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Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

hyphz posted:

Puppetland

Reading the notes on the third version of Puppetland I sighed a little, because I fell in love with the 1995 edition long ago and particularly loved that little twist about the world being a toyshop display that the second edition moved firmly away from. I can't entirely blame it, but I always felt it was a better idea for what is ultimately a horror game.

You see, it was a valid take that perhaps Mr Punch did not kill the Maker. Rather, Mr Punch saw the Maker dragged away by the Brownshirts and knows he is not coming back (hence the missing body). The sheer horror of confronting a child's toy with the reality of the Holocaust and that sending Mr Punch insane was, I felt, a genuine suckerpunch to round out the setting - he really does know a dark and terrible secret and the puppets can triumph by working out (a) a way to get him to come to terms with it, and (b) working out a way to survive without the Maker. But I can understand some groups not wanting to go there, I suppose.

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Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
My favourite Spire High Advance is the one for the Drow private eye - taking it doesn't give you a mechanical benefit, but within a week the triple Goddess will manifest as a dame who walks into your office with the Big Case Of A Lifetime.

EDIT: Also that class refreshed by being roughed up. You want your powers back, go ask unwanted questions at some waterfront dives.

Loxbourne fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Nov 23, 2019

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
Hmm. After some very painful previous examples of games that got revolutions horribly wrong (or were all about the poor oppressed facists beneath the SJW jackboot, in some cases without even noticing) it would be refreshing to see someone get it right.

Let's cross our fingers!

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Libertad! posted:

Fistandantilus

I cannot be the only person who can't read this name aloud with a straight face.

Just seeing it on the page gives me a massive attack of the giggles.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

grassy gnoll posted:


The Great Isle



See that? That was five pages of Fantasy Environs where heroic heros hero heroically and dastardly dastards do dastardly deeds.

Setting aside, I do like the art style on the map. More settings should use this kind of brightly-coloured tourist map, I think. It pleasantly reminds me of the Fallout 76 map and for all that game had problems, using a faded 50s tourist map to navigate (and tattered gas station maps in the original games) was an excellent idea.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
I've often noticed that The Gods in any fantasy epic will always stand in for the author's preferred morality without question, in both directions.. I suppose with D&D's alignment system being such a loving mess, it was inevitable neckbeards would find some way to slip in the mighty authorial fist of justice.

It also brings to mind the old adage about how whenever there's a collapse of civilisation in speculative fiction, the reasons for the collapse will always be a dead giveaway for the author's politics.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
You'd think a core application of carousing would be keeping your wits about you in a party situation. Heck, it could have useful defaults to other survival-oriented skills in a classic medieval fantasy (knowing how to brew and store beer being a crucial skill because it purified water, for example).

Escorting a blackout-drunk NPC home is a perfect quest - heck, it kicks off stories going all the way back to Classical Greek comedy.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Libertad! posted:

Barring Hiyal, the Cities of the Heart are not exactly the most “adventure-worthy” places.

I think you could have some fun with Wasat as a terribly jaded place where the populace have seen it all before. Firey djinn with whirling swords? That's nice dearie, put him in the corner with the rest.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Pakxos posted:

Quick point, in the pre-Disney versions, Aladdin was actually given a magic ring that literally called a genie to him - kinda neat they threw that in there along side the more recognizable magic items.

I do like the idea that wishes have to be reviewed by the Efreeti Wishing Review Board. There's some lovely adventure potential in the players being frantically sent to amend a poorly-judged wish before the paperwork gets processed.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

PurpleXVI posted:

Night: Glad to see Warhammer back on the docket, and this place sounds interesting. The Street Judges sound like they could make for an entire adventure on their own.

A hilarious adventure.

"Court is in session, everyone in this street is now either a juryman or a bailiff. YOU! You are now my wigbearer, hold this wig."

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Jerik posted:

Edit: Make that at least four! I forgot From the Shadows, where the PCs all get decapitated and then brought back by Azalin as disembodied heads. Yeah, Ravenloft was pretty bad about this...

