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Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Count Chocula posted:

Many isolated religious sects use snake-handling as a symbol of faith, though. I read a great book on backwoods snake-handlers but I forget the name. The 'physical' demonic characteristics could come through from the power of suggestion.

DITV sounds like a great Southern gothic game, and you could use it as a framework for any game about tradition and duty. Might make an interesting Star Trek game; since so many episodes are about moral judgement.

A lot of people have more or less independently come up with the idea of hacking DitV's system to do Star Trek. It's harder than it looks for various reasons (the escalation mechanics aren't an easy fit for all Star Trek plots and the system has pretty limited support for handling any kind of adversity other than direct interpersonal conflict), but the idea doesn't come from nowhere.

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Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

SirPhoebos posted:

Bringing all of this together, Buckley is a short but menacing fiend with 4 multi-jointed arms and thick-fingered hands and 2 telescoping legs with webbed feet and a long prehensile tail. It has a hunched back and no neck, making it's frilled, conical head appear to just appear out of its torso. It's long, pointed nose and ears contrasts with it's large mouth and tusks.

So...any artgoons want to sketch up our monster?

I can't draw to save my life but I felt like doing this anyway

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Bieeardo posted:

BD&D made a strong argument for demihuman community/family responsibilities kicking in past a point, and 'goofing off' adventuring beyond that simply being unthinkable on a cultural level, but it also had some limited progression rules to keep those characters active and useful during the human PCs' slog to level 36 and everyone's Trials of Immortality. Something like that would have been more palatable than a flat cut-off, even if level limits were higher than they were in 1E.

I'm not sure BECMI even needed its level limits to accomplish the design goal of a human-dominated setting, given the way demihumans worked in that. When Dwarf is its own character class, there are only so many dwarves you can fit into a single party.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

The Lone Badger posted:

The book I read said a 'difficult' task was at -2/TN6. (normal is TN4, very difficult is TN8, etc). So just RAW it should come up quite often in noncombat checks. I've never actually played SW though.

It's one of those things that depends a lot on GMing style; I only adjudicated a penalty when the rules specifically called for one or when players were doing something either wildly ambitious, under significant adverse conditions, or dubiously relevant to the skill they were using. I defaulted to 4 for most stuff because I just don't want to spend more time than I have to thinking about whether this lock is harder to pick than that lock. Even when a worst-case scenario does come up, though, your chance of success with a d6 will only ever be about 1-2% worse than with a d4, and your chance of a Raise is still much better in situations where that matters. There's no denying that SW's probabilities are wonky sometimes, but I found they weren't usually wonky enough to make it possible to game the system in a way that takes advantage of the wonkiness, at least. There are solutions for smoothing out the probability curve if it bothers your group, like subtracting 1 from every exploding die after the initial roll, but they add extra work and only change most probabilities a little bit.

What all of that wonkiness bought you was that between the wild die and benny-fuelled rerolls, you actually had a pretty decent chance of doing something way beyond what you were normally capable of if you were willing to blow your entire stock of bennies on it. It worked well for a group that liked to take big risks once or twice a session. It probably won't be worth it for a group that sees potentially extreme swinginess as a nuisance: there are ways to mitigate the risk, but when you use exploding dice sometimes somebody is going to get exploded.

But yeah, variable die sizes plus exploding dice are going to lead to some weird-looking probability curves and they're not really a combination I'd recommend to someone designing a system from scratch. When my first reaction to seeing a system's core mechanic is to open a spreadsheet and start making tables of success rate vs. die size and target number, that core mechanic could maybe use some simplification.

Thuryl fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Sep 6, 2016

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Zereth posted:

I'm assuming that narcissist would have had a similar ad for Continuum in it. (It never came out, right?)

It was never completed. A draft version exists, but it seems pretty unplayable even compared to Continuum.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Night10194 posted:

Wasn't poison lethal as gently caress in early D&D and thus would've been a no-brainer advantage for PCs if it was safe to use often?

Yeah, originally poison was save-or-die by default with occasional exceptions. By 2e most poisons just did damage on a failed save (and either reduced or no damage on a successful save), but that was often still more than enough to outright kill a low-level character.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I think the real problem is that we just don't have nuance in our terms of racism. Somebody who does something racially insensitive or ignorant and literal racial supremacists get the same term, and that's what the argument boils down to. I don't think anybody's arguing that equating dark skin with evil qualities is problematic, but just on the original intent of such.

Of course, there are other issues with drow as well, like S&M = eeevil, the demonized depiction of matriarchy, ritualized rape, female sexuality as an aberration - there's a lot of garbage in the concept as it is. The general idea of "underground elves" is far from unsalvageable but the traditional depiction is pretty damned awful.

