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Their deal with disinfection before entering the citadel sounds a whole lot like the old short story "The Chemically Pure Warriors" by Allen Kim Lang.
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# ? Sep 23, 2023 16:14 |
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Speleothing posted:Yo dudes, let's skip having Glorantha lorechat for the eighth time and go strait to mechanics before you get bogged down and distracted by minutiae (again) Night10194 posted:Runequest has mechanics? They keep printing Glorantha stuff and this thread keeps covering the lore over and over again. I'll summarize: something... something... gently caress with the ducks DON'T gently caress WITH THE DUCKS something... something... reenact myths something... something... Rules I guess...
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Glorantha: things get weird fast. As for Tekumel, what's so weird about it? Besides being, IIRC, a game made by anthtopologist about a failed human colonisation world where demons are a thing and iron basically isn't. E: "The Chemically Pure Warriors" is a title straight out of 40K or 2020 AD (but I repeat myself). JcDent fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Jun 18, 2018 |
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![]() The Setting Speleothing posted:Yo dudes, let's skip having Glorantha lorechat for the eighth time and go strait to mechanics before you get bogged down and distracted by minutiae (again) this is true, basically everybody either knows this or won't know it from all the discussions. The Gods came, fought each other, hosed everything up, kind of fixed it and then time started, a lot of people had issues with Hubris, got hosed up then we get into recent history. I'll talk about the current state of play because it's baked in to the rules and actual game, but I don't want to say anything here I wouldn't say to a player in the first session. I like my reviews breezy and conversational anyway there's an excellent tumblr from a while ago that did a lot of writeups of stuff here, go scroll around if you want specifics the glorantha thread for everything that isn't relevant Lets just skip ahead to Character Creation The game gives us a particular order for character creation that I don’t think is very good. ![]() Doing it in chronological order makes a certain kind of sense, but I’d probably do steps 4, 5 and 6 first, since they’re the most important for determining what your character does mechanically. To demonstrate the process, since there’s a lot of fluff, I’ll run a character through the process. Conveniently, most decisions have as many options as a common dice has faces, so it’s possible to randomly generate a character. They might not make sense or work mechanically, but it’s possible. The first step to creating a character is to select a homeland. The game provides 6 sample homelands, all surrounding the region of Dragon Pass, like every Runequest thing ever made.
I rolled somebody from the Impala tribe of Prax. They get a stat adjustment because they’re pygmies, which I should remember. It boosts a few skills, most importantly riding impalas, shooting a bow and Sprit Combat if I ever get involved in Shamany stuff. I also start with the passions of Hate (Chaos) 60%, Love (Family) 60% and Loyalty (Tribe) 60%. The Hate one is a big deal since it’s frequently applicable. 2. Family History This edition of Runequest provides an extensive list of events in recent history that may have happened to your grandparents, parents and the PC, along with random rolls to determine the exact outcomes of people involved. Although I’ve heard a few complaints that it really puts the central conflict of Dragon Pass vs the Lunar Empire and the Hero Wars front and centre, it’s a very effective way to introduce a player to the setting and give their character some history. It does provide an alternative for people looking for quick starts that you can use if your campaign is in Ralios or something. Because I don’t think the thread wants to read 100 years of fictional history, I’ll run our Impala Rider’s ancestors through it and see what pops up.
3. Rune Affinities Each character is connected to several runes as an expression of their soul and connection to the Gods. There’s a variety of mechanical and narrative purpose to these: They represent your character’s personality, and define their magic and connection to the Gods. The game lumps these into 4 main categories: Elemental, Power, Form and Condition, but there’s 2 different sorts mechanically. There are 6 Elemental Runes: Water, Air, Earth, Sky/Fire, Darkness and Moon. You start with 60%, 40% and 20% in 3 of your choice, and get a 10% boost in one based on your homeland. You get a lot out of Element Runes: They give a stat bonus, let you augment some skills and are important for Rune Magic. The other runes available at the start are the Power runes, which are set up in opposition of Harmony/Disorder, Fertility/Death, Movement/Stasis and Truth/Illusion. Man/Beast is also available at start for humans, although it isn’t technically a Power Rune. These runes are set up in opposition, so if you increase one, you must decrease the opposite by that much. These get used in Rune Magic a lot but are also for defining your personality. You get to assign two to 75/25, and there’s 50 extra points after all that to spread around. I have no idea why this section is before characteristics and Cults since it’s so important to match these to your God and the stat boost is useful. The stats in this game are kind of dumb so you’ll probably tailor secondary element runes to them. More on that next time.
