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Just Dan Again posted:The Maze of the Blue Medusa - A Retrospective, part 15 This kind of mirrors my experience reading through the book. It's mostly boring, the NPCs and rooms are usually traps, and the treasure itself is rarely worth the effort - except when it is. The plot elements are hidden and too disconnected for most players to follow or care about. Some of the areas are interesting, but the whole thing isn't worth the effort. And I also had no idea what the GM is supposed to do with the Blue Medusa, like, there's nothing to do with her and she's completely passive as a character despite receiving an enormous amount of wordcount. Now that I think about it, "passive-aggressive" is how I would sum up this dungeon. The whole module expects you to come to it and then does nothing to make itself worth engaging with.
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Sep 15, 2021 17:28
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It's not a dungeon, it's a bunch of creative writing prompts in a dungeon format.
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Sep 15, 2021 17:39
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You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. You can untwist them, but bad things will happen for convoluted reasons. It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. If the grue eats you, you become the grue, until someone else posts an old meme about being eaten by a grue.
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Sep 15, 2021 17:48
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All these rooms sound like the writers just got high and wrote down all the ideas they had. This poo poo probably sounded super, super cool and interesting while they were stoned out of their minds. What if, like, there’s this guy… and he’s made of, I dunno, marble or some poo poo? And like… if he breathes on you… you have to tell everyone you’re a chicken. And they’ll fuckin’… just believe you, man. Like, they just… believe you’re a chicken. But you can get that uh, that goat with the, fuckin’, lightbulb hat to bite you, and then… whoosh… you’re cured. 
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Sep 15, 2021 19:38
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Ratoslov posted:It's not a dungeon, it's a bunch of creative writing prompts in a dungeon format. This was my thought too.
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Sep 15, 2021 19:50
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So is the Medusa herself just Mandy Morbid with snakes or nah?
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Sep 15, 2021 20:20
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Terrible Opinions posted:The big obvious one is Liu Bei ends up looking incredibly stupid or incredibly hypocritical because the real life Liu Bei was a practical pragmatic warlord who made and broke alliances in such a way that the audience for Romance would find unsympathetic. So the novel has him consistently refusing to engage in politics and being just kinda doing it for him because they're so impressed by his virtue. What about the throwing the baby on the floor and eating a peasant woman? Would that have been as weird as it is to us?
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Sep 15, 2021 21:36
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Josef bugman posted:What about the throwing the baby on the floor and eating a peasant woman? Would that have been as weird as it is to us?
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Sep 15, 2021 22:26
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Terrible Opinions posted:The big obvious one is Liu Bei ends up looking incredibly stupid or incredibly hypocritical because the real life Liu Bei was a practical pragmatic warlord who made and broke alliances in such a way that the audience for Romance would find unsympathetic. So the novel has him consistently refusing to engage in politics and being just kinda doing it for him because they're so impressed by his virtue.
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Sep 15, 2021 22:41
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  Part 7: Cops, Politicians, and Other Criminals Nightlife has a brief chapter on organized crime, police, and gangs. It’s bad. The section on organized crime is a very stereotypical and surface-level look at the Italian Mafia, Yakuza, and Triads. It gets into stuff like the hierarchy of the Mafia from capos to soladatas [sic] and how yakuza have a lot of tattoos. It doesn’t really give any insight into how mobs operate day-to-day. Only the Italian Mafia is really relevant because it’s how the Complex, the biggest anti-Human faction of Kin, sustains itself. Meanwhile, the section on the police likens them to the Praetorian Guard and says, make no mistake, the cops are the Kin’s worst enemy. There are tens of thousands of them, and in the 90s the NYPD already had the technology to trace your identity (or lack thereof) during a simple traffic stop. Although the Commissioner knows about the Kin, police generally do not, unless they’re Kin contacts or have connections to certain federal agencies. So thankfully, there’s no institutional push to wage war on the Kin.  Now that we’ve shot your dog, have you seen a mummy with a mohawk around here? The section on gangs is also bad. Probably the only good bit is that they remind you the average gang member is a teenager, which should make PCs think twice about seeing them as disposable orcs. Then it introduces the FACE mechanic. Both individual gangbangers and the gang as a whole have FACE scores. When members of different gangs encounter each other on the street, there’s an encounter roll to see who gains a FACE point at the other side’s expense. There are modifiers for stuff like being on your own turf, and violence can result no matter who wins the roll. I have no idea why you’d use this. FACE doesn’t do much--if someone wants to quit the gang, they have to make a test modified by FACE or chicken out. Does that even apply to PCs? A few gangs are listed here. The Muertes are a mostly Latino gang; they wear skull motifs and work with the Mafia and the triads. Along with the Reds, an African-American gang known for crack and weapons trafficking, they’re the biggest and most powerful gangs in Harlem. The Katanas are a Chinese/Vietnamese American gang. They work with the triads, they hang out at a bar called The Celestial Emperor, they wear a crossed-swords logo, and their leader is named “General” Robert Lee Cheong for some reason. Like all Asians, they’re martial arts experts. The Czars are a small and very young gang based out of Little Moscow; none of them are even legal adults. They wear red stars because, like all immigrants from Russia, they love Communism and the Red Army. The Posse Caribbeanne is a Jamaican gang who deal cannabis and a designer drug called Beautiful Dreamer. (Surprisingly, there’s no nonsense about voodoo cults.) The Manhattan Alliance is a Nazi skinhead gang based out of SoHo. They make a lot of noise about fighting other gangs, but they’re too weak to do so. Plenty of Kin would like to destroy them, but their membership includes too many poseurs from rich families to annihilate them completely without bringing down serious heat.  