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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon Look At This Werewolf, You Broke It, It's Broken Now Zi'ir is a First Tongue word. It refers to werewolves who have lost their path and fallen to the extremes of Harmony, a werewolf whose soul is literally broken. They are no longer werewolves, but something lesser, something empy. A Zi'ir is made when a werewolf's spirit becomes so completely imbalanced with its own nature that it is irreparably damaged. Typically, this is self-inflicted - it's very hard for this fate to be forced on a werewolf by anyone but themself, and that is done by performing actions that drive them ever further away from balanced harmony of spirit until, at last, they cannot find their way back. The way this manifests differs, depending on if the Zi'ir is fallen to Flesh or fallen to Shadow, and even then there's a few forms it can take. Some Zi'ir become trapped in a single shape, unable to change at all, and are driven mad by instincts they can no longer satisfy. Others become consumed by hunger for human flesh. (Cannibalism is honestly a bit over-repeated as a problem for werewolves.) Still more become trapped in obsessive, contradictory Bans that force them to absurd, mad actions, while others have their rage and fury tear free from them and rampage through Shadow as an independent being. Some claim that the Zi'ir are the sources or descendants of the Geryo contagion, as their lack of harmony renders them spiritually vulnerable to the mutations of the Geryo. Certainly, the zi'ir suffer from spiritual weakness, and they overwhelmingly come from the ranks of Ghost Wolves, who lack the social and spiritual supports of the tribes. It's just one more reason that the Forsaken tend to look on the Ghost Wolves with scorn. They see the Ghost Wolves as cowards, who lacked the bravery to commit themselves and who blinded themselves to their duty. The reason Zi'ir are much more common among Ghost Wolves is, again, that the spiritual ties of the Firstborn help the werewolf soul resist the spiral into total disharmony, compounded by the fact that many Ghost Wolves reject the teachings and tenets of the Forsaken that are designed to allow them to maintain that harmony. Still, even for Ghost Wolves, becoming a zi'ir is neither sudden or unexpected. You don't get there without a sustained pattern of behavior that your instincts are pretty much screaming against constantly. Eventually, your soul just gives out, no longer able to try and push you away from your path, and you basically get the spiritual equivalent of gangrene. Zi'ir are typically shunned but not attacked if they keep away from other werewolves and their madness is at least not super disruptive. Those who are more dangerous are put down by other packs before they can hurt anything. Rarely, a Zi'ir may be "adopted" by their former pack, kept chained up or held somewhere and, usually, cared for - or at least kept ready to unleash on the pack's foes to give them a chance to vent their endless fury. Among the Pure, Zi'ir often serve as test subjects for their strange science and sorcery, with the results occasionally loosed on the Forsaken. Most werewolves, though, just want nothing to do with the Zi'ir, who are an unwelcome reminder of the dangers of failing to maintain balance. Occasionally, a Zi'ir trapped in wolf shape will form a spiritual connection to a piece of wilderness or a natural wolf pack. These connections are not healthy or wholesome for anyone involved - rather, the Zi'ir becomes a ravening master of the wild, defending its territory with blind ferocity against all comers. These broken wolves are able to wield the Gifts of Hunger, Nature, Rage and Strength at range, extending out to any part of their territory, and may grant their benefits to their adopted wolf pack. These places are the source of legends about man-eating wolves and vanishing travelers in the dark wood, at least until someone takes down the Zi'ir. On the other hand, a Zi'ir lost to spirit can be a source of valuable knowledge, as they almost certainly reached that state by seeking out spirit lore and rejecting their human side entirely. Werewolf lore and history is typically orally transmitted rather than written down, so often they are the only ones who know these things. Thus, occasionally pilgrimages will be taken to meet such zi'ir, either to ask for their secrets or to imprison them and torture them for information. Most Zi'ir are self-inflicted problems, but there are a few things out there that can break a werewolf's soul from the outside. In Hong Kong, some strange and unknown thing occasionally tears the power of the First Change out of young werewolves in the midst of their transformation, leaving them as Zi'ir before they even know what they truly are. In France, there are far more werewolves than ever before recorded, and the nation is now a pilgrimage center and hub for many tribal efforts in Europe. Some there were overwhelmed during their First Change, consumed by a fury so great that they have never awakened from their bestial rage. In some places, for no reason anyone knows, there are strange spirit-maelstroms in Shadow which flay Essence from spirits and can tear harmony directly from werewolves. Further, the Firstborn can levy terrible punishments on those that gravely dishonor and desecrate their spiritual bond, which can occasionally go so far as to shatter a werewolf's mind and soul, rendering them Zi'ir. Zi'ir are created when a werewolf at Harmony 0 or 10 dramatically fails a Breaking Point that would push them in the direction of the extreme they are already at. Forsaken require three such dramatic failures, while Pure require two. Zi'ir are locked at their Harmony rating and can never change it in any circumstances. They also gain the persistent Madness condition, and each day they gain one of Spooked, Shaken, Guilty or Paranoid. They cannot join packs or form totem bonds, and they cannot regain Willpower from Bone, only Blood. Zi'ir also gain at least one Spiritual Poison, which they can never remove. These include: Dead Spirit (Harmony 10 only): Your eyes are dead, your spirit desolate. You can never regain Willpower by any means. Any location you are present in for a scene becomes a temporary Barren until you leave. Dissipation (Harmony 0 only): Your flesh is dissolving into spirit ephemera. While you are asleep or inactive in Shadow, your body decoheres, becoming a mist or rain of blood and dust that drifts around the area. If alerted or woken up, you take several turns to recohere into your normal form. If