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That Old Tree posted:I've been playing Sekiro all week and now I want to I just finished running a campaign based in the Dishonored world using the Qin rules (hacked to hell to allow Void Powers instead of Internal and External Alchemy). Turned out great.      I had a lot of fun making the maps.
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Apr 4, 2019 16:06
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drat what did you do to make maps that good?
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Apr 4, 2019 18:34
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I love Kylmä Paikka
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Apr 4, 2019 18:38
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Mine was basically just an entire elaborate alternate world that was a tidally locked moon so its weather and fauna was wonky versus our expectations but otherwise no magic, normal progression of technology. What made it insane was i wrote a frankly absurd amount of extremely boring history for it. I dont mean like "King X of the Y people did this in year Z" but like discussing socio-cultural shifts like changing attitudes towards different ethnic minorities, field notes on animal life cycles, development of different political thought, and the various artistic movements of different historical eras to go along with creating multiple writing systems and tracking when and how linguistic shifts occured. In hindsight i realized I was writing a social studies textbook not a game.
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Apr 4, 2019 18:40
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Covok posted:Since we were all noobz once, what was the setting y'all made when you are just getting started dming that you totally thought was awesome until you realized it was crap? You know what I'm talkin about. That's setting y'all made back in high school and totally thought you were hot poo poo for doing so. You started with City 17 and then counted up/down from there, didn't you?
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Apr 4, 2019 19:17
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Strom Cuzewon posted:You started with City 17 and then counted up/down from there, didn't you? No! M-maybe. ... Yes
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Apr 4, 2019 19:54
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Agent Rush posted:Doubt I could find the notes now, but I once had a setting where the world was a cube where every face had radically different technology levels and populations. One was your standard fantasy land where everyone thought the world was flat because no one had ever tried going over the edge. Another was full of modern people, who had realized that gravity would re-orient anything that went over but tried to avoid interfering with the development of the other faces. Maybe I'll talk more if I remember or find my old notebooks. Dang, I've been working on a different cubeworld idea for nearly 20 years.
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Apr 4, 2019 20:00
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Arivia posted:drat what did you do to make maps that good? This is the map I started with.  The rest was photoshop with a lot of practice. EDIT: Here's the Atlas I threw together... http://www.mediafire.com/file/itn8tnk1g3tj21v/An_Atlas_of_the_World_By_Hecaton_DeGuardia.pdf Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Apr 4, 2019 |
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Apr 4, 2019 21:02
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My ancient badly-put-together setting was called World Half Empty and was basically a kinda-Clark Ashton Smith-inspired mad fantasy setting where everything was manageably bad, but on the precipice of getting truly terrible. The setting map was basically like an old anatomical drawing of an eye, side-on. The humours are a mostly-enclosed sea, the lens is the inlet that leads out to a terrible astral ocean, the sclera is the coastline, and beyond that there are various land provinces that eventually degrade into a physics-breaking froth of madness that everyone just calls Insanity. There's a giant bridge leading out into the beyond that's basically where the optical nerve would be. There's no sun, but plenty of stars and a kind of fading and rising half-light everywhere. Some other stuff in the setting: A central, cultured, arrogant city-state led by a ruling triumvirate and split into two competing cults based around the idea that the whole world was born from the corpse of a godlike cosmic being. One's a flagellant cult that suffers in penitence for being alive due to the death of this god, the other's a hedonistic cult that thinks the god-being would want everyone to seek the darkest depths of every pleasure life has to offer or else you're not making the best of being alive/the god being dead. Each cult's leader is part of the triumvirate. The third member is a hermit-librarian-philosopher who thinks this is all dumb as hell and that you shouldn't anthropomorphise the local equivalent of Azathoth, and basically votes whichever way will piss off either of the other two the most. Also, their city has an eldritch triangular design carved from ancient spacerock and Was Not Meant For Human Habitation, but they've all been squatting there for so long that technically they own the place? An isolated, totalitarian city-state with a fearful population that disdains outsiders, secretly led by aliens who've inculcated prophetic/suicide-cult beliefs into the local culture so they can harvest everyone's bodies when some undefined plan reaches completion. A living, livid hurricane that roams around the ocean and occasionally over land. It's called Wrath. It's real angry. The whisperwinds, which are the voices of the dead floating on the wind, whispering what they see (spoilers, it's not good). All the whisperwinds lead North, into the neck of a giant headless statue in the wilderness that's actually an imprisoned bio-weapon slowly reconstructing itself using the minds of the fallen after it was defeated and frozen by a coalition of ancient sorceror-kings, then largely forgotten about. Whoops! A bridge to nowhere leading out over the insane wastelands around the setting, where the rules of reality rapidly break down. The bridge is enormous, unfinished, and finishing itself - giant blocks of stone move around and slot into place, crushing anyone unobservant or unfortunate enough to be standing in their way. Also there are periodic towers full of horrible treasures and glittering traps. A magic artefact/soul battery that swallows or annihilates your soul if you touch it and then try to let go. A bandit king found it, touched it, realised his mistake before letting go, tied it to his hand, and now goes around swatting people into oblivion.
