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 Chapter 4: Hazards Some scholars think that monsters are no more or less common in the Border Princes than in the rest of the world; the region just lacks enough resources to mount consistent monster extermination efforts. This gives the appearance of more numerous and more deadly threats in the Border Princes. They are wrong. The region overflows with monsters naturally.  In this chapter, “hazards” means any (theoretically) mobile threat – not natural disasters or traps, but monsters or hordes. Hazard generation works by creating “lairs”, each of which is essentially an independent threat or group of threats (they don't have to have an actual lair), then distributing said lairs across the map. Since they can end up huge in number or power and very influential on regional politics, the number of lairs in a map can shift the tone of a campaign; a smaller number puts a focus on politicking with a few unusual threats to keep things lively, while a larger number means principality politics takes a backseat to ensuring mutual survival. Lairs themselves come in four flavors: Chaos, greenskins, undead, and everything else.  Maybe one in five lairs are openly Chaotic. Beastmen tend to make up the bulk of Chaos worshipers in the area, hanging out in forested regions and raiding their neighbors, while mutants either from the Border Princes or fleeing more civilized lands tend to form their own groups or join up with beastman tribes. You also have the occasional Chaos warrior or even an open Daemon, in large part because this is after the Storm of Chaos and defeated fragments of Archaeon’s armies tend to flee into the Border Princes too. But unless you get lucky, most of your Chaotic lairs will belong to beastmen. As a side note, a settlement with a Chaos cult generated in step three doesn’t count as a lair, though Chaotic lairs can function as settlements in their own right. Greenskins by far take up more lairs than any other type, showing up about half the time. Orcs are endemic to the region; in fact, they held much of the Border Princes after Araby left and had to be driven out by early settlers. The only type of greenskin that doesn’t regularly show up here are hobgoblins, which are limited to fantasy Central Asia anyway. They also tend to be numerous and well organized (as far as they can be organized), making them serious threats to nearby principalities. Most greenskin groups operate out of a stationary lair (a literal one, this time) and periodically raid the surrounding area. Any groups of 100 or less have a 50% chance to be nomadic (better to avoid more powerful groups that way), while groups of over 1000 roll for territory size like principalities and push any settlements in their area of control to its rim (I never position this kind of lair where it can move a village around since erasing and redrawing stuff I’ve already worked on makes my stomach turn). Curiously, given how the greenskin population table works, it’s possible to roll up a lair without any inhabitants; if that happens, just start the table over.  Various kinds of undead occupy another one in five lairs. They come in three flavors:
 The last lair type covers everything else, mostly monstrous animals. Every monster lair is generated with its attitude towards the outside world; they might attack the surrounding areas, keep to themselves, protect something valuable, or even set up a tributary relationship with a nearby settlement. Not much more to cover here. Now, lair placement. At this point we’ve run out of tables to roll on; the region’s complex enough. Most lairs can be placed down wherever you want, but there’s a couple paragraphs on how to place monster lairs depending on their attitude. After this, we get some solid GM advice; work out with your players what kind of campaign everyone would like, adapt the region to fit what you agree on, and reroll anything that doesn’t fit or that you don’t like. And then you’re done. Since this is kind of a short update, I’ll go ahead and throw up the eight lairs I rolled up:  The finished map (generation wise, appearance wise it still sucks). I really ran out of space here, I probably should have set some area aside for monsters in the third step. Either way. While I could have played up the lairs’ influence on regional affairs a lot more, I chose to leave them mostly marginalized
And that’s the end of region creation. I’ll do a retrospective in the next post.
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Apr 28, 2020 18:31
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Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing 4th Edition Starter Set Part 2: Law and Order Quality: 1 Guidance: 1 Summary: ...Mysteriously, a local lawyer steps in and convinces the judge responsible for the case to let the Characters serve as members of the Watch to work off their ‘debt’. So last time, our new GM had just convinced his players to get on the train, keep the story on the rails, and go directly to jail. Our polite and well-behaved players agree to go along with it. How are they rewarded? They have a few cute but pointless interactions with the entertainers while in lockup. They’re called before the judge, who accuses them of starting the riot and murdering Fosten the Fiery. Before they can say anything, ‘their’ lawyer barges in and demands a recess. The lawyer explains that they’re obviously being framed, but there’s nothing they can do about it. If they agree to join the Watch, they can get out of it. The players get a brief chance to roleplay while the judge asks them questions. The judge sentences them to 3 years of service on the Watch, with the punishment of death for dereliction of duty. The section ends. You're suppose to roleplay each of those scenes. WHY. It’s a mostly pointless, boring section that has just ruined any goodwill your players had towards this adventure, for no real purpose. On the previous page, the adventure book tells you to skip over the boring parts and get to the exciting bits, and then it has this bullshit. It doesn’t even make sense! As far as I can tell, after re-reading the GM only information a second time, here’s the plot: somebody is setting up your characters up to take the fall. This is completely unrelated to Fosten’s murder, or the attempted murder of Jocelin Karstadt (the young woman you saved). Heske told her boss that you looked like competent folk, you were nearby when a murder happened, so the mysterious patron decided to frame you to force you to work for them. But since you saved Jocelin, the Karstadt family hires an attorney to get you off, who does this by getting you onto the Watch. This is where saving Jocelin technically affects the plot, by the way - if you don’t save her, the lawyer doesn’t tell you who hired her or why. Later in the segment it instead states that your lawyer is working for the patron who framed you as part of a plot to get you on the Watch, so that’s confusing. Heske, her mysterious patron who framed you, and the Karstadt family immediately exit the adventure stage left, and it no longer matters. I could at least understand why all this complexity was necessary if it mattered to the story, but it doesn’t. The only important elements, err, element here are “The judge sentences you to join the Watch.” Nothing else matters. And it’s not like it’s fun to roleplay being questioned and berated by the judge, and there isn’t much roleplaying to do anyway. As described, between spending time in lockup, arguing with your lawyer, and being questioned by a judge - and having my players call it bullshit out of character - I would expect this to take the better part of a gaming session. If the players don’t fight it and just go “Yeah, yeah, skip ahead to when we get our Stinkin’ Badges”, it’s just going to annoy them when they have to go before the judge for questioning after talking to their lawyer. Let me throw out three examples of better ways you could do this. Your name is called and Gunnar wave the “mutant” with the brandy hidden in his fake tentacle good-bye. But instead of taking you before the judge, you’re placed in a coach and taken to a nearby mansion where the servants politely but firmly direct you to a luxurious office. Inside there is Heske, the woman from the market, and her mysterious patron. “Everyone is blaming the crazy adventurers - you - for starting the riot, and the judge is planning to throw the book at you. I can make the charges go away, but I need a favor from you in return. The City Watch is staffed by incompetent Altdorfers, and crime is getting in the way of business. Join up, help get them into shape, and I’ll owe you a favor. Or don't... I'm sure the Gray Mountain Penal Camps' reputation is over-stated.” Your name is called, and Salundra shudders as you squeeze past the silent, staring mimes that you’ve shared your cell with for the past several hours. But instead of taking you before the judge, you’re placed in an office. Salundra snaps to attention as General Jendrick von Dabernick enters the room. “At ease, soldier. I have a special mission for you. Corruption is rampant in the City Watch, and it’s destabilizing the city. Unfortunately, I don’t know who I can trust, and I need to keep this operation quiet. To provide an explanation for your demotion, you’ll be accused of murder with the sentence commuted to service on the Watch. Do you accept your mission?” Your name is called, and Molli give Geri the Bearded Halfling Woman a long hug before leaving. You’re taken before the judge, and it turns out he’s the judge from Doc Hollywood or Cars, depending on how old you are. He sentences you to three years service on the City Watch. Why does this have to be complicated? Skip over the boring parts and jump to the exciting bit where you’re rookie cops already. It’s not fun, it’s not exciting, and nothing your players do will affect the outcome. This just serves as a way to force the players onto the Watch, and threatens them with death if they decide to leave. It takes too long and creates too much complexity to achieve even that simple goal. Out of character, you shouldn’t have too much trouble with getting your players to go along with adventure where they join the Watch without bludgeoning them into it. I would never run this segment as written, and I think it’s actively harmful to the development of a new GM and his player group. But like I said, this is the worst part of the adventure, and it picks up from here. Next time: Training Day (2001) is an American Crime Drama starring Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke
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Apr 28, 2020 18:32
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wiegieman posted:That's... sort of how elves are. Let them practice long enough and they really are fantastically good at pretty much everything. They're just dicks about it. It's completely out of balance with all the other abilities and material they get anywhere else in 2e. The fun of Hams Elfs is that they think they are the material in that book, when in reality they're just a guy with +10 Agi and BS. Which is still good! They're still good at things, and a leveled up elf is a badass like anyone else. But they're not suddenly out of sync with every other PC type. The gap between what elves think they can do, and what elves can actually do, is the entire fun of elves. E: Also from a game point of view, it's like having a Vampire in a human party. One guy getting piles of pluses and super abilities that others can't access that make them much better than everyone else is usually a bad idea from a game design standpoint. That it also makes for fun fluff that elves aren't quite as great as they think is just a bonus. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 18:36
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Everyone posted:BTW, a really cool take on a Warhammer Witch can be found in the Gretel and Hansel movie. Another one ? The Hansel & Gretel movie from 2007 is also period and tone appropriate for WHFRP. It knows it's a bit silly and just runs with it. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1428538/
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Apr 28, 2020 19:13
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Night10194 posted:Jesus this elf book Hornburg and others worked on and didn't get published is definitely getting a look. I might do it right after Plundered Vaults before Barony of the Damned. It's hilariously awful, with stuff like elves getting magic martial arts that let them Fury on 8+ or outfight a Blood Dragon and lots of special rules about how they're too good for normal mutation and get more pluses. Sounds like people didn't learn the lesson of the Complete Book of Elves.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:18
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Bieeanshee posted:Sounds like people didn't learn the lesson of the Complete Book of Elves. It has a Bladesinger super jedi!
