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Kurieg posted:Apparently Beast feeding can also gently caress up the Lifeweb and this is a capital B Bad thing? The Lifeweb is one of a million things in Mummy that gets a proper noun and a couple pages of description but never really ends up being very relevant or important. But Beasts also remind mummies of amkhata (mindless eaters of life-force), the Shuankhsen (hollow, miserable mummies that harrow the PC mummies and also eat life-force), and the Devourer (Mummy Satan, or more properly, their mythology's cosmic force of doom and destruction). Kurieg posted:Wyrd is a Changeling's power stat, if it gets to high they risk turning into one of the Gentry. The hedge is the weird fucky other-place that the Gentry are from, and being able to control it is explicitly their domain. And apparently there are pathways from the primordial dream straight into the Hedge. It's not exclusively the Keepers' to do, changelings can do it too, it's their mechanics to warp the Hedge that Beasts are glomming onto and saying "me too" about. It's just gratuitous, though, that they get to do this side benefit that doesn't come up often, and do it just as well as a changeling could, despite their only relevance to the Hedge being that they're kinda-sorta dreamworld monsters and 2e Changeling is relating dreams to the role of the Hedge a bit.
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Oct 13, 2016 07:14
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The character group names are the worst offenders, in my eyes. The other CofD games typically, to some degree, either have proper names you have to remember, but which are pithy and tied to a more descriptive moniker (Vampire has Ventrue, who are Lords, and Gangrel, who are Savages; Mage has Obrimos, who are Theurges, and Moros, who are Necromancers), or just start from a descriptive name from which you can glean something about the characters in question (Changeling has Ogres, Beasts and the Fairest; Demon has Messengers and Destroyers, who may be Saboteurs or Integrators). They're not always quite that clear-cut, those are the ideal, but Mummy exceeds the worst in opacity by a pretty good degree. Mummy's Guilds each have two poetic proper nouns, one in Egyptian (faux Egyptian?) and one in English, and they're not terribly descriptive. I'll be damned if I can remember off the top of my head which Guild is Maa-Kep, the Bearers of the Engraved, and which is Su-Menent, the Shepherds of the Chamber. The other axis, the Decree, comes later in the book, but it isn't better. Don't expect those five parts of the soul to be referred to by what they are in English again much. quote:The Arisen know the basics of their existence—their origins in predynastic Egypt, their positions as servants of the ruling elite of the Nameless Empire, and their instincts to rise, serve their cults, and reclaim items of power. But they don’t know the full story of their creation. That last sentence is, at best, misleading.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:09
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potatocubed posted:I think the problem TFV would face with mummies is that a) a mummy is extremely difficult to put down even once and b) they can do unspeakable amounts of collateral damage in the attempt. Meteor showers, earthquakes, blasting people into pillars of salt, zombie plagues... Although I did enjoy the tangent that emerged on rpg.net awhile back which started at this premise and went in the opposite direction: because mummies have brief periods of terrifying power, have little reason to respect any kind of masquerade, make unclear demands addled by their initial fogginess on rising, and direct hidden networks of followers, the government's response is to drop all other priorities in favor of a Global War on Mummies.
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Oct 19, 2016 20:14
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quote:If you want to include Heroes that break with this narrative role, go ahead! The prevailing thought among Beasts is that Heroes are dangerous and violent, because that’s the type of Hero they tend to find. Again, thematically speaking, breaking narrative assumptions and recognizing that easy labels aren’t so useful is very much in keeping with Beast quote:If the Hero is a sympathetic character, driven to hunt monsters by the relentless attacks of the supernatural, then you might be better served checking out Hunter: The Vigil (and perhaps using Beasts as antagonists). If, however, the Hero has deliberately shunned other people, defining himself by what he is not, what he hates, or the wrongs done to him, that’s a perfect candidate. Beast is all about breaking assumptions and subverting expectations! Do not deviate from the following assumptions.
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Oct 21, 2016 07:14
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Ewen Cluney posted:I should see about at least writing up a summary, but there's a Japanese book that collects a column on weird American TRPGs, and it includes a replay of when the author roped the writer and illustrator of Slayers into playing Slayers d20. One of the PCs was a weirdly cute fish boy. I absolutely want to hear more about this, both the replay specifically and the column in general. Is any of the collected column online somewhere if I feel masochistic enough to try to read it in the original Japanese, or are we talking hardcopy only?
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Nov 26, 2016 22:19
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LongDarkNight posted:Speaking of Demon and the God-Machine, didn't someone do a write up of God-Machine Chronicle? I wanted to go back and read but don't see it on Inklesspen's archive. Re: the God-Machine Chronicle, it's folded into unzealous's writeup of the Chronicles of Darkness Revised Storytelling Rulebook, because the latter half of that book reprints the majority of the GMC content. The writeup itself covers the stuff left out, too. Re: Demon and the Lucifuge, my impression of the Mortal Remains chapter has always been that it takes a firmly ambiguous position, as appropriate for Hunter. The weaker chapters of Mortal Remains are like Tooth and Nail in that they give a straightforward, point by point summary of the corresponding gameline, but the Demon chapter isn't like that. It has a version of greater demons which are definitely out of Descent, some lesser demons which are entirely unheard of from a Descent perspective, and a conflated merger of the Hunter core's elder demons and Demon's infrastructure and occult matrices. The Lucifuge section is sufficiently ambiguous that the God-Machines demons – or its angels, for that matter – could be relatives, a red herring, or part of a larger puzzle. I don't think I expect Hunter 2e to take the Lucifuge more firmly in the direction of Descent; they have their own associations. My personal interpretation of the Lucifuge sometimes runs toward the sidebar in the corebook identifying what their actual Castigations count as "demons." It turns out they treat the category as very, very broad, such that it wouldn't be out of place to suppose that the demonic heritage that runs through the hunters of the Lucifuge isn't of one kind at all, but monstrous birthrights from the many different ways human ancestries have been tainted from without. Re: Beast... Well, there's not really anything left to be said, is there.
