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JcDent posted:And from the north pole, because that vortex ain't going nowhere. Which is probably the least fun aspect of WFRP. There's plenty of drama and in-fighting to get involved in without Chaos at any point. I'd love it if the setting had some genuine way to shuffle physical Chaos off the planet and leave it as just the occasional host/summoned daemon and cults, rather than literal "INFINITE UNDEFEATABLE DEMON VORTEX" which I just find it hard to conceive of any engaging story about.
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Sep 8, 2018 09:53
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"This is the spawn point for bullshit that walks/charges/runs/flies/teleports into your gunline"
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Sep 8, 2018 09:56
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I was implying that no one's been doing anything about the south side and they've had all this time to build strength... with something. Maybe go full Lovecraft with Shoggoths and penguins. ed: brb writing Codex: Penguins of Chaos
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Sep 8, 2018 10:03
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Ronwayne posted:"This is the spawn point for bullshit that walks/charges/runs/flies/teleports into your gunline" I've read a novel where a plot point involved a tower that horrible things came out of. It was completely surrounded with fortifications and zeroed-in artillery and nothing ever made it more than a hundred meters.
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Sep 8, 2018 10:05
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The Lone Badger posted:I've read a novel where a plot point involved a tower that horrible things came out of. It was completely surrounded with fortifications and zeroed-in artillery and nothing ever made it more than a hundred meters. What was the book?
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Sep 8, 2018 12:46
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Joe Slowboat posted:I really, really want a sourcebook for the Old World in the equivalent of the 1790s. After Chaos has basically been pushed off the map and maybe even gone to sleep, because Archaon got his face pushed in during the Storm and Chaos can't actually rally an infinite number of times. This is precisely what my home group is doing. Warhammer Industrial Roleplay is my pet name for the 2600s games. I just try not to let any of that into the review because it isn't the text as written. And yes, there is a crazy as hell Bretonnian Revolution. And a Norscan rebellion against Chaos. And Kislev having to contend with maybe potentially falling apart because the thing keeping them together (hell hordes from the north) isn't a concern anymore.
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Sep 8, 2018 13:08
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Deptfordx posted:What was the book? The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson. (It's a little more complicated in that the horrible things are chalk drawings of monsters rather than normal 3D monsters)
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Sep 8, 2018 13:12
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Might be funny if Chaos realises that going quiet for a while will cause all kinds of hell to break loose now they're not the common enemy anymore.
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Sep 8, 2018 13:28
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Might be funny if Chaos realises that going quiet for a while will cause all kinds of hell to break loose now they're not the common enemy anymore. It's very Tzeentch.
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Sep 8, 2018 13:31
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Might be funny if Chaos realises that going quiet for a while will cause all kinds of hell to break loose now they're not the common enemy anymore. Khorne wouldn't stop going in and getting rowdy even if he knew 100% not doing that for a year would lead to overwhelming victory for Chaos though.
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Sep 8, 2018 14:47
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One of the primary differences between the conventional religious cults in Warhams and the Chaos cults, as you'll see in these books, is that in the conventional cults the Gods are interesting but the Priests and Laity are the main characters. The Gods are hands off enough that priests can believe in flawed ways or cause schisms or heterodoxies, people worship in many different ways, and there's space for everything to get messy. Chaos, on the other hand, is very clear that you do things how Chaos wants them done or you're going down hard and going down fast. Chaos cultists are as much about rules-lawyering the idiots they worship to allow them to actually plot, scheme, or try to get what they want as they are about trying to bring down the Empire. Chaos doesn't give its followers much room to breathe.
