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About three days ago I received an email from Modiphius saying that they will distribute 5th Edition Vampire (published by White Wolf). https://www.modiphius.com/modiphius-press-releases So is White Wolf subcontracting distribution? They used to be their own distributor correct?
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May 2, 2018 00:34
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Yawgmoth posted:Five Nations is another book in the same vein, but for the 5 countries involved in the Last War. Each one gets a prestige class, a handful of plot hooks, a few factions, and a couple monsters along with the usual important cities/locations/demographics stuff. Really great stuff for fleshing out a given country, doubly useful if you want to run a more "political intrigue"-y style game. Don't know how I feel about the reputation system in there since I've never used it, but it seems like a thing that would function well enough if that's a thing you want to use. One of the things I loved about Five Nations is how they described the countries in terms of the population; you'd get a typical day in the life of some generic guy, little interesting facts about the people, what the national pastimes were, stuff like that.
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May 2, 2018 00:45
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Helical Nightmares posted:About three days ago I received an email from Modiphius saying that they will distribute 5th Edition Vampire (published by White Wolf). White Wolf is essentially an IP holding company at this point.
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May 2, 2018 01:59
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Yawgmoth posted:Five Nations is another book in the same vein, but for the 5 countries involved in the Last War. Each one gets a prestige class, a handful of plot hooks, a few factions, and a couple monsters along with the usual important cities/locations/demographics stuff. Really great stuff for fleshing out a given country, doubly useful if you want to run a more "political intrigue"-y style game. Don't know how I feel about the reputation system in there since I've never used it, but it seems like a thing that would function well enough if that's a thing you want to use. I definitely want a reputation system, and was going to rip out Zeitgeist's rep, but a setting specific one also sounds pretty rad. Does it port to 4e well? Evil Mastermind posted:One of the things I loved about Five Nations is how they described the countries in terms of the population; you'd get a typical day in the life of some generic guy, little interesting facts about the people, what the national pastimes were, stuff like that. This is sick as hell.
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May 2, 2018 02:01
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Moriatti posted:I definitely want a reputation system, and was going to rip out Zeitgeist's rep, but a setting specific one also sounds pretty rad. Does it port to 4e well? 
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May 2, 2018 02:28
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I actually like Eberron's treatment of its religions more than a lot of other fantasy game settings because when you start digging into it you discover that yeah, there's a "good pantheon" and "evil pantheon" but everyday people still make little prayers and offerings to the bad guy gods because they're in charge of more than just murder and torture but, like, artistic passion and the ocean and journeys so of course you're going to hedge your bets if you're working on a masterpiece of planning a trip across the sea, which is a lot more true to form for actual real-world religions where you don't just ignore half the gods out of spite. And I appreciate that it keeps the fundamental truth of divinity an unanswered mystery instead of being an objective fact, and consequently you get weird stuff like the Blood of Vol, a completely bullshit made up religion constructed by a lich for her own ends, suddenly manifesting divine magic in its adherents and said lich not knowing what the gently caress is going on because that wasn't supposed to happen.
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May 2, 2018 02:34
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Halloween Jack posted:I guess my only complaint about Eberron is that most of the religion stuff seems pretty unengaging. Then again, the most interesting stuff in D&D religion is generally either evil cults, or the Factions in Planescape if they count. It's actually really neat because you can worship the evil gods in the setting without actually being in any way an evil person. You just have a different way of thinking about them.
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May 2, 2018 02:35
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Kai Tave posted:I actually like Eberron's treatment of its religions more than a lot of other fantasy game settings because when you start digging into it you discover that yeah, there's a "good pantheon" and "evil pantheon" but everyday people still make little prayers and offerings to the bad guy gods because they're in charge of more than just murder and torture but, like, artistic passion and the ocean and journeys so of course you're going to hedge your bets if you're working on a masterpiece of planning a trip across the sea, which is a lot more true to form for actual real-world religions where you don't just ignore half the gods out of spite. And I appreciate that it keeps the fundamental truth of divinity an unanswered mystery instead of being an objective fact, and consequently you get weird stuff like the Blood of Vol, a completely bullshit made up religion constructed by a lich for her own ends, suddenly manifesting divine magic in its adherents and said lich not knowing what the gently caress is going on because that wasn't supposed to happen. The Blood of Vol is 100% correct and the afterlife really is just this gray dull hellhole where you are slowly subsumed to nonexistence.
