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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:I quite enjoy the blending of mythos and Baba Yaga legend. Ancient witch awakens from the Siberian wastes to reinvent herself as an avant-garde pop star, coming this summer...
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Jan 7, 2018 17:31
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The dress made of meat, it's human flesh!
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Jan 7, 2018 17:33
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Simian_Prime posted:Ancient witch awakens from the Siberian wastes to reinvent herself as an avant-garde pop star, coming this summer... I would watch this.
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Jan 7, 2018 17:39
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I wonder if there would be anything you could toss into the oven to give the Walker the world's worst case of food poisoning. Is there any sort of artifact that would basically act like mega-poison to it? Edit: Like what'd happen if you threw a fully active elder sign in there? Personally, I would have found a way to tip of the brothers of the skin as to the location of this piece and then watch another cult gang war unfold.
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Jan 7, 2018 17:59
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Obligatum VII posted:I wonder if there would be anything you could toss into the oven to give the Walker the world's worst case of food poisoning. 
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Jan 7, 2018 18:03
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A mythos game all about goading cults to annihilate eachother and then sweeping in with the armed troops could be rather fun.
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Jan 7, 2018 18:05
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Kurieg posted:Not sure how much detail I should go into for the different maneuvers, though. Diamond Mind and Setting Sun are kind of boring on the whole compared to SUNLIGHT ENDS IMMEDIATELY
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Jan 7, 2018 19:28
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Falconier111 posted:
Mt. Baldy in California is the location of a Zen monastery. Leonard Cohen spent some time there in the 90s. Horrible Lurkbeast posted:A mythos game all about goading cults to annihilate eachother and then sweeping in with the armed troops could be rather fun. This seems like something a less hopeless Delta Green campaign could be built around.
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Jan 7, 2018 20:24
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Or a less poo poo interpretation of Cthulhutech. By the way, what Cthulhu story has the whole.wizard Chinese oppression thing?
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Jan 7, 2018 20:31
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Down With People posted:OH poo poo I forgot just how much I loved this scenario. Baba Yaga segues into Hansel and Gretel. Marvelous. Kurieg posted:Uhh... is the deck implying that you should age-down the party and then summon people to molest them? Please, no, don't remind me. 
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Jan 7, 2018 20:58
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JcDent posted:Or a less poo poo interpretation of Cthulhutech. There is usually less talk about the mighty beetle civilization that will arise on Earth after Man has died out, possibly because that rules.
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Jan 7, 2018 21:07
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JcDent posted:Or a less poo poo interpretation of Cthulhutech. I believe 'The Horror at Red Hook', which is all about that fear of non-Anglo immigrants. Assuming I'm remembering correctly.
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Jan 7, 2018 21:07
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Midjack posted:Mt. Baldy in California is the location of a Zen monastery. Leonard Cohen spent some time there in the 90s. Huh. There's no mention of a monastery in the book. The town has a Buddhism-inspired cult, though. Is there a Black Lake-equivalent nearby?  Part 9 – CONCLUSION  Now, my son, you ought to go apologize to your sister for killing and cloning her. It’s what God would have wanted. At some point as the party reaches the bottom of the mine, they encounter Nash’s mercenary squad, the Four Horsemen. They are loyal to money before Nash and can be convinced to leave if paid off or if they face overwhelming firepower; they are still pretty tough, though. They might also encounter Fidel, Nash’s stereotypical underling, a hunchback who reveres him and tries to carry out his bidding without question, but he’s incompetent and entrusted with too much control over the hideout’s defense systems for him to handle. He’ll be hard to manipulate but easy to intimidate. After a bit more wandering the party will finally hit paydirt; the three chambers Nash uses for his diabolical plots. In one they can find massive test tubes for creating