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Rand Brittain posted:The book is called "Secrets of the Magister," is from 2e, and is not to be confused with "The Magister," which is about something totally different. The Magister, easily mistaken for an adventure module at a glance, being one in a long line of books compiled from Greenwood's 'conversations' with Elminster and containing stats for a hojillion unique magic items and grimoires. It was a pretty nifty little booklet, even if it had a terrible title. Introduced me to the concept of the traveling spellbook, for when you don't want to risk your whole goddamned library on a murderhobo spree.
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Feb 7, 2016 07:45
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I've always liked Ravenloft, but running it in D&D has always struck me as a screw-you of Wickian proportions. Dumping a bunch of murderhobos into a gothic horror scenario, turning a swathe of their magical arsenal inside-out, and offering them bennies to start meandering down the road to NPChood was a raw deal, and that's not even touching the outright racism toward non-humans and renamed Roma given mechanical weight.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:38
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I'd like to see that. My experience is with the 2E material, which worked relatively well if you ignored the 'suck your PCs into the Demiplane of Dread!' approach they seemed to like, and made everyone native to the setting and aware of the risks of using certain spells and tactics. And, you know, made sure your players knew they were in for something more Dracula than Army of Darkness. Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 18:46
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Okay, I'm definitely intrigued now.
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Feb 8, 2016 19:12
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Nessus posted:Hey man, enough temporaries start to look like a lifetime. Not just bad fiction, but bad metaplot fiction, culminating in a second edition boxed set that massively rewrites the setting at the hands of the novel heroes. PCs? Pfft, what about 'em?
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Feb 9, 2016 01:57
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I might have to see how much of my 2E Ravenloft stuff is near to hand, though I basically stopped collecting it around the time they put out the 'Surprise! You're Undead!' box set, and gave up completely when they gave it the late TSR cataclysmic reboot treatment. There's a brief entry in the old, old Manual of the Planes, describing a fabled 'Demiplane of Imprisonment' formed after the great, great grandparents of the current gods defeated, destroyed and disposed of things far worse than the current run of demons and devils, sending vast hunks of Evil Matter sailing into the Negative Material Plane. Remnants were said to have coalesced in the Deep Ethereal, and with traditional hoary tale logic, anyone who found entryways must have been stupid enough to step inside and get lost. When the Ravenloft boxed set came out, it was like a painting that nodded and winked as its eyes followed you around the room.
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Feb 9, 2016 20:21
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Hypocrisy posted:I like Ravenloft a lot but stuff like horror checks always annoyed me. I understood the 2E Fear and Horror checks (and the attached Madness rules) as an attempt at genre emulation, but at the same time, I completely agree. They came off a little like old-school level drain, something to frighten and drive the players rather than their characters. Wanky poo poo like bone golems, that would kill you stone dead if you blew both checks, didn't help matters at all.
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Feb 10, 2016 18:44
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Night10194 posted:I'm thinking of abandoning my WHFRP thing since I haven't updated in months and taking a stab at the cursed thing that is Ironclaw (We've had how many attempts at reviewing it now?) It's at inklesspen twice, whatever that's worth. I saw it just now while looking for Play Dirty for a friend.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:48
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I'm a little surprised that they continued the Ravenloft canon, given references to the setting reboot and side-line stuff, rather than just restarting it. It's not like 2E and 3.x were particularly compatible to begin with, so having the Dark Powers shake the setting like an Etch-a-Sketch wouldn't have harmed continuity much further.
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Feb 10, 2016 23:40
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Half a dozen subraces of Vistani? This is edging toward WoD: Gypsies territory.
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Feb 12, 2016 17:55
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Unless things have changed dramatically, Outsiders should be strikingly rare. Makes that one power rather narrow in its application.
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Feb 13, 2016 06:07
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I'm getting the feeling that Bill hates elves because Bill leans on secret doors too heavily, and Bill's players caught wise-- like the one who started casting buffs when he noticed that particularly dense fluff descriptions coincided with a likely rain of poo poo.
