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DalaranJ posted:95. The actual treasure is a permanently invisible two by four. See, I found the invisible 2x4 the point at which it went from 'humorous wizard prank' (a ring with Avoidance and Continual Light is an amusing object for about five minutes) to 'why would you ever do this' - but this is a good point! Invisible 2x4 is probably the best tavern brawl weapon you could ask for.
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Nov 1, 2017 15:58
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Make the dragon equally malevolent, just way more ambitious than some orc who just wants revenge on Farmer Jenkins for some relatively sympathetic reason. The dragon wants to be off conquering kingdoms and kidnapping princesses, like one does, but is stuck here until the PCs free them.
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Nov 8, 2017 15:48
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TLE might have been 'inspired' by Jesus Christ Superstar? Otherwise I got nothin'
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Nov 9, 2017 07:04
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Halloween Jack posted:That's Napoleon Bonaparte. If the dragon's also massively racist I guess. Who doesn't love saying "I am the revolution" while reinstating slavery in the colonies and banning black veterans from Paris? gently caress Napoleon.
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Nov 15, 2017 20:58
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Napoleon being a monster for petty reasons rather than power consolidation is still monstrous, for the record. That being said, I imagine you've read The Black Count? I cannot recommend that account of the elder Dumas enough. Also civil rights were introduced by the Revolutionary govt; Napoleon just kept some of them around. He also reintroduced looting to large-scale warfare and abandoned most of his army in Egypt after his campaign there, he is given far more credit than he deserves. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Nov 15, 2017 |
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Nov 15, 2017 23:10
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Personally I like the idea of a bunch of slimes that are just... how nanotech works out in the setting. Slimes are a constant in dungeons, and they're kind of endearing, so having a bunch of different grey goo scenarios as mildly annoying low-level monsters sounds like a fun take on the genre convention. That's not what this is, but, it's what it could have been.
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Nov 22, 2017 03:37
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Mors Rattus posted:I've always liked the explanation posited by nHunter, which is that for all they try, any masquerade which relies on just hiding rather than, say, Mage's 'your mind cannot process this and you forget it, no matter what', the masquerade just...has failed, basically. People know weird poo poo is out there. They're just mostly ignoring it because people assume everyone else would think they were crazy, or that no one would believe it, or that if they pretend it's not real, the world will be a sane place where they can raise their kids. This honestly seems like the single biggest difference between Old and New WOD to me (as an nWOD player): The grand conspiracies to hide the supernatural only need to achieve deniability, because everyone is going to prefer to pretend they live in a world where the dead don't wake up to drink our blood because maybe that way it won't be *my* blood. Mage then makes this a metaphysical conceit, the Lie, but that's more of a continuation of the theme that it's something about your average person, not huge supernatural conspiracies, that keeps society from falling apart in screaming monster chaos.
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Nov 30, 2017 22:18
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If a wendigo can't be Daryl the Wendigo, it is a mediocre wendigo.
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Dec 2, 2017 02:39
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Mors Rattus posted:The gently caress is perceptronium? According to wiktionary, it's "A hypothetical state of matter capable of giving rise to self-awareness and subjectivity." So it's the most useless answer to the Hard Problem of Cognition ever devised, in prepackaged form. It's a physicist's attempt to answer 'why do we have subjectivity, how does it arise' with 'there's subjective stuff in our brains, it's a state of matter.' So presumably they mean a universe where everything has a subjectivity of some kind. Still ridiculous but I can see sticking that in a table if the table were weird, optional, and in a much looser, more PBTA-ish game where you're intended to make poo poo up off of general setting implication.
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Dec 3, 2017 18:50
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It has every appearance of being a physicist being as reductionist as physically possible, so they probably mean some kind of subatomic free will particle that neatly solves all the problems of both philosophy of mind and cognitive biology. I don't like reductionism even a little. And I suspect the 'perceptronium' hypothesis is pretty equivocal about what perceptronium should look like when you crack a skull open because it dodges the question 'ok, so we have this material form of subjectivity... what are its properties then?'
