were developed 300 years ago and nothing has ever gotten better since, even in places that have glitter boy tech and centuries to advance on it-  Stupid blanket statements about how things were "better back in in my day" aside, we get to hear about how they have highly developed cybernetics, bionics, juicing technology, and crazy technology. Nearly half the population is cybernetically enhanced, as mentioned, and they're "connected to cyber-space", because the Republic has gotta be cyberpunk even though the authors at best have a nebulous notion of how computers work, as we'll see in the cybernetics section. Cyber-space won't really be discussed further than this passing mention. Juicer and crazy augmentations were used by the Republic early on but have been made largely illegal, but groups like ninja clans, organized crime, H-Brand, and Otomo still use them. They also have enough knowledge of genetics to cure most genetic diseases and to clone replacement tissue, organs, and limbs. Some private research facilities offer replacement bodies for the rich and powerful to extend their lifespan. Though they once experimented with making superior human mutants, they mostly created tragic monsters that no doubt mumbled "killll meeee". Otomo and H-Brand are probably still loving around with the idea, twirling their mustaches as they do so, but the idea won't be any further developed than that.  Akira, now with more neckbeard. The Law & Law Enforcement Rifts World Book 8: Japan posted:The laws and social mores are fundamentally the same as 20th or 21st Century Japan. ... except having literal families of ninja running around and the occasional cybernetic samurai and proxy wars between corporations, but other than that, pretty much the same! We're told corruption is "uncommon" with only 13% of the police force accepting bribes or bending the law. (For the record, America is considered to have a rate of 1% of police officers performing misconduct in a year... which we consider completely unacceptable.) The military is only at 2%. Citizens are only rarely allowed to have weapons under license and visitors are expected to have all their weapons held at a customs office, unless they have a license from a company or government for security work or the like. The Military Being heavily militarized for defense, the military-industrial complex is in full swing here, though they tend to rely on small elite groups with high technology rather than large armies. In general, they're said to be actually more elite than the Coalition or Triax, owing to Japan's superior orientalism, either using "blitzkrieg" tactics (one of the only strategies Siembieda has heard of, so everybody uses it) or precision strike teams. We're told that police and military are treated as big heroes, but really, where aren't they in Rifts? Coalition, Columbia, Triax, New Navy, every place is ra ra war machine go go. In any case, they are treated like "the samurai of old" because this book can barely two pages without invoking samurai, ninjas, dragons, or oni. They have the "Glitter Force" (seriously) that is their glitter boy unit, and then two paragraphs detailing how they don't have a formal navy. Who the hell is raiding China and Korea, then, private citizens? Occamsnailfile: Also are they just subsisting on tofu for protein? Sushi goddammit. And being Rifts, fishing boats need considerable cannon. I would not recommend whaling in the time of Rifts though. At the very least, you’re likely to shoot an Uplift who can return fire. Alien Rope Burn: Supposedly they fish yet somehow don’t have a Navy. There are pirates out there, guys! It’s established! D-Bees of the Republic of Japan The Republic accepts D-Bees (even though there aren't many) as long as they "complete the necessary steps", whatever those are. There's a small minority of human supremacists (1%, we're told), lead by a radical group called Earth for Humanity that wear black coveralls and commit harassment and violence against D-Bees, since we can't have a completely enlightened human nation that isn't written by Carella. Comparatively, Otomo is about half human supremacists (being the baddies) and Ichto has about one-third (being the diet baddies). Foreign Relations The Republic has only discovered that China, Korea, and Taiwan to be full of monsters but is trying to investigate further. The New Empire is a relatively amiable rival. We get a side note that some New Empire Shintoists think that the ghosts of the atomic attack on Hiroshima saved that city from the rifts. Apparently this is why a lot of them see it as their job to "enlighten" the Republic rather than reject it. Ichto is a more bitter rival, being far more hawkish than the Republic. Takamatsu is a generic ally. The Otomo Shogunate has all the moral nuance of Skeletor on a cocaine bender, and so, hates the Republic and supplies their enemies and criminal factions with weapons. The Zone, being full of oni, mostly just sees the Republic as an obstacle to conquer. Most of the Freelands see the Republics as a cage for pampered wusses. The Horune Pirates conflict with the Republic and trade with the Otomo, and have taken over Okinawa in a footnote. We get a lot of notes on what countries don't know about the Republic, but that's not important. In case you missed it, the ghosts of the atomic attack on Hiroshima may have saved that city from the rifts. Nagasaki was just lucky, though?  Next: Enough ninjas to make Mortal Kombat blush. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Feb 9, 2017 |
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Feb 9, 2017 23:16
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Cooked Auto posted:Must've missed that line completely when I played. I ran one using the Armageddon 2.0 system (modded for Cinematic Unisystem). EDIT: Also, Blood/Pistols represent. Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Feb 9, 2017 |
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Feb 9, 2017 23:33
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Bieeardo posted:Oh, I like this one. The kid who looks like Elliot from E.T., and the ghost trap, lovely ersatz Stranger Things thing going on. Took me a minute to realize what that one kid's pulling out of his duffel bag; I thought everyone had forgotten about My Science Project. Still not sure where the boombox contraption is from. Yeah I dunno if this came out pre or post Stranger Things (I know the 'Dream Warrior' bit comes from a Nightmare on Elm Street movie) but I love the idea of playing teen escapees from MK Ultra/The Shop from Firestarter/the lab from Beyond the Black Rainbow/drat there's a ton of shady govt psychic labs in fiction. It'd make a fun campaign. I'd dial down the horror though, and give them a sympathetic adult like the sherrif guy from Stranger Things. Just a bunch of teens, trying to survive. The D&Dness of the party roles could be intentional if they're all gamers.
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Feb 10, 2017 00:10
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I got gifted ultimate edition Secret World awhile back but have yet to get past the first island, not because of combat difficulty but because no matter how I make their face look in chargen, somehow every dude I roll up turn into Steve Carrell once the actual gameplay starts and it's really offputting so I start over.
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Feb 10, 2017 00:12
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Having once suffered through part of Mortal Kombat Mytholgies: Sub-Zero I am obligated to inform you that Sub-Zero and his allies are Lin Kuei and not Ninjas. Scorpion though, hes a filthy Ninja.
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Feb 10, 2017 01:45
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Count Chocula posted:Yeah I dunno if this came out pre or post Stranger Things (I know the 'Dream Warrior' bit comes from a Nightmare on Elm Street movie) but I love the idea of playing teen escapees from MK Ultra/The Shop from Firestarter/the lab from Beyond the Black Rainbow/drat there's a ton of shady govt psychic labs in fiction. The next Chronicles of Darkness gameline is Deviant: The Renegade where you play humans who were experimented on or changed somehow, and then escaped and try to hide from, or get revenge on, the organisations that did this to them. I wouldn't be surprised if The Merrick Institute is a bit of a teaser for that.
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Feb 10, 2017 03:20
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In my latest Sgt Nerd column inspired by crap I read in this thread, Decision Points
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Feb 10, 2017 03:36
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