Next is a section on human-Kin relations. Humans who know about the Kin and interact with them are divided into Crowleys and Renfields. Crowleys are humans who relate to Kin more-or-less as equals and are more-or-less welcome in Kin spaces. Some Crowleys run businesses that serve Kin clients, others are Crowleys by way of being magic-users. Others are plain and simply friends of the Kin, giving them “normal people'' to hang out with. Renfields are humans who serve a specific Kin or group of Kin. They may not know any other Kin or have much understanding of the Kin writ large. While the term sounds derogatory, the stereotypical crazed, fearful slave is the least common type of Renfield. Kin rely on Renfields to do things like guard them while they sleep and maintain their cover identity, and trying to control someone you need with manipulation and bullying is a good way to get yourself dusted. The most common type of Renfield relationship is a quid pro quo where humans take care of things like going to the bank, etc. in exchange for money or favours. A less common, but very prevalent relationship is between Kin and humans who are addicted to their Drain. These Renfields are usually kept in the dark about other Kin. The last part in this section is about keeping the secret. With millions of people in NYC, why hasn’t somebody screwed up and made knowledge of the Kin public? Nightlife rationalizes this in a few ways. First, most people flat-out reject the idea that monsters are real. If you see someone who seems to move faster than is possible, or disappear into the darkness, or grow fangs, it’s easy to write that off as your mind playing tricks on you in a stressful situation. Even if you saw someone turn into a bat and fly away, who would you tell? What would you do about it? Only a tiny fraction of those who encounter the Kin decide to do anything about it. Some of them become Crowleys, wanting to know more about a whole world they never knew existed. Some join monster-hunter groups and become Stakes, who are likely to meet a grisly end. Occasionally, a Crowley has an experience that leads them to turn on the Kin writ large, and these are the hunters who are actually dangerous. And of course, some want to become Kin themselves. Kin tend to avoid these people, feeling that they’re looking to fill a void in their lives and won’t be able to hack it as Kin.  The meatiest part of this chapter is the section on the Factions. But first...you know how Vampire has a huge glossary of slang? That’s because there were three categories: regular, old-fashioned, and vulgar. Nightlife only has that last thing. I won’t list them all, but these are the most Kin-specific. Baby: A newly-transformed Kin. Big Microwave, Big Mike: The sun. Bleach: To Drain. A drained corpse is called a Bleacher. Blood Bank: A Kin club that serves blood. Boss: Elder Kin. Cannibal: Kin who Drain other Kin. Cheeking: Feeding via seduction. Clean and floss: Cleaning up evidence after Draining. Drac: Insult for Vampyres who act like movie stereotypes. Dust: Kill for good. Edger: Victim of an Edge attack. Frankie: Insult for Animates. Go to College: To learn about the Kin and their rules. The Herd: Humanity. Herd: A human. In The Pink: Acting particularly human. Hook: A Drain addict. Minnie: Humans who idolize the idea of the Kin, with or without knowing they exist. Twilight hadn't been written yet. Hell, Christopher Pike's YA vampire books hadn't been written yet. Monster: An insult. Mushroom: Innocent bystanders. (They pop up unexpectedly in the wrong places.) The Pipe: Sewers. Poison: Drugged victims. The Pox: Nerve Rot. Push: Kin who cultivate Hooks. Ratsucker: Insult for humane Vampyres. Red Beer: Blood by the glass. Rug: Insult for Werewolves. Stable: A Push’s group of Hooks. Topside: Rooftops. The Tube: Subways. Whitey: Insult for Wyghts. The two major factions, the Commune and the Complex, are pretty well thought out. Some of the smaller factions, less so. The Commune and Complex grew out of a series of informal meetings in London in 1838. Some Kin thought that they should try to assimilate into human society, others thought that Kin should, ideally, openly rule the world. By 1908, the Commune and the Complex had developed enough to hold official peace talks and establish the Tenets of the Kin. Also called the Rules, they're very simple: 1. We don’t reveal ourselves to the Herd. 2. When we feed, we leave no evidence. 3. Nor do we use our powers where the Herd can see them. 4. Our wars are secret wars, or else it will lead an open war with the Herd that we’ll lose. 5. All Kin need to be educated in our ways. So the Commune and the Complex are at war, but the war is under cover. Kin from rival factions can often meet in public without violence, but by the same token, they’ll play for keeps if they can get away with it. For example, when the Commune in Alexandria discovered the city’s Complex base of operations, they blew it up and blamed it on terrorists. The Commune was developed by Kin who were alarmed by a growing trend toward Kin dominating and abusing humans. They believed that this would eventually lead to a new Inquisition. The Commune aren’t all goody-two-shoes, but they recognize that they aren’t invincible and humankind has the numbers. The Commune didn’t assume its modern form until shortly after WWII, thanks to a Kin Allied commando unit called the Nowhere Men. After returning from the war, they organized themselves after the French Resistance. Today, the Commune is a network of autonomous cells with a few revered Elders, like Golgotha, but no central command. Like the Nowhere Men, cells often give themselves cool names to build esprit de corps. Cells aren’t really organized like military units, though. Cells have to support themselves, and while they can call on each other for aid, that’s based on personal contacts and friendships. Some Commune units are constantly on the “front lines” against the other factions, but others are just doing their own thing and not really engaged in political struggle. The Complex developed as a reaction to the Commune and is its polar opposite in some ways. The Complex believe that humankind is fit only to be food and slaves, though they’re not dumb enough to think they can conquer the world any time soon. They keep to the Tenets, but they see them as a long-term strategy, not a status quo to be maintained forever. The Complex is also strictly hierarchical, organized with a chess motif. The ruling council of the city are called kings and queens, followed by lieutenants called bishops, with all other Kin serving as knights. Renfields are called pawns. The Complex sustains itself through organized crime, and is infiltrating every major syndicate in New York. They don’t lack for muscle, with an elite force of 24 Kin and 64 of the best killers that various gangs and mobs have to offer. The Complex is open to Kin who can’t coexist with humans at all, so this includes some big bruisers like Ogres and Trolles. But while racketeering and drug trafficking bankroll their operations, their goal is to move fully into white-collar crime. Currently they’re blackmailing US senators as part of a scheme to legalize gambling across the country. The profit from a huge legal gambling business is an end in itself, but it will also give them leverage to cement their control over the Mafia. The Complex also supports nationwide gun control, in order to disarm ordinary people before the final confrontation between Kin and humans. Uh, okay. The Complex’s other major project is scientific research. They have Kin scientists trying to find ways to eliminate the Kin’s Flaws. Thus far, nothing has come of it, and most Kin in the know believe nothing ever will.  