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Here's a fairly complete list of OSR clones with a short description of each. It's a good starting point for exploring the retroclone space, at any rate, even if some of the games aren't actually available as such. http://taxidermicowlbear.weebly.com/dd-retroclones.html
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Jun 5, 2016 19:11
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Most people have to go on foot because apparently gas ran out at the end of the first winter after The Wave. What the hell? There'd be a lot of gas left around with nearly everybody being dead, with it left in gas tanks friggin' everywhere. Well, Winnipeg is making ethanol. Good for them. Gasoline can, actually, go bad and because useless if not stored properly or treated. So, given that we're a couple of years down the road, yes there should be gas out there but probably not in easily accessible places. Looking forward to this review, I love watching Siembieda screw with his own authors because the Quality is Not There and end up producing a steaming pile.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:08
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FMguru posted:Has anyone ever done an everything-is-awful medieval era RPG that actually worked? WFRP and Vampire: the Dark Ages are the only two that come to mind. I think HârnMaster probably comes closest. Maybe Ars Magica for everyone but the wizards.
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Dec 1, 2016 15:51
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DalaranJ posted:The Starfinger Society is some sort of adventures guild carry over from Pathfinder, I assume. And not just an aping of Traveler's Aid Society? Pretty sure it's the SF counterpart to the Pathfinder Society, which is Paizo's organized play thing for Pathfinder.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:I really liked the idea of the Marines storming Innsmouth while the Navy depth-charges Dagon's resting place ... and then the story picks up with having to hunt down all of the Marines that survived the raid and "retiring" them. Sounds like a fun proto-Delta Green campaign.
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Oct 19, 2017 16:02
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Night10194 posted:It seems like you kind of really want a couple PCs who can fight some on Horrient, despite the usual 'combat skills aren't that useful in CoC' thinking. Whenever my group played CoC we were almost always split 50/50 between fightin' oriented guys and knowledge oriented guys. If nothing else you've got to expect cultists, so you need someone to be able to deal with them while your professors figure out how to stop the ritual and/or put the summoned thing back in the bottle. Worst case you throw enough dynamite at something it'll usually let you at least run off. When we did Horrient (the original version), I recall we had a couple of WW1 vets with some good rifle skills, and most of the investigators had some kind of weapon (usually a pistol), and by the end we were so paranoid we had 'acquired' some high explosives and automatic rifles which let us escape at least one "deathtrap" as my GM at the time put it.
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Jan 16, 2018 14:18
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How does it compare to Enemy Within, if you've played/run that?
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Sep 9, 2018 00:11
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Halloween Jack posted:Yeah, that would be a game of Cabal where you play the World Bank. Oo, I cannot wait to see you talk about the hit location system.
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Apr 23, 2019 19:28
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Cooked Auto posted:Is it as bad as Neotech's or worse? Because I'm not sure if you can get worse than Neotech in this case. Does Neotech have a transparent sheet of plastic marked with ~100 numbered dots, which you position over a sihouette of the target to figure out where the shot landed?
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Apr 23, 2019 19:53
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wiegieman posted:Someday, someone is going to automate Phoenix Command and create the craziest and least played xcom-like of all time. I think LatwPIAT (forgive me if I mangled that) did some spreadsheets that largely automated shots for their Phoenix Command let's play.
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Apr 23, 2019 21:08
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NGDBSS posted:We skip ahead to 1914, because apparently nothing else worth even a sentence of detail happened in 40 years. (This gets readdressed later but only slightly.) Archduke Franz Ferdinand got assassinated, mainland Europe went to war, and Britain noped out because “[we] did not consider the Germans a match for our navy and, after all, Kaiser Bill was a cousin of King George”. Wait, what? Do you cretins not realize that royal relations didn’t stop any of the major powers from warring, that Britain went to war because it had signed a pact as one of the major Entente Powers, and that British militarism after its colonial struggles would have made the populace more eager to fight the German upstarts? Anyway, France apparently got conquered handily and Italy soon followed. puts on pedant hat Well, actually... the British were reluctant to get involved in World War I. There was pretty serious waffling in the cabinet of the time about whether or not to commit troops to the continent. The British Army was tiny compared to the French Army, and there were doubts about whether it was worth it. In the end, they went to war because if they didn't, they'd end up without friends--if Germany wins, well, England's potential allies are now conquered, and if France/Russia win, England didn't help them, so they're still out in the cold. The French Army was actually considered equal to the German army, and barring serious deviations from what happened in our TL were unlikely to be easily defeated. "Conquered handily" is just applying World War 2 France to World War 1 era. 
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May 7, 2019 13:28
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Hey Purple, glad to see we're back wallowing in the filth. Any chance you could dial back the r-word a bit there? Creeped in at the end of your review, and honestly the subject matter is bad enough without dropping down to their level.