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Sep 8, 2018 15:12
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Night10194 posted:One of the primary differences between the conventional religious cults in Warhams and the Chaos cults, as you'll see in these books, is that in the conventional cults the Gods are interesting but the Priests and Laity are the main characters. The Gods are hands off enough that priests can believe in flawed ways or cause schisms or heterodoxies, people worship in many different ways, and there's space for everything to get messy. Chaos, on the other hand, is very clear that you do things how Chaos wants them done or you're going down hard and going down fast. Chaos cultists are as much about rules-lawyering the idiots they worship to allow them to actually plot, scheme, or try to get what they want as they are about trying to bring down the Empire. Chaos doesn't give its followers much room to breathe. Chaos only cares about himself (except for maybe Nurgle), while human gods actually care about humans. Also, the vortices aren't spawning the chaos hordes; those rise up from the surprisingly populous northern tribes of chaos worshipping barbarians. And even without the hordes, you'll have cultists doing their thing in the cities. You know what happens during an industrial revolution in WHFB? The same thing that happens in industrial 40K worlds when chaos cultists rise up. That, and you still have beastmen, ratmen, at least two kinds of skellies, bdsm elves, evil dorfs and whatever happens in Avalon... aside from any new threats that might arise with the times.
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Sep 8, 2018 16:09
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Fantasy generally has a better chance of turning out better than 40k because everyone in the setting isn't quite as much of an idiot or coward. E: And as others have said, look at all the material. Chaos is generally the least interesting overall enemy in the setting (though having them around is fine), so I don't see why they shouldn't get downgraded just on the strength of 'Man I would really rather lead a revolution against awesome castlevania villains' or 'It's time to destroy the social normalization fairy'.
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Sep 8, 2018 16:25
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I think it is more that Fantasy is a sci-fi game in the guise of classic fantasy and 40k is a fantasy game in the guise of sci-fi.
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Sep 8, 2018 17:26
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Night10194 posted:Fantasy generally has a better chance of turning out better than 40k because everyone in the setting isn't quite as much of an idiot or coward. I really think it’s important to note that the social normalization fairy is backed by a bunch of evil, psychotic trees that whisper into the minds of the elf equivalent of the guys from Deliverance. Because the Wood Elves of Athel Loren are fuckin’ amazing conceptually and the only reason it’s not obvious is that they don’t actually wear overalls and play banjos.
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Sep 8, 2018 17:42
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Mors Rattus posted:I really think it’s important to note that the social normalization fairy is backed by a bunch of evil, psychotic trees that whisper into the minds of the elf equivalent of the guys from Deliverance. I love them. All of Athel Loren absolutely rules and is scary as hell.
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Sep 8, 2018 17:46
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Chaos is much more interesting if you accept the hunted at theory that a fair number of benevolent gods are opposition aspects of the chaos gods. Ulric and Kurnous/Taal as Khorne, Loec as Loesh/Slaaneah, Ranald as Tzeentch, ect. Chaos as impossibly dangerous but also self defeating and self destructive makes it more interesting. Similarly, beastmen are more interesting when you play up the beastmen as self-hating and jealous fallen humans who loath the chaos gods but worship them out of terror that they’ll make things worse for them. Or desperately talking themselves into believing that their curse is actually the gods making them superior. fool of sound fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Sep 8, 2018 |
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Sep 8, 2018 17:49
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I bet Sigmar and Ulric would be considered a single being by now if it weren't for them having the two most politically powerful cults, with Sigmar being the mortal incarnation of Ulric to make him a literal Viking Jesus. They overlap a lot already because Sigmar worshipped Ulric but if you combined the two then you might get a cult that could moderate the excesses of the two: on the one hand Sigmar's emphasis on law & order could moderate Ulric's social darwinist individualism, while on the other Ulric's emphasis on proving yourself worthy could curb the excesses of the nobility since it'd mean that they have to live up to Ulric's ideals and can't just coast by on being Sigmar's divinely sanctioned agents. Or it'd combine the worst aspects of the two and just create actual, literal Nazis.