The Morningstar Corporation believes in destroying human civilization from within. Its membership is mostly Daemons and Vampyres, and they seek high positions in government and big business. Their long-term goal is to incite global economic collapse, and supposedly they played a role in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Morningstar is a multinational megacorporation with many subsidiaries and thousands of employees, the vast majority of whom have no idea that their CEO is a cool monster with super powers, instead of the boring kind of monster that runs most corporations. Among their other activities, Morningstar uses its media power to spread as much disinfo about Kin as possible. One imprint produces a show called Aramus Blackbird, Psychic Investigator, where the eponymous hero battles monsters whose powers and weaknesses bear little resemblance to real Vampyres, Werewolves, etc. Another produces a children’s show called Spook’Ems, basically a monstrous Muppet Babies. They use the same tactics to discourage humans from learning real magic--one TV network produces televangelists who condemn New Age trends, while another produces “psychic hotline” shows designed to make mysticism look as trashy and stupid as possible. Morningstar has even more muscle than the Complex. They run a Blackwater-style company called Behemoth Security, with 30-100 Kin and over 500 humans, mostly former military and police. But their status as a legitimate corporation, run by Kin who have to maintain double lives, makes them much more reluctant to use force. I think the Morningstar Corporation is a well thought out faction--the only problem is that they’re too powerful. They’ve accomplished all of the Complex’s goals and then some, being a global conglomerate with countless humans doing their bidding and presumably billions of dollars in revenue. I guess the Complex must have many more members and more room to operate freely, or else they would have been overwhelmed and absorbed into Morningstar by now.  Red Moonrise is a loose coalition of gangs who rejected the Tenets, formed in 1925. Ironically, they have the same basic structure as the Commune, made up of independent cells with no central leadership. The size of each Moonrise gang runs from a half-dozen to over 40, each ruled by a Boss who rules by personal force. They also give their cells names, though their taste runs to stuff like “The Black Death Gang.” Red Moonrise believes in bringing down human civilization with shocking acts of terrorism. They don’t agree on how best to do that, and spend as much time feuding and fighting with each other as they do fighting the other factions. In spite of this, they seem genuinely dedicated to terrorism for its own sake. They often come into contact with City Elementals, who thwart their most grandiose schemes. They’ve tried and failed many times to destroy the Statue of Liberty despite being stopped every time by its powerful warden, The Guard. That said, Red Moonrise has killed a lot of people. They assassinated the mayor of Philadelphia in a bombing, and have carried out numerous other murders and bomb attacks which each killed a few dozen people. The public is aware of its existence, but believes it’s some kind of cult. The only reason they haven’t exposed the Kin is that the government actually covers up their true nature. At the same time, their exploits resulted in the extermination of the entire Kin community in Boulder, CO. Even in a Gothic-Splatterpunk world, I find it hard to believe that a gang of superhuman terrorists could start doing IRA numbers without either blowing the lid off the Kin’s existence or being wiped out. The Laughter Factory is a faction of Kin who are cuckoo bananapants. That’s it, that’s their whole deal, they’re crazy. They want to destroy civilization because “madness is the truth and sanity is a sham.” Okay. Its members are outcasts living in sewers and abandoned buildings, and they aren’t even organized into cells, just cliques that occasionally get together to carry out some insane plot. As you can tell, I don’t think much of the Laughter Factory. Why haven’t they just, y’know, revealed themselves to humans yet? But the problem is not so much that it’s implausible, it’s that it’s not really necessary. There’s plenty of room in the other factions, or outside them, for your game to have Vampyres and Werewolves who are also The Dang Joker. The Failsafe Coalition is an offshoot of the Commune, formed in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. They believe that humans need to be controlled for their own good, or else they’ll destroy themselves and the whole planet along with them. Theoretically, the Coalition isn’t in it for the power; they think that Kin, being long-lived, can see the big picture and manage the world better than short-sighted humans. In practice, some of their members are willing to deal with Morningstar and the Complex to further their goals. In fairness to the Coalition, their activities are focused on making the world more peaceful rather than acquiring wealth and power for their own sake. They practice various kinds of activism to promote peace and world unification, ranging from participating in human protest movements to blackmailing UN representatives and assassinating right-wing politicians. The faction section ends with a list of Kin gangs. Kin street gangs form alliances with Kin factions, rather than human mobs, but they do socialize and fight with human gangs. They have to be careful not to reveal themselves, especially when they keep surviving wounds that would kill normal people. Oh, and Kin gangs are supposed to use the stupid FACE rules. Nah. The Headbangers are a Commune-affiliated gang made up mostly of Manitou. They’re basically harmless, using their invisibility powers for such criminal enterprises as sneaking into clubs without paying the cover. The Underground is a group of Ghosts who were all “born” in the same horrific subway crash. They eventually managed to obtain the wreckage and move it to an abandoned subway spur, where they guard their collective Relic. They just commit petty crime on the subway. The Bubonics are a Daemon gang who traffic drugs and Upper Manhattan. Their initiation requires infecting a human with a deadly disease. They’re mortal enemies of The KOLD (Knights of Living Dead), a gang so violently pro-human that even the Commune blanches at their methods. The Lobos are a were-only gang that tries to stay out of Kin factional conflicts. Not because they’re pacifists, they’re just focused on racketeering and dealing drugs in Lower Manhattan. They often feud with the Mirrorshades, a gang made up entirely of Zipperheads--more on them in the “bestiary” section. The Goreboys do what they want, when they want. This includes stuff like skinning people alive and allying with Red Moonrise. The Corpsegrinders don’t do that kind of thing for the fun of it, but they’re all about hiring themselves out as muscle and contract killers. The Skullbenders are a gang of mostly Animates who control racketeering in Greenwich Village and enjoy using their mind-control powers to torture humans when they’re not using them as proxies. What isn’t controlled by the Skullbenders belongs to the Slay-Riders, an all-female gang of Daemons and Penangallan who deal in drugs and prostitution. The two gangs have an uneasy alliance to defend the neighbourhood from anyone looking for a piece of their action. The Beijings are a gang of Chinese and Japanese Kin who are taking the crack cocaine business in Chinatown away from the Katanas. They have a lot of human members who don’t know that their leaders are a different, special, Asian type of Vampyre.  