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I hated it with a passion GMing it in the playtest, but from what I saw of the release (one of our players backed it) it's really turned around and improved.
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Nov 25, 2020 06:29
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Ithle01 posted:Out of curiosity what didn't you like about it? I'll be sure to pay attention to any concerns. The old system for traveling between "waypoints" (I forget the term the game actually uses) was based around rolling a random number of encounters between two points that *had* to somehow be solved with one and only one dice check, because the progression was based off the results on the single check. Rolled mid-session, too, so you didn't get time to prep anything. The stress system was also way overtuned and stress recovery was essentially unavailable because of its costs, a given character was unlikely to make it much of anywhere without getting destroyed by stress they couldn't offset. Vermissian Knights hosed with both systems and were essential as a result. In short the core gameplay loop worked against the aims of the game, against fun for the players, and against ease of running for the GM. The release version completely replaced the encounter/travel mechanics and fixed much of the stress system, while also improving playbook variety and balance. I haven't played it to see how well it works in practice now, but that's more due to being in no shape to GM lately.
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Nov 25, 2020 14:57
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Sounds kind sad. I know the thread has seen a bunch of discussion on how exactly this kind of simplification ("Light Pistol", "Heavy Pistol") with keywording, modding, or other standardised variants actually covers most of the relevant crunch granularity of most gunporn games, but I still enjoy the shopping list aspect of it... For games that only go so far into their setting in the actual setting blocks, gear and the discussion around it can establish setting flavor/detail. It's a nice little way to do things without having to add too much. (That said, don't be Ops and Tactics, please.)
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Nov 29, 2020 02:27
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Ratoslov posted:This reminds me of one of the weirder things from Shadowrun 4e's epistolary chatter bits in the gun books. Like, they'd introduce a gun that would be pretty lovely for a Shadowrunner to carry because it'd have low ammo capacity and maybe be magazine fed and so forth and the ad copy would mention that it got a award for being a good civilian self-defense weapon. The runners would say that this was obvious evidence of the police departments encouraging bad weapons for civilians so they couldn't fight back. But with a few exceptions these weapons would be perfectly good everyday carry weapons for normal people. It was kinda bizarre. I mean, is it that far off from fudds complaining about how 9mm doesn't have enough "stopping power" for a self defense pistol and saying to not trust anything under a .45? Some groups of people have weird ideas about how guns work with limited basis in reality, based on a specific (imagined or real) niche.
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Nov 30, 2020 07:24
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I'm glad my impression of Carbon 2185 was exactly on point without ever having to actually get the book. I'm less glad for how popular and profitable it's been on account of it, but... well, that's the business, I guess. Wouldn't be the first "cyberpunk" game to hit both of those despite being a pile of dealbreakers.
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Dec 2, 2020 00:18
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Nessus posted:Do they literally have spell levels and slots and poo poo?  Yes. edit: there's also ritual hacks, "upcasting" hacks, etc SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 06:07
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Cooked Auto posted:Yeah I think image could've been done a lot better. It also feels like it's a kind of awkward photoshop thrown together in a hurry towards the end of production. There's just something awkward about it and I think I've seen the head part before elsewhere but I could be wrong. The art throughout the book (what I've read is it at least) has been giving me that feeling. Painted-over photobashes everywhere, with more attention paid to matching the components than to making it look cohesive and good. But that's my take, ymmv.
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Dec 3, 2020 02:47
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Cooked Auto posted:
Oh yeah, I'm not defending that stuff at all, don't get me wrong. Though I do have to ask - I've seen all of the Eve Ventrue illustrations in the book before I ever opened it, and never in a ttrpg context. They're not commissioned for RED, are they? If so it's been in the works longer than I thought.
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Dec 3, 2020 03:03
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PeterWeller posted:So just take all the psychology out of it and say there's a physiological limit to how many robot parts a human body can support. There's also the HWI route that applies just fine here - sure, get cybered up! Can you afford the monthly payments to the corp that's got you in a "rent-to-own" program (these suck irl, by the way)? Can you find and afford antirejection drugs and the specialty diet that "fuels" them better, or the pile of batteries to do it without that method? What socioeconomic effects does it carry and how does that weigh on you? But that isn't as workable if you don't hold an "all good cyberpunk is anticapitalist" mindset like I do, and I think Mike and the gang have left that behind partially.
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Dec 3, 2020 05:15
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JcDent posted:This also requires strict out of combat rules for recovery, tracking time, and so on, which not all games like. For HWI (at least as of the Kickstarter preview), it was handled pretty minimally & effectively; HWI uses a Burden score that summarizes your status independent od discretionary money, 0-4 (PbtA, so it's a dice modifier); getting augmented increments your score an extra point to represent the upkeep, medical care, etc. It works for lighter games to not have a hefty system. How well an abstracted system transfers to something like RED with its concrete finances, or could be created for it, is up in the air.
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Dec 3, 2020 21:43
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Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror Part 1: Introduction  Well, “economic horror” doesn’t sound much like “zombies” - what’s with that? Well, let’s see what game designer & lead author Caleb Stokes has to say: quote:Furthermore, Red Markets is basically a poverty simulator that uses zombies to keep its theme from getting too real. Red Markets is a zombie game set in the ruined western United States, abandoned in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. The players are Takers, mercenaries that travel the surviving enclaves to earn a living through good old adventurer stuff; stealing valuables from the ruins, clearing the ever-present threat of zombies, scamming the poo poo out of anyone that falls for it, the works. Red Markets calls it the “carrion economy”, which we’ll come back to in a bit. Every Taker’s fate follows two paths: break the cycle of poverty and buy your way into one of the “safe zones” in the east, or fall into debt, into conflict, and eventually into a grave. Assuming the casualties don’t get you first. Any good zombie fiction isn’t about the zombies. Zombies are an external pressure, an environmental hazard; humanity is under the lens, in the ways they react to the new world. Red Markets is no different. It’s a game about downtrodden, normal people breaking their bodies, their hearts, and their minds to survive poverty and exploitation. You play Red Markets, you’re exploring what you’ll sacrifice to earn back the bits of humanity that the American collapse took from your characters, what you’ll lose to support and protect the people your characters love. (All of this is mechanically supported, too!) In short, it is 100% my poo poo. It isn’t perfect and the flaws are glaring sometimes, but Red Markets has a place on my short-list of “RPGs that needed to be made”. Credits page note, before we get into the actual text: Red Markets is CC-BY-NC-SA licensed. I’m trying to think of another studio that’s gone full Creative Commons with their books, besides Posthuman Studios with Eclipse Phase, and I can’t think of any. It’s appreciated. Stokes is pretty fervently anti-capitalist and pro-freedom of information, and this will come through constantly in the book; one of those “flaws” I mentioned is that the book gets soapboxy. A lot. --- Table of contents. We have six sections, five if you don’t count the appendix: the Introduction, the “History of the Crash” setting background and “The Loss” setting guide (a combined 160 pages), “Playing the Market” for players, and “Running the Market” as a GM guide (a combined 214 pages). With additional material from the appendix/introduction counted in, RM clocks in as a 500-page book; it’s surprisingly not as hefty as the page count implies, but from experience this is a bit of a doozy to get people to read, especially with the depressing subject matter. You get a lot thrown at you in long blocks, and it only comes together at the very end of them. The system, thankfully, is easier to grok.  Not all of Red Markets’ art is great (and we’ll get to some of it that’s not), but the chapter head pieces are pretty evocative. The short Introduction chapter starts off with “What is Red Markets?”, which I summarized up above. Here, it's a solid two-paragraph summary that puts themes front and center. The obligatory “What is an RPG?” section exists, but refreshingly Stokes just says to Google it; odds are good this isn't someone's first RPG, and if it is, there are some solid resources provided. There’s a list of a few of the playtest podcasts (RPPR, One-Shot, Technical Difficulties) and some social media mentions, plus an added note at the end: quote:We understand that books are products, products are meant to be sold, and this maybe isn’t the best way to do that. But the purpose of consuming this particular product is to create a unique story-telling experience with your friends; an experience that can’t be commoditized, co-opted, or cheapened. Creating something that special is going to require some work out of you. It starts here. The rest of the introduction is an overview of the other sections of the book, as well as two separate glossaries; one for game system terminology, one for in-setting terminology. The game terminology could probably have waited until the start of the game mechanics chapter instead of 160 pages earlier; on the other hand, the setting glossary before dumping you into the lore is helpful, and keeping both glossaries together, I assume, was the design intent. Everything in the glossaries is explained in-text pretty well, but a reference never hurt anyone. The intro does a solid job of selling the game and setting up for what's to come, though it definitely misallocates some of the word count. It's also quite short compared to the rest of the book, and there's much deeper dives to come. Next time, History of the Crash, pt. 1, or: 20 pages of “we live in a society”. A quick author’s note that can be redacted from the archive entry: I haven’t written a long-form review like this before. Stick with me, I’ll get it eventually; I'm still working out depth of detail vs odds of actually finishing.
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Dec 4, 2020 04:16
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tokenbrownguy posted:You know how this subforum argues endlessly about games with Intent? Capital I-Intent? Games that model nothing more or less than what they set out to do? It's fantastic that way. Not every mechanic in the game is necessarily good, but it's one of the few games where I can pull any random rule and go "okay, so that's how it's reinforcing the core themes" and understand immediately why it's there.
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Dec 4, 2020 14:19
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Bieeanshee posted:I was revolted by the idea of Red Markets when it came out, because I completely misread the intent. What intent did you think it had coming in? I'm mostly curious because RM wears its message/intent on its sleeve (excessively so at times, which I'll be covering in the next post).
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Dec 4, 2020 19:38
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Bieeanshee posted:My brain recoiled at 'zombies', flew right up my rear end, and decided it was a Libertarian hellscape and not the kind of hellscape it really is. Ah, yeah. This isn't ancap paradise. It's, uh... Extremely dedicated to dismantling any sort of libertarian or ancap positivity about the setting. But I totally see where that would come from without digging into the book itself. Thanks, undead gig economy.
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Dec 4, 2020 20:00
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Pussy Cartel posted:I'd actually love to see a cyberpunk game that had something like cyberpsychosis paired with Delta Green's rules for bonds. A game about clinging to human connections and emotional intimacy in the face of dehumanization and objectification at the hands of a rapacious capitalist world order. Good news: one of the bits of the Red Markets review I have written in my head is how its stress mechanics do exactly that and what a good basis for a cyberpunk game Profit is.
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Dec 5, 2020 00:33
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Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror Part 2: The (Un)Death of History; or, The Part Where We (Poorly) Talk About Economics  4chan is still alive and well, even in the apocalypse. Pictured: Natalie “Gnat” Delle, narrator of History of the Crash, and one of the main operators of the post-Crash internet. A quick preface note: Red Markets' setting is long, dense, and frankly poorly written. I'm not doing a deep dive into every single paragraph here; you'll get the tone without the headache. Ultimately the setting is a kind of dumb contrivance to make the system work, and to allow for several author tracts to be shoved in the players' faces. Americans, this is all going to be very familiar. The entire setting section of this game, both parts, is written in-character, and so naturally Gnat starts us off with a little background on why even write a history lecture in-character. Credit where it’s due, even if Stokes and company hammer on the points pretty hard, these sections do a good job of painting the setting through broad notes. In the span of a single page with minimal direct acknowledgements of any of this, they allude to Taker missions (the lifeblood of the game), the bad blood between the Recession (the East) and the Loss (the West), the lovely conditions even the “free” that you’re aspiring to join are in, the level of societal failure in the Recession (from this single page alone, it’s a propagandized hell at direct odds with Loss survivors that can’t even teach its children and leaves refugees living in ghettos), and establishes our central narrator cast. Not bad for a story about finding an abandoned kid in a tree. So because of how badly education has failed, Gnat puts up an official record of what happened. Convenient for us as players; if only the same conciseness stuck around with the main text. Hit some personal history for Gnat, and we reach… The Failed State Everything leading up to the Crash itself falls into this section of the book. “The Failed State” is a mixture of modern-day political tirade and setting-building, and it’s the peak of Stokes’ preachy parts. Way, way too much of it, even for me. The Recession government wants to keep past America held up as a golden age to return to, and to blame all the problems on zombies that were more of a straw on the camel’s back. As a counter, we get treated to an overview of exactly how much more hosed Red Markets!Earth was than we were. The Crash came after global warming cracked a 3-degree rise, natural disasters spiked, and famine and housing crises swept the globe. Fertile ground for political fracturing; refugee crises, mass killings, political extremism on the rise (it gets mentioned on both sides, but the right managed success and the left… fell to infighting and self-destruction), and increased militarization of police to the point of “missile batteries on sports stadiums” and cops looking like Judge Dredd cosplayers. For extra points, the Internet basically collapsed, and journalism with it. We’re really setting up some fantastic groundwork worldwide! There’s notes made that a few powers survived the Crash mostly successfully, Scandinavians among them (this gets followed up on as a whole section later, but Scandinavia is the only one acknowledged). It gets chalked up to “green energy” here. But this is an American game, so we need more America, and you know what that means with this setting, I’m guessing. Education loan defaults skyrocket, economy collapses on the back of that alone, and… we get President Hunter, who is going to come up a lot, because he’s RM’s personal Reagan. Privatize the loan business, no bailouts, “business can do everything”. Red Markets really likes calling out right-wingers (and boomers), and that continues just fine into the collapse of workers’ rights and continued wage theft, the bolstering of the gig economy to stop dissent (“it’s hard to start a revolution on a full stomach” is acknowledged directly)... and every pension fund collapses at once to really wreck things. The Crash gets acknowledged as maybe a lesser loss of life than actually letting the economic collapse go on unchecked. Okay, half of the country is an abandoned wasteland and the other half is in slum conditions, I’m pretty sure that’s where this was headed anyway and adding zombies into the mix sure didn’t help. But sure, a zombie apocalypse is an improvement. Whatever you say.  America also gives us the first sample of the real art quality you can expect from this game. It’s… not ideal. Frankly, these two sections are much less “setting information” and more “personal diatribe”; they’re rarely going to come up for the average character. They’re just an extended acknowledgement and critique of all of the real-world issues that get extended forward. I’d normally just advise skipping over this block because it just doesn’t matter all that much, anyone who’s going to play Red Markets is sufficiently plugged in to know all this already, it’s just putting it in black and white. But, there’s good news in this messy section: what did science do to save us? The “Desperate Innovation” subsection is really long on account of explaining every single thing going on with Ubiq, the future internet run by balloon drone-hosted servers. Why balloons? Because balloons make it a miracle network. Gnat as narrator runs the Ubiq network, so of course it gets talked about a ton (to reinforce why I’m not covering every paragraph, Ubiq’s background is 9 tangentially-relevant-at-best pages long - it’s one of the longest single subsections in either setting chapter, and it’s longer than many of the full sections). This is another case of “it doesn’t actually matter all that much at all” aside from establishing backing for a couple pieces of equipment later, so to cut it much shorter, the big technical developments:
So, that’s everything leading up to the Crash itself. The world was already going to hell, so a zombie apocalypse was naturally the cap. At least it makes 2020 look nice. This chapter doesn’t compress well, but it’s frankly a chapter you don’t really need by the time you get to equipment and the GM section. The actual implications for Takers and for the GM are all covered in other sections again and more directly, without waxing poetic about the drat balloon Internet. Next time, History of the Crash pt. 2, or: I promised you zombies, I promise they’re coming!
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Dec 5, 2020 02:48
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mellonbread posted:Thanks for the story summary. I've played a few games of Red Markets but I don't think anyone except the GM read that section of the book. I have bad news. That's, uh, not nearly the story summarized. That's 17 pages' worth out of 170 or so; the prologue to the story. Fortunately after this it gets more interesting. I'm still going to try to not take an obnoxiously long time on it, because you said it well: the gameplay carries all the themes real well without all this needing to spell it out. LatwPIAT posted:I think this would be interesting and explore some themes I think are neat to have in cyberpunk-y fiction, but I can't stop thinking about the sheer comedy of someone going "Egads! Replacing my arm with a prosthetic with a machine gun in it has strained my relationship with my wife!" Ah yes, the good old Girlfriend Paradox of Resistance engine games, played in reverse.
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Dec 5, 2020 03:59
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Clever Moniker posted:I'm hype for the Red Markets write-up. I considered running it for the first time over the summer. Definitely hits different these days. It does hit different, and that's part of why I put it on my short-list to write up a review for; it's relevant/important in ways that it wasn't in 2017. Even though it's misery incarnate there's still something valuable to its "veneer-off" approach, acknowledging and taking on its issues head-on instead of putting them behind a veil and just alluding to them. You can't fix the whole system on your own, it will grind you down, but you know what the causes are and you can work to make the Loss a better place for you and the people you love, or break the cycle entirely. I think the intervening three years since RM was published have marked a shift that makes that attitude more mainstream, so to speak. Could just be me. And, well, the whole "global pandemic" thing. This weekend is going to be a nightmare for writing. Sunday or Monday for the next installment, it's written raw right now and I have to do some editing. I'm glad this is a game that interests people to see.
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Dec 5, 2020 05:56
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Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror Part 3: The Crash and the Blight This is another extremely long section, so we’re splitting it. A lot. We’re splitting the splits, actually, because Gnat/Stokes just will not shut up about a play-by-play of everything that ever happened. For now, let’s talk about the Blight. It’s zombie magic. It’s zombie magic all the way, down. The Blight is Red Markets’ version of the zombie plague. It’s also not a plague, or a virus, or a parasite, or anything. It’s just “black poo poo” that makes more zombies. The setting acknowledges this, but it’s also pretty disappointing for a game that otherwise takes itself fairly seriously (algorithms aside) to just give zero concern whatsoever to suspension of belief. Absolutely nothing about the way zombies work, biologically, makes sense, even compared to other zombie fiction; for some people that's nitpicking, but as a GM, understanding why something in the setting works the way it does is helpful to actually do anything with it or to homebrew things that are still "fitting". What we do know Blight is is a pair of magical substance-organisms that make two different kinds of zombies. Hot strain Blight makes Vectors, your 28 Days Later fast zombies who are still alive. They last hours, tops, because all their muscles run at 100% and they can’t self-maintain, setting aside any combat damage. Dead Vectors’ hot strain turns into cold strain that raises them as “casualties”, regular zombies whose nervous system gets turned into parasitic Blight tissue and get puppeted around. It’s a nice way to get both flavors of zombie in fiction into the mix, depending on what you and your players are into; casualties will always show up eventually, but Vectors give you a different style to work with. Yes, headshots work on both of them. Both types of zombie also happen to be creepy as poo poo. Vectors on account of being alive, turning in minutes and dying in days, and being conscious enough to scream apologies at the people they’re killing; casualties in some ways we’ll come around to later, but in how their actions call back to their old lives, with some fragment of the mind maybe intact. Plus you get all the usual zombie tropes, except your zombies have cords of black poo poo trailing out of them. There are images attached to it but gory body horror isn't something I'm subjecting you to. Okay, so you get bit, saliva gets in the wound, you get infected, you turn into a Vector and poo poo’s over. Right? No, it’s a little more complicated. Immune and Latents are where you get some of the moral bastardry of the setting. There’s an anti-infection drug that turns hot Blight cold, Supressin K-7864. Expensive, but when the alternative is turning into a zombie, it’s helpful. Where does Supressin come from? Well, there’s a handful of people who are naturally immune, with no common traits whatsoever. You just find out through blood testing. You get Supressin from their bone marrow. K-7864 is the number of test subjects it took to figure that out and find a useful donor. Every time it wrapped past "9999", increment a letter - 107,854 victims, for a drug that only halfway works. The more humane scientists and labs tap the marrow periodically to draw safe amounts out; the amoral labs and the criminal element just kill you and crack the whole bone for a payday. Needless to say, Immune PCs should not be spreading that news around. Or, if you really need your own quick payday, you can sell that marrow off - that’s mechanized later in the book. This all gets covered at length when we start talking about CDC kidnapping squads, "medical conscription," and the spreadsheet of doom. Immunity is another magical thing, there’s no “immune system response”, Blight just stops affecting them when it’s injected; "it just quits". So naturally Suppressin should do the same, right? No. Latents are what you get when Supressin works. The Blight turns cold and starts going parasite, but it can’t do anything to a living brain. So you get to walk around in constant agony with a spare nervous system, black veins and sinews all over your body, and a permanently necrotic bite wound. On the plus side, you’re immune! You're one of the only people (alongside your actual Immune buddies up there) who can safely go into melee combat and not have to spend all your bounty on bullets, though brute force can still kill you same as any human. On the down side again, you’re infectious just like a regular zombie (and you still transfer hot strain); no physical contact with anyone but other Latents, separate living quarters from the "normal" folks... Oh, and you get killed? You go zombie in seconds, because your entire body is already blight-threaded. Latents are treated a whole lot like Fallout ghouls; there’s a handful of places that will accept them and bring them into communities, there’s a lot of places that want nothing to do with them whatsoever and reject them, and there’s another handful with shoot-on-sight orders. Including the entire Recession. Latents don’t get the happy ending option. There’s some hints near the end about Aberrants as a third class of zombie, but they’re not really documented on account of all being weird compared to the rest. No details there; that’s a hint for GMs to go look in their section!  There’s a handful of these “posters” scattered through the book to set tones. With all the questions about what the Blight is settled (except, you know, everything about how it works behind the scenes, because zombie magic), you start asking when and why. “When” gets settled pretty quickly - nobody knows. All the old internet hardware was conveniently trashed even in survivor areas, so all the records are gone.  Surely we can study it? Nope. Immune to science. Doesn’t matter what you use. Straight down to electron microscopes, Blight is just “black poo poo”. Seamless and solid, apparently not even really three-dimensional-looking; "a seamless, black smear of pure void". It violates physics, chemistry, and common sense: quote:But when you ask the physicists, they’ll rightly point out that something so tightly bonded as to resist magnification completely is closer to the density of a black hole than any solid we’ve ever encountered. It should be harder than diamonds, so how come bullets can penetrate it? Why aren’t casualties as heavy as mountains? More worryingly, how do the cadavers manage to be lighter than in life? This stuff is sufficiently reality-breaking-bullshit that the people who persevere through and keep studying it go batshit crazy in the religious search for a cure that doesn't exist. The message is unambiguous, even as the various theories (aliens, bioweapons, mutated disease, supernatural cause, even nanomachines) get floated: Red Markets does not care about where the Blight comes from. It does not want you to waste time exploring the finicky details of how exactly it works and what it’s made of. It’s just zombie magic, and despite how much it bothers my suspension of disbelief, it’s really all you need to know to make the game work. Zombies are here; they bite you and you turn; you shoot or stab them and they’ll die, eventually. Players can work with that, those are reasonable rules. It'd be nice to have more to work with on the GM side, but all you really need is that there's zombies that follow the rules, and a few rare ones you can bring in to break 'em. That's all you really need. It’s the other humans we’re really here to deal with, after all. Next time: History of the Crash pt. 3, Emergence Events and the Romero Effect, or: more zombie magic, infection deniers, and essential healthcare and retail workers.
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Dec 8, 2020 02:30
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JcDent posted:I was going to pipe up and say that why the zombies work the way they work doesn't matter, but you pointed that out yourself here, so yay. Yeah, the realistic science angle is a) not possible with the undead, b) not really necessary for the game or genre. I would still like to have seen some more consistent narrative-side "rules" for them, instead of the page worth of "sometimes it does this until it doesn't" and "you can't understand it and we don't know how it works". I'm oriented towards the more technical side of things as a GM and player. But the actual game rules (which I'll get to eventually, I forgot how much of a slog the setting is and how much Stokes just keeps on talking) lay everything on the table for GMs effectively. Considering the nature of the game that's the only thing I can really ask.
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Dec 8, 2020 07:20
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By popular demand posted:How much text does it waste on telling you that it doesn't matter though? 153 lines of text about how it can't be understood, if I counted right. Red Markets is formatted in two-column layout with 50 lines per column.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:25
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wiegieman posted:Depends on whether they are forced to go to work by capitalism to avoid being evicted in winter during a pandemic. So, that's coming up in the review...
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Dec 8, 2020 20:56
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Aww, you didn't even post the vending machine table, it's one of the few things that actually made me laugh.
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Dec 9, 2020 01:22
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Okay, real question. The next post is already written to edit and put up tomorrow, so it's not affected, but: Does anyone actually care about the Red Markets setting enough that I should continue close-ups with what's written? I don't like it, it's a lazy and edgy "america bad, rural bad, techbros good, not!Musk savior of humanity" misery pit. (It's by far not the worst setting I've read though.) It commits the fatal sin of not just being unpleasant, but uninteresting, at length. My love for Red Markets lies solely in its system. I'm not going to just go "skip 100 pages, we're in the mechanics now" but if I stop giving a poo poo about commenting on every idea Stokes et al put in here and follow about the detail level of Cartel's RED posts, then I can probably clear the remainder in another 3 or 4 after that. Less if I collapse the Loss chapterinto one post. If people really want to hear about Recession America and the Loss I'll keep writing as I have. Just getting a feel. Like I said at the start, first long form review and the format trips me up.
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Dec 9, 2020 05:08
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I'm responding to you directly because your quote is most relevant but this is kind of touching on everyone's commentary.TK_Nyarlathotep posted:I haven't read Red Markets because I do not like stuff that is that unhappy but also doesn't have an off switch (like saving the day, taking out the authoritarian big bad, helping people besides yourself and improving their lives, etc.) or some kind of levity valve (the comedy of Paranoia, the quirky take on D&D-likes of WFRP, etc.), but I am curious where you drew the conclusion that the game hates rural people and loves not!Musk. The "loves not!Musk" bit is easy to explain. Austin Palbicke gets a full 9 pages dedicated to his biography and his Ubiq project, and it's constantly cited as the only reason survivors can survive, the Loss would have collapsed except Palbicke, etc etc, world is saved by Palbicke's indestructible, immune-to-malfunction, data-transmission-mechanics-defying free-of-charge worldwide balloon internet and his literal Galt's Gulch that is now held up as the best and brightest enclave in the entire Loss. Join that with Palbicke, who never touched a computer until seventh grade, immediately "hack[ing] the school's firewall to enroll in a MOOC offered by Yale", constant extolling of techbro "goals" bullshit, the loving algorithms Christ almighty how did this dude apparently write literal magic several times... The entire section on Palbicke and Ubiq is the exact same sort of "Elon Musk is a visionary genius who's personally responsible for every Tesla, SpaceX, etc development that's ever happened and is the savior of the future of mankind" poo poo Muskites spew everywhere, except Palbicke doesn't have any apartheid emerald mine money. The "gently caress rural people" bit is, honestly, not what I should have put it as (having reviewed to find specific examples), so let me be more accurate; Stokes never misses a chance to take a dig at Republicans, Libertarians, and really anyone that isn't lib-left as you put it, the whole way through. "Libertarian preppers" get their own faction put on the same level of awful as slavers and Typhoid Marys. So on. It gets tiring, especially with the limited cast of named figures consisting of "reasonable, well-rounded Ubiq crew members from Galt's Gulch; Trump-meets-Reagan incompetent President Hunter backed by Unite the Right types that got their own art piece; and rogue army officer Pappa Doc who has no details whatsoever and barely even counts". Nobody else matters, looks like. I'm not going back and editing it in the prior post, but narrowing down/refining that take is necessary on my part in future discussion. edit: on reflection now that I'm actually awake, i was probably pulling this specific thought from the Ubiq section too in part, his rural hometown gets painted as a shithole for anyone with promise, aka any budding stemlord, because of poor funding and government. it gets tangentially acknowledged elsewhere. Stokes' writing in the sections on America and economics/politics reads to me as a kind of paternalistic dismissal of people in red states (really just Americans in general) as just not knowing any better and voting against their interests when he's not trying to say they're all KKK supporters and Proud Boys; I take that personally, having lived in a red state my entire life. even with the events of the intervening three years from publication. A little fried mentally considering it's 1 AM but hopefully that clarifies. The latter bit is inaccurate on my part, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not "gently caress non-libleft". SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 07:59
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Serf posted:yeah i think this is an uncharitable reading of the material in question. the reason that palbicke gets 9 pages to himself is that gnat is his former employee and clearly thought a lot of him but it never gets into the hero worship you're talking about here. and there are even parts of this section where she dismissively talks about some of the shadier poo poo they did, like when she disclaims responsibility for exploiting contract workers because they followed the letter of the law. i can think of several sections in the book where gnat expresses admiration for groups like the police and the cia that reveal her true nature. and the second narrator, banhammer, is explicitly a fascist who works with the moths only out of convenience. gnat is not an unbiased observer here, but she is also not particularly left either. the whole setting section is about identifying the material causes of the collapse and then using that as a springboard to talk about why the blight hit as hard as it did, but gnat and the other characters depicted are still active participants in the carrion economy with no particular designs on building something better. the book has an anti-capitalist streak, but the conclusion it comes to is that the forces of capital are strong enough to adapt to the worst disaster in history without really losing too much in the process. its a bleak vision, for sure, but also a realistic one (leaving aside the magic zombies). A little late but I wanted to get back to you on this (and, again, tangentially to other replies). I'll have tonight's post up when I'm home, really. The issue with "let's filter everything through unreliable narrators" is that if you decide to only have unreliable narrators and only ever give one unreliable narrator's view of events, while writing the section that is supposed to be hard facts of the setting so that GMs can accurately represent it and players have an accurate grounding in it, there is no distinction to be made between the character's view and the "facts". There are no facts to work with; you're required to take the narrator's words as gospel, or dive into homebrew territory. While I'd contend nearly every group immediately dives into homebrew territory before they even start a game, that's not the same as saying that homebrew-as-solution is desirable. The resulting issue I take with Red Markets' setting is that it's very clearly aimed to impart Gnat's views and morality (flawed as it is) as "the way the world works". What are the odds that every Recession official is a corrupt bastard with better than coinflip odds of being incompetent to top it off? Really, really low, but we barely get any examples against it because Gnat's view is "the entire Recession is a hellhole run by corrupt bastards, whether in office or a valet in some Free Parking ghetto". There's room for competence - like you acknowledged, intelligence services and the like get acknowledged as competent - but the entire setting is so hung on Gnat's, and later Banhammer's, biases that you cannot get a coherent, realistic, and most of all reasonable interpretation of the setting. This is intentional. It's also a terrible approach. I don't need Stokes to yell at me for 160 pages about how the government will ruin everyone's lives if it benefits corporate backers, how capitalism is going to exploit everyone until and past its breaking point, how everyone under pressure is some degree of a terrible person... I either already know these things, or can accept that they're genre elements. If you don't write a "what is an RPG and how do they work" section because you assume someone playing a roleplaying game knows what they are and how they work (and if they don't then they can do their own research), then you also shouldn't need to write a "what is capitalism and why does it suck" section in "a game of economic horror" billed on its cycle of exploitation. Re: hero worship, I'm not talking in character. Stokes falls into great man theory with what he attributes to Palbicke. He's an inherent genius with no regard for any actual circumstance who, again, upon getting access to a computer for the first time in his life promptly hacks his way into enrolling in Yale under a false identity and getting past every step of the way there, then makes a fortune by writing two magic algorithms to solve for the entire economy and inadvertantly predict the future (before we even touch Ubiq!); there's no element of "how the hell can he do any of this" except "because he's inherently great and can do great things with his greatness". There's half of "great man theory" by definition- he's born with the traits that let him rise to success and lead mankind, there's jack poo poo indicating he learned or worked for any of this (and plenty of counterevidence that no, he didn't work for anything, his magic algorithms that only he could have come up with did it for him). What's the second half? "The need for them has to be great for these traits to then arise, allowing them to lead". Well, considering Palbicke comes up in the book amid a tirade about the end of the free internet, the progressive collapse of the very markets Spawn and Cull are later let loose in, entering a society where he conveniently has all the answers to all the problems & can outwit those pesky capitalists and incompetent government who just can't understand the things he does to put himself in a seat of influence... All of this could be just bull from Gnat's perspective intentionally written as such, but remember: this setting gives you no other perspectives! Take Gnat's words as gospel or leave the setting as written. I'm not here to write a review of Red Markets as I'd run it; I'm writing about the text we are given. This is getting my blood pressure up so I'm going to stop complaining about Palbicke. I think my points are already made and hope they're coherent. Stokes can write systems well. He cannot write fiction to save his life and absolutely cannot write anything technical (this is going to keep coming up through the end of the book).
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Dec 10, 2020 21:12
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That's the next post, I'll have it up tonight. Australia is one of the two superpowers remaining. I'll let you guys guess the other.
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Dec 10, 2020 22:52
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Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror Part 4: Emergence Events and the Romero Effect Let's talk about the outbreak. Emergence Events Remember how Blight is magic zombie juice? Here’s another piece of magic zombie tricks: there is no patient zero. More accurately there’s a lot of patient zeroes, none of whom can get tracked effectively, that appeared across the world within minutes to an hour (China, Pakistan, Germany, and Russia are all acknowledged as initial appearance sites, as well as California and the rest of the west coast). So no quarantine, the world was immediately hosed.  Yes, it’s this unreadable in PDF format too; this is 100% zoom. Nobody I've found has a high-res version that’s cleaned up at all. Just look at the pretty colors. Green is Blight-free, blue is contested, red is lost territory. White dots are nuclear detonations, though some are unaccounted for. Gnat gives us a rundown of the world, with a couple weird consistency bits, that is promptly never referenced outside this section again except America and Canada. Separated out as the book does, by region:
The Romero Effect and Responses Cognitive biases and memes kept people from caching on until it’s too late. Gnat breaks down every single one, but the summary is pretty straightforward; nobody wanted to believe the apocalypse was here, people wanted to stay comfortable and not risk anything. But some people definitely responded, right? Some heroes of the outbreak? quote:The civil rights movement aimed at curbing the epidemic of racist police violence accomplished one thing: it made police a lot more enthusiastic about covering up their executions. Hospitals, of all things, survived thanks to the quick hot strain turnover & medical professionalism. Paramedics were massacred, firefighters substituted, firefighters got massacred, cities caught fire. And then we’ve got… another block, that reads differently three years after publishing. quote:True to form, commerce made things simultaneously better and worse. By the time of the Crash, the US had the worst employee sick leave and personal time policy amongst all the industrialized nations. A lot of desperate families careened into the parking lot of their closest camping superstores and mega-groceries to find the buildings fully-staffed - their familiarity with facilities and inventory saved a lot of people. But while it was great if you worked in a gun store or easily defensible industrial complex, there wasn’t much comfort for those working hundreds of other professions. For every big box superstore destined to become an enclave, there were a dozen fast food joints demanding their workers leave the house and flood the area with Vector targets. Essential worker mood there. Schools, prisons, homeless shelters, and mental hospitals are all mass infection zones. Stokes definitely got that one right.  quote:If every so-called “journalist” burned in hell for their part in the Crash, I’d consider the injustice suffered by the few good ones the price of doing business. Journalists helped make everything go to hell, of course, by straight-up lying to everyone about what's going on for clicks. Red Markets hates media. Red Markets also basically called COVID coverage with its criticisms of fake news, sensationalization, and politicization. Social media gets aimed at too; clout-chasing people killed or infected trying to scare people and turn the outbreak into a joke, 4chan troll types "spoofed evacuation orders and safe zone announcements so they could watch people get eaten for the lulz"... yeah, average people aren't any good either. Remember, everyone is awful, guys! Right at the end you get a little block that could come out of coverage published today. quote:The more serious things got - the more undeniably real - the faster the tide of misinformation multiplied. By the time no one could deny what was happening, everyone had lost someone close to the lies. The louder we screamed, the less intelligible things became. ...so the answer was to nationalize the news and strip all the editorializing, which is where “casualties” as a term comes from - couldn’t talk about zombies, so “casualties” became the official, bloodless line, and everyone who died or turned became just casualty numbers. The people abandoned in the Loss just took it as an official name to avoid the stress or anger of using the real word. I actually like this justification for not using “zombie”! It’s also where the “Taker” nickname from the beginning of the book comes from; “taking casualties”. Finally, we’re back into good worldbuilding briefly. I’m continuing to rag on the setting a bit. But Stokes at least to some degree gets the actual progression of a zombie outbreak and the reasons denial crops up, and paints the events worryingly well. This could still probably do with being about 20% shorter, and it wouldn’t lose much of anything in the process. Going forward I'm condensing these setting overviews. Next time: Reaction and Policy, or (choose whatever subtitle you like, they're all applicable to some degree): "How the West was SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Dec 11, 2020 |
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Dec 11, 2020 03:00
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Skellybones posted:Is there an explanation for how zombification happens in minutes vs stopping outbreaks turning away refugees/poor transport availability mesh together? With an hours or days long transformation period (Dawn of the Dead) you'd have infected people be the main source of outbreaks spreading as they move from one city or even continent to the next and turning there, but with an almost instant zombie mode (28 Day Later) it's more of a short range propagating wave that's determined by line of sight from the nearest zombie as they wander around. This is where it gets a little more complicated: Vectors and casualties infect differently. "Cold bites" take multiple days, "hot bites" take minutes. I assume the former, being the majority of the zombies, are the reason we have infection carriers sorta-referenced. Getting really ahead of myself, in gameplay terms, cold bites are essentially arbitrary calls by the GM for whatever's narratively convenient, while hot bites turn in d10 combat rounds (which have no defined length of time, but mechanically encompasses the time it takes to shoot a gun/barricade a door/give first aid as explicit examples).
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Dec 11, 2020 03:53
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Allstone posted:This is a staggeringly racist way to generalise the entire continent of Africa. I opted not to comment on it too directly. That said, before any potential calls of "she hates the setting so she's exaggerating"... well, the game license lets me, so have the Africa block. The only tiny bit of exaggeration is "Madagascar closed its borders" because Plague Inc., and on reflection, I actually undersold the writing a little. quote:Africa’s thick jungles, endless savannah, and crap transportation infrastructure meant the initial outbreaks that got out of hand never coalesced into the giant stampedes seen on other continents. Mali and surrounding nations fell early, but the Blight never spread quite so far as to take out Libya, Egypt, or the Sudan. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the corner of the area known as the African Loss, a box which starts on the West coast, then bisects the continent laterally until it runs against the lakes of the East African Rift zone. The swamplands and rivers kept the dead from migrating, so the East Coast survived and Madagascar became a literal bastion for the AU. Angola and Zambia are barely hanging on against the corpses trickling down through the Congo’s jungles, but they’re supported by the relative prosperity of every nation further south. This is the only text on Africa in the entire book. I will point out for anyone reading the bolded block and then looking at the provided map that all three named countries are mostly or entirely in the red Loss. Cairo and Khartoum specifically are in the "contested" area... but countries are not just their capitals.
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Dec 11, 2020 04:22
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Nessus posted:I may have missed this in an earlier section, but: Does the blight make the zombs unusually durable or long lasting? In gameplay mechanics, Vectors are killed instantly by headshots or are treated as "management-level NPCs" (the full durability of PCs with the entire hit box array), where "part-time" NPCs (with a single, much smaller hit box pool) are considered standard. Management-level NPCs are a pain in the rear end to kill, but... only as durable as players are, which is to say "still not particularly hard", and Vectors with armor are deeply unlikely. Narratively, Vectors ignore pain and trauma, so "stopping power" in traditional terms is inapplicable; you have to make the body stop moving to put them down. This takes a fair amount of work. Casualties build their own muscle and nervous system that doesn't really care about the harm the Vector took unless the head is destroyed. The Blight strands are effectively immune to damage, the only way to stop them at all is complete body destruction or destroying the brain stem. (There's no straightforward gameplay mechanics to compare to, Dead Weather is its own weird implementation of horde combat.) e: forgot to acknowledge the firearms bit. The problem is ammo and volume. They work well at killing but you'll get more of them in your face every time you start shooting. Plus, nobody has much in the way of munitions factories in Lost areas. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Dec 11, 2020 |
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Dec 11, 2020 04:37
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You know it's time for RATS. These are interesting posts as someone with zero interest in AoS as a game.
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Dec 11, 2020 18:57
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Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror Part 5: Reaction and Policy, Retreat Becomes Recession A lot of setting to cover here. Let’s talk about how the Western US became the Loss, and the East became the Recession. quote:In President Hunter’s memoir, our former fearful leader writes, “Criticizing institutional quote:So, these uber-Deep State operatives are the kind of folks who see blood start flying and immediately open up a spreadsheet file. Years in the Loss might force that kind of detachment on a person, but these spooks were psychopaths before it was cool. From that distance, you start to see the Blight’s weaknesses... primarily because you’re already thinking about how you’d design it better. The Survival Window, and the Torpor Lockdown We’ve had some side discussion about the way that Blight spreads in the context of Part 4’s worldwide update. Here, Gnat gives us some real numbers. Hot Blight is too lethal, too quickly, to cause extinction. Planes, trains, boats, even buses - all of them can’t transmit infection. Vectors inside a vehicle result in a crashed vehicle and everyone dead. You’re stuck with foot traffic, and thanks to Vectors’ lack of will to conserve energy (and the morbidly obese American population), that’s about a 25-mile straight-line radius for potential infection. Vectors don’t last long, they attack anything so they won’t go in a straight line. Basically, if you’re in a sparsely populated area you’re completely safe… from Vectors. Casualties break all the math. Casualties can transmit with days of latency and infectees can hide bites. The cold strain is what made Blight impossible to kill off. So there’s a “survival window” between all the Vectors in an area dying off and the casualties starting to wake up, of about 3 or 4 days. No new infectees in that window, you get to set up quarantine in about a week. Workable on a small scale, right? This falls apart when you have cities of millions of people getting infected. Then when you scale it up to the entire country (Once again, Gnat gives us math; it’s physically impossible to manage in the survival window.). So we get just the Recession protected. Draw a line at the Mississippi River, everything west is dead, everything east gets cleared. In the meantime, we go on lockdown, everyone stays in their homes. Tell me how that one works out for you... Every media channel is nationalized. All media is shut down except a repeat of a martial law order inflicting house arrest on the entire nation. Oh, and televising the execution of every violator of house arrest, though Gnat contends that most of it was faked. The entire military shifts east, near everyone on deployment worldwide gets pulled back to the eastern seaboard to clear it. Infection in the east gets cut off, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic block off two routes of approach (Vectors can’t swim, they don’t bloat because all their internal bacteria is dead, casualties just wander the riverbed/seafloor, and Blight sinks and won’t infect the water supply). Two more borders exist. The Mississippi River and Canada. Every bridge on the river is fortified and mined. Chicago turns into the new hub for the military. And we start Operation Utility. Mercenaries, special forces, every “operator” gets tasked with shutting down infrastructure in the west that poses a danger, pulling out important people and supporting bases/satcomms, the whole nine yards. These are your “patriotic mass murderers” that massacred their way across states to protect the fed’s interests... and Gnat straight-up admits to hero worshipping them. Not surprising considering a chunk of them make up her team; a Marine Raider company went rogue and deserted, kept Ubiq up and running. Preemptive Genocide Oh, that’s a good section name right there. That’s three borders taken care of. “But wait,” I hear you saying, “what about Canada?” Remember our world map from part 4? Remember the string of white dots along Quebec and Ontario? Well, we didn’t have a good water border to work with, and there’s only so much to do on land.  So we dropped dirty bombs in a near solid line from Quebec City to Detroit. (Radiation apparently stops Blight from reanimating, which never comes up before or after.) There were no infections in eastern Canada. Canada wanted to help. They got nuked for the trouble, and now the Recession has to deal with Canadian insurgents and terror attacks as a major threat. All for a guarantee that America didn’t have to trust anyone non-American. America truly can’t do anything without committing crimes against humanity here. Gnat’s Whisper Hey, look! This is where we find out why Gnat is on the top of America’s terrorist watch list and why that kid in the beginning was so scared of her. The mined bridges on the Mississippi were going to be blown, independently, without notifying anyone except the teams individually blowing the bridges without any context. Hunter assumes nobody in the west would know and nobody in the east would care. Meanwhile, Palbicke’s magic algorithms freak out and force Gnat into deep-diving into the system and seeing all of Palbicke’s peak-paranoia spyware at work… and she intercepts military encryption and starts getting all the information going on, including the Canadian genocide, plans to shut Ubiq’s team down and nationalize it, and military brass shifting everything onto the network to deal with power outages. Utility teams were never going to be evacuated, the “evacuations” they promised the civilians in the West and Utility’s families are all fakes. Every bit of the cover stories fall apart internally. So Gnat publishes all of this as a leak on every worldwide Ubiq user’s homepage.  Stokes really likes the borderline illegible handwriting font for all the inserts. All hell breaks loose, evacuation caravans try to get through, military units revolt and try to let refugees through before they get bombed to hell. A few million more people than expected make it through, many millions more die in the chaos. Every refugee that makes it through gets shoved into cattle chutes, every belonging abandoned and destroyed, and anyone with so much as a bruise gets shot. The survivors that make it through are left naked with nothing as emergency services fail. Welcome to safety, here’s your death from exposure. Within a few days, the Loss is cut off entirely.  