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Night10194 posted:Goddamn do I hate D&D Gods. At least in Pathfinder it was more along the lines of people typically would pick a single deity as their primary, then also pray to other gods when relevant. With exceptions, of course.
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Oct 22, 2017 17:58
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The finest minds of TSR are once again ready to liven up your stagnant, brackish AD&D game with The Deck of Encounters Set One Part 6: The Deck of 38: A Charming Day in the Woods In a calm, lovely, wooded glade. A dryad comes out and presents herself (“assuming that the party contains at least one male”; this dryad is a 0 on the Kinsey scale), offers them rest and comfort, and tries to charm the male with the highest Charisma. She’ll run if threatened. She’s not malicious, just horny. Her tree is not the one in the glen, and under no circumstances will she tell them where it is. Yep, that sure is a Dryad encounter. Any 39: Dryad Love The villagers in a small farming village are upset, gathered around the edge of a wood but not daring to enter. A young man went too deep inside while hunting & wood gathering, and was charmed by the local dryad. Tracking him down is not hard. The dryad will initially deny he’s there, but again, the tracks are right there. Obviously the guy doesn’t want to go because magic. The dryad will cry when the PCs demand the boy’s return, but I assume they’re crocodile tears? Dryads must know exactly how charm magic works, and the card says she’ll “relinquish her hold on the boy in return for gold or gets (at least 100 gp worth) or a small magical item).” She’ll also try to charm PC males with 16+ Charisma, and dimension door out if there’s danger. Soooooo, AD&D writers, do dryads do anything besides rape men? No? Just checking. Anyway, deeply-embedded sexism aside, this is marginally more interesting than the previous dryad card. I guess I’ll keep it for that reason. 40: Mistaken Identity, Version 1 At some point after the PCs have been somewhere with gargoyles (the decorative statues), a gargoyle (the animated monster) comes screaming down from the sky, shouting incoherently about revenge. It thinks a PC chipped its wing, but it was actually some vandals. “Despite whatever the PCs tell it, it will not stop attacking until they are dead, or it is.” (The card does remind the DM not to use this unless the PCs have +1 weapons.) According to the card, you could continue the encounter by bringing in “the creature’s master (an evil wizard) who demands reparation, either in magical items or in service. This is an excellent way to begin a quest!” Is it, though? You think the PCs are going to go along with that when they are 0% at fault? I mean, they might, just to lull the evil wizard into a false sense of security so they can ambush him later. I guess that’s something. “Creature attacks the PCs and they must fight it to the death” is my least favorite kind of encounter. Pass. 41: Hobbies, Part 1 of 2 In a small village, someone’s been digging up the graves and the folks are kind of freaked out about it. They can’t offer money, just local fame. It’s not hard to find out what’s happening - if you just go to the graveyard at night you see a ghoul digging up the graves. If the PCs kill it, a zombie will show up later looking for it. If they kill the zombie too, nothing else happens. If they wait and follow, it turns out the ghoul brings the corpses to the home of the village priest. There are other zombies who crawl into fresh graves behind the house as dawn breaks. ...Okay, and? Clearly this did not fit on one card. I disapprove, since I think each card should stand on its own, but let’s see where they’re going with this. 42: Hobbies, Part 2 of 2 If they confront the priest, they find that he’s neutral and has taken up necromancy out of boredom. He controlled the ghoul and used it to help him make some harmless zombies. He promises to keep them on a tight leash. If they threaten to expose him, he will fight, though. Eh, it’s hard to eke good drama out of an old dude’s hobbies, but I guess I’ll keep it as a quick side-plot. If the PCs let the guy be and come back through town later, there are some easy ways to follow up on it. (The priest is besieged by angry townsfolk! The priest has gone mad! The priest has convinced the town to let their ancestors help them work the fields, and they've set up a zombie-based socialist collective!) Dallbun fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Oct 22, 2017 |
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Oct 22, 2017 18:00
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You joke but a friend of mine played a Bone Knight in a D&D game who did, in fact, come from a necro-industrial society and who was eagerly trying to spread word to the peasantry of other lands that with their help of their ancestors they could rise up, throw off the shackles of their lords, and devote themselves to high pursuits while the bodies of those whose souls had already ascended labored in the fields and factories.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:03
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My favorite part of DnD religions is how much they usually suck. Like Im not expecting crazyness gere but even using the justice league with the serial numbers filed off would be a massive improvement. Nobody needs 40 gods of boring things.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:11