This grab-bag of a chapter ends with a list of Kin musical groups. First up, Looks 2 Kill is a group of Vampyres and Daemons who are anti-human but have no interest in joining any factions. They love inciting their audience to riot, and their human fans think that their extreme misanthropy is a publicity stunt. Their albums and songs all have names like “I Luv Your Flesh” and “Luv U 2 Doomsday.” They’ve released 3 albums and done multiple nationwide tours, including shows at Death Row and the Lighthouse. Meanwhile, The Taint is an easygoing punk jam band influenced by folk, blues, and The Grateful Dead. Led by a Werewolf named Uncle Wiggly, who also plays fiddle and mandolin, they play songs like “Mister Quayle’s Blues” and “The Ramble.” They’re the kind of band that fans insist you have to see live. Also, they call themselves the Taint.  The Taint. Last but not least is The Krypt, a metal band fronted by Lisa “Blood” Bath. It’s her band, and she’s a primadonna who fires and hires a lot. Of these bands, The Krypt is the one most likely to hit the big time. Next Chapter: City Planner Information...another grab-bag of random stuff. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Sep 24, 2021 |
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Sep 15, 2021 22:46
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quote:The Katanas are a Chinese/Vietnamese American gang
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Sep 15, 2021 23:01
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Halloween Jack posted:The Czars are a small and very young gang based out of Little Moscow; none of them are even legal adults. They wear red stars because, like all immigrants from Russia, they love Communism and the Red Army.
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Sep 16, 2021 00:34
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So wait, the Failsafe Coalition is a group of monster people organized around killing nazis and ending wars? Sounds like they should be the default PC faction. Also the CHINESE KATANA GANG makes me think of Samurai Cop and its Katana Gang.
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Sep 16, 2021 01:35
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Froghammer posted:This is SUPER off-topic, but is there a particular English translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms? It's a text I've been meaning to dive into for a decade and a half. I read the abridged Moss Roberts version last year and found it a good read- they include lots of context and notes, and summarize the parts that are abridged in a logical way. Also, loving the new thread title. Thinking of the Maze as a bunch of creative writing prompts flung arbitrarily into a book format is a perfectly valid reading. My post mortem will hopefully extract a few good ideas and set them free to run, unburdened by hundreds of descriptions of a thing that kills you if you touch it.
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Sep 16, 2021 02:02
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If I'm reading correctly the optimised strategy for the Maze is to stonefacedly march down the middle refusing to touch, talk to, react to or otherwise interact with anything. If anyone persists in trying to talk just stab them and keep walking.
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Sep 16, 2021 03:40
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Froghammer posted:This is SUPER off-topic, but is there a particular English translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms? It's a text I've been meaning to dive into for a decade and a half.
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Sep 16, 2021 03:49
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The Lone Badger posted:If I'm reading correctly the optimised strategy for the Maze is to stonefacedly march down the middle refusing to touch, talk to, react to or otherwise interact with anything. If anyone persists in trying to talk just stab them and keep walking. Unfortunately, you do need to interact with some parts of the maze at some points, but the adventure makes this as arduous and hostile as possible. Also, no one will talk to you willingly, it's assumed you will approach them despite the default NPC state being "murderous".
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Sep 16, 2021 04:45
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Halloween Jack posted:They often feud with the Mirrorshades, a gang made up entirely of Zipperheads--more on them in the “bestiary” section PUT ON THE MIRRORSHADES AND GET WITH THE POGROM *technocracy intensifies*
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Sep 16, 2021 06:12
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Halloween Jack posted:
I'm sure that whatever kind of monster it is, it's going to be incredibly racist.
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Sep 16, 2021 07:03
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Promethean Animates, like Frankenstein's creation.
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Sep 16, 2021 08:02
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I know that Nightlife has done absolutely nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt here, but think Clive Barker rather than the Vietnam War.
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Sep 16, 2021 14:23
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The Lone Badger posted:If I'm reading correctly the optimised strategy for the Maze is to stonefacedly march down the middle refusing to touch, talk to, react to or otherwise interact with anything. If anyone persists in trying to talk just stab them and keep walking.
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Sep 16, 2021 14:33
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megane posted:All these rooms sound like the writers just got high and wrote down all the ideas they had. This poo poo probably sounded super, super cool and interesting while they were stoned out of their minds. What if, like, there’s this guy… and he’s made of, I dunno, marble or some poo poo? And like… if he breathes on you… you have to tell everyone you’re a chicken. And they’ll fuckin’… just believe you, man. Like, they just… believe you’re a chicken. But you can get that uh, that goat with the, fuckin’, lightbulb hat to bite you, and then… whoosh… you’re cured. Just Dan Again posted:Also, loving the new thread title. Thinking of the Maze as a bunch of creative writing prompts flung arbitrarily into a book format is a perfectly valid reading. My post mortem will hopefully extract a few good ideas and set them free to run, unburdened by hundreds of descriptions of a thing that kills you if you touch it. For example, there's a golem made of pure distilled stupidity. You can only defeat it by trapping it in an airtight container, and your plan to do so has to be literally foolproof, because just being around the golem makes you stupid. Cute, but it's the kind of thing you either base a whole session around or don't use at all.
