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Ironically, I feel like it's the one supernatural show that Unknown Armies wouldn't work for. The setting, I mean. The system with its Obsessions and Triggers would work perfectly.
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Jun 27, 2016 05:47
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The way the God-Machine 'thinks' is reminiscent to me of a mini-RPG Vincent Baker wrote to prove a point, Rock of Tahamaat. In RoT, one player is Rock of Tahamaat, a space tyrant ruling over multiple worlds. Rock's player has to write on their sheet of paper 'No mere individual can hold my notice'. When it's Rock's turn, Rock does whatever space tyrants do, and then gives out his orders (usually in response to the other, regular player characters rebelling against him somewhere). Rock doesn't speak his orders directly - he has a team of psychics attending him for that. Who sometimes get things wrong, but whatever. Anyway, because Rock thinks individual people are beneath him, all Rock's orders are targeted at groups, although Rock can intersect groups as much as he wants. So while he can't say "Find and execute John Doe", he can say "Execute all members of the Doe family" or "Execute all member of the Doe family on Planet Alpha in the Priest caste". I can imagine the God-Machine working much like that. It doesn't know what an individual is, only that things belong to groups.
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Jun 27, 2016 05:57
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Count Chocula posted:Ironically, I feel like it's the one supernatural show that Unknown Armies wouldn't work for. That's easy to explain, it's because Unknown Armies posits an entirely humanocentric cosmology. There aren't any sinister aliens behind the scenes, no reptile-men pulling the strings, no immortal vampire lords, every bit of weirdness that happens, every magical conspiracy, every pivotal decision, is down to people. Even demons in Unknown Armies aren't like demon demons from hell, they're basically the unruly and occasionally unhinged ghosts of people. There's a reason that the tagline for UA is "You Did It."
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Jun 27, 2016 05:58
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Adnachiel posted:
I am making a joke, it only KINDA looks like it.
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Jun 27, 2016 05:59
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Tasoth posted:Literally ConX. You are humans battling a Grey breeding plan that is trying to silence the psychic seepage of Humanity, Atlanteans that may or may not be hunting humans for sport, Saurians that are now just returning from a prehistoric religious war that got dragged out on account of time dilation, and human beings that have succumbed to the nearly sapient psychic miasma that humans have produced from their existence since the species began and become predators of various stripes. This is an actual plot hook in the September 11 sidebar of Conspiracy X 2.0.
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Jun 27, 2016 06:02
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Wasn't the whole point of ROCK OF TAHAMAAT to demonstrate that making a PC have to declare their action, see if they can declare their action, and then roll to resolve the action means you have so many chances of failure that nothing actually happens most of the time? I like saying ROCK OF TAHAMAAT!
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Jun 27, 2016 06:05
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Delta Green could definitely be read as "X-Files" meets "Call of Cthulhu" since a big part of the premise is that your traditional investigators are replaced by members of government agencies who use their position and influence provided by their role to help investigate the supernatural but also have to deal with red tape, duties and the problems of government oversight. You've also got Majestic 12 in the setting which more or less serves an identical role to the human conspirators within X-files, working with the aliens (they think they're grays, they're really Mi-Go).
