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Nessus posted:I think that makes sense, it's just that in this rare case managing to survive the planned TPK by the skin of their teeth means that you have a polite round of applause and narrate what the survivor glimpses in the 2D4 seconds before the followup consequences of the TPK wipe 'em out. "Congratulations! You (barely) survived the adventure! Make a Dexterity saving throw; if you succeed, you have enough time to give one last 'YOUR MOM' before 1d4 tarrasque(s) squash you flat."
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Jun 9, 2025 05:34
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This is weird but I've been reading through old reviews (and games) and I find myself coming back to Maxwell Lord's review of Buck Rogers XXVC. I don't know why I find it such a particularly interesting failure. I think it's that I'm continually amazed how TSR kept failing to establish any really successful games outside D&D in the late 80s and 90s. I haven't read, watched, or listened to more than a little of the actual Buck Rogers media from 1929-1967. It's very influential, but Buck isn't in the same league as Superman or Tintin. (My knee-jerk read on Buck Rogers is that there's just "no there there" beyond the premise of a square-jawed American pilot fighting Orientalist stereotypes on the loving moon.) That gave Pondsmith and co. the freedom to make a kinda-hard-sci-fi, kinda-cyberpunk game which is actually very Neat. But a lot of it feels half-hearted, considering that the idea coming from the lady who co-owned the IP and the company. I just don't think it does a great job of making people want to play characters in its world, starting with the art. Jerry Bingham is a solid illustrator, but most of the covers are focused on the protagonist NPCs or on vehicles. People are always floating around in spacesuits, and the different types of "gennies" you can play are rarely featured. Compare them to the covers Elmore and Caldwell did for Star Frontiers a few years earlier. In general there's not a lot of art of characters who aren't Terran or Martian. You do see desert runners and terrines from time to time, and a spacer made it onto the cover of one supplement. The classes are basic and boring and lack interesting abilities. Engineers and Medics in particular--I have this issue with a lot of Mechanic and Doctor classes in RPGs, they feel perfunctory. Because of course you need someone to fix the ship when it's damaged and the PCs when they're hurt, but is this actually interesting to do? The Engineer's special class ability being "you can smack people with a wrench at +2 to hit" feels like a gently caress-you. This leads to the issues with the skills system, which is also basic and boring. One good thing about the Medic is that they get "Cure Serious Wounds" and "Cure Critical Wounds" as basically a skill path which replaces those spells. Meanwhile, there are like 7 different Spaceship Repair skills that just serve to suck up the Engineer's limited points. It would be nice if other classes got "advanced skills," even if they were just bland combat bonuses or something. Again, comparing XXVC to other TSR games, I wish that its skill system worked more like the skills in Marvel Super Heroes or BECMI D&D, where they often work like proto-feats that give you extra bennies or a combat maneuver, or the skill description calls out a specific interesting thing you can do. The equipment options are particularly boring. I haven't played this game, I haven't even played Countdown to Doomsday or Matrix Cubed, but the standard weapons seem like they feel boring and lovely to use. That's remarkable considering that the Buck Rogers XZ-31 Rocket Pistol was the first commercial raygun ever sold, the guns themselves are fascinating to toy collectors, and the marketing campaign is actually kind of notorious. Anyway. Pistols are almost always better than rifles or melee weapons in XXVC, because they fire faster. The standard weapons are the needler, laser pistol, and rocket pistol. Needlers can fire 3 shots a round and hold 20 rounds. Rocket pistols can fire 2 shots a round and hold 5 rounds. Laser pistols can fire 3 shots every 2 rounds (sigh) and hold 7 rounds. This means you will always be in a weird position of either reloading before you're out of ammo or have a round when you run dry after firing 1 shot and then spend another round reloading. And by the way, yes, rounds. Laser pistols use rechargeable magazines that cycle through one-use capacitors instead of firing bullets. Lasers can also be deflected by shiny surfaces, while rocket guns can be thwarted by ECM. I think I get what they were going for here; in Star Frontiers, there was an interplay between the different basic damage types (physical/energy/sonic IIRC) so that you would always be unprotected against one type. But this is less intuitive. Speaking of rocket guns, while it's noted that the guns have limited homing ability, you don't get a bonus to hit or anything. In fact, you can buy cheaper "dumb" rounds that give a penalty to hit. (When has anyone playing an RPG ever taken a penalty to hit for a discount unless the DM forced them into that position?) Really the most interesting thing about the rocket guns is that Pondsmith, it seems, eventually used the same concept for Smartguns in Cyberpunk 2077, whereas before "smartgun" had basically meant a gun equipped with a virtual laser sight. Here's another goofy thing: Buck Rogers himself has a unique weapon, which is just his old .45 pistol. Get this, it has the same stats as a rocket pistol, but it holds six rounds and can't be thrown off by ECM like a rocket gun can. Why the gently caress don't more people use firearms, then?! I get that lasers and rockets can be used in zero-G but a rocket pistol only holds 5 rounds and does the same damage as a .45? I can go buy a .45 ACP handgun with a 13-round magazine right now. For that matter, Buck could have bought a Colt .45 with a 7-round magazine before he got frozen. Future guns are lovely. Armor is comparatively not so bad. There are several types of armor, but the one that matters most is Smart Clothes. Most military personnel, and really anyone who can afford the 1,000 credits, wears smart clothes. It's a suit of clothes that protects as well as "banded mail" from D&D, is climate-controlled, and powers all your gadgets. PCs with enough money and access can buy Battle Armor and even Battle Armor w/Force Fields, which add armor and forcefields to a Smart Clothes base. But there's plenty of stealth and investigation in the published models, so it's safe to assume the PCs are going to basically live in Smart Clothes. The problem with armor is that it's a missed opportunity. There are add-ons and attachments for Smart Clothes which are powered by the same battery that keeps you from sweating into your shiny jumpsuit. (These even form a justification for having cool racing stripes on your smartsuit; they're basically webbing for your gear.) But the options are mostly just basic equipment. It seems like the obvious play here was to have a limited number of mods you can attach to your suit and let PCs specialize and differentiate based on that. Warriors will want more ammo and hidden armor plating, engineers will want to carry every conceivable tool, and so on. But nah. Again, comparing XXVC to other TSR games from the same era, the weapons and armor in Gamma World 3e and 4e are way more interesting. Like, cool, I want to play a weird mutant or android and maybe I'll find a plasma rifle or some mech armor. Who wants to play a Tinker with a Needler? It just seems very strange to me that they didn't try to make the character types or the equipment exciting--there's very little that's toyetic compared to e.g. Warhammer or Shadowrun. You see the art and skim through those books, you want to play a Space Marine with a bolter or an Elf Street Samurai with a pair of smartlinked Ares Predators.
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Jun 17, 2025 22:16
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Sounds like a worse case of Cyberpunk 2020's issues: the game wants to be about one thing but the mechanics are so '80s they cannot support that kind of game and instead lead somewhere different. You say 'perfunctory' and I think that's the issue, rules are set down because RPGs of the time are expected to have them, not because they actually fit. Plus in XXVc's case IIRC there's the tension of pulpy newspaper strip sci-fi (of course the masculine 20th century revolver can punch through the personal defenses of the future) and Maximum Mike's proto-Eclipse Phase technothriller vision which further compounds the trouble.
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Jun 17, 2025 23:41
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Neither ECM, nor shiny surfaces can stop A FIST!
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Jun 18, 2025 05:47
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As someone who HAS consumed a lot of Buck Rogers media: I do actually think there are some interesting consistent themes even as the specifics of the setting change. Rebellion against a conquering enemy is usually where the stories start- in the original material it's the scattered gangs of America vs. the technologically superior Han, in the serial it was the Hidden City people vs. "super-racketeers" who controlled people with robot helmets (it's kind of an allegory for fascism if you squint), and in the game it's NEO vs. RAM. (The TV series has more of a formula of "Earth vs. whatever ne'er do well is trying to blow them up this week", at least until it self-destructs in season two.) Buck is a man out of time (the show played with this a lot, every episode he'd reference something like football or Elvis and they'd be all "What is this you speak of") but a model of can-do Yankee ingenuity. It's also often very tech-focused, trying to dazzle the viewer with some techno stuff. The Han had broadcast power (not long after Tesla had tried to make this a real thing, possibly before we realized the reasons it doesn't work), disintegrator beams, and their warships "flew" via repulsor rays that chewed up the earth beneath them. Soon enough you had rocket ships and underwater cities. XXVc actually fits into this vein pretty well. The main thing that persists is just the characters, really. Buck, Wilma Deering, Dr. Huer, Killer Kane, Ardala, etc. Which does make it a tricky franchise to try and turn into a TTRPG. I think Pondsmith did his best within certain limitations- trying to make AD&D work for space opera was probably imposed from above. It really is not a system which opens itself up to the kind of customization you might want to make weapons and armor more interesting. (SOMEDAY I will get back to trying to do a 4e space opera hack, but it's got similar obstacles even though it's a much more elegant system. 5e? Fugeddaboutit.) It crawled so Star Wars Saga Edition could walk, I guess.
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Jun 18, 2025 06:07
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The tv show couldn’t maintain the same premise over 2 seasons of episodes. Maybe a Buck Rodger game would be one of sci fi incoherence. Setting elements are randomly determined and previously established elements can change while characters remain the same. It would be a game about the struggle to imagine a future in a world where alternatives have been systematically eliminated. Building a fake future out of other people’s old ideas that are all basically the hope that the same conflicts continue forever. Fancier guns to shoot fancier enemies.
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Jun 18, 2025 17:53
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Just base it off of Duck Dodgers
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Jun 18, 2025 19:15
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I like the NEO vs. RAM setting. RAM is an artifact of that strain of New Wave sci-fi which predicted that the First and Second Worlds would evolve into mirrors of each other possibly merge. I think the Buck Rogers could have worked for the late 80s and 90s. Star Wars was already the model for how to make that Googie aesthetic look lived-in. Elmore and Caldwell's art for Star Frontiers and Gamma World was on my mind, but also the costume design from Car Wars. I don't think that TSR should have tried to pull off D20 in 1989, but I think it would have been a good thing if Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and XXVC were all cross-compatible. Alternity as a concept happened too late.
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Jun 18, 2025 19:40
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Traveller posted:Sounds like a worse case of Cyberpunk 2020's issues: the game wants to be about one thing but the mechanics are so '80s they cannot support that kind of game and instead lead somewhere different. You say 'perfunctory' and I think that's the issue, rules are set down because RPGs of the time are expected to have them, not because they actually fit. Plus in XXVc's case IIRC there's the tension of pulpy newspaper strip sci-fi (of course the masculine 20th century revolver can punch through the personal defenses of the future) and Maximum Mike's proto-Eclipse Phase technothriller vision which further compounds the trouble. Well, seeing as CP2020 and Buck Rogers XXVC were both written by Mike Pondsmith...
