FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I haven't done research save where I absolutely have to, admittedly. I wanted to read this from the perspective from somebody who wasn't neck-deep in Pathfinder already (I'm about knee-deep), so I don't know that much about Golarion.

There's really not that much to know. If Warhammer Fantasy is 'fantasy cliches and historical analogues bounce off one another with fun twists', Golarion is '*D&D* cliches and historical analogues bounce off one another, completely straight faced and with no twist.'

# ? Oct 20, 2017 23:24

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# ? Apr 16, 2024 07:22

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Night10194 posted:

There's really not that much to know. If Warhammer Fantasy is 'fantasy cliches and historical analogues bounce off one another with fun twists', Golarion is '*D&D* cliches and historical analogues bounce off one another, completely straight faced and with no twist.'

There's a reason I've never been that interested in digging into it. It all seemed fairly derivative with only just enough in terms of twists to be something of its own (or to shoehorn whatever public domain pop culture thing the authors were enamored with at a given moment). But the deities section in Starfinger mostly only surprised me with how... straightforward it is. "A goddess of healing... and the sun... who hates evil, and has angelic properties? Well, that's... yeah, that is."

# ? Oct 20, 2017 23:48

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

It's the custom D&D setting you made when you were 14.

# ? Oct 20, 2017 23:52

Joe Slowboat: Nov 9, 2016; Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements

Can the good guys in We Can't Even Get Gnosticism Right just trade their, and I want to stress this, absolutely white supremacist and war-crimes-committing Lion-O/Eugene de Kock for Talbot?
And then I guess figure out what to do about "I'm literally Captain America but my Stand is the Red Skull."

Seriously this goes beyond dumb to incomprehensible. What are the qualities that make people one thing rather than the other, blind chance and needing to have equal edge on both teams?

Also you know what's a great story about twelve human granted deification to bring about some great epoch in humanity and all aesthetics are informed by popular music? Wicked and the Divine, and boy does it ever blow TLE out of the water.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 01:51

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Wic+Div owns and I'm super glad that it was an inspiration for the next edition of Scion but yeah it's absolutely like the better equivalent of Dance Dance Book of Exodus: Part S3A.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 02:23

Feinne: Oct 9, 2007; When you fall, get right back up again.

Freaking Crumbum posted:

NEXT TIME:
What's the Dark*Matter alternate history for sub-Saharan Africa and the entirety of Asia and Australia?
Apparently non-existent, because we jump from the European Renaissance straight to the United States in the mid-19th century.

Xenomorphs is the closest they come to touching any of that, and from what I recall sub-Saharan Africa and Australia are sorta Kinori territory and Asia is largely left up to you to figure out what you want to do with it beyond them giving you some things that live there.

Xenomorphs is kinda a cool book tbqh, they set out to come up with takes on a lot of famous mythical creatures and urban legends and such and then give you an idea for a one-off monster of the week adventure using them.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 02:34

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Night10194 posted:

It's the custom D&D setting you made when you were 14.

At 14 I was making "Rifts on Ice guest starring Champions", actually.

It was awful.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 03:08

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

At 14 I was making "Rifts on Ice guest starring Champions", actually.

It was awful.

I straight up merged Baldur's Gate and Phantasy Star 4.

It was also awful. We should have a thread for terrible home brews people wrote as teenagers.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 03:12

senrath: Nov 4, 2009; Look Professor, a destruct switch!

I'm fairly certain any setting I made when I was 14 was significantly more boring than Golarion, but also included fewer problematic elements.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 03:21

Kavak: Aug 23, 2009

I'm making terrible homebrew settings -as an adult- :smugbert:

# ? Oct 21, 2017 03:23

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; La morte non ha sesso

The custom D&D setting I made at 21 (I didn't even play D&D until I was 18) was designed to Absolutely Not Be The Forgotten Realms, and in that I was more ambitious than either WotC or Paizo.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 03:43

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Night10194 posted:

It was also awful. We should have a thread for terrible home brews people wrote as teenagers.

It tried this once! A lot of goons thought it was a great idea, but the fact it requires a good number of people to put in :effort:

killed it pretty fast.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 03:46

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; La morte non ha sesso

What, like, I would exchange Homebrew.doc files with another goon, and we'd F&F each other's work?

