FATAL & Friends 2020: 61 billion casualties

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > FATAL & Friends 2020: 61 billion casualties

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

SunAndSpring posted:

Deviant the Renegades, part 1

The Intro

I figure I might as well get in on the ground floor while the Kickstarter is going and talk about this game, which can be described in a very reductive way as a game in which one can put Seth Brundle from The Fly, the titular character of RoboCop, Eleven from Stranger Things, The Human Torch from Fantastic Four, and maybe an X-man or two into the same party to go and gently caress up evil Conspiracies with their powers before everything goes to hell and you have a real Tetsuo moment and turn into a pile of writing biomass. There's quite a bit more to it, but I think what's very satisfying about this game is that there's probably not going to be a huge amount of tedious lore arguments since this is largely a very toolbox-like game line, compared to the more directed and convoluted settings of its sister games such as Mage, Promethean, and so on. I will be going broad strokes on the mechanics, both because going too in-depth is tedious and probably a breach of copyright law, and also because much is subject to change from this playtest until the release.

It's funny you bring up copyright law, since in depth discussions of mechanics are protected (there's only so many ways to roll dice) while rewriting thousands of words of setting materials and fluff is specifically not.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2019 23:00

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 22:59

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

I've always been weirded out by the 'reviewers' who rewrite whole books*.

*_{_Mors}

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 03:07

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Charisma, Combat, Magic, Sanctity, Scouting, and Thievery. drat that's a satisfying set of attributes. Add in athletics and I think you'd have just about everything covered.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2019 00:20

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Like us commoners would be allowed to live forever. We'd end up with shorter, more disposable lives while the trillionaires buy bigger mountains to fortify.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2019 22:12

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Why does the ice moon of Saturn not have any settlements? First of all it's not going to be any colder than the others and second of all it'd be easier to tunnel into.

"Cat like disposition and a good heart"
No need to say the same thing twice.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2020 04:32

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

That's the best breath weapon ever

# ¿ Feb 5, 2020 04:16

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

hyphz posted:

And, um, apart from that

Let's talk about the other monsters. I'm not going to give the stats for all of them, since this book is still actively being promoted. I will, however, give their descriptions and names, because many of them are.. um.. weird.

Bickerknockers are giant stick insects that look as if they're made of twigs and like to eat angry or fearful people, the angrier or more afraid the better.

Crystal Spiders are, well, giant spiders made of crystals. Their bodies are sought after by jewelry makers.

Eyrwulfs are blink dogs, except they're evil and they turn into mist. But they can't stay as mist for long, or they billow away completely and can't reform.

Funglions are creatures that look like lions made of mushroom flesh and breathe spores.

Ironphagous Drakes are giant lizards that will eat any kind of metal. This includes your armor, which they will reduce to flakes with their acid breath. They are not, however, at all interested in eating you, and small ones are tamed and used as vacuum cleaners by very bold blacksmiths.

Masquerades are ambush predators that can turn into any object and that want to eat you. Yea, ok, they're the Polymorph from Red Dwarf, but hey, that was cool.

Virago Sponges are spherical expanding sponges that also want to eat you.

Muskpatro are tiny creatures made of living moss that adopt caverns and attack those who harm them, and also hate anyone who forgets anything.

Okuloi are writhing masses of eyeballs of different types, which create different types of illusion. Mammalian eyes create illusions of harm happening to you; insectile eyes hypnotise you; and human eyes are the worst of all, because they instantly take advantage of your personal secrets. They know how well these work, and if they kill you, they will add your human eyes to their collection.

Owlbears are owlbears. Good ol' owlbears. Good ol', hang on, sapient owlbears. These guys have their own societies and you can befriend them, too.

Swordtusk Behemoths are giant mammoths with fur made from curly, wooly metal, and tusks that can't be melted by any flame.

Senvisaga are the other kind of doppelganger; they steal the faces and bodies of other creatures and play their role to the hilt until everyone they once knew is dead, then they move onto the next town.

Which has some very original ideas, some unnecessary twists, and some old chestnuts. The book does mention that some monsters may inflict Conditions instead of dealing damage, but none of the monsters listed are actually described as doing so.

If you're going to have a short monster list, then might as well make it 75% rad as heck and 25% familiar favorites.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2020 00:18

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Night, you committed one of the classic blunders of talking about dwarves: you got ancestors and descendents mixed up.