you somehow enter the Flesh world, you are permanently treated as being in the Twilight Form manifestation. You may submerge yourself into a Locus, however, gaining rote quality on all Gift activation rolls against anyone that's taken Essence from the Locus that scene. Form Lock (Harmony 10 only): Except during death rage, you cannot exit either your human or your wolf form, whichever one you happened to become Zi'ir in. Geryo: You have become infected with the Geryo contagion. Gibber (Harmony 0 only): You cannot communicate coherently. Anyone who is exposed to your attempts to do so has to make a roll to avoid gaining the Madness condition for a week. Maddening Bans: You gain three persistant Ban conditions, at least two of which must contradict each other. Moon Fugue (Harmony 10 only): You gain the Moon set of triggers for death rage. If you already had them, you enter death rage every night when the moon rises. Rage Spirit (Harmony 0 only): When you sleep, your death rage exits your body in the form of a rage spirit that wanders into shadow and has rank based on your honorary rank. While your rage is out on its own, you cannot death rage or enter Gauru form. Regaining your death rage requires you to track the spirit down and make a roll to force it back inside you. If it dies, a new one emerges from your body when you next sleep. Ravening Hunger (Harmony 10 only): You get the persistent Addicted condition towards human flesh. Spiritual Poison (Harmony 0 only): Your Essence is toxic. If you take Essence from a locus or use a fetish, any other werewolf that attempts to use that Locus or fetish in the next month suffers the Poisoned tilt at moderate level. Next time: Smothering Love, the Angel of Empty Spaces
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Aug 26, 2019 17:25
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JcDent posted:Ah, so we'll reach them eventually. I though it was something I was missing, what with not having been here for the Forsaken FnF. Yes, though idigam are a thing from prior books. Capsule summary: they are prehistoric spirits of constant change which Wolf defeated but was unable to kill, so he trapped most of them on the moon. Like, the physical moon. They came back to Earth with the astronauts and have a tendency to cause problems because they're both extremely powerful and unpredictable and have a tendency to latch onto and take shape from the first thing they run into, which makes researching their weaknesses extremely hard.
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Aug 26, 2019 17:26
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Mr. Maltose posted:The X-card is actually an extremely good rule that is occasionally used to paper over other due diligence but if you find yourself complaining about it every game you review that doesn’t sound like an X-Card problem. 
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Aug 26, 2019 17:42
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 Being a Dynamic GM is our next section. It's longer than the previous sections, and marginally better organized, but still has an awful lot of disconnection between its sections. It commits the ongoing and frustrating fallacy of many of these books of telling you that something's a good idea, but not how to do it. And as I mentioned previously, it never actually tells you what a "dynamic" GM is. There are a few references to it in the chapter, and they come down to saying that a dynamic GM is one who stands up and walks around the room while running. So, our first subsection is How to Start a Campaign. Rather than talking about recruitment as the previous sections did, it's three specific techniques. Session Zero is the advice to have a character generation and expectations session, which is good stuff. Campaign Prologues suggests running one-on-one sessions for the individual players, which is an interesting idea, but I wouldn't want to try and schedule it in real life and there's no guidelines as to how those sessions ought to be structured - especially difficult given that a lot of the earlier advice about session structure might not work in this case. Player Adventure Seeds suggests.. well, asking the players for their own adventure seeds. That's going to be very player dependent, and there's not a lot about how to adapt it to different player types. Check In With The Players basically means to ask the players how the game is going - again, a good idea, but I'd hope not one that many new GMs need to be told (although I might be surprised, I suppose..) Learn How Things Are Going gives the rather painfully obvious advice that you should act on player feedback, and pretty much nothing on how to do it, other than that for some reason you should ignore the players if they say they want more magic swords. No, really, that's an actual example. Refresh Your Memory and Theirs suggests checking in with the players to remind them of ongoing campaign events, which is a good idea, but unfortunately the example given is one where a PC has a plot where they're searching for their brother but it hasn't come up for a few months (!), and the GM is supposed to just ask the player "Tell me what you've learned about your brother's disappearance." Not as in "what would your character have learned during that period of downtime", but "relist all the things your character learned from play several months ago". The theory is that the player will reacquaint themselves with the information and also they might mention things at different levels of importance to what you originally thought, which is a cue on how the plot is going. The only problem with this is that most players I've met will just tell you to sod off, having a brain primarily filled with several months of real life and work. Ah well. Character Summaries suggests asking the players to summarise the events of the session from their characters' point of view at the end, which I suppose is potentially workable - except that the examples aren't really character summaries but player summaries. (The example is "I really like combat so I was a bit sad when Bill's technician deactivated the warbot from afar..." It'd be a kind of weird character who'd have preferred to risk their life.) Those are fair enough, I suppose, a bit similar to the previous suggestion. Setting the Tone is our next subsection, and unfortunately it's another repetition of most common set of unworkable suggestions and unexplained tasks in these books. Mess with the enue: dim the lights, play music, use props, and even (groan) cosplay (there was an interesting thread on Reddit describing how the