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Oh hey, Starfinger religion is the most boring, this is me being surprised. For the record, the term "henotheism" applies to a polytheist who nonetheless solely worships one god above all others; this doesn't imply disrespect to other gods, but one has a specific loyalty. This may imply (as in modern Bhakti tradition Hinduism) that the one god you worship is the most powerful, absolute, and/or important, but it could just mean that they're the god whose favor matters to your life. The related term, kathahenotheism, means the worship of only one god /at once/ - the Vedas in Hinduism are a great example of that, because each deva is honored as the most powerful and important in their particular hymns. Also for the record, the tradition in which all Devas are aspects or forms of Brahman, the Absolute or Godhead, is relatively recent historically and also not necessarily hugely widespread. It's comparable to Deism or Scholastic philosophy- a religious movement popular among theologians and educated scholars of religion, but not entirely representative of most believers' practice. Not to say such Vedanta ideas aren't widespread, but it's a dangerous simplification to say that 'Hinduism' holds Vedanta beliefs. It's a mistake I made for like two years! In fact if you want an example of 'messy' religion you cannot do better than Hinduism; the many traditions that make up the religion are united more by a common culture of origin (mostly) and shared history than by theological abstractions, and there is no central doctrinal source other than the widely interpreted texts. TL;DR Hindu theology is complex, sophisticated, and deeply connected to the history of its texts and practitioners. Starfinger theology is bad.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:12
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Yeah like I'm not even asking for 'this needs to work like real polytheistic religions' or whatever. If you're just going to have D&D fantasy gods at least do something wild and fun with them instead of 'High level PC who ascended into the template for PC paladins'. Give me some kind of twist, goddamnit. And fewer of them. E: Ah, good old Henotheism. It's actually really interesting to read the prophetic narratives to nail down exactly when Judaism shifted from Henotheistic to Monotheistic (It had to do with explaining how to maintain their faith in light of getting the poo poo kicked out of them by Babylon). After all, if God *allowed* Babylon to defeat the kingdoms of Israel and Judea for not honoring their covenant, then the conventional near-eastern idea that Marduk had defeated Yahweh and taken him captive when his people defeated Yahweh's didn't need to apply, and then it grew from there. Also of course Hinduism would be complex, it has like a billion followers spread over a wide geographic area. Still, I appreciate the brief primer! I love pretty much all real-world religious traditions, I just had to pick one to specialize in and it happened to be Second Temple Judaism/Christian Origins. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Oct 22, 2017 |
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Oct 22, 2017 18:12
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Night10194 posted:You joke but a friend of mine played a Bone Knight in a D&D game who did, in fact, come from a necro-industrial society and who was eagerly trying to spread word to the peasantry of other lands that with their help of their ancestors they could rise up, throw off the shackles of their lords, and devote themselves to high pursuits while the bodies of those whose souls had already ascended labored in the fields and factories. I know this isn't quite how it works but my friend and I really want Warhammer's Sylvania to be this and plan to play it that way. Necromancers using the dark arts to improve everyone's day to day is a fun idea.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:19
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Night10194 posted:Yeah like I'm not even asking for 'this needs to work like real polytheistic religions' or whatever. If you're just going to have D&D fantasy gods at least do something wild and fun with them instead of 'High level PC who ascended into the template for PC paladins'. Give me some kind of twist, goddamnit. And fewer of them. How about Unknown Armies: there is one god per class, and the God of Rogues is the best rogue to ever rogue. However, if another rogue ever does better, the current God retires. This is dumb but, I would argue, still better than completely bland Classic Golarion Gods. Other thoughts: have gods be metaphysically linked to stars, so that each system has its own pantheon unless something weird has happened. Have far-travelers carry their religions with them. Then the star Jedi make (a little) sense, since they revere the laws of the universe which even gods obey. Or really anything. Do anything. Do SOMETHING. E: my pleasure! I'm not an expert but I find Hindu religion and art incredibly interesting, so I've tried to learn what I can. Also, your mention of Marduk capturing conquered gods makes me think- how much better would a space fantasy setting be than Starfinger if you applied that model of god-hood to star systems? Or just generally do Space Sumeria, that would be great (there's a really excellent short story, A Soldier of the City, about space Sumerian civilization, I can't remember the author's name right now) Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Oct 22, 2017 |
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Oct 22, 2017 18:20
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marshmallow creep posted:I know this isn't quite how it works my friend and I really want Warhammer's Sylvania to be this and plan to play it that way. Necromancers using the dark arts to improve everyone's day to day is a fun idea. This is no poo poo Mina von Carstein's (my reformist vampire PC) plan for fixing Sylvania's economy once she gets the country away from her brother Manfred and the awakened Nagash he caused by his bumbling.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:20
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marshmallow creep posted:I know this isn't quite how it works but my friend and I really want Warhammer's Sylvania to be this and plan to play it that way. Necromancers using the dark arts to improve everyone's day to day is a fun idea. There was a bit of inconsistently applied fluff from the older editions of Warhammer that outright stated the Sylvanian populace had of course noticed that their lord was more than a bit off. Nobody did anything because he did a much better job than the previous counts had, and the rest of the Elector Counts for that matter.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:27
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Night's Dark Masters is explicit that Stirlanders are such absolute dicks that the Sitrlander occupation after the Wars of the Vampire Counts convinced the Sylvanians they were better off with the vampires.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:27
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'Why are they called "Stirlanders?" Because they always stirring up poo poo.'
