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Night10194 posted:Amusingly, the Commissar isn't even very good in OW. Their abilities kind of suck next to the normal Sergeant. About the only really useful thing the Commissar can do is try to counter Fear tests a little more easily. The Commissar was alright, they could pull their weight in combat with some advances. Mostly in melee. The real reason why you want one though is their rank. Even a junior commissar is multiple steps above a sergeant in rank, which gives them a huge and very important boost to requisition rolls. If you wanted the cool toys, you wanted a Commissar to ensure you succeeded on the rolls for that power sword.
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Nov 7, 2019 09:43
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Re; Dragonlance There's a bit of running plot that I kinda liked, in that a lot of the evil folks that worship Takhsis eventually mellow out after they wise up to the fact that they're just being used, and there never was a place at the table for them in the first place. There's a bit where the Alien Blue Dragon Overlord tells Mina to go gently caress herself when she shows up to bring him back into the fold. All he wanted was to be shown the respect of a valued servant, and to rule in her name, and Takhsis is such a selfish rear end in a top hat she can't even do that much. The draconians are a bit gimmicky with regards to their abilities, but they actually get a couple of standalone novels that flesh them out fairly well (if memory serves) and make them interesting. They find out about and then rescue the first and only batch of female draconians that were made in secret, and eventually found their own nation in the remains of an abandoned dwarf colony. They shift towards neutral as they focus more on building their fledgling nation, and mostly abandon the wars of a goddess who never gave a poo poo about them. Its still mostly bad, but I remember liking parts of Dragonlance.
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Dec 1, 2019 17:30
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Wrestlepig posted:its not really mentioned in the book but I will note: Everything I've read about dunklezahn and his will is incredible Its basically a long list of potential plot hooks for GMs, and I agree it owns. Last time I played SR, we got some of our best gear by flying down to Mexico and kidnapping a couple Aztechnology blood mages and dropping those evil fucks off at Big D's magic institute. Pays way better than most runs, and you can feel good knowing you just removed a real piece of poo poo from magical society. Also, as the SR games will show you, there's some pretty interesting stuff you can throw at the PCs if they're not just into robbing one bunch of lovely capitalists for another bunch of lovely capitalists.
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Oct 21, 2020 12:33
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Bieeanshee posted:I remember, once upon a time, when SJG had a warehouse out in... Alberta, I think it was. That's odd. I live in Edmonton and I can't fathom why an RPG company would keep a warehouse out here. BC or Ontario I could understand, but Alberta?
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Nov 3, 2020 12:28
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JcDent posted:Degensis Stuff Are you planning on doing the metaplot adventure books? I'm reading through In Thy Blood right now, and uh, drat. Are these guys time travellers from the 90's?
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Mar 20, 2021 13:39
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Hell, I'll do them if nobody else wants to. I keep having to go back and see if Mark Rein-Hagen wrote this thing.
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Mar 20, 2021 16:26
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Degenesis, In Thy Blood Welcome to my first F&F folks, let me be the first to tell you that this one is a doozy. I’ll be covering 3 (possibly 4) of the Metaplot adventure books for Degenesis Rebirth, the first of these being In Thy Blood, the second being The Killing Game, and the last being Black Atlantic. That is of course, if I don’t put myself out of my misery first.  A fourth book just came out covering Justinian, the capital of the Protectorate and it has a whole bunch of Metaplot in it too.A bit of a foreword first. I do like some of the setting of Degenesis (and I hate a lot of it as well), at least enough to wonder what’s really going on with all the setting mysteries, hence why I started reading these books. I kinda wish I hadn’t, because its just Vampire the Masquerade metaplot all over again. These guys have a story to tell, and for reasons beyond me they didn’t just choose to write a drat novel. They want to tell you a tale of epic characters, powerful nations, and mysterious forces clashing on a post-apocalyptic stage. You might think the PCs are meant to be amongst these characters, since its a game directed at them and all. You’d be wrong. The PCs are less movers and shakers, and more of a television crew, traveling from place to place to witness events and probably die while doing so. Survival means getting to watch more powerful NPCs affect the story while you get to make superficial changes at best. Stuff will just happen to you regardless of skill rolls or other PC actions, the very function of the skills themselves will be fudged far too often, and sometimes the GM will even tell you how you feel! When I say this is a railroad, I mean I’m pretty sure SIXMOREVODKA has a controlling interest in Deutsche Bahn. Chapter 1 gives us a brief summary of events and covers the location of the adventure with a lot of unnecessary detail (I’m not sure why the party would give a drat about its exports or trade routes), Chapter 2 gives us the full background to the adventure, Chapter 3 is the “Adventure” itself, and Chapter 4 is yet more adventure. Anyways, on with the show! Chapter 1, Oil and Fire  Our tale begins in the Alps of Pugare, post-apocalyptic Italy for those that might have forgotten. The Cloister of Lucatore is the center of production for the Elysian Oils, basically combat drugs you rub into your skin because why the hell not. There's a few different varieties that boost different stats, and you can even mix Burn into them if you're dumb enough and don't care about pissing off the only Doctors in the setting. Lucatore is the seat of power of the Baptist Altair (one of the Anabaptist’s head honchos). Altair rose from humble beginnings in the Benesato clan, converted to Anabaptism, discovered the secret of the Elysian Oils, and became a powerful warlord. He led the Anabaptists to many victories over the Jehammedans in the Adriatic Wars, before eventually suing for peace because this war had been going on for a hundred years and nobody really understood why they were killing each other any more. Dude was basically a messiah figure and beloved by all. Then one day someone plants a knee in his back and slits his throat while he’s alone in his garden. His much younger wife and fellow warrior Neva refuses to let the local Spitalian surgeon (or indeed anyone) examine the body, and it is buried the next day under a 10 ton boulder. Does the book say anything about this makes his wife obviously guilty in the eyes of any PC with a half a brain? Nope! As the death of someone so important threatens to seriously unbalance the power structure in Purgare, the PCs are ostensibly representatives of their cults sent to investigate the murder of Altair. The book does not give the cults any reason to work together on this, so its up to you as a GM to patch over that hole.  Lucatore is relatively safe. The Helvetics keep the passes through the Alps guarded, and Anabaptist warriors and missionaries have cleared away most of the Clans from the province. Aside from Clan Lombardi, which controls the largest city in Northern Pugare and has resisted conversion to Neognosis for decades. Lucatore has around 3000 people in the town itself, with about 10,000 in the surrounding province. It is still ruled by governor Ennio Benesato, brother of Altair but not a convert to Anabaptism itself. Altair’s widow really runs the show though, as she controls the guards and Ennio is the prime suspect in his brother’s murder. Aside from the Elysian oils, it's about what you’d expect from a medieval-tech level monk town. Its got a scrapper radio connection to Cathedral City, but aside from that its mostly water wheels and primitive pneumatics as far as tech goes. There’s some other locations outside Lucatore described that don’t really matter, mostly just outposts and the like. The only places of note are the Vivaco Sickbay and Bergamo. The former being the domain of the Spitalian surgeon Carmine Ferro, and the later being the seat of Clan Lombardi and a relatively large center of trade and commerce. As a side note, Clan Lombardi hates the Anabaptists and wants what they see as their ancestral lands back. They’re kinda right tbh. Then the book starts describing a bunch of locations within Lucatore itself. ”Degenesis In They Blood” posted:THE MANURE HILL: Trash, refuse, and dung are collected on the Manure Hill, waiting to be cut and brought to the fields by Aesthetics. When the wind blows in the wrong direction, its stink covers the entire city, sometimes for days at a time. Whew, dunno how I would have ran this murder mystery without knowing if the city randomly starting stinking like poo poo or not. Anyways, none of this poo poo is important or interesting, anything plot relevant aside from where you’re staying happens at the Cloister itself.  Basically the Cloister was a big ‘ol castle on top of a hill. For a while Clan Benesato held it while things were spicy in the area, but eventually poo poo calms down and they move into houses that don’t require experienced stonemasons for repair and upkeep. Then the Anabaptists move in, convert a whole bunch of people, and fix up the castle turning it into their cloister where they produce the Elysian Oils. So what are the Elysian Oils? Well, this section goes into detail about the dark secret at the heart of its production. You see, the first Baptist Rebus invented the oils, they’re an alchemical concoction that induce visions called Emanations and give you stat bonuses depending on which of the six types you make. Abacus (Altair’s alchemist buddy) discovered a new formula after coming across Marduk Oil in his travels. Yeah, he just added Burn and a couple other things to the mix. You know, the drug that makes you super high and is derived from the evil space mushrooms. The one where too much turns you into a carrier for the evil space mushroom plague, and turns any children you might have into disgusting mutants with powers. The drug derived from the very force the Anabaptists swore to fight with cleanse and purify-type zeal. You could mix burn into it before, but you suffered all the negative effects of it and risked setting off the Spitaliers. This new formula is like a stable form of Burn, and won't tip off the doctor cops. It's a lot stronger than the basic Elysian Oil found in the corebook, and as long as you keep taking it, its not as bad as Burn. You’re infected with Sepsis, but the oil forms a shield and the evil space mushrooms and thus they can’t connect to the Earth Chakras. It can’t be washed off, only flaked off as you shed your skin. In addition to recovering Ego Points equal to the level of the oil and having a vision lasting a number of hours equal to the grade, you cannot gain permanent Sepsis points and any temporary points fade by 1 a week. This is in addition to the stat buffs. However, you still get infested by Spores and if you hit twice your maximum score the oils stop working and bam! You’re a seed carrier. Mollusks will not sense you for reasons. Anyways, Altair wasn'tstupid, so aside from a few trusted folks who make the stuff nobody knows that Burn is in this. If they did, they’d have hell to pay from the Spitaliers. Some of you may have already guessed this is why nobody was allowed to examine Altair’s body, and you’re half-right. So Altair sends a sample to Cathedral City, they love it, and send him all the resources he needs to expand production so this can give this poo poo to all their soldiers on their various war fronts. They keep the real good poo poo for those in the know (the stuff with Burn), but they’re a major exporter of all the other types. Basically everyone has used some form of this drug at some point, and it's important enough that ensuring the Cloister keeps up production and doesn’t fall to chaos is the primary goal of any Anabaptist investigation. if they lost Lucatore, they'd lose most of their combat drug production, and thus would probably start losing battles all over the place. The rest of the chapter is short descriptions of various rooms in the Cloister which aren’t super relevant until later, aside from the Oil Mills and the Graveyard. Then we have some plot hooks that drag PCs into this whole mess, two chapters before the actual adventure chapter. Man, these guys really know how to gently caress up a layout don’t they? I’ll do those later, when it makes sense. So there we have it. A messianic Anabaptist Warlord and heretic drug user has been assassinated, Hipster Occultist fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Mar 21, 2021 |
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Mar 21, 2021 10:17
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JcDent posted:Of course the adventure is dumb, the way the content is split into chapters is dumb, and it already does fluff conflicts as Elysian oils can be made by any Elysian anywhere by using random herbs and roots, provide stable and cool combat benefit for 4 hours, and are a lot better than the dumb Burn varieties as presented in Katharsys. It gets even dumber than that, just wait. 
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Mar 22, 2021 03:50
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Chapter 2, Sins of the Fathers Welcome back folks. Chapter 2 is mostly just the history of Altair and Co. Why is this chapter 2 and not chapter 1? I have no idea! It seems to be like you’d put background first, then describe the setting, and then plot the adventure, but then what do I know? Anyways, when Altair is 14 he signs up with the Anabaptists because he thinks they’re cool holy warrior guys. He’s a pretty good fighter himself, and by the time he’s 23 he’s a pack leader and has won some notable victories over the Jehammeds. He gets summoned to Cathedral City, where he meets up with Baptist Marcellus and learns how to do diplomacy and stuff for a couple years. He then hits the road and travels for a while. In those travels he comes across Marduk Oil while visiting Neolibyian coastal settlements, and somehow manages to convince them to sell him the formula. His Emanations then tell him that Marcellus is dying, so he goes back to Cathedral City, is named Marcellus’s successor, and fucks off to Lucatore. He calls in his scouts, and realizes that the situation on the Adriatic Front is fuckin’ dire. Too many folks are dying, and they’re losing a lot of ground to the Jehammeds. How could he turn the tide? ”Altair the biggest dumb idiot in the whole fuckin’ world” posted:In Franka he had seen people use Burn - could something similar bring success on the Adriatic Front?  We have all of these sick-nasty combat drugs that we can make from basically anything anywhere, but clearly the real ticket is to abuse the drug that infests you with evil space mushrooms. I mean yeah, Burn does buff some stats and can make you ignore stuff like stress or the cold, but like, even if he wasn’t supposedly a religious fanatic sworn to burn Sepsis from the face of the planet, the side effects alone make anyone abusing Burn a gigantic loving moron. Anyways, he imports some into the Cloister and he and his Monks get some crazy strong visions, but eventually Abacus invents the new formulas that will protect them from getting found out by the Spitaliers. He makes his young, non-Anabaptist brother Ennio governor of Lucatore and returns to the front, where he meets a warrior name Neva (20 years younger than him), they fall in love, etc. When he gets the first shipment of super oil, Neva is the first person he shares the secret with. So they fight on the front for 5 years, and after winning 3 significant pitched battles they’re able to bring the Jehammeds to the bargaining table. After a century of war, nobody feels like fighting anymore and a peace treaty is signed. Right around this time Neva and Altair disappear from public view on a retreat, because Neva is pregnant. It’s not a nice pregnancy either. She gets real sick, has crazy visions, goes a little insane, hears the voice of her unborn child, etc. When Altair’s son Vikal is finally born, it's clear that something is seriously wrong. He’s hairless, doesn’t really speak or react to the outside world very much, and is constantly suffering from various fevers. Some of you are probably ahead of me and have realized that this kid is an Aberrant. Turns out abusing space mushroom cocaine mixed with olive oil was a bad idea, who knew? Altair drifts apart from Neva, clearly disgusted and disappointed. This neglect further erodes her mental state, and what time they do spend together anymore is usually spent fighting. Finally, one day she sees stones and dust floating in circles around Vikal’s head, fully realizes what’s happened, and chains Vikal up in the Cloister’s tower. ”Neva” posted:Madness has crept into her, has engulfed her mind like oil. The only thing she can think of is saving Vikal.  In a grand tradition of a lot of lovely writers that cannot write women, Neva becomes a one-dimensional hysterical mother. She tells Altair the truth, and begs him to leave with the two of them in search of a cure. Altair can’t bear to look at her anymore, but says that the oil was more important than the child. He does promise to ask the Spitaliers for help though. At this point, Neva realizes that it was the oil that poisoned her. The book doesn’t outright say so, but given that any Spital “help” for an Aberrant would be a quick fiery death, she’s probably not interested in pursuing that avenue. She’s come to the conclusion that Altair must die if she’s to save her son. So she goes down to the local Ramano camp, a little ways outside Lucatore. They’re Romani stereotypes. Thieves, rapists, murderers, dressed in gaudy rear end jewelry, etc. They’re currently here literally just digging for treasure. There she meets this man.  That’s Papa Chicco. Basically he’s a fat ugly murderer and crime lord whose sole goal in life is to festoon himself with kitsch from the bygone era because he saw a cool Neolibyian once. I’m being a bit reductive, but that’s basically it. He’s a piece of poo poo that other pieces of poo poo look down upon is what I’m saying, besides being a racial stereotype. He was told that cool Bygone stuff is usually buried, so here he is with his underlings, digging for jewelry. Neva contracts him to assassinate her husband, and pays him in golden artifacts taken from the Jehammeds during the Adriatic war. She wanted the captain of Lucatore’s guard, Lucio Bastardo to do it, but Altair is his adoptive father and he can’t bear the thought. However, he’s hopelessly in love with Neva so he promises to hold back his guard for Papa Chicco’s attempt on Altair’s life. As you already know, Papa is successful and slits Altair’s throat while his two squires ran back into a building where they forgot their swords. Altair is buried by Abacus and Lucio beneath that massive boulder so that nobody can ever figure out what really happened. His brother Ennio is basically trapped in his estate after this. He’s still governor so he hasn’t been arrested or lynched yet, but a lot of folks think he did it. This is partly because he’s shacked up with Gala Lombardi, daughter of chief of Clan Lombardi. Ennio has no kids of his own, so the Lombardi plan is to marry the two families and when Ennio dies, Clam Lombardi gets its land back from those hated Anabaptists. They in turn don’t like Gala very much, because her clan refuses to convert. The rest of the chapter is a dramatis personae, but I’ll just intro characters and provide background as they come up in the adventure. Next time, the adventure! Well, the story they call an adventure at least.
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Mar 22, 2021 08:13
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JcDent posted:This is more of "Europeans talk mad poo poo about racist Americans until someone mentions the Romani" as we already have immoral thieves, rapists, and murderers dressed in gaudy rear end jewelry in the game, they're called Apocalyptics and you can play as one. The funny thing is, he's not even an Apocalytpic. He's a Clanner, from Clan Romano.