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Feb 15, 2016 22:04
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Kurieg posted:
It's got two. That lovely, lovely font is obscuring a superfluous 'I' in Condemnation.
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Feb 16, 2016 05:15
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I'm not sure what's worse: the feeling I've got that Ms. Purple is a fictionalized author insert, or that I may have met them... no. The crazy, Circe-worshiping transformation fetishist I met had a vastly better grasp of English.
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Feb 16, 2016 14:32
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Kavak posted:Probably true for Azure Bonds, I'm pretty sure they just took the easy way out with BG II. It's a real cockbite when you're emulating a game like AD&D 2E, with straight-up penalties if you use weapons you're not trained for, and essentially worse if you can't use the ones you've trained deeply in. It only gets worse when all of the major loot is pre-generated, so training picks made in ignorance might leave you at a serious disadvantage.
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Feb 17, 2016 19:37
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It's even messier than that. The wording describes changing back to a fully-functional biological male, which seems to indicate she's misgendering trans women here, misusing terminology in a delightfully confusing way, erasing female-to-male trans people entirely and, my favourite, perpetuating the myth that trans people are innately untrustworthy. After all, you can never know what you'll find in their pants until you reach in... and then it's too late. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if trans men show up in the list of enemies, bitter at having chosen to sever themselves from the goddesshead, and empowered by the patriarchal penis-monster that's twisted them away from systerhood.
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Feb 18, 2016 05:32
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Kurieg posted:Not that I can see. For either interpretation. Small mercies, there. Poison Mushroom posted:That is somehow both less worse and also more worse than I thought it would be. It doesn't even seem to be actively malicious just very... It's the Magical Tranny trope from that sidebar in the Mage20 review all over again, with all its misguided ugliness and then some. Ettin posted:Then there was Shen Meng Rui, who had started out at the Chrysalis Corporation as a project manager. However, his natural attention-deficit disorder, while it helped make him a highly efficient project manager, had also made him a jack of all trades. He was, among other things, an archaeologist, a theologian, a linguist, and an occultist. It was no surprise that the Children of Chaos had their eyes on him within a few months of starting at the company. This is so specific, so laudatory, that it smells suspiciously of author insertion. The kind that a self-diagnosed teenager with a habit of browsing Wikipedia might construct.
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Feb 18, 2016 12:38
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I was going to drop a reference to the Knights of the True Fiancee, but that beats me but good.
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Feb 19, 2016 01:51
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Inevitables were in the outer planes content before Planescape, I think. Maruts, and a couple of others got added or expanded upon in the PS stuff.
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Feb 21, 2016 16:31
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Oh, god. I remember stories where the GM collected weird puzzles as a hobby, and took every opportunity to inflict them on his players. Sure, they could rely on their characters and their ability scores to bypass the puzzle and get back to the game they'd come over to play, but the GM would get pouty and only give them half the reward at best.
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Feb 26, 2016 19:42
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Doresh posted:Silent Legions I think you just sold me a copy of Silent Legions. Holy poo poo, I love those.
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Feb 27, 2016 16:28
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Comrade Koba posted:Be sure to bring a wizard so you can cast Detect Nazis and Otto's Irresistible Car Chase. Sticks to Snakes may only be cast by those of a Chaotic alignment.
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Feb 29, 2016 23:09
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I love you in a deeply platonic fashion, just saying.Cythereal posted:That could be a fun take on vampires, actually: they're perfectly free to walk around during the day, they're just perpetually on fire when they do so, regenerating fast enough that it doesn't physically impair them. I think I saw this on a Pink Floyd cover.
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Mar 3, 2016 02:34
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I can't believe I'm actually typing this, but would smoking Circe actually kill her? I'm assuming that the mundanes are ash, but her reaction to returning to human form with her hips turned into one of RPGpundit's siglines seems more 'ugh! you little bitch!' than 'OH MY GOD WHERE'S THE REST OF ME?!' The chessboard thing is probably just a cheap metaphor for carefully crafted antagonism, made cheaper by the fact there's clearly nothing careful about it.