This is also one of my biggest pet peeves

# ¿ May 31, 2020 15:39

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Tibalt posted:

I wanted to post my thoughts about the Warhammer Fantasy 4e system and the game design decisions they made, but it doesn't really fit the format of this thread, so I started posting them in the WFRP thread instead. Feel free to come by and tell me why I'm wrong.

Personally, I don't like the ten thousand word reviews that only talk about fluff. :justpost:

# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 15:15

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

I guess the F&F archive might have to take posts directly?

# ¿ Jun 24, 2020 18:45

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Xiahou Dun posted:

...why is East on the left, against how all actual maps in the West work?

That was my first thought, too.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2020 13:23

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Night10194 posted:

Yeah, Death Knight family is cool. The Tainted Bloodline just being cool monsters and their magically powered kids and buddies is better than a lot of the places it could have gone.

The classic tainted bloodlines are almost always Lovecraft stuff or sometimes vampires, so it's cool to see other options on the random table.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2020 17:48

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Falconier111 posted:

Huh. In the MotP they stated portals between the Prime Materials and Inner Planes form frequently in areas heavily associated with a given element. As in, if you want to avoid the Ethereal and portals, you can your way in through the depths of a particularly large volcano or the eye of a hurricane. I didn't go in depth there because the book only barely touched on it, but it's interesting that they chose to deemphasize that here.

Removing interesting mystical things from the world in favor of :smugwizard:

is completely in line with 3e design philosophy.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 17:34

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

PurpleXVI posted:

I'd play it for comedy.

It would walk up to the party and stand behind them, looming. Constantly dropping hints that it's watching and waiting for them to do something, without explicitly saying what. And it just keeps following them, starting to drop hints about what it doesn't want them to do. And eventually it turns out that it's enforcing a misspelled contract, one with a badly placed comma or something similar that slipped through, so now it only gets to paste people if they adopt a grey-and-white sheepdog at exactly 3AM or something similarly stupid, and it's desperate for a chance to actually complete its duty and enforce the contract. Thus it's been stalking adventuring parties and travellers and trying to goad them into doing whatever the dumb thing is, so it has some purpose in existence, but it can't legally do anything except be really, really annoying until they do.

And yes my players do absolutely hate me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds6-o4gomRc

# ¿ Aug 1, 2020 21:52

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

That land scheme is funny because here, now in 2020 it's so obvious. But in 1992 the average gamer had not heard of nigerian princes asking for help to get their money back.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2020 17:41

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

I'm just over here lol'ing at AD&D's ideas about wilderness travel.

A mining camp that's only half an hour from the surface would be a regular trading post that every surface dweller in a ten mile radius could tell you about.

Half an hour? That's like walking to the grocery store and back.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2020 05:04

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Mr. Maltose posted:

Yeah, Wings! seems like it be a really easy adaption. Either your party has pre-existing hooks where they can effectively be plus ones for a wedding of someone they sort of know about, or they can just be hired to be at the wedding because of course you hire a group of morally flexible sellswords for weddings. poo poo like one of the couple getting grabbed by a huge bird is a noted risk in D&D fantasy world.

Particularly if the groom has a reason to suspect the bride wants to engineer an escape with her druid 'friend'

# ¿ Sep 30, 2020 23:23

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

That Old Tree posted:

In These Troubled Times™, I'd suggest finding something you like that's not ubiquitous that you want to help other people discover and like.

The best advice

# ¿ Oct 7, 2020 18:27

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Gatto Grigio posted:

The OSR contingent is weirdly obsessed with frogs in general for reasons unknown.

Because frogs are cute and you should feel bad for hurting them

# ¿ Oct 15, 2020 01:10

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Chaos Space Marines are best as Saturday morning cartoon villains though

Look at the hosed up scale between the marine boots and the robot nerds. Are they like 4'6"?

Epicurius posted:

In sorry, but I just love the idea of a giant hermit crab that lives in church bells, because of course it would.

Don't damage the bell, it's what we're here to get!!! Can't attack the crab from behind.

Speleothing fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Oct 16, 2020

# ¿ Oct 16, 2020 16:50

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

There's a difference between fixing the system and fixing the racism and sexism in the lore.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2020 18:55

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

By popular demand posted:

I don't need this silly fanservice sexy design.
Just give me some badass ducks.

