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The System Mastery review of A State made it sound like unplayable garbage TBH. I'm always a little weirded out by SLA Industries because it's a game I occasionally see references to but have never once seen a single SI book in a store or heard somebody discuss it except in books like the Munchkin's Guide (which was surprisingly entertaining for a James Desborough product). I think I saw an ad for it once in like Dragon? But anyway it's weird to me that it's apparently a going concern in the tiny RPG industry/scene and has been for like twenty years and I have never encountered anything but sparse references to it. Is it more popular in the UK than in the US or something?
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Jan 3, 2019 23:54
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Kwyndig posted:I think there are Paragon Paths and Epic destinies that take you down the road of the Sorcerer Kings, but the Dragon is like a level ridiculous enemy intended to really challenge a whole max level party. Dragon Kings, complete with a whole passel of 10th level spells. Even starting down that path was absurdly difficult. First: level to 20 defiler. Then, dual-class to psionicist and advance that to 20. Bear in mind that if you use your old abilities before you match levels, you get no XP for that adventure. The really hosed up thing is that some of the fluff in City by the Silt Sea boxed set indicated that Borys the Dragon was made by relatively rapid fire, coordinated castings of the 10th level metamorphosis spell. One of the published adventures ended with Abalach-Re trying to do something similar, at a rate like a level per round.
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Jan 4, 2019 03:25
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unseenlibrarian posted:Didn't some of the sorcerer kings have this explained by the fact that they'd genocided some of the regular D&D humanoid types that didn't exist in the setting? Like I think one of them had killed off the Athas gnome population or something, and another one had done for ogres.
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Jan 4, 2019 07:22
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Warthur posted:It's really, really weird to me that they keep pushing SLA Industries. I don't think it ever really picked up very much steam but the Nightfall guys just keep trying to make SLA a thing and putting out new products at a slow drip. Tales of Gargentihr is an amazing setting with some of the worst made-up slang and boring rules put together. I ended up running a campaign of it using Savage Worlds that worked pretty well though.
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Jan 4, 2019 18:14
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Well, in A|State’s case it’s because Contested Ground are out of the RPG business and don’t want to license the ip to anyone else. Which is fair enough.
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Jan 4, 2019 18:23
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Tales of Gargentihr is an amazing setting with some of the worst made-up slang and boring rules put together. I ended up running a campaign of it using Savage Worlds that worked pretty well though.
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Jan 4, 2019 18:25
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm always a little weirded out by SLA Industries because it's a game I occasionally see references to but have never once seen a single SI book in a store or heard somebody discuss it except in books like the Munchkin's Guide (which was surprisingly entertaining for a James Desborough product). I think I saw an ad for it once in like Dragon? But anyway it's weird to me that it's apparently a going concern in the tiny RPG industry/scene and has been for like twenty years and I have never encountered anything but sparse references to it. Is it more popular in the UK than in the US or something?
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Jan 4, 2019 18:27
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I know there was a Savage Worlds conversion that's way more playable from what I've seen but like...yeah, SLA has its place and its place is that weird pseudo-2000AD RPG scene where criticizing people watching TV is a relevant social message. I still like it but like. I'm glad it's playable under SW but that's probably all I need.
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Jan 4, 2019 18:57
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Warthur posted:I mean, that's true, but the slang isn't that much worse than the stuff in SLA or Jorune and both of those have an actual active fan community out there. You're literally the only person I'm aware of who's even run or played Gargentihr. It is a bizarre as gently caress concept (Continents floating on a sea of dust that compresses and makes bridges between them periodically is not the weirdest thing for example).
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Jan 4, 2019 22:08
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Warthur posted:That's pretty much the question I've been asking - what is it with Nightfall still trying to make SLA a thing? If there's a hidden SLA community eagerly beavering away at this stuff over here in the UK they've succeeded at entirely hiding away from me. IIRC there used to be a really active mailing list. I personally lost all interest in SLA once I discovered The Truth, because it was so loving stupid. Did run a fun game of it once though where the characters were the principals in a reality TV show, called Ops! Ran it with BESM.
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Jan 4, 2019 22:40
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Mike Stackpole resigned from the GAMA board. Chasing down the links on the incident he mentions, it sounds like it's descended into a real shitshow. (Summary, at my current point of digging: current GAMA president got into a physical altercation with a security guard at Gen Con last year, got kicked out, board only censured him, Stackpole has had enough of the board being shitbags about this.)
