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About to finish up Ghost Ship Carthage today, not sure if gonna jump into another module or let them gently caress around on a new space ship for a while. The Nephilim PC is pretty excited by the plot hooks, but people might have remade after the first session.
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Dec 22, 2017 04:25
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So having found basically most of the books over the past day or so, I haven't really had the time to sit down and pore over each book as much as it probably should be. However, from the little I've gleaned from /tg/ and here, it seems like this might just be the system to scratch my itch of having a good science-fantasy system, even if it would take smashing a few of the different systems (like Empire, Kingdom and probably Aeturnum) together. One thing that I didn't see in my durdling on the internet is, how compatible are the systems with each other? I've heard that Empire and Kingdom are supposed to be fairly interchangable, but what about everything else?
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Dec 25, 2017 06:06
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It'll take a little fiddling to get it all to work together, it's not 100% plug-and-play because there are different subsystems/skillsets/etc that would jam together in weird ways. You might be better served just using and refluffing Fragged Seas or Fragged Kingdom alone depending on what you want out of science fantasy - Kingdom in particular is already fairly science-fantasy without much rework.
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Dec 25, 2017 13:00
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I’m re-skimming Fragged Empire over the holidays, and finally looking at the skill examples in more detail. Wealth says that it requires a toolbox to do a number of things, one of which is calculate interest. Is this Wade’s statement about the state of modern financial literacy, or was multiplication lost to history?
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Jan 1, 2018 15:00
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My guess is that banking and investments are foreign to most people in Fragged Empire. I'm sure every little Corporation kid grows up learning all about it, but nobody else really lives in that same kind of structure, so there's not much of a call to learn how to calculate interest.
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Jan 2, 2018 15:01
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Pretty much. Only the Corp has advanced enough financial "technology" to worry about that sort of thing on a regular basis. To most of the races, I imagine interest isn't something they worry about as a general concept (yet), though individuals may vary.
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Jan 2, 2018 15:23
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I guess that’s possible, but I have a hard time reconciling “never learned about interest” with “own a spacecraft” or “sell trade goods”, and we expect all PCs to do those. Even if not, it seems like a wealth roll itself should suffice for that sort of fundamental task, and not require “financial software” as well. You don’t need tools to recommend an investment or fill out a loan form, both of which seem likely to involve knowing about interest. (Interestingly, recommending an investment doesn’t require tools, but calculating the value of an investment does. I guess those aren’t very careful recommendations?) I think there’s also a typo in the tool description, which likely should be “Bank Card or Financial Software” instead of and. It doesn’t make sense to also need financial software to buy something with a bank card.
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Jan 2, 2018 16:19
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I always look at Fragged Empire as having a sort of Firefly-like barely-holding-together attitude, especially when it comes to owning a ship. That's probably why the resource for building and maintaining your ship is "influence," actually--it's more about knowing the people who can keep your hunk of junk flying (or having the capability yourself) than amassing large sums of money to pay for things. Selling trade goods is often about just getting valuable scavenged stuff and selling it to someone who wants it, rather than something like commodities trading. One of the things about the setting that might not be obvious at first is that a lot of people, and a lot of whole societies, don't really know much about the technology they rely on. It's scavenged, jury-rigged stuff in many cases, or reverse-engineered from scavenged tech. For example, the Nephilim are pretty good at biotech, but everyone else has to rely on them for that--the knowledge and equipment necessary isn't widespread at all. That said, there are some little rules quirks in the books that might not make sense (and plenty of typos). For example, I'd probably rule that a normal Wealth roll would suffice for calculating interest (on the off-chance that actually comes up in the first place).
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Jan 2, 2018 16:51
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Subjunctive posted:I think there’s also a typo in the tool description, which likely should be “Bank Card or Financial Software” instead of and. It doesn’t make sense to also need financial software to buy something with a bank card. No, those are included in the toolkit item. There's a lot of weirdness in the tool examples (how does a wrench help you detect a radiation leak? how does a sports bag or climbing gear help you drink somone under the table?), and it's best to just use those as examples of stuff you might have in your toolkit when you purchase it.
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Jan 2, 2018 16:58
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Yeah, I think toolkits are meant to be generic, like "if you have this toolkit, these items are the kinds of things you can assume you have."