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wiegieman posted:Skinks with tiny versions of everything. Tiny uniforms, tiny drums, tiny banners, marching songs they sing off key and with the wrong words. Reminded of how I was making a skink battallion but they lacked a Musician model I could notice, so I used a handy horn thing I had laying around on a blowpiper to make a Skink blowing a horn.
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I have an Imperial Guardskink with a lasgun. For all its faults, Total hams 2 sold me on skinks. Well, at least the art did. They're like the good, smart version of goblins/gretchin.
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Thank you Spitalians, for introducing somethig that undermines a setting construct with a vague handwave
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JcDent posted:I have an Imperial Guardskink with a lasgun. Skinks are basically Warhammer's kobolds. I do like how well they play off Saurus and Slann. (does remind me of my own ideas of how D&D 4e Dragonborn and Kobolds interact, since the canon goes into little detail about that)
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JcDent posted:As for Tekumel, what's so weird about it? Besides being, IIRC, a game made by anthtopologist about a failed human colonisation world where demons are a thing and iron basically isn't. That's not what I was actually talking about, though. Tekumel is hard to get into because its publication history is a shitshow. The first edition was Empire of the Petal Throne (1974), a boxed set published by TSR, which basically used D&D rules for a radically different setting. The second edition, Swords & Glory (1983) was a 3-volume set. The first volume is just setting. The second has character creation and game mechanics. The third volume, the GM's guide, was never completed and published. The third edition, Gardásiyal: Deeds of Glory (1994) was a boxed set. It did not include character creation rules (only premades) or monsters. You had to buy supplements for those. The fourth edition, Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne (2005) was a one-book game by Guardians of Order using their Tri-Stat system. Say what you will about GoO, they managed to publish a Tekumel game that makes sense in a single coherent book. The fifth edition, Bethorm (2010) was authored by Jeff Dee and Barker himself. It's great in terms of showcasing every combination of clan and caste you can be and how they interact. It's also way too loving complicated; the system can be roughly described as "Everything I dislike about old-school D&D, plus everything I dislike about 80s skill-focused systems." There are several unofficial rulesets floating around; my favourite is Heroic Age of Tekumel, by a coolgrog who played with MAR Barker when everyone called him Phil. So if you ever read someone going "Waaah why is everyone such a dumb Forgotten Realms babby instead of playing Glorantha or Tekumel," the latter is not what I'd call accessible.
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Just as much as I love the actual reviews in F&F, the RPG history trivia is also something worth returning for.
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I would really like to know if any other RPG has managed to produce a core boxed set that somehow didn't include character creation or a monster manual. That's a special and, AFAIK, unique sort of gently caress-up. Apropos of nothing, I think Erol Otus must have taken a great deal of inspiration from Tekumel and put it into his D&D and other work: ![]() ![]() ![]() The ornate headgear, peaked collars and shoulders, partial armor, and impossible blades are very Tekumel. (Tekumel is really hot, and most of their weapons and armor are made out of treated hide that's about as tough as bronze. So there's lot of impractical-looking armor and blades in shapes and colours that would be impossible to forge in metal.)
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I love the brave decision to have basically zero continuity in the names of the editions. Also, Jesus Christ, leather swords. Yep, that's the weirdest poo poo ever, Glorantha ain't got poo poo on that.
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i've been doing speculative work trying to find another game to review after Dark*Matter, and i managed to come across an original copy of the Maztica campaign setting for AD&D Forgotten Realms. "Oh cool, i've heard vague things about this but I've never actually read it. This might be good! . . . Oh my god the book starts with 45 pages of lore and it starts in the pre-history of the setting and is so cliched and uninteresting that my eyes cross after reading any two consecutive paragraphs. Make the pain stop!" i don't know if Maztica has any cool or weird stuff in it because the entire first chapter is impenetrably dense realm lore that i can't be bothered to parse. i think there might be some interesting (for AD&D FR) twists but it's really really hard to sift thru 45 pages of uninteresting setting mush for hidden gems.
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Freaking Crumbum posted:i think there might be some interesting (for AD&D FR) twists but it's really really hard to sift thru 45 pages of uninteresting setting mush for hidden gems. There's not. Maztica is very, very blatantly just Spain invading and conquering the New World, now in the Forgotten Realms with Amn as your Spain stand-ins and the clergy of Helm standing in for the Catholic priests cheering on the conquistadores' atrocities.