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Oct 22, 2017 18:34
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senrath posted:At least in Pathfinder it was more along the lines of people typically would pick a single deity as their primary, then also pray to other gods when relevant. With exceptions, of course. Yeah, that's the thing. The Mystic class can worship a god, if they want, but all that might do is steer them in the direction of a particular Connection, but it's not like Clerics in Pathfinder where not worshiping a specific god is an anomaly you have to hash out with your GM. There's at least no written reason why I can't be a Mystic of old family sitcoms or the mystical perfect sandwich. So having this big focus on deities doesn't have a world of impact on, well, anything other than where you go to church on churchdays. On the other hand, Solarians are supposed to be this deep mystical order and only get some word salad about how stellar evolution is really deep, man. But yeah, when occamsnailfile and I reviewed Pantheons of the Megaverse, it was depressing because I'd do research on every god I could, but Rifts just boiled them down into D&D domain bearers (or secret evil blobs) for the most part, and it was always sad to see the weirdest or most interesting things washed out in favor of just slotting them into the Greco-Roman-Norse model.
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Oct 22, 2017 18:36
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Alien Rope Burn posted:it was always sad to see the weirdest or most interesting things washed out in favor of just slotting them into the Greco-Roman-Norse model. And most works don't even do a good job of presenting the sort of proto-Indo-European-derived pantheon/family structure in an interesting way. There's no intermarriage with the Vanar or mystery cults or whatever, it's all just domain-name-aesthetic-done.
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Oct 22, 2017 20:11
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unseenlibrarian posted:The lich cult being called "The Song of Silence" just makes me think more liches should be bards and skalds and I am honestly okay with heavy metal viking liches. Heavy metal rocker liches cruising around the cosmos in undead space barges carved out of bone is exactly the kind of awesome stuff the game should be embracing. That it fell back so quickly into "D&D in space", in a setting that is already written to be "D&D just the way you remember it with no threatening new ideas", is a depressing indictment of how low the bar for success can be in this hobby.
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Oct 22, 2017 20:20
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Hell, Spelljammer did that back in the day. The liches tended to be really, really pissed off when they discovered that there were better, faster means of space travel than killing yourself and spending centuries on a skeletal trireme.
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Oct 22, 2017 20:22
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Okay, I’m sold on space liches.
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Oct 22, 2017 20:33
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Loxbourne posted:That it fell back so quickly into "D&D in space", in a setting that is already written to be "D&D just the way you remember it with no threatening new ideas", is a depressing indictment of how low the bar for success can be in this hobby. It's not even 'D&D in space'. So much of Starfinger's setting is copy-pasted from Pathfinder I'm actually shocked. It's like they put in as little original thought as they possibly could.
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Oct 22, 2017 20:40
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I'm disappointed that "the Free Market" isn't a belief system that happens to have avatars like John Galt and That Boneitis Guy, but an actual god behind it. Lame. Of course, how would donations and sacrifices to the Free Market work? Perhaps instead of you giving a donation, you have someone else pay for it. Or better, pay you for it. Getting away from that, I'm also disappointed that the nature religion is so chlorophyll-chauvinist. I mean, life would evolved on different planets around different suns, so what's nature on one of those planets might be associated with "yellow", "blue", or "red' instead of the green spectrum which chloroplasts reject. They could have called it the Black Faith or Diamond Faith since nature as most species would define it would be carbon-based (silicon-based life is an abomination).
