FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Doresh posted:

Now that would make for a far better game of Beast: Monster: The Weekening. Can you live a normal family life and make a living stealing life energy from helpless citizens while Power Rangers and Japanese school girls are out to get you?

Man now I'm remembering an attempt at a fan splat based on Tokusatsu Heroes I tried to make back in the day, and still occasionally fiddle with, could never really figure out an exact niche for them though, let alone a consistent origin for them

# ¿ Apr 11, 2016 23:48

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# ¿ Jan 15, 2025 12:30

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

FMguru posted:

A game about early modern European history (with folklore and magic and national cultures) is a great idea. Zorro and the Ancien Regime and King Arthur and Merlin and the Unseelie Court and Baba Yaga and Saracens and Musketeers and Galileo and Newton all crammed into it sounds like a hell of a good time. Except it was sold as "7th Sea" and the promotional art was full of pirates and ships and the CCG it was a spinoff was literally had players controlling fleets of ships sailing from place to place. And the setting literally had NO PLACE for those age of sail pirates and ships in it.

Just astonishing. Wick trying to play it off as, oh I meant river piracy is just the cherry on the poo poo sundae.
Ronin are popularly regarded as badasses (see Miyamoto Musashi, see Yojimbo and Sanjuro) and Wick's special cause is breaking down players who have the temerity to think they're badasses. Also Ronin are free of a certain amount of House bullshit and can just bail and move on if they're put in some ridiculous blood-and-honor "heads you lose, tails you lose" dilemma like Wick loves to stick players with.

Man he sounds like a complete rear end in a top hat

# ¿ Apr 12, 2016 07:14

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Doresh posted:

Their niche is that they can turn this World of Darkness into one of Brightness. And their origin is magic / spiritual power that is indistinguishable from technology.

I'll keep that in mind, Kamen Rider Amazons is definitely making me want to do something with this idea(cause it has quite a bit of a WoD vibe to it)

# ¿ Apr 14, 2016 04:59

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

I had almost forgotten how much I loathe Witch Girl Adventures, makes me want to run a game dedicated to murdering that kind of magic user(actually that would make for a good campaign, a group of assorted supernatural beings ganging up to murder these Witches cause they are being too blatant and open with their magic, and it's threatening an already fragile Masquerade/truce with a government monster hunting agency, that will literally burn the city to the ground to contain this if necessary)

# ¿ Apr 14, 2016 10:09

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

So has anyone done a review of either Mekton Zeta(and/or the Z+ supplement) or Battle Century G, cause if not maybe I'll give it a shot, haven't done this sort of review before but it seems fun to me

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 06:21

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Man now I just want to shoot the WGA author in the kneecaps

# ¿ Apr 18, 2016 23:18

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Doresh posted:

I should write a Dude: The Bro or Mahou: The Shoujo where all cases of snarky bullshit are replaced with "Man, these guys are awesome".

Except for Beasts. They should be killed with fire.

Do they also have a homosexual Beast who brainwashes children into becoming homosexual themselves? Or a Beast from the Middle East whose lessons involve explosions?

God-Machine? More like Jock-Machine.

That's because there are so many lessons to teach to us humans. Which we already know.

There's already a Magical Girl fan-splat actually, look up Princess: The Hopeful

At one point my hypothetical Tokusatsu themed fan-splat idea was going to be directly tied to them(where they represent Hope, my guys would represent Justice as a concept, which is something that the WoD is sorely in need of, which would have been expressed through them both being physically more powerful than most other supernatural beings, and through them having an inherent ability to destroy permanently any magical method a supernatural creature has for disguising it's true nature), although if I ever do anything with it now I'd make them their own thing fully

Traveller posted:

The only crossover I can think of is a vampire, a werewolf, a mage, a changeling, a Promethean (somehow), a hunter, a sin-eater, a mummy and a demon all coming together in the same room and going "we are the literal scum of the earth but those fucks don't get a pass," and then fixing the World of Darkness - Beast by bloody Beast.

Now I'm remembering an old idea for a campaign I had where a group composed of one of each type of supernatural come together and inadvertently end up becoming a Justice League expy

Daeren posted:

I'm doing a very quick skim right now. It's still kind of ill-thought-out in a lot of the crunch, but it's still got compelling hooks and ideas under it, and I haven't trivially found a way to roll 98 dice to throw a house on somebody right out of chargen like 1e Leviathan's powers let me.

And yeah, honestly? Leviathan does a significant chunk of Beast's more salvageable concepts much better. For instance, Ahabs are basically Heroes that aren't completely awful in every way, and Atolls can be used for all sorts of entertaining/horrifying things.

