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Spellbound Kingdoms is without a doubt the best fantasy RPG ever written and is one of those rare games that's practically impossible to not have fun while playing in. Everything about it is golden and it's criminal that more people haven't played it. If you're going to buy it off of DrivethruRPG then please, do yourself a favour and buy the Premium Heavyweight version, because the print quality of Drivethru's standard book is really lacking.
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Apr 15, 2016 14:26
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| # ¿ Jan 23, 2025 07:30 |
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Hostile V posted:I was sold at "fling cat at enemy's face". Yep. Love is the most powerful of Inspirations - hence it bestowing immortality at 3 instead of 4 like all other Inspirations - but any inspiration at 4 saveguards the character. My character in the campaign I played in was kept alive by his Hatred of the King, for example, and PCs in the game I'm currently GMing are kept alive by things like Bettering The World Through Technology (wait until Nifara gets to the Engineering rules - holy crap) and Loyalty To The Pack. If you're wondering whether Love Inspirations at 4 have any point, then let me tell you that True Love is a thing and the game isn't kidding when it says it's the most powerful force in the world.
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Apr 17, 2016 16:00
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It's a lovely bit of game mechanics and fluff working together - the game works best as a rip-roaring high adventure where you rescue innocents from the clutches of evil nobles and help the peasantry rise up and overthrow their cruel masters and Brunner's gone out of his way to make sure that the setting is one where you want to do that. Every aspect of the setting is so completely designed to be awful to normal, innocent people that even the most adventure-shy of PCs will eventually crack and decide that it's all wrong and something needs to be done about it. The only choice is to overthrow the Kingdoms. This doesn't have to be swashbuckling and using the War and Organisation rules to start an organised rebellion, by the way. It'll come up later, but any player character with an appropriate History or skill can use the Research rules to start working on ways to improve the quality of life for everyone. If you want, you can just use this to buff up your equipment and make yourself rich - but if you wanted to you could, say, do some research to reduce the Wealth Level of food down to 0, making not starving to death effectively a cost-free endeavour for even the lowliest peasant - simultaneously saving many lives and making life just that little bit brighter for the common folk. Imagine what doing that will do to the Doom in the region, eh? There's a reason that Trader and Engineer are character classes and Trading Company is one of the PC organisation types - if you want that kind of campaign, you can very much save the world through enlightened thinking and sound economic practices. You'll probably have to swashbuckle the occasional noble who wants to stop you in the early days, but eventually you'll be able to crush them under the weight of your highly trained and well-equipped armies. And your fleets of zeppelins.
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Apr 19, 2016 12:21
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gourdcaptain posted:You know, if you're going to savagely punish multiclassing before a certain point, maybe it would make more sense not to allow it at all before that point, because that sounds ludicrously crippling. I think it's to make it harder for the GM to just go "oh I'll just allow multiclassing whenever" Maxwell Lord posted:Wait, so is name level for Chosen One "Chosen" or "The One"? I think neither. Nobles don't have a name level either. Once you get on the Destiny train, you can never get off.
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Apr 20, 2016 11:15
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I need to post the texts of a couple more of those Wonders, you guys. They're so good.Spellbound Kingdoms posted:Doomsday device. A doomsday device always operates mechanically or alchemically, though many believe it uses magic to draw strength from the Inspiration of its creator. The device can have many forms: an explosive mine dam holding back lava that will divert and engulf a city, or an earthquake projector the size of Koshtra Noln, or a toxin in the rats of a city that is released upon reaching critical mass. A dooms-day device always takes from one season to one year from its setting to its triggering. During this time, the city, council, region, or any other single-entity target knows that a Doomsday device has been triggered, usually through rumors from laborers who worked for the engineer while constructing the device. Even if there were no such laborers, somehow, word always leaks out when a doomsday device is counting down; perhaps that is another part of the device that blurs the boundary between magic and engineering. If the device is not stopped, then it utterly destroys the target. What is a plot hook for the party at lower levels becomes a legit thing that the party Engineer can poo poo out if you have a real beef with someone. Spellbound Kingdoms posted:Giant. This colossal statue towers over your city. You choose its likeness, pose, and import; through this choice you can assign a Reputation 20, positive or negative, to any individual that you like. The reputation cannot be brought below 10 while the Giant yet stands. Furthermore, the Giant can animate in defense of your city if it is fed the proper takings: the Love of a Maid, the Rage of a savage, the Hope of a Child, and the Wrath of a Father. When these takings are poured out on the Giant's feet, it animates for one season in defense of its city (see Colossus, p. 170). You can build giant robots in this Renaissance-era fantasy game.
