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Kurieg posted:On the one hand, sort of. On the other hand Brucato straight up resents not being born in an age when he would be properly revered as a Shaman. And hates that religion and modernity have made it this way. Stuff like this makes me wish that Brucato could somehow be granted his dream, and we could all watch. Because I've been around actual shamans among indigenous groups in the US and Asia, and I guarantee its nothing like Brucato imagines it to be. Shockingly, pretty much every culture has figured out that "likes to play drums and spew vaguely mystical nonsense to try to get laid" isn't actually a terribly valuable skill set. Actual shamans have to do more useful poo poo if they want respect from their communities, including sometimes fairly long hours if its their full time occupation.
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Feb 8, 2018 01:49
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Night10194 posted:The funny thing is, from what I know from people still playing the Tabletop game, it isn't even that Marines are the strongest. It's that they're omnipresent. Every single army has to plan to fight Marines as their main opponent. That was certainly the case when I last played, some 4 editions ago. Ironically back then, it meant that the strongest forces for quite a while were the eldar, just because of how much stuff they could pack in for relatively cheap that negated power armor level armor saves. Not sure how the meta has gone since then (though a quick googling says that eldar look to be on top right now again), but generally marines were always competitive but often not top of the heap. The "no flaws" thing is just weird to me. The older books pretty much always noted how many of the geneorgans for chapters were screwed up or non-functional. They even pointed out that the only one that *had* to work for a space marine was the black carapace, which let them interface with their armor (though if they couldn't do one of the others, the chapter would die out from lack of new geneseed material, so that was crucial too). That certainly made a lot more sense in the early days, when half the artwork was of kind of stubby rotund marines, who only shot as well as your average ork did, and whose intro scenario in the core book was about a missle in their base misfiring and almost wiping out the chapter. There was always a lot of talk about how awesome they were, but my takeaway from the old RT book was that was more about how lovely the general quality of people were in the 41st millennium as much as anything. They were basically space-chavs in hand me down armor and biomods, who were "superior" only insomuch as your average human was a clusterfuck of mutation, insanity, corruption, or who knows what else.
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Mar 25, 2018 03:28
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In addition to being a fun april fool's F&F, the Eldoru talk of USEnet rants made the name of one of the old trolls from that era pop into my head for the first time in like, 20 years (Mark Kamikaze Hughes, for those who remember). So out of curiosity of his life after getting banned, like, everywhere in the 2000s I googled him and found a hilariously lovely site where he's trying to sell even more hilariously lovely app games that would have been bad even when the first iPhone came out. So basically, I got two hits of grog amusement out of this. Kudos.
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Apr 3, 2018 14:58
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:I'm hoping that you can play renegades who haven't gone completely razdraz* yet. I have no idea where the Age of Sigmar RPG is going in terms of characters, but based on the novel I was listening to on a long rear end drive recently, you might be able to get some of it there. 2/3rds of the book was tearing through Nurgle's chaos dimension, including the various settlements and had a lot of viewpoint from a nurgle pirate dealing with the weird rear end social politics of the realm (plus nurgle bretonnians running around babbling about chivalry). So at least in terms of the fiction, they seem oriented towards making chaos have more personality and less single minded bent towards whatever the respective god's theme is.
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Apr 12, 2018 23:25
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Terrible Opinions posted:The Imperium's real problem is that that it's just straight up worse than the fairly normal scifi society that directly proceeded it and that the Emperor more or less just leeched off the achievements of for his entire period as despot. Plus, of course, the one thing he theoretically did better than the previous golden age, i.e. understand the warp and focus on negating/bypassing it for humanity to flourish, he completely cocked up. Tons of scheming and however many quadrillions of future bux to engineer his demigod sons and build the infrastructure to invade the webway, and he figures the best way to protect humanity from the warp in the interim is not tell them there's malign creatures in there. Because apparently, the fanatical alien killers out blowing up all sorts of weird poo poo just would not be able to handle alien weird poo poo that happened to be in a different dimension that they drove through on a regular basis. Smart guy, the Emperor.
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Apr 15, 2018 04:24
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MonsterEnvy posted:Quick correction Empy just ordered the Space Wolves to capture Magnus not kill him. Horus just got the message first and changed it to a kill order. Wut. Like....what's the point of all that crap? Designing the thunder warriors to be powerful but unstable, expecting them to die out after establishing the Imperium makes at least some sense. What's the point of making 20 even more powerful demigods with weird (but stable, they're functionally immortal it seems) flaws, and then setting them up to blow up your imperium in a civil war?
