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Oooh, please do Dungeons: The Dragoning 7th edition because it's just a bad pop culture mashup I really wanted to learn at one point.
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Mar 21, 2019 22:45
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Night10194 posted:Well, I guess that settles it. It makes a good compliment to Exalted, anyway. It's that simple, sheesh.
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Mar 21, 2019 23:01
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Also yeah like in execution nobody has to be King poo poo of Stat Mountain in Exalted. You really can just be unnaturally good at a wide variety of stuff and if you want to all do that as a party I say go nuts. The main issue is that in addition to the combat focus, Exalted is a game that says clearly and directly to its audience "this is a game about being a loving anime demigod" and their immediate reaction is "so I should build an anime god that uses system mastery to become godly insanely well because the game is telling me to do that".
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Mar 24, 2019 07:04
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Well done, EM. Congratulations!
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Apr 16, 2019 01:54
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The Border Region of Pferdekrieg and the rivers Hundenhemd, Katzenhosen and Alpaka-Schuhe.
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Apr 17, 2019 |
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Apr 17, 2019 15:14
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Night10194 posted:Thank you for respecting the long traditions of Warhams German and its Horse Wars.
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Apr 17, 2019 15:24
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Really doesn't help that the national god of Cathay is just Tzeentch in a scaly fursuit.
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Apr 17, 2019 18:29
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Also, random tables as a jumping off point for tabletop design is one of my favorite things/absolute vices and I'm glad Ham 2e has a nice and robust little drama maker for your own somewhat original adventures in a slice of your own canon.
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Apr 17, 2019 20:52
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Renegade Crowns Sound and fury signifying nothing! When Gildemeister Nazril Gudrunsson first entered the Border Princes 30 years ago, he had a map of the ruins of his people, enough coin to satisfy settlers and a head full of commerce and masonry thanks to his years as a Merchant. He did not, however, speak the Imperial tongue. Traveling upriver through the region to where the river forked and the caves lurked at the foot of the mountains, he asked his guide what this place was called. "Langweilig und sinnlos." replied his guide. And so the town of Langweilig-und-Sinnlosstadt (Lusstadt) was formed. Lucien-Etienne Champlain, a mercenary from Bretonnia who his men called "The Exalted One", and Holy Father Nils Borshevsky, a local boy with aspirations of becoming the head of religious state, were the next to take a stab at colonizing Lus 20 years later. Nazril did not care what they wanted but he told them: "this land is mostly worthless. As long as most of your own land is mostly worthless, I don't care where you settle". Naturally the two humans took land with plenty of grass. Though Nils got the good end of that bargain, Lucien wheedled the better metals out from under the eye of Nils. Lucien also settled his own town, Sudlusstadt (South Lusstadt because, well, it's more south than the old one). Things were fine until they went to war five years later and the next Prince showed up, a Norscan knight named Hanna Hakonsdatter with a mass of barely intelligible seamen who staggered across the Borders until they could find a new home. "Go live to the West", the warring provinces advised her, "and don't touch our poo poo". She took their advice and she also did not touch their poo poo and things were fine for a time as the war continued. Lucien committed crimes upon Nils' people, Nils committed crimes upon Lucien's, standard business. Things got worse when the Greenskins and the Kislevites showed up. Specifically, three thousand Kislevite soldiers lead by a self-styled Tsarina, Anastasia Nikita Antonina Devora Kristina Petrov. "There's not a lot of room for you," said Lucien. "That's okay, we'll find some space." said Anastasia. "I think this might be getting too crowded," murmured Hanna. "What's the plan for these Greenskins?" asked Nils, being pretty heavily ignored for the moment. "Just don't name whatever encampment you set up South South Lusstadt" grumbled Lucien. "...Lusdorf." said Anastasia. "Good enough." said Hanna. "I'm sorry did you say your last name was Petrov?" interrupted Nazril as he thumbed through his Book of Grudges. The Border Region of Langweilig-und-Sinnlosstadt (Lus)  For the sake of reference, 1/1 is at the bottom left corner. Originally settled by a Khemri prince as an excuse to bury his many, many, many grandchildren in a far away land where nobody could see him kill them, Lus was last actually occupied by Araby around 700 years ago before that occupation ended. Since