What's an Atoll? Imagine being the incarnate bloodline of the Old Gods, your psychic pressure intense enough to force your worst enemies to bow before you in fear and reverence. You probably haven't interacted with someone who wasn't bending over backward for you in decades. Then, all of a sudden, you meet someone who makes your constant inner anxiety chill the gently caress out, and you must get to know them...but your mojo doesn't work on them. At all. And now you're a centuries old squid god babbling like a goon trying to impress this random checkout clerk who's getting more and more weirded out, and oh god your fish eyes are starting to pop out :spaghetti:

Ahabs, meanwhile, are basically people who respond to your psychic browbeating with murderous rage and become, well, Captain Ahab. They will not rest until you're dead, and the sheer level of their obsession with killing you empowers them to do so. Again, you're probably so used to scaring trained soldiers into submission with a mean look that some accountant with a baseball bat who will not lay down and die is going to be a big, big problem for you if you've gotten out of shape.

I had almost forgotten how much I liked the fluff ideas for Leviathan

# ¿ Apr 24, 2016 22:09

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Mors Rattus posted:

Princess is awful.

And the thing about CofD is that the setting is existentialist. It has no overarching concept of hope or justice that will swoop in to empower people and save the day.

It's got you, the player characters. If you want make poo poo worse, you can. If you want to be a force of justice in an uncaring world, you can. And you can make life better for people. (Probably not yourself, though - that poo poo is hard work and hard on your relationships.) But there's no one else out there that's going to besides people. The closest thing that can reliably be identified as a deity operates near-randomly to produce bizarre effects for no reason. Spirits exist primarily to eat each other rather than for any actual purpose.

I feel it misses the point to set something up where people are empowered by hope or justice. The heroes of CofD are existential heroes - people who do the right thing not because there is some force empowering them to do it, or because they know what it is for sure, but because they've decided to make a stand and do their best. Giving them a Hope or Justice power source is missing the point entirely.

I'll admit I'd be intentionally tearing the setting apart both literally and thematically, cause I've been long disillusioned with the actual setting as being way too bleak to find actually enjoyable on it's own merits

# ¿ Apr 24, 2016 23:28

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Mors Rattus posted:

Yeah. You're unlikely to fix everything, but you absolutely can make the world a better place.

Part of my issue is that for heavily detailed settings like this, I can't ignore the big picture situation, and for the WoD that big picture is a setting that is worse than the real world in every regard, and to be frank the real world is already awful enough, I don't need to be depressed by my fiction as well(same reason I don't actively follow DC or Marvel's main universes anymore)

# ¿ Apr 24, 2016 23:41

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

If I ever did do anything with that Toku fan-splat idea(if I can figure out how to make them fit into Chronicles of Darkness thematically in a way that's fitting to the source material), when it comes to the section detailing how they interact with other types of supernatural beings, I'd probably list them as being instinctively hostile towards Beasts, cause one of my current ideas for this is if you were to consider Humanity as an organism, Hunters would be the White Blood Cells, and most Supernatural types are diseases that plague it, while whatever I call my idea(that's been another problem I've had with this, can't think of a good name for it) would be the equivalent of taking prescription strength medication to fight said diseases(and yes I just realized I basically said that the World of Darkness is Bill Murray in Osmosis Jones)

# ¿ Apr 26, 2016 19:40

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

LatwPIAT posted:

My principal example within this is nWoD fan's obsession with X-splats and Y-splats. Every idea I've seen for a homebrew nWoD line starts off with "Creature: the Title. You play a Creature. There are five X-splats and five Y-splats." of some kind, completely oblivious to what purpose X-splats and Y-splats should serve, or why there should be five of them. And there's always 5x5, despite the fact that Changeling had 6x4. (And oVampire primarily ran on only 7 X-splats, while oWerewolf had a 13x5x3 model.)

Yeah I ran into that issue when I first tried doing that Toku fan-splat idea of mine years ago, although I'll admit I didn't understand World of Darkness rules very well back then, as I only had the core book and none of the splats in physical format

# ¿ Apr 27, 2016 22:03

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# ¿ Jan 15, 2025 12:30

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Luminous Obscurity posted:

It was called Fury: The Scourge. The PCs were Furies, people who were suffered some kind of great injustice and took revenge and as a result this giant cosmic spirit of justice empowered them to battle injustice. In practice though its basically people being given superpowers and hitlists of people who broke any and all manner of archaic laws so while you might have to go kill a serial killer, you also might have to torment someone who hasn't finalized their divorce so they're technically an adulterer or something. If you stand your ground against the cosmos, Bad Stuff happens with the severity depending on the degree of your disobedience. You group up so you can fight more injustice, but also so you can "cover" for each other. So like say you have to go kill somebody. You might hate killing, but one of your buddies can stomach it, so they can go kill the guy instead of you and cosmic justice doesn't go bananas on everyone.

It was basically an anti-revenge fantasy

edit: Found it! Keep in mind its literally an internal document written just to pitch an idea so its a little rough around the edges

Might have to borrow some stuff from that if I ever do anything with my Toku fan-splat idea

# ¿ Apr 30, 2016 06:22

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