 Godbound is an OSR-style game made by Kevin Crawford, of Sine Nomine Publishing. In Godbound, you play as a Godbound (funnily enough), a person lucky enough to have somehow attuned to the fundamental Words of Creation and gained divine power in the process. A Godbound attuned to the Word of Fire, for example, has complete and utter control over flame and smoke, while a Godbound of Alacrity can dash to a point three miles away in under a second and a Godbound of the Sword can guarantee that his blade will hit even the most evasive of foes. Of course, you're going to need all that power, considering that the base setting, Arcem, is an utterly broken world in which Heaven and its reality regulating engines lie in fragments thanks to meddling humans trying to find the one true god, the Angels of Heaven are rather pissed about said event forcibly relocating them to Hell and want nothing more than the complete genocide of mankind, and various horrible things from the primordial chaos in between realms of reality keep breaking through the world thanks to mortals smashing up Heaven for nifty magical trinkets. The (Free!) Core Book Contains all the rules for making a Godbound and running the game, as well as a chapter detailing the base setting of the game, the realm of Arcem, and how to manage the Faction system of the game. The Deluxe Core Book The core book, but with an extra chapter detailing many supplementary rules for the game. Want to make a mortal hero instead of a crazy God man and maybe give him some cybernetics? You got it. Want to pilot a giant mecha powered by prayer or learn how to perform supernatural martial arts? Say no more. Want to become the undisputed deity of a realm and make it into your personal Paradise? This is where you'll learn how. Want to Sixteen Sorrows Sixteen Sorrows contains 16 different disasters or complications to throw at your pantheon of Godbound to solve, such as lethal plagues, wandering warbeasts, brutal dictators, and so on. In addition to giving advice on how to GM those events, it also comes with dice tables if you want to randomize up a conundrum. Ten Buried Blades Ten Buried Blades is a starter adventure for new Godbound, in which the pantheon unravels a plot in a rural trading town in Dulimbai involving a greedy magistrate, a powerful mage conducting dark experiments, and an eidolon of a dead hero from a conquered culture. It also includes a new Strife based off taking as much physical punishment as possible and ignoring it, a new path of Low Magic based off Taoism, and three new theurgic invocations. Ancalia: The Broken Towers This book goes into deeper detail on running a campaign in the nation of Ancalia, now fallen to invaders from Uncreated Night. It gives details on the history and politics of Ancalia, rules for the unique Courts of Uncreated in Ancalia and their powers and minions, the fae-like, transhuman Cousins that hide away from the world in hidden bunkers and steal away humans to sustain their lives, and the many many undead that inhabit the fallen nation. Finally, rules are given for playing each of the many Orders of Knighthood in Ancalia as well as the transhuman noble Lineages of Ancalia. SunAndSpring fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 16:44
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So, I'm wondering, what kind of house rules would you toss in to the game? I'm thinking that one potential problem of the system is that people with Words that have lots of utility, such as Knowledge, get way too much benefit out of significant periods of downtime. Normally, the pretty potent power of "GM tell me exactly how to navigate your plot" that Knowledge gives is tempered by said power costing you an Effort for the day. But when your plucky group of Godbound boys are relaxing after raiding Heaven for shiny things and tending to their kingdom, the Knowledge guy can spam his powers ad infinitum. Therefore, I feel like you should probably toss in the caveat that you can only use a Gift once per period of downtime and only get one Miracle. Still makes it fun for the Knowledge guy because he can prep for the next adventure, but not so that he can guess the entire plot.
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Jan 7, 2017 05:13
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That seems like that would be the best way to handle it. Also it doesn't have to be the sole issue that will come in conflict with the party. Maybe by taking care of one issue they allow opportunities for issues they couldn't or didn't notice.
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Jan 7, 2017 06:44
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So a while back, one of my final D&D 3.5 games was basically a game of Godbound: after the death of the One God (actually an extradimensional terror who had consumed all the Old Gods, then 'fallen asleep' by becoming a more benevolent deity), the PCs of one of my previous campaigns went whole hog on their new divinity. But because the 'god-killer' trait had become endemic to mortalkind at that point, the PCs of this new campaign were basically overthrowing the old, corrupt order, becoming basically Godbound in the process. What I'm saying is, I wish this game had existed ~8 years ago, because it would have been perfect for then. Now? Well, since my players are convinced that playing Exalted would be some kind of esoteric sin, and that actually reading a rulebook would be compounding said sin, I might actually run this instead.
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Jan 7, 2017 12:07
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Marking this thread. I ran 3 sessions of Godbound, and I can confirm, it loving rocks. Also Ten Buried Blades is a really solid starter.
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Jan 17, 2017 05:37
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Finally picked up the deluxe corebook to this this weekend, and have basically toying with chargen since it showed up because it's pretty great. There's a kinda Jack Kirby rhythm to the cultures of Arcem that make me want to run a game that's just the Kammandi the last boy map, with the "Great disaster' being the Shattering.
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Jan 17, 2017 07:11
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I'd say one of my complaints is that Sword isn't as good as Bow for some reason. Feathered Tempest, Bow's mook killer Gift, spreads overflow damage to others while Thirsting Razor does not, and Rain of Sorrow blends Mobs much better than Sword does. Couple that with the fact that Bow can snipe people from way the gently caress back (literally miles if you plan it out right) while Sword has to get in close (itself a challenge due to being limited to a 30 ft per turn move unless you pick up a gift from Alacrity or something), I think Sword got the shorter end of the stick.
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Jan 17, 2017 07:12
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I think the main thing is that sword gets a bunch of defense that bow doesn't. Bow's got one defensive gift (That's actually an offense, since it's basically "Redirect all ranged attacks once in exchange for effort"), while Sword get a couple different ways to become immune to weapons, so you can just advance across the battlefield to stab that guy who needs stabbing and no one can stop you. Admittedly the first melee guy I rolled up was a might/endurance/passion dude who could supplement his melee by throwing really heavy things at people.
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Jan 17, 2017 07:36
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The Bow's best defense is being really really far away
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Jan 17, 2017 07:48
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I don't really have a ton to add to this thread mainly due to not having had a chance to actually play Godbound yet though I really want to, but here is an RPGnet megathread all about Godbound with regular contributions from Kevin Crawford himself posting under the name CardinalXimines. Note that this thread was posted before the final version of Godbound was published so the early parts of it are about the beta, but if you've got a couple days of idle internet reading to kill you can get some good insights into the design behind the game, why Crawford did some stuff the way he did, and there's even some quasi-official homebrew mixed in there as he whips out Words and Strifes off the top of his head on occasion. Unfortunately RPGnet doesn't have a "click to only show this one poster's posts" function, but if you're willing to wade through it then Crawford does weigh in on a lot of FAQ-worthy stuff like "what's the deal with the breakdown between Sword and Bow?" which I recall someone asking as they had more or less the same impression as SunAndSpring, so in general I'd consider it a pretty decent read.
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Jan 17, 2017 08:46
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Also in my degenerate heart of hearts what I would absolutely be over the moon for is for Kevin Crawford to release a book that's all about mashing up Godbound and Stars Without Number.
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Jan 17, 2017 08:53
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I was going to immediately suggest "Starbound" for the title but then I thought nah, we want people to think this is actually good as opposed to 'ridiculous long boondoggle'.
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Jan 17, 2017 09:06
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Kai Tave posted:Also in my degenerate heart of hearts what I would absolutely be over the moon for is for Kevin Crawford to release a book that's all about mashing up Godbound and Stars Without Number. So basically OSR Guardians of the Galaxy? I can dig it.
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Jan 17, 2017 09:15
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The godwalker stuff makes it pretty trivial to play a group of semi-divine Fighter jocks, too. Rogue God Squadron.
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Jan 17, 2017 09:24
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unseenlibrarian posted:The godwalker stuff makes it pretty trivial to play a group of semi-divine Fighter jocks, too. In Shards of the Exalted Dream one of the alterna-settings I liked best was the riff on Battlestar Galactica where the Exalted lost the great war against the Primordials and had to gently caress off into space aboard Autocthon with the ultimate plan of turning him into a Death Star to go back and start blowing up Primordial-held worlds, complete with transforming Viper-warstriders. I'm making it sound a lot shallower than it was, it actually had some pretty interesting twists on the standard Exalted setup (the Unconquered Sun bent the knee to the Primordials and now spends his time furiously hunting down his Chosen, how the various other flavors of Exalted have integrated into Autochthonian society, etc) but I mean it's hardly like I need that much of an excuse to want to mash up divinely-empowered heroes and mechs. I would still greatly prefer a version thereof that doesn't require me to actually use any version of Exalted's system in any way, shape, or form, and if I have to give Kevin Crawford even more of my money to make it happen then I guess it'll just have to be the burden I bear.
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Jan 17, 2017 09:30
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How difficult would it be to hack it yourself? To my knowledge base Godbound characters are basically OSR Fighters with god powers thrown in, and one of the classes in Stars Without Number is basically OSR Fighter except with lasers instead of swords. Given that the two games have that much in common already making I don't see that it'd be all that difficult to simply mash them together.
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Jan 17, 2017 09:38
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Ratpick posted:How difficult would it be to hack it yourself? Welllllllll given that I'm incredibly lazy, I would put it somewhere around literally impossible. Nah though, you're right that it's probably not that hard. I think the biggest conversion hurdle would probably be SWN's weapons table which is a lot more robust and involved than what Godbound typically deals in, so you'd need to decide how you want to integrate all the various sci-fi guns with special abilities and, in some cases, multiple damage dice into Godbound without inadvertently causing a huge mess.
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Jan 17, 2017 09:47
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To be honest, Godbound's weapons are so abstract, you could just give a rifle a damage die size and call it a day. EDIT: Heavy weapons would probably have something like "straight damage to mobs" or something. Mitama fucked around with this message at 10:01 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 09:59
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Mitama posted:To be honest, Godbound's weapons are so abstract, you could just give a rifle a damage die size and call it a day. In fact this is basically how the Bright Republic's magnetic rifles work according to Kevin, you just essentially treat them the same as bows at the end of the day as far as stats go with the main advantage being that you can carry like 50-100 shots on your person without overburdening yourself.
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Jan 17, 2017 10:04
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Well this game looks pretty cool, something about the Made Gods and the celestial war stuff reminds me of Kill Six Billion Demons, which is always good. The setting is very cool and it looks a little more structured than Dungeon World while not being crazy complex like pathfinder.
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Jan 17, 2017 10:27
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Kai Tave posted:In fact this is basically how the Bright Republic's magnetic rifles work according to Kevin, you just essentially treat them the same as bows at the end of the day as far as stats go with the main advantage being that you can carry like 50-100 shots on your person without overburdening yourself. I guess that's my point. The Bright Republic's modern tech already works alright within the game's rules, that it wouldn't really take much to extrapolate that to space tech. SunAndSpring posted:So, I'm wondering, what kind of house rules would you toss in to the game? Some form of social combat rules and a way for Words like Command and Passion to interact with them. I might just loosely base them off Exalted's intimacies, though. Mitama fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 10:31
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Mitama posted:I guess that's my point. The Bright Republic's modern tech already works alright within the game's rules, that it wouldn't really take much to extrapolate that to space tech. And I agree insofar as "basic" sci-fi weapons go, for more exotic weapons you'd probably want some additional guidelines. Rifles and bows are, if you squint, roughly similar in function insofar as they're both ways of putting small bits of something into/through people very, very quickly, but when you start getting into stuff like audio-kinetic pulse grenades and plasma cannons which require special operator suits to use so you don't give yourself flash-burns whenever you fire it, that's when you probably start making decisions about how you want to model stuff like that, whether it's "treat it as a gift of some sort" to creating special unique rules for crazy sci-fi weapons to simply saying gently caress it, just give it a damage die and call it a day.
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Jan 17, 2017 10:48
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unseenlibrarian posted:Admittedly the first melee guy I rolled up was a might/endurance/passion dude who could supplement his melee by throwing really heavy things at people. He spent the first session Kool-Aid-Man-ning through various buildings.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:13
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dwarf74 posted:Whoa, weird. That's exactly what one of my players picked. He decided he'd be The Amazing Rando, more or less. Because of too much anime my inspiration was a little bit Shizuo from Durarara and like 90 percent all the Joe Hill labor ballads I'd been mainlining for unrelated research so he's a Bright Republic factory union organizer who likes to throw vending machines at people. 
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Jan 17, 2017 15:22
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I feel it's a little weird that low power stuff like cities and towns can still farm up Dominion really quickly if you use the faction system as is, as at the highest a nation only gets about 3 per round, and that nation is basically a world government who doesn't need it too much. Only takes 16 to change the world, after all. Of course, the opposition to a small village trying to implement a world-changing manuever would make the cost to do so insurmountable for even then most innocuous of things like "give everyone a hug". I had an argument about this on /tg/ with that weird guy that worked on Strike! who credited themselves as a Touhou character, and god talking to him is a loving chore. Guy didn't seem to get that while, yes, a Power 1 faction could probably get 16 Dominion if it did nothing but Build Strength and could thus give itself new features more rapidly then a bigger faction, the fact of the matter is that most other factions will oppose them if they try anything bigger than, say, giving themselves the Feature "Well trained militia to fend off bandits" or "Local crops are exceptionally tasty" and thus make the Dominion cost to do so bloom. SunAndSpring fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 01:34
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Yeah, opposition will increase that from 16 real drat quick.
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Jan 18, 2017 01:57
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SunAndSpring posted:I had an argument about this on /tg/ with that weird guy that worked on Strike! who credited themselves as a Touhou character, and god talking to him is a loving chore. If it's who I think it is, then I've gamed with that guy. You do not want to game with that guy.
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Jan 18, 2017 02:19
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SunAndSpring posted:I had an argument about this on /tg/ with that weird guy that worked on Strike! who credited themselves as a Touhou character wait what
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Jan 18, 2017 02:31
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Kai Tave posted:wait what Looking at the pdf, there's a Earth Seraph Edna credited under Development. Google tells me that's a Tales of Zestiria character.
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Jan 18, 2017 03:27
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jadarx posted:Looking at the pdf, there's a Earth Seraph Edna credited under Development. Google tells me that's a Tales of Zestiria character. Oh, it's Tales Of? Same person though. Colette's the only person I know who posts exclusively in touhou pics in /tg/ and he admitted to helping with Strike!. Dude's one bizarre man. Will barge into a thread and start going ON and ON about mechanical balance or their current crossdressing magical cat-boy shota character's exploits (I swear this is real). Haven't met a soul who likes that pedo.
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Jan 18, 2017 03:34
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SunAndSpring posted:Dude's one bizarre man. Will barge into a thread and start going ON and ON about mechanical balance or their current crossdressing magical cat-boy shota character's exploits Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh that dude. Yeah, that dude sucks.
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Jan 18, 2017 03:43
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SunAndSpring posted:Dude's one bizarre man. Will barge into a thread and start going ON and ON about mechanical balance or their current crossdressing magical cat-boy shota character's exploits (I swear this is real). Haven't met a soul who likes that pedo. Yup, pretty sure that's the same guy. He's been that way since the inception of /tg/ and was the one to coin the infamous DC80 Escape Artist check. Usually posts with touhou images. Once got a court order from WotC over leaking a PDF of a 4e book (allegedly, anyway). If I recall correctly, he's on the spectrum and is very high-functioning. Which explains a lot, but doesn't make it any less intolerable. Gaming with him was absolutely awful as he'd strong-arm the DM into playing the game exactly how he wanted and dictated how everything should go at all times. Lord help you if poo poo didn't go his way either.
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Jan 18, 2017 03:48
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Anyway so this thread doesn't wind up derailing too badly about weird and dumb /tg/ posters, those of you who've played Godbound please tell me all about your games. I have not yet, so I choose to live vicariously through you, but I'm also interested to hear how it's worked for you, especially if you brought in any external OSR/OD&D material like monsters, modules, etc. and how well they meshed with the game. Compatibility with the broader OSR spectrum has always been one of Kevin Crawford's big reasons for why he sticks with the base system he does, but Godbound's expectations and general PC power level is on a level above even stuff like Scarlet Tide which uses some of the same mechanical conceits as Godbound like the alternate damage resolution method and Fray Dice but stops a fair ways short of divine empowerment.
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Jan 18, 2017 03:52
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I like Raktia and Nezdovha in the corebooks. The former reminds me a lot of the Witcher series, what with the wandering monster hunters and curse-breakers in a Slavic setting full of abusive nobles and strange wizard lodges. The latter is pre-revolution Russia, but with superpowered androids in place of the Romanovs.
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Jan 18, 2017 06:04
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Nezdovha is one of the nations I hope gets a Gazetter in the vein of Ancalia. On a basic level it's a hilarious premise, someone creates a powerful automaton that becomes self-aware and decides to conquer the world by making a bunch of loyal superpowered automaton soldiers and oh poo poo, now they've become self-aware and if I don't bog them down with a web of politics, social shuffling, and intrigue they might gang up on me, gently caress gently caress gently caress. Down deeper though I think there's a lot you could do with a nation literally stratified between mortal peasants and their superhuman robotic nobility and all that entails. In fact: Kevin Crawford posted:Nezdohva's got about a gazetteer worth of material and all of it in first, changeable draft, but a crude sketch goes like this:
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Jan 18, 2017 06:25
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Got late into Godbound, but I've already got plans to run a game for my RL group. No lie, one of the first Godbound characters that came to my mind was the Nezdovah version of Rasputin.
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Jan 18, 2017 07:03
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I've not had a chance to run or play yet (Just got the book like...last weekend?) but one thing I'm considering regarding old school adventures: some of the 'top end' adventures in the old Runequest box sets seem very ripe for Godbound adventures. Like, a dungeon so large you have to use a boat to get through it, filled with weird barely described water monsters and with a demon at the middle that was a tough fight for rune level PCs, guarding a painting that lets you see the future, and a quest where they're the only hope of an enormous infant being assaulted by literal armies as she floats down a river both seem like the sort of thing a pantheon might get involved in, more than more standard D&D things. Might be a little more work to convert, but Godbound's got pretty solid monster design stuff anyway.
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Jan 18, 2017 11:49
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Yeah, I definitely feel like raiding the "weirder" end of old-school fantasy adventures is the way to go with Godbound, the whole "crashed alien spaceships and flying Atlantean super-cities" sort of thing seems like a good fit for the Kirby-esque setting. Protecting a giant baby from an army seems like a pretty great scenario to throw at a pantheon.
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Jan 18, 2017 11:55
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Kai Tave posted:Compatibility with the broader OSR spectrum has always been one of Kevin Crawford's big reasons for why he sticks with the base system he does, but Godbound's expectations and general PC power level is on a level above even stuff like Scarlet Tide which uses some of the same mechanical conceits as Godbound like the alternate damage resolution method and Fray Dice but stops a fair ways short of divine empowerment. Definitely planning to pillage the monsters from Scarlet Heroes/Red Tide for my PBP Kasirutan Archipelago game.  Glad he made some Southeast Asian monsters so I didn't have to.
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Jan 18, 2017 12:04
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unseenlibrarian posted:I've not had a chance to run or play yet (Just got the book like...last weekend?) but one thing I'm considering regarding old school adventures: some of the 'top end' adventures in the old Runequest box sets seem very ripe for Godbound adventures. Like, a dungeon so large you have to use a boat to get through it, filled with weird barely described water monsters and with a demon at the middle that was a tough fight for rune level PCs, guarding a painting that lets you see the future, and a quest where they're the only hope of an enormous infant being assaulted by literal armies as she floats down a river both seem like the sort of thing a pantheon might get involved in, more than more standard D&D things. You can definitely cobble together a good Orlanthi by combining Alacrity, Passion or Command, and Sky.
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Jan 18, 2017 16:13
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