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Sep 16, 2021 14:49
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Froghammer posted:This is SUPER off-topic, but is there a particular English translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms? It's a text I've been meaning to dive into for a decade and a half. If you're up for 2000+ pages, the Chinese Foreign Language Press has a 4-volume unabridged set. ISBN: 978-7119005904
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Sep 16, 2021 15:00
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Age of Sigmar: Soulblight Gravelords The Rot Within Deadwalker Zombies are formed from the corpses of the recent dead. It's very simple necromancy to make them stand up and walk, though the rotting flesh that covers them is quite smelly. They can't do much more than moan to communicate, but that's okay because they're not actually intelligent. They can, at best, poorly grip whatever object they find to swing at people, and many simply tear at foes with their fingernails and teeth. They're essentially mindless creatures, and many haven't even been raised on purpose. The Necroquake awakened many corpses, which have been wandering the Realms ever since. These Deadwalker marches tend to begin in bogs, fens or mass graves, and it's a rare nation that has not had to drive them off at some point. At this point, many free cities maintain pyre-gangs, groups of volunteers who track down and burn the Deadwalkers to ash before they can spread plague. Individual Deadwalkers are clumsy, slow and incompetent. They are still quite dangerous, though, because they're never alone. Literally any necromancer at all can raise huge amounts of these things, and no one thinks of them as anything but expendable forces. You can just keep throwing them at an enemy over and over until they get unlucky or you run out of bodies. They may not be very strong, but they're able to overwhelm any foe that lets their guard down. Further, many of the living find it quite offputting to deal with them, especially because it can mean coming face to face with their own dead friends and family. Those killed by Deadwalkers have it even worse, as the magic that animates them is prone to traveling into their victims, raising them to join the horde. Undead animals tend to be somewhat more dangerous. Dire Wolves are the zombie remains of dogs and wolves, which are quite common in the forests and tundras of the Mortal Realms. They retain the predator nature they had in life - indeed, they tend to become even more aggressive in death. Dire Wolves are much faster than most undead, able to run at great speeds with no rest whatsoever required. Many vampires rely on them as hunting dogs, and Shyishian folklore claims they can smell fear. (They certainly retain their strong sense of smell.) Their jaws are strong enough to crush bone, and the leaders of their packs seem to be animated by an ancient, primal hatred for humanity. Vampires who keep Dire Wolves tend to treat them as beloved pets despite the rot and smell, and many maintain a Necromancer solely to care for the dogs and keep them strong in battle. The Vyrkos especially are well known for their love of Dire Wolves, as their ancestral culture holds the wolf to be a particularly potent symbol and spiritual patron. Belladamma Volga is said to sometimes go into battle alongside only her fellow ancient vampires and hordes of angry wolves, overrunning entire towns with them. They love to hunt, and the Dire Wolves love to help them. Necromancers are some of the few mortals that can be found aiding the Soulblight. They are potent wielders of the magic of Shyish, armed with skull-clad staves and often little else. Their studies tend to make them resemble the dead, with hollow faces and sunken eyes, and many of them do embrace undeath eventually. At their command, the Deadwalkers and Deathrattle emerge from the grave once more to fight, and their magic can empower their forces to ever greater strength. They are not generally of greater inherent skill with Amethyst magic than the sepulchrist orders of Shyishian nations or the Amethyst Mages of the Collegiate, but they are willing to use the magic in ways their fellows never would. They are more than happy to perform terrible experiments on the living, merging them with dead flesh to create new monsters. Many are even willing to sacrifice their own health and wellbeing for greater magical power, trading their humanity for Nagash's secrets. This is why they are often able to perform more terrifying and dangerous feats than other users of Shyishian magic. It isn't hard to imagine why someone might pursue the depths of necromancy. Some dream of resurrecting their fallen kin, others of turning the dead into an army of vengeance, and many more simply terrified of their own eventual end. It does not especially matter how it began - all pursuit of necromancy leads to the same place. Each terrible experiment and monstrous action numbs the soul and leads further into the corruption that is Nagash's philosophy. They are torn further and further from the living hearts of humanity and come closer and closer to the cold and frozen mind of the Great Necromancer. Many dream of becoming immortal, terrifying liches. Few manage it - it is much, much more common for them to end up under the thrall of a vampire. In theory, they learn the magical secrets of their master in return for their service; in practice, they generally end up as simple servants who will never escape the rule of their Soulblight leader. Corpse Carts are a frequent sight in the Soulblight lands. They are rickety old wagons aglow with the power of undeath and full of corpses. The Deadwalkers drag these things along, shambling forward without care. They are impaled on iron spikes that nail them to the cart, since they're too mindless to think about pulling them normally. They resemble plague carts, and like plague carts they collect bodies - but these are not to protect the people whose cadavers they retrieve. Instead, the Corpsemasters oversee the collection. These are undead beings who are not mindless but lack the true power of a necromantic Deathmage. They are bound to direct the carts, heading for the battlefield. Once there, they find the points where the vampiric armies falter, directing the amethyst energies to repair bone and regenerate rotting flesh. Many Corpse Carts bear powerful relics known as unholy lodestones, which are immense iron bells that ring themselves endlessly. As they ring, they attract any ambient amethyst energy in the region, further empowering nearby Deadwalkers and Deathrattle. Others are topped in large braziers, where the Corpsemaster burns corrupted realmstone. The smoke of these fires spreads over the field, driven by the malignant will of the Corpsemaster. Where the smoke passes, magic withers, and wizards are consumed by teerrible pain and delusion. Still, if you want to see a real master of death magic, look for a Mortis Engine. The few Necromancers who do finally achieve lichedom are revered by their fellows, and when they are destroyed, the lesser deathmages will seek out and collect their remains with just as much care as any religious acolyte. For good reason, too - the bones are still full of necromantic power. These remains are bound into caskets or reliquaries, which are then mounted on the necro-arcane machinery - the Mortis Engines. These are created from twisted and warped bone and held in the air by the souls of those once commanded by the liche within. They fly in total silence, each the center of a necromantic storm. Each Engine is a wellspring of Shyishan magic, dragging amethyst power into itself and rationing it out to the Necromancers that care for it. A Corpsemaster is set to guard the Engine, and in times of emergency, they can unleash the energies all at once as a massive pulse, returning unnatural life into the bones and corpses of fallen undead. The power of the Mortis Engines is so great, in fact, that even the predatory spells unleashed by the Necroquake avoid them, in some way recognizing the power within the bones and apparently fearing it. Next time: Bats, Dragons and Some Dudes In Armor