zombies, including one currently gestating in the same green goo Julie exploded into earlier; the second contains cloning tubes and computers with the scientific data necessary to make more (clones of Capt. Fred and Julie take up two of them, but if the party tries to decant them the clones will fall out, writhe mindlessly, and die, provoking an extreme Fright Check); and the third has computers containing extensive profiles of every resident of Black Lake, complex enough to re-create every citizen of the town with their prior personalities restored. If these computers are somehow destroyed or damaged, some profiles will be deleted or corrupted and that citizen will be effectively dead. Well done! Once Nash is dead the party can use them to bring the townsfolk back to life and replace the clones. At this point Link tells us the party should have enough information to reconstruct Nash’s history and motivations. Like Wong said, Ezra Nash was a brilliant but unethical scientist who got fired for performing really gross experiments on his own time. This pushed him off the deep end and he went to ground, eventually getting picked up by the Cabal (GURPS’s evil magical conspiracy, mentioned earlier) as a resident mad scientist. With their help Nash perfected a way to create digital copies of people’s minds, modifying them, and inserting them into clone bodies – he made Fidel as his first test subject – then headed to Black Lake to prepare his vengeance against Wong. His plan went like this: first, enter town with an identity and credentials (“Bob Smith”) provided by Cabal shell companies; persuade Doc Basset to “test out” his mind-scanning machine, get his information, clone him, and kill him and dump his body; have the clone run the rest of town through the machine, clone them, and kill the originals; threaten Wong anonymously until he fled to his retreat near Black Lake; and finally lead the clones against the mansion and kill his former employer. The plan was just kicking into action when the PCs arrive, hence the signal jamming. Also, Autoduel information. Been a while! Basically, Future Nash did those experiments with pre-existing cloning tech at Columbus before Wong noticed his clones were implanted with memories he’d constructed and had him fired. That’s it!  Finally, an opportunity for a REAL Thriller joke! By the way? The zombies? Nash just made them as a distraction for investigators and/or observant townsfolk. This adventure is actually about clones. Holy false advertising, Batman! The book provides schedules for Nash, Fidel, and the Horsemen, as well as the former’s plans for dealing with interlopers (spot them, sic the horsemen on them, arm himself and Fidel if they fail, call town for a posse of a dozen or so to come back them up, and hold the party off until help arrives). Link doesn’t tell us what Nash will do if they happen to catch him, but implies they’ll have to kill him; otherwise he’ll either escape through a hidden tunnel, escape AND join up with the clone posse to ambush the PCs, or capture them and kill them. Once he is dead or gone, the adventure is effectively over. Forgot to mention: Nash implanted reverence for his mother in every clone. Because of COURSE he wasn’t evil enough without Oedipal themes. Somehow the clones in town will detect Nash’s death and immediately fall into confusion, some committing suicide out of despair. From there the book suggests reconstructing the townsfolk from Nash’s database – no Star Trek transporter problem here! – and try and integrate surviving clones into the community. Two days later the authorities arrive, grill the PCs as they try to sort out what happened, and eventually let them go. The party completed the adventure! Yaaaaay! The last few pages of the book cover various reasons the party might return to Black Lake – just adventure hooks with little interesting about them so I don’t care about writing them up. FINAL THOUGHTS  That was… interesting. This book smacks of someone trying to work in every part of GURPS they liked into one rickety adventure. There’s just too many connections to thematically conflicting settings and a lack of focus in general. Why the hell does this book contain Autoduel rules? They don’t add anything, they don’t connect to anything outside the town, and they clash with the fearful atmosphere the book tries to set up. To be fair, it remarks up front that the adventure is designed to break Autoduel characters out of their comfort zone, but why focus on that setting specifically? It clashes too much with the run-and-gun style you’d expect from it for the adventure to serve as a breather episode. The mechanics are clunky, the characters are broad sketches or stereotypes, and the story is clichéd. It’s not that it’s awful, per se, it’s just not great. I can see why Link never wrote another adventure. But, whatever. It only cost me a few bucks, so it’s not like I regret buying it. I wouldn’t run it myself but I can see others running it for whatever reason. Inklesspen, whenever you have time to next update the archive, I expect to see all THREE of my reviews marked as completed 