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Apr 25, 2018 02:39
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MonsterEnvy posted:Here is the exact excerpt about that part. That, I suppose makes slightly more sense, but still in a really dumb way. Like, there are so many better ways to get to "disposable post human army" from an efficiency or safety standpoint (including the one he already successfully used to conquer Terra!), it just makes the whole thing look stupid. Which I'd be okay with, if I thought the writers were seriously trying to get back to the old "the Imperium is a batshit crazy place" vibe. Hell, it would probably hit the current zeitgeist if they went with the notion that the emperor was a poorly socialized idiot handed too much power, destined to become the chaos god of the Dunning-Kruger effect. But I get the impression they're going for "flawed demigod" for which the flaws are usually supposed to be about flaws in human character, not just being terrible at project management.
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Apr 25, 2018 12:21
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Night10194 posted:What the hell do you do with him in a game? He's just an impossibly powerful (and annoying) magic hitler who doesn't tell anyone anything. He's not going to be your mentor, your players are likely to hate him and want to put him through a wall, etc. The only thing with Divis Mal I kinda liked was in the Teragen book they laid it out as "Divis Mal isn't going to dictate what the group is, here's some ideas of the factions and what might happen if the PCs back one hard enough to tip it to be the dominant ideology". With the sorta implication that Divis Mal himself would take on a role and actions in the world based on how Teragen went. Granted, this was the 90s, so the idea wasn't well implemented and other issues (like statted NPCs in that era being absurdly powerful compared to PCs, even if they were c-listers) really kept it from working. I think there could have been potential there though, and maybe the new edition will work it better. And yeah, aberrant totally had a hard on for not being superheroes, despite being superheroes. The most infamous incident of which being the players guide, which had an extended peak WW rant about how anyone playing aberrant as four color heroes was some mushbrained idiot...followed literally on the next page by "how to play aberrant as four color superheroes".
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Nov 6, 2018 23:49
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I forget if its already come up yet where you are in the core, but are you going to talk about how badly the writers failed at understanding the UN and how it works? Because that ends up making two factions (Team Tomorrow and the Directive) even more nonsensical than expected in the setting.
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Nov 8, 2018 23:01
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Well, at least as I recall (its been a while), the UN actually provides the charter and legal permission for team tomorrow and project utopia to be able to go intervene all over the globe and do various beneficial and conspiratorial things, rather than being told to bugger off by local authorities of all stripes. Which went down as follows: 1. The UN decides it has has the power to actually do that in the first place 2. The UN vote passes, and every state on the security council decides to cede a big chunk of power to this random new organization of superheroes, despite any one of them being able to nix it and the security council existing mainly so they don't have to listen to any poo poo they don't want to. 3. The executive decisions of these respective countries are all approved by the other governmental institutions that would have to ratify it. There's an implication that maybe Utopia used mind control to get this through, but that would mean having to mentally influence at least dozens if not hundreds of people in each government to pull that off. 4. Most of these same governments almost immediately become suspicious and frightened of Utopia's power, despite being the ones that handed it to them. 5. Said governments decide to form an international conspiracy of their own in the Directive to deal with the situation. Rather than just backing out of the UN agreement, or passing a new measure to revoke Utopia's charter. I remember that whole setup just bugged the poo poo out of me back in the day.
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Nov 9, 2018 02:35
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Mors Rattus posted:Y'know, it'd be fun to run an RPG of 'we are the insane superhero fantasy clones made by ALEPH' This is doable in the infinity RPG. Maybe not the superhero fantasy exactly, but there are rules in the core for doing recreation PCs.
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Nov 14, 2018 16:40
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The first thing we did after an initial foray was remove all the "techniques that basically does another specified power" things from the "X control" powers, and ruled that if you had, say, both quantum bolt and gravity manipulation at the same level, you could opt to use the rules for one or the other. It was kludgy and didn't come close to solving all of aberrant's problems, but it was the most glaring issue to us in the very first game we ran. We had one guy who built a more general telekinetic-ish hero with some quantum bolt, some flight, some defensive shield, and some mega-strength to depict a newish superhero that had a fairly rounded common powerset. Then we had another player want to do a gravitokinetic, and who just bought that up real high since that was the focus of her powers. The gulf in ability was pretty absurd; I remember we calculated it out and figured out that while yes, eventually telekinetic guy could catch up and out perform gravitokinetic girl in those core shooting/flying/defense stats, it would takes months and months worth of xp to do so.