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Jun 18, 2025 19:45
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A couple of years ago I played a very cool LUMEN game called Infinite Revolution (specifically, the game's Stardrive edition), which had some neat ideas for tactical, zone-based dogfighting and cool setting/aesthetic/tone. Shortly after I'd finished running a mini-campaign, the author announced she was doing a Kickstarter for a print run of a new edition (INFINITE REVOLUTION: OVERDRIVE) that would also make several changes game, most noticeably adding more robust out-of-combat mechanics. The final PDF got sent to backers a couple of months ago so I thought I would do an F&F of it, because I don't think a ton of people know about it, LUMEN games don't get talked about much in TG, and this is by far the most interesting one (especially in how it diverges from LUMEN). Anyway, here's the first post, and I'll have the second (covering the combat mechanics) up within a couple of hours. There'll probably be a couple of posts to talk about player options, one to talk about downtime mechanics and GM rules, and one covering the bestiary, all of which I'll make over the next few days. INFINITE REVOLUTION: OVERDRIVE Part 1: intro and core mechanics  quote:SCREAMING through the void along relativity’s bleeding edge, clad in starlight and fire, painting glistered fractal burntrails in your wake— INFINITE REVOLUTION is a game of desperate, dramatic, superhuman/all-too-human hardlight exosuit pilots engaging in tactical dogfights in a seemingly-hopeless war against entropic horrors from beyond our dimension, and trying not to burn out between missions. You play a Revolver, a human whose atomic frequency is out of tune with our dimension, which means your body-system tends towards infinite energy rather than entropy. Hundreds of years ago, when people like you first appeared, that meant certain death - eventually, their bodies would sublimate into so much starlight and subatomic particles, taking out whatever they happened to be standing next to at the time - but humanity quickly figured out how to master your condition, developing turbine-like implants that stabilised Revolvers, allowing them to safely generate infinite, entropy-defying energy and will glittering starlight constructs into existence. With Revolvers as navigators, engineers, and living power sources, humanity turned to the stars, breaching into adjacent dimensions to attain faster-than-light travel and communication, and spreading out across the Milky Way. Now, humanity is under siege, and Revolvers have been weaponised, their powers harnessed to create and pilot hardlight exosuits and wield hardlight weaponry, Humanity's first and last line of defence against total, entropic annihilation: quote:The galaxy has gone dark. The Veil—a legion of bizarre paracausal anti-life, ruthless predators made of animate entropy—have swept across the Milky Way, shrouding the stars themselves in a curtain of hungry shadow. Their presence has disrupted both entanglement comms and V-Gate travel, leaving the fate of the systems beyond Prima Sol to grim speculation. Not that you have time to speculate. quote:To be the ring of spears. To destroy destruction. To harm, so that others may not be harmed—but still, to harm. How It Works INFINITE REVOLUTION is half turn-based, tactical, zone-based combat, and half fiction-first problem-solving and freeform downtime roleplaying drama. Play is structured into missions, where you and the other Revolvers in your Brace are sent out by command to solve problems and fight the Veil to save humanity:
Something else it borrows from FitD is its core resolution system: die rolls involve assembling a d6 pool based on ratings (a rating of 0 rolls 2d6 and drops the highest), then taking the highest result, with a 1-3 being a failure, a 4-5 being a success at cost, a 6 being a success and two or more 6s being a critical. Unlike FitD games, INFINITE REVOLUTION doesn't have pre-set actions with ratings. Instead, characters have freeform talents with broad applications, which the game calls Sparks. Sparks represent your Revolver's particular skills, powers, or specialty items (outside of combat), and each of them has two Limiters - complications or situations in which the Spark is less powerful or a liability (INFINITE REVOLUTION doesn't have Position, but it does have Effect, which it calls Potential - Limiters primarly adjust Potential down when they would logically interfere). The book has a single page of examples for these, and honestly could have done with having at least one or two more pages of them, or at least some more guidelines around creating them since in my experience people really struggle to come up with good, characterful traits that are broad enough without being too broad (see the problem everyone has with Aspects in Fate), and you have to come up with Limiters on top of that. Here are two of the six examples given:   It's not obvious from these screenshots, but the book makes it clear you're supposed to answer the Limiter questions yourself to define those Limiters, making it easier to just take one of these and customise it to your liking. Starting Revolvers have three Sparks, each rated 2, meaning that whenever a Spark applies, a Revolver will be rolling 2d6 as a baseline. However, they also have ways of adding more dice when they need them. The main way they can do this is by Igniting a Spark - when a Revolver does this, they immediately take up to three Drive Stress to get that many bonus dice on their roll. As long as they don't roll a crit (two or more 6s), everything is fine, and there's no upper limit to Drive Stress, so Revolvers can Ignite as much as they want. If they do roll a crit, the resulting strain triggers a Push Your Limits roll: they roll as many d6 as they have Drive Stress, and then if the lowest die is:
That's it for the core mechanics, which are pretty simple, but don't worry if that seems too light - the Combat phase is its own, mostly separate tactical combat system.
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Jun 24, 2025 15:31
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This looks dope. Thanks, Lemon! Always happy to have a review of a game I've never even heard of.
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Jun 24, 2025 17:22
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Xiahou Dun posted:This looks dope. Thanks, Lemon!  It's extremely dope, and now I'm getting to one of the cooler parts: INFINITE REVOLUTION: OVERDRIVE  Part 2: Combat quote:It’s different for everyone. The book places this chapter after the second half of character creation, but since picking combat options involves understand a bunch of the combat mechanics, I figured it would make more sense to talk about those first in this F&F. Combat Basics The chapter starts by reminding the GM that combat should have stakes and probably also have objectives that aren't just "kill everything" (there's some specific guidelines on how to do this later on in the GM section). Combat itself works in rounds, which are made up of turns (one per Revolver), with the GM getting their own Incursion Turn at the end of the round. Enemies do not automatically get individual turns - more on that in a bit. And now, here's the really cool part of this game's combat system: your speed is your position is your life.  Because these fights are relativistic dogfights happening in the vastness of space where the Veil just need to outmanoeuvre or delay the Revolvers (whose exosuits make them physically invulnerable) to accomplish their objectives, Revolvers don't have an HP value. Instead, Revolvers have Speed. Speed is your zone on the tracker above. Weapon ranges are given as Leading X, Trailing X, or Matched - which means they can hit targets going faster (up to X range bands), going slower (ditto), or going the same Speed as whoever's shooting. If you're Speed 5, and your weapon has a range of Trailing 3, it can hit Speed bands 2-4 only - it can't shoot ahead of you, and it can't hit targets Matched to you. Damage is dealt to players and Veil units differently: enemy damage is dealt to Revolvers as Impact, which is directly subtracted from their Speed. If you drop to 0 Speed, you Zero Out and get knocked out of the fight until you take an action to catch up on one of your next turns. Players deal damage to Veil units as Harm which reduces their Presence - this is just HP, since you're trying to blow them up. Revolvers have a handful of combat-specific stats:
Turns and Actions Every round, your Revolver can take one Basic Action and any number of Special Actions. Basic Actions are: Attack: choose a weapon and a valid target (within the weapon's range), and roll Sights.
Use a Power: every Drive Core has a selection of three powers. Powers always hit, without requiring a roll, but they give Drive Stress when they're used. Special Actions are:
By contrast, as mentioned before, Veil units don't automatically get to take individual turns. Instead, the GM gets to take enemy-specific Counter actions whenever Revolvers roll a Null or Weak Hit. These include effects like "Warp 1, and all other Veil units of the same type may also Warp 1," "all Revolvers within 3 must save or become Primed," or "choose a non-Elite Veil within 3; destroy them and replace them with a copy of this unit." In addition to Counters, the GM also has the ability to give a number of Veil units a full turn every round by spending Incursion. Incursion represents the strength of the Veil's intrusion into local space. Each round, after all Revolvers have acted:
Ending Combat Here, we just get a quick note going over the different ways Combat can end: the Revolvers can destroy all Veil and seal all Breaches (in which case it's a win), the Brace can complete whatever objective the GM defined as part of the encounter (a win), every Revolver can be Zeroed Out (a loss), the Brace can fail their objective (whether it's time sensitive or simply is destroyed; a loss), or the Brace can simply decide to withdraw from combat because there's something more important for them to do. The consequences for losing combat are primarily narrative - whatever the was established in the fiction happens/doesn't happen - but most importantly, the Revolvers lose time, the single most important resource they have in this war. The Combat chapter ends with this paragraph: quote:Remember—raw annihilative force is entropy’s ally, not ours. Combat is a means to an end and that end is us, not them. Space is cold and empty, but our ships-stations-planets are full of warm and fragile life. Favor retreat over obliteration. Flesh over metal. Protect what Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Jun 25, 2025 |
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Jun 24, 2025 17:36
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Apokalypse Part 3: I LIED. MOVEMENT RULES. FORMATIONS & MOVEMENT I’ve tried ~70 miniature wargames just for my podcast alone, and let me tell you, movement rules are never interesting - but they are necessary Formations No game escapes unit coherency talk.  quote:A squad consists of 5 of more troops, the norm being 8. Untrained/Green troops get “formation distance” of 3 meters, most others 5, and Commandos “Move as Characters” (characters notably move independently). Robots and Landmates also run solo. Doing some  , this gives Greens nearly two inches coherency. That’s fairly generous: the hobby standard these days is 1-2 inches for everyone. Now, models separated from their units! What is an an edge case in most games is almost assured Apokalypse: wounded troops may be left behind to try and join back up later. “Try” is the operative word as they may also decide to retreat. And that’s it for “formations.” If you expected rules for testudo, line-abreast, diamond, etc., you are directed to remember that hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.  Movement So while Apocalypse players pre-plan their units’ movement routes, they can easily switch between movement modes: Cautious Advance: Slow and careful, you get 8m movement while the enemy shooters get -2 to hit you. Advance: 14 m rush that gives -4 to your shooting. Charge: 20 m move into melee that gives -8 to shooting, but provides as-of-yet-unspecified bonuses to melee.  That latter is why you choose to charge instead of just walking into melee. Overwatch:  Nothing else in the game is as powerful a boost as Overwatch. It’s +4 to your accuracy while imposing a -2 to enemies targeting the unit. Overwatch can interrupt enemy movement and shoot them outside of cover, with dumb caveats.It is also cursed: a trooper on OwF can fire more than the weapon’s RoF. It is based on their training - 1x for Untrained to 3x for Elite. However, this does not apply to weapons that have RoF 3+ as those only double RoF because those guns are already firing as much as they can, so pulling the trigger more often won’t help.  It’s the kind of “realism” justification that’s worse than none!  At least ammo expenditure is easy - OwF eats one mag automatically. Overwatch also inflicts Duckback, but I left that for the Morale discussion. Also, you may have noticed that for a Movement Mode, Overwatch doesn’t involve any movement.  Robots have two modes: DeployMode and AttackMode. DeployMode makes them a Fast Target (whatever that is), but doesn’t let them attack. AttackMode is what it says it is.  Cute tokens tho. When the squad leader dies, the unit only moves at Advance as “no one wants the responsibility of giving orders” - not even, as we see later, hardened professional soldiers. It’s unclear how this interfaces with the rules about Warlord assigning a dude as a new leader for the purpose of the order change discussion. Kill Zones  As a Horrible Histories fan, I appreciate a good GRR! when I see it. Normal games give units Zones of Control to prevent units from doing public transport squeeze between opposing squads to infiltrate the back lines. This is usually 1“ and enemy troops usually can’t come within that range unless charging into melee. In Apokalypse, this is called a “kill zone” and it’s 3 meters. That’s where the sanity ends: lo, if one trooper in a squad gets into an enemy’s killzone, they have to stay and fight while the rest of the squad fucks off. If 1/3 of the squad blunders into a Kill Zone, then the entire squad fights.  Naturally, Landmates ignore infantry “kill zones” out of sheer arrogance [which deftly avoids tarpitting issues that a Bloodthirster would encounter when engaging a Guardsman squad and getting challenged by the sarge]. The “Harsh terrain” rules are shockingly sane as terrain just doubles movement cost. Landmates ignore most of this but they don’t enter most buildings because they don’t fit or risk getting stuck or crashing through the floor which is “very embarrassing for the pilot” as well as dangerous. Climbing rules! Wouldn’t you know it, these Scandinavian weirdos are once again certain that you will climb trees. Maybe they were fed a steady diet of American WWII/Vietnam movies that featured snipers in every palm tree. Landmates don’t climb - and not a lot of terrain could survive the attempt - while robots are just not equipped to do so. Another terror of any miniature game ruleset: buildings.  Not everyone has buildings with modeled interiors, and even then, you’d need to take off the 2nd floor to reveal troops on the 1st, which isn’t great as miniatures don’t tend to stick to surfaces. However, just declaring a house an impenetrable block means losing that urban combat/cityfight/MOUT/FISH and CHIPS flavor. Apokalypse advocates either building a model house or drawing floor plans to be kept next to the board. Charge mode allows you to move two floors, which seems to be underrating how annoying stairs are. On the other hand, I may just be a goon/Dalek. quote:It is up to you to decide if troops inside a staircase can see and shoot at each other, after all it is great[sic] difference between different types of stairs. drat, I’ve heard of rivet-counting, but banister counting is a first.  Outside of that, Apokalypse doesn’t have rules for fighting inside buildings “yet” and the Gamer is told to make their own. quote:If you have the guts to be a Powermonger, you should have enough guts to make tough rules decisions. See, one of the common refrains of our podcast Fortified Niche is “don't make me do game design,” I already paid you money for the rules, have the decency to have done your job!  The Hiding rules are kinda boring, but don’t you fret, more rules are coming with the Apokalypse Kompanion (ETA: when YIIK gets good) If the hidden unit is shooting personal weapons or moving (even Cautious), the enemy rolls a dice FOR EVERY TROOPER WITHIN LOS and a single success is enough to spot it. However, there’s also the cool way to find infiltrators:  Troopers on “Kill ‘em all!” will just shoot random trees if they don’t see any targets. If a unit on “Kill ‘em all!” is within 20 meters of hidden troops and the firing arcs of half the unit can hit them, and it hasn’t shot at anything else in the FPh, then the hidden unit has to check for stray fire and is automatically detected at the end of the FPh.  The Apokalypse Kompanion was also meant to give us rules for wandering womb fire. However, this means - and the book states this explicitly - that you can’t fire on them this turn! Hope they don’t run away in the next Movement Phase! Next time: fire resolution, for real this time!