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Dec 3, 2017 19:29
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What I'm getting from soulless fashion is that they have the same style sense as MMO players who have gotten extremely bored but can't bring themselves to stop playing. Which is pretty much the Soulless condition.
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Dec 15, 2017 07:12
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Down With People posted:Will destroy Sarnath. At this point in time the Sarnathians still have 9000 years to avoid that fate. Pretty sure the original story has it 1000 years later, not 10,000 - which means the Beings of Ib are going to destroy the city quite soon. Presumably getting restitution from the Sarnathians instead of that is part of the point of talking to the king (and we can assume it will go extremely poorly).
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Dec 17, 2017 06:53
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Kavak posted:Lovecraft also doesn't side with Sarnath that much in his story- its doom is portrayed as an inevitable consequence of the Ib slaughter. The priests of Sarnath were supposed to maintain rites to Bokrug, but they forgot one year and bam, whole city is smote. I don't think that's quite it - they definitely did their rites reviling Bokrug on the doomed night (having just gone back and reread the story. drat me if it isn't much more fun to read than most of his straight horror, even if it's more than usually copying Dunsany). The idol went missing that very first year, when the high priest died of horror and wrote 'doom' in the altar to warn them all.
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Dec 17, 2017 16:34
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PurpleXVI posted:SPEAKING OF. They released a "lore book." Please, this would be a great way to ring in the new year.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:23
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Night10194 posted:Was this official or unofficial stuff? You can never tell with Exalted, given the line's sordid bits. Unofficial, thankfully. The closest it got were an evil barbarian overlord type having what I am led to believe were rape camps (published as an online extra, IIRC, and extremely grimdark evil, and extremely awful - I never read that stuff because of its deservedly dire reputation). And then in the mythical dawn of time the Dragon-Blooded were supposedly 90% women and spent a few generations having massive bacchanals and increasing their population as much as possible. Which is also extremely gross and dumb, but if they'd been a little more restricted and just said 'the Children of the Dragons focused on building their numbers, within a few generations creating a vast nation' it would have been uncomfortable but within the realm of ancient mythology, I imagine. Both are still better than what the fans came up with. EDIT: To be clear, there were official rape camps as a thing in the setting and it was horrendous. It was only the fans who insisted that 'breeding camps' were the necessary solution to the setting, rather than 'this is an over the top evil thing this character does, so that you know you should kill him ASAP.' Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 03:54
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Bieeardo posted:One Thousand Blank Deck of Encounters Cards Disney's Aladdin, I assume
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Jan 14, 2018 20:28
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Halloween Jack posted:Actually, Deep Ones are just sexy mermaid people that the U.S. government viciously oppressed with bombing campaigns. Actually Lovecraft didn't claim Deep Ones were rapists either. Dude just super-hated "miscegenation" - the horror of Innsmouth was that its people willingly married fishpeople and established trade relations with them. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is both one of the better Lovecraft stories for craft and one of the worst for metaphorical racism (even before we get to his many awful stories for direct racism). The Shape of Water is basically Lovecraft's nightmare scenario. EDIT: it's also worth remembering that Original Lovecraft is not coherent because the guy wasn't interested in constructing a world, he just wanted everyone to live in as much fear of Poles as he did, metaphorically speaking. It's his fans, like August Derleth (Wisconsin represent!) that shaped his work into a single universe, defined 'Outer Gods' versus alien GOOs, and so on. Yogg-Sothoth.being 'spacetime incarnate' was invented to make Yoggy more godlike, when originally Yoggs was a parodic horrible version of the Abrahamic God so that The Dunwich Horror could be snide about religion, which Lovecraft thought was for rubes. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 15:32
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I feel like the Fenalik endgame is easily improved in a way Istanbul isn't. The idea that the Brotherhood looks unbeatable then gets totally shredded by Dracula is a great if a bit railroads way to lead in to the actual confrontation. Maybe have Fenalik actually try to converse (maybe through intermediaries) with the Investigators, give them a sense of the haughty French noble/undead monster they've been traveling with. Then have him be ready to murder them unless they really impress him-, possibly focus his assaults on limb tending (in ways that fit Baleful Influences). I'm fine with the penultimate challenge of the campaign being potentially lethal to an investigator, but make it fun and flavorful, not just a boring slap fight with a vampire. In short I think Fenalik is a way less natively terrible session than all this Orientalist crap.
