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I've been waiting for Siege of Tolkeen for so long. Since Alien Rope Burn started to review rifts.
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May 2, 2019 13:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I aim to not disappoint! This has been a goal of the reviews for a long time to get to this point. Back in the 1990s I was, for my sins, big into rifts (I was young then). I don't think I actually played a session but I read most of the books. Until the end of Siege Against Tolkeen, which practically killed my interest in the whole game line. Not to spoil people, but the end of it is one of the dumbest, most anticlimactic things I've ever seen. It's absolutely the worst.
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May 3, 2019 03:10
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Tibalt posted:I think what annoys me the most is that there is a blindingly obvious way to write this story if you REALLY wanted to make Tolkeen villainous. Rifts is lousy with evil magically-aligned groups. Have it be clear, "So says the Prophecies", Winter Is Coming obvious that Tolkeen is going to lose this war! Have King Creed start making deals with the Atlantians or getting advice from Lord Dunscon or start summoning demons! The road to hell is paved with good intentions! It always interested me how like, the various demon witch groups don't get the same kind of consideration. The Federation of Magic are just super evil without any kind of redeeming thing about how actually they're just driven to it by their loathing of the coalition to deal with demons and do child sacrifice. It's just Nazi Cobra that gets this treatment.
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May 7, 2019 13:45
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Alien Rope Burn posted:A good number of Simvan Monster Riders have joined because the Coalition is a threat to their existence and they also like fighting. Why they've overcome their general xenophobia (was that ever really a thing with them?) is less clear. Some Psi-Stalkers have joined, but the presence of the Simvan and the fact the Coalition doesn't really persecute them means there's not many involved. Naturally, D-Bees are generally involved because they live in Minnesota, but some more have arrived just to fight the Coalition because. But you don't understand. If Tolkeen got help, then the CS will lose, and obviously that can't be allowed. :V
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May 8, 2019 22:12
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Nessus posted:If by crypto-fascist you mean like, trying to deliberately inculcate a streak of explicit fascist apologia, I doubt it. If you mean in the sense of being a little too into how awesome it is to fly a skull robot while being a hard man who makes a hard decision, extremely certainly and that writer was Kevin Siembieda. There's certainly a bunch of people who were pretty clearly crypto playing the coalition though. This becomes very obvious if you've ever read a rifts message board.
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May 10, 2019 00:32
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Then, since Coffin has dared to offer a means to resolve the war in a single plot, it's time for some Siembieda shade! Thanks Kevin, something interesting almost happened. Oh god the Vanguard are next.
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May 19, 2019 12:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Oh, don't worry, it's coming. You'd think that the whole explaination of what Tolkeen was like would have been in the first book, like, maybe with some pre-war setup, and then the rest would be what happened.
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Jun 11, 2019 01:41
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Dawgstar posted:
Pretty much. The whole holmes subplot, indeed the whole final siege was the point where even my teenage self really just abandoned rifts. Even beyond the fact that it's softpeddling nazism to a huge degree, it's just... so dumb, and so anticlimatic. This huge six book series which has been developing since the core book, ends, spoiler, on a whimper, not a bang.
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Jun 11, 2019 15:14
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Holmes is our 'Rommel is the good Nazi' isn't he?
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ZeroCount posted:Man, Rifts really wants you to know how much obsessing with opposing the not-Nazis makes you evil and just as bad as they are No, you don't get it, according to Kevin, what Tolkeen should have done was abandon their city and flee off into the North West, abandoning their infrastructure and becoming a nation of refugees, hounded by both the coalition (who, being genocidal fascists with air transports seem unlikely to let them go) and by the various dangers of rifts earth, so that 20 years from now they can get killed again by the now far more unstoppable Coalition. Obviously, this is a real alternative to war. Obviously. Edit: It's especially hard not to despise people like Lazlo, who seem like they have at least the war-making potential of Tolkeen, who refuse to help out against the genocidal fascists kicking down Tolkeen's door even when the Coalition is super on the back foot, or give even token aid when the Coalition is about to move in and kill everyone. I'd despise them too. "Sure is nice your principles are so important to you that you'll let the skull nazis murder all my friends and burn down my home." Of course, in reality, the success of the sorcerer's revenge seems like it'd have caused the coalition to get swarmed by all its other enemies. Like, you'd think the Federation hardliners would be all abandoning Dunscon because of his failure to meaningfully fight the Coalition while Tolkeen was kicking the stuffing out of them. FBH991 fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Jun 17, 2019 |
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Jun 17, 2019 13:46
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Dawgstar posted:I'm shocked. Three whole female NPCs on the council and not one thing about them 'using their stunning attractiveness to their best advantage.' and only one of them is an old lady, the other rifts go to.