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Jun 24, 2025 18:17
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 Follow-up on a couple of things I've posted in this thread. First, I just discovered that Tabletop Simulator has the entire Pocket Odyssey game in the Steam Workshop, rulebook and all. If my review vaguely piqued anybody's interest, you can check it out for yourself. Second, reports are coming in that Need Games, publishers of Fabula Ultima, is working with Group SNE/Fushimi Shobo to officially translate Japanese fantasy TTRPG Sword World 2.5 ... into Italian. Which is still closer to this side of the world than they've ever come. Maybe the ice is beginning to thaw there.
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Jun 25, 2025 21:11
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Infinite Revolution reminds me somewhat of the premise of Mark Rein Hagen's abortive Exile. The Revolvers themselves remind me of Huey Moon from Miracleman. Also, the art is Very Neat.
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Jun 25, 2025 21:40
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Lemon-Lime posted:INFINITE REVOLUTION: OVERDRIVE The question I have is "Can I have my Weapon be a Drill?" Because the whole "Defy the forces of entropy with stylish fights and the indomitable human spirit" thing I am seeing in the text you quoted is giving me enormous Gurren Lagann vibes.
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Jun 25, 2025 23:16
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Hattie Masters posted:The question I have is "Can I have my Weapon be a Drill?" Very much so:  INFINITE REVOLUTION: OVERDRIVE Part 3: character creation, Drives, and weapons quote:They say everyone’s made of stardust—but not you. You’re all starlight. The character creation section in the game starts by presenting a few questions to guide the players' reflection when thinking about who their Revolvers are. The game is about super-powered exosuit pilots fighting a desperate war for humanity's survival against horrible void monsters, so you're encouraged to think about :
Once players have figured out a general concept for their character, we move on to mechanical elements. Characters in INFINITE REVOLUTION are made up of a few parts:
 Side note to the side note: I really like what was done with the page reference numbers here. The book uses this sparingly, usually when introducing a concept that gets its own section later in the book. Patterns After coming up with your Sparks, the next thing you get to do is pick your Pattern. There are four of these, and they're broadly a choice of Thrust vs. Mass vs. weapon capacity (Mount Points, or MP) vs. special abilities:
There are a variety of Cores which correspond to different playstyles, like snipers, tanks, nimble assassins, tacticians, supports, etc. - and you can combine any of these with any of the Patterns. You can absolutely take the glass cannon Drive Core with the Heavy Pattern if you want, trading Thrust for Mass and the ability to equip better weapons, just like you can make an Ultralight-pattern tank Core that takes slightly more damage and has worse weapon options in exchange for having much better manoeuvrability and ability to recover from Impact. One thing the book probably could have given here is general guidelines for which combinations work particularly well or badly together. The previous edition restricted most of the Cores to 2-3 specific Patterns, but that restriction is entirely gone in OVERDRIVE, which is fun for character build shenanigans but less immediately approachable. The Cores do get vague role descriptions, they're generally not made up of a ton of different moving parts (as we'll see in a second) so it's not too hard to figure out what they do, and most of their Powers don't explicitly rely on any of their stats or weapon stats, so it's difficult to make something truly bad, but there's a few combinations that probably won't work out great (one of the Cores can redirect attacks to itself, which you will probably be less successful doing as an Ultralight than something else, and several of the Cores have powers that deal damage based on distance moved even if they also tend to come with ways to get +Thrust). Drive Cores Once you've picked your Pattern, you move on to picking your Drive Core. Unlike the Patterns, which are broad stat arrays that multiple players can share, Cores are meant to be unique within a Brace. Each Core is designed to fulfil a specialised combat role (both in and out of the fiction), and the game notes that specific Cores either tend to attract pilots of a specific personality, or else pilot personalities tend to align with their Core's role over time - no one is really sure which.  Here's the whole Aries core spread just to showcase how the book lays that information out - it's clear, concise, keyworded, and easy to reference. Each Core has exactly:
Note that you can take Burn Scars in any order, so it's entirely possible for you to take Burn and decide the situation is dire enough to justify immediately picking BURNUP and die a heroic death - shine bright, Revolver. I'll cover the full list of available Drive Cores in my next post. Weapons The final step of character creation is to pick your weapons. These come in two broad types:
Terrestrial weapons are generally more specialised and less versatile than Celestial ones, but not any weaker than base-level Celestial weapons; however, they can never have Lenses applied to them, so they'll eventually fall behind your Celestial weapons - long-term, they're useful more for tactically shoring up a weakness in your loadout. Before I start talking about the different Patterns and Subtypes, a quick aside to explain how targeting works: as mentioned in the Combat post, weapon ranges are given as Leading, Trailing, or Matched. Weapons with a Leading range can hit targets that have a higher Speed than your Revolver; with a Trailing range, targets that have a lower Speed than your Revolver; and with a range of Matched, targets on the same Speed band as your Revolver. Ranges are given as e.g. Leading 2 (abbreviated L2) or Matched, Trailing 4 (abbreviated M, T4), and you always pick a single Speed band within the direction indicated. Note that Leading/Trailing explicitly exclude Matched targets; this means a Leading 2 weapon fired by a Revolver at Speed 5 can choose to hit target(s) that are Speed 6 or Speed 7, but not both Speed 6 and 7 (this matters since you might have a weapon or power that targets all foes/allies in a chosen Speed band). There's also a fourth range type, Within X, which is shorthand for "Leading X + Matched + Trailing X." Finally, weapons can have a number of Tags:  I don't want to type all these out, so have a screenshot. Several of these Tags let your weapon apply a Status whenever you roll a 6 or better on an Attack action. These almost always last until the end of the enemy's next turn, and can do things like prevent the enemy from moving (Locked and Slowed), prevent them from reducing damage taken (Fractured), boost the accuracy of attacks against them (Sighted) or make them take more damage (Primed), or outright stun them (Stunned). Most of these can also be applied to Revolvers, so both PCs and enemies have a nice range of tactical options here. With that explanation out of the way, the ranged Celestial Weapon Patterns are:
   That's the end of this (long!) post - the next post will go through all twelve of the Drive Cores in the book. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Jun 29, 2025 |
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Jun 26, 2025 00:50
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If you can't become an entire star when you die, did you even live?
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Jun 29, 2025 10:15
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What is a "Gundam style funnel" Yes, I just watched a YouTube video of a Gundam using something called a "fin funnel." I still have no idea what it is.
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Jun 30, 2025 16:52
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You shout "Funnels, go!" and the drones attached to the back of your mech go over and shoot up the enemy mech while flying around it. Depending on the specific show and mech it can be a support weapon or the mech's primary weapon. Some of them also function as defensive barriers of various types.
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Jun 30, 2025 17:32
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Pretty sure that's a weird Gundam weapon where drones go and shoot the other mech?
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Jun 30, 2025 17:34
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Yeah Gundam had two types of Psychic assisted Remote Weapons, Bits and Funnels. Bits were first and Funnels were the upgrade. The difference was that Funnels were smaller (and thus harder to see and hit) and didn’t have their own separate power supply instead recharging in a dock in the mobile suit that deploys them.
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Jun 30, 2025 17:42
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MonsterEnvy posted:Yeah Gundam had two types of Psychic assisted Remote Weapons, Bits and Funnels. Bits were first and Funnels were the upgrade. The difference was that Funnels were smaller (and thus harder to see and hit) and didn’t have their own separate power supply instead recharging in a dock in the mobile suit that deploys them. Amusingly they are not consistent about that at ALL after a little while, Fin Funnels are bits and Gund-Bits are funnels.
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Jun 30, 2025 17:46
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Halloween Jack posted:What is a "Gundam style funnel"  Small drones, usually mentally/psychically operated by a mech pilot at the same time as their actual mech, which let them attack from multiple/unexpected directions. Sometimes they can also be used to form energy barriers or paralyse enemy mechs. You might also see people calling them bits (in-universe, another term for a nearly-identical type of weapon). If you want to know, fin funnels are just one specific mech model's drone weapons, which get a fancy name because it's the protagonist's mech. (Next post is being worked on, but I'm currently trying not to die to near-40C temperatures by doing as little as possible, so it'll probably be up this weekend.) wdarkk posted:Amusingly they are not consistent about that at ALL after a little while, Fin Funnels are bits and Gund-Bits are funnels. To be fair, GUND-bits aren't a Universal Century weapon (but yeah, fin funnels being bits is funny). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jun 30, 2025 |
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Jun 30, 2025 17:49
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Halloween Jack posted:What is a "Gundam style funnel"
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Jun 30, 2025 18:08
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That's how I play Master of Orion and it usually works! Thank you, I can actually tell what's happening in that clip. mellonbread posted:You drop a bunch of Level 0 colonies on earth. The ones that survive advance to Level 1 and get to choose a character class.
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Jun 30, 2025 18:54
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Along with funnels and bits, there are also INCOMs. See, to operate funnels or bits in the Gundam universe, you need to be a Newtype, a new type of human that's developed as an adaptation to living in outer space. They have advanced information-processing ability (to the point where powerful Newtypes have the equivalent of "half a second in the future" precognition because their brains are able to analyze information and make predictions based on it that well) as well as some very minor and vague psychic powers that aren't relevant to any of this. Anyway, that massive capacity for data analysis is required to operate weapons like funnels and bits, but oldtypes can instead use INCOMs, which, unlike the other two all-range weapons, remain attached to the mobile suit by wires in order to get support from the mobile suit's onboard computer. This has been your Irrelevant Gundam Lore corner for today.
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Jun 30, 2025 21:43
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And all of this is necessary because the Minovsky particles produced by the fusion reactors the setting uses for everything play havoc with radio waves and at high concentrations even optical perception, so you find stuff like literal balloons shaped like asteroids and enemy units useful since computers will try to pierce through the Minovsky particle haze and more or less draw a representation of what's out there for pilots and crew. Conveniently, this also keeps combat at visual ranges.
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Jun 30, 2025 22:09
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Funnels are controlled by the pilot via psychic powers (they "funnel" his will), bits are computer controlled and exist in the universes without psychics, like g-gundam. Fin funnels are special because of the huge reflective fins.
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Jun 30, 2025 23:04
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Kurieg posted:Funnels are controlled by the pilot via psychic powers (they "funnel" his will), bits are computer controlled and exist in the universes without psychics, like g-gundam. No, both funnels and bits are computer-controlled (or rather, work through a computer-based interface), and require extreme information-processing to operate (since you're calculating the angles and vectors of four to eight independent mini-spacecraft in real time, simultaneously), and systems like the Psycommu allow for a direct neural interface to allow the Newtype to input those calculations at the speed of thought, as well as amplifying their processing abilities even further (the attendant mental instability some pilots experience comes from information overload; Gundam Wing does more or less the same thing with the Zero System). The poorly-defined psychic powers generally only come into play as a plot device at big, dramatic moments, or in very small ways (like Newtypes reacting to each other's presence). But yeah they're called "fin" funnels because when docked, it looks like the Nu Gundam has big, goofy fins.