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Sep 16, 2021 17:49
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Halloween Jack posted:For example, there's a golem made of pure distilled stupidity. You can only defeat it by trapping it in an airtight container, and your plan to do so has to be literally foolproof, because just being around the golem makes you stupid. Cute, but it's the kind of thing you either base a whole session around or don't use at all. As you say, this sort of feels a lot like the problem with the Maze. Coming up with a weird thing with a really narrow solution is like step 1 of doing good adventure design, if that. That "monster" (and almost everything in the Maze) is a lot like the monster in a lot of Monster of the Week shows - the actual bulk of the story is going to be about figuring out its weird deal and how to defeat it, and that's going to be the part that actually most involves the PCs as characters and the mechanics of the game you're actually playing. So it's not completely useless, but it's also not really a "monster" in the way I want when I get a Bestiary, since it's not something I can use in a combat encounter. Still, a book of plot-hook monsters might be useful, whereas the Maze is just filled with these things without any way to do the research or apparent awareness that that's an important step in making those kinds of things fun and interesting, so yeah, much better. The actual pretending-to-be-a-module thing makes it actively worse not just because of all the cruft, but because it presents all these things in their worst possible game environment.
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Sep 16, 2021 18:09
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MotBM would work better as a MacVenture style point-and-click game, played by a single person on a computer, so you can try-and-die your way to learning about all these weirdo characters and their weird poo poo that only makes sense in the context of some other weirdo character and their weird poo poo.
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Sep 16, 2021 18:18
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Halloween Jack posted:For example, there's a golem made of pure distilled stupidity. You can only defeat it by trapping it in an airtight container, and your plan to do so has to be literally foolproof, because just being around the golem makes you stupid. Cute, but it's the kind of thing you either base a whole session around or don't use at all.
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Sep 16, 2021 19:21
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Engaging at all with a stupidity golem means you’ve already lost.
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Sep 16, 2021 19:43
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And that's why I don't post on TheRPGSite anymore.
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Sep 16, 2021 19:48
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Terrible Opinions posted:You have it the wrong way around. They'd be alien to the people of the actual history. Both of those are inventions of the novel to prove how perfectly "virtuous" Liu Bei was in putting ritual and the kingdom above himself. At the real Battle of Changban when Liu Bei's son was saved he reacted like a normal person and promoted the guy who performed the rescue. Not a child end zone dance in site. Oh thank goodness. I do like the fact that the idea of what is virtuous can differ so much that "spike the baby" was even considered as an option to show it mark you.
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Sep 17, 2021 09:00
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 Part 8: City Planning Nightlife has a very good layout overall, but the City Planner chapter is the worst organized in the whole book. There’s some stuff buried in here that really ought to be player-facing: more information on Humanity, and info on Feeding that I should have gone over earlier. Whoops! There’s an encounter table wedged between two different sections on Humanity, and info on making money between two sections about the Kin life cycle. This is why I don’t review books as I read them or cover everything in sequence, but sometimes stuff slips through the cracks. The chapter opens with some notes on “Sustaining an Atmosphere of Horror.” It acknowledges that the game has superheroic aspects, but it’s “designed to send chills down the spines of the players.” It suggests that you play up the horror by focusing on two aspects: first, the PCs themselves are horrors to ordinary people. Even if they save the world from the machinations of anti-Human factions, they’ll never receive any recognition for it. Second, New York City can itself be a very scary place given the poverty and claustrophobic overcrowding of many neighbourhoods. And that’s it. In this whole book, there’s about a third of a page on atmosphere. “By the way, remember that this is a horror game. Here’s another page of preaching about drugs.” With that out of the way, let’s get into the nuances of Humanity and Feeding. Nightlife emphasizes that Humanity is not a measure of how good or evil you are, and the point of the Humanity system isn’t to cancel out bad deeds with good ones. Humanity is a measure of how human you are in outlook. Kin are fundamentally different from humans in that they’re predators, but they’re still social animals with the same needs as other people. Inhuman Kin tend to attract the attention of both mortal authorities and other Kin who see them as a liability. The Humanity rewards and penalties are relative and open to interpretation by the City Planner, and that’s intentional. For example, killing a drug dealer who sells to kids might bring a -20 penalty (for wanton murder), or a reduced penalty, or none at all depending on the circumstances. To better understand the nuts-and-bolts of Humanity gains and losses, we need to discuss Feeding and Not Feeding. For Kin that need to Drain to live, hunger can drive them to lose control. If you haven’t fed in over 24 hours, you have to make a WILL test not to freak out and feed at the first opportunity, consequences be damned. The test is penalized by the number of people around and how long you’ve gone hungry, with a bonus for high Humanity. Once again, I can’t help but compare Nightlife to Vampire. While Vampire’s Humanity mechanic creates a vicious circle, Nightlife’s Humanity is a virtuous circle. The better you maintain it, the easier it is to maintain it. Some of you have been asking: why not just feed on animals all the time? For the most part, you can. Vampyres and Wyghts can suck the life out of