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Feinne posted:Oh yeah he's actually pretty great because him being a secular cultist both makes him very interesting and ALSO lets the GM spite him whenever they feel it's appropriate by having him get a bit too uppity with the Skinless One, at which point the Crawling Chaos shows him the almighty power of the Outer Gods. God is real and he doesn't even hate you because he's incapable of experiencing human emotion! Mehmet encountering his God would be fun times.
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Jan 22, 2018 02:51
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Down With People posted:He intends to use this to replace the Duke of York, which is…not a good plan at all, actually. The Duke of York is fated to become King of England within the years but Mehmet has no way of knowing that. How much power and influence could he really get from stealing that particular identity? I mean, if you want temporal power in the real world, Mehmet my man, have you heard of this Ataturk guy? You could be president of a whole new country in a few months! Even if Mehmet somehow knows (via magic?) that the Duke of York will become king... Britain in the 1920s is a superpower in its death throes. England just got kicked hard up between the legs less than ten years ago, now is when the colonies are starting to get seriously restive, and the British Empire as a world power is going to be effectively gone in about twenty years. You'd think he'd be much more interested in an up and coming power in the world like Japan or the Soviet Union. England's glory days are long behind it.
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Jan 22, 2018 05:06
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"Mehmet's on his way to replace Stalin" would be a much more impactful storyline, unless that mess hadn't been resolved yet.
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Jan 22, 2018 05:14
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Cythereal posted:Even if Mehmet somehow knows (via magic?) that the Duke of York will become king... Britain in the 1920s is a superpower in its death throes. England just got kicked hard up between the legs less than ten years ago, now is when the colonies are starting to get seriously restive, and the British Empire as a world power is going to be effectively gone in about twenty years. He very explicitly a) doesn't know about the Duke of York thing and b) knows that the Brits aren't what they used to be, so what the gently caress. Of course, if he stayed right at home to replace Ataturk or hosed off to Russia your investigators might not give a gently caress. Your investigators are a party of ride-or-die monarchist Englishmen, right?
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Jan 22, 2018 05:17
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Just because he's too ignorant and secular to realize he works for a god that is real, is strong, and is not his friend does not mean that making some worthless puppet king of an empire in its death throes is not Nyarlathotep's best means to cause a whole bunch of people's lives to be that much shittier.
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Jan 22, 2018 05:39
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You ever like a song you never really listened to that closely? You might have loved it, or just filed it away as one of a million songs you'll remember if it comes on the radio but you'd never be able to hum a bar. Then you listen closer one day or you read some article and you realize it's really about a dude trying to pressure a woman into sex, or shooting the hipsters dancing to how the song sounds, or it's Every Breath You Take, and you just feel kinda gross as the realization hits you. Reading Powerchords changed my view of Satyros Phil Brucato's writing in a similar way.   Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends. Seven years ago, I wrote one of the very first reviews in these threads, just after the FATAL review that gave it its name. It was a review of a particularly notorious book, Changing Breeds. A whole lot of poo poo has happened since 2010-2011, to put it mildly. These threads have absolutely detonated in the years since, thanks to inklesspen's curation of the archive and the tireless work of many a goon. I graduated college, went through a master's program, bounced between a few jobs, and stumbled unexpectedly into a relationship with a wonderful partner. The world at large has had a whole lot of changes too, a lot of it good, a lot of it bad, and a lot of it terrifying enough to inspire several returns to therapy. Traditional games in general has had a wild ride too - Remember that in 2010, the Essentials line was just coming out for 4e, Pathfinder was the new kid on the block, Kickstarter was still pretty much the Wild West, Patreon didn't exist, CCCP still owned White Wolf, Onyx Path wouldn't even exist for two years, and the OSR was only just beginning to be associated with the name. In the time since then, a whole poo poo-ton of games that made huge splashes came out. Makes the fact that a project initially pitched as a 50,000 word manuscript took seven years to come out stand out in even harsher light, doesn't it? Despite it coming out a few months ago (at time of writing), I hadn't even heard of Powerchords until just recently. This makes complete sense, given that it was a modest project with a final funding of just above five thousand dollars, and exactly 100 backers. That's the scope of passion projects that quietly come and go on Kickstarter, a mouse in the shadow of the lions. If they quietly gutter out, only their tiny circles of backers will care, or even notice. Really, the only things distinguishing Powerchords from any other hobbyist project that quietly dies or gets Chinese Democracy'd are the following: 1) It had an in-depth post-mortem of what went wrong written by its developer that was considerably more sincere about screwups than most mismanaged projects'; 2) It was written by one of the bigger and more eccentric fish in our particularly small pond. For those who don't know him, Phil Brucato - who has recently changed his legal name to Satyros - was the main developer of Mage: the Ascension, and a contributing writer or book dev to many, many things in 90s World of Darkness material. He is, for better or for worse, the soul of Ascension - the reason the game is what it is. You can argue how much of its strengths and its faults are rooted in his writing, or from the people editing his writing, but it would not be the gloriously messy neopagan technophobic-no-wait-technofetishist-no-wait clusterfuck it is without him. The problem is that he was, by all accounts I've ever heard, kind of a son of a bitch to work with.  