introduction of cosplay to an RPG session ruined the mood for everyone, but let's not discuss that possibility). Vocabulary says to use.. relevant vocabulary, but not a whole lot on doing this other than some painfully obvious ones like "don't compare magical items in a fantasy game to cars or smartphones". It also contains the suggestion to "inject words like troubadours, villeins, fiefdom, abbey, and so on" which would be good if it actually explained what they mean - well, ok, ok, that's only a Google away, but still, injecting those words doesn't mean much if you don't inject the things into the setting. And Impose The Tone.. well. "If the players are on a long trek, have them stand up and walk around the room." Using your tools is a very brief section which is the one that tells us that standing up and jumping and moving around the table is "the very definition of dynamic GMing", and that it can be a good idea to do different voices as long as they're not racist stereotypes. Advanced Description is a much more detailed, and therefore more interesting, section. It talks about using pre-written descriptions and avoiding making the game become a session of being read to, and that you should give more description to the important things in a scene - and then makes the very valuable observation that once the players are used to this, you can use it in the opposite direction, signalling importance by how much something is described - and that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, for you or for the players. Unfortunately, next to it is the idea of giving general descriptions and letting the players ask questions, with this example: quote:By asking "are there a lot of books on the bookcase?" what they're actually telling you is "I go over and look at the bookcase." No. No they bloody aren't. You can see if a bookcase is stuffed or has empty spaces from a distance. I mean, ok, it's not a bad suggestion, but somewhere there's a new GM thinking it's a good idea to follow up with something like "and as you walk towards the bookcase a mantrap closes on your foot..." Describe Emotions says you should use emotive descriptions without specifically telling the players how their characters are feeling, and does actually give some examples of doing that, although they're not all that good (for example, describing something as "a thing of pure fear" technically doesn't tell the player that their PC is afraid, but it's a bit of an awkward description). Don't Provide Specificity Unless Asked, however, is.. ugh. It basically says: don't tell the players how many crates are in the storeroom, don't tell them which way something came from, don't tell them the exact distance that the orcs are away because people are bad at estimating distance under pressure, and so on. One of the examples is the distance to a hill being "pretty far" away, which unfortunately completely ignores what the previous section said about tells and cues in GM speech. One time when I tried to run a game with that kind of description, the players started writing a chart with the different phrases I'd used to describe distance listed in relationship to each other. "Ok, so which is further? Pretty far, quite far, or 'a way away'?" The summary gives away the problem: "eschew the idea that you're describing an objective reality". Now that's ok for some players, but it really isn't for others, with a heck of a lot of difference between players preferences based on environment interaction, visualisation, and so on. In fact one of the most interesting questions I found to ask players in recruitment or session zero is how they prefer descriptions: wargame style, movie style, book style or radio theatre style. Monte going for book style isn't too much of a surprise given the focus of his game systems, but it can be a very unpleasant clash - especially for a new GM - if it comes across wrong. Oh, and Know Your Players suggests that a good description is "the temple looks a little bit like the big Methodist church on Maple Street". So much for not using modern references in fantasy games. Next section. Advanced Timing! Oh yea, something good for me! Starting Things With Action suggests throwing the PCs into a fight at the start of a session, even if you skip over narrative to do so. See, I can see this working pretty well, provided.. and it's a big proviso.. that the fight goes well for them. If the PCs all get killed then, well, they're not going to be happy about having to work out the narrative leading up to it retroactively. (Yes, yes, you can fudge the fight, but that might be jarring too if that's not in PC expectations.) Flashbacks describes methods for using flashbacks, and - to its credit - does add that you have to make sure that the players are on board with it and prepared not to try to use them to create narrative contradictions or later problems. (It doesn't mention the need for one of the lower levels of descriptive detail to make it vaguely possible to avoid doing so, though.) Fast-Forward might sound obvious, but it's actually a suggestion to use flashbacks but from the other direction - in fact, what it suggests is almost exactly the Blades In The Dark technique of skipping over the preparations before a big event, then letting them be filled in retroactively. There's a second suggestion too - which is basically a legacy campaign. Both are excellent ideas, but they did need more detail. Side Scenes suggests that scenes with individual players should be played out in separate one-on-one sessions instead of at the table while everyone else waits, but doesn't deal with how this is a nightmare of narrative timing and RL scheduling and probably isn't realistic. And then there's advancing through foregone conclusions. Now, ok, yes, I can see the logic in "there's only two goblins left out of the twenty, do we need to play this out?" But it's a violent misfire with the previous bits of advice. If you're doing the "system-as-spectacle" thing where combats and similar are played out but heavily fudged, then yes, you should be playing that out because that's the height of system-as-spectacle. Let the players take their chance to use the weird ability combos and modifiers they can't use in risky situations, roll scadloads of dice and see how far into the negatives they can get those goblins. Again, what we have is a set of advice that's probably very specific to the kind of group that Monte likes to run for, but assumes a whole bunch of variables that can be significantly different for any other group. Creating Tension is about creating narrative tension, and would really have better