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Jun 27, 2016 06:17
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Fossilized Rappy posted:You forgot the part where the Iraq War might have a Reptoid civil war, because Saddam Hussein and George Bush were possibly both Reptoids from rival clans. Ah, in the X-Files Saddam is just a British actor, according to Morris Fletcher. Literally any metaplot from this thread would be better than the alien X-Files one. I'd run it as just monsters of the week. If somebody INSISTED we need a conspiracy, it's either vampires or the God Machine (which, if you want to tie it into XF lore, was born in the episode Kill Switch, and had some interaction with the Lone Gunmen). Maybe the God Machine thinks of individual humans the way I do, where unless they're fantastically interesting or useful it just forgets about them, or gets them confused with similar people/fictional characters/images in its own incomprehensible brain. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 06:18
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Night10194 posted:Wasn't the whole point of ROCK OF TAHAMAAT to demonstrate that making a PC have to declare their action, see if they can declare their action, and then roll to resolve the action means you have so many chances of failure that nothing actually happens most of the time? It's that from the PC side. From Rock's side, it's also demonstrating the possible flaws in a single-roll system where you only have one axis, or having a high level of abstraction. The intended way the game plays out (I actually did play it once, as a one-shot), Rock's player realises that they can execute and dominate and do whatever all they want, but the restrictions placed on Rock mean that they can never actually get the thing they want. The Doe family gets executed - but John Doe will survive to take revenge and lead the rebellion. The rebellion headquarters will be destroyed... but John Doe will be there with a ragtag bunch of the other PCs, ready to infiltrate the palace. And so on. You can read it here http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/462 , it's a short fun read. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 06:27
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Another question about Pacts: Say I buy someone's children and and apply it as a patch to one of my Covers. She's now childless and always has been, and as far as they remember I've always been their mother. But what happens to them in the period between signing the Pact and when I use it for something? When it's just sitting around my desk draw waiting to be onsold to another demon or used to build a Cover..
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Jun 27, 2016 10:20
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The Lone Badger posted:Another question about Pacts: At any point after you've got a valid pact agreed upon, signed and charged with Willpower, you can go up and touch the signatory and cash it in. That's the moment when relationships unravel retroactively, benefits trickle to the signatory through mysterious means, and the kids' parentage changes. Until that moment of touch and intent, the pact exerts no effect on the pieces of lives it governs: it's just a license to claim. An uncashed signatory who develops cold feet can try to renege by just laying low, skipping town, and staying where you can't find and touch them. Trying to dodge out the devil when he comes to collect is, of course, a hell of a dangerous game unto itself.
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Jun 27, 2016 11:56
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theironjef posted:Oooh, a Moorcock superfan! You should cover one of the Stormbringer RPGs, or maybe even the edition just called "Elric!" With the exclamation point and everything, like it was a musical. Yes, I would love for a Count Chocula review of Stormbringer 
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Jun 27, 2016 15:36
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Hostile V posted:Japan segregates its Deltas by gender. The men are forced to join the Rising Sons where they’re indoctrinated into an Imperial cult and dedicated to strength and physical prowess along with being told to follow the rules of bushido as samurai. Count Chocula posted:Any random Moorcock story contains more that is original and 'fantastic' than everything Tolkien wrote. And I don't recall anything racist in his stories. Count Chocula posted:There's a Paul Di Flippo story where Kurt Cobain's sweater is a time-traveling AI. Is one of the splinters the grunge scene right before Nirvana got huge (aka 'the only thing anyone knows about Seattle') ? 3. Space Needle 4. Shadowrun
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Jun 27, 2016 16:57
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Young Freud posted:Hahaha, sorry if you combine superheroes with cyberpunk you'll either get an Image Comic, probably from Top Cow; Pat Mills' Martial Law; or Ray Winninger's Underground. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 17:14
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Halloween Jack posted:The Empire of Japan uses English puns to name its super-soldier corps. Is it wrong of me to think that if that pun was in Japanese it'd be vaguely plausible?
