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Halloween Jack posted:CP2020's classes seem like they would be a good fit for some of the rules-lite, narrative cyberpunk games I've seen come out in the past few years--done in a style where the characters are rarely or never "on a run" together, and a system that doesn't keep track of things like combat rounds.The PCs are some kind of power clique, so the Media and Rockerboy are doing propaganda ops, the Cop and Nomad are making the right grassroots connections and digging up information, the Corporate and Fixer are getting the team the poo poo they need, and only the Netrunner and Solo are actually infiltrating places and killing people. poo poo, you could do it in John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors.
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Feb 6, 2017 17:37
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Kurieg posted:So.... Ghost in the Shell? Exactly what I was thinking, yes. The profound damage to most of those characters' senses of self from their cybernetic bodies is much more interesting to explore in their interactions and how it drives their politics and what they try to do, rather than by just having some meter that drives them crazy as they get more cyberized. Also, Tachikomas would improve everything.
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Feb 6, 2017 17:41
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Tachikomas are basically Remedial Science Fiction for people who didn't actually pay attention to Star Wars. I'm saying that's a good thing.
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Feb 6, 2017 18:07
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Night10194 posted:It feels like rather than balancing out the fact that cybernetics give meaningful gameplay advantages a game would be better off assuming the protagonists have a baseline of powerful cybernetics or fully prosthetic bodies, balancing the various specialties they could have with their hardware against one another, and then leaving the explorations of the deep disconnect between sense of self and artificial body, the commodification of an agent's actual physical form, and other cyberpunk themes to the plot rather than directly enforcing them with soul-loss. Honest-to-god, I would play the heck out of a game where physical and energy limitations would require one to work with tech like GitSSAC did. Heck, make it something FATE-y and you´ve gone most of the way you need. Throw in a little bit of PDQ or something equally screwed and call it...I don´t now Shadowrun CHAOS Edition. Would buy that in a heartbeat.....ohhhhhhh
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Feb 6, 2017 18:11
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unseenlibrarian posted:There were two separate therapy rules, too, IIRC- the one for the full borgs, and then one introduced in the Euro sourcebook trivialized it even more: Roll the humanity loss from the original implant again, subtract new value from old and your new value is the difference. (Which could lead to 0 loss.) If I understand this correctly... you roll, say, 1d10 for humanity loss, then you roll 1d10 for therapy, giving you a total of 1d10-1d10 humantity loss? That doesn't just have a chance of leading to 0 loss, it averages 0 loss!
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Feb 6, 2017 18:23
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Night10194 posted:Exactly what I was thinking, yes. The profound damage to most of those characters' senses of self from their cybernetic bodies is much more interesting to explore in their interactions and how it drives their politics and what they try to do, rather than by just having some meter that drives them crazy as they get more cyberized. Yeah, the entire point of cyborging shouldn't be "Oh you only have X amount of soul points" it should be actual physical limitations. You only have so much room before you start running out of body, and obvious augmentations give you social stigma. And then there's the episode where Togusa gets put on trial for putting down a cyborg'd criminal who turned off his pain centers so that he literally couldn't be stopped.
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Feb 6, 2017 18:27
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I mean the sense I always got was Motoko Kusanagi was a fundamentally weak character in the sense that she had no real sense of who she was or what she wanted in the world. This cyborg with incredible power and training, easily influenced by any strong personality she encounters because of her deep alienation from having literally grown up without a body? That's a really cool character! I would play that character in a heartbeat. Similarly, I always liked season 1 because the big threat in the end wasn't any attempt to end the world or anything like that. It was just regular political and corporate corruption trying to hide its tracks and equipped with the tremendous power of a cyberpunk security state to throw at it.
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Feb 6, 2017 18:35
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In Shadowrun's case, this is another point where I found the fan community was more than willing to step in, make up a bunch of poo poo unsupported by the text of the actual game, then smugly proclaim their fanfiction the One True Way. That is to say, essays and fanfiction about the many problems caused by cyberware and bioware. Even when this fanfiction was supported by flavour text, it rarely had any mechanical backing.
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Feb 6, 2017 18:44
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Night10194 posted:Similarly, I always liked season 1 because the big threat in the end wasn't any attempt to end the world or anything like that. It was just regular political and corporate corruption trying to hide its tracks and equipped with the tremendous power of a cyberpunk security state to throw at it. Season 2 wasn't so much that she was a weak character, as much as it was that Kuze was the only guy with a link to her former life. The shock of that realization threw her for a loop that left her out of sorts for several episodes while she tried to reconcile "The Major" with a 8 year old girl. Solid State Society was basically a tantamount admission that she's realized she's too powerful to not be working for the government because when she went off to work on her own she subconsciously created a country-spanning child abduction ring so she could swoop in and be the hero.
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Feb 6, 2017 18:47
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Night10194 posted:It feels like rather than balancing out the fact that cybernetics give meaningful gameplay advantages a game would be better off assuming the protagonists have a baseline of powerful cybernetics or fully prosthetic bodies, balancing the various specialties they could have with their hardware against one another, and then leaving the explorations of the deep disconnect between sense of self and artificial body, the commodification of an agent's actual physical form, and other cyberpunk themes to the plot rather than directly enforcing them with soul-loss. Or, basically Eclipse Phase. The folks that made Eclipse Phase are basically ShadowRun expats anyhow. There's an explicit mechanical divide between your *self* (ego) and your *body* (morph). And you can change between bodies at will, assuming you have the cash/favors enough to do so. I've often though of Eclipse Phase as being the hundred-years-in-the-future to Cyberpunk's five-minutes-in-the-future
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Feb 6, 2017 18:49
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Night10194 posted:It feels like rather than balancing out the fact that cybernetics give meaningful gameplay advantages a game would be better off assuming the protagonists have a baseline of powerful cybernetics or fully prosthetic bodies, balancing the various specialties they could have with their hardware against one another, and then leaving the explorations of the deep disconnect between sense of self and artificial body, the commodification of an agent's actual physical form, and other cyberpunk themes to the plot rather than directly enforcing them with soul-loss. The game I'm currently working on is heading in this direction - you start out digital, a disembodied brain scan whose original is dead or otherwise out of the picture. Your choice of drone body is a big part of character creation, and its loadout is a question of power, space and cost. The game's more set up for Expanse-style space drama, but there's definitely room for cyberpunk raging against the corporate machine.