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Apr 28, 2020 19:21
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Night10194 posted:It has a Bladesinger super jedi! Goddamn it, now I want to play WHFRP.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:24
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Night10194 posted:It has a Bladesinger super jedi! Are those the swordmasters of Hoeth? I think they were the only unit that every member of it had like 2 attacks the last time I played.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:31
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Servetus posted:They are still working on layouts, but the text manuscripts were sent out to Kickstarter backers in the last couple of days. The rules are very different; there are more mechanical differences between nobles and priests, merchants and yeomen/independents. They've all been converted into classes and your class determines which callings you have access to, and it's level based now. So there are some major differences, a much bigger shift than earlier edition changes. I... really don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand, classless systems always tend to collapse because they're a lot harder to balance than class systems, on the other hand I feel like if Fading Suns should have classes they should really be more like the careers you progress through from WFRP. Levels feel very much like a pointless and non-necessary addition, though, especially since games with levels also tend to include +HP per level and Fading Suns was generally about you remaining relatively vulnerable no matter how powerful you were, you were never gonna be able to tank a cruise missile. But, I guess this means I have another future game to review!
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Apr 28, 2020 19:32
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Plundered Vaults A confluence of bad influences So, our heroes arrive in Mittlesdorf in Wissenland and hear a local wealthy scholar has had his daughter go missing. Supposedly kidnapped by bandits. They'll happily take that dance and do what they can, going to talk to the scholar. What's actually going on? Bela Dustermann is a terrible person. About on par with Ondurin. Except what he's done, the PCs aren't allowed to undo. He's a Tzeentch worshiping wizard cultist, who follow Tzeentch because...um...Okay he just does okay? He was a curious boy who killed a woman to find out what it was like once, and from there Chaos cultist. So he's just kind of a psychopath. He then met another rear end in a top hat Tzeentch worshiper and they got super into mutation. But not themselves; what do they look like, idiots? They tried to steal some Warpstone, but were caught by Skaven of Clan Moulder. Bela promised he'd make a brutalized woman mutant to end all brutalized woman mutants and hand her over to the ratmen. They agreed to see where he was going with this. He 'bought' a 16 year old girl from an orphanage (a large donation and a sob story about how his daughter had died of the pox), raised her as his daughter, and fed her 'potions'. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Unfortunately for him, she fell in love with a dashing highwayman and ran off. She's still mutating like crazy (though she doesn't know it, and thinks she's pregnant) and nothing the heroes do is going to matter. Bela wants her back, the Skaven want her, and it's going to end in a three way Skaven on rear end in a top hat on Hero fight while she dies horribly. Hooray! To be honest, I'm probably going to be giving this one a little bit of short shrift. Not much happens in it besides the summary up above, and I despise this adventure. Oh, it also contains a hook for instead going off to free a dwarf-hold, but you're meant to ignore it and it's 'just for flavor'. The heroes arrive, head to the inn, get the talk from a dwarf about going to free Zhufbarr (Which they'd be interested in, if they hadn't promised Gilbert they'd be going back to Bretonnia as soon as business here was done), meet some flavor characters, then a kid stumbles in and yells that a rough looking guy at another table 'got him slaughtered'. This is a local boy who was hired to get the girl back from the bandits, and he's pissed as poo poo he and his friends were sent in with no preparation or intel and got shot down by bandits. The rough chap, Bertram, is Bela's fellow cultist. He simply unsheathes his sword, slices the boy across the chest, and prepares to commit murder. He finds it grabbed from behind by Ulrike's gauntleted hand. She tells him to stop, he tries to wrench it free, and the proprietor talks it down before it comes to a fight between the Pit Fighter and the Ulrican. Karl runs over to the wounded boy and gets him back up, treating his injuries. This is not a good intro to Bertram trying to hire them to do the same job. Were they not contractually obligated to do the adventure, they'd tell him to gently caress himself and leave. Sadly, they must. He offers 20 crowns up front, 100 if they get his master's item back. They agree, they're here to face bandits anyway. It's notable Bela's man refers to rescuing his daughter as 'retrieving an item'. They go to see Bela Dustermann, and again, an adventure that would end pretty quickly if, say, a suspicious Anya used Magical Sense, but no. He feeds them the lines about how his beautiful daughter has been kidnapped and they must save her, and Gilbert is all about that. Ulrike points out he sent some poorly armed village kids to get killed, he shrugs and says it was 'a mistake', but that this group is clearly well armed veterans. What really happened is Dustermann forbade Julianne from seeing her boyfriend, so she ran off into the woods to join him and gently caress what dad says. The problem is she's rapidly mutating, though the heroes clearly can't know that. They make the deal, find out where to find the bandits from Wil, the injured kid from yesterday, and head out. They find the bandits slaughtered to the man, except for Juilanne's boyfriend Rudigar, who is merely dying. He tries to refuse healing, thinking he got all his men killed by giant 'rat beastmen' and that they've surely killed Juilanne, too. Karl tells him he's being an idiot and bandages his wounds anyway. If you heal him, he'll get himself killed by GM fiat later. They head on down the tunnels, find the rats, and the rat leader tells them to back the gently caress off, Julianne was 'promised' to them. Four Clanrat-tier enemies are, uh...not the force that will make these PCs back off. It's barely even a fight, but GM fiat is supposed to say Rudigar charges the rats and dies instantly before anyone can do anything. So...RIP, I guess. They kill the rats easily, and retrieve the seemingly pregnant Julianne. Karl tries to examine her, and help her with the obvious pain she's in, but she 'refuses any examination' and 'is too far along to be saved anyway'. They bring her back to Bela, I guess, which seems out of character but it's what's assumed. Bela claims she was 'poisoned' by the Skaven and he'll 'make an antidote'. Karl asks what that would entail and offers to help, as does Anya. He pretends not to hear. Normally you're supposed to get fooled here, but c'mon. These characters aren't idiots. They press the line of questioning and so that's when the planned Skaven attack happens. 7 Clanrats and a more advanced Clanrat with 2 attacks come to kill Betramm and Bela and take Julianne, while Bela forces the last potion down her throat in the confusion. The heroes can handle 8 Clanrats easy, but the distraction stops them from stopping Bela. Then Julianne mutates into a hellbeast and attacks both sides of the fight. Because of course. She's now seven feet tall, with a huge mouth where her pregnant belly was, and trying to kill everyone. 'If the players are struggling, she focuses on her 'father' and the Skaven'. Bela laughs at his success, starts casting spells, and...gets wasted by an arrow, a crossbow bolt, and a magic dart, dying while screaming that Tzeentch will 'have' the heroes. Ulrike smashes Bertramm's head in with her hammer while Gilbert's new Virtue fucks up Clanrats something fierce. With their armor, gear, and training, soon the lab is a bloody, ruined battlefield. Karl insists they remain long enough to give Julianne a proper burial, praying for her soul. Elena loots the gently caress out of Dustermann's house and then 'accidentally' drops a torch to torch the place. The local watch runs them out of town for causing trouble (while quietly thanking them for wasting the cultist), and it's over. It's short, nobody makes any decisions, it's easy, and it's yet another Doomed Brutalized Woman story. Bela is insanely suspicious but it expects you to buy everything he sells, and constantly chides you for trying to investigate in a way that might discover any plot points early, despite you being unable to do anything about any of them. gently caress this adventure. If Sing for your Supper was a decent enough intro spoiled by its epilogue, this one is just poo poo all the way down. With that, our heroes are off for Bretonnia. But not before Vendrick details everything about how he thinks Athel Loren is! That's Plundered Vaults. 2 adventures are decent, 2 are good, 2 are bad. You could have a much worse low-level adventure book than this, though I could do without the two Brutalized Woman Victim adventures. The difference with them and what happens with Anya in Carrion Call is simple: Anya's story actually goes out of the way to point out she's resilient. A person with actual agency, who, if you rescue her, gets past what happened to her and has an actual life. She's in terrible peril, but she works to get herself out of it and help the protagonists. She doesn't just exist to be a brutalized victim like Hanna and Julianne. What you do actually matters in Carrion Call, unlike here. The End
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Apr 28, 2020 20:01
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Josef bugman posted:Are those the swordmasters of Hoeth? It's just a class called the Bladesinger; these are Woodsy Elfs, Swordsmasters are from Ulthuan. It'll be a fun time. It's not offensive in like 'brutalized doomed women and poo poo everywhere' stuff, it's just silly and dumb and badly balanced. And was never published, so I'm not exactly going to hold it against the line, it's just funny and I want to share it.
