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

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Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Traveller posted:

So is having a perfectly executed tea ceremony on horseback.

I am just going to assume that the horse pours the tea.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2016 03:38

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# ¿ Jan 23, 2025 07:02

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Night10194 posted:

Why do people keep going back to exploding dice. They are the worst.

I could see it working in a system intended to be comedic where the exploding was designed to be really swingy. Cue hijinks.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2016 15:33

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

That cover art is really rad and that alone endears the game to me already.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2016 19:27

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:

There's some lovely treasure here, too, but it's totally not worth it. That could really be the byline for the whole adventure.
Next time: More nightmarish traps and unremitting horror! Seriously, how the gently caress did Desatysso solo his way through this?!

A truly staggering number of summon monster wands and the sacrifice of countless celestial badgers or what-have-you probably. I don't know what the 2E version summoned.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2016 02:49

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Night10194 posted:

Wolf stuff

I find it wonderfully ironic that wolves, a pack animal, have such a fractious society that has trouble working together.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2016 22:34

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Night10194 posted:

In their smaller groups they're supremely dangerous precisely because they work together really well, though. As a racial thing, every Wolf gets to add their Species die to Tactics. This means every single wolf has an instinct to fight in the line as a group; Tactics gets added to your fighting rolls whenever you're double-teaming someone or working together against a single foe. A Wolf Soldier will be adding their Career die (twice, since Soldier gets Melee as a Career Skill) and Species die to everything if they're working in a team.

Adding to that, their natural Gift of Howl actually works really well as long-range communications. Wolves are really goddamn dangerous in an army.

E: This is also how they were able to beat the Morrignai, who very much exist and are enormous shitwreckers individually but have no sense of tactics or strategy.

Yeah, it's just funny how it only works up to a certain point and then appears to more or less collapse catastrophically on itself.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2016 03:47

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm not saying this is an absolute necessity for all World of Darkness games. I don't have any deep reading into if or how it serves a greater purpose. But...

The character types of every WoD game thus far has been pegged as an analogue for some kind of marginalized group. Vampires are immigrant gangsters. Werewolves are gangs and cops. The Promethean are homeless. Mages I've often heard compared to detectives. Changelings are trauma victims and the chronically ill. Demons are spies.

What are mummies and demons?

detectives are marginalized?

# ¿ Oct 21, 2016 22:36

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

unseenlibrarian posted:

Honestly I think Spider-gods get a bad rap so the next D&D campaign I run the Spider god will be the Lawful Good patron of a nation of Paladins (Who honor him because a spider once saved the paladin-king's heir from traitors by spinning a web over the door of the room he was hiding in, thus making the villains looking for him not bother to look in there, thinking it long-abandoned.)

I agree, spiders are terribly maligned in fantasy and fiction in general. No one ever decides to focus on the whole creative and crafting aspects.

Also, jumping spiders are great and an incredibly easy reskin of thri-keen.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2016 00:22

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Zomborgon posted:

Exalted's Pattern Spiders tend to the Loom of Fate that controls all destiny, but do tend to bite if you screw up that destiny as a Sidereal.

Those poor pattern spiders are the hardest workers in Creation and they get no respect. Every bitten Sidereal has it coming.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2016 18:36

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Crasical posted:

The Coil of the Wyrm has always slightly perplexed me.

Imagine a vampire who's come to the conclusion that "The Beast is a dumb, panicky animal, and I'm better than that, and I'm gonna learn to control it."

And so he goes to the Ordo Dracul, and says "Hey, surmounting the curse of our condition is your bag, man, have you had any luck in taming the Beast?"

"Oh, sure, there's a whole Coil devoted to that study. We've learned how to flip out for no reason, flip out harder, direct our frenzy, flip out EVEN HARDER, and ULTRA MEGA FLIP OUT"

"...Only one of those five things is about actually CONTROLLING the beast."

"HYEERGARGBLE."

They learned to change it from loss of control to merely a very severe narrowing of focus. They went from having to worry about the beast is basically wielding it like a weapon. That's an improvement.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2016 04:58

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Daeren posted:

The only real springboard for a salvaged beast is also the one I've seen like fifteen times via independent sources by now, where Beasts are more like Grigori from Dragon's Dogma and exist to forge properly good and heroic people via testing them, and the win condition is when you get got by a worthy foe.