strays, and even Kin that need raw flesh can eat animal meat. Here’s the problem: while animals can sate you, they don’t really quell the desire for human life. Feeding on animals is all well and good until you go hungry for a day, and then that built-up hunger hits you all at once. For example, if you’ve been feeding exclusively on stray cats for the last 10 days, and then you don’t feed for a day, you immediately take hunger penalties as if you hadn’t fed for the whole 10 days! There’s also a table of animal stats in the back of the book, and rats and cats only have 3-4 SP, while a dog has 13. While Vampyres like to drink blood at Kin bars, banked blood doesn’t have any nutrition. Kin who eat raw flesh have it a little easier in this regard: as long as it was just slaughtered a few hours ago, the meat still counts as having SP value. Kin that Drain stuff like stuff like fear or pain can’t get anything out of dead tissue. I reviewed the Humanity gains and losses chart earlier, and there was some discussion about how the Kin maintain Humanity day-by-day. The book actually addresses this directly with a concrete example! TroyBoy is a Wyght who works as a bouncer at a (dimly lit) nightclub. His Kin abilities make him very good at this. It’s pretty slow during the weekdays, and he feeds on stray cats and dogs to avoid attracting too much attention. During the weekend, little scuffles are inevitable, and it’s very easy for him to Drain a little life force from some drunk rear end in a top hat while he’s showing them the door, with no one the wiser. So TroyBoy’s weekly Humanity tally looks like this: -5 for 5 days of feeding on animals, -12 for feeding on an unwilling (but alive) human on Saturday and Sunday, +18 for interacting with humans 6 days a week. That’s a net gain of +1 Humanity a week, before we get into any Edge use or the kinds of mischief that PCs get into. Here’s the rub: Nightlife actually encourages the CP and players to figure out their characters’ weekly Humanity gain or loss outside of play, and apply that in practice! I think it goes without saying that this is not a good idea, since Humanity is XP in this game. I can’t see players sitting around the table and going “Yeah, my character is the edgy loner Wolverine of the group, so I should automatically lose a few Humanity a week while Jeff’s character gains a few.” (Since Humbug played Nightlife for years, perhaps they have some insight into how it plays.) Even in the example they give us, TroyBoy has a net gain of 1 point a week...it’s easier to just assume that Humanity gain and loss, outside of stuff that actually happens at the table, just averages out to zero for all PCs. If you want to introduce wealth and downtime mechanics into the game (a la #iHunt, Blades in the Dark, etc.), it makes more sense to say that being injured, broke, hunted by enemies, etc. makes it harder to feed while keeping a low profile. I’ll close the issue with notes on Max Humanity. If you end a session with Humanity higher than your Max, 10 points of Humanity becomes 1 point of Max Humanity, until that’s not the case. If your Humanity dips all the way below zero, the reverse happens. If you raise your Humanity and Max Humanity all the way to 100, you’re practically human. This is both a major boon and a major weakness. The upside is that your Flaws no longer affect you! Wyghts can sunbathe, Vampyres can swim in the East River (not that you’d want to), Daemons can wear crosses, Werewolves can use real silverware. You also don’t need or feel the desire to Drain. The downside is that you’re practically human! Other Kin can Drain you without getting drugged, and use Edges on you without taking that huge -50 penalty. If you die, you loving die. Maxing out your Humanity means that it’s time to buy up your Edges.  The next section is on the Stages of Existence for the Kin. Interestingly, this section is peppered with references to the rules--there are clear measurements for when Kin come into their powers, and when they’re considered mighty elders. The rules for PC advancement are intended to fit the setting. Daemons are born, but most other Kin are made by Infection. This is traumatic, to say the least. Some new Kin lose their minds; these are usually killed by their creator or themselves. Some slink off to live a miserable existence and maybe join the Laughter Factory. Those who can make it as Kin gradually develop their superhuman Abilities and basic Edges. This can take from a year to a century, but PC Kin are assumed to have already completed this process. They’re no longer “Babies” who need to be shown the ropes. So PCs gain LUCK points after every session, which increases their SP. A Kin is considered fully “mature” when they’ve reached their maximum SP (which is FIT times 10). Have you noticed that there are rules for buying and increasing Skills and Edges, but not your Basic Abilities? You can do it, but it’s incredibly expensive. Once you’ve maxed out your SP, you can increase a Basic Ability by 1 point by spending LUCK points equal to that Ability. Let’s say you got an average roll for your DEX score, 22. Increasing that to 23 costs 22 LUCK points. You only get 1d10 LUCK for each game session. Unlike Humanity and Skills, you can’t earn more in play. Kin are considered Elders when they’ve maxed out all of their Basic Abilities. Keeping strictly to these rules, it’s basically impossible to get there in play even if you religiously kept to a weekly game for years! I suppose this does track with the setting--the two Elder Kin in the NPC chapter are thousands of years old. Of course, so few Kin survive this long that Elder Kin would be a myth--if there wasn’t one of them running a bar and another one running an art gallery. Once you’re Elder Kin, there’s only one thing left to do with LUCK points. You know how you die the True Death if you die (FIT) number of times? You can spend LUCK points to cure the effects of one death. There’s a table you can roll on to randomly determine a Kin’s age. The benefits of increased age aren’t as much as you’d expect, because most Kin don’t “go adventuring” and aggressively hone their Skills and Edges like PCs in a tabletop game. Nightlife gives sensible advice against using this for character creation. If you want older and more powerful PCs, just do it, and put everyone on an equal footing.  This chapter also has a page of advice on variant campaigns. But these are really things that can bind the PCs together in addition to being a Commune cell that fights the bad guy factions. Suggested campaign frames include forming a band, forming a street gang, doing heists, working as mercenaries, and being vigilante superheroes. This is followed by advice on working and making money. It’s assumed that if you have a professional skill, you can earn (Skill rating) times $10 a week. Doesn’t matter whether you’re a surgeon or a stripper. This assumes that you work 40 hours a week, and can be modified downward by the CP since Kin tend to need flexible hours, live on the margins, and work in precarious fields like entertainment and food service. There are also rules for running a business, legal or illegal, which is another raison d’etre for the PCs to hang together. You make more money, but there are periodic LUCK tests that modify it. Criminal enterprises earn more money, with tests to see if you attract police attention. There are similar rules for risky financial ventures--not that you’ll get arrested, but the profits and losses are more random. These rules aren’t bad, I suppose, but most game designers have moved past tracking money down to the dollar. There’s also some guidance on creating a Rumour Mill. Gossip and socializing among their own kind is very important to Kin, because they don’t have TV or newspapers of their own. When they get together, they blab about anything and everything. You’re encouraged to create at least a few rumours going around that are relevant to whatever the PCs will be doing next session. And this is some good advice: throwing out some red herrings here and there is a way to both play up the horror aspects and teach the players that not everything an NPC says is exposition. At the same time, using the Rumour Mill to give useful hints about upcoming adventures keeps PCs engaged in stuff besides fighting and feeding. It’s also a way to inject a little humour--Kin love spreading absolutely ridiculous rumours to entertain each other and sort the Babies from the grown-ups. “Anything involving Elvis is grist for the rumour mill.”  