gone in a section on adventure or story planning than live table running, but still. It lists two ways of creating tension. Raising the stakes is a good one: things get more risky, opponents pose bigger threats, and so on. The Unknown, however, is a bloody horrible section. It says that tension and interest is raised by mysterious questions with unknown answers. Now, to be fair, it does mention the big problem with this, which is that after a while it stops doing any of those things and just becomes a sign that you haven't been bothered to think something through. Unfortunately, its comment on this is that "that's a lousy assumption on their part and it usually comes either from having had a bad GM in the past, or from you inadvertently teaching them that you don't always do things for a reason". It doesn't mention the alternative interpretation - that they instantly recognize the mystery as a lazy way of creating interest and it runs off their backs; nor what that far more usually comes from - shittily written TV series shoehorned into a commercial model that actively creates lazy mysteries with answers no-one cares about because they'll only be revealed when the ratings are in freefall anyway. Ahem. Oh. "As soon as the players are absolutely convinced that they understand something, alter that thing." NO NO NO NO THAT'S JUST TEACHING THEM THAT NO LEARNED INFORMATION IS VALID SO THEY STOP EVEN TRYING TO ENGAGE WITH THE SETTING AAAAARGH Ahem. Ahem. Wooo-saaaa. Ok. Evoking Emotion. Oh, hey, you just managed that.. and you just have again. I'm just going to quote here. quote:There’s probably no greater moment for a GM than when you create situations that affect the players emotionally. I don’t mean in a weird, psychologically manipulative way, but in the way that a sad story makes someone sad or a horror story makes someone scared. We all know it’s not real, it’s just a story, but good stories bring out real emotions. Yep, you totally ought to do it! How? Well, um, moving swiftly on! We also don't mention that there's two levels to this kind of stuff and if the players are genuinely angry and upset that an NPC betrayed them that might not be a reaction to the story, it might be a genuine upset with the game and something that was a huge mistake. Ok, it does actually mention this in the next section, but just says "make sure that it is only within the context of the game". How? Gumph. Hooking Players says to get to know what the players (not the PCs) want from the game, and use it to drive them into the stories. This can work. It can also blow up disasterously, especially if the players feel that they'll never get what they want out of the game until the story ends - in the last session. That's not addressed. Encouraging Proactivity in Players is a full column of how great it is to have proactive players, but nothing about encouraging them except "use character arcs". What are they? Oh, I didn't mention this. See, one of the chapters in the player section is the character arcs copy-and-pasted from Invisible Sun, but with the mechanics deleted. Ok, granted, that means that the startup cost and the XP rewards are gone, which removes some of the system messiness from it, but still. Yes, Build, Birth and Fall From Grace are all there exactly as in Walpole's F&F. And, yes, the Game Mastering Character Arcs section from Invisible Sun is there too in a sidebar (in the player section) but with "vislae" replaced with "PC" or "character" whenever it is mentioned. Offstage Scenes is to do with running scenes with the standard PCs not present, and - well, it's fair enough, honestly. The next section, however, Two Games, One World is the rather bizarre idea of running two concurrent groups in the same world such that they can interact with each other. The main benefit of this appears to be that.. players can cross over between the groups. Geek social fallacy! I mean, it's an interesting idea, but I don't know why it's here - it's certainly not something a beginner ought to be taking on, and this is still a beginner level book. Co-GMing discusses ways to involve multiple people in running the game, such as dividing duties, and dividing up the players - either onto completely different branches of the adventure, or while in the same scene but in different parts of it (which sounds incredibly confusing). Finally, Learning from your mistakes repeats the previous advice about player feedback, then suggests looking at your session in hindsight. If things didn't go well, it suggests "think about what you might have done, and then as a mental exercise, roleplay what might have happened if you had". But the example is weird - the example isn't about the GM making a mistake, it's about the PCs doing something that wasn't what the GM expected and oh god there's a chance that Monte actually considers that to be a mistake by the GM doesn't he. It doesn't mention, though, that GMing is a real-time activity and too much focus on "the wit of the staircase" ultimately only makes you feel bad. Finally, there's the idea of Recording the sessions - not to share online or anything, but just to watch back. I've never met a PC group who wasn't creeped out by this. So, we have some very good ideas, but very weak implementations. And some massive assumptions about group style that aren't going to be borne out in every situation. Pretty much textbook for the weaker GM advice books, really, and it's rather sad that it's positive compared to the huge shadow of meh that's been most of this book so far. Still, there is a bit more to come. (And hey, they're reprinting Robin's Laws! That's something neat at least.)
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Aug 26, 2019 18:07
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the whole “turning a person into noodles” thing matters so much less in a world of resleeving. Like it’s weird and gross but when the person you just killed and ground up can show up before the noodles are even all the way cooked it takes a lot of the horror out of the situation. Which in turn mean there’s even less reason to include it unless we’re entering the GM’s magical realm
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Aug 26, 2019 18:27
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Fuuuuuuuuuck this. All of this. Stop writing, Monte.
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Aug 26, 2019 18:31
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I wonder if there's a word for "advice which is awful in that specific way that makes it obvious that the writer never thought for a second about putting it into practice himself."