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Feb 6, 2017 18:50
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 16f: The myriad gifts of Lanala The next chapter is the list of miracles available to followers of Lanala, and as you can imagine there's quite a few of them. The book goes into a little detail about how the Jakatts operate and what their role is in edeinos society, but really it's nothing we haven't covered already. Oh, by the way, I should point out that here on page 72 of 130 is where the term "Saar" is finally defined: it just means "chief above all chiefs". I mean, I pretty much got that through context, but they still should have defined that much earlier. It's worth pointing out, though, that the title of "Saar" didn't exist until Kaah became High Lord and made it up for himself. Unlike a lot of other miracles, the ones listed in this book are only available to followers of Keta Kalles. But before I start listing them out in order, I'm going to call out one particular miracle because it's pretty important.  People have asked before how edeinos use weapons if they can't use dead things. Well, this is how. Hrockt shoots are stiff tree-ish plants that grow to about three feet tall and tend to be a few inches thick. When this miracle is cast on one (usual as part of a ritual rather than on the fly), then the shoot can be uprooted, used as a spear, and then replanted without the plant dying. Once it's replanted, the hrockt shoot will take root once again and continue growing. So as always, let's hit the highlights. Animal rage is a ritual that involves finding and enraging an animal. Once you've done that, you touch it and draw the animal's rage into yourself for up to 24 hours. You can then use the "charge" to give yourself a combat boost. You also get +3 to be hit and +3 "to be damaged" (which I guess means +3 to damage results?) due to being berzerk. Blossom Spears is mostly the same as simple spear except it causes the hrockt shoot to grow thorns. The thorns will infict an extra wound of damage on the spear's first hit as the thorns break off and stick in the enemy, although if the person wielding the spear makes a medicine roll they can pull the spear out without losing the thorns. Earth's Ear lets the Jakatt prepare a circle of land three meters across so that he will recieve a warning when an enemy passes within a certain distance (based on the success of the roll) around the three meter circle. This is done by having all the leaves, flowers, and plants in the circle listen for intruders, then crying out to warn the Jakatt. Make Stelae does what it says on the label, but is only used by gotaks since it involves the ritual mutilation and preparation of corpses. Said corpses need to be ritually sacrificed, and the gotaks tend to use captured Core Earthers for this. Reverse Emotions also does what it says. It doesn't create emotion (you can't make someone calm feel jealousy), but it could turn love to hate. The downside is that the caster has no control over what the target does after the miracle takes effect. quote:An enraged man about to kill an edeinos who is successfully influenced by reverse emotion might let the lizard go out of happiness, or enjoy killing the lizard. Only the emotions are influenced, not the actions. Sensory Explosion is either a blessing or a curse, depending on who's on the recieving end. For Jakatts, it's a way to take in all the sensations of their surroundings as part of a meditation on Lanala. For people who didn't expect it, though, it's a bit rough to have all your senses turned up to 11: the miricle inflicts up to a -5 penaluty to all actions for the duration of the miracle. There are also individiual miracles for increasing each one of the senses, as well as boosting the three physical stats.  "Hey, that thing doesn't have a stat block!" And now that that's out of the way, let's start talking about the Folk and Creatures of the Living Land. The Living Land is populated with a very...biodiverse range of beings. There are other intelligent races that Kaah has conquered and converted to Keta Kalles, and there's all the weird-rear end beasts from multiple worlds now occupying the jungles. The whole place is pretty much a kaiju-palooza, and it would have been nice if the book had some more pictured of these things. Anywho, let's get to it. I'm listing all of them because they're a pretty eclectic bunch. Plus the names are all funny. Unfortunately, this is just going to be a big ol' list of names, because with like three exceptions none of these creatures have any illustrations. Which is something you kinda need when you're introducing 20+ new critters. Abentallos are 10-meter long giant-rear end snakes with meter-wide mouths. They tend to lay in wait under the foliage in the barer parts of the Living Land because they have a hard time getting around trees. Baragons are basically reptilian bears, over 20 feet tall with giant claws and thick scaly hides. They feed on dinosaurs, which they are more than capable of taking down so yikes. Sadly, they cannot shoot beams of fire out of their mouths. Bedotoks are a sphere-shaped unintelligent creature from the stalenger's homeworld. They're basically glowing, floating bags of gas, unable to move under their own power. Only really notable because their natural defense against predators is to expel a cloud of poison gas. Benthe are small, amoeba-like beings that feed off of, and can manipulate, pheremones. They're also intelligent, and are ardent followers of Keta Kalles. This means that they have Jakatts, and are capabale of performing miracles. On top of that, they can also sense emotions and generate pheremones to manipulate enemies. The main use for Benthe by the edeinos is to control the beasts of the Living Land. Bentre reproduce via mitosis. quote:Because of this natural ability, if a benthe is attacked and damaged, for each level of wound received after the first wound, a new benthe is formed. The new benthe divide the damage received among their siblings. For example, if a benthe were hit for two wounds in a single round, it would become two benthe and each of these would only suffer one wound each. If a benthe suffers enough damage to kill it in a single round, then itdies and no new benthe are formed. Each new benthe formed by violent separation receive the original's attribute and skill points at -2. A benthe cannot divide below Toughness 0. So, a benthe with faith 14 would form two benthe, each with faith 12.  I don't think you're really thinking that through there, Rust. Bonthkra are the oil slick from that one Creepshow segment with the lake. Borr Akas are some of the largest creatues in the Living Land. They're up to 85 meters tall, 150 meters long, with a long neck and back spikes. Borr Akas can and will flatten large swaths of the jungle while hunting for prey, and the edeinos tend to use them as siege weapons. It has a Toughness of 43 (higher than an M1 Abarams) and its bite is damage value is 42 (higher than a direct hit by a torpedo). They're not fast by any means, but when you're that tough and that pwoerful you don't really have to be. Carnols are 15 meter-long dinos with spiked tails. Not as tough as Borr Akas, but a lot faster. Crosktreckts are small carrion-feeding lizards that travel in packs. Since things rot so quickly in the Living Land, they're always on the prowl for food. They're attracted by the sounds of fighting, and will often wait out a battle to feed off the losers. They'll only attack living creatues if they're desprate for food. Ecrusts are an indirect danger. These lizards are barely a foot long, and feed off insects. What makes them dangerous is that a) they have poison spines on their backs, and b) they're very easy to not notice, and therefore step on. If someone does so, then the lizard makes an "attack" against the target's Toughness, and if that hits then the spikes penetrated the skin. If the target takes a wound, then they have eight rounds to do something (or must make a pretty hard Toughness roll) to neutralize the poison of they're dead. Oh hey, gospog! Remember those? Kaah's been introducing gospog very slowly to edeinos culture (since they're grown in fields full of corpses). As it is, he never grows them back in Takta Ker, instead having all the operations in worlds he's conqured. This has kept the Jakatt's objections to a (relative) minimum, although ever since the Core Earth invasion there's been a much surge in the Jakatts pushing back against these mockeries of life and has been causing some of the edeinos tribes to turn their backs on Kaah. Second-planting gospog are 10-foot tall four-armed humanoid lizards; they also very closely resemble edeinos, which is another reason the Jakatts hate them. Third-planting gospog are person-sized beetles that can stand on their hind legs and use weapons (like guns). Gospog of the fourth planting are three meter tall insectoids with coarse wings and powerful mandibles. The fifth planting gospog... quote:The horrendous gospog of the Fifth Planting has the body of a giant, bloated fly topped with three huge heads - all of which are reptilian in nature. Each head's mouth is filled with a sea of sharp teeth and has a long tongue capable of shooting out and catching preyup to 10meters away. The gospog are eight meterstall, far larger than the other gospog, and in every respect much more dangerous.  On top of being disgusting, they get three attacks per round via claws, teeth, tongue, and wings.Grotuks are herbivores, but they're also 20 feet tall at the shoulder with antlers and three tentacles growing from their snouts, so they're capable of doing some damage when enraged. Herres are snakes with eight clawed legs that likes to attack prey by waiting in trees and dropping onto whoever's unlucky to wander beneath them. Itoons are human-sized T-rex like creatures that are solitary hunters, whose primary weapon is the large horn on the end of its snout. Because their little T-rex arms are useless in a fight, they keep them tucked behind their necks. Jaadds are from the same world as the benthe, and like the benthe they live off people's emotions. Specifically: fear. Jaadds look like weeping willow trees, but are capable of moving via four feet hidden at the base of the "body" under a mass of tentacles. They prefer to attack sleeping victims, using their pheremones to instill nightmares in their prey.  Oh, hey, an actual picture of something! This is a fifth-planting gospog. Jeskowntas is a feathered lizard with useless wings that lives in the plains. They're kind of like Jurassic Park raptors, only with sharp beaks. Karkatas are tiny flying insects who like to lay their eggs in living hosts. Nests of karkatas enter breeding frenzies every three weeks or so, and each individual insect can lay anywhere from 20 to 100 eggs. The eggs take an unknown time to hatch, but when they do they begin to feed on the host for the first week of their life, at which point they leave the host and return to the nest that spawned them. Removing the eggs requires a bunch of medicine rolls.  