then it's been a wild and lawless land of homesteaders and small villages getting by until Nazril came to town to take back what was his. Lus' main claims to fame are "not much" and being the genesis point of two rivers that feed into each other and the local swamp, one from the cliffs to the west and one from the eastern geyser. The west river is known as the Klippe Erbrechen River for its placement while the eastern river is called the Abgetrennte Aorta for the pigment of the dirt from the badlands that gets carried until washed out. Monsters To the south is a small clan of reclusive giants that would like to be left alone and Tsarina Anastasia is trying to keep her men from bothering them. To the west lurks a small war band of Chaos that Countess Hanna has to deal with. Lead by a Bestigor, his mutants and beastmen are a hazard, making a blasted and otherwise useless land more useless. The two bands of Orcs are their own problem. To the east, in the badlands, are the runts of the litter. 750 snotlings, 100 goblins, 2 trolls and 25 orcs call the badlands their home, a motley crew of some power and danger but mostly scattered and disorganized. It's the other group that's the reason why nobody's bothered trying to settle the swampland: an army of 750 snotlings, 25 goblins, 20 trolls, 500 orcs and 50 black orcs. The southeastern army poses enough of a threat that it's the reason why the war between Father Nils and Lucien hasn't boiled over into one side settling. Both sides are forced to mostly terrify each other with acts of insurgency that wage open war, because whoever wins will be overexerted and tired with no mercy from the Greenskins. The Princes Gildemeister Nazril Gudrunsson is a Dwarven merchant with a passion for his heritage and a hatred of monsters and other miscreants. He's in love with his own power and refuses to let it go, almost to the point of paranoia. He's attended by a solid retinue of his own people and makes his home in Lusstadt, overseeing commerce more than performing princely duties. His land is his business and he expects people to act as such, deferring and demurring to his economical overtures. His big weakness is he is a compulsive note-taker and often doesn't clean up after himself, needing to rifle through his various charts and graphs and notes at a moment's notice. His other big weakness is his tendency towards mercy in secret. Nazril's lands are economically wealthy. Lusstadt is a Dwarven ruin repurposed into a fortified city, a stronghold with a choke-point on the river. If there's one complaint he has, it's the local witch all the humans keep relying on for lousy magical mumbo jumbo. If Nazril had his way he'd just pitch her into the river and be done with it, but it would be more trouble than it's worth to put her down. He also lays claim to a stone quarry at 1/18, a gold mine/stronghold at 3/15 on the river, one of the local markets at 9/18 and a silver mine with a man who makes remarkable shoes at 16/19. Holy Father Nils Borshevsky was a good local boy, once upon a time. It's not like his religion changed him into a bad man. He just learned at a young age that Sigmar purifies the wicked as their souls leave their body, and when faced with the brutal ways of life in the Border, decided that the best way to spread his message would be to rule. Nils is a genuinely nice man, which is a problem when you lead a religious cult. His word is his bond and he treats all people on his land as his equals (and expects the same in turn). Sure it's kind of a problem that he wants to rule all of Lus. Yes he's actually secretly an extremist zealot and not just a faithful of Sigmar who set up shop in an impoverished land to help people. But his eyes are open, his mind is clear, his cause is just and his heart is full of love. Plus he's got a good sizable cult that waits on him hand and foot. Nils doesn't have a town but he does have the prime grazing territory in the land. He resides in a pleasant stronghold at 13/3 that also functions as his church and training grounds for his soldiers. 12/6 is the miracle that told Nils to make this land his own, a well-spring of magical energy that heals the sick and invigorates the faithful. 14/8 is a lead mine and rather unremarkable. 16/6 is his dirty little secret in the area: a small village of cultists sworn to Khorne. Nils vaguely knows of them and their cause but he also knows two things. First, the love of Sigmar will help cleanse their terrible souls and it's his duty to love the sinner and hate the sin, keeping them isolated. Second they're more than willing to fight that dirty Bretonnian gently caress Lucien-Etienne Champlain and why not use them and hope Sigmar purifies them as they die in battle against his enemy. If not him, the Orcs, he needs them for the Orcs. He'll get rid of them one day when they've outlived their usefulness. Lucien-Etienne Champlain the Exalted One didn't really have the chops to make it as a knight so he became a mercenary instead, making coin in the Empire as a sell-sword and picking up other disgraced kin as he went. Not a noble, not a knight, not a Merry Man, not much of anything back home, Lucien wants to claim this little slice of the world for himself and his men. He is Inscrutably Bretonnian to a baffling degree in his rule, relying on foreign social mores and conventions with a smile in his eyes as you falter for the right gesture. But he is a...relatively honorable man, his word worth its weight in gold until he's crossed (like that stupid inbred Sigmar-loving gently caress Nils done did, by the Lady). He's catered to by a large retinue of his countrymen (and women) who do their best to keep his fear of apples in check. Nobody is sure why he's afraid of apples, but cider is certainly banned (much to some consternation). He's also an agent working directly for the Lady's courtly affairs to keep an eye on Bretonnians abroad but that's on the down-low. Sudlusstadt is Lucien's fortress, his rock. A stronghold with a choke-point built on top of a quarry suitable for building stone, Sudlusstadt does business with everyone in the region who needs anything sturdy built. 