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May 2, 2018 02:36
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Bedlamdan posted:The Blood of Vol is 100% correct and the afterlife really is just this gray dull hellhole where you are slowly subsumed to nonexistence. The Blood of Vol is correct in that regard, by "made up and bullshit" I mean that the original version was built on the back of misinterpreted fragments of texts, then it got co-opted by a lich to use as a sort of recruiting ground for useful operatives, so it's several layers of the telephone game piled on top of each other, but Eberron's afterlife objectively sucks and the quest for self-actualized divine immortality isn't a terrible one as these things go.
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May 2, 2018 02:40
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Helical Nightmares posted:I do this anyway because I can't stand the repetitive commercials inside the podcast. When Ken (?) starts talking about blueberries do stop to take a listen. He loves his superfood They really need a milestone on their Patreon to kill the ads. They really, really do. I may certainly have issues with Ken's weird dinosaur opinions, but the ads quickly grow insufferable.
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May 2, 2018 02:43
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Halloween Jack posted:I guess my only complaint about Eberron is that most of the religion stuff seems pretty unengaging. Then again, the most interesting stuff in D&D religion is generally either evil cults, or the Factions in Planescape if they count. Eberron isn't as perfectly "kitchen sink" as its contest rules seemed to expect, anyway. Does anyone have a copy of the archived rules? I can't find them anymore but I remember thinking Eberron bent at least a few of the rules pretty far. e- also, going back to a prior post: Alien Rope Burn posted:I think it's less that it's post-apocalypse and more the sense of roleplaying in what is essentially a prison. Maybe not a total institution, but you're trapped, at least. And to me, part of the heist genre is the idea that we're doing this heist to achieve some personal freedom or empowerment. That may be paying off the debts you owe to Mr. Big, being able to retire to the Caribbean and sip boat drinks, or keep the evil villain from constructing the real bad evil thing, or whatever. But the heist changes things, whether that's towards your dream or ending up in bigger trouble. But the construction of Blades in the Dark's setting seems to be to make the whole notion Sisyphean. You're not going to be retiring to Bermuda and just downing boat drinks for the rest of your days. Which makes sense, because it doesn't want that to happen, it wants to be an ongoing serial without that obvious endpoint. But it also means there's no big dream to scheme over other than being wealthier than the other jerks in your cage. You'd probably dig S&V then. The galaxy is wide enough that you can lay low in another sector to take heat off after an operation, then ultimately retire someplace pretty decent. The game's meant to hit an endpoint where you help one of the factions ultimately achieve whatever goal they were vying for, too, so you can drastically improve everyone's life that way. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 03:05 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 02:54
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The new Vampire layout looks like rear end
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May 2, 2018 03:03
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The best part of Eberron is that there's no metaplot or canon to care about! It's as though the world is paused before you throw the players in, and it's all just for them to play with.
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May 2, 2018 03:04
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Plutonis posted:The new Vampire layout looks like rear end please don't give money to these people
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May 2, 2018 03:04
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Also i'm gonna cut through the bullshit again. Everyone here talks a great deal about Eberron. But I haven't seen a single drat game run on that setting in this forum. Forgotten Realms? Zeitgeist? loving Greyhawk? I see those. But no Eberron.