You're better off just saving your incindiary bolts for the nests, really. Kaylls are trees that feed off the rotted remains of anyone unfortunate enough to get close enough to get slashed by their thorny branches. Yes, in the Living Land even the trees are out to kill you. Koltras are yet another upright reptilian hunter. What makes these different is that a) they're nocturnal, and b) each of their arms has two elbows. Kylots are basically spiked triceratops with a big spiked club tail. Lakten are flying beasts with a four-meter wingspan that are often used by edeinos as flying mounts. On their own, they've been known to leave the Living Land to hunt for food (i.e., livestock or people) in Core Earth areas close to the stelae zones. Langatoks are also flying beasts used as mounts, only these things are actually giant winged scorpions because the Living Land hates you. Meksobats are giant butterflies. No, really. They have a two-meter wingspan and can spray poison. This poison is pretty much a save-or-die-in-five-rounds thing because that's always fun. Nosktret are graboids. That's kinda it. Pakottons are amphibious humanoid creatures who are basically Deep Ones or murlocs depending on your frame of reference. In a bit of design that preps for the Aysle sourcebook and spell creation, Pakottons are considered "creatures", not "folk", because they don't use tools or have a society, and "respond entirely to instinctual signals of fear and hunger." Portochks are five meter tall mobile swamp plants that feed on creatures that wander near them by basically falling on them. This is done via a contested Dexterity roll; if the portochk succeeds by 3 or more points, then the target is pinned and entangled in vines. Pinned targets can't do anything except try to free itself by making contestsed Strength rolls. Oh, and weapons are ineffectual (-3 to the weapon's damage value) against these things for no real defined reason.  I'm only including this to show how dull a Torg stat block is. Note that the creature's special rules aren't in the stat block; they're only in the description. Quarteks are small leeches that are also from the benthe's home cosm, and like all beings from that cosm they're capable of manipulating emotions. Quarteks don't drain blood; they drain your will to live. They do this by making a Charisma roll against the target's Spirit once an hour. The target gets a penalty to all actions equal to the value the leech succeeded by. The book states that the player shouldn't be told about the penalty in advance or why they're reciving a penalty, which I kinda get, but still feels like a dick move because I doubt players are going to think to check under their clothing to see what's going on. Oh, and the Jakatts consider quarteks to be a plague on the Living Land (for obvious reasons) but don't know how to deal with the problem yet. Restras are... quote:Restras are native to the stalenger homeworld. Thecreatures areabout a meter in diameter and a meter high. They are circular in shape and have four legs, each about half a meter high, and have four to eight arms, which radiate randomly from the body's surface. The skin of a restra is covered with a thick, yellow mucus that it secretes from various pores. Ropraj look like mounds of mud with tentacles around the base and a giant mouth on top. They are incapable of movement, but since their metabolism is ridiculously slow they only need to eat once a month or so.  So one of these, I guess? Rufkas are flying serpents, although not big enough to eat a skyscraper. They're only two meters long on average, and their preferred method of attack is strangulation. Shestike are GIANT spiders. Like, eight meters tall giant. Legs like tree trunks giant. I don't think I need to go into any more detail, really, because the book doesn't. Skroches are also spider-like, but are lizards. They do build webs, though, that require a Toughness roll of 10 or 12 to get out of. And again, that's all we get on these things. Stalengers were mentioned before; they're the most populous intelligent race in the Living Land after the edeinos. They're starfish-shaped creatures about two meters in diameter. They fly by means of what's essentially an organic air pump and the fact that their "arms" are aerodynamically shaped like an airplane's wing. They also have thin tentacles that allow them to perform fine manipulation. They can also change the color of their skin to hide in natural foliage.  A stalenger. All stalengers are converts to Keta Kalles, and those who do become Jakatts use their color-changing ability to create beautiful patterns on their skin to increase the beauty in the world. It should be noted that there are two stalenger character templates, but depite having natural camouflage, the ability to fly, and a long-range attack thanks to their tentacles, there's no special rules or penalties for playing one. Odd, that. Toradas are giant octopus things where you can fight each of the tentacles separately. Tornlen are carnivorous plants with a red-and-blue speckled pattern on their leaves. It attacks by spraying poison into the target's face, then using its strong arm-like vines to drag the creature into the acid pool at the plant's center. Tromblens are from the stalenger homeworld, but look like flying manta rays rather than starfish. They're also not intelligent, rather being pack hunting animals. They prefer to attack by swooping down from on high to take bites out of their prey, then flying back up out of range of a counterattack. Udatoks are large herbivores that "look much like the ancient triceratops of our world, but has only one large horn." The only notable thing about them is that Jakatts like to use them as the target of miracles that allow them to directly control animals. Ugresk are large winged serpents that actually are big enough to menace a skyscraper. They're basically dragons; 25 meters long, gree scales, wings, lays eggs. Voskats are large bettle-like insects with red coloration that mixes in well with a lot of the new plant life in the realm. There's really not much to them; they lay in wait for prey and attack in groups of 10 or more. --- And that's all of them. Sorry this was such a boring list of creatures, but they seemed to be more interested in quantity over quality. I mean, there are some interesting critters in there, but there's also a lot of "This is a dinosaur. This is also a dinosaur" in there as well. Not that a lot of the creatures matter because, once again, the majority of this stuff wouldn't see the light of day in the game line due to the Living Land being pretty much abandoned after this. On the plus side, we're chewing through the book pretty quickly? NEXT TIME: Exploring the lost world. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 19:11
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Warhammer Fantasy Night's Dark Masters Necharchs: The Tower Dwelling Nerds of Undeath The Necharchs were founded by W'Soran, who if you'll recall is the only person in all of Warhammer who actually likes Nagash and the only vampire who was genuinely loyal to him. After everything went downhill for Nagash and Nehekara, W'Soran ran off into the hills to try to think of how to get his master back, and how to perfect necromancy. Hiding out with his acolytes, he also began to experiment with his own condition, finding a way to supplement pure dark magic from the Winds for some of his required blood and enabling him to go years between feedings. The cost of this was that he became increasingly twisted and corpse-like, a condition that was passed on to his followers when he began to bite his aging acolytes to keep them around. Constantly drawing on dark magic also made them even more insane and unstable than most vampires, and in a fit of madness, W'Soran's favored apprentice Melkhior, rose up and devoured the original Necharch. Now, vampires feeding on other vampires isn't covered much and is something most of them are extremely loathe to talk about, but I get the sense from what happened here that it tends to drive them even madder. Seeing their master eaten, each of them looked to the others as possible killers and a fit of paranoid ranting ended with the Necharchs becoming very solitary creatures, each fleeing to their own desolate holes to build towers and study in silence. Necharchs would mostly remain isolated and unimportant for thousands of years, busily trying to best the sun in wizard's duels, studying how perversions of geometry could produce localized seas of UN-TIME, and whatever else insane dark wizards do in their towers all day. In 1750, near a millennia before the present day, a Necharch named Nourgal decided he was coming back onto the world stage because he greatly desired the wisdom of Myrmidia. To gain this, he declared war on all of Estalia and assailed it with an army of followers and endless tides of corpses, nearly overwhelming the not-spaniards. Eventually, he managed to capture the capitol city of Magritta, and found the defenders silent and the Grand Temple of Myrmidia wide open to him. As soon as he entered to claim the holy books and wisdom inside, the doors snapped shut behind him and later, his ashes were found next to the great Tome Of Wisdom in one of the few almost certain cases of direct divine intervention in Warhams. Estalia has hated vampires ever since. Necharchs don't just build their towers tall because they're impressive. As well as the Dark Wind, they also tend to have a strong affinity for the Blue, studying astrology and the movement of the spheres to divine fates and protents from them. As these prophecies are filtered through a bunch of isolated lunatic undead, Necharch prophecies are as eccentric as their masters. Necharchs are also unique in sharing Nagash's goals more than any other line. A Necharch searches for the cure for their thirst not for convenience, but because they tend to hope to one day exterminate all the living and replace it with a world of the dead (obviously under the control of whatever great master Necharch is telling you their master plan right now). They want to find ways to cut the need for mortals and for life entirely from the world, that all can finally be quiet and peaceful for these nuts. Necharchs also tend to enjoy natural philosophy, and happily recruit from ghouls, mutants, and other outcasts to gain experimental subjects and devoted lab assistants. Necharchs turn their apprentices, and almost exclusively their apprentices, and do it very carefully after long association to be sure their child won't betray them. Most Necharchs are then betrayed by their child. Their solitary nature and paranoid standards for breeding are a major reason there aren't very many Necharchs. While all vampires gain a wizard's Magical Sense to some degree, Necharchs have it come on strong; they cannot look away from the eddies and flows of the winds of magic to the extent that some completely lose touch with the real world. The various example Necharchs are mostly various flavors of villain for a party to fight: An insane monster that took over a cruel insane asylum and uses the torment of the mad to study how to bind and break souls. A crazed Bretonnian wizard who invaded the homeland of the high elves in a quest to steal their magic. That sort of thing. Three stand out, though. One for being pretty neat, one for being pretty annoying, and one for having eaten W'Soran. Melkhior the Ancient doesn't get much text because he is mostly dead for the moment. In an endless torpor and slowly recovering