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MonsieurChoc posted:I never played Kuro, but Qin is pretty good. Some rules weirdness, a railroady campaign, but overall a solid Wuxia rpg. I bought Qin and at least one of the expansions, and it's probably the most historical of the Wuxia RPGs you can get in English. Not that there are many Wuxia RPGs you can get in English in print at this point, if you can't buy Qin anywhere, since it's also hard to get Legends of the Wulin or Weapons of the Gods. I think that leaves Tianxia, which is FATE but otherwise as good as any. Save for a bit of a squicky bit where they claim that Dongfang Bubai is an example of a positive trans character. (Spoilers: no)
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Aug 26, 2017 18:11
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I've actually run Kuro and it is not a good set of rules, but n-thing how pretty the cover art is though. I also have run Qin (much better rules) and have currently modded it to run a Dunwall (Dishonored) Campaign. I think I have all the Wuxia based games that have been put out, including weird ones like Cathay Art of Roleplaying and Outlaws of the Water Margin and Qin is probably the best. I might as well post a link to Cathay... https://web.archive.org/web/20061213110216/http://physics.hkbu.edu.hk:80/~lhung/system1.html Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Aug 26, 2017 |
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Aug 26, 2017 18:22
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Green Intern posted:Really loving the artwork of Cool Skeleton, and the one of somebody showing off their fart gun to a friend. Dapper skeletons are my jam. 
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Aug 26, 2017 18:22
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Green Intern posted:Really loving the artwork of Cool Skeleton, and the one of somebody showing off their fart gun to a friend. Rigged Death Trap posted:On the internet
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Aug 26, 2017 18:28
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Aug 26, 2017 18:32
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Kuro's premise sounds loving boss, despite the nonsensicalness of the two Koreas being close enough to operate in an alliance together but not reunifying* and India trying to invade Taiwan. Is it going to be like Necropolis London or whatever where the setting obviously belongs in something other than a roleplaying game and there's not that much to actually loving do? *I know that'd be expensive as hell but still.
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Aug 26, 2017 20:10
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Kavak posted:Kuro's premise sounds loving boss, despite the nonsensicalness of the two Koreas being close enough to operate in an alliance together but not reunifying* and India trying to invade Taiwan. So to bring it on back to the elevator pitch of “Japanese horror cyberpunk in the near future”:
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Aug 26, 2017 20:56
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 TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY Or Why Have a Baby When You Can Have a Robot Instead? So the upside of the green and nano revolution was that the fact that it helped put future ecological disasters in arrested development for now. They haven't really gotten around to reversing the damage, but enhanced recycling programs and proliferation of green energy have been adapted around the world. And, of course, Japan has been at the forefront of this technological and biological revolution. This hasn't been great for society. Japan has been rubbing its technology all over societal issues with mixed results. On the cyberpunk side of things, this has lead to a creation of a new 1% class called the Genocracy. Genocrats are the rich who bankroll biotech, gengineering, cloning and age treatments for their own self interests. They can afford all of the miracles of science and you do not see them out on the street. Genocrats live in skyscrapers that they've turned into mansion arcologies, making them entirely self contained to hold their companies, their ballrooms, their pools, their gardens. Beneath the skyscrapers are their labs that contain cloned organs, backup selves and machines dedicated to brain scanning and uploading. The Genocrats hold a monopoly on things that the average citizen just cannot have, most people limited to replacement teeth or low-key implants. The other main issue that has been addressed is the mass decline and aging of Japan's population which has actually been a good thing for the government. The government actually thinks this is A-OK for two reasons. First, less citizens means that Japan has to rely less on import which makes them more self sufficient and they have to build less vertically to accommodate people. Second, less citizens means less land owned by the public, resulting in the government buying up huge swathes of countryside and the coast to create government-owned fisheries and farms to feed the