My favourite (for which read: most horrifying) piece of dumb RPG railroading comes from a sadly forgotten RPG that was quite big once upon a time, Space: 1889.

The first thing I noticed was that all the published adventures by one particular author seemed to have a Thing for destroying the party's vehicles. In a Victoriana steampunk game you'd expect the PCs to have some custom conveyances and such, which this author dealt with by including little sidebars on how to destroy them and kill any NPC allies in Act 1 to ensure the PCs couldn't bypass bits of the adventure due to inconvenient zeppelins or something. I'm guessing none of this GM's home game PCs bothered to waste resources on such things after a while, but it's really noticeable in a game with such detailed invention mechanics (and a genre full of wisecracking servants).

It got so bad that one day myself and a bunch of friends went through his published adventures with a "time until PC's vehicle trashed" counter. Usually it took about three pages before a little sidebar appeared saying something like "if your party has access to a flyer or such then here are some suggested ways to destroy it".

But the real killer was one particular adventure by this guy published in Challenge magazine. This involved an expedition to a ruined city full of hideous degenerate remnants of its former inhabitants, twisted and warped by a plague in the distant past. When the party arrived and got their bearings, the adventure included instructions to the GM to make one of the PCs disappear during their opening sweep of the ruins.

The GM was then supposed to take away that player's character sheet and hand them a replacement, or have them roll up a new one. The other PCs would then break into a forgotten temple, hear their comrade screaming, and stumble across their missing fellow PC being flayed alive as a sacrifice. They explicitly could not intervene to stop it and were expected to watch.

The GM was told not to worry, this was only temporary and actually the flaying was an illusion, but not to tell the players this as it would spoil the surprise at the end of the adventure.

"SURPRISE! Your PC whom I forcibly and unavoidably showed you all being horrifically killed isn't actually dead! You can have them back! Hey wait where are you all going..."

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
The idea that the fall of the entire city is mandated is a little annoying and I can see it irritating the gamers in my circles ("All that work for nothing? Bah!"), but otherwise that's a darn good ratfight and it throws up the best aspect of Skaven as villains - they're memorable, batshit crazy, and want to save their own skins.

Were I to run this I'd probably try to make the plague section a self-contained story, tossing more plot into it and maybe letting the players get a glimpse of some of the notable villains early. The best time to spring the attack would be right after the players start thinking "hey this sounds an awful lot like the stuff Skaven do when setting up for a major assaOHSHIT".

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

NutritiousSnack posted:

Hey Night, before this adventure review wraps up, I gotta ask...are you familiar with the writers intended ending to it, that got spiked by GW?

He's commented in earlier posts that yes, he is familiar (assuming you refer to the Empire openly acknowledging Skaven).

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
And this is why I tend to be so down on Games Workshop and their writing. You can laugh at Warhams as a setting, you can enjoy the parts with good writing or the entertaining bits where goofy old GW has stuck around and refused to leave...but sooner or later somehow the bullshit always catches up, usually via authors having their hands in their trousers as they kill women and children while insisting how "necessary" and "natural" it all is.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Wrestlepig posted:

judging from shadow of the demon lord the guys not great at writing balanced adventures in general

Probably because he's learned he has to use the Big Stick, not realising why his parties keep needing it. This is a shame as I had heard SotDL was an excellent Diablo-toned game, provided you watched out for a lot of scatological humour. For some reason there's a bit on a derelict spaceship?

That said the way we're supposed to feel sorry for the poor town psychopath sets off all kinds of creep alarms in my head. Not sure I'd want to meet the author in person.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
A powerful character who gets to shout at the PCs with a bank of GM punishments ready for them if they answer back is a huge red flag. Yes, a fat arsehole character is a worthy complication in an adventure, but the PCs should be allowed to give them a wedgie if they so desire.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
A Paladin who communes with the feral spirits of subway trains. Yeah, that's the good kind of twisted. I think I might get this game.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
This is just the Tom Clancy version of "real = shitfarming peasants" we've had to wade through in the Warhammer Fantasy stuff, isn't it?

