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Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017


"It has always been the way out our women to wear a chestguard over a bra, white man. How dare you disrespect our beliefs."

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Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Emerald Empire: Diplomacy Is War

Most samurai are bushi, but all samurai are warriors. Bushido is the Way of the Warrior, and even shugenja, artisans and courtiers treat their role as one in which dominance is established by will, if not by force of arms. All samurai are a moment from death - even courtiers. Political struggle is the domain of the court, and every daimyo has a court. The higher rank and more prestigious the host, the more powerful and important their court. The Imperial Court, of course, is the greatest of all, and particularly the highly prestigious Winter Court. We get a sidebar on how two clans are always honored above the others as the Hands of the Emperor. The Left Hand of the Emperor is traditionally the Crane, and their duty is to draft laws and exert political influence in the name of the Emperor, supported by the Otomo, Miya and Emerald Magistrates. If the Emperor were ever to meet with foreign dignitaries, unthinkable as it might be, the Left Hand would be the representatives. The Right Hand of the Emperor is traditionally the Lion, and their duty is to serve as the Emperor's personal army. They settle skirmishes between forces of the Empire if the Emperor requires it, and they defend Rokugan against external threats such as the Yobanjin, supported by the Seppun and the Imperial Legions.

Courts develop their own regional traditions at times. Crab court is held during meals rather than before or after, to save time. Crane courts, after a tsunami, consider talk of natural disasters rude and will go out of their way to avoid it. Dragon court typically begins with the hosting daimyo presenting a riddle or koan for the court's attendants to interpret. Lion court is often held while observing military exercises or mock battles. Phoenix court traditionally has the daimyo leave the room after a meeting with advisors, that they might discuss things freely, then returning to listen to a designated speaker voice any concerns so the lord doesn't know who specifically has those concerns. It is traditional for the last guest to arrive at Scorpion court to drink tea or sake first. In the Unicorn city of Khanbulak, it is fashionable to recite modern poetry at the start of court. However, much of court is ruled by national tradition about appearances. Appearances matter in Rokugan. Perception is all. Courtesy to others earns you respect, rudeness can destroy you. Contradicting what appears to be true without proof or good cause is embarrassing for all involved, as it disrupts harmony. What matters is how you say things, probably more than what you say. Even accusing someone or pointing out their bad behavior must be done carefully to avoid dishonor. This is true in battle as well, even if some clans are better than others at avoiding brusque rudeness.

Court is not the sole domain of courtiers. Military officers of a certain rank are expected to attend as well if their duties allow - generals and captains in higher courts, sergeants and lieutenants in lower. Often, in higher courts, representatives from the various clan schools will be present as well, usually sensei. Temples may send monks, and major cities or strongholds will often send representatives, as may any other noteworthy group. Your rough order of importance of courts is city and provincial courts, then Clan family courts, then Clan courts, then the Imperial court. Other clans often send delegations to clan courts not their own, as may an Imperial representative. Minor Clan courts are in theory equal to Great Clan courts, but in practice they're rarely any more attended than a Great Clan family court, simply because Minor Clans control little land. Family court guests are usually from within the clan, with a few rare representatives from other clans sometimes showing up.

The Imperial Court is, of course, the greatest of all, even if the Emperor himself often does not attend. Representatives to the Imperial Court are empowered to make deals for their entire clans without needing to consult anyone, after all. When the Emperor is not in attendance, the court is hosted by the Imperial Chancellor, assisted by deputies and heralds to ensure protocol and etiquette as well as to steer the agenda. Recently, there has also been the creation of the informal rank of Imperial Advisor, a direct servant of the Emperor in whatever role required. Bayushi Kachiko is the first and so far only Imperial Advisor, with many believing she has undue influence over the Emperor, though as yet no open attempts to weaken her position have been made. Hosting Winter Court is a privilege most clans compete fiercely for, with the Crane clan and the Imperial Families of the Otomo, Miya and Seppun hosting the most over history, such that both Kyuden Doji and Kyuden Seppun maintain permanent guest quarters for the Emperor. However, all Great Clans have hosted Winter Court at least once over the centuries, and the minor Fox Clan is known to have hosted it twice in the earlier centuries.

Many traditions dictate what is and is not acceptable in a court setting, and being in court is as harrowing and dangerous as a battlefield if you are not careful. It is in court that Rokugani social customs are strongest, after all, and the weight of disgrace is heaviest. One particularly notable tradition is that of the shoji screen or paper wall. It is considered basic etiquette to ignore anything happening behind a paper wall, no matter how clearly you can hear it. To mention anything overheard this way is a breach of privacy, inherently dishonorable, and a shoji screen is merely a portable paper wall. The same rules apply. This is very useful for anyone wanting a private conversation in a crowded castle, of course. Less obviously, the paper fan has been treated the same way. Hiding your mouth with a paper fan indicates a private conversation, meant only for the person addressed. Proper etiquette insists that anyone overhearing must ignore it, as if it were heard through a paper wall. In practice this primarily limits people from admitting they overheard. Samurai often act on information learned through paper walls, a fact that many courtiers count on and make careful use of fans and shoji screens to encourage and control. Manipulating information and rumor flow is very useful, as anything said behind the wall can never be attributed to you, even if everyone knows you're the surce. Of course, courts also have genuinely private areas most of the time for the making of secret agreements or deals, but they are rarer and busier. Word of mouth is as binding as written treaties, and indeed few treaties in Rokugan are ever written down formally, as a samurai's word is their bond.

The practice of the hostage exchange, or hitojichi, is a major practice for the keeping of the peace. Typically, hostage exchanges happen after negotiations or as a consequence of war. Hostages are always treated exceptionally well by the clan holding them, and are always young, well before gempuku, and often of great lineage and talent. Sometimes, a hostage may even be enrolled in the host clan's school as a sign of great favor or as part of the deal. However, the primary purpose is to ensure their clan's good behavior. Of course, it's not a perfect guarantee, just another item weighted in the calculus of whether or not to break a deal.

Rokugani gifting traditions are a bit complicated, due to the fact that a lord is in theory supposed to provide anything their samurai need. Therefore, giving a samurai a gift with any practical utility is an insulting insinuation about their lord's ability. In theory, only a ronin or peasant would even consider accepting a monetary gift, though bribery still happens. Gifts are given for any number of reasons - celebrations, as part of meeting a new superior, during special events, as recognition of merit. While a gift is traditionally refused three times before it can be accepted, it is socially unacceptable to actually refuse a gift. Therefore, a gift can be used as a carefully made insult to the samurai and their lord. Giving someone something they should already have, such as a copy of Lies for a Scorpion or a copy of Leadership for a Lion, sends a very clear message indeed.

Marriage is a vital part of Rokugani politics and family alliances, as is adoption. Betrothals and adoptions are contracts carefully negotiated by the families involved, which may or may not involve any consultation at all with those to be married, adopted or doing the adopting. Most samurai will hire a professional nakodo to find a good spouse for their children or to identify prospective heirs for adoption and to handle the negotiations. Nakodo (matchmakers, remember) will consider a number of factors, such as temperament, age differences, sexual orientations and skillsets when preparing a marriage, but the most important factor is always a clan's political needs, not love or romance.

The desires of those involved come second to the needs of the people. Of course, a good nakodo does still consider those desires. Benten, Fortune of Romantic Love and Arts, is one of the Seven Great Fortunes, and no one can deny the power of love or passion. Benten does not discriminate based on class or gender in the love she inspires, and the Tao of Shinsei states that romance is a natural expression of human nature. However, free expression of love belongs to the peasantry; a samurai's first duty must be to clan and lord, with neither love nor romance playing a necessary role in a succesful marriage - though obviously there must be some lack of abject hatred. It isn't impossible for a samurai to marry for love, but it takes some luck to manage it, between the other family and the matchmaker. The most important part of a marriage contract is the bit that says which samurai joins the other's family. Usually it's whoever has the lower social station, and many families use this as a way to select talented samurai from the lower ranks, elevating them via marriage.

Adoption is equally important for solidifying political alliances. As with marriage, a nakodo considers age, temperament and other factors, but will outweigh them with political concerns if necessary. The adoption of young or promising samurai from vassal families or low-status bloodlines is common, honoring all involved. Adopted samurai take on the family and clan names of those that adopt them, and they are treated as natural children for all purposes. Adult adoptions are not rare, and they're often used when sexual orientations or existing marriages mean there's no possibility of biological offspring or marriage. Some families have other customs, of course. The Utaku forbid their women to marry any man of higher status, and the Matsu discourage it, while the Doji absolutely prefer marrying their children to higher-status spouses. Special adoption traditions are rare, which is another part of why it is often used as an alternative to marriage. No matter what, the higher status family will gain a new member and will traditionally pay the lower status family, which is another contractual duty the nakodo arranges. This often involves elaborate political concerns far beyond a simple (and rather shameful) exchange of currency, and exchanges of land, castles, servants, art or other rare commodoties may well be included.

Next time: Killing With Swords, Not Kindness

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

Dawgstar posted:

"It has always been the way out our women to wear a chestguard over a bra, white man. How dare you disrespect our beliefs."

"Now, let me introduce you to my daughter, Heaves Breastfully.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Emerald Empire: War Is Also War

War is possible only in spring, summer and autumn. Marching in the heavy snow of winter is idiocy of the highest order, after all. In those areas where it does not snow, like the coasts or the Islands of Spice and Silk, it's still not easy to move armies due to thick jungle, rocky beaches, sand, cliffs and river deltas. Few battles happen in spring, due to ancient custom and wisdom regarding when honorable forces make war. Summer, with the high heat and humidity, has the most battles. Long campaigns may stretch into autumn, but the crop harvest and tax season give a strong incentive to end wars quickly. Battles are usually held on roads or outside castles, providing a chance for the losers to retreat more easily. Long sieges are rare, as they are very costly for both sides. Feeding an army costs, after all, and the logistics become near impossible in winter. Most armies aren't particularly suited to siegebreaking, either, and while the Crab have dedicated siege specialists, they're usually busy defending the Wall.

Armies in Rokugan are made primarily of conscripts and ashigaru, semi-professional peasant soldiers. Conscripts, on the other hand, are usually poorly equipped and worse trained, just handed a spear and sent to die. Many of the Great Clans have families of hereditary ashigaru that have served as guards and doshin assistants to the magistrates for generations. They are very proud of their work, but in war must rely heavily on luck and numbers to have much chance against an armored bushi - and then only with good leadership. Cavalry tactics are possible only with use of Unicorn steeds, which are larger and stronger than Rokugani ponies. The pony is simply not tough enough to support full-scale cavalry warfare, though it is used by scouts and mounted infantry. Since the return of the Unicorn, other clans have developed effective anticavalry tactics, usually as a result of a brutal defeat, but few use largescale forces of cavalry themselves.

The feudal society is the core of army organization. Each provincial daimyo is responsible for raising, training and equipping their own forces drawn from the villages and lords they rule, including any castle guards. This typically means a force is composed of spear-wielding ashigaru, sword and bow-using samurai, and possibly cavalry or shugenja. Each unit is led by a kashira, a designated leader that serves the general's will. Besides warriors, a unit will also have horn blowers, drummers and banner carriers, each important to the direction of the unit in battle or to identify the unit for tacticians overseeing the fight. In large armies, the number of warriors involved will require an expanded command structure of captains (taisa), sergeants (gunso) or both command the kashira. Many daimyo are warriors themselves, but may choose to defer to an appropriate general, such as one of their hatamoto, to decide on tactics and strategy for them.

When multiple daimyos combine forces, they fight together but preserve their original command structures, with each lord commanding their own subordinates. Regardless of size, formation is almost always predictable - ashigaru deploy in blocks, wider than they are deep. Archers form up in rows behind the ashigaru to fire on the enemy, and then once the forces meet, each breaks into large, brutal masses of combatants, thousands of tiny personal combats. This continues until one side surrenders, every soldier has died, or the peasants break and run. Fleeing samurai...well, it's not honorable. The number of foot soldiers and samurai that a lord can actually field is restricted by Imperial edict in an effort to mitigate the risk of open warfare, and violation of these edicts without permission may result in censure, loss of status or territory or even direct intervention by the Imperial Legions.

The Imperial Legions are unlike clan armies, as they are a single, unified force drawn from all clans, led by the Emerald Champion. There are and have always been ten legions, each able to field 10,000 soldiers, though their actual size has varied, and their full force has not existed in centuries. Each legion is subdivided into ten regiments, each divided into five companies, each with a varying number of platoons. Commanders are always Seppun or the best and brightest of the clans. Most of the forces of the legions are Lion, and any peasants that lords choose to send to fill out their ranks. The ashigaru of the legions are typically as close as a peasant can get to being a career soldier, as once sent they sign up for a renewable six year term and do not return home until their assignment is completed. The bureaucracy to maintain the Imperial Legions is vast by necessity, overseen by the Otomo with aid from the Miya and Seppun and additional support from the Great Clans (which varies wildly depending on how large the Legions are at the time). It is believed that there are twice as many bureaucrats working in the capital to support the legions as there are active soldiers in the field, and even more peasant support staff handling cooking, cleaning and maintenance. In peacetime, the Imperial Legions can be repurposed for public works, giving yet more reason for courtiers to compete for the attention of the Otomo officials and the Emerald Champion.