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Jan 19, 2018 06:08
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and don't forget the cats! Really all it would take to turn this into Baccano would be for Fenalik to have somehow survived to be the Rail Tracer. The Flesh Engine or whatever would be a great addition to that once everyone is onboard- nonstop service straight to hell or London, either one.
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Jan 24, 2018 15:04
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If all the changing and developing myths in Glorantha, accessible through the Godtime, are true... surely either the setting has no core 'reality' as we would describe it and different cultures experience different worlds, or else there's some universally accurate if highly symbolic account of the universe. It seems to me as though the first version of things is basically the out of character image of the world, and the second version is the specific cultural understanding of the world by the God Learner culture, who wanted things to work out. Their methods did work extremely well, as far as I can tell, until they blew themselves up. Could one compare this to a phenomenological account of anthropology, where all cultural accounts are taken on their own terms, but the Enlightenment worldview is clearly instrumentally powerful and capable of subjugating other accounts?
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Feb 20, 2018 21:15
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My primary issue with Glorantha is that it's a setting with only mythic history - every time there's a conqueror or a rebellion, it centers around vast magics and spells, god-sorcery and so on. Which is true to the intent of Glorantha as I understand it, but also necessarily a huge difference from the bronze age history (or even the Hyborean Age Conan stories) which is what I want out of bronze age fantasy. The setting is so high fantasy that it doesn't seem to really see the ground, which is ironically an issue it shares with a lot of the most bog-standard Forgotten Realms type fantasy settings. It means that while there are many interesting societies, they don't actually change and develop in ways that even rhyme with Earth history, or follow even particularly similar mechanisms. The Lunar Empire in particular stands out - they're theoretically a conquering empire like the Assyrians or Akkadians, as I understand it, but they can besiege a city for a year and nobody notices, and they seem (based on the Prince of Sartar webcomic) to primarily rely on sorcery, and I have no sense of the apparatus of resource extraction or administration they use. And then Heroquesting further cements that, as the actual events of history become the echoes of mythic archetypes. Overall I just slide off Glorantha even though it looks very cool, because I can't find purchase.
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Mar 1, 2018 06:39
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I'd like to lodge a polite request that future Glorantha writeups please focus on the level of social interaction where the players will be? This isn't to say that that's inherently better I just know I'd get a lot more out of a sense of what life and morality are like for a citizen of the Lunar Empire and how they would get into the hero business, for example, than knowing who Herrek the Berserker is, unless players get to be (the equivalent of) Herrek the Berserk. Edit: because from both the wiki and threads on here I have never managed to find out what life in the Lunar Empire is like at all, or what they actually use their Empire for other than spreading what I understand to be moon worship and subjugating other gods.
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Mar 1, 2018 15:23
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I personally think the idea of ultimately relative truth is incoherent on a philosophical level; moreover, it inherently denies any possible universalism of, say, human rights. So on an ontological and moral level I think pure relativism of truth is not good. That being said, the idea that there is not a single guiding narrative truth of history (like the British Empire) is central to some very well-thought-out postmodernism, and I think is fundamentally separable from the ontological relativism that it is often parlayed into. Glorantha seems to have a pretty well-structured meta-truth that allows for variable theological truth, but where I think I part ways with it is the idea that this changes the basic lived reality of the world two people share in different ways for them. If I claim you are killing me with a sword, you shouldn't get to say that actually it is I who am killing you with my unwillingness to submit to your sword, and have those be equally true. There is an underlying reality which we interpret, or else the God Learners were no worse than anyone else. And the setting goes out of its way to say they're terrible, as far as I can tell. The relativism ends precisely at the depiction of positivism, and that's kind of silly. My 2c
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Mar 1, 2018 19:33
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Please do! Glorantha is if nothing else super interesting, and this conversation should in no way be construed as criticism! Especially if, as I've sort of gathered, the information I specifically want isn't really present in it, you can't be blamed for not sharing it with the thread.