I wonder if the writers are so scared of powerful player characters because of bad experiences in playtest, knowledge of their own playerbase, or fear that somewhere a GM might have mere mortals bring down the all-powerful masters of the night they love so much?

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

grassy gnoll posted:

"he is a spy, he should be clean shaven and use several different disguise moustaches."

I love the mental image of a Master Warhams Spy preparing himself for The Big Caper by opening a small case of disguise moustaches (ranging from Le Petit Brett to The Full Imperial Wizard With Double Sideburns), and then holding them up to a portrait of the target and trying to judge them in a mirror.

"Hmmm, the Half-Horseshoe or the Double Chevron?"

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Ithle01 posted:

A long time ago I ran a WHFRP game whose premise was that the characters are mercenaries just discharged from a far-off campaign and in session one they more or less crash their river boat into a sunken pirate ship filled with loot.

I kicked around an idea for a Rogue Trader campaign where the players lost their ship to mutiny but stumbled across a wrecked grand cruiser (most powerful ship class in the game, but can have dodgy demon-attracting engines), with the idea being that now they have to get their prize out of the mud and home with a skeleton crew and whatever they can scavenge.

The problems I ran into were that RT considers crew population to basically be another hitpoint track, and the penalties in ship combat for having a skeleton crew either rendered the party totally useless or did nothing at all, meaning the party might as well just flip a coin each session to decide if they had a working superpowered spaceship or not.

What I am saying is that this is a good premise but one that FFG's game engine cannot handle very well.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Nessus posted:

I never got this poo poo because most classical science fiction stuff has cool ray guns which are immensely destructive and also intrinsically adjustable, so your fuckin DeLameter can fill the role of thirty different tactical subweapons.

It's the same problem facing any adaptation of a property that has a lot of precisely defined weapons with pre-defined in-setting roles. The audience expects to see all the guns (or their particular favourite gun), and for all those guns to have the same niches they do in the original IP. You gotta have something called a Heavy Bolter than works like a portable HMG. You gotta have something called a Multi-Melta that kills tanks at short range.

Then you add the need to fill 101 supplements and sourcebooks with content, and now you've got variants in the mix (laser, hand laser, hotshot laser, snub-nosed laser, sawn-off laser...). Then you've got major characters and their signature weapons atop that, and of course PCs want to develop their own signature weapons too, and if there isn't some sort of mechanical delineation between all those different lasers then the fanbase starts screaming, and so on.

Look at the expanded universe stuff for, say, Halo - the readership gets a kick out of seeing The Pistol From Halo, The Assault Rifle From Halo, The Tank From Halo, The Spaceship From Halo, etc etc and all these things must act somehow in accordance with the audience's expectations of them. Heck, half the reason 40K has such mainstream appeal is that it doesn't tax the dumber members of its audience's brains with "wacky" things like ray guns. Not ones that don't work exactly like an M-16 with an underslung grenade launcher, at least.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
Adding female equality is a break from the "commonly accepted" depiction of early modern Germany that the WHFB Empire likes to imitate (please note I said commonly accepted there before anyone jumps on me with examples from history). Since this is a game that justifies a lot of it's systems with "it's more realistic this way", there's now a break from reality that the writers have to grudgingly accommodate for.

The rest is bitter grog GMs who got turned down for dates, using gritty realism and dark tones as an excuse to indulge themselves. I'LL GET YOU SADIE HAWKINS! I'LL GET YOU EVEN IF I HAVE TO WRITE YOU INTO MY ADVENTURE MODULE AS A NURGLE CULTIST! Mix this with the way that the Empire sourcebooks are always going to be the first released for any given line, before the really good freelancers show up, and you get the position with 2e. "Yes yes you can be a girl and do whatever you want. But we'll be sure to make it weird."

Or to put it more simply, these authors would really rather the female characters get back in the kitchen and focus on being hideous cultists who our heroes have to burn at the stake, but the game has this editorial mandate to allow gender equality. So they rebel against it.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

This just occurred to me. The writer of this adventure goes out of his way to have a "German" food central to the plot and hint about people being ground up into sausage har har but doesn't acknowledge the hilarious period-accurate food laws in early modern Germany? The culture this is drawn from had some serious hangups and phobias around tainted meat and dishonest butchers. There should, at the very least be the option to call up an angry mob for the finale there.

What I am saying is that a far better introduction to a "dark and gritty with black humour" setting would be the players getting a wannabe sorcerer burned at the stake because of his terrible food hygiene rather than the actual consorting with dark gods.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Ratoslov posted:

The really funny thing is that they insist on having all these weird devices to show how ponies can use guns instead of how it'd work in the show, which is ponies just use guns/sewing machines/doorknobs/typewriters whatever and it just works, shut up, we're telling a story that's not all about stupid robot hands.

This is part of the defensiveness - it's surely not creepy to cover a children's cartoon setting with guns'n'libertarianism if you do it in intense and loving detail. The rest is just the usual nerd phase of "put something I like into something else I like". I don't expect we'll see any characters from the TV show but we'll probably get the Sun/Moon duology turned into organised religion, probably with lots of fluff that boils down to "here are the swear words your magical horses should use".

The silly thing is that if this game actually has the makings of an entertaining 40s/50s-era feds-and-Thompsons game, sorta like Lackadiasy with ponies. If it were less self-conscious and just embraced the sheer silliness of the premise, there could be some genuine fun here.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Froghammer posted:

40K is, most importantly, a fictional universe created by human beings who made the conscious choice to make justify fascism by making all of the alternatives worse than fascism, and that's a creative decision I'm just kind of over in 2020

This. But the extra wrinkles you have to add are (a) 40K was a standard part of nerd adolescence (in the UK in particular) for so long that fans now give it a free pass to avoid awkward introspection about their hobby choices, and (b) those same fans may be invested to the tune of thousands of dollars/pounds on multiple armies and books, which they may genuinely enjoy playing with. Or use as the basis for social interaction. They will react very badly to any suggestion they think about what the fluff actually depicts - hence the common phenomena of groups softening 40K down.

People get very very defensive over anything that makes them think too hard about 40K, including changes to 40K.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
Does Solo Ops include the Night's Black Agents response track system? That was one of the best GMing tools I've ever seen, it really gave faceless spy organisations a sense of flavour and personality in how they reacted to events or escalated situations.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
Having now given the document itself a scan-through, I think I've realised the author's core problem. His brief was "wood elves" and he went to existing cultural fae and Celtic/druidic tradition (itself rife with past authors' weird hangups, fetishes, and Mary-Suetopias, to borrow a phrase) long before he even touched a Warhammer sourcebook. This is "the author's take on elves, who live in woods because they are pretty and spiritual and the best", bolted onto the Warhammer wood elf "slot" because...I dunno, probably that way he could get more people to read it.

I'll let Night10194 get to the sections that make this apparent naturally, but to me this explains all the issues instantly. The author hasn't cared about game balance so far because he's making his perfect woodsie elves, they're The Best and they have to match the image inside his head.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Night10194 posted:

What always astounds me is when an author is writing about their perfect elfs, they almost always make them extremely vicious as well as insufferable. You see the same with the Race War Get hosed Up On Magic Wine holiday in Complete Book of Elves, or the slaving Grey Elves (who are like, double elfs). And yet it's still treated as perfect elfs. The thing that bugs me most in this book is definitely the 'They all instinctively know their place and have no need of dissent or unrest, beneath the Highborn who are their superior people.'

This generally means "the author wants to include stock fantasy tropes which they know are pretty nasty in origin or execution, but doesn't want their perfect race to be criticised for it" Therefore some magical reason why it's not evil to do these things will obligingly show up. "Ferociously defends their home" is cool. "Brooks no interlopers or trespassers" sounds cool. "Shows no mercy" sounds badass. Then the author realises what these things all actually mean when put together, goes "erk", and quickly backtracks to find a way to insist that they're still nice and wonderful people really.

The "instinctively knows their place" thing reeks of "the author wants fancy titles and pretty headdresses for elven nobles, but is aware on some level that feudal systems are brutal and harsh things". So now he needs an excuse to take the sting out and explain that there's no brutality really, and so on.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
The Brettonian Peasants Revolutionary Army marching on the Loren with fire, zeal, and muskets to get their children back would be an amazing setting, let alone the thought of how the human pantheons etc might react (I wonder if a surprising number of knights might say "gently caress this poo poo" and sign on with the revolution - a knightly order of revolutions could be amazing, like Ranauldian paladins). You could do a whole "apres moi la deluge" thing with King Leonceur being a decent king who held the realm together but who ultimately is mortal. When he dies, the nastier aristos get nasty but push it too far.

Bonus points if the "Bastille moment" is linked to the stolen children, since I recall the nobility harshly punish any interference in the abductions for fear of reprisals from the elves. All it takes is some organised militia to drive the reprisal squads off, and you've got a chain of escalating violence that ends in burning castles and barrel-organs playing Ca Ira in the streets.

You could even keep the End Times explanation for where the children were going, since it's not terribly grimdark but their parents are still going to be enraged.

Alas we got the pauldrons instead.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
I'm going to be laughing for quite a while at the bow spirit whose arrows circle back around like a malfunctioning torpedo if you miss

DAMMIT ELF-STEVE THAT'S IT I AM COMING FOR YOUR TENDER EYEBALLS.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Hostile V posted:

Skaven steel is simultaneously top of the list and bottom of the list depending on who it's pointed at.

And who made it this week. And how much effort they felt like putting into it. And how close the overseer was while that batch was being poured or hammered out. And if the overseer threw anyone into the blast furnace. And which parts of the Warpfire Forgeinator 5000 blew up this week. And assuming someone didn't sabotage the batch to embarrass a rival or upstage an enemy or prove how inferior your materials are...

It's hard to get stuff done in the Under-Empire. Must piss off the Engineers no end.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Night10194 posted:

But first we have to get into what Mousillon is like. I'm a little sad this book doesn't lean into the impression of Mousillon from Knights of the Grail, as a more theatrical sort of evil barony

It'd be tempting to run Mousillon as-is on the basis that even when they're setting out to be bad, Bretts don't know any other way to do it than to reach for the storybooks. They paint their armour black and brood at crossroads because they genuinely think that's how you do evil. Every time the Sylvanians visit they get very awkward and leave early.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

wiegieman posted:

Is Malerion Malekith with fewer burns?

He's Malekith after Marvel coughed pointedly in GW's direction about their own dark elf villain named Malekith, and GW decided they wanted something they could be certain they held the copyright on.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Night10194 posted:

The Ghouls show you the same thing all over again (with their Baron executing LeBeau out of fear of dangerous ideas coming to the peasants, even) and asking you: Are you only this bothered by it this time because they're ghouls? Yes, they're even worse, but it's a nice third degree of parallel.

Ordinarily I'd consider being handed LeBeau's head to be a bit of a copout, but this is actually a darn good setpiece because it's something that would fit right into Arthurian myth itself. A damned parody of the world above that nevertheless points out just how hosed up the world above is when you look at it in the same light, a horror that cannot simply be slain and demands the questing knight demonstrate character development to deal with, and sufficient opportunity for hijinks and shenanigans to allow the PCs to prevail and bring a little light to the situation if they wish. And heck, maybe they CAN come back with an army (of hydraulic engineers) and start cleaning the place up, if they want to.

That's more than I'd expect of anything but the best RPGs (ironically I'd include Pendragon itself in that). My opinion of GW's settings tends to be very, very low because I only ever encountered stuff like Thousand Thrones and its 40K equivalents, but I'll give the authors credit here. Maybe if I'd read this stuff first I wouldn't regard the company so askance.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

There's a problem here, and it's a simple one. All these profiles talk about great and glorious history of dwarf-holds and so on and so forth...but they haven't earned it. I appreciate it's the standard generic dwarvern template to have a long and glorious history, but the setting doesn't have the narrative staying power to support one yet. Heck, basically nothing has happened in the Age of Sigmar setting since the whole realmgate war thing that kicked off the relaunch.