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Nov 18, 2018 15:31
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The aberrant PG should be fun. There's some choice 90s-WW in both mechanics and condescending rants in that one.
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Nov 27, 2018 18:22
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megane posted:I remember when somebody first explained Chaos' basic shtick to me and I thought, "wait, they're called Chaos, and they're supposed to be these insane marauders who hate structure and law... aaaand they're all utterly, dogmatically devoted to one of four very specific and consistently detailed deities?" I get that it's supposed to be kind of ironic maybe, but man, the Empire's religion is more chaotic than Chaos. At various points there has been more...well, chaos I guess to the faction. Early on their were lots of lesser gods and the big 4 just tended to be the largest entities around. There's also typically been a "chaos undivided" option, though what that actually meant could vary some. In some cases and characters it tended to be interpreted as someone who was more mercenary about their allegiance to chaos (sort of the archtypical power hungry sorcerer rather than fanatic), and in other cases it was more of just a catchall for people and entities that didn't fit really under one of the four gods. Strangely, Age of Sigmar has started to drift away from the focus on the 4 (now 5 sorta) big gods, at least for some chaos factions. In the new beastmen lore they most disdain the chaos gods, finding them antithetical to the nature of chaos for the reasons quoted above. Most of them just worship chaos in its primal form, or obscure deities that are just manifestations of primal mutation or something. Archaeon is also preaching a sort of "new chaos" that respects the chaos gods but doesn't turn into slavish adherence, though mostly to build his own power base.
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Dec 5, 2018 05:01
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So since there's a bunch of posters who seem to know the Japanese RPG scene, is there anything (translated or not) that could do something close to exalted? I've been on the lookout for alternatives that are still crunchy but better balanced and/or smoother play for online games, and figured given how much exalted cribs from wuxia and anime there might be something. Tenra Bansho Zero didn't seem to really fit, and DX sounds awesome and maybe hackable towards something along those lines, but not quite the same itch.
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Dec 29, 2018 04:34
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Leraika posted:Kamigakari is about people granted exceptional power when they're infused with shards of the weapons and tools of the gods. It might be what you're looking for. Thanks, I'll check it out. PurpleXVI posted:Encroachment could be a great stand-in for "you're about to become a superpowered villain instead of a superpowered hero because of your own inherent flaws!" that Exalted tried to push but fails at so hard in every loving edition. I like Godbound, but it kind of goes too far in the other direction to really scratch my exalted itch, in terms of level of crunchiness. My group likes it on its own merits though, just not as much when going for wacky balanced combat. 3e exalted isn't terrible, we played a campaign of it and enjoyed it. But there are some big stumbling blocks I'd rather have something a little more tightly designed to work with. The bloated charm trees were a pain to keep track of, and the multiple variations of dice alteration (bonus dice, differing doubling success target numbers, automatic successes, changing difficulty numbers, etc.) were obnoxious to keep straight or compare without modeling. "Simplified NPCs" are still more convoluted than things like DND 4e, using RAW. It mostly just made it a lot slower than I'd like for online play. At a rough approximation, we're running DND 4e right now, and can get through 2-3 fights in the same time it used to take us to do one in Exalted 3e. I'd ideally like something with the speed and decent balancing of 4e, but with a little more of the goofy mix of effects you get from exalted charms. And then I'd like a pony and a red wagon.
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Dec 30, 2018 00:38
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Alien Rope Burn posted:To say I'm exhausted with this notion is beyond understatement. Perhaps some sort of netherstatement. It's a flagrantly false notion born of stereotype and ignorance, in any case. My hypothesis on how egregious it was in the 90s was that it dovetailed in with the whole neopagan boom, itself getting pushed by the overall millennial fervor and interest in end of the world thinking. It wasn't unique to deadlands for sure. I remember someone on RPGnet ranting about how Mage the Awakening had ruined shaman/dreamspeaker-esque concepts because of the notion that mages came from a primordial city. Because obviously native peoples never lived in anything other than grass huts with sticks for tools. Of course, even in the early 2000s, I'd still have undergrad students who were surprised when I showed them videos of aboriginals using cars and other technology, so some of it was just good old fashion ignorance about the world.