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Feb 9, 2017 10:59
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Jesus. Interesting exercise, like hell I'd particularly want to play it myself. Seems like some strange priorities on where to put the detail; very little on what means might be used to actually accomplish the task the game says it centers around.Hostile V posted:The purpose of the Farm is to cultivate organically-fed, happy Residents to be eaten. Stress and fear taints the meat. The Farm's a whole lot better at quantity than it is at quality then, isn't it. Doresh posted:My splat ideas are dumber Honestly, I feel the same way about yours, too. The horse died pages ago, please stop beating it whenever CofD comes up. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Feb 22, 2017 |
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Feb 22, 2017 10:57
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Integrity is by no means a perfect system itself. There's little of particular interest to seeing it slide up and down, with the serious dramatic failure Conditions being very rare, and raising your Integrity being a boring XP expenditure with little effect except for a minor situational bonus or penalty change. But I think there's a big difference in perspective and tone communicated between saying that specific actions, like shoplifting, breaking and entering, or arson, can cause you to develop an Inferiority Complex, Obsessive-Compulsion, or Megalomania, and saying that flexibly defined personal shocks can cause you to feel Shaken or to become Broken or go Mad. Using the language of the DSM is a loaded decision.
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Feb 24, 2017 20:34
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Evil Mastermind posted:I remember that After Midnight or whatever it was called was literally his TGD posts about the whole "WoD heartbreaker" idea, just put together into a single document without editing anything. I recall it still has undisguised use of White Wolf-specific neologisms, like just straight up referring to Prometheans who use Transmutation powers, etc. It was really just one step up from being Vampire: Undeath, a sourcebook for the Wastelands of Damnation. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 03:00
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Hostile V posted:Thoughts on Shawn: I don't like Shawn the character too much because he kind of reeks of a certain degree of GM homerule. The plot idea is decent and he's generally an excellent example of why you should never set the Ritual time to be too soon. But he really does feel like the Bather template was added as an afterthought or that he might've been a character/GMPC that one of the writers enjoyed enough to slide on in. I agree that the Bather Ritual seems mostly ancillary to what's gripping about the concept, but I like the use of Shawn to highlight rituals that focus more on the gory shedding of blood than its ritual preparation. For the most part, though, I just usually like when a writeup manages to sneak in an entirely new angle. I don't think I'd run TV smack demons as an outright apocalyptic threat, but yes, I like that they're there being jerks and causing problems.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:35
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JackMann posted:I've said this elsewhere, but I wanna say I really do appreciate the work inklesspen has put (and is putting) into the archives. It's fantastic to be able to catch up on older writeups and stuff from times when I wasn't following the thread, so I definitely appreciate the work. Another hand for inklesspen.
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Mar 31, 2017 00:33
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JcDent posted:I don't know how anyone could see that as N endorsement of Ayn Rand when her book was referred to as nightmarish. Anthem is a dystopia. What the author is calling nightmarish is the strawman Rand is railing against, whereas the book itself is "thought-provoking." Edit: Excuse me, "thought-provocative."
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Mar 15, 2018 12:52
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FMguru posted:I thought the whole point of Exalted, going back to the original 1E Rulebook, was that this was a game of demigod-tier heroes fighting demigod-tier enemies to determine the fate of all Creation? It's supposed to be Achilles and Beowulf and Cuchulain and Gilgamesh teaming up to storm Mordor and cast down its walls, not grim-and-gritty misery tourism, isn't it? From the beginning under Geoff Grabowski, Exalted kind of walked a conceptual tightrope where it tried to have a setting of mighty but flawed demigods fighting tragic battles on which hung the fate of Creation, but written from a realist angle, where if you weren't one of the mighty demigods you had to worry about sepsis and cholera, and the subtext of the game was that having Great Men Chosen for Excellence decide the destiny of the world was a bad idea that would lead to tyranny. It tried to be that. Sometimes it didn't try very hard. Like most White Wolf settings, Exalted has a very confused and self-contradictory history.
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Mar 20, 2019 21:50
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Halloween Jack posted:Not only that, he managed to come up with an even worse list of random dumb poo poo than the gross-out equipment in Shadow of the Demon Lord. And sandwiched it around a little quotelet that serves to do nothing but massively overpromise. quote:Not everything people (even vislae) say about vislae is true. It's all far stranger. Surrounded by a list that is very much a counterpoint.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:21
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Mors Rattus posted:It's apparently mostly a D&D comedy reskin. It has Vancian "cool moves." You have to decide which cool moves by level to prepare each day. Shame, because a bestiary of reverse twins and vampire night buses definitely has promise.
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Sep 6, 2019 06:05
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