populace. Now, you might be asking the reasonable question "if a lot of the Japanese are dead then who runs society and like are women just not having kids anymore?" Well basically most roles (convenience store clerk, construction worker, bureaucrat, etc.) are filled by robots now and yeah Japanese women are kinda done being mothers. The latter point breaks down into two further points of interest. For starters, not wanting to focus on families means that Japanese women have shattered the glass ceiling and taken over all sorts of high ranking positions in the country at large. Women now have host clubs that cater to them, school uniforms are made to be less fetishized, you can no longer buy used underwear most of the time, I am making none of this up. I'm also just going to say that this is incredibly hand-wavey knowing what I know about gender politics in Japan and all that jazz and it's a very strange statement to make that it took giving up being mothers to lead to gender equality. The other thing is that the Ministry of Family heavily restricts who can and can't have kids anymore. Even if a woman wants to be a stay at home mom, there's no guarantee the MoF will approve their request. This has lead to situations where women who don't want kids will give up their future birthing rights to rich families who want them or other people in the baby queue and also the government forcing abortions on women who break the law. Microphotonics Microphotonics refers to using nanofiberoptics to make silicon microprocessors that transmit info at the speed of light. The most advanced tech in this vein uses synthetic organic material and is able to properly emulate a brain. This jump forward has lead to wonderful new toys, such as: Magnetic Weapons: your average magnetic weapon basically fire magnetic shockwaves that knock out electronics and also knock people on their rear end. Firearms are still used but they're more expensive due to the materials it takes to make bullets and the fact that shockguns are nonlethal and more safe for law enforcement. Laser and Optic Network: Instead of radio waves and wireless transmissions, lasers are used to carry information and data through light impulses. The latest innovation for reading this info from these optic ports is called a Pod, a pocket computer that fits in the palm of your hand and projects a holographic keyboard wherever you need it. Pods are often paired with Gantai, monocles or visors or glasses that let you discretely view things on the Pod like Google Glass or you can use a flexible, modular monitor. Augmented Reality and Holograms: because Shin-Edo is full of laser ports and everyone has a Pod and a Gantai, it's pretty common for folks to overlay AR using their Gantai. You don't need a Gantai for holograms. The internet has changed heavily, however. Now called the NeoWeb, net neutrality is pretty dead and the NeoWeb has fully replaced TV. Search engines still exist, people might have private pages, but the internet is privatized and pretty strictly regulated.  Retinal Scans and Intelligent Kettles: So everything is connected and interlocking as a result of optic technology being ubiquitous and instead of everything having Blu-Tooth and wifi we have everything being attached to your Pod. You can view the contents of your fridge with your Pod, adjust the ceiling fan, lock and unlock doors and more. On top of that, there are massive databases full of everyone's retinal scans for security reasons and retinal scanners are pretty much everywhere. You're constantly being monitored oh no! This also applies if you're not Japanese but on Japan's soil. If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, if you've something to hide you shouldn't even be here. Also this leads to every ad being directly targeted at you. Squids and Jellyfishes: Squids and Jellyfish are basically VR rigs that are soft and squishy little hats you just put on your head and then put a hat over. They send and receive info with brain impulses, letting you manipulate a mouse pointer with your mind or interact with your Gantai and Pod hands-free. The problem is that Squids are basically Hot Sim from Shadowrun: you slap one on and can feel all sorts of sensations in a video or a memory or a videogame. This is addictive to people and if you also feel some sorts of pain you can die from Not Dumpshock, especially if you're the standard cyberpunk sick gently caress who loads a snuff film of being killed onto their Squid and experiences what it feels like to die. So Squids are made illegal internationally and instead most people use Jellyfish which just have no tactile sensations whatsoever. Also it's mentioned that most videogames are AR that use your Gantai to display things in the real world and your Jellyfish acts as a controller.  