The issues are kind of worse as a package than individually, too. Geographically isolated, racially othered group + sexualized matriarchy + disturbing religious rituals reads like a collection of tropes grabbed directly from an H. Rider Haggard novel, which would be fine if it were still 1887.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

ZeroCount posted:

considering that a vegan diet is one of the things inflicted upon you on pain of death I doubt it's advertising the lifestyle.

'Something we do to animals, now to people' is a great and instantly evocative horror source with a lot of history behind it, you don't have to have to be part of an agenda to use it.

It's apparently a common enough assumption among readers that the author felt the need to address it. From the preview on DTRPG:

quote:

Designed as an experiment in social dynamics and as an example of a “true horror” game, the farm is meant to present some interesting questions and tough choices. While its success at either goal is up for debate, I enjoyed designing and writing it. And to answer a frequently asked question...no, I’m not a vegetarian.

As for the game itself, I think I'm in the camp of not being quite sure how to run or play it even if I wanted to, but I get the impression that seeing what happens when the group has to figure out that stuff on their own might be part of the point.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Hostile V posted:

It's real cool and good when the game is like "yeah you can play the baddest of the bad gangers and you should totally abandon the party and try to kill them, this is fine".

Yeah, it's especially weird how on one hand the adventure consciously accounts for the possibility of one or more PCs betraying the rest, but on the other it doesn't really give any PCs that leave the main group anything to do for the rest of the adventure if they manage to do that without getting themselves killed.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

4E paladins were pretty explicitly holy warriors and their powers were god granted, so that doesn't sound quite right.

What 4E did differently is allow paladins to be of any alignment, and to champion any god, right from day one. There was some discussion of them championing whole pantheons as well.

Also, once a god invests a 4E divine class with power there are no backsies, so paladins aren't at risk of losing their powers if the player and GM disagree on the right thing for a paladin to do. That was a pretty significant difference from previous editions.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Yeah. There isn't actually a shortage of decent chase rules out there, at least, no more than there are shortages of any other kind of rules. Savage Worlds did okay and it's a decade-and-a-half old. The fact that Starfinger goofs their mechanics is not because the is some endemic failure of chase rules, but more clearly indicative of bizarre or sloppy design decisions at Paizo itself - something, frankly, that is an ongoing issue they have.

One caveat about chases in Savage Worlds is that the vehicle rules are obviously designed with cars or other small land-based vehicles in mind, and will produce some increasingly weird results the further you get away from that design assumption. I tried to run a chase between two ships on open water once and there were a few times when I had to say to the players, "okay, the thing the game is telling me to do on this result makes no sense, so I'll make up something that does".

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Down With People posted:

The book suggests that the investigators might want to hold a séance with a Oujia board – can we get a citation on whether that's historically accurate or not?

Wikipedia claims the Ouija board was first sold as a parlour game in 1890 and was widely popularized as a tool for serious attempts at divination during World War I, so the timing is about right, at least. It was evidently put to some pretty interesting uses; Mark Twain's estate was involved in a court case in 1917 over the rights to a novel supposedly dictated to its writer by the spirit of Twain via an Ouija board.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

senrath posted:

It's a reference to one of cboyardee's Dilbert animations, I'm pretty sure.

That certainly popularized it, but it's originally from obscure 1985 Japanese RPG The Screamer. (While it has a fan translation patch now, that particular bit of Engrish was in the Japanese original.)

Thuryl fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Jan 29, 2018

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Red Metal posted:

the 3.5 dodge only applies to a single enemy at any one time

The way people talk about their 3e games online has convinced me that there are a surprising number of GMs who really do just throw one solitary CR-appropriate enemy at the party for 90% of fights, so I guess it has some value if you find yourself with a GM like that, but geez.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

quote:

There’s also a 50% chance that the food will be poison (what the poison will do is not elaborated upon).

AD&D poison defaulted to save-or-die unless otherwise specified, so probably that. B/X D&D was generous enough to let you revive the poisoned character with neutralize poison if cast within 10 rounds of it taking effect, but no such luck in AD&D (although enough groups played a weird mishmash of Basic and AD&D that it would have been a common houserule).

Thuryl fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Mar 17, 2018

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Green Intern posted:

Why do people forget this all the time?

Well, that was a deliberate attempt to walk back an idea that had already been established in players' consciousness by previous editions. AD&D 2e's example of play on alignment involved the Chaotic Neutral character charging at a gorgon without any plan or backup and immediately getting killed.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.
One of the big problems with playing a high-lethality style of game in 3e is that the wider range of choices to make during character creation also makes character creation a whole lot more time-consuming, especially beyond the first few levels. In older editions, if your PC was flattened by a falling anvil trap, you could at least plausibly create a new one mid-session and get back into the action before it was over. In 3e that ain't happening unless you kept a backup character sheet in reserve.