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Sep 8, 2018 19:02
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Yeah, my point isn't 'by the setting as written, Chaos can be safely put aside' but rather 'Chaos sucks as an antagonist, and the only way to make Chaos interesting would be to shoot all four chaos gods in the kneecaps and hand the whole thing over to the hellvikings, who are fun.' The Skaven, the Carsteins, the Athel Loren Helltrees, the Chaos Dwarfs, all of these would be great Industrial Age factions and antagonists. But there are precisely four characters in Chaos as written and they are all boring because they're too much the writers' pets. Kill the gods. Let Chaos have its four vague flavors, and then have it all be specific demons and cults. And also make mutation and corruption rarer so that it's not 'gently caress you for living near interesting things.' The list goes on.
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Sep 8, 2018 19:20
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The chaos god I really hate is Nurgle, who doesn’t really have interesting positive aspects to entice people in like the others do. He’s just ‘lol I got you sick now come be evil with me’
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Sep 8, 2018 19:25
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fool_of_sound posted:The chaos god I really hate is Nurgle, who doesn’t really have interesting positive aspects to entice people in like the others do. He’s just ‘lol I got you sick now come be evil with me’ Honestly, Nurgle's the best-written of the lot, since his position is essentially 'All of life is precious and beloved and sacred. Literally everything alive is precious to me, the Plague Buddha. I love you, and equally I love all the microbes inside you, and I want you all to live and share in joy and not suffer.'
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Sep 8, 2018 19:29
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Mors Rattus posted:Honestly, Nurgle's the best-written of the lot, since his position is essentially 'All of life is precious and beloved and sacred. Literally everything alive is precious to me, the Plague Buddha. I love you, and equally I love all the microbes inside you, and I want you all to live and share in joy and not suffer.' This would be more interesting if there was any way to make a story out of it. Warhammer just doesn't provide the tools to make that motivation interesting or present; if it meant Nurglites were pacificistic plague carriers it would be weird and unpleasant but it would at least be interesting.
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Sep 8, 2018 19:54
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In the fantasy setting, you can see why plague victims would worship him. Just do his bidding and spread his diseases, and you don't have to suffer or die! It's win-win! 40K's take on Nurgle seems to begin and end with 'pustules are rad!' though. Maybe if they leaned a little harder into Nurgle being the chaos god of Garbage Pail Kids it would feel a little more thematically consistent.
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Sep 8, 2018 19:55
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Nurgle's the best one! He has an enticing thing of "whatever happens, you will live and will not suffer and be in rapturous joy" compared to Khorne's "go fight and if you die well thats fine too" and Tzeentch's "all according to plan, even if it goes wrong its good. For me." Nurgle is also the one that is least self-defeating. Not to say that he isnt, because as much as people talk about how rad being sick is its a tough sell and if people don't convert they just die of super plague and he's such a chill dude that if anything goes wrong he just laughs and is all "wow, didn't except that! Hahaha!" like when the nurgling drank the Ultimate Plague or the fact that he keeps the only being capable of countering his bullshit (the Elf goddess of healing and health) locked up, but testing poo poo on her so she creates vaccines and cures for it which she then is able to share with the mortal realms. Sickness and disease aren't driven by anything and have no real plans, and neither does the god that embodies them. Nurgle is opposite Tzeentch, who plans everything meticulously because diseases, plagues and pathogens just spread as they will at random. Tzeentch will never get his spells back because he's put the worst dude on the task so he won't get betrayed and his plans directly counter each other. Khorne cares not who dies, as long as blood flows which means that one day his armies and those who worship will be gone and then he's done because the end point is mutually assured destruction. Slaneesh just sits jacking off all day instead of doing anything productive and all of the top people are maximum narcissist to the point they don't even care about Slaneesh so nothing gets done by them either.
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Sep 8, 2018 20:09
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Ok but again, what do you do with Nurgle in an RPG? What stories can this character take part in? Hell, even outside of an RPG, Nurgle is an interesting idea but he's so one-note that that's all he is - an interesting idea. One interesting idea. That can't carry a character, especially not one that has as much narrative weight and interest in their doings as the Chaos Gods - even an elaborately well-written Chaos God would be hard to sustain an entire faction on, and that's all their factions really are: extensions of the one character. Chaos is built terribly to take part in any interesting narrative, and remains the weighted shackle around the legs of Warhams Fantasy - it makes sense in the context of a wargame where you want strong faction branding, but wargames are terrible vectors for stories.