Ever since the Yasuki War between the Crane and Crab in the 300s, which did lasting damage to the Empire, Hantei Fujiwa ruled that Great Clans may not use their full might against each other. Since then, all conflicts between the Great Clans have officially been "minor" border skirmishes and limited wars. While the era is deemed the Thousand Years of Peace, battles are constant part of Rokugani life and the struggle for dominance between clans. Most wars are fought with relatively small armies - no more than a few hundred to a few thousand per side - but are nearly constant during late spring and summer. The full might of the Clans is unleashed only rarely, and then mostly against inhuman foes - Shadowlansd forces, the armies of the Bloodspeaker Iuchiban, or the gaijin. The Crab maintain a state of constant readiness, and the Lion cross the Empire to enforce the Imperial will when the Legions are busy or insufficient. The Lion Clan takes its duties to protect the empire very seriously, and has faced gaijin forces multiple times over the centuries, both in and outside the borders of Rokugan. It is rare for a year to pass without each Great Clan fighting at least a few skirmishes in the warmer months, often internal civil wars between clan families over territory or points of honor.

The earliest internal war of the Empire was the Lion-Phoenix War of the early centuries. The Lion exhausted their food sources, for they conscripted too many farmers to be ashigaru, and so their champion chose to expand into the Crane lands in late summer to try and claim their harvest. The Crane worked for months in the Imperial Court to force a nonaggression treaty, so the Lion promptly decided to invade the Valley of the Two Generals in Phoenix lands - which had been their real intent the entire time. Trapped by their own treaty, the Crane watched as their Phoenix allies were besieged at Shiro Shiba. The Lion slaughtered the remnant Ki-Rin, who had settled in the area after the rest of their clan left the Empire. However, the Crane did manage to come up with a tactic that has long served them well against the Lion: bleeding them dry in court and ensuring that surplus Crane rice gave no economic benefit to the Lion. By cutting off Lion supply lines in other clans, they forced the Lion to attempt a cross of Crane territory, then promptly cited a violation of the treaty and threatened war. Faced with a second front, the Lion called for a truce, restoring peace. The Lion were given the Ki-Rin lands, and the Ki-Rin survivors became the Fox Clan, given independent status and new lands elsewhere in the Empire. The war is also notable for a major show of compassion. When Isawa Tomokazu rode to seek vengeance on the Lion, the Crane Champion Doji Ritsuko went to stop him, but refused to duel. She endured Tomokazu's magical assault but would not fall, and after days of her passive defense, the kami at last refused to obey Tomokazu's pleas to smite her. Thus, the Phoenix forces lost all will to fight, surrendering. All three clans involved saw this as a masterful strategic victory, remembered as the Victory with No Strike, in which one's goals are achieved solely by breaking the enemy's will.

In the last years of the 300s came the Yasuki War between the Crane and Crab. Hantei Fujiwa sought many ways to check the power of the Gozoku conspiracy which had usurped his authority. He attempted to do it by breaking the internal unity of the Crane, one of the chief clans backing the Gozoku. This was done by driving a wedge between the mercantile Yasuki family and the courtly Doji. Under Fujiwa's instruction, the Crab expanded their borders, encroaching on Crane lands and emboldening the Lion. Open war erupted when the Crab seized the Yasuki family's land, claiming the Crane did not need them. However, Fujiwa's plot worked too well. The Yasuki daimyo had never liked the Crane Champion, and having been told repeatedly that he was, quote, "of no service to his lord," the Yasuki daimyo chose to interpret the comment as a command rather than an insult. He instead swore service to the Crab Champion, and the Yasuki family defected from the Crane entirely while all attempts at peace negotiation failed or were sabotaged. That war ended up as a gigantic economic drain on the empire, for the Yasuki and Crane locked down much of the Imperial rice crop. The war showed the power of open, full-scale warfare, and in the aftermath, Fujiwa issued the edict that prevents the clans from bringing full force against each other. Despite the longterm damage the war did, it also had no short-term benefits. The Gozoku were left unchecked, growing in power until Fujiwa was a mere figurehead Emperor. The Yasuki remain a Crab family even now, and the Crab and Crane still hold a grudge against each other.

The Imperial Histories do not include it, but if one were to examine family ledgers from the 600s, it would show massive decline of fortunes in each clan, both material and in loss of bloodlines. This was the Great Famine, a decade of disease, starvation and open warfare, made worse by a tyrant Emerald Champion and weak Emperor. When heavy rain destroyed the Empire's crops, the poor Dragon Clan requested a lien on their yearly tax to prevent starvation. In response, the Emerald Champion placed heavy fines on them, and refugees streamed into Lion lands seeking food. When the Lion confronted the Dragon on their failure to prevent this, the clan champion, Togashi Toshimasa, led an attack on the Lion, seizing huge amounts of food. The Lion, while already in trouble due to serving as peacekeepers and putting down a full peasant revolt, were able to easily defeat the invading Dragon afterwards, as the Dragon were not used to defending themselves in unfamiliar land. Only the intervention of the Phoenix kept the Lion from a full-scale counteroffensive, and the Dragon refugees were permitted to settle into the Phoenix lands.

Next time: Clan philosophies of war.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 4, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Dawgstar posted:

"It has always been the way out our women to wear a chestguard over a bra, white man. How dare you disrespect our beliefs."

I felt I could let that part of the pic speak for itself and I'm glad I was right.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Ironclaw 1e

How the hell do you pronounce synedoche

Magic in 1e is one of the game's big mechanical weaknesses, and the entire magic system was overhauled for 2e and Myriad Song for a reason. The funny thing is, even in IC1e, magic has always been one of the more interesting parts of the setting from a fiction perspective, even when it was a particular point of mechanical weakness. To understand why the magic of Ironclaw struggled with balancing itself, you have to understand its intended role in the setting (or at least, what I get out of what's there), so we're going to talk a little about fluff despite this being a purely mechanical examination on the whole.

You see, the thing that makes magic stand out is that in the current age in both editions of Ironclaw, magic isn't special. It's a skill. It's something you learn by training. Any PC can learn it, though like any other skill, some of them will be better or worse at it. Any PC can learn magic in IC1e and 2e if they're willing to pay for the requirements during play; it just takes being literate, getting access to the right books, and spending time learning. There's no mystical gift required, no powerful mark on the soul or bloodline. You just need a strong will and some dedication to your education. In return, magic isn't nearly as powerful as it is in a lot of fantasy settings. It was once, but you know how it is. Ancient wizard kings blow everything up, poo poo gets crazy, no-one knows if they were ever even real depending on what directions you want your interpretation of the setting to go. But wizards in Ironclaw aren't like, say, wizards in Warhammer: There's no warping of the soul, no contact with a great and mysterious and beautiful and terrible otherworldly force. Most wizards in the setting are just professionals, and I always got the impression they're as likely to be hired to help move earth to build a road as to do anything related to blowing people up.

And so, when you want to model that kind of magic and you have the clear goal of NOT making magic drive the majority of plots by itself, you obviously want to come up with a more generally limited impression of what mages can do. Without the idea of 'exhaustible gifts' to limit special moves in 1e, they instead had a system of Magic Points. You get MP equal to the size of your Will and your various Wizard career dice. So if The Bear learned Cleric magic and picked up Extra Trait d6 Cleric (As Paladins sometimes do), he'd have 8 (d8 Will)+6 (d6 Career) for 14 MP. You regain MP by rolling your magic Careers when you sleep for 8 hours and adding the results together. That's how much MP you regained. Mages can also meditate for an hour and roll the Meditation skill to try to get back 1 or more points faster.

The first issue with magic comes up with the Spell Casting Skill. You see, every spell has a difficulty to cast it. And every spell uses a skill for that difficulty. EVERY SPELL IS ITS OWN SKILL. Also, the whole 'need to roll to cast the spell' thing goes out the window once you have skill points equal to the spell's MP cost in the spell, becoming 'adept' at it. Then you just cast automatically, spending MP and rolling effect dice. The other mechanical issue with the spells as skills thing is that effect dice are also the spell's difficulty dice. So before I'm Adept in a spell, say, that does 3d12 damage, those 3d12 damage are also the spell's difficulty to be cast, and I don't make a separate damage roll for the spell and the casting difficulty. I just roll 3d12 once, test my Wizard trait dice and spell Skill against them, and if I succeed the difficulty dice become my damage roll. Effectively, this just becomes a massive EXP and skillpoint drain on wizards. They also need a skill called Spell Throwing if they want to actually hit with non-homing magic (speaking of, there's Homing, Targeting, and Explosion magic!) which is explicitly and intentionally NOT part of any of the magic careers and has to be bought separately and used with Speed.

So to be a good wizard, you need to buy a Career trait high (for MP, and because your Career trait often determines the effectiveness of buffs). You need a high Will. You probably want a decent Mind. You need a high Speed if you want to be a combat mage. And you're spending tons of EXP on individual 'skills' that then stop being skills at all as soon as you've spent 1-5 skill advances worth on them. You can also only get at the Journeyman and Master lists for your spell type by mastering enough spells from the prior list. Oh, and mages are also expected to multiclass between Elementalist (kill poo poo with magic, the basic combat mage), Green and Purple (Status Wizard, fairly useful), White (Heal people, protect people, usually actually very useful since it's one of the few things magic does outright better than mundane means), and Thaumaturgy (Metamagic). There are simply so many points of EXP sinking for a dedicated caster character that not only does it silo them off specializing in magic, but they also don't tend to get as much out of it as a mundane character like The Bear.

The other issue is, of course, that magic is complicated as hell. Take the spell types: Homing spells hit automatically, but the opponent can use their Block or Dodge as part of their Soak, to represent getting a shield up to deflect the fireball, etc. Explosion spells do the same, but they can only use Dodge as extra Soak. Targeting spells work exactly like a weapon, just with the Spell-Throwing Skill+Speed, then the spell's Effect Dice as a damage roll. There's also Defense spells, cast once per round as an equivalent to a Parry or Block. There's also a magic called Privilege, which lets a Journeyman try to stop Apprentice spells or a Master try to stop Journeyman spells by rolling a Privilege spell check against them at the cost of 1 MP per attempt until they stop trying or fail, which sounds really frustrating to go up against.

Elementalism also has the issue where it's disciplines all pretty much do the same thing. They're all mostly novelty utility spells until you've spent 5 skillpoints mastering the apprentice spells for an element, then you get a spell to call an Elemental (which can be quite useful but is also entirely dependent on the GM deciding if it works or not even if you cast it), a spell to do 3d12 Targeted damage, a buff that lets an ally include your Wizard dice with a check type (Like Stone letting them use your Wizard dice with Soak), a debuff for enemies, and a 4d10 Explosion. The Master levels are similar. And more importantly, with all the investment necessary, combat/direct damage magic just isn't that great in IC1e; if you put the same effort into 'shoot man with bow/crossbow/gun' you'd get similar results. Master Magic does include the ability to bind Elementals into items and make magic items, which gets at another element of magic: Delayed Spells. Delayed Spells let you put part of your MP into a spell, where it will stay, until you end the spell. You can't recover that MP until the spell ends. So every magic item in the setting, if it remains permanent, is costing its caster some portion of their magical ability forever.

At the same time, the actual effect of elementally bound weapons and armor is pretty elegantly done. You bind an Elemental, and then if the item's a weapon it gets +Elemental Trait (As in, the Elemental's Species die) to damage and a new critical hit option like setting people on fire. Bound to armor or clothes, the Elemental trait gets added to two check types, like Digging and Armor for Earth, or Dodge and Acrobatics for Air. It's a simple but very powerful effect that makes a magic item very desirable. Also, you can stab ghosts and your weapon gives off cool magic special effects. Everything's better if you can stab ghosts with it now.

White Magic is one of my exceptions to 'magic usually isn't hugely worth it' because 'fast and efficient magical healing' and 'let people reroll failed death tests 8 'o clock, day 1' are really good tricks to have around. You can even preemptively heal someone, adding in extra HP that will get chipped off first as a buff. It also destroys the heck out of undead, which is a little situational but potentially useful, as undead are one of the few consistent supernatural plagues of Calabria. Also has powerful defensive magic. The big thing with White is that even Apprentice White Magic is really useful. It can be very MP intensive, though, which also means Adepting White Magic can be EXP intense. It also gets a cool thing where you can Delay a spell on an ally, giving them a little prayer to say to invoke the spell themselves at a later date. He may have been an NPC, but the fat raccoon priest who liked to gamble that served as company chaplain in the merc company game was really goddamn helpful at keeping the company alive. White does stuff you can't easily do without magic, and can do it with less investment necessary to get started, which is key.

Green and Purple is all about mental status effects and mind control. Blinding, frightening, mind controlling, and stunning enemies is as useful in Ironclaw as it is in almost any other RPG, though it's less of a sure thing for a wizard than it is in a game like D&D. They can also make bound magic items made out of Shades, which are elemental thought/fantasy/dreams (and sometimes the quieter spirits of the dead). They succeed in being able to do stuff that you can't quite do better by taking lots of 'be good at shooting a man' points, unlike Elementalists, but they're still a huge investment like all wizards.