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Mar 22, 2021 09:10
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Chapter 3, In Thy Name, Part 1 Finally, it's adventure time. Sadly, Finn and Jake will not be joining us, although after reading this thing I can’t say that I blame them. For some reason, instead of beginning this chapter with plot hooks for the various cults they put those back in chapter 1, along with the rumors they could dig up. The plot hooks basically amount to “cult x has some interest in the area and is all wtf is going on” I can go into more detail if folks would like, but I wanna get to the good poo poo asap so I’m summarizing a bit. The rumors themselves aren’t all that helpful, you can learn that “An African is said to have gone into hiding in the area a few weeks ago” which is true and the PCs will met this dude later, but it's not really relevant info for PCs looking into the murder. You can learn that Altair was stabbed, which is also true, but won’t help much. The good poo poo you can learn comes if you hit triggers on your gather information roll.   This info is actually useful, but it actually it’ll probably only contextualize things after the fact rather than guide your investigation. This adventure doesn’t really provide much guidance for handling a proper investigation. Only 4 people know what happened (Neva, Lucio, Abacus, Papa Chicco), and they ain’t saying poo poo. There’s no other witnesses, no written correspondence or other clues to find, etc. Altair’s body has been crushed to a pulp beneath a boulder that’s basically impossible to move, so you ain’t goona find poo poo with an autopsy either. So I’m not really sure what you’re supposed to do with this info. It might give the PCs a pretty good hunch of what happened, but they aren’t really in a position to dole out justice on an educated hunch, nor would their cults be satisfied with a threadbare report. You might then ask, so what do the PCs do? Mostly react to some crazy poo poo that happens around them as we’ll see. The adventure can begin one of two ways. The PCs can simply be in town on other business when the dirty deed happens, or they can be sent at the behest of their cults. If the former is true, the PCs have 5 days to kill where not much happens because the city gets locked down tighter than a convent after Altair gets got. If the PCs have come to town on a mission, they arrive on day 6 according to the book. Lets assume the PCs were chasing down a bounty or something and have just the worst timing in the goddamn world, and they get their the night before the murder is announced. Day 0: The PCs arrive and discover the Bleeding Ram Inn has no room, so they’ll have to stay at the Alms House. Just as they’re about to bed down for the night, a servant of house Benesato shows up and tells them that they need this room for an Itinerant preacher who’s coming to town soon. They’ll have to stay at the Commission House outside the walls, but on the plus side it's better accommodations and there’s free food involved. The adventure assumes the PCs don’t kick up a fuss and follow along. If they ask why they’ve been given a room upgrade, the servant will tell them that House Benesato is big on hospitality and doesn’t want them staying out in the cold. Day 1: The PCs get woken up by the horn of sorrow, whatever the gently caress that is. People are crying and shouting that the Baptist is dead. If they want, they can go outside and take a look at the body being carried towards the cloister in a procession. Some people stare accusingly or shout “killers” at the characters, you know because they’re ignorant peasants and the characters are probably foreigners. It's just the kind of thing you expect. The Anabaptist guards do keep a lid on things though. During this time Lucatore is locked down for the day, it doesn’t really say what that means though. I assume a closed gate with guards, but if my PCs want to escape, what would they be facing? Damned if I know. In the afternoon you can witness a fight between someone who thinks Neva is a bitch who doesn’t care about the village and is grateful that Ennio is still around, versus a guy talking mad poo poo about the govenror A drunken monk also claims that Ennio has gotten his brains hosed out by his bitch Lombardi wife and is goona hand over the entire village to them. Nothing useful. In the evening, Lucio goes from Inn to Inn questioning foreigners. He’s got six heavily armed men with him and questions the characters aggressively. Luckily, the servant girl can testify that they were right here at the break of day. Lucio forbids them from leaving the city for a day, even if they seem innocent. A successful Int+Empathy roll (3) will tell the player that Lucio is questioning them absent-mindedly, while triggers indicate a certain callousness and strong, suppressed emotions. Day 2: Abacus steps forward at the chief authority of the Anabaptists and lays out the following rules.  So basically, if the PCs try to sequence-break this adventure they’ll be fed their own intestines by an army of Orgastics. Yay! Anyways word has spread of Altair’s death so a bunch of folks show up to pay their respects. There’s so many they open the gates again, and the city becomes packed with visitors. Locals take every opportunity to dump on the characters, and if they react violently a mob will probably feed them their intestines. Abacus also announces 7 days of grieving, and also that the Cloister will be closed during this time. Rumours start to spread that Altair has already been buried without ceremony, which is odd for a man of his stature. Mobs form in the night to perform their own investigations, but those obviously don’t go anywhere. Day 3-5: Things have calmed down a bit, people are still grieving and talking about Altair, but life returns to the street. The PCs can help a scrapper by the name of Custus repair a boiler, he’ll chat them up a bit and offer some alcohol to them should they ever stop by his place again. The PCs can question folks in the marketplace, and if they succeed on their roles you can dole out the following info.   Day 6: Remember, Altair has been dead for six days, the PCs cannot easily leave Lucatore, and if they want to investigate they have no way to access anyone in the know, nor do they have a way to look for other evidence since everything is locked down by 50 warriors. Anyways, this is where cult investigators come into the picture. The only scene that takes place today occurs at the Bleeding Ram Inn, which as we’ll note, is full from all the visitors that have come to town, and isn’t where the PCs are staying besides. Even if they’re new arrivals, they’ll be put up at the Commission House. So uh, I guess hope your PCs want to drink a beer in a town that up until they point has shunned and denied them a place to eat or drink. (No joke, the book basically says that any strangers won’t find any places in the Taprooms or Market Stalls to eat or drink.) What gets me is, there’s no hook to bring the PCs to this place to take part in what will lead to them meeting a major npc. The Book just writes a scene and places the PCs in it. In the bar are the two Orgastics who were with Altair right before he was murdered. I actually got this bit wrong last time. They didn’t forget their swords at that time, but they had previously forgotten them once before, so Lucio sounded the horn for a muster. They think it was like a test, to make sure they hadn’t hosed up again. What they don’t know is that Lucio called them away knowing what would happen. They’re drowning their sorrows and being bought drinks while they tell their story. At this point, two pikemen (this has to be a mistranslation, how the gently caress do you fit pikes into a mediveal tavern?) come into the bar. These men are Domingo and Pace Benesato, nephews of Ennio Benesato and his personal bodyguards. One of the Monks spits at the feet of Domingo, he rams his spear into the ground in front of the monk as a counter-threat. Another, older Orgastic named Tosco steps in front of Domingo and gets all up in his grill, while a few more Orgastics surround the two pikemen. Its at this time the book tells us that the PCs have a choice! Will wonders never cease? Except the outcome is basically the same regardless of how they choose to react. If they stay out of it, the hunter and vigilante (in this context, a vigilante is a hunter that hunts Psychokinetics) Fenerex intervenes for them.  His big nasty hunting dog comes out from under the table and snarls, while he threatens to put a fourth hole in their head to go along with their tattoos. This calms everyone down, and if the PCs want they can talk to Fenerex for a bit. If the PCs do decide to get involved, there’s two ways it can go down. They can talk the monks down with some rolls, or they can fight. Its meant to be a fistfight, so if they draw lethal weaponry the monks scatter immediately. The tavernkeeper runs to get the guard, if they arrive the PCs get a tongue lashing from Lucio but Fenerex calms them down, saying they’re hotheaded but just wanted to help. Day 7: The characters get a message from Ennio Benesato, asking them to come to his estate. The adventure assumes they helped out his two nephews, but even if they didn’t he still summons them. Something about them not stepping in makes them truly neutral parties and perfect for the investigation or something.  He asks them to look into his brothers murder, and is clearly torn up over the whole thing. He wasn’t an ambitious man, and owes everything to Altair. He’s pretty pissed the Anabaptists didn’t let him say goodbye, nor did they bury him with his horse and some wheat as is clan Benesato custom. He’ll tell the characters that he doesn’t think the clans had him killed, they’re too scattered and weak to take advantage. He’ll also tell them that Altair had no enemies, his wife loved him and his adopted son Lucion owed him his life. He was a righteous man, and everyone looked up to him. If the PCs take the job, he offers them a bunch of dinars, safe passage in the region, and will put in a good word with them with the Hellvetics. He’ll also give them his Seal ring. It's extremely sentimental, so they better not lose it. While they have it though, they can move about the town freely and it’ll even get them an audience in the Cloister. Ennio’s lady friend Gala Lombardi watches the PCs closely, and if they succeed on a roll they can intuit that she’s watching every move, every gesture, and could probably remember their facial expressions days from now. If they accuse her father of the hit, she completely loses her cool. ”Gala Lombardi” posted:”Vespaccio is a wolf who hunts his prey, not a cowardly killer. Furthermore, Altair was never his prey.” With that, the PCs leave and will hear people in the marketplace say that the Water Tower (where Altair was merked) is no longer closed, and that the Aesthetics have left the Cemetery. If you just heard an air whistle, that's because the train has just stopped and is now accepting passengers for the journey to the next plot point. The gate is open at the water tower, and with a successful stealth roll they can hear Lucio arguing with this guy.  That’s Carmine Ferro, he’s a Spitalier and a pretty dang good surgeon from the Vivaco Sickbay. He was Altair’s personal physician, and it determined to get to the bottom of his suspicious death. Basically, he’s pissed that he was buried so early and without a proper autopsy, and tells Lucio that he will find the killer, no matter how. With a perception roll you can see that the argument is just short when Abacus blows a signal horn from the Arcade Wall. (Btw, these guys love perception rolls to find the clue. It's not as bad here, but there are notable instances where somebody better make the perception roll or the plot just stalls out.) Lucio just runs right past without noticing the PCs. If they want, the PCs can approach Ferro (who just sticks around taking water samples after the argument), and well they better because future events assume that they do. You’d have to significantly re-work several events that occur later in the story if they don’t. Ferro can tell you a bunch of stuff. He’s generally pretty open if the PCs let him know that they’re investigating Altair’s death. He’ll say that he has severe doubts about the investigation, too much neglect or active attempts to cover stuff up (duh). Altair was pretty healthy and a good fighter even in his advanced age, so he figures that the killer would have had to have known that he’d be vulnerable at that exact moment. Further prodding from the PCs will get him to reveal that Altair was on his way to Vivaco that morning, and Ferro knew that he wanted to ask him something very important. He wants to find out what that was, and is sick of all the religious mumbo-jumbo loving poo poo up. He says that he’ll investigate around the water tower for clues, and that the PCs should go to his grave. The adventure assumes that the PCs play along. The grave won’t tell you much. It’s simple, and the stones atop it have no lichen like the other graves. If the PCs move these smaller stones, they reveal the ten-ton boulder Altair is buried under. An Int+Legend (4) roll will tell you that Anabaptists aren’t usually buried under giant boulders, or you could just take a look at literally any other grave. An Int+Engineering (2) roll will tell you that at least 10 Oxen were required to move this boulder, and anything under it is probably completely crushed. So that’s one possible lead completely obliterated. But lets say the PCs had a way to get the boulder out of the way, what would they find?  ”This Dumb Book” posted:All in all, that’s amazing and very extraordinary. Someone went to great lengths here, maybe to protect the grave from robbers… Yeah, I’m not sure how dumb their playtesters are, but if anyone hasn’t figured out by now that this is a cover-up I think an investigation adventure is wasted on them.  Remember when I said that these guys love perception checks? They also seem to be a big fan of dictating what the PCs do or feel when the situation requires it.  Anyways, this is Decoy 5. He's a Chronicler spy who mostly exists to frustrate the PCs for reasons. He’s ostensibly curious about the PCs, hence why he’s watching them right now, but we’re told that he thinks that Neva has secrets and is looking into what those are. He doesn’t really do much to further that end though, he’s just annoying. The players can chase Decoy 5. The book assumes it is more than improbable that they’ll catch him. Apparently these are thick, gloomy woods, so any actions are at -3D. In order to begin the chase, the PCs have to succeed at an AGI+Mobility (3) roll, if that succeeds they can enter into a contest of their Body+Athletics vs his Body + Stamina (his is 10d). Decoy 5 suffers no penalties due to the bad vision. If the PCs get close he’ll toss a smoke grenade and take cover, it takes a successful Int+Orientieerng (6) roll to find his trail again. If you do managed to make that roll, he uses his drone (the one that just crashed) to whiz around, breaking branches and leading the PCs on a wild goose chase. They do not call for a roll here, I’m not sure if they just assume that PCs will buy it? While it's pretty dang unlikely that they’ll catch Decoy 5 here, it does seem possible with good rolls and the right skills. The book provides no guidance for what might happen if you do capture him. His NPC entry gives his backstory, but aside from him thinking that something sinister is going on, he doesn’t really know more than the PCs do about the whole murder situation. Also, if you do capture him, a lot of future events will not make sense, both in this book and the next one where he features more prominently. So let's assume that he gets away. That’s it for Part 1, next time Part 2 of Chapter 3!
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Mar 23, 2021 04:02
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SkyeAuroline posted:It's refreshing to see someone else with a similar view of how disconnected every element of these adventures is. Just like the rest of it, there's some solid elements in a vacuum that just... don't come together at all, and a lot of poor quality or pointless filler. Yeah, if I had to guess I'd say that the authors got real big into the Euro Vampire scene in the 90's, a lot of this writing smacks of the mistakes made during VTM's metaplot treadmill. They very much have a story they want to tell, and while there is a narrative there, its not a game. Its like I said in a previous post, the PCs don't really drive the plot, they're just there to witness things.
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Mar 23, 2021 05:37
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BattleMaster posted:That adventure has big "written by someone who has never actually run a game" vibes. I mean, a lot of stuff from that era did, but still. Stuff that just doesn't seem to have any sense about what players would do at the table or what they would want from the game. In Thy Blood is actually pretty new, I don't have an exact date but I think this came out in 2018? For the cult (heh), that serves as this game's fanbase, they give this is pass by excusing the writing style as novel-like and just one possible way things could go, you know so the GM knows what their NPCs will do. Its supposed to be up to the GM to hack it apart and make it work for the players. To some extent, you'd have to do that with even the best module, but a good one will at least try to account for other outcomes, and provide plot hooks to move the PCs. These books just writes scenes, places players in them, and sometimes tells them what they do and feel. At that point, why are you not just writing a novel? It'd be easier and have broader appeal as just a sci-fi novel, and also be more likely to actually build Degenesis into the transmedia property that they want it to be. You also run into problems with adapting a confined narrative like this. Going back to my last update, lets say the PCs catch Decoy 5, and for whatever reason, they dome him. This doesn't effect a lot in this book, except for one thing during the ending which is easily fixed. However, it'll gently caress up several plot threads that he's more prominent in during the next book, The Killing Game. If I ran this adventure right as In Thy Blood had come out, I'd probably be pretty pissed upon figuring that out. As a GM, I'd be reading this preplanned adventures to save on prep time and whatnot, if I have to gut and rework half the book, what's the loving point? Here's the dark secret though, barely anyone plays through these books. Some people do, and are either dissatisfied or don't know any better and eat this kind of poo poo up. Most folks just read them as bad novels, its what I did with VTM books as a teen.
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Mar 23, 2021 12:22
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BattleMaster posted:I'm a dummy and thought it was something from the 90s, because aside from maybe the art looking a little more CGI than typical for that era it has big 90s vibes. That might just be me and my lovely laptop I'm using to crop images, the actual books look fairly nice even in their pdf form. They're free too, direct form their website.
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Mar 23, 2021 14:17
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By popular demand posted:There's a couple weirdly porny character drawings though. Oh you sweet, sweet summer child. You have no idea. In Thy Blood, Chapter 3, Part 2 When we last left off, the PCs had just been given a either a ring with a Seal on it or an actual signet ring that seals wax, the translation is a little unclear. They’d also met one of the few smart people in town, and ineffectively done some investigating. Onto the next day, so sayeth the great book! Day 8: The PCs wake up at the Commission House, where an Aesthetic in a bad mood tells them that the Iron Emissary (Neva) is receiving visitors today, and that they’d better hurry if they want to get there with dry feet. This is odd, because yesterday they were told that the ring would get them an audience, but here they’re being told that she’s granting them anyways? The PCs mutter something about their GM and leave the house to go do so. Once they get out into the streets, they see a procession led by this guy.  This is Scirocco the Sinner. He’s a Flayer, an odd religious movement that believes in Neognosis but is not Anabaptist. They flay their skin so that others may be forgiven by god and whatnot. Scirocco himself is a former burn addict, who beat himself clean and has come to town because Lucatore is chock full of hypocrisy and sin. He says there will be 3 signs before the reckoning before the guards, sick of his shut, haul his rear end away. Incidentally, this is the guy the PCs lost their room in the Alms House to. The death of the Baptist is the first sign, and all who fail to repent will share in his fate. Then he yells at the Cloister, calling for the Abomination to show itself so they can torture it.  I dunno, I think most PCs would be less impressed and more “look at that crazy guy who flays his skin in an age without easy access to antibiotics, what a dumbass” but that’s just me. He’s got a couple more “signs” that get delivered later before he dies like a chump later on. Spoilers! With the exposition out of the way, the PCs can now go see Neva and get their ultimately fruitless audience.  Lucio will greet them at the gates, and take all of their weapons and technology before allowing them inside, they’ll get it back later.  This is just a really good picture of Neva that I wanted to add, I figure we should admire some good art before I get all mad at some terrible rpg writing. The characters meet Dr Ferro in the audience chamber, and for some reason he comes in with the PCs. That reason is because we can’t have PCs hijacking the narrative! The very idea! Neva will exchange formalities and greet both parties, and Dr ferro completely hijacks the interview, even speaking over the PCs if they try to talk while he's present.  He asks a bunch of questions and gets told a bunch of lies. My favourite is when he asks “yo whats up with the ten ton boulder” to which Lucio basically replies “Flayers are graverobbers.” Which is kinda true, they do the whole catholic finger of a saint thing, but like, nobody else in the graveyard is buried that way. Carmine believes none of what Neva says, loudly announces this fact, and storms out leaving the PCs alone with Neva. She will ask to see the seal ring that permits their presence. Upon examining it, she’ll take the time to talk poo poo about her brother-in-law and basically accuse him and his men of murdering her husband. You can ask her questions, but she has 10D to lie to you, but if you’re disrespectful she’ll have you dragged out of the Cloister. You’re probably not going to learn anything you don’t already suspect here, is what I’m saying. As they’re escorted out, there’s a scene were a couple Touched Ones (Rank 1 Anabaptists) gently caress up an drop a shipment of some Elysian Oil stuff, and Abacus gets real mad. That’s it  As a side note, Degenesis always uses male primary pronouns and generally assumes all PCs are males.  Just wanted to point that out when I saw that sidebar come up during my read-through. On the way out, you’ll meet the two Orgastic Guards that tried to start poo poo with Ennio’s bodyguards in the tavern on day 6, when sober they’re pretty chill dudes. They’ll apologize and chat the PCs up a bit, one will even tell you about a hard-to-find gate into the Elysian Gardens that’s not watched. Thus ends day 8. Day 9: The book assumes you’ll go to the Elysian Gardens on the next day, I guess you’re supposed to be suspicious of the dropped box in the courtyard yesterday? The Touched One who dropped in (Venera), works there and you can calm her down and ask her questions with some rolls. She’s bruised up and makes excuses for Abacus, but will tell you that the box was a shipment for a faraway land. She will say that the Emissary is broken, and not made from Iron like everybody says. If you ask her why, she says that its because she does not see life in butterflies, only death. This is because Aberrants attract bugs, and Vikal is calling butterflies to feed him Spores. (the pcs can notice a couple floating around the tower, and a ton in the garden) More Spores = more telekinetic power, and eventually, freedom once he can shatter his chains. Venera doesn’t know all of this exactly because she’s young and bit simple, but she has slightly heretical views regarding psychonauts. Eventually an older monk catches you and shoos the PCs out, since they’re not supposed to be there. The adventure assumes that the PCs head back to the Commission House, were they’ll be met by Caspar and Morvin, master distillers and cousins to Dana, the servant who runs the Commission House. They’re there to deliver booze, but in the grand tradition of all drunks they’re a little too free with their tongues if you get’em drunk. They’ll tell you that Neva and Altair barely spent any time together, and were hardly star-crossed lovers after they both got back from the Adriatic Front. Abacus is a real piece of poo poo and a slave driver, he’s the reason they left the Cloister. Finally, they’ll also tell you that Lucio is at Neva’s beck and call, and that Flayers are heretics. Any rumours of Burn being at the Cloister are pure nonsense they say. Day 10: Some kids are putting on a play to honour Altair in the Plaza, a lot of folks are paying attention and seem to like it. The PCs can be called over into an alleyway to talk with Ferro, who asks them about their theories. If they tell them about the mysterious hooded figure they chased, he’ll straight up say that it was likely a Chronicler, because I guess nerds have the patent on robes in the post-apocalypse. It's strange that one would be here, since there’s no tech in Lucatore, nor are there any Alcoves. If the PCs hadn't already guessed that the guy who was spying on them and then ran away once discovered was a spy, Ferro spells it out for them. He’ll also say that his Mollusk hasn’t twitched once in 3 days, which is only normal in the Spital or a sickbay, everyone has at least some temporary spore infection. So poo poo is strange with the evil space mushrooms too. After the discussion it's time for the next set piece. A crowd starts to form at the Plaza, Fenerex’s hunting dog Atilla has apparently gone rabid and bitten a little girl! Folks like her dad are pretty mad!  You remember that one guy you might have met once? Well, the GM just told you that you and your comrades have placed yourselves between him and an angry mob. The mob doesn’t have time to do anything though. The Dog gets even more angry as Fenerx tries to calm him down, and will snap at Fenerex and try to bite his throat out. He doesn’t get that far though, as Atilla’s strength fails him before the worst can happen. The dog collapses, and its sides burst as a tide of maggots and slide burts his side open. He coughs more maggots and slime before dying  Fenerex is shocked and has no idea what the gently caress just happened, Atillia was a little sick before so he had bought some herbs, but nothing like this! He thinks it must have been something in the woods that did this, and tells the PCs he wants to check there. He heads out after tending to the disposal of his dog’s body via fire. Our good friend Scirocco shows up next and proclaims the second sign, apparently the Baptists have opened their gates to the Demiurge and now he crawls through our guts and rummages around there until our stomach bursts or something. He causes a big ruckus though, and a lot of townsfolk are losing faith in the Baptists and are on board with this guy wearing a literal crown of thorns. Lucio will approach the PCs and ask them to arrest and guard the guy at the Alms house until he can round up more men. You don’t really have a good reason to comply, but you can if you want to probe the flayers for a bit more info. The characters are alone for a while during their unpaid, impromptu guard shift. They events get invited inside, where Sirocco will tell them that even as strangers they won’t be saved from the reckoning that’s coming. They can ask him questions, but the book says the clearer their questions, the more cryptic his answers will be. Does that work in reverse? Can I get a good answer out of this nutjob by quoting Yoda’s jedi wisdom or some poo poo? He’ll also tell you that the Third Sign will split the herd, rivers of blood will drench the people, and Lucatore will wade through its own entrails. You can look around if you want to make a couple rolls, but there’s nothing really important to find that you don’t already know by now. Now it's time to go back to the Commission House for supper. So sayeth the great book! While they’re eating dinner, they hear a loud scream from a couple young girls outside. If they go investigate, these panicking girls will tell the PCs that their father is very sick and needs help now! He’s at a nearby chapel. (remember, both the commission house and this chapel are outside the city walls) If they decide to help, it doesn’t take long to get to the place. There’s not much they can do though. The man is now dead, full of thousands of tiny little holes and sucked completely dry. The man’s wife will tell you (through tears) that his joints ached and he wanted to get oils to anoint himself from said chapel, they found him like this went he took more than 3 hours to return home. Ferro shows up, because of course he does. He’ll give the wife poo poo for not wanting to give up her husband’s body for an autopsy, and points out the exsanguination to the PCs. He tells you that clearly this has something to do with the woods, and you’ll have to go find Fenerex to get some answers while he defies the wishes of this new widow. There's a nearby coffin with some Elysian Oils you can take, its the good poo poo Abacus makes as well. Its kinda dumb to just go stumbling into the woods, so its off to the Hunting Lodge first! Fenerex’s two huntress apprentices are there, but Fenerex is not. They can tell the PCs he has provisions for a week and took the Eden Route westwards. They’ll also give one PC a necklace of mirror shards, explaining them as Talismans. They’re not that, but they do have another important use. If the PCs are nice and considerate, they’ll also give them some rope, flint, a sundial, and a telescope. Its cracked, but it does give +1D to perception, which is huge in these adventures that are constantly asking for those.  None of this makes any sense. All clues point towards Neva. The PCs have no idea the Romanos even exist, much less have anything to do with the murder. The PCs have done gently caress-all to disturb the peace in Lucatore (by default, your PCs may vary). The clues that do point towards the woods are soley composed of a maggot-ridden rabid dog and an exsanguinated old man, and those are Psychonaught clues my dudes, not murder clues. Next time, tracking Fenerex!