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Jan 7, 2019 12:03
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Oh, also there seems to have been a weird song and dance going on with Executive Director John Ward, where so far as I can tell the events ran like this: - GAMA board vote, narrowly, not to renew Ward's contract as Executive Director. - GAMA voting membership do a non-binding, advisory vote of confidence in Ward; two-thirds support him. - GAMA board do a poll of the membership to see if they're really sure about Ward (this poll would in theory allow them to get the views of non-voting members). Over 70% support Ward. - GAMA board go ahead and jettison Ward anyway because ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
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Jan 7, 2019 12:13
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This industry needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
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Jan 7, 2019 16:30
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I'm surprised it was ever built in the first place.
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Jan 7, 2019 16:50
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Warthur posted:That's pretty much the question I've been asking - what is it with Nightfall still trying to make SLA a thing? If there's a hidden SLA community eagerly beavering away at this stuff over here in the UK they've succeeded at entirely hiding away from me. There are probably enough people nostalgic for SLA that they could do good business on a quality rerelease with some good supplements, but it seems like Nightfall never has their act together. Pope Guilty posted:The System Mastery review of A State made it sound like unplayable garbage TBH. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 17:15
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm surprised it was ever built in the first place. I think 'accreted' is a better term.
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Jan 7, 2019 17:55
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GAMA's kind of the definition of an Old Boy's Club in the industry, but I don't think it does more than Origins (which has been hilariously mismanaged for awhile now, IMO) and a industry show or two. I mean, they're a thing, but AFAIK they aren't nearly the influencers they used to be.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:26
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Alien Rope Burn posted:GAMA's kind of the definition of an Old Boy's Club in the industry, but I don't think it does more than Origins (which has been hilariously mismanaged for awhile now, IMO) and a industry show or two. I mean, they're a thing, but AFAIK they aren't nearly the influencers they used to be. Yeah, every year GAMA manages to find new and interesting ways to gently caress up managing Origins, despite the fact that the volunteers that actually do the gruntwork are all doing their best..
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Jan 7, 2019 22:33
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, every year GAMA manages to find new and interesting ways to gently caress up managing Origins, despite the fact that the volunteers that actually do the gruntwork are all doing their best..
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Jan 8, 2019 14:55
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So there's somebody posting the original version of the Sailor Moon RPG up under Cortex (it is not, it's Tri-Stat) and under the name of Guardian of Order's Mark MacKinnon (very likely not him).
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Jan 9, 2019 13:19
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Dawgstar posted:So there's somebody posting the original version of the Sailor Moon RPG up under Cortex (it is not, it's Tri-Stat) and under the name of Guardian of Order's Mark MacKinnon (very likely not him). This is like three hilariously dumb different kinds of illegal.
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Jan 9, 2019 13:51
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Looks like it's already been pulled. For some reason the system was listed as WOIN, aka "What's Old Is New".
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Jan 9, 2019 14:06
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Apparently "Mark" responded to a comment in broken English, so now one can pass the time guessing which country the bizarre attempt at a scam came from.
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Jan 9, 2019 14:22
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Why, if you're stealing identities, do you try to steal the identity of a notorious and largely-despised thief? Is it under the impression that nobody else wants it?
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Jan 9, 2019 14:58
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Rand Brittain posted:Why, if you're stealing identities, do you try to steal the identity of a notorious and largely-despised thief? Is it under the impression that nobody else wants it?
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Jan 9, 2019 17:04
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Warthur posted:What's the deal with Mark? I know GoO fell over through financial difficulties but I thought that was standard RPG industry difficulties, was there something worse going on? After the advantageous CAD to USD conversion went south (killing his business), he dark while still collecting sales checks and then ran off with a significant amount of stock which he has slowly offloaded through various online channels since. Nobody who actually wrote those books saw a dime from the sales.
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Jan 9, 2019 17:13
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Rand Brittain posted:Why, if you're stealing identities, do you try to steal the identity of a notorious and largely-despised thief? Is it under the impression that nobody else wants it? I promise you whoever did that did not have the faintest grasp of our inside baseball elfgame drama.