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Oct 22, 2017 20:41
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Loxbourne posted:Heavy metal rocker liches cruising around the cosmos in undead space barges carved out of bone is exactly the kind of awesome stuff the game should be embracing. Well, they did have the bone ships of Eox back in the spaceship section, but it was mostly just an aesthetic, they function the same as all the other ships. I feel like the elebrians really deserved to part of the core playable group, I don't know if the editorial direction of Paizo of "undead must be evil" influenced that, but it seems like a lame thing to deny to players given they're core members of the Pact Worlds with their own planet and everything. Hopefully they'll be playable down the road, at least.
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Oct 22, 2017 20:58
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Young Freud posted:I'm disappointed that "the Free Market" isn't a belief system that happens to have avatars like John Galt and That Boneitis Guy, but an actual god behind it. Lame. I would just use prosperity gospel as a model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology Alternatively, the church is just a big ponzi scheme, which is already in a Venn diagram with most of the programs of prosperity gospel proponents. EDIT: tl;dr God is the greatest investor of all so buying into his ventures will net you his favor and success. The heads of churches are also corrupt dictators that are at odds with other churches of the same faith. There's a reason mega churches are all nondenominational and the highest authority is the pastor. Objectivism doesn't really fit the mold as well because it was, and still is, just a personality cult around Ayn Rand. It's less wealthy people are among the elect, there are lots of wealthy, evil socialists in her works, but more that rules and socialism constrain the genius protagonist(s) from succeeding. Objectivism is ultimately more about ego and and it only intersects with libertarianism because libertarianism caters to that level of selfishness. The Blood of Vol in Eberron was a great rendition on that, complete with a terrible, bitter lich as its founder/leader. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Oct 22, 2017 |
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Oct 22, 2017 21:03
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Young Freud posted:Of course, how would donations and sacrifices to the Free Market work?  I tried to look into developing some kind of quasi-Buddhism for a fantasy setting once, and it turns out there WAS a divine-type sorceror reskin!
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Oct 22, 2017 21:07
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Night10194 posted:Yeah like I'm not even asking for 'this needs to work like real polytheistic religions' or whatever. If you're just going to have D&D fantasy gods at least do something wild and fun with them instead of 'High level PC who ascended into the template for PC paladins'. Give me some kind of twist, goddamnit. And fewer of them. The default in Faerun, at least, is that most people are polytheistic and offer prayers to whoever's appropriate, but most people choose one patron god they feel especially close to. Most of the good gods, especially the Triad of Tyr, Ilmater, and Torm all say hey clerics and paladins and whatnot there's no shame beseeching my buddies for help it's all good.
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Oct 22, 2017 21:12
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quote:The Hidden: Remember the colonists from The X-Files? These are evil greys and shapeshifters that may be hiding amongst people and they've been visiting since even before the Gap and the government censors stuff about them because shut up they do. I guess I'm not paying enough attention (and feel no shame for doing so), but the Gap™ affected these guys too? Because they visited pre-Gap® cultures, but everything pre-Gap is still somehow a mystery. And if so, how can they possibly know? What the gently caress is the point of this?
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Oct 22, 2017 21:47
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Night10194 posted:Part of my problem with Pathfinder in general, and Starfinder *especially*, is...what ideas is it trying to communicate? It feels so utterly joyless, like no-one involved was doing anything but trying to produce something that would keep a supplement treadmill going in a new direction. Yeah, Spelljammer managed to absolutely capture my imagination when it came out. It was easy, super easy, to see a creaky wooden ship, dangly lanterns in cramped halls, cutlass-waving scoundrels running on a deck, but IN SPAAAAAACE. The weird plant-ships of the elves, the stone dwarven citadels, the cephalopod-themed mindflayer ships, they all fed into that really strong theme and everything seemed designed around 'what can we do that's loving cool?' Then there's this and it's just... dull. They could have done such amazing things with the core concept, but wound up with so little.