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Jun 30, 2025 23:30
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HIS MAJESTY THE WORM In Actual Play, Part 5: The DM Section Welcome back to His Majesty The Worm. In this update we’ll check out the DM section of the book. Like with prior updates, I’m going to call out things that I think work or don’t work in actual play rather than giving a blow-by-blow of every subheading. I went back and forth on this section, trying to decide what was a real problem with the game vs a personal beef. In the end I decided that a review based on actual play experience can never truly be “fair” and I should just say what I think. DM SECTION Like the game rules for everything outside the combat system, a huge amount of the DM advice section is advice copied from other people’s blog posts. This is at least better than not copying the advice and assuming the reader is already familiar with it, which was a problem with 0e Mothership. The Monster manual is excellent, almost perfect. The templates and examples are a solid foundation to create anything you want. It’s fun to make your own monsters or convert from other systems. While I don’t rate the rest of the book’s conversion advice highly, porting classic fantasy monsters into the paradigm of cards and hands works great. My one objection is the generation advice for human or demihuman opponents. Rather than give a template for these foes, the book admonishes the DM to make them “actual characters”. At first I thought this meant stat them up like player characters. But that doesn’t work for two reasons. First, player Talents key off cards with specific suits, which doesn’t work for the DM’s fistful of unsuited cards. Second, the example of play in the combat section depicts a fight versus Goblins, who are Orc children and therefore fall under the umbrella of player races. But in the example the Goblins have Health/Defense like monsters, not a series of notchable Talents and conditions like players. So “actual characters” is probably meant in the literary rather than literal sense. Which is cute, but I would really appreciate some game statistics in the game statistics section of the book.  Breadrick spies on the council chamber at the Giant Conclave This combination of chiding the reader while not offering any mechanical help continues into the dungeon stocking procedures, or rather the lack thereof. One of the reasons I keep coming back to OSE even though the rules aren’t that interesting is the stocking system. The monster and treasure tables make it easy to quickly fill in things I don’t already have a strong idea for. His Majesty The Worm has no dungeon stocking procedures. It has a lot of advice, again pulled from blog posts, but the author outright refuses to provide rules.  Besides reams of DM advice, we also get a bunch of Blank Maps accompanied by canned lore descriptions and suggestions for encounters. These are very evocative but I don’t find them helpful. Drawing a map and picking a few big ideas for a dungeon floor is not hard. What’s hard is stocking and keying each room, which is where those absent procedures I mentioned earlier would come in handy. The weak dungeon builder stands out to me because the city builder is so much better. Why is the system for generating an evocative sideshow so well realized, while the core of the game is left to the reader’s imagination? I understand it’s not easy to build an Esoteric Enterprises style dungeon builder, but that’s what the guy did with the surface city. (During the 0e Mothership review I realized that Esoteric Enterprises is head and shoulders above the competition in so many ways, and that has only been reinforced in the intervening years). I don’t think the maps are that great but some of the other examples are good. I like the list of Traps. My experience is that the examples in the core book are the first thing the DM will reach for when they have to improvise anything that requires a heavy creative lift. Like the monster section the Traps section can be used straight out of the book or as a starting point for designing your own. I might have said before that His Majesty The Worm having no trap disarming class or feat was the right move. It means you have to use creativity to deal with traps, sure. It also means that if the DM just doesn’t include any traps, there’s no dedicated trap disarming guy who feels like he wasted his skill points.  The Guild induces the Red Claw gang to fight among themselves A lot of subsystems in the DM section are things I covered earlier in the series. Alchemy is cool. There’s an example of each category of alchemical item (bomb, potion, oil) for each entry in the monster manual except the two boss monsters. The power creation rules also reference a rule I forgot to talk about in the player rules. Thanks to the Rumor Mill the players never have to pretend their characters don’t know things that they know out of character. They don’t have to pretend a fresh character doesn’t know something their old, dead character knew, or “rediscover” a monster weakness in combat, or in the case of alchemy act like an obvious alchemical effect is a mystery until they use it. And they don't need to come up with a contrived excuse for why, they just know what they know. The developer recognizes that discovering things is fun but pretending to discover things is not fun. I bring this up because I used to play a lot of investigative horror games and I really did not like being asked to roleplay “wait… monsters are REAL???” over and over and over. It’s why I appreciate the core setting conceit of Unknown Armies and Delta Green that the player characters are people who have chosen to adventure further after being initiated into a supernatural mystery. Though both those settings (along with Eclipse Phase, and basically every other RPG) also had a bunch of information that was supposed to be discovered by the players over the course of the game but every player knew before the starting gun was fired, either because they devoured all the books with the assumption that they would be the one running the game or because supposed GM only secrets were discussed openly in the player facing sections of later splats. I mentioned in the last post that I ignored some of the pure roleplaying/random event sections of the City Phase because the City Phase is eight steps long and several of the phases are mechanically dense, prompt rounds of discussion and planning among the players, or require additional one-on-one discussions between the players and DM to resolve. I completely forgot that in the DM section on running the Camp Phase there’s also an expansive freeform roleplaying element where the players are supposed to simulate sitting around the campfire discussing their character backstories. There’s a table of 50 prompts to choose from if you’d like to set up a vignette. The idea is to take a break and put the responsibility on the players to entertain each other while developing their characters. I don’t think I would have done this even if I had remembered the 50 roleplaying questions table. The Camp Phase is almost as procedurally dense as the City Phase. I’ve got to make sure four players deplete resources properly, replenish the resources they’re entitled to, and get their choice of camp actions that typically require additional one-on-one conversations with me before finally checking for random encounters. Everything just takes so loving long already and the players were happy to get back to the Crawl Phase where most of the freeform slice of life roleplaying that His Majesty The Worm encourages actually occurred. The exception was all the Talents that expressly prompted the players to tell a short story or share a piece of information, which they did enjoy.  Welcome to the discard pile. You come here to wet your whistle? I bring it up because Indie Game Club had a good discussion on Band of Blades, where the guy felt that the density of rules for resolving mechanical interactions and the amount of time each of those systems took to play out did not leave much breathing room for character embodiment in a game that was supposed to evoke a series of novels about the human experience of fighting in a war. My experience with His Majesty The Worm also reminded me of my own experience with vanilla Blades in the Dark, a game with strict rules and procedures for downtime but basically freeform rules for everything else. I’m dubious about the Conversion Rules. Not because I disagree with the game mechanical advice for converting your standard six attribute spread from d20 fantasy, but because most dungeons written for Basic/0e/AD&D and friends have vastly different assumptions about encounter density that I worry would make them a total slog in HMTW’s more involved battle system. I’ve never tried it so it’s all theoretical. SAMPLE DUNGEON His Majesty The Worm closes with a sample dungeon. We played with the four pregens that used to be linked on the official website. You may have already seen the illustrations the dev commissioned for these jokers.     I played Tovald the Dwarf. The dungeon took us two sessions and I liked it enough that combined with my tarot cards and miniatures and the hardback book at the game store, I decided to run the game myself. It’s got your standard mix of puzzles, diplomacy, exploration and tutorial fights that teach you the basics of the battle system. It’s got strong theming and a few interesting traps and treasures. Rather than go room by room we’ll just examine a couple ways it illuminates (or contradicts) the advice and mechanics from previous sections. Page 233 boldly states that ““Encounter balance” is not a meaningful concept in His Majesty the Worm”, but several random encounters in the Meat Grinder for the tutorial dungeon are scaled to the number of players. Any time you encounter [adventurer] monsters, that means you’ve encountered monsters equal to the number of players. His Majesty The Worm expressly prohibits the players from hiring NPC henchmen. Because of this, there aren’t any rules for friendly NPCs fighting alongside the players in combat. The tutorial dungeon can spawn a random encounter with two NPC adventurers running away from giant centipedes. When we played the NPCs ran away from the combat and left us to deal with the monsters, which is probably the intended outcome. What happens if a player uses the disposition system to alter the NPCs’ affect toward them and pull them into the combat encounter? I’ve tried two methods for running allied NPCs in the situations where it came up
You could just say no, the NPCs won’t help the players in combat under any circumstances, it’s against the game rules, sorry. I thought this was the intended handling, but the dev waxes rhapsodic about how much he likes rival adventuring parties. If you’re going to remove the possibility of the players and NPCs fighting alongside each other, even under limited circumstances, why have rival adventurers in the game at all? The pregens aren’t in the corebook but they were created by the developer so I consider them fair game to talk about in the context of practical application of the rules. The pregen Dwarf has a lightning bolt as his pet, which uses the Path of Cups’ animal handling powers. The animal handling rules in the corebook are half-baked and leave everything except HP and action economy in combat to the imagination. It’s like the Alchemy system where you have to be creative, except you don’t get a deep bench of example animals to draw from. Only a couple admonitions on what’s not allowed - your animal will never under any circumstances carry items for you, so don’t bring a mule. The questions the players will ask, like “what kind of animal am I allowed to make” and “what game mechanically defined powers does my animal have?” are left to be handfitted by the DM. So the pregen Dwarf shows us how the pet rules could work. His lightning bold has some custom commands not taken from the menu of options in the corebook. It can be used like a tool to weld or melt metal, or it can be thrown to seek and attack targets on its own. It’s a very creative and fun powerset but it’s all handcrafted rather than using the systems from the base game. It’s helpful as an example but has to be reverse engineered.  Aethelbald the Green, Cindy Hakkapeliitta, Chris Hakkapeliitta, Wall the Griffon and Gary the Mage One possible angle is that the players are meant to capture beasts during play rather than starting the game with a prebaked animal. Technically the Beastmaster talent is only necessary to load animals up with commands, anyone can speak a command to a beast or tell it to take an action in combat. So if the players capture a beast (presumably by immobilizing it with the Roughhouse action and using the chains, manacles, falconry gear etc from the equipment list) the beastmaster teaches it commands and it gets tamed, and you work off the stat block in the monster manual to create a simplified powerset. In practice I ended up doing both. I made a pregen Dwarf with a pet worm that could burrow through terrain using handpicked commands, and then the Dwarf caught a Griffon and I used the Griffon stat block to work up a simplified list of legal commands (such as flying and serving as a mount). That’s it for now. Next update we’ll wrap it all up.
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Jul 1, 2025 00:49
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EclecticTastes posted:No, both funnels and bits are computer-controlled (or rather, work through a computer-based interface), and require extreme information-processing to operate (since you're calculating the angles and vectors of four to eight independent mini-spacecraft in real time, simultaneously), and systems like the Psycommu allow for a direct neural interface to allow the Newtype to input those calculations at the speed of thought, as well as amplifying their processing abilities even further (the attendant mental instability some pilots experience comes from information overload; Gundam Wing does more or less the same thing with the Zero System). The poorly-defined psychic powers generally only come into play as a plot device at big, dramatic moments, or in very small ways (like Newtypes reacting to each other's presence). Generally the more powerful Newtypes can control more funnels. Ple 2 could control 30 Funnels at once, while Char a relatively weak Newtype even with the most up to date tech could only use 6.
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Jul 1, 2025 05:27
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It would honestly be an own if we had a powerful Newtype enter a battle in just a standard mobile suit and their ability is just jamming or taking over bits/funnels with their Newtype presence, kind of like how drones tactics are evolving in real life.
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Jul 1, 2025 05:34
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Young Freud posted:It would honestly be an own if we had a powerful Newtype enter a battle in just a standard mobile suit and their ability is just jamming or taking over bits/funnels with their Newtype presence, kind of like how drones tactics are evolving in real life. That's the primary function of the Unicorn, Banshee, and Phenex's (and later the Narrative's) NT-D (Newtype Destroyer) system in Gundam Unicorn and Gundam Narrative.