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Jun 17, 2019 15:05
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Rereading federation of magic (and Alien Rope Burn's article on it) it also strikes me as interesting how much we seem to be reading kind of... the version of the setting in Seimbeda's head, rather than the version of the setting that is actually written on the page. Like, as mentioned earlier, it seems pretty strange that the other factions of the Federation of Magic don't intervene. Dweomer is the third largest magical city in North America, and seems unlikely to have Lazlo's (already unrealistic) qualms. Nor does Dunscon have any real power over them. Sure, they want to avoid conflict with the Coalition, but it seems pretty obvious that the Coalition will eventually come for them and all other magic users. So once the Coalition is looking weak, why not pounce? A lot of the criticism of appeasement as a policy is actually quite ahistorical because it doesn't realize the bad state of the French and British economies, and how much they didn't want to wreck them by rearming. Hitler kept pushing for an early war because he'd managed to steal a march on them and rearm, and they kept appeasing him to catch up (which they only partly did.) But I've never before seen avoiding war with the genocidal fascists as not only the wise choice, but the only moral one. The only one that the real heroes can make.
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Jun 17, 2019 15:31
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Night10194 posted:You have to remember a big part of Kev's writing on the Coalition is that no-one can ever morally fight them, they are both too powerful and if they are ever defeated it will harm 'stability' so much that it will be terrible for everyone. I find the attitude to the CS very strange. He obviously wants us to think they're evil, but like, trying to stop them is more evil? I don't think he's a cryptofascist, but that just leaves me more confused.
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Jun 17, 2019 15:54
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's particularly weird when, like, we just had Xiticix Invasion get published. Like, there's the perfect reason to have Lazlo be preoccupied fighting bugs! And it just gets ignored - and with no explanation, either. The whole Holmes plot thread is enormously dumb, so it works as something to dump. I mean, I don't really understand why you'd even want to have the CS win. Given that even at the time there was a lot of CS fans, it'd be a great way to rebalance the setting to make them less villains and more PC friendly: Have them lose, have the government get overthrown because they lose and put a reformist in charge. They still hate aliens and mages but they're less willing to do extermination missions now that they got beat like a drum. I think part of the reason that CS only parties are a thing is also because magic doesn't seem all that useful.
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Jun 17, 2019 18:52
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's ironically more thoughtful than the Coalition Wars series, but that's small comfort. After all, Heroes of Humanity is still the title and it wants to eat its cake and have it afterwards with how super-elite and badass Coalition soldiers are, like literally better than any other military force. I mean, it's possible just because they're well resourced and not suffering from the kind of constant attrition NGR armies are, but it seems like, even if you reject all of the stuff Carrella wrote, that it'd be Japan, who are much richer and have access to full pre-rifts technology, who'd be the best.