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Jan 2, 2018 17:03
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Subjunctive posted:I guess that’s possible, but I have a hard time reconciling “never learned about interest” with “own a spacecraft” or “sell trade goods”, and we expect all PCs to do those. Even if not, it seems like a wealth roll itself should suffice for that sort of fundamental task, and not require “financial software” as well. You don’t need tools to recommend an investment or fill out a loan form, both of which seem likely to involve knowing about interest. Hi, I've lived in a barter economy my entire life, and the lives of the ancestors whose memories I can actively recall because I'm special. I have here my standard unit of trade, a box with a pistol and a shotgun in it that occupies one universal-standard cubby hole in my cargo bay. Please explain to me why I should take a loan from you in the form of intangible credits, let alone why I will owe you one point twenty-three pistols and shotguns at the end of the month for the privilege. Like, you can do that pretty easily - Kaltorans understand math, and the concept of promissory notes is relatively simple to get across, with fiat currency coming a little after that. But the point of the distinction is that these people are not like us, and are only now getting to a point at which they have contact with different cultures. Not everyone is operating on the same assumptions and logic - you may well have to explain to a Nephilim creature why not everyone can breathe methane, or atheism to a Remnant, and all the while a Palantor NPC is looking down on you for your primitive understanding of physics and computer networking. FE is post-human world populated by our alien great grandchildren - it should be weird and a lot of it shouldn't make sense to us. This also shouldn't be construed as dismissing your concerns, but there's going to be something about every fictional setting that sticks in somebody's craw, and at least with the FE setting, I feel like the weirdness and incongruities are meant to give you texture and challenge you to puzzle out how things came to be, instead of just being something the writer thought was nifty.
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Jan 2, 2018 17:39
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Harrow posted:Yeah, I think toolkits are meant to be generic, like "if you have this toolkit, these items are the kinds of things you can assume you have." Some of them use “or”, like Resolve’s “Icon of Ideology or Personal Heirloom”, while others use “and”, like Culture’s “Archaeology Tools & Encyclopedia”. I’m not sure what the difference is meant to be. The wording in the book is generally quite precise.
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Jan 2, 2018 17:43
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Subjunctive posted:Some of them use “or”, like Resolve’s “Icon of Ideology or Personal Heirloom”, while others use “and”, like Culture’s “Archaeology Tools & Encyclopedia”. I’m not sure what the difference is meant to be. The wording in the book is generally quite precise. I don't know, it's not that complicated. It uses "and" in an example when you'd need both to do anything useful. (You can't identify anything archaeologically if you don't have anything to identify it with, and you can't identify anything if you can't dig it out in the first place.) It uses "or" when there's two potential toolkits with different flavors that can do basically the same thing. (Rank insignias and interrogation gear are both Leadership toolboxes. Very different conceptually, but you can do enough similar things when it comes to scaring people into doing things you want with either of them to make it not worth splitting their list of 10 into two lists of 5.) Then, they have two separate toolbox examples when they have a meaningful difference in scale. (The wrench's examples are kind of weird, but it's still a good example of what you can do with a few specific tools vs a full toolbox.)
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Jan 2, 2018 18:09
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grassy gnoll posted:This also shouldn't be construed as dismissing your concerns, but there's going to be something about every fictional setting that sticks in somebody's craw, and at least with the FE setting, I feel like the weirdness and incongruities are meant to give you texture and challenge you to puzzle out how things came to be, instead of just being something the writer thought was nifty. Yeah, I can see the value of the weirdness. Wealth is so central to things, though, that if racial backgrounds have a big impact on how characters interact with the economy, I would expect that to be called out somewhere more prominently. Kaltorans run businesses and sell things, though their -1 to Wealth means that they don’t do it very well I guess. My perspective (for now!) is that PCs are worldly examples of their races, which is why they all have exceptional attributes and know how to use weapons and spacecraft systems. The game follows them because they’re unusually interesting and capable. It seems unheroic to be able to apply for a loan but not calculate interest, just because you left your Wealth kit’s financial software on the ship.
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Jan 2, 2018 18:12
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Also, for what it's worth, I always assumed that you needed a toolkit to calculate interest because it means calculating interest on your own holdings, so you just need to look at your ledgers to see how much you have in the first place. It isn't that you need a program to do basic multiplication, it's that you don't have your net worth memorized at all times and a toolbox is how you represent having constant access to that info.