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Sep 8, 2018 21:33
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Joe Slowboat posted:Ok but again, what do you do with Nurgle in an RPG? This is, by the way, the problem with him since your PCs probably don't have a way to discover advanced epidemiology and stop the spread of infectious disease. Nurgle plots usually boil down to making a lot of Toughness saves and trying to stop them from poisoning the town water supply again. E: It's by extension the problem I harped on all through ToC: Every Chaos plot is full of save or die corruption and plenty of 'nu-uh, you didn't actually achieve anything against this enemy'. More Chaos writing is devoted to 'No, you didn't really beat it, we swear! Maybe it just let you win for now!' than almost any other subject. It makes them frustrating and boring to fight in an RPG. Meanwhile, look at the mortal Gods so far. They're just bristling with plot hooks, character ideas, and things to get involved in. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Sep 8, 2018 |
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Sep 8, 2018 21:47
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It's like playing cops and robbers with a stubborn five year old: "nu-huh, you didn't shoot me 'cuz I got a super shield"
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Sep 8, 2018 22:56
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To be fair you don't really have to worry too much about the big gods in the RPG's. Cause you will largely be fighting their cultists and Evil Viking followers rather then them. Their Deamons will pop up once in a while, but largely of servants of the cults as the Daemons don't tend to do many big plots. The closest thing to nuh uh you did not win. Is the fact that other cult or more hell vikings will eventually come again. But it's not like the Chaos god are going to be coming down and saying that to you personally. Like foiling a Nurgle plot to poison a town or summon a great unclean one in it, is a victory. The fact that Chaos will try to do so again does not make it less of a victory. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Sep 8, 2018 |
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Sep 8, 2018 23:09
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The life of a germ is tragic, for the most part it either kills the host or is in turn wiped out by their immune system, even if it is able to spread beforehand. Thusly, priests of nurgle wander from town to town curing the sick by transferring their illnesses to a more hospitable host, themselves. Special effort is given to tracking down and absorbing new and exotic afflictions so they can study themselves
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Sep 8, 2018 23:11
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Joe Slowboat posted:Yeah, my point isn't 'by the setting as written, Chaos can be safely put aside' but rather 'Chaos sucks as an antagonist, and the only way to make Chaos interesting would be to shoot all four chaos gods in the kneecaps and hand the whole thing over to the hellvikings, who are fun.' Getting rid of the chaos gods won't make Chaos more interesting. And I don't even see how you guys think that it would. And I don't think you understand things too much if you think getting rid of them is better. Chaos is fine as an antagonist. And there are much more then four characters in chaos. Also Chaos has like 7 or so flavors.
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Sep 8, 2018 23:16
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The fundamental problem with Chaos is that every example of a Chaos plot tends to be players racing to stop Chaos from doing a thing, with no way to actually affect Chaos in a way it cares about. Also, trying to learn more about it or interact with it on a level besides setting it on fire tends to destroy your character. You just sit there reacting to Chaos the whole time. It sucks. You could kill Malekith or fight Ariel or defeat Mannfred von Carstein and the setting would change because you did. You have agency against those enemies. Against Chaos you're just dodging bullets (as written) until the authors get bored and declare you lose. Also there's the whole part where, by fluff, it genuinely does destroy the personality of its followers (Warriors lose their memories of their old lives) and replace them with being just an extension of their God.