Biotechnology I just. Have to put some of this in here verbatim: "Having cast aside all religion-derived ethical laws, Japan allows labs to experiment widely with medical goals, which has led to innumerable discoveries and advances. Scientists no longer play at being God when they can do it professionally. While Europe and the USA were still questioning the use of cloning and stem cells, Japan made large-scale advances from its research. While the Western countries have done their best to follow suit, their prudence and regulations have left them lagging behind in the biotech field." It is amazing that this was written by a French company. "While you foolish Western scientists were studying medical ethics, I was busy studying the blade of my scalpel!" Organ Implants: these squishy bits come from braindead clones mass-grown in vats. Everything that can be replaced can be reinforced and made better and most Genocrats have clones of themselves in their towers so they can get things they won't have to worry about being rejected. A lot of Genocrats only have their brains remaining from their original flesh. For the average person, you have to get your organs from dead people or government-financed implant which is said to be increasingly rare as time goes on.  Replication and Eugenics: Artificial wombs are a thing that exists if you want a baby that you don't want to carry. As previously mentioned, not everyone is allowed to have kids with the government basically having a baby quota for maximum baby yield a year and genetic history is generally in vogue so the government will be like "no you can't have kids". If you're a Genocrat, you'd allowed to go to Stork.biz and make your perfect baby and birth them in an artificial womb especially if you no longer have genitals or working bits. If you're a normal person, I sure hope you're a recently married woman and not wanting to have more than one child. Selling your rights to birth will generally have the side effect of you never being selected to breed again but hey you get money for it. And, of course, government-mandated abortions or if that's not possible the child is taken and given to someone else and you're never allowed to see them again. For some odd reason, the birth rate of Japan is still low. But who needs babies when you can have a bioroid of your body get built and then you have a near-death experience to upload your mind into this new body? Who needs children when you can replicate yourself forever! I mean, if you're rich. Bioports: Bioports are optical ports what are built into your bio. Get poo poo beamed right into your brain! They're ungodly expensive and everyone is talking about bioports so the government is like "alright I guess we're only giving these things to special ops forces for now". Nanotechnology Nanochips, nanonsensors and molecular resonance: the first two are implants that monitor your health and repeatedly run realtime diagnostics on your health to anticipate problems. There are also Brain Chips and Cell Chips, the former of which are implanted in your grey matter to help with brain damage and the latter which will keep the body in homeostasis by repeatedly making things your body needs. This is really only if you're rich. There are also microscopic senses that detect stuff.  Nanocreatures: Nanocreatures are roughly the size of a paperclip or smaller, used to track or spy or investigate like if you're a coroner or a cop. They're not particularly common but there are hobby-grade and toy versions being made to be sold to the public. Flexible Polymers and Biomaterials: New materials have been created by combining atoms using nanotech. Stainless clothing, double-enforced concrete, flexible glass and earthquake-resistant technology are common in Japan. There are even new bulletproof vests that are lightweight and just snap into action the moment kinetic force hits them. There is also a fancy new fractal suit which is just an invisibility suit. Robotics Androids are being used in all walks of life in Japan, as children or as pets or as employees. Androids come in four forms, distinguished by form and function. Puppetbots are robits meant to function as companions. They're not humanoid in the slightest, appearing as lifelike robotic pets or are "smooth and curved abstracts shapes with many wheels, in striking, primary colours". Puppetbots are used as pets or nannies or function as caretakers. Androids/Artificials are humanoids who recharge through kinetic energy or solar energy or thermal energy, made out of clearly synthetic materials and robotic features. They're smart enough to answer questions but not think for themselves outside of pre-programmed personalities, working manual labor or hazard jobs or lower class jobs society needs filled. The latest generation of Artificial is more realistic when it comes to skin and appearance, costing more and used more as hostesses and prostitutes, but clearly artificial when you speak to them.  