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Jan 2, 2018 18:20
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Feel like my only real beef other than maybe the Corp being too silly for their own good is the timeline feels a little wonky. 100 years makes some sense for everyone else. Kaltorans's entire thing is they had these horrific generations-old memories of genocide and cannibalism and children being born without eyesight. All in a hundred years. The average kaltoran lifespan is 120 years. The war in its entirety is probably in living memory of a handful of survivors. Even the really young PCs are only going to be like three generations removed.
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Jan 2, 2018 18:35
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Der Waffle Mous posted:Feel like my only real beef other than maybe the Corp being too silly for their own good is the timeline feels a little wonky. I see it more as Kaltorans live to ~120 under normal circumstances, but the War and Dark Times were definitely not normal. Violence, starvation, and dome-cities collapsing under the ocean can bring down the average.
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Jan 2, 2018 18:45
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Subjunctive posted:Yeah, I can see the value of the weirdness. Wealth is so central to things, though, that if racial backgrounds have a big impact on how characters interact with the economy, I would expect that to be called out somewhere more prominently. Kaltorans run businesses and sell things, though their -1 to Wealth means that they don’t do it very well I guess. I think the point is that money isn't really that central to anyone but the Corporation and the Wealth skill deals explicitly with money. When you make a spare time roll to acquire an item, for example, you don't have to roll Wealth--that's just if you're buying it with money. There are other ways of acquiring things that don't involve money and can still boil down to spare time rolls. And if you don't need to make a spare time roll to get an item, and it just costs resources, then it's completely up to you how you got it. Because resources is so abstracted and doesn't just represent money, there are a lot of ways you could say you got things, right down to just saying you put it together yourself from scavenged parts. When you add new parts to your spaceship, you might be buying things and paying for maintenance, but maybe you're doing it with your own skill as a party, or by drawing on your connections and favors you're owed, organizational ties, that sort of thing. Money isn't a totally foreign concept in Fragged Empire, but it isn't the main way your typical adventuring party gets what they need, either. Kaltorans run businesses and sell things, sure, but they're not doing that within their own society. That's not how Kaltoran society works--it's very collectivist and family-oriented, and has little do with business and finance. That -1 Wealth just means that your typical Kaltoran upbringing leaves you ill-equipped to venture into the business world compared to someone with a different background. Harrow fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 18:49
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Harrow posted:I always look at Fragged Empire as having a sort of Firefly-like barely-holding-together attitude, especially when it comes to owning a ship. That's probably why the resource for building and maintaining your ship is "influence," actually--it's more about knowing the people who can keep your hunk of junk flying (or having the capability yourself) than amassing large sums of money to pay for things. Selling trade goods is often about just getting valuable scavenged stuff and selling it to someone who wants it, rather than something like commodities trading. Yeah, a key point is even with the timeline, though the Haven system has pulled itself out of the post-apocalypse ruins, it's not far gone from them. A lot of ships are going to be old or salvaged (the "cut and weld" Kaltoran ships, or the painstakingly maintained Legion ships). Though new ships can be built, a lot of the good ones still rely on salvaged technology that can't yet be reproduced, even with the Corp and Nephilim. I mean, sure, you can get a loan and finance a ship that way through the Corp, but getting a mostly-new ship is still something of a novelty.
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Jan 2, 2018 19:37
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On a slightly different tack, has anyone noticed any hidden pitfalls with having Empire characters in the Kingdoms setting/rules? The changelist looks fairly straightfoward but I've missed minor Fragged rules-stuff in the past.
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Jan 2, 2018 19:56
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PoultryGeist posted:I see it more as Kaltorans live to ~120 under normal circumstances, but the War and Dark Times were definitely not normal. Violence, starvation, and dome-cities collapsing under the ocean can bring down the average. I mean yeah, but still. But speaking from experience that's a pretty compressed timeline even for regular intergenerational trauma let alone weird genetically induced intergenerational trauma and actual physical changes.