Of course, you'd have to burn down so much of Beast to get to that as your base premise that you're actively hurting your pitch by associating it with Beast as it actually exists. Believe me, I tried for months to rewrite both the mechanics and the fluff to make it happen, but it honestly just doesn't deserve the legitimacy bestowed by having someone put the effort in. The kindest thing you can do to Beast is poach the few mechanical innovations it made that were either good or a novel stab at an idea, and leave the rest behind.

Dragon's Dogma in the dragon's role as a P&P game is still a really rad concept that I hope someone does eventually. Though I think it would ultimately be best off in some other system than WoD, and not just to avoid association with Beast.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2017 23:30

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Kurieg posted:

Nah, he just still thinks that Beast is a game about punching up and wants to defend it to the ends of the earth, just like Bellum Maga.

He is one of the most egregious contrarians I have ever seen. If people liked Beast, he'd be on the exact opposite side of the fence.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2017 14:49

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

You know, I joke about Siembieda taking any possible exhaust port or circular protrusion and making it into a weapon (and if he wants to add a weapon that isn't in the art, he just calls it concealed), but Kevin. Kevin. We have to talk, pal. You need to cut it out, because this is just silly. The moment a GM describes a dragon firing snot missiles the table is going to lose it. And, yes, I'm sure some poster is readying their post about how this is unironically awesome, but I don't think just being farcical is your intent here, Kevin. It can bite and claw and horn, has palm lasers (not in the art), tail lasers (not in the art), long-range shoulder mini-missiles (not in the art), and a prehensile tail (... which I guess is in the art). The missiles are the only thing with any punch - this thing has a lot of armor but not many ways to dish out damage otherwise. It probably can't compete with actual dragons, not because dragons can deal out a lot of damage, but just because they generally will have three times the damage capacity this thing has.

Next: It�s no longer cosplay if all the armor looks like samurai armor.

Hey now, Impact makes nose bullets work.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2017 13:52

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Horrible Lurkbeast posted:

This is the place to ask, do dragons ever marry dragons? my personal take is that even good dragons have too big of an ego to share.

I think I remember blue dragons actually forming family units and stuff. Petty, squabbling ones, but mostly functional?

# ¿ Apr 18, 2017 04:39

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Nessus posted:

The dragons flew with desperate haste, but as they passed the great Sea or came from the eternal snows of Greenland; whether they came across the far East from the ancient realm of Zhongguo or from the sun-heated realms of the south, or from antipode's reversal, all faltered, all failed, landing in their fatigue or plummeting from the sky.

For Nixon had signed the Document, and Fiat Money ruled the day. With no intrinsic recognition of the value of pure-strain gold, dragons could only sleep, deathless and waiting, for the rise and return of gold-backed currencies - if not under Man, then under the Beetles that would succeed them.

Except the one dragon who, in their wisdom, chose to have a hoard comprised entirely of various magical items, which are always valuable on the basis of utility or at least novelty. Even if it WAS a lot less comfortable to sleep on, who's laughing now? Who's laughing at this giant pile of wands, swords, and decks of many things? No one, that's who.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2017 05:00

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Cythereal posted:

They do, IIRC, at least in the Draconomicon book which posited blues as the big Lawful Evil dragons - they're interested in building and running empires, and if you think you've seen an evil empire ruled by complex, literally cutthroat politics before, just wait till you see one run by blue dragon clans.

To be fair, it's probably fairly safe for their subjects. Remember, they consider the people in their domain their possessions, eg. you are are part of their hoard. Dragons defend their hoards pretty ferociously. Likewise, while the dragon may often make difficult demands, they are unlikely to demand you ever do something blatantly suicidal.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2017 14:08

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Zereth posted:

Itinerant priests of the god of journeys sounds pretty cool though.

I'm pretty sure it's a requirement to be a priest of the god of journeys that you don't stay in one place very long. They wouldn't be a very good god of journeys otherwise.

# ¿ May 16, 2017 01:56

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Wapole Languray posted:

Childhood Encounter
A less impressive name that what it means: The event that propels our character from Zero to Hero. It�s essentially some notable important event that marks your character as special and destined for greater things. Our result is:

9, You saw something, then 8, Witnessed the death of a parent you were helpless to stop.

So, basically Simba, given he's a lion-man?

# ¿ May 19, 2017 04:54

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Night10194 posted:

Ironclaw, Myriad Song, and maybe even Albedo (depending on tone) are RIGHT THERE for this, after all.