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Jan 9, 2019 17:28
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Warthur posted:What's the deal with Mark? I know GoO fell over through financial difficulties but I thought that was standard RPG industry difficulties, was there something worse going on? Zurui posted:After the advantageous CAD to USD conversion went south (killing his business), he dark while still collecting sales checks and then ran off with a significant amount of stock which he has slowly offloaded through various online channels since. Nobody who actually wrote those books saw a dime from the sales.
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Jan 9, 2019 17:32
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He also stole all the hard copies of the second edition of Nobilis from Jenna.
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Jan 9, 2019 17:55
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Rand Brittain posted:He also stole all the hard copies of the second edition of Nobilis from Jenna. I thought Nobilis 2nd edition was Hogshead?
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Jan 9, 2019 18:59
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Warthur posted:I thought Nobilis 2nd edition was Hogshead?
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Jan 9, 2019 19:01
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Plutonis posted:Weren't it like just 1k sacrifices a year to keep the former boss of the sorcerer-kings shackled? I mean the Aztecs killed a shitload more irl and it was on just a smaller expanse. As an aside, the Aztecs very much probably didn't sacrifice nearly as many people as they said they did. The replacement rate for the population of Mesoamerica wouldn't have really allowed it to happen and a lot of the really large figures were actually Nahuatl idioms for a big number.
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Jan 9, 2019 19:31
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Oh really! Interesting.
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Jan 9, 2019 19:37
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Sampatrick posted:As an aside, the Aztecs very much probably didn't sacrifice nearly as many people as they said they did. The replacement rate for the population of Mesoamerica wouldn't have really allowed it to happen and a lot of the really large figures were actually Nahuatl idioms for a big number. That sounds reasonable! Stuff like the famous 100k sacrifices on a single festival looks unrealistic even if Tenochtitlan had a bigger population than most of European cities during its height.
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Jan 9, 2019 21:48
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Well, it's worth remembering that Nahuatl ritual sacrifice was primarily prisoners of war - they were an empire, and one way they maintained that was constant wars where the prisoners were ransomed and/or sacrificed. E: so while mass sacrifice was still not super likely, the pool of candidates wasn't the metropole, but the subject city-states.
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Jan 9, 2019 22:03
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Plutonis posted:That sounds reasonable! Stuff like the famous 100k sacrifices on a single festival looks unrealistic even if Tenochtitlan had a bigger population than most of European cities during its height. Yeah, the number was 90k iirc and that is a nahuatl idiom meaning an uncountably large number so who knows how many it really was. I also want to say, and this could be wrong honestly, that the reason why Tenochtitlan's population is larger than any European city mostly comes down to it including the whole metropole whereas the numbers for European cities tend to be just the actual city limits. That could be wrong though. Joe Slowboat posted:Well, it's worth remembering that Nahuatl ritual sacrifice was primarily prisoners of war - they were an empire, and one way they maintained that was constant wars where the prisoners were ransomed and/or sacrificed. Yeah, flower wars were pretty essential to Aztec society. Aztec society in general is interesting in how it evolved in really weird directions compared to the rest of the world. I am talking about the whole population of Mesoamerica though - the Aztec numbers just wouldn't make sense given what we know of pre-Columbian population numbers in the area. It would also make a lot of sense for them to exaggerate so it's hard to buy at face value the numbers that they give.
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Jan 10, 2019 06:04
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So that person trying to sell the old Sailor Moon RPG is basically just uploading it under different names in various Community Content programs. Cool cool.
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Jan 10, 2019 06:22
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Comrade Gorbash posted:This is more in line with "standard RPG industry difficulties" than I think we like to admit. Yeah. As much as the straightforward financial theft is kinda hosed up, it's not nearly as hosed up as, say, the events that slowly came out surrounding the writing of Nobilis 3e.
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Jan 10, 2019 07:12
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Roadie posted:Yeah. As much as the straightforward financial theft is kinda hosed up, it's not nearly as hosed up as, say, the events that slowly came out surrounding the writing of Nobilis 3e.
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Jan 10, 2019 07:22
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Zereth posted:Wait, what happened there? I missed that news Only drips and drabs of info ever came out, but the implications aren't pleasant. Note that everything there is on top of the more usual "lots of people never got paid", "the company management vanished with the Kickstarter money", etc. Also, lol, one of the Eos Press guys is trying to make books again, so there's a company to avoid. Roadie fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Jan 10, 2019 |
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Jan 10, 2019 08:24
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