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Jan 7, 2018 21:17
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Hc Svnt Dracones: Sound and Silence THIS UPDATE IS MOSTLY ABOUT SPACE GHOSTS. AND SPACE GOD. AND SPACE SATAN. Hokay, before we get into the really wacky poo poo, let's finish up some of the more mundane "secrets" of the HSD universe. Someone might remember, if I even considered it worth posting, that in the original HSD review, it's mentioned that human singing makes Vectors(the furries) kinda peace out and doesn't seem to do much else. Kinda weird. Turns out, when the surviving humans finished up the last Vector generations, they programmed them with some triggers that A) made it easier to fast-learn them stuff and B) meant that humans could tell them to go gently caress themselves if they tried to rebel. Then the furries found out about it and rebelled, forcing the remaining humans to either turn into weird semi-vectors or go down to Earth and get eaten. It's like 99% a completely pointless part of the fluff and its only part of the game world, is, as the book tells us, that it gets used as a date rape drug sometimes, because human singing makes Vectors susceptible to suggestion. The book also tries to make this sound like just a "ho ho those wacky kids"-thing when in fact it's stupendously creepy and gross. Okay, so next there's one of the dumber loving things... THE SHADOW PRESIDENCY The book spends like five pages setting up how this works. Essentially every megacorporation has a SHADOW PRESIDENT who has total control of the corporation, can have people killed for laughs, no one knows who they are, and mostly they pass on their position to "trusted friends"(nepotism all the way down! Except it's presented as a good thing for some reason). This is entirely presented as something that totally keeps corporations on the straight and narrow and keeps them functioning like well-oiled capitalist machines. It details all of their little rules of succession and what powers they have and how the mainline corporations really want to kill them off so they can have total control of their corporations without any meddling magic dictators loving things up. Then. Then. It details how it works for the actual seven canonical megacorporations, and five out of seven of them do not follow these five pages of elaborate rules and regulations because their shadow presidents are alien bugs that ate the last shadow president's brain(exonymphs), children being raised by aliens(the kid from the lovely setting fluff that ended the first book is being taken care of by a Pale Man), AI's(ASR is being run by one of these and it just keeps passing the position on to itself, ignoring the stupid succession rules), have four separate Shadow Presidents at once(the IRPF space cops) or don't actually have one(MarsCo's is dead and they're being run by ASR's AI shadow president). I swear this loving book is out to troll me at this point. But now in the space station base of the UAC he knew there were demons. Okay so follow along here for a bit, because this is going to make sense in a moment. The remainder of the book is basically all about SPACE MAGIC, I'm sorry, TRANSCENDENT TECHNOLOGY AND PHENOMENA(TM) which is legally distinct from SPACE MAGIC in every way and also by being much dumber as a concept. I'm going to go through this in a different order than the book does, because it's incredibly meandering and enchanted with itself. Let's just try to sum it up. Firstly, all religious experiences and miracles and spooky things ever have been the result of people accidentally invoking Space Magic. Secondly, humanity destroyed itself with Space Magic. They did this by sending a probe to Europa that sent back ANOMALOUS READINGS. Despite all signs that they were loving with something unnatural, they went "hey guys lets feed these readings into a giant 3D printer and see what sanity-destroying shape it makes!" and it turns out that it 3D printed a portal into an unfathomable other reality that destroyed all probes sent through, as well as the minds of all sapient explorers. So then the humans decided to shoot a giant laser in there, which prompted no response, except that the next day, a scientist randomly explodes and his scattered blood, gore and viscera hardens into a SPOOKY SPACE MAGIC GLYPH. So these morons then decide to start carving this glyph into everything they can find, including computer code, just to see what happens. Even after the first attempts show that the glyph rapidly copies itself into anything else that resembles what it was first carved into. So promptly it jumps into every single computer on Earth during the nation/corporate war and decides to touch off all the Earth's nuclear warheads because it wanted to find out what nukes were like. Yes, really, and that's going to be part of the big retarded reveal eventually coming. Third, the SPACE MAGIC GLYPH got itself emailed to Mars. Then, when the Vectors were making the owls, they decided to brand the SATANIC SPACE GLYPH right into their loving DNA for ?????? reasons and were extremely surprised when the owl furries came out as homicidal maniacs that wanted to kill