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Oct 22, 2017 22:00
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 WORLD OF DARKNESS: INNOCENTS INTRODUCTION So after rereading all of Innocents, I can’t lie: it’s gonna be a bit tough to cover this one. Not for the content or subject matter; it’s leaps and bounds above KidWorld. No, the issue I have with it is an issue of heavy redundancy. The idea of the book is solid enough. Innocents is all about letting the Storyteller run a very thematically different game than your average nWoD adventure by letting you play as children. And I liked Innocents a lot when I first read it years ago, I really did. The fiction in the book is pretty on point (though a touch repetitive) and it’s sprinkled liberally through the entire book. The premade adventures are interesting choices and fit the themes of the fact that you’re all children and you’re not going to solve this problem by becoming a Hunter (maybe). I quite enjoy the representatives of vampires, werewolves, etc. that are selected to be characters you can introduce the kids to. And, this is crucial, I like that the game establishes that these are about supernatural horrors or horrors related to the World of Darkness, explicitly says this at one point and commits to that. This entire book is refreshingly free of sexual menace and there's less emphasis on mundane menaces like child abuse. Which, admittedly, is not to say that it’s entirely bereft of the latter (it absolutely is clear of the former though). One of the sample fictions is about police looking over the cases of an abused girl who set her vampire father on fire because he threatened to prey on her younger sister. This is abuse of an 11-year-old girl but she’s not abused for reasons of power or sadism or carnal reasons. She was abused because this is what a vampire does as a predator that hungers for the Vitae of the mortal. Her abuse was entirely supernatural in nature. If vampires weren’t real, this never would have happened. And that’s…legitimately good. Innocents goes out of its way to say “look: bad things happen to kids but that’s not something we really want to make a game about because it’s not fun and that’s also not really the WoD so this is explicitly a game about kids dealing with actual monsters” and that’s one of its strong points. But there’s a pretty glaring weakness to Innocents and that’s mostly that Innocents is 266 pages long when it really could just be a slimmer 130 or so. I didn’t entirely comprehend this when I was reading it years ago and was less familiar with the whole Storyteller system and hadn’t yet acquired the core book for nWoD. Innocents reprints a lot of the core book’s rules and that’s kind of to its detriment because then it skimps on the ideas. There’s a lot of fiction but it’s attached to skill descriptions and dice roll examples. There are premade NPCs but there really could stand to be more. There are some example adventures but they could really stand to have a bit more depth (also there’s photomanipulated art which…isn’t great). There are eight chapters, a prologue (which is just fiction) and an appendix (which has content). Let’s lay it out a bit:
Which kinda puts me in a weird position about how to cover this book exactly. I thought KidWorld would be the faster one to go through but, well, I’m not going to sit here and repeat rules for nWoD. Others have done that better than I have. So I’m going to focus on what’s different about playing as children in regards to the mechanics. I’m not going to be covering this on a chapter-to-chapter basis like I normally would. From there we’ll look at the sample adventures and all that and then just wrap the book up. So yeah, we’ll get started on that NEXT TIME. I felt like addressing the main shortcoming of this book was important enough to warrant its own post.
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Oct 22, 2017 23:02
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That Old Tree posted:I guess I'm not paying enough attention (and feel no shame for doing so), but the Gap™ affected these guys too? Because they visited pre-Gap® cultures, but everything pre-Gap is still somehow a mystery. And if so, how can they possibly know? What the gently caress is the point of this? Nah, it's a little confusing. People know what happened after the Gap (not the store). People can know (or find out) what happened before the Gap. They give an example of an elf being old enough to remember, which seems like a stretch given their lifespan is usually only 500-600 years of age? But everything during the Gap has been wiped. Except for the things that haven't. So nearly all the things. Which is why people know about Golarion and all that, because those records can still exist. But the whole period where people colonized and invented space travel is wiped (though not interstellar travel, of course).
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Oct 22, 2017 23:14
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Nah, it's a little confusing. That Old Tree posted:What the gently caress is the point of this?
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Oct 22, 2017 23:19
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so that paizo doesn't have to give canonical endings to any of their world-changing adventure paths
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Oct 22, 2017 23:20
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My guess is that it is a completely artificial mystery included so they could just say "this is the far future of Golarion!" and be able to completely ignore factors like "how would their stuff have expanded, what is going on here. Who conquered who and when?" etc.
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Oct 22, 2017 23:20
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Red Metal posted:so that paizo doesn't have to give canonical endings to any of their world-changing adventure paths Here it is, the real answer.
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Oct 22, 2017 23:24
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I mean, plenty of other properties just don't give a poo poo because that's far in the past. Goddamn, Starfinger.
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Oct 22, 2017 23:25
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Intrigued by innocents but its such an odd premise to focus on. How much of WoD does it cover? Redmetaln is right about Starfinger, but the story happening at my table is those gods of interstellar travel are full of poo poo and used the Gap to get a monopoly on space transit systems.
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Oct 22, 2017 23:25
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Barudak posted:Intrigued by innocents but its such an odd premise to focus on. How much of WoD does it cover? In a sense of release history, Innocents came out before Hunter in 2008, so everything after Hunter isn't really touched on.