after he was defeated by his apprentice Zacharias, he had originally devoured his own master, W'Soran, and shortly began to take on his work of completing a great collection of all necromantic knowledge. Devouring his master did nothing for his sanity, and a major reason Zacharias was able to cast him down was simply that Melkhior was too unchained from reality to see it coming. I do not like Zacharias the Unliving. You remember back in the Blood Dragon write up, how none of them actually know if their quest is possible or if Abhorash is really cured of his thirst, and how it's the entire core of their bloodline that they seek it regardless? Zacharias was Melkhior's favored apprentice, until his master drove him out when he tried and failed to steal the Books of Nagash. He happened upon a sleepy dragon and just casually managed to eat it, curing his thirst forever and removing all his weaknesses. So much for that being a mystery, or a major achievement. You just have to get lucky and find one when it's tired. Now he's a generic evil lord for your PCs to fight but doesn't have any of the weaknesses you need to kill a Vampire Lord. They warn against making a character like this in the Vamp Creation section! I know they have to work with GW's fluff to some extent, but Zacharias is just lame. But Madame Kalfon isn't. Helloise Kalfon was a young Bretonnian girl who had obvious magical talent. Things would just happen when she had dreams that they would, dishes would clean and put themselves away in her presence, that sort of thing. In Bretonnia, children with such abilities are stolen away by the fae folk, never to return (this is a huge part of the Bret book, as is the terrible scar this leaves on the national psyche) and so her parents resolved to protect their daughter against all custom and law. They took her to the mountains, having heard stories of kindly hermits and wanderers who would protect children left there, and abandoned her. Luckily for Helloise, she was discovered by a band of peaceful mutants and outcasts, twisted people who had no desire to do what Chaos had tried to warp their bodies to do, and they took the poor, frightened child in to raise as their own. One day, the band happened across a Necharch's lair, and agreed to help him in the lab for shelter and food. The master sensed the obvious magical power in Helloise, and thinking her age would make her no threat to him, gave the twelve year old girl the Blood Kiss. And then, to try to teach her her place, made her watch as he further warped and then reanimated the kind folk who had saved her. It should not be a surprise that she killed her 'master' as soon as she was able. Over the years, despite the blows to her sanity and her tendency to play with living creatures like they were dolls to be studied and put back together, Kalfon has continued to shelter outcasts, tried to rescue children from the Fae Folk to study at her tower as apprentices, and spent a lot of time doing unspeakable things to Fae Folk of Athel Loren and their fairy spirit servants. She knows why she was originally abandoned, knows what they do, and hates them beyond anything else in the world. Kalfon is actually interesting; she's got a nice, tragic arc to her, a few twisted but positive aspects, and man I completely get being horrified by the forest of Loren and wanting endless revenge on it, that place is extremely hosed up (we'll get to that in Knights of the Grail). The Necharchs are fine for the most part, I just find them the most limited of the lines. They're mostly one-note and one-hat, serving as isolated antagonists plotting to use their dark wizardry to cleanse the world of life while doing insane experiments, but at least it's a note and a hat you can definitely use as villain for one of your story arcs. Next: Strigoi, The Justifiably Pissed Off Second Ugly Vamp Type. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Aug 4, 2017 |
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 Night Horrors: Conquering Heroes - Heroes:Part 2 The hero chapter is apparently as long as the other two chapters put together and I’ve been dealing with some family issues, so I’m going to be dialing down the fidelity a little bit so we can get to the really egregious poo poo rather than the just tonally inconsistent poo poo.  Dwight Whittaker: The Web Weaver You might think different, but you’ve been trapped ever since you blundered into my web. I caught you a year ago and we’ve been playing ever since. Time for the game to end. Yup, the same web weaver from Candy's Story. Dwight apparently propagates some myth about him being a half-arachnid monstrosity because he poisons people. It's completely untrue, they also believe that the web weaver has some kind of military background. Since he's an expert at rigging elaborate traps and orchestrating assassinations. And Dwight would have loved doing that in service of his country. But he's probably the first hero that was actually psychopathic before hearing the call. quote:He exhibited an unhealthy admiration for al-Qaeda and the Islamic State’s nuanced approach to bomb design and placement. The review board classified him as “suitable only for tactical planning, and never to be utilized as an active disposal specialist.” Anyways, Dwight decided this was bullshit and went AWOL after rigging his former commanding officer's Jeep to explode 3 weeks after his departure, ensuring the Terrorists were blamed. He fled to Brazil and assumed his current name while working security for logging companies and academic researchers. He studied alongside the research teams and became a lay expert on native toxins. He also fell in love with a Sao Paulo professor named Sam dos Santos Cruz. But then the research team camped on top of a Namtaru's lair. When a research team stopped to work it was his job to clear the forest floor and ensure the team's safety, searching for signs of indigenous peoples and dangerous creatures, "The one threat he was unprepared to face was one able to attack the dreams of its prey." One hot night while the rest of the science crew slept, "Only Whittaker remained awake. He stared into the flowing water and thought deeply of the professor." Then everyone started screaming cause they drank poisoned water and ate tainted food and oh look there's a Gorgon made entirely of millipedes, Dwight wasn't tripping balls so the Gorgon ran away, and then Dwight realized that he couldn't find Sam. He delved into the rainforest and recovered each one of the researchers but not a one knew what happened to Sam, Dwight spent days searching for him even after the scientists moved on, and eventually he camped out the site where the Namtaru attacked them and littered it with booby traps. Roughly eight IEDs and molotovs later the Namtaru disappeared into a nearby tree and was never seen again. And the book is burying the lead on this one but 1)Sam was a guy, meaning we have yet another Gay Hero 2) Sam was the Namtaru, he was gaslighting the research team into being a better meal and was planning on doing the same thing to Dwight but his hero powers protected him, though Dwight doesn't know any of this. This is the second Hero in a row who was awakened by his gay beast lover trying to emotionally manipulate them into a better meal. And yes, the book would like you to believe that Sam is the wronged party. Anyways, after that whole ordeal the rest of the science team thought he was just dehydrated and hallucinating, but Dwight couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. The team gave him a Science Without Borders scholarship and he went trekking across Australia and Central America. In Cote d'Ivoire his nightmares led him to a Beast that looked decidedly human, he only briefly weighed the possibilities that the Beast was undeserving of punishment before he remembered what happened to Sam(or what he believed happened to Sam) and hated that Beasts were able to best him. And, well... quote:Stalking the creature for a month, Whittaker discovered the humans the Beast was calling family, and decided to see whether the monster was capable of feeling loss. Dwight kidnapped a child from the Beast’s family home, and stashed him several miles away. He then began to send cruel, mocking letters to the address from which he snatched the boy. He described how the child had been administered a poison that within a week would cause a painful death. He left clues to the child’s location, taunting the Beast into acting without calm or control. Dwight reveled in his role as a nightmare, luring the Beast into his web. Anyways, Dwight returned to the US under his assumed name and has been roaming the country killing Beasts and marking them with his silver web mark. Description Dwight loves the web-weaver persona and has absolutely no illusions about not going out on his own terms. He always has either an explosive device or an instantly fatal poison pill on him at all times. He wants the Web Weaver to live on past his own death. quote:Dwight has a habit of grading others by their value as bait or competition, and prefers to do this at a safe distance. He’s developed a chart based on letters — A to E, with A being prime lure material and E nothing more than collateral — and numbers — 1 to 5, with 1 being unapproachably dangerous and 5 being pathetic. When he has to interact with people face to face, he’s awkward, and tends to make the person opposite him uncomfortable. He fails to blink, licks his lips a lot, and smiles at inopportune moments. Heroes who meet Dwight classify him as a “cold fish,” not realizing much of the ineptness he displays is affected. His truthful persona is cold, but he deliberately makes people fear him. It brings him pleasure to know those around him don’t know how to react to his mannerisms. Rumors We've already gone over the fact that Sam was the Namtaru. “The Web Weaver has dens laden with traps all over the country. He stalks us and studies us, and sticks juicy bait down in them designed to lure us in. I heard he’s figured out a way to impose his personality onto his dens, just as we do with our Lairs.” Dwight has only recently learned about Lairs and has begun capturing Beasts alive to torture them and try to figure out a way how to make his own. “If you make this Hero when he’s stalking you, he’ll disappear and pursue a different Beast. Weaver’s a coward; only attacks those who don’t see him coming.” Dwight loves his Anonymity, if you try to bring him out into the light he'll retreat further into the shadows. The only thing that really gets his attention is references to his life before the Amazon. Then he starts trying to blow you up even harder. Story Hooks quote:A prominent Eshmaki in the region disappears, leaving her Lair abandoned and decaying. The only obvious clues to her whereabouts are the spray-painted silver web of the Web Weaver marked on the manhole cover beneath which she made her home, and a handwritten note coaxing other Beasts to attempt rescuing her. Although it’s clearly a trap set by Dwight Whittaker, this particular Beast has acted as a mentor and friend to Children all across the city, and the longer he has her, the less likely her survival becomes. Dwight is exactly the kind of Hero the game wants us to believe is the most common variety... yet they couldn't resist making him Gay, and there's yet another instance of the first beast he encountered being 100% in the wrong, even if his second victim was (maybe) innocent. His stat block is fine, he's no good in a stand up fight and works entirely off of poisons and explosives, which are at 4 and 5 respectively.  