After all, when your co-workers are putting NPCs like this in their books after you've left the building, it's not hard to draw a few conclusions. As you may imagine from that writeup, Brucato is largely known for being a very vocal neopagan that has neoprimitivist leanings and a complete inability to hide the fact that he's horny on main at all times. He's contributed to several different books about love and sex, including one about sex and neopaganism, which I managed to actually track down and read. The best analogy I can give is that reading enough Brucato-directed material gives you the impression that it's written in the voice of the uncle that half-cured his brain in the 70s with ten different drug habits, and you only ever see him at Thanksgiving despite your family never really inviting him anymore, and everybody's keeping half an eye on him to make sure he doesnt get too deep into the wine and start talking to the nieces and nephews about things he really shouldn't. He changed his legal name to Satyros for pity's sake. That's about as subtle as that Squidbillies hat that says "BREATHE IF YOU'RE HORNY." After 2000, he had very little to do with White Wolf until the last thing he did before being brought back to the company for Ascension's 20th anniversary books:Changing Breeds. I have plenty to say about that, him, and his role in my review of it. So, with that established, we come to a very important point: Brucato had editors and company oversight when working with White Wolf. They may have had some really painful edgelord phases (cough, Montreal by Night, cough), but there was someone to answer to that could say "yo, hang on, no we can't print that." He's done a few personal projects since then, but Powerchords was my first exposure to him writing with nobody to answer to but himself.  This book gets loving creepy.This intro post is largely to establish this, and discuss how I'll structure the review. This book is 95% what you'd expect from Brucato writing about musical magick-with-the-k, but the last 5%, scattered thinly across the book in passing mentions or short bits of narrative fiction, show a remarkably unsettling pattern. I rolled my eyes at the explicit content sticker on the front of the book as a hackneyed little bit of music history ephemera, but if anything it's selling the warning short. This book contains repeated mention or barely-subtext insinuation of children and teenagers having sex with adults. One of these instances is incestuous. Many of them are in discussions of groupies. NONE OF THEM ARE MORE THAN PASSIVELY NEGATIVE OR JUDGMENTAL TO ANYONE BUT THE UNDERAGED PARTY IN THE ENCOUNTER. There is, however no explicit description of sexual activities, merely statements that they occur.While on its own this would be enough to leave an exceptionally sour taste in the mouth, the particular phrasing and structure of several of these mentions set off red flags in every abuse survivor I showed them to. It also makes the book's discussions of any and all related or roughly approximate topics (sex, maturity, age) considerably sketchier. Excerpts or tangents I post that I deem sufficiently dire enough to require a reiterated content warning will be posted with one, and the text and my discussion of it will be placed in spoiler tags below it. I will also edit any posts requested to have spoiler tags and content warnings if I miss that mark. The maddening thing is that there's some value to this book, even if it's deeply opinionated about music and music history. There are a few pretty clever ideas in it, and I genuinely like the idea of marketing it as a system-agnostic setting book that comes with optional standalone rules, even if it's pretty nakedly just so it can be stapled on top of oWoD and Shadowrun (really, he calls them both out.) It just happens to seem to be entirely too okay with the idea of loving children for me to leave that out of the first post in good faith. It's the sort of thing where a good editor could have saved it from itself (if their cuts went through). Unfortunately, the editor of the book was Brucato's current romantic partner, who also served several other roles in the production of the game, thus proving why third party editors are a good idea. Well with that elephant air dropped into the room, that's largely what I wanted to say for now. My actual review will begin with a discussion of the postmortem of the game Brucato wrote for his Kickstarter backers, then I'll go through the game itself. One thing I'd like to say up front as well is that I'm, bluntly, pretty uninformed about a lot of music genres and history. I was raised by a very Dad Rock kind of family and never really went too far from that. This book, though, namedrops, references, and passes judgment on bands and styles constantly, so I will be posting a lot of direct mentions of stuff so those who know what they're talking about can evaluate his statements and extrapolations, because even I had a few "wait a loving second" moments reading the book. Before you ask, no, he's astoundingly not a "Everything But Rap And Country" guy. Next time: Brucato Didn't Run A Very Good Kickstarter Daeren fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jan 23, 2018 |
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Jan 22, 2018 07:46
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Night10194 posted:There's no seed of a good idea in Beast that isn't in an already-existing line.