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Mar 23, 2021 17:23
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In Thy Blood, Chapter 3, Part 3 When we last left off, the PCs stopped investigating the murder of one of the eight leaders of Anabaptism to investigate the mysterious death of a dog and an old-rear end man. The characters were told that Fenerex headed west towards Lombard Bog, so that’s where they go. Half a day from Lucatore poo poo gets real humid and muddy in the forest, and the PCs need to make an INS+Perception (2) roll and a INS+Survival roll (3) to see that there is a track with a half a day’s head start, which would match when Fenerex left the hunting lodge. The book says to let them roll multiple times to keep on the track. Why are they rolling at all? There’s another bit about how sleeping wet with a fire will cause the players to biome exhausted the next morning, unless they make an INS+Survival (3) roll to create a Bivouac. While the characters rest for the night, they can make an INS+Primal roll to feel that they’re being watched, and a INS+Perception roll to tell which direction a crackling sound is coming from in the nearby trees. Anyone high on Burn or Burn-Infused Oils can see puffs of black smokes flash in and out of exsistence between the trees. (That’s Primer, any PC that knows this will immediately know that this is Psychonaut country). The Book tells us that without Stimulants this sound is much harder to find, and requires an INS+Orienteering (3) roll to find, it does not tell us how that might be modified if we’re on said stimulants.  If they make the roll, they find a strange circular image 10 feet in diameter, carved into the dirt. This symbol is the chakra of the Psychokenetics. For some reason, only Spitialiers and Anabaptists get to roll Int+Legends (2) to figure this out. A INS+Perception (2) roll reveals the same symbol scattered around the surface of nearly everything in the clearing, everything from rocks to lichen to tree bark has this symbol carved into it somewhere. If the characters are dumb enough to step into the symbol, you sink down to your ankle in maggots. Disrupting the symbol like this causes everything to make an AGI+Mobility (4) roll to avoid falling down, as the ground heaves and releases an awful stench of decay. The ground burps, basically. A Mollusk will not twitch, as there is no Psychonaut nearby, nor is this a spore field. However, a Numoenon Vocalizer can give you clues if you hit enough triggers on a combo of INS+Perception (4) and INT+Science (4). With 3 triggers, you can tell that a very powerful Psychonaut was here about 2 days ago, and is probably an Archon. His force fields are strongest in the Northeast, so he probably went that way. Anyways, that’s all you can find tonight. The PCs wake up in the morning and begin their search for Fenerex anew. You need a successful combo of INS+Orienteering (3) and INS+Survival (3) to find his trail. No mention of what happens if you fails these rolls, I guess this part of the adventure just stalls out! Assuming you do make the rolls, you find a trail that leads to a dead deer strung up in a tree, it's just strewn about in a banquet for the swarm of flying insects eating and breeding up all in those guts. An INT+Legends (4) or Int+Science (3) roll will tell you that a Psychonaut is creating insect breeding pits, and enough triggers will tell you that they likely encircle Lucatore! Then the PCs get attacked by Aerial Leeches feasting on the last of the deer’s blood. They’re like mosquitos, but clumsier and bigger. They attack in a swarm, and the book gives some rules for fighting a swarm. Killing the first swarm is easy enough, but the book directs the GM to just keep through swarms at then, while every step on this soggy ground reveals new breeding pits of tapeworms that try to crawl into your boots. The group has to roll Psy+Faith/Willpower (3) to avoid panicking and just running for safety. If anyone passes it, you’re supposed to increase the difficulty by 1D every round until everyone breaks. Why? Why even bother with the loving rolls? The outcome is already determined. Anyways, the book says the PCs run around panicking until they lose the insects. Then, as luck would have it they see an otherwise well camouflaged hunting pit that has those mirror shards around it, the same shards as their necklace. They have found Fenerex! Give or take 6 fairly hard rolls to find his trail, they find poo poo. Instead they end up stumbling across him after running from giant skeeters in GM-mandated panic. Fenerex motions for them to shut up, and gets one of them to throw a stick at a spot between two trees. The branch hits some Filaments and dissolves into small pieces with a flash of light. Kind of a dumb thing to do if you’re trying to remain unnoticed, especially since a Vigilante like Fenerex should know that a Psychokenetic is aware of the Filament strands it spins. But I digress. Fenerex has then look through the sight of his Lupara, and they see this about 300 feet away.  This is Barghest, an Archon level Psycokenetic. If you fight him, you will die. One of his special Psychonaut powers is basically a Soul Burner (a directed energy weapon). It does 16 damage and is Fatal and Frightening (4). I couldn’t be bothered to look up Frightenting, because the Fatal quality is where it's at. It bypasses Flesh wounds and goes Straight to Trauma Wounds. Barghest himself, the strongest thing in this module, has twelve. (Also, due to a typo his layers of fat give him 22 armour instead of 2, but I digress). Neva, the strongest human in this adventure, has 8 Trauma. It does not ignore armour or defense rolls, but even the best armour that a PC is likely to have at this stage (a Hellvetic full harness) is 5 armour I think? Meaning a PC with 6-7 trauma wounds and 5 armour still has to roll several successes on an active defense to not instantly go poof. I think Free Spirit has some Tech VI armour with energy shields that would let you go toe to toe with this kind of power, but it’ll be several books before the PCs have the chance to loot Bygone tech like that. Don’t fight Barghest, is what I’m saying. This is bad, because Barghest looks directly at them while they’re ogling him through the scope! Anyways, if the PCs suggest fighting him, Fenerex will try to stop them by holding them down and warning them that it's suicide. He’ll also tell them that they can’t run, Barghest has bad sight and hearing but will sense them if their blood pressure rises. It does not explain why you can’t creep away stealthily. Fenerex will say that you have to wait until the mirror talismans stop dancing. (Psychonaut powers distort light and gravity, and the light plays along the mirror shards). It takes an hour for things to cool down, Fenerex urges the PCs to leave and warn Ferro and Lucatore at once! He’ll try to hold the Archon off for as long as he can. The next selection of scenes is really oddly placed. If the PCs want, they can investigate some traps they saw while they were chasing Decoy 5 in the northern woods. Narratively speaking, these events can only take place after the PCs have met Neva, so they can’t do it then. They also probably aren’t going to do it after finding Fenerex and seeing an Archon, so you kinda have to awkward squeeze it into day 8. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense even then, as it requires the PCs getting curious about a few traps in the woods when they’re investigating a high-profile assassination. The book also gives us another way to introduce the owner of said traps.  This is Black Tom.  Said introduction involved the PCs witnessing him coming to market and everyone refusing to sell to him because he’s an African. The book assumes the PCs intervene, and he’ll give them a few rifle bullets which match the construction of the traps they saw earlier. Then the PCs go into the woods to find his house I guess? You have to make a bunch of rolls to avoid setting off his traps, before finding the cave he’s hiding out in. Tom is currently making ammo without a care in the world. Once he realizes you’re there, he’ll level a really expensive looking Neolybian rifle at you and demand to know who you are. It's easier to talk him down honestly than lie, and he’ll give you one warning shot if he thinks you’re lying.Assuming you talk him down, he’s willing to hear you out. (About what? What possible reason do the PCs have for being here?)  Hey look, more racist Romani stereotypes. Tom will shoo the PCs inside his cave quickly, he can’t be discovered by the Romanos. He’ll tell the PCs his story then. Apparently he was kidnapped by Papa Chicco as a teen, and that “Abomination” bit off two of his fingers while he was in captivity. The ransom bankrupted his father, he slipped into a depression and killed himself. Neolybian hyper-capitalists have little use or respect for the poors as it turns out. He fell in with the scrappers who taught him some things, before he got word of Papa in these parts and came to Lucatore for vengeance. He doesn’t know poo poo about Altair’s murder, nor does he think the Romanos are involved. But he wants the help of the PCs anyways, he’s greatly outnumbered. So uh, aside from a few free bullets is there a reason why these PCs should help someone they barely know kill another man they don’t know at all, based on the story told to them by the first man? I mean, I’d probably need a bit more than that if I were playing this game, but whatever, lets see where this goes. There’s a few other ways the PCs could stumble across the Romano camp, but the GM would have to create those from scratch. The journey to the Romano camp is fairly uneventful until the PCs get close. Near the camp are a bunch of deep holes that require 3 successes on a perception roll to avoid, if you fall it takes a nearly impossible Body+Athletics roll to avoid falling down the pit. Falling in said pit does 6 damage that ignores armour. There’s also a stallion hitched up nearby, if you calm him down you can loot a knife and two vials of oil (no mention of what kind) from its saddlebags, and you can presumably take the horse too at some point. If you don’t calm it down, it kicks you. How much damage? Dunno, no stats are provided for said horse. Anyways, assuming the PCs survive the onslaught of horse and hole, the book says that they creep up to a rocky outcropping overlooking the Romano camp. They see Papa Chicco and Neva exiting a big tent, you can’t overhear their discussion despite them being about 60 feet away, and various auditory enhancement drugs and tech in this setting being a thing. With a CHA+Expression (2) roll you can tell that they’ve agreed on something though  ”This drat book” posted:Caught! Four Romano gaurds sneak up on the characters under the cover of the drumming rain. Now they attack, wanting to get rid of the enemy scouts. Have the characters enter a conflict with them. INS+Perception against Agi+Stealth (4W). The characters have a penalty of -2D due to the weather. If the Romano remain undetected, they ambushed them. No perception checks to see guards approaching them before its too late, no mention of what would happen if the PCs set watch behind them, no allowance for the PCs making stealth rolls to avoid being caught, etc. They’re just found via gm fiat, and unless they make this perception roll they’re taking melee weapons to the head. If the PCs win without firing guns, the rain covers up the sounds of the fight. The book assumes they don’t though, as the rest of the passage is written as if the PCs were heard by those at the camp. Black Tom chambers a round and tells you to rush the camp. The book says that you do so. You get to the camp, and this happens.  It doesn’t even tell you to roll for this combat lol, the book just says they all die and the bigtime npcs run away. Now you have a choice. Pursue Papa Chicco and save Black Tom, or pursue Neva. The book implies that splitting your forces reduces your chances of bagging either target, but this isn’t really true. Neva doesn’t fight back, and all you really need to catch her is someone fast enough to pull her off of her horse. (Not too hard, her horse can’t run in wet underbrush very well), and Papa Chicco is only one man. Let's assume our PCs split up, two go to kill Papa, and two go to catch Neva and get some answers. When they catch up to Papa Chiocco, he’s disarmed Black Tom and is stabbing at him a bunch. The book describes him as a terrifying pit fighter type who’s going to give multiple PCs the fight of their lives, and while he has some pretty good stats, JcDent’s Hellvetic from a couple pages ago would put this guy into the dirt with two shots from her Trailblazer. If you want, you can let the wounded Black Tom dome him for honor or something. As a side note, there’s no mention of what happens if the PCs try to take him captive or pump him for information. The book just assumes you’ll want to kill the fat, scheming, dirty Romani. No roll is required for the PCs to catch up to Neva, and it doesn’t explicitly call for one to drag her off of her horse either. She fights in a purely defensive manner, dodging and blocking mostly, looking for a way out. She’ll try to misdirect the PCs by shouting that it was Lucio who sounded the morning horn and that he’s the guilty party here. He was jealous of Altair and wanted to share her bed. She’ll also shout that she was here to pay a bounty to the Romanos to kill Lucio, but now the PCs have ruined everything. Remember Decoy 5? Remember how I said he mostly exists to gently caress with the PCs?  Yu-huh. The old GM-fiat “the villain just gets away” trick we’ve seen in a hundred metaplots before. If anyone has played this, I want to know how well this went over at your table. Genuinely. Because if it were I playing, I would be tempted to beat my GM to death with a lead pipe. Anyways, after we re-correct the time stream and try to figure out just where to hell we actually put that scene, the next part contains the grand finale of the adventure. Next time, the attack of the swarm! I'll finish this book in the next post, even if it kills me.
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Mar 24, 2021 12:24
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JcDent posted:Hey, that Vocoder can fetch 1500CD from the right buyer, the players might be likely to forgive. That's Kevlar jacket money right there! :p The funny thing, when Degenesis talks about Vigilantes they say that the Lupara is a "sawed-off rifle" as if that made any sense. Vigilantes use'em because you gotta get in close to kill a Psychokinetic. and yes, Fenerex mounted one to his sawed-off shotgun. Why doesn't he just use a pair of binoculars?
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Mar 24, 2021 13:46
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BattleMaster posted:It's nice of the adventure to tell us exactly how the player characters will react to something. It really saves time doesn't it?
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Mar 26, 2021 21:08
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In Thy Blood, Chapter 3, Part 4 Our tale resumes with the PCs arriving back in Lucatore after finding Fenerex, with a warning to deliver. The PCs arrive at the Commission House, where the servant Dana informs them that Dr Ferro has been looking for them every day since they left, and is waiting at the Cold Stores for them. Apparently the good doctor can’t wait 24 hours for news. Anyways, they go to see Ferro because they don’t have much else to do at this point. He ushers them into a large barn, where the slab of the monk who died via exsanguination lies cut open on a large slab of ice. He points out that this man has the typical signs of a heavy Burn user, a large white growth crawling up the windpipe and into the pharynx. However, he does not have the stigma upon his chest, which has Ferro stumped. He looks at the PCs for answers, while some of them may have guessed that there's a special burn-infused oil being made here, nobody would really have a concrete idea of what really goes on in the mills yet. Once the PCs tell him about Barghest, he’s immediately horrified and pissed that the Anabaptists let this happen. He grabs a nearby Spitalian messenger, and tells him to ride to a nearby Hellvetic stronghold, and that they need to come in force along with a Preserver Corps as well. However, none of this matters because like 5 minutes later the messenger bisects himself and his horse on a line of Filament. This happens within line-of-sign of the characters too.Oh, if they tell him about the encounter with Neva and the Romanos, he has this to say. ”Carmine Ferro” posted:Romanos? This Emmisray has more to answer for that just her husband’s murder. What else does Ferro think she did? Associating with the wrong kind of people is hardly a crime. Anyways, Ferro wants to see if the route to Eden is still open despite his messenger turning into a bloody cloud not two minutes ago, so he tells the PCs to go ask Ennio Benesato to help. The PCs have long since learned how this adventure works, so they do as they’re told. While they’re en-route, they stumble across Ambroggio and Siphon (the two drunken Anabaptists from the tavern brawl) beating the poo poo out of Domingo Benesato, the young nephew and bodyguard of Ennio. You can intervene to save him, otherwise he gets his head caved in. It’s probably not a hard fight, but that might depend on how hosed up they are from previous encounters. Healing in Degenesis is really slow and lovely. Assuming the PCs win, a Int+Medicine (1) roll will stabilize Domingo so he can breathe. They’re told that they can’t do anything else for him, and the only possible further aid that they can provide is to hide him and hope that nobody takes the opportunity to kill a helpless man. Moving and hiding him requires a combo roll of Int+Medicine and Agi+Stealth. Given that this guy is the loving Nephew of the man that they were on the way to see, I’m not sure why you can’t just loving carry him to actual saftey. The Benesato Estate is oddly quiet from the outside, the door’s open, the PC’s don’t see anyone, etc. Once they enter the estate proper they hear some muffled voices coming from the upper floors. Assuming they go to investigate, they find Ennio and Gala along with four swordsmen and Pace Benesato, the other nephew. There’s also six dead Orgastics lying on the floor. Apparently poo poo has really gone down hill in like the day or two the PCs spent in the woods. Ennio himself is pretty defeated and looks all worn out, and basically unprompted he sits down and tells the PCs some stuff. Its clumsy exposition time folks! He tells the PCs about Vikal, how he was a pale, hairless, sickly thing and no true heir for a Baptist. He tells them that six months ago Altair told him that Vikal died of pneumonia, which is insane when Ferro is your family physician. He’ll go to say that this is bullshit, he believes that Vikal is still alive and kept hidden away (duh). Once storytime is over, Gala Lombardi’s guards will lead the family out of Lucatore, leaving the PCs to their business. Once they’re gone, the book says that if the characters look out the window, they see a terrifying sight. Two torchlit processions march towards the town square, one from the south, the other from the east. I’m not sure why this terrifying, foreboding maybe? Anyways, like always if the book writes it, the PCs go there. The book actually does give you the choice of stepping outside and checking this out, but the rest of the book assumes you do as the plot here is a very straight and rigid line.  The first procession is the one from the south, lead by Scirocco the Sinner and his flayers. He is being carried atop a wooden throne adorned with barbed wire, and a little boy holding a severed ear on a gold-embroidered pillow sits on this lap. Along with the flayers, he has a bunch of villagers with him. The folks coming in from the east arrive next, these are the Anabaptists armed with melee weapons, along with the rest of the villagers. There’s a lot of tension between the two groups, the Anabaptists want to arrest the Flayers, while Sciocco and Co want to continue their particularly crazy brand of religious bullshit. Scirocco is here to save your souls, and how is he going to do that? By dragging up a confused and scared woman, stripping her naked, and accusing her of fornicating with the Demiurge. He then tosses her in front of Westing, a bald Aesthetic and leader of the Anabaptist procession. If the PCs want to see any of this, there’s a bunch of actually kinda difficult rolls they have to make to force their way through the crowd, otherwise they just have to listen. Anyways, right now Westing is primarily concerned with how powerful Scirocco is at this moment, and the need to essentially regain control of the religious narrative here. Otherwise the Flayer might plunge the entire town into chaos. He proclaims that Anabaptists do not side with evil, they destroy it, and they show this little harlot what for! The PCs can roll INS+Empathy or CHA + Expression (3) to see that Westing is using hand signals to guide his men into position, and is stalling for time. They chain the woman to the broken cross, and Westing puts on his best fire and brimstone voice. It doesn’t go so well though, Westing plays the spectacle up for the crowd at first, but ends up yanking his arm back from the barrel and dropping the bowl of water. It’s full of tapeworms! Hundreds of big-rear end tapeworms start flopping around and moving towards the crowd, which breaks into a panic. Meanwhile, Scirocco is loving all of this. ”Scirocco the Sinner” posted:BEHOLD THE LAST SIGN! THE WORM WILL BE IN ALL WATERS! Personally, I’m a little unimpressed by his after-the-fact prophecies, but that’s just me. Most of the villagers switch sides at such a display, and surround the Anabaptists. Things do not look good for our local monks, and Scirocco is able to more or less take total control of the situation. He stops the mob from killing them, and instead proclaims that they must be offered a chance to save their souls from the Demiurge. For some reason he rams a crown of thorns onto Westing’s head, who just stands there all dumbfounded. He then has the next “harlot” brought to him, and it’s none other than the Touched One, Venera! Apparently she’s guilty of carrying decaying water for the Anabaptists, and has lain in the lap of evil or some poo poo. Anyways, the only way they can cleanse her sin is with some good ol blood sacrifice.  A little late on the title card drop there. That droning is the insect army Barghest has been breeding, surprise suprise. Millions of gadflies and mosquitos the size of a grown man’s palm zoom around feasting on the blood of the crowd, and its full-blown panic time now.  Scirocco, even in the midst of a couple million flying insects, is really determined to slit the throat of this servant girl for daring to serve people that do not follow his particular brand of religious orthodoxy. He’s got the sacrificial dagger at her throat, ready to slit it at a moment's notice. We are told that this is the last chance that the PCs have to save the girl, if they choose to do so. Like many of the other “choices” in this module, the book assumes you do so and all other content in the book assumes you do save here. I don’t think that anyone is going to lose too much sleep over killing Scirocco, but honestly this fight is kinda hosed. The PCs are at a -6D penalty for all actions right now, due to the raging swarm of insects all around them. A relatively new combat focused character at this stage (unless you’ve done a bunch of other poo poo first) will have 10D, meaning they now have to fight this guy with 4D. Characters focused moreso in other areas might not get to roll dice at all, or they’ll roll less at least. The PCs can roll INT+Focus/Primal, with each success and trigger on that roll taking 1D off of the penalty. However, this roll is still subject to the -6 penalty, and there’s a fairly good chance that will mean for some that it's impossible for them to succeed on this roll. Finally, as a cherry atop the poo poo sundae, characters have to get 3 successes on a PSY+Faith/Willpower roll to actually stand and fight Scirocco, or they run away in a panic. Keep in mind, this is while you’re possibly afflicted with a serious dice penalty. If you fail the roll, you can fight Scirocco by burning 1 eo point a round, running out means you flee. So you rescue Venera as the book bids, and then you have to make your way towards the cloister.  It seems kinda weird that the swarm doesn’t inflict damage or do anything beyond a single point of spore infestation, and there are no mechanics for battling or moving through said swarm. Fast forward a bit (there’s not much on the way other than an AGI check to avoid taking 6 damage that ignores armour from a runaway horse cart) and the PCs escape the swarm by moving up the hill towards the Cloister. They run into our good friend Dr Ferro again, who informs them that the Psychonaut has totally cut them off from the outside world, they are trapped. They have no way to get word to anyone that can help. Venera will then pipe up and let the PCs and Ferro know that the monks keep a flare rifle that can signal the Hellvetics in the Cloister. The stables are nearby, and with a couple fairly easy rolls the PCs can tame some horses for the trip. When the PCs arrive at the cloister, Venera opens the gate with her key but they’ll all have to make a roll combo of perception and stealth to hide before 4 Aesthetics come running past. I guess the book assumes everyone will make a Int+Perception (3) roll followed by a Agi+Stealth (2) roll, because I don’t think it properly considers what will happen if they fail. The PCs are within earshot of Abacus who’s ordering all the various monks around, getting them setup to use Spirfires on the oncoming swarm. He’s got about 40 Aesthetics in the Refractory with him. If the PCs get discovered, this is a TPK. Full stop. Abacus orders that 20 join Lucio on the walls, while the other half will come with him to protect the oil mill. Also, apparently the last that they’re supposed to do is use the rifle, because Abacus does not want a battalion of “self-righteous Hellvetics” coming to the Cloister. This man certainly has his priorities. The book tells us that the PCs are able to escape the Refractory after the monks leave to take up positions, and then the PCs creep up onto the walls. There they see two monks, with a long metal box between them, it’s the flare rifle! Ferro will direct them to take out one monk, while he takes out the other. It’s once again a combination of rolls to do this successfully, with no mention of what happens should the PCs fail one of these rolls. Anyways, the PCs easily kill the monks, and pop open the case. It’s an Int+Artifact Lore (3) roll to figure out how to load and use the thing, but if nobody does it Ferro can easily fire the drat thing. After the shot, a bunch of monks notice it and start yelling in confusion, wondering who shot the rifle against orders. Then, a sudden bang from the other side of the Cloister rings out above the yelling of the monks. Carmine Ferro has been shot! He staggers backwards, says he’s been shot in the heart, and collapses in a heap. Lucio himself comes up from the armoury to the battlements, trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. As this happens, the PCs can see a blue flare in the distance. The Hellvetics have answered.  Keep in mind, they’ve known this guy “professionally” at best for a week at most. In Thy Blood, Chapter 4  Why is this a new chapter when we’re still in the middle of things?  Um, do these people know what surprise is? A squad of heavily armed monks making no attempt at stealth while rushing the PCs counts as a surprise round? Okay I guess. Not that it matters though, because after those attacks another shot rings out and pegs Lucio, this time the PCs can apparently tell that it’s coming from Neva’s rooms. Lucio screams in anger, clearly not understanding the motives of a deranged widow who murdered her husband to save her cursed child. Neva can be seen leaving her room for some reason, taking up a position in the Arcades before firing another shot at the petrol container of an Orgastic. The PCs then have to make an Agi+Mobility (3) check or take 14 explosive damage. The flames also cut off their only direction they might have been able to escape, and while its temporarily blinding Neva it won’t for long, as she looks for a better firing position and fires pot-shots at the PCs. So the PCs are trapped on a burning wall, the only way out is a 30 foot drop, and a madwoman is shooting at them. Neva does take a break to reveal that she’s pissed at Lucio for forcing her to hire the Romanos to kill Altair, he should have had the guts to do it. Also, he was supposed to kill the PCs, so she’s real mad at him. She’s about to kill him with her Bienhander (after her rifle jams), when Vikal finally has his moment and explodes the tower he was kept prisoner in for months. A skeleton frame is all that is left of the tower, but the strain is too much for Vikal and the boy collapses. This isn’t the only large explosion that will rock the Cloister today though.   After doing some divine and conquer with the Swarm, Barghest has arrived. We get treated to a page or two of him screaming about stuff and killing monks with his Psychonaut abilities. Yawn. This is what I come to the table for, to listen to my GM use one NPC (with powers I’m not allowed to have) slaughter a bunch of other NPCs. Anyways, he’s here for Vikal because he feels that the boy is basically his son. Neva is having none of that, and is trying to kill Barghest with an anti-tank rifle. Its not going well, but she is distracting him. Barghest’s entrance collapsed part of the wall and left a staircase of debris that leads down into the oil mill, so that’s where we’re headed. Its that, or burn to death on the battlements or get killed by Barghest. Anyways, the PCs head down into the Mills. There’s a skill check to push a couple monks down some stairs as they try to rush the PCs, if these fail they’ll have to fight’em. Once the monks are dealt with, the PCs go down further and see Abacus ordering a bunch of monks around in the midst of sume really huge machinery. He orders them to pack the Burn up into crates, along with the oil. Then there are several loud claps of thunder, and part of the roof collapses as Barghest descends into the Mills, holding onto Vikal.  Witnessing Barghest in such close quarters triggers a sort of primal fear in the PCs, and they have to make a PSY+Faith/Willpower check to avoid being paralyzed by fear or fleeing in panic. He does have a couple weaknesses. He cannot stand his mirror image, and his reflection with transfix him for a few moments, during this time he loses the initiative and cannot maintain his filament force field. If he’s coated with Elysian Oil, he loses his connection to the Earth Chakra and thus cannot control his swarm. He still gets his sick-nasty powers though. For some reason Venera rushes at Barghest and screams “VIKAL!” Barghest goes to kill her, but stops because of the necklace she’s wearing. Altair gave her this for some reason, it's a seed from a Fractal Forest and it contains a great deal of mysterious power, the nature of which even the GM is not told of. Barghest knocks her aside and kills some more monks, while inhaling Burn from spare crates. (He needs the spores to revive Vikal, and also feels that the Burn is his stolen property) After this, a shot rings out, but it is not aimed at any of the PCs or the NPCs, instead a hole appears in one of the copper vats holding the Elysian oil. Fenerex is back my dudes. The rest of the battle plays out like this. First, Fenerex tosses the PCs a bag full of mirror shards, and directs most of the PCs to head towards the largest vat. While one or two PCs throw shards to distract Barghest, Fenerex sneaks around and shoots him with his Lupara, while the other PCs work to topple the last vat. If the PCs gently caress up the throwing rolls, they need to make a difficult stealth roll or Barghest notices them and deletes their rear end with his gravity laser. That’s not even a joke, they’ll probably just get one shot. Assuming everything goes as planned, Barghest gets covered in oil, screams that he hates humans, and then flies away with Vikal. Venera is also missing again, all of sudden. poo poo is getting real bad in the Mills, basically everything is collapsing. Fenerex runs up to the PCs and tells them that there’s no longer an exit, when suddenly they hear Venera scream. A shirtless Abacus has her, and he’s showing the signs of being a full-on Leperos. He’s got a knife to her throat, and is screaming at Venera for ruining everything he’s worked for. If the PCs make the wrong move, he kills her. He walks backwards towards a formerly hidden supply tunnel, but stops to cough up a bunch of white flakes. This is the one round the PCs have to save Venera and kill Abacus. For what seems like an eternity, the PCs crawl through the shaft. Fenerex and Venera are with them. Eventually the tunnel empties out into the now-abandoned Romano camp, where they see this guy.  Our good friend Decoy 5. He’s searched through some stuff in a tent, his back to the PCs. He’s pretty ashamed to get caught without his mask up, but the PCs will recognize Decoy 5 as Custus the Scrapper. He’ll offer them a golden disk in exchange for his life and keeping his identity secret. You’d better take the disk, because it's the macguffin that links these three books together. Basically, as far as the overarching plot is concerned, nothing aside from the PCs acquiring this disk actually matters. Decoy 5 shows up as a major npc in the next book, but aside from that and maybe some hints that Venera and Fenerex will show up again later, most of the “plot” is relatively self-contained. I’m not kidding when I saw that this item is basically the one thing that ties the 3-book series together.  This is Jehammed’s disk, an incredibly important and valuable artifact. An Int+Artifact Lore (5) roll will reveal that it is some sort of receiver, and that it is missing two parts. There’s two more books. Coincidence? Here’s the funny thing, if you want, you can give it to the Jehammeds and they’ll love you forever, but then the rest of the series doesn’t work, and your PCs will miss out on acquiring perhaps the one thing that might make them more important than all of SMV’s pet npcs. Anyways, Epilogue stuff. Gala marries Ennio, and clan Lombardi takes over Lucatore after he dies in a few years. The Hellevtics come and help people rebuild. A death squad of Arianoi called “The Horned Nine '' found and killed all the Romanos after they fled, recovering all of the Jehammed treasure, aside from the disk. Barghest and Vikal are still out there somewhere. Lucio survives, but spends the rest of his life in Anabaptist prison as a parapalegic cripple. And Neva’s corpse is never found. Then there’s the experience rewards, and possible clan reputation rewards depending on your actions. For example, if you tell the Spitalians that the Anabaptists were making burn oil, you get some nice benefits from them. However, it tanks your rep with all Anabaptists and now squads will start tracking you down. Don’t worry though, none of the future adventures seem to really take this into account. And that’s In Thy Blood. Up next, The Killing Game
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Mar 27, 2021 00:22
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JcDent posted:
One of them does eventually show up in Black Atlantic, he's a mostly naked guy with a Ram Skull Helmet fitted with nanotech and fights with a white katana You can't make this poo poo up folks
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Mar 27, 2021 17:40
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SkyeAuroline posted:That's a negative. Just katanas. I forgot about the fleece, that's also nanotech.