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Jan 31, 2019 20:53
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Dawgstar posted:Perhaps nobody told them about, say, Cahokia? It's not like Tenochtilan doesn't qualify either. Cahokia I might kinda-sorta let slide back in the 90s. It wasn't like archaeologists didn't know it was a city in a complex society, but it seems like its only been in the last 10-20 years that the popular consciousness has started to grok exactly how big and complex that society was, and think of it as more than just a weird one off. But yeah, Tenochtilan, any of the other Mayan cities, the various African kingdoms and trade networks....even in the 90s it took a willful sort of blindness to think that indigenous populations all just sat around "in harmony with nature" until white people came along with cities and roads and poo poo. More broadly, I'd love to see games recognize that indigenous people actually tend to be very fast adopters of technology, when they see the value in it. That last part is the key; Native Americans didn't immediately start turning into Europeans because they rejected technology or wanted "balance with nature". They didn't because in many cases the early colonists seemed like idiots who didn't know how to survive, so why would you want to bother with most of the poo poo they were trying to do? The technology they had that didn't seem useless, like guns and horses, were adopted really quickly. Of course, I suspect there'd be screaming from the usual suspects for such a librul rewrite of history.
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Jan 31, 2019 22:04
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Night10194 posted:The nerdy quest for 'maturity' in an ocean of blood and 'justified' genocide or fascism is goddamn everywhere in this hobby (and nerdy grimdark in general). Though it seems like it's gotten less prominent of late. I suspect that's one of the few silver linings to the Trump shitshow. Authoritarian fetishism can only be in vogue as long as its got a mystique about it. When we were separated from it by a half century or more it was easy to focus on what successes it had and the power it projected and gloss over the bumbling clowncar that most of it was. It also helped that most of the old fascist leadership had at least enough intelligence and savvy to want to project an actual tough, elitist image. And that a significant number of them had survived World War 1, which was no small feat. The current crop of would be authoritarians blow up that mystique. The incompetence of the would be "hard men" is on full display. The fearless leader is a gasbag whose abnormal dick is made fun of by porn stars, and the alt-right is characterized more by emotionally fragile manbabies and crying suburban nazis than veterans hardened in the last world war. MAGA hats and proud boy tattoos engender some fear to be sure, but far more they engender mockery and exclusion. I suspect we'll be seeing the aftereffects of that in games for a decent while. Even for GW, notorious for the grimdark, there's been a push more towards the satirical and levity in 40k, and AoS is very much leaning into the "gonzo heavy metal" vibe moreso than the "hard men making hard choices" wank that was 40k until recently.
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Feb 10, 2019 17:19
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The origins (and timeframe) for Exalted I think had a big influence as to why it didn't just go whole hog into more upbeat anime/wuxia type themes. The game as originally envisioned was going to be a prequel to the World of Darkness, and was more in line with that game's sensibilities. So darker, grittier, more about lower powered solar reincarnations trying to desperately survive. Grabowski introduced more of the anime elements and higher power level, but this was still in the WW era where games could incorporate a kitchen sink of themes, many goofy and overpowered, but then the writers would yell at people for Playing it Wrong and not engaging the Super Serious Themes. Compared to the levels of alternate obsession with and embarrassment of the blade/underworld/matrix superheroes with fangs mentality, Exalted embraced its silliness much better than most of WW at the time. But it still couldn't shake that mindset completely, that it should also have Big Complex Tragic Themes. And then of course, as has already been pointed out by the time of 2nd and 3rd, the weird mishmash had been enshrined and trying to get the game towards something a little more coherent has gone...well, about as well as you'd expect.
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Mar 21, 2019 01:43
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PurpleXVI posted:Also am I reading it right that you can "farm" initiative off of a weak enemy and then use that to murder a tougher enemy? Because mechanically it sounds potentially interesting but thematically it sounds like the protagonists ignoring the big bad for three rounds while they kick over one of his henchmen, kicking him whenever he tries to get up and then suddenly they turn towards the boss and annihilate him in a single round. Its sort of an issue, though they do try to limit it. So, as someone already alluded to, battlegroups are a thing for mooks so your exalt can do the crazy things like personally destroying whole army units and whatnot. These groups do not follow the same rules about gaining/losing initiative; successful withering attacks against them give you the one automatic init, but no more, and the damage is just applied to their "health". Also, I partially lied about them being for destroying armies. That's certainly true for a size 5 battlegroup, but the smallest size 1 groups are meant to model around a half dozen people. So, generally, people in a fight that are too weak to really be anything but init sponges should normally get grouped as a battlegroup and run that way. Its not perfect, and there's some wonky elements (for example, from a mechanical perspective summoning 5-6 fighty demons and having them fight individually can be way more powerful than they would be as a battlegroup), but it does cover the biggest cases where farming init might emerge. There's also IIRC some sidebars noting that if an individual is too weak to be meaningful to combat, you shouldn't get init for attacking them (so stabbing fleeing peasants to power up to kill the bandits attacking the village is out). Also you can't do weird things like whack the dawn with functionally invulnerable soak to get those +1 inits over and over before going in to a fight.