Emily Esser: Soul Eater You think They are your friends, but I promise you it is a lie. They are only using you, and sooner or later they will expect you to turn against your own kind to further Their goals. You must renounce your allegiance to Them before it is too late. And now we get to the point where the game starts to seriously stretch the definition of what a Hero is. Case in point, Emily is a Proximus, to put it obliquely (as I understand it) they're the "Wolf-Blooded" or "Ghouls" of the Mage line, they aren't hugely supernatural but they are at least a half-step above baseline humanity. Specifically. quote:Over the next four years, Emily learned how to swallow the souls of the recently deceased in order to keep them from passing on to the next world, as well as how to regurgitate the soul and bind it to someone whose soul had been lost. The sorcerers promoted her to the rank of Soul-Tender and placed her in the service of Anomandus — a mage with a reputation as a healer of afflictions of the soul. He arranged for Emily to operate as a nurse in the ICU of a local hospital, where she would collect the souls of the recently deceased and bring them to him. Anomandus would implant these into the victims of soul theft. Emily never really questioned the morality of this as the dead "Don't need their souls anymore" and like transplanted organs they save lives. This seems like a rather sweeping statement about the nature of the soul to put as a bit villain in a supplementary splat-book for a gameline that almost no one likes. Then her master Anomandus brought over his cousin Phillip "Taken in after a desperate altercation that left his face scarred and bruised" and his soul looked like "a sandy pit filled with scorpions", but to Emily he was always "The Stranger". Anomandus started increasing his demand for souls, getting angry at Emily for not satisfying his demand. She couldn't be in two places at once nor could she work every hour of the day, so Anomandus' solution was to start swallowing the souls of the dying rather than waiting till they came free on their own. This of course wasn't exactly something she was okay with, as it was physically painful. All the while the Stranger sat in the corner and smiled. Now I'm just gonna copy the next bit. quote:At first, Emily did as she was told in spite of her misgivings and even though the souls of the living tasted like blood and burned her chest and throat like unquenchable fire. A week passed and then two. After a month of coughing up blood, Emily finally decided she had had enough. She confronted Anomandus with an unwelcome truth — she wasn’t harvesting more souls than she had been before. The souls of the living had torn her up inside, and she was spending hours in the bathroom every day — either squatting on a toilet in gut-wrenching agony or bent over it as she retched up bloody bile. The loss of blood had left her too weak to do the job that served as her cover story in the ICU, and very soon she would likely be a patient at the hospital instead of a nurse. She had burning soul diarrhea. This is a thing that someone just wrote. Anyways, Anomandus didn't give a drat, and Emily realized the Stranger had corrupted him. So Emily resolved to kill the Stranger to save her Master. Anomandus laughed her off cause he was just going to let the Beast slaughter his way across the city while Anomandus slurped up the newly free souls and disposed of the bodies. Then the Stranger moved to attack Emily and she knew that he was going to kill her, in a moment of desperation she vomited up her own soul to keep the Stranger from feeding on it. At that exact moment, conveniently, the Sentinel and her deputies showed up to arrest Anomandus for his shady soul poo poo, and the Stranger decided that he could survive in a stand up fight against six mages. He didn't, fyi. Emily stayed behind to try and find her soul, but she couldn't, however the Stranger's soul was still around and with some trepidation she ate it. It was the best thing that she had ever felt, and she instantly knew that there were other mages being tainted by monsters like the Stranger. At Anomandus' trial she sensed another Mage that had befriended a Beast, unlike her master this mage took Emily's warnings seriously and they lured the Beast into a trap and she waited while the wizards killed it, and Emily ate his soul. Unfortunately, the Beast Souls eventually faded away within her, and Emily felt weaker, she tried to return to her job to bind a soul to herself, but it faded away even faster, the Stranger had made her a Soul-Eater in truth, and only the souls of Beasts could keep her from becoming a Reaper like Anomandus. quote:Emily scoured the city for more signs of the Children. Her path led her to a shapechanger who had allied herself with a Beast. Emily convinced her to turn against the monster, and then she fed on the shadowy soul. Thus began the Hero’s unending journey. After five years of hunting for Beasts among the supernatural creatures that people the world, Emily has become convinced that the Children are the ones who tempt them to use their occult powers to engage in selfish depravity. They are the voice of hubris, the unchecked rage, and the callous disregard for human suffering that turns otherwise sensible supernatural creatures into monsters like the Beasts. The prevalence of horrors in the world only proves how insidious and widespread the Children’s influence has become. Description Emily seeks out the supernatural creatures she can see are tied to Beasts, and warns them about the monsters that they're working with. She uses her special abilities (Oh boy does she have a bunch of new powers) on the target to drive a wedge between the Beast and their ally, then waits for the inevitable confrontation so she can slurp up the soul. Rumors “I had him right there in my Lair — fleeing from me through waist-high water infested with leeches. He kept muttering to himself about how this must be a nightmare, but both of us knew he wasn’t going to wake up until my jaws clamped down on his leg and dragged him down. I don’t know what happened. One minute he was scrambling to escape, and the next he was just gone, leaving me alone with my Hunger. How is that even possible?” Any living person that Emily eats the soul of is immune to Nightmares, this takes a toll on her and she knows how horrible it is to be soulless so she only does this in cases of dire emergency. And she needs to touch her target to do this which might let the Beasts find her. “We were damned near inseparable for 20 years! I can’t even tell you how many secrets we learned, how many opportunities we had to betray one another, or how many times we saved each other’s lives, but it was probably north of a thousand. Then one day she comes to me with tears in her eyes and demands to know the truth about me. What truth? That the Children are in league with the Gentry, keeping her kind divided so that they are easy to recapture. The accusation wounded me. I thought she had learned to trust me, right? A month later, she shows up with some Summer Court heavies to put me down. What the gently caress? I barely escaped with my life. I hear she’s still hunting me, and maybe I should do something about that, but dammit, I still consider her my friend.” Except that's sort of true annywaaayyyyy~ But yes, Emily's unique set of gifts let her completely undermine the special relationship Beasts have with their friends and it's kind of great. “My aunt says that when she was in the hospital after her heart attack, she had to share a room with a homeless woman who obviously had a long history of being abused. If my aunt so much as closed her book too loudly, her roommate would break down in tears as often as not. Then this new nurse comes in — Emily. She’s nice enough to my aunt, but she seems real interested in the woman on the other side of the curtain, says she can help. That night, my aunt had a vivid dream about Emily pulling a demon out of the homeless woman and wrestling it into submission as it bit and scratched her. The next day, Emily looks like she fell down a flight of stairs, which my aunt thought was really weird. Even weirder, a week later, this homeless woman who couldn’t go three hours without sobbing uncontrollably walks out of the hospital a new person. Gives Emily a hug. Gives my aunt a hug. Talks about how she’s going to go back to college and finish her degree. My aunt says it had to be some kind of miracle.” Putting a soul back into a Soulless person can change them rather drastically and might attract supernatural attention to Emily, and more meals. Plot Hooks quote:• He was a useful friend to have — not too great in a toe-to-toe fight, but always able to figure out what was really going on and tied in tight enough with the local sorcerers that they never got in the players’ characters’ way. Now he has come to the brood begging them to hide him from every Mystagogue in the metro area. He wants to clear his name, but no matter what anyone says or does the Mysterium remains convinced that he’s a Scelesti spy. It all started when that young Esser told him that his association with the Children would lead him to a precipitous fall into hubris — as if a mere Proximus could educate one of the Awakened on the subject of Wisdom! Yet it seems she You know, as much as she is a walking violation of everything a Hero is supposed to be, I love her as an 'antagonist' in a Beast game because she undermines the one thing the game places as inviolate, their "Everybody loves me" poochy powers. She has a new Anathema "Chosen One" Which works like Weaponbound anathema except it applies to a person of her choosing, usually the person whom she senses has a tie with the Beast. Which gets pretty crazy when you apply this to say, a werewolf or a mage rather than a sword. quote:High Satiety: Meeting her Weaponbound weapon in combat spells almost certain doom for a Beast whose Horror cannot help to defend her. Attacks made against the Beast with her Weaponbound weapon gain the rote action quality. The weapon inflicts its normal damage, plus an additional two points of aggravated damage (so a sword that inflicts 2L damage would inflict successes rolled + 2 in lethal damage, and then two points of aggravated damage as well). She also has a new gift called Family Rivalry, which lets her sense anyone who has the family ties condition. And she can use social maneuvering against these people to convince them that the Beast is bad for them, once she opens the final door they gain the Peer Pressure condition, and if the target is connected to a Beast that's currently sated then the Hero can mark them as a Chosen One with a point of willpower. Peer Pressure hurts your ability to resist social maneuvering from your own kind, and can only be resolved by cutting family ties with the Beast, if you accept aid from the beast it worsens to Black Sheep. Which also lowers the effect of any of your social merits with your peers by 2. The only way to resolve this is to kill the Beast or make the beast flee beyond reasonable range of pursuit. If you again accept aid from the Beast or go more than a month without trying to kill the Beast this worsens to Pariah. Your peers now regard you as Hostile, all your social merits disappear(Sanctity of merits applies) and the only way to resolve it is to personally kill the Beast. Also she's a "Soul-Eater" Which is overly complicated and involves a ludicrous amount of willpower expenditure, but she can sense if people are supernaturals and what kind with a wits+occult roll. "Digesting" a soul lets her go a week without being soulless, a horror lasts 3 months. Also there's this which I don't understand.  