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Oct 22, 2017 23:35
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The main point of The Gap seems to be that yes, they don't gotta explain shiiiit, but also so you can have ruins and mysteries and stuff like that in a setting that should already be explored out. Basically the dilemma is that every stock, generic, fantasy setting needs to have a fallen past empire to poke about in the remnants of. You need dungeons. The Gap gives you dungeons. You may say "well, that's played out", and "there are more graceful ways of doing that" and you'd be right on both counts in my opinion.
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Oct 22, 2017 23:36
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Do you think that other game lines do this "more gracefully", as it were? The only one that comes to mind is Ashen Stars and its Bogey Conundrum--how does that compare to Starfinder's Gap?
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Oct 22, 2017 23:43
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Nessus posted:My guess is that it is a completely artificial mystery included so they could just say "this is the far future of Golarion!" and be able to completely ignore factors like "how would their stuff have expanded, what is going on here. Who conquered who and when?" etc. My experience Wednesday was of a supergrog at the FLGS complaining about how exactly this ignored factor was total bullshit for at least an hour before I packed up and left.
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Oct 22, 2017 23:53
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Davin Valkri posted:Do you think that other game lines do this "more gracefully", as it were? The only one that comes to mind is Ashen Stars and its Bogey Conundrum--how does that compare to Starfinder's Gap? In Ashen Stars it's handled in the vein of a TV series plot point and one of the races is directly related to it, the Vas Mal. It's up to the GM to decide how to handle it but it's like something out of a Star Trek series, Babylon 5, or another serialized or quasi-serialized sci-fi series. It very obviously happened, its after effects are physically present in the world, and it hangs over everyone because it just happened and the characters lived through it. The Gap just seems like something you can pull out of the plot grab bag of Starfinder. It's vague and there but it's up to you to decide what to do with it or you can just ignore it. Starfinder, like Pathfinder, is a random assortment of tropes and I don't think the devs put much thought into it since the average Pathfinder/Starfinder player just cares about min/maxing and/or just playing a generic D&D game with their friends. On the one hand, D&D has a terrible track record with settings and having too much can be bad but Pathfinder/Starfinder epitomizes the worst faults in D&D setting world building. EDIT: The Bogey Conundrum is also very open ended and they supply you with possible routes to take it. It's Pelgrane though so that's always one of their strongest areas. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Oct 23, 2017 |
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Oct 23, 2017 00:00
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In Albedo it was literally the main plot point of the entire setting and the search for meaning behind their sudden existence is what drove their society into existentialist despair and created rabbit fascism, among other things. Well, failing late stage space capitalism also created rabbit fascism as a means to keep people from questioning their oligarchs, but also existentialist dread and despair. In the RPG, at least, it's also deliberate that they have no idea where they come from (I'm pretty sure there was an answer at some point in the comic, but I've never read it) and that debating that question is a huge thing for the people in the setting, and looking for reasons they exist and hints of what probably created them (most are fairly sure they're a created people) drove a lot of early space exploration. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Oct 23, 2017 |
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Oct 23, 2017 00:04
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I don't really know Ashen Stars well enough to comment on it, but take the "genocidal war" that presaged Fragged Empire - the history of the conflict shapes all of the races in the game, but is on such a scale that none of them are able to see the full scope of it. Most of them were just client states or constructed for single tasks. This leaves a lot of ruins and resources about to try and pick up afterwards, but preserves mystery not through some amnesia ray, but just by making the scope of the conflict too large for any one race to comprehend. Furthermore, it leaves the setting so devastated that people have to go out and discover resources and trade and generally leave their comfort zone, because no community is entirely self-sustaining. They adventure not just out of academic curiosity or seeking riches like they would in Starfinger - though those might be motivations - but because if people like them don't, everybody dies. In short, there's a reason why things happen that creates an need for gun-toting maniacs to wander around the star system shooting dangerous creatures and taking stuff, while still leaving a lot of space wide open to fill with mysteries... without having to rely on any sort of magic plot boot to just wish away things that would be otherwise inconvenient for the writers to deal with. The problem is that Starfinger still has characters that can call up their divine info hotline and be like "So, what happened?" and didn't see fit to really do away with that kind of magic, so instead they relied on an a big ham-handed handwave rather than actually come up with with the tough answers they'd need to preserve mystery for more than ten minutes around a properly leveled Mystic.
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Oct 23, 2017 00:05
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