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Mors Rattus posted:So, quick question, you do know there's an actual sci fi series out there that stars a band of Nazis as the heroes, who remain Nazis but at one point end up taking in some Jewish members to help fight aliens? Based entirely on that sentence, I'm assuming Harry Turtledove?
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Feb 2, 2016 21:30
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Young Freud posted:So, almost exactly like John Ringo himself, given my knowledge of the man from the legendary horrific read-alongs of his Ghost series in TFR about a former Navy SEAL/rapist of underage girls/goth band aficionado-turned-North Caucasian warlord directly sanctioned by George Bush in his global efforts to kill most of the world's Muslims. John Ringo, the Chris Fields of pulp sci-fi. I should have known.
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Feb 3, 2016 01:45
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I'd love to see an RPG for the comic East of West. Keep the Union and the racist-rear end Confederacy, add a united techno-shaman Native state, an industrial free black state, a Judge Dredd Texas, and Red Chinese California. Then have them all in an uneasy peace because every national leader is a pawn of the Four Horsemen and their Elder God masters. Western games seem to run universally disappointing. Is the "some interesting setting, some interesting mechanics, please playtest more and kill the loving metaplot" of Deadlands really as good as it gets?
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Feb 3, 2016 23:39
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Count Chocula posted:Why not both? Ironically, while exploiting "any part of a corpse counts as the whole thing for adding/removing items from its inventory" was slightly counter-thematic to Fallout, it feels very AD&D. Like, the kind of custom 3rd level Transmutation a particularly cheesy wizard researches.
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Feb 29, 2016 20:56
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oriongates posted:Here, the very first actual page: Dark Sun did technically get a WotC (or officially licensed at least, I forget if Paizo was running things by then) release in a three-issue Dragon/Dungeon setting+rules/monster/adventure combo. It wasn't very big or particularly good, but it was presented as "here, here is All of Dark Sun, you can definitely play The Entire Dark Sun with this". I'm pretty sure the rules were entirely about defiling (which was done with feats, of course), and the only martial rules were "all your weapons are bone and wood and take damage penalties and break." I'd F&F it but I have no idea where I put those issues, and I'd probably just end up being sad.
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Mar 13, 2016 04:31
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Mors Rattus posted:Not the Draca Is... is this adventure name actually a reference to the Dinosaurs TV show, of which I can only remember that terrible catchphrase and horrific puppet abominations? I mean, I know not to expect class from late era TSR but geez, talk about your references that haven't aged well.
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Apr 21, 2017 23:15
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Barudak posted:Youd just use Keeshonds. Theyre medium sized, unflappably loyal, completely incapable of independent thought, louder than gently caress when affirming your orders, like confined spaces and boats, and hate mice and small rodents with a vigor. In my experience Keeshonds hate nothing and are unable to even grasp the concept that they might bite or injure a living being rather than just licking it a bunch, so probably not the best soldiers. Mine was also a massive scaredy-dog; does RIFTS have rules for forcing Dog Boys to save against hiding under the nearest object if they hear the tiniest hint of an explosion?
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Jun 10, 2017 00:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:Regarding Starfinder's conversion notes for Pathfinder: But is the unarmed damage still garbage because one of the Paizo devs (SKR?) has an incredibly stupid hate-on for monks being "overpowered," like every 14 year old in 2000 who couldn't properly analyze the math?
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Oct 24, 2017 12:41
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All this Pak stuff reminds me of Øyvind Thorsby's comic The Accidental Space Spy (warning: unimpressive but reliable MS Paint art), which is all about a bunch of aliens with more and more ridiculous reproductive strategies extrapolated from the basic concept of "things you do to gently caress will get extremely exaggerated over thousands of generations" - specifically the part about the Castrators, who all have a natural blade they use to castrate (or neuter, it's bigender) their own parents and relatives so their instincts shift their caretaker urge to the next closest genetically viable family member. (rear end warning 2: when that comic decides to extend its "logic" to humans it gets real nice and  )Maybe it's the other writers in the collection more than Niven himself, but the handful of random Man-Kzin Wars books I've read always made the setting feel very Libertarian Gunwank - "look at you NWO Nanny State Earth Liberals, you're so peaceful you're like herd animals and only us wilderness (white) colonists with our ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY GUNS can save you from evil space cats." I'm hoping that's a dormant thread in Ringworld? I want to read other Known Space stuff but it's a lovely year IRL to read people stroking themselves about how great and necessary guns and "the killing instinct" are.
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Nov 16, 2017 18:53
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Kavak posted:They're a background race, and I prefer their "Everything is elves" to other settings where elves are just as diverse but there's a dozen other types of creature to keep track of as well. They’re also just called “left-handed elves“ by the Redguard, who fought multiple wars against them and then their continent got magi-nuked. They probably had their own name for themselves, but there’s nobody left to use it.  An excellent background detail use of elves, IMO.
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Jan 5, 2018 01:22
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Obviously, it's to keep Ferrus dan Buellerophon from hotrodding your space-cathedral anywhere he wants to go while Dad's down on the planet.
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Apr 14, 2018 02:23
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Look, I think you're underselling the potential of the Otter table for horror. Imagine the terror of a normal human with otter whiskers and an otter tail! Or a person whose lower half is a giant otter! Consider all the otter possibilities. Kevin Siembieda’s d100 Table of Cheap Halloween Costumes
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Apr 25, 2018 02:12
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Mors Rattus posted:racism comes in many forms and just because this isn't literally stormfront doesn't mean it isn't hella racist I don’t think Jc’s trying to defend it so much as lacking the vocab to differentiate specifically between a game actively pursuing a racist agenda (like Myfarog) and a game created with a background of institutional and cultural racism (like Degenesis). Harmful cultural stereotypes come from ignorance and unrecognized bigotry, but without generalizing too much, I think Americans are a lot more used to spotting that and having the language to differentiate between subtle and blatant racism, than Europeans who don’t live in multiethnic enclaves.
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Jun 4, 2018 17:39
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Robindaybird posted:yeeah, they may not understand germ theory, but they know "Put stuff sick people touched in the fruit basket" and "Put corpse of a plague victim in well" is an amazing and awful way of decimating your enemies. Germ warfare and even unintentional smallpox didn’t really have time to do much for the Conquest of the Aztecs, though - that was more about the 2,000 conquistadores being backed up by 200,000 local levies from the neighboring state of Tlaxcala, that saw the arrival of these weird foreigners as a chance to get out from under the grip of Tenochtitlan. In a grim, unpleasant way, it’s a lot like an RPG story - a bunch of bumbling, vicious idiots stumble their way into a war, luck through it, then over the next couple decades take back all the gifts they offered to their allies to dust as disease saps their strength.
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Jun 19, 2018 06:31
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Young Freud posted:Yeah, the only good white knight armed faction in Syria is the Kurds' Self-Defense Groups and even they've done questionable things. TBF, an analogue to the Kurds in Sigmata would be something like the Black Panthers, the self-defense group of a minority community seeking autonomy. After learning about the behind the scenes aspects of Sigmata in this thread, I’m actually more offended by the tankies than the other factions now. Some misplaced analogizing between anti-Assad forces and historically proto-fascist US subcultures is a simple mistake but I don’t think it’s particularly impugning everyone; comparing the democratic socialist forces of the largest ethnic group in the world that lacks its own nation to Stalin fanboys is just character assassination. It’s almost like a game about fascism and fighting it should have been made by a social sciences nerd instead of a communication sciences guy 
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Jul 31, 2018 15:19
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EclecticTastes posted:Keep in mind, the Cognitive Union is mainly a "bad guy" because every other culture reflexively hates the basic premise of their society. In other words, because every other superpower has decided that their way of life is inherently and by necessity evil and wicked, they have forced an otherwise-benign society into the role of an antagonist. Consider, then, that this might be a metaphor for the way socialism is treated by modern capitalist culture, with the frequent knee-jerk reaction that equates socialism with Soviet communism (which was actually a fascist totalitarian state for most of its lifespan, and only paid the barest lip service to communism), making socialists the "bad guys" when they're just trying to even the playing field a bit. Your description of them from the book, which I assume is either from the Patent Office and Transcendants' perspective, or from a supposedly neutral third person viewpoint, keeps using the word "slaves." That can be a little incendiary.
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Oct 12, 2018 08:54
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Tibalt posted:Oh, absolutely. Just pointing out that full equality of women in the Green Lan- Jed- err, ur-Space Police wouldn't necessarily be as assumed in the early 90s as today.  It wasn't until the end of TNG's run (Season Seven, in 1994), but Crusher commanded the Enterprise in a space battle in Descent, and Troi took the Bridge Command Test as the b-plot of Thine Own Self because she was tired of feeling like a civilian!Plus I'm pretty sure Ensign Ro ended up in command on the Bridge at some point, but then Bajorans are kind of metaphorically IDF or PLO and it gets weird… And Uhura commanded in The Animated Series! Admittedly it was at a planet where sinister space-sirens were seducing the male crew. Still, at least Roddenberry considered the possibility of women in command to be not entirely ridiculous! (Please ignore Turnabout Intruder)
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Oct 26, 2018 15:57
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Wapole Languray posted:Adepts in UA are all about finding super deep mystical significance in things that most people wouldn't. Nobody thinks Micheal Bay movies contain the deep mystic secrets that act as the keys to reality itself. But a cinemancer does. You say this like you've never read a Supermechagodzilla post.
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Nov 3, 2018 08:32
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I get the impression Siembieda really had a reaction against to the classic D&D trope of being able to often tell alignment on sight, where ugly often equals evil. So that's why in England you have the two bug races, and the more monstrous one is good while the more human-looking ones are evil. It even goes back to Vampire Kingdoms with the snake-people that are presumed to be demons but actually a perfectly advanced and decent technological race. And so on. Villains Unlimited is a real highlight of this, with a number of "villains" who just have a bad rep because of their appearance but are really secret good people, and a number of villains that seem like upstanding citizens who are really total monsters. Not to mention him missing the ever so slight difference in the judgments "you have horns, you must be evil!" and "you're wearing the uniform of an officer in an expansionist, genocidal fascist military, you must be evil!" E: And as far as post-apocalypse explanations and random tables go, the sterling example of doing both excellently is still Gamma World 7e, with functional random characters that you get to explain yourself, and an apocalypse of "all the apocalypses at once, who cares, have fun." Mors Rattus posted:I mean, it's more that being dirty attracts evil spirits. Like, literally. Dirt and blood and filth literally attract evil spirits. That's an entirely diegetic explanation, though. The real world one is "we decided to not only incorporate some kind of unpleasant Japanese superstitions that still result in prejudice to this day, but to say they are Officially And Truly Correct in-universe." Pieces of Peace fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 21:52
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Night10194 posted:A question for people who know Woofs and Vamps more than I do: In their oWoD sourcebooks, do they Soak Lethal damage if it isn't from silver/fire/whatever? I'm noticing some weird contradictions in Hunter if they do or don't and I wouldn't put it past Hunter to just forget that it needs to say it. Yup. Both Woofs and Vamps in oWoD added Stam to soak Lethal. Mages didn't but didn't care because they could do it magically, I think Demons, Changelings, and Wraiths either did or conditionally did. Pretty default for all the non-humans.
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Jul 4, 2019 04:22
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