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Jan 22, 2018 09:02
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 TATTOO MAGIC Or Stick M'Necky Out Real Far This is gonna be a short one. Tattoo magic is magical tattoos. Well goodnight.  Alright so tattoo magic has existed all around the world before the Europeans found out about it. They are found in China and Japan, on Polynesian island countries like Samoa, Hawaii and New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Africa, amongst Native American tribes, etc. Then European sailors discovered they existed and also that they were practical and brought the magic and style back to the Netherlands and Portugal and etc. This lead to a lot of uproar amongst aristocrats and high society types who decried tattoos and tattoo magic as being lower class or of common morals or vulgar. The Guild itself classifies magical tattoos as petty conjuring because you're channeling the Quintessence through the tattoo which means you're a poo poo wizard.  Now, that being said, magic tattoos are pretty useful...in theory. To get a tattoo, you need to see a tattooist that knows the design you want. They have to succeed at an average Tattoo+Resolve test and pay a cost to inscribe the aetheric designs into the tattoo. The nice thing is that they can just be a lovely little prison tattoo. You just need the aetheric designs weaved into it. You can also have, in effect, limitless magical tattoos and you don't need to have any magical ability whatsoever to receive them.  To use a tattoo, simply expose the tattoo and spend an action to make a Resolve+Concentration check to pay the Quintessence cost and engage the magical effect. The Resolve of the user determines how long the effect is. Honestly I'm not a huge fan of needing to make a test to use the tattoos. This just makes you have to spread more points over Resolve and a skill you won't use too often except now you will because of your tattoo magickries. It's really not great design. Quintessence and an action cost is good enough. Anyway let's look at the tattoos themselves! Spoilers: there are only ten of them. 
 And yeah why not just turn any drat spell into a tattoo, why not. The big upside of this is, at least, you can tattoo something like Aether Inferno onto a person and they can just expend all of their Quintessence at once to set everything on fire should they have enough mojo and health to power it. But that's tattoo magic! It's marginally more useful than Rune Magic because it's a lot more concrete plus you have access to magical healing all the time. As a whole I'm not a huge fan of the whole "society looks down on it!" and the fact that tattoo magic was stolen from native cultures so Europe undivided could just insult it and call it poo poo-magic. And then you can just get hermetic spells tattooed on you because gently caress you. Ugh. Anyway that does it for all Runic-based magics. NEXT TIME we'll see what Petty Conjuring is up to. Spoilers: it too is focusing on breaking its spells down into core components and seeing what makes them tick and then providing bad spells for you to know.
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Jan 22, 2018 09:17
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Honestly, it's 1923 in the book, right? So Britain might be in decline, but it still is World's #1 Empire, and it's not clear if it's going to lose that position - there is, at best, some unrest in the colonies, rather than mass breakaway you will see after World War II, the Germans are still kept down and there is hope they may pay for UK's war debts at least in part, and there is some post-war economic recovery (no-one knows about the Great Depression to come). Meanwhile, Turkey is permanently on the verge of collapse. The Turkish War of Independence has only concluded last year, and the peace treaty won't come until the summer. There is no certainty whatsoever as to whether or not the state will last. The Soviet Union is an even riskier proposition - they just lost a war against Poland of all places, they still have very little in the way of industry, while their collectivizing agriculture results in country-wide famine. And Lenin is still alive, if not well, and outsiders have no idea who even could replace him. The United States, while clearly on the rise, are a democracy - and that means you cannot tell who will be the next ruler, and even if you could, how long can you keep yourself in office? Britain really is your best shot - and even if the Duke of York is not going to become King, he is sure as hell easier to get access to for an outsider than the Prince of Wales. Maybe York is just a stepping stone?
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Jan 22, 2018 12:07
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Besides, seems like the plan got started when the British Empire was at its peak and it's only just starting to have problems. Of course, there's the question of how much power the King might actually have in an empire where the power of the monarchy is already being limited. Though I like the idea that even Nyalathotep might nonetheless assume that being the next king is obviously the best way to seize control of a country and doesn't quite get the whole divestment of power or democracy thing that's becoming so popular.
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Jan 22, 2018 12:16
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I could also see this being precisely the sort of twist Nyarlathotep would had one of his less than faithful cultists. "Yes you are Duke of York, a nearly powerless position in a declining state. I hope a House of Lords pension was worth it."
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Jan 22, 2018 12:42
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Well it's probably better than leading a cult in the shadows of Istanbul?