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Mar 26, 2019 16:48
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One thing I and my players quite liked with the social rules was that there was a bit more specialization in how you'd approach your situations than a traditional "I am the diplomancer" type build in these games. Identifying and hiding intimacies was one set of things, actually influencing in different manners were other charms/skills. So there was some value in having multiple people working together on a social problem.
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Mar 26, 2019 22:34
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I wonder if player reactions to influence attempts by each other or NPCs would change if it was a carrot rather than a stick. Something like getting a buff or other mechanic reward for accepting the influence. Of course, unless really well set up that sort of system could be gamed and broken in many many ways, but I'm more just wondering if changing the parameters would be more comfortable for some players and get away from the feeling like they're having to blow personal resources to not be told what they think or do.
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Mar 27, 2019 00:41
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That Old Tree posted:Like, you don't really need an exhaustive and exclusive list for it to work. Just like putting down "concept" or "background" or "motivation" or whatever, it's useful to keep track of and you can sink some mechanical hooks into it, but ultimately it's just knowing who the character is and what they want. It's way easy to wing. From my group's play experience, I kind of wished they had just treated minor intimacies as flat out condition cards that were auto returned either at the end of the scene or adventure. The players in my group who felt intimacies were a lot of bookkeeping also generally had the takeaway that minor intimacies were a little bit less disposeable than that. Not that they didn't wither away when not relevant (the book is pretty clear on that), just how long it took. Having them clearly be a "this is a temporary thing, don't bother writing it on your sheet unless something triggers off it that bumps it up somehow" might have helped convey how situational minors are supposed to be.
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Mar 27, 2019 13:01
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Dawgstar posted:The Presence Socialize divide also seemed odd. Presence/socialize divided kinda made sense in play, with presence as the more persuasion/inspiration type skill and socialize the more intrigue/gossip/manipulation type skill. Naming them "presence" and "socialize" respectively though wasn't particularly helpful if you weren't already familiar with how both worked in play.
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Mar 27, 2019 13:42
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For extra hilarity on the evocations, one of the final stages of Holden and Morke's tenure was failing to get out said "quick release" book of artifacts in anything approaching timely fashion, mainly because Morke was proudly and publicly ripping up the systems and putting in a new even betterer one that was going to be so awesome, you guys. No real way to wager on it, being alt-history and all, but I'd bet if OPP hadn't fired them, we wouldn't even have DBs out yet, let alone Lunars in manuscript.
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Mar 28, 2019 01:33
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Just going back a bit to the question about decision paralysis (and further reasons dice tricks suck): When we played, the one player who always has trouble with rules did have some with the charms, but we helped her pre-write some combos with some notes on what they'd be good for and how to decide how many motes to use, and she was fine after that. That's pretty standard for our group, so it wasn't very notable. On the other hand, I and one other player did get a shitton of questions and requests for advice when considering different charms to buy, because of those stupid dice tricks. I use stats regularly at work, and said other player is an engineer. And sure, we could eyeball some of those dice tricks and see what kind of benefit they'd give. But then it'd go beyond "9s count as 2 successes" or "reroll 6s" where you'd be rolling until none of those number appeared or whatever else, and players would be asking how that stacked up compared to working on this other skill where it had a different dice trick, and suddenly my piece of scratch paper is full of numbers and arg this is so dumb. When that first started happening, on a slow day at work I got it in my head to map out all the dice tricks and their relative benefit and see if/what the underlying logic to them being in different skills at different places were. I don't remember if it was 3 or 4 charm trees in that I realized I had better things to do with my life, but how they expected your average gamer to try to evaluate different dice tricks beyond "more chance for success = GUD", I dunno.