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Freaking Crumbum posted:Oh my god the book starts with 45 pages of lore and it starts in the pre-history of the setting and is so cliched and uninteresting that my eyes cross after reading any two consecutive paragraphs. Make the pain stop!" This is yet another thing I have a weird pet theory about. It seems that there was this general anxiety of "I have to differentiate my game from D&D, but it can't be too different or it won't sell." So you get dozens of games that start with an immense setting chapter explaining the detailed origins of their cliche fantasy races, the details of their cliche vaguely Roman pantheism, the details of their cliche D&D not-Europe...stultifying detail lavished on the same old cliches.
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I remember that being in the background in Baldur's Gate 2 (another reason why everyone was not happy with Helm), even then I had thought there's no way it wouldn't be awkward or tone deaf.
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inklesspen posted:I feel like he has a point on the very nice art that PurpleXVI embedded in the posts. Were it not for that I'd be happy to put it back in. PurpleXVI posted:My bad, he threatened to sue me for a while, and I conflated it with him asking for the review to be taken down. inklesspen posted:That's kinda-sorta Uh, not to toot my own horn, but... NoWayToTheOldWay posted:Fear of drawing the ire of Osprey Publishing?
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Robindaybird posted:I remember that being in the background in Baldur's Gate 2 (another reason why everyone was not happy with Helm), even then I had thought there's no way it wouldn't be awkward or tone deaf. there's only 3 demi-human races in Maztica: humans dwarves (that crossed some subterranean cavern network on the ocean floor from FR proper and the oldest among them might remember some things about the Sword Coast) halflings are described as being dark-skinned and immediately visually distinct from "regular" halflings, fulfill the same cultural niche as real-world aboriginals (living in stone-age tribes in remote jungles), and even get a -1 racial penalty to INT. yeahhhhh "Also, these [Maztican] halflings receive a +1 modifier when using short bows". +1 modifier to what? Is that a THAC0 bonus or an attack roll penalty? Is it to damage rolled? do they ephemerally become "halflings+1" as long as they're holding a short bow? the mind boggles
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Freaking Crumbum posted:"Also, these [Maztican] halflings receive a +1 modifier when using short bows".
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Cythereal posted:There's not. Maztica is very, very blatantly just Spain invading and conquering the New World, now in the Forgotten Realms with Amn as your Spain stand-ins and the clergy of Helm standing in for the Catholic priests cheering on the conquistadores' atrocities. it'd be an even worse slaughter because Maztica explicitly doesn't have arcane magic (no wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, bards, etc.) and their cleric XP growth caps out at 5th level spells. it's not even like Athas where arcane magic exists but is outlawed and psionics are the functional replacement and elemental clerics and druids can still progress up to 9th level spells. nope, just clerics capping out at 5th level spells and no other magic to speak of. although i guess if they were trying to recreate the "guns. germs & steel" aesthetic but with a D&D flavor, giving the native population almost no access to spell casting is the biggest in-setting power disparity you could come up with
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Freaking Crumbum posted:it'd be an even worse slaughter because Maztica explicitly doesn't have arcane magic (no wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, bards, etc.) and their cleric XP growth caps out at 5th level spells. it's not even like Athas where arcane magic exists but is outlawed and psionics are the functional replacement and elemental clerics and druids can still progress up to 9th level spells. nope, just clerics capping out at 5th level spells and no other magic to speak of. I read the lovely novels about Maztica when I was a young nailfile who knew no better and I remember the conquistadors using ranked crossbow fire with faux-musket drill because St. Gary decreed in the long-ago that Guns Must Suck and Aren't Fantasy. Also something about giant ants?
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The destruction of the not-Aztecs was actually somehow crueller and weirder than the real life one, and the guy who did it got promoted too!
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What's frustrating is that things like of the fall of the Aztec and Maya Empires had relatively little to do with technological differences in the first place. It was a factor, sure, but "we crushed them mostly through illness and skullduggery" just isn't as classically exciting to Western minds as the notion of doomed indigenous warriors falling before King Slug.
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Was the knowledge of how disease basically erased native civilization even that embedded in popular historical consciousness when Maztica was written?
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The widespread knowledge that colonists brought disease long predates that book. I was taught this in elementary school. I could swear that Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman did an episode where army officers were selling smallpox blankets.