11/18 and 12/10 are iron mines under his control, though 12/10 is his favorite due to having a solid chokepoint and recently discovered veins of tin that are getting him excited for new revenue. 14/11 is his other pride: a local village with a competent armorer working on weapons and protection for his men. These assets provide him the solid edge he'd need to take out Nils once and for all...but those Orcs are there...eh, perhaps later. Countess Hanna Hakonsdatter was raised a long ways away from the Border in a land of spraying saltwater and blood. A headstrong girl by their standards, Hanna was taught to hold an axe before she could walk, raised to be a Knight of Chaos and plunder. Her first raid was spent promptly going AWOL to live anywhere else and not deal with a life of deprivation and despair by murdering the captain and capturing the boat. Thankfully her crew thoroughly agreed and with the little Imperial tongue she knew (mostly taught to her to help her raid better) she demanded land for her people. Was this lovely scrubland? Yes. Was it warmer and safer then home? Also yes. In theory Hanna is still a thrall of Chaos, a deep-cover agent who is furthering their insidious goals and begging for their help. In execution she's more of an Easter and Christmas Chaos cultist and has been trying to break the habit of swearing with their names. Hanna is friendly to her subjects, obsessed with acquiring more capital and completely amoral, sticking only to the creed she was educated under: live to survive. She is also an absolute glutton, possessing little to no self restraint after years of hard training and starvation. A few years of being able to eat more and live more have softened the iron of her upbringing and helped cool the fires inside of her, filling the hungers inside of her with constant nourishment somewhat recklessly. There's not much to Hanna's lands; a lot of her crew were allowed to roam wherever they saw fit. She resides in a stronghold at the base of the cliffs at 5/13, occasionally telling the Beastmen and Mutants to get the gently caress back into the forests and leave her alone. At 7/11 she's got the area's sole gunsmith, keeping her soldiers in better arms than what they had both home. And they need them, too: the big source of money in her lands is found at 10/1, a dungeon. There's something down there and there's money down there. She hasn't found either yet. But anyone willing to give it a shot can find themselves armed with a gun in no time with a pack of food on their backs. Tsarina Anastasia Nikita Antonina Devora Kristina Petrov is pretty sure a Tsar is supposed to have a long flowery name and she's working on adding more. She was in the cavalry for a while before she realized the real money soldiering was found in banditry, and a little greasing of the social wheels helped her coax her unit into padding their pockets with plunder. Soon she and her riders were attracting more and more members until they became a cartel that wasn't really wanted in her home country anymore. So they set out to somewhere warmer...and found a ton of absolutely nothing in their new home and four new neighbors with axes to grind. Anastasia is a bit soft-hearted when it comes to "innocents" and as such her army is full of women and children making a home among her roughnecks. She's also a firm believer in individualism, eschewing traditional courtly politics and doing what thou wilt but ruling morally. Unlike the other Princes, she has a code she tends to actually adhere to. The main thing that's a point of contention is her open door policy...that applies to her bedroom and boudoir only. Her subjects understand she's a libertine but she walks a very strange line between being a free spirit and being incredibly unprofessional. It's all absolutely consensual, of course, but then a lot of people wonder if this means they're a thing and then are even more confused when she moves on to the next paramour without really talking about it with them. Lusdorf probably wouldn't have taken off if not for her cartel being a couple thousand people strong and the discovery of marble in the hills. They also have a potter, which is handy. Both allow them to make high quality goods to carry to markets and sell them as Authentic Kislevite Marble and Pottery before they're in turn sold down-river into another province. Her other asset is at 6/5: a witch from the old country who has decided to stick to tradition and live in the hills with a community. Independent Communities: these operate all along the rivers for the most part in the places that are livable but not claimed.