Needless to say she's a great antagonist for a group of Beasts, but she's not strictly a Hero by any definition. She barely interacts with the game in the same way Heroes do, she just takes your Beast's NPC friends and turns them into laser focused death machines.  Grace Teller: Reality TV Star Next up on Grace Hunts in Hollywood: the season concludes as our heroine invades the monster’s lair and puts an end to it! Okay, this one also makes absolutely no loving sense but for different reasons. When Grace was four, her mother gave birth to her severely disabled brother, and her parents were caught in a never-ending struggle of living from paycheck to paycheck. Grace did not take the transition very well, which is understandable considering she was four and surprisingly the book makes the same judgement, and she eventually realized the sacrifices her parents had to make but a small part of her still remembers how abandoned she felt as a child. Eventually her mother put her into the community theater program and Grace excelled. Her path was set, she was going to be an actor. Insert struggling actress cliches here, small loft apartment, eating ramen, working as a waitress, etc etc etc. Then a young Ugalu came into his powers in her neighborhood, and he didn't have anyone to show him the way. So he starved himself until his horror lashed out which reaffirmed his commitment to not giving into his horror's hunger and the cycle repeats. So Grace started stalking him, realizing on some level that they were caught in a battle of good vs evil... so she started vlogging. And because we're in the world of idiots, everyone thought that this was just a very dedicated performance art piece, that there was no "Black Feathers"(as she named the Ugalu) and it was all fake. Grace knew how the story would end, and that everyone else saw that the Ugalu was a person (And "I really wanted to" isn't a great murder defense) So she wasn't sure how to reconcile the fact that her "show" could only end with Black Feather's death. Then she got a producer... She killed the Ugalu, they CGIed out his face and made him look more monstrous, and everything was okay. Then she got another season order for 13 episodes. Grace knows that in the eyes of the law she's a cold blooded serial killer but the law doesn't know she's actually killing people.. somehow... even though she's literally filming her actions... Yeah. There have been five seasons of this so presumably she's killed five beasts. Description Hot Topic, end of statement. She is estranged from her parents, even though she knows they're still struggling with money, but she knows that she lives in the digital age and she is essentially 'always acting'. Her integrity is starting to slip since she's actively documenting the lives of the people she's stalking and killing and forcing her to deal with that is probably the one thing that can bring her down. Rumors “Now, listen, son. If you want to succeed as a Hero, you gotta get yourself some followers. Look at the lady out in Hollywood, the one with the fake reality show no one but us knows ain’t fake. See the questions she asks her fans to answer for her? They think it’s part of the show, audience participation and all that. She asks them to find some piece of information, some random bit of data, and now she’s got a couple hundred folks doing her research.” Yeah Grace crowdsources her research, loving lol. “Yeah, we get that question a lot. The answer is, no, Grace Teller doesn’t work with Network Zero. She never has. I don’t think she even knows we exist. She shouldn’t, not if we’re doing our job right.” Network Zero is trying to figure out if grace is worse than the people she hunts, for now they haven't made up their minds. Grace has no idea a supernatural world exists outside of her monster of the week. “Casting call! Want to be part of the hottest new unreality show’s upcoming season? Dreaming of fame and fortune as L.A.’s new monster hunter extraordinaire? Grace Hunts in Hollywood is ready for some fresh faces! We’re looking for potential new talent to work with Grace as her new apprentice. Age: 20s-30s. Gender: Any. Ethnicity: Any. Must be athletic; martial arts or surveillance training a plus. Send acting resume and recent headshots to the casting office. Per the request of Grace, you must also send in a thousand-word description of your most vivid dream and the impact it’s had on your life. Union only.” Grace would love for a Hero co-star to share some of her burden but actually finding one would be difficult. “That chick with the show? It’s not pretend; it’s real. Believe me, she killed my sister in her last ‘season.’ You couldn’t tell it wasn’t fake, though, not with all the special effects work they did. If you knew what you were looking at, though…drat, I watched my sister get murdered on TV. The worst part is, I heard she just got her show renewed for two new seasons. That means she’s going to kill two more of us. Maybe me. Maybe you. Look, I know this guy. Kind of loopy, says he spent some time in this magical fairyland that messed with his head. Nuts or not, he’s got my back and can do stuff I can’t. And Trung says he knows this other lady who’s some kind of vampire scientist. Yeah, yeah, I know. We need all the help we can get, though, and I’d rather hang with a vampire than see more of us die. Are you in or not?” Of course the beasts are onto her, it's loving ridiculous. Stats-wise, at least she actually has the gifts to account for her recorded kills, and her integrity is only four, that's not as low as Web-Weaver. And it's actually the upper-limit for Heroes so   Jada Cole: Lightseeker I was born to end you. Thank you for helping me see that. Only child, told she was special, strong personality, center of attention and always led the games that her and her friends played. She was always drawn to stories with a lone hero with the power to right all the wrongs in the world, as well as any number of fantasy and science-fiction tales. She became best friends with another girl named Connie who was willing to play the damsel to Jada's hero. They planned out hundreds of daring capers and rescues and were like sisters despite their differences. But Connie started growing up and realized that the stories were growing old and admonished Jada for her "Childish" interests. Jada stuck to martial arts and comic books, while Connie moved to gossip and boys and also systematically turned all the other children in the school against the weird girl. You get no stars for realizing that Connie is a Beast. By the time they've entered highschool, Connie is the popular kid who leads the most elite clique, Jada is in the comic book club. Jada is of course fascinated by her friend's transformation from damsel to monster. And started noticing that anyone who stood up to Connie was quickly shut down and was shaken for the next few days looking tired and haunted. Then one day Jada walked into the bathroom while Connie was dressing down a freshman, screaming and berating her while tears streamed down the younger girl's face. Jada announced her presence with a slammed door and tended to the victim while Connie burned a hole into Jada's back with her glare, and Jada knew her childhood friend was gone. That night she had nightmares, the world was too large and her existence was meaningless. She was constantly overpowered and dominated, shunted aside and abandoned. When she woke up she was sure that Connie was something inhuman and evil. And that she had known that this kind of evil has existed her entire life. So she does what any well adjusted member of the comic book club does when confronted with elemental evil. Trains herself in martial arts, dresses up in biker gear, and goes out to hunt evil as "The Lightseeker". Of course she knew she wasn't strong enough to kill Connie, not yet, so she started out with lesser evils. quote:A few days into investigating one of the weakest threats on her radar, she realized her town was heavily populated by vampires. Those, at least, she could take out. After all, everyone knew how to kill a vampire, right? Rumors “She looks like she never sleeps anymore. Have you noticed that? I worry about what her home life is like, she’s been coming into school with bruises lately…but she’s happier than she’s ever been. I asked her about it, and she said she’d taken up martial arts. It’s so strange.” Jada spends her nights listening to the police scanner and Batmanning it up stopping muggers and drunken brawls. She sees this as a worthy pursuit to keep herself in fighting shape. “She’s telling anyone who’ll listen that monsters are real, and she’s the only one that can stop them…I mean, she’s always been obsessed with those TV shows and books with zombies and vampires and stuff, but…we’re in high school, and now she’s going on about how it’s all real? Break in reality much?” Her parents are writing off her escapades as teenage rebellion. And yes the supernatural community hates her guts. “Tch. A vampire here or there, fine; they are the young, stupid ones anyway. That wasn’t a problem. But she’s been branching out lately, and getting better and better at tracking us down. She’ll overestimate herself soon enough, I’m sure, and something will get the better of her. Full of bravado, that one, without enough skill to back it up.” Beasts see Jada as a nuisance, and her killing of weaker supernatural creatures is unsettling, but killing her would lend credence to her claims. Story Hooks quote:• A blog has recently shown up and gone viral, documenting various monster killings, complete with photos of the vanquished creatures when available. Mortals cry fake or suspect a viral movie campaign, but the methods and details ring alarmingly true. The supernatural community as a whole is looking to find out what they can about this blog and how they can either shut it down or use it for their own purposes. Seriously Jada isn't as impressive physically as they set her out to be. she's Mental primary and only has Brawl 4, no weapons, no martial arts merits. And why is that Beast setting her on the path of stronger Beasts and not weaker ones. What? But so far Jada's not even really a Hero, she's a Hunter, and not a very good one.  