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In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a game called 7th Sea was produced. I wrote it up for the first iteration of this thread, in 2011. In 2015, AEG announced that they'd made a deal with John Wick Presents, transferring all publication rights to John Wick. In 2016, John Wick crowdfunded 7th Sea Secnd Edition to the tun of $1,316,813. The rules were delivered later that year, and since then, there have been a number of supplements, exanding the setting with more detail on places like the Not Caribbean, Not Middle East, Not South America and, more recently, Not Africa, with promises of delibery of an entire Not Asia-centered core book and supplements for later this year or next. It is time for me to return and see what's changed, and what's better, and what's not. 7th Sea 2nd Edition: Mors Rattus Returns ![]() All of the covers, incidentally, resemble movie posters. It's kinda neat! The opening prose story has also improved in quality, but that's hardly a high bar. Chapter 1 jumps us straight into the conflicts of the setting, most notably the swashbuckling, the power of magic that lies in noble blood, and the freedom of piracy and adventure, alongside intrigue and nationalism, romance, and...the Syrneth. This is a big change - we're addressing the Syrne right upfront. They were an ancient, ruined civilization with ancient secrets that are now all the rage to try and discover. They are not space aliens, as far as I've been able to tell. The entire space alien metaplot has been scrubbed from the book - as has much of the metaplot in general, honestly, in favor of the Eternal Now. The Vaticine Church and Objectionists are still around, as is the Inquisition, which has recently seized power still. When we get the list of nations in Theah, you're going to note some changes. We still have Avalon (Not England), Castille (Not Spain), Eisen (Not Germany), Montaigne (Not France), Ussura (Not Russia), Vodacce (Not Italy) and the Vestenmennavenjar (new spelling, but sitll Not Scandinavia and Not Holland). The Highland Marches (Not Scotland) and Inismore (Not Irelend) are now being recognized as full nations, and we've added the Sarmatian Commonwealth (Not Eastern Europe). Secret societies still exist, but the intro chapter doesn't list them. We have new continents mentioned - Ifri, the Lands of Gold and Fire (Not Africa) and the New World (Not South America), along with a mention that there are a number of settled coloniues north of the New World, and of course the Crescent Empire still exists in the east. These will all, we are told, get their own sourcebooks. (And did, except for what is presumably Not North America, so far.) That's the entirety of Chapter One - it's basically just an introduction to the setting. The adding of the Sarmatians does patch a hole that has been there for a long time, though, in that 7th Sea 1 had...no Eastern Europe at all. Next time: Chapter 2 - Theah.
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Wrestlepig posted:In 1977, A game called Dungeons and Dragons was invented. Almost immediately after, a budding anthropology student and game designer thought he could do a better job. The result was a long-running series, the latest version of which is: So, wait, what is the actual title of this F&F writeup? I need to know for archiving reasons. NoWayToTheOldWay posted:Uh, not to toot my own horn, but... I never said they weren't plagiarized, just that Star-Lord was really upset at the high res art in the writeup, and if I'm going to go through and add the old writeup to the site again, I want some low-effort way of swapping it out.
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occamsnailfile posted:because St. Gary decreed in the long-ago that Guns Must Suck and Aren't Fantasy. Guns actually did exist in the Realms during 2nd and 3rd edition, and there were rules for muskets and pistols - in the religion book, the god of craftsmanship and invention was noted to be so fond of guns that his avatars would dual-wield them. Gunpowder and guns were treated as very new technology, only available in the island nation of Lantan where they were invented and in the largest trading cities like Athkatla and Waterdeep, but the technology hadn't spread far. They were completely axed in 4E.
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They were mechanically totally useless, though. As were crossbows, generally.
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Night10194 posted:They were mechanically totally useless, though. Hey now. The light crossbow had a very respectable place in 3/.5E as the default sidearm of every level one adventurer. But yeah.
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Halloween Jack posted:The widespread knowledge that colonists brought disease long predates that book. I was taught this in elementary school. yeeah, they may not understand germ theory, but they know "Put stuff sick people touched in the fruit basket" and "Put corpse of a plague victim in well" is an amazing and awful way of decimating your enemies.
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Wasn't there a Greyhawk NPC who dual-wielded wands that were actually pistols? A time-traveler from the Old West or something?
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Halloween Jack posted:Wasn't there a Greyhawk NPC who dual-wielded wands that were actually pistols? A time-traveler from the Old West or something? Murlynd (the one who invented Murlynd's Spoon). He was one of the first PCs for Gary's home game. For as much poo poo people attribute to "St. Gary" he pretty much let people do what they wanted in the games he ran.
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Robindaybird posted:yeeah, they may not understand germ theory, but they know "Put stuff sick people touched in the fruit basket" and "Put corpse of a plague victim in well" is an amazing and awful way of decimating your enemies. Germ warfare and even unintentional smallpox didn’t really have time to do much for the Conquest of the Aztecs, though - that was more about the 2,000 conquistadores being backed up by 200,000 local levies from the neighboring state of Tlaxcala, that saw the arrival of these weird foreigners as a chance to get out from under the grip of Tenochtitlan. In a grim, unpleasant way, it’s a lot like an RPG story - a bunch of bumbling, vicious idiots stumble their way into a war, luck through it, then over the next couple decades take back all the gifts they offered to their allies to dust as disease saps their strength.