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Jan 22, 2018 12:49
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 Review Part 1: This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook posted:The world of Conspiracy X is based on historic and contemporary events, persons, and groups. The secret of a good Conspiracy X campaign is weaving “real” events as seamlessly as possible into the story line so that the players cannot be sure what is true and what is deception. Heightened paranoia is central to the experience. When this book, or any other Conspiracy X publication, uses names and details taken from history or contemporary affairs, all such references are fictional or satirical. Conspiracy X is intended solely as a game and not as a source of the “truth.” Nothing in this book is intended to degrade or impugn these people or groups, nor does this book purport to reveal true secretive information about them. In fact, Eden Studios and the authors would like to publicly disclaim any “inside” knowledge and assure any MiBs and Aegis operatives out there that there is no reason to look into the matter any further. Honest! The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook begins with a brief introduction that goes over the basics of Unisystem writing style for those who didn't pay attention the first time: the game uses d4, d6, d8, and d10 dice, the Imperial measuring system is used, the writing swaps between male and female pronouns for third person referrals on a by-chapter basis, etc. There's also a whopping six page-long timeline of alien history, but we're going to straight up ignore that because it's stuff that will be learned organically through the rest of the book. This leaves nothing between us and starting this long-delayed post with the actual first chapter.  Chapter 1: The Atlanteans Atlantean History While they may be outwardly human now, the Atlanteans have a very different ancestry. They call their home planet Adlan'ns - hope you're not allergic to apostrophes, because there's going to be a lot of proper nouns in this section with them - a moonless world with almost-constant daylight and frequent storms. A plethora of violent predators evolved on the planet, but the most successful were giant canine predators referred to by Atlantean palaeontologists as the Sphi'ns. Eventually, an arboreal pack-hunting offshoot called An'Sphi'ns developed, having smaller body size, opposable thumbs, larger brains, and muzzle-free faces. The An'Sphi'ns would eventually begin to forge tools, walk upright, and become sapient, becoming the ancestral Atlantean: the Pr'Adlan'ns. The most successful Pr'Adlan'n tribes were the subjugation-obsessed and weapon-crafting Dyauspa'r, agrigultural Gerishrig'al, metropolitan Qwezdaco'al, aristic and honor-loving Rapa'lo, nomadic Ahr'am, and seafaring Ea'don. When the Dyauspa'r decided they wanted to become an empire and began steamrolling over tribes and clans all around them, the Gerishrig'al and Qwezdaco'al quickly offered to sign articles of confederation. The others, however, all fought back: the Rapa'lo only submitted once they were nearly extinct, the guerrilla fighters of the Ahr'am didn't lay down their arms until they were promised autonomy under the Dyauspa'r empire, and the Ea'don navies kicked the asses of the Dyauspa'r repeatedly and only eventually joined the empire under the condition that all of the Atlantean tribes would band together and wage holy war on a sapient species of ocean-dwelling armored serpents called the Leva'ans that had been plaguing Ea'don ships. With all the tribes united under the Dyauspa'r, the Atlanteans spread across their planet, eventually creating a society with the weird contrast of Information Age technology and a feudalist social structure. An overarching global feudalism unsurprisingly bred dissidents unhappy with the aristocracy. These ragtag anarchists, freedom fighters, and general malcontents were collectively referred to as Anuzca'lipoc: "the Adversaries". In spite of that rather bombastic title, though, the true danger to the Dyauspa'r Empire would come from within; 750,000 years ago, increasing autonomy of the nobles of each of the tribes and infighting between them would rip the empire apart in a great civil war. The Pr'Adlan'ns would have almost certainly wiped themselves off the face of their planet were it not for the intervention of the clergy known as the Nameless Priests. An old Dyauspa'r religion, the Nameless religion held that the universe was created by Ns (literally "Nameless"), a cosmic nothingness that gained the spark of thought and proceeded to think the rest of the cosmos into being out of a desire for companionship. While Ns as a primordial god had existed in pre-unification Pr'Adlan'ns cultures, under the Dyauspa'r Empire his mythology was codified. A Satan-like figure was represented in the Leva'ans god of shadows named Dra'ans, as well as a pantheon under Ns was created in the form of seven children collectively known as the Celestial Family: Ah'ram the goddess of hunting and justice, Anuzca'lipoc the god of adversity and growth through trials, Dyauspa'r the god of the heavens and bureaucracy, Ea'don the god of the seas, Gerishrig'al the earth goddess, Qwezdaco'al the god of laws and craftsmen, and Rapa'lo the god of fire, war, and creativity. The idea was that each tribe was meant to emulate the god they were 'named' after, even having their leader give up their own name to take on the name of the tribe and act as an avatar of their god, and with that social conformity could be obtained. While that obviously didn't work before the civil war, the Nameless Priests managed to persuade the tribes to come stop the bloodshed and actually follow the example of their gods under a new theocratic society.  