Finally, Thaumaturgy is generic metamagic and utility magic. Open locks, dispel magic, silence people to stop them using magic, summon light, protect yourself from rain, you know. General wizard tricks. It's implied most talented mages will learn at least a d4 of Thaumaturgy because it's the 'state of the art' magic type. It also lets you alter the targeting of magic, turn things into Synedoche spells (spells where the range is dependent only on you having, say, a lock of hair from the target), stop people using Synedoche magic, etc. It would be much more important if magic in general was more useful.

It's notable that the book feels a need to include suggested builds for wizards, and only wizards, because their builds at PC creation are much more complicated than any other character type.

There's also our friend Necromancy, which is in the back of the book because it's evil and not for PCs. It uses a lot of d6s because if 666 comes up on the dice, some bad stuff happens. You cannot, RAW, start as a black mage and have to learn their spells in play. Black Magic is only for the GM's eyes early on, and it's meant to be 'unpredictable and dangerous' because 666 causes basically whatever the GM wants it to. It focuses on creating and controlling undead, causing curses and afflictions, and it's generally the evil (and less useful, really) opposite of White magic. You see, healing people of terrible wounds instantly is something you can't really do without magic. Killing people with magic is sort of a sucker's game because you can kill people just fine by being The Bear. The focus on 'only the Host knows what darkness this terrible magic can inflict!' also makes it a little too easy to be arbitrary with the miscasts.

To talk about learning magic, we have to talk about EXP. EXP is awarded in chunks; an average session will see a 4 point aware, a 3 point award, a 2 point award, and a 1 point award, plus several extra little 1 or 2 point awards for moments that stood out. You spend that EXP in a block, on long-term self-improvement goals. In general, everything costs 5 EXP per one character point it cost at creation; I appreciate keeping this exchange rate steady as that eliminates the need to optimize your character creation as heavily. The only difference is buffing traits is always 20 EXP (even though starting with a d12+d4 is 6 CP, rather than the 4 CP to raise a trait up to d12 or less) and adding a new trait is always 15 EXP. You also need GM permission on spending your EXP, which is not so good. You can only assign a single chunk to one goal per session. So if I got a 4 point award and a 1 point award, I couldn't put them both in Gun to immediately raise Gun by a rank.

Wizarding careers are special: You need either a teacher or literacy to learn magic. If you have a teacher (who has to be better at the spellcasting skill or Trait they're trying to teach you), you roll Mind and they roll Wizard. The lower test result between the two of you is the limiter on how big an EXP chunk you can spend on that Trait or Spell right now. So say the Bear is trying to learn to be a Cleric, and Vesper the Raccoon Cleric is teaching him. He rolls his d6 Mind and gets a 4. Vesper rolls his d12 Cleric and gets an 8. The Bear can spend up to a 4 point EXP chunk on Gaining Cleric (marking it as 4/15) and is well on his way. You can also do the same by checking your Literacy against a spellbook if you have one, with your result on Literacy limiting your EXP spending. This is also all optional and can be dropped at will.

What really stands out is how magic takes all these extra hoops and then doesn't really do a lot of special stuff for you. In 2e, by contrast, magic still isn't the mightiest method of killing people ever, but it settles into a role of 'A wizard is a talented academic with some useful, easy to get utility abilities, who is with minimal investment able to contribute about as much as a crossbow, but who can also occasionally pull out some bigger tricks'. Which is a much better place for a wizard. 2e Wizards also fit a lot better into the system and don't require adding on additional subsystems the way 1e does. 1e magic just adds too much mechanical complexity for how little it actually does. It comes out of a place of trying not to let the wizards run away with the setting and plot the way they often do in fantasy settings, and I appreciate that. I don't herein mean that wizards are meant to be useless, or to not have means to affect the plot; what I mean is that Ironclaw is not generally a setting where 'stop the evil wizard from using evil wizardry' is the sum total of the plot. 'That guy's an evil wizard' is rarely the sum total of someone's abilities, because that doesn't grant them the far-reaching and immense power it does in, say, D&D. They're usually an evil wizard who is ALSO the widow of the Don Rinaldi or whatever.

From a fictional standpoint, magic has always been a neat element of IC's setting. From a mechanical standpoint, 2e really, really improved it as an actual playable element. It feels like a system that, in seeking to limit magic's influence, ended up limiting it a little too much and really benefited from the introduction of new ways to make something cost 'actions' or take time to recharge. The move to Gifts as a fundamental building block of advancement also worked a lot better for discrete magical powers and powerful tricks compared to trying to make each separate spell cost a ton of skillpoints.

But magic can't get the badge of 'most improved' individual mechanical block in the transition from 1e to 2e, because that's reserved for what's coming next.

Next Time: AWOOOOOOOO

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

AD&D: 2nd Edition



The Complete Psionics Handbook

Unfortunately it turns out that remainder of Combat & Tactics was much drier than I remembered, really only consisting of tables full of siege weapons and more variant weaponry all largely suffering from the same issue as the rest of the 2nd ed AD&D weapons on display: There are a few really optimal choices you'll make, and then the rest will be irrelevant except as flavour.

So instead, I've decided to close off the 2nd ed AD&D review with Psionics, because someone(I forget who, sorry) suggested that I show off why they're such a shitshow. Before this Nerd Court I present Exhibit A: The Complete Psionics Handbook. Which doesn't even have any good cover art! In fact it has none at all! How hard do you have to gently caress up to not have good cover art in 2nd ed?

The interior art is a mixed bag, half of it looks like it was ripped from a book about expanding your mind through meditation and peyote:



The other half makes Psionics look cool and awesome if you don't actually read the text and the rules:



Anyway, let's get started. What are Psionics and what is a Psionicist?

Chapter 1: The Psionicist

Psionics are essentially the third branch of "magic" in AD&D. You've got Arcane and Divine, which function on broadly similar rules, and then Psionics which are wildly different. As mentioned, they function more like NWP's, being that they require checks to use, and those checks are based on stats and do not improve with level(at least until Skills & Powers overhauls them) and instead of having spell memorization and spells per level per day, they run off power points, like brain mana. Powers also generally do not improve with level either. The outcome of this is mostly that Psionicists are quite capable and powerful at low levels(if they have good stats, anyway...) but rapidly get left behind by literally every other class since they only broaden the scope of their powers, and never increase the intensity of them. So the murder they can hand out per action never increases. Also unlike spells, their powers can both crit fail and crit succeed. The crit fails have a decent chance of killing you or completely ruining your day for the more useful powers.

This wouldn't be so bad if every other class didn't do the exact opposite, having a much smaller bag of tricks and getting better and better at it with every level, only rarely adding wholly new tricks.

Outside of his powers, a psionicist is most similar to a thief, having somewhat-similar Thac0 and armor selection(right down to getting worse at his schtick if he wears heavy armor) but considerably worse weapon selection. Once again, outside of the first couple of levels, psionicists engaging in non-psionic combat are going to very rapidly be left behind. You could multiclass them with a Thief or a Fighter to get them something to do outside of their other abilities(they might work very well as thief-psions since psionics are by default silent, meaning they merge well with stealth, or using psionic movement powers as a Fighter to have supreme battlefield mobility if your GM rolls with Combat & Tactics and all the ways it rewards flanking and rear attacks), but then you're stuck being a Dwarf or a Halfling.

At 9th level the psionicist also starts attracting an infinitely refilling number of 1st and 2nd-level psionicist students up to either half his Cha score(if he's wandering) or equal to his Cha score(if he's settled) in exchange for 10 hours of lecturing a week and will "serve in any capacity the master chooses." Good thing you never have to risk any of those crit fails yourself, after this point. Risky power? Make the student use it.

Similarly to how arcane casters have schools and divine casters have spheres, psionics has disciplines. Clairsentience(Divination stuff, truly terrible), Psychokinesis(Telekinetic powers, great if you're fighting a single goblin who's suffered a stroke, otherwise terrible), Psychometabolism(body-changing powers, they're... also bad), Psychoportation(being able to teleport more or less from level 1? Sign me the gently caress up. The only objectively "good" discipline), Telepathy(I mean, sure, if you want to drag the game to a halt as you play psychic rock-paper-scissors with someone just to read their mind and learn that their deepest fear is turning into a corb cob, go ahead. Technically has some good powers, but is way too fiddly) and Metapsionics(has one ability that can kind of break the game, and a lot of abilities you will never, ever want to use, by which I mean all the rest of them).

There are also Wild Talents, which can be any character or any class and any race. In the Dark Sun setting, the only one that I know of that really engages with Psionics and makes them part of the setting, all PC's have Wild Talents. In every other setting, any player can choose to be tested for it. This gives you, at best, an 11% chance of having Wild Talents(you're a human non-caster of level 9+ with 18 in your Int, Will and Con) and always has a 4% chance of losing 1d6 Wisdom, Constitution or Intelligence permanently OR having all three stats reduced to 3, permanently. If you do get a Wild Talent, though, you have a chance to have literally any psionic ability(including any prereqs it may have) as well as a few wild card rolls that give you more rerolls or free non-random picks. And of course you also get the power points needed to use it several times per day.

Kinda risky, but sometimes worth the gamble, I guess?

So anyway, I mentioned Telepathy sucks, and this is why.

Chapter 2: Psionic Combat


this is not in this chapter. this is not in any chapter at all

So most powers are just "roll your check, it works, maybe the dude gets a save, maybe he does not." Telepathy works differently.

All Telepathy is based off the Contact power. It needs to be stuck once on non-psionicists, and three times on psionicists, for them to be accessible to Telepathic powers. After this, all powers still need to succeed at their roll and be used, but there are no saves against them. Against enemy psionicists there's also a variety of psionic defense powers, which are better or worse resisted by a variety of psionic attack powers, most of which have no real use beyond establishing Contact hits on your enemy.

This means that technically all Telepathic powers require between two and four whole rounds to take effect, rather than a mage or cleric's spell which usually goes off in the same round it's used. Again, it'd be great as a Thief/Psion who doesn't have a party that also wants to play, who can just sneak around and mind control innocent suckers and brainwipe them and stuff. But in the heat of combat, it's considerably less useful.

Now, the actual powers. Because some of these have got to be good, right? Yeah, some of them are. But none of them which are in this next chapter.

Chapter 3: Clairsentience

This is supposed to be the psionic version of Divination. Which it kind of is, except Divination has plenty of spells that give you relevant info. Clairsentience lets you boost your senses to unimaginable, interplanetary levels of reach! Except they're still limited by line of sight, so that's kind of pointless. Also almost the entire discipline has -4 or -5 to its checks, so even with maxed out Wisdom, you're only landing your powers on a roll of 13 or less, and you probably don't have 18 Wisdom, because if you did, you'd be too clever to pick Clairsentience as a discipline.

But some of these are technically useful. How about... Hear Light? Or Feel Sound? Those sure are great powers to have and use.

Literally the only two marginally useful powers are the one that gives the party a -1 bonus to Initiative and the one that lets you read people's alignments(since you can do it subtly without a spell, no one's likely to get offended and you could get some good info that way). But literally those are the only things you'd ever want to invest in, since anything else this school can do can be replicated by a compass, a spyglass or a dose of LSD.

Chapter 4: Psychokinesis

Conceptually, this one starts off strong, with letting you Create Objects from raw materials in a matter of seconds(unfortunately limited by present materials and the size/weight/dimensions of the object) which could have uses, and letting you turn any non-animate matter into a bomb that goes off instantly(this includes being able to blow up plants and non-sentient undead or golems). This does negligible damage to everything nearby, but could be used to blast holes in doors, trigger traps and mechanisms or just completely annihilate certain enemies while laughing. It could also be well used to blow up an enemy's weapon or armor in his face, it's actually a great low-level power since it lets you effortlessly annihilate weak enemies.

Similarly, Disintegrate is also sweet since you can access it at a ridiculously low level, you get to psionically forge weapons or punch enemies with Project Force(since it does 1d6+AC damage, it's useless quickly, but does very strong guaranteed damage against weaker enemies, more or less sure kills in every case if it lands), and of course you can telekinetically lift things, throw things, animate objects(even shadows, for some reason), telekinetically puppeteer enemies(they get a save, and another if you try to make them suicide, but still loving cool), create defense fields, levitate, melt and ignite things, etc.

All powers that are extremely strong in the first three levels and/or objectively cool as concepts, they just forgot that everyone else is gonna outstrip them. Disintegrate and Detonate really remain as the only two powers that stay sweet and useful outside of the earliest game.

Chapter 5: Psychometabolism

Intended, really, to give the psionicist some body horror and healing abilities. Complete Healing heals literally every point of damage the psionicist has taken and even has a relatively easy barrier to cross, only requiring a non-penalized Con check. Sounds sweet, right? Ha ha no. It takes loving 24 hours to function. Animal Affinity binds you to one normal animal from the Monstrous Manual permanently, allowing you to temporarily take on one of its stats. Good if it's, say, a bird and you can take on its movement mode(wings), sucks if it's, like, a wolf, or some other animal that offers marginal stat boosts(to, say, Thac0 or AC) at level 1, and then nothing afterwards.


without trying, the book's art "gets" the problem. the psionicists are always fighting weak enemies and they're more or less always by themselves, since their more elaborate tricks wouldn't really work while journeying with normies

You can make a dreadful DEATH FIELD which melts everything inside... and does just as much damage to you, the scrawny guy with a thief's Hit Dice. Whoops. Hope those are goblins you're fighting. Or ants. Let's not get too ambitious. You can also polymorph into anything with roughly the same mass, but you get none of the advantages except movement and physical attacks. Sadly, most human-sized monsters you could transform into have more or less the same stats as humans, and anything that makes them really dangerous is usually magical or their high Thac0.