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Apr 28, 2020 20:08
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Night's Black Agents: Solo Ops Part Two: The Woman Who Knew Too Much Our next section covers Investigative abilities, General abilities, and Mastery Edges. Yes, in grand roleplaying game book tradition, we're going to learn about all your character's bits and bobs before we learn the rules for actually using them. I'm being a little dramatic here; it's not nearly as much of a problem here as in a lot of other games, because you aren't really making any mechanical decisions beyond the binary choices of which Investigative skills you know and what Mastery Edges you start the game with--and those tend toward the narrative side than the mechanical (and the mechanics they do feature are pretty easy to understand even without knowing the system). Still, it's a bugaboo of mine, almost as big a one as skill lists that mix adjectives, nouns, and verbs as skill names (seriously, don't have Intimidation and Climb and Charming in the same list!) But I digress. Investigative Abilities This section kicks off with an overview of how you, the player, use investigative abilitiesand the general flow of investigative play. It starts, naturally enough, with the Director describing the basic scene to you--the stuff anyone would be able to see or reasonably infer. The Director might also outright tell you clues that would be obvious to someone with your particular expertise expertise ("with your Streetwise, you recognize these guys as local muscle for the Lisky Bratva"), or you might ask questions based on your abilities ("given my Military Science background, can I tell based on their positions which specific VIP they're guarding?") or just describe what you do ("I walk up to one of the goons and Intimidate him--I walk right up to him and, real fast, reach into his jacket and grab his own pistol, then calmly ask if his health insurance covers replacing a kidney.") The one thing you never do is just read off your list of abilities and ask for clues from each one--though it's not as baldly stated here as in, say, Apocalypse World, to do it, you have to do it. Finally, of course, since there's no such thing as Search checks or whatever, if you do something that would reveal a clue, you find the clue (obviously). If the USB drive is hidden under a false bottom in the drawer and you say "I check the drawers to see if there's anything weird like a false bottom or something," you find it. Good, solid, all around advice, but the part I appreciate most is the advice on handling when it looks like the player might miss a core clue. Most of the time, the core clue should be obvious: there's a dead body to examine or a ledger in the safe or whatnot--but if for some reason it's not or the player just doesn't trigger to it, the Director should give the player time to work it out. Only if it looks like they're getting frustrated or about to leave without the clue should you gently step in and say "as you're about to leave, something about the desk catches your eye--there's an unusual panel above the rightmost door. Thanks to your Art History, you recognize it as characteristic of a Georgian fashion for secret drawers, and sure enough, there's a USB drive in there" or the like. Also, the Director might ask how you know a certain piece of info--that's not a challene for you to justify yourself, it's a chance to drop a cool hint of backstory about your spy. That's a great tip for just about any game, but it does feel a little weird in a game where the default protagonist is an amnesiac. Anyway, there's also a sidebar that baldly lays out the GUMSHOE philosophy on clues I outlined in the first update, and includes what I'd say are the two thesis statements of this game: Intelligence operations are not about finding clues. They are about interpreting the clues you do find. and Whenever you get stuck, get out and gather more intel, even if that means taking risks. Single-player games have an advantage over group ones, in that a lone player is less likely to fall into endless theorizing about what the intel means, but this is still good advice. The basic structure of the thriller story is that information leads to new danger, and the reward for surviving danger is new information. If you don't have a clear picture of what's going on, follow a lead, have a car chase, and pick up another piece of the puzzle. Pushes Pushes are really straightforward. As mentioned last update, you start each mission with three of them, and you can spend them on your Investigative abilities to either gain useful but not plot-critical information, introduce helpful facts into the narrative, or secure some other small advantage. Effectively, they're compensation for the fact that Investigative abilities don't have "skill checks:" instead of a chance of success to use them in situations that aren't directly about finding clues, you have a limited currency to use them. Examples of Pushes include things like Pushing Architecture to know that a disused subway line runs under the warehouse and might give you a way past the guards, Pushing Bureaucracy to convince the evidence room clerk not to log your visit, or Pushing History to say you know of an eminent scholar of Balkan folklore (i.e. a useful potential Contact) at the local university. Also, the book doesn't mention this till later, but I'll tell you now: You can also spend Pushes for bonus dice in challenges or to get actual favors out of your Contacts as opposed to just intel. We'll also get to how you regain Pushes later on. As with finding clues, it's fine for either the Director to offer a Push opportunity or for the player to ask for one. But if the player asks for a Push that doesn't exist (and, presumably, the Director can't think up one on the fly, but Solo Ops skews pretty hard toward pretty traditional, pre-planned adventures in its assumptions), that doesn't cost one of her Pushes--you can never "waste" a Push. Probably obvious to most of us, but good to be called out. I talked in the last update about how much I prefer Pushes over Investigative ability pools and spends in classic GUMSHOE. I also really appreciate that the One-2-One system streamlines a lot of the edge-case uses of Investigative spends--the original Night's Black Agents was particularly bad about this, with the abominably-confusingly-named "tactical fact-finding benefits" and "tactical tag-team benefits" and bonuses from how much of the conspiracy you've mapped out and a bunch of others that I'm probably forgetting. Pushes are immediate, reactive, and--if you use tokens, since you only have three of them--nicely tactile. Contacts We'll get more on Contacts in general later, but this section addresses how they're used in the context of Investigative abilities. Contacts themselves have a few Investigative abilities (generally as many as makes sense--a doctor probably has all the medical-related ones, while a filthy-rich socialite might only have High Society), and may or may not have a couple of General abilities. There are usually possible Contacts among the NPC cast of any given scenario, but you also have the Network General ability that represents a sort of quantum field of old associates from your character's past who you can create as needed. Most of the time they will not go into the field with you--you'll either need to bring the raw evidence to them to decipher or work out a way for them to watch/listen remotely. Once that's done, they provide you with the relevant clue, just like if you used an Investigative ability yourself. You can also spend a Push on a Contact to get actual, concrete help, not just analysis and information. An arms dealer might sell you some assault gear for your raid on the vampire's castle, while an Interpol inspector might be able to stall investigation into that mysterious decapitated corpse that turned up in the Danube. We'll learn more about Contacts in challenge scenes later, but if your Contact has any General abilities, they might be able to help out. Contacts exist to fill the role of intra-party banter in group games--they give you a chance to slow down, roleplay some interpersonal scenes, and talk through the investigation in-character. They also, naturally, provide good dramatic levers for the Director to yank on. I've always loved the ability to spontaneously create useful NPCs, and as we'll see later, the actual system for doing so is a lot of fun. The Ability List I'm not going to go through the entire list here--there are around 40 or so, and it would mostly be a list of "Yep, Data Recovery lets you recoer data from things," which is boring as hell. The Investigative abilities are very granular and have a lot of overlap--one example the book gives is that identifying the gun that left a particular exit wound couldbe done with Criminology, Forensic Pathology, Military Science, or even Shooting as an Investigative skill (yes, sometimes you can count General abilities as Investigative abilities if it makes sense). I'm kind of of two minds about this. On the one hand, a big, bloated skill list is usually something I dislike--but in this specific case it strongly encourages the player to engage with Contacts, which is an absolute necessity in one-on-one games. On the other hand, the list being so big and having so much overlap just feels a little flabby. Add to that some Investigative abilities seem pretty unlikely to come up in most games: Astronomy in particular makes perfect sense in Trail of Cthulhu where motherfuckers will not shut up about stars coming right, but unless the Director has decided to go with a weird sci-fi or Lovecraftian take on vampires doesn't seem particularly useful? I dunno, I feel like the list could be pared down by, say, 25% without losing much of value. Oh, and technically the abilities are divided into Interpersonal, Academic, and Technical categories, but these barely have any impact--occasionally you'll see something in published adventures referencing the Interpersonal category (e.g. "an Interpersonal Push can get the doorman to give up the apartment number," meaning a Push on any Interpersonal ability), but I don't think I've seen the other two used at all. There are two notable absences from the ability list, though: Firstly, there's no Bluff, Deception, Lie, etc. skill. That's because lying is pretty much part and parcel of a spy's interactions--it's an assumed tool in any Interpersonal ability, not its own thing. This makes a lot of sense to me and nicely reinforces the deception and uncertainty inherent in the genre. Perhaps more controversially, there's no Hacking ability--at least, not for players. Hacking, as either an Investigative ability or a General one, is the province of Contacts. This is an action thriller game, and frankly it's hard enough dealing with one hacker safely back at base while the rest of the team raids the office. When it's just one player, they should be out there getting in trouble, not tippy-tapping away at a laptop from a Starbucks