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Apr 20, 2016 16:26
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quote:Reign and Spellbound Kingdoms Goddamn these are two of my top four favourite games. I'll apologise to Nifara and Wapole Languray now if I can't stop talking about these games while they're trying to do F&Fs. Spellbound is my favourite fantasy game about playing awesome, larger-than-life heroes where there is lots of high adventure, derring-do and emotion. Reign is my favourite fantasy game about playing hardcore down-to-earth motherfuckers who have an agenda and the will to fulfill it by any means necessary. The combat is brutal and unforgiving, but still allows kek murderers with expensive equipment to scythe their way through hordes of lesser foes. The Esoteric Disciplines make "skill monkey" characters incredibly powerful and compelling, giving them lots of weird tricks that other characters probably haven't even heard of. Magic is, as previously mentioned, one of the highlights of the game: balanced, powerful and fun to use. It's not without its flaws (some of them serious) but I love it to bits.
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Apr 21, 2016 00:28
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The Lone Badger posted:I bought Spellbound Kingdoms thanks to this threat and have been giving it a look. Nope. Make sure to put Heart as one of your higher stats in chargen because it's not getting any higher permanently. There are a couple of temporary buffs to it using magic or alchemy, but you can't increase it.
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Apr 21, 2016 11:10
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Beasts are definitely the antagonists from someone else's book that somehow got lost and ended up with their own splat. It's like a comedy sketch where they're on stage in the spotlight while the director keeps making the "keep going" gesture from the wings, and they keep trotting out more and more abhorrent things as justifications for why you should play as them, then abruptly switch tack and lamely try to pretend that they're the good guys. Seriously, when you compare the Strix and Beasts you can pretty much go "both of these splats are pure, unrepentent evil for the hell of it" but at least the Strix have class. Beasts are just petty. unseenlibrarian posted:Uld also make pretty good villains, since they're basically Prosperity Gospel assholes who sincerely believe the poor are poor because of moral failings and they have a right to drive the Truil out of their already crappy land because if the Truils were truly good people they wouldn't be scratching out a subsistence level existence in a sunless wasteland. When I ran a Reign campaign, Imperial nobles largely used Uldholm as a justification for their continued divine right to rule. Commoners obviously can't be trusted to rule over themselves, they have absolutely no sense of noblesse oblige and let their brethren starve in the streets after taking everything away from them. Commoners over in the Empire don't have any rights, but at least we feed and clothe them and give them places to sleep and meaningful work. One of the things I like about Reign is that depending on where you're standing, any of the nations can either be the definite good guys or absolute monsters. Uldholm are a socially progressive, forward thinking people who also crush their own poor and are committing genocide against their neighbours. Dindavara are a militaristic hegemony where commoners are barely considered people who also happen to have strong traditions of honour, brotherhood, chivalry and benevolence. The Truils are cannibal barbarians who probably value the family unit and human life more than any other nation. The Empire are backstabbing, corrupt and incompetent but also value social stability and quality of life for everyone under their rule. Even the Opetkans, who are basically Sparta on PCP and are world leaders in the assassination and espionage business, or the Upunzi who are governed by literal eye eating vampires have their redeeming features. As far as bad guys in the setting go, it's basically the Lightless Jungle, Demons and maybe the laser desert.
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Apr 26, 2016 13:11
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unseenlibrarian posted:There's two white groups actually; the Truils and the Ob-lobs. The Lightless Jungle natives are also white, and I'm semi-sure that the Sunless Plains natives and the people from the Wincu desert are, if not white, at least a few shades lighter than the rest of the world. I like that it makes total sense that black people are the symbol of civilisation and white people are savages in Reign - all the white people are white because they live in perpetual darkness and can't do agriculture or anything. It's proper worldbuilding instead of just an inversion for the hell of it. Same with the gender equality thing: the fact that only women can ride horses, the fact that magic exists and is independent of body size and the fact that the most powerful empire in the world has always exclusively been ruled by women means that there's just no stigma attached to gender. Women have nothing to prove.