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Aug 26, 2019 18:42
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megane posted:I wonder if there's a word for "advice which is awful in that specific way that makes it obvious that the writer never thought for a second about putting it into practice himself." Punditry Yikes is a lot of that oddly counterproductive and self defeating. It sounds like someone rambling and unwilling to stop even long after running out of actual ideas.
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Aug 26, 2019 18:55
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Sometimes I think all these hacks saying to develop voices for your characters by actually trying to do six amateur voice acting gigs (while dancing in circles, running a stereo, and cosplaying no less) at the table just don't know what a narrative voice is. Yes, absolutely develop 'voices' for your NPCs, by which I mean ways they speak, mannerisms they have, etc. I find it's not a bad idea to practice improv writing dialogue, and to read it aloud to see if it sounds natural enough, mostly because it saves you time to be ready to type when you're GMing. Having a voice in my head for what a character would sound like if I could pay someone to voice-act my games is helpful. Trying to do it at the table myself usually isn't. I mean I can't exactly do 'grumpy, world weary dragon trying to sound a lot older than she is and coming off like a teenager trying to Batman Growl.' myself. But I can certainly know that's how a character sounds and have that inform their text and speaking.
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Aug 26, 2019 18:55
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Mr. Maltose posted:The X-card is actually an extremely good rule that is occasionally used to paper over other due diligence but if you find yourself complaining about it every game you review that doesn’t sound like an X-Card problem. The thing is that since I tend to review moron edgy games, it tends to be games that have stuff like "OH YEAH YOU SHOULD HAVE YOUR PLAYER CHARACTERS RAPED TO REALLY SHOW THEM HOW EDGY YOU ARE.  " like nuKult that then whip out the X-Card rather than actually making a commitment towards helping GM's not fuckign traumatize their players.
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Aug 26, 2019 19:13
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1) I didn't expect Hams to make a reference to actual real historical fencing from Spain. That's a pretty deep pull. Good for them. 2) Purple : as someone who runs a lot of horror games, I really love and appreciate the X-Card as a mechanic. Horror games are inherently about riding a line between fun and disgust and it's really handy to have constant player feedback. Obviously I talk to my players about broad themes and stuff before the game but even then you can over-step a boundary that someone didn't know they had, and I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable because horror is kind of all about doing scary things but in a safe environment. Like to give a random movie example, as someone who has watched horror movies all their life I'm pretty immune to violence in movies. But when I got to That Scene in Bone Tomahawk I still was pretty freaked out. Now that was still fine for me, if getting towards the edge of my tolerance, but I can totally see someone who wasn't as inured to horror poo poo getting freaked out and if I was GMing something like that I'd want the feedback that I'd over-stepped. (Not that I would. I think describing gore in RPG's is pretty facile and juvenile and I prefer creeping dread, but the same would apply.) 3) If you put a person through a meat grinder, you wouldn't get noodles. This was clearly written by a person who doesn't know how noodles or meat grinders work. Making meat noodles would be a loving nightmare and you'd need to add a bonding agent waaaaay stronger than making say meatballs and then you'd have to flour the poo poo out of them and then I don't know how you'd actually cook them that wouldn't just turn it back into a hamburger. The person who wrote this clearly doesn't know anything about cooking and I'm deeply offended by their lack of taste. I'm so angry I don't care about the pun.
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Aug 26, 2019 19:23
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Xiahou Dun posted:2) Purple : as someone who runs a lot of horror games, I really love and appreciate the X-Card as a mechanic. Horror games are inherently about riding a line between fun and disgust and it's really handy to have constant player feedback. Obviously I talk to my players about broad themes and stuff before the game but even then you can over-step a boundary that someone didn't know they had, and I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable because horror is kind of all about doing scary things but in a safe environment. See, I'm totally on board with telling people that: "If poo poo crosses your red lines, you can say no and things stop/you can leave the table with no judgments." But something about calling it THE X-CARD rather than just "say no if it weirds you out/terrifies you in an unfun way" just grates on me. It's probably entirely on me that it pisses me off, but it just feels like an immature way of handling it.
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Aug 26, 2019 19:30
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Making it an explicit mechanical thing is actually part of the reason the X-Card is effective, so this is extremely a ‘you’ problem.