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Jun 18, 2019 02:24
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
Only woman in the NPC list ist is super sexy scantily clad Altairan. Oh Rifts. Dawgstar posted:Are the Warrior Ladies MDC on their own or is she counting on her mega-damage booty shorts to save her from an errant shot from a Wilk's? They have magical forcefield armour IIRC. FBH991 fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Jun 18, 2019 |
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Jun 18, 2019 15:30
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Oddly, though, fortune telling is banned by the King to prevent doomsaying. Uncoincidentally, a lot of psychics leave the city weeks before the new invasion. You would think this would instead lead to a radical rethink of the Tolkeen strategy. It's not as if they're exactly out of options. Just use the fact you can teleport and rift about to deploy a bunch of strike forces into areas where the Coalition are relatively weak, such as their agricultural land, and mount a series of mobile strikes that force the coalition to redeploy inordinate amounts of forces to deal with. It would also be far more effective at showing how cruel the war had made Tolkeen if they were running around coalition crop lands casting blight of ages and feeding small coalition towns to the Daemonix. If the choice is between a campaign of terror to draw the CS offensive away until the solstice, or resist the siege and fight only against the enemy army that would actually be a legitimate shades of grey moral dilemma. Of course this would also require Jericho Holmes dumb plan to not work, which we can't have.
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Jun 20, 2019 20:30
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
This feels like it'd have more impact if they'd established the City of Tolkeen in the first book then turned it around from there.
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Jun 21, 2019 15:36
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Alien Rope Burn posted:[*]19. Expedition Expediters Unlimited: A second Naruni front business that eventually offers help with escape routes, but if the PCs use them they're automatically associated with the Naruni somehow and get killed by the Coalition or just people what hate the Naruni. Given there's not one but 2 Naruni businesses here, and the Naruni presumably hate the Coalition, why isn't Tolkeen fighting the coalition with a ton of Naruni gear as well?
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Jun 21, 2019 23:02
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Dawgstar posted:The Naruni are simultaneously the most prosperous and least trusted arms dealers in the Multiverse. They remain staggeringly successful despite nobody seemingly trusting them enough to buy a pack of gum off them. You'd think, given how bad they are, and how desperate Tolkeen is, they'd set them up with a refresher army of interdimensional mercenaries and sweet gear (like a big technological air defence system to ground the CS skull transports) on a "pay later" basis then use this to make post-war Tolkeen totally dependent on them.
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Jun 21, 2019 23:33
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Rereading what has been posted so far, and my own copies from back in the day, it's kind of interesting to me how much Tolkeen becoming evil is something we're told, not something we see. In general, Tolkeen fights a clean, defensive war without any attacks on anyone who's not a combatant. There's no bombardment of CS civilian territories. Hell, is, as far as I can see, no attack on any CS person who isn't a combatant or a politician. Like, rather than having an Auto-G try to get all the way to Prosek, couldn't Tolkeen just take a suitcase nuke or some kind of magical weapon of mass destruction into Chi-town proper and blow it up? Given Rifts has long-range missiles with ranges of hundreds of miles why aren't they raining down on nearby CS cities? They have blight of ages as a spell, why aren't they sending teams into Missouri or where ever the CS grow food and just chain casting it until it's a magical version of the dustbowl. The allies fought a dirtier war in WW2 than Tolkeen fights against the coalition. The North fought a dirtier war against the South. Kevin seems to think that just them using demons will be enough for us to think that they're super bad guys, but I kinda... don't? And we never actually see the Daemonix or whatever do anything particularly bad. They're not demanding blood sacrifices or anything, or that after the war ever 10th Tolkeenite be given over to them. Nor even they get to eat CS prisoners. They're literally helping because Tolkeen was the first people ever to be nice to them. The closest you get to any kind of atrocity on the Tolkeen side that in the heat of the moment, they may mistreat captured or surrendering CS genociders. Even then, Tolkeen mostly treats its prisoners fairly well. They're not exterminating them. They're not implanting them with mind control devices and sending them to kill their former comrades. They're not using them as part of mass sacrifices. There's not even an incident where Tolkeen demon troops break through the CS lines, take over a CS town and eat everyone. It would be creepy enough in modern conditions to portray Tolkeen as having gone too far against the CS Neo-Nazis. However even with the morals of the time, it looks more like Tolkeen is fighting a clean war, while the rest of the supposed good guys refuse to help them for petty reasons.
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Jun 22, 2019 13:19
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