Oh boy here we go.  Fundamentally it all comes down to the war in the region between Nils and Lucien when a dispute between the two of them lead to Nils converting some Bretonnians to his faith at sword-point. Things got worse from there. It turns out it's easy to have politics when only one Dwarven merchant owns the lands. Nazril dislikes Anastasia because of something a relative of hers did 40 years ago. She has no idea what's really going on there but he's planning on extracting his repayment from her and hers to cross it off the book. Been a while since he's had a proper Grudging. Hanna hates Nazril because the independent market has been doing better business with him over her. She deserves recognition and appreciation, drat it. He's got his own loving market. It's not fair. Anastasia has the hots for Nils wife, which makes him incredibly uncomfortable to share a border with her. It's not that he's got a problem with her libertine behaviors (he legitimately doesn't have a problem with her pansexuality); love the sinner and hate the sin and such. It's that he knows she doesn't keep people around long, but this crush has been going on for a while and neither party has any idea how to broach the topic because Anastasia doesn't particularly care for the Father himself. Could this be resolved by talking to his wife? Probably. Nils doesn't really have much of a problem with Hanna right now. Things are calm between them. There's just general friction because he's got more of the grazing land. Anastasia thinks Hanna is a decadent bitch who needs to learn some self control. Liking things is fine. Having things you like is good. But the Norscan is just indulging in some downright conspicuous consumption and it reminds Anastasia too much of home. Hanna, in turn, doesn't need some self-righteous nymphomaniac telling her how to live her life. As for the war itself, it's mostly Nils and Lucien occasionally doing horrible things to captured members of the other province to send a message of strength. Lucien has the power and armaments and defenses but likes having Nils as a bulwark against the Greenskins. Nils wants to push hard but doesn't want the Greenskins to sneak up on him and destroy his flock. Nazril wants nothing to do with either side: Nils is a maniac capable of atrocities and Lucien's arrogance has soured their business relationship. Hanna doesn't think much of Nils for now but is terrified of Lucien's martial prowess; she was a raider, yes, but he's had a more disciplined upbringing when it comes to war and knows more than she does. The only one who has any real interest is Anastasia. She likes the cut of Lucien's jib and likes the way he commands an army and would love to have that kind of relationship with her men. That said, it's less "I'll join this conflict!" and more "god I wish that were meeeee...". And one day a band of adventurers will inevitably throw this entire ecosystem out of whack! THOUGHTS God I love random tables. This was good. This was stimulating. This was fun to do over the span of two days I had off. But. 1: the layout is bad. God it's bad. There's so much flipping. 2: the explanations for the bonuses is lacking when it comes to running tallies and god don't make me keep this math tracked, please. 3: some of the formatting and presentation could be better. 4: I'm not statting out every single homestead, hell no, god no. Will I ever use this for a Warhammer game? Yes. Super yes. The initial map construction is fun. It's incredibly satisfying to take a 20x20 map and fill in all the wonderful little dots and build a realm and then pit a bunch of people against each other therein. And I actually do like the monster aspect, even if it's swingy. The ruins are good for flavor but rather one-note. Instead the atmosphere really shines when it comes to the villages and who has what to sell or which special feature. The towns are also a great aspect, as is the fact that you can have multiples based on random rolls. So I would use this again but I would have to cut some of this way the hell down and maybe set up a better spreadsheet ahead of time. ...also this could have all been shorter but I am absolutely extra and in love with my own words, so you got a stupidly intricate political assessment and backstories for all of these replaceable fools. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Apr 21, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 06:22
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Evil Mastermind posted:What software were y'all using to make those maps?
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Apr 21, 2019 00:01
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Ogryn cricket-player.
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Apr 27, 2019 05:18
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The moral of the story: never work for exposure when you're more than capable of killing the client.
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May 1, 2019 20:41
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God drat it Etherscope.
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May 20, 2019 17:53
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It's hilarious to me that Eclipse Phase 2e is nowhere to be seen and the shameless furry knockoff has had its 2e come out first.
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May 26, 2019 02:49
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First and foremost, needlessly complicated plot-wank and aligning of the stars is a central habit of a lot of nerds regardless of whether or not they're into the furry fandom. HSD is no less outrageous and no less uncommon than the people on alt-history sites who come up with detailed timelines where Walt Disney is elected instead of Nixon and timelines where people try to condense every single good to bad sci-fi B-movie involving space truckers into a single cohesive world and timeline. This just feels worse because it goes into reproductive stuff to an outrageous degree and is priding itself on relentless and above all else immutable internal consistency. Second they're actually in the process of adopting Mars in Safe Havens to prevent it from being exploited by greedy capitalists because now there's a spare Earth and because Mars is a sapient being. The logic there is because it's a new planet entirely after terraforming so they can adopt it. This isn't bad because of Holbrook's furry leanings and predilictions. This is bad because Bill Holbrook has been running this strip since the early 90s on the internet and is incredibly Old Internet compounded by his love for never letting everything stop and his fetishes for pregnancy, being subservient to corporate power and raising children. In conclusion: rigid and stupidly complex writing and structuring only stands out in furry works because the furry works already stand out for being full of upright talking anthros and more common mainstream geek plot rambling is something we're all just incredibly used to.
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May 26, 2019 03:29
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The quick-start free thing to look into for Invisible Sun is just cobbled out of all four books and leaves a ton of gaps for basic-rear end rules and that was enough to make me think "ah, you're a nightmare and someone else's problem". Good luck and godspeed WL. And when I say "cobbled out of all four books" I mean "includes the titles and covers of the books differentiating them".
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May 27, 2019 23:21
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So in short, you are Total Recall Wizards. There was a big stupid war and you were either a deserter or a draft dodger or someone broken by the war. So after a certain point, you just went to the nearest neutral developing nation (the Grey) and just went AWOL until something lured you back or you found your way back. The war is over, the city you once knew is in turmoil, the wizard war economy is headed for a downturn due to post-war rebuilding and relief, and you're trying to figure out where you belong and what exactly you left behind because you have no memories. As a pitch? Pretty solid idea for a game. Allows for magical mystery and intrigue and name-making adventure. As presented? Hard to comprehend without hard reading and the players aren't meant to know they're playing a game that can be summed up as Total Recall but with wizards.