in Cairo. General Abilities & Mastery Edges This update has gotten longer than I intended, but the General abilities section is really short, since all the rules for actually using them are in the next chapter. Once again I'm not going to go through the entire list, because most of them aren't terribly surprising, but there are three that are worth talking about, all of which enable the same kind of quantum narrative shenanigans we discussed earlier with Contacts: Cover lets you whip out a previously-established (and probably heretofore-unmentioned) cover identity, complete with supporting documents, that you can use to get access to places you shouldn't. Especially useful Covers might require a Push, but otherwise, the sky's the limit. Network is the ability for creating the aforementioned Contacts. Finally, Preparedness is the game's equipment system. No, really. Basically, as long as you can access a go-bag, stash, or some kind of nebulously-defined pool of gear, you can test Preparedness to pull out whatever you need, as long as it could fit in your kit. You never need to test for basic gear that would obviously be useful on any covert operation or vampire hunt, or for the gear you need to use your other abilities--this is strictly for "drat, if only I had a wheelbarrow!" type situations. Later in the book there are example challenges for every General ability--the one for Preparedness is busting out a rocket launcher and shooting down a fleeing helicopter. I love Preparedness. Lastly in this section, along with the General ability descriptions, are the Mastery edges. Each General ability has 2-3, and usually one is a simple "discard this card for +1 die in a challenge." The more fun ones let you play with the fiction--I already mentioned the Driving Mastery that guarantees that a) there's a vehicle present and b) you steal it instantly. Other fun ones include one for Conceal that you can discard to produce one small item, no matter how thoroughly you've been searched and stripped, the Filch one that lets you retroactively say "oh yeah, I palmed the sicario's hotel room key when we met at the bar," and the wonderfully-named Painkillers and Vodka for the Medic ability, that lets you make a healing check without taking downtime. That will become much more important later. And to round out the update, there's this lovely little combo from Preparedness and Mechanics, respectively: The Nick of Time posted:PREPAREDNESS MASTERY Boom posted:MECHANICS MASTERY Yes, throw down these two cards and your climactic confrontation with Dracula goes like this:  Next Time: Rules and Regulations
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Apr 28, 2020 21:04
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Hunter: the Reckoning - Player's Guide Part Eight: Wait is this part actually alright? Next we have a section talking about what life after the Imbuing is like- specifically, the ways that being a Hunter will gently caress up your life. It's pretty good, especially compared to the garbage that preceded it. The first bit is about the challenges of trying to actually live a dual life, and to my immense shock they manage to engage with this intensely superhero/vigilante-y concept without really nagging the reader to play it their way. Instead, it's mostly just practical. It talks difficulties of trying to add the Hunt to your existing lifestyle which will already be full of challenges, responsibilities, and commitments. There's only so many hours in a day, and trying to work harder just makes it more likely you'll make mistakes that might give you problems at work, lose the trust of your family or just get you hurt/killed. It talks about the difficulties of trying to maintain relationships with friends and family, how hard your character will have to work at those relationships to counterbalance constantly being absent from them and not being able to explain what you're doing with your time. But it also talks a bit about ways that your relationships can help you out, or try to make it all work. We get a lot of similar stuff about trying to keep your job, or finding a new job that enables your Hunting more, including some obvious suggestions (cop, paramedic, journalist) and some interesting ones like driving a tow truck. It talks about looking at ways your job can be made to help you Hunt if it gives you access to resources or information. While still reminding you of the potential complications, but in a helpful- story-idea-generating way. It undercuts the goodwill it was generating a bit with a very silly sidebar, though.  once again I'm not sure where to start to unpack the weird class stuff here Ignoring everything else, I feel like when you're talking about fighting monsters that can and will kill you the idea that some people have more to lose than others is pretty ridiculous. Then there's just a list of ways your mundane concerns and priorities might shift or become more difficult to accommodate from basic stuff like "how do you get equipment", "who patches you up", and "do you maybe need to make your home more secure" to more weighty questions about things like relationships and children. But what if you don't do any of that, and instead just walk away from your old life completely after the Imbuing? Turns out, that's also fraught with difficulties. For example, wouldn't this be emotionally devastating for your friends and family? Yes, obviously. The book talks a bit more about that, including things your character might do to mitigate that damage a bit. The next problem is how you'll even live at all. First off, walking away from your life doesn't mean much if you're still tied to your old credit history and so on. Cutting those strings is hard and probably requires you to break the law one way or the other. Trying to live an all-cash life is pretty limiting, not that it matters if you've abandoned everything but the Hunt. A lot of Hunters who fully embrace the Hunt end up having to turn to some sort of crime just to survive. No matter what you do, needing to make money is always going to make you just that much easier to find, while going completely off the grid can be pretty miserable. There's also a long section on how your character might fake their own death and the difficulties that might arise from trying. It's fun, but again there's not much to say about it. There's also some stuff about the practical benefits and dangers of allying with other Hunters, and then a long long list of potential tragedies and setback you might face. Again, most of them are fairly obvious, but it's still a pretty good cross-section of things that the Hunt might cost you such as respect, free time, family/friends, to the more serious things like your health or even your life. Lastly, there's a little reminder that the Hunt never ends. The Imbuing is forever. "After all, you can't ignore the call". This section is much better than the previous one, mostly because it actually does the thing that the book previously failed to do. Instead of constantly trying to berate you away from The Wrong Fun, it lays out the vision for the game and tries to explain how to engage with it. A vision of a game that's actually grounded in someone's real experience and the way that the imbuing completely blows that up, and the wreckage that can leave behind. About how they want you to play mundane characters because they're interested in examining not just the Hunt but your life during it. It's not a vision that everyone will be interested in, certainly. I certainly wouldn't focus on a lot of the stuff they talk about in every session of every Hunter game I might run. I definitely do wish they had something that at least acknowledges that people might want to play this game in a different style without condemning the idea. But at least this part of the book is written to try to work with the player rather than slap their hand when they do something it doesn't like. I don't know, I struggled a lot trying to think of how to write this up and tbh I'm not really sure I succeeded in doing it in an interesting way, but I did want it on record that not all of this book is the kind of bullshit from last time. Coming up: The last chapter, which this section really felt like it should have been a part of.
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Apr 28, 2020 21:14
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Region Creation Conclusion We are now 64 pages into a 127-page book. In this time we’ve worked our way through four separate stages, each with its own constellation of subsystems, and theoretically created a campaign setting from scratch, a process that, in and of itself, is fun as hell. So let’s start evaluating the finished product with the numbers: leaving everything else behind, what did we roll up?
Okay, cool, I love it. I’ve been through a dozen different campaign area generation systems before, and already we’ve gotten enough to beat out half of them. But that’s purely mechanical, just a place for PCs to run around in. In general, these systems just produce a map and leave it to the GM to come up with ways to use it. But what have the various chunks of fluff in all those subsystems helped me produce?
That is… A hell of a lot more than most similar systems provide. As engaging as region generation on its own is, the way Renegade Crowns makes you come up with reasoning for your rolls as you make them and encourages you to adjust them to fit that reasoning results in a setting much more cohesive than you can get anywhere else. Now, the book isn’t perfect, of course: I specifically called out the core generation mechanics as flawed and tacked-on, and some of the art is…  … Questionable. But the fact that I have to hunt for subsystems or pieces of art I don’t like just to have something to criticize says a lot about the level of quality on display. With this all covered, we have two questions left. The first is one of the most important for any RPG: is it playable? I have no idea how well a Border Princes region would function in a real campaign. Even if I did understand the system/want to run it, I don’t have the equipment and people I’d need to pull it off. If anyone has experience using Renegade Crowns, I’d ask you to share just to see whether all of this would pan out. The second is where to go with this review. I am intimately familiar with the first part of the book – region generation – but I’ve only ever skimmed the second part – GM advice for running a campaign in said region. I have no idea how far I’d make it into these next chapters or how deep I’d be able to go; does the thread want me to write it up?
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Apr 28, 2020 23:28
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The advice is actually pretty good. The one I like the most is 'if the players are blindsided by something they couldn't see coming, the first attempt on them misses so they have a chance to react.' As in, 'if you want to start the plotline with the assassination attempt, go ahead, but the first shot misses.'