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Mar 1, 2018 19:37
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Josef bugman posted:Anyone know a good primer on positivism and the associated philosophies? I wouldn't say positivism is the only philosophy that holds to a single unified ontological truth; it has more baggage than that. That being said... the French Enlightenment and its offshoots have a lot to do with positivism, and any modern analytical philosophy is likely to be positivist. also I think the online Britannica is good for introductions to schools of thought if you just want a historical overview and basic definition. Edit: also, I appreciate the clarification that Gloranthan metaphysics do not entirely dissolve the reality of the setting as a place in which people live; it seems sometimes from description that it mostly gets eaten by the metaphysics. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 20:40
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Mors Rattus posted:You'd have some trouble in modern anthropology or even just general history. See, the internal worldview and beliefs of a culture need to be accepted from the internal viewpoint, which is just as important as the outsider's viewpoint. Questioning the beliefs of your subjects is unethical when dealing with them as insiders, even if those beliefs seem to contradict your own, such as if they believe in magic in our world. History, likewise, is not simply about just raw factual data, because interpreting those facts is an act that involves viewpoints. Mutually exclusive interpretations can both be valid. This isn't the only way to approach history, though- revisionist analysis is also vastly important, and approaches from much the opposite position. If one seeks to historically analyze, say, the development of modern science, or the British Empire, one does in fact theorize and introduce tension within the actors' own accounts. When discussing the myth of Manifest Destiny we are not in fact beholden in all study to granting truth to that claim and justifying it, even as we seek to understand the beliefs and positions that inform it. One can allow for an agnosticism of interpretation in the discussion of history, but it does not actually dissolve the events - what you call 'raw factual data' - that occurred in a physical sense. Hell, scientists rarely have a fully coherent image of scientific history and the structure of science, which is in large part where one can analyze science as a social construct rather than a quasi-divine organ of pure truth. The idea that that skepticism is not a key part of constructing a history of science is bizarre to me.
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Mar 1, 2018 20:59
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Mors Rattus posted:That's...kind of my point? That's not actually what I said, though, in key ways. Principally, there is a key difference between 'multiple ways' and 'all ways including uncritically accepting the statements of people within the culture as ontologically true.' Having multiple frameworks and approaches in attempts to theorize a situation is not identical with truth being relative; if anything, it's incompatible with fully relative truth, because it divides out valid and sound methods of analysis from those we do not accept. I mean, I guess one could be totally agnostic between theoretical frameworks such that literally all are equally valid, but generally speaking the set of events does hugely constrain what theoretical frameworks might be acceptable. Also you can easily have a universalist truth framework in this context while still admitting to an epistemological inability to finally resolve what theoretical analysis is most true. Fake edit: I think our disagreement is on the word 'many' - I think that it's entirely possible to have a model of historicity that is respectable for analysis which limits the acceptable theories considerably more than your model of anthropology would seem to allow. Real edit: like historical materialism, for example, which allows for belief in and social reality of spellcraft, but not ontological reality. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 21:16
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Mors Rattus posted:'Several' is a fine word, then. My problem is when it gets cut down to 'one', because that's not how it works. That's a pretty huge difference! Like, thenvery fact of being able to thresh down the number of functional frameworks creates a space of truth and universality. Edit: yeah, you hit the nail on the head: I think that Glorantha's 'everyone is right' motto completely sidesteps the possibility of critique or engagement other than reproduction of its societies. Also if the God Learners in particular got it /wrong/ then there must be some way in which they did that which is universalizable. Double edit: well if you meant 'report' rather than 'accept' that's the last of my disagreement up in smoke. I certainly think anthropology should report the account(s) of a culture's people. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 21:19
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Mors Rattus posted:Basically, to me, the idea of skepticism and then not going 'okay, but what assumptions am I bringing to the table here' is not great. There's been a long, long loving history of Western cultural assumptions erasing or conflating poo poo that shouldn't have been, and in a lot of ways Glorantha is reacting to that. We're getting better about it these days, but even as recently as the 60s and 70s poo poo was bad. Certainly reasonable - I just personally think that there are certain modes of response to the hegemonic narratives of modernism that end up creating other problems; universalism is my hobbyhorse because of the extremely long history of (in the West particularly, but also worldwide) justifying vast injustice by reference to fundamental differences between people and their moral worth. Within the hobby, Unknown Armies has always frustrated me because it's postmodernism leads to metaphysical enforcement and reification of cultural norms, rather than radical challenges to cultural norms and critique.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:28