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Jul 1, 2025 06:49
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  Edition Note: This book was designed for the 2014 5e and pre-Remaster Pathfinder 2e rulesets. Roll For Combat Storefront (PDF & Hardcover, both systems) Drive-Thru RPG Storefront (D&D 5th Edition) Drive-Thru RPG Storefront (Pathfinder 2nd Edition) As has been evidenced in my earlier reviews of PC monster sourcebooks, the idea of turning traditionally antagonistic creatures into protagonists is a popular sentiment among publishers. It was only a matter of time before people sought to make PC-friendly versions of the only monster whose very name premieres in the title of Dungeons & Dragons. In broader media, dragons played roles of companions to heroes, if not being the heroes themselves, such as the Eragon book series, while among the furry fandom dragons are one of the most common fursonas. On the D&D/Pathfinder front, metallic dragons’ well-known reputation for moral goodness makes them easier to slot into protagonist roles than most other monsters who are traditionally evil-aligned. And yet, dragons have been quite hard to balance as playable characters in D&D and its inspired systems for a multitude of reasons. The first is that they get multiple features which are highly potent: flight, large size and strength, natural defenses, an AoE breath attack, and spellcasting are consistent elements in both D&D and Pathfinder, and even having just one of these would be a powerful choice for a base race/species trait. Additionally, dragons increase in power with age, and a lot of attempts at playable dragons* often restricted them to beginning or remaining as children, sometimes being as effectively young as toddlers. Furthermore, the mental image many players have of a dragon was often deemed too powerful to replicate by existing rulesets, such as Savage Species’ Level Adjustment making it so that even wyrmling dragons were effectively mid-level PCs. This often meant that even at high levels, playable dragons were almost never adults, or if they advanced in level often created weird cases like a child dragon effectively becoming an “adult” over the course of a campaign that only lasted months or years. *or PCs with dragon mounts and companions. One of the first books published by Roll For Combat was Battlezoo Ancestries: Dragons. Unlike the later books in the Ancestries line, which focused on multiple playable monsters, Dragons was all about the most iconic monster of the world’s oldest roleplaying game. Instead of trying to cram all of the most iconic traits into a single race or limited set of options, this product has a more holistic “build your own dragon” by splitting up features between race, class/subclass/archetypes, and feats/gifts to allow one to fine-tune one’s dragon character. Beyond just the most stereotypical big, bruising marauder, the options within seek to emulate the many roles and powers evidenced by the many different draconic families seen in D&D and Pathfinder. In the Pathfinder fandom, Battlezoo Ancestries: Dragons is one of the more well-regarded and discussed third party sourcebook. Part of it is that Mark Seifter is one of its writers, a man who co-designed Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Another part is that it takes aim at many of the above design concerns of playable dragons and finds ways to rectify them that many people have said turned out to be surprisingly balanced. With both a D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e version existing, I will be reviewing both. An important element of Battlezoo Ancestries: Dragons is the Lux Aeterna, a powerful yet controversial ritual among dragonkind that allows one to bypass the typically-slow method of attaining power via age. Dragons who undertake the ritual are known as aeternal dragons, with typical members of their species known as “traditionalist” by comparison. The magical foundations of an aeternal dragon’s body undergo major, permanent transformations that allow them to “jumpstart” traditional methods of growth, such as growing to the size of an elder wyrm in a matter of years rather than millennia, or unlocking spells and supernatural powers not typically possessed by their traditionalist brethren. Undergoing intense training and stress further accelerates the magical pathways of an aeternal dragon, so this leads many of them to take a more active role in the world. Like going on adventures! The Lux Aeterna ritual makes use of a variety of magical disciplines, ranging from ley lines and spiritualism to transmutation. Its tradeoff is that the end result reduces the existing dragon’s power, where a once-mighty adult becomes the size of a wyrmling and effectively “forgets” much of the powers and abilities attained over their lifespan. The opinion of the Lux Aeterna’s usefulness and morality varies greatly among dragonkind, not just between subspecies and cultures but even among dragons of the same types and moral outlooks. Critics might look down on it as a risky gamble undertaken by power-hungry dragons, while those who embrace the aeternal mindset might justify it as a practical plan of short-term loss for longer-term power. In terms of physical and observant traits, aeternal dragons typically look similar to their traditionalist kin, with a few commonalities. As their physical size is reduced, many aeternal dragons can more effectively play at being relatively weak or inexperienced to fool less knowledgeable folk, and people who can sense magic and been around dragons long enough often notice that the magic flowing through an aeternal dragon’s body is different than that of typical dragons. Additionally, aeternal dragons are much more likely to make use of weapons and armor, and the use of such tools is often a dead giveaway of a dragon’s aeternal nature. Finally, the Lux Aeterna’s effects grants a greater degree of autonomy among dragons who are ordinarily locked into specific alignments, and they can find themselves adopting new and very different mortal outlooks over time. Basically, the Lux Aeterna ritual takes a Monster Manual dragon and changes them into a “starting-level/newborn dragon” in power, but allows them to gain the iconic features of older dragons by gaining experience levels. In terms of game mechanics, the D&D and Pathfinder books take slightly different approaches. A dragon is a race in both systems, with 45 unique subspecies known as Draconic Ancestries (or Draconic Heritages in Pathfinder). The subspecies are drawn from existing D&D/Pathfinder varieties, along with ones original to the Battlezoo line. But in D&D, a Dragon is also a class with two subclasses, representative of common draconic roles known as the Draconic Ravage and Dragon Mage. These subclasses exist in Pathfinder as two new archetype dedications. In 5th Edition, the dragon’s base racial features are +1 to a single ability score of choice, are either Small or Medium Size, a 30 foot movement speed, 60 feet darkvision, are the Dragon type rather than Humanoid, have a bite (1d6) and claw (1d4) attack as natural weapons, speak Draconic and Common, gain one Draconic Gift for free (whose rules are detailed later in the Dragon class), and their Draconic Ancestry/Heritage determines further additional traits such as damage resistances and breath weapons. In Pathfinder, they are Rare rarity as a species option, grant 8 Hit Points, have a 25 foot speed, are Small or Medium, grant one free ability score boost of choice plus either Strength or an alternative option dependent on their Ancestry, have the darkvision sense, and more or less have the same traits as D&D when it comes to natural weapons, languages, and being dragon type instead of humanoid. Thoughts: I like how the Lux Aeterna provides an in-universe reason for why PC dragons don’t function similarly to dragon as monsters. I also like how the ritual has a viable reason for why dragons would accept its otherwise depowering nature in bypassing the slow-yet-assured method of power by aging. While the base traits of a dragon race might initially appear ho-hum, the following subspecies, class/archetypes, and feats/Gifts help flesh out the draconic PC with more substantial and thematic options. I think the base race thus serves its purpose in covering the bare-bones yet broad traits people associated with dragons as a whole.  With 45 options, there’s just too many Draconic Ancestries/Heritages to cover here. They more or less function as a subrace, signifying what family of dragons the character belongs to. They include the classic chromatic and metallic dragon families, plus ones associated with planes of existence and conceptual phenomena such as the space-dwelling Lunar Dragons and the morally righteous Paradise Dragons. In 5th Edition, an Ancestry grants +2 to the player’s choice of either Strength or another (typically mental) ability score, while in Pathfinder the secondary score serves as the non-free ancestry ability boost option. In Pathfinder, the Heritage also determines what school their innate spells belong to; for instance, a Blue Dragon’s innate spells are arcane, while an Infernal Dragon’s are divine. Ancestries/Heritages grant 2-3 other benefits, which range the gamut of function, from bonus skill training/proficiencies, resistance to a certain energy type, advantage on rolls/recovering faster from certain negative effects and conditions, a bonus language proficiency, and more specific powers such as a tail which can naturally produce an ink-like substance for writing simple text and glyphs (Edict Dragon), a swim speed and amphibiousness (various aquatic families of dragons), being trained/proficient in cooking and alchemy-related stuff depending on the ruleset (Toadstool Dragon), and the innate ability to cast the Light cantrip (Solar Dragons). I noticed that some subspecies abilities exist for a particular dragon type in one ruleset, but not another, or are granted for free in D&D but have to be taken as a feat in Pathfinder. For instance, the Solar Dragon in D&D always knows how long it will take for the sun to rise or set, but doesn’t have this ability in Pathfinder. Or Dream Sight, which Dream and Nightmare Dragons get for free in D&D but is a 1st-level feat in Pathfinder, where they can see a creatures’ dreams as a hazy image above their heads, and thus can grant the observing dragon bonuses/advantage on social skill checks for 24 hours. In a few cases, abilities which are feats in Pathfinder but don’t exist in D&D are made into subspecies abilities in the latter RPG, such as the Harlequin Dragon gaining the Impressive Performance feat in Pathfinder, which in D&D becomes a racial ability allowing them to substitute a Charisma (Performance) check in place of Charisma (Persuasion) to improve someone’s attitude. Additionally, the Pathfinder subspecies grant additional unarmed weapon attacks for free beyond the jaws and claw such as horn or wing, but not so in D&D. Such attacks can still be gained, but via the Evolution option for Improved Natural Weapons of the Dragon class. A dragon’s Ancestry/Heritage also determines the damage type of their breath weapon once they get it, along with that damage type applying to similar offensive and defensive traits for relevant feats, class features, and the like. For example, a Blue Dragon has Lightning as an associated damage type, and their breath weapon takes the form of a line. Thoughts: I am impressed that this book manages to cover so many different dragon subspecies; even moreso given that the later chapters provide nearly 50 pages’ worth of fluff text about their cultures and typical approaches to the Lux Aeterna ritual. Of course, such variety means that a lot of subspecies traits can range the gamut in overall utility. For example, the Toadstool dragon is proficient with two tool types in D&D and has the Seasoned feat in Pathfinder, both of which are quite dependent on the campaign incorporating crafting rules as a regular feature. Compare this to a Crystal Dragon, who gains tremorsense in both systems which is more broadly useful for campaigns heavy with dungeon-crawling. Or an Indigo While some otherwise unimpressive initial abilities might be balanced out by later feats/Gifts, as those aren’t freebies I feel that many players will be looking at what they can get now vs what they must pay for in character building. But some of the more situational abilities can be useful with the right builds and campaigns. For example, Cloud and Sky Dragons can see normally in fog and mist, which can supplement real well with Fog Cloud/Obscuring Mist in order to blind enemies. The Crypt Dragon’s ability to more easily hurt incorporeal creatures with their natural weapons in both systems and add double their proficiency bonus to Religion checks when it comes to knowing about undead creatures will be great for horror-focused campaigns, which are the most popular kinds of adventure paths in both D&D and Pathfinder. But even so, there are some draconic families who just don’t have very impressive abilities. The Time Dragon merely gains training in lore regarding the Dimension of Time in Pathfinder, while in D&D they gain proficiency in History and know exactly how much time has passed since any event they personally experienced. In both systems they cannot die of old age. The White Dragon, besides gaining resistance to cold damage, gets no other unique things for free, save in D&D where their vision is unobscured by snow. A Havoc Dragon in both systems gains proficiency/training in Performance in both systems, gains proficiency with one musical instrument and advantage on saves vs the deafened condition in D&D, and in Pathfinder gains Virtuosic Performer as a bonus feat. While their breath weapon damage type is the rarely-resisted sonic/thunder, the Tumult Dragon can also gain this damage type (among acid, cold, electricity/lightning, fire, or sonic/thunder) and has more attractive features: one bonus skill/tool of choice in D&D, resistance to their chosen damage type, and can retrain their damage type every long rest/one month of downtime depending on system. Thoughts So Far: While it’s a bit hard to judge the initial chapters in isolation, I feel that they help build a good foundation for the meatier mechanical aspects of a dragon PC. My major complaint is that there’s a bit of mechanical inconsistency in what abilities the dragon subspecies get in certain editions. In some cases this can make sense, like an ability that would be too powerful to grant for free in Pathfinder being allowed as a feat instead, but otherwise this can appear unintuitive. The Sovereign Dragon is a good example of this: in D&D they get bonus proficiency in Deception, History, or Persuasion to reflect their knack for politics, but they don’t get any equivalent skill training in Pathfinder. As there are Pathfinder subspecies that can grant free skill training, this feels odd to me. Join us next time as we cover the D&D Dragon Class for D&D, the Draconic Ravager and Dragon Mage archetypes/subclasses, and the Draconic Diehard archetype and Draconic Scion Versatile Heritage for Pathfinder! Libertad! fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jul 5, 2025 |
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Jul 5, 2025 02:36