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May 25, 2019 02:44
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Night10194 posted:Similarly, while there are super tough enemies and stuff in the setting, you're kind of intended to eventually kick their asses. No-one is 'beyond' you like you'd get in a lot of other nineties games. Every metaplot character is there for you to matter to. You might be their best agents, the guys they rely on completely. You might be their bitter arch nemesis. But all the people you run into in Feng Shui are meant to be played with. Right from the start, your PC is a big deal. The game also does a good thing with its metaplot, which is groundbreaking for the 1990s: This game has a 'snapshot' metaplot. Some poo poo went down just before your game started, and the default Hero Group faction (The Silver Dragons) are mostly dead, leaving you an in to be the new generation of Silver Dragons as a default if you want. But all the setting material is based around that snapshot in time, rather than advancing the 'story'. This makes it a lot easier to include the setting material in your games, and would've meant that a group acquiring this material as it got published would instead be getting new cool stuff about what was going on Right Now instead of stuff that suddenly writes lots of pre-existing material out. It's a great way to handle it. Just a historical note: Hârn did this, starting in like 1983. All products stop at a specific date, everything past that is completely up to the GM. There's half a dozen conflicts set up in the setting, and none of them have ever been resolved canonically in the ~30 years since release. It's one of the cool bits of Hârn.
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Jun 7, 2019 16:03
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Well, I mean you literally have Good Angel and Charon..
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Jun 18, 2019 21:43
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Halloween Jack posted:I admit I haven't closely followed the Coalition/Tolkeen war, but my understanding is that the wizards had everything they needed to teleport into Coalition headquarters and level it, and the books never really explain why that didn't happen. Plus the whole thing where the Coalition has more military hardware than the modern United States. The Coalition manages to misplace a force that's equal to about 20% of the current US military's strength and not particularly notice it, militarily. This is with a worldwide human population of under half a billion. (11 billion pop at the start of the Rifts event, 2% survive--220m--about a hundred years to double that given conditions on Earth). Imagine if tomorrow, all US Navy personnel were off doing something somewhere. That's the force that the Coalition loses and just shrugs and carries on, not really even losing... until they magically pop up, somehow concealing themselves and all of their equipment in arguably the most secure place in Tolkeen territory.
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Jun 21, 2019 20:53
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Night10194 posted:Which is full of seers and wizards, don't forget. Under constant Xiticix attack, too, IIRC, to which they just basically.. died in numbers? They literally Zap Brannigan'd the Xiticix.
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Jun 21, 2019 20:58
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Does Alas, Vegas ever explain why it feels the need for four GMs? Based on the stuff hyphz' is relating, it feels like you'd be better off with one GM, so you could lace hints for all the stuff the players are supposed to figure out ~somehow~ throughout the chapters. Or is it supposed to be some metagamey thing where previous GMs now impart the sekret information to the party sneakily?
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Jul 15, 2019 03:35
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By popular demand posted:I just bought the TinyD6 Bundle of Holding specifically for the Tiny Wastelands ruleset (which I intend to modify quite a bit), is there interest here for a review? 
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Jul 22, 2019 13:37
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There's at least one F&F for HârnMaster (3e, iirc) on inklesspen, if you want more detail. Basically it's a percentile skill-based system with a fairly punishing combat system. It likes to claim realism but ymmv. Hârn itself is explicitly system neutral. All flavors of D&D have been used, FATE, Runequest, and pretty much anything that can support a low-magic setting should work fine. The basic setting info isn't particularly crunchy; basically you're looking at a five-star quality rating system and that's about it. It takes an immense amount of inspiration from 10-12th century England, so you have a very feudal society for 3.5 of the seven realms on Hârn proper. Kaldor is large, and on the verge of a civil war (the "Kaldoric Succession Crisis"). Chybisa is small, surrounded by two of the major barbarian nations, and a catspaw between Kaldor and Melderyn, its larger neighbors who both have a claim to the throne. Melderyn is a large, stable kingdom with a strong wizardly presence behind the scenes that mainly holds a smaller island off the coast, but likes to meddle on the main island. In the West, you have Rethem, which is a newly feudal nation with serious internal division and a lot of unhealthy influence from the "evil" churches of Agrik (overtly) and Morgath (covertly), as well as a religiously-inspired cold war with neighboring Kanday. Kanday is another feudal state, though this one has a weak long and very strong barons. The church of Larani (think chivalry and noblesse oblige) is very strong in Kanday, particularly due to the strength of the Agrikan church in Rethem. Bordering both of them is one of the odd ducks on Hârn, the Thardic Republic. This is quasi-Roman, with a senate and legates and lots of internal scheming. It's been at war with either or both neighbors regularly over the years. The last nation is the newest, Orbaal, in the far northeast corner of the island. It was conquered less than 50 years ago by the setting's Viking analogues, and very much has a Saxons vs Danes kinda feel. Around all of these are ~25 barbarian nations of various organizations and development. There's also a kingdom of elves and one of dwarves, who are both very much in the Tolkien mold and don't really interact with the rest of the island much. Happy to answer questions about it if anyone wants further details.
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Aug 3, 2019 23:55
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