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Aug 26, 2019 19:34
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Xiahou Dun posted:1) I didn't expect Hams to make a reference to actual real historical fencing from Spain. That's a pretty deep pull. Good for them. They add more silliness with the focus on reciting exactly what you're doing while you're fighting, but yes, the Diestros are basically using Destreza style fencing. Also given the obvious Princess Bride influence, it's fitting they'd still use a real fencing style; the styles Inigo references as he and Wesley fight and talk about their tactics are all real fencing masters and fight-books, after all. E: I like the Diestros so much because I really enjoy stories about martial arts styles and schools and things, since I used to both fence and practice martial arts before my arthritis stopped me. So I enjoy reliving that stuff through PCs and I'm glad they're in the game. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Aug 26, 2019 |
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Aug 26, 2019 19:34
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PurpleXVI posted:See, I'm totally on board with telling people that: "If poo poo crosses your red lines, you can say no and things stop/you can leave the table with no judgments." But something about calling it THE X-CARD rather than just "say no if it weirds you out/terrifies you in an unfun way" just grates on me. For whatever reasons, making it an explicit mechanic makes people waaaaaaaay more likely to invoke it. Probably something about psychology and socialization. Lots of people find it much easier to hold up a card than say, "Hey guys, this is a bit much, could we not?" I can agree that if the latter were natural it might lead to a better civilization, possibly, but that's not the reality we live in so just use the X-Card mechanic and make everyone happier. Now I'll entirely agree that if a game is trying to solve actual problems in their writing with the X-Card mechanic that's hosed up and dumb. It's fundamentally about honing in on the tone everyone wants out of a game, but everyone still needs to be vaguely aiming in the same ballpark ; it works fine for making sure that everyone has a comfortable amount of body-horror in a game about doing Cronenberg poo poo, but if someone tries to do a rape scene in Golden Sky Stories we've obviously gone beyond that point. Basically it's a very good mechanic that I think should be in all horror RPG's and also many others, but has been sometimes misused and misapplied. Night10194 posted:They add more silliness with the focus on reciting exactly what you're doing while you're fighting, but yes, the Diestros are basically using Destreza style fencing. I also see that, but I'm annoyed by the Princess Bride (despite loving the movie as it's amazing) because they list that poo poo but don't do any of it. Like they did all this research to actually list historical fencing masters, and then just do Errol Flynn style stage fighting. Which is fine. I have no beef with that. It looks good on the screen. But I would have honestly preferred they did made up names. It's like how I love hard sci-fi, or science fantasy technobabble, but the bits in between piss me off. I'm fine with fiction caring or not giving a poo poo, but I want it to decide on a level and stick with it.
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Aug 26, 2019 19:59
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Mr. Maltose posted:Making it an explicit mechanical thing is actually part of the reason the X-Card is effective, so this is extremely a ‘you’ problem.
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Aug 26, 2019 20:33
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Xiahou Dun posted:For whatever reasons, making it an explicit mechanic makes people waaaaaaaay more likely to invoke it. Probably something about psychology and socialization. Lots of people find it much easier to hold up a card than say, "Hey guys, this is a bit much, could we not?" I can agree that if the latter were natural it might lead to a better civilization, possibly, but that's not the reality we live in so just use the X-Card mechanic and make everyone happier.
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Aug 26, 2019 20:35
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Mors Rattus posted:Yes, though idigam are a thing from prior books. Capsule summary: they are prehistoric spirits of constant change which Wolf defeated but was unable to kill, so he trapped most of them on the moon. Like, the physical moon. They came back to Earth with the astronauts and have a tendency to cause problems because they're both extremely powerful and unpredictable and have a tendency to latch onto and take shape from the first thing they run into, which makes researching their weaknesses extremely hard.
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Aug 26, 2019 20:40
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Zereth posted:Not to mention that there's a good chance that other people might say "No" to the "could we not" request, while if they say no to the x-card they're breaking the rules. Yes this is also an excellent point that I hadn’t considered. I basically only play with friends who are chill so I’ve only had the mechanic used like twice, but this is a very good thing to keep in mind.
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Aug 26, 2019 20:57
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 Inquisitor Making Characters for Inquisitor Once again, it’s time to talk about everyone’s favorite 54mm-scale wargame/narrative generator set in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, Inquisitor. Last time, we talked about the genre staple of gear porn and an endless series of items getting statted out, whereas now we get to character creation. To begin, the game lays out a few important guidelines:
So, a lot of this is the idea that it’s an experience generator, rather than a strictly balanced game. As such, there are some huge variations in what you’re doing, but overall, they stress designing to a narrative and what would be fun in order to help players get engrossed. They then present a series of archetypes, with options for rolling some random “generics” alongside the examples they provide. Inquisitors are, obviously, the main thing this entire book is about. I’ll spare the descriptions, but we get some basic statlines and recommendations, as well as three example Inquisitors: Inquisitor Covenant of the Ordo Malleus, Witch Hunter Tyrus and his bombastic Monodominant philosophy, and Inquisitor Eisenhorn of the Highly-Profitable Book Series from Black Library. They each show that, using the same basic template, you can create wildly-different characters - one of them hates psykers while the other is one, all of them are described as using different techniques to inquisit, and they’re all characters that feel somewhat fleshed out from the brief description. Space Marines are the biggest dudes, and absolutely ridiculous in Inquisitor, which is why the game warns that they should only show up as