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  Now that we covered the dragon as a “race,” we will now cover the class-focused building blocks for character creation as well as a new Versatile Heritage. The two systems have quite a bit of different content. The D&D version has a new Dragon class with two subclasses, while in Pathfinder the aforementioned subclasses are instead archetype dedication feats as well as an exclusive Draconic Diehard Class Archetype and a new Versatile Heritage in the form of the Draconic Scion. Another thing I’d like to take note of is that Pathfinder is more feat-intensive, and a lot of choices that are class features for the 5e Dragon Class are turned into feats. The 5e book doesn’t have any new feats, and the bulk of what would be Ancestry and Archetype feats in Pathfinder are instead known as Draconic Gifts in D&D in a similar vein to a Warlock choosing from a list of powers. For those who read my preceding Battlezoo Ancestries: Classic Creatures review, this book follows a similar format in that the Gifts feats locked behind higher levels are generally more powerful than lower-level ones in both systems, and to reflect their different standards of character advancement the non-1st level Gifts/feats follow a 4/5, 8/9, etc of level-based prerequisites. We will be covering Gifts and Feats in the post after this one due to the sheer variety out there. This post will first cover the Dragon Class for D&D. It is highly customizable, with the role a Dragon plays in the party further determined by its Gifts and subclasses. The class’ base features are 1d8 Hit Dice, proficiency in light armor and simple weapons, Constitution and Charisma saves, and can choose two skills from a broad list of physical/wilderness/scholarly skills and Intimidation for the sole social skill. All Dragons gain access to a Breath Weapon, which functions similar to a Dragonborn’s in being a line/cone-based AoE dealing a particular damage type, although its damage progression is much greater in starting at 2d6 and increasing by 1d6 every 2 levels thereafter. It also recharges on either a short or long rest, making it more reliably usable than the dragonborn’s. Dragons also are competent in melee, with Draconic Surge letting them make a claw or bite as a bonus action whenever they use an Attack action with just those weapons. They also gain Extra Attack at 5th level like most martial classes. Evolutions are the first taste of role diversity, representing universal traits possessed by almost all dragonkind that represents the lux aeterna ritual returning their iconic abilities at an accelerated rate. They gain their choice of Evolution at 1st, 6th, and every 4 levels thereafter as well as 20th, which provides persistent benefits. An Evolution can be chosen more than once, further increasing its power, either up to a total of 3 or 5 times. They include Draconic Resistance (gain resistance/short-term and eventually permanent immunity to the damage type associated with your ancestry), Dragon Scales (gain a better innate AC plus chance to negate critical hits, armor proficiency lets you choose better AC options to make up for loss of said armor), Flight (gain increased jump distance and eventually short-term/permanent flight), Frightful Presence (AoE fear-based debuff, increased range and uses), Improved Natural Weapons (additional and increased damage dice of natural weapons), Size (gain increased Hit Dice, reach, and size, all the way up to Gargantuan), and Unconquerable (increased saving throw proficiencies and can reroll a failed save 1-3 times per long rest). The Draconic Archetypes are cleanly divided into martial and magical roles, which both grant access to Gifts unique to said subclasses. The Draconic Ravager represents dragons who focus on increasing their physical and combat prowess, and gain weapon/armor proficiency akin to a Fighter plus a bonus skill as well as a bonus Evolution, and at later levels gain access to 4 unique Fighting Styles reflective of draconic combat, an additional Draconic Gift, Fighting Style, and Evolution. Their 14th and 20th level class features make their natural weapons deal 1 or 2 additional weapon dice worth of damage respectively. The Dragon Mage represents wyrms who hone the magical arts. Unlike a primary caster they are more akin to a gish in the vein of a warlock, where the highest level spells they gain access to are 5th level. They are spontaneous casters, meaning that they are limited to spells they know based on level, but have great variety in that they make the initial choice of whether their spell list comes from the Cleric, Druid, or Sorcerer class. Their key spellcasting ability is whatever mental ability score they get a +2 from due to their ancestry, or Charisma if it doesn’t increase any of those three scores. The Mage’s supplementary class features revolve around using their spell power to enhance their draconic nature, such as a bonus Draconic Gift, using a bonus action once per short rest to recover an expended spell slot, and at middle-to higher levels can expend spell slots to make their natural attacks and breath weapons deal additional damage. Thoughts: The 5e Dragon Class looks to be a surprisingly balanced means of playing a true dragon that slowly grows in power, and between the ancestries, Gifts, Evolutions, and subclasses you can easily make a dragon who can encompass most archetypical fantasy roles. The class isn’t really built for “pure mage” types, as they have a limited set of spells, and for dragons who want to take on thief/skill-user roles they will need to pay particular attention to their ancestry plus appropriate Gifts. Another thing I like is that the use of Evolution allows draconic PCs to eventually emulate the majestic feel of a flying, scaled terror of destruction at middle to higher levels. However, unlike a traditionalist adult/ancient dragon, they will not have the full range of such powers, and their Evolution slots force them to prioritize certain choices. While the Ravager and its Fighting Styles can grant bonus Evolutions, most players will need to make do without some of the more iconic abilities at higher levels.  While Pathfinder 2e doesn’t have a new class, the Draconic Ravager and Dragon Mage fill much the same roles as their D&D subclass counterparts, where most of the subclass features are converted into feats. There are several feats new to this particular system, such as Bite of Opportunity that lets the Ravager make a bite attack against someone doing something which would normally provoke an attack of opportunity.* Several Gifts/Feats that have the same name work slightly differently due to the system. For example, the Devastating Bite Gift increases a bite’s critical threat range to 19 to 20 in D&D, but in Pathfinder it lets the Ravager spend two or three Actions to deal additional weapon damage if they hit. *In Pathfinder, Attacks of Opportunity are not available to characters by default, and must be earned via being a particular class like the Fighter or taken as a feat. One interesting difference for Pathfinder is that several Gifts for certain ancestries in D&D are locked behind these specific Archetypes as feats. For example, Fool’s Wisdom of the Harlequin Dragon is a 1st-level Gift in D&D, but in Pathfinder it’s a 4th-level feat restricted to Draconic Ravagers who are also Harlequin Dragons. Both versions do much the same thing, in making a contested skill check for the dragon to learn a secret piece of information about a target, with the Pathfinder version having more detail such as its interaction with the influence subsystem and a wider range of effects for critical success/fail results. Interestingly, the size-increasing Evolutions in D&D are restricted to Draconic Ravagers in Pathfinder, meaning that players who want to be a Gargantuan lizard wizard will either need to pursue a gish type build (such as playing a Wizard who takes Draconic Ravager archetype dedication feats) or rely upon more conventional spells to increase their size. As for the Dragon Mage, the archetype dedication initially grants skill training in a skill appropriate to their chosen magical tradition, and they choose their spells from one of the four main magical traditions in Pathfinder. Some feats unique to Pathfinder include Talisman Keeper (occult dragon heritage only, grants Talisman Dabbler Dedication feat and access to said archetype feats), Gossip Lore (amber dragons only, trained in Gossip Lore that lets one Recall Knowledge on any topic but a failed result grants a mixture of true and false information), and Draconic Metamagician (20th level, can use single actions as free actions if they’re metamagic or from a Dragon Mage feat, provided that their next action is to use their breath weapon). Similar to the system changes, several feats with the same name work slightly differently by system. The 5e Majestic Spell feat changes the visuals of a spell as a bonus action to impose the Frightened condition on those who see the spell once per long rest, while in Pathfinder it’s a one-action ability that imposes penalties to Recall Knowledge for onlookers to identify the spell and grants a bonus on Intimidation checks made by the Dragon Mage. Similarly, Breath Magic, which is the class feature in D&D that lets one spend spell slots to increase breath weapon damage, allows a Pathfinder Dragon Mage to change the AoE one of their archetype spells to be that of their breath weapon, albeit they then lose their ability to use their breath weapon for a limited number of rounds much like a real breath weapon. Thoughts: I am not as experienced with Pathfinder, but its take on the Ravager and Mage both look to be faithful translations. The choice to make some of the Gifts from D&D restricted to the archetypes is a bit of an odd choice, but not a major complaint.  Further covering the Pathfinder-exclusive content, the Draconic Diehard represents aeternal dragons who still hew to conservative outlooks on how a dragon should act. Namely, they are against the adoption of weapons, armor, and similar manufactured items to the extent that they swear an oath to never use such items. This archetype can be taken with any class, and they gain the Draconic Ravager Dedication feat for free at 1st level. As they sacrifice their training in such items, they gain increased effects and bonus feats based on how much they’re trading off: such as increasing the damage dice of their bite if they’d ordinarily be trained in martial weapons, and Empower Scales/Sturdy Scales if they’d be trained in light or medium armor, respectively. They also cannot make use of shields and similar held items like a magus’ tome, although they can still use consumables such as potions and material components. If they end up breaking their oath by using forbidden equipment, they lose the benefits of Draconic Ravager feats for 24 hours. The other Pathfinder-exclusive content is the Draconic Scion Versatile Heritage, representing creatures with some connection to dragons that manifests in physical and magical ways. This can range from growing patches of scales on their skin to snouts, horns, tails, and similar body parts. Beyond dragons siring children with non-dragons, other means of creating scions include gifted disciples of draconic secrets learning ways to adopt the traits of their studied species, undergoing magical transformations that change the foundation of their soul, a dragon’s life force being embedded in them, a dragon reincarnated as another species, and other A Wizard Did It types of backstories. Draconic Scions are rare and few in number, so they almost always live in settlements mainly composed of their non-dragon heritage, with the extremely rare settlements made up of scions almost always being ones part of the same extended family. Dragonkind runs the gamut of acceptance towards draconic scions, although aeternal dragons are more accepting on average, as they often find each other more relatable than traditionalist dragons. Draconic Scions gain access to a limited number of dragon-only Ancestry Feats in this book, plus 4 new feats specific to them. All of them are available at 1st level, with the exception of Dragon’s Lungs which requires being at least 5th level. Dragon’s Claws and Dragon’s Jaws grant appropriate unarmed attacks, Dragon’s Eyes grants darkvision provided that they already have low-light vision, and Dragon’s Lungs can only be taken by those with draconic heritage of an amphibious nature. This last feat grants a swim speed, along with being able to breathe both air and water. Thoughts: While being able to wield tools and have opposable thumbs is a smart decision for a playable species and I appreciate this being the default option for dragons, a lot of people’s mental image of the creature does not involving wielding sword and shield or relying on armor for protection. The 5e Dragon Class helps with this a bit via the Evolution options and Draconic Ravager subclass, but as the former doesn’t exist in Pathfinder I do like the idea of granting bonus feats in line with what the PC would have to sacrifice in committing to the role. The Draconic Scion is also cool, and can actually be a good way of “converting” Dragonborn to Pathfinder IMO. Thoughts So Far: I really like how this book expands on the “build your own dragon” by committing to class options, as solely limiting all the iconic abilities to a race/ancestry would make it very bloated. One thing I will say is that the two system’s approaches to class-based stuff can result in rather different-feeling dragon PCs, but also surprisingly similar in a few ways. As the D&D version has a Dragon as a class, a player who wants more class-specific features like a Cleric’s Channel Divinity or Warlock’s pact magic will need to multiclass. This forces them to balance how much they want their iconic dragon abilities to scale in power vs their iconic class abilities. As for Pathfinder, the dragons must be one of the existing classes, so a 1st-level Dragon Paladin is easily attainable. But with how Archetype Dedication feats work, a character is swapping out such a feat for a class-specific feat they’d ordinarily take, which results in a similar case of “how much do you want to be a Dragon or [X Class]” choice that comes from multi-classing in D&D. As for the Free Archetype house rule, the book does have a sidebar about Varying Power Levels, as the major balance factor is that iconic draconic abilities are locked behind archetypes so that mixed dragon/non-dragon parties can be viable. I will say that from my initial estimation, several of the Ravager/Mage feats can feel like no-brainer choices if they’re granted for free, particularly the ones that increase the dragon’s size and reach for martial builds, so campaigns using that house rule might want to exercise some degree of caution when it comes to PC advancement. Join us next time as we cover D&D’s Draconic Gifts and Pathfinder’s dragon-exclusive Feats! Libertad! fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jul 8, 2025 |
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Jul 5, 2025 22:53
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Slight change of plans: I'm splitting the Drive Cores post into two otherwise this is going to be another interminably long post - expect the other six Drive Cores later this week. INFINITE REVOLUTION: OVERDRIVE Part 4: Drive Cores, part 1 There are a total of 12 Cores in the book, covering a range of playstyles. I'm going to go through each of them one by one:  I'm reposting this spread, since I included it in the last post to show people what a Drive Core looks like - but for the rest of these I'll only be posting the Core icon/title, since otherwise I'm just posting half the rulebook. The Aries core is a mobile stance-dancing damage dealer. Its Passive gives it access to Red Giant Stance, which it starts in and which lasts one turn; RGS gives the Aries quite a bit more Thrust and makes its attacks hit harder and deal damage even on a miss. Its Powers all have stronger effects when in Red Giant Stance:
Its Burn Scars involve having glowing cracks in your skin, like you're burning inside out; your touch conducting enormous force; feeling physical pain if you refuse or retreat from a challenge; and going berserk when angry. In BURNUP, the Aries enters RGS permanently for the rest of the scene, and gains access to Canis Meteor as a Power: move, then destroy all Matched foes; if you moved more than 4, destroy all foes W1 instead; and if you destroyed 3 or more foes with this, you can immediately use the power again. Then, quote:At the end of the scene, your Drive grows to the size of a stellar body, and explodes into roiling crimson plasma.  The Taurus is a battlefield control specialist that leverages gravity to protect its allies and lock down enemy movement. Its Passive, Gravity Well, lets it choose to take 2 Drive Stress at the start of its own turn; if it does so, it's Braced (-1 damage from all sources) and Slowed (treat Thrust as 1, cannot be increased) until next round, Matched allies are also Braced, and Matched foes are Locked (can't Boost/Fold, but can Warp). Its Powers are:
Scars involve never changing your mind, having a gravitational pull strong enough that small objects orbit you, people feeling physically pulled towards you (the closer they are, the stronger) when you think about them, and:  In BURNUP, Gravity Well is permanently active for the rest of the scene, and instead of its normal effects:
quote:At the end of the scene, your Drive Core pulls in all nearby matter and light and collapses into a luminous singularity.  The Gemini is an agile, high-speed dogfighter that gets to exist in multiple Speed bands at once and can tag-team with itself. Its Passive, Quantum Double, means there's a second copy of the Gemini on the map that has its own Speed, tracked separately; whenever the Gemini Boosts, it can split the distance between itself and its Double, and whenever it attacks, it can use the Double as the attack's point of origin. Its Powers are:
Its Scars include: light bending and refracting around you as though you're in two places at once, your double flickering in and out of visibility and acting out potential futures, getting a momentary flash of other potential outcomes for every choice you make, and being unsure if your memories are actually yours. In BURNUP, the Gemini gains six Quantum Doubles for the rest of the scene, and now whenever you attack or Boost, all your Doubles do as well, and when you use a power, each Double does moderate Harm to all Matched foes and Primes them before the power resolve. Then, quote:At the end of the scene, your Drive cracks, then shatters, scattering echoes of you across every possible reality.  The Cancer is an active-defence shield tank that can force enemies to attack it and take damage for their trouble. Its Passive, Antimatter Shell, lets it take 2 Stress (either at the start of its turn or when it would take Impact) to give itself an AM Shell until the end of the round. As long as the Cancer has an AM Shell, it is permanently Braced, and any foe that hits it takes a moderate amount of Harm - and yes, you're explicitly meant to be able to trigger this before an enemy attack would actually hit you to then benefit from Braced and deal damage back. Its Powers are:
The Cancer's Scars are: being covered in crackling pseudomatter thorns and barbs, spontaneously annihilating small objects when you touch them (this happens randomly, but more frequently as you get more stressed), being permanently hypervigilant and ready to shield up or lash out at perceived hostile action, and feeling every emotion very, very strongly. In BURNUP, your AM Shell becomes permanent, reduces all Impact to 1, and destroys foes outright instead of dealing Harm to them; and at the start of each Incursion Turn (the GM turn where they get to choose to activate their units), you pick two foes to activate and force them to attack you. Then, quote:At the end of the scene, your Drive’s symmetry stabilizers fail, and it instantly self-annihilates in a matter-antimatter flash.  The Leo is an AoE passive damage Core that sets everything on fire, inflicting foes with slow-burning Radiance which cooks them over time and spreads as they die. Its Passive, Radiance means that all its Celestial weapons apply the Radiance status on hit, which lasts until the end of the scene - any foe with Radiance takes 1 Harm at the end of each round (ignoring reduction and immunity), which doesn't go away even if the Leo Zeroes Out or otherwise leaves the encounter. Whenever a foe with Radiance dies, they explode, applying Radiance to all Matched foes. Its Powers are:
Its Scars make you radiate blistering heat (leaving painful burns, and melting or vaporising weak materials in seconds), give you a mane of golden light which shines brighter the riskier your behaviour, makes you experience glory and attention as waves of blissful warmth better than any drug, and makes your ambitions burn like hungry flames that must be fed lest they devour you. In BURNUP, the Leo gains access to Magnetar Fission as a power (which means it can use this whenever it takes a Basic Action), which makes every foe with Radiance apply Radiance to all foes W1 of them, then if every foe has Radiance, destroy all foes, seal all Breaches, and win the fight. Then, quote:At the end of the scene, your Drive flares like the heart of a star, and erupts in a nova visible from Earth.  The Virgo is a controller that uses the tools of the enemy against them, taking over Veil Breaches and manipulating them to inflict statuses on enemies. Its Passive is Enthropic Harvest: whenever you Seal a Breach, replace it with a Void Bloom. Blooms count as a Breach for friendly powers and abilities and can be Sealed (for powers that do stuff when Sealing, of which there are a number including the Virgo's own), but don't generate Incursion. If Sealed, they reappear at the start of the next round. Additionally, all Allies gain 1 less Stress for each Bloom they're Matched with, whenever they would gain Stress. Its Powers are:
Its Scars are: your skin/hair/eyes becoming translucent and being covered in a sheen of void rime; a strange planet growing from your spine, which is bone-white, cold to the touch, and doesn't match any known species; hearing soft, unintelligble whispers from the Veil whenever you're out in space; and being less and less able to relate to humans, feeling fundamentally alone no matter how many people are around you. In BURNUP, all Veil stop being hostile to you, you immediately steal 4 Incursion from the GM and steal 4 more at the start of every one of your turns (even if the GM has less than 4), and you can use Incursion to activate Veil units that are Matched to a Breach (with the same costs as the GM); they treat Revolvers as allies and deal Harm instead of Impact when activated this way, meaning they can attack Veil units but not Revolvers. Then, quote:At the end of the scene, your Drive sprouts uncountable void-buds, and is overgrown with shimmering unlight flowers. The Veil will tend you for eternity. I ran a game using the previous edition where we had a Virgo, and I can confidently say this is the number one "your GM doesn't get to have any fun" Core in the game, and that was before Incursion existed as a mechanic for it to steal. 
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Jul 7, 2025 |
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Jul 7, 2025 16:26
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 By far the meatiest and lengthiest part of the character creation options, Draconic Gifts for D&D and Feats for Pathfinder allow one to fine-tune one’s dragon PC with just a little bit of everything. As can be expected, a lot of the traits that would be part of the Dragon class (and some subspecies) in D&D are repurposed as feats in Pathfinder. Most of the latter are Ancestry Feats, with a few further restricted by being locked into the Ravager or Mage archetype feat trees. Both the Draconic Gifts and Ancestry feats have the same tiers of progression: starting out with simple 1st level Gifts/Feats, some more substantial ones at 5th level, even more powerful ones at 9th level, and the 13th and 17th level ones representing mighty abilities associated with adult and ancient dragons. D&D goes one step farther and has 19th level Gifts, which in Pathfinder are 18th and 20th level dedication feats. But even Gifts/feats with the same name don’t always map to the same level, for there’s quite a bit of shift level-wise between the two systems, particularly for Pathfinder where some identical feats are higher-level than D&D Gifts. The low-level options include nice little abilities that can be useful but aren’t too powerful, such as Animal Shape (Bliss or Havoc Dragon, can change into a Tiny animal indefinitely and back again as an action, is 1st level in D&D and 5th level in Pathfinder), Animal Speaker (Bliss or Havoc Dragon, can cast Speak with Animals once per long rest in D&D and speak to all animals and +1 bonus to Make an Impression Pathfinder, is 1st level in D&D and 5th level in Pathfinder), Change Shape (can take the form of a Small or Medium humanoid, 1st level),* Collective Aid (bliss or toadstool dragons, can use Help as a bonus action in D&D or +4 to Aid in Pathfinder, 1st level in both), Draconic Advance (Draconic Ravager, can make a free melee attack against a target after Dashing/Striding twice as either a bonus action or 2-action ability depending on system, is 4th level in Pathfinder), Draconic Cantrip (learn a cantrip, 1st level), Draconic Resistance (Pathfinder only, you gain resistance equal to half your level against your associated damage type, 1st level),** Dragon Breath (Pathfinder only, gives you an AoE breath weapon that can be used once every 10 minutes or 1d4 rounds 3rd level onwards, deals 2d4 damage plus 1d4 every 2 levels thereafter, 1st level), Exaggerate Strength (Vermillion Dragon, can reroll a failed Wisdom save in D&D and once per long rest, treated as two levels higher against an incapacitation effect in Pathfinder once per day, 1st level), Ghostbane Breath (Crypt and Umbral Dragons, creatures damaged by breath weapon cannot benefit from incorporeal movement in D&D, while in Pathfinder the damage type is changed to positive/force instead of negative damage and undead take one additional damage die, 1st level in D&D and 5th level in Pathfinder), Hellfire (Infernal Dragon, can opt to turn your fire damage breath weapon into dealing half fire and half necrotic/evil damage, is 1st level in D&D and 5th level in Pathfinder), Hoard Hauler (gain proficiency/training in Athletics, as well as doubled carrying capacity in D&D or the Hefty Hauler feat in Pathfinder, 1st level), and Read the Threads (Time Dragon, use Perception checks or Dimension of Time Lore as your initiative; in D&D you cannot be surprised while conscious and in Pathfinder the initiative substitution can be used only once per hour, 1st level). *There’s a sidebar suggesting granting this Gift/feat for free in campaigns where dragons are mythical, in hiding, or otherwise have a good reason to keep their presence unknown. **Quite a bit of dragon heritages get this feat for free. They’d be the ones who gain resistance as part of their ancestry in D&D. We also get some nifty situational utility options for low-level dragons, such as Far Traveler (Cerulean Dragon, is automatically part of that subspecies in D&D, gain increased movement speed for overland travel, 1st level), Forest Shape (Forest Dragon, can take the form of an immobile tree, is 1st level in D&D and 5th In Pathfinder), and Weren’t You At That Party? (Indigo Dragon, can arrange a meeting with a contact you met in the past after spending 8 hours/1 day of downtime in a settlement, is 1st level in D&D and 5th level in Pathfinder).  The mid-level (5th and 9th level) options start granting more significant powers. They include Aeternal Stride (can move twice your speed once per short or long rest in D&D or once per day in Pathfinder, can automatically avoid reactions that would ordinarily be triggered by movement, is 5th level in D&D and 9th level in Pathfinder), Antipodal Duality (gain limited features of the subclass/archetype dedication you didn’t pick, 5th level in D&D and 9th in Pathfinder), Astral Eyes (Astral Dragon, can see invisibility creatures for a limited duration whose length depends on its refresh rate of rest/hour/day, 9th level in both), Channel Wings (Pathfinder only, once per day gain a fly speed equal to your speed for 10 minutes, 9th level), Deep Breath ( can “supercharge” your breath weapon to have a doubled AoE and range [and double damage in Pathfinder] in exchange for a longer refresh rate, 5th level in D&D and 9th level in Pathfinder), Draconic Haste (can cast Haste on self once per long rest/day), Dragon’s Instincts (can roll initiative twice and take higher result once per long rest/day, is 5th level in D&D and 9th level in Pathfinder), Earthbound (can force a flying target to descend to the ground on a failed saving throw once per long rest, is 5th level in D&D and 9th level in Pathfinder), Gouging Claws (Rift Dragon, 9th level in both, critical hit with claws deal persistent damage due to bleeding wound until healed), Ground Slam (can create a shockwave that deals damage and can knock foes prone in an AoE effect, 9th level in D&D and 10th level Draconic Ravager feat in Pathfinder), and Lingering Breath (after-effects of breath weapon continue to exist in affected area for 1d4 rounds while dealing less damage, 9th level in D&D and 12th level Draconic Ravager feat in Pathfinder). The 9th and 10th levels are also where we see the bulk of new uses for breath weapons coming into play, such as a Rift Dragon’s Dissolving Breath that can remove/lower resistance against acid and physical damage types to affected targets, a Harlequin Dragon’s Laughing Gas Breath that can debuff targets as they collapse with laughter, or an Apocalypse Dragon’s Slime Breath that becomes a long-term infesting disease. At 8th to 14th levels, we see a lot of great options, with many being good enough in scope and utility of use for many builds. They include Draconic Reflexes (gain an additional reaction every round that must be used to make a natural weapon attack, 13th in D&D and 14th in Pathfinder), Draining Bite (gain temporary hit points after making a bite attack against a target, 13th in D&D, 9th in Pathfinder), Magic Resistance (grants advantage on saves against spells and magical effects in D&D and +1 on saves vs the same stuff in Pathfinder, is 9th level in D&D and 13th level in Pathfinder), Miasma (Green Dragon, emanates a concealing cloud dealing poison damage around body after using their breath weapon, is 13th level in D&D 14th level in Pathfinder), Overwhelming Spice (Vermillion Dragon, infuses breath with burning spice that can stun targets who crit fail/fail save by 5 or more against the breath weapon, is 13th in D&D and 12th in Pathfinder), and Reflect Spell (9th level in D&D and 12th level Dragon Mage feat in Pathfinder, is pretty much what it sounds like).  