Those ducks show an awful lot of feather

# ¿ Feb 20, 2021 16:19

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

I remember back when degenesis was new and there were constant threads for it on /tg/. It seemed really lovely and racist, almost designed to appeal to the worst people.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2021 02:33

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

I feel like when you're in kung fu land you're allowed to count up just as much as you're allowed to count down.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2021 19:00

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Find a daoist master to help you with your chi cultivation because you've become lovesick but had to fight your love's brother this week? Sounds like you're already playing into the narrative of the condition

# ¿ Apr 5, 2021 15:09

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

That's the same problem as HP in every other game ever. How is it that you keep going through fight after fight until you just randomly kick the bucket to orc with a spear #14.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2021 21:37

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

GimpInBlack posted:

Nonbinary, African gold smuggler from the Empire of Mali, circa the reign of Mansa Musa.

I'll agree with this

# ¿ May 12, 2021 19:41

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Precambrian posted:

Nagash and Sigmar as a man who fashioned himself into a god and a man who was fashioned into a god make a nice contrast. You could read it as Sigmar's received all of what humanity hopes a god would be to them: just, forgiving, compassionate, etc. while Nagash is what a human would be if they were given the power of a god to use on others: presenting themselves as just in the most self-serving and childish way.

Etc etc etc

You should write for GW

# ¿ Jun 7, 2021 00:55

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Really enjoying this review! Any funky low budget art in the books?

Edit: the Selfoes could also be a sola fide insert: the protestant idea that salvation is wholly dependent on faith rather than works/good deeds

Yes. The book is dripping in sola fide. After all, the only mission that matters is convincing the unfaithful to be faithful. Everything else that you do is just extra steps along that road.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2021 12:17

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

kommy5 posted:

So we have Catholic Elves. Do we have Calvinist Dwarfs? Please tell me there are also Calvinist dwarfs.

Your explicit job handed down from the almighty is to go grab certain individuals and bring them into paradise. The Calvinists are the player characters.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2021 14:23

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

By popular demand posted:

I'd go with the guy shouting Lightning Bolt while throwing darts over playing this game every time.

Maybe combining religious sperging and gaming is strictly an American thing, whenever I got to sperg out with gamers real life religion was never on the table.

That's because this game isn't marketed towards you. It's marketed towards your parents who want you to be a good little christian and memorize bible passages*.

*only the right ones tho, not the commie bits

# ¿ Jun 20, 2021 12:58

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Epicurius posted:

I'm not trying to defend him, unless you think "racist, right wing rear end in a top hat" is a phrase i use as a compliment.

Then don't attribute the rise of talented authors to him. They would have become famous and well respected under the auspices of any editor, and we would have had a less fascist golden age of sci-fi with more diverse and more leftist stories.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2021 12:58

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Do it. Write. Make it happen.

Dooooooo ittttttttttt

# ¿ Jul 23, 2021 16:12

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Tag yourself, I'm the $75 mouse

# ¿ Sep 26, 2021 23:28

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

There's a whole strain of bad world-building where you come up with a gimmick about the way things look without any thought at all as to the stories that take place on it or whether the gimmick matters at all to gameplay. (the world is a cube! You're inside a hollow sphere! All the trees are giant mushrooms! Birds don't exist! Giant megaliths everywhere! The sun is a lizard!)

Zak seems to be caught up in that.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2021 18:45

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Excellent, we couldn't have asked for a better first character.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2021 17:53

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Who was it that had a statue of Nike chained to the city square so that Victory could never abandon them?

# ¿ Nov 14, 2021 00:44

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

kommy5 posted:

Thinking about how your book and graphs work without color is kind of a necessity, after all. Not just because of color blindness, but the very common event where all the people have is a black and white printer or only a single pen or pencil. Really, it comes up a lot and there are a ton of best practices out there that you can use.

I've got a hiking guidebook that was intended to rate the routes on a green- yellow- orange- red difficulty scale. Guess what got dropped to save costs on the paperback edition? All the colors of course.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2022 21:06

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Kurieg posted:

Not so much the main 'villain' but the main 'dude you fight' in the CP2077 game is a dude who's only remaining fleshy parts are the skin over his metal skull and the brain, the rest of him is just a top spec combat robot.

Ahhh, robocop.

Actually, I think having a complete brain makes him still more human than robocop

# ¿ Jan 31, 2022 23:01

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 22:59

Speleothing: May 6, 2008; Spare batteries are pretty key.

Ronwayne posted:

What's spray can cheese eaten by squirting directly into one's mouth?

That's cheese-wiz, because only wizards know how to make a pressurized can.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2022 21:50

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