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Mar 29, 2019 03:18
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Halloween Jack posted:I never knew who HTK was before, but he's a discount Terada who draws every woman with the same figure and does Liefeldian things to their spine and pelvis. Are their standards that low? He did a bunch of Final Fantasy concept art; I'm guessing that was the standard. Though I am actually kind of baffled now, having looked through his stuff some more. Lots of absurd poses aside, even his less skin heavy stuff is just...kind of average, I guess? Like, I came across maybe a handful of designs that actually had some clever or unique designs or compositions. Everything just seems like someone who's competent at painting in photoshop, and likes to put a ton of shiny highlight on a lot of his work. Maybe a decade ago that really stood out, but I'm not seeing it today. So in conclusion, if you're going to brag about having a smutty Korean artist design your cover, at least make sure its Kim Jung Gi.
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Mar 29, 2019 21:38
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Khorne is one of the few places I feel like Age of Sigmar may have actually surpassed its predecessor, in terms of lore. Khorne followers are still murderous assholes who fly into frenzies, and the early books they're about as dysfunctional as you'd expect. But they've gradually been fleshing them (and the followers of a lot of the gods, for that matter out) out into people with actual motivations, albeit weird ones. The biggest part of that being simply that while they're berzerkers on the battlefield still, they're not permanently locked into a mindless explosion of bloodlust even outside of combat. Like, one of the short story collections has a whole thing about a khorne warband figuring out a new leader once the old one bites it, and there's actual politicking and conversation. It does end up getting settled through brutal combat, but there's factions in the warband and maneuvering to get warriors to back one candidate over another. It also features a khorne warrior whose open and expressed goal is to get powerful enough to become a daemon, so he can go to khorne's throne and kill the fucker for wiping out his nation. Khorne finds this amusing. Some of the Nurgle expanded stuff is pretty good too. Plague Garden gets into bizarre class conflict between different groups of Nurglites in Grandfather's realm. There's also Warcry coming out soon, which is a warband scale skirmish game that's explicitly about highlighting how different cultural groups across the realms approach worshipping chaos. Its not high art, but its got more nuance than the older depictions of chaos followers often did.
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Apr 4, 2019 22:16
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gourdcaptain posted:Ah, the kind of "ruin the setting" that is incredibly unlikely to actually come up in play but breaks a bunch of underpinnings in that view. Why is Second Bread a thing? (Besides the oh-so-witty Jesus joke they wanted to put in.) That second part is why arguments about things like second bread always lose me well before they begin. The central conceit of the setting is an empire roughly the size of modern day Russia in a mishmash of technological development that could be described as "bronze to early iron age-ish". That empire is not only able to hold together a consistent internal culture and administration, but has been able to maintain a mixture of hegemony and outright colonialism over territories bigger than Eurasia, and has done so in part by transporting legions of thousands of troops hundreds if not thousands of miles with some regularity. And has done so for nearly 8 centuries without falling apart in all the various ways autocratic tribute based economies usually do. In other words, Exalted has about as much relation to historical reality as...well, most fantasy settings. I'd actually put it on a lower tier of realism than something like DnD even. Which is fine; the game at least originally wasn't trying to push its setting as being a simulation of bronze age life if there were demigods running around. But for some reason Exalted in particular seems to often tie itself in knots trying to get to some sort of "realism" that doesn't seem to be rooted in much of anything. Like, I hear people grousing sometimes about DnD settings not really showing the full implications of what having all these spells and magic items around would be. But I think that's probably a wiser course of action for settings like this, then to try to make your whole historical mishmash with absurd population numbers, distances, and historical tenures of nations all have some sort of mechanical underpinning.
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Apr 9, 2019 04:02
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Joe Slowboat posted:Union is, however, also perfectly willing to let large corporations go out and take over chunks of space for profit, as long as the corporations promise to not do too many human rights violations. They should, but that's one thing I really like about Lancer's writing. There's a strong sense of messiness and held over artifacts in the very long history of the factions, that is often absent in fictional histories. Union's Third Committee is more idealistic and committed to doing better, but is also a revolutionary reaction to a specific imperial regime and is crisscrossed with unexamined assumptions, compromises of convenience, and just the practical reality of managing a territory where responses have to be measured in years or decades of real time travel. It has a great lived in feel to it.