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May 28, 2019 23:38
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Thinking you're too good to sum up your idea in a sentence is a poison many designers drink. Does it make your idea, your baby, your precious gluten-free vegan free-range child sound stupid? Kinda, but it's a hook, you draw them in and then wow them. Your idea is never too good to turned into "like x but y" to get the basic ideas across, because god knows how many bloated and swollen corpses are in this hobby with the core DNA of "it's like D&D but" and "it's like LOTR but" that suffocated or died of heart attacks on their own justifying heartbreaker bulk.
Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 23:55 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 23:50
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Good new thread name.
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May 29, 2019 12:41
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AmiYumi posted:Next time I run a game, this is how dwarven society works. Every dwarf has a rank, they are all gray metals (iron, silver, steel, platinum, chrome, etc), they are ranked by dwarfy criteria rather than monetary worth, and their forms of address require you to be able to tell them apart on sight.
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May 30, 2019 00:07
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Congrats on the job well done, Night! Very enjoyable and very interesting series which generally sold me on the whole shebang.
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Jun 3, 2019 22:07
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I’m the Trash Man. I come out, I throw trash all over the thread, and then I start eatin’ garbage, and then I pick up the trash can and bash the guy on the head. There’s not much better than honest and open communication between parties about what they’re both getting into. Look at that cover. The breasts on display. The mutant with the leather studded thong. Everyone is fighting. Everything is being destroyed. This just looks bad. And it is! And that’s why I’m here to share this with you all today! I saw this cover art and I thought “y’know what? gently caress it. Sure. You look like a fried food buffet at a carnival. Got any deep-friend oreos?”. Boy howdy was I not disappointed. The main writer is the main designer is the main artist; this is a one-man show. Players are expected to have two PCs being controlled at once due to high mortality. Pretty much every woman in this book is in a sports bra and has a minimum of a C-cup. Small little art pieces decorate everything. Most importantly: this game is serious. We’re not talking the casual gonzo humor of your Gamma World, though there’s a lot owed to Gamma World sense of humor and design. This is a serious game, despite all appearances. Little casual backstory on the mind behind the game: William McAusland is apparently a long-time Canadian artist for RPGs and has been doing this for decades. According to his blurbs and resumes I’ve seen online, he’s done work for WOTC, Kenzer, FFG and Goodman Games. In fact, the nice blurb giving him praise on his website is by Joseph Goodman, the owner of Goodman Games. [sips a drink] Read into that how you will. But, he’s worked on some legitimate products and had his art used in a lot of OGL products. I will admit that this makes Mutant Epoch an interesting project; he’s someone who’s seen how the sausage is made, seen how books are constructed and knows layout. However. Making your own game in that position is kind of like being a professional saucier deciding to start your own restaurant because you’ve worked in enough kitchens and consider that to be enough experience to assume the role of head chef. That’s not even an accurate analogy; McAusland was solely responsible for this book’s construction, art, writing, layout, editing, etc. Mutant Epoch is like if a French-trained saucier took a break from being a mercenary kitchen worker to open an artisanal taco truck driven and crewed entirely by himself. I don’t want this to be a personal attack, mind. I don’t know the guy and I don’t know too much about him besides what’s public. I’m just giving some context. Later on in the book, McAusland describes his game as “the game I always wanted to buy”, something he’s been working on for two decades (  ). This game is a labor of love and of professional development and I am going to focus on the product more than the person. The two are intertwined, and all art is inherently ideological based on the creator, but we’re not going to attack the creator. He is still making modules, monster books, runs a newsletter and is doing a pseudo-Adventurers League endeavor. This is his project, this is his idea, let’s talk about the execution.Mutant Epoch is a bad heartbreaker with too many charts, incomplete formatting, missed typos, art that tends to treat women as breast pedestals, no seriously too many charts, fiddly mechanics, a strange sense of priorities, a deep fascist streak that stems from othering anyone not a “genetically pure” human into a second class or banned citizen, a lot of slavery baked into the mechanics and a tone so dry and clinical for the subject matter it’s like starting a fire with a surgeon’s notes as kindling. It’s awful. I love it. Let’s begin. WHAT IS MUTANT EPOCH? Good question! Mutant Epoch is a post-apocalyptic adventure game from 2011. It's set in the 24th century in the ruins of what was California. The setting is specifically the area around what was once…”Las Angeles”. Sic. God drat it. The 2100s and 2200s were the decline of mankind as a whole. Corruption, civil strife, radicalized