And now for something completely different: the Drug Effects Table. I covered this in a previous entry, since it was relevant to the Drain and Combat rules. Taking hard drugs forces you to roll on a table with results like vomiting, covered in blisters, bleeding from every orifice, and literally falling apart, for hours. Or your eyes could melt, or you could explode. They realized they wrote themselves into a bit of a corner here, so they wrote out some rationales as to why weaponizing drugs is not very effective. We’ll end with the City Encounters Table. This isn’t a hexcrawl game, but sometimes the CP needs a random encounter to pick up a lagging game. Here are the results: 01-20: Nothing. (If I wanted nothing to happen, I wouldn’t roll.) 21-30: Accosted by a panhandler. A chance to gain or lose Humanity! 31-40: Close call with traffic. Okay, but nothing really happened. 41-50: Accosted by several aggressive panhandlers. Could get ugly. 51-60: Gang of muggers equal to the PCs, armed with knives; one has a pistol. 61-69: Muggers, but outnumbering the PCs 2-to-1. Nice. 70-89: You stumbled onto gang turf, and they’re not happy about it. A leader plus gangbangers outnumbering the PCs 3-to-1, armed with pistols and shotguns, maybe an Uzi or two. 90-91: A Kin gang looking for a rumble, armed with knives, bats, and an Uzi. If you’re on they’re side, you can hang with them. 92-93: Cops, outnumbering the PCs 2-to-1, looking for weapons and “gang affiliation.” I hope none of you are wearing blue, or red, or plaid, or a bandana, or a belt, or a t-shirt, or 94: A Target Alpha patrol. More on these bastards later. 95: A Skinthief, which is exactly what it sounds like. It has 4 human servants, armed with bats, to preserve your sweet precious skin. 96: A Zipperhead gang on motorcycles, looking for food, i.e. you. They also have Crowleys armed with pistols. 97: Tapefaces, very nasty, also exactly what they sound like. 98: Suckers. They suck. You won’t like it. 99: Pox Zombies. They carry Nerve Rot. Best to just stay away. 00: An Elder Kin, a for-real Demon, or Lazarus Smile. If the Elder Kin is in your faction, cool, otherwise this is all extremely bad news. Next Chapter: The Other Kin! This one’s going to be fun. Lotsa pictures. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Sep 24, 2021 |
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Sep 17, 2021 14:06
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Pictures 
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Sep 17, 2021 18:52
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Kudos to the authors for making a pretty tightly focused game about the nightlife in a single city, with factions and locations and other playable elements presented in reasonable detail. I'd love to hear about how the game actually plays, I know some people upthread mentioned running campaigns that lasted years.
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Sep 17, 2021 19:48
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mellonbread posted:Kudos to the authors for making a pretty tightly focused game about the nightlife in a single city, with factions and locations and other playable elements presented in reasonable detail. I haven't run it in over twenty-five years, but I was the person upthread and ran a five-year-long campaign involving the PCs who were bounty hunters for the Commune taking down Kin that really did not want to play nice with humanity. The game systems ran well enough for a late-80s ruleset, and the world setting was rich enough to be able to expand on it. I thought (and I assume the eight players thought) that the game was cool and I still do. I have never liked WoD (probably because I'm an old punk not a newish goth) but Nightlife had something I really enjoyed.
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Sep 17, 2021 20:19
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Nightlife jank aside really looked like the kind of game people actually want out of V:tM
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Sep 17, 2021 21:49
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It really, really is. With some work, I could easily see running it with Esoteric Enterprises and some version of The Black Hack.
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Sep 17, 2021 22:18
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Night10194 posted:"The Thing but it gets clipped by artillery very early and the rest of the story is just everyone being insanely paranoid in addition to being shot at." Hey, that's my morbid fascination war you're talking about, you can't just give me ideas like that, I might use them. That poo poo is dangerous as gently caress.
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Sep 17, 2021 22:19
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Robindaybird posted:Nightlife jank aside really looked like the kind of game people actually want out of V:tM Yeah, for real, I can sense the jank, but at the same time I kind of want to try Nightlife!
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Sep 18, 2021 10:09
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Terrible Opinions posted:The big obvious one is Liu Bei ends up looking incredibly stupid or incredibly hypocritical because the real life Liu Bei was a practical pragmatic warlord who made and broke alliances in such a way that the audience for Romance would find unsympathetic. So the novel has him consistently refusing to engage in politics and being just kinda doing it for him because they're so impressed by his virtue. Terrible Opinions posted:You have it the wrong way around. They'd be alien to the people of the actual history. Both of those are inventions of the novel to prove how perfectly "virtuous" Liu Bei was in putting ritual and the kingdom above himself. At the real Battle of Changban when Liu Bei's son was saved he reacted like a normal person and promoted the guy who performed the rescue. Not a child end zone dance in site. That's very interesting! If I could impose a bit more, any books you would recommend on the topic of commentary/analysis on the relationship between the novel and real history? PoontifexMacksimus fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Sep 18, 2021 |
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Sep 18, 2021 12:12
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