everyone. At this point it becomes less chronological and more like a sort of smattering of retarded facts. TTI discovers a SPACE MAGIC implant that lets you quicksave and quickload with time travel(except not really apparently they're just jumping to parallel realities), do stupid space magic experiments that destroy the world over and over, with a bunch of quickloaders and quicksavers hanging around to watch the universe get unravelled, then quickloading back and going "okay here's the scoop that was a loving stupid idea but it gave us a bunch of science that's going to let us gently caress up reality in a totally different way next time!" Until the point where the quickloaders come back with the Whispers(spooky blood magic space magic crystal slendermen) and oh poo poo turns out it was a loving stupid idea after all. One of them survives and ends up creating like twelve literal gods through ~GENETICS~ and puts them into the Oort Cloud to protect space from furries and also to protect furries from space and some of them are planet-sized and the book doesn't even bother to detail or stat them because GODS. Anyway, so the Whispers are the agents of Hydra, the space glyph virus, which is actually Satan, and is destroying the universe because it really wants to pull everything in it apart and catalogue it. This is literally its motivation and the Whispers are the editors of Satan's wikipedia that disassemble and tag everything and turn it into red space crystal, which is what they're doing to Earth. Taking it apart so Space Satan can figure out how to take other planets apart. Now, you might think, since all of this bullshit originated from the portal on Europa, maybe that's where Space Satan's from, except no. That's where Space God is from, except Space God is a dick served by the evil aliens that TTI resurrected on Europa, as well as the evil orca bio-servitors that TTI also made, and also he's radioactive and is the reason why Jupiter is radioactive and Jupiter's radioactivity is what his servants live off. It also confirms that aliens exist and that many alien civilizations are fighting Space God because he's a total Space Dick to them, too. And there's also an even bigger Space God who's more of a Space God than Space Dick God or Space Satan except we can't comprehend him so he basically doesn't matter at all. The last bit of the book is then about other horrible dimensions and how we can go there to die horribly or to discover that anyone who tries to stand out in society is probably a rapist, nazi or other horrible person. OTHER DIMENSIONS Or, as the book decides to call them, "Near-Cuil Realms." Now, I'll be fair and say that these other dimensions are probably the least mockable parts of the game... and therefore also the least statted and described parts of the game in any way, thus rendering them more or less unusable for any GM who doesn't want to write half of his own game. Mostly the game seems to suggest that you can dive into one, and then come out somewhere else on our side, using them to essentially teleport places. Unfortunately it has no rules for this whatsoever, and we now know we've got FTL travel in the real world. It also suggests that GREAT KNOWLEDGE can be brought back from these places... unfortunately this seems doubtful since their vastly different physical rules means that anything neat that exists in them probably can't even exist on our side. Bright side? They do get some of the book's only seriously good art.  Like, check that poo poo, that could be on a Magic: the Gathering card or in Endless Space/Legend and I wouldn't bat an eye. It looks loving sweet. Travelling to them either involves being psychic and unlucky(like if you try to teleport immediately before getting hit by an object you may, GM fiat, end up in Vesper instead. Using certain powers while drowning may dunk you in Stifle, etc.), or being friends with TTI and actually asking to be allowed to go places. So what other dimensions can you go to, anyway? Let's list them off. VESPER Vesper is basically Xen from Halflife, really far to fall, weird geography that's disjointed and you can see celestial phenomena everywhere in the sky like there's no real intervening distance. Mostly chill and the wildlife generally doesn't give a poo poo about you. However, Whispers here explode from water rather than blood, including any water you're carrying, and any water in you, making them much spookier. Also Space God's orcas can fly here, making them pretty scary. Or they would be if any of the loving books ever statted them. You useless chodes.  FRACTAL Super-pretty place where everything's sharp and jagged, like it's made from gems or obsidian, where light is solid(meaning it can be used for PUZZLE PHYSICS like making bridges and stuff), and where everything is out to kill you. Except none of the local monsters are statted. Also all your gear is useless and only if you're unarmoured and unarmoured can you employ the mystical space talent of yelling your opponents to death with imagination. Whispers here manifest out of the sounds you make, stealing your voice and using it to attack you and your friends with. That sounds like a Far Wyld encounter from Exalted rather than something out of HSD, and equally as impossible to actually stat or GM except as an extended description where you hand-wave and rule-zero what happens all the time because the book doesn't loving suggest much of anything.  STIFLE What happens once Space Satan or Space God finishes eating a dimension, presumably. Everything's so destroyed and uniform that even the local laws of physics have collapsed, to the point where distance, space, time and even aggression largely have no meaning. This makes Stifle a very safe place(assuming you have the one Space Magic power that allows you to actually exist there, otherwise you just... cease), and a good place for first-contact scenarios since no one can attack each other. Unfortunately it also means that if something does want to attack you, it just needs to stalk you until you go home, then it can pop into our reality after you've gone to bed and eat your eyeballs.  VAST Going to VAST basically just means you teleport really far except VAST also reads your mind and puts you near something you really want. For some reason the game implies this is often going to be somewhere fatal without very specific protective gear(like between-galaxies deep space, the inner atmosphere of a star, etc.), though I doubt most people want to go there and I don't understand why the GM would want to TPK everyone with that. It seems to only mention as an afterthought that it might put you to hang out with the furries' artificial gods for a bit or on a safe, more-or-less terran planet or in the presence of sapient aliens. Or it could probably just drop you near some donuts if you're feeling really hungry. WRITHE  WRITHE feels like it's out of Kult for multiple reasons, including how it's just thrown in there as "A COOL ALIEN LOCATION" and then a great big shrug and "I DUNNO" when you ask what you can/should do with it. Basically it's a GOTHIC CITY where the streets are crammed with miserable, naked bodies just pointlessly squirming along and rolling over each other. Any time any of them try to escape, they're pulled down by the others. The few escapees roaming about are glowing and ethereal beings of colour and beauty. Also there are giant spiders maintaining the city which is also full of cruel machinery, the giant spiders may try to eat you. So anyway, all the naked bodies are the subconsciousnesses of all the furries around(and possibly other sapient beings in other parts of the universe), and the city is a metaphor for SOCIETY'S RULES AND CONSTRAINTS. And all the GLOWING MAGICAL BEINGS who escape/try to escape the press of CONFORMITY might be creative wonders or more likely they're just rapists, genocidal idiots, plans for weapons of mass destruction or plots for ruling the world. So you shouldn't help them escape if you're visiting, in fact you should kick them back into the sprawl for everyone's sake. Silence posted:The terrain in Writhe is beautiful, but in a gothic, foreboding sort of way. The buildings and structures represent ideals of society, but are in turn feeding the squirm by virtue of their existence. As a result, they appear as a sort of techno-organic hybrid structure, alive and dead at once, with beautiful sculpting and detail but threatening posture. Divers have described them as “the monster we live in, stripped of its veneer, so that you can actually see its teeth and claws as it eats us each day.” gently caress off you pretentious sacks of fursuiting poo poo. Guess I'm finally done with this game until they release HSD 2nd Edition, Advanced HSD or another loving deepest lore book. I'm sorry you had to suffer with me.
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Jan 7, 2018 22:31
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Kurieg posted:Uhh... is the deck implying that you should age-down the party and then summon people to molest them? I'm going to be generous and assume they just mean, "random encounters that are a lot harder because they've been turned to kids."
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Jan 8, 2018 01:01
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At least fighting demons in space hell is less boring as poo poo than 'Shadowrun, but everyone idolizes and loves the corporations and is also a furry'.
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Jan 8, 2018 01:05
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Falconier111 posted:Huh. There's no mention of a monastery in the book. The town has a Buddhism-inspired cult, though. Is there a Black Lake-equivalent nearby? Kind of. It's about 20 miles north of Pomona. Silverwood Lake is about 15 miles to the east.
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Jan 8, 2018 01:45
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Oh my that unasked for history of HSD is just a giant ball of stupid. your valiant sacrifice of sanity for our benefit has not gone unnoticed.
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Jan 8, 2018 01:59
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So basically HSD is the new Doom game but even dumber, with furries. Cool!
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Jan 8, 2018 02:38
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Tevery Best posted:Oh, it's not really isolated from American tropes. In fact, it mashes together an incredible number of them in a way that is unmistakably European because of its blind spots. I think the strongest telltale sign is that for a game set in the United States it only ever mentions two states by name.
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Jan 8, 2018 02:44
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Wait, it just ends, right there? I thought there would be more SUPER LIBERTOPIA FURRY SECRETS than that. It was so underwhelming. So stupid, but underwhelming. I thought there'd be more of a reveal about the enemies in the game, not this wet fart about space satan. Why did I expect more of these people? I was a fool, I say!
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Jan 8, 2018 02:54
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Tibalt posted:So basically HSD is the new Doom game but even dumber, with furries. Cool! It's more like Dead Space to me, at least with infectious and deadly memes.
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Jan 8, 2018 02:58
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Tibalt posted:So basically HSD is the new Doom game but even dumber, with furries. Cool! There is nothing dumb about Doom
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Jan 8, 2018 03:23
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HSD just feels like a hodge-podge of 'video games and things from the internet I like' not done well. And the inclusion of Space-Yahweh makes me want to know why it has to be there. Why not just leave it at self replicating viral glyph? Why does it have to be a personified malignant intelligence? Make it more terrifying by having it be just an environmental phenomenon.
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Jan 8, 2018 03:56
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Tasoth posted:HSD just feels like a hodge-podge of 'video games and things from the internet I like' not done well. And the inclusion of Space-Yahweh makes me want to know why it has to be there. Why not just leave it at self replicating viral glyph? Why does it have to be a personified malignant intelligence? Make it more terrifying by having it be just an environmental phenomenon. Played Shin Megami Tensei once, didn't take much more away from it than 'Fighting the God of Abraham with a wrist computer full of gods and a katana is rad as poo poo.' That's probably where Space Yahweh came from.
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Jan 8, 2018 04:13
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I still can't get over they literally printed a portal and it somehow works.
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Jan 8, 2018 04:16
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It's really been quite awhile since 'THE DM'S GUIDE CONTAINS THE TRUTH OF THE SETTING AND ITS DEEP MYSTERIES OF BEING A DIFFERENT GENRE THAT MIGHT PISS OFF PLAYERS WHO LIKED THE ORIGINAL PITCH' last showed up in F&F. With added twist that the original pitch was loving awful
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Jan 8, 2018 04:18
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Night10194 posted:'Fighting the God of Abraham with a wrist computer full of gods and a katana is rad as poo poo.'. To be fair, this is true.
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Jan 8, 2018 04:59
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The Lone Badger posted:To be fair, this is true. Also you will probably be damned for eternity and forced to witness the end of time itself because God is a dick.
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Jan 8, 2018 05:19
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It's usually inadvisable to fight God, yes. I kinda think that Gatecrashing in EP is expanding the setting too far, and the aliens in Infinity just shouldn't be. Meanwhile, HSD starts with post scarcity furry society and each new layer of the game.informs you that previous layers don't matter. Oh, you were doing shadow runs? Well, they don't matter, since corp war is all theatre. And the corp war? Doesn't matter, since some red crystal is eating Earth. But that doesn't matter either, since there are aliens out there. An the aliens? Well they're fighting a space god, but we have cloned our own space gods, but there's a bigger space god but we have multiple realities to go to but whocaresweexperimentwithdestroyingtheuniverse
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Jan 8, 2018 06:20
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rumble in the bunghole posted:There is nothing dumb about Doom Oh, plenty of stuff in Doom 2016 is dumb, it's just intentionally dumb. "Hey, guys, let's go run around in the hell dimension to see if we can use it for power. Can't possibly go wrong!" Some of the best moments are where the Doom Marine silently reacts to the stupid poo poo he's hearing.
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Jan 8, 2018 07:38
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JackMann posted:Oh, plenty of stuff in Doom 2016 is dumb, it's just intentionally dumb. "Hey, guys, let's go run around in the hell dimension to see if we can use it for power. Can't possibly go wrong!" The fact that the NPCs in the game are trying to relay the standard video game plot and the Doom Marine is having loving none of it is the best thing* about the game. *Second best, behind the running and gunning.