ideologies and war between nations and corporate states go hand-in-hand with amazing technological advances that created mutants and robots. Everything becomes more authoritarian and repressive, governing forces bolster their control over the civilians and military with slave races in the form of the artificial humans and robots. What causes everything to come to a head is a bunch of AI assuming control of “mecha” (an unexplained but easily surmised force) teaming up with the rebellion of the slave races to crush human dominance for the next century. It’s 2364, mankind has made enough of a comeback to have feudal states (except for all of the supertech enclaves that are, like, everywhere) compete for survival against the mutants, the clones, the cyborgs, the bestial humans…just a whole god drat mess of sapient beings, really. You are beings who are giving up your old life to try and make a new one as ruin delvers, folks who dig deep into the wrecks of the old world to come back up with relics such as guns, technology and lost sciences to make money and live comfortably. Aaaaand that’s all you get for this book. Setting information comes later in other books which I may or may not cover. This game is more or less just mechanics for character generation, gameplay, equipment and more. There’s a glimpse at what the world is like that can be read into from the mechanics. It sucks! There is a ton of slavery and racism! Regular humans are fascist supremacist dickheads! A lot of the beings are right to dislike us because we tend to mindfuck a ton of them into being our slaves! But the game also offers us alternatives to play with in case you want to use this as some kind of universal system (don’t) such as:
GM goals are to have fun, facilitate fun and This is the part where I knew the game was going to be that special kind of bad: dice conventions and commonly used dice. D4, d6, d8, d12, d20 and a whole mess of d10s to do d100 rolls and, drumroll please: d1000s. The beautiful and wonderful d1000, the shining hallmark of “I had a lot of ideas but I didn’t have exactly 100 ideas, and I didn’t want some ideas to be 1% probable, so I made a d1000 table out of what I had”. The d1000 is the true sign of the doomed heartbreaker, the mark it bears that call out to me and entices me, especially if it’s a post-apocalyptic adventure game. This is where we’ll leave off for now. Let’s talk real quick about how I’m going to be handling this book: a ton of the writing is just bluntly boring. It takes its theoretically gonzo mutant splatterfest ideas and then gives them dry and technical summations that explain the mechanical reflections. Now, I find it hilarious. One of the strongest pillars of comedy is something ludicrous happening but being treated and played completely straight; this is the main thing behind why Leslie Nielsen was such a good comedic actor with the right direction. The man had gravitas and dignity pouring off his voice, delivery and mannerisms, treating things that are nonsensical as deathly serious and elevating the nonsense to comedic heights. It’s why it’s not funny to have him act funny and do yuk-yuk schtick because then he’s acting funny and making an rear end out of himself. This book has rules for calling shots to the groin. This book has rules for if your character has male menopause. This book has rules for your character being naturally flammable or how there’s a lot of ethical debate over which bestial humanoids are okay to eat and which ones are generally considered edible or how a mutation can be the ability to fart sleeping gas twice a day. These would be intolerable and stupid in less skilled heh heh snicker hands…but the book treats them all as serious facts of life and explains, seriously, how acid farts work, how being trained in doing sex well makes you a decent at first aid, how your characters can have an extra nipple per breast and more. Radiation and mutations are Wizard Bullshit, to quote a friend, and the book pretends it isn’t, it’s serious and here are the rules. I find it funny. However. It isn’t interesting to read. As a result, I’m not including a lot of technical gritty gameplay details and mechanics for things. I’m leaving off damage values, how many times you can use a mutation per day, how many bullets fit in a gun, etc. I’m also leaving off a lot of art because there is a lot of art that’s often found in the form of a small thumbnail. If it’s interesting or warrants further diving into, I’ll take a look at it. This does mean I will just be posting a whole mess of charts that list things I won’t talk about. If you want to go seek out this book so you can see first-hand how it works and all shakes out, sure, go ahead. I can’t reprint this whole thing; as a general rule I like to leave something behind to motivate people to ever look at this on their own unless I consider it irredeemable. It would also be a boring mind-numbing slog on my end to just reprint it all and it wouldn’t be an engaging read. As a general rule of thumb, if it looks stupid and questionable and a joke, it may stem from a place of a joke but it is absolutely not intended as a joke, and I find that funny. That said, I absolutely will be making characters where applicable, because stuff can get stupid and is also just full of questionable design choices. So! Join me NEXT TIME when we start the long haul into all 106 pages of character creation in this 250 page book. We're going to be specifically looking at stat generation and the first chunk of the races. And yes, dice will absolutely be rolled. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Jun 7, 2019 |
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Jun 7, 2019 06:27