Synthetics are cyborgs. Basically they're more than 50% artificial with some models being so far as only having a human brain. Synthetics are common in the armed forces or in law enforcement and are seen as the most human of robots because...well, they're still people, they're just people with prosthetics or heavy reconstruction. They're pretty rare because they're mostly kept out of the public eye and some folks aren't sure if they even exist. Bioroids/Replicants are clones with synthetic brains, generally used by Genocrats as replacement bodies. They're also used as henchmen or to replace people after something has gone horribly wrong. Because they're super expensive, most people don't know of their existence to begin with. Prosthetics Biomechanical prosthetics: hybrid implants with reinforced carbon musculature or nanochips are common models of prosthetics, melding machine and flesh to create a more organic limb. They're not visibly robotic, having been designed to appear more natural and they're generally used to return function to a patient with a missing limb more than turn them into a Street Samurai. Military models that do enhance functionality and strength do exist but aren't available to the public. Exoskeletons, skinsuits and waldos: your basic exoskeleton is a mobility aid for someone with a disability or an infirmity. A waldo is basically a power loader from Aliens, being a 3 meter tall suit you climb into and operate to give yourself further strength for heavy lifting. A skinsuit is a sleek skin-tight suit you slip into that grants enhanced speed or endurance. They're all technically exoskeletons, it just depends on their functionality and what materials are put into them. Environmental Technology Housing: Japan is still very much a vertical country, especially if you move to Shin-Edo. New materials have been used to make more resistant and durable housing that has even less of a risk of collapse due to weight. The modern Japanese home has a lot of integration with laser tech and AR tech; lights will turn on when you tell them to, the NeoWeb acts as your phone and your television and you're able to have less tech cluttering up your home. Ecology and Energy: Farming and fishing have been revolutionized thanks to advances in replication software. Oceanic pollution means that fisheries actually just mass-clone stocks of fish in captivity and reliably deliver them fresh to plate. This process is also used for livestock farming as well; a few farms remain that cultivate cattle and such the old fashioned way but most farms need their space for vegetation and vat-grow livestock that human operators then send to the slaughter. The country is doing its best to make all trash 100% recyclable and the same applies to energy sources, mainly focusing on solar panels to supplement nuclear power. Your average Pod is solar-powered during the day and at night backup chargers kick on that recharge from your body heat or kinetic movements. Also while most of mass transportation contains high-speed rail and magnetic trains, your average car has a hybrid engine that's powered by biofuel and hydrogen power cells. Space Ion drives have been invented to allow faster movement around space but it's really not conquered yet. China has a moonbase that holds the Tycho Children, gengineered taikonauts they want to use to colonize Mars. In response the US and Europe have been working on building their own moonbase. I really don't want to go too in depth with this because space doesn't really have much that applies to this game. Occultech Following the Kuro Incident and the rise in religion and superstition, some folks have been messing around with integrating Shinto ritual, Taoist belief and modern technology to keep themselves safe. There's a semi-public network of shady dealers, crackpots and salesmen who will sell you things like a Ouija program for your Pod, holographic pentacles, programs that will let your Gantai see spirits or Oni-detecting nanosensors that will change color in response to the presence of demons. Less scrupulous groups have been paying thieves to loot shrines or museums to collect items for replication and study. The other trade that's become popular has been trading with coroners and morgues for things in possession of the dead or items that have caused death. Bullets taken from the chest of a dead Yakuza or a razorblade used to cut a wrist or the twisted fender from a fatal crash have found second life in the form of a weapon against the forces of darkness. If they're still bloodstained, that's just bonus potency.  NEXT TIME: I'm gonna skip around a bit because otherwise I would just be going directly into what life in Japan is like in various neighborhoods and districts. So instead I'm going to skip to character creation so we can talk about the problems therein. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Aug 26, 2017 |
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Aug 26, 2017 22:47
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MonsieurChoc posted:Catching up with System Mastery, it seems to me as if The City from A|State is just a shittier NewCrobuzon. Or Paradigm City from Big O. Belatedly, listening to that just makes me want to shout at game writers, "No, seriously, have some idea what characters do in your game, and have some idea why they'd do it!" Lot of great and awful games alike that never really confront the question, and I think one of the common threads to games that actually get played is that they bother to answer both questions, even if the answers may be amazingly shallow.