An Ironclaw game that followed a mercenary group right as all the impending wars that the settings sets up go off all at once would be pretty interesting.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2017 18:14

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Dareon posted:

*faint laughter from Shakespeare's direction*

Shakespeare mostly made up words in the service of making further dick jokes though, which is an exemption from that rule.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2017 00:54

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Tasoth posted:

Kudzu golems are a terrifying concept. You build one, the next week the entire South is under siege from pissy topiary monsters.

I once had an idea for a fantasy race that was basically sapient vines. Due to the generally expansionist nature of vines, they were also basically Great Vine Britain. Built their own skeletons to aid in movement and such and were surprisingly industrious for plant based creatures. Invented gunpowder in the theoretical setting in which they existed.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2017 01:27

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Cythereal posted:

Sounds quite a bit like the Unfallen in Endless Space 2.

Haven't played that, but wouldn't surprise me if someone else had done the concept already.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2017 02:33

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Mors Rattus posted:

Next time: Cats, Hedgehogs, Monkeys, Rams, Rats, Roosters, Snakes and Turtles.

Huh, no illusionist foxes? That's kind of a surprise for something like this.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 16:53

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Night10194 posted:

Black Smokes and Engineers sound cool as hell.

Also their pictures are rad.

I like the monks too. Wow, the ninjas sure seem like morons, making a whole lot of enemies they could have avoided and escalating things constantly.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2017 18:13

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Glagha posted:

I do enjoy the 2E picture of a dude busting a door down by flexing at it but i remind everyone that one of his hands is fuckin backwards.

Look, just because he had a Rakshasa (I probably misspelled that) somewhere in his family tree is no reason to discriminate.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 04:12

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

I like the nightmare eating monster in a box that has no actual power to cause you to have nightmares, so it just tries to egg you on into encountering horrible stuff so it has more food.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 13:04

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Inescapable Duck posted:

Seems like you could probably work out a decent deal with the nightmare-eating jellyfish by passing it around a hospice or something.

Janky as it is, Kuro at least seems to have some decent ideas behind it, though I think as mentioned it doesn't really seem clear exactly what they're going for when actually playing it, besides vaguely J-horror stuff? Japan becoming isolationist out of international embargo rather than out of choice is a bit historically amusing, and probably intentional. Though the logical extension of that would be to have it go all warring states with some Nobunaga analogue eventually emerging.

It's not like the magic monster box can do anything if you don't feed it enough nightmares except get increasingly pissy and start popping out increasingly passive aggressive cryptic messages. And maybe eventually starving to death.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2017 04:27

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Hostile V posted:

I'd keep Elven McGofast because when faced with a situation like that you're gonna end up getting some good creativity out of the players trying to figure out a solution to catching him.

a cleverly placed immovable rod seems the obvious solution.

Edit: Provided you're ok with him not surviving his encounter with said rod

# ¿ Nov 5, 2017 17:41

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Nessus posted:

No. Gold ring.

If you get hit while wearing it, it flies off your finger at high speed.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2017 05:07

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Kurieg posted:

Now I'm envisioning a Dragon taking over a country and working his hardest to instill a sense of national pride and sense of self worth because his citizenry is his hoard.

Going by the Draconomicon, this is actually legitimately a route that a lot of blue dragons take. The people working for them and the people they rule over are all part of their hoard. If you gently caress with them, you'll have a ripshit pissed dragon after you.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 05:24

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

PurpleXVI posted:

I think from the entire Starfinder review, literally the only interesting PC race option I saw was "lazy crystal slug."

At least lazy crystal slug was pretty neat.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2017 14:48

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Mors Rattus posted:

So you're saying that the evil wizard is dancing naked on a mailbox.

Depends how many drinks they had that night.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2017 20:46

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Dallbun posted:

266: Dogged Pursuit

In a dungeon or whatever, the PCs notice a rust monster scuttling and �trilling� behind them. It�s been digging out ore but is now following them like a lost puppy, or perhaps an aggressive, hungry squirrel at a tourist spot. It�s more than happy to eat whatever metal they feed it, and will stick around if fed. The card suggests that the �simplest and safest� method is to leave it with a big shield or something and then make an escape, but I�m sure 99% of PCs are going to try to befriend it and have a rust monster pet. Which is kind of awesome. Keep.