So all this fluff rings rather hollow just now, in a way that isn't really the case for the dark elves (and I do think making them traders and explorers is a nice direction to take them). I haven't stopped rolling my eyes at the Fish Elves though. I guess they let the 40K Dark Eldar writers loose on them.

I'll be curious to see how Soulbound handles the "Empire". GW kept the WHFB Empire armies in production even alongside the Stormcast, claiming they were particularly driven humans cosplaying as their ancestors and acting as auxiliaries.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Night10194 posted:

The Warlock entry in Career Compendium is the best thing in the book and I should have covered it.

I feel the follow-up question that needs to be asked is...do the game mechanics actually support the idea that the class is a bumbling moron in a way that is fun to play? Or are we about to have a Games Workshop Moment?

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Mors Rattus posted:

The mages are extremely annoyed that they've been unable to figure out what Tzeentch wants from there, or even what most of the citadels do. Some, like the Great Observatory, seem obvious, but others are total mysteries. Some of the citadels appear to be broken, while others won't even open up and haven't since the Agloraxi left them.

Getting a firm "Mote in God's Eye" vibe here. Not necessarily a bad thing (when stealing, steal from the greats). Otherwise though, this level of Capitalised Proper Nouns and incredible epic backstory(TM) is mostly giving me flashbacks to Exalted.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Night10194 posted:

Not so in 40kRP where even if you're a Marine, a 5d10+10 Lascannon is going to splat you.

This is almost certainly for some sort of tonal "you could die at any time AND THAT MAKES COMBAT MEANINGFUL AND THE SETTING PROPERLY GRIMDARK" reason. It's too deeply embedded in the system otherwise.

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Night10194 posted:

you would not believe how many problems giving 40k nerds playable Commissars caused. Well, you probably will: Giving one player a 'it's what my character would do' option of 'shoot someone else's powerup buddy/shoot at someone else's character' is a good way to cause problems. Also, the Commissar class cannot accurately be used to simulate being Caiaphas Cain, so what use is it? They don't even get Comrades, so you can't have Jurgen and his melta to save you. What kind of bullshit is this?

This poo poo needs to be illuminated, and then stomped on very hard. FFG should never ever have put playable loving 40K Commissars in the game, let alone give them "shoot the players' buddies for buffs" powers. "Are there playable commissars?" was my very first question to the college buddy who explained Only War to me and his answer ensured I would never, ever touch the game.

The "very specific example" Night mentioned is in fact "when a PC hits zero hitpoints, the commissar shoots their comrade to give them some HP back". The whole idea of the comrade system is presented to players as "they're your mates, people who you know and survived horrible things alongside, you save their rear end and they'll save yours, they are important to you"...except to the guy playing commissar, who can kill them for healz.

Oh and not only does the class specifically inspire terror in PCs, they're seen as a "blessing" so the PCs can't complain about it. They're not even the "actually have lots of other jobs, kinda resemble the political/education officers from the WW2 Red Army they're based on, take their duties to their men's morale and welfare very seriously" commissars seen in the blasted 40K novels. No, Only War's commissar class seems to be entirely built from the ground up for the very worst kind of abusive roleplayers at the table, ones who see the game as an excuse to order people around.

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Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.

Cooked Auto posted:

And probably sick of GW's demands too I imagine. From what I heard GW tried to pull something during re-negotiations after FFG got acquired by Asmodee that they went gently caress that and ended the partnership.

If this is true (and it hasn't been verified to my knowledge), GW supposedly demanded that FFG halt development of their own fantasy tabletop game (the short-lived Runewars), as a potential competitor. FFG shrugged and went with the Star Wars licence instead. Take this with whatever sized grain of salt feels appropriate.

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