Night10194 fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 23:44
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Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing 4th Edition Starter Set Part 3: Learning the Ropes Quality: 2 Guidance: 3 We finally get to the meat of the adventure - being rookie cops on a corrupt police force. You're introduced to Watch Captain Pfeffer, a young but competent military officer, and Watch Sergeant Klumpenklug, your direct supervisor and a friendly veteran of the force. The PCs have been assigned to the Docks, the poor, crime-ridden district next to the river Teufel. The rest of this section is filled with short scenes that set up a situation and suggest skill tests for the obvious courses of action. For example, while on patrol the PCs find a tenement building on fire with folks trapped inside. The book provides examples of using Leadership or Intimidate to start a bucket line, or passing a Cool test to charge into the fire and Athletics to avoid acquiring the Ablaze Condition. As a side note, in 4th edition Conditions like Ablaze and Bleeding are still really bad for NPCs, but the PCs can negate them by using Resolve. You can also use Resolve to ignore psychology and the modifier from critical wounds (to prevent breaking or a death spiral, respectively), and stand back up to keep fighting if you drop to 0 wounds. This is why I mentioned that burning Resilience to prevent a mutation makes your character a lot squishier in a way that isn't very obvious until you start to lose a fight - without Resolve, running into a burning building is potentially deadly. With Resolve, none of the characters are really at risk unless they have terribly bad luck. Besides the burning tenement building that introduces Conditions, these scenes don't introduce any new rules. Instead, the focus is on revealing that Klumpenklug is both corrupt and an rear end in a top hat. For example, when you see the fire, he points out that you're the Watch not firefighters, and watches from the sidelines with a beer if your characters decide to help anyway. It's a little weak in my opinion, as Klumpenklug seems to be right in line with the sort of graft that the core rulebook describes as endemic to Imperial law enforcement. For example, Felix has the option to buy the Criminal talent when he promotes into the next tier in the Road Warden career, because a lot of Road Wardens are corrupt. He's also an rear end in a top hat in an IDGAF way that isn't particularly malicious towards the PCs - grabbing a beer because you're not paid to fight fires has some chutzpah. Getting out from under Klumpenklug is supposed to be the motivation for taking on a very suspicious, obviously dangerous job at the conclusion of the adventure, so getting your players to hate him is pretty important. The adventure seems to recognize this, because the section ends with Rewards!, a scene where Klumpenklug is given a medal and a full purse after he takes credit for everything the PCs did. This is some really cheap heat. I mean "The heel wrestler making fun of the local sports team" levels of cheap heat. But, again, this is an introductory adventure so I can't really hold a grudge about it. It personally makes me roll my eyes a little bit though, along with the name "Klumpenklug." The organization of this section and the next section is odd. You're supposed to run all of the scenes in Part 3 except for Rewards!, move on to Part 4 for a bit, and then circle back for the "Klumpenklug steals your glory (and your reward)" scene. I personally would have moved Rewards! to the end of Part 4 in the book to make this clearer, but it's a minor quibble. Overall, I feel that this section is mediocre. Nothing here is really sparking my interest, and it doesn't really offer much support to a new GM either. It does an alright job of introducing the players to their new position, but having every scene focused on Klumpenklug's corruption makes it repetitive. It also doesn't offer much advice or structure for a new GM to work with - the scenes are presented with no advice on how to flow from one to the next. Even a few lines of advice on transitions would be useful here. The scenes themselves are a bit shallow and short on characters and scenery, which makes them feel underdeveloped. I wish they had cut down the number of scenes with Klumpenklug and instead used the format from Part 4 for the remainder, where the book presents proper (short) adventures. But, I didn't really notice anything that I disagreed with either. It's just sort of fine, I guess. Next Time: Police work is a lot more fun without Sgt. Smart-Lumps
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Apr 29, 2020 05:45
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Xiahou Dun posted:ElfI6. This, only it's the Tau, not the Nids. This group of banded together races starts exploring outside their cluster and OH MY GOD! WHY ARE THEY ALL SHOOTING US!!!??? Hell, even the Orks are more reasonable than the Imperium.
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Apr 29, 2020 05:55
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Orks just wanna have fun, they are more reasonable than most real world political leaders. Imagine a world where Trump keeps beating the poo poo out of Xi Jinping with his fists and then they both get drunk on cheap booze.
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Apr 29, 2020 07:46
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By popular demand posted:Orks just wanna have fun, they are more reasonable than most real world political leaders. Isn't that already our world? One night a few months they were bar-crawling in Wuhan and Trump bet Xi he couldn't bite the head off a bat like Ozzy. Xi did it and that's why none of can leave our homes due to COVID.
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Apr 29, 2020 11:11
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Night's Black Agents: Solo Ops Part Three: ACTION THIS DAY Now that we've looked at the guaranteed results from Investigative abilities, it's time to look at the uncertain outcomes of General abilities. Using General abilities is called a test, and there are two kinds: Quick Tests and Challenges. Challenges are the more complex of the two, so we'll look at them first. Challenges Challenges sit somewhere in the design space between Apocalypse World moves and Blades in the Dark action rolls. Like moves, the general expectation is that the Director is creating them during the prep phase, not extemporizing them at the table (though that's a perfectly valid way to play as well, which the text acknowledges even though it doesn't do much to explicitly support it). Like action rolls, though, they're not expected to reflect the specific fiction they come out of. Whereas a move like go aggro is meant to be applied any time a PC gets all up in someone's grill with threats of violence (with the mechanics adapted to fit the fiction of this specific incident), a specific Intimidation challenge would be something like Sweat the Info Out of Duchesne (with the various possible outcomes all directly tied to the fact that you're putting the heat on Duchesne specifically). For all that it has a lot of storygame DNA in it, Solo Ops still very much expects a pre-constructed adventure. Which is fine, and certainly goes a long way toward making the investigation work if there's a concrete mosaic of clues to find and scenes to uncover them in, but I can't help wishing the book gave a little more guidance for "play to find out" type play. Anyways, when a General ability Challenge is called for, you grab your d6s--usually two of them, since you start with 2 in each General ability. You don't just roll them as a batch and add them up, though. You roll them one at a time, and use the results on each individual roll as a guideline for your narration of how the Challenge is unfolding in the fiction. Rolled a 1 on your first Fighting die? poo poo, it's the obligatory "enormous goon who just smiles when you hammer him in the gut!" Follow that up with a 6? You grabbed a convenient fire extinguisher and cracked him across the head--he'll feel that one! This is one of my favorite bits of Solo Ops, and it goes a long way toward mitigating the feel of just rolling chains of dice, which extended actions like this can often end up feeling like. (Of course, the book does admit that sometimes a Challenge is just doing the same repetitive action over and over, in which case it's fine to just roll up all your dice and describe the action as a whole.) In any Challenge, you're hoping to total up to an Advance: That's the best outcome on a Challenge, and it means you come out of the fight ahead in some way. You might get an Edge card (representing some strategic advantage to deploy later), bypass a subsequent Challenge (e.g. if you Advance on an Infiltration Challenge, you might not even have to deal with the last guard by the door) or get an easier one, or just get some kind of immediate bonus. You'll settle for a Hold, which means you don't come out no worse off than you already were but also don't move forward with any advantages. You successfully evade the patrols looking for you, but there's one guard blocking the only exit. You stop the bombing, but the bomber dies before you can question her. Stuff like that. And finally, you're praying to avoid a Setback, wherein you take an absolute drubbing. The exact targets for these thresholds vary, but the most common difficulty is 9+ to Advance, 6-8 to Hold, and 5- for a Setback (moving forward in this review I'll note these as, e.g., a 9/6 Challenge). You might have realized by now that, with only 2 dice, your odds of Advancing are... not great. A little under 28%, in fact. Even worse, after you use an ability in a Challenge, it's depleted, meaning that until you take some downtime, you're at -1 die to use that ability. Extended fight scenes are dangerous in Solo Ops. Fortunately, there are ways to get bonuses to our roll, and to get bonus dice. Bonuses usually come from Edges, from the benefits of a previous Advance, or, most commonly, from Pushing an Investigative ability. You might Push Military Science in an Evasion test to get away from the Spetznaz squad currently tracking you through the wilds of Siberia, earning a +2 because you're familiar with Spetznaz search-and-capture protocols. Bonuses (and penalties, if they come up) always apply to the first roll of the Challenge. Bonus dice, on the other hand, generally come from three sources: Edges (including quite a few Masteries) are almost always a consumable resource. Stunts are where you get to justify how one of your other General abilities helps (e.g. an Athletics Stunt on an Evasion Challenge because you're parkouring all over the drat place is a fine example. The catch with Stunts is that you get bonus dice at a 1-for-2 rate: two General ability dice convert to one Stunt die. That means you can't Stunt with depleted abilities (at least, not yet, we'll discuss that more once we hit character advancement), and using an ability for a Stunt also depletes it. So you can, at most, Stunt once with a given ability before you have to rest up. Finally, most Challenges present an Extra Problem. Like the name suggests, this is an extra Problem (the opposite of an Edge) you can choose to take on for an extra die. It's pretty much exactly the devil's bargain in Blades in the Dark, and it's as much fun here as it is there. You can choose to avail yourself of these bonus dice at any point during your rolling process, so if you want, you can conserve your resources and only spend what you need. However, there's an advantage to over-committing: if you hit the Advance threshold and you still have dice in your pool, you earn a Push in addition to the advantages of the Advance. You can also voluntarily take a Setback without even rolling if you want to, but even though it's called out as an option there's absolutely no incentive to do so other than "it would be interesting to fail here." Which... sure, fair enough, but I feel like there should be at least some reward for this option, like another Push. Handling Problems and Edges Problems and Edges are the cards you pick up and discard throughout the operation, representing clues, assets, threats, and hazards. Most of the time they have a title, a brief bit of flavor text to remind you where they came from, and optionally some rules text. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, multiple instances of the same card stack--taking three injuries can really put a damper on your day. Some cards have additional keywords, though: Continuity cards, unlike most cards, which are discarded at the end of the adventure, stick around until the card says you're allowed to discard it. Clues are tangible reminders of the intel you've collected--a lot of times this is just an organizational keyword, but if a Clue has some kind of benefit (like "discard for a +1 on your next Fighting challenge"), you can't discard that clue until its purpose in the investigation has been fulfilled. Heat, Shadow, and Injury cards are cumulative Problems that track how much attention you've garnered from mortal authorities or the vampire menace, and how badly beaten up you are. We'll talk a lot more about them in an upcoming section. And for some reason this keyword isn't listed with the general rules for keywords, but there are also Blowback problems. These are things that aren't a threat right now, but will bite you in the rear end when you try to catch your breath later. Problem cards can be Countered--this is just a shorthand for "do something in the fiction that would get rid of the problem." It will usually require a challenge, a Push, or the use of an Edge. Sometimes they go away automatically after a certain time, like a Problem that gives you a -2 on your next Cool test, but if you can find a way to counter it before that happens, you can avoid the penalty altogether. Oh, and just in case you were thinking of cheesing it, "next test" means next meaningful, story-relevant test. No finding some low-stakes excuse to roll the dice to burn a penalty. Taking Time Here we also see another odd element of the book's organization. The rules for taking time, which are a pretty significant component of the play cycle and factor into a lot of other elements, are tucked in as a subheader under the Countering Problems header. Granted, countering problems is a pretty common reason to take time, but it's significant enough that it feels like it should be its own section. Anyways, taking time is when you... well... take some narrative downtime. This can be the entire point (e.g. "I hole up in the safehouse and wait till dawn" or it can just be part of the fiction ("it's a three-hour drive to Budapest, that'll count as taking time"), but in any case it has a few effects. First, you refresh all your depleted General abilities, bringing them back to their normal value. Second, you heal, trading in all your Injury problems for half as many Hurt cards (we'll get to those later). Third, you will very likely be hit by Blowback: while you were busy, the opposition, local law enforcement, and shady folks you've pissed off are still doing there thing. The Director has a menu of optional Blowback scenes depending on how many Heat, Shadow, and Blowback Problems you have, and will probably pick one to throw at you. We'll get into Blowback later, but it's a great streamlining of the "Vampyramid" from core Night's Black Agents. Quick Tests and Secret Tests Sometimes you just need to see whether a thing happens or doesn't, and there's no real advantage or disadvantage to be had beyond those results. Preparedness tests are a common example--you either have that Enochian dictionary or you don't, and there aren't a lot of advantages or disadvantages in that scenario beyond "can translate Enochian/cannot translate Enochian." In these cases, the Director just sets an Advance difficulty and you try to hit it. You never gain Edges or Problems on Quick Tests, and there are no Stunts or Extra Problems. I can see the uses for these, because sometimes you do just need a quick "yes or no" solution, but honestly I would have rather seen this kind of thing handled under the Push system--spend a resource, get what you wanted. Oh, and as far as secret tests? Don't do them. Not only is GUMSHOE One-2-One entirely player facing (the Director never rolls dice), a huge part of success or failure hinges on the player's decisions about when and how to expend their resources, and you can't do that if the player doesn't know what's being tested and why. This section is 100% here to speak to GMs who still think it's "unrealistic" for players to know they failed a Perception test, or whatever, but I appreciate that it's called out. Not explicitly stated, but corrollary to this, don't ask the player for fake checks to "throw them off the scent." Just tell them "hey, you need to make a Sense Trouble challenge here," and if they Setback, hit them with the consequences--ell, just telling them "you have the naging sensation you missed something" creates as much if not more tension as a secret test or a fake one. Next Time: Fights, Friends, and Fallout
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Apr 29, 2020 13:40
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Defenders of the Forest The Complete Book of Wood Elves So this is probably a little unfair of me; this 'sourcebook' is unpublished, available on internet fan-sites, but it is written by some of the line developers for WHFRP 2e. It looks like a proposed Asrai book that never actually got published. I don't know the circumstances of it all; maybe this was always just a full side project done on their own time by people like Jude Hornburg, but it's laid out like a full RPG supplement and even has a fair bit of art. One of my complaints about the Hams line has always been that all the books focus on the human nations. Don't get me wrong, I love Kislev and Bretonnia and the Empire, but I've always wanted more on the dwarfs and elfs. This book is a stark reminder that you've got to be very careful wishing for more material on elfs. Writers in fantasy RPGs often struggle with The Elf. They're supposed to be great at stuff, you see, but they also need to fit into a normal party. Hams mostly solves this by giving elfs +10 to two stats, a useful automatic weapon prof (If you take Aethyric Attunement instead of Longbow you're being silly, as any class that actually has the skills Attunement applies to has the Talent anyway and you can't use them without the skills either), but -1 to Fate and Wounds. The lost Fate point really hurts. There's often a lot of talk about balancing powerful elfs with 'everyone hates them'. This is bad design. It's expecting a roleplaying disadvantage to compensate for hard mechanical power, so something that only applies if the group decides to apply it (which will often be somewhat uneven, too) vs. something the character assuredly gets. Fortunately, that isn't necessary in 2e; they're fairly balanced already on base stats. This book throws that all out the window in favor of a long, sloppy love-letter to angry hillbilly ninja elfs. It also has the unfortunate effect of being very, very direct in telling you exactly how you 'must' play a Wood Elf character. Lots of 'all Wood Elfs are like this' style writing. And the picture it paints of them is as sociopathic assholes you should keep far from any party. It also has a random encounter roll with a strong chance (10%) you encounter and then are probably killed by a demigod if you don't pass a Charm-30. For a bit of the flavor of BS that's coming. Oh, and it tries to completely demystify and overexplain the Athel Loren in a way that will only make sense if your group is putting the Old Ones front and center, which I suspect most groups don't. I mean, mine uses the Old Ones as sort of an overarching major plot backing but that's one group; I doubt the average group of rat catchers and peasants cares about alien terraforming systems. Plus much of the appeal of the Loren is how it doesn't fit into any of the neat categories of the setting and gets to be weird. Just having a one paragraph, dry, 'well that's the Loren, it's just the blueprint forest the Old Ones used' is uh...not how to do Athel Loren. Oh man, did I already spoil that? I did. Yeah, you know the mystical weird forest full of spirits and time distortions that makes its elves go 'off'? Yeah, it's just an overactive alien terraforming site, no biggy. Exactly what you'd expect from the guy who wrote the Deep Lore for Chapter 7 of Thousand Thrones. Did you know there are 'campaign extensions' that used to be on Black Library's website for if you want that Deep Lore to get Deeper and be more of the campaign? They're advertised in Chapter 7! This is a book about exactly how awesome wood elves are, while having sentences like 'For the Pit Fighter career, most elves join it because it permits them to kill humans with impunity' or 'Stealing from humans is considered moral, because their society is based on institutional theft'. Or stuff about how human allies may be permitted into the forest to help with a problem, then usually murdered when they aren't useful anymore, followed by 'the elves are justly prejudiced and bitter, for none truly aid their lonely struggle to save this benighted world'. In the hands of a more skillful author, I'd think that was intentional irony, but that's really not the sense I get here. Everything about elven prejudice in this book is about how it's totally justified because they're simply so much better than everyone else and the only ones who are spiritual and talented enough to protect the world. It even has a dwarf admitting nothing his people can do can ever really match the elfs. I mean c'mon. Oh, it also has a rule where any woodsy elf who is outside their forest homes gains IP every month until they gain an insanity that cuts them off from other woodsy elfs and makes them forever an outcast until they go meditate in trees for a year. That sounds like fun to deal with. Oh, and it gives every woodsy elf starting PC an Elfbow as long as they took Longbow prof, so there goes one of Kithbander's main benefits. Elves also get the ability to use Magical Sense even if they don't have it, a bonus to Disease tests (they're too good for it), and a special subsystem to replace mutation, because they are 'so resistant to Chaos' that they're nearly immune. Remember: That's the Halflings' entire thing. That's the joke: The silly irrelevant little guys who like pies and just want to live happy lives are literally immune to the worst forces of the crazy cosmic horror main villain. But no, the mighty elves are close to immune, too. Instead they have a special corruption table where you roll a d10 to determine which table they check and then check your DoF against it, and it can have such terrible effects as 'permanent +1 Mag' or 'Gain Warrior Born'. They only physically mutate on a failure of a mutation test by 40 or more, and then only if they roll a 7 or 8. So you know, that awful thing most PCs have to deal with? Elfs are immune mostly because they're too good for it and who ever heard of a mutant elf? My personal take on mutating elfs has always been to point out elves mostly live in places with low exposure outside of Druchii; we like to play up that they mistake that for immunity and are extremely surprised to find that isn't the case when out in the world. Elfs also get a Kindred/Kithband that gives them extra access to special bonus talents, like 'can forego the free-parry for +1 attacks using your off-hand weapon when using Two Weapon Fighting' or 'add one Chaos Die to magic to double one of a spell's effects' or 'gain rerolls on tests without using Fortune'. These are on top of everything else an elf learns. Giving players extra rules on top that all do good things for them can be flavorful, yes, but it also makes them more powerful. Much of this book is about describing the extra piles of pluses elfs get for being just so darn great because they're elfs. Oh, and it also gives elves divine magic. You know, that was a genuinely important fluff point that elven 'priestly' magic is still arcane and they have no goddamn idea what humans are doing with their god-magic. So let's just toss that out the window. Elven fickleness is described as their sensitivity to the natural world: they believe they have the right to cull humans and generally dictate the path of the world from their forests. All non-wood elf PCs take -10 Fel when dealing with them, because wood elfs are always cocked, locked, and ready to murder you if the racist trees say they should, and they're basically all assholes. Most of the descriptions of how elves should interact with anyone from outside their forest paint them as sociopaths without much actual agency of their own. This is sort of a function of the relatively poor prose; I'm reminded of a concept from Glorantha where they make it clear that when they say 'every' or 'all' they mean 'most' or 'the norm'. That is not in play here. Here it is 'elfs all believe this' or 'elfs all act like this'. It's extremely prescriptive language that gives a poor impression, peppered with 'roleplaying tips' like 'your prejudice is totally justified, elfs are the best'. The idea that 'things should be in balance', called Yenlui, is treated as some grand mystic revelation and the main organizing principle of living for the elfs, rather than just a bog-standard 'they live in harmony with nature we swear, even as their magic and powers are all about controlling it to do what they want'. But then that's a consistent issue I have with the depiction of 'harmony' with nature in a lot of these sorts of works: It always seems like nature is the one having to harmonize with the bipeds, if you get my meaning. It's always the human-like people who can make the trees do whatever they want, make the animals die for them, etc. Stop me if you've heard this spiel in anything about elfs before: All elfs also strive for perfection in all things, and naturally practice at whatever they do for ages until they are the absolute best at it. No elf cares for money or power, because those are fleeting, and they are above those things. They see the big picture, and are much wiser than the hasty and foolish humans or the filthy dwarfs. They are highly restrained and always wise, but passionate and caring and compassionate, even as they mercilessly cut down Anyway, we're going to go through this stuff more thoroughly, I just wanted to give you all a sampler. Just wait until we get to their magic and their special martial arts! I mean, I get elfs having strong mages. The 4th tier mage they have having Mag 5 and the ability to learn magic of other Lores is about how I represented High Mages in my home games, and isn't as unbalancing as you'd think since most Magic isn't that reliant on your Mag stat for anything but getting the spell off (and you put yourself at huge Miscast risk as you go up). Elfs getting two whole lores for 200 EXP and a resurrection spell? That's probably a little far. Just a little. Similar the magic martial arts that are superior to Blood Dragons, who were already some of the most brokenly strong direct melee combatants in all of Hams (on purpose, given they're meant to be boss fights, not PCs; this stuff is meant for PCs). On the plus side, a few of the new classes are fine, and I might even use some of them. Wood Elf Punch Lord is a fun class concept. We'll get to it! For now, join me for the Warhammer equivalent of the Complete Book of Elves; it's going to be a funny time. Next Time: Vendrick Is Sad He Doesn't Get These Rules
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Apr 29, 2020 15:01
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Pretending the Wood Elves are kind and generous is kind of hilarious, given the Asrai consistently being portrayed as nearly psychotic violent survivalists in literally all GW media ever.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:06
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Mors Rattus posted:Pretending the Wood Elves are kind and generous is kind of hilarious, given the Asrai consistently being portrayed as nearly psychotic violent survivalists in literally all GW media ever. It's funny because all that material is still here! Just with the author thinking they're awesome instead of crazy. I don't know how you write 'elves get into pit fighting so they can thrill kill for fun' and still think 'these are mystical and wonderful beings'. My biggest issue (okay I have a lot of them) is, like...in our home games, Ariel was the Lady, Ariel is a total bastard who has set herself up in a way where she thinks she's the sole bastion against Chaos, she completely hosed up her husband to make him into Orion, and the coal-black eyes Asrai have are a function of her having enchanted their aethyric attunement to help her propagandize, control, and radicalize them. And somehow our version of Asrai is more sympathetic, because they're doing what they do because their means of perceiving the world has been hosed with by taking advantage of how the Winds can make you feel things and mess with perceptions in sensitive people, but outside that they're still self-determined and most are trying to do right. Just with their heads hosed with by a Hard Elf Making Hard Decisions. Which they're capable of rejecting. Compare that to 'all wood elfs act like X', which doesn't leave room for a player or individual character to write their PC. It dictates how they should be. We specifically wrote them as villains for the Bret Revolution arc and it still gave them more room to be their own people. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 15:09
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I don't like the "All X are Y" styles of roleplaying advice, it sets back precedents (For example Kenders are 'fearless children who takes everything not nailed down'), and the more hidebound grognards would get after people for 'not playing to type' causing some drama.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:29
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I mean some of this might've all gotten fixed in editing if this became official, so I'm effectively reviewing a fan-supplement just written by people who worked on the line. I just thought it was hilarious and really wanted to share it. You see, when I was young and first getting into D&D, I played an Elf Thief for the +1 to Dex. So the first supplement book I ever bought with my allowance for D&D 2e was The Complete Book of Elfs, thinking I would get good stuff about how to play an elf. That was a bad time. So this reminding me so thoroughly of one of the most reviled old D&D sourcebooks is funny as hell. E: But yes, my issue with it is it's the kind of thing that makes people think they 'can't' play against type. When playing partially to type, against type, whatever is fun and should always be allowed. Hams Adventurers especially are all weirdos just for being RPG adventurers anyway, so being weird shouldn't be proscribed. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 15:31
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Night10194 posted:I mean some of this might've all gotten fixed in editing if this became official, so I'm effectively reviewing a fan-supplement just written by people who worked on the line. I just thought it was hilarious and really wanted to share it. One of my fondest D&D memories is what we simply referred to as "the Elf Game," where everyone played an elf utilizing kits and proficiencies from that monstrosity of a book. It was a completely unbalanced mess, of course, and we abused the hell out of every ridiculous thing in that book (remember how Elvish is such a subtle and nuanced language that elves can have conversations with other elves that are completely different from the actual words they're speaking? And even non-elves who speak Elvish can never hear this subtext? And how there's no proficiency or skill check required to do this?), but because everyone was working from the same base and the DM rolled with it, it actually kind of worked. Also, for what it's worth (and keep in mind that this was over 20 years ago), the bladesinger gets the most flack for being ridiculously broken, but for my money the Elven Archer kit was the stealth MVP of that book. A poo poo-ton of extra ranged attacks (I think by mid-levels with decent gear I was making around 6-8 shots per round and reliably hitting most of them) and a bonus to trick shots that offset the penalties from those bonus attacks. What did bladesingers get, a floating +2 to attack, damage, or AC? Also, Night, your Hams games sound delightful and I wish I could play in one.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:50
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I like the idea in WHRP 4E that each forest with Wood Elves is essentially its own nation and the ones by Bretonnia are considered way too up their own elvish bottoms by the ones in the Empire, and the two groups there don't think a lot of each other for varying reasons that, to paraphrase Sir Terry Pratchett, stem from the ancient equivalent of "what they said about our Sharon." Also I feel like the way the Wood Elf in Vermintide interacts with her human and Dwarf party members is probably as note perfect as it gets.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:54
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I mostly build off what my long-time GM did. He's the one who introduced the whole Old One plot, who first moved the gameplay to other eras (2600s and 2700s), etc. Also came up with all the stuff about Ariel thinking herself the scion of the Old Ones and trying her own worse version of the Great Plan. And Nagash vs. Early 20th Century Empire, with industrial warfare facing off against necromancy while Mina Von Carstein plays out an almost JoJo like globe-trotting adventure to piece together if there's any way to kill the guy. The extent to which I got into Hams and writing it myself is entirely dependent on my having a really good other GM who did great things with the setting.Dawgstar posted:I like the idea in WHRP 4E that each forest with Wood Elves is essentially its own nation and the ones by Bretonnia are considered way too up their own elvish bottoms by the ones in the Empire, and the two groups there don't think a lot of each other for varying reasons that, to paraphrase Sir Terry Pratchett, stem from the ancient equivalent of "what they said about our Sharon." Also I feel like the way the Wood Elf in Vermintide interacts with her human and Dwarf party members is probably as note perfect as it gets. Vendrick is basically gender-swapped Kerellian. And yeah, I really like the Eonir. We took that from 4e to do our own stuff with and they find the Asrai confusing.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:57
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Yeah, the introduction of a group of Wood Elves less paranoid and violent than the Asrai while still being fundamentally violent survivalists that don’t trust outsiders was a really good idea.
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Apr 29, 2020 16:09
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, the introduction of a group of Wood Elves less paranoid and violent than the Asrai while still being fundamentally violent survivalists that don’t trust outsiders was a really good idea. I'm reminded of something Stanley on The Office said. "We don't have to get along, we just have to work together."
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Apr 29, 2020 16:20
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Defenders of the Forest Supreme States of Elfmind First and foremost: The newly suggested Wood Elf species bonuses set your tenor for this book. Charm Animal, Common Lore (Elfs), Common Knowledge (Home Realm), Outdoor Survival, Performer (Dancer, Singer, and Musician) OR Trade (Bowyer and Fletcher), Speak Eltharin. Talents of Rover, Attunement or Longbow, Savvy or Coolheaded, Excellent Vision, Night Vision. Note they get significantly more 'free' advances from their racial abilities than a normal elf. Normal elfs just get the ability to speak Eltharin and Reikspiel, Knowledge (Elfs), and then Attunement or Longbow, Savvy or Coolheaded, Excellent vision, Night Vision. This is because when Pramas was designing WHFRP2e's core, one of his absolute foremost goals was balancing starting player options. Most characters start with similar amounts of 'free' advances from their species. This is why humans get those 2 random talents. Dwarfs and halflings get slightly more overall advances, but they don't get penalty-free stat bonuses like elfs or the huge pile of Fate humans do. An elf getting a big pile of skills and an extra (very useful, Rover is +10 to all stealth skills in forests/natural areas) talent is kind of breaking the conventions of a starting PC. Sure, many of them are flavor like all those performance skills, but they also start with the core of a Ranger's skillset for free. And they're still getting that +10 to Agi and BS, plus the new '+10 to Disease checks, can use Magical Sense as a Basic'. Basically, from the start, Wood Elfs' mechanics are above par because 'that's how it would be in fluff'. That's not a good way to design a PC option. They also suggest bows should do '+1 damage at short range, -1 damage at long range' and a complex makework system for retrieving your arrows, since bows are 'so core' to the wood elfs. I'd prefer not to fiddle about with that, thanks. Hell, I barely track ammo beyond 'what ammo do you have on hand/loaded in your gun' as it is because it's mostly tedious makework. We are also assured that elfs are gender equal, and later get a weird sidebar about elven fertility. It says elfs rarely have more than 2 children, 'not for lack of trying', and that elfs 'teach their children about reproduction well before humans would' and 'generally regard sexuality with a casualness that makes humans uncomfortable'. Someone wants their Hot Elfs. That would just be a little silly if it weren't for the sentence about them teaching children young; I'm sure it's meant to sound like they just have a robust and less puritanical sexual education policy, but when it's right before 'man we elfs just love to gently caress and talk about fuckin' it has some unfortunate implications. I'm fairly sure this is just a case of clumsy writing rather than Wood Elfs being very concerned about lowering the age of consent, at least. The lands Elfs come from are Laurelorn, where the elfs are less aggressive but still Asrai (though they maintain more Ulthuan-esque civilization and actually talk to people), Athel Loren, land of the hillbilly psycho ninjas, and Hinterglades, or 'I dunno, you're just from whatever forest'. This is fine. They change your career table; only Laurelorn elves will have 'settled' classes like Dilletantes and Scribes, while Hinterglades may have human classes (which get altered a little for elfs) because they're more likely to live near human settlements and wander into the human world. There is one pretty great picture of a wood elf looking extremely awkward with big poofy slashed sleeves and a huge hat for the Hinterglades. She's still wearing elf tights and pointy shoes, too, and has a little bindle-stick to represent she's a vagabond. That elf looks like fun to play. On elven Kinbands and Kithbands, you get a little sidebar about how elves naturally organize their society perfectly and never tolerate neighbors they despise, not understanding how humans can live with and co-exist with people they don't like. This will be a theme: They'll tell you over and over elves have no hierarchy, they just all know to follow the Highborn because they're so great. Similarly, they don't have generals or leaders in war, just champions who are charismatic and skillful, as every line-elf knows exactly what to do and naturally organizes themselves into perfect units. It must be nice to have all your problems solved by 'every single person knows their place and won't step out of it', which sounds kinda...questionable when combined with being led by people know as 'The Highborn'. Almost like they have a highly standard aristocracy but tell themselves it's better. The Kithband you're in is determined by your starting class. Vendrick is a Kithband Warrior, so he could be a Warrior or Scout. That would determine what special talents he could access from his friend group. You may spend 100 EXP to swap to another Kithband, and the Talents are pure bonuses; you don't have to buy them. They can be extremely powerful, though. Let's say Vendrick is a Scout (he's way more ranger than warrior), he'd get access to Pathfinder, Forest-Walker, and Hawkeye. Pathfinder would let him reroll as if he'd use Fortune once for free per test on Follow Trail, Outdoor Survival, and Set Trap, but would also require he'd bought +10 in Perception and Follow Trail. Which is also new; Talents in the core don't have pre-reqs, which I think was actually better. Hawkeye would let him alter his hit location calculations when shooting, trying to put arrows into areas the enemy was less armored, for instance, requiring BS 50+ (easy for him) and Marksman (also easy). Forest Walker would just make any plant-based movement penalties vanish. And these are some of the weak ones. Others can include 'you can use a Fast, Defensive two-handed double-spear as if it was two hand weapons for purposes of parrying and/or attacking more' or 'you can attack more when using two weapon fighting', something the original system intentionally avoided letting two-weapon fighting do because when you do that, it tends to become one of the most powerful options (unless it requires as much rigamarole as it does in 3.PF games) because attacking more is almost always the best possible option in combat. Taking more actions is usually good. Mages and Priests can do stuff like '+1 to all Casting Rolls'. A Seer literally can't be surprised or blinded and never suffers penalties for, say, getting flashbanged with the Lore of Light. A Shade rerolls all stealth checks and gives enemies -10% to Per to oppose their Stealth. Etc, etc. These abilities can be bullshit powerful, and they're free cherries on top of your normal character building. This is how the elf book do. Also, remember that one of the major elven weaknesses is 1-2 Fate. Which means 1-2 Fortune. Which means fewer rerolls. Giving them tons of special talents that give them a free reroll on every check of the type effectively negates one of the intentional major weaknesses of elfs. And is generally out of balance with how any other skill talents work (they're generally +10 situationally or +10 to multiple skills, making them better EXP value than just buying up those skills). This will be a theme. This book effectively ignores most of the guidelines of design that exist in core WHFRP2e. Next Time: Elf Gods
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Apr 29, 2020 16:40
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Night10194 posted:Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Defenders of the Forest I don't know how sad Vendrick is about not dealing with "gain Insanity when outside a wild forest." I'd forgo the rest of the "cool stuff" just to not have to deal with that poo poo. My own take on the Elf Book is that it's basically hosed up propaganda written by racist Imperials who really don't know a loving thing about Elves. Figure realistically that yes, they are a little secretive and xenophobic. They likely see Humans as a people being short-lived, short-sighted and prone to violence, disease and chaos (including actual Chaos). That said, they're long-lived, curious beings who will make (relatively rare) exceptions for those who prove themselves worthy of such. Elves are a people and are people. They're just as flawed and hosed up in different ways as any Human, Dwarf or Halfling and should be treated (and played) as individuals just like anyone else.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:03
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Night10194 posted:There is one pretty great picture of a wood elf looking extremely awkward with big poofy slashed sleeves and a huge hat for the Hinterglades. She's still wearing elf tights and pointy shoes, too, and has a little bindle-stick to represent she's a vagabond. That elf looks like fun to play. I really want to see this picture. Prism fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 18:10
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Prism posted:I really, really want to see this picture. http://www.liberfanatica.net/Defenders%20of%20the%20Forest_display.pdf Page 48.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:12
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, the introduction of a group of Wood Elves less paranoid and violent than the Asrai while still being fundamentally violent survivalists that don’t trust outsiders was a really good idea. Laurelorn absolutely has their own mysterious crystal city, they're just not living in the hell forest. There's a whole nation across two imperial provinces that isn't on the human maps aside from a dashed line border labeled "deep forest, from where travelers do not return." They do a lot of timber trade.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:28
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Their relationship is generally fairly friendly and mostly allied, though. Nordland especially has a lot of friendly contact with the Laurelorn. When I was playing the Blood Dragon Wilhlem Metzger, he was from Nordland, and he was a former Outrider (cavalry scout). He'd been in the woods a lot when he was younger and human, he'd dealt with Wood Elves. He thought he knew them pretty well and that they were mostly reasonable people. Then he ended up in Bretonnia during the revolution and saw Asrai and was like 'What the gently caress is wrong with these elves!?' Followed by 'Oh man, Wardancers are pretty fun to kill.' I mean, Blood Dragon.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:31
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Yeah, the Laurelorn elves are just...still wood elves, they’re still going to cut you if you cut trees without explicit permission or go off the path in the wrong spot. They’re great because they take the wood elf thing of Warhammer (‘violent survivalists who trust no one’) and show a different side of it, where they have become a relatively reliable ally because they figure trying a century or two of seeing if humans can be taught how to behave “properly” if you talk to them is a short term experiment.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:34
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And it actually does work out! Nordland leaves their forest alone, does business with them, and the two of them both shoot beastmen. E: Oh, also, as part of their end the Laurelorn elves are more likely to have a patrol escort you out of their borders rather than just kill you, because that keeps the Count of Nordland also trying to keep people from violating their borders. This is all in Sigmar's Heirs and is basically an example of both the humans and elfs being reasonable and benefiting from it. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 18:35
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It turns out being reasonable is the true secret power of teamwork the races in Warhammer/fantasy in general need to win.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:42
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Having now given the document itself a scan-through, I think I've realised the author's core problem. His brief was "wood elves" and he went to existing cultural fae and Celtic/druidic tradition (itself rife with past authors' weird hangups, fetishes, and Mary-Suetopias, to borrow a phrase) long before he even touched a Warhammer sourcebook. This is "the author's take on elves, who live in woods because they are pretty and spiritual and the best", bolted onto the Warhammer wood elf "slot" because...I dunno, probably that way he could get more people to read it. I'll let Night10194 get to the sections that make this apparent naturally, but to me this explains all the issues instantly. The author hasn't cared about game balance so far because he's making his perfect woodsie elves, they're The Best and they have to match the image inside his head.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:53
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