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Mar 28, 2021 03:19
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The Killing Game, Prologue and Chapter 1 Our next tale of metaplot madness and grimdark cringe begins in Toulon, a city on the southern coast of Franka (France), along the Rhone delta. Basically, most of Franka is a hellhole ruled by the Pheromancers, Psychonauts that manipulate emotions and can turn anyone who cannot withstand their influence into slaves called Drones. However, Toulon along with 2 other cities on the coast has managed to resist the Pheromancers thus far. Why have they stood tall, while so many others have fallen? Well, there’s a Neolibyian by the name of Hamza who’s poured a significant amount of capital into the region, mostly so he can exploit the gently caress out of it. So far, he’s done pretty well for himself, the cities are bustling and his investments are really paying off. Enter the Chronicler Mirage. Mirage is a bit of a fanatic, totally devoted to the Chronicler cause and willing to wipe out anyone that slanders them. She goes to Hamza with a very reasonable proposal, they want a stable 1:1 exchange of drafts to dinars, and first right of refusal on artifacts. All in all, pretty reasonable. It wouldn’t really cost him anything to agree, and he’d avoid making an enemy of the Protectorate. So what does Hamza do? Well, he’s basically a giant dick who tells her that he has no need to help her, agree to any sort of deal, and she and the Chroniclers can get hosed, Africa rules! Mirage does not take this well. She puts Operation Mirage into gear, a full scale rebellion designed to wipe Hamza Abubakar III off of the map and erase any trace of a NeoLibyian from Toulon. The Senate is behind her, but they still want the fact that they approve of her future actions to remain secret. Enter Decoy 5, who’s the Chronicler clean-up man in this adventure. Now, you might look at this and think there’s two sides to this conflict. And there are, but the PCs can only side with Hamza, or half this book is outright useless. Anyways, the book begins with a short story where we meet these fellas.  The human is an Anubian called Nephraim, and Pheromancer is called Murankir. Murankir is essentially a vassal of King Machiawhen, the most powerful psychonaut in the area. Nephraim has coated himself in marduk oil and has come to bargain, after testing him in combat with a few drones (in which Nephraim actually uses a snake like a fuckin whip lol), Murankir says his king agrees to the truce, and they shake on it by eating some of King Machiawen’s nectar. Murankir agrees that the Pheromancers will stay in the swamps, and that Nepharim’s wasp tattoos are funny for some reason. The first chapter begins with an overview of the region proper, and some of the backstory of the coming conflict. It’s mostly what I wrote before, the Chroniclers are pissed that the Africans are bleeding Franka dry while cementing their claim to rule with the spoils of said exploitation. They've decided to do something about it. I’ll be honest, most of this chapter is rather dry, and I’ll be skipping a lot. The book is free on their website if you want to check it out yourself. Just don’t give these people any money.  The man in charge, Hamza Abubakar III. Southern Franka sucks. Millions upon Millions of insects darken the sky while Pheromancer vents puff mind-control pheromones into the air. Much of it has been terraformed into a bug-ish landscape inhospitable to regular humans. Resistance efforts from the Spitialians and their allies were of limited effectiveness, and things seemed pretty lovely overall I’d say. And then the Neolibyians came. They came in with resources and connections, calmed the feuds between the clans and “elevated the best of the natives to be their aides, advisors, and governors.” They didn’t try to force a religion on them, which is about the only non-colonialist thing they did as they assumed control over the region. The thriving trade has in turn lured a bunch of crime to the region, and many coastal settlements have popped that host collections of assassins, intellectual firebrands, and other outcasts. We get a bit on the Rhone river. The swarm does not settle upon water, so river traffic along the river is generally quite safe. However, it also feeds the swamp through its tributaries, so without it the Pheromancer breeding camps would likely not exist. The Rhone delta inself feeds into the Mediterrainian, creating an extremely diverse biosphere. Shitloads of seafood and birds feed the population of southern Franka. Most of the setting info is boring poo poo like this. There’s occasionally some good stuff, like how a flock of Apocalyptics has set up shop in an abandoned scourge tank that got stuck. They keep the Spitalians off their back by selling captured Pheromancer drones as lab rats to’em. That’s a plot hook, that’s something I can use. I don’t really care if the fishermen of Montipellier make a lot of money which they usually end up blowing at the NeoLibyian markets that encircle the harbour.  That’s a Drone standing in Front of an Icon, spoiler tags for full frontal nudity. The Icons are primitive carvings that serve as border markings for the various Pheromancer realms. Next we get some info on the spore fields. It's believed that there are nine big ones, but given the dangers of the swamp the Spitaliers haven’t been able to completely map them. The swamp itself is divided up into 5 zones of danger. 1 is relatively fine, 2 is where you really start seeing drones and swarms, in 3 you start seeing the signs of terraforming. Methane clouds hang around, and for some reason gas masks only partially protect you, if you walk into one you fall under the effect of a Narcotic drug. 4 is a mother spore field, only go here with a really good reason and a hell of a lot of preparation and equipment. 5 is Souffrance. It's hell, nobody goes there or they get eaten by palm-sized ants. Also, starting in 3 Unity (variant of Burn that makes you more social but unable to engage in violence) is present in the very air. You can only resist it with Marduk Oil, or with a Psy+Willpower (5) roll. Marduk oil makes you immune for six hours, unless your sweat mixes in with it. In a stressful situation, you roll 1d6 every 10 rounds. A 1 means it turns off and you get high as poo poo, and become visible to the drones, as well as vulnerable to being mind-slaved if a Pheromancer is nearby  There’s a bit more on the various spore fields/realms of the bigtime pheromancers, but it's still kinda boring and not very useful. They don’t really provide a reason to walk into these hells. Most of the time. There is something called Mercure’s Field Hospital. It's a comflagued Spitalier ship that sneaks through the swamp trying to figure out the Pheromancer’s achilles’ heel. They take a skeleton crew composed of the best of the best, and I could see the PCs fitting into that somehow. The Foster Woods are another possible plot hook. A variant of Pheromancers called fosters by the locals resides in these woods, they snatch kids basically. It's a pretty basic plot, but it works nonetheless. I’m not sure why you’d ever step foot in the Ninth Ziggurat, the City of Combs, or heaven forbid, Souffrance.  The next section covers east of the Rhone. As a quick aside, so far this book has talked at length about all the rich veins of scrap hidden in the swamps, and all the money everyone is making from finding and exploiting them. Yet, according to the salvage rules that JcDent went over recently, finding stuff in Franka is actually pretty difficult. I have yet to see any rules that modify this for Franka. They keep saying there’s a bunch of treasure to be found here, but I’ve yet to see any rules that reflect that. The first bit covers Hamza’s entry into Toulon. Basically, he assumed control by letting the local clans still run things as mayor, but over time (and with judicious gift-giving) he earned more and more economic concessions for him and his cult. He effectively controls the economic machine of Franka’s populated coast now, and nobody has a snowball’s chance in hell in the swamps without the Marduk Oil he can supply. Then there's a bunch of bring poo poo about the various waystations, roads, etc, manned mostly by the Hellvetics that I can’t be bothered to write up. A lot of these places mostly exist because NPCs interact with them, or I guess to make a seemingly more realistic world? I just don’t care though. SMV wastes a lot of page count on stuff that just isn’t very useful to me as a GM, even if I was running their plotlines. The next section covers land west of the Rhone. This region is mostly the dominion of the Jehmmadens, Clanners, and the Resistance. There’s a big city that had an oil spill, some Resistance training camps, etc. Stuff that might be useful as a setting Altas, but there’s not much in the way to talk about with regards to plot hooks and the like. Onto the Mediterranean. Near the Rhone Delta things are good, lots of marine life, etc. Go further south and you hit a lot of oil spills that were never really cleaned up, massive algae blooms, and even boiling water if you go far enough. The Reaper’s Blow exposed magma vents to the Med, and along with boiling waring comes large bubbles of gas that can poison the crew or capsize the ship. We do have a couple neat locations, The Black Nest has potential. Its massive collection of pointy rocks in the domain of the Purgan flocks. Callisto, leader of the Black Flock resides here. She and her Apocalyptics are known as very dangerous pirates in the region, and they make berth here. It's basically a scrap tower with machine guns bolted to every square inch of spare walkway. While it does have permanent residents, it’s also capable of hosting a thousand more Apocs for business talks and whatnot. The next section talks about Toulon in more depth. The Judges and Senate of the Protectorate hate the “largesse and lenient laws” of the Neolibyians and figure somebody oughta go in there and straighten them out, before their corruption spreads to the Protectorate. They talk a bit about Cour Argent, the port neighborhood of the city. Ships come in, people make money, ships leave, etc. It's mostly pretty dry stuff, but this caught my eye. ”Ugh, this book” posted:“With each and every one of those transport ships that leave Toulon‘s harbor, a piece of Franka‘s history and cultural identity dies” They really lay it on thick in spots with the whole “The Africans are violating mother Europe” type poo poo, and it gets worse later on as well. ”Just look at this poo poo” posted:At the same time, the university would be a great place to win the students over to the Neolibyan cause, to teach them profit optimization and the power of capital, all the while cleaning their heads of trivial nonsense like pride, homeland, culture and solidarity. Hamza and Zohra agreed on all this from the beginning. If the next generation of rulers, big landowners and Clan leaders were to grow up without prejudices the Neolibyans would be able to effortlessly loot Franka and expand the African influence to the Borcan border. “Lets corrupt Whitey’s kids with hyper-captialism so we can pillage their land and expand our influence without complaint.” There’s a whole district that lends people the money to go on scrapping expeditions, you pay them 40% of your profits from the artifacts and they buy you food, tents, marduk oil, all that poo poo. Still no word on how scrap hunting in the swamps works. After I skip some more boring poo poo regarding yet another harbour and a guard barracks we come to something interesting and useful, the laws of the Neolibyians. If you murder someone, they tie your hands behind your back and toss you off of a boat at noon. If you manage to swim back I think you’re acquitted, most die though. For other crimes you and your accuser gather before a judge in the won square and rant at each other basically. The public votes by dropping shards of soloured glass in a vase, and then the judge carries out the sentence. It’s usually a fine or forced labour, but the reputation hit is worse apparently. Now keep in mind, these are laws for non-Africans. If you do a crime towards an African, they toss you on the next boat to Africa and you die as a slave on a plantation somewhere. Yep. Anyways, there’s some more boring poo poo about customs houses and hospitals before we get to the Refinery. It's not an Oil Refinery like you might think. Most of their oil comes via tanker ships and is stored in two massive towers on the harbour. It’s actually the storehouse for cool artifacts, here they’re appraised, dissabled, fixed, etc. They’re especially interested in anything that thinks to the UEO (basically the EU) which has a bunch of locked up storehouses at whatnot, filled with cool Bygone gear. Europeans aren’t even allowed to work as assistants here, but its a pretty tempting place to raid is all I’m goona say.  That’s Hamza’s place, a super huge, well-defended, and extremely expensive fortress manor built upon a hill overlooking Cour Argent. It’s not completely finished, but there is potentially a lot of loot there to steal. Tons of resources, money, bygone treasures, but most importantly a fortune in Chronicler drafts. He uses the currency (some real, some counterfeit) to control exchange rates and manipulate them in favor of the dinar.  The Scrapper neighborhood of Ferrallies is detailed in the next section. Apparently prior to the Neolibyian arrival, this was the center of the artifact trade. Now it's a poor, stinking, squalid industrial hell that only survives as bulk scrap recycler foundry. The Africans are really loving the “European carrion crow’s collecting mania” but they still sometimes need parts from the Scrappers. Enter Diech, a scrapper and agent of the Justianian Cartel. He just loves pissing off the Africans to get the better of them in deals, and the locals love him for sticking it to those “drat africans.” There’s a bunch of other districts, but the main thing of note here is the Module. The Module supplies electricity to Toulon (they do have backups but the Module is the main source). It’s a massive oil-burning generator, any outages result in heavy fines placed upon the Iron Brothers (They’re the main Scrapper org in the region, they don’t outright say it, but I don’t think they let Africans in) by the Neolibyians. The Iron Brothers do pay, because apparently paying outrageous fines when your slapped together power plant goes down is better than being a plantation slave. Maybe its just me, but if I were a colonizer I might want to keep a closer eye on such an important utility, I might not trust it to the folks that are openly racist and hate me, but what do I know. Terres Putain is the district you go to to do crimes or get your rocks off. Gladiator fights, cock fights (both kinds), gambling, all that kind of poo poo is found here. It's basically a cultural melting pot as well. One funny thing is that this game will go on at length describing all the cool guns you can buy, but then pulls back to say that even in one of the biggest black markets in post-apoc Europe, ammo is limited. What the gently caress are all these assault rifles shooting then, prayers?  Port Lagagne’s most notable aspect is that now I want to eat some lasagna. Its yet another port with more craftsmen and ships, next!  Saint Chenil is the abandoned home of the Anabaptists (who left for Purgare in an exodus a while back) and the Spitalians (who were forced to consolidate in Montipellier after a disastrous expedition). It’s most notable for its orphanage, run by a former Preserve named Wachsmann, but his servant Opis runs things on the surface. All the children of the sex workers in Terres Putain go here, along with any other unwanted children from Toulon’s many districts. Wachsmann is hiding from his cult and doing some heinous experiments, and the Orphans are basically turbo-abused. The good ones get leases as slaves to the tannery, while the bad ones are basically imprisoned lab rats. He also has access to a UEO supply center, whenever the bounties he gets for the Orphans stop rolling in, he takes a few things and sells them on the Black Market. So far, only the general of the Resistance has questioned where he’s getting all of this top quality bygone gear. Next we get some info on the cults and how they’re managing in the region. It's mostly stuff you could glean from reading the book up until now, but I did notice something curious.  Apparently they both own Southern Franka, that’s not confusing at all. With that said, here’s a picture of two people making GBS threads at a public toilet.  This isn’t particularly relevant, for some reason it's the header image for the rumors section, which for some reason is placed two chapters before the adventure again. I don’t know why you’d put something that requires rolls pages and pages before its actually relevant, but these are the guys dead set against listing their cults in Alphabetical order, so I digress. We also have a timeline of background events prior to the adventure. It's mostly a summary of previously available info, but it's useful as a quick reference nonetheless. That’s chapter 1 complete. Chapter 2 is mostly a list of npcs and the factions, so it’ll be a smaller update next time. Hipster Occultist fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 13:48
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JcDent posted:I got tired just by reading that post. Thanks for doing this so I wouldn't have to. Man, so much of the setting is just, so goddamn dry. They barely use any of the word-count to allow for PC interaction with the plot, instead foisting the task of actually making the adventure work off to the GM. The third time that I read about some portside marketplace with X vendors that make Y goods, I wanted to claw my goddamn eyes out. The racism in this game is especially maddening. Its like if I had a faction that said "all Mexicans are sleepy" and then the Mexicans themselves spent half the day asleep. Souffrance is something I might steal for a better game. The air so thick with spores it burns away the Marduk Oil on your skin, but you're not really attacked by any enemies. All the Drones just want to help you join the Unity, and they help you get rid of those troublesome gasmasks and the like. That's creepy and I could work with that as a GM, even if the PCs would only be going there with FS nanotech to plant a guidance beacon for Minerva Station's space to ground weaponry or something like that.