a cameo at some point. If you don’t know their history, then I suspect this is your first time browsing any sort of gaming space, in which case I hope you enjoy what you’re reading and also that the dudes yelling about the Emperor of Mankind aren’t too offputting. The Adeptus Mechanicus are, obviously, the folks who are adept at mechanized stuff. Game roles include being super pro-cyborg, acting as a mission patron, and blithely causing Necron invasions by refusing to listen to any sort of reason or sanity around cool machines. The sample character, Magos Delphan Gross, shows the other advantage of writing Mechanicus characters - you can create some weird technology and prosthesis if you’re interested and willing to play with mechanics, which is a fertile ground for modelers and converters. Rogue Traders have their own RPG, but it boils down to “Hyper-colonialist adventures in space”, so I think you can see where they might fit in Inquisitor - either as an asset in a game or as the leader of a quasi-Inquisitorial retinue that seeks even more incredible wealth from the galaxy. Cultists and Fanatics are self-explanatory. Because this is the grim darkness of the future, they are clearly going to be on all sides of any conflict. Imperial Guard are members of the interplanetary fighting forces that, while not exactly the Imperium’s finest, are still some of humanity’s finest soldiers. In general, if you’re including a Guardsman, you’ll stick with the general soldier archetypes - grizzled veteran, complete rookie, individual on penalty duties thanks to some crime, or any other number of soldier-y concepts. Desperados are something fairly unusual to the typical 40k experience, however! Outside of the military organizations, Desperados are loner mercenaries with some code of honor - think any of the wandering protagonists in a western. They’re good gunfighters, bad at working with others, and exactly the kind of fringe figures that end up working with the Inquisition. Enforcers are cops. Obviously. They can be Judge Dredd, hilariously corrupt Keystone Kopps, or anything in-between in Inquisitor. They make interesting characters because they’re the visible agents of order in what might otherwise be a band of ne’er-do-wells, and one suggestion is having an Enforcer ‘watching over’ some of the less-wholesome members of an Inquisitorial investigative squad, both to provide cover and help deal with the inevitable friction between people. Mutants are people diverging from the baseline genetic patterns of humanity. Seen as an underclass, they’re definitely the sorts of folks who will be fanatically loyal to an Inquisitor that has decided to bring them under their wing. Ecclesiarchy are priests of the Imperial Cult, giving sermons and doing other crazy-religious 40k stuff. Basically your classic protestant preacher as filtered through science fiction. Arco-Flagellants are enhanced, lobotomized agents of the Imperium, kept calm through neuro-feedback helmets and drugs. Then, when things need to get wrecked, they activate them via combat drugs and point them in the direction of whatever needs killing. They are loving terrifying on the board - their Nerve is 160, to give an idea - but they’re a one-trick pony that need a babysitter to do much of anything. Assassins come in several varieties, including random thrill-kill cultists all the way up to official members of the Officio Assassinorum. They’re hired to go in, kill the target, and then leave, getting good weapons and training (especially if an official member of the Officio rear end.). Daemonhosts are people with daemons in them. The daemons do not want to be there - instead, they want to be causing havoc, possibly temporarily manifesting in the real world in order to destroy and cause chaos. These are pretty much intended as objectives to kill. Following these examples, there’s quite a bit of advice on acting as a gamemaster and designing scenarios.
Apart from some scenarios and the single most worthless “point calculator” ever created, that’s the end of Inquisitor. It’s a strange game, and yet its DNA can be found in a ton of stuff that’s around today, because it was an ambitious game that didn’t really get the traction it deserved. There’s even people playing in 28mm scale, given the abundance of neat kits available now for various Imperial groups in 40k. So, if not a revival, then at least a greater understanding of what Inquisitor has brought to the world of sci-fi wargaming.
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Aug 26, 2019 21:16
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A lot of WH40kRP has its origins with Inquisitor. The eventual system they ended up with for DH is basically 'really badly abused WHFRP2e, but also with Necromunda and Inquisitor in it'. So it certainly had quite a legacy.
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Aug 26, 2019 21:21
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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon Evil Enemy Ghost Monsters We're into the spirit chapter now!  The Grandmother, also called Granny Stitch, is an ancient magath, a spirit that has combined several entirely unrelated concepts into itself. Humans have always warned of the shadows beyond the fire - and one of the many reasons for that is the Grandmother, who whispers promises. Hers is the voice that calls to adventure, which pushes ambition to act. Once, human tribes would sing in order to drown out her whispers in the night, promising great riches and untold wonders. The few tales werewolves tell of the Grandmother that date back to those ancient times say that she was a misguided spirit, as often destroying her victims as enlightening them. She lured the strong and greedy into the wild lands, that she might feed on the Essence derived from their fear of the unknown and the exhiliration they felt in discovery in darkness. She pushed humans to discover, to tame the lands of mystery and danger. She grew fat on their fear and their curiosity, as men and women sought ever deeper into the night, lighting it with their torches of learning. Unfortunately, she went mad. She became too attached to her food source, and she became unable to reconcile the fear and the inspiration together into a cohesive whole. Thus, she became magath, coming to crave the protection of humans from the dangers she called them towards. She was never able to resolve this contradiction. The Grandmother began to select victims from the ancient tribes of humanity. Those who followed her whispers were tangled in a black sludge, then drawn into her domain, where she would spare them the pain and suffering their curiosity would surely bring. Tales began to spread of slouched people wandering without goal in the trackless woods and jungles, their spirits broken. Those who had the bravery to attempt rescue of their lost kin only brought the Grandmother more Essence to feed on. Today, werewolves refer to the Grandmother as Granny Stitch. She is still potent and feared, but werewolves know how to be careful when dealing with the old magath. Some even do rituals to seek her favor in exchange for victims