The 13th to 19th level Gifts and feats represent the harnessing of aeternal power, the cumulation of a dragon’s journey of rapid self-improvement where they become more like the elder wyrms of their traditionalist brethren. They include Adamantine Claws (Underworld Dragon and Draconic Ravager, claws are treated as adamantine and can thus deal more damage to objects along with getting past certain creature resistances, 19th level in D&D and 18th in Pathfinder), Cloud Form (Cloud Dragon, can transform into a gaseous form for a limited time, 13th level in D&D and 17th in Pathfinder), Expanded Resistance (gain resistance to one more damage type in D&D or resistance 5 to a bunch of non-physical damage types in Pathfinder, is 13th level in D&D and 17th in Pathfinder), Golden Luck (Gold Dragon, turn a failed save into a successful one once per long rest in D&D or reroll a failed save in Pathfinder and can’t use it again for 1d4 rounds, is 19th level in D&D and 18th level Draconic Ravager exclusive in Pathfinder), Hyperfocus Speed (magically increase their speed for 10 minutes once per long rest or day, doubling in D&D or +120 foot fly speed in Pathfinder, is 13th in D&D and 17th in Pathfinder), Inspire Envoy (Sovereign Dragon, can bless a mortal gain various stat buffs, and in D&D takes on a Geas from you, is 19th level and Dragon Mage restricted in D&D and 20th level Draconic Ravager feat in Pathfinder), Living Breath (Dragon Mage, can turn your breath into a movable 10 foot square form of a dragon like yourself, deals damage to those in it and requires concentration to have it persist for up to 1 minute, 19th level in D&D and 18th level in Pathfinder), Redemption (Paradise Dragon and Dragon Mage, can speak to a dead creature’s soul and offer it a chance of redemption, if accepts grants a free casting of Raise Dead and creature moves one step closer to good on alignment or lawful if already good, 13th level in D&D and 17th in Pathfinder), Tidal Wave (Sea Dragon and Draconic Ravager, while in a sufficiently large body of water can slam into it to create a damaging AoE wave that also can knock prone and carry off targets), and Transforming Breath (Tumult Dragon, can polymorph one creature affected by breath weapon once per long rest/day, 13th level in D&D and 17th level in Pathfinder). Thoughts: While it might look like there’s an awful lot of Gifts/Feats, the fact that many are specific to particular subspecies means that the choices aren’t actually that overwhelming. The subspecies-specific options tend to be more specialized, particularly in regards to roles, such as the Amber and Indigo dragons getting good social-based gifts/feats, or the healing-focused options being mostly consigned to the Bliss Dragons. I would like to note that the Time Dragon gets redeemed a bit with some rather strong options to make up for its otherwise lackluster base features. Thoughts So Far: Much like the dragon subspecies, the Gifts and feats run the gamut from “good for anyone” to “useful only in particular campaigns.” For instance, being able to take the form of an immobile tree isn’t going to be as appealing as using Help as a bonus action/+4 to Aid attempts. And while the Draconic Diehard is meant to cover for this, the fact that certain Pathfinder feats are strongly associated with dragons as a whole (like Breath Weapon and the size increase ones) means that a lot of players will be going for those ones first and foremost. This isn’t as much of a problem in 5th Edition, where such feats are Evolutions instead. I do appreciate that there’s a lot of Gifts/feats that have out-of-combat uses, which helps draconic PCs be more than just scaled brutes, even if many of those are subspecies-specific. Join us next time as we wrap up this review with some fluff and worldbuilding in Dragons and the Lux Aeterna Ritual and the Hoards of Power optional subsystem! Libertad! fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jul 8, 2025 |
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Jul 8, 2025 01:40
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 Dragons and the Lux Aeterna Ritual is a purely flavor chapter, written from the in-character perspective of Kallizandrex, an aeternal green dragon scholar. This chapter discusses each of the 45 dragon families’ views and approaches to the ritual, and in the case of Battlezoo’s more original families provides some additional fluffy world-building. Beyond the aforementioned quicker path to power, traditionalist dragons often become aeternal because it is in line with their ethos or or helps enhance some aspect of their nature. For example,the isolationist nature Black Dragons and their desire to win at all costs makes them more likely than other chromatic dragons to go “all-in” with a risky magical ritual. This also has the effect of causing traditionalist Black Dragons to hate and fear their aeternal counterparts, viewing them as akin to rapidly-ticking time bombs that will eclipse them in power if they’re not dealt with immediately. While there are some interesting exceptions, for the most part this chapter is a bit repetitive, in that entries have recurring themes of draconic societies debating the merits of fast but risky power vs slow yet tried-and-true means, and aeternal dragons being more likely to interact with non-dragons and join adventuring groups. Each entry also discusses which character classes aeternal dragons of that family are likeliest to gravitate. Some of the more interesting exceptions are worth calling out The first are Bliss Dragons, who have their own unique process of the Lux Aeterna, where they perform the ritual in order to save a mortal’s life. Astral Dragons are among the least likely type to undergo the ritual, but those who do are strongly compelled by encountering visions or memories from mental echoes of long-dead dragons. Crypt Dragons patrol the planes in search of threats to the natural flow of souls, and being independent in this duty they typically undertake the Lux Aeterna in order to avert a great threat that needs relatively quick action. Lunar Dragons watch inhabitants of planets much like people in the real world might watch a reality show, as detached observers who often develop one-sided bonds of fondness for people they may never personally meet. Their society has a rule of non-interference, but Lunar Dragons who want to more directly intervene (usually due to forming an attachment for their favorite watched beings) are the likeliest to undertake the ritual. Finally, Void Dragons are cursed to eventually be consumed by alien entities representative of the cosmic forces of entropy, and the Lux Aeterna can not only reset the clock but let them control how much cosmic corruption they take via the selective attainment of powers specific to their kind. Thus, the Lux Aeterna is viewed by many Void Dragons as a means of potential salvation for their people. Thoughts: I covered it before, but I did find this chapter repetitive in places and suffers a bit from word bloat. That being said, I’d prefer to have this chapter than not, as it can be a useful bite-sized look for players who need a quick rundown of their draconic PC’s society and common reasons for adventuring.  Hoards of Power is a new subsystem present in both the D&D and Pathfinder 2e systems of this book. It makes references to a crafting subsystem in the Battlezoo Bestiary books, which I don’t own, so I can’t give it as insightful a review as I can other parts of this book. The Pathfinder 2e version says that one can use the Automatic Bonus Progression optional rules, but that the monster parts subsystem is recommended. In short, when an aeternal dragon PC gains treasure, they can choose to add it to their treasure hoard. Coins, art, gemstones, and the like add their full value, but magic items only add half their value. The dragon can then “spend” the value of their hoard to refine and imbue their natural weapons and scales, with the former being treated as handwraps and the latter being treated as bracers (but only when they’re not wearing armor or using a shield). For Pathfinder groups using Automatic Bonus Progression, dragon PCs who upgrade their hoard to a certain amount worth of gold pieces gain the ABP benefits of that level, using item bonus instead of potency bonus. In the case of gaining defense potency their maximum Dexterity modifier to AC is capped at +5. Thoughts: I cannot really grade this sub-system without buying another sourcebook, so others more familiar with the Battlezoo Bestiary series will need to fill me in if these rules sound good or not. I do like the idea of dragons effectively “buying” new powers by collecting treasure, as in a normal campaign hoarding wealth and not using it is actually suboptimal from a game design perspective. One oversight is that while it’s not outright spelled out, the book doesn’t say if items in the hoard can or cannot be used without “taking them out” of said hoard. While the implication is that the dragon PC will be storing them for safekeeping when not on adventures, it does raise the question of stuff like using a hoard’s Lyre of Building during downtime for constructing a home base but not being taken on adventures. Our book ends with an Appendix, which includes 11 alternatives* to the Lux Aeterna Ritual to explain varying concepts for dragon PCs in case the aforementioned ritual doesn’t fit the DM or player’s vision. The Dragon Index lists every dragon family in alphabetical order, detailing snippets of important game information such as their dragon family (chromatic, metallic, planar, etc), damage type, unique Gifts/feats, and the like. *The book says 10, but they have 1 more. Thoughts So Far: I don’t have much to add for this section as a whole besides that I liked the Dragon Index most, as I can see it of most frequent use for the average player and DM needing a quick comparison or reference for building characters. Final Thoughts: While making playable monsters in D&D and Pathfinder always required a delicate balancing act between authenticity and playability, dragons in particular are one of the most difficult for such a task. Battlezoo Ancestries: Dragons had a difficult road and high bar to clear, yet managed success where I’ve seen so many other designers fail. This is the best “playable dragon” sourcebook I’ve ever read, and would highly recommend it to gaming groups who want to emphasize the Dragon part of their Dungeons & Dragons (and Pathfinder) campaigns. But this isn’t the end of draconic goodness! Later this month, I have plans to review of Itza’s Guide to Dragonbonding. For those fans of Eragon, Drakengard, and similar “dragon-rider” fantasy media, this 5e setting is heavily inspired by such titles and pits PCs in the saddle of true dragons as they battle world-ending threats!
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Jul 10, 2025 00:48
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HIS MAJESTY THE WORM In Actual Play, Part 6: The End It’s time to wrap up His Majesty The Worm. FOLLOW UP I said at the beginning of this series that I would follow up on anything I changed my mind about after I wrapped up my game. I said previously that the hidden information aspect of the battle system did not work in practice because everything got revealed pretty quickly anyway. At the end of my run the players said they really liked this part. To them it felt like actually playing poker against the house. There was a post a few years back on some blog about how many “boring combats” are not actually boring to the players, because they can’t the monster stat blocks and don’t know whether something is a foregone conclusion. I can look at the imbalance of forces and the number of cards available to the monsters and realize the players are going to just keep a bad guy stunlocked for most of the fight. From their perspective they’re just barely keeping a dangerous enemy from unleashing their most powerful abilities. One thing I did not give enough emphasis, given how important it is to me personally: His Majesty The Worm frees us from the utter misery of rolling to hit, waiting 5 minutes and doing it again. Games like Into the Odd do this by skipping straight to the damage roll, producing combat that’s so blazing fast and deadly that the optimal choice is always attack attack attack and focus the enemy down before they do the same to you. His Majesty The Worm goes in the opposite direction and gives you a reason to pay attention no matter whose turn it is, and a chance to act at any time. Your time is never wasted and even if you screw up and your action goes nowhere you set someone else up for success. But God drat does it feel like work to run, in a way other games in the genre really do not.  Gyrfalcon “Gary the Mage” Hakkapeliitta and his archrival Jerboa “Jerry the Mage” De Hornachos MY OWN GAME My game of His Majesty The Worm ran seven sessions. Besides play reports I also included all the maps, keys and custom monsters I made. It took me about two weeks to make each realm, which is how long I had between sessions. Dungeon creation follows a power law where the first 90 percent comes together in a couple days but the last few key entries and monster descriptions take the remaining time. The first area I created was Crypt of the Vampire Voivode, and I made the pregens to play with that. Now that all the realms are finished, I think Beneath Hangman's Hill would be a better tutorial dungeon. My dungeon doesn't have any books in the treasure piles because I didn't like the Bookworm talent or give it to any of my pregens. I also ignored the languages rule. If your players want to take the Bookworm or Loremaster starting talents on their Cups characters you should either warn them that the dungeon doesn't have a ton of hooks that interact with those powers, or add languages and books back in yourself. One change I would make if I did the whole thing over is add more shortcuts back to the ossuary. You could add these connections to existing nodes by inserting weak walls at map edges, which can be broken through to open shortcuts through the ossuary and to the surface.  The Unicorn, Jerry the Mage and his brothers Baramundi “Barry the Mage” and Scarab “Scary the Mage” De Hornachos hold the tunnel entrance while the Guild descends into the Cave of Squids I’m going back to His Majesty The Worm for another couple sessions because the players liked it more than I thought they did, and I’ve got a good core group that I can hand recruit from instead of running a public game. I don’t believe any of my problems with the rules will actually be fixed but running for a private group instead of an open table will be less fatiguing. Teaching rules to brand new players, making pregens and making a new dungeon every two weeks is not hard. The hard part of running an open table, which really does not work with the languorous pace of the game’s battle, camp and city systems, is ensuring that every session ends at a good stopping point within the allotted time. Not having to cycle players in and out means you can drop the game and pick it up anywhere you please. (It’ll also be nice to play at a venue where we don’t have to shout to be heard. Whether a game store, cafe or brewery, games in public places inevitably end surrounded by roaring drunks, screaming toddlers and howling dogs. But that’s a reality of public space and not anything to do with the game)  The Guild comes under attack from three sides, facing a Mind Flayer, a pack of Ghouls and a group of mind-controlled adventurers THE END His Majesty The Worm is what would happen if Fantasy Flight made a dungeon crawler before their RPG division got shut down by private equity leeches. It’s got wacky peripherals, cool subsystems, frustrating bullshit, piles of metacurrency, overstuffed feat and gear lists… This is not a game I ever saw myself liking. The two primary focuses (in-depth tactical combat and inventory management) are things I hate. But Red Markets also had a terrible premise (zombies and resource management) and was fun to play. His Majesty The Worm is the only game I’ve ever enjoyed that required me to learn a bespoke vocabulary of actions. You can’t just say “I do X” and roll dice on your turn, you have to match a shifting pool of resources with a menu of allowable moves every time you act. I think that’s the real determining factor of whether you will like this game or not, moreso than fiddly inventory management bullshit and fights that take up an entire session. I may do a final final post if anything happens in the last couple sessions that changes my opinion of the game. That’ll be after Gencon 2025, so August a the soonest.  More unicorns
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Jul 10, 2025 21:16
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