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Aug 27, 2017 02:45
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That Jobutsu company's gonna just be sending cyber-Majima to your house to beat up the ghost.
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Aug 27, 2017 03:21
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I always get a chuckle out of Colonize Mars storylines. Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere!
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Aug 27, 2017 04:56
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wiegieman posted:I always get a chuckle out of Colonize Mars storylines. Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere! We terraformed it one. 
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Aug 27, 2017 04:58
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Belatedly, listening to that just makes me want to shout at game writers, "No, seriously, have some idea what characters do in your game, and have some idea why they'd do it!" It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate little bits like Ironclaw straight up spelling out 'You're playing as people who don't quite fit the feudal order but who have such talents that the powers that be desire to hire you for their intrigues in a powder-keg of historical change.' or Shadowrun going 'You're Shadowrunners. You're people who do hardcore corporate espionage for money and also maybe freedom fighting.' It's always good to start with an elevator pitch and then open up options for players to play other stuff later.
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Aug 27, 2017 05:04
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wiegieman posted:I always get a chuckle out of Colonize Mars storylines. Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere! There's been some discussion that atmospheric loss due to solar wind isn't that big of a deal regardless of a magnetosphere and Mars didn't have one as thick as Earth's to begin with (Venus has an atmosphere and is postulated that it doesn't have an magnetic-field producing core), as well as there's been a proposal regarding putting a magnetic shield in Martian-Solar L1 that could allow for building up a magnetosphere.
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Aug 27, 2017 05:11
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MollyMetroid posted:I bought Qin and at least one of the expansions, and it's probably the most historical of the Wuxia RPGs you can get in English. You mean because Dongfang Bubai is a villain, or because the character isn't trans? I agree the circumstances are pretty gross, but my understanding is that the character is often read today as a trans woman even if that's not really what Jin Yong had in mind. I don't know whether to chalk that up to cis gaze or Chinese LGBT readers taking representation where they can get it though.
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Aug 27, 2017 06:58
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I'll admit my knowledge of Japanese geopolitics is mostly of the Wikipedia and anime variety, so I'm nowhere near an authority, but... Kuro's grasp feels even looser than mine. Like Japan going to be buddies with China in an endrun around the US. I mean, yeah, Japan and the USA have a... complicated relationship, to put things mildly, but China and Japan actively dislike each other. Quite a bit, depending on the active administration. Trade deals can continue and even thrive despite mutual enmity, of course, but it's not the sort of situation that inspires joint Mars missions. And a country that's having a population crisis responding by artificially limiting birthrates (while having the tech to boost population fairly easily)... why? Oh! And there's the whole extreme bioadvances thing thanks to discarding ethics... but Japan's got the whole Shinto death stigma thing, if Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service can be trusted. Even if a society has no moral objection to an action, it can still be gross, and Japan's got traditions that say "Don't loving shove corpse bits into you." Am I missing something, or is this falling below my "I check the library's manga section" level of cultural understanding?
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Aug 27, 2017 09:32
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Night10194 posted:It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate little bits like Ironclaw straight up spelling out 'You're playing as people who don't quite fit the feudal order but who have such talents that the powers that be desire to hire you for their intrigues in a powder-keg of historical change.' or Shadowrun going 'You're Shadowrunners. You're people who do hardcore corporate espionage for money and also maybe freedom fighting.' It's always good to start with an elevator pitch and then open up options for players to play other stuff later. We really should have a good term for this idea. Shadowrun works almost entirely on the strength of it's default elevator pitch.
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Aug 27, 2017 10:56
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Started reading the Unhallow Metropolis review/fatal and friends/however you people call what we produce in this thread, so thanks for someone mentioning this!