Under the Nameless Priests' societal plans, all were children of Ns first and tribal identifier second, marking the period where the Atlanteans consider their modern species to have truly begun. After divvying up land to each of the tribes, now known as the Seven Celestial Families, the priesthood would create a new seat of power in the form of the Autarch. An Autarch would be chosen by the Nameless Priests in an event known as the Harmonic Concordance whenever they felt like it was time to get a new Autarch. The Autarch's rule was absolute, and anyone defying it would be effectively excommunicated by the Nameless Priests, unpersoned as one of 'the Forgotten'. Nobles were also given extra legal protection under the rule of the Nameless: a commoner who killed a noble would have themselves and their entire immediate family executed, and duels to the death between different nobles were expressly prohibited. Fast forward 50,000 years from the Atlantean civil war and the Rapa'lo have invented nanomachines. Even better, several centuries of further research perfect it to the point that the Atlantean people are immortal nanite-hives! At first, this immortality was only afforded to the nobles of each Celestial Family by supposed divine mandate, but enough commoners rebelled that a new eighth Celestial Family specifically for the rebels known as the Frad'ri was created by the Nameless Priests in a hasty attempt to patch things up once again. The Frad'ri would select two members every decade to receive the gift of nanomachine immortality. The Atlantean immortals would capitalize on the whole inability to die thing by inventing artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and space flight. The Ah'ram of the day would be the one to put these three things together into a fully functioning luxury trip through the stars to find potential new people and creatures for the Atlanteans to conquer, so she and the rest of the Ah'ram Family packed up and headed into space. Around 500,000 years ago, the Ah'ram Family ship finally lands on a planet with life bigger than microbes. Unfortunately, it's the homeworld of the Grays, which at this point were basically psychic space dolphins. The Grays attempted to communicate telepathically, but the lack of psychic powers in the Atlanteans led to Ah'ram and her people assuming that the Grays were all weird sea beasts too dumb to know a predator when they saw one. Queue the Ah'ram Family hooting and hollering about this fun new trophy animal to hunt down and slaughter for the honor of their clan. This was the first time the Grays encountered a new species, and also the first time they ever felt the psychic impression of suffering and violence. Unsurprisingly, they didn't take it well. Doing what any self-respecting psychic space dolphin would, the Grays mindfucked their own genetic code to become terrestrial bipeds, made some coral spacecraft, and went to tell off these new rear end in a top hat neighbors. And by 'tell off', I mean 'kidnap and vivisect', because the Atlanteans had done the same to them and thus given the species a very bad new habit. Meanwhile, back on Adlan'ns, the reigning Qwezdaco'al decided that all the other Celestial Families were getting too much honor and fame for him to sit around and do nothing. His plan? Create and release a nanomachine swarm to terraform the entire planet into a perfect eden, optimally designed for the Atlantean people to relax in eternal comfort. Unfortunately for him, the Nameless Priests had a different idea; namely, to turn the planet into a hostile hellworld and murder all the commoners so that the immortal nobles of 'pure blood' could become even stronger. With that goal in mind, they tampered with Qwezdaco'al's invention, and its release ended up creating a gray goo scenario. As all life and land on Adlan'nis melted into a slurry of nanite-infested mud, the terrified nobles on their spaceships gazed on their dying world for the last time. Next Update: A bunch of dipshits with a god complex stumble onto Earth. Chariots of the Gods ensues.
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Jan 22, 2018 12:58
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That was an apostrophe catastrophe.
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Jan 22, 2018 13:31
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Inescapable Duck posted:Besides, seems like the plan got started when the British Empire was at its peak and it's only just starting to have problems. Of course, there's the question of how much power the King might actually have in an empire where the power of the monarchy is already being limited. Alternatively, Nyarlathoptep knows the British Empire is on the way down and is trying really hard not to laugh while helping Mehmet into the position. "*Snort*. Oh, yeah! You'll be master of an Empire where the sun never sets, for ever and ever!"
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Jan 22, 2018 14:15
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Daeren posted:Before you ask, no, he's astoundingly not a "Everything But Rap And Country" guy. This review is in many ways my fault, having provided the Bad Idea Fund necessary for its creation. I regret nothing. Well, except learning where Brucato's musical blind spot is, and the latent pedophilia. It's a really weird blind spot.
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Jan 22, 2018 14:40
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Tevery Best posted:Britain really is your best shot - and even if the Duke of York is not going to become King, he is sure as hell easier to get access to for an outsider than the Prince of Wales. Maybe York is just a stepping stone? Yeah the idea might be "Replace the Duke, remove the Prince, somehow destroy British democracy and not get killed." Not a great one, but this plan was almost certainly started before World War I and meant for the Tsarevitch or somebody.