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Jun 27, 2016 17:18
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Demon: the Descent Seattle's got five timelines: the dominant one, plus four splinters. The four splinters are:
Southwest Quadrant is one of the oldest parts of Seattle, being where most of the settlers came and built their camps. It retains a 'border' nature, with an independent spirit. Old Seattle is a rather eclectic area, with old brick buildings and young hipster inhabitants just blocks away from five different missions for the homeless and a bunch of tech startups. The area south of downtown Seattle was once called the Industrial District and is still home to a lot of industry, shipping and, these days, sports stadiums. The area is also home to Boeing Field, which does not handle commercial passenger flights. It's the smaller airport of Seattle since the 1940s, and has primarily been used for cargo, design testing and private aircraft. The God-Machine finds it notable because sensitive documents and parts are shipped through it by hand. The area is heavily Machine-infiltrated, and many of the people there can tell stories about seeing gears even if they aren't stigmatic. Many have mechanistic tattoos, making it hard to tell who's an agent and who's not.  1889 Seattle is the splinter centered in the SW Quadrant. It's a land of opportunity, still waiting to be discovered. No one is entirely sure what triggered the splinter, but in it, the Great Fire never happened. Some buildings have been replaced by brickwork, but far fewer than in the normal world. It is in many ways still a frontier town of boardwalks and rough edges. It's smaller, tougher and wilder than real Seattle, and only really covers the Downtown and Pioneer Square parts of the modern city, with settlements around the edges. The rest is woods and water and local tribes, many of whom are not happy about the Europeans sticking around. 1889 is unique among the splinters in several ways. First, it's changed most of any of them. Ships come and go from other places with people on them and new arrivals, though outsiders can't leave any more than usual. Second, while the technology and fashion and language are all 1880s and 1890s, the calendars say it's 1930 now, and all of the citizens believe the date is 1930, though not any 1930 a historian would ever recognize. Fashion has changed some - different hats, more skin shown, more buckskin in men's clothing - but it is certainly not 1930s fashion, either. The major players of the area include: W. J. Fletcher, chief of police. He's a blustery fellow in his late 30s who is always impeccably attired and who believes strongly in fate and providence. He ignores vice for the most part, focusing on murder or crimes involving upstanding citizens. He used to want to clean up the whole city, but was turned into a stigmatic by Mother Damnable and has become devoted to her and her plans. His pocket watch marks him as her man, and he is completely loyal. Captain Bruce "Devil" Pendergast is a the captain of the Callipe, a sail-ship who'll carry just about any cargo, stolen, human or otherwise. He's surrounded by rumors, has a quick temper and a lot of tattoos. He knows just about everything going down in the criminal underworld and will take pretty much any job if you're polite to him and your money's good. Father Francois Valancourt is one of the most respected men of Seattle, and older man and Catholic priest who will minister to anyone. He is devout and respected, and one of the few agents of the Machine left in the splinter. He received a stranger raving about gears and flying machines and blood some years ago. The man died hours later, but gave the man a silver box that showed Valancourt a vision of the future and proof of God. He receives instructions from a heavenly voice in the box in return for reciting the confessions he receives to it. Mrs. Mei Lee is the owner of Jade Prosperity Pawn Shop. Her husband was a wealthy Chinese man whose many came from somewhere unknown. He died two years after his marriage to the immigrant Mei, and she was forced to act quickly, opening hte pawn shop. She dresses in high finery and is one of the most fashionable women in town. She is the keepero f secrets not only for the Chinese community but also for anyone who needs ready cash, and she's happy to deal in information. Mother Damnable was once known as Mary Ann Conklin, owner of the Felker Hotel. She always had a temper, and her husband sailed off one night on a whaling ship, never to return. She came to Seattle after that to manage the hotel. She is famous for her cursing (in six languages, fluently), and that's where the nickname comes from. She's bcome a fixture of Seattle, installing a brothel in her hotel and renting out space even to the government for meetings and court. In early 1889, a stranger came to her and rented a room. Two weeks later, she left for the south, and came back after a month, healthier and stronger. (In truth, she entered into a soul pact and is now a demon wearing the life of Mother Damnable.) She is a small but stout woman and dresses plainly and practically. She is the real power in 1889 splinter - the demon Karabes, who has decided to turn the place into its personal Hell. It has been slowly ensuring changes to the timeline persist, making people into stigmatics and infiltrating society, suborning or destroying Infrastructure when possible. Mother Damnable is the name Karabes prefers now, and demons that come to the splinter and think they want to stay must go through her. She's happy to bring in anyone who'll strengthen her vision, but she won't tolerate challenges. She won't leave, for fear that her work will revert and be lost, but she'll happily try to remove threats with whatever force is needed. She has no intention of giving up her Hell.  For a variety of reasons, the fractures leading to 1889 are heavily guarded on both sides, more than any other in the city. The Machine knows that its power and influence there are weakened, but is not entirely sure what the end result will be and so is trying to quarantine the area and prevent anyone going out or coming in. Mother Damnable, for her part, wants no agents spying on her and undoing her work, so she's happy to keep anyone from crossing over at all most of the time. Neither side has been brave or foolish enough to try and destroy the fractures completely, as that could be catastrophic. There are two primary fracture points. The first is in an iron pergola in the modern Pioneer Square. For years, falling asleep there gave you a chance of waking up in the Yesler Mill, half-demolished during the 1889 street-straightening projects. Now, no one is allowed to stay in the pergola long enough to fall asleep...but if you slip between the gateways just right, you can still cross over. The second fracture point is in the Seattle Underground. See, in the dominant timeline, after the Great Fire the streets got regraded at two stories above ground, filling in and raising the city elevation, and creating a series of tunnels between buildings at the old ground level, with glass prims in the sidewlaks to light them. Most of the underground is now closed off for safety, but some is open to tourists. If you leave the tour path at 1st and Madison in the tunnels, you can cross to 1889 via a disused archway, arriving at 1st and Madison in 1889l. It is the less-used and so less-guarded fracture, but harder to get to thanks to various boarded up arches and stacked barrels blocking access, plus the ease of getting lost in the dark tunnels, full of who knows what. Next time: Southeast Quadrant, Dizang and 1932 Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 17:31
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Count Chocula posted:I've linked this too many times on this forum and elsewhere, but if you want to read an essay on racism in Tolkien and fantasy in general, here's one by a fantasy author who is much better than Tolkien, Michael Moorcock: http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953 So, a lot of people accuse Tolkien of racism in his works, on account of all the good people being white skinned and fair haired and the bad guys being savage black people of varying degrees of "literally a monster", but it's actually not as bad as people keep saying. I'll link my source on this, http://www.mediafire.com/download/jviiivrdbfxerxk/Racism+and+Middle+Earth.pdf A few points to be made: 1) Tolkien rarely actually describes the skin color of the characters (or literally anything about Legolas. Seriously, the guy is never described but that is unrelated) 2) Where he does, it's almost always "not white". For instance, the majority of hobbits are explicitly called out as having dark skin, and Sam is described as brown 3) Rohan are the only humans described as white, and the men of Gondor are frequently described as swarthy (not a good word to use today, but probably not contemptible given the times) and various other terms for dark skin 4) While the Easterlings and Southrons were often described in text as "Savages", their culture as presented were not, being centers of learning and deep religious traditions. It's unclear whether Tolkien thought of them as savages despite presenting them as civilized, or if he intended the "savage" label to be through the unreliable and imperfect view of the characters His works still have a lot of uncomfortable or outright racist implications. Orcs all being horrible twisted monsters is a bad thing, which Tolkien admitted in his later works and was trying to fix when he died. The Woses, while not described as dark skinned, fit many of the negative stereotypes of African people. However, most of the racism in his stories is cultural rather than skin-related, such as the heroes culturally resembling England and the enemies resembling foreign (especially Middle Eastern) cultures. Not to mention how early stories depict the dwarves as Literally Jewish Stereotypes. But in his defense, he saw and acknowledged the racist implications in his works, and wrote extensively on where he went wrong and how he would fix it. Nobody is claiming that he or his stories are perfect, but he also doesn't deserve quite as much shame as is frequently heaped upon him.
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Jun 27, 2016 17:31
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potatocubed posted:Is it wrong of me to think that if that pun was in Japanese it'd be vaguely plausible? Based on some quick googling: Taiyou is sun, whereas son is musuko, segare or goshisoku. So...no.
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Jun 27, 2016 17:32
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I feel like as above, people do read too much into Tolkein - there are certainly racist elements but not as much as people like to claim, if anything I think he's more guilty of Classism than racism, and while he denies doing so consciously - his service in the World Wars has certainly colored Lord of the Rings. Honestly, he's way better than C.S Lewis in some respects.
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Jun 27, 2016 17:41
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Halloween Jack posted:Pan Tang, perhaps. Those were mentioned in the System Mastery review as an entire race of Fu Manchu, right? Can't see what would be problematic about that. 
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Jun 27, 2016 18:47
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It's been quite some time since I read the novels. While comics and tabletop games may have portrayed the Pan Tangians as all being Inscrutable Orientals, I don't recall if they're portrayed that way in the source material. Besides "Pan Tang," the names don't sound particularly East Asian, nor do I recall characters being described as sallow-skinned, silk-robed, etc. etc.
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Jun 27, 2016 19:28
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SirPhoebos posted:Those were mentioned in the System Mastery review as an entire race of Fu Manchu, right? Our episode should basically be thought of as the last step in a game of telephone. The book we read left us thinking that Pan-Tang is an island of Mings the Merciless but that was based on a blurb and some art. We've never read any Moorcock.
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Jun 27, 2016 21:19
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Robindaybird posted:Basically it was negate the "Dark skin = evil" implication, and the "Wimmenz, they go cray with power" that tends to pop up, though to D&D's defense they've been downplaying both aspects, it's still enough there that someone can run with it. So, uh, GAZ13: The Shadow Elves? No Lloth, even, given it's Mystara.
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Jun 27, 2016 21:26
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Halloween Jack posted:It's been quite some time since I read the novels. While comics and tabletop games may have portrayed the Pan Tangians as all being Inscrutable Orientals, I don't recall if they're portrayed that way in the source material. Besides "Pan Tang," the names don't sound particularly East Asian, nor do I recall characters being described as sallow-skinned, silk-robed, etc. etc. I think it's honestly varied based on who's depicting them in secondary material, sometimes they're unmistakably Asian in cast, sometimes they have outfits that could be Chinese or Russian, it's not terribly consistent. But then, they are supposed to embody Chaos, so I suppose you can't pick on inconsistencies too much. Of course, Moorcock did the Elric series as a reaction against Tolkien, so though some of his criticisms are valid, he may have protested a bit too much. Of course, there's the treatment of women in Moorcock's novels; you can only be so progressive, I suppose. I, for one, quickly had my fill of reading about a character heavily motivated by incest, but that was part of the his anti-Tolkien reaction and not necessarily having the same sort of moralizing Tolkien did. YMMV. Count Chocula posted:Has there been an official X-Files game? It has the most RPG-friendly structure of any major media. No. Hunter: the Vigil + Slasher is I think as close as you're going to come in the game (or at least as close as you're going to get to Millennium, anyway). There's always the aforementioned Conspiracy X, but there were a number of other games that took a stab at it of varying quality from Dark•Matter (it's alright) to Dark Conspiracy (don't bother). And there's always the venerable Delta Green, though that's more focused on modern Lovecraftian menaces. There's also Agents of Oblivion for Savage Worlds, but I don't know much about it. Esoterrorists has more of a baddie-fighting bent but also could be useful to those wanting to explore the GUMSHOE system for that sort of game.
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Jun 27, 2016 22:06
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Of course, Moorcock did the Elric series as a reaction against Tolkien, so though some of his criticisms are valid, he may have protested a bit too much. Of course, there's the treatment of women in Moorcock's novels; you can only be so progressive, I suppose. I, for one, quickly had my fill of reading about a character heavily motivated by incest, but that was part of the his anti-Tolkien reaction and not necessarily having the same sort of moralizing Tolkien did. YMMV. And yeah, a lot of "progressive" stuff from the 60s and 70s is really retrograde w/r/t women.
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Jun 27, 2016 22:23
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Yeah that was the explicit intent for Elric. To be honest, he interests me much less than Jerry Cornelius- musical assassin, shapeshifter, jaded teenager, companion to Lemmy (aka Shaky Mo Collier in the books - Moorcock was in Hawkwind for a bit and wrote Lemmy into his stories), Austin Powers but cool, source of Bowie's Pierrot persona... he's a much cooler character. I haven't seen much that captures that kind of jaded existential adventure- except maybe the old Yellowjacket Greenapple front page stories. I mean he's also part of Elric due to how the Eternal Champion works. I did a quick search for that Mother Damnable NPC, and her whole wiki entry is prime Demon: quote:
She's up there with Al Swearengen in 'real people who seem fictional'. I like how the book tells you she's 'real', since so many books don't. But no grunge timeline? No alt-history where it stayed a regional scene and never displaced hair metal and never lead to Creed or Nickleback? No timeline where Cobain lived and became a revered elder statesman? I'm not even a grunge fan and that seems like an obvious omission. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 22:30
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Esoterrorists has more of a baddie-fighting bent but also could be useful to those wanting to explore the GUMSHOE system for that sort of game. Also I do honestly appreciate that the Outer Dark is a separate reality from ours and the natives couldn't really care less about us. It's not even a Cthulhu thing, it's just that they have their own things going down and don't bother with us and any incursions into our reality is because someone was a jerk/idiot and did a very bad/dumb thing on our end. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 22:48
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 I don't have enough content to make a full post on Aethera, but here's this. The team did a panel at PaizoCon, a podcast of which can be found here. If you were interested by my first post on the subject, it might be worth tossing it on a player and listening when you have a free hour. Come for the giant dismembered torso flying through space accompanied by white blood cell monsters, stay for the minotaur space pirates flying hollowed-out stolen planets. Everyone attending the panel also got thumbdrives containing the Cantor and Early Access Guide, so expect those out in the wild if they're not already. Notable for me is that there are no actual gods in the setting. The lack of an astral plane means there's no teleportation, and any outsiders called are stuck. Summoning spells work normally, but if you use Lesser Planar Ally and get something, they're stuck, and not happy about it. There is long-distance transport, but it's taxing, like you're stretched from one point to the other. "If you try to scry-and-fry, you're gonna be puking your guts out while your target looks at you and wonders why you're in his bathroom." No gods also means no clerics. Inquisitors, oracles, other divine casters that don't necessarily rely on deities, those work. There's even a note towards the end that if you have a PC that really wants to be an actual cleric (say, of a concept), they can, but be ready to be in the spotlight because they're going to be unprecedented. With no gods, the afterlife becomes reincarnation. A soul is sucked into the white dwarf of the binary star, scrubbed clean, and sent back out to be born again. Sometimes it gets where it needs to be, sometimes it gets intercepted, "sometimes you wake up and you're a robot, that's weird." Golarion and Aethera can technically coexist in the same universe, the lack of an astral plane is localized to a few hundred million miles from the suns. Your Golarion PCs can come to Aethera. "I'm sorry for them, but you can do that. Or you can take your Aethera characters and bring them to Golarion and they'll never want to go home again." They go into more detail on the cosmology and how it interacted with the Progenitors. In this system, each planet was linked to an element. They would cycle elements every ten thousand years, so a water planet would dry up as another element took over, etc. The Progenitors stopped that cycle to power all their poo poo. Until it broke, and dozens of planar shifts happened in a rapid timeframe. The few survivors of the cataclysm became the races present today. The human homeworld used to be a water world, but is now earth-dominant. The arcologies that the ruling class live in are the remains of Progenitor oil wells that were anchored to the ocean floor. I'm not entirely sure how that works with physics, because as they state, the fire planet is currently one of the suns, which implies they take it in turn. Also notable is that the air planet is a gas giant. Dareon fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 23:15
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I think it's honestly varied based on who's depicting them in secondary material, sometimes they're unmistakably Asian in cast, sometimes they have outfits that could be Chinese or Russian, it's not terribly consistent. But then, they are supposed to embody Chaos, so I suppose you can't pick on inconsistencies too much. Dark Conspiracy is a really schizophrenic game. It can't decide what genre it really wants to be which is a shame because it does have some very clever setting ideas (non-magical origins for legendary supernatural beings, an interesting way of dealing with alternate dimensions) tied up with a 90s set of rules (which are fine but not excellent) and some really poor tonal decisions (is it cyberpunk or urban horror or  ).