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Sep 8, 2018 23:40
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I think Chaos would maybe be interesting if there were actually stakes in the game for Chaos. Like, if Chaos had a reason to give a poo poo or be worried about a setback. If they didn't just have infinite resources that they could lazily and boredly throw at reality until they win. Like maybe if Chaos had to get to Lustria and beat up the Slann before the Slann remembered the command line parameter required to shut down the vortexes at the poles and reboot the stargates, and that failing to do so would mean Chaos got locked out of loving with the WFRP planet for a long period of time, if nothing else. Then Chaos would actually be forced to have plans other than "here's a swarm of expendable goons lead by a moron, lol, see you guys again next year with the exact same plan except this time all my dudes are gonna be wearing blue instead of red!!!!!!!" Or maybe if Chaos needed/wanted to accomplish something more complex than "melt reality into chaos goop and then sit around picking their bellybuttons for all eternity," so that their plots would have some nuance. But the thing is that if you change WFRP/WH40k Chaos into an interesting opponent, then you've already had to make enough changes that it won't be particularly similar to Chaos Classic(tm) and you're basically writing your own setting or a fanfic.
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Sep 8, 2018 23:43
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I guess you could have chaos function more as a "force of nature" than an actually thinking entity (because it clearly does very little of that). It exists as a constant hazard and you'll encounter hints of it most places you go however it works better as a backdrop to other antagonists than the main antagonist. Trying to beat up a hurricane isn't that fun.
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Sep 9, 2018 00:23
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PEPSI for TV-GAME
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It's one of the reasons a lot of the pre-made adventures suck and I won't be bothering to cover them. Lots of them think they can reinforce the 'grim perilous world of adventure' tone by throwing in 'by the way, you got paid but nothing you did actually mattered and you failed in the end' at the end of the adventure. The reason I stopped the Paths of the Damned writeup was just that I tried running book 2 and oh my GOD is it the dullest goddamn adventure ever. And book 3 has a literal Sierra Adventure Game unwinnable state. I just didn't feel like slogging through all of that.
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Sep 9, 2018 00:43
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Night10194 posted:The reason I stopped the Paths of the Damned writeup was just that I tried running book 2 and oh my GOD is it the dullest goddamn adventure ever. And book 3 has a literal Sierra Adventure Game unwinnable state. I just didn't feel like slogging through all of that. At least tell us more about the Roberta Williams Special. 
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Sep 9, 2018 00:58
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PurpleXVI posted:At least tell us more about the Roberta Williams Special. In Book 3, you've made friends with a prodigy wizard who has a ritual that can actually destroy Chaos Demons trapped in relics, and you're using her help to destroy the macguffins of the game. You're also hunting a serial killer. If you don't make the choice to stay in an inn with her one night, the serial killer completely randomly kills this NPC and renders the main plot unwinnable (the best you can do then is kill the demon/break the relic which 'frees it' in the Realm of Chaos and it will come back for revenge later and blah blah). If you do, he kills another helpful female NPC who isn't as essential. Oh, yeah, the premades also kind of have a thing for extremely doomed women. Also, Adventure 2 has a long series where you talk to a ton of NPCs and it's explicitly, intentionally written as never, ever using any Diplomatic skills, being determined entirely by what you choose to say and to whom. If you succeed at that part, you automatically succeed the main plot as you just get reasonable authorities to hand over the macguffin to destroy and only have a minor B plot about a two-bit chaos sorcerer to deal with. There's an undercurrent in a lot of the pre-made writing that you 'should' generally just bypass actually using the Fel stat by 'role playing', and I hate it. I tried running the runaround with the dozen or so NPCs and my players and I got so bored we took a break from the campaign to go play Spire. Though I had promised I'd get to the crazy part of book 1 some day, so here it is: At the climax of book 1, Medium Priest Klaus Liebnitz has managed to successfully cause a massive religious riot by pretending that an ancient icon of Sigmar had chaos symbols on it the whole time. He has the whole city at one another's throats and is at risk of causing an Imperial civil war. For no reason at all, at this point, he decides it's time to go kill a bunch of his Axe Brothers and summon a demon essence from a macguffin in the middle of the temple of Ulric, throwing away his entire subtle, intelligent plan because ??? Khaos Krazy!? The PCs go to stop him, and are confronted by 2 fully armored, full plate clad (except their heads) Knights of the Inner Circle with Great Weapons, 2 attacks, huge WS, and 9 points of DR each. Midway through/just finishing *1st tier* PCs are expected to fight these. If they win, they find Liebnitz sacrificing half a dozen other knights, one by one. They then either have to fight Liebnitz (who is also no slouch) and the knights, at which point the ritual completes because Khorne Ritual!!! and you killed guys!!! or they can let him complete the ritual, at which point he semi-dies too because Khorne is a dick. Either way you end up fighting the real final boss: A single Bloodletter who is weaker than one of the knights. This is treated as an insurmountable battle while the previous insanity is treated as normal swashbuckling, with explicit 'Maybe you should have allies burst into the room to help the PCs!!!' suggestions for the relatively extremely easy demon fight. When my players did the adventure, they just blew away the demon round 1 with a crossbow and some magic missiles since they had a pair of wizards. It's just the dumbest conclusion to an otherwise kind of dull but solid first adventure. I can finally say all this because we've agreed we're just going to wrap up the RED FLAYER plotline quick and then get the players on to more interesting poo poo than chasing the macguffins of a single Khorne demon for 3 minicampaigns when we get back to hams, so it's no longer spoilers for my players who read the thread. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 01:03
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How does it compare to Enemy Within, if you've played/run that?