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May 2, 2018 03:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:please don't give money to these people I saw some pages they posted on /tg/ and other sites. Seriously it looks like a lovely goth fashion fanzine/blog instead of a drat sourcebook
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May 2, 2018 03:06
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Plutonis posted:Also i'm gonna cut through the bullshit again. Everyone here talks a great deal about Eberron. But I haven't seen a single drat game run on that setting in this forum. Forgotten Realms? Zeitgeist? loving Greyhawk? I see those. But no Eberron. Yawgmoth completed DMing his 18 month Eberron campaign for our group earlier this year, and we're all goons, but its a weekly roll20 game and the original recruitment post was over 2 years ago
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May 2, 2018 03:10
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Kai Tave posted:The Blood of Vol is correct in that regard, by "made up and bullshit" I mean that the original version was built on the back of misinterpreted fragments of texts, then it got co-opted by a lich to use as a sort of recruiting ground for useful operatives, so it's several layers of the telephone game piled on top of each other, but Eberron's afterlife objectively sucks and the quest for self-actualized divine immortality isn't a terrible one as these things go. The Blood of Vol itself just seems to be a populist bastardization of the Aerenal Elves’ Undying Court (which is no surprise considering Vol was an elf), wherein instead of the elite of society getting preserved, any fucko can become immortal by preying on others. Both the Undying Court and the Blood of Vol both have clerics in spite of lacking any gods. Presumably, this is because the Undying Court itself taps into a massive reserve of extradimensional energy to keep themselves powered while the Blood of Vol was inadvertently onto something when it claimed blood was divine. All this doesn’t do anything to explain why people are able to gain cleric powers by worshiping the Lord of Blades, who for all intents and purposes is really nothing more than a sentient robot-man created within living memory, in a factory somewhere. My best guess is that it all works on Warhammer Fantasy/Berserk logic where gods are just manifestations of a collective unconsciousness. Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 03:13 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 03:10
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Plutonis posted:The new Vampire layout looks like rear end White wolf layouts always suck butthole
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May 2, 2018 03:14
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fool_of_sound posted:White wolf layouts always suck butthole New White Wolf manages to be way, way worse though, not even exaggerating. Logos, layout decisions, it all looks super awful in every respect. Bedlamdan posted:The Blood of Vol itself just seems to be a populist bastardization of the Aerenal Elves’ Undying Court (which is no surprise considering Vol was an elf), wherein instead of the elite of society getting preserved, any fucko can become immortal by preying on others. I may be misremembering but I vaguely recall that the Blood of Vol views becoming a sentient undead as merely "okay I guess," a reasonable enough stopgap solution but not really their true aspirational goal of genuine no-strings-attached immortality.
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May 2, 2018 03:19
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:are there any good podcasts focused on tabletop / rpg game design / theory Bonus Experience touches on it occasionally; they both write/have written for Onyx Path. Full disclosure I'm married to one of the podcasters.
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May 2, 2018 03:33
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Kai Tave posted:I may be misremembering but I vaguely recall that the Blood of Vol views becoming a sentient undead as merely "okay I guess," a reasonable enough stopgap solution but not really their true aspirational goal of genuine no-strings-attached immortality. The religion itself, whatever the hell it is, is oriented around unlocking one’s inner divinity within their own blood, as they claim blood is fundamentally tied to life. The philosophy itself isn’t joined to hip by the undead, save for the fact that its creator was a Lich and its adherents find undeath preferable to regular death. For what little it actually matters for the game, the Alignment of the Blood of Vol is Neutral (Edit:at least as of 4E) whereas the Lords of Dust or the Khyber Cults are outright Evil. In and of itself it just seems to be something similar to the Godsmen from Planescape with an added fixation with blood that could allow you to just use the Blood of Vol as a stand-in for Bloodborne’s Healing Church, complete with all the weird transhumanism. Because again, to them blood = life/power. Which isn’t really at all true given that plants get by just fine with chlorophyll and viruses seem to straddle the line between alive and not alive, given that they don’t metabolize things but reproduce regardless via hosts. What is true is that the undead can sustain themselves by drinking the blood of others, so it’s potentially as potent as whatever Positive Energy wahoo the Undying Court draws off of, and the cult can use blood to power all sorts of things. Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 03:59 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 03:43
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Halloween Jack posted:I guess my only complaint about Eberron is that most of the religion stuff seems pretty unengaging. Then again, the most interesting stuff in D&D religion is generally either evil cults, or the Factions in Planescape if they count. Eberron's religions, at least for me, are incredibly interesting...once you leave the "mainstream" religion of the Soverign Host behind (but even they're interesting to a degree too). Remember, the lack of afterlife is a known fact to...well, most everyone in the setting. And none of the religions are "provable" in a way that denies the others, and so unlike basically every other D&D setting where religion is little more then a cosmic macguffin, religion in Eberron is cultural. In Forgotten Realms, your choice of deity is shorthand for character traits. In Eberron, it's a declaration of background. Also it's important to state that the Blood of Vol is not about becoming and worshiping undead. It's almost the complete opposite. Blood of Vol states that if the gods do exist, they're all motherfuckers, and the only way we're going to get any justice in life or death is by overthrowing them with the divinity in all living things (and just haven't fully unlocked yet). But we can't do that alone as individuals - we can only do that if we band together, brothers and neighbors and communities. "Living things" is a key part here - by BoV's own doctrine, there's no room in heaven for the undead. Intelligent undead are seen not as heroes to emulate, but martyrs to respect. After all, they sacrificed their share in our inevitable collectivist uprising against reality - literally sold their soul, to never join their community in eternity, forcing themselves to stay in this shitheap of a world, so that they can keep the good fight going. As for non-intelligent undead? Well, what's so bad about them? What, you think your body is so awesome and special that it gets to have it's own special resting place where it can just rot away pointlessly? What a foolish luxury! No, comrade - even in death, as your soul rests, your body can continue to proudly serve and aid your brothers and sisters. That this was orchestrated as something of a great lie around in immortal (but also, like, 14 year old) lich queen is almost incidental. Because in Eberron, belief matters, and so the Blood of Vol does in fact impart divine power that it's secretive leader has nothing to do with. As for Lady Vol herself...well, she does want to become as close to a living god of death Eberron can have, because she wants to find a way to reactivate her dragon-mark, and with her dragon blood, that's going to do things. Who knows - maybe she actually is working to make the heaven her cult believes in. ...How is this not filled to the brim with dramatic hooks to use?