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Jan 8, 2018 07:41
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"Our interest in their world was purely for the betterment of mankind." *Glances down at a dead worker, then punches the intercom*
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Jan 8, 2018 07:45
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JcDent posted:Meanwhile, HSD starts with post scarcity furry society and each new layer of the game.informs you that previous layers don't matter. Sometimes INTENTIONALLY, sometimes unintentionally. It feels very much like every time they finished a chapter, the author got a totally new idea that made them completely lose all interest in the previous one, especially considering all of the screaming contradictions in the text. It almost makes me look forward to the next LORE EXPANSION, if there is one, just to see how they're going to top this.
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Jan 8, 2018 08:27
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I CTRL-F'd PurpleXVI's posts and found zero mentions of "cryptocurrency" or "bitcoin" or "(sea)steading". I have to say I'm just a little disappointed.
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Jan 8, 2018 08:31
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 LITTLE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS – PART FIVE Blow The House Down The bone whistle is about six inches long and exquisitely carved with patterns of flowers and vines. Archaeology or History identifies it as Byzantine-era, but carved by a Slavic craftsman. It's a rare find and something far too valuable to be a casual gift. Blowing on it produces a low, warbling tone with strange harmonics that are felt rather than heard – Spot Hidden reveals that the trees shudder in symphony. It can be blown full-force only once, first requiring a Constitution roll to take a big lungful of air. As the note sounds, it rises higher and higher, vibrating with teeth-rattling force. At its apex it shatters, possible cutting its player in the process. Blowing the whistle is the deus ex machina that saves the investigators here. The book accommodates for a wide range of possible times they might choose to blow it. If they blow it when they make it out of the cottage, this is what happens. The Walker hunches on its legs and sways in place as if uncertain. The Dark Young are thrown into total confusion by the sound, emitting ululations from their many mouths and swinging their tentacles wildly. Grandmother's song rises in pitch as she attempts to control them, but that just makes things worse. One of the Dark Young smacks her with a tentacle and the force sends her flying across the clearing with a sickening crack. She lands hard against the stump of an old oak tree. The investigators now have 1D4 rounds to get the gently caress out. The Walker is no longer maintaining its illusions and is withdrawing the mycofilaments that accelerated the clearing's growth. The investigators can now see that the woods around the clearing are dead, and the cottage's fence is bones topped with skulls. Investigators who look back as they run and failed a Luck roll will get an excellent view of the Walker in the Woods risen to its full stature, and lose 1D6/1D20 SAN in accordance. They'll also hear a terrified scream. Grandmother is holding onto Kcerca's arm tight and staring her dead in the eyes as she sings a different song. In seconds she drains the life force out of the poor girl, leaving her a desiccated husk as she stands up, her bones healing. That's 1/1D6 SAN. The forest becomes like a maze to the investigators. They'll need three successful Navigate or Track rolls to escape. An Extreme success counts as two Regular successes while a failed rolled means they lose more time getting turned around in the forest. A fumbled roll means a random encounter: either panicked wolves, a panicked bear or an angry Dark Young. I sincerely hope someone remembered to grab the Right Arm in all of that.  Hunting Season If the investigators failed their Navigate rolls they escape the woods but have no idea where they are. There's other villages near Orasac, but if they lack a translator they'll have difficulty getting directions, especially if they're wild-eyed, filthy and wounded. Alternatively, they might run into the Romani, who will take them in and see that they're taken care of. If the investigators share their story, the Romani aren't surprised at all; that's just the poo poo that happens in the woods. They all stay the gently caress away from whoever's holding the Arm, and Venclovic warns them that they'll meet their doom carrying the evil artefacts. As they talk, a Spot Hidden roll reveals a familiar face at the edge of the crowd...Kcerca! If they mention her by name, the young woman asks for her description. When she hears it, she wails and collapses to her knees. This is of course Tsuba, twin sister to Kcerca. She always believed Kcerca had never died. Well, now she knows. This news fills the Romani with anger. One of their daughters, stolen and corrupted by the witch? Markovic swears vengeance. At dawn tomorrow, the Romani will hunt. The investigators are invited to join the party. If they do, they'll