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Apr 4, 2019 22:29
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Leperflesh posted:Dang, I've been working on a different cubeworld idea for nearly 20 years. Neat! Feel like sharing any details? Mine was an ocean world, about 80% water with islands and small continents spread across the faces. No land mass came close to the edges, so anyone trying to reach one would need transportation. One of the faces had animal people (various mammals and lizards, flying and aquatic animals were all ordinary animals). They were slightly behind fantasy land technology wise but made up for it with natural abilities. Wow, remembering more about this makes it sound like One Piece before One Piece.
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Apr 5, 2019 01:48
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One Piece actually does kinda count there given the world is divided into quadrants by one line that's a world-spanning landmass with sheer cliffs on either side and another line of ocean that's one big Bermuda Triangle.
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Apr 5, 2019 07:21
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Agent Rush posted:Doubt I could find the notes now, but I once had a setting where the world was a cube where every face had radically different technology levels and populations. One was your standard fantasy land where everyone thought the world was flat because no one had ever tried going over the edge. Another was full of modern people, who had realized that gravity would re-orient anything that went over but tried to avoid interfering with the development of the other faces. Maybe I'll talk more if I remember or find my old notebooks. I think Hickman&Weis had a novel series like that, but it was a D20
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Apr 5, 2019 10:27
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UnCO3 posted:My ancient badly-put-together setting was called World Half Empty and was basically a kinda-Clark Ashton Smith-inspired mad fantasy setting where everything was manageably bad, but on the precipice of getting truly terrible. The setting map was basically like an old anatomical drawing of an eye, side-on. The humours are a mostly-enclosed sea, the lens is the inlet that leads out to a terrible astral ocean, the sclera is the coastline, and beyond that there are various land provinces that eventually degrade into a physics-breaking froth of madness that everyone just calls Insanity. There's a giant bridge leading out into the beyond that's basically where the optical nerve would be. There's no sun, but plenty of stars and a kind of fading and rising half-light everywhere.
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Apr 5, 2019 10:34
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Tendales posted:I think Hickman&Weis had a novel series like that, but it was a D20 Gillen and Hans are doing a comic called Die where people are trapped on an RPG world shaped like a giant d20, with each face being a different territory.
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Apr 5, 2019 12:21
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My Lovely Horse posted:stealing all of this thank you
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Apr 5, 2019 15:32
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Covok posted:No! 
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Apr 5, 2019 18:11
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I'd like to apologize to everyone for getting the new grognards.txt locked again. I was too tempted by the low-hanging fruit that I didn't consider the consequences of how my slobbering juice-stained mouth would look to everyone else. I hereby solemnly swear to never grogquote again.
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Apr 5, 2019 21:11
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My current DCC game is set in an onion-world like in Iain M. Banks's Matter. Not that it makes much of an impact. Yet, anyway.