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Apr 27, 2016 13:29
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BinaryDoubts posted:Would just like to thank Nifara for their awesome Spellbound Kingdoms writeup, which got me to pick up the book. After reading through the whole thing, I'm happy to say it holds up - it's a little clunky in places, the warrior class is boring as ever, and there's some little rules niggles that arise from the conversational tone, but on the whole - it's really loving cool. You can tell there's a lot of heart put into it. I'd love to see a v2 that's a little more streamlined with some prettier layout (you can really tell all the sheets were put together with Word's drawing tools...) but doubt that'll ever happen. The Warrior's in a sort of weird place in Spellbound. Pretty much every other class comes with some sort of built in plot hooks or really awesome thing that they get at higher levels - the Savage is a good example, being the other smashman class, in that it gets a Savage Tribe organisation, vision quests, Beast World features and eventually a unique fighting style. The Warrior pretty much just gets more and better combat features. The important difference to me is that the Warrior is actually, genuinely the best at combat. Arguably this is not a good excuse for a class that could be considered boring but I'll disagree - I played one right the way up to level 20 and I can tell you that the Warrior fulfils all the D&D Fighter's wildest dreams of being an unstoppable murder god on the field of battle. As long as you know what you're getting into with the Warrior - that you're signing up to be the combat character who smashes lesser mortals over your knee - the Warrior is perfect. If you want more peripheral stuff, the Savage is right there. I seriously can't exaggerate how dangerous the Warrior is. Twice the hits of anyone else (probably more than twice the hits, since you'll be wearing the best and heaviest armour) with incredible, bone-shattering amounts of bonus damage and more combat styles than you will know what to do with. Not for the Spellbound Kingdoms Warrior the old-fashioned D&D Fighter ways of having all your combat feats stacking on top of a single weapon, so you can only ever use it instead of actually being the flexible combat master that's advertised. A 20th level warrior can have 5 masteries and an apprentice style, which could get you: Arrowheart to be a master of bows, Free Sword for your general day-to-day needs, Five Seasons for unarmed combat, Black Powder and Crimson Blade for your light-armoured swashbuckling needs, Guardsman to protect your shittier teammates and Parapet Defense should you need to murder a mage. Every single one of those styles is dangerous on its own and lethal in the hands of a Warrior - the sheer variety of death-dealing you can get away with is awe-inspiring. Also thanks to Talents, you can also be a Charismatic leader of men, tactical genius and master smith without needing to cross class at all. The Warrior delivers. All you need to know is that when I played one, I Eviscerated a Sky Kraken without breaking stride and now that I'm GMing a campaign I wince a bit every time I stat a bad guy up as a Warrior.
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May 3, 2016 16:05
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Kaza42 posted:So, after reading the review here, I decided to pick up Spellbound Kingdoms, and I'm loving it so far. Quick question for Nifara or anyone who might know, how are you supposed to use the Spin maneuver in Court Sword? The only path that accesses it is through Lunge, which has an (r) tag, which means you have to use one of the balancing moves next turn. Or the Intensify maneuver from Elemental Maelstrom, which is only accessible past the Fireball (r) move. I feel like I'm missing something here, but can't figure out what. Cirno already answered this question, but another thing that's not obvious about Court Sword: the arrows leading from Signature Strike to Lord's Punishment and Lord's Stance are actually bidirectional - they're the only arrows in any fighting style in the game that aren't one-way.
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May 5, 2016 11:36
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Tendales posted:Does Dodge work against ranged attacks now? Defense isn't subtracted from the normal pool, but dodge seems to be a separate roll? In the old days if you were in close range against somebody with a gun, you got to apply your defense like you would against a melee weapon because you were trying to dodge the arm rather than the bullet. In CofD, I think you get to use the gun's Size as defense or something? Like if they're using a rifle, you get to have a defense of 3 whereas if they're using a handgun you only get a defense of 1. Sort of makes sense.
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May 6, 2016 11:02
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what the hell are alphas and deltas?
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May 6, 2016 15:10
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ProfessorProf posted:Ah yes, I remember the "male, female or transgender" thing. Yikes. I mean charitably he might just be really misinformed and thinking of the three-gender thing that come cultures have/used to have. I have a vague recollection that it used to be a prominent thing in some native american cultures and with Brucato's fixation on native american culture it may well be where that particular line came from.
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May 6, 2016 18:44
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| # ¿ Jan 23, 2025 07:30 |
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Daeren posted:In the first edition, it was actually a sucker's game to ever go full wolfman, because going Dalu and using a giant gun/weapon was far more effective and came without the downside of uncontrollable berserker rage. Dalu is still the most effective form for combat. Weapons and armour are where it's at in 2e. Don't get me wrong, Gauru is a wrecking ball, but in a rumble between a Dalu with a silver axe vs a Gauru I would bet on the Dalu every time. It's weird - Gauru is supposed to be the war form for fighting the mightiest opponents and other werewolves but actually it's ideally suited for killing hordes of shitters whereas Dalu is the form mechanically specialised for alpha-striking dangerous opponents.
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May 31, 2016 17:37
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