Ah, but wait, there's more! You could bust out Aging! And if you pass that absurd Con-7 roll to use it you... age the victim by... 1d4, maybe 1d4+1, years. Which will make no difference whatsoever in 99.99999% of all situations. Good use of a combat round, my man. I mean, just think about it, Con-7. That puts the TN for a roll-under check at between 3 and 11, for anyone qualifying to be a psionicist in the first place. Also keep in mind that almost every offensive power in this discipline requires a touch attack, for a class with a thief's Thac0 which has Con, Int and Wis stat reqs, and thus likely hasn't been able to invest much into Strength.

It does have a couple of gems, like Double Pain, which, if you land it, makes an enemy take double damage for 10 combat rounds, with half the damage being "imaginary," thus the enemy only passes out when they drop to 0HP(at which point you can then tie them up or just beat them to death with a rock while they're out cold) or Displacement which can grant a +2 AC bonus on top of all other bonuses, great if you're a Thief/Psion or Fighter/Psion and thus can do more things in fights than rolling up into a ball and crying.

He's got like seven different buffs which each provide a +1 to various aspects of melee combat, and have a maintenance cost in PSP's, meaning if he actually took the time to whip them all up before a fight, he'd be running out of PSP's when he got to the fight. Or if he was using them in the fight, it'd be over by the time he activated them all. And even then a Fighter or Cleric of equal level would still outpace him.

Chapter 6: Psychoportation

So this is the one chapter where Psionicists are objectively a Good Class, because most of the stuff they can do here doesn't interact with hit points or damage done, which become harder hurdles to pass with level, or with saves, which are equally troublesome. The very first power listed, Banishment, just pulls a target out of the world for as long as the Psionicist keeps paying the cost. You could yank an enemy mage away, have the entire party surround the location where he disappeared(after mangling whatever support he had), then initiate a beatdown party or an overbearing attempt as soon as he returns. You could Banish a kidnapping victim or hostage so enemies can't use them as leverage, then bring them back when the situation is resolved. You could Banish a critically injured party member to keep them safe until the enemies are defeated. You could have a Fighter jump off a building, Banish him in mid-air, lure enemies below him and then dispel the power so he drops right on to them and gets chopping, or otherwise use it to set up an ambush. And you know what? It only takes an Int-1 check to pull off. Sure, it's expensive in terms of PSP's, but that's actually one of the hurdles that do improve for psionicists with level.

In addition he can Dimension Door, travel to the Astral Plane, summon planar creatures(picks the plane, but has no control, but, say, a summon from a Lawful Good plane is unlikely to worsen the situation in most cases unless it's an evil party), pop himself into the future and thus gain extra(non-attack) rounds to act(like running away, drinking potions, setting up traps, maneuvering for position which gives a massive +4 to hit not counting any potential flanking/rear bonuses, etc.).

It's not a very varied discipline, but it has the only powers that both a 1st level and 20th level psionicist would be equally likely to make use of.

Chapter 7: Telepathy

So, Telepathy. Technically, it has some good options, you can Dominate people, turn Invisible, etc... except everything takes at least two rounds(Contact and THEN using the power) and enemies do get traditional saves against some things(like Domination), which means you can really just do what Mages can do, except in a worse, clunkier way. Additionally, we're back to -4 to -6 modifiers for using every single vaguely useful Telepathy power(like Mindwipe, which temporarily reduces the target by 1 level or 1 hit die as it locks off part of their memories and experiences). Even when there's a technically badass power, like Switch Personality, which would allow you to swap your fragile wimp psionic into a better body if you can just get close and pass a couple of tough rolls... they nerf it by making bodies that aren't "yours" slowly rot away to the tune of 1 point of Con every day, which means that all but the most badass of hosts would barely last you a couple of weeks. And also in the meantime whoever you stole a body from is likely holding your own body hostage or something, so you might not even have a decent body to return to at the end of it.

Strangely enough, the most consistently useful Telepathy powers are the ones intended primarily for scoring Contact points so other powers can be used. If they're used on someone already Contacted, they have different effects, like Ego Whip, which lashes an opponent with a massive -5 to all things and an inability to cast spells of level 4+, Id Insinuation which paralyzes the target for 1d4 rounds or Psionic Blast which instantly reduces the target to 20% of his max health(again, like Inflict Pain, only in his mind, but it's still useful, as noted there).

At this point, all the actually useful powers could be rolled into one single Discipline and you'd still have less powers than, say, Psychometabolism.

Chapter 8: Metapsionics

Metapsionics really only has two powers that are actually worth anything: Empower, which allows you to create psionic "magic items" which are sentient and can basically use powers for you, and Split Personality, which allows you to take one extra Psionic action per turn. Both of these are also the only way to make a Psionicist competitive in any way, because when their individual powers have a very strict power ceiling, the only way to keep up is to use more powers in a given span of time. Project Force is great at first level, okay at second and third. Beyond that, it's forgettable. But if you could hurl three of them every round, it could remain a competitive way of doing damage.

Unfortunately, he can't even dream of busting these out until level 10, some of the few things for Psionics that are actively level-gated(rather than just being gated by requiring crazy amounts of PSP's). There's also Magnify, at 6th level, which multipliers the effects of powers, but that lets you do stuff like a grand total of 2d10 damage at level 6, in exchange for a massive amount of PSP's... and spending two rounds, because of course Magnify requires you spending a full round to activate it. That means you're still doing 1d10 damage per round to one or two targets while a Mage does 5d6 damage to potentially a large number of targets.

Conclusion: Psionics? More like Suckonics, lol

But in all seriousness, Psionics is more or less the only real departure from Vancian casting outside of 4th edition D&D(unless 3rd ed also played with psionics, I never touched them and I never experienced anyone else who actually used them. So I assume they're in the same hellish state as 2nd ed psionics), and they just bungled it hardcore, creating a class that can dominate the game for two levels and then gets bullied by even the wimpiest wizard.

All they had to do was let the powers scale somewhat with level and also make the powers easier to use as psionicists levelled up, and it would've been an okay class. Still no Fighter, but at least playable.

Goddammit TSR, you hacks.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Night10194 posted:

How the hell do you pronounce synedoche

Sin-eck-dough-key

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
The big problem with 2E psionics for me was that clerical and arcane magic already had things sewn up. Clerical magic was tops at healing and such, arcane magic had everything else, and psionics was sniffing for their leftovers.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
3.5E does have psionics, and it's hit-and-miss. The actual psionic casters (psion, the wizard equivalent, and wilder, the sorcerer equivalent) are just fine and dandy with a power list that any normal spellcaster would be happy to have, just with a psychic flavor and mana power points instead of slots.

However, there's two other classes in the EPH: the psychic warrior (a psionic-flavored gish as a base class) and the soulknife (you are Psylocke). They're bad. Really bad in the soulknife's case - it has a cute gimmick where they're based around summoning a blade made of pure mental energy, but aside from being able to summon it at will, it's never going to be as good as an actual fighter using a weapon due to the mindblade not scaling well.

Then the psionic prestige classes are almost universally terrible, with a couple of exceptions. The Slayer is incredible for any martial character (it's specifically designed for rangers, but isn't hard for anyone else) that's expecting to fight the likes of mind flayers, as it's designed from beginning to end to gently caress over psionic enemies, and the Ectopic Adept from the Complete Psionic turns the psionic version of a conjuration specialist into a ridiculously overpowered monster who can constantly summon super customizable build-a-bear minions.

The elocater has a cool gimmick at level one where they constantly levitate a foot off the ground with no penalty to any actions (anyone experienced with DnD can immediately think of tons of uses for this), but how many people do you know who get the full Spring Attack feat chain?

Cythereal fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jan 23, 2019

Halloween Jack
Sep 11, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
It would be neat to get a good hexblade class, and fold soulknife into it.

Did anyone take Spring Attack for any other reason than to get Whirlwind Attack? Ugh, the more I remember about 3e the less I miss it.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

yeah, 3e has a lot of issues of requiring very specific builds for non-caster classes to be useful, and needing to know exactly what you're building for, so no real flexibility if it turns out your build doesn't suit the way the campaign is going.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Ironclaw 1e

Cat people run, run like the wind

So, Atavism. Atavism is really important to the Bisclavret-Phelan conflict in the setting, and to the Phelan in general. The idea is meant to be that there is a tremendous power within characters, represented by the Species die in general, and that many of them trade it off in return for learning, the trappings of civilization, etc. The whole setting is called Ironclaw because the idea is that the world has traded claws of flesh for claws of iron, that the world is changing, and that there were other directions the world could have gone. Atavism is the power of reaching deep into a character's natural gifts to do superhuman feats of crazy animal power.

It is also the worst power set in 1e by far. Like just terrible. There are so many bad ideas in 1e Atavism. For one: You always include your Mind die in the difficulty of your powers. Yep! You make your crazy furry physical adept powers better by being stupider. Atavism is also limited by Encumbrance, and gets a big bonus for being 'sky clad', by which I mean naked. Thankfully, not in the original Gardnerian Wiccan sense, so you are still permitted the trappings of 'basic modesty', just no armor or fancy clothes. Atavism requires a 3 point gift to learn, and like spells, every individual power is a skill of its own. All Atavism powers are 3rd rank maneuvers, and most of them are self-buffs of some kind. You can heal yourself. You can spend a round charging up to make a natural weapon like claw or bite do triple damage (but only the weapon damage, your Strength dice are unaffected). You can buff your Speed dice (up to doubling them if you're lucky) or your Strength dice (not your damage reduction) with repeated checks that give small bonuses until you fail one. You can heal yourself. You can move faster. And you can scare people with your howl. That's it. That's all you can do with Atavism.

It's an entire power set that requires you to tank your mind, asks you to fight unarmored and generally unarmed, and often requires spending whole turns yelling to buff up before a big attack. Let's take a look at what 'tripled damage' actually works out to with a claw attack: 3d6 Weapon Dice. Let's compare that to someone very strong (not even The Bear strong, just strong enough to two-hand this thing) using a two-handed Full Stone axe. That does 2d10+d4. Even on number of dice you're not ahead (though the d4 can't overwhelm even if it's up against a 1). And remember, the Atavist has to make a check that they can fail in order to invoke that, and has to be unarmored, and is benefited significantly by being unarmored, and takes 2 rounds to pull that off while opening themselves up to get sent Reeling before they can invoke. The main use for Atavism is if you're a lightly armored dodge tank anyway. The seeds of a concept for a power set are there, but there's just not much to do with it.

Now let's look at what 2e ended up doing. I went over this in the 2e review, but again we see that Exhaustible Gifts are a huge boon to the Atavism system, even more than they were to magic. Atavism doesn't roll against Mind anymore because the authors realized that making all Atavists mechanically incentivized for being idiots wasn't a great look for the Phelan (and the setting is better off if the Phelan aren't idiots anyway). There's also a good mix of passive Gifts (Like Claws of Iron, which just makes Claws a really solid weapon option) and Gifts that are big, superhuman feats. You want to leap a wall with a superjump? That's there. You want to perform an incredible feat of strength, or just shrug off some incoming damage by flexing so hard you don't get hurt? Those are there. There's also more focus on non-combat abilities, like superhuman senses. Going without armor and weapons isn't required at all, it just enables the really great 'recharge my Atavism Gifts much easier' Gift. Also, armor is noticeably less extreme in 2e, so losing it to rely on Will and Body (you probably have Resolve if you're an Atavist) is a more reasonable trade-off.

One of the things that's come up over and over again is that IC1e suffers a lot for not having 'resource' systems. As a result, everything in it is based around limiting things by rolling dice. Which means, with a fairly complex dice system, you're rolling dice a lot, and the dice rolls can slow the game down. There's a mechanical reason for almost every bit of complexity in IC1e, but it doesn't always ask if it's needed, so to speak. Take magic; without another broader resource system, they had to use the MP system to limit spell use. Then they added all kinds of things that make magic work differently from weapon combat, without asking 'why don't we just treat magic like a summoned weapon' like they do with IC2e. There's design logic to the mechanics in IC1e, and it did produce a game that was playable (if extremely complicated) and reasonably balanced (even if it really rewarded specialization), especially for its time.

The reason I wanted to bring it up and talk about it in detail here is because I can point to just about every bit of standardization and streamlining in 2e and say exactly which issue from 1e it was trying to solve. Most of the changes are for the better, but more importantly they're all specifically addressing actual issues from previous games in an attempt to make the future games more open, playable, and streamlined. Cardinal will always be a complicated system, but it tries to cut out unnecessary complication where it can and the willingness to radically rework elements of the system like the Bonus and Penalty system or the entire magic system when they didn't work in previous editions is laudable. Look at how many systems we see covered in this thread where the solution to a broken subsystem is 'eh'. gently caress, look at all of RIFTs.

That's why I keep covering these games like Double Cross and Cardinal; I feel like they're an instructive and useful look at what it takes to make a complicated and crunchy game actually work. Crunch gets a bad rap because of poo poo like 3e D&D, and rightfully so. Unconsidered crunch, pointless complication for the purpose of complication, does nothing but waste your goddamn time. But crunch that's designed to give you interesting mechanical decisions to make can also help reinforce tone and even help tell a story. Sometimes it's fun to have a lot of game elements in your Roleplaying Game when those game elements were actually well thought out and designed to let you mechanically distinguish your characters. Which is part of what's interesting in the shift in Cardinal; what was originally just a function of a Merits and Flaws system (Gifts) ended up shifting to be the main point of mechanical distinction between characters. The general shift was towards a system where characters are broadly competent in general, and then the main mechanism for distinguishing them in more detail would be their special powers through the revamped Gift system.

I'm also really glad Flaws went into the garbage bin/optional rules section because point-based flaws systems are usually impossible to balance. The player with Heroic is getting points for doing what they wanted to do anyway and playing a character, while the player with Weak is getting mechanically punished.

Not all the solutions are great; I actually think, with experience, that the damage system in IC2e and Myriad Song is one of the weaker systems in the game. The reason being the extra +1 damage you get for being Hurt (and +2 for Injured) ramps up how quickly you get turbo-hosed so fast (especially with #Finish lurking in the wings in MS) because the seriousness of effects goes up very quickly in general. I also would've preferred a 'Down' level of damage to 'Dying' being the 4th damage level. The damage system in IC1e worked about as well as the later stuff, with the later mechanics being more of a side-jump into a different concept of damage as states rather than a more traditional HP system. But this will get addressed, too, when we get to Urban Jungle.

There's a lot more I could potentially get into the weeds on with IC1e, but you get the gist; it's an unusual game for its time of publication, it's mechanically interesting, but very over-complex and without as much consideration of how much time calculating and playing out some of the mechanics would take. It also lacks the level of standardization you see in the later Cardinal games; there are far more subsystems, exceptions, and special cases where something works differently. It was also lacking a lot of the mechanical elements like Rote, exhaustible Gifts, or counting successes against a static TN, and it's easy to see how many of those were introduced specifically to cut down on the over-reliance on complicated dicepool vs. dicepool contests that marked 1e. It was a good game for its time, and it's especially notable for how much better its successor is, because there was a conscious effort made to go through and address the over complexities, special cases, and issues that plagued it.

And in this hobby, that kind of thing is worth talking about.

Next Time: I knew something was wrong, but I needed the dough.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

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Emerald Empire: crab battle

The Crab Clan is extremely militaristic, largely out of necessity. The monsters of the Shadowlands are exceptionally dangerous, countless hordes of creatures supported by near-invulnerable beasts, empowered by the insidious Taint. Crab military units are small, extremely close and wildly paranoid. They wear heavy Kaiu armor and wield large weapons such as the otsuchi and tetsubo alongside the katana. Their weapons and tactics are wholly designed to fight inhuman foes, and they honestly tend to adapt rather poorly to fighting other samurai. However, Crab bushi see more battle in a single year than those of other clans manage in entire decades. They are masters of siege, both offensively and defensively, but they rarely have any time to spare away from the Wall to make war on other clans. When they do, it is their raw strength and determination that are most terrifying.

The Crane Clan excel at the duel and in court, rather than the battlefield itself. This is reflected in their military doctrine. Crane commanders often favor challenging their counterparts to duels to deprive the foe of leadership while their forces maintain a defensive scorched-earth strategy and the courtiers focus on runing the enemy's economy in court. This, along with their highly trained heavy infantry, helps make up for their great weakness - low numbers. While the Crane are in general impeccably honorable, their scouts are infamous for use of questionable tactics, sabotage, laying traps for marching soldiers and poisoning supplies the Crane are forced to abandon.

The Dragon Clan's forces tend to be, more than any other clan, unique reflections of their commanders. Some daimyo focus on the Tao to gain victory, while others rely on the Agasha family's skill in metallurgy and smithing. Others focus on drilling for any environment or on deploying warrior-monks from the Togashi Order. Esoteric training and the tendency of Dragon bushi to train alongside shugenjas and warrior monks means that their small units tend to be terrifyingly skilled and unique foes. They usually rely on fast, powerful attacks to separate foes from each other and defeat individual units in lightning campaigns.

The Lion Clan maintains the only school in all the Empire that focuses solely on the study of war as an art and science - the Akodo. True to the Kami Akodo's ways, the Lion are the most militarized of any clan. Their army is immense, their drills endless and relentless, and their economy is built entirely to support war. Every aspect of a Lion bushi's life reflects this, with harsh duty rotations and daily kata practice mixed in with prayers to martial ancestors, broken only by training practice in Go or shogi to hone tactical and strategic skill. When the Lion call on their full forces, including vassals, their numbers are immense. They tend to overwhelm their foes with a mix of numerical superiority and classical, time-honored strategies. They are very proud of their martial accomplishments throughout history, but this means they are slow to innovate and discourage unorthodox strategies. However, they are extremely fast to develop counterstrategies once they encounter something new.

The Phoenix Clan vastly prefers peace to war. They fight only rarely and in limited capacities, focused more on ending the conflict with settlements and peace. However, if forced to total war, they wield nature as their weapon. The Phoenix Champions who are normally subordinate to the Elemental Masters rise to equal voice to the entirety of the Council of Five for these periods. The Champion and the Elemental Guard usually take to the field personally for important battles, unleashing the prayers of their shugenja and might of the kami on their foes, warping and permanently altering the land around their battlefields. The Elemental Guard are so skilled that they can even perform such feats in enemy territory. It is custom for all Phoenix to pray for forgiveness before any battle. In times of truly great trouble, entire units of talented shugenja are formed up based on their elemental proficiency. While it has not been needed in generations, they can call forth firestorms or tsunamis in truly terrible displays of might.

This is notable primarily because normally, shugenja have somewhat limited ability in war due to their reliance on the support of the kami. Because they are appealing to local spirits, shugenja are generally much more able to work defensively than offensively, simply due to having existing relationships with the kami of their own regions. It's pretty hard to convince the local earth kami to rain death on the people that give them regular offerings at local shrines. Further, the blood and death of the battlefield can attract the kansen, Tainted kami, as the battle goes on, disrupting the local elemental forces. There are some notable exceptions, however. Hachiman, the Fortune of Warfare, and the Fortunes of swords and bravery are all much more likely to answer the prayers of non-local shugenja and to intervene on their behalf than local kami are. Due to these limitations, shugenja are not and can't be treated as regular assets to most armies. Rather, they work closely with the commander and use their expertise with the spirits to determine how they can be most effective. A commander that tries to order a shugenja as they would a bushi will quickly learn that their miracles are limited entirely by the willingness of the spirits to do things, and that often the best way to use them is to let them act on their own discretion. Regardless of where they are put in battle, shugenja are nearly always accompanied by at least one yojimbo, dedicated to keeping them alive even if the rest of their attached unit doesn't manage it.

The Scorpion Clan rely on deception a lot, as you might expect. They use a lot of confusing false intelligence, diversions and ambushes. They also have excellent scouts of their own, plus a massive network of spies and informants that get them a ton of actionable intelligence. They are more than happy to rely on spies and assassins...but are required to do so in ways that can't be openly traced back to them. When they actually do fight open battles, they rely on a well-trained but highly traditionalist army, similar to a mix of Lion and Crane tactics except better trained for night combat and less perfectly elite.

The Unicorn Clan are militant and foreign, having absorbed foreigners like the Ujik-Hai, who were super aggressive to begin with. Since their return, they have never changed their tactics, but their skill at archery and cavalry mean they haven't really needed to. Cavalry tactics are the heart of their doctrine, and they're drat good at it. They use rapidly moving infantry and heavy cavalry charges to win battles, forming a spearhead of steel to slam into foes. Their talisman-wielding shugenja also work well to enhance their speed and mobility with slightly less reliance on local spirits, and the Utaku horses are the undisputed best in the entire Empire. Other clans have had to develop specialized anti-cavalry tactics essentially entirely because of the Unicorn.

The Minor Clans each have about the military strength of a single Great Clan family. Some are more martial, some less, but few can field anything like the strength of a Great Clan army, or indeed more than a hundred soldiers at a time. Only the Hare, Falcon, Dragonfly and Mantis have any sizable forces, and of those, only the Mantis Navy is anything like a match for the Great Clan forces. In large part, the Minor Clans are protected by Imperial edict, distinct from the other laws on military force, that was established after the Lion attempted to seize the lands of the Fox Clan. Without that edict or if a clan were to decide to violate it, the Minor Clans would be exceptionally vulnerable.

Next time: City Life

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I do appreciate the detail that Crab might struggle with human enemies for the same reason Lion might struggle fighting hellbeasts despite both being completely devoted to war.

NGDBSS
Dec 30, 2009






PurpleXVI posted:

But in all seriousness, Psionics is more or less the only real departure from Vancian casting outside of 4th edition D&D(unless 3rd ed also played with psionics, I never touched them and I never experienced anyone else who actually used them. So I assume they're in the same hellish state as 2nd ed psionics), and they just bungled it hardcore, creating a class that can dominate the game for two levels and then gets bullied by even the wimpiest wizard.
3.5 psionics are certainly less ridiculous overall than 3.x casters while mostly not being bad. It still works on a power point (so magic points) system, but you can spend a variable number of those on most powers up to your manifester level so that you can still get scaling on them. Unlike a caster you have to pay for your scaling, but inversely any given power is going to be more versatile so you aren't dragging around several different summoning effects vs. Astral Construct. As for classes:
  • Psions act mostly like wizards, no surprise. But in particular they're like specialized wizards - some powers are only available to a given type of psion rather than to all psions as a whole.
  • Psychic warriors are a gish class, mixing manifesting and combat. They're not at the level of full casters, but still very good outside that wheelhouse with some of their wacky buffs.
  • Soulknives are actually bad, being a class that's focused around getting a magic weapon in a game that's all about finding loot so you can just purchase magic weapons in the first place.
  • Wilders are the psionic equivalent of sorcerers. They get the same power access as psions at base (ie, nothing from the specialist lists), but with fewer powers and the ability to wild surge. Wild surging is a risk/reward mechanic, trading the chance of getting dazed and losing some PP in return for free power boosting up front.
  • Complete Psionic also had three classes. First was the Ardent, functionally a psionic cleric who periodically could choose psionic mantles. Each of these gave access to its own list of powers and a small extra, so in practice the ardent is still at the level of full casters but differently so. Of note was their mechanic for accessing new powers based on manifester level rather than class level, which made them more multiclass-friendly.
  • The Divine Mind was trash. It tried to be a psionic paladin with a small PP pool and some psychic auras, but was too watered down to be more than a clone of the soulborn from Magic of Incarnum.
  • The Lurk was intended to be a psionic assassin, with the same style of power access and BAB as the psychic warrior but with a different power list. I don't know how well this worked in practice, since the power lists didn't contribute as directly to this kind of play and their distinctive class feature of lurk augments was tracked on a per-day basis for mostly meh effects.
Prestige classes were a more mixed bag, but then again those from XPH were originally written in the day when Wizards hadn't figured out how to make properly interesting PrCs for their subsystems. Those from CPsi, on the other hand, had no such excuse:
  • Cerebremancer is a theurge-type class for mixing arcane magic and psionics. It's really unspectacular and skippable.
  • Elocater gets 7/10 manifesting and some not-amazing mobility tricks.
  • Psionic Fist was intended as an entry for monks into psionics. Like most monk things it falls flat on its face, especially because you don't actually get much PP or many powers and because it doesn't do anything interesting with unarmed combat.
  • The Slayer gets full BAB and 9/10 manifesting - really good! In the XPH it was the Illithid Slayer but the SRD had to remove those references. Even if you don't need to be a gish it still has some other useful features against mental stuff, like equivalents to nondetection/mind blank.
  • The Metamind is a loving joke. In theory it's supposed to give you more PP or more efficient use of that PP. In practice it kneecaps you by only granting 5/10 manifesting.
  • Psion Uncarnate is, like many transformative PrCs, janky as hell. In return for 6/10 manifesting...you eventually become incorporeal? Who cares?
  • Pyrokineticist has the problem of not integrating with any particular subsystem but instead giving you a mediocre grab-bag of disconnected abilities.
  • Thrallherd gets 8/10 manifesting. Thrallherd also gets access to Leadership, twice. It's arguably one of the best PrCs in all of 3.5, if the DM even allows it.
  • War Mind is like Psionic Fist, but for fighters. As before there's no real cohesive whole, just a loose collection of stuff.
  • Complete Psionic also had several PrCs. First was the Anarchic Initiate, which was intended foremost for wilders but which is actually harder for them to access than it is for psions. It wasn't all that special beyond its gimmick of dealing less damage a quarter of the time but more damage half the time, but it got 10/10 manifesting and was thus decent enough.
  • Ebon Saint is intended to focus the lurk even harder into the psionic assassin archetype. It's nothing to write home about.
  • The Ectopic Adept is pretty meh. It was designed to get around a stealth nerf that no one wanted in the first place and yet it's not even good at that. In return for 4/5 manifesting, you get more instances of Ectopic Form (a feat that removes the whole point of the astral construct power, its versatility) and some mediocre class features that disappear if you don't keep up with a skill tax.
  • Flayerspawn Psychic is a real headscratcher. It's supposed to be about transforming yourself into a near-illithid, but gives 6/10 manifesting and makes reference to missing mechanics. It's like Kevin Siembieda wrote this.
  • Illumine Soul is a janky addon to the soulknife. Skip.
  • Out of all the options for the soulknife, the Soulbow PrC is the least bad. That isn't to say it's actually good, but if your entire schtick is "dude with magic weapon" then it helps a bit to do that at range.
  • Storm Disciple is a weird joke intended for ardents. In return for 3/5 manifesting it gets some tiny bonuses. Seriously, who thought that "+1 electricity damage per hit" with no scaling means anything in a game where HP regularly scales into the hundreds?
  • Zerth Cenobite is another attempt at monk multiclassing. While it does get class features with actual substance and cohesion to them, in return it gives even less power access to the point that you don't care about 27 PP/day at level 15.
There was other stuff out there in various splatbooks and web supplements - the constructor was what the ectopic adept should have been in the first place - but without doing a full review that's beyond the scope of just one post.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I should have noted one considerable fluff difference between Ironclaw 1e and 2e: 1e's core book includes almost nothing on the Phelan, which is kind of a shame since they're really important to the Bisclavret. 2e in general has, I believe, a compilation of all the sourcebook fluff produced for 1e expansions.