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Apr 5, 2019 22:06
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Agent Rush posted:Neat! Feel like sharing any details? Well I decided my cube world formed by an extradimensional rift opening and letting in some alternate-universe physics for a short period, which resulted in a cubic lattice of force hanging out in the midst of a solar accretion disk for a billion years or so. Instead of mass obeying newtonian physics to accrete into a ball due to gravity, the lattice of the cube allowed mass to accrete along geometricl lines parallel or orthoganal to the lines, so gradually a world shaped like a cube formed. I got out my high school physics textbooks and built a world of the correct size, based on a back-of-the-envelope average density, to have 1G at the center of each face. Despite the lines of force allowing mass to accumulate, on my world gravity still acts toward the center of mass, so as you move along a face toward an edge, you are effectively climbing an increasingly steep mountain range. Also, climbing out of the atmosphere, which I figured would cling to the centers of each face in kind of a lens shape (same thing water would do). Effectively each face is isolated from the others by the lack of air at the ridglines defining each face's edges, with the corners experiencing hard vacuum. On my cubeworld, "magic" is caused by anything that has straight lines, and especially anything forming geometric shapes. Creating such shapes channels the lines of force that tie the whole world together into new directions, which has unpredictable and wildly dangerous outcomes. Consequently, because of the well-founded fear of unwanted usually highly destructive or dangerous magical effects, cultures developed powerful taboos against the use of straight lines. People live in irregularly rounded buildings, roads are always curvy, clothing patterns are always irregular and rounded or shaped, even tools that would otherwise need to have a straight line in our world, like a level or a measuring tool, work around the problem of straight-line danger in one creative way or another. Where the major lines of force meet, something akin to gods formed. So there are 8 major powers, one at each corner of the world, and a ninth power in the center. The people of the cubeworld regard them with varying culturally-determined ideas. Over the span of millions of years, the 8 and the 1 gained something like sentience, and they're responsible for seeding life on their respectively-adjacent faces, often borrowed from elsewhere in the universe. The world is oriented with one corner "up" and one "down" with respect to the orbital plane around the star; if you hold a d6 by opposite corners between your thumb and forefinger, and then use your other finger to spin it, you'll see that the sun's path passes over a zigzag of the four edges defining the equator. Shadows are cast in interesting shapes. The people of each face, by paying attention to the shadows cast and by doing some pretty straightforward deduction, would be able to know they were living on a square plane, with a particular inclination to the sun, and which is probably attached to a three-dimensional object. But, isolated on their own faces, they could not prove the world is a cube; it could be rounded on the other sides with only one flat face, for example. Or they could be on the square base of a pyramid. Different cultures might have different convictions as to the nature of the world, which I liked. Also maybe the gods would just tell some of them the truth... or lie to them... I originally conceived of my cubeworld as a setting for D&D; I gave the 8 & the 1 the various alignments, with the 1 being true neutral. Each god would influence the three faces adjacent to them the most, and the faces not adjacent to them the least, while the neutral 1 would influence all faces equally. The 1 would be asleep, a natural god that the other 8 fear to awaken, as its power would exceed any four of them and possibly only be controllable by an alliance of all 8. Consequently, people on all 6 faces would be able to tap into the bleed of power from the 1, largely without risk, but clerical power from any of the other 8 is tapping into an awake and conscious deity, one in direct conflict with the three others nearest, and indirect conflict with three more who lie at the opposite corner of each of their three border faces, with only 1 god on the opposite corner of the world being mostly irrelevant to them. Later, though, I decided to eject the D&D setting. I haven't worked on it in years, but if I were to go back and work on it some more, I'm not sure what game setting I'd use; most likely I'd develop it as a systemless setting suitable for multiple different rulesets. Given the size and how the math works out, there's an extreme gravitational slope as you move from the center of a face towards an edge or corner. Moving halfway from a center to an edge would involve climbing an increasingly steep slope tens of thousands of feet in the air, by angle and by oxygen partial pressure. I figured custom rules would be needed for movement and combat depending on how high up you are, and people populating the centers would be physically adapted to higher gravity than people populating the slopes. Social strata might develop, perhaps with those higher up lording it over those below: although those at the centers would have small seas to use, while those high up would live in much dryer, near-desertlike conditions, so possibly the lowlanders would have more wealth and power. Travel between the sides would be impossible for normal people. I decided it might be possible if there's necromancy or golem construction for some enterprising near-edge civilization to send scouts up and over the airless peaks to explore an adjacent side: and, if there were people good at tunneling, it would be possible to cut a tunnel (hundreds of miles long!) across one edge to connect two faces (to feel "flat" inside, the tunnel would actually be a segment of a circle!). I realized later that if I wanted the cube to be larger - which would be very good for making a more gradual transition from high to low G - I could reduce the average density, and one way of doing that would be to make a hollow area in the center. Which might make sense anyway, both as the domain of the slumbering 1, and as a consequence of the planetary formation I settled on. But, an empty void in the center plays havoc with the calculation of gravity, because now when you stand on one edge, there is a vector along each face with more mass than the vector straight down... I think they average out, but if you then move towards a corner, I'm not sure they still do... I know I could just handwave it away, but I may want to consult with a physicist. So, that's my cubeworld. Original idea, do not steal Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Apr 5, 2019 |
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Apr 5, 2019 22:41
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I love both of these cubeworlds so much.
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Apr 6, 2019 00:36
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Libertad! posted:I'd like to apologize to everyone for getting the new grognards.txt locked again. I was too tempted by the low-hanging fruit that I didn't consider the consequences of how my slobbering juice-stained mouth would look to everyone else. Wait, they reopened grogs.txt!?
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Apr 6, 2019 01:43
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Covok posted:Wait, they reopened grogs.txt!?
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Apr 6, 2019 01:53
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Just saw Us and it 100% would be on the "recommended fiction" list for Changeling the Lost if it had been released like a decade earlier
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Apr 6, 2019 01:59
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Libertad! posted:I'd like to apologize to everyone for getting the new grognards.txt locked again. I was too tempted by the low-hanging fruit that I didn't consider the consequences of how my slobbering juice-stained mouth would look to everyone else. It was going to be closed anyway 
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Apr 6, 2019 02:01
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Leperflesh posted:Detailed setting explanation That's had way more thought put into it than mine did! It sounds pretty cool, along with the idea to have it be setting agnostic.
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Apr 6, 2019 03:11
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Found a copy of Dark Sword Adventures by Margaret Weis at a used book store, and while I would have bought it anyways because it was only 3 bucks and I'm a sucker for RPG books that come in smaller size format*, I figured I'd ask to see if anyone has run it before and whether it's any good *really need to hunt down a set of Dragon Warriors books some day
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Apr 6, 2019 03:33
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drrockso20 posted:Found a copy of Dark Sword Adventures by Margaret Weis at a used book store, and while I would have bought it anyways because it was only 3 bucks and I'm a sucker for RPG books that come in smaller size format*, I figured I'd ask to see if anyone has run it before and whether it's any good
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Apr 6, 2019 03:42
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Tendales posted:I think Hickman&Weis had a novel series like that, but it was a D20 The series was rose of the prophet, and it was fantastic. Good and evil were the two tips of the d20, with virtues and vices being the ring of points adjacent to them, and each god was defined by the three points of their face. Unfortunately, they screwed it up, listing at least six gods with "good" as a trait even though there's a max of five faces touching that vertex. All the gods that didn't touch good or evil were the neutral gods, and leaned good or evil depending on whether their face had two virtues or two vices. The main protagonists followed a god with two vices and one virtue, too.
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Apr 6, 2019 04:16
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My weird homebrew setting was Twin World, where there were two spherical planets nearly touching one another, named Adin and Dina. Legends anthropomorphize both of them, as lovers, straining to be together. The two planets are aligned in their orbit around the sun, tidally locked and spinning together in the orbital plane. They were held apart by the only real god of the setting, the World-Bearer, at the Axis, where the two planets nearly touch. I never specified what the World-Bearer is like. Maybe a person, bearing the weight of a world on their shoulders. Maybe a great tree with two sets of roots and leaves at the center. Maybe a tower or bridge. Magic had two sides, Water and Fire. Water stems from the frission between Adin and Dina, the heart of its power at the Axis and the World-Bearer, weakening as it spreads from that point. Fire is not considered magic of the setting per se, but more like great feats of engineering. The game was supposed to take place just on Adin, and maybe migrate to the mysterious Dina later on. The Far Pole of Adin, furthest from the Axis, gets the most sunlight, has the highest gravity, and has the least water, as it mostly is pulled toward the center point. This is where the grand civilization of the Adin formed, Avtandil. They are the strongest in Fire, and has used it to get themselves up to an early renaissance technological level. Geographically it was supposed to be arid or desert, and Avtandil was supposed to have a Persian vibe. Nearer to the center point is the Sea of Shadow and Mist, where gravity gets lower and the sunlight is much less. Especially right around the Axis, the waves are vast and dissipate to mist that hangs between the worlds. The Avtandil people call the reaches away from their civilization the Wilds, where the Vishna witches and barbarians live. The Water magic that suffuses these areas warp the people who live the re, giving them strange magical features. The whole idea of the World-Bearer being shrouded in mist gave me the idea that religions of the World-Bearer would have a common theme of wearing veils. I had some other random stuff like a lost civilization that came before the joining of the Twin Worlds called the XU, which had made a vast non-euclidean network of tunnels through Adin called Agartha.
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Apr 6, 2019 04:39
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I combined Planescape and Spelljammer by sticking Sigil on the surface of an endless phlogiston sea, sort of floating on magic surface tension. Because the setting was infinite and flat, ships had their own astral cords that connected everyone back to Sigil so you could get back. The setting was really just an excuse for the first dungeon to be inside the carcass of a colossal space whale, fighting undead reskinned into various dead blood cells, bone fragments, and ghosts of astral food.
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Apr 6, 2019 05:13
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What’s the best pen and paper rpg to play with 11-12 year olds? My gf wants to get a friend’s nerdy kid into gaming.
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Apr 8, 2019 00:54
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Snowy posted:What’s the best pen and paper rpg to play with 11-12 year olds? My gf wants to get a friend’s nerdy kid into gaming. That was when I started playing 3rd Ed dnd so clearly pick that
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Apr 8, 2019 01:01
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Len posted:That was when I started playing 3rd Ed dnd so clearly pick that That’s when I started 1st Ed but there’s got to be something better by now, right?
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Apr 8, 2019 01:17
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Snowy posted:That’s when I started 1st Ed but there’s got to be something better by now, right? Something Apocalypse Powered would be my go to. Dungeon World plays how I wanted D&D to play
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Apr 8, 2019 01:24
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Snowy posted:What’s the best pen and paper rpg to play with 11-12 year olds? My gf wants to get a friend’s nerdy kid into gaming. My experience is that middle schoolers respond best to a ruleset that is crunchy enough that they can fall back on it when they don't know what to rp, but light enough that it isn't difficult to learn. They tend to play the game as though it were a video game: they want to discover and do cool stuff, with the role play largely as window dressing. They don't want to have to choose the bad things that happen to their characters and they don't want to have to contribute to the world building.
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Apr 8, 2019 01:24
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At that age, any rpg can work. I still like the classics, like red box basic, but as long as you don't get too esoteric you should be fine. Anything FATE based, D&Dish, etc. I grabbed No Thank You Evil but it's for even younger kids and also real bad in most ways.
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Apr 8, 2019 01:26
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Ok cool thanks guys 
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Apr 8, 2019 01:29
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Len posted:Something Apocalypse Powered would be my go to. Dungeon World plays how I wanted D&D to play seconding this
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Apr 8, 2019 01:30
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Snowy posted:What’s the best pen and paper rpg to play with 11-12 year olds? My gf wants to get a friend’s nerdy kid into gaming. Run a 4e Essentials oneshot. Lord knows I hate that supplement but it's good enough to introduce a brat to the game.
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Apr 8, 2019 01:40
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fool_of_sound posted:My experience is that middle schoolers respond best to a ruleset that is crunchy enough that they can fall back on it when they don't know what to rp, but light enough that it isn't difficult to learn. They tend to play the game as though it were a video game: they want to discover and do cool stuff, with the role play largely as window dressing. They don't want to have to choose the bad things that happen to their characters and they don't want to have to contribute to the world building. This is a good take. Also I'd recommend making pregens and letting him choose one to play.
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Apr 8, 2019 01:43
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