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  The second and fourth chapters cover the playable species/entities/states of decomposition in Bloodshadows. I’m not going to do a deep dive into the rules regarding these things, it’s a mixed bag. The best thing about it is that everything is customizable. There’s no “racial template” with prescribed powers, plusses and minuses for each type, just a sidebar of “background notes” with recommendations. Everything is build-your-own, within reason–a werewolf has to have the shapeshifting skill, of course. The downside is that these are still the Masterbook rules. The base system doesn’t really give you enough points to fully realize the concept of, say, a demonic gargoyle that possesses people. Properly emulating a Hammer Horror style vampire would involve more Advantages and Compensations than the rules allow, and of course these are all very fiddly. Again, this is damning when Bloodshadows is the only original setting for Masterbook. I’ll start by saying that there are three basic types of Unnatural PCs: demons, breeds, shifters, and the undead. Demons are Chaotic entities from some other plane of reality, and range from incorporeal possessing spirits to the very fleshy Succubi. The book is vague and hazy about where demons come from; some are summoned by magicians, while others may breed true. Speaking of which, “Breeds” are humanoid species that reproduce more or less like humans, and some are human hybrids. Fortunately, there are no box-standard D&D demihumans in Bloodshadows. Shifters are creatures who can change between two or more forms, such as werewolves. Shifters are different from other creatures who can change shape. For example, the undead Orris can change into all kinds of shapes, but they don’t gain the properties of the things they mimic. A weresnake, on the other hand, gains fangs and venom and a scaly armored hide. Some shifters breed true, while others gain their powers from a curse or infection by a shifter. There are many kinds of undead, but what they all have in common is that they died and were reanimated. (Obvious, I know, but D&D has “undead” monsters that were never actually alive.)  Let’s just get humans out of the way. There are about half a billion humans on Marl (not that anyone is taking a census) and they’re far and away the dominant species and overwhelming majority of people in the cities. Humans have two special powers, so to speak. The first is a +1 bonus to all spellcasting totals, which is nice to have but not much. The other is that everyone who isn’t human has a Prejudice II Compensation, and they don’t get compensated for the Compensation.  Relkazar are demons summoned by Chaotic priests. In their natural form they resemble gargogyles. They’re stronger than humans, and they can fly. But they’re rarely encountered in their natural form: they can become immaterial and possess people, and they prefer to spend most of their time in borrowed bodies. Relkazar focus on social skills, the better to maintain their cover, and don’t have any compunction about using people for their own ends. This makes them even more despised than most Unnaturals. They all have the Possession power and the Infamy Compensation, and most are aligned with Chaos. Sketh are little demons, only about 20 inches tall, covered in thick black fur which gives off a musky stench. They’re hyperactive, scatterbrained, and not very bright, and usually stick together in small groups. Sketh have a couple of unusual powers. They can run so fast that their movement is just a blur, and they can induce confusion in people by brushing against people as they run past them. Sketh are mostly Chaotic, but work for anyone who will pay them to do this to people. A small group of sketh can panic a crowd.  Succubi and Incubi are demons who feed off strong emotions. They have superhuman charisma and the power to change their appearance, so most of them feed by using their powers to seduce people and drain them during sex. Succubi can feed off any strong emotion, and there are some real sickos who like abusing people, slowly driving them mad, feeding off despair. Most find that seducing people is easier and comes with fringe benefits and cash prizes. Succubi who kill their targets, accidentally or on purpose, leave a corpse with its eyes burned out.  Tulpa are demons who feed on fear. Most people, including Tulpa themselves, believe they were conjured into being by humankind’s fears. They have the power to teleport and to induce fear, and they reflexively shapeshift into whatever people around them fear most. No information is given about their “natural” form, if they even have one. They usually align with Chaos, and sometimes with Chaos Oathbreakers.  Hugors are hybrids of humans and ogres. They’re huge and muscular, with greenish skin and lots of thick black hair. They’re not very intelligent or socially adept. Hugors always travel and work in pairs, and lose some of their strength if separated from their “life-mate” for too long. Hugors usually find work as manual labourers, bouncers, or thugs for the sentinels or mobs. Most are Order-aligned. Gris are also hybrids of humans and ogres–and a few other things. Unlike other breeds, they’re homunculi cooked up by alchemists. Gris are squat, muscular, sallow-skinned creatures who can eat anything and often do. They’re smart, but not particularly sociable, known for being disagreeable and violent. They typically have combat skills and work as mercenaries for anyone with the gold to hire them.  Elkists are a strange hybrid of demon and ghoul whose name means “parts is parts.” They have to eat human internal organs. They’re known for a strange ability: they can make part of their body intangible, but not all at once. Elkists make excellent hand-to-hand fighters, since they can allow a blow to pass right through them before delivering a lethal counterattack. Like the Gris, Elkist tend to do whatever pays, and don’t often align with Order or Chaos.  Werecreature is a catch-all for your werewolves, werecats, werebears, weresnakes, whatever. You can design your werecreature of choice by playing around with different Advantages and Compensations, as always. They tend to have a few things in common besides their animal form: an allergy to silver, the potential to lose control and go berserk, and the ability to infect other people with lycanthropy. Hellghests have two forms. One is a vaguely humanoid mass of soft, grey tissue. The other is a clawed catlike beast. No other information is given. The last and largest category of Unnaturals is the Undead. First, Ghouls are undead who eat human flesh. Beyond that, they vary widely in appearance and habits. Some are feral, reeking, barely-sentient monsters who will tear into anything. Others are refined monsters who look almost human and feed very carefully. Intelligent ghouls tend to prefer particular cuts of meat, usually the ribs or limbs, and leave the organs and stringy bits to less discriminating cannibals. Most are aligned with Order or the Order-Oathbreakers.  Orris are shapeshifting undead with an appetite for human bones. In their natural form they look like grey humanoids crudely fashioned from clay. They can shape themselves into something resembling humans, but they look like painted mannequins and aren’t likely to fool anyone who isn’t blind drunk. But they’re very good at shaping themselves into inanimate objects, preferring furniture. Yeah, they’re basically D&D mimics. (If they were undead, ate bones, and didn’t have that glue-power.) Their powers make them great spies, especially for bosses looking to bust up unions. Orris tend to be neutral in alignment. They also tend to be more curious and open-minded than most undead, who are preoccupied with their next meal.  Karkas are undead created by a necromantic curse. They look, well, dead–blank white eyes, pale or sallow skin, and sometimes open sores. They also tend to be dirty and unkempt. Karkas have the ability to regenerate from almost any injury, even total dismemberment. The curse that created them usually entails some specific means by which they can be killed. They also have the power to sap people’s energy, or even rearrange their physical attributes, making them strong but clumsy or agile but weak. Despite their powers, Karkas don’t really like being torn to bits, and usually shy away from the sorts of high-risk occupations you’d expect. They lean towards Order. Pretas are hungry ghosts who can’t or won’t accept that they’re dead. They possess people, and usually go after mentally ill victims who they can manipulate into letting them take over. They can’t completely drive out and replace the mind of their host, but they can bully, threaten, and cajole them. Pretas are almost entirely Chaotic. Some have joined the Chaos Oathbreakers in the hopes that technomagic can create a mechanical body for them to live in.  Vampires are perhaps the best-known and most common type of undead. In fact, they may comprise as much as 1% of the population of large cities! Vampires face more prejudice than other Unnaturals, precisely because they blend in so well. Some cities have “bloodlines,” welfare programs to distribute blood rations to needy vampires. (The book doesn’t specify how much flesh the ghoul-types need to get by, but it’s more helpful when it comes to vampires: most need a pint of blood every three days.) Vampires are stereotyped as wearing spooky black outfits and living in covens that are always looking for new members. In fact, most of them are solitary and living undercover. They don’t need the attention, and they don’t need competition for food. Like ghouls and werecreatures, there are many different types of vampire with different powers and weaknesses, and mechanically it’s very much a build-your-own kinda deal. Common powers include fangs, hypnotism, and shapeshifting into bats, wolves, or mist. Common weaknesses include an allergy to garlic, holy symbols, or sunlight, but most can at least walk around in the daytime. A majority of vampires are aligned with Order or the Order-Oathbreakers. Sucks for them, because being a Chaos Vampire is better in every way. We talked about Taxim a bit in the first update. They’re reanimated corpses which are possessed by minor demons. (Their statblock is in one of the setting chapters, for some reason, but they give you everything you need to play them.) Besides being undead, there’s not a lot to them mechanically. They don’t have any built-in special powers or weaknesses. Taxim are the oppressed proletariat of Selastos, but they’re not particularly nice people themselves. They’re not human, they’re demon-possessed corpses who work lovely jobs for beer money. They don’t want good public schools, they want booze and smokes and blackjack and hookers. Most have no qualms about conning gullible humans. Taxim are generally aligned with Chaos, and the Taxim Quarter is known for numerous obscure little shrines to Chaotic deities.  Last and definitely least are the Zuvembie. They’re barely-sentient zombies, reanimated by necromancers to slave away in mills and factories. They’re too clumsy and stupid for anything but the simplest manual labour, which is why the city founders had to turn to Taxim. They also don’t heal, so they eventually wear themselves down to nothing and collapse. Zuvembie occasionally get flashes of memory from their lives, which manifests as a momentary desire for food, drink, or sex. Most cities make it illegal to serve Zuvembie, since it tends to either get them worked up or lull them into an even deeper stupor, which leads to Zuvembie standing in the street and blocking traffic. So those are the PC types in Bloodshadows! I’m glad that they’re not just the box-standard elves and dwarves, and even creatures like werewolves and ghouls can be further customized. Still, some of them seem hardly playable. Sketh are kinda one-note, and the book admits that Zuvembie are too dumb to be worth playing. I’m not even sure how a Tulpa would work in play. Another striking thing is the undead PC types who feed on human flesh. From skimming this section, I figured Marl would be a wildly grim and gothic setting like Unhallowed Metropolis, where corpses are free for the taking. I believe Galitia is like that–there are references to “flesh mills” that definitely aren’t brothels. But I suppose there aren’t a lot of Ghouls and Elkists around, and they eat the drunks who wander into the Taxim Quarter.  Listen up, pally, I know my onions. Converting Masterbook to D6 is a cakewalk, see? They put a handy two-page conversion guide in with all the boxed sets! So howzabout you divide those numbers by three and add the pips, and I won’t have to burn powder in a creep joint like this, savvy? So now, skipping past the Selastos chapter I already covered, is all the other stuff for character creation. Advantages and Compensations, new skills, everything but equipment and magic spells. The first thing worth talking about is Alignment. Yes, Bloodshadows has alignment, and they even managed to not screw it up. There are four alignments: Order, Chaos, Order-Oathbreaker, Chaos-Oathbreaker. Many, maybe most people have no alignment. Alignment is actually measured in points. “Adds,” in fact, because Masterbook is weird. If your PC starts the game with an alignment, they get one free add. Alignment is a very loose measurement of political allegiance. There’s no table saying that if you have 15 Order points you’re the bishop of St. Cuthbert. You can earn more alignment adds when you do things that benefit “the cause,” even if you did them for your own reasons. If you work as caravan guards for a shipment of alchemical reagents, the GM can offer you a Chaos add. But you’re never obliged to take it, and you won’t lose Order points by smuggling rare metals for the cult of Ghazareth. You’d only need to do that if you were trying to renounce your alignment, in which case you can “work off” your current points. So what do the adds do? For most PCs, the only mechanical effect of alignment is on your spells. Many spells are associated with one of the alignments. If you’re aligned with the spell, you can subtract your adds from the Feedback Value (the damage or other bad poo poo you suffer from spellcasting). If you belong to any other alignment, you add your adds, making the spell more dangerous. This might seem like a bum deal, but in practice, it pays to specialize–and there’s some overlap between the alignments. Some Unnatural people, like vampires and werewolves, have their powers work differently based on alignment. The only other downside of alignment is the suggestion that enemies of your alignment will target you, which is just an excuse for adventure to happen.  The meat of the character creation chapter is in the Advantages & Compensations. I’m not going to go over them one by one. There’s a whole lot of Column III and Column IV options that measure the supernatural strengths and weaknesses of various Unnaturals. Most of them amount to a +3 to some situational ability or a +1 to a group of related skills. (It’s difficult for this game to stat out something as basic as an orc when Strength +1 is a Column III power.) Super-hearing gives you +3 to relevant perception rolls, that sort of thing. The most interesting examples are abilities that aren’t just an enhancement to something everyone can do. include Omnivorousness (you can live on garbage), Glider Wings, and Animal Control. Column IV gives you more options for spell-like abilities, such as Confusion, Darkness, Fear, and Hypnotism. Column IV Advantages also include all the “key” powers for the various Unnatural PC types, such as Possession for Relkazar and Preta, Life Drain for Succubi and Vampires, Immortality for Karkas, and Shapeshifting for several types. There’s Paralyzing Touch if you want to play a D&D style ghoul or wight. As for the Compensations, you can imagine most of them. Allergies to silver, sunlight, holy relics, whatever. The need to feed on human flesh or blood or bones, or whatever. Masterbook has a really 80s sensibility, so this is called "Nutritional Requirements (Parentheses)." These tend to be tied to other Compensations that specify what happens when a werewolf is hit with a silver weapon or an Orris doesn’t get their fill of bones: losing your special abilities, temporary Attribute loss, or suffering a persistent debuff. Interesting examples include Stench, Symbiosis for Hugors, and Rot, where bits of you are frequently falling off and you have to pick them up and reattach them.  The last thing thing in this section worth noting is the Dependency Table for vampires. It gets into the details of how much blood they need and how often. This sidebar is specific to vampires, even though there’s no reason you couldn’t also apply it to ghouls’ need for flesh, Succubi’s need for lust, and so on. The Dependency Table is why Chaotic vampires are strictly superior to Orderly ones. If you’re an Order-aligned or unaligned vampire, you need a pint of blood every three days. If you’re Chaotic, then whenever you feed, you roll 2d10 on a table to see when you need to feed again. Here’s the kicker: if you roll poorly, you need more blood in two days, or a day, or you need more blood right now! But if you roll above average, you don’t need to feed for a week…or a month…or three. You stand to gain way more than you stand to lose, for the same odds. Let me end this section by noting the one thing they did very, very right: Unlike in the Masterbook core rules, you don't need to spend a Column III Advantage to be a magician. Just put adds in the relevant skills. You don't need to play an Unnatural to play a weird occult character in Bloodshadows.  There’s a section on new skills. The obvious ones are the magic skills. There are way too many different magic skills, but I’ll get into that in the next update. The magic skills are alteration, apportation, cantrips, conjuration, divination, and summoning. All of them are macro-skills that require you to specialize in a school of magic. For nonmagical skills, standouts here include Safecracking, Smuggling, and Cartography. The world of Marl is poorly-mapped, so being able to read maps, make maps, and identify an outdated or forged map is a very valuable trade. One magical skill worth focusing on is Cantrips. This skill governs magic spells that don’t require a roll, like lighting a cigarette with your finger or finding your misplaced steamcar keys. Your skill rating just governs how many cantrips you know. Shapeshifting is a magical skill that doesn’t work like the others; it doesn’t cast spells, but a successful use lets you rearrange your Attribute points, with your skill adds adding to the total. It’s a cumbersome subsystem that doesn’t really work properly, since there’s nothing about temporarily gaining special abilities like claws or wings. Next Update: I piss on the magic rules from a great height.
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Sep 26, 2022 01:28
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The thought of all those golem brains just sitting around...Fivemarks posted:
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Sep 29, 2022 |
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Sep 29, 2022 19:33
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Grog. Grog never changes. That's the point
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Oct 2, 2022 15:04
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That's the plot of Carter's "The Thing in the Pit."
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Oct 3, 2022 14:51
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Well, that's just it--if you want the tactical considerations that level drain brings to the table, it seems that you can do the same thing with persistent status effects. Ugh, I hated calculating level drain in 3e.
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Oct 3, 2022 18:15
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To an architecture nerd like Lovecraft there's nothing creepier than a pile of irregular rocks.
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Oct 4, 2022 18:33
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Idunno Lovecraft's feelings about the Greeks, but I'm sure they were not good.
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Oct 4, 2022 19:39
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One of his most racist stories was about a white guy from the Catskills. Dude thought rural New Englanders were the Sawyer clan.
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Oct 4, 2022 23:39
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Pvt.Scott posted:That had better be a midnight sunstone bazooka that raccoon is wielding, or it just wouldn’t be Synnibarr.
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Oct 11, 2022 22:48
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Broadswords are just plain better than sabres. Eat it, sabre duelists. (I wonder what they think a broadsword is?)
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Oct 13, 2022 15:15
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It's always been kinda funny to me that Kindred have very little interaction with the spirit world; vampires and ghosts barely talk to each other. Of course, this is because the Umbra and Shadowlands and so on got developed later. They tried to change it later, but the results always felt weirdly patchy (the Necromancy powers) or silly over the top stuff like Enoch.
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Oct 13, 2022 17:23
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Dawgstar posted:Except for the clan who made that their whole thing in the Giovanni. The Giovanni being the edgelord gangster incest Clan doesn't help.
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Oct 13, 2022 18:01
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joylessdivision posted:I've been toying with a "United World of Darkness"  
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Oct 13, 2022 18:29
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Sure, but like, do the ghosts have stats? What can you do with your pet ghosts? It's the same question posed by Animalism, which in the core rulebook is somewhat vague.
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Oct 13, 2022 19:24
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I've never understood why people need porn in their tabletop roleplaying games. You're already on the Internet; infinite free pornography is just a few clicks away.
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Oct 20, 2022 18:58
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By popular demand posted:That reminds me, I'm browsing through the old Kult books and feeling deeply ashamed that I ever thought it had any potential. So Kult's big selling point is a setting full of gruesome edgy scenarios that aren't very playable. Basically, they completely failed to do with their mythos what Chaosium did with Call of Cthulhu. Edit: All they really needed to do was say "You've seen something beyond the Veil, so now you have magic powers but monsters are after you so you'd better stick together." The premise of Mage and a dozen other games. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Oct 24, 2022 |
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Oct 24, 2022 19:04
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I think Chill is one of those things where the strength is in the sourcebooks, definitely. Idunno why it didn't make a bigger splash than it did. It was well-supported, so I guess it sold well enough. But it isn't much discussed today.Everyone posted:Or just play Macabre Tales which does all that stuff a lot better. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Oct 28, 2022 |
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Oct 28, 2022 17:30
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sasha_d3ath posted:tbh Kult is mega unpopular around here, and even I, the local Kultpologist (I used to admin for the Discord server!!), have kind of found my peace in that I like it the way I like paperback horror or VHS trash movies, where I value more what I get out of it than what's actually visibly on the page. Lord, take this cup from me
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Oct 31, 2022 16:54
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Is a lamia not supposed to look like you stuck another body on top of a snake?
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Nov 3, 2022 15:12
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You want the snake to have feet?!
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Nov 3, 2022 15:54
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I'm torn. I appreciate the gonzo weirdness of this thing while being put off by the generic movie subtitle names for stuff.
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Nov 3, 2022 16:46
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I mean when you think about it, everyone's face is made of leather, or at least a precursor to leather.
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Nov 3, 2022 20:39
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My Bloodshadows review is also very late because a) I got sick and b) it takes time to heap the appropriate amount of scorn on this thing
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Nov 30, 2022 19:54
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PurpleXVI posted:Everyone else pouring in these good reviews make me feel like casting around for something to review myself. 
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Nov 30, 2022 20:51
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, certainly, I don't need to only review trash, but trash is A) easier to identify and B) funnier to write about. Plus... the "arrogant trash artist" genre of games tend to have the most interesting good parts. Almost all of them have something that's accidentally genius, like Middenarde's bargain bin Exalted feats in its original incarnation or In Dark Alleys having a few feats that might be worth lifting for an RPG that's not about sexually abusing people until they achieve enlightenment and transcend mortal reality. Something that's just solid and competently made rarely excites me in the same way as finding the one diamond of something cool after sifting through a landfill, this is probably a character flaw on my part.
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Dec 1, 2022 16:13
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I don't want to review In Dark Alleys. I want to grab the author by the shoulders and shake them as hard as Ican while screaming "What the gently caress is wrong with you" until my voice gives out.
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Dec 1, 2022 17:20
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I don't care to rationalize anything in Dragonlance for the same reason that I don't care to rationalize anything in Mormon theology.
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Dec 2, 2022 18:11
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PurpleXVI posted:Seriously. Why the hell are the flood gates powered by pit fiends? You'd figure some sort of engineer or artificer could find a better solution. Just set up a clay or iron golem to manipulate the mechanism manually instead.
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Dec 8, 2022 15:54
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Obligatum VII posted:Pit Fiends are lawful, they might actually be able to count on a rescue squad if for no other reason than to send a message not to do pull this kind of thing. You'd really want Balors if you're committed to the world's stupidest flood gate. Edit: I can definitely see Acererak or Halaster imprisoning an epic-level monster just to make them operate a door. That's the kind of thing they'd do. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Dec 9, 2022 |
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Dec 9, 2022 20:01
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I liked shifters and changelings, and I'm unhappy that D&D never really did anything with shifters in particular. (Changelings, by definition, don't suffer much from not having a well-defined culture of their own.) I can't think of any notable Shifter NPCs, or settlements, or adventures built around them. The Silver Flame is Problematic because they're bigoted against Shifters, but I don't recall any campaign modules or metaplot events where that mattered. The stats are also crap, and while it's nice that they got stats in 4e, they're just another monster race where you might pick them for flavour if the ability score bonuses are good while ignoring the rest. Oh wow, I have this ability that gives me a +2 to something for a few rounds, whoopty loving poo poo. The way the mechanics for actually Shifting was handled smacks of that era of design where developers went into a stinky flop sweat at the thought of ever actually doing anything interesting. Now that I'm on the topic, the way Shifters were designed reminds me how much I loving despise 3e-era design, and the extent to which that lived on in 4e. With the Go gently caress Yourself ability, X times per day you can gain a +Y bonus to Who Gives A poo poo for Z rounds. There's a whole chain of Who loving Cares feats you can take to gain an extra +A to Some Combat Option You Never Use Because It Sucks poo poo, but only in Bullshit Situation That Will Come Up Twice in a Yearlong Campaign.
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Dec 13, 2022 17:36
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What was that stupid 5e game about fighting the evil Baron Drumpf or whatever?
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Dec 15, 2022 19:22
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Libertad! posted:You're thinking of Monsters of Murka, a 5e campaign setting that turns the modern world into a meme-filled fantasy land. I can't recall if I talked about it here, but it has been a setting I've considered reviewing. Its big weaknesses are that it over-relies on puns for its humor and while the author is liberal, it reads like someone saw the Trump Derangement Syndrome insult and decided to wear it as a badge of pride.
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Dec 15, 2022 23:35
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 Well, I haven’t had much time to write about Bloodshadows lately. For reference, previous updates are here and here. Now it’s time to talk about the magic system in this game that’s all about magic. Remember, Bloodshadows is the only original setting for the Masterbook system. So how well does the Masterbook magic system work for its original high magic setting?  Let’s start by talking about the magic skills. I will say one thing for Bloodshadows: you don’t need to spend any of your Advantages to be a spellcaster. Just put points in the skill, and you’re a caster. Alteration changes people or objects. So that’s shapeshifting and transmutation, right? Wrong. You see, if I were to cast a spell that gave you wings to fly, that would be creating something from nothing, ergo it’s conjuration. The same goes for giving a living creature an ability it didn’t have before, like night vision. Alteration is mainly used to increase or decrease existing abilities, or transmute matter without changing its mass. Apportation governs movement. You use it to move stuff with your mind. Including teleportation? No, that’s summoning. So this is just telekinesis. Conjuration, like I said, creates stuff that didn’t exist before. This is easily the broadest magic skill, since it covers almost any spell that involves making something from nothing or giving a person or thing a trait it didn’t have before. Divination covers spells that give you information, let you perceive other places, or perceive the past or future. (A spell that enhances your vision would be Alteration, while one that gives you special vision would be Conjuration.) Summoning covers spells that magically call people or things to you, either by teleporting them or forcing them to move under their own power. This includes calling forth spirits and demons from other planes of existence. I really don’t care for this “physics envy” approach to magic. It always leads to nonsensical conclusions based on semantics. Like the idea that giving someone gills isn’t Alteration, but Conjuration because the gills weren’t there before. Floating a tea kettle from the stove to the table is Apportation, while teleporting it to the table is Summoning. You see this poo poo in D&D, too, where throwing a fireball at someone is “evoking” but throwing an acid arrow is “conjuring” because one projectile’s made of energy and the other is made of liquid. I prefer the Shadowrun approach, where spells that kill people are Combat spells and spells that detect things are Detection spells.  But the actual, practical problem with magic skills is that they’re “macroskills” as defined in ye Masterbook. If you wanted to master every type of magic, it’s not 5 skills but 45 skills: you have to “focus” each skill in a school of magic, and there are 9 of those. An alchemist needs alteration: alchemy, conjuration: alchemy, apportation: alchemy, and so on. These are the schools of magic: Alchemy: On Marl, alchemical concepts like the prima materia and philosopher’s stone are very much real. Alchemy tends to involve lots of dangerous equipment and substances. Practically, it’s concerned with transmuting matter, producing potions, and creating homunculi. Chronomancy: The rare and very dangerous art of loving around with time. Elemental: Earth, fire, air, and water. Necromancy: Conjuring the dead, including communicating with ghosts and reanimating corpses. Photomancy: Magical light and darkness. Popular among Order and Chaos cultists, and theatre people. Sorcery: A rare and specialized school that governs magical gates. This raises questions about the extradimensional sources of all magic, since sorcery means “power from a source.” (That is, of course, wrong. “Sorcery” comes from a root word meaning, approximately, “divining by casting lots.”) Technomancy: Spells dealing with weapons, tools, machines, and metal. Vitomancy: Everything to do with life and health. This includes heals, buffs of all kinds, spells for controlling plants or animals, and evil Dr. Moreau stuff. Wizardry: This is the “magic of magic.” Wards, counterspells, detecting spells, and for some reason, golems and a grab bag of other stuff. You’re probably thinking that this system is very unfun because it forces you to hyperspecialize to have a high enough skill total to do anything. Mechanically, that’s true. Practically, it’s full of loopholes that let you bullshit your way into using a few skills for everything, and the writers flat-out encourage it. That’s where Arcane Knowledges come in. Arcane Knowledges are bought like skill adds, but they don’t connect with any attribute. They add to your skill total for any relevant spell. There are way too many of them, though, at 21. Death is much everything necromancy does. Life and Living Forces are different. One is the creation of life from nothing, the other covers all biological life. Aquatic, Animal, Avian, and Plant are different fundamental types of creature. Bloodshadows actually affirms Aristotelian taxonomy as metaphysically real. Folk covers sentient creatures. Earth, Fire, Air, Water, Metal, Light, Darkness, and Time are self-explanatory. Then there are the weird ones: Dimension is concerned with extradimensional travel and messing with the fabric of reality. Inanimate Forces covers “pure” physical forces that aren’t necessarily covered by the elements: gravity and electromagnetism as opposed to fire and ice. (But it also covers heat and cold, which aren’t forces. See, this pseudoscientific approach to magic never holds up under scrutiny, ipso facto.) Magic covers that “magic of magic” stuff encompassed by Wizardry. Unnaturals are covered by Enchanted and Entity. The former includes shapeshifters and elementals, while the latter includes demons, ghosts, golems, and undead. I really don’t know why. There are too many of these, but as you can imagine, you probably only need 2 or 3 to add some points to every spell you cast. Vitomancers want Living Forces, Necromancers want Death, zap-bang-boom mages want Inanimate Forces.  The last character trait that can affect your spells is Alignment. Each Alignment is associated with 6-8 Arcane Knowledges. When you cast a spell associated with your alignment, you subtract your Alignment trait directly from the Feedback Value, which is very good. When you cast any spell not associated with your Alignment, you add your Alignment adds to the Feedback, which is very bad. Chaos: Darkness, Dimension, Entity, Fire, Inanimate Forces, Water Order: Air, Animal, Aquatic, Avian, Enchanted, Light, Living Forces, Time Oathbreaker Chaos: Darkness, Entity, Fire, Inanimate Forces, Metal, Water Oathbreaker Order: Air, Animal, Aquatic, Avian, Earth, Enchanted, Light, Living Forces Having an Alignment may seem like a bad bargain in general, and some get more Knowledges than others. But remember: you’re going to bullshit your way to using Apportation: Chronomancy (Time) for everything.  I guess we have to talk about Feedback now. In the default Masterbook system, Feedback translates directly into damage. Bloodshadows–again, the only original setting for the Masterbook system–doesn’t do this. Instead, if your Feedback is strong enough to cause at least one Wound, you roll on a special d100 Feedback Results Chart. (Like all Masterbook charts, this chart is actually a table.) Each Wound translates to +10 on the results. Here are the results: 01-50: You got lucky. Nothing happens. 51-60: You vomit random objects like feathers, coins, nails, or live vermin for 3 rounds. 61-70: You suffer from severe symptoms of mental illness for d10 hours. 71-75: You become a shapeshifter with a random form decided by the GM. You will transform randomly until you buy the shapeshifting skill and gain control over it. This is permanent. 76-85: Your skin becomes brittle and dry, and bleeds easily in combat. This is permanent. 86-90: You lose a Life Point and become exhausted until you rest for a week. 91-00: You randomly forget 5 skills until you spend a Life Point apiece to regain them. 106-110: A permanent cosmetic mutation. Lose all your hair, grow fur, change the colour of your skin or eyes, change your sex, glow in the dark. 111-120: Even more radical permanent changes. Grow or shrink, grow an extra head, have your head explode and die. 121-130: You die, become a ghost, and immediately try to possess someone nearby. 131-135: Absorb Life Points from everyone around you, but each one inflicts a Wound. 136-140: A spirit follows you around. 141-145: Permanent bad luck. 146-149: You explode, possibly surviving as a fire elemental. 150: You become a God. Existing Gods immediately drag you out of the campaign for some kind of divine hazing. So now you know why entire neighbourhoods in Selastos are filled with magical burnouts. Having gone over all that, the process of Casting a Spell is simple. Roll the dice and add it to your Magic:School + Arcane Knowledge. If you beat the spell’s Difficulty, subtract the difference from the Feedback; if you failed, add the difference. Alignment also affects the Feedback Value. Spells never “fizzle,” but a lot of them use either your casting skill total or the spell’s Effect Value as a roll to attack, trick, detect, etc. Combat spells often require a separate skill roll (usually Thrown Weapons) to actually hit the target. So you can “successfully” cast a spell that fails to have any effect. Well, at least there’s no multi-action penalty.  The last part of the chapter is another huge problem with the magic system: The spellbook. There are 52 spells in the book. That might sound like a lot, but remember, there are 45 magic skills. It’s incredibly unbalanced, too. Half of the spells are Alteration, and 14 of those are Vitomancy. Conjuration gets 15 spells, Apportation gets 6, Divination 4, and Summoning only gets a single spell. Not only does this give short shrift to anyone who decided to play a seer or a summoner, it means there’s very little guidance on how to navigate the ways that different types of magic overlap or claim dominion over different things. So if you actually want to play a Bloodshadows campaign, at all, you’re going to have to write your own spellbook and come up with dozens of spells using Masterbook’s convoluted SFX system. Building a single spell in this game is grueling, and you’re practically expected to make dozens of spells. Speaking of which, Bloodshadows spells have a very old-school D&D sensibility in that many of them require “material components” and “somatic components” that seem like corny jokes. The alarm spell requires you to mime breaking into your place, then scream. Combat spells often require you to toss something at the enemy, which is how you bullshit your way to casting combat spells with Alteration. Acid Bath (Alteration: Elemental). Throw some water at your enemy; the spell turns it into acid. Animate Golem (Conjuration: Wizardry). This animates a golem that you built out of wood or stone or whatever. There’s a complicated formula for slightly increasing some of the golem’s attributes if you roll really well. Bullet (Apportation: Technomancy). Turn any small metal object into a speeding bullet by palming it and miming finger-guns at someone. Dark Cloud (Conjuration: Photomancy). Light a match, then try to snatch its shadow away from the wall. This gives you three charges; using one allows you to throw an obfuscating