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 CHARACTER CREATION PART ONE: Initial Type Generation and Stat Generation Or God drat, I’ve Been So Spoiled by WFRP Character creation is a sixteen-step process. Some of these steps are substantially faster than others. This is because A: some steps are just plain shorter than others and B: this book is structured…weirdly. You generate your character type, your stats, your caste, your height and weight and then some further details before there’s ever an explanation for what the different types of humanoids there are. Step One: Type Selection  In short, there are eight different breeds of PC you can come up with: Pure Stock Humans, Clones, Bioreplicas, Trans-Humans, Cyborgs, Bestial Humans, Ghost Mutants and Mutants. As you can see some of those are broken down into subsections, and this doesn’t include the fact that there are thirty-three species of Bestial Humanoids you can have. Some of these are pretty self-explanatory for now, so we’ll do a deeper rundown later when we talk deep “species” lore. For now, here’s what you need to know:
 We’ve rolled a 41 (https://orokos.com/roll/732322), which is a pretty lucky selection for a beginner character: Trans-Human! Please welcome Helena Nothru of the Pure Stock enclave of Nothru. She’ll be our generation sample for this entire exercise. I like the idea of there being a matrix by which you can get random characters depending on play level. It’s explicitly said you should stick with lightly mutated or pure characters to get people used to the system and flow before the heavy details come. They do, admittedly, streamline some of the process because while it's the Mutants and Cyborgs and Bestial Humans who have a lot of extra cruft, everyone inherently has some cruft in this design process. That said, here come the heavy details: traits.  There is just a general dearth of shirts for ladies. Guys too, but the absence of shirts still having the presence of bras just makes it stand out that much more. And it really doesn't matter how mutated they are; if one is possessed of bosom, they shall always be supple, pert, perky and pretty clearly on display in some form. Step Two: Traits Eight traits. Let’s see what we got. You can tell exactly when I realized I was going to have fun with this game: Endurance (Con/Str), Strength (Str/Con), Agility (Dex), Accuracy (for aiming and hitting), Intelligence (Int), Perception (the skill but as a stat), Willpower (defends against mutations, willpower) aaaaaaaaand Appearance (“physical looks based on human standards…One’s ugliness or attractiveness is often a factor when encountering beings with human ancestry”). Yeaahhhhh buddy it’s that kind of game! But, important question: how do you generate these stats (for anyone not a Clone, Bioreplicant or Bestial Humanoid)? Oh I’m so glad you asked.
And then you cross-reference the derived basic traits with another chart.  We’re not gonna do that just yet because Helena has much more coming that will just keep changing NEXT TIME when we take a look at the caste systems! Can you be a slave? Absolutely! Can you be a prostitute? You bet your rear end! Do a lot of options come with some kind of mechanically enforced downside? BOY HOWDY! Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Jun 7, 2019 |
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Jun 7, 2019 22:46
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Night10194 posted:Boy howdy that's a real chart infestation ya got there. 
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Jun 7, 2019 23:01
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Hold on, let me get the d7...
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Jun 8, 2019 00:04
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Yeah that legit explains a lot and can easily be solved by backporting Stolze's Company rules from REIGN into the game to represent the defenses of you creating a scrappy bunch of ragtag friends protecting these sites.
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Jun 13, 2019 21:03
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Fightmare.
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Jun 15, 2019 07:47
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Boodo, Muay Frighten, Craven Maga, Hap-Scream-Do.
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Jun 16, 2019 17:27
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If sleep loss causes loss of reaction time and dulled reflexes like being nice and drunk, Nightmare Fist Technique is simply a more horrifying and more sober spin on Drunken Boxing.
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Jun 16, 2019 19:29
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Everything is fan-fiction in this inbred bulldog of an industry, sometimes poo poo just sticks the landing better than others and it's always good to see the stuff that isn't just a forgettable heartbreaker wearing someone else's freshly skinned face.
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Jun 20, 2019 23:11
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RIFTS in Peace, ARB. The cycle is completed and the Coalition won.
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Jun 23, 2019 20:21
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Inklesspen is a very nice lady who uses a trawler to grab content from the thread, so yeah add some kind of header for easier scooping. You can also add chapter/installment demarcations if you want custom chapter headings to show up as well.
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Jun 25, 2019 15:42
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Night10194 posted:Mancala is really fun to play.