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Jan 22, 2018 14:46
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Mors Rattus posted:It's a really weird blind spot. Is it that he doesn't know what genres are and just string together cool-sounding words? I learned that from reading M20! LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Jan 22, 2018 |
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Jan 22, 2018 15:44
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Bieeardo posted:That was an apostrophe catastrophe. In some transliteration schemes, apostrophes represent glottal stops. For instance, Arabic and Navajo, which are languages that don't allow words to start with vowels. For other transliterations, apostrophes alter the preceding consonant in some way, whether by palatalization (e.g. Russian) or aspiration (some transliterations of Mandarin). However, this section contains apostrophes both after vowels and in consonant clusters where a glottal stop would be unpronounceable. Anyway, this is really a long-winded way of saying the writers had no idea what they were doing.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:11
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Mors Rattus posted:This review is in many ways my fault, having provided the Bad Idea Fund necessary for its creation. I regret nothing. Is it Orchestral or Choral music?
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Jan 22, 2018 16:15
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I remember noping out of M20 when we were told that the character creation example girl was kicked out of her house for having a teenage orgy. I'd struggled, until then. I had. And then all hope was lost.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:43
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You know, in the admittedly small field of "Former White Wolf writers who have broken the chains of editing," Stephen Brown looks better and better all the time.
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Jan 22, 2018 16:59
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MightyMatilda posted:In some transliteration schemes, apostrophes represent glottal stops. For instance, Arabic and Navajo, which are languages that don't allow words to start with vowels. For other transliterations, apostrophes alter the preceding consonant in some way, whether by palatalization (e.g. Russian) or aspiration (some transliterations of Mandarin). However, this section contains apostrophes both after vowels and in consonant clusters where a glottal stop would be unpronounceable. Yes. Ex'a''ctl'y.
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Jan 22, 2018 17:05
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Halloween Jack posted:You know, in the admittedly small field of "Former White Wolf writers who have broken the chains of editing," Stephen Brown looks better and better all the time. Which one is he?
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Jan 22, 2018 17:07
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He basically invented the Sabbat as we know it, since he wrote the books that expanded on the extremely bare-bones info in the corebook. His vision of the Sabbat ran off the rails in Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, and after leaving WW, he wrote The Everlasting series of books. Edit: In the interest of topicality, fiction writers seem to insert apostrophes to make something sound more foreign. Like, Alun is the Welsh version of Allen or Alan. But make it A'lun, and suddenly it's vaguely Asian! Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jan 22, 2018 |
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Jan 22, 2018 17:09
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To be fair, few people are language nerds, which holds true for game devs. Now what language should I pillfer for Haradrim names?
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Jan 22, 2018 18:01
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JcDent posted:To be fair, few people are language nerds, which holds true for game devs. Suladan, Hasharin, Dalamyr. So kinda arabic filtered through fantasy?
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Jan 22, 2018 18:09
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Daeren posted:Before you ask, no, he's astoundingly not a "Everything But Rap And Country" guy. Doesn't recognize jazz supremacy?
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Jan 22, 2018 18:18
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Kurieg posted:Is it Orchestral or Choral music? Imagine a man who stole the Metallica font for his game title and who worships Black Sabbath but who spends approximately zero time discussing metal as a genre or any metal bands besides Black Sabbath. Dude also has an unhealthy obsession with KISS as an actual band rather than the rock version of Insane Clown Posse.
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Jan 22, 2018 18:21
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Mors Rattus posted:Imagine a man who stole the Metallica font for his game title and who worships Black Sabbath but who spends approximately zero time discussing metal as a genre or any metal bands besides Black Sabbath.
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Jan 22, 2018 18:34
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Mors Rattus posted:Imagine a man who stole the Metallica font for his game title and who worships Black Sabbath but who spends approximately zero time discussing metal as a genre or any metal bands besides Black Sabbath. I.. uhhh... What? So I'm assuming he just completely ignores any metal band more recent than 1970? Also the fact that Black Sabbath got their start as a Blues Rock band?
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Jan 22, 2018 18:36
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Kurieg posted:I.. uhhh...
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Jan 22, 2018 18:53
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Yeah, not surprised that he would not have much in the way of metal - given his whole aversion to Black Magic(tm), he probably believes Metal will actually summon demons.
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Jan 22, 2018 19:01
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Which probably severely limits his design space. Since I was half expecting a Guitar-Magicker to be able to shake a building down to it's foundations with a proper Death Metal Growl(R).
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Jan 22, 2018 19:12
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I like the really dumb history of the dog people who grew up to become immortal bio/nanotech assholes and you did a great job condensing their history into a more digestible, coherent post. That being said god I hate their apostrophe fetish.