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May 2, 2018 04:09
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The Karrnath pragmatic take on necromancy is so cool and something that isn't explored much on other settings. Actually you could make a case in shadowrun homebrew to use zombies as megacorp cheap labor.
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May 2, 2018 04:16
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The Sovereign Host is admittedly a little dull, I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone play a cleric or paladin of the Host before. I can't remember if they ever got expanded on in any interesting ways. The Dark Six are more interesting for the fact that they're ostensibly the "evil" gods (I mean the Mockery is pretty much a huge dick, to be fair) but worship and sacrifices to them are one of those open secrets that everybody partakes of at least once in a while, you just don't talk about it in polite company.Plutonis posted:The Karrnath pragmatic take on necromancy is so cool and something that isn't explored much on other settings. Actually you could make a case in shadowrun homebrew to use zombies as megacorp cheap labor. There was a supplement for White Wolf's d20 fantasy setting that was all about a city run on neutral necromancy. It was called Hollowfaust, I believe.
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May 2, 2018 04:22
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I've had PCs for one or two of the various host deities. I think it's pretty neat that the host and the dark six can be worshiped as a collective, too. It plays well into their genericized nature and reinforces how the two pantheons are used by the mainstream khorvairian culture to conquer and sublimate various cultures they come in contact with.
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May 2, 2018 04:27
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Plutonis posted:The Karrnath pragmatic take on necromancy is so cool and something that isn't explored much on other settings. Actually you could make a case in shadowrun homebrew to use zombies as megacorp cheap labor. Kaius of Karrnath is also absolutely committed to keeping the peace on the continent in spite of being an LE Vampire Lord, simply because he saw the war from its inception to its conclusion and understands that it benefitted no-one. Meanwhile the NG Queen of one of Karrnath’s rivals on Khorvaire is just waiting for a suitable pretext to restart the fighting, because she’s convinced this is something actually winnable.
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May 2, 2018 04:28
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You can tell that alignment is something Keith Baker only really put in Eberron because he was contractually obligated to.
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May 2, 2018 04:31
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Kai Tave posted:You can tell that alignment is something Keith Baker only really put in Eberron because he was contractually obligated to. It’s something he took every opportunity to subvert, at least, which I think is a more meaningful statement than omitting it in its entirety.
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May 2, 2018 04:36
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Eberron also has a sensible justification for the "common" language D&D trope, too. Gnomish mass print media made the common language universal on Khorvaire. Humans back on the continent of Sarlona speak a separate language from the ones on Khorvaire, and they can't understand one another due to language shifts (and dream monster brainwashing) over hundreds of years.
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May 2, 2018 04:52
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The two things that makes the Host interesting for me at least is that a) there's no heaven, so nobody really follows a singular "god" of the Host, you literally just pray to whoever you think can help you out the most, and b) the actual religious doctrine is more just a very loose collection of cultural stories. That people disagree on! Not only is worship of individual gods of the Dark Six not unheard of, there are adherents who would absolutely have a religious debate with you about it. If I recall, it's even mentioned in one of the books that there's evidence of gods that sure do resemble the Dark Six appearing in Dhakaani poo poo, meaning the humans literally just stole the goblinoid gods and put them in their own religion as the "bad ones."
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May 2, 2018 05:08
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I think the Dhakaani are actually athiest, but that after the empire fell some goblins started worshipping gods for various reasons. Humans did steal a lot of poo poo from them though, like an entire city for starters.