set out with a fearsome hunting band in the dark hours of the morning. They can guide the Romani to the now empty location of the cottage – Spot Hidden reveals that only a thin layer of soil covers a Roman-era mosaic underneath, decorated with similar horrors to those the investigators encountered yesterday. After that, the investigators need to match their Track against the Walker in the Woods' Stealth 80. Each failed test means a day lost and more of the hunters dropping out of the band, eventually dwindling from 15 to 3, at which point they call off the hunt. If they do find the Walker, it'll be partially dormant, looking like a huge mass of rotting vegetation. The investigators and the hunters have one free round to do as much damage as they can against something almost totally immune to firearms. Good luck. If they survive, they're friends with the Romani for life. Alternatively, they may not want to join the band. No hard feelings. No-one could blame them for wanting to get the gently caress out after the day they've had. One of Markovic's sons can drive the investigators to a train station, or back to Orasac. If they do go back to Orasac, they'll find Father Filopovic in the church, where he's staring down in mute horror at the withered body of Ana. Guess Grandmother was still hungry. Depending on how the investigators plan to get back to civilisation, they might fall victim to the Baba Yaga's magic. Grandmother is too weak to attack directly but she still follows the investigators and makes her fury known to them. She plagues them with boils, or just appears menacingly in the distance. In one extremely memorable encounter, she summons a plague of hundreds of black chickens to attack the investigators – anyone who's played Ocarina of Time can tell you how horrific that can be.  Fuckin Witches Man The investigators get 1D4 SAN for the Right Arm but nothing for eluding Baba Yaga, on the basis that she's still out there. Come on. Escaping her clutches, knocking her down a peg, doesn't that deserve anything? As the Orient Express leaves the station, it starts storming. As they look out the window, the investigators can see something moving on the hillside. It's the Walker in the Woods, keeping pace with the train. Now it is a cottage on chicken legs, then when the lightning strikes it becomes a loping monster the size of a house. Riding it is the Baba Yaga, her hands raised above her head, her voice like grinding stones audible above the storm, cursing the investigators with unholy malice. That's 1/1D6 SAN. But no attack comes. An Occult roll lets the investigators realise that the Baba Yaga is the power of nature, and inside their metal box mounted on twin iron rails, the investigators are protected from her magic. When they cross the border into Bulgaria, the investigators will see that the Baba Yaga follows them no longer. They're probably not welcome in Belgrade again. Best think about what they want to do on the return trip. After a quick nap, of course. Next time: one last trek in the Dreamlands!
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Jan 8, 2018 11:57
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Obligatum VII posted:I wonder if there would be anything you could toss into the oven to give the Walker the world's worst case of food poisoning. Is there any sort of artifact that would basically act like mega-poison to it? Hostile V posted:Okay so maybe dynamite and fire is a bad idea. Maybe smart and enterprising PCs should just walk around tooting on that whistle. So if you toot the whistle outside of the cottage, it wakes the thing up and freaks it out. Grandma comes to calm it down and gets trampled. If you toot the whistle inside of the cottage, it really is like it gives the thing food poisoning; it loses all guise of being a cottage and very obviously becomes the inside of something's stomach. It sprays everyone with acid and barfs them all up. Grandma has the worst burns, of course.
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Jan 8, 2018 12:00
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Down With People posted:So if you toot the whistle outside of the cottage, it wakes the thing up and freaks it out. Grandma comes to calm it down and gets trampled. Does a recording of the whistle work just as well? Have something playing on loop and leave in there. Enjoy, rear end in a top hat evil house.
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Jan 8, 2018 13:41
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8one6 posted:The fact that the NPCs in the game are trying to relay the standard video game plot and the Doom Marine is having loving none of it is the best thing* about the game. A character conveyed entirely by his body language and punching.
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Jan 8, 2018 13:53
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Down With People posted:Best think about what they want to do on the return trip. My usual gaming group would probably opt to go by boat. It's not like "Stay the gently caress out of the Balkans" is a hard sell to anyone in the 20th century. 
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Jan 8, 2018 13:59
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