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Mar 30, 2021 20:40
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Degenesis doesn't have much of a presence anymore, communities like the Degenesis reddit are basically dead. For example, the Justianian sourcebook got only got a few comments when it released and the longest threads on r/rpg are those where people stepped in to call out the game's flaws. /tg sees threads now and then I think, but they're fairly short as well. Most of their community is centered on their discord, which has become an echo chamber. If you're thinking "hey, maybe these people will get better over time and learn from their mistakes," you're sadly mistaken. The only people playing/reading their game nowadays believe SMV can do no wrong and its literally the best game of all time, and are obsessed with unveiling the metaplot like its an ARG or something. There are some elements of the setting I've been intrigued by. I think metaplot is a mistake, but the stuff around Gerome Getrell could be an interesting arc to run in a post apoc game. He's a villain I could see building an arc around, but having to read 5 books to learn half of the poo poo he's been up to is just dumb as hell. SMV has adopted a model that basically requires a supplement treadmill, and they have one auteur writer and a game that didn't make money even when it was new on the scene. I might steal parts of this setting for the Apocoylse World game I want to run at some point in the future though Hipster Occultist fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 06:47
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The Killing Game, Chapter 2 Chapter 2 is mostly a npc background/statblock section, so I’ll mostly be doing an overview of the various factions tied up in the civil war, npc descriptions themselves will come when I get to the adventure proper. We begin with a brief overview of why Operation Mirage is being launched.  The reverse racism alone is enough to make me gag, but what makes it worse is that if Hamza wasn’t such a greedy idiot his crown jewel wouldn’t be about to go up in flames. Sure, the right of first refusal on artifacts might mean that they’d lose out on some good poo poo to the Chroniclers, but isn’t not making a powerful enemy and keeping the locals pacified worth it? I mean poo poo, he’d still be making money hand over fist. He doesn’t even attempt to argue over terms, there was probably some wiggle room there. Mirage is almost just as bad though, her response to Hamza’s “get hosed lol” is basically to clam up and leave. Time to go plan a civil war that will drown the region in blood, it's not like the mind control mutants next door are a threat or anything. Even if Operation Mirage was a guaranteed success, it’d still be fuckin’ stupid idea. Mirage has been planning this operation for about a year. She’s been planting explosives, stockpiling weapons, exacerbating tensions, and making alliances. First among the factions are the rulers of Toulon. Mostly they’re related to or have served under Hamza Abukar the III, they’re the scions of a vast and wealthy Neolibyian lineage. Success has blinded them, and they no longer see the dangers of oppressing whitey. They’re rich, fairly powerful, etc. Next we have the Iron Brothers, they’re the European scrapper organization in Toulon. It doesn’t explicitly say that they have a “no blacks allowed” policy, but the previous section points out that all the African Scrappers are led by a Scrapper by the name of Orma, who is loyal to the Hamza administration. They get all the Marduk Oil and best supplies, while the Europeans get jack poo poo. The Iron Brothers got effectively sidelined when the Africans arrived, and most lived a life of constant drudgery while blaming the Africans for everything that went wrong. The entire situation is a powder keg of racist/classism anger, and even without the advantage of surprise they’d still outnumber Hamza’s Scourgers. They’ve also been infiltrated by a group of Scrapper Cartel thugs from Borca who want to steer the Iron Brothers and channel whatever revolution that does happen towards their own benefit, and they have orders to kill any Iron Brother that tries to stop them. My favorite is a lady named Hurlant. She found the journal of a Preserver lost on an old expedition into the Spore Fields, and it has meticulous notes that include passwords for a UEO supply depot. It’s written in Borcan, which she does not read or speak, so she uses it as a cutting board instead of getting one of the numerous Borcan-speaking Scrappers to translate this weird book she found.  Whoa, that’s loving deep you guys. Anyways, our next faction is Commando Requiem. The Fuse Factor lends a group of 24 Shutters (Chronicler spies). They do all the high tech spying, surveillance, explosives planning, and general infiltration and smuggling duties. They also put pressure on the Senate back home in Justitian, and got a Black Judge named Arcville along with 30 other Judges assigned to their efforts. Sadly, Fuse is an idiot and has fallen to the one weakness all spies share. Pussy. He’s having sex with one of the Rattler’s Magpies and is talking way too much  I feel like I should write about Mirage a bit here, because boy, she is something else. She was taken from her parents at a young age, and grew up in the Aquitaine Cluster. As she matured she proved to be a prodigy, mastering the ways of the Chroniclers with little effort. She’s also fiercely loyal to the Cult, you’re either in support of the Chronicles (the last great hope of civilization) or you’re a barbarian that deserves only death. She’s completely given up human emotions and has thus given her life over to the cult. So the fuckin turbo nerds turned her into a diplomat. Look at this poo poo if you think I’m exaggerating.  Chronicler 1: “Hey Chronicler 2, you know what’d be a good idea? Let's put our emotionally stunted fanatic at the forefront of all tense diplomatic conflicts with other Cults that despise us.” Chronicler 2: “I agree fellow Chronicler, that sounds logical and totally unlike a moronic decision that will blow up in our collective faces.” Chronicler 1: “Now that business is taken care of, you wanna go boot up the static stream and masturbate to anime porn drawn centuries ago?” Chronicler 2: “Boy, do I!” Anyways, our old friend Decoy 5 is here, disguised as one of Acville’s judges. He infiltrates Commando Requiem on the orders of the Central Cluster, they don’t want any word of their involvement getting out. Plausible deniability and all that. If Mirage makes a mess, he’s supposed to clean it up. If the Operation fails, he’s got orders to kill everyone involved so they don’t get tortured for information. He’s on thin ice due to his failure to get anything useful in Lucatore, and this is basically his last shot. The Black Flock is our next faction. These Apocalyptics form a 700-strong core of mediterrianian pirates, living fast but short lives preying upon Neolibyian shipping lanes. However, recent pulls from the Tarot have set the Abomination above the Creator, which only happens when some seriously bad poo poo is about to go down. It's only been pulled 3 times in history, the day before the Eshaton being the most dramatic example. So, in response they’ve all piled in their boats and have started making their way to southern Franka, to stop the worst from happening. The Firebirds are also Apocalyptics, but they’re not your standard drug dealers, sex workers, theives, and murderers. They’re more of a small revenge cult. They’re led by a man named Rattler, sometimes known as the Phoenix. At some time somebody tried to kill him, but they never quite finished the job. Almost dying had some profound effects upon his mental state. He loving hates the Apocalyptics for taking him from his mother, destroying his innocence, and teaching him to kill for memes. He figures that if he turns Toulon into a pyre, eventually the other, proper Apocalyptics will come swooping in to roost and salvage. Then he’ll kill them all, every single last one for what they did to him. He’s gathered about 20 others like him, and has convinced them to find redemption by butchering the people that hosed them up. I kinda like this guy, he’s interesting at least. He’s also recruited a Hellvetic deserter by the name of Baptiste, who looted an entire Hellvetic storage unit, and aside from being heavily armed they’ve planted enough explosives in Toulon to turn it into an inferno. He’s allied with Mirage for now, but that’ll change as he wants to cause as much chaos and bloodshed as possible. Rattler himself is a boss later on, and he’s kinda hosed. In addition to having almost as many health levels as the goddamn Archon Pyschokentic from In Thy Blood, he suffers no wound penalties due to trauma and mental attacks automatically fail because he’s always in some weird mystical trance. He also has not 1 (but 2) potentials that gently caress up dice math if you happen to be facing him. Rorschach removes sixes from your dice pool when you attack him (making triggers impossible to get and botches more likely) and Bad Luck triggers an auto-botch when you encounter him if you don’t succeed on a PSY+Willpower/Faith (4) roll. Damage wise he’s nothing to sneeze at either, 11D with a damage 10 sawed-off shotgun, and 9D with a damage 8 chain. The Cauldron is the last faction, and they’re just sort of a catch-all for any and all independent players. They include the Resistance and the other clans, as well as independents like Wachsmann. They don’t have a stake in the planning of Operation Mirage, but eventually they’ll get involved.  That’s Nestor with his literal Gears of War Lancer on the left (leader of the Iron Brothers), and Eisenhauer (smuggler and bodyguard for Nestor) on the right. That’s it for Chapter 2, onto Chapter 3 and the Adventure itself next time! Cooked Auto posted:Suddenly remembering the advertising image the Degenesis devs posted a while ago that had a bunch of scaremongering headlines about immigration and so on and them going "We called this!".  All I can do is laugh and laugh Hipster Occultist fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 13:25
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SkyeAuroline posted:Wow. I'm not sure how I missed that particular ad. When the hell did that happen? 28 days ago according to Reddit. Just imagine using 200,000 US Covid deaths to promote your ttrpg
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Mar 31, 2021 15:33
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Young Freud posted:Love how half of these headlines have no direct relation to their fungal post-apocalypse Europe. And the other half is just generic sci-fi concepts decades older than them. Josef bugman posted:There seems to be some legit good art for Legacy or a more "realistic" Apocalypse world game. It's just bolted to a system that makes anything associated with it feel slightly tarnished. Some of it is yeah. The "author" (I use the term loosely) does concept art and storyboard work for the Video Game industry, which is what keeps the lights on since Degenesis sure doesn't/
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Mar 31, 2021 19:36
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The Killing Game, Chapter 3 Before we start, I just noticed something that I wanted to point out regarding Marduk Oil. Assuming your PCs go into the swamps, this stuff is vital. In The Killing Game, the sidebar for Marduk Oil says it lasts six hours (unless you roll unlucky in a stressful situation and sweat it off), and renders you invisible to drones and plagues for six hours. Meanwhile, in the core rulebook Marduk Oil lasts one hour, and grants you +4S against Pheromancer attempts to control you, that’s it. Good editing is important ya’ll. Anyways, our adventure begins with a short story, Rattler is having a daydream about his mother, right before the Apocalyptics take him away. The story is uh, weirdly porny and taboo at a certain spot, see if you can find it.  After he wakes up, Rattler and a few Scrappers set off bombs, before he kills them all after they’ve outlived their usefulness. Before we begin the adventure, we have to go back to the beginning of Chapter 1 for our rumours table. There’s a few modifications to roll depending on what networks you have and if you’re Frankan or not. Rather than just summarize all the rumours, I’ll just post that page here.  The very last result with 3 triggers is basically the plot of the module. Keep in mind, X-Day (when all the bombs start going off) catches the Neolibyians completely by surprise, but with a good enough INT+Legends roll you make upon coming to the city (and it’s pretty easy to pump this up to 12 dice, getting 3 sixes is not super unlikely) you can get dumped with information that not even the fabulously wealthy, intelligent, and luckiest man in the city possesses. By default, there’s not much you can do about that though, as the book fails to provide any guidance for what might happen if you tip off Hamza early. Moving along, the book gives us a few different ways to get the PCs involved. There’s a bunch. Thankfully, most are “Cult X is interested in Thing Y and sends you there,” a little uncreative but they’ll work well enough. If the PCs have completed In Thy Blood, we’re given two additional hooks. The first doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me, but is presented as the most obvious reason. You could track down Decoy 5. He goes to Northern Purgare, crosses the Alps, contacts the Cluster, and then goes into hiding in Toulon. I have two issues with this. The first being, why? What possible motivation could they have for exposing him? If they played In Thy Blood, they likely have already had him at gunpoint. This would depend on the PCs letting him go, changing their minds, and then dragging rear end across post-apoc Europe out of what, spite? There’s no real reward for his head or anything, and while a GM could maybe work some inter-cult conflict into a reason to chase him down, you again run into the issue of you already had him at your mercy once before. It just seems silly. The second hook that can bring you to Toulon only works if your PCs kept Jehammed’s disk and didn’t just sell this incredibly rare and important artifact. The disk is a receiver, and a good enough roll will let you activate it. It’s picking up a weak transmission that can be triangulated, and is strongest in Toulon. If you’re running the Jehammed’s Will Trilogy, this would be the most likely avenue you’d choose I think. I’m going to skip over the next section, basically your PCs can talk to the citizens of Toulon and learn unimportant poo poo. It adds some colour to the city if you want it, but it's not really necessary. Next we get some campaign specific rules. First I want to talk about the scope/time frame of this adventure, as I believe it to be seriously flawed even if you pull your punches as a DM. This adventure occurs over the course of 3 days, 72 hours give or take an hour. Unless the PCs are part of Operation Mirage (in which case half of this book is worthless), they have no inkling that hell itself is about to descend upon the city. They might be wounded already, low on supplies, their guard is probably down, etc. This is a major problem because unless your PCs are paranoid, powergaming machines, your chances of making it through this meatgrinder are very low. Degenesis has fast and lethal combat as a design goal, and without serious armour most folks go down in 2-3 good hits. In this adventure, there are multiple lethal combats. Let’s say just one of these fights goes bad during these 72 hours, in which the PCs have so little opportunity for rest the book gives us new rules for Exhaustion, Stimulants, and Burn abuse. In Degenesis, you have two types of wounds, Flesh (easier to heal and more plentiful) and Trauma (the opposite). If you’re suffering from wound penalties, good painkillers can ignore some or all of the penalties for a time. Lets try and max out our wounds. We’ll do that by making a Balkan Scrapper with the Conqueror concept, which gives 4 Body, 3 Psyche, and 4 Toughness. This is assuming that we put a 2 (the most you can assign to a skill or attribute at chargen, the rest comes from cult/concept/culture bonuses) in all of those. Our Flesh Wounds are BOD+Toughness x2, so 16. Our Trauma is equal to Body + Psy, so 7. This is basically min-maxed at chargen, most folks will have less, but nobody can really afford to dump these stats so it won’t be too dissimilar. Assuming our little Scrapper just finished In Thy Blood, he’s looking at somewhere around 80-90xp earned. Attributes are new value x12 to raise, skills are new value x5. So they could either use that xp to raise their body and potentially their toughness by 1 each, giving them 18 flesh and 8 Trauma wounds. Or they could raise Toughness by 2 (maybe 3 if they had 90 xp) for 20/22 Flesh wounds and the same amount of trauma. Either way, not a lot of difference. Armour generally hovers around 3-5 depending on your cult and resources, let’s assume that our Scrapper is wearing leather armor, it’s cheap and scrapper armor sucks because damage degrades it. So they’ve got say 18 Flesh Wounds and 8 Trauma, and minus 3 damage from every attack unless said attack is penetrating. Now, let’s say after some good NPC rolls our Scrapper isn’t looking so hot at the end of the first day, and is down a bunch of wounds. How do we get them back on their feet? Well, here’s how healing works in Dengesis. You must recover all flesh wounds before trauma wounds, and you naturally heal 1 flesh every day, and one trauma every 10 days. If we want to speed this up, we roll Int+Medicine, we need two successes and then we heal 1+triggers in flesh wounds. This can only be done once. Healing trauma wounds requires surgery that takes 12 hours, heals 1+triggers, and can only be done once every 4 days. I’m fairly certain that the timeline does not allow for 12 hours for likely exhausted characters to do surgery, but I digress. Using a bandage will grant an additional flesh wound if its applied right away, and medical equipment does exist that can grant the medic more dice. However, you’re still capped at 12 dice on a single roll, so even all 6’s would still only heal 12 wounds. A couple of interesting side notes. Chroniclers have an amazing trigger called Fractal Memory. It’s always on, costs nothing, and gives you extra triggers on any INT roll equal to its level. The Chroniclers have nothing of the sort, and thus if you can boost your Medicine skill high enough and/or steal some Spitalier doctor gear, the nerds make better medics than the doctor faction. Some of you may be wondering, with all this nanotech lying around, are there faster ways to heal? Why yes, yes there are! If you have access to a Cryostasis chamber, one night will heal you to full. However, it turns you into a black man.  I just, I mean, what? Anyways, metaplot-wise this important, as using a cryo-chamber imprints memetics on you. Of course, you’ll likely never have access to a working one as PCs. Also, this whole ethnicity swap thing occurs with the Anubian initiation too. Whitey can join, but their whole death and rebirth thing makes you a black dude. This will come into play in a major way during Black Atlantic, the next and final book of the trilogy. This isn't directly relevant to The Killing Game itself, but I stumbled across it while looking at healing mechanics, and yeah. Not only is healing sparse, but during these 72 hours you’re probably not going to be sleeping much either. You can stay awake for 20+(Body+Toughness) hours, after that you’re at -2D to all actions. Each hour you want to stay awake requires you to spend an ego point. Run out of those, and it’s a -4D penalty now. Also, you need to make a PSY+Faith/Willpower roll to take awake for X, where X equals the number of minutes you can stay awake before collapsing. Being awoken by another person lets you roll again, with a stacking +1 difficulty per roll. One hour of sleep recovers a quarter of ego points lost his way, so basically all it takes is 4 hours of sleep a day to keep going. One thing you'll notice as you read this books, is that the designers really don't have a good grasp on the math behind their system. Penalties combined with small dice pools and the need for multiple successes + triggers can make trying to get poo poo done an exercise in frustration, and I don't believe that the writers have realized that. Fortunately for our tired PCs, there are options. Drug options. Abusing Burn means you don’t have to spend ego points to stay away, and if you’re taking Unity Burn you do not suffer the -2D penalty during the intoxication and stimulation phase. However, Unity generally prevents you from engaging in conflict without a roll, not the best state to be in while a war is raging. Stimulants are also an option. Normally these grant buffs depending on which stimulant is used, and that’s still true. Once you’re in your exhaustion phase, you don’t suffer any dice penalties, and instead of burning ego points to stay awake, you take 1 damage per hour instead. Which is uh, way worse, especially considering all the healing stuff I went over at length above. You don’t suffer any wound penalties from this damage, but after the effects wear off in level (of the drug)x3 hours you crash. Crashing takes away all of those ego points anyways, and if you’re out you collapse for 1D hours. So basically, surviving this module basically requires avoiding every fight you possible can, quickly steamrolling those you can’t, and likely taking a shitload of drugs that aren’t every good to pick up the slack. Honestly, I don’t see many groups making it through this alive. Next, we get some rules for moving through the city once poo poo starts popping off. They’re mostly rolls to find alternate routes, get information from dead bodies, avoiding firefights between two groups, and so on. Most of them aren’t too bad, aside from the alleyway lined with explosives and pit traps that could potentially wipe a party, or at least injure them enough for them to consider just getting the gently caress out of here. X-day minus 1 The day before everything goes down, the PCs are in Toulon doing whatever it is they came here to do. The book gives us several short scenes to run, these are said to serve as ways to alert them of what’s to come, introduce them to key locations, etc. These aren’t important to the plot, and the book says you can run as many or as few as you want. Personally, I think they’re a waste of time and wordcount. You don’t really accomplish or learn anything of note during most of them, but let's take a look anyways. Scene 1, Cour Argent. A Scrapper gets his boat stuck in a canal. A Neolybian Emissary shows up, gets mad, demands he gets unstuck, etc. He orders some Scourgers to take over his boat and “help” him. The Scrapper runs his boat aground and runs into a canal, the Scrougers don’t chase him for reasons, and are instead more worried about the canal jam. Your PCs can make some rolls to chase him, but the Book mandates that the PCs lose track of him once he disappears from a Slaughterhouse. The butchers won’t tell you poo poo either. Scene 2, Ferrallies. Nothing to do here except have the GM read a few descriptions of Scrapper life in the neighborhood. Well, that’s not entirely true, you can get disoriented and then lost, you end up in a bar that smells like human waste and cheap booze, and need to make some social rolls to get directions to make your way out of Ferrallies. You can also witness some Iron Brothers putting the boots to someone over some wire or something. Next! Scene 3, Terres Putain. For some reason, the characters stumbling onto a business dinner hosted a floating cookhouse by a Neolibyian Grantor. He tries to buy a character’s weapon, offering to fund an expedition in exchange. Then a house falls off the nearby shore and into the Ocean, the waves nearly swamping the cookhouse. You gotta make a roll not to be swept overboard. Eventually a raft comes and takes the PCs and NPCs to the shore. The PCs can check the remnants of the house, where an INT+Science (3) or AGI + Crafting (2) roll will reveal that the foundation was deliberately undermined, a further INT+Perception roll (4) will reveal two picks and a shovel about to be swept away by rushing water. Eventually a district judge shows up, if you try to tell him what happened, this is what he says. [quote="”District Judge”"]Who would want to bring a house down? Who are you? Architects? I have no use for witnesses like you.”[/quote} He’ll then blame it on lovely work by Scrappers, literally say “case closed,” and then bail after ordering that the hole be filled. It might seem odd that an NPC would angrily shut you down for no reason where you discover sabotage in a town with a well-armed and agitated populace, but the module only works if the Africans are complete idiots that ignore every sign of the coming storm. So, you’ll get nowhere with this. If that wasn’t bad enough, with a Int+perception (3) roll you can hear a familiar buzz above your heads, if you look up you’ll see Decoy 5’s drone. If you want him to remain unaware that you’ve seen it, you have to beat him in a PSY+Deception against his CHA+Expression. Then you’ll have the opportunity to carefully follow it, and trail Decoy 5 once he collects it. Like the Scrapper before though, it’s not time to catch Decoy 5 yet so he slips away again in a sewer tunnel thanks to GM fiat. While this scene is still largely railroady bullshit, at least the PCs would learn something potentially useful here. Scene Four, Port Scene 5, Saint Chenil. There’s basically no good reason for your PCs to be here, even during the day. Unless they want to buy empty rusted tin cans or see a guy dead in his own feces, there’s not a whole lot for PCs to do here until the end of the module. If they do come here, a thief steals something from them and runs off. If you catch her, she begs forgiveness and is such a pitiful little girl you have to make a PSY+Faith/Willpower (3) roll to avoid giving her a few dinars. If you’re nice to her, she does know a lot about the streets/criminal element and can be a good source of info, if you pay her. What does she know? The Book doesn’t say and she has no stats or entry in the NPC section, so that’s yet more work for the GM if you go that route. The last thing of note to happen here is that with an INS+Perception (3) roll, you can see a smaller boat enter the harbour and then disappear into Ferrailles. An INT+Engineering (5) roll will tell you that this is a camo boat. The thief knows nothing about this boat. We haven’t had any art in this section, so enjoy this picture of General Zoe, leader of the Resistance.  And that’s it for the prologue, next time, X-day!
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Apr 2, 2021 18:43
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SirFozzie posted:Ah... Legends of the Wulin. The bestest game ever to be destroyed by embezzling to run a Chinese maid cafe.... If I remember the tales right Wut?