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Sep 9, 2018 01:11
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Hypnobeard posted:How does it compare to Enemy Within, if you've played/run that? Never played, read, or run it, so couldn't tell you. Paths of the Damned left me a little wary of Warhammer pre-made campaigns. I think one of their problems is the career system; they can't tell what a 'standard' party will look like to balance the adventures around that.
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Sep 9, 2018 01:15
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Hypnobeard posted:How does it compare to Enemy Within, if you've played/run that? I can't speak for the entire Enemy Within campaign but the campaign expects you to have completed the oldenhaller contract which is the starter adventure in the 1e core rulebook. Though it doesn't tell you this until the third book iirc. The Oldenhaller Contract usually ends in my experience with the whole party inflicted with nurgle rot which is 100% fatal, has no cure and inflicts mutations on the sufferer. It's been a long time since I read Something Rotten in Kislev and Empire in Flames but I remember Something Rotten in Kislev being super lethal and pretty much designed to kill characters and Empire in Flames being a big railroad where there was only one solution to any problem and you either did it the way the book decided or failed. The Thousand Thrones isn't much better either. Most of the prewritten adventures for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay are of pretty poor quality. psudonym55 fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 01:35
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I suspect a lot of the reputation of the game as a meat grinder comes from people who mostly played premades. Like, in the first big group campaign I played in, our first adventure was defending a coaching inn from a bunch of beastmen and a Chaos Warrior, while we were presented ample chances to even the odds using the inn's structure, to shoot the warrior with crossbows and my gun (I was a Kislevite Streltsi) before we engaged, and to fight the beastmen in a running battle through the structure that kept the numbers fairly even such that a Knight Errant, a Streltsi, a Student medic, and a Woodsman could hack them up. Meanwhile, in the premades, you get railroaded into a boss fight early on with a giant acid-flinging monster that does Damage 8 (damage 6 if you make a Dodge save when hit) and that catches you on fire (lose d10 Wounds a round, no reduction) every time you wound it if you don't make an Agi save. The Haunting Horror was more lethal than like 90% of the Old World Bestiary. I think the pre-mades just have no idea how to balance combat. There's a point in Terror in Talabheim where 3 tier 1 Plague Monks are meant to be a 'vicious, memorable' fight for an entire 2nd tier party, when one 2nd tier fighter could kill all 3 in two rounds. In the same campaign that made you fight 3 Ogres earlier. E: A note in favor of the designers, though, is that they actually intend for you to get a lot of Fate through adventures, so you're supposed to be able to have a lot of extra lives. One adventure even specifically gives every PC a fate point if they make a heroic, doomed last stand midway through the plot, reasoning it'll be a cool scene and they deserve to have that but continue the story after being knocked out in a pile of enemy bodies in the morning since it's hard to convince PCs to run. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 01:37
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