Welcome to Free Parking. Aftermath The brass covered their asses and pinned everything on Ubiq as a cyber-attack. Gnat is the world’s biggest terrorist. Mutineers come back into the fold instead of fully revolting. Militias and independent units keep things moving. The economy completely collapses as famine sets in and rationing fails. Everything that isn’t food, medical, or other life-essential productions is shut down and torn down, and everyone out of a job is shunted off to “Free Parking” ghettos where caravans ran out of gas. Great Depression all over again, with token relief to keep outright revolution away. Everyone in the Hunter administration turns on each other, and by the end of the year, a new authoritarian government takes hold. Then everyone in the Loss legally dies. quote:Declared dead is a bit of a simplification. The policy paper known as “The Denouncement” actually declares any and all former US citizens west of the Mississippi to be homo sacer (Latin for “the accursed man”). It’s the most extreme form of civil death. The Loss has no protection, nobody can leave the Loss without becoming homo sacer themselves, and anyone who might be smuggled across the border, or does the smuggling, can be ratted out by a single tip. All rights lost, anything can be seized. The west no longer matters, the narrative slowly shifts to “anyone still over there was too stupid or evil to get out, and they have to be exterminated”. Hello, more propaganda, this time self-reinforcing. The Loss has its name. The east tries to stay “the United States of America”, but the Loss has a different idea. quote:It wasn’t defeat. They didn’t retreat. They Commentary here is a little minimal. It’s setting up the narrative bounds that let later mechanics work. Why can Takers exist, as for-profit D&D groups out looting the remnants of the West? Because there’s no longer any rights, for anyone, except what you can guarantee at the barrel of a gun. Next time, we set up a lot more game mechanics. Next time: Writing Off the Loss, and the Carrion Economy
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Dec 12, 2020 20:42
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Nessus posted:They nuked... Canada? The idea is that while the entire United States (or the entirety of North America) can't be contained, smaller areas can. The smaller you cut your geographic area to, the easier you can work within the survival window to clear out all of the dead in torpor before they come back as casualties. Gnat shows off the math and to clear the entire US with the American military would require every soldier to cover something like twenty square miles and 22,500 headshots an hour for four days straight (edit: now that I have my book, that was combining a couple of figures: the "full US clearance" rate is seven kills per soldier per hour, 3.5m an hour across everyone, over 20 square miles per soldier). If any casualties slip through you restart the clock. Since there are no foolproof geographic barriers in the north like the major bodies of water on the other three sides of the Recession, America chose to make their own radioactive barrier. To their very tiny credit, it worked. No infected came down, infected that entered the area later died, the north is basically safe from human threats. Now you just have Canadian terrorists. The text actually does reference that some Members of Parliament that either fled west or already were there are running governments in exile of sorts (none legitimate) in the Alberta/BC/SK region, and that they're major funding sources for insurgent attacks on the Recession. The structure of the Loss means I don't see any functional successor states arising quite yet. Possibly later on, but the Loss is in a difficult position where there are enough casualties roaming to have "dead weather" patterns, there's a TON of distrust and tension between "hidden infected survivors", "merciless exploitation", "cults" etc , basic services are missing everywhere, and with the exception of the Moths (for reasons Serf acknowledged earlier) anyone who gets too big and organized can just have a Predator drone flown overhead. Large scale organization and building up a social unit larger than single enclaves requires stability that the Loss doesn't have yet. That may change if casualty numbers draw down over time or if the Recession attempts reclamation, but the Loss presents too good of a boogeyman for authoritarian control for the latter, and the former depends on a far less organized and worse supplied region enacting survival window tactics that are, essentially, untenable for them. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 15:43
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Is there anything inherently wrong with d10s, besides them being a pain to roll fairly in the spinner design?
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Dec 13, 2020 16:37
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I'm pretty sure Skryre is about 90% of why I love the Skaven. Conniving assholes who COULD rule the
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Dec 13, 2020 18:36
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Nessus posted:I mean, I get that they're going for a particular thing here and I am quite sure the writers, appropriately, started from their desired endgame and worked backwards. And indeed I'm surprised it was "the US, East of the mississippi" as the clear zone, because the impression I had gotten was that it was more like "speckled regions of splendor and safety surrounded by The poo poo," based on earlier discussions. The Loss is "speckled enclaves of safety and relative splendor surrounded by The poo poo". The Recession is "speckled enclaves of wealthy people in safety and relative splendor surrounded by ghettos and famine-stricken masses. They're not terribly different, really. Nessus posted:Though if the zombies are this vulnerable to radiation, could you not do a high altitude neutron bomb over a location and clear out most or all of the zombs? It sounds like gamma sources would be as effective as firearms. I'll let Gnat answer this, with a little more context. quote:Blight doesn’t die under radiation, but something in it does stop being able to animate dead flesh after heavy exposure. Officially, the dirtiness of the bombs was selected as the bare minimum required to assure the radioactive moat held back the “massive influx of Canadian infected.” But, officially, a lot of bullshit gets thrown when talking about the Preemptive Genocide. I doubt the CDC radiation experiments got underway until well after the Crash, but you’d lie too if you’d just killed millions of your closest allies.
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Dec 13, 2020 22:04
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quote:When the Clans Skryre march to war, they divide up command into formations known as Warpcog Convocations, teams of engineers lead by Arch-Warlocks that specialize in various kinds of mechanized warfare. The infamous Whyrlblade Threshik are noted for their construction of giant war machines covered in cutting blades, while the Gautfyre Skorch are a unit specialized in flamethrowers, and the Archspark Voltik favor lightning cannons. Remember when we could just call a unit "warpfire thrower" or "ratling gunner" and it was perfectly fine? I miss those times.
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Dec 13, 2020 22:32
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"There's some saucers with pistols..." Okay... "... and some puppet socked Neotenics..." Weird, but all right... "... and a Reaper just vibing in the back" And there goes half the Firewall parties that would investigate this getting blown into a fine paste. This adventure seems to have a lot of neat ideas and do a really bad job of implementing them. I suppose it's a microcosm of Eclipse Phase.
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Dec 15, 2020 18:41
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mellonbread posted:I think you're overestimating the power of the Reaper. It's definitely a boss fight, but if you've got even one player character with good Speed then you already have it beat from an action economic perspective. And once you add the players' ability to spend Moxie on guaranteed critical hits that ignore its armor, you can focus it down pretty fast. I suppose it depends on how they built out the Reaper as a boss (though from your description they don't provide stat blocks). My very limited experience with Reapers involved people dying very, very quickly. Though "doesn't attack you" is a wrinkle.
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Dec 15, 2020 19:07
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