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May 2, 2018 05:32
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Helical Nightmares posted:About three days ago I received an email from Modiphius saying that they will distribute 5th Edition Vampire (published by White Wolf). White Wolf is a Swedish company, a daughter company of Paradox Interactive which publishes computer games in Europe. It is unrelated to White Wolf, the daughter company of CCP which is responsible for EVE Online, other than the fact that White Wolf was bought by Paradox from CCP in 2015. And then there's the US / Georgia-based role-playing game publisher that "merged" with CCP in 2006. None of them have anything to do with Onyx Path, who exist to run Kickstarters and take a minimum of two years to deliver products they claim are written at the time of the Kickstarter launch. From every appearance, they're contracting with Modiphius to be able to get their international distribution taken care of with a minimum of headaches. There aren't many Euro-RPG companies that manage the volume of US sales that Modiphius is able to take on. Kwyndig posted:White Wolf is essentially an IP holding company at this point. Nope. See above. gradenko_2000 posted:please don't give money to these people Yeah, seriously. Unlike Onyx Path, it would appear that they can deliver a product on a decent timetable.
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May 2, 2018 05:54
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Martin Snazz posted:Yeah, seriously. Unlike Onyx Path, it would appear that they can deliver a product on a decent timetable. Exalted 3E's Kickstarter was a debacle but lol if you think Swedish Dracula's magnum opus is going to be remotely worth paying for based on everything that's been presented thus far. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:25 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 06:23
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Kai Tave posted:Exalted 3E's Kickstarter was a debacle but lol if you think Swedish Dracula's magnum opus is going to be remotely worth paying for based on everything that's been presented thus far. It's silly to think Exalted was the only project at OPP to have problems. Wraith20 still isn't out yet, but everyone seems to give it a free pass because of some nebulous Wraith Curse and the fact that nobody has any personal beefs with Wraith's developers. OTOH, Beast came out in a much more timely fashion, probably meaning it had no issues? Then there was one OPP project that had two of the devs quit the project midway, only to end up taking the entire team's ideas to their personal non-OPP affiliated kickstarter project (that subsequently failed to deliver). Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 07:02 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 07:00
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ProfessorCirno posted:The two things that makes the Host interesting for me at least is that a) there's no heaven, so nobody really follows a singular "god" of the Host, you literally just pray to whoever you think can help you out the most, and b) the actual religious doctrine is more just a very loose collection of cultural stories. That people disagree on! Not only is worship of individual gods of the Dark Six not unheard of, there are adherents who would absolutely have a religious debate with you about it. If I recall, it's even mentioned in one of the books that there's evidence of gods that sure do resemble the Dark Six appearing in Dhakaani poo poo, meaning the humans literally just stole the goblinoid gods and put them in their own religion as the "bad ones." From what I recall of the Eberron religion book, there was a serious divide between the Dark Six as more "primitive", rural/clan gods of less developed concepts (emotional passions, basic tyranny, and the like), and the Sovereign Host as the "civilized" deities, city/feudal gods of more socially complex concepts like trade, codes of honor, etc. It was definitely spelled out that who was good and evil to you probably had a lot to do with your society's level of complexity.
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May 2, 2018 07:01
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Bedlamdan posted:It's silly to think Exalted was the only project at OPP to have problems. I mentioned Exalted because of the "products they claim are written at the time of launch" dig, dude. I have no idea if they promised Wraith20 was done prior to it being crowdfunded though yes, it's been significantly delayed as well. Other than those two, have there been any other Onyx Path kickstarters with significant delays beyond the norm for a crowdfunded RPG project?
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May 2, 2018 07:06
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Jeez, I looked it up, Exalted came out two years late, Wraith is at nearly three  Kai Tave posted:I mentioned Exalted because of the "products they claim are written at the time of launch" dig, dude. I have no idea if they promised Wraith20 was done prior to it being crowdfunded though yes, it's been significantly delayed as well. Other than those two, have there been any other Onyx Path kickstarters with significant delays beyond the norm for a crowdfunded RPG project? Not to the same extent Exalted and Wraith were. Maybe a few months late here and there to unforeseen issues, but nothing as long as a year late as far as I can tell.
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May 2, 2018 07:13
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Why the hell is Wraith20 so late anyhow? None of the other 20A books have had that sort of issue, three years late and everybody else getting their stuff and I'd be pretty pissed too.
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May 2, 2018 07:24
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Are there any comprehensive wikis on the random publisher inhouse drama cause that poo poo is extremely fascinating for some reason
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