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Jan 2, 2018 20:24
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Der Waffle Mous posted:I mean yeah, but still. I could have sworn it was mentioned somewhere that the blindness was due to a nephilim biological agent but no, it's apparently just a generational thing. Huh. unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 20:59
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Subjunctive posted:Yeah, I can see the value of the weirdness. Wealth is so central to things, though, that if racial backgrounds have a big impact on how characters interact with the economy, I would expect that to be called out somewhere more prominently. Kaltorans run businesses and sell things, though their -1 to Wealth means that they don’t do it very well I guess. Oh yeah, if your PCs in pretty much any game aren't some kind of special, I'd say you're doing it wrong. I think of the Resource skills like languages. I may be equipped to deal and think in one mode, and I can get by in another using the translation programs on my phone, but if I'm suddenly cut off from that assistance, I'm going to be in trouble if the question I need to ask isn't "where is the bathroom?" Or if it's just this particular aspect that bugs you, write it out so that you need a financial toolkit to short-sell something or make good bond purchases or what have you.
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Jan 2, 2018 21:06
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Der Waffle Mous posted:I mean yeah, but still. Ah, I thought the blindness was a 'hasnt ever seen light thing' instead of a mutation. But yeah, I think at this point I'm so used to RPGs not quite getting time and distance that my brain just went with it.
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Jan 2, 2018 21:50
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Yeah, as others have said, it's important to note that Wealth - as in, digital money - is not something everyone typically uses. The Corps use it, and everyone else uses it when they have to deal with the Corps, and you always have to deal with the Corps eventually because they own just about all forms of manufacturing, so everyone has to kinda deal with and sorta accept their credits. At the same time, when no Corp is involved, almost nobody is going to use credits. The Kaltoran would barter, the Legion would go to speak to their quartermaster, and the Nephilim would probably either create their own version of whatever it was they wanted, or just murder whoever had it to take it from them. And ALL would trade favors. The Corporate idea of "money" is alien to all three, and while Legion and Nephilim can mostly get on board, the Kaltoran living experience had no room for a fiat currency. Part of the setting is that all these cultures really do not get along, or even have that much in common, but they also sorta don't have a choice. They learn to adapt to each other, or die slowly in space. The way I see things, the Kaltoran -1 to Wealth isn't that they're somehow incapable of understanding money, it's that they don't work well with the probably myriad of loopholes and rules and whatnot you have to deal with when dealing with Corp currency. They the people who end up with sky-high fees on every bank transaction because they didn't realize just how much the bank was screwing them over with each new "feature." And beyond that, you have the problem of, well, it's the Corporate money. Lots of Kaltoran are going to refuse to use it or understand it on that alone. Subjunctive posted:I guess that’s possible, but I have a hard time reconciling “never learned about interest” with “own a spacecraft” or “sell trade goods”, and we expect all PCs to do those. Even if not, it seems like a wealth roll itself should suffice for that sort of fundamental task, and not require “financial software” as well. You don’t need tools to recommend an investment or fill out a loan form, both of which seem likely to involve knowing about interest. This fits the Corps perfectly, to be fair.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:34
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ProfessorCirno posted:The way I see things, the Kaltoran -1 to Wealth isn't that they're somehow incapable of understanding money, it's that they don't work well with the probably myriad of loopholes and rules and whatnot you have to deal with when dealing with Corp currency. They the people who end up with sky-high fees on every bank transaction because they didn't realize just how much the bank was screwing them over with each new "feature." And beyond that, you have the problem of, well, it's the Corporate money. Lots of Kaltoran are going to refuse to use it or understand it on that alone. Yeah, the way I interpret it is just that the idea of this whole financial system is entirely foreign to the normal Kaltoran upbringing, so a Kaltoran would have a much steeper learning curve to get to the point of being, y'know, financially literate. The Kaltoran don't trade with money between themselves or really have any concept of financial markets, loans, banking, or anything like that, so a young Kaltoran entering the Corp economic world is basically starting from scratch.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:42
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There's also the less charitable explanation, and consider how many people off the street today, in an environment where we are constantly exposed to the machinations of financial giants and their instruments, could give you a cogent explanation of their bank statements.