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Jun 28, 2016 00:43
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the GUMSHOE system seems like the best one for X-Files, and all the talk makes me wish the comic Monster of the Week isn't on Hiatus/abandoned
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Jun 28, 2016 01:59
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Kai Tave posted:That's easy to explain, it's because Unknown Armies posits an entirely humanocentric cosmology. There aren't any sinister aliens behind the scenes, no reptile-men pulling the strings, no immortal vampire lords, every bit of weirdness that happens, every magical conspiracy, every pivotal decision, is down to people. Even demons in Unknown Armies aren't like demon demons from hell, they're basically the unruly and occasionally unhinged ghosts of people. There's a reason that the tagline for UA is "You Did It."
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Jun 28, 2016 03:05
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Wasn't one of the principal NPCs a very, very well done Mechanomancy project?
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Jun 28, 2016 03:08
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I'm up to Season 5 in my X-Files rewatch and it's the arc where Mulder thinks there are no aliens, the conspiracy is just done by people. Cue emoting and Self checks (turned out all those Hardened Supernatural and Violence notches don't help). A Vince Gilligan/Darin Morgan Unknown Armies...anything would be so perfect.
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Jun 28, 2016 03:11
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Halloween Jack posted:Wasn't one of the principal NPCs a very, very well done Mechanomancy project? Yeah, one of the sample NPCs in some book was basically a clockwork human-looking robot that a Mechanomancer poured every last one of his memories into and turned her sentient in the process. There are other examples of Mechanomancers creating human-seeming automata including the old guy's wife in the Prison Break one-shot adventure but I'd note that this sort of thing is again due entirely to people doing it rather than cosmic intelligences or grey aliens from space.
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Jun 28, 2016 03:17
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Which also fits into the X-Files. Apparently you can create strong AI in a trailer. I think a proper X-Files game needs random monster generation to capture the bonkers feel of the MOTW entries. "You're fighting a (rolls) stretchy guy who kills due to (rolls) hunger. He eats (rolls) livers and his weakness is (rolls) salt" or whatever, I haven't seen that episode in ages. Use a table for powers, a table for motivation, a table for weaknesses, and then use some Wikipedia randomizer to generate Mulder infodumps. I guess Nightbane's tables would work.
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Jun 28, 2016 03:25
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, one of the sample NPCs in some book was basically a clockwork human-looking robot that a Mechanomancer poured every last one of his memories into and turned her sentient in the process. There are other examples of Mechanomancers creating human-seeming automata including the old guy's wife in the Prison Break one-shot adventure but I'd note that this sort of thing is again due entirely to people doing it rather than cosmic intelligences or grey aliens from space. Creating independent intelligence would be more of a challenge but I think you could manage it. The trick really would be making it so it isn't inherently dependent on humanity for soul energies, or memories, or whatever.
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Jun 28, 2016 03:29
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It's actually already possible with the existing material in the book: the Unspeakable Servants. Unlike Mechanomancy constructs they don't involve harvesting bits of your mind or spirit to create and they don't have a remotely human form unlike things like Golems. Unspeakable Servants have independent intelligence and a completely non-human form and physiology (They're technically a rotting horror turducken of a cow, sheep and chicken). The Abominable-level servant is just as smart or smarter than most humans and even has the potential to use magick itself. They're not independent while their master lives, but they're immortal unless killed (which is very tough) and when their master dies they become fully independent beings. One of them is even working within the inner circle of the Sleepers. So, creating non-human intelligences or beings isn't terribly hard (relatively speaking), but that doesn't remove the humanocentric nature of UA. Even the most powerful Unspeakable Servant is a creation of humans and lives (physically and metaphysically) in their world.
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Jun 28, 2016 06:37
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To be honest, removing all the aliens and demons from X-Files and just leaving the mad scientists, random mutants, cryptids, and folkloric creatures wouldn't be bad at all. Hell putting it in Unknown Armies strengthens the thematics. You've got a main character driven by his obsession, which is mechanically coded into the game itself. You'd end up something like the version of the world in Jose Chung's From Outer Space, where everybody clings to their own truth.
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Jun 28, 2016 07:48
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Can the servant things create similar creatures of their kind independently? Like ol' Frankenstein's original monster, mebbe? I mean, that might interfere with it being navel-gazey, of course.
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Jun 28, 2016 07:57
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There was a Borges story about infinite golems.
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Jun 28, 2016 08:15
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