Really, much as I wanted to talk about the original mechanics and how they've changed, the most succinct review possible of IC1e is: Buy 2e if you're interested. Not out of fault of the first edition so much as the extent of improvements, the additional setting writing, etc pretty much rendering the 1st edition obsolete.

Tulul
Oct 23, 2013

THAT SOUND WILL FOLLOW ME TO HELL.
It's probably worth noting that 3.0 psionics were way shittier than their 3.5 incarnation. Most notably, all of the six disciplines were associated with a different ability score, and you used that ability for that discipline's powers, making Psions really bad with the majority of their powers. Powers which were also worse, both in general and because augmenting was a 3.5 creation.

There was also a whole subsystem of psionic combat with 10 individual modes (and a table, natch) that each had a different interaction with each other and their own power point cost. Using it against other psychics was mostly useless, because it did pretty minor amounts of ability damage, and using it against non-psychics was useless, because they got a huge bonus to their saves. That is until you leveled up a few times and got mind blast, which attacked everyone in a giant area, gave non-psychics a penalty to their save, and stunned everyone in the area for 3d4 rounds, making it the only thing worth doing as a Psion.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Even if that's your only trick as a Psion that doesn't sound like a bad trick.

The issue of course being that a wizard gets that trick and then every other trick that exists.

Halloween Jack
Sep 11, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Did psionics in D&D begin as an attempt to break away from Vancian casting without actually slaughtering that sacred cow?

I feel like psionics didn't really make sense (how is manipulating reality with your mind not magic?) until 4e introduced a simple structure explaining how all these different power sources are magic, but channeling energy from different sources.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Halloween Jack posted:

Did psionics in D&D begin as an attempt to break away from Vancian casting without actually slaughtering that sacred cow?

Well.

Far as I know, D&D psionics, at least in 2nd ed, were only really at home in Dark Sun, a setting where mages were meant to be exceptionally rare due to being hunted outlaws(no matter whether they were Defilers or Preservers) in 90% of the area the setting covered. The whole setting was kind of trying to be a low-fantasy, post-apocalyptic setting, and since post-apoc is usually the realm of sci-fi, and psionics are usually the realm of sci-fi... I assume that's how they wormed their way in there.

I don't think they were ever really intended to replace Vancian casters so much as Gary or someone else read The Dead Zone or saw Scanners and was like "man I wish my Fighter could do that." and the ball got rolling that way.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

The whole 'psionics are sci-fi and not fantasy!' thing has always been one of the dumber aspects of psionics as a fantasy/sci-fi element. "We have this thing that is functionally magic, but you concentrate really hard instead of saying a bunch of nonsense, so it's totally different."

NGDBSS
Dec 30, 2009






Tulul posted:

It's probably worth noting that 3.0 psionics were way shittier than their 3.5 incarnation. Most notably, all of the six disciplines were associated with a different ability score, and you used that ability for that discipline's powers, making Psions really bad with the majority of their powers. Powers which were also worse, both in general and because augmenting was a 3.5 creation.

There was also a whole subsystem of psionic combat with 10 individual modes (and a table, natch) that each had a different interaction with each other and their own power point cost. Using it against other psychics was mostly useless, because it did pretty minor amounts of ability damage, and using it against non-psychics was useless, because they got a huge bonus to their saves. That is until you leveled up a few times and got mind blast, which attacked everyone in a giant area, gave non-psychics a penalty to their save, and stunned everyone in the area for 3d4 rounds, making it the only thing worth doing as a Psion.
I've said it before but it always bears mentioning that the community had issues with both Complete Psionics and the 3.0 Psionics Handbook. The former was regarded as what happens when designers roll a natural 1 - clearly they could have done better, but poo poo happens and all that. The latter was regarded as the physical manifestation of a natural 1 - effectively irredeemable.

Halloween Jack posted:

Did psionics in D&D begin as an attempt to break away from Vancian casting without actually slaughtering that sacred cow?

I feel like psionics didn't really make sense (how is manipulating reality with your mind not magic?) until 4e introduced a simple structure explaining how all these different power sources are magic, but channeling energy from different sources.
I dunno how enshrined this was in the rules, but in some of the fiction I remember from when I actually cared about reading FR pulp novels 2E psionics was completely separate from magic for reasons. Even stuff like antimagic didn't work on it, which sounds cool in theory but in practice is a horrendous mess to adjudicate. In contrast 3.5 psionics interacts with magic/magical protections just fine and is mechanically just a different power source. Technically there's a variant called Psionics is Different, but it's called out as a variant and gets universally shunned for being a waste of page space.

In real-world cultural terms the two came from similar sources of Doing Supernatural poo poo. Psionics just gets treated as this sci-fi thing because a century ago its practioners dressed it up with New Age terminology to sound more respectable.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

REIGNING YOSPOS COSTCO KING

PurpleXVI posted:

I don't think they were ever really intended to replace Vancian casters so much as Gary or someone else read The Dead Zone or saw Scanners and was like "man I wish my Fighter could do that." and the ball got rolling that way.
IIRC they were a set of rules someone sent to Gary in the early days of OD&D and Gygax liked them enough to put them in one of the supplements as an optional rule system (quasi-scientific psychic/psionic powers and energy were a big feature of a lot of 1960s and 1970s SF and fantasy).

AD&D 1E adopted the same policy (an optional rule add-on in the back of the PHB)

BX/BECMI did away with them entirely

AD&D 2E gave them their own supplement (Complete Psionicists Handbook) and made them their own character class (Psionicist - before 2E, there were additional powers that your otherwise ordinary fighter or thief has a sub-1% chance of having) and they got their own setting in which they were emphasized (Dark Sun).

3E/3.5E/4E have been mentioned above.

They pretty much came from outside of Gygax's vision and design for D&D, and they've always had a hard time being integrated with the core rules.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

PurpleXVI posted:

Well.

Far as I know, D&D psionics, at least in 2nd ed, were only really at home in Dark Sun, a setting where mages were meant to be exceptionally rare due to being hunted outlaws(no matter whether they were Defilers or Preservers) in 90% of the area the setting covered. The whole setting was kind of trying to be a low-fantasy, post-apocalyptic setting, and since post-apoc is usually the realm of sci-fi, and psionics are usually the realm of sci-fi... I assume that's how they wormed their way in there.

I don't think they were ever really intended to replace Vancian casters so much as Gary or someone else read The Dead Zone or saw Scanners and was like "man I wish my Fighter could do that." and the ball got rolling that way.

3.5E had a home for psionics in the Eberron setting, where they're mainly associated with the creepy fantasy North Korea realm of Sarlona (and the plucky rebels fighting against the evil empire). Sarlona is big on the "we have secret police who will literally read your mind and execute you on the spot for even thinking about dissension" so psionics fit well with them and the rebels.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

Night10194 posted:

The whole 'psionics are sci-fi and not fantasy!' thing has always been one of the dumber aspects of psionics as a fantasy/sci-fi element. "We have this thing that is functionally magic, but you concentrate really hard instead of saying a bunch of nonsense, so it's totally different."

D&D came out during a period where there was much less siloing of sci-fi and fantasy concepts. More than one series was placed in a setting where Clarke's Law stood in for magic.

The seventies were WILD with regard to weird woo like EST, pyramid power, and psi. The introduction to a novel I have from the era has the author claiming it as a legitimate science that would soon be studied everywhere and transform the world.

It's fuckin' weird now, but somebody at Gary's table would have asked for it with all reasonableness.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
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Emerald Empire: Sex and the City

Before the Empire, humans lived as nomads or small farming communities. Now, almost all important political, social and cultural events revolve around cities. Most Rokugani cities are walled, with samurai and peasants living inside the walls and hinin villages and exterior roads outside, along with any fields or paddies. Buildings are mostly wood and paper, as is typical in Rokugan, making them easy for disasters to destroy but also very easy to rebuild. Almost all cities also contain internal, smaller walls and gates to demarcate districts. Merchant, trade and even temple districts with many shrines or holy places are open to anyone except hinin, who must use hidden paths in the dense cities to move about. Moats and defenses may cut through castle towns, but those that live there usually have ways to bypass them. Cities are typically divided into parts for high- and low-ranking samurai, plus separate districts for craftspeople, soldiers and traveling merchants. That last usually sits by a road and is closed off by tents and tarps.

Cities are crowded. Millions live in the Empire, and the majority live in cities. Samurai will see all kinds of peasants, crafters, merchants and even heimin guards just by walking through. In such tight quarters, formality is necessarily somewhat relaxed, to avoid trouble. Samurai and peasants share the same streets, and they both have to deal with the massive crowds and avoid being run down by the litters of powerful lords or wealthy merchants. Most cities are built along north-south trade routes, and while samurai may not like monetary issues, merchants are recognized as a necessary evil of the Empire, able to turn koku into goods and back again across the Empire. Merchant caravans rely on travel papers and bright colors to be recognized, seeking out cheap goods to buy and move. They are not respected by the samurai, and the clans demand steep tariffs for movement through their lands, plus slow caravans are a favorite target of bandits. In times of war, merchants may be barred from some routes entirely or even have their goods seized for the military effort without payment. Merchants that work in a city's trade districts are usually safe from these fates, but they rely on traveling traders to get their goods still.

Cities have also become religious centers. Most have important shrines and temples, both of local import and famous. It's not rare for there to be an entire temple district. These places tend to be full of tranquil gardens and also monks. They are usually next to the noble sections, as a sort of buffer against the market districts and theater spaces. It's not subtle about it, either - Rokugani cities are deliberately built so that crude monetary affairs are kept at a distance from spiritual areas, despite the fact that the money often ends up going to the temples and shrines, which are often very wealthy. Temple district gardens are often a major focus of competition when the monks themselves aren't in charge of them, and even a small city will have an extensive display of ikebana and rock gardens. Dance studios and theaters are kept closer to the merchant districts than the temples, but the monks are known to allow performances of great piety within the public spaces of the temple district.

And then, well, there's the crime. Gambling houses and cheap brothels are extremely common in the peasant areas, mirrors of the more licensed facilities in higher-status districts. Opium dens are in every city, no matter what, and honestly, plenty of samurai head into them. Commoner gangs run these areas, sometimes even having influence over shamed samurai due to debts and crime.

We get a section on daily life in cities for various classes. Hinin villages are notable for being mostly outside the city walls and being honestly not terrible places to live if you can put up with being constantly poo poo on by everyone else in Rokugan. They are only spiritually unclean, not physically. Hinin life sucks despite that, as their lives are cheap and unlike those of normal peasants, can be ended on the whim of basically any samurai. Living in a village is safer than being alone on the road, though, since higher classes avoid them. Entertainers and criminals are also hinin, notably, but are treated differently. Geisha, for example, are the only people samurai can truly relax around, being not part of formal society. There's also a sidebar on the use of 'eta' as a slur in modern Japan and the care to be taken with the word.

Sidebar on theater - there's three types. No, kabuki and bunraku puppet theatre. Samurai love all three, and peasants would if they got to see No all that often. (Samurai rarely attend bunraku, for that matter.) No is the oldest and most respected. It's basically a long, chanted poem accompanied by music and sign from a handful of actors, using stylized movements and masks. They tend to be tragic or mythic in nature, and kyogen, short slapstick comedy skits, are performed between them to lighten the mood. No is a high art, suitable for samurai to perform, and day-long performances of No theatre are popular at festivals. Kabuki is younger and seen as more garish, as well as more popular with the lower classes. It evolved out of the kyogen, and despite its reputation, many lords patronize kabuki troupes and several samurai artisans have written plays for the form. Kabuki uses elaborate and beautiful costumes, dramatic action on stage and a mix of traditional stories and thinly fictionalized versions of current events. They tend to rely strongly on improv, with an actor's skill being equally as important as the script if not more. Bunraku is a puppet-based show, with a chanter speaking the plot to the audience while puppeteers hide behind a screen and use elaborate puppets to act out the story. The flexibility and size of the puppets allows feats impossible for humans, and elaborate mechanisms or pyrotechnics are often used, as are stories of supernatural beings, as the puppet form makes them easier to represent. While bunraku is the most lowbrow of all forms of theatre, it is wildly popular.