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Jan 22, 2018 19:13
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Mors Rattus posted:Imagine a man who stole the Metallica font for his game title and who worships Black Sabbath but who spends approximately zero time discussing metal as a genre or any metal bands besides Black Sabbath. I was going to guess this, but decided it was just too ironic to be true. The metal part, not the part about KISS.
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Jan 22, 2018 19:43
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Betrayal At House On The Hill, 12 Airborne Trigger: Find the Madman in the Charred Room, Kitchen or Servants' Quarters. Just like Fleshwalkers, this is a kind-of-cooperative-but-maybe-not Haunt. The entire house has just been lifted off the ground by a giant bird "the size of a 747". It's successfully ripped the house out of the foundations and removed the basement; it can no longer be accessed and anyone in the basement gets automatically moved to the Mystic Elevator on the ground floor. The aim of the Haunt is to escape from the house with a parachute, but there are only as many as half the player count rounded down. Anyone can find a Parachute with a Knowledge/Speed 4+ roll in any room with an omen symbol, or you can steal one from another Hero with an opposed Might or Knowledge roll. However, any time you gain a Parachute or try to steal one, your turn ends immediately afterwards. This means you can't move away, which means there can be a nice infinite loop of heroes passing a parachute between each other. And oddly, there's no time limit; the scenario only ends when the parachutes run out. Once you have a parachute, head to one of the "outside" rooms (Entrance Hall, Balcony, Tower, Coal Chute or Collapsed Room) and roll Knowledge/Sanity 4+ to leave. Heroes can also attack each other in the normal way in order to kill each other. This is a fairly straightforward all-against-all scenario, but I'm not sure it's sufficiently managed for that. The aforementioned "let's just keep stealing the parachute from each other because doing anything else is overall a bad idea" issue could be a real problem, especially when there's only one left. As could the classic problem of all-against-all games, where the winner is determined by who doesn't get gained up on, either leading to a walking race or an unsatisfying ending. Lost Trigger: Find the Crystal Ball on the Balcony, in the Furnace Room, or in the Pentagram Chamber. See, there's being original, and there's being.. totally bizarre. The house's pipe organ turns out to actually be a dimensional transporter, and it's just taken the house to another dimension. Whoever has the highest sanity is actually from that dimension, and wants to stay there. Unfortunately, the atmosphere in the other dimension is poisonous and does 2 dice worth of damage (applied to any trait or trait combination) to every non-traitor at the start of their turn. The main issue with this Haunt is that it resets the entire house. Everything that's been played except the starting area and occupied areas is removed, the occupied areas move up next to the starting area, and everyone can explore everything again. The heroes are trying to find the Organ Room and re-activate the dimensional transporter. To do that, you need a Knowledge roll in the Organ Room.. with a result of between 15-20 based on the number of players. Since that's basically impossible, there's a ton of bonuses to build up; +1 for every omen in the house, +2 if your character's hobby is music (Darrin Williams or Zoe Ingstrom, or possibly Professor Longfellow if Gaelic Music counts) , and +2 if the Book or Madman are in the organ room with you with +4 for both (the Madman's travelled between dimensions before and the book tells you how to use the transporter), and additional bonuses of +2 each to be found by making rolls in the Library, Game Room and Tower. The Traitor, on the other hand, a swell as killing the heroes can try and make the transporter harder to operate. They can make rolls in the Chapel, Game Room, Laboratories or Pentagram Chamber which each give a -3 to rolls to use the transporter. Ok, so. The highest Knowledge stat anyone has in the group is 5, which can roll a 10 if every dice comes up 2. If there's 6 players the target number is 20, so either dice bonuses or stat bonuses have to cover the other 10. Professor Longfellow is the only character with Knowledge 5 and Music for a hobby, so if you have him you can just hit 12. Which means you need at least two of the room bonuses (or stat bonuses) to even have a chance. And those traitor rolls are nasty? If they actually get all five penalties (because there are two laboratories), -15 raising the target number to effectively 35 is a death sentence. And, of course, the heroes don't get to know about those dice penalties (although the traitor doesn't get to know the target number of bonuses) so you could end up playing at cross purposes for a long time. I'm not sure why that's fun. More problematic is the need to rush for the Organ Room at the start. Where it ends up in the deck is likely to be pretty critical to the chance the heroes have is this Haunt, and it's just random. Really surprising that they didn't allow for this. An Invocation of Darkness Trigger: Find the Book in the Charred Room, Furnace Room, or Junk Room. Oh, sweet Elder Gods! After that attempt at being original turned out just bizarre, we're doing Cthulhu again? After The Stars are Right and the heavy implications of Tentacled Horror? And moreover.. it's another Big Monster haunt! So. The person who found the book needs to take it to either the Chapel or Pentagram Chamber and make Knowledge 5+ rolls. Each successful roll scores a point, and once they have 5, "the Elder God" shows up (who is not