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Apr 4, 2021 01:37
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Just wanted to second that more analysis of the deep-rooted faults of Degenesis is always welcome! It would also be interesting to know how exactly they keep funding this incipient ~transmedia property~ considering all the expensive art they are giving away for free. Secret cache of nazi gold? Degenesis is published by SIXMOREVODKA, which is primarily a concept art studio based out of Berlin. They've had their fingers in a lot of pies, but primarily work with video games and comics. The head writer for Degenesis is Marko Djurdjevic, and he is also the head of SMV. He does a lot of Marvel covers and such these days, while his company is currently doing the art for Riot's Legends of Runeterra. That's where the money comes from, their successful artists fund their vanity transmedia project. (There's even a sample movie script on their website that you can download heh) They do Q&A's with their Discord community every now and then, and Marko has straight up admitted that the game has never made any money. The books themselves sell for a lot of Euros and they do have some other merch, but after years of not so much as breaking even, they made the decision to go free to play in early 2020. I believe the intent was to give the game out free to grow their fanbase, and then hopefully reach profitability via donations and new limited print runs for the hardcore fans willing to drop the cash on their premium books. Apparently this didn't work, as a few months later the staff was bitching on their discord that almost nobody was paying for the game they were giving out for free. Hipster Occultist fucked around with this message at 11:34 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 11:32
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JcDent posted:Must be the weird euro racism, because as we all know, lovely rules and no editing doesn't stop bad games In all seriousness, I think its a combination of factors. The game is kinda small, its got more reach in Europe than anywhere else really, but its still a pretty small fanbase so word of mouth doesn't generate a lot of interest. As you've seen yourself, even the two core rulebooks are dense as gently caress. It's a pretty big ask to get a table of players willing to dive into a little over 700 pages of dense rules and lore, especially when said lore is incomplete, hidden from even the GM to feed the supplement treadmill, and told in an often scattershot ARG or Dark Souls fashion. Its also a pretty hard system to GM. There's no proper bestiary, the Kartharsys book gives you stats for 2 animals, 3 mooks, and Sleepers/Marauders/AUSUMOS. It doesn't really offer much in the way of meta tools you that might help a GM, and basically foists most of the work of actually getting the system to function off on to the GM. If you think maybe you'll get some help by joining their community, I hope you don't dare break canon or they'll chase you out like you just put a hex on their dairy cows. If you get past all of that, then you get to all of the ignorant and ugly racism, sexism, and just plain bad game design. This is excused by their attitude that gatekeeping is good actually, and this system is meant for skilled GMs and mature players ready to handle dark and mature themes. I'm curious as to what folks felt as they played through a campaign though.
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Apr 5, 2021 01:21
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The Killing Game, Day 1. X-Day has arrived! For those that might have missed it, unless the PCs are part of Operation Mirage (in which case you basically have to rewrite this adventure from scratch), all of the proceeding events will likely come as a surprise to the PCs. Depending on their information gathering and how they interpreted the scenes they may or may not have taken part in yesterday, they might have an inkling of what’s about to happen, but they probably aren’t going to expect literal civil war the very next day. This is a problem, because it's quite possible that the PCs will not have the supplies necessary to survive 72 hours of hell. If they’re in Cour Argent when the explosions start happening, they won’t even have their guns/swords as those are taken away from you upon entry to the district. The day begins with 2 paragraphs of purple prose describing three explosions. The Silver Axis in Cour Argent is bombed to spread chaos and fear amongst the civies, the Scourger barracks in Terres Putain are bombed because (duh), and the scorched path bridge that links Cour Argent to Ferrallies is also bombed. This cuts off General Zoe and the Resistance, ensuring that Nestor and his Iron Brothers won’t get hit with a counterattack as they breach the palace in Cour Argent. As a side note, every so often there’s a timer at the top of the page, the explosions take place at 7am, and generally it does tell us when a specific event is happening. So where do the PCs come into this? Well, the book says that ideally the PCs are in one of two locations, The Silver Axis of Cour Argent in which case they’ll see sections 1-4, or the Northern Port, in which case they start at section 5. I’m not really a big fan of these scenes,as they’re basically just narrative descriptions of what the NPCs are doing, without any text given over to how they might react to the PCs should they get involved. We do get a couple toolbars that tell us stuff like how unless the PCs are on the side of Operation Mirage, recklessness will get them killed, Chroniclers and Scrappers are manning the rooftops, etc. We do also have stats for grunts for most of the non-named npcs, but those are collected at the end of the book. That all being said, as a GM I don’t have much use for short passages from a novel, even in a linear D&D module we’d get more than this. Here’s the first one for example.  Its kinda fitting that this is basically GM storytime, as there’s basically no way for the PCs to get involved without committing suicide by racist Scrappers There’s 200 of the fuckers! Also, assuming you had some way to triumph here, the module stops. With the ringleaders and most of the ground forces dead Hamza likely cleans up once reinforcements arrive. For the sake of being a nice GM, we’ll say that the PCs were close to the guard post where they surrendered their weapons, and were able to collect them without much fuss once poo poo popped off.  Scene 2 involves Dietch and two dozen Scrapper cartel thugs busting into the Consulate, looking for Zhora. She’s a pretty valuable hostage, and Deitch is looking for her so he can sell her back to the Neolibyians for a big cash prize. As he looks for her, his men tie up the women/children and indiscrimiantely murder the men. You might think that its dumb to intervene when there’s literally 25 guys there, and you’d be right! The book does seem to acknowledge this, a bit. Zhora sent her 6 Scrouger bodyguards to go investigate the explosions, 3 died in the fighting that erupted but the other three have made it. They are out of ammo however. So now its the PCs (likely 4-5 characters) +3 NPCs against 25 NPCs. You have three rounds to make an AGI+Expression roll to signal the Scourgers and coordinate a surprise attack before Dietch finds Zhora. The Scrappers don’t have amazing stats, but they’re not one-pump-chump mooks either, and there’s a lot of them. Let’s say that your PCs are righteous badasses though, and you carve through the Scrappers without any major issues. Well, that changes nothing. Dietch uses a grenade to blow himself an exit through which he escapes with Zhora in tow, since it’s not his time to die yet. Scene three is a bunch of Scrappers and one Chronicler robbing the Bank of Commerce while brutalizing some hostages. If you want you make some stealth rolls to sneak some hostages away after creating a diversion, but there’s not much you can do against 30 dudes, there’s zero npc help this time. Ah, scene 4. Ya’ll ready for some ethnic cleansing? A squad composed of Jurymen (rank 1 Judges) Shutters (Chronicler Spec Ops), and Scrappers is loving up the university. Smashing poo poo, bruning books, etc. They line up all the students against the wall, with the oldest student not even 15 years of age. The Shutter that announces that if Franka is your heritage, (ie: you’re white), you can go. All the black students are to be executed. Yup. Up until this point, you could have been working for Operation Mirage. The book points out that the hate-crime murder of children might be enough to get them to switch sides. Ya think? Anyways, if they don’t intervene they’re murdered, stripped naked, and dumped into the nearby canal. If the PCs do intervene, they are two Shutters, 2 Scrappers, and 6 Jurymen. As soon as a fight breaks out all the civvies scatter, the Scrappers will try to kill as many fleeing students with gunfire as they can while the Judges engage the PCs in Melee. The Shutters flee the battle, and will show up with TPK reinforcements in exactly five minutes, so you’d better end this fight quickly. Scene 5 takes place in the Northern Port. What brings the PCs there you ask? Well, back in the Consulate exactly one Scourger survives the battle. He’ll tell the PCs that the way to the palace is blocked off, and the only thing they can do now is get the women and children to the L’Orage Field Hospital in the Northern Port. I’m not sure exactly how the previous two scenes are supposed to fit in while you have a convoy of women and children, but I digress. When the PCs get to the hospital, they see some Judges and Scrappers take about 30 Spitlians hostage. The Scrapper Hurlant and the Black Judge Arcville get into a little verbal scrap, Hurlant wants to take revenge on a Spitalian who failed to save her daughter, Acville stops her because they need these doctors for their own people. By now the PCs have learned how SMV’s adventures work, so they gracefully wait for the bigtime NPCs to finish monologuing and leave. There’s just two Scrappers and two Judges here, so saving the Spitalians before they board a boat to Ferrallies is fairly easy, and they should be able to get a surprise round off as well. Which is good, because the module assumes you win here and save them all. One of the Scappers has a radio that you can decrypt, or you could find another/make your own. At a certain point the book decries that the PCs can now listen in on Mirage’s comms channel, and this is setup for that. Scene 6 takes place immediately after the preceding scene. The characters and the freed Spitalians are aboard the raft as it kicks off from the dock. When did the PCs decide to go sailing, and why? Anyways, the head doc will catch the PCs up on the giant explosions they might have somehow missed, as well as what happened at the hospital. Apparently the Scrappers burst in, starting throwing patients out of windows, and rounding up all the doctors. I’m not sure that these Scrappers realize that committing indiscriminate murder is not an ideal way to win the populace over to their rebellion. A few minutes later the Spitalians inform the PCs that they’re all headed for Terres Putain because that’s where the Resistance is, they’ve gotta get them mobilzed if there’s any hope of saving the city. As they draw close to their destination, a couple rolls will let them spot a torpedo boat heading their way! The Scrappers need these doctors, and do not intend to give them up that easily. The Boat will not ram your raft, as they don’t want to risk killing what they came for, but they do circle it taking pot shots at the PCs with a kinda dinky hunting rifle. What’s more dangerous are the waves that begin to swell, causing the raft to sway. This gives you +2 passive defense, but -2D to all actions. If an action that involves movement fails, you need to make an AGI+Mobility (2) roll to not fall overboard. If you do, you have to make a Body+Athletics (3) roll to remain afloat and undrowned. Fail those, and you sink and die. If you pass the Body roll, it takes a joint effort Body+Force (5) roll to pull you back aboard. As far as the boat shooting at you goes, you have three options. You can shoot the driver. This is at -5 due to the speed, but it’s unclear if that factors in the -2D or not. The Scrapper has a passive defense of 2, so you’re either looking at a -7 or -9 to your shot. Fortunately, you only have to wing him to make the Scrapper lose control of this craft, killing isn’t necessary. It’s a pretty hard shot to make, but your local Hellvetic might be able to pull it off. The second option is to shoot the boat’s gas tank. Locating it requires an INT+Engineering (3) roll, and hitting it requires an AGI+Projectiles (4) roll. Doable even with the penalty if you’re a min-maxed marksman, but even then it's a tough shot and you easily fail over and over again with bad luck. Your last option is to ram the boat with your raft, this takes an AGI+Piloting (3) roll, and destroys both in a fiery conflagration. Most of the Spitalians make it to shore, but a few bite it here. Curiously, if you chose this method you don’t need to roll to stay afloat and are able to swim to Terres Putain just fine. Part 2 The second part of the first day begins with the PCs and the Spitalians arriving at the Eastern part of Terres Putain. It is now 10am on day 1, and the PCs have been involved in roughly 3-4 combats so far, with one of them potentially being a combat in which they were outnumbered 3:1. Keep that in mind as we progress. From there it’s about a 20 minute walk to the Resistance camp, and the head Spitalian vouches for you, so you get to meet General Zoe, leader of the Resistance. You get a minute to make a report before Vericon (the mayor of Toulon) bursts in. Zoe is a woman of action who wants to go on the offensive, Vericon does not, and they argue a bunch about what is to be done. Eventually he storms out, and Zoe says that they will attack the Scrappers in the Silver Axis at noon. Zoe isn’t interested in paying the PCs to help, she tries to win them over to his cause in the name of Toulon and Franka. If the PCs insist on payment, the conversation ends. This next bit is actually kind of interesting, as it represents a first in these modules. An alternate path! Well, kinda. It's possible that the PCs were more closely aligned with Hamza, and thus instead of going to save the Spitalians, they went to the palace instead. During these events they’re with Hamza at the palace. Hamza’s palace is basically hosed. Eisenhauer used a mortar to blow a hole in the outer wall, through which the Scrappers brought a giant armoured battering ram. There’s about 30 African Scrourgers defending the walls, and their assault rifles can’t penetrate the makeshift armour. I’m not really why they call it a battering ram in the text though, it's more of a mobile bulletproof shield. They don’t actually try to batter down the walls with it, and once they get to said walls they reveal that all the carts that they’ve been transporting under it are filled with gas-powered jackhammers. They take these out and start going to town on the walls. Meanwhile, Hamza is frantically trying to radio Orma. The African Scrapper is on his way back to Toulon aboard the Unya, Hamza’s largest transport liner. He wants Orma to come get him because Whitey is going nuts. Unfortunately for Hamza, the Chroniclers set up a jammer network that prevents radio signals from escaping the city, but radio communication within the city is still possible. Thanks to some beggars who found the jammer in Saint Chenil and sold it for parts, the jammer shield is not perfect. A strong enough signal could potentially get out. If the PCs follow Hamza to the roof, he’ll get them to fetch the big antenna that is supposed to be on the roof, but is currently missing. This requires a bunch of successes on cooperative rolls to retrieve, and you have to do so while under musket fire from the Scrappers down below that can see your dumb asses. Assuming the PCs succeed, the signal that comes through is very weak and everyone present concludes that they’re being jammed. The next scene is mostly just an argument between Hamza and Nephraim that the PCs have to listen to, there’s no need for them to get involved here. Eventually Hamza settles on escaping the palace to board his big boat, after which they regroup and attack Ferrallies at dawn. To aid in their escape, they’re going to light a signal flame usually lit when allied warships from Hamza’s two other cities arrive for holiday celebrations. The Scappers cannot afford to let a bunch of Africans land more troops, so this apparently forces Nestor to send a detachment down to the harbor. Hamza and his remaining Scrougers head for the south gate, the intent being to punch their way through the weakest part of the ring of Scrappers surrounding the Palace. Everyone repels down the walls easy enough, and Hamza makes the mistake of saying that this was too easy. Tempting fate like this is dangerous, and it turns out to be an ambush! No rolls, you’re just declared surprised via GM fiat again. You’ve gotta help the Scrourgers keep Hamza alive against overwhelming odds, but then heads start exploding! The PCs don’t know it yet, but their guardian angel is Hexell, one of the Firebirds serving under Rattler. He has orders to not let anything happen to Hamza, and nothing does. He just shoots literally everyone apparently, because the next section places you all in the Silver Axis. If you had been with Zoe all this time instead, the Resistance takes the signal fire as a sign to attack, and their forces pour into Cour Argent’s elite marketplace to merge the two plotlines. Part 3 It is now 2pm. The PCs are either with General Zoe, or with Hamza as they meet up in the Silver Axis. poo poo’s hosed, lotta dead civvies, etc. They’re all running down the road when suddenly, a wild armoured car appears!  This could be really cool, but I actually hate this encounter. It has so much potential, the PCs could be running around trying to avoid being pancaked while frantically trying to bring it down. If they’d tossed in some rules/tactics for how it might behave as it weaves around shooting people, it could have been a really dynamic encounter. Instead, it just puts around while the Scrappers aboard shoot Muskets at everyone. The only “stats” they provide are the three weaknesses you have to exploit to one-shot it. First, you need to make an Int+Engineering (3) or a INS+Perception (3) roll to identify and target these weak spots. I sure hope nobody rolls badly here, because this thing doesn’t have wounds! (Also, from my reading it looks like the person making the shot has to make the roll, you can’t just point it out to someone else.) Assuming that works, you can shoot the massive gas tank welded to the side (the one your apparently severely nearsighted rear end could miss) on a difficulty 5 roll, no mention of any amount of damage you need to do so I assume 1 damage makes it go boom. A few Scrappers survive and after a moment of confusion will start fighting again, but at least the car and most of the Scrappers are gone. You can also shoot the water tank with a difficulty (4), said tank is keeping the vehicle cool. This blinds the driver and he crashes into a building. Everyone else survives though, and they all jump off ready to fight. Finally by making a combination roll of INS+Perception (3) and an AGI+Projectiles (6) roll you can shoot the driver through his viewing port. The driver loses control immediately as the car bucks, tossing Scrappers everywhere. 3 heartbeats later the car explodes for some reason. I assume he also crashes and mangles it, but the text doesn’t actually confirm that. Anyways shooting the driver kills everyone. During this fight, the PCs won’t be specifically targeted so long as they’re in cover. If they wish to move, an AGI+Stealth/Mobility (3) roll is necessary or they take a hit from a bullet. If they target one of the weak points and fail, the text says that they’ll be under massive attack. Given that dozens of Scrappers are aboard this thing, that’s probably bad. So, don’t miss. Once the enemy is dead, General Zoe and Ayubu (the Scourger General) talk strategy. The Resistance is told to fall back and secure a bridge or something, while the Scrougers take Hamza to a defensible position, the nearby Customs Houses. They’re got some time to kill before Orma arrives with his ocean liner. The PCs are ordered to go to the Refinery (the artifact storehouse) and distract the Iron Brothers. Given that this place is the second best place to loot in the city, this seems like the PCs would be stirring up a hornet’s nest that seems likely to get them killed. I’d probably tell Ayubu to go gently caress himself, but our PCs follow orders regardless of who gives’em. It is now 7pm. When the PCs arrive at the Refinery, it’s quiet, too quiet. The gates are open, charred bodies lie strewn about, and smokes billows from several smouldering fires. The book says that an INS+Perception (2) roll reveals that the coast is clear, which seems entirely loving backwards, but okay. This next scene relies upon the PCs having a Scrapper radio. As it gets close to the refinery, it makes some weird sounds. An Int+Science (3) roll reveals that something is interfering with the transmission, and that they are likely drawing close to the source. A combination of Int+Engineering (3) and INS+Orienting (2) rolls lets them start pinpointing the source. They’ll have to climb up to the roof of a nearby warehouse first, and then cross across a gap to a different roof. Wait, weren’t we sent here to distract the Iron Brothers or something? Anyways, there’s two ways to cross this gap. It’s only 3 meters, and given that the world record is almost 9 meters, that seems pretty doable if you just want to jump. You can also throw a rope across and travel to the other roof hand over hand, this requires a BOD+Athletics (3) roll. Failure means you fall and take 20 damage, (each meter fallen = 2 damage) armour does nothing. Breaking your fall requires making a BOD+Athletics roll where the difficulty = the damage, so that is not happening here, it’s literally not possible. Better hope that the nerds in your party didn’t skip leg day, because for anyone with less than 21 wounds this fall is fatal. Because I am an rear end in a top hat that denies my PCs the sweet release of death, they all make it past the deadliest boss so far, a 3 meter gap. Anyways, they’re pretty close to the Emitter now, which is why this prick opens fire. No, you don’t get a perception roll before he opens up, why do you ask?  To be fair, he does miss his first salvo thanks to gm fiat. Factor (leader of Commando Requiem) is here because a (now dead) African Scrapper found his jammer emitter and was tinkering with it earlier in the day, so Factor killed him and set up shop here to keep it safe. Assuming the characters react and put pressure on him, Factor ups the ante immediately. He throws a strange grenade at the PCs, which doesn’t really so much as detonate as it does start spewing a blue-ish gas that starts to spark. An INT+Engineering/Artifact Lore/Science (4) will reveal that the cloud could discharge a giant flash of electricity at any moment, and any organic material would go up in flames in seconds. The PC’s only option here to jump off of the roof and dive through a neighboring window/awning. This takes a BOD+Athletics (3) roll. Take 3 unsoakable damage if you succeed, and 9 if you fail. Look out, the son of 3-meter gap is out for blood after you defeated his pa! poo poo like this is a major problem with this so-called “novelist style” that composes these adventures. The adventure assumes the PCs make the rolls because the linear narrative demands it, so they don’t provide rules or guidance for what might happen if they fail these rolls. There are no stats provided for the “Influence Grenade” in this book, nor could I find any in Katharsys or Artifacts. I have no idea how much damage it does, the timer on it, etc. All I know is that the PCs have to jump off the roof or ??? There is no guidance for what might happen to Factor if the PCs one-round him, which is quite possible. Factor has armor 4, 16 flesh wounds, and 7 trauma wounds. He’s also got a passive defence of two, so we’ll bump that up to 3 for light cover because he’s probably crouched behind a waist-high wall already. Bob the Hellvetic opens up with his Trailblazer and Salvos 3 times, he has a base AGI + Projectiles of 10 (very doable at this stage of advancement if you min-max a bit), which gets bumped up to 12 (the max dice you can roll). He rolls 6,1,6,3,4,4,6,2,1,2. Pretty dang good! Trailblazers are damage 11, which gets up to 14 with Salvo 3, 17 with the 3 triggers, and then you subtract 4 for Factor’s armor for a total of 13 damage. Bob isn’t done yet though, because he got 3 triggers Smooth Running kicks in. This gives him another attack at -2D. So he rolls 8 dice this time. He rolls 3,2,6,2,6,3,5,3. 16 total damage, subtract 4 for the armor, and that’s another 12 damage. That’s 25 damage, Factor has 23 health. He’s pasted. That’s just one PC, there’s probably 3-4 more attacks at least coming his way before he gets a chance to throw that Grenade. It does say that after the grenade, Factor does not let himself be captured and loses any pursuit via his superior knowledge of the terrain or some poo poo, no rolls required. But here’s the thing, he’s supposedly defending a static objective that forms a crucial link in his radio-jamming network. Does he take it with him and redeploy it elsewhere? Is it destroyed by the grenade? What happens to the network if it is? So many questions, and so few answers. In the meantime, The Iron Brothers manage to win a battle that forces the Resistance back across the bridge to Terres Putian, they can no longer aid Hamza and his forces as they’re now cut off. Anyways, the characters look towards the harbour and see the Unya, the ship Hamza has been waiting for. If the characters have not linked back up with the Africans by now, they can follow them from their vantage points atop the warehouse roofs. The adventure assumes that you catch up prior to them entering the harbour itself. There’s only one pier that can accommodate a ship of that size, and aside from scattered terrain like sandbags and crates, there’s basically no cover. You can to make some rolls to move from cover to cover successfully, but for a little bit there’s no hostile movement. It is now 9pm. And then, you hear galloping. Ten Jurymen ride in on horses, along with what I assume are also 10 Protectors, although it fails to say exactly how many Protectors arrive. Boats from Ferrallies stream up and start unloading Iron Brothers onto the docks of the Northern Port, and finally a stolen Kom (Scrouger vehicle) roars up from the east. Eisenhauer is aboard manning a mounted minigun, and once he says the Africans he starts spewing bullets. The characters are vastly outnumbered and completely surrounded. You’ve got no choice but to hold the line. Tactics wise the rebels try to overwhelm you with numbers, being outnumbered gives you -2D, and them +2D. If you want there’s mechanics for knocking the Judges off of their horses as well. Fortunately, the book tells us “that courage and the instinct of self preservation fill the characters.” This gets you D6 ego points back. Eisenhauer himself shoots at Africans indiscriminately, regardless of whether he might hit his own allies or not. He’s got 6000 rounds for his minigun so he can fire all night long, we’re told. This just goes to show you that SMV does not understand ammo and automatic fire. I mean, we don’t know the exact model of the minigun he’s using, but most miniguns would burn through 6000 rounds in a minute or less. Anyways, if a salvo gets close to the characters they have to roll Int+Focus/Primal (3) to retain their bearings, dodging requires a AGI+Mobility (3) roll. Failure on either means you take a damage 12 hit. Probably 7-9 damage after armor. If you want to stop him, you have to shot the driver of the buggy, killing Eisenhauer himself is possible but curiously not presented as an option here. That takes a AGI+Projectiles (5) roll. The buggy crashes, and Eisnehauer is stunned for 20 rounds as he stumbles out of the wreckage, but is otherwise unharmed. After a while (the book does not tell us how long this should take, I guess you could do the math and compare the length of a combat round to the speed of an Ocean Liner but eh) the Unya crashes into the dock, throwing everyone to the ground. Chains and ropes are flung down the sides, and the African Scrappers unload with their guns and the ship’s cannon. The characters have to wait 5 rounds while under fire before they’re allowed to climb up, fortunately the Scrougers at least throw up a shield wall (passive defense +4). Assuming they make the rolls to claim aboard, they year Hamza giving Orma poo poo for getting his boat stuck. They’ll need to free it with a nearby tugboat, and they’ll also need to attach the towing chains. Guess what the PCs + one NPC are doing next? It is now 11pm. First, you have to make a BOD+Athletics (3) roll to climb down a rope, or you can climb down a rope ladder slowly. Then it’s a BOD+Athletics (3) roll to swim out to the tugboat in full gear, otherwise you have to wait for Yuma (your npc helmsman who’s going to drive the boat) to swim out and pilot the boat back to the ship. Once the tugboat is close enough, it’s a cooperative action BOD+Force (10) to grab the heavy chains with hooked poles and steer them towards the Unya. It then takes an AGI+Dexertiy (4) roll to actually attach said chains to the tugboat’s winch. At this time the rebels notice the tugboat and start shooting at ya’ll. Once Yuma punches it into gear and starts towing, you lose the cover you had from the ship’s hull and are more or less in the open while aboard this boat. Fortunately, the shooting soon stops as Eisenhauer presses his way through the crowd. He’s got an anti-tank launcher ready! Fortunately, Yuma manages to get the Unya unstuck just in time. The PCs have to make a PYS+Reaction and a AGI+Mobility (2) roll to see the muzzle flash in time to jump overboard and dodge the rocket, otherwise you take 10 damage. Fortunately, you won’t drown because you’re able to climb to the wreckage of the tugboat. The Unya leaves port, and it’s wake washes you towards Terres Putain. Auybu and the rest of his Scrougers die in melee combat aboard the docks, and the GM reads you the tale of his badass heroic sacrifice.  And that’s day one! Day two begins with the likely heavily wounded and exhausted PCs arriving at Camp Resistance at 5am. Next time!