Glagha posted:

Alternatively, Fly is really cool and good. I really don't want to lose Fly because I think it's just such a cool thing and is so intrinsically a thing I wanna be able to do if I can use magic. While I understand the reasons for it my biggest disappointment in post-Morrowind ES games is that you can't fly around. Same thing with teleporting.

The real problem is that casters shouldn't be able to just invalidate what someone else does. Knock? Why does that spell exist and at such a low level? Why do Wizards have a "Lol gently caress rogues" button? (They actually have a lot of those)

The Rogue/Thief class seems to have a pretty weird and awkward history in itself, in terms of how it fits into the game. I've heard a few of the really old-school types talk about it as the class you picked if you rolled bad stats and wanted your PC to die quickly, although I don't know how representative that opinion ever was.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Angrymog posted:

The dumbkillbot was really a 3rd and Pathfinder thing. 5e lets you use backgrounds to have a broader base of skills, and as said above, the NWPs in 2e had far more varied options available to the warrior classes than 3rd allowed as class skills.

I think one little-discussed disadvantage of giving players more control over their character's stats (whether through point buy, arrays, or roll-and-assign) is that while it allows you to set a baseline of competence at the things your character should be good at, it also creates more uniformity in what characters of a particular class are bad at. People aren't gonna voluntarily give their fighter a 15 in Int if that comes at the cost of the main thing they're meant to be doing.

Of course, people do like to have some choice in what kind of character they're playing. And if your game saddles the Fighter with a skill list that has maybe one Int-based skill on it, it's not like rolling that 15 buys you much either. So if you want to keep the idea of a skill system, the solution is gonna be more complicated than going back to making people roll 3d6 down the line.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Halloween Jack posted:

I went reading into this a long while back, and here is how I remember it: Two-weapon fighting was introduced in 1e, and rangers were one of the classes that could do it, by virtue of being a fighter subclass. This only became a signature Ranger Thing after Drizzt.

Rangers are good at archery because of their high chance to ambush opponents and avoid being ambushed. If you're actually using the rules for combat segments, rangers are ace at softening up the opposition before they can get a shot off.

I checked what my 2e PHB has to say. All warrior and rogue classes (so the fighter, paladin, ranger, thief, and bard) can dual-wield to gain a single bonus attack per round with their off-hand weapon, but at a penalty to all attack rolls: -2 for the main hand, -4 for the off-hand, modified by Dexterity. Rangers ignore this penalty as long as they're wearing studded leather armour or lighter. So by the time 2e came out, dual-wielding was something particularly associated with rangers, with mechanics to back it up. As far as I can see, they don't have any particular expertise at archery compared to the other warrior classes, but they did get the ability to hide in shadows and move silently (again, only in studded leather or lighter, and with a penalty when trying to do so in non-natural environments), and eventually access to low-level priest spells (starting at level 8, up to spell level 3 by level 12). Also, 2e rangers can fall just like paladins do and turn into fighters if they intentionally do evil, because 2e was the weirdest edition about alignment (although the rules for atonement are less strict than for paladins).

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Tibalt posted:

I think you're sort of missing the point here. It's the nature of D&D that elements of popular 60s to 80s fantasy were incorporated into the game through semi-official rule expansions to the, like, 3 different versions of D&D that were developing concurrently, and then later on became sacred cows slaughtered during edition wars.

I'm not sure what point I'm missing, which I suppose is further evidence that I'm probably missing it. I was mostly just intending to provide a data point on how the ranger class's abilities evolved over time.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

JackMann posted:

The attribites are fairly balanced. Agility and Smarts don't do a ton compared to the other attributes, but they have the most skills. Strength affects how much you can carry, what weapons you can use, and your melee damage. Spirit helps you recover from the shaken condition, resist fear, and has a smattering of useful skills. Vigor us straight up your "don't die" skill. There really isn't a single god stat. On the other hand, thanks to the math behind the game, you're not completely gimped even with a d4 Vigor.

My experience of Savage Worlds has been that Strength is kind of a dump stat if you're not a melee fighter and don't use the encumbrance rules, and also that the encumbrance rules are really harsh if you do use them, especially if you want to wear armour.

quote:

Persuasion's the primary social skill. It can improve how people react to you. You add your Charisma when you roll it. Charisma's a bit of an issue. It's possible to boost it to a ridiculous +6 as a first level character (and +8 one advance later). Even a +2 is pretty huge in this system, so it can make the Persuasion skill effectively automatic.

My houserule for this was to make Persuasion an opposed roll against the target's Spirit, modified by their own Charisma; high-Charisma characters can still persuade most people most of the time, but it gives the GM a few more ways to push back within the system rather than just having to either let a character persuade people or veto it. (Not really a big fan of how two of the Edges that give you Charisma bonuses are directly linked to physical attractiveness, either, even if they try to justify it by saying it's appropriate for the genre they're aiming for.)

The Hindrance system is kinda interesting in how it plays out in practice. There's a sidebar that basically says "the game assumes everyone will take the maximum allowed number of Hindrances, so please feel free to do that", and all the Hindrances that give you a mechanical disadvantage also give a compensating mechanical advantage, but they're not all very well balanced (Elderly is super good if you don't care about ever raising your Strength or Vigor above d4, while the benefits of Blind and Young really aren't worth the cost at all).

quote:

Leadership Edges generally give bonuses to "people under your command." Expect to have a talk with yous players over exactly what that means. It doesn't need to be an issue, and shouldn't be, but it can be. Personally, I turn it into a bard or warlord style "buff your friends" thing in my games.

SW makes some deceptively odd assumptions about how it's going to be played. One sidebar talks about how players are supposed to have a bunch of allied NPCs following them around a lot of the time, and in my experience the game really does work better if you follow that advice, but it's not something that's easy to work into every campaign.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

JackMann posted:

Those are pretty much the only ones that come with a benefit. Other mechanical hindrances like Lame, One Arm, or Small are pure negatives.

There's also Obese (which is a pretty decent pick if you don't plan on taking Brawny), but yeah, now that I look at it, there are more purely disadvantageous ones than I remembered.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Nessus posted:

The idea of using Mythender for Madoka Magica is actually pretty clever, though you'd have to tone it down a little if you're going for a pace more like the implicit pace of the show.

You'd probably also want to rework the PVP conflict mechanics to have stakes other than "at least one character inevitably dies".

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

EthanSteele posted:

I think that's actually pitch perfect for Madoka. In show when they turn on each other and it escalates, one of them will die. It encourages the players not to escalate to actual fighting PVP unless its something they're willing to kill/die for, which is also extremely Madoka.

Did we watch the same show? Magical girls directly fight each other in three episodes that I can think of (plus the third movie), and in only of those does one of them kill another. There's the further complication that they don't actually know how to kill each other until halfway through the series, even if they wanted to.

I'd probably handle it with a two-tiered model: unless the initiator is specifically intending to kill from the outset, losing a PVP fight gets you taken out of the action for some amount of time by default (probably until after the next witch fight), and whoever loses can either take the loss or escalate to lethal force.

Thuryl fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jun 2, 2018

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

EthanSteele posted:

So 33% of the time they kill each other? But yeah, you're right, I was mostly thinking of the overall deaths not just to each other. I believe there are out of combat drama rules that you could use for PVP where you're not trying to kill each other.

25% of the time, if you count Rebellion. And the fights are all pretty important scenes with significant consequences, so you'd want some way to handle them within the mechanics, anyway.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

PurpleXVI posted:

MIDDENARDE!

So, the author, apparently being a moron glutton for punishment, has gifted me a free copy after releasing his RPG on DriveThru. Would there be interest in an attempt at a comparison review? Because he's pinged a few suggestions off me while doing the "revised" version, and it's mostly consisted of "take out the absurd fun parts, jam in some dumb parts, refuse critique."

Has he at least given some kind of undertaking that even if you write things he doesn't like, he's not just gonna yell at you until you take it down again?

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

PurpleXVI posted:

Generally this chapter is mostly GM'ing advice that's either painfully obvious to anyone who could ever even hope to be a good GM, or stuff that I mildly disagree with, but there's one section I feel every game should have:


Like, I think this entire chunk here is probably one of the most important pieces of GM'ing advice ever, and I eagerly encourage everyone to take it to heart.

That section you liked is lifted pretty much directly from Apocalypse World, by the way, just rephrased a bit and with the example changed. Compare:

quote:

The worst way there is to make a character’s life more interesting is to take away the things that made the character cool to begin with. The gunlugger’s guns, but also the gunlugger’s collection of ancient photographs — what makes the character match our expectations and also what makes the character rise above them. Don’t take those away.

The other worst way is to deny the character success when the character’s fought for it and won it. Always give the characters what they work for! No, the way to make a character’s success interesting is to make it consequential. When a character accomplishes something, have all of your NPCs respond. Reevaluate all those PC–NPC–PC triangles you’ve been creating. Whose needs change? Whose opinions change? Who was an enemy, but now is afraid; who was an enemy, but now sees better opportunities as an ally? Let the characters’ successes make waves outward, let them topple the already unstable situation. There are no status quos in Apocalypse World! Even life doesn’t always suck.

So yeah, the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that original are not good.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

8one6 posted:

Since my only experience with UA are the F&F write ups I have to ask if it's actually any fun at all to play? Because everything I read about it sounds like the opposite of what I'd want to deal with in a game. (admittedly that could just be my taste in games.)

Well, if you're getting the impression that player characters in UA are mostly going to be kind of miserable people, you're not wrong. Whether that means you as a player will find it miserable is something you can probably judge better than we can.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Snorb posted:

Good Lord, I think I'll just stick to Fifth Edition's poisoned condition (and some poisons doing damage over time or having other effects while you're poisoned). Old edition poisons are loving brutal! D:

Basic D&D's poison rules were a bit simpler but not much more forgiving: poisons were save-or-die by default unless otherwise specified, with weaker poisons giving you a bonus to your saving throw. The Rules Cyclopedia had this to say about PCs using poison:

quote:

The use of deadly poison as a weapon is not a good act. Because of its dangers, poison may be declared illegal by local or regional rulers. In this case, Lawful characters do not typically use it. The DM may choose not to allow player characters to use poisons in his campaign. Warn players that, if they want their characters to use blowguns, monsters will have them as well.

...which at least suggests having the DM directly tell the players "hey, please don't use poison" as an alternative to getting passive-aggressive about it.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Xiahou Dun posted:

Just as a rando, I don't think deleting it is the best move?

Like I hate Zak S as much if not more than the next person, but honest criticism (I'm pretty sure it's crappy ; haven't read your review) seems like a good thing.

We've all known for like 6 years he's a super abusive creep, but I don't see how denying someone in the future your flaying (again, I'm assuming) of his thing is good. If anything you should edit in an update (if you're willing, obviously).

It's a positive review.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

NutritiousSnack posted:

RahXephon is literally a love story, and how about relationships affect art. I really think it's only because of TERRA and NERV, both being introspective Super Robots, and their last episodes having very surreal natures that comparisons are ever made.

In fairness, there are some places where it cribs pretty directly from Eva, like that one monster of the week that attacks in exactly the same way as the 12th Angel. That's more a surface detail than a core thematic element, but it's the kind of thing that people notice.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

NutritiousSnack posted:

I will say sending someone into an illusion to communicate or gently caress with them isn't unique to either series or even mecha, but I'll cede the point because it no doubt played some influence just because of Evangelion cultural footprint. But in that, the angel is trying to communicate and understand Shinji, and humanity as a whole. In RahXephon, it was to distract him long enough to bring him back to Tokyo Jupiter and for his mother to try to convince him to go home/test how far Haruka's and humanity had influenced him. The revelations that Ayato gets are from his second soul, the outside world trying to contact him, or the Dolem trying and failing to placate him, then getting frustrated and cutting through his bullshit and admit he lusts after Haruka.

I mean, the whole "the ground turning black and everything sinking into it" visual effect was pretty distinctive. I can't really see that as anything other than a deliberate reference, even if the context is different.

Thuryl fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Mar 12, 2019

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

gourdcaptain posted:

It says something about Exalted that "make sure my character remains playable instead of getting hit with a save or suck or fiat effect into unusability" is a goddamn charm you have to purchase.

Yeah, I can't imagine using that as anything other than a flag to say "hey, ST, please give me a cool curse with some kind of beneficial side effect", because the situation it's ostensibly meant to prevent is one that shouldn't normally be coming up in the first place.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.
The idea of a solo RPG is one that's existed since the very early days of the hobby; Tunnels and Trolls was known for having a large number of adventures designed for solo play, although for the most part they were basically gamebooks using the T&T ruleset.

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Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.

hyphz posted:

The book also mentions the intriguing possibility that the PCs might somehow have two bullets, which I suppose they could have if they gave Belphegor's Eye to the Innocent after using it to pay their way into the elevator. Unfortunately, it's another Jareth moment, because if the PCs actually shoot both Satan and Hades then there's no freaking clue what happens other than the PCs potentially being stuck in the gameroom until Cthulhu rises. Tucked away in a random footnote in a completely different section of the book (!) is the suggestion that the PCs might be able to escape from Hell if they.. destroy Satan's Tarot deck? Huh.

Given the combination of meticulous planning and ruthless backstabbing required to get all the conditions in place to where that would even be possible, I think my first instinct if a group of PCs did something like that would be to tell them "I sure hope you were angling to be the new rulers of Hell, because guess what you just became by default".

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