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Jan 3, 2018 00:04
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Harrow posted:Yeah, the way I interpret it is just that the idea of this whole financial system is entirely foreign to the normal Kaltoran upbringing, so a Kaltoran would have a much steeper learning curve to get to the point of being, y'know, financially literate. The Kaltoran don't trade with money between themselves or really have any concept of financial markets, loans, banking, or anything like that, so a young Kaltoran entering the Corp economic world is basically starting from scratch. Yeah, that’s interesting. So then it seems like “Wealth” is really “Corp Finance”, since a Wealthy Kaltoran would know how to set up barter networks, pull together collaborative resources for a project, adjudicate disputes of unfair trading, etc. I wonder why none of that stuff shows up in the skill matrix.
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Jan 3, 2018 02:29
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Plus, remember that they never had these financial mechanisms to begin with, we’re not talking about something that was around in the pre-war era - whatever the Archons used for resource allocation (iirc Wade said that’s up to individual GMs), it wasn’t market capitalism and probably didn’t involve private property, especially for their experimental species. I’m personally thinking some kind of semi-academic review boards and peer examination reputation system. The Kaltorans and others probably just got “enough” and had to figure out their own way to allocate it (unless you decide there were Archon social scientists as well!)
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Jan 3, 2018 02:34
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Subjunctive posted:Yeah, that’s interesting. So then it seems like “Wealth” is really “Corp Finance”, since a Wealthy Kaltoran would know how to set up barter networks, pull together collaborative resources for a project, adjudicate disputes of unfair trading, etc. I wonder why none of that stuff shows up in the skill matrix. Honestly, that just sounds like having Culture and Conversation.
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Jan 3, 2018 02:40
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Honestly, that just sounds like having Culture and Conversation. Well, sure. So does Wealth, if you’re a Corp.
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Jan 3, 2018 02:44
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Honestly, that just sounds like having Culture and Conversation. Leadership doesn't hurt either, but that's sort of a LBJ kinda collaboration, isn't it?
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Jan 3, 2018 02:46
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There's a reason why "Wealth" and "Resources" are not the same thing. Kaltoran DO have barter networks, colab projects, etc. That's their Resources and their Spare Time. A Kaltoran absolutely can use their other skills and a Spare Time to grab other items. The Corporate is just gonna use a credit card and wealth for their Spare Time, instead. And just like you can't barter for everything, there's gonna be times where the Corporate flashes their loving Future Bitcoins and everyone around them laughs and asks what they're really gonna pay with.
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Jan 3, 2018 07:16
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So does anyone have a suggestion for using this systrm for star wars? I feel like im going to run into trouble with the ship combat for that star wars fleet vs a massive super weapon, and obviously the force stuff. Im still reading theough all the books so im aware this is a big project a bit of a ways off
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Jan 20, 2018 01:57
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Are fighter swarms (from Antagonist Archive) still represented by a single unit on the tactical map? Is there any guidance as to how many ships make up a swarm or is it just a matter of narrative convenience?
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Feb 26, 2018 06:52
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So a surprise: Wade just released https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/236484/Fragged-Empire-ARMOURY a big book of pre-made weapons and outfits for folks who have trouble putting those together. It's got a lot of 0-1 cost gear, making it a little easier to grasp how to outfit first level PCs. (Favorite running gag so far: Every entry larger than pistol seems to have an entry for 'Oni <weapon that is smaller.> So the puncture rifle has "Oni pistol", the auto-cannon has "Oni assault rifle" etc, which suggests the oni nephilim swarm chasing the Twi-far are...very big.)
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Mar 9, 2018 02:44
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My group from what I've seen vastly prefers pre-made stuff then making their own stuff, so that book's gonna probably get a looot of use from me, hahaha.
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Mar 9, 2018 05:36
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unseenlibrarian posted:(Favorite running gag so far: Every entry larger than pistol seems to have an entry for 'Oni <weapon that is smaller.> So the puncture rifle has "Oni pistol", the auto-cannon has "Oni assault rifle" etc, which suggests the oni nephilim swarm chasing the Twi-far are...very big.) Yes. Check page 26 of the Protagonist Archive.
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Mar 9, 2018 08:03
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I had previously overlooked that fiction vignette and did not realize that those were legion it was fighting. That is definitely a sense of scale.
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Mar 9, 2018 08:44
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So I've been fiddling around a lot with the NPC creators for Fragged Aeternum in preparation for running a game. Would anyone be interested in me posting what I've made?
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Apr 30, 2018 20:51
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