lured into the dark, where she can strip them of fear, ambition and desire forever. Grandmother's power is drawn from human ambition, curiosity and desire. These are what bring her the Essence she consumes - the leaps into the dark. When she feels enough of that Essence in a place's resonance, she creates a Shadow Gateway, sending her Saved out to influence and draw in new victims for her. However, in the modern era, there are not nearly so many explorers seeking the unknown. Rather, Granny Stitch's targets are more often thrill seekers hunting adrenaline highs - they're easier to find. She does still target those exploring the new, though - astronauts, space researchers, physicists investigating the cutting edge of science and doctors performing new and groundbreaking research. These call to her hunger and her desire to "secure" her favored people. She has no particular interest in the lazy, listless or drug-addled, and she deliberately shuns them. If these are caught in her web, her Saved reject them and sometimes even kill them. Granny Stitch takes the form of a mass of thick black liquid contained in the shell of an immense bald woman. She sits in a rocking chair that moans constantly in pain and pleasure, and which sings songs of terror and beauty through unnumbered mouths woven into its upholstery. Her skin is wrinkled by the oozing of her thick corpus within her form, and several spindly arms and other appendages grow from her sides, emerging from underneath the quilt of human ears she wears. Jewels and eyes hang from strings around her neck and are worn as earrings, and she also wears them as rings on her many pointed, black fingers. She is always surrounded by bobbins loaded with black, tar-like thread and balls of black and sticky yarn, both made from her own Essence. She is lightning-fast with her needles when she wishes to make it into new things. She keeps her Saved under her skirts, each a shadow of their former human self. They emerge as needed, each stripped of their facial features. These are replaced by three cross-shaped stitches where they once had eyes and a mouth. The Grandmother sees this as a kindness - she is saving them from the tormented fates that their curiosity would drag them to. Granny Stitch genuinely believes herself a kindly protector, a savior of humanity from the dangers of the dark, the dangers they seek due to their constant need to discover, experiment and push the bounds of understanding. Her lures are meant to entrap those most vulnerable to such urges. When dealing with humans, she favors the confident, bold and ambitious, seeking to entrap them by whatever means seems convenient at the time. She has deluded herself into believing that she is beloved by humanity, and that she is personally responsible for all major breakthroughs of knowledge in human history, for the evolution of humanity out of its bestial past, and for simultaneously (and contradictorily) saving humanity from its impulses to know and discover. She lives in a realm in Deep Shadow, within a quaint little cottage in a vivid purple forest. The Saved stumble blindly in its gardens, tumbling and falling often. Those who reach her lair find it horrific, but also safe and secure. The ground is soft and pillowy, and it gently raises any who fall back to their feet. Even fire does not harm here, providing only a gentle, ticklish warmth. Accidental injury is practically impossible - the only threat is the Grandmother herself. Some old werewolves remember tales of those who have sought the Grandmother's favor. When she tried to entrap one of these werewolves, they say, they were saved by carrying the antique kit of a seamstress, brought in hopes of winning her over. The scissors, they say, were made of pure iron, and were able to slice right through her snares with great ease. Ithaeur are quick to note that while Granny Stitch is dangerous as hell, she is neither good nor evil. She's a spirit and doesn't really understand those concepts. Her snares are out there for good and bad alike to fall into, if they meet her criteria. Thus, she can be used to trap enemies if you're clever. Lately, however, she has been stepping up her kidnapping efforts. She wants to get as many humans as possible, and she's been talking to anyone that'll listen to her about a terrible threat approaching. She must, she says, save as many humans as possible before it arrives. In a very rare moment of self-awareness, she will even describe it as 'something worse even than what I have become.' The Grandmother is a rank 5 spirit, which makes her insanely powerful in a straight-up fight. She also has Influence (Fear) 3 and (Inspiration) 4, making her very powerful in anything relating to those two emotions. Her Ban is that she cannot interfere with any creature at rest, and even just sitting cross-legged on the ground means she can't attack you. Further, she cannot harm children, and the sound of a child crying causes her to lose Essence. Her bane is iron scissors. She has a unique power, Granny's Threads, which lets her coat an area in her black yarn to entrap people who touch it and drain their Willpower. Once she drains someone of all Willpower, the threads tighten around them completely and drag them to her realm. She can only use the threads this way in areas resonant with darkness, and they can only manifest when the area is actually dark - by day or in bright light, the threads vanish until the light goes away. However, they will remain in place for a month or until the threads are destroyed, whichever is first. The Saved are primarily human beings, though Grandmother has taken a few other creatures over the centuries. Each one once served her as a source of Essence to feed on, but now they are basically just hollow shells. They have no desire, emotion or want, save that which Grandmother implants into them. They are entirely dependent on her to exist, and if left to themselves will only frolic in her Shadow garden or stand perfectly still. All Saved have no facial features, as Grandmother removes them and weaves them into her own being, using them like clothing and jewelry. While they lack sensory organs besides skin, they can perceive the world in a limited way via the black, inky threads that form the X-marks on their 'faces' where their features once were. These resonate with Grandmother's hunger, and when she opens a Shadow gate for them, the threads push them to go through it and seek out those with urges for adventure, discovery and excitement. The calls they send out take a form relevant to the victim; typically, this is dreams or subconscious thought. These affected humans get drawn to the gate and may even enlist others to help them explore the unknown. Once there, however, they face the true horror of the situation. Almost no one is going to willingly enter Granny Stitch's home with the Saved, but they don't take no for an answer, and the Essence of fear is appetizing to the magath. The Saved themselves fight in complete silence. All of their efforts are focused on grabbing, dragged and throwing victims into Granny's threads. They neither feel nor understand the concept of pