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Does anyone have any experience running Bill in Three Persons? Would it be a good opening scenario? The way I see it, it's kind of a clever way to get everyone in one place.
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# ? Jun 4, 2010 21:10 |
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# ? Jun 4, 2024 21:52 |
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Ansob. posted:So many occult tomes to bind, so little time. That would be the most hosed up sweat shop ever. All those little kids trying to make books, just going insane and dancing around and stabbing each other instead. You're a messed up dude.
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# ? Jun 5, 2010 20:46 |
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Gr3y posted:That would be the most hosed up sweat shop ever. All those little kids trying to make books, just going insane and dancing around and stabbing each other instead. You're a messed up dude. drat, so this is going on in China right now?
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# ? Jun 5, 2010 23:34 |
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Gr3y posted:That would be the most hosed up sweat shop ever. All those little kids trying to make books, just going insane and dancing around and stabbing each other instead. You're a messed up dude. Sounds like the basis for a new off-broadway show. Oliver Twisted.
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# ? Jun 6, 2010 01:50 |
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Stolze also started the ransom model craze among game designers with Meatbot Massacre. http://www.danielsolis.com/meatbot/ It looks neat but I haven't played it yet. Any thoughts?
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 05:43 |
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Okay, so I've just gotten my hands on a copy of Unknown Armies, and I'm curious: Wouldn't the system just cause more instances of "The Wizard Problem"? Not in the 'the character is powerful enough to do anything that everyone else can combined' sense, but in the 'the game becomes all about the caster and what they need to do to get power' sense.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 07:28 |
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:Okay, so I've just gotten my hands on a copy of Unknown Armies, and I'm curious: Wouldn't the system just cause more instances of "The Wizard Problem"? Not in the 'the character is powerful enough to do anything that everyone else can combined' sense, but in the 'the game becomes all about the caster and what they need to do to get power' sense. The Wizard Issue is about spotlight time. Unknown Armies works with this by giving each character Passions and Obsessions. By default, each character is supposed to be overwhelmingly interested in something and be all about giving the world a middle finger just to get it. Adepts take this a little further than anyone else, your sessions aren't all going to revolve around the Cliomancer a major charge unless the rest of the group wants it. Further, a lot of adepts' major charge goals can work well with more mundane goals. If you've got a gun-obsessed dude who wants to see how big a statement a bullet can make, a nigh-sociopathic people pleaser with a flair for the dramatic, and a magey Cliomancer adept obsessed with presidential shenanigans, all of their obsessions can easily line up. (Let's talk the president into placing gun-dude as the department of homeland sec., get him to blow him up, and then have the Cliomancer harvest the charge in order to XYZ) In fact, they most likely need to. Adepts can't use magic to generate their own charges. They need people who aren't broken, miserable cusses to help them further their own goals. This can sound a bit like ROLEPLAYING! But the obsessions and passions are hardcoded into the system. And Adepts are going to be really, really useless in any function that requires the PCs to act like normal human beings (Your PCs may not act like normal human beings anyway. If that's the case, start hitting them with Madness checks until they learn the meaning of sociopath protagonist.) As far as Avatars go, the picture is different. It's pretty easy to keep avatars low-key early on, but they start becoming the center of the spotlight once they start doing their high-level shenanigans. (Of course, by this time everybody will have a hand or two deep in the supernatural) Even then, to be a mover and shaker at that level without any supernatural ability at that point requires a person who's so driven that they demand the storyline move around them. If you can browse a copy of The New Inquisition, take a look at Alex Abel et al. to see how truly scary the normals are in UA.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 08:02 |
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Alex gets a writeup in the main book. If anything, it surprises me that he hasn't learned Plutomancy himself (although I'm not sure if investments would counts a 'getting money' for the purpose of gaining charges). I suppose that whole 'inability to spend anything' part might screw him over though. Still a very scary man.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 08:17 |
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Impermanent posted:In fact, they most likely need to. Adepts can't use magic to generate their own charges. They need people who aren't broken, miserable cusses to help them further their own goals. This can sound a bit like ROLEPLAYING! This is pretty much why Greg Stolze is a mad, beautiful genius. Anyone can make a game setting in which interesting/broken/powerful people exist; it takes talent to create a system that makes a group of people want to cooperatively play in it.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 08:31 |
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Impermanent posted:If you've got a gun-obsessed dude who wants to see how big a statement a bullet can make, a nigh-sociopathic people pleaser with a flair for the dramatic, and a magey Cliomancer adept obsessed with presidential shenanigans, all of their obsessions can easily line up. (Let's talk the president into placing gun-dude as the department of homeland sec., get him to blow him up, and then have the Cliomancer harvest the charge in order to XYZ) I guess my problem with this is that two of the three individuals here get less mechanical benefit for accomplishing their goals (they all get XP, but one gets charges too).
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 08:48 |
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:I guess my problem with this is that two of the three individuals here get less mechanical benefit for accomplishing their goals (they all get XP, but one gets charges too). Are you quibbling about the Spotlight Time, or the Mechanical Benefits? Because Magick will seriously gently caress up your life, because You Did It
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 09:39 |
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Spotlight Time and Mechanical Spotlight Time aren't mutually exclusive. If one player gets to at least push the direction that the story goes (because otherwise I won't get charges and then my character is useless this isn't fair wahhh), and gets more crunch than other players, it's a disincentive to play a non-adept. Sure, there are downsides to playing some of the caster-types, but others don't really have a lot to lose. For example (and this was only a brief readthrough, so let me know if there are rules for permanently removing someone's access to magic) Plutomancers lose all charges if they spend more than $1000. That's the downside to being one. So anytime you're out of charges, you can go nuts and spend as much of your accumulated money as you'd like. Now, if you lost the money when you spend or lost the charge, then there'd be a cost, but as it is, the only price you pay is waiting (an opportunity cost, sure, but not the end of the world). Given that is suggests a decent Plutomancer can generate half a dozen minor charges, and 1-2 significant charges in a week, that's not a huge price to pay unless you're carrying a major charge in your back pocket. UrbanLabyrinth fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Jun 8, 2010 |
# ? Jun 8, 2010 10:12 |
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I think I understand what you're getting at, but the obsession doesn't lift just because the plutomancer happens to run out of charges. It's a superstitious compulsion he has about money. His worldview is fixed on accumulating wealth because every cent brings him closer to a state of mystical perfection, or whatever else he might believe. The point is, that even with zero charges and a million bucks at his disposal, he's going to buy the used Miata for 599$ and not the latest model Maserati. This is a person who could not overcome the compulsion even with psychiatric help. Every dollar counts.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 11:01 |
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:Alex gets a writeup in the main book. If anything, it surprises me that he hasn't learned Plutomancy himself (although I'm not sure if investments would counts a 'getting money' for the purpose of gaining charges). I suppose that whole 'inability to spend anything' part might screw him over though. Still a very scary man. Because he's not an insane miserly freak when it comes to money. He won't dive into a loving sewer for a hundred-dollar bill. He's capable of buying a house, let alone renting anything more than a shithole that he pays for by the week. He's able to have a bank account, because he can stand to not have all his money in lovely, sweet-smelling greenabcks he can touch and fondle whenever he wants. He's a bit odd, but he's not an insane freak who will never function in society.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 15:08 |
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It's a lot safer to have an adept in your pocket (or locked in your basement) then it is to do magic yourself. You've got to love a game where it's a better idea to have your goons beat a mage with pipes until he does what you say than to try to learn magic yourself. If you guys dig UA you'd do well to read some Tim Powers -- his treatment of magic lines up really well, and I've snatched a lot of inspiration for those kinds of campaigns out of his books.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 15:32 |
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In UA, people don't learn magic because they want to. They learn magic because they, in a very real, deep, and personal way, have to.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 15:35 |
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:Alex gets a writeup in the main book. If anything, it surprises me that he hasn't learned Plutomancy himself (although I'm not sure if investments would counts a 'getting money' for the purpose of gaining charges). I suppose that whole 'inability to spend anything' part might screw him over though. Still a very scary man. Alex almost had real comsic-level power, but he lost it and can't get it back. And since he can't own it, he'll do the next best thing and control it.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 18:02 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, bear in mind that Alex Abel almost ascended to the Clergy (as a still unknown archetype) without realizing it, but was cockblocked by Dermot Arkane (the Heisenberg Messenger and Avatar of Fox News). I'm never going to get over how great the Clergy are for explaining politics and the crazy dramas of the political and public news world. I talked about this in my first post in this thread, but I want to keep talking about it. In the UA campaign book (which I'm only going to spoil very, very lightly because it already has been in this thread) there's a war goin' on, essentially, between two godwalkers. One of them is the Heisenberg Messenger, which is trying to ascend as the new incarnation of the Messenger. Instead of being merely a teller of the truth, the Heisenberg Messenger slightly changes the meaning or implications of anything he says. With the Heisenberg Messenger in charge, nothing we hear is ever faithful to the source, because we cannot help but change it slightly. Further, most Avatars of the Heisenberg Messenger are going to be consummate spin-doctors, and have to always alter fact to suit theory. Sound familiar? But it doesn't end there - the easiest way to generate a whole slew of UA campaign ideas is to take a look at any long-running political feud. You can (you may not WANT to) read the recent rise of Wikileaks' journalism and Anonymous' splinter crusade against thetans as a war against the Demagogue and the Heisenberg Messenger by a third archetype. It could be Anonymous if you're feeling especially prone to being an immature jerk online today, but it could also the The Grey Suits, the Anonymous Whistleblower, or the Hooded Man. where do you and your players' sympathies lie? Is it better to be aiding the force of misinformation and misleading slander from named individuals, or do they work for the cause of mob rule and the protection of anonymity that helps whistleblowers, attention-seeking firestarters, and violent racists? Or, and this is the most fun option, do they gradually piece together their own response? * There are a lot of fanmade Avatars posted on the UA fansite, and something like 90 percent of them are crap. Usually, when it's not because the writers didn't understand the game at all, were busy being in-jokey, or were some combination of drunk, high or autistic, it's because they were too specific. An avatar needs to be something akin to a Jungian archetype - broad enough that you can think of personal, legal, military, and social incarnations of the same avatar. The True King is a good example of an archetype from the books that seems very specific but isn't. Most people are going to create the True King of whatever city their game takes place in, because that's the obvious way to do things, but you could also have a True King of the Chicago Cubs, (whose land would be the Cubs' stadium, and whose followers might be fans, the players, and the coach, if the King isn't the coach) a True King of the Local Gaming Store, or a True King of an Internet Messageboard (which would require some adjudication as to what counts as his land, but c'mon.) The bottom line is, an Avatar usually best thought of as their primary verb. The True King leads. The Warrior fights, the Executioner hunts, the Mother nurtures.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 22:22 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:Also, Reign is probably the only game where random chargen is totally balanced with point buy. 2x10 Noble By-Blow 1x1 Exiled: You are no longer welcome in some province, country or region. Just what did you do that was bad enough to get kicked out, but not bad enough to merit summary execution? 1x3 Star Crossed Lovers: Well, a parent just didn't approve. Or maybe it was a spouse. Or maybe events just conspired to trap you, hundreds of miles from your beloved. In any event, it was not to be, leaving you sadder, wiser, and unusually attentive to the quickest exit from any bedroom you enter. 1x2 Robbed: Someone has stolen pretty much every cent you have in the world. How was this done? Stealth? Confidence trickery? Simple brute force? However it was accomplished, it's made you more watchful. 1x5 Press Ganged: Against your will, you were forced onto service aboard a warship. How'd you get out of that one? 1x6 Gladiator: You've fought for the entertainment of others. Maybe you were willing, maybe not so much, but you've known the pressure of having people hoot and cheer while someone else tries to stick a trident in your thigh. 1x9 Survived Hideous Occult Ritual: Blasphemous religious ceremony? Arcane experiment? Whatever it was, it went really, really wrong. Really. The question is, were you performing it, or just there to be sacrificed? 3x8 Officer Screw playing this guy, I want to read about him.
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# ? Jun 8, 2010 23:54 |
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I've been a fan of Greg Stolze since I picked up Godlike back when it was originally released. Shortly after I grabbed the entire Unknown Armies line. The guy is, IMO, the best writer in the RPG business right now and seems pretty down to earth from his posts on RPG.net.
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# ? Jun 9, 2010 01:30 |
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Okay. I have bought REIGN, and am having a blast creating random characters. From what I hear Unknown Armies sounds awesome. Do I only need the core book or are all the cool magic schools found in various splatbooks? (Also could somebody explain the concept of the noble byblow to me? I don't understand it )
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# ? Jun 9, 2010 02:57 |
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Robotic Folksinger posted:Okay. I have bought REIGN, and am having a blast creating random characters. http://www.fromoldbooks.org/NathanBailey-CantingDictionary/B/BY-BLOW.html
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# ? Jun 9, 2010 03:00 |
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Robotic Folksinger posted:Okay. I have bought REIGN, and am having a blast creating random characters. You don't need the splats. The Avatars and Adepts in the core + cherrypicked ones from the UA fansite should be enough. The ones in the core are in the core because they are easily the most flavorful and good jumping off points for homebrew. ON THE OTHER HAND: the splats are fantastic, and if you WANT them they're quite good. Greg Stolze talks about what he liked and didn't like about them here: http://www.gregstolze.com/atlas.html
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# ? Jun 9, 2010 03:50 |
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Robotic Folksinger posted:From what I hear Unknown Armies sounds awesome. Do I only need the core book or are all the cool magic schools found in various splatbooks? The only other "crunch" supplement is Statosphere (additional details for adepts, avatars, the House of Renunciation, and the Comte de Saint-Germaine). It's neat but far from essential. All the other books are either splat books describing the various factions (Break Today, Hush Hush, Lawyers Guns & Money) or adventures (One-Shots, Weep, To Go, Ascension of the Magdalene). All of which are good, none of which are necessary. UA is something of an bizarro-world gameline compared to many other 90s RPGs (which are full of books that aren't very good but necessary to figure out what's going on and to keep up with the metaplot).
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# ? Jun 9, 2010 06:14 |
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You owe it to yourself to buy at least one of the adventure supplements, though. It's not strictly necessary, but they're really nothing short of amazing. It'll give you a good idea how UA should play, too. Even if you don't end up running a module straight from the book there's a lot of stuff you can steal for other adventures, like One Shots' infamous fortune cookie paper.
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# ? Jun 9, 2010 08:50 |
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I thought it'd be neat to make a campaign and throughout it spread rumors of an even more powerful charge, the supreme charge. Acquiring one makes getting a major charge seem easy. Only the most insane of Adepts even humor the idea. A plutomancer would have to acquire a sum of money that's at LEAST 1 trillion dollars, probably more, it might mean acquiring all currency. For most schools no one has any clue what the supreme charge might require and no one in any school is sure what you would be able to do with one. Despite the very real possibility that this might all be totally wrong, an Entropomancer is nearly ready to execute his plan. One oracle saw a vision of a roulette wheel with the names of cities scrawled on each black number.
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# ? Jun 9, 2010 09:50 |
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Splicer posted:I just clicked a button and got my entire character history I got a character who's the grizzled child of a general and the royal horse breeder, started her career as a notary, then moved on to being a beauty salon operator who uses her skills to case joints before organising heists and using the wealth to protect her neighbourhood from other criminals. I'm pretty sure there's hours of fun to be had in that random character generator alone, and I really wish I had a gaming group so I could force someone to run Reign. Also I randomly generated a Company full of gossipy old men cum remorseless killers.
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# ? Jun 9, 2010 11:38 |
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I thought it'd be neat to make a campaign and throughout it spread rumors of an even more powerful charge, the supreme charge. Acquiring one makes getting a major charge seem easy. Only the most insane of Adepts even humor the idea. A plutomancer would have to acquire a sum of money that's at LEAST 1 trillion dollars, probably more, it might mean acquiring all currency. My take on the way magick works and adepts think is that if such a thing as a supreme charge was rumoured to exist, all of the adepts in the world would be dreaming day and night about how they'd go about getting it. Because there isn't a plutomancer alive who doesn't spend all day and all night dreaming about acquiring all the money in the world. The city-name roulette wheel is an awesome idea, though, and would be a wonderful thing for players to run into if they were shaking down the house of an entropomancer, even if he had no idea how he was going to go about destroying any of said cities.
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# ? Jun 10, 2010 00:27 |
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For anyone who's played Reign, do the following changes sound like they would be detrimental to the quality of the game? I was reading the Player's Chapter a couple of days ago and was mildly annoyed that all stats cost the same to raise but have different skills under them and that a lot of skills seem incredibly narrow and like they would be better covered by an Expert/Student skill:
I'll no doubt have to make an exhaustive list of specialties, which I don't really have a problem with. My biggest problem is accounting for Weapon skills in the cost of Coordination; I think the simplest solution is to force people using a weapon that they do not have the Weapon skill for to use Fight instead, so someone with Weapon (Spear) using a sword would roll his Body+Fight pool instead of his Coord+Spear pool. Also, I need to devise a way of allowing multiple specialties per skill at some sort of additional cost. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Jun 10, 2010 |
# ? Jun 10, 2010 01:25 |
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As a big Tim Powers fan, I think I'm obligated to pick up UA. Also, the Companies mechanic in Reign seems like something I've been loooking for for quite some time.
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# ? Jun 11, 2010 00:36 |
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Veritek83 posted:As a big Tim Powers fan, I think I'm obligated to pick up UA. Also, the Companies mechanic in Reign seems like something I've been loooking for for quite some time. Reign has a short $10 handbook edition that just came out that's missing the (delightfully weird) default fantasy setting (but has all of the system material). Reign Enchiridion Edition or something like that.
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# ? Jun 11, 2010 05:15 |
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FMguru posted:The original high-concept "elevator pitch" for UA was "Tim Powers meets James Ellroy and Quentin Tarrantino." So, yeah, you're obligated to pick it up. Something that I appreciate about Enchiridion is that it's actually available from distributors so you can order it through game stores. $10 isn't much, but I like to support the store where I play so I ended up buying it. The normal Reign book can only be ordered online, as far as I know.
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# ? Jun 11, 2010 06:58 |
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The Unspeakable Oath, a great Call of Cthulhu magazine, is being brought back and guess who is on the staff? http://www.theunspeakableoath.com/staff.php
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# ? Jun 11, 2010 21:10 |
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clockworkjoe posted:The Unspeakable Oath, a great Call of Cthulhu magazine, is being brought back and guess who is on the staff? http://www.theunspeakableoath.com/staff.php Holy poo poo, look at that lineup. Stolze, Ken Hite, Dennis Detwiler, Monte Cook, Adam Glancy, and John "holy poo poo it's John loving Tynes" Tynes. It's like, if you were putting together a dream team to resurrect TUO, this is who you would choose.
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# ? Jun 12, 2010 02:35 |
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Pope Guilty posted:Holy poo poo, look at that lineup. Stolze, Ken Hite, Dennis Detwiler, Monte Cook, Adam Glancy, and John "holy poo poo it's John loving Tynes" Tynes. It's like, if you were putting together a dream team to resurrect TUO, this is who you would choose. Unfortunately it looks like they're going to be using Todd Shearer's art for it, at least in part. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think his "poser models with photoshop filters" motif is just hideous. Really brought the quality of the new Delta Green book down.
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# ? Jun 12, 2010 03:06 |
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3D, computer-generated, non-abstract artwork is a loving abomination. It's lazy, it's cheap and it looks like rear end.
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# ? Jun 12, 2010 03:09 |
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It's like a dream team (and Monte Cook)
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# ? Jun 12, 2010 23:53 |
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I ran a group of four through Bill in Three persons tonight - my first time running a campaign in almost a year, but I think it went pretty well! Trip report and spoilers below! Our cast: Judas: An undercover cop on an urgent drug run, obsessed with betrayal. The Snake: A divorce lawyer following the devil avatar, who is all about tempting the weak into evil, but also about protecting those tested in fire. The Widow: A barren mother, divorced and cursed to die alone. The Lost Child: A teenager whose brother was violently un-existed, leaving him with an impossible past and fractured world view, living in a group home. They did pretty much everything wrong. They instantly decided that their task was to preserve and maintain the paradox exactly as they first witnessed it, to the point of stabbing Bill in the eye because that's how he came out of the wreckage. They did shrooms with the cult of the Prophet Bill, and accidentally killed a heroic stockboy in the Grocery robbery. The Snake, thinking he had to protect the Sheriff, announced that he was a child molester and led the cops on a chase to keep them from preventing Bill's deadly rendezvous. The Snake really stood out as playing his character to the hilt, tempting the first Bill in the robbery into killing all his partners and taking the money for himself. He even talked him into killing a poor florist who recognized Bill. One thing that bothered me about the scenario was how limited the available characters were - most of the time, it's just the pcs and Bill and maybe one other NPC interacting in a static setting. I added a lot of scenery characters, so a mostly social group could still have a big effect on the setting. I also changed the trailer park setting to be an RV graveyard, with the UFO constructed out of the stripped sides of the caravans, with the cult huddled inside, using a diesel generator as an altar for the dead sheriff. The house where the child molester kept poor Sascha was moved to the Garden from Weep. Since they kept exactly preserving the reality-breaking paradox, I felt that they deserved a more epic failure scenario. The exploding cars pushed them once last time into WreckSpace, a world of nothing but smashed cars, infinitely and eternally in all directions. Every possible car wreck that ever happened, past and future, wrapped into a frozen ball of crushed metal at that first moment of impact. The drivers were all frozen in their last moments as black silhouettes without any features. But the real threat was the skittering Never Children, all the unborn potentials who these wrecks prevented, who chased the PCs through a nightmare hub of metal ruin. They were coming for the Widow, the closest thing to a Mother they'd ever get. The PCs fled, until they came across a tight ball of Blue Hyundais, all recognizable as Bill's car. Over the session, I'd indicated that a sin of Bill's had triggered the initial split, and crawling into his car through a smashed window, they saw a much younger Bill taking drunken aim at his father in his shitbox car. This was the single catalyst, the first catalyst, and their last chance to cut the paradox off before it ever happened. All they had to do was turn the wheel away from his father, and Bill would continue on his flight as only a single man. They couldn't do it. They didn't think it would be fair to his never-born daughter. They didn't think they had the right to take away his choices. What's the point of free will, they argued, if God's just going to slap the apple away from Eve at the last moment? They spent a good forty minutes arguing over what was the most moral solution was! In the end, rather than either steering him away from his dad, or steering into incoming traffic to kill him, they chose to cut his fuel lines. That way, his free will was preserved, but he would have to face the consequences of his actions for the first time, his broken car preventing him from escaping his rash revenge. As they started cutting into the fuel tank, they felt the mass of cars shifting. Hundreds of possible blue Hyundais started disappearing into dust, causing an avalanches of suddenly falling vehicles - they scrambled into a nearby minivan, apparently on a crash course into a Smart Car, and were able to force it out of WreckSpace and onto the New York highways, riding the paradox shockwave of collapsing realities. They were even able to avoid the fatal accident that would otherwise have claimed the driver! So in conclusion: It was mad, terrifying, but I think everyone enjoyed it. In two weeks we start again, and next time I think I'll give Garden full of Weeds a try.
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# ? Jun 13, 2010 08:25 |
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Squidster posted:awesomeness Someday, I will run Jailbreak. Someday. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jun 13, 2010 |
# ? Jun 13, 2010 22:58 |
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# ? Jun 4, 2024 21:52 |
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This has come up before in UA discussions but I don't remember if anyone posted it here. That old Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete and Pete was straight up Unknown Armies: The Series. One of the episodes was about two godwalkers competing for assumption of the King of the Road archetype. Complete with symbolism (the King o Frod license plate) and taboos and everything. Or how that one hour in daylight savings time doesn't count. I'm sure pretty much everyone already knows about this but hopefully it's new to at least one person.
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# ? Jun 16, 2010 02:53 |