Dr. Jameson Stone: The Dream Killer Son, you just go on to sleep, don’t pay me no mind. After I’m done, you’ll never have another sleepless night, I guarantee. quote:The depths of the human mind have always fascinated Jameson Stone, whose single mother battled insomnia for years, and who originally became a doctor to banish suffering from the lives of people like his mother. As an adolescent he poked and prodded at the emotional states of his peers, convincing them to try strange potions and rituals that he’d read about in some obscure magazine or other and taking notes on their reactions. Later in life, he dabbled in psychology, neurology, and even paranormal oneiromancy before settling on a career as a physician, with a specialization in sleep disorders. The inquisitive and philosophical Dr. Stone never shied away from trying experimental techniques and treatments, inventing new devices to track a sleeping patient’s brain activity and prescribing meditation with medicines, herbal remedies, and mental exercises in every combination he could devise. His colleagues’ concerns about the illogical and, at times, unethical bent to his methods fell on deaf ears. While on call on the late shift during a sleep study, he was accosted by nightmares that jarred him awake with absolute certainty that something was wrong in the testing lab. He ran down the hallway to see one of his patients, a sleepwalker, brandishing her own bed like a baseball bat and using it to menace the other testees. Stone realized that she was still sleepwalking, and possessed by some evil presence. After she killed one of them he grabbed the nearest weapon at hand and bashed her skull in. Avoiding the bed somehow by??????????? After that he embarked on a detailed study of the Primordial Dream and it's ghastly children, and has come to the conclusion that all sleep disorders are a result of the Primordial Dream, and it is his sacred duty to destroy the Primordial Dream and free humanity from it. "choosing to ignore all the obvious real science, psychological study, and human empathy that should have tempered his wild ambitions." ...what? The Primordial Dream exists, why is the game admonishing him for not sticking to "Real Sciences"? He's convinced his patients to engage in cutting edge treatments as he tries to figure out how to end a dream without waking a sleeper, how to stop someone from waking entirely, and how all of those things extend to the 'nightmare dimension'. He refuses to rest until he figures out it's secrets and banishes fear forever. Description Stone knows that Beasts are monsters, but they're also useful research tools. He tries to lure them in as assistants or subjects and then subdues and kills them once he learns all he can. He prefers to convince them that he's doing this with good intentions but he's not above drugging, kidnapping, and restraining them. He's not a combatant and he avoids direct fights instead crafting medicines and monitoring his targets to strike when they're vulnerable. He's usually not so desperate as to use his hospital and patients as collateral, he's rightly assumed that Beasts wouldn't care anyway, but he does see himself as more important than his subjects and will sacrifice them for the good of his mission. He works the night shift as that gives him a convenient way to dispose of bodies and hide his work from his wife and daughter, who know him only as a loving and thoughtful man. Rumors “I’ve heard some weird poo poo coming from the sleep test lab in the middle of the night. I don’t know what they’re doing in there, but I’ll tell you what, I don’t clean that room until the sun comes up. One of the patients told me she saw the doctor hook up a tube to a man’s head and suck his brains right out. Said his brains were poisoned, and the doc, he drained out all the poison and then put the brains back in, good as new. God help me, I believe her.” Nope, he doesn't do this, the patient is misremembering something that he heard while sedated. But there are enough parallels that a Beast can put together the clues. “They say one of us lurks around the hive in these parts, a Makara, working for the Dream Killer. He brainwashed her, twisted up her dreams and made her a kinslayer, and now she goes around dragging us back to his lab so he can twist up our dreams, too. You’ll know her by the tune she’s always whistling.” Yup, he's brainwashed a Makara somehow and turned her into a race traitor or something. Her job is to basically gently caress with other Beasts until they're starved and vulnerable and bring them to Stone on command. “I’m applying for the internship program at the local hospital. The doctor there is famous for his work in sleep disorders and dream interpretation; he’s a genius — and I heard his interns get all kinds of extra bennies. Free experimental drugs, confidential expeditions, and supposedly, he can get you into a secret government conference. Only the best of the best get accepted. Don’t repeat this, but I heard some people come out of this program changed. Better. I don’t know exactly how, but I’m going to find out.” loving what? The book says this is all bullshit but does say that he can take interns on 'field trips' to the primordial dream and sometimes they get supernatural merits out of it. Rumors quote:• Traveling through the local hive, one of the characters’ Horrors runs across a Chamber withered from some unknown corruption, a dead husk of a place where mad dream-spirits roam and Beast powers don’t work properly. Further investigation of the phenomenon reveals the corruption spreading slowly through the hive like a disease. If it isn’t stopped, it could seep into the characters’ Lairs as well, and the outcome would be devastating. Will the Beast’s Nightmares sputter out in the real world, too? Has the disease connected the Primordial Dream with some hidden depth of the Underworld somehow? Was it caused by the murder of a Horror gone wrong, or a vast shared nightmare of death among thousands of humans at once, or something else? Regardless of the source, the characters can trace it back to Dr. Stone’s experiments. for a Mage game. His stats are what you'd expect, but he has two special gifts, one that lets him close down Lairs really really well, and one that lets him go into the dreams of a sleeper and see the tell-tale signs of a Beast, giving him bonuses for applying Anathema or tracking the Beast down, or can even take control of the nightmare from the Beast and shut it down entirely. He's weird. I get that he's a Hero, and he's at least engaging with the game on it's own terms, but he's even less of a combatant than the soul eater. Up Next: A soccer mom scorned and three psychopaths, including a really bad Dexter expy.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:46
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This is what, a good 1/2 of the Heroes who are just Hunter protagonists now?
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Feb 6, 2017 19:58
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Having glossed over the rest of the hero section (I only stopped due to the character limit) that number is going to inflate. The remaining 4 are basically Hunters/Slashers and the fourth one is a loving member of Cheiron group
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Feb 6, 2017 20:03
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The proximus one seems kinda cool as a villain, honestly. Granted, I'd be way more likely to use her as a secondary antagonist/enemy of my enemy in a hunter game, but
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Feb 6, 2017 20:19
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Beast seems to be mostly godawful grimdark antihero justifying bullshit, but I am officially glad it exists because souls giving you the magical shits is possibly the funniest thing I've read in quite some time. I also hope my finding that funny pisses off a Beast fan somewhere. E: "This is your major antagonist. She wants to kill you and eat your soul. Also doing that gives her the shits." It's like something out of loving Paranoia. RandallODim fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 20:25
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Man, my potential parody WoD splat is looking less dumb. And it will probably involve a fluff piece where a werewolf gets kamehameha-d by a catgirl.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:25
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An interesting thing about the soul eater is that, if you look at her through Beast's putative lens of 'Beasts are marginalised people' she's a proper villain: her main power is the ability to strip away the social support networks that are so vital to the marginalised and isolate them even further. But the fact that Beasts are awful and their 'social support network' in this case is made up of other supernaturals who are weirdly compelled to love them despite the Beast ruining their life makes it seem like a weapon of beautiful poetic justice instead.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:29
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RandallODim posted:Beast seems to be mostly godawful grimdark antihero justifying bullshit, but I am officially glad it exists because souls giving you the magical shits is possibly the funniest thing I've read in quite some time. I also hope my finding that funny pisses off a Beast fan somewhere. She only gets bloody soul diarrhea if she eats the souls of the living and she explicitly can't rip out the living soul of anything supernatural. They also interchangeably use "soul" and "Horror" so she might actually be removing horrors from the world which is kind of amazing.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:31
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Kurieg posted:She only gets bloody soul diarrhea if she eats the souls of the living and she explicitly can't rip out the living soul of anything supernatural. They also interchangeably use "soul" and "Horror" so she might actually be removing horrors from the world which is kind of amazing. She might be a magical girl after all.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:32
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Kurieg posted:She only gets bloody soul diarrhea if she eats the souls of the living and she explicitly can't rip out the living soul of anything supernatural. They also interchangeably use "soul" and "Horror" so she might actually be removing horrors from the world which is kind of amazing. "This is your major antagonist. She wants to kill you, and also she can eat people's souls, but not yours, and if she does it to something that isn't already dead she gets the shits." I'm really seeing why everyone says it's hard to be intimidated by the Heroes.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:35
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, dude's a psychopath, this does not however excuse the fact that SO WAS SAM. Seriously, the whole thing with Heroes is just "Oh yeah I do terrible things but THEY do terrible things back! They're just as bad as me!", then deliberately writing the Heroes as rock stupid or deliberately terrible to back up the thinking. It's such a false equivalency they can't even make strawmen straw-y enough to support it without looking even worse. I mean, this isn't anything new but it just pisses me off. Especially nowadays given the overall social/political climate.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:52
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Does literally every Hero under 30 plaster their literal crimes on their blog? What a hip and interesting twist for the modern era!
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Feb 6, 2017 20:55
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unseenlibrarian posted:There were two separate therapy rules, too, IIRC- the one for the full borgs, and then one introduced in the Euro sourcebook trivialized it even more: Roll the humanity loss from the original implant again, subtract new value from old and your new value is the difference. (Which could lead to 0 loss.) There's actually three. The corebook suggests that C-SWAT/MAXTAC teams tend to find guys who are going around getting a lot of chrome and handily suggesting they get a tracker and also go into therapy, and that therapy restored IIRC something like 1-2 Humanity points a week until you got back to your original empathy for a small cost. If you assume that this wasn't an oversight, and it was always intended that you could stabilize your empathy it makes a lot more sense but also retunes the balance to be, again, giant piles of money versus any hard limits. As to the talk about becoming the Terminator, there was actually an augmentation in one of the CP2020 books which let you shove motors and armor plate on your skeleton. Yeah, you could literally have the Terminator endoskeleton installed into you.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:56
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That Old Tree posted:Does literally every Hero under 30 plaster their literal crimes on their blog? What a hip and interesting twist for the modern era! That's honestly approaching something interesting, because the idea of them as gloryhounds means broadcasting their 'heroics' makes a good amount of sense. Hell, if they were actually threatening instead of pathetic, it could provide additional suspense and fear knowing their moves in hunting you. Your phone buzzes as the Hero after you tweets a selfie outside one of your safehouses and you know you can't go back there now, but you also know that they're closing in and that's bad because if they get to you when you're not prepared you're hosed.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:08
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RandallODim posted:"This is your major antagonist. She wants to kill you, and also she can eat people's souls, but not yours, and if she does it to something that isn't already dead she gets the shits." I'm really seeing why everyone says it's hard to be intimidated by the Heroes. The problem with Heroes is that they're only as powerful as the storyteller allows them to be off screen. A fresh off their awakening hero has no powers other than the ability to inflict anathema and a supernatural sense that beasts are wrong. And to inflict anathema they have to be physically present when a Beast is at 5, 6, or 7 satiety. poo poo like Loremaster and the combat buffs make them marginally more of a threat, but for a hero to be more of a threat to a Beast PC than a baseline human then they need to have done some killing of other Beasts off screen. That said the really scary and good Heroes are the ones with strong supernatural support networks, or other explicitly supernatural abilities. Or Heroes that work together in groups. Which is why they've also explicitly stated that Heroes hate working in groups. Also the stated 'preferred' method of dealing with Heroes is talking them out of their delusions of superiority, something that the game states is supposed to be nigh impossible. That's why family rivalry is so potent, not only does it pull another player into the game (Presumably one that is more powerful than the Hero) it also allows them to place a VERY Strong anathema remotely. Heroes are completely uninteresting threats because they're supposed to be the raving lunatics that you talk down by proving that you're right and they're insane. Evil Mastermind posted:It wasn't until I read this sentence that I realized that the entire Beast line is just a right-winger on Twitter going "oh so much for the COMPASSIONATE LIBERALS" when they're getting called out on their assorted -isms. Oh god you're going to love the plot hooks they try to justify for the next Hero. I know it.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:09
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Kurieg posted:Case in point, Emily is a Proximus, to put it obliquely (as I understand it) they're the "Wolf-Blooded" or "Ghouls" of the Mage line, they aren't hugely supernatural but they are at least a half-step above baseline humanity. Specifically. Kurieg posted:This seems like a rather sweeping statement about the nature of the soul to put as a bit villain in a supplementary splat-book for a gameline that almost no one likes. It's actually been a thing for a long, long while in the nWoD. Souls are literally just like magic and moral organs that, when you're dead, you don't really need - and like transplant organs, you don't need your soul specifically. e: All the gay Beast lovers seems to be some unskilled commentary on how coming out as LGBT makes people suddenly drop you as a friend and start hating you. Only here it's more like admitting to being a serial date rapist and being annoyed that people stop being you friend.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:19
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I wish someone who is a hardcore CP2020 would review Cyberpunk v3.0. Because I think I kinda get what Pondsmith was going for?
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Feb 6, 2017 21:19
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The fact every Gay Beast have been either emotionally abusive, full out gaslighting, or turned into Alpha Queen bitch (Wait, aren't these Jocks and Preps the sort of people Beast was railing against?) really undermines the metaphor they're going for.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:47
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Honstly, by mage standards, the proximus is barely a villain at all and could easily be a team's ally. Souls, according to mage, are essentially a vital organ but not a personalized one - you can get on just fine with someone else's soul. And...well, you can't say for sure that the soul isn't needed for something after death, but certainly it's as cromulent a theory as any, so why not use them to save lives? It's creepy and weird, yes, many mages will be leery - but in Mage 2e, Reapers aren't necessarily KOS if they're circumspect about what they do and aren't killing folks. ...even if her old boss was a goddamn tremere lich and probably a monster even before he met a Beast.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:55
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It's blowing my mind that like 4+ of these Heroes are "used to be close personal friends with a Beast, then the Beast was abusive or lovely and they became a Hero in response, and now they're a major internet personality." That's an incredibly specific premise and they just keep repeating it over and over. It reminds me of that Night Horrors book for Vampire where they kept falling back on varying flavors of "vampire mad scientist!" I guess internet culture and social media is just part of the Beast aesthetic in the same way that Promethean is big on hobo codes and road trips, but I don't understand why they made that choice. It's a game about the mythic conflict between monsters of legend and their heroic enemies, and they go out of their way to make it as mundane and anti-epic as possible. Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 22:16
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Those TORG monster names were made by somebody flipping a Scrabble board over and calling it a day.
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Feb 6, 2017 22:57
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occamsnailfile posted:I never read the GitS manga but SAC was great, a beautiful, smartly-written, incredibly expensive failure. I'm told they took a lot of the author's kinky nonsense out of the anime, though Major Kusanagi still had to wear combat garters. Speaking of literal tank people, the episode about the disabled engineer who put himself into an experimental military tank was pretty amazing and an example of where 'runner' gear just fails against real military hardware. Honestly, GitS is fairly subdued by modern manga standards. Shirow has some exploitative stuff like the infamous sex scene, but at the same time the grand majority of the comic is a straightforward tech-thriller (with tongue slightly in cheek) and Motoko's outfits are so, so much better in the comic. She knows that pants exist, and wears them on the regular. And not just hip-huggers, like. Slacks. It's kind of amazing how other designers (in the anime, other manga adaptations, etc.) have sexualized the character so much more than she was originally. It's definitely not a comic without issues but the anime's outfit always makes my eyebrow twitch. Kurieg posted:
Let me see if I can follow their design process and come up with a hero of my own. Once, there was a puppy. Then a beast kicked it really hard. It fell into a ditch, fading in and out of consciousness, with tiny broken ribs. It had to survive drinking ditch water and getting feasted upon my mosquito while it fell into fever. But that puppy survived, and lived an epic tale of survival and montages and suffing. And it tracked down that beast, though hardships and danger and self-sacrifice. It found the beast that kicked it. It barks at the beast's door night and day, trying to avenge itself. It can't - it's still just a dog - but it will harass that beast as loudly as as best it can. Maybe, one day, it might even bite the beast in the rear end, if it's lucky. Your mission as PCs is to frighten that dog to death and consume its delicious suffering. But it's okay, because that dog denies the holocaust.
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Feb 7, 2017 01:26
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Night10194 posted:The Necharchs are fine for the most part, I just find them the most limited of the lines. They're mostly one-note and one-hat, serving as isolated antagonists plotting to use their dark wizardry to cleanse the world of life while doing insane experiments, but at least it's a note and a hat you can definitely use as villain for one of your story arcs. They could make interesting allies, though, if one of their prophecies leads them to the same purposes as the PCs. Not at all unreasonable to have a Necharch who wants to gently caress over the local Beastmen, or acquire a shiny held by a Skaven prince, or had a tower looted by greenskins and is itching for revenge. Also, the talk of LGBT characters in Beast makes me wonder: did Warhammer Fantasy ever address homosexuality? 40k is kind of [in]famous in certain circles for having more and more positive depictions of LGBT characters than Star Trek and Star Wars put together. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 01:37
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Cythereal posted:They could make interesting allies, though, if one of their prophecies leads them to the same purposes as the PCs. Not at all unreasonable to have a Necharch who wants to gently caress over the local Beastmen, or acquire a shiny held by a Skaven prince, or had a tower looted by greenskins and is itching for revenge. Also if you want to use the mutation rules to their fullest from Tome of Corruption (my god do I have a lot of books to get through) but don't want to play as Chaos, you could be the loyal Igors that keep everything going for a crazy but loveable dark lord's tower, I suppose.
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Feb 7, 2017 01:39
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Night10194 posted:Also if you want to use the mutation rules to their fullest from Tome of Corruption (my god do I have a lot of books to get through) but don't want to play as Chaos, you could be the loyal Igors that keep everything going for a crazy but loveable dark lord's tower, I suppose. I could also see a Necharch as a potential patron to PCs in a jam - one who's rich and has a lot of influence and if he asks the occasional unsavory favor, well surely he's insane and won't actually accomplish his goals... right?
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Feb 7, 2017 01:41
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Cythereal posted:I could also see a Necharch as a potential patron to PCs in a jam - one who's rich and has a lot of influence and if he asks the occasional unsavory favor, well surely he's insane and won't actually accomplish his goals... right? This description applies to most of the potential patrons a party of whf players can have.
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Feb 7, 2017 01:44
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Hostile V posted:Some of these classes got adapted to the PBtA game The Sprawl, so you're not the only one to think of that. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 01:58
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