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Apr 29, 2019 13:44
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Nessus posted:Off the top of my head: From what I remember, in previous editions the power gap between celestial and terrestrial exalts was both bigger and generally harder to cross, especially in regards to sorcery. I think there was one artifact (Brigid's Mantle) that Mnemon had that let her use Celestial Sorcery, and there may have been a few other things buried here or there, but gaining power via the selling out to the Yozis (the Broken-Winged Crane being a gateway to that) was one of the more common ones. So that was I think why she was getting copies of those books and using them, until it backfired on her via the Ebon Dragon. But yeah, it was a pretty bad metaplot, pretty much set up because IIRC The Scarlet Empress and Ebon Dragon were Yoma Kings in the WoD. They had already moved away from direct connections by then, but I guess decided that had to fit together for some reason. About the only thing I liked was the concept that the Scarlet Empress as her corrupted demon form was the future author of the Broken Winged Crane, writing ever changing versions to lead her to that point. Not specifically for that plot, but just as a concept to steal and use elsewhere.
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May 16, 2019 13:20
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Mors Rattus posted:The new devs have said that literally nothing but ‘they used to be Solars’ was retained. Even pre-new devs, the little bit of teaser from the core book KS had them changed quite a bit. Biggest being (which I expect they'll keep), that infernals aren't just defaulted to devoted minions of the yozis. It was much more of a "grant these guys power and let them go muck poo poo up in creation, it'll help us in some fashion" type of deal.
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May 20, 2019 13:18
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Night10194 posted:
I doubt the "exalted as prehistory" would have ever worked out well given how much of a muddled mess the oWoD was, but in my understanding Exalted's original conception at least fit a little better. The crazy wuxia over the top kitchen sink fantasy element wasn't baked in from the get go. It was originally going to be something of a more grim and desperate game of anathema being hunted in a fallen world. AFAIK Grabowski pushed for the setting to be more high powered fantasy, and by the time it published, most of the WoD prehistory elements were little more than easter eggs. So I could see how they might have originally thought it could work, even if it probably would have just made the already absurdly contradictory heap that was oWoD mythology even leakier.
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Jul 11, 2019 19:25
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SunAndSpring posted:It's really bizarre how, for the last stretch of 2e, the devs thought Infernals were the most popular splat of that edition, and then they did some actual polling and it turns out it was just a bunch of really vocal weirdos who liked the weirdly codified and rigid structure of the charms and demons in general drowning out the majority, and most people didn't really like them at all because of those first chapters to their book being insanely bad. I remember at least a couple of those super-vocal people were also super-vocal about transhumanism. I dunno if that was the majority of the infernals fanbase or how the devs viewed it, but I just remember a couple of those guys really latching on to demon shintai, and also being huge fanboys for anything about turning into nanoswarms or whatever other poo poo was the geek fad du jour at the time. That was always what that particular craze seemed tied to, to me as an outside observer.
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Jul 16, 2019 18:25
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Have to say I find it hard to see the human aspect of an ambulant pile of cogs and cables. It kinda does in the Horus Heresy series. The whole "Emperor as Omnissah" thing was pretty blatantly political, an agreement that papered over an arrangement where the Mechanicus was given autonomy and resources to reunite their forgeworlds, and in return they'd manufacture tech for the Emperor's war machine. The revolt of Mars and throwing in their lot with Horus was mainly due to the dissidents who opposed the treaty. The Fabricator-General, Kelbor Hal, was promised greater independence if Horus won, but was opposed to the Treaty even before then, seeing the idea of the Emperor being the living embodiment of the Omnissah as...well, as what it was, basically. An easy story to smooth over the divisions between two empires that had been welded together 200 years previous.
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Jul 29, 2019 20:31
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Sure, it's a setting element, obviously, but I always thought it was one of those internal contradictions in the setting which would be interesting to see more explored, and the RPGs would obviously be the place to do it.
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Not to derail too much more from the horrors that are the d20 aberrant rules, but plot wise I'll note the new version just kickstartered looks waaaaay better on both the Mal and the "play actual heroes if that's your jam" fronts. There's advice and mechanical support for picking the specific subgenres you like, and Mal as far as I've read basically just has made his null manifesto statement and that's it, letting everyone else decide what to do with it. (he is still in the secret history section as part of the instigator for the whole thing, but that mostly just maps out how the games connect for those who like it and lays out in pretty clear terms that Mal's approach is dumb and wrong)
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Aug 1, 2019 20:49
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