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Jul 8, 2019 05:00
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Part of the main issue with the Jovians in 1e isn't their political position and the fact that "they have a point, but their point has been hijacked by authoritarians and fascists who are gleefully controlling their society and government". It's the fact that in order to survive on Jupiter and its moons they're more or less living in bunkers inside giant asteroids and moons and are just an intrastellar tollbooth lane that gets cranky when people don't pay to go through their space...and it's really easy to just transport your consciousness remotely to bypass them entirely. "The Jovians are complicated" would be fine if they had more means by which to actively interact with the world as compared to the other factions that Are Complicated and Make Some Good Points But Then Kinda gently caress Up. Planetary Consortium: runs Luna, fighting over control of Mars, run the banks, run the trades. Very visible. Very easy to interact with outside of their own territory. Extropians: hyper libertarian capitalists follow the money and the cheapest working conditions possible and are generally traveling wherever for the purposes of business. Ultimates: generally found out in the Brink, Ultimates nevertheless gently caress around the solar system looking for new skills to master and new people to impose their fashy ideology on. Exhumans: either Brinkers or found anywhere. You generally can't expect where to find them. Scum: The Swarms travel all over for trade and cultural purposes and they're a pretty reliable way to get a ride if you can live anarchic for a while. But, in general: Anarchists: everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Jovians: unless they're special agents slipped loose from the home state for purposes of espionage/PCs, generally just found in the bunker cities of Jupiter.
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Jul 30, 2019 02:26
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Nessus posted:Also between hearing about yet another god drat society of Batmans and finding out that dude isn't a cloud of literal forks, I gotta say Eclipse Phase is definitely falling short here. Forks vary wildly in legality and ethicality depending on where you are but generally speaking you wouldn't want to have a whole mess of forks working in unison for two reasons. 1: there already exists a Morph that's a decentralized cloud of nanomachines linking one mind together called a Swarmoid. 2: it's hard to herd a bunch of forks because generally speaking they're all people and the people who do have a whole mess of forks working in unison are a breed of Exhumans who inhabit gigantic war machines and have pruned all the forks back so they stop being so drat difficult and non-compliant. It's hard to manage people and it's even harder when they're all crewing the same body. So they just alter their forks to be specialized and not complain about working the guns or the treads or monitoring coolant all day every day forever indefinitely. The more sustainable way to be a whole mess of forks working together is, as previously established, instance everyone in some means. This can be turning yourself into a family of six You-s Paranoia 1e-style with a bunch of identical bodies, being a chef and letting all of yourselves live in the instruments, run a bunch of servers that you let each version of you live on as an infomorph, etc. To say nothing about the problems with ego-merging a bunch of yourselves who've lived separately enough to diverge. Anything longer than separation for a few hours gets psychologically taxing should you integrate them all and become one entity again.
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Jul 30, 2019 03:07
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Night10194 posted:Also does the drugs an hour before doing an 'emergency militia call'.
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Aug 4, 2019 04:05
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Night10194 posted:Wait, EP has Psi? As in psionics? In their 'hard sci-fi' setting?
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Aug 12, 2019 03:44
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Night10194 posted:Well, at least the lovely mental health rules will fix that stuff right up. A: a trained medical professional. B: one spicy someone who only existed for three years realtime but has lived 18 mental years inside of the world's most evil VR experiment where their minds were conditioned through psychotherapy and they've learned since grade school how to hack their own reality to piss off their parents.
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Aug 12, 2019 03:50
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Tibalt posted:So this may have changed from 1st to 2nd version and I may be remembering wrong, but in the aftermath of the TITANS and Earth getting wiped out, somebody decided they needed a generation of brilliant leaders NOW. They stuck a bunch of baby brains in a simulated environment, cracked up the speed so that the children inside the simulation would experience time 6x faster (and therefore grow up in just 3 years), and let that simulation go without so much as a "Hello" to any bioethics board. A: an integral reproduction cycle to Flats (non-chipped regular humans) or B: an absolute luxury due to birth control augs being the norm in morphs and needing money to raise kids any which way. Exowombs exist for growing new kids but you have to have some kind of capital to access them. Regular-rear end pregnancy takes time and resources which you may be lacking as a wage slave on Luna or a rep-scumming anarchist who keeps the toilets unclogged. Many, many societies in Eclipse Phase are not conducive to healthily raising children and ironically the Jovian Republic kinda has this on lock as a result of the majority being Flats. There's universities but not a lot of schools. There's scum swarms and exhuman habitats and floating cylinders full of robot morphs and whales on the sun. Everyone is working 24/7, even if you're too rich in rep or money to work. It's a world for adults. And the Lost (this name was post-hoc, obviously) Project was, in universe, a deeply deniable corporate project to answer this question. 'cuz fundamentally if you want to have a kid all you have to do is fork yourself and edit the memories heavily. Bam. New person. But they wanted something more traditional with some acceleration: absolutely new minds incubated in a safe place and allowed to mature and grow. 99% of humanity is dead. Can we really just repopulate with forks of ourselves? (yes) Is this project a viable way to raise new life in this solar system now? Which is a really great mission statement until you start giving corporate carte blanche and really really powerful computer servers to unsupervised scientists and don't include as many social scientists as you should.
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Aug 13, 2019 01:19
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Kobolds Ate My Baby! has a lot of issues with being a comedy game focused on comedy over game but god drat the design of the kobolds themselves loving slap.
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Aug 16, 2019 02:30
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