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Mar 7, 2016 23:51
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senrath posted:Nahhh is probably right. I've met a small handful of people that fit that description in various RPG circles over time. I'm really wishing I hadn't, actually. Likewise, I can think of a few different people I've met in MU* that fit that kink and behavior.
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Mar 8, 2016 01:05
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I never understood how that table was supposed to work.
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Mar 14, 2016 01:44
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For me, the IC realization that there really is a Grand Unified Theory of magick is, pardon my phrasing, paradigm-shifting. Front-loading it, the way Brucato has with M20, really defeats the purpose of putting so much weight on the splats, and especially of introducing a rival set of Traditions.
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Mar 28, 2016 03:08
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That's really what strikes me as weird about the whole thing. I was expecting a big digest of Mage, like the other x20 books had, not a Revised style rewrite.
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Mar 28, 2016 04:03
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I can't help thinking of this, after reading that effigy cigar thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHLw2lyLnA8
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Mar 28, 2016 14:53
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Goddamn it, I swear I checked.
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Mar 28, 2016 15:59
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Oh god, GSS is just loving adorable. 
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Mar 31, 2016 17:13
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Autoduel was my introduction to GURPS, way back when the third edition book was out. A battered-looking (through the cellophane, even) copy sat on a shelf at the local hobby/crafts/etc store at the mall, somehow looking sun-bleached, until a friend picked it up and we finally stopped making body noise jokes over the name. ...we got worse from there. There's just something about systems with disadvantages that bring out the inner five year old in a lot of people I've met.
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Mar 31, 2016 19:15
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Nowadays they could just make a reference to the 38 Studios debacle.
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Apr 3, 2016 17:26
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Wow. That adventure was almost as lovely as the one for Mind Lords of the Last Sea.
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Apr 4, 2016 03:39
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I presumed you don't call yourself a monarchy unless you genuinely let a monarch call the shots. Oops. Don't worry about it too much. I'd wager a lot of us up here aren't aware of it either. 
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Apr 5, 2016 13:26
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This is TVtropes levels of cack-handedness.
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Apr 5, 2016 17:25
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oriongates posted:But anyway....Psionic Artifacts of Athas is basically a version of the Book of Artifacts designed exclusively for the Dark Sun setting. It's not quite clear why they felt that Dark Sun needed its own...I love the setting but the place isn't exactly overflowing with magic items. In fact a good chunk of the items are taken from the Prism Pentad novels, and most are not actually psionic. Perhaps realizing that they didn't have enough material to turn this into a full book they introduced something even weirder: life-shaped artifacts! What are those? You'll see. I've always been halfway convinced that this book is mostly scraps of paper Bill Slaviscek left in his cubicle before quitting TSR. The copy I have is rife with awful grammatical errors, 'its' transposed with 'it's', and at least one of the front sections reads like point-form notes. A significant section of the book being fairly mundane (so to speak) life-shaped grafts and gear didn't help, though at least that stuff was arguably more useful than the artifacts.
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Apr 6, 2016 05:01
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Alien Rope Burn posted:[*]Commando Scout: Like a Boy Scout, but also trained in civil defense. It gives a cap to points spent on skills based on age, but I don't remember if that was a mainstream GURPS rule. Maximum of twice your age in CP spent on starting skills, yeah. I think we used that one all of once or twice, and dropped it entirely for high-CP games.
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Apr 7, 2016 03:39
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oriongates posted:The orbs only have to be eaten in order to complete the final transformation into Kalid-Ma, for ordinary use they merely need to be in the user's possession or (for some uses) held in the hand. Each defiler/psionicist undergoing dragon metamorphosis has to acquire, consume and excrete X number of obsidian orbs to serve as foci for their growing power, according to the Dragon Kings rulebook. It's not too far a leap for a potential dragon aware of these things to get the bright idea of using these ones (and presumably binding their power to themselves) instead of farming up their own orbs.
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Apr 9, 2016 19:38
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Every time I think of Beast, I can't help but think someone was really affected by John Gardner's Grendel... and didn't realize that even in his own retelling, Grendel was utterly unsympathetic and incorrigible.
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Apr 9, 2016 21:05
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