cloud at someone. Destroy Magic (Alteration:Wizardry) lets you cancel an active spell in the area, while Detect Magic (Divination: Wizardry) tells you what active enchantments are around. Expel (Conjuration: Sorcery) is what you use to banish a demon. Bloodshadows wants the GM to arbitrarily determine the Distance Value of the demon’s home dimension. It defaults to 38. Your guess is as good as mine. Facade (Alteration: Vitomancy) is popular with Unnaturals; it lets you disguise yourself as a random person. First Aid (Alteration: Vitomancy) is your basic healing spell which substitutes for a First Aid skill total. Glass Jaw (Alteration): Vitomancy) is a combat debuff that reduces Toughness. Wow, Alteration: Vitomancy gets lots of good spells, doesn’t it? Mystic Barrier (Conjuration: Wizardry) is your basic anti-magic force field. Pain (Conjuration: Vitomancy) is typically charged into sentinels’ batons. Savvy sentinels use the Slow (Alteration: Vitomancy) spell to stop fleeing targets; just present your badge and yell “Freeze Police!” There are lots of spells you’d recognize from D&D. Charm person, speak with dead, the one that ties people up with vines. The spellbook ends with cantrips, simple spells that don’t even require a skill roll. Honestly, for spells designed to be convenient, a lot of them are lame because of the required components. Chill and Heat are handy for warm beer and cold coffee, respectively. Clean and Find make housework a breeze. But then there’s Note, which lets you leave a secret message for someone. You have to mime writing, and you also need a bit of the target, like a hair. So like, are you carrying around a little scrapbook with a few hairs each from all of your friends, in case you need to leave any given one of them a secret message? The best thing about the magic system is a sidebar called “Focus On Fireballs.” This is where they flat-out tell you that you should build whatever spells you want using the skills that you have. The default Fireball spell is a Conjuration: Elemental spell. They give examples of an alternative Fireball built off of three different skills. And boy, they really advocate some far-fetched bullshit. Fires of Death is a Conjuration: Necromancy fireball that sacrifices a “corpse candle” to fling a fiery will’o’the’whisp at the enemy. Temporal Fires is a very clever Alteration:Chronomancy fireball. You take some ashes from a fire, and fling them at the enemy. The spell rewinds time so that they ashes are now a raging fire. Lastly, Sun Burn is an Alteration: Photomancy fireball that requires you to catch some sunlight in a magic jar. When you open the jar in the general direction of the enemy, the spell enhances the sunlight to burning intensity. Okay, that’s nice, but you’re still stuck building lots of spells in a system that’s a pain to use. This comes out of an extremely 80s sensibility where fun has to be earned by measuring everything “scientifically” and in great detail. And when you have questions that can’t be answered, like “how far is it to the nearest circle of hell,” the answer is “waste a bunch of time making a big show of doing basic math, and bullshit the result.” If we’re just bullshitting, why are we spending so much time looking things up on tables? So that’s the crappy magic system for this game about magic. In the last Bloodshadows update, we’ll round it out with equipment, GM advice, and a sample adventure. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Dec 26, 2022 |
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Dec 26, 2022 01:30
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SimonChris posted:This is giving me flashbacks to the old process- vs results based determinism debate in the Mage: The Ascension community. Like, if you want a cab to randomly appear and take you across the city in record time, is that Correspondence (movement) because you are moving from point A to point B or is it more like Entropy/Mind since you are manipulating probability to make the cab appear and then mind-controlling the cabbie, I guess?
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Dec 26, 2022 18:49
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Someone should tell these people that a fantasy game doesn't have to have humans in it at all, if you don't want to. It's fantasy. I will, of course, vote for Vampires.
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Jan 5, 2023 20:38
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Does any game have a better Peasant Class than WFRP?
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Jan 7, 2023 17:07
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Best 3e campaign I played was basically a Book of 9 Swords playtest where we all had Aberrant marks and didn't know why.
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Jan 9, 2023 13:37
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White Wolf notoriously put a Goth Kid faction in Mage. Yet when they did the splatbook, there was barely any understanding of the music or the scene or anything else connected to it. It was bizarre.
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Jan 19, 2023 23:46
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juggalo baby coffin posted:its because while the white wolf audience might include goth kids, it was written by 40 year old men in the shape of a bean
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Jan 23, 2023 16:38
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NPCs like this are terrible enough. It gets even more disgusting when WoD books start actually suggesting that you play a child molester.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:15
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