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Aug 27, 2017 11:05
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chiasaur11 posted:And a country that's having a population crisis responding by artificially limiting birthrates (while having the tech to boost population fairly easily)... why? If you wanted to be all cyberpunk you could just project outwards a little bit into the not too distant future, and depopulate the countryside even more. This would allow for adventuring, especially if this depopulation was noted by some event that killed random people (who might have had treasure) or otherwise creates vast areas which are only visited by landscaping robots and a once-yearly parks and wildlife tour. This would also give you huge sexy sprawling neon cityscapes, which everyone loves.
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Aug 27, 2017 11:14
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chiasaur11 posted:I'll admit my knowledge of Japanese geopolitics is mostly of the Wikipedia and anime variety, so I'm nowhere near an authority, but... Kuro's grasp feels even looser than mine. No, you're right. If you have ever heard where the whole burakumin came from, they were descended from the traditional butchers, tanners, executioners, morticians, and gravediggers. That Shinto death stigma is so great it's tainted entire families for generations. Nessus posted:If you wanted to be all cyberpunk you could just project outwards a little bit into the not too distant future, and depopulate the countryside even more. This would allow for adventuring, especially if this depopulation was noted by some event that killed random people (who might have had treasure) or otherwise creates vast areas which are only visited by landscaping robots and a once-yearly parks and wildlife tour. This would also give you huge sexy sprawling neon cityscapes, which everyone loves. You don't even have to go that far. Most of rural Japan is populated by elderly, who are dying off. There's whole ghost towns popping up because their population have grown old and died and there's been a spate of calls from the municipal level to allow for increased immigration to help replace dying taxpayers. We're talking like offering foreigners stipends, land, and other incentives to go out and live there. If not for automation, Japan of the future is going to look like Britain in Children Of Men.
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Aug 27, 2017 11:44
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Good thing Abe and his party are so foreigner frie- oh.
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Aug 27, 2017 11:46
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chiasaur11 posted:Am I missing something, or is this falling below my "I check the library's manga section" level of cultural understanding? I'm still baffled every time someone living in the present day manages to write yet another game that is all about NeoCyberJapan dominating the TechnoFuture. You'd have to pretend really hard that the past 30 years never happened. 
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Aug 27, 2017 13:30
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Comrade Koba posted:I'm still baffled every time someone living in the present day manages to write yet another game that is all about NeoCyberJapan dominating the TechnoFuture. You'd have to pretend really hard that the past 30 years never happened. Somehow, I still think one of the most accurate sci-fi depictions of Japan comes from Civilization: Beyond Earth in which Japan has become a third world backwater after demographic collapse and getting hit especially hard by global climate change. That game predicts east Asia becoming ruled by a Chinese realignment to South Korea and their resulting alliance.
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Aug 27, 2017 14:23
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Cythereal posted:Somehow, I still think one of the most accurate sci-fi depictions of Japan comes from Civilization: Beyond Earth in which Japan has become a third world backwater after demographic collapse and getting hit especially hard by global climate change. That game predicts east Asia becoming ruled by a Chinese realignment to South Korea and their resulting alliance. In Infinity, China buys out the other nations in East Asia after their economies collapse when France, Russia, Scotland, and the US bankrupt themselves on space exploration and the world economy tanks. It's a very Battletech-esque setting in terms of realism but it's definitely a trope seeing wider use.
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Aug 27, 2017 15:36
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Kavak posted:Kuro's premise sounds loving boss, despite the nonsensicalness of the two Koreas being close enough to operate in an alliance together but not reunifying* and India trying to invade Taiwan. (Bearing in mind that the standard for discussing Asian cultures in RPGs is to say that Asian people are Inscrutable Orientals who do inscrutably oriental things because of some ideological black box called "Confucianism.") In a future where China overcomes its economic hurdles and continues to prosper while American influence declines, I can easily see the three nations settling into economic cooperation without borders changing. (It's already happening, and China is the primary trading partner of both Koreas.) South Korea doesn't want to reunify the peninsula under the DPRK for obvious reasons, and they don't want to reunify under their own government because it would send their economy into a decades-long recession. SirPhoebos posted:Every time I'm about to join the Katarin fan club I get some more info and say "ooh right, she's a tyrant that wants to monopolize power for its own sake." Cythereal posted:But the flip side is that her monopolizing power might end up working better for Kislev's eternal fight against Chaos in the long run. She wants to reduce Kislev's internal divisions and get everything running more efficiently from a central command structure. The caveat, of course, is that doing so also benefits her personally. The Lone Badger posted:Assuming a highly competent Tsar. If her successor is less capable at statecraft then the need for them to get personally involved with everything will end up crippling efficiency instead.