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Apr 6, 2021 00:17
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JcDent posted:
There's a few more, but they're given as one off things to powerful NPCs pretty much exclusively.
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Apr 7, 2021 08:33
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The Killing Game, Day 2 It is now 5am as the PCs stumble into the Resistance camp. When we last left off with our PCs, they were clinging to the wreckage of the Tugboat and it was 11pm. This brings me to another problem that I have with how this adventure is structured. It is meant to be this to be a 72 hour marathon of chaos, with little opportunity for rest as you push the PCs to their limits. While the adventure does provide rough updates as to when certain events start, iit leaves out a couple of very important things that make running this marathon a lot harder than it needs to be. They consistently fail to tell the GM how long a scene should last, and how long it takes the PCs to get from place to place. For example, does it take 5-6 hours for the PCs to walk to the Resistance camp, or do they have time to take an hour-long (or more) rest in there somewhere? This seems like very important information I’d want to know as a GM of this adventure, but like many other things, they couldn’t be bothered to have put it in. Anyways, most of the palace has been looted and sacked by now, with only the artifact room kept safe via its Bygone security door. Nephraim has been taken prisoner, and the Iron Brothers are trying to torture the secret of Marduk Oil out of him. The camp itself is pretty chaotic. Medics are running around treating the wounded, people stream in and out tents carrying supplies, etc. As the PCs grab something to eat, they witness General Zoe and Mayor Vericon arguing. Vericon is pissed that Zoe didn’t unite with Hamza, while Zoe is proclaiming that she is going to take back the city for the Resistance. poo poo, she might as well be saying “France is for the French only!” She’s not explicitly anti-Hamza, but does see the opportunity to take power for herself here. Anyways, before anything is resolved an Iron Brother/old-rear end crippled man who can barely speak and farts a lot (not a joke) shows up. He says Nestor (Iron Brother leader) wants the Resistance to essentially swear fealty and kill Hamza for them, and before he can say that if they do this nobody will be hurt, Zoe pulls out a pistol and caps him. I guess they had to end that scene quick, before some crazy like the PCs getting involved happened. There’s a bit more stuff about rumours swirling around, the PCs can make rolls to make sense of some things, but if they’ve been playing through the adventure normally they already know this is a well-equipped, well-planned, and well-supported rebellion enacted in concert with the Judges and the Chroniclers, so I fail to see the point of all this. As far as the situation on the ground goes, the city only has a few days of rations left before poo poo really gets bad. The Resistance itself can’t retake Toulon without more men, but it would sure like to. With Hamza gone, Zoe would become a Kingmaker. Speaking of Hamza, his ship the Unya sits a couple km off shore. The Iron Brothers don’t have a boat that could assault it, so it just sits there, likely waiting for reinforcements. Aside fro that, the Iron Brothers control most of the important parts of the city. It is now 8am The PCs catch a small break, the looted scrapper radio crackles as a couple of dumb Scrappers literally give out thier password to their encoded channels over an unsecured channel. With a fairly easy engineering or artifact lore roll they can use this code to listen in on a wide variety of rebel Scrapper channels.  As soon Tweedledum and Tweedledee finish giving out their password over an open channel, your radio gets hit with a wave interference. If you make an INT+Engineering (2) roll, you can start seeking out the source of said interference. This leads you into the Arms Distilleries (The gun market in Terres Putain), and after 5 minutes the PCs realize that they’ve been walking in circles. How will they ever find the source of the interference this way?! Luckily for them, the book tells us that the PCs know what to do. They climb up a rickety wooden staircase, jump across a wooden truss, and sprint across several rooftops until they reach a second emitted leaning against a metal antenna. Whew, that was a close one. Our PCs almost had to make a decision there. It is now 9am. The rooftops in this area are coated in soot, and with a INS+Survival (2) roll that character can tell that they’re both fresh, and someone knelt down right next to the Antenna. The book then tells us that the characters then scurry to the edge of the building and look down, where they see Factor disappear (through a fake detachable wall) into a warehouse below them. He has not seen them, so now they can take revenge on this guy who shot at them once and then threw a weird grenade. That’s actually a pretty long list of people by now, and while most PCs would still be down for merking this fool, I doubt it’s going to feel too much like an epic showdown. Anyways, if they want to sneak up on him all stealth rolls are at -2D because it’s so quiet. If you succeed, you get to hear Factor calling for someone named Alabaster. His mission is done and they can go be romantic and poo poo, only she ain’t answering. Curiously, there’s no mention of what he might do if he heard the PCs coming. If a character makes an INT+Perception (3) roll, they can see the following lady.  That’s Alabaster, waifu of Rattler. We’ll get to her in a second, but if she’s spotted she’ll merely do the hush sign and look afraid. If the PCs attack now they get +2D to initiative, otherwise Factor makes his perception check (basically) and combat starts. If they’ve successfully stealthed up here, I dunno why they don’t just get a full on surprise round or whatever. It’s an easy fight, and Factor dies in 2-3 shots he never saw coming.    Ahem, moving along. I think SMV knows that most GMs are in risk of being savagely beaten to death by their enraged players should they ever discover that, so for once there’s actually some good loot to be had here. For starters, with a perception check they can find a fuckin Trailblazer in its cause stashed under the floorboards, along with a decent amount (oddly specific numbers though) of various ammunition caiburs. Factor himself has okay armor, a decent gun, and several fairly potent grenades (no artifacts though). Factor’s transponder will start to heat up in his cheek, as it doesn’t sense a heartbeat anymore. A combo of AGI + Dexterity and INT+Medicine (3) lets you extract it before it goes poof. So long as it touches skin, it senses a heartbeat and cools down. Why would you want to go to the trouble? Well, said transponder is a small metal pin that contains authorization codes for various sanctioned caches used by Chronicler spooks. Factor’s boss is a generous one, and while I’ve yet to see these caches detailed, they’re probably full of good poo poo if the PCs find one. This warehouse also contains a bunch of drugs (both medical and Burn), as well as a bunch of crudely drawn maps with X’s on them. There’s also a map marked with nearby Hellvetic supply camps combined with an explosive inventory list. (Also a Hellvetic sapper medal is found wedged between two floorboards) Is that enough hints that a Hellvetic deserter has planted power explosives in key locations? I sure hope it is, because I’m not sure how it could get anymore obvious than that. That’s it for loot, but if the PCs want to lift up a heavy door they find a bunch of various birds stitched together in the vague shape of a kneeling woman. Alabaster would have known what this was about, too bad she’s gone. TOO BAD YOU LET THE APOCALYPTIC JUST WALK AWAY! Sorry. The PCs get back to the Resistance Camp at 11am. They’ve now been awake for 28 hours, and have maybe gotten an hour or two of sleep in there somewhere if they were lucky. At this point, they’d like to sleep. Well too fuckin’ bad, because General Zoe has a date with destiny! She sees the flight of the Unya as a sign of cowardice, so she’s going to take the Iron Brothers on alone. Mayor Vericon shows up again with some carrier pigeons so they can ask the nearby cities for help, because they’re dead meat without reinforcement (he’s right). They argue a bit, and then he releases them. Then they get shot down. (the Firebird sniper Hexell is responsible, but we don’t know that yet). Zoe does not question a sniper literally shooting her messengers. I’m starting to think this woman is not a very good military leader. ”General Zoe” posted:“Great idea, mayor!” Zoe shouts. “Resistance, we cross over to Cour Argent. Right now! Hamza has given up on his domain. It‘s our job to take back the city and kick some Iron Brother rear end.” Zoe doesn’t know poo poo about the Firebirds if asked, but can confirm the positions of the buildings marked by the crudely drawn maps, and if they tell here about Factor and the Emitters, she asks them to destroy them at once! In the meantime she’ll be off The first location is right next to the Butcher’s shop the characters lost a Scrapper’s trail in on day one. They have to succeed on a INS+Survival (3) roll to find a hidden entrance to an underground tunnel. There’s a dead end they can go down for basically no reason, so we’ll assume that they follow the main path. There they’ll find the 3 Scrappers that Rattler wasted from behind. The corpses weren’t looted, so they still have armour/weapons/ammo you can take, and there’s some digging equipment and a Scrapper radio receiver as well. It is now 1:00pm And then Decoy 5 shows up. You’ll hear his Steam Drone first, and get a chance to roll AGI+Stealth (3) to turn out your lights and hide. The result of the roll doesn’t seem to matter, because the book literally says “The Characters go unnoticed.” right after calling for said roll. If the characters make themselves known, he holds up his hands and professes that he’s not one of the attackers. He’ll basically spill a lot info with no real prodding, although he does lie slightly. He claims that Operation Mirage is a rogue OP, when its very much approved, but off the books. He’ll admit that they started the civil war, the Scrappers have tunnels like this all over Toulon, and he’s out to kill Mirage herself. Then he notices that a beam holding up the tunnel’s roof ain’t looking so hot. As a side note, if the PCs know Decoy 5 from In thy Blood, he’ll be a bit friendlier and try to win them over, he’ll even admit he’s in the tunnels investigating some leads regarding the Firebirds. Chekov’s gun, it starts to crack. We are told that the PCs run one way, Decoy 5 the other. For some reason his drone ended up with the PCs in the confusion, so he asks them (through the Drone’s speaker) to keep it with them so he can retrieve it later once they’re topside. That happens pretty quick and without much fuss after they go forward a bit. It is now 3:00pm The ladder exits the tunnel into a boarded up shop in the Silver Axis. Suddenly, the PCs hear a radio message come over the Chronicler channel. Mirage says the op is compromised and calls a full retreat to the Alcove. Though the replies of the other members of Commando Requiem are coded, the PCs can make out that nobody seems to understand fully what just happened, or why. Decoy 5’s voice then comes on over the Drone and tells them that Mirage is the traitor, and where the Alcove is (Ferrallies). Trying to get their across Cour Argent is a death sentence, so they’ll have to pack up the Drone and take a boat. Luckily, there’s a shabby motorboat right there! As they’re piloting said motorboat, they hear another conversation over the radio. Nestor has heard about Mirage’s defection, and is going to put the boots to her with a bunch of his goons. He’s ordering a Scrapper by the name of Hurlant to crash a freight gondola full of explosives into the port’s massive petro towers. The characters have to stop her, both because the resulting inferno would cook Hamza’s ship in the harbour and a good part of the city, and because the book says that they have to. It is now 5:00pm So, the characters can make a combo INT+Science (3) and INT+Engineering (2) to determine what kind of danger this action poses. I mean, gas go boom doesn’t seem like it should need five successes to figure out, but I digress. No roll required to catch up to the gondola though. We’re told that she wants to take as many people to hell with her as possible, and that the battle is bestial. Um, maybe in the narrative Marko had in his head maybe. This lady has 16 total wounds, 2 armor, and even her active defenses are a 7. What’s going to happen is that the Hellvetic PC sees her, aims, and it’ll take one maybe two of his shots (if he rolls dogshit) to put her down. In Degenesis, NPCs and PCs are built the same, and there’s a fairly low ceiling as far as survival goes without crazy future tech. Most single mob boss fights are going to end like this, with your combat monkey either ending poo poo right there, or by mostly ending poo poo and the rest of the party finishing the job. The same can happen to your PCs as well, which is why they should invest in the initiative potential. Anyways, the book tells us in the next paragraph that the characters have defeated Hurlant. Whew, thank god for that. I dunno what we would have done against a drug-addled woman with a lead pipe and a flare gun if we actually had to roll dice. However, the Gondola is still speeding towards the Petro towers. Hurlant broke off the key in the ignition, so the only thing to do is break the interlock of the steering wheel. This takes a cooperative BOD+Force (14) complex action, and you have 4 turns to do this. Succeed, and the gondola turns 180 degrees and slams into the quay wall in Ferrallies. What happens if they fail? The book does not say, but that’s probably a TPK followed by an actual IRL murder. Anyways, crashing doesn’t do any damage but the PCs don’t have long to take cover before an Iron Brother patrol happens by. They also see that the Unya starts to move in the harbor, as if it was going out to sea.  This stuff will never not make me angry. Anyways, if the PCs look out in the harbor they see a bunch of Apocalyptic pirates. The Black Flock has finally arrived. They show up in an armada of junky-yet well armed boats, with one firing a warning shot over the Unya.  It is now 6:00pm. The PCs arrive at the Alcove about an hour ahead of Nestor and the Iron Brothers. Unfortunately for them, Rattler and Baptiste got here first, took Mirage hostage, killed the other Chroniclers present, and left. The PCs find this out by rewinding some security footage, and with a couple of rolls and enough triggers the PCs can figure out some interesting things. First off, they learn that the type of equipment required to run a city-wide camera surveillance network like this takes support from the very highest level in the Protectorate, so this is no rogue op. Also, a Scalar (high ranking Chronicler) named Nullify is being sent a feed of everything via an encrypted connection. If the PCs could loot this place, this stuff is beyond the value of drafts we’re told. The timing breaks down even more in this bit. So, the PCs arrive and the Chronicler panopticon at 6:00pm, with the scrappers just half an hour behind them. That’s where we're at here. The PCs will then hear a conversation between Nestor and Dietch, and they can see on the cameras that they’re less than 10 minutes away after scanning the security footage for Rattler and Baptiste. Nestor will order Dietch to bring Zhora (the consul and Hamza’s sister) to the Alcove, along with her six scribes. They’re going to execute Zhora and shoot her head at the Unya, while the men have some fun with her scribes. After this message, they’ll also hear the telltale sign of interference that an emitter causes.So, they have some poo poo to do. There’s innocents to save, and an emitter to bring down. We’re told you could just shoot it, but doing so would bring down the Scrappers on your head. No, the safer option is to wait until dusk, climb up, hide amongst the cables entwined around the antenna, rip it off while trying not to fall, and then sneaking away BECAUSE YOU WAITED FOR DUSK WHEN AN ARMY WAS 10 MINUTES AWAY! Seriously, in what fuckin’ world is waiting a good idea? Just shoot the dang thing and book it towards the hostages. You’ve got a lead of several minutes, plus the option of maybe using a silenced weapon? Shesh. Note, this is not a joke. Waiting for dusk cover means waiting for the Scrappers to arrive, and needing to make four pretty hard rolls to not attract their attention and get turbo-murdered as a consequence. If you’re up on the tower, from your perch you see the Scrappers surround and butcher the Judges for betraying the cause or whatever. Eisenhauer murders the Black Judge Arcville. Who’s he you might ask?  He shows up one other time in this adventure, when you rescue the Spitalians he’s kinda in the area. Otherwise he’s of no value to this adventure, and pretty much exists to get punked on. Rescuing the hostages is pretty easy. Zhora is antagonizing them so the PCs are able to surprise them pretty easily. One of Dietch’s thugs tries to take a girl hostage, saving her requires an AGI+Projectiles (5) roll to nail the guy in the forehead. It’s a pretty simple combat, shoot’em, grab the girls, and make way for the harbor and thus the Unya. It is now 9pm, apparently. I’m not really sure how what seems like maybe a half hour was 3 hours, but whatever. You and your damsels make it to the harbor, but whoops Nestor saw you on the cams and has sent Eisenhauer to gently caress you up! Zhora helps the girls get in a nearby boat while the PCs deal with a raging steroid freak.  You have to make a PSY+Faith+Willpower (3) roll to even fight him at alll because he’s like, so primal and scary yo. Failure means you have to spend an ego point, a botch means you run away in fear and probably into the arms of the oncoming Scrapper mob headed to backEisenhauer up. So, botch this roll and you probably die. Eisenhauer is pretty tough, but he has a heart attack and dies mid-fight. Seriously. Post-apocalyptic steroids are dangerous yo. It is now 10pm. The PCs push out into the harbor, where they are stopped by and order to board the ship of Meridian, a leader of the Black Flock.  He and Zhora make introductions, talk a bit of turkey etc. Hamza then lights up a signal flare, and Zhora explains that means he wants to negotiate with the Black Flock. Fast forward a little bit, and Meridian and Hamza has out terms. The Black Flock will take back his city, in exchange there will be no more Scorugers on Corpse (forward post they used to launch anti-pirate raids), Amnesty for his flock, and safe passage for a year through the Mediterranean sea. Hamza at first doesn’t want to give up that much, but he really doesn’t have much leverage, so he agrees to the terms. Meridian also wants the head of a man heavily tattooed with a maze all over his body (Rattler). Orma, the African Scrapper is confused, because that very man delivered Mirage right to him earlier that day! Anyways, they bring Mirage up from her cell and do some interrogation which, much like the negotiation, does not involve the PCs in any way and is just NPCs talking to each other. Hamza gets her talk by first ranting about how cool African hypercapitalism is (he even calls it a faith lol, with the first dinar ever minted being the most valuable relic he owns), and the promises to his wiley ways with money to tank the draft economy unless she talks. It is now 3am Mirage spills her guts regarding Rattler, he’s just some assassin she hired in case the Brothers got out of hand. Meridian does not believe her, he’s been having Tarot visions regarding him and is a true believer in that poo poo. He thinks Rattler is some sort of spirit or something by the way he’s nested in his mind, and Mirage is trying to cover for him or something. Before he can cut off her arm to make her talk, the other two female leaders of the Black Flock come in. Sabata, and Callisto are their names. They say some more Tarot nonsense, and then they order the attack to begin at dawn tomorrow!  And that’s day 2 complete. Next time, THE FINAL DAY.
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Apr 7, 2021 21:26
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SkyeAuroline posted:One would think that with Marko working with Marvel so long, he'd know they could just, like... do a comic series with all the artists they've pulled instead. And probably actually make more money doing it. Every time I continue to be impressed how hard they railroad, even though I know what's in store. I really don't get it either. As a business strategy, putting this narrative out as a RPG is going to outright frustrate most players I know, and even the ones willing to assume the pretty large workload of kludging this book into something a group of PCs could actually play are going to be few in number. They are right about one thing, in that this takes and experienced GM to run. I think Marko is still stuck in the 90's, when this approach to RPGs was all the rage and actually performed pretty well for a time. This is what he likes best, and while SMV could look at how RPGs have developed for the past 30+ years, its not want he'd want to play, so he doesn't write that. At least, that's my armchair interpretation. I'm just having fun ragging on all of this poo poo design. JcDent posted:First of all, isn't Apocalyptic tarot meant to be nonsense that Ravens use to control the flock? It was already p. dumb when they were talking about the DOOM CARD BEING PULLED FOR TEH FORTH TIM!!1! It's real, at least in some sense. All 3 leaders of the Black Flock have been having visions of the Phoenix, and apparently the Abomination over the Creator has only been drawn when really big and terrible things are about to happen. Prior to this, I think that combo came up last when the (now dead, kinda) Pheromancer King of all Franka was born a few decades ago. In addition, we'll find out in the next book that some of the Tarot symbols link back to sacred Jehammedan scrolls, which means the RG is involved somehow. Alabaster is a Magpie yeah, and not a very mentally stable one either. She's hopelessly in love with Rattler for some abusive/psycho-sexual reasons, while he is incredibly abusive but keeps her around because he knows he can exploit that love and turn it into absolute loyalty. And yeah, she was left in the hideout to wait for Factor and distract him while they did other things. If the PCs did not show up, she'd end up killing him while they were loving. The Judges are sent mostly for a couple reasons. The first being as some extra muscle, and the second being to establish law and order after the coup. Arcville was meant to essentially be the city magistrate once hostilities died down. However, he does vitrually nothing the entire adventure. I think the PCs see him once, from afar as they rescue the Spitalians. That's basically it, and then you see the Scrappers turn on them because Operation Mirage is declared a failure and the Judges are trying to leave Toulon.  Hopefully that helps, Corpse is the staging ground the Scourgers use for punitive raids on pirates in the region.