Heimin peasants, also called bonge, are the middle class of laborers, crafters, servants, merchants and other city-dwellers. Wealthy merchants often live in homes very similar to those of samurai, and Bushido requires that heimin be treated with compassion and courtesy despite the fact that they are, in theory, abjectly submissive to samurai. (Of course, ideals and reality differ.) Many heimin own their own homes, which for the wealthy may also double as businesses. Townhouses are usually narrow and deep, as streetfront is in high demand, and decorative alcoves, desks for the literate and sliding doors are common, in contrast to the very simple homes of the hinin. They do tend to be more informal than samurai homes, however. Peasant clothes are similar to those of samurai, but usually made of cotton with simple designs, or sometimes silk in a hot summer. Women try to have a colorful kimono for festivals, but most wear simpler, practical kimonos for day to day life, with shorter skirts to make labor easier. Men wear similar, plus a cotton overcoat called a haori. Both wear straw hats, especially if they work outdoors. Their work is essentially constant through the day, though shopkeepers or vendors may have more free time, as long as they always make themselves available when a samurai or their servant (far more likely) comes to call. While children can play, they must also work, and urban heimin are often educated in private schools run by generous lords or Brotherhood-run temple schools, as long as they can afford tuition. These schools teach literacy, math, theology and philosophy.

Rural heimin are usually much freer of social responsibility, but worse educated. They are, after all, far less likely to run into a samurai on any given day. While it is an overstatement to say that a poorly chosen word can kill a peasant, it is still difficult to interact with them, and most peasants take great pains to stay out of the way of their betters. In some cities, they will even take alleys and back streets to avoid bumping into samurai. Merchants typically have an easier life than other peasants, getting up early to prepare the store or move the goods, usually paying servants to do the carrying. Wealthy merchants may even travel in a cloth litter, called a kago. While still restricted in interacting with samurai, merchants may be exceptionally wealthy, moreso than any jizamurai and even some poorer lords. These merchants are renowned for their displays of (often tasteless) art at home and their love of ostentation that angers samurai. They eat fine foods more often than most peasants and will accept few challenges to their pride - even, sometimes, from samurai. Certainly not from other peasants.

City-dwelling samurai live a pretty routine life outside of winter, when the most prominent head to Winter Court. A city samurai's life is all about the governor's court, and typically involves either dealing with trade and war matters or protecting those who do. City courts deal with trade kind of sideways, via the status of merchant patrons. However, cities support a lot of samurai, which makes them politically powerful just by virtue of the powerful living there when they don't yet have holdings of their own. City samurai tend to be ambitious and talented, pursuing their own goals but facing a social ceiling unless they can find some great act to do for their clan, which means city court is always full of intrigue. Samurai homes tend to be closed off by small perimeter walls, a courtyard or garden and then walls of wood and paper. There is almost always a formal reception room for guests. The decor, of course, varies by clan. All but the poorest will have servants maintaining the household, often living in the home or a small outbuilding where food is also stored and made.

Samurai dress more finely than peasants do, with higher quality cotton and silk kimonos. Those that need mobility, such as bushi, typically wear a pleated and flowing skirt called a hakama that allows for easier movement, along with kosode robes that have smaller sleeves than a kimono, along with a single-color haori for warmth or to show allegiance. Daimyo and ranking courtiers favor an outer jacket or vest called a kataginu, and samurai in general will often incorporate their clan colors into their clothes. However, they are not restricted to those colors, and fashionable samurai often use design and color creatively to draw attention. They are, however, careful not to wear a clan's colors while in that clan's lands, which could be taken as insult. Unless, that is, they are deliberately intending insult, in which case they do wear them. City samurai tend to have a wider variety of clothes than rural or castle samurai, as they don't need to worry about travelwear. Traveling samurai in a town or city are expected to visit the local magistrate, lord or governor in charge, to announce their presence and intentions. It is very rude not to do so promptly. Powerful samurai are often carried about town in closed litters, called norimono.

Next time: Food

Young Freud
Nov 25, 2006

FMguru posted:

IIRC they were a set of rules someone sent to Gary in the early days of OD&D and Gygax liked them enough to put them in one of the supplements as an optional rule system (quasi-scientific psychic/psionic powers and energy were a big feature of a lot of 1960s and 1970s SF and fantasy).

AD&D 1E adopted the same policy (an optional rule add-on in the back of the PHB)

BX/BECMI did away with them entirely

AD&D 2E gave them their own supplement (Complete Psionicists Handbook) and made them their own character class (Psionicist - before 2E, there were additional powers that your otherwise ordinary fighter or thief has a sub-1% chance of having) and they got their own setting in which they were emphasized (Dark Sun).

3E/3.5E/4E have been mentioned above.

They pretty much came from outside of Gygax's vision and design for D&D, and they've always had a hard time being integrated with the core rules.

And let's not forget Palladium, which started as a homebrew of AD&D and explains why goddamn psi-powerz are so prevalent in its games.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
I'm still puzzled at what this new Five Rings book is supposed to be for. It's useful setting information, I suppose, but in my experience a kind of gaming group that would be interested in or make use of this stuff so far is the kind of gaming group that doesn't need a sourcebook laying it out for them.

Leraika
Jun 14, 2015

Luckily, I *did* save your old avatar. Fucked around and found out indeed.
The best version of the soulknife is Pathfinder's Psychic Armory because it's all about forming swords with your mind and shooting them at people.

I am extremely easily pleased.

NGDBSS
Dec 30, 2009






Leraika posted:

The best version of the soulknife is Pathfinder's Psychic Armory because it's all about forming swords with your mind and shooting them at people.

I am extremely easily pleased.
Strictly speaking that's not Paizo, but 3rd-party material from Dreamscarred Press. By all accounts DSP actually knows what they're doing with d20 design, as opposed to Paizo's line of Reinvent the Wheel One Hundred Times sourcebooks. In fact they're old enough to predate Pathfinder itself; their soulknife material was first published as part of a 3.5 product called Untapped Potential in 2007.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 4, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!


Rifts World Book 20: Canada, Part 9 - "Travelers not paying attention can ride through the Veil and into another dimension without realizing it until hours later; probably when it is too late to turn back."

"Hey, everything is grey and the sky is red. You think we made a wrong turn at Bristcho Lake?" "Hmmm. I dunno. Let's just keep going."


No, I don't know either.

British Columbia

So, this is a mysterious region on account of the fact that the Rocky Mountains are full of demons, and also on account of the fact that the author forgets this is a setting with hoverbikes that can fly over mountains. Well, nobody's perfect. We get a laundry list of all the stuff they used to mine here and energy they used to produce (they don't anymore, so who cares?), but now it's mostly bears and birds.

Vancouver Island, aka Fog Island, aka Misty Isle, is now covered in a spooky supernatural mist where people have seen g-g-ghosts and eerie sounds, but nobody who's tried to investigate has ever returned. Not even on a hoverbike. Also, there's monsters in the water around here. Nonetheless, people fish here. This apparent conflict is never clarified.

So, once or twice a year, the Aurora Borealis Shifting Veil Wall appears across a network of ley lines, though the actual location changes, and it transports those who travel through it to other worlds. It usually only lasts an hour or so, and apparently it's easy to travel across (even though it's giant obvious magic wall) and not notice you've traveled through it (even though about 85% of the settings it leads you to would be completely obvious). Settings it can randomly take you to include a Splugorth Slave World (see Rifts World Book 2: Atlantis), a parallel Canada ruled by demons* with a Inuit/Sasquatch underclass, Seeron (I almost forgot the name of the world from Rifts Dimension Book 4: Skraypers), The Nightlands (from the Nightbane RPG), Wormwood (from Rifts Dimension Book 1: Wormwood), The Realm of the Four Horsemen (see Rifts World Book 4: Africa), or the Palladium Fantasy World (see Palladium Fantasy). What if you roll up a book you don't own? Get to buyin', Palladium zombie!

For the demons in demon Canada, it says "...use any race from any of the Rifts World or Soucebooks or other Palladium RPGs or sourcebooks like Aliens Unlimited™, Skraypers™, Palladium Fantasy RPG®, The Rifter™ sourcebook series and so on; heck, maybe even a non-Palladium RPG." Yes, they just gave you carte blanche to use non-Palladium material. Go wild, I guess! You can now say... "suddenly, a Darth Maul approaches!" There's also a moment where they describe Wormwood as "A more hellish place is unimaginable.", and then immediately go to describe the Darkest-er Africa that is apparently the Four Horsemen's homeworld (seriously, it's just Evil Stereotype Deepest Darkenest Africa, filled with witches and cannibals) which is clearly, unambiguously worse.

Also instead of Palladium Fantasy you could end up on the Earth from Systems Failure, which would be a hilarious mismatch because that's a setting without mega-damage... but also with alien bugs that can possess your Glitter Boy, maybe?


It's interesting to see centaurs dominate an area bigger than any single Coalition State.

The Centaurs and Cyber-Horsemen of Ixion

So, we don't have many people in British Columbia, but there are centaurs, the stats for which are largely reprinted from Rifts Conversion Book. They apparently are loosely allied with the Simvan Monster Riders (if you're curious, there's no sign that the Monster Riders ride Centaurs), and now use vibro-blades and "partial M.D.C. armor" we have no details for. They're generic noble savages (they can even take Native American shamanistic classes, so you know it's true), in touch with nature but who distrust most "two-legs". Stat-wise, they're a bit dim mentally, but have horsey speed and horsey strength. For some reason they get a natural 60% prowl, so they're very sneaky 10' tall half-ton horse people. Largely, they're generic wilderness dudes with a built-in horse. They can take wilderness classes, back-to-nature mystic classes, and a few combat classes including Tundra Rangers. But we've had more than enough generic wilderness dudes and generic horse dudes.


Man, the X-Men books are doing really weird stuff with Cyclops.

The Cyber-Horsemen of Ixion, though, are more interesting, coming from a technologically advanced city of centaurs (Ixion) that was randomly sucked through a vortex to Earth. Or, as they say on Rifts Earth, "a tuesday". We're reassured that even though their tech level is sophisticated bionically, they're "several degrees less than the Coalition's". Most of them who become cyborgs are males who have already raised a family and apparently don't need their dicks anymore, but women are less likely to because it's a necessity for them to pop out babies the natural way, and apparently bionics restrict that. Unlike other centaurs, they met some cyber-knights when traveling across the mountains, and became cyber-bros. Also, they like the Tundra Rangers, because everybody likes Winter Camouflage Storm Shadow.


Not your conventional RPG rear end shot.

For some reason, they're much smarter, stronger-willed, and ridiculously more charismatic than normal centaurs. Maybe having better schooling and shiny metal asses does it?... well, okay, it doesn't make a ton of sense. They're generally cool and chill folks that can resist psionic probes (an unexplained conceit to make Ixion harder to find), and are largely reprinted from Rifts Conversion Book with their cyber-parts. They get some absolutely garbage energy weapons (the only thing good about them is that they self-recharge), and a "Sensory Deprivation Web" that is a net that somehow distorts one's senses, and gives persistent and solid penalties with no save... that last for nearly a minute on average even after removing the net. As usual, debuffs are farcically strong in combat.

Still, chill cyborg centaurs are taurrific, unlike au naturale racist centaurs, who are taurible.



Next: The Quintessential Cable.

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry

FMguru posted:

IIRC they were a set of rules someone sent to Gary in the early days of OD&D and Gygax liked them enough to put them in one of the supplements as an optional rule system (quasi-scientific psychic/psionic powers and energy were a big feature of a lot of 1960s and 1970s SF and fantasy).

AD&D 1E adopted the same policy (an optional rule add-on in the back of the PHB)

BX/BECMI did away with them entirely

AD&D 2E gave them their own supplement (Complete Psionicists Handbook) and made them their own character class (Psionicist - before 2E, there were additional powers that your otherwise ordinary fighter or thief has a sub-1% chance of having) and they got their own setting in which they were emphasized (Dark Sun).

3E/3.5E/4E have been mentioned above.

They pretty much came from outside of Gygax's vision and design for D&D, and they've always had a hard time being integrated with the core rules.

Yeah. Psionics first appeared in Eldritch Wizardry (The third expansion for ODD) along with Druids and demons...

megane
Jun 20, 2008



FATAL & Friends 2019: Cyber Horse Weakness for Dummies

Zereth
Jul 8, 2003



megane posted:

FATAL & Friends 2019: Cyber Horse Weakness for Dummies
:hmmyes:

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Alien Rope Burn posted:


Not your conventional RPG rear end shot.

Aw! Daily Life With Post-Apocalyptic Monster Girls!

I know that the Cyber-Horsemen of Ixion have been mentioned for ages, have we ever gotten stats for them before?

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Urban Jungle

Le chat noir

A fair warning before I begin: I only picked this game up recently and have not yet had a chance to run a campaign in it, so my analysis of mechanics and concepts will be based on A: What came before, since this is still fairly close to IC2e and Myriad Song and B: My first impressions of the new material and changes made to the system.