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occamsnailfile posted:I read the lovely novels about Maztica when I was a young nailfile who knew no better and I remember the conquistadors using ranked crossbow fire with faux-musket drill because St. Gary decreed in the long-ago that Guns Must Suck and Aren't Fantasy. Don't quote me on this, but when the Conquistadors came to the New World, they had more crossbows than guns.
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Halloween Jack posted:Wasn't there a Greyhawk NPC who dual-wielded wands that were actually pistols? A time-traveler from the Old West or something? Although that might have been Mystara?
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inklesspen posted:So, wait, what is the actual title of this F&F writeup? I need to know for archiving reasons. the game is officially called Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha so I'd probably call it that. anyway ![]() 4. Characteristics. Can you believe these were originally designed in 1978? Each character has seven different characteristics. The different categories of skills get a bit of a boost from high stats, some important things are derived from them, and they’re occasionally used as checks on their own.
The stats are determined by rolling 3d6 down the line, except for Size and Power getting 2d6+6, because Power is the most important stat in the game by far and the game doesn’t want heroes that are 4 feet tall. The book acknowledges that this is bad and recommends you mitigate this in multiple fashions, like re-rolling 1s or bad results, and says that the Game Master’s guide will have alternatives when it comes out because point buy or stat arrays are really hard. There’s a couple of extra modifiers based on your homeland for differently sized humans, and you can get a +2 or +1 in a stat based on your elemental rune affinities, which means that every PC is going to take at least a bit of Moon because that gives the POW bonus. Any rune can give a charisma bonus, if you want, so that's easy to increase. Occupation These mostly function as a skill package, as well as providing starting gear, an option for a passion, income, the amount of money it would take to ransom or resurrect you, some suggested Cults to join, and sometimes some starting magic. Not all of them are equal, but they tend to have something to them and between your Homeland and Cult it's easy to have someone capable in a fight.
Cults Unlike the old Runequest Games, you start as an initiate into a Cult. Runequest doesn’t care about the modern connotations of the word and uses it to refer to any religious practice centred on a particular God. These give you a bunch of skill bonuses, including an extra 20% and 15% to assign as well as some basic lore and ritual stuff, some suggested passions and access to Rune Magic. The actual spells depend on the cult, but everyone gets some important basics like Divination, Heal, a basic counterspell and some anti-spirit stuff. As a guy who’s played D&D, everyone having magic that’s balanced-ish and flavorful is one of the best parts of the game.There’s 20 different gods so I’m just going to put up the most basic summary the book provides. There’s more detail in the book later but I can’t really discuss it without transcribing or taking forever with lore chat. ![]() Next: The rest of Character Creation, and rolling up the Impala rider since this post is long enough Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Jun 19, 2018 |
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Pieces of Peace posted:Germ warfare and even unintentional smallpox didn’t really have time to do much for the Conquest of the Aztecs, though - that was more about the 2,000 conquistadores being backed up by 200,000 local levies from the neighboring state of Tlaxcala, that saw the arrival of these weird foreigners as a chance to get out from under the grip of Tenochtitlan. Agreed, it's important to note that when you hear about the 'Aztec Empire,' don't think about it like 'The Roman Empire'. It's actually a hegemony, like the empires of the pre-alexandrian Greek city-states. E.g. You have numerous culturally similar city-states sharing a region. Then one of the big-dog city state rises to prominence, starts making alliances, installing client-kings in other cities and accepting their tribute etc etc. See Athens and the Delian League for example. The Aztecs had plenty of defeated rivals just waiting for a chance of payback. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Jun 19, 2018 |
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Mors Rattus posted:In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a game called 7th Sea was produced. I wrote it up for the first iteration of this thread, in 2011. In 2015, AEG announced that they'd made a deal with John Wick Presents, transferring all publication rights to John Wick. In 2016, John Wick crowdfunded 7th Sea Secnd Edition to the tun of $1,316,813. The rules were delivered later that year, and since then, there have been a number of supplements, exanding the setting with more detail on places like the Not Caribbean, Not Middle East, Not South America and, more recently, Not Africa, with promises of delibery of an entire Not Asia-centered core book and supplements for later this year or next. It is time for me to return and see what's changed, and what's better, and what's not. are inter-dimensional locusts still the "real" big bad of the setting this is v important
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# ? Sep 23, 2023 16:14 |
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Freaking Crumbum posted:are inter-dimensional locusts still the "real" big bad of the setting this is v important no
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