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Apr 8, 2021 14:49
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SkyeAuroline posted:I think you're right, I'm just generally baffled. Game of Thrones et al have long since proven that... I don't know how to word this, and my brain keeps coming back to "euro media sensibilities" when that doesn't even make sense, but the "adult" approach has its market that's a lot easier to sell in non-interactive media. Things like the Black Atlantic rape scene, while just about never "appropriate material", are easier for watchers to swallow when they aren't being asked to mentally invest in it and have their own surrogates doing it while in control. All these railroaded plots have the bones of decent narrative fiction that could easily ride on SMV's artistic direction. I'm thinking back to either 1e or the early 2e supplements, the black-and-white Spitalian scenes in Justitian (I'll look for it when I have time), and picturing something in that style. (If I can't find it but readers have played Destiny 2, this season's animated cutscenes are stylistically similar, just much darker in palette.) They've got strengths to ride on, just none of them are in game design. Yeah, If you cleaned things up a bit (well a lot lets be real) and brought in some POC writers to fix the mess that is Africa and its peoples in Degenesis, you could probably make a decent show or even video game out of it.
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Apr 8, 2021 17:09
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The Killing Game, Day 3 We’re on the home stretch now folks. The assault on Toulon doesn’t begin until 6am, so the PCs have 2-3 hours after the negotiations with the Black Flock and Hamza to get some much needed rest. The assault has been planned, but there’s no mention made of the PCs having any input or anything. They’re been around and have seen quite a lot of fairly important stuff, and there’s a lot of good intel that the PCs could provide. Sadly, like most instances of PCs affecting the plot in these modules, that’s something you as a GM will have to work for yourself as the text offers no help in that regard. Anyways, the PCs are sent a shore with Hamza, Orma, Callisto, a bunch of Apocalytpics/African Scrappers, and for some reason I cannot loving fathom, Mirage. Why you chose to bring the most valuable prisoner you have with you along into a loving warzone, instread of leaving her chained aboard a ship she could not escape, boggles my mind. It is now 7:07am The war party lands ashore near LOrage, the Spitalian field hospital in Cour Argent. Mirage starts a verbal altercation with Orma, calling him a lapdog, in response an Apocalyptic calls her a slut. Would it surprise you if I said that SMV was far too comfortable with gendered sexual insults?Then, basically out of nowhere, an Iron Brother who was trying to hide bursts out from under a nearby tarp, gets shot by an Apocalyptic npc, and falls into a bunch of barrels and crates making a bunch of noise. This noise draws the attention of the Spitalians you might have saved on day 0. They’ve returned to their hospital and armed themselves with Splayers (flamethrowers). They demand you all disarm/lower your weapons. The situation can get ugly here. The leader of the Spitalians has no idea what’s really going on, and is understandably worried that a Chronicler (close allies to the Spitalians) has been obviously taken captive by a bunch of Apocalyptic pirates and Scrappers. It does say in a sidebar that if the PCs have helped the Spitalians earlier, they can calm the situation down with a CHA+Conduct (4) roll. However, the proceeding scenes only work if everything goes to poo poo, and provides no guidance for what might actually happen. Here’s what happens. Mirage screams for help, pulls away from her two captors, and starts booking it towards the Spitalians. (maybe you shoulda left in in prison you dumb fucks) Then an Apocalytpic goes to shoot her with a revolver. The PCs can stop the shot with a PSY+Reaction (3) roll, they manage to knock the gun aside if successful and it does not hit Mirage. However, the bullet ricohets and gutshots a Spitalian, who dies like a punk. A vicious fight then breaks out, while the PCs are ordered to run down Mirage. The next few scenes involve the chase in some fashion. She only breaks away if the situation with the Spitialians gives her an opening, so what do you do if she doesn’t? What do you do if a PC had the forethought to do something like handcuff her to him? I guess you re-write half of this goddamn chapter. It is now 8:16am Mirage runs a lot, she’s got 6D for her BOD+Athletics so your beefy guy in the party should have little trouble keeping up. What happens next is fuckin comical. She leads you down an alley near the Refinery, when someone sticks out their leg and trips her. She faceplants right into concrete, before being put into a headlock by none other than General Zoe of the Resistance! She’s got some soldiers with her, who all level their rifles at the PC’s heads. This next bit sucks, and once again I can say I hate this book and how it’s written. What ends up happening is that shortly after the PCs run into Zoe, Hamza and Co pop up. They get into an argument over Mirage. Zoe wants to exchange her for the rights to the city, while Hamza wants her for other reasons and is not willing to give up said city, and nobody is willing to budge. So Callisto has some Apocalytpics quietly flank the Resistance and shoot them all. All the PCs can do we’re told, is to dive for cover so they don’t get shot. It's more of the watch the powerful npcs talk at each other while the PCs listen from the sidelines bullshit that plagues these 90’s metaplot style books. While there’s nothing explicitly stopping the PCs from getting involved, the text itself doesn’t really seem to concern itself with what your players might want or do here. And I think that sucks, I really do. I’m also not really fond of poo poo like this.  For some reason Zoe gets shot but doesn’t bite it, and the PCs are the only ones close enough to notice her dragging Mirage out through the one remaining free exit, and it leads towards the palace she had claimed to liberate yesterday. There’s a chase but no rolls are required, because they catch up Zoe at a crossroads thanks to our old friend, GM Fiat. Zoe hates you because apparently you’re mercenaries getting in the way of a free Franka or whatever, despite never having actually been formally hired as such. Hell, aside from a general bounty on Rattler and some admittedly good loot you’ve found (and storehouses you could potentially loot later), nobody has really promised the PCs anything. At this point Zoe is crazy and can’t be reasoned with, although you can use a CHA+Conduct (4) roll to buy more time. It doesn’t say what you’d want to buy time for though. She’ll try to kill a PC with an aimed shot, only for Mayor Vericon to come out of nowhere and shoot one of her hands with a tiny pistol. Suprise suprise, Mirage takes the opportunity to book it yet again. You could fight Zoe if you want, but she wants the Mayor dead more so you could probably just book it. It is now 9:11am. Yep.  This writing is dogshit. Half the time it calls for skill rolls (and then often forgets to include a result of a failure of that skill roll), and then half the time it just narrates the PCs actions for them. I know I’ve said that before several times, but goddamn! Anyways they’re at Hamza’s palace now. There’s a whole lotta dead bodies and garbage is strewn about, and the PCs have Mirage who still can’t stop talking poo poo. Hamza, Orma, and Callisto show up with a bunch of troops right after they catch her, and you are all let inside the walls by the literal six Resistance troops who are left. Hamza barks out some orders to gather food and such, while He and Mirage get into it yet again. He asks if all this carnage was worth it, and she replies that any number of bodies is worth the price of bringing back the super internet. Hamza also orders some Apocalytpics to look for his brother Nephraim, before asking the PCs to join him on the inner wall above the entrance gate. I actually like the beginning of this first part. Hamza directly thanks the characters for their help and staying by his side throughout all of this, and even asks the PCs to be his ambassadors to the other cults, he wants to avoid another war like this. There’s a lot a good GM could do with this, a powerful patron to hand out rewards and quests is pretty useful. Were I in this position, I would first suggest to Hamza that maybe you stop the wholesale pillagining of the land you’re colonizing, and that you also may also want to consider stopping the enslavement of people as punishment for power outages. That might go a long way to preventing the rise of another Iron Brotherhood. While you’re up on the walls, Hamza and the PCs will see incoming ships from Perpignan and Montipellier. If you look back at the palace, you can make an INS+Perception (3) roll to notice the reflection of a sniper’s scope aboard a nearby overwatch platform. Before you have any time to process this, a pirate comes running down from the core steps screaming “BOMB BOMB.” It is now 10:10am Rewind a few hours, and the Hellvetic deserter and sapper (Baptiste, works for Rattler) lined bombs along the walls in the vault underneath the palace. When the pirates went in looking for Nephraim, boom! There’s a big explosion, the characters and Hamza get tossed around a bit, etc. Then the Sniper they may or may not have seen, starts opening up. His name is Hexell, and he’s also one of Rattler’s men. We’re told that nothing short of artillery could dislodge him from his firing position, and he’s well prepared to fire his rifle all day. He uses the chaos to start shooting every Apocalyptic he sees, and yes this includes PCs. If he misses, he gets frustrated and keeps trying to kill that one person. You can make a roll to divert his salvos away from wounded Apocalytpics in the Atrium, but given that they’re all thieving, murdering scum, why would you bother? If you fail the roll to notice him, Hamza just points him out, tosses you his rifle, and orders you to go take him out. There is a route that leads to him that does have plenty of cover thankfully. Getting there involves repelling down the wall via a nearby chain, this requis a BOD+Athletics (2) roll. It’s a 20 meter fall, so failure means taking 40 damage, instant death for anyone really. Better spend Ego for some auto-successes here. Once you get down the wall, you can use it as cover to remain unseen and your approach to the Temple of the Ancestors, from there you can get to the Overwatch platform. While they’re hidden from the sniper, they see Sabata (the other Black Flock leader) run up the steps of the south gate screaming that “He” is here. And then she and all of her fellow Apocaltypics suffer from sudden hole-in-face syndrome. Moving to help them means stepping into the sniper’s sightlines, so the PCs say gently caress that and keep moving towards the temple. It is now 11:11am. ”This fuckin’ book” posted:A naked Anubian lies in the grass in front of the characters. Raped and strangled. Her hair has been torn out in handfuls, bruises cover her slim body, and a rope is fastened around her slender neck Flies buzz around irritably as the characters approach the initiate. Look at how fuckin’ cool and edgy and dark we are you guys, we’re so mature we can handle rape unlike you little babies. Look at how much depth this raped corpse adds to our game.  Anyways, Rattler and Callisto are inside the temple. Rattler has blown a chunk of Callisto’s calf off with his double-barreled shotgun, and is being all evil and menacing and poo poo. He goes on about how much the Apocalytpics suck for tearing him from his mama and turning him into a monster, and then reveals that Callisto is his biological sister. Then he attacks the PCs!  So this fight seems kinda hosed. It's hard for this system to do boss encounters, mostly because bosses have the same sort of ceiling that PCs have. Thus, most fights between a party and one npc tend to end pretty quickly. Damage is high, and HP is low. To get around this, Rattler has a few tricks up his sleeve. His “Rorchach” potential removes all sixes from the pool when he’s attacked. There are some potentials which will give you extra triggers on rolls, but Rorschach means that most PCs are not going to be able to get stuff like extra damage and Smooth Running to trigger. For someone like our Hellvetic PC who two-shot Factor earlier in the adventure, this is a pretty solid nerf to his Trailblazer. His second potential calls for a PYS+Faith/Willpower (4) roll, fail that and you botch if you have more 1’s than successes now. He’s got 11D to attack with his sawed-off shotgun, armor 2, passive defence of 2 (active 10’s), and 30 total wounds. This guy is a beast already. For some reason, he’s basically supernaturally fast on top of everything. Every round he rolls a contest of PYS+Cunning vs the PC’s PYS+Cunning, Rattler has the max of 12D for this. If Rattler wins, he can dodge the attack with AGI+Mobility which then causes the attack to hit one of the PC’s allies. The only way to stop him from dodging around like this we’re told, is for the PCs to use a cooperative action to surround him, and then one PC can take an aimed shot. If this fails, Rattler gets to instantly counterattack. If you get into melee with Rattler, he grabs you and uses you as a human shield. He has 10D to hold onto you, and you have to beat this in a BOD+Brawl/Force roll. I think I see what they were trying to go for here, they wanted a neat set piece fight against one target that felt like a drag-out, knuckle down fight against this really unsettling crazy guy. Unfortunately, I think it's just going to be frustrating rather than thrilling. Unless your combat stats are min-maxed to hell, his dice skew is really just going to poo poo all over your attempts to actually land hits on him, and I don’t think many players are going to enjoy that. Then again, most people don’t play these metaplot books anyways, they just read them on the shitter, so maybe it's not as big a problem as I’m making it out to be. We’ll just assume Rattler dies, and the PCs are able to make their way up to Hexell’s sniper perch without any more issues. Once confronted, Hexell makes no effort to defend himself. He simply starts laughing, points to a group of vie silhouettes standing on the roof below, and either falls off his tower or gets shot by the PCs. You should shoot him, because he has cool automatically polarizing goggles that you can take off of his corpse. If you look through the scope of the sniper rifle he left behind so thoughtfully, you’ll see that the five figures are Hamza, Orma, Mirage, Nephraim, and Baptiste. Nephraim is chained to Baptiste and looks pretty hosed up. It looks like Hamza is trying to negotiate for Nephraim, and an Empathy roll will tell you that Baptiste is having none of this. It is now 12:01pm I really, really hate this next bit. The book is all like, you’ve got one shot, one chance to kill this guy. You gotta wait for the perfect moment (when Baptiste looks in your direction) and then succeed on an AGI+Projectiles (5) roll. This instantly blows up Baptiste’s skull, but not all is well. You see the figures down below look up all the character all aghast, as Orma tries to use an iron bar to wrench the heavy iron collar away from Baptiste’s mangled skull. When it looks like that’s not going to work, Orma forcefully drags Hamza out of there. Nephraim does not get far, what with a broken leg and a dead man chained to him. This is when the PCs find out that Baptiste had a dead man’s switch. For those that read the last entry I did, the PCs actually found the locations of Baptiste’s bombs that he planted throughout the city, way back in the Firebird’s hideout. For some reason, the default narrative takes place in a universe wherein the PCs simply ignore those. This is bad, because right as the core hall explodes, the Module (the power plant that supplies power to the entire city) explodes in Ferralies, along with several other important sites in Terres Putain (like the Resistance camp) and Cour Argent. Basically everything of importance to the city is now a smouldering wreck, Toulon would basically have to be rebuilt from the ground up at this point. ”This fuckin’ book” posted:The Characters have sealed the fate of Toulon Yeah, I’m sure this revelation would go over about as well as warmed over turd. Thanks, you loving hacks.  I guess it’s time to head back down from the tower and take a look at the city the PCs “destroyed.” They’ll come across Hamza, Orma, Mirage, and a dead Nephraim in the courtyard. Hamza is pretty bummed, as you can guess. Hamza talks a little more poo poo at Mirage, who finally starts to realize what she’s done (massively overreact because she was in no way suited to be a diplomat) and actually shuts up for one. The PCs and Hamza have a moment where they lock eyes and realize they’ve been through a lot, have forged a bond stronger than steel, etc. I guess he’s cool with them unknowingly nuking his city? Then Decoy 5 literally comes out of nowhere and shoots Mirage in the head with a revolver. The Aristocrats! Epilogue Thousands are dead. The Scourgers and the Resistance are completely wiped out, so uh, better hope the Pheromancers don’t come calling. Hamza has to basically sell off all of his holdings in Africa to get fresh capital to rebuild Toulon, but he is determined to do so. Decoy 5 gets away (somehow) but is basically burned by the Cluster and they’re trying to have him killed in a way that cannot be traced to them. For that matter, they’re trying to scrub all traces of this fuckup leading back to them. This is a waste of time and effort, as Hamza already knows everything. The Neolybians start flooding the market with fake Drafts, while the Chroniclers start paying extra for missions into Africa, and when they meet in Franka all interactions are openly hostile. A bunch more poo poo happens that I can’t be bothered to type out, but if anyone is interested in the fate of a particular character for some reason I can provide that. A New Day You thought this was over, no, not yet! We still have a couple scenes to run. In the first of these, the PCs encounter a Jehemmadan man burying dead Scrappers down near the beach. A few local fisherman are none too happy with this (given what those Scrappers were responsible for) and start harassing this old man. If the characters wish to intervene, they’ll have to place themselves between the old man and the fisherman. The text does not ask for a roll to talk them down, merely stating that any indication of violence causes the old man to speak up finally. There’s been enough death in the past few days, and he is having none of this poo poo basically. That’s enough to get the fisherman to back off, and the man asks the PCs to help him dig the graves. He’ll share supper with the PCs, say a couple cryptic things, and then gives them a piece of the metaplot McGuffin before literally just walking off into the darkness. This part is just so superfluous and weird. This man has a name, stats, a full writeup in the major NPCs section. And this all he does, he shows up in the twilight hour of the adventure, literally just hands you a sacred artifact of his faith, and walks off. I cannot stress just how fuckin’ insane that is. Jehammed’s star is like the holy grail on crack for them, Adonai is kind of a weird place right now and maybe he’s tired of guarding it/looking for a safe place for it, but still. This last scene can only be run if the PCs retrieved the journal from Hurlant’s corpse a couple days ago. After opening the lock and translating its coded contents, they released the inventory list for a UEO supply bunker located right here in Toulon! Beneath the hills of Saint Chenil, lies a treasure of Bygone gear. Except nah. When the PCs get there, all they see are child-sized footprints a day old and a bunch of empty shelves. Sike! If the characters look for tracks outside, a nearby beggar will tell them that the old man and a horde of children carried away everything a while ago, if they bribe him with Dinars he’ll point them towards the Orphanage. There’s nothing of note really in the Orphanage itself, save for signs that all the children have fled. There is a ladder that leads down into a laboratory though, where they meet this charming old man.  The lab is full of weird chemicals, smells like powerful disinfectant, and is full of poo poo like vivisected drone bodies and organs stuffed in jars. Wachsmann is packing up his tools (with his back turned to the PCs who could have made successful stealth rolls when the text called for them like 3 sentences ago), when he calls out “show yourselves!” You can chat with him a bit, but he’ll only tell you that you’re too late to stop the children on their mission if you mention the UEO supply center. He won’t tell the PCs this, but he loaded up 350 children he’d trained as child soldiers onto a swamp cutter with all the supplies, and sent her henchman Opis along to act as their commander. They’ve been sent upriver into Souffrance. If the PCs try to stop him from leaving or save the child drone he has imprisoned, he’ll attack. He’s an Old School preservist basically Spitalian Preservists used to stop at nothing, full-on ends justify the means people and Wachsmann is one of the remaining few that still holds to that philosophy, hence the child soldiers.  These books do this a lot, they love describing these intense, cinematic fight scenes that the rules just do not support or even enable in any way. This is not going to be an epic fight. Wacshmann is an old man with -3D to most of his important fighting stat pools, he has 1 armor and 19 total wounds. Two shots from our Hellvetic will put this guy into the dirt before he has a chance to throw these chemicals that the book never bothers to give us stats for. Anyways, that's it for the scenes to be run in this book. Just a little more bookkeeping and we’re done! The disc the PCs were just handed is Jehammad’s Star, and it looks like this  It emits a low static when it's near the Disc the PCs got in the last adventure, and if placed together the Star magnetically slides into the recess in the disc and locks into place. While the Disc appears to be a receiver or amplifier, the Star appears to be an astrolabe, a piece of old technology capable of calculating coordinates of stellar bodies. There’s one more book in the trilogy, and thus one more piece to collect. In the middle there’s a spot for a needle-like piece. And that’s basically it, there’s some lead stuff for Black Atlantic, but I’m not going to cover that. All in all, much like the last adventure, The Killing Game is a railroaded mess. What’s worse is that these books are presented as a trilogy, but aside for like 1 npc and a macguffin that literally gets handed to you at the end, there’s no narrative threads that link In Thy Blood and The Killing Game. You could literally just have the disc and star fall from the sky along with a bunch of xp, and send your PCs right into Black Atlantic. If you’ve come to Degenesis to solve the setting mysteries and figure out what's going on with the Recombination Group and all of those weird techno-zombies and cyro-sleepers, (and the gross mutant + space evolution rock) that’s the book that will actually begin to touch on that stuff. Honestly, The Killing Game just comes across a profounding infuriating waste of time. Even if I had the wherewithal to untangle this narrative and make it into something a PC could play through, it’d wouldn’t be worth my time to do so. Hipster Occultist fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Apr 10, 2021 |
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Apr 10, 2021 08:09
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Aww Sorry, what I meant was I'm still going to do Black Atlantic, just not the little bits at the end of the Killing Game that lead into it. Also, we'll be finding a lot about Jehammed himself in BA as well, so stay tuned!
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Apr 10, 2021 19:19
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JcDent posted:Yeah, the whole thing with Jehammed's artefacts is just base nonsense. Acquiring stuff like that is worthy of adventures itself, and now they're like DLC content you get for completing an adventure. Blink and you'll miss, and they don't tie in thematically into anything, and you as the player aren't invested in then at all. The funny thing is, the beginning of Black Atlantic specifically says that the PCs need both the Disc and Star in their possession going in. None of the previous books really do a lot to impress upon the GM or the PCs just how vital and important it is that they keep it, rather than sell it/give it to one of the cults for a big reward. Its very possible that your PCs will not have it going in, and that you'll have to pull some more poo poo to get it back to them Also, if you think this adventure was bad, oh man are you in for a (disgusting) treat with Black Atlantic. Don't spoil it SkyeAuroline
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Apr 10, 2021 20:36
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SkyeAuroline posted:I believe I've discussed it here already. Which one though? Dogs? "Dreams"? One I'm not remembering off hand? The dream and what follows after yeah. I don't think you'd ever gone over it in detail, which makes it so much worse.
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Apr 10, 2021 21:28
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