Urban Jungle is the latest of Sanguine's Cardinal games, and many of the systems you're about to see will obviously be familiar from Myriad Song. Some of the systems that have been altered have changed to fit the setting: This is a purely mundane (until the expansion book, which I don't yet possess) noir crime drama setting, set in a lightly (extremely lightly, to the point that I don't know why they bothered) fictionalized 1920s-1940s US. The primary point of fictionalization being, of course, that the United States is not primarily occupied by humanimals. I actually think this is the first game Sanguine's made where the animal people serve no real purpose. They're pretty much gratuitous this time, though they do provide gameplay variation. Urban Jungle introduces a new Trait that everyone has, your Type, that could have easily replaced Species if they'd wanted to make a human-focused game. But it doesn't especially detract from the story that it's foxes and cats (Lackadaisy is fantastic anyway, go read Lackadaisy) and rum-running gorillas.

Now, another important mechanical difference right off the bat in PC creation: The addition of Type (which is effectively exactly the same kind of thing as Species and Career) has effectively removed the Skill Mark system and the 3 Free Gifts. I'm guessing the logic here goes across several points. First, Skill Marks were your only source of unlimited advancement in dice from IC2e and on. PCs have not been able to raise Traits past d12 since IC1e, the only game in the line where they could do that. Thus, by removing the Skill Mark system and making things Trait only, you can more easily control the number of dice players roll. Second, as it is, Skill Marks were less overall EXP efficient than raising a Trait die anyway; you'd effectively get a skill raise to 3 skills, 12 EXP worth of Skill Marks, by raising a Trait with a 10 point Gift. Third, there's a consistent desire to prevent 'minmaxing' by controlling PC development that's evident through most of the Sanguine systems. Given how consistently this seems to be a design goal, I'd hazard the guess that this is something Jason Holmgren (the lead designer of the Cardinal system since IC1e) encountered a lot of trouble with in his own home games. The old Skill Marks system is included in the back as a variant rule anyway if you want to use it.

One of the nice things about writing up systems made by a process of iterative design is that I don't have to repeat myself for dozens of pages. In general, the meat of the system works the same way as IC2e/Myriad Song. You still take Rote how you used to, you still often roll vs. 3, penalties are still bonus dice for your opponent, the dice mechanics work exactly the same, etc etc. The biggest changes are to character creation (introducing Type), a redesigning and streamlining of Gifts, and the addition of a totally overhauled damage system, called Soaks. I also suspect the attempt to cut down on player dice has something to do with the prominence of Rote and Rule of 4 rolling post Myriad Song; one thing you'll note as we get into the system is there are fewer ways to gain a lot of bonus dice consistently, too. For instance, Outfits are now just 'do you fit in' and have nothing to do with providing armor nor do they provide a bunch of 'gear bonus' d8s. There's also another new standardized mechanic: The Dwindle Die. Dwindle Dice represent a situation where you're slowly losing an edge that you've got, so every time that die comes up a 1, it decreases in size until it dwindles away to nothing after rolling a 1 on d4. The main uses for this are temporary NPC opinions (good and bad) where you slowly wear out someone's good will (or get off their bad side) over time. It's also the new ammunition system in place of the old Capacity system from Myriad Song; most guns have a d4 Ammo die and when you hit a 1, you're dry and need to reload.

The other really important change is Soaks. You get Soaks for your Type. See, when you get shot, if you take ANY un-soaked damage, you drop. You're not necessarily dead, or even dying, but you're definitely out of the fight. You still roll your Body vs. 3 to reduce a point of damage, and if you have the Endurance skill from your Type or Career or Species, any Endurance dice also get rolled vs. 3 to lower damage. But what happens when you take a 5 damage shotgun hit and you've only got your Body die? You go to your Soaks. These tell you what they are, how much damage they stop, and what happens to you in return for claiming them. For instance, the Angel (the good-hearted, innocent, peaceful Type) gets Distress Soak-4. That means when somebody tries to kill you, you can tap that to stop up 4 damage instantly (if you only had 1 unstopped damage, you still use up the whole Soak. 'Wasting' 3 points is better than getting gut-shot, right?). The Distress effect is actually a positive effect, too! Your allies see their good buddy is in trouble and have a surge of courage to try to help you, Rallying with 1 success immediately. This opens up a really interesting design space for damage that wasn't present in the original damage system, where you can accept debuffs (everyone can get Panicked to reduce damage by 2, for instance, and you can buy abilities like getting your gun shot out of your hand to reduce damage by lots, etc) or even give buffs to allies in return for not dropping. It looks like it will make saving vs. going down a lot less random. In return, there's no more 'deathblow resistance' Gifts; if you drop, you drop.

Soaks recharge at variable rates; some of them are much harder to 'ready' again. I'll go into them in more detail when we get to Gifts, because they're interesting enough and there are few enough that I think I can cover them all to give an idea of how the new HP system works. The old damage system was one of the weaker parts of the system, and I'm quite excited to see how the new Soak system works in play some time.

As it is, though, if you've read the MS writeup, you almost know how to play Urban Jungle already. I'll also mention the writing is done in a much more 'in-character' style, though it doesn't particularly detract from the clarity of the rules and organization. There's a lot more color commentary and there isn't as clear a line drawn between the fluff and the rules as there was in Myriad Song. On one hand, it makes the book a bit less dry, on the other you've got to be careful with that kind of stuff; for the most part it manages.

Also, of course, this being Noir, the whole book is in black and white.

Next Time: The Species of the Urban Jungle

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Night10194 posted:

The whole 'psionics are sci-fi and not fantasy!' thing has always been one of the dumber aspects of psionics as a fantasy/sci-fi element. "We have this thing that is functionally magic, but you concentrate really hard instead of saying a bunch of nonsense, so it's totally different."
Honestly, I've never liked psionics in D&D for pretty much this reason. It doesn't fit high fantasy, and at the end of the day it's just "magic, but with a slightly different mechanic".

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Emerald Empire: Rice Balls

Samurai in the cities eat well - vegetables, meat, fish and lots of rice. White rice is everywhere. Served in a bowl, used for sushi and rice balls, brewed into sake, and made into the rice vinegar used with nearly every meal. Brown rice is sometimes eaten or used for mochi, rice cakes or aromatic rice (a food brought in by the Unicorn) regionally, white is by far more common in nearly any samurai meal. Peasants get less variation, mostly eating barley, or millet for the poor ones. Merchants and other wealthy peasants of the city might eat rice often, however, and even get meat or fish sometimes. After rice, but not far after, are noodles of buckwheat or wheat flour, or sometimes yams. Seafood and especially fish is also common anywhere near the coast, as well as anywhere inland that can get ahold of river and lake fish. Poultry - mainly chicken, pheasant and more rarely turkey - is widely used for meat and eggs. Soybeans make up the rest of the proteins most Rokugani eat, as they can grow nearly anywhere. Most soybeans are turned into tofu, but it's also used for soy sauce and miso paste. Besides fish, seafood includes fresh and dried seaweed, and the common vegetables of the Empire are cabbage, kale, yams, burdock, carrots, radishes and onions. Plums, apricots, pears, cherries and apples are common fruits.

Red meat is held to be unclean, and most samurai refuse to eat it, especially along the coast. Most Unicorn ignore this rule, however, and the Crab can't usually afford to be picky about food. Besides, their view is usually that the unclean can just be purified later if it's more practical. The Dragon have been known to insist that the smoked and cured meats they eat as a delicacy is not, in fact, goat, but "mountain tuna." Individual samurai may well eat red meat by preference or circumstance, and the social results of this may range from mild disgust to loss of standing, depending on what company they eat in. Everything but soup is eaten with chopsticks or hands, and literally everyone has their own pair of chopsticks. While they're normally made of simple bamboo, the wealthy prefer those made of rare or aromatic wood, ivory or even jade. Spoons are used for soup and stew, though more often the solid parts are eaten with chopsticks and then the broth is drunk from the bowl. Knives are used in the kitchen to make food, but never at the table. There aren't any banquet halls - you eat wherever suits you, except for the kitchen. You never eat in the kitchen. Snacks on the street are usually sold on wooden skewers.

The most popular drink in the Empire is tea, called cha, and serving tea is basic hospitality. Just behind it, however, is sake, and sake has nearly as many rituals around it. It is often served in sake houses, a specialty form of bar. Sake is made from fermented rice and has been popular since well before the Empire even existed. It is usually served hot, but the best sake is chilled. You can also get the harsher and stronger shochu, made from sweet potatoes, barley or rice, but this is favored only by heavy drinkers, especially among the Mantis. Others often look down on shochu-drinkers. Other drinks are popular regionally. The Crane love umeshu, a form of plum wine, and the Unicorn like airag, made from fermented mare's milk, though no one else does.

Definitions! A city is generally defined as any single settlement of over ten thousand people, though not always. Legally, a city must have an appointed governor, and it isn't unknown for a town to have over ten thousand inhabitants but no governor, possibly due to a lack of strategic or economic import, political maneuvers or just bureaucratic inefficiency. Cities are the pinnacle of Rokugani society in most ways, with peasant farmers, miners and other rural laborers forming the lowest socioeconomic strata but the largest, providing the resources everyone else needs. These then head to various villages, where more resources are gathered and sent into regional hubs in local towns, and from there, to cities. At each step, the goods are refined and manufactured further, and taxes are collected.

The biggest factor in deciding where a city's going to grow is geography. Cities tend to be built on flat, accessible land with good drainage, especially if it's a defensible location, such as near a river, forest or mountain. Others grow up around castles or major trade routes. Roads and trade routes are a big deal, especially for cities not near farmland. Mountain passes and natural harbors also attract cities, such as Ryoko Owari Toshi, bult in the gap between the Spine of the World range and the Shinomen Forest. There are also cultural considerations; Rokugan is very much concerned with the supernatural, and this plays a major role in city siting, most obviously in Otosan Uchi, built around the Seppun Hill where the Kami fell to earth. (It is also in a natural harbor, but that's of lesser concern.)

Urban planning is not really a thing. Most cities grow outwards from a central core, usually a defensive structure of some kind such as a castle, where the local governor lives. This will usually form the core of the central, 'noble' district, which will then be surrounded by others. There will almost always be a temple district of holy sites and shrines as well as homes for the priests and shrine keepers. There will be one or more samurai districts, where lower-rank samurai live and are serviced by various sake houses, noodle shops, tailors and so on. There will be an entertainment district, with theaters, geisha houses and inns for wealthy travelers, as well as schools and workshops to support these places. There will be a merchant district, where trade is done and warehouses are stored. There will always be at least one commoner district to house the heimin, and indeed these are usually the largest part of a city. Hinin live in either their own district or a village outside the city. Depending on a city's wealth, walls may separate the districts. A city on a river or harbor will also have dock, harbor or fishing districts. As a city grows, while the original core usually remains orderly, the outer edges become full of alleys, winding roads, and narrow streets, especially in commoner areas.

Because most buildings are paper and wood, fire is one of the biggest dangers of the city. The best way to fight it is with a disciplined fire squad armed with sand buckets and a keen knowledge of the location of wells and water pumps, and the ability to demolish buildings to stop a fire from spreading. Most cities delegate this task to minor officials paid a small stipend to maintain a gang of heimin firefighters. In cities with lax order, firefighting gangs inevitably become involved in crime, gambling and prostitution. They are especially fond of protection rackets, requiring bribes to avoid violence at the hands of the firefighters or even arson while the firefighters stand around doing nothing. However, firefighter gangs also rarely allow anyone to encroach on their territory, so they are safe from other crime. Samurai are usually free to ignore all this, as firefighters aren't idiots. (Indeed, most are unlikely to believe the firefighter gangs do crime at all unless shown proof.)

Most city governors are appointed by a clan champion or local family daimyo. A governor is similar to a daimyo, but their jurisdiction only covers the city and its immediate area, running the city court and bureaucracy. The city court oversees public works, road maintenance, data collection on the city population and justice, which is specifically overseen by an appointed chief magistrate reporting to the governor. The magistrates manage taxes, law and the enforcing of gubernatorial mandates. In truly large cities, like Otosan Uchi, individual districts may have governors. The Imperial Court assigns Otosan Uchi's districts to senior samurai that report to a central council which reports to the Court.

Crime ranges from petty to sophisticated, and in big cities, bigger crime happens. Large syndicates exist, such as the opium cartels of Ryoko Owari, as they can hide easier in the bustle of the city. Ryoko Owari's firefighters are also infamously powerful street gangs, even if they also do genuinely fight fires. Most cities also have shockingly organized beggars' societies, coordinated groups of vagrants and urchins that practice petty crime and pool their take to benefit all members. Some cities are also home to blasphemous cults, but they usually prefer the anonymity of more rural areas. Plus, of course, there's the vast amounts of unorganized criminals - pickpockets, extortionists, blackmailers and so on. The magistrates work hard to prevent rampant criminality, but humans are human. Many magistrates actually maintain contacts throughout their city's criminal element and will often overlook minor crimes in order to better monitor and prevent large ones.

Next time: Townies

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Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

A nice touch from earlier editions was Scorpion really love spicy foods. Diced up ghost pepper level stuff. They serve it to those who've taken the Scorpion's hospitality (that they also want to troll) and sick back and smirk as the person gets their tongue burned off. What're they gonna do? Complain?

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