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Aug 27, 2017 16:09
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Halloween Jack posted:In a future where China overcomes its economic hurdles and continues to prosper while American influence declines, I can easily see the three nations settling into economic cooperation without borders changing. (It's already happening, and China is the primary trading partner of both Koreas.) South Korea doesn't want to reunify the peninsula under the DPRK for obvious reasons, and they don't want to reunify under their own government because it would send their economy into a decades-long recession. Beyond Earth postulates China and South Korea coming out of future upheaval and climate change reasonably well, unlike North Korea and Japan, and becoming a distinctly technocratic state - the PAC's leader in the game, the one the PAC selected to lead their first interstellar colony, is a Chinese-Cambodian scientist. Korea later became its own playable faction, but the their faction was basically X-COM (this game was made by the same company). Meanwhile in southeast Asia, Indonesia enters an alliance with Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. And in south Asia, India bore the brunt of WW3 and has only re-emerged onto the world stage more than a century later as a theocracy lead by a new religion that seems to be a syncretic movement mainly incorporating elements of Islam and Hinduism. This game also has no direct American faction in terms of government. The Americans in this sci-fi world are represented by a private megacorp whose backstory note that Congress specifically decided this megacorp couldn't use the American flag on their spacecraft.
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Aug 27, 2017 16:37
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JcDent posted:Good thing Abe and his party are so foreigner frie- oh. That's why I made the comment about it being at the "municipal" level, there's no way something like that would be done as a national program.
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Aug 27, 2017 17:34
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Kellsterik posted:You mean because Dongfang Bubai is a villain, or because the character isn't trans? I agree the circumstances are pretty gross, but my understanding is that the character is often read today as a trans woman even if that's not really what Jin Yong had in mind. I don't know whether to chalk that up to cis gaze or Chinese LGBT readers taking representation where they can get it though. Because Dongfang Bubai isn't typically considered a "positive portrayal", primarily. As a trans woman, when I read the sidebar I headed to Wikipedia to learn more about Dongfang Bubai and (at the time) was greeted with a bunch of information about how Bubai was typically considered to be an example of a gross perverted character. Yeah there have been a lot of portrayals of Bubai as a trans woman, some even sympathetic, but the sidebar in question had no business presenting her as a positive example.
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Aug 27, 2017 17:38
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Hostile V posted:Noroi is all about documentarians picking apart what happened to this old village and what's going on, I would play the gently caress out of a Noroi RPG. How many rolls of tin foil do I need to wrap myself in to gain Resistance to Astral Worms?
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Aug 27, 2017 18:18
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Cythereal posted:And in south Asia, India bore the brunt of WW3 and has only re-emerged onto the world stage more than a century later as a theocracy lead by a new religion that seems to be a syncretic movement mainly incorporating elements of Islam and Hinduism. Sikhism? 
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Aug 27, 2017 18:43
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Ormi posted:Sikhism? I'm not familiar enough with Sikhism to say, sorry. Kavitha and her father are depicted in the game's story as the leaders of an entirely new religious movement that reunited the Indian subcontinent in the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange with Pakistan and China.
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Aug 27, 2017 18:47
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'China takes over the world' pretty much replaced 'Japan takes over the world' and is similarly based on an economic bubble. And give it a decade or two and it'll be 'India takes over the world'.