# ? Oct 21, 2017 03:55

Barudak: May 7, 2007

The Grey Beings burden is a great line. At least Dark*Matter produced that.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 04:02

Cythereal: Nov 8, 2009; I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Come to think of it, that KidSurreal setting would be a great weird little World of Darkness adventure. Maybe make it focused on something other than kids, but that would be a great "This is weird and spooky as hell" situation to drop a crew of PCs into, especially Hunters.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 04:04

unseenlibrarian: Jun 4, 2012; There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.

My most terrible homebrew thing from back when I was young an didn't know any better was and remains "Let's take the setting of Changeling the dreaming and the rules of Feng Shui"

It was called Feng Sidhe and you can guess how bad it was from the name.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 04:06

Tuxedo Catfish: Mar 17, 2007; You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

unseenlibrarian posted:

My most terrible homebrew thing from back when I was young an didn't know any better was and remains "Let's take the setting of Changeling the dreaming and the rules of Feng Shui"

It was called Feng Sidhe and you can guess how bad it was from the name.

the name makes it sound amazing though

just make it C:tL instead so it can live up to that incredible potential

# ? Oct 21, 2017 04:29

MonsieurChoc: Oct 12, 2013; Every species can smell its own extinction.

senrath posted:

I'm fairly certain any setting I made when I was 14 was significantly more boring than Golarion, but also included fewer problematic elements.

It was just a mishmash of whatever I felt was cool at the time. I had a good Drow God with a Good Drow city. I had a frozen north where lived steampunk science people with a giant airship cemetary. I had a floating magic city. I had a desert full of ruins of a civilization that predated the world. I had cities run by Demons that all had names ending with sang (like Fontainedesang or Glacelesang).

That's all I remember about it.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 04:33

Kaza42: Oct 3, 2013; Blood and Souls and all that

I had a super generic fantasy setting that was also a mashup of whatever I thought cool at that second. I also took most of the names from Wheel of Time, because I was terrible at names and there was a convenient glossary full of fantasy names at the back of every one of them. None of the characters or details were the same, just the names.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 04:40

Feinne: Oct 9, 2007; When you fall, get right back up again.

Barudak posted:

The Grey Beings burden is a great line. At least Dark*Matter produced that.

Dark*Matter is at the end of the day a sincere effort to try and say 'gently caress it, it's ALL true' and I've always appreciated that.

Also the takes on a lot of mythological creatures are cool twists.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 04:42

Chernobyl Peace Prize: May 7, 2007; Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Who among us, if he or she is being honest, did not spend the mid 90s attempting to make a Goku class for AD&D

# ? Oct 21, 2017 04:47

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

the name makes it sound amazing though

just make it C:tL instead so it can live up to that incredible potential

Wherever True Fae are referred to, replace with "the enemies of my wise master, now dead."

# ? Oct 21, 2017 05:13

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Cythereal posted:

Come to think of it, that KidSurreal setting would be a great weird little World of Darkness adventure. Maybe make it focused on something other than kids, but that would be a great "This is weird and spooky as hell" situation to drop a crew of PCs into, especially Hunters.

Oh yeah there are some actually decent nWoD hooks you can take from KidNight and KidSurreal, just ignore pretty much everything else.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 05:45

Bieeanshee: Aug 21, 2000; Not keen on keening.; Grimey Drawer

I spent a summer during high school turning AD&D into a terrible heartbreaker of percentile skills, bleeding and bruised conditions, and an index of races and available classes that was so absurdly huge, it had to be printed in six-point font to fit on a sheet of paper.

And the guy I was working with on the project tore a bunch of events out of a Central Casting book for an equally misguided random background generator. The number of times someone rolled 'Yeah, you wake up with a new face and a new background and working for some shadowy organization' was ridiculous.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 05:48

theironjef: Aug 11, 2009; The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

It tried this once! A lot of goons thought it was a great idea, but the fact it requires a good number of people to put in killed it pretty fast.

Mine was a super city inside the skeleton of a dead Leviathan whale at the bottom of a massive trench. Magic kept water outside the bones, and the city was basically Sigil before Sigil, since it was all water portals to places I thought were more interesting than what was mostly available to me at the time in books, which was mostly variations of SomethingDale. You could walk to the edge of the ribcage and see massive deepwater monsters peering in.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 05:49

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I built an entire space combat system. In 2e D&D.

This was not a productive use of a summer.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 05:50

Barudak: May 7, 2007

So instead of writing updates on the extremely boring world settings for TLE I decided to start prepping my review of the game's character creation and I swear to Ahura Mazda who did I offend to deserve this? I know I complained up a storm for Untold Story but I have never in my life seen a more poorly laid out character creation section slathered on top of the most half-baked and under-thought rule system I've ever seen.

A machine gun will, on hit, have a 100% chance to incapacitate a character who invested 1/4 their stats into health and leave them dying with exactly 4 hours and 4 minutes to get to a hospital before they "stop breathing." If you're more than 4 hours and 4 minutes away from a hospital the only way to live through this is to have a friend nearby who invested almost half their character creation points into healing or have one of the two of you be a member of Franklin Talbot's religion. If you think you'll just invest all of your points into health so you can take a staggering 4 shots from a machine gun before dying I have bad news; 1/26th* of the time you get hit by a machine gun you take so much damage you instantly die no saves.

Good news though; the game has no rules for what dying actually means and actually forgets to say outright that your character dies in the section about taking damage. The closest it comes is death is implied in the section on critical hits.

*This may be wrong math, but it represents the lowest possible chance. If you're curious why I don't know what the actual math is behind this hoo-boy wait till we get there.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 06:04

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Bieeardo posted:

And the guy I was working with on the project tore a bunch of events out of a Central Casting book for an equally misguided random background generator. The number of times someone rolled 'Yeah, you wake up with a new face and a new background and working for some shadowy organization' was ridiculous.

Subtable (roll 1d10):

1-6: No twist.
7-8: You've been activated. You were one of their agents all along...
9: It's all a simulation to learn about your reactions.
10: Nicolas Cage is out there, and he has your face.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 06:18

Barudak: May 7, 2007

Oh my god RAW it takes 5 nuclear bombs to destroy a motorcycle.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 06:36

Ghost Leviathan: Mar 2, 2017; Exploration is ill-advised.

As I suggested, just take the G Gundam route and stick your PCs in giant robots that have all the same weapons and abilities scaled up.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 06:58

Kavak: Aug 23, 2009

Fatal and Friends 2018: RAW it takes 5 nuclear bombs to destroy a motorcycle

# ? Oct 21, 2017 08:27

Terrible Opinions: Oct 18, 2013

theironjef posted:

Mine was a super city inside the skeleton of a dead Leviathan whale at the bottom of a massive trench. Magic kept water outside the bones, and the city was basically Sigil before Sigil, since it was all water portals to places I thought were more interesting than what was mostly available to me at the time in books, which was mostly variations of SomethingDale. You could walk to the edge of the ribcage and see massive deepwater monsters peering in.

Sounds rad. I didn't start making homebrew that I'm not currently super ashamed of until I was 18.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 12:01

Terratina: Jun 30, 2013

Aaah, I still have notes from my first campaign, forever immortalized on an Obsidian Portal page.

...It was a mash of quality media like Final Fantasy and Monster Hunter. I then made the mistake of there being only one major city in the world (on a floating continent but still). Limited things a fair bunch.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 12:29

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Starfinger Core Rules Part #23: "That is known as the Drift, and when you go into the Drift, sometimes you pull stuff from other planes with you, whether that be a small chunk of Heaven or a tiny part of Hell or maybe a bit of the Maelstrom, etc. etc., and sometimes that comes with, you know, a bunch of angels minding their own business singing hallelujahs and suddenly they're in another dimension."
_{(Credit: Jason Keeley, Starfinger Design Team Member, GenCon Q&A Transcript)}

The Great Beyond

Time to talk about other planes! Granted, this doesn't see much use unless you have a Mystic or Technomancer of 16th level or higher who can cast plane shift. In addition, casting plane shift requires you to have a specifically attuned object (for Mystics) or program (for Technomancers) for a plane in question. However, the nature of the Drift means you might run into a chunk of one of these other worlds there while warping around, so there's at least that, but it's a bit tricky to use this section as written. Additionally, it's real short, so there's not much to go on. Hell, there's barely anything to go on.

The Inner Sphere is the set of planes that make up most of the area "around" the Material Plane (the Material Plane being the actual setting of the game). They include:

The Drift: The aforementioned plane used for FTL travel.
Elemental Planes: Four of them, Air, Earth, Fire, and Water - the usual.
Ethereal Plane: Kind of redundant with The Drift around, huh? A spooky mist place that's a way to travel between planes!... somehow.
The First World: A "rough draft for the Material Plane" abandoned by the gods and dominated by fey.
Negative and Positive Energy Planes: Planes of unlife and life energy, respectively. We're told both are equally deadly! But I'll just add the "fun" murphy's rule that you can just stab yourself repeatedly on the Positive Energy Plane to keep from exploding.
Shadow Plane: Scarytown

The Astral Plane isn't something this book really cares about, and I don't have much reason to either, as a result.

The Outer Sphere is where dead people go, becoming the servants of deities or becoming an angel or demon, and a god named "Pharasma" (not the stormtrooper) decides where you end up. We have:

Abaddon (neutral evil): Daemonvania.
Abyss (chaotic evil): Demonville.
Axis (lawful neutral): Inevitabland.
Boneyard (neutral): Pharasma's Judgement Park.
Elysium (chaotic good): Hippiezone.
Heaven (lawful good): Archonia
Hell (lawful evil): Devilburg.
Maelstrom (chaotic neutral): CHAOS CONTROOOOL.
Nirvana (neutral good): Sounds really monastic for a place monks can't end up.

Of course, you can summon some of the creatures from these planes, but are there any rules for them? Of course not! Are there any rules for these planes? Of course not! Are we done with this section? Of course n... of course.

_{Abadarcorp and Starfinger Society illustrations.}

Factions & Organizations

Like the "Beyond the Pact" section, it starts with micellany and then moves onto the main organizations? It's a weird layout, so I'll reverse the order a bit and start with the main factions.

_{Knight of Golarion and Hellknight illustrations.}

Abadarcorp: The largest corporation and Church of Abadar, god of Civilization + Commerce + Wealth. Basically they Wal-Mart up everything and are effectively the Pact Worlds governmental bank. People are uncomfortable about this but there's no indication Abadarcorp is anything but straightforward.
Android Abolitionist Front: So, this is a covert organization that goes around liberating androids, which is cool! Also they're super-secretive, which is weirder given that... enslaving androids is illegal in the Pact Worlds and they're really just busting up criminals. I mean, that cloak and dagger stuff makes sense if slavery is the cultural norm, but not so much when it's clearly not allowed. However, there's an extremist, violent minority that believes anything that seems to be sentient needs to be liberated, and go around gunning down ship crews to liberate their AIs. (Because I guess we just can't have liberating slaves as a straightforward good cause... or something...)
Augmented: This is mostly a social movement that thinks self-augmentation is rad, yo. They're mainly based out of Verces and has a lot of people who just plug in to the net and tune out, man. Most are open-minded sorts who are just pushing for understanding, but of course you have the extreeeme faction who wants to just forcibly augment people with nanos or surgery, and the two groups have a "shadow war" going.
Free Captains: So, this is a sort of space pirate brotherhood run by pirate lords. They have a code - don't attack fellow members, respect ships that pay protection fees, stand by your word, and crews have to fight for their commander unto death - but can leave at any port. This is basically to prevent infighting, but exactly why is... vague. It's not like they seem to be united against lawkeepers or anything, but I guess it makes it harder on space cops, but there's no actual rule again ratting people out. Probably should add that in.
Hellknights: Oh hey, Mercykillers, haven't seen you since Planescape. 'Sup?

I guess I should say a little more. These are guys that go around enforcing law irregardless of the morality involved. What law? Y'know... law... that thing everybody agrees on... that isn't subjective... anyway, they're basically like a bunch of Vaders and Fetts who go around bounty hunting or acting as ~~evil~~ ruthless right hands. Though it says they don't champion evil, they hero-worship devils, wear black spiky armor, and will burn a baby if it would preserve order, so you can make a your own call there. Kind of Mercykillers join the Space Marines while cosplaying as Sith Lords.
Knights of Golarion: Primarily united under the faith of Iomedae, these are, uh, psuedo-religious fanatics that hold up ~~religious law~~ good as the highest virtue and go around protecting the innocent and killing devils or the undead. But sometimes the devils go "I have diplomatic immunity!" So the Pact Worlds government tries to point space paladin Riggs and Murdock at less political targets to keep them from upsetting the apple cart with their antics. They're exceedingly generic paladin types that conflict a bit with the attempts in this book to sell a more conflicted morality to the Pact Worlds (what with Eox the skeletor planet). Vut the Paizo management doesn't really let the writers lean into that as mentioned in interviews, and it's pretty half-assed as a result.
Starfinger Society: Explorers that go around to trying to uncover history and artifacts for the greater good, and sell or publish the results. Generally they're supposed to not go around outright stealing or exploiting but given they only just "frown" on that sort of thing, presumably it still happens.
~~Spectres~~ Stewards: These are "warrior-diplomats" tasked with maintaining the Pact Worlds alliance through policing, negotiations, or preventing wars. They're based out of Absalom Station and work with the council but aren't beholden to them. However, their jurisdiction is limited to the system itself, so baddies can escape them by just jumping out of the system... but they still have a lot of leeway to pull shenanigans.
Xenowardens: These are druids that go around trying to keep newly discovered planets and try and make sure that their ecology isn't ruined. They have "arkships" which apparently are made from organic tech "to reduce reliance on nonrenewable technologies", whatever that means in the infinity of space. Also their leader, the Greenspeaker, has a crowd of space mice that follow them around that can answer questions about the future but don't actually understand language themselves. Sure. Okay.

_{Free Captain and Steward illustrations.}

We also have a Corpse Fleet of rogue elebrians that go around raiding the living, cults of the ~~public domain~~ Elder Mythos, the Golden League of crime families, and the Skyfire Legion of mercenaries bound to dragonkin (the book still hasn't mentioned what dragonkin are).

... also the Golden League is an rather unfortunate name for an organization that has a very clearly Asian theme, I guess even the far future of deep space isn't immune to pulp Yellow Peril tropes. Dammit, Starfinger, you were doing pretty well there.

Next: Gods and monsters.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 12:32

Green Intern: Dec 29, 2008; Loon, Crazy and Laughable

Inescapable Duck posted:

As I suggested, just take the G Gundam route and stick your PCs in giant robots that have all the same weapons and abilities scaled up.

This Call of Cthulhu game has gotten way out hand.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 13:15

kommy5: Dec 6, 2016

Those Starfinger character illustrations... Did the Paizo artists just file off the skulls and copyright infringements from their GW fanart? Just, wow is that pretty blatant. I actually feel a little sorry for GW for once.

Speaking of fanart, GW, and homebrews, I think the closest I've made to a homebrew was advancing the Warhammer fantasy timeline a few hundred years to run games in the Bretonnian Revolution, where peasants and would be tyrants take up arms against their knightly oppressors and their sinister wood elven allies, with fights between dashing musketeers and magical Arthurian knights in a brightly colorful take on Napoleonic war.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 13:53

MightyMatilda: Sep 2, 2015

kommy5 posted:

Those Starfinger character illustrations... Did the Paizo artists just file off the skulls and copyright infringements from their GW fanart? Just, wow is that pretty blatant. I actually feel a little sorry for GW for once.

Speaking of fanart, GW, and homebrews, I think the closest I've made to a homebrew was advancing the Warhammer fantasy timeline a few hundred years to run games in the Bretonnian Revolution, where peasants and would be tyrants take up arms against their knightly oppressors and their sinister wood elven allies, with fights between dashing musketeers and magical Arthurian knights in a brightly colorful take on Napoleonic war.

I did think, "That Knight of Golarion design looks really good, I wonder where they plagiarized it from".

# ? Oct 21, 2017 14:16

MightyMatilda: Sep 2, 2015

E: Double post, somehow.

MightyMatilda fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Oct 21, 2017

# ? Oct 21, 2017 14:16

Barudak: May 7, 2007

The Knight of Golarian is an anime Khorne Bezerker with glowing tubes instead of skulls.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 14:20

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# ? Apr 16, 2024 07:22

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Also, what the hell is that display on the Starfinder�s leg for?

At first I didn�t mind it, because the upper thigh is actually a smart place to put a control panel or diagnostic display on a spacesuit. But they�re not wearing a spacesuit, it�s too far down to reach unless they�re sitting, and even then it�s upside down. The text clearly oriented for someone in front of them to read. And if it�s for someone else to look at, that�s a really terrible place to put it.

I don�t know why that bothers me so much but it does.

# ? Oct 21, 2017 14:44

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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