named as Cthulhu but they put "Ia, Ia!" in the flavor text).. and immediately kills them. The good news is, they get to play the Elder God. It's Might 12 and Sanity 7, and Speed equal to the number of heroes left at the time it showed up. It goes to kill the players. As for the heroes, they need to either kill the traitor before the God is summoned, or steal the Book (either from the traitor, or from the room where the God was summoned after the ritual), carry it to the Furnace or Chasm and throw it in with no roll required. That immediately destroys the Elder God if it's been summoned and wins the scenario. The traitor doesn't get to know this, so the most likely ending of this haunt is the traitor feeling really disappointed that they didn't get to play Ogre and have their awesome monster worn down but just lost in one turn. Oh well. I don't know what to say about this. It's just meh overall and rather simplistic. Actually, hey, the next one's really interesting, so let's just have a bonus Haunt. Guillotines Trigger: Find the Skull in the Abandoned Room, Furnace Room, or Servants' Quarters. The house suddenly floods with knockout gas. Everyone awakens, woozy and ensure.. and with steel bladed collars locked around their necks. Yep, it's Saw. But it's done in an interesting way. Every player gets handed two random numbered tokens; a red one that's face down and a pentagon one that's face up. The pentagon one shows the timer on their collar. When the number of turns since the Haunt starts has reached that number, they start having to roll 3 dice at the start of every turn, and if the result is less than the turn number, their collar snaps shut and beheads them. Ta ta. Of course this wouldn't be Saw without a silly challenge. Not-Jigsaw tells everyone at the start of the adventure that they can remove their collars with keys that are found in the house. The keys are placed in 11 fixed rooms, which the players are told, but each one is either a room with a built-in hazard or requires an additional roll. For example, in the Collapsed Room, if you fall you don't get the key; the Furnace Room must apply its damage to give you the key. Characters can freely trade keys to each other, and anyone with two keys can unlock their collar and be safe, after which the keys are lost. But what about the traitor? Well, that's where those red tokens come in. Apparently the reason this is happening is that one of the characters' mothers was killed in a traffic accident, and all of the other characters drove on past without trying to help. Whoever got the face-down red token with the number 1 is the one whose mother died. They aren't not-Jigsaw (hi, Zero Escape fans!) but they are a special case: their collar doesn't work. They play the same way as everyone else, but as soon as they fail their collar roll, they reveal themselves as traitor and their collar shuts off. When everyone's collar has been either removed or activated, the Haunt is over, and the heroes win if at least half of them survived; otherwise, the traitor wins (and promptly "feels they've learned something important about life"). The hidden traitor aspect of this Haunt gives it a dynamic that's really original, as does the traitor's role - in that if they succeed at their goal, and get their collar removed when it didn't need to be, they will also never be revealed. However, the timer number the traitor gets can heavily limit their ability to do this - with a really unlucky roll they could be revealed on the first turn, and since they can't sensibly attack anyone until after they're revealed, they're kind of limited. As with an awful lot of traitor based board games, there isn't really any way the players have any chance of identifying someone as the traitor nor meaningfully doing anything about it in advance. But, still, compared to many of the haunts it's a genuinely interesting design, and more of this kind of thing would have helped. Unfortunately, there's only one other hidden traitor haunt in the game.
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Jan 22, 2018 20:08
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I just binged this whole thing, I'm really enjoying your write up! I like the structure, even if the occasional scenario falls flat and the overall milieu is a bit grotesque for me (someone just has to get their eye ripped out for the game to proceed?) And once again, Dreamlands ends up being the best part of Lovecraft by far. The eternal gratitude of cats 
Otherkinsey Scale fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jan 22, 2018 |
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Jan 22, 2018 20:40
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Kurieg posted:Which probably severely limits his design space. Since I was half expecting a Guitar-Magicker to be able to shake a building down to it's foundations with a proper Death Metal Growl(R). Oh you can do that. It's one of the few things in the game I enjoy. And metal does get mentions, but it's very clearly through a lens of "I stopped paying attention to most metal somewhere after Metallica's Black Album came out," and it's inexplicably left out of the magical musical genre lineup despite getting later mentions all over the place. Robindaybird posted:Yeah, not surprised that he would not have much in the way of metal - given his whole aversion to Black Magic(tm), he probably believes Metal will actually summon demons. Ha ha ha. Ha.
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Jan 22, 2018 21:52
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Considering what Brucato is cool with, I can't guess what he considers "black magick." Literally throwing fireballs at people or summoning Cthulhu, I guess.
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Jan 22, 2018 21:56
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