It's funny how the Rust Monster has morphed over time from a horrible menace to a kind of adorable, albeit still a pest, quasi-mascot. At least insofar as the general D&D playing populace views them.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2017 14:14

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Nessus posted:

Sam & Max is my paradigm

I played the Max half of what was basically a Sam and Max duo in a long running nDemon game that I was in. We came surprisingly close to a "It's a Max Max Max Max World" scenario at one point. In some alternate reality, that definitely happened.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2017 00:31

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

PurpleXVI posted:

I wouldn't be able to resist making this guy a recurring NPC. Just sort of casually accepting whatever peril he's in this time, and the PC's can justify killing him or abandoning him, so they have to put up with him until they can rescue him or get him home or turn him human again or whatever it is this time.

A man with both the lucky and unlucky traits for the game system he's in maxed out. keeps ending up in horrible situations, keeps getting out of them both in equally absurd ways.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2017 17:58

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Feinne posted:

Kwakarian (Lesser Demon):

Kwakarians are demons that delight in pointless and brutal violence. They like watching other people carrying out such acts at least as much as they like doing it themselves, and will often hang around people and goad them into violence. They�re very difficult to see when in shadow because they�re demons don�t ask for too many details, so they will often hang out in dark areas where they�ll generally be considered a trick of the light.

Kwakarians aren�t really that powerful in a fight with a real opponent and aren�t going to stick around for such a thing. They are much more about bullying and torturing, not so much about getting filled full of bullets.

The adventure hook again starts in some other theoretical adventure probably, where an opponent has a shadowy figure hovering behind them making suggestions. Then, later on, the PC who noticed this starts getting increasingly vicious and brutal suggestions as to how they should act in combat. It turns out one of these guys has decided it likes the cut of their jib after they killed the person they were previously messing with and now they�ve got to figure out a solution.

Verdict: These guys are alright I guess, at least they�re not stealing demons from D&D or something.

The idea of the PCs getting stalked by one of these things because it became their new biggest fan is pretty amusing to me.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2017 05:07

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Down With People posted:

The Baleful Influence

That brings us to the Simulacrum itself. The Left Arm, like the other pieces, appears to be ceramic. It's smooth and cool to the touch. Inspected closely, each part seems to have a repeating pattern of whatever part it is imprinted on the surface, i.e. arms on the Arm, heads on the Head. The parts are pretty heavy, but their weight also has a tendency to fluctuate. As the thing starts to come together, it starts to uncomfortably remind the investigators of themselves. The completed Simulacrum is human-sized but only weighs about 40 kilos.

The Simulacrum is portable but extremely awkward to carry around. Transporting the drat thing is a source of plot hooks in and of itself. It's too valuable to leave in the cargo, too obviously exotic to leave out in the open, too strange to pass off as a normal statue. It will attract uncomfortable attention from any customs agents who set eyes on it. Naturally, it gets harder to hide the more pieces the investigators have.

It also has a nasty supernatural effect in its Baleful Influence. Whoever picked up the Left Arm first will start to have a range of aches and pains plaguing their own left arm. Each piece applies a similar effect on whoever discovers it. You can see how much trouble the Arm alone caused for the Loriens.

The Simulacrum is also totally indestructible. Try to destroy it at your own risk; that bullet you shot at the Torso is just as likely to ricochet and hit you in the dick.

I wonder what happens if you toss the drat things into a pocket dimension via the gate spell learned in the doom train scenario. Seems like the most simple way to handle them unless you have to open the gate from the same place you originally made it.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2017 02:50

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Hostile V posted:

God drat, I love how the Dreamlands stuff in general will always tonally clash with all other Lovecraft stuff like with how Nodens is generally just this primal man-shaped hunt God and the fact that the Express lets you make a cat buddy. I am always generally a fan of ignoring everything Lovecraft except the Dreamlands and also certain expressions of Hastur and Carcossa.

What, no love for Yog-Sothoth?

Edit: Sure does suck to be supernaturally ugly I guess. Too bad more detail isn't given on the beings of Ib compared to the genocide elves.

Obligatum VII fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Dec 17, 2017

# ¿ Dec 17, 2017 02:33

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Now that I think about it the one thousand years shows immense patience on the part of Bokrug.

The beings are apparently actually really nice. Which just makes what the Sarnathians did that much shittier.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2017 07:35

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# ¿ Jan 23, 2025 07:02

Obligatum VII: May 5, 2014; Haunting you until no 8 arrives.

Down With People posted:

Massa di Requiem per Shaggai. I like the references to it in Delta Green where it's yet another abysmal failure project of the Shan. It'll absolutely summon Azathoth, but it's never been successfully performed to completion.

I'm just imagining a giant scramble by every other elder god aware of it to stop the play, since Azathoth waking up would be bad for everyone including them.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 06:50

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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