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Mors Rattus posted:
That's what I said, though? If there's a universal rule 'don't do the poo poo the God Learners were doing it ducks everything up' then there's a universal rule, which applies across all cultures, Don't Be God Learners, It Fucks Everything Up. Edit: also at this point I should be clear, you've convinced me that Glorantha has a particular ethos founded in a particular well-constructed postmodernism and anthropological neutrality, which is interesting but makes it hard for me to puzzle out what being within those societies is like (on an RPG playing level) because it primarily depicts what that culture expressly believes without other 'factual' information. And that isn't how RPG materials I've used fruitfully tend to function. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 21:30
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FMguru posted:Again, here are the ground-level in-character writeups for sixteen Gloranthan cultures, free of charge at the official glorantha.com website: http://www.glorantha.com/docs/heroquest-voices/ while I do appreciate this impressive ethnography, it is limited to the extent that ethnography is limited in depicting a culture, and since the problem I'm running into is getting from ethnographical account to RPG/narrative/novelistic depiction. Thanks for the link, though!
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Mar 1, 2018 21:56
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Also not to extend the Glorantha chat for more than I have (sorry thread) but: would it be fair to describe the Heroquesting and similar as being a fantastical model of a world where myths develop like they do in our own world (as beliefs and accounts passed down by humans) but are at the same time always literally true? You have political efforts to shape and modify belief (see the Imperial cult of Rome) but which do actually change the nature of Jupiter and Caesar and grant magical powers based on the divine Julius? Because that would make a lot of the metaphysics make sense to me even if pure ethnography presents me wth difficulties.
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Mar 1, 2018 22:05
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Not to get this even further into the weeds but I feel responsible for setting this off: I'm pretty sure you two don't mean precisely the same thing by 'true'? And possibly defining those parameters would go a long way towards this not just being an indefinite mage chat argument?
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Mar 1, 2018 22:27
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I think it's fair to say that one dislikes a setting's implicit (or explicit) valuations, same as any other media.
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Mar 2, 2018 00:40
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:Actually an officially licensed Bioshock game would be awesome. You'd think so but the encouraged style of GMing tends to be polite-but-tyrannical.
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Mar 2, 2018 03:39
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I feel like it should be extremely easy to give magical automata defensive spells that make artillery useless? I really like the towering automata art and the image of a wizard sitting on the brow of one of those things as it strides through battle is extremely old-school pulp fantasy. The fact that it's miserably unsupported mechanically is just how Rifts is, isn't it?
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Mar 3, 2018 20:53
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I would love an explanation of 'limit break' being on here, as well as why 'Exaltation' is banging around. Also 'crystals' and a ten dot scale for 'read/write' and everything about the 'psychology' section really. It's the worst character sheet I've ever seen and I love it.
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Mar 11, 2018 08:31
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wiegieman posted:Personally, I've always had a problem with systems that split physical power and resilience up. They should be a stat for how big, powerful, fast, and tough you are, and a separate stat for doing finesse things, and the rest should be mental or social. I demand precisely equal granularity between physical prowess and mental prowess. I don't care if it's one number each or a grid like NWoD or an elaborate system where every muscle group and every mental trait are ranked separately, so you can have useless biceps and weirdly overdeveloped memory for song lyrics. Parity, I demand parity!
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Mar 11, 2018 09:02
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wiegieman posted:Divine Power and its ability to replace an entire character class with a single action will never cease to be bleakly hilarious. What does Divine Power do?
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Mar 12, 2018 19:54
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It would probably be fine if being a wizard is the core of your game and going to fulfill arbitrary requirements to get that sweet spell reward was a group endeavor and a group reward. Isn't this Ars Magicka
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Apr 6, 2018 05:17
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