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Aug 27, 2017 19:47
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Inescapable Duck posted:'China takes over the world' pretty much replaced 'Japan takes over the world' and is similarly based on an economic bubble. And give it a decade or two and it'll be 'India takes over the world'. Honestly, I'm thinking it'll be "Russia takes over the world" the way things are going.
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Aug 27, 2017 19:54
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Totally the Cayman Islands.
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Aug 27, 2017 20:01
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Since I kinda started the China derail, I'll clarify that Beyond Earth posits the following groups as capable of launching interstellar colonization missions in the 23rd century: * An American-based megacorp. * An east Asian federation dominated by China and South Korea. * India. * An alliance of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and various but unspecified North African countries. * An alliance of South American nations, dominated and lead by Brazil. * Russia. * An alliance of Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand. * A coalition of nations in sub-Saharan Africa (they escaped the devastation of WW3 almost entirely unscathed) * Germany. * An alliance of the UK, Low Countries, and Scandinavia. * The remnants of the Middle East after the collapse of the oil industry (their starships are significantly less advanced than everyone else's and make do with much more primitive technology). * X-COM, operating out of hidden undersea bases around South Korea. So it's not any single country taking over the world, but a whole lot of nations and coalitions thereof launching as many interstellar colony ships as they can into the darkness before Earth's resources are finally depleted and such expeditions become impossible. Earth is doomed, so humanity is launching a great diaspora in the hopes that somewhere, somehow, humanity will survive among the stars.
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Aug 27, 2017 20:07
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Halloween Jack posted:In a future where China overcomes its economic hurdles and continues to prosper while American influence declines, I can easily see the three nations settling into economic cooperation without borders changing. (It's already happening, and China is the primary trading partner of both Koreas.) South Korea doesn't want to reunify the peninsula under the DPRK for obvious reasons, and they don't want to reunify under their own government because it would send their economy into a decades-long recession. Okay, then explain India invading Taiwan.
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Aug 27, 2017 20:28
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Unhallowed metropolis: yeah, it's strange that someone would play in London when everyone else is doing much better. The grimdark atmosphere would be understandable if London was the last bastion of Humanity, but then you have the rest of Europe doing OK all things considered. It's like all the misery that England is going through is just self inflicted emo kid stuff.
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Aug 27, 2017 20:52
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JcDent posted:Unhallowed metropolis: yeah, it's strange that someone would play in London when everyone else is doing much better. The grimdark atmosphere would be understandable if London was the last bastion of Humanity, but then you have the rest of Europe doing OK all things considered.
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Aug 27, 2017 21:09
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Inescapable Duck posted:'China takes over the world' pretty much replaced 'Japan takes over the world' and is similarly based on an economic bubble. And give it a decade or two and it'll be 'India takes over the world'. Things are somewhat complicated by China's sheer size meaning they do have outsize influence, so it's unlikely we'll see mass-media China-bashing the way we had Japan-bashing.
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Aug 27, 2017 21:44
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Hostile V posted:Don't get me wrong from all of that: the world is hosed. It's just that the rest of the world is not a sneeze away from total societal collapse. There's no good way to save the world or survive out in it, it's just that the core book doesn't have any sense of fun to it because they took "gothic horror" to an absolute logical extreme. UH is one of those settings like SLA Industries, where they give you a world with stuff to do in it, but it doesn't point to anything that would allow you to really change or save the world (in such a way that it could stay saved). Kavak posted:Okay, then explain India invading Taiwan. The funny, happenchance similarity there is that you're looking at two countries with a surprising amount of cooperation despite not having formal diplomatic relations. (It's hard to say that the DPRK and ROK are "cooperating" when they have terrifying arrays of artillery pointed at each other. But in that very same light it's odd that they have $1-2 billion in trade with one another.) The first thing I want to know about the Indian invasion of Taiwan is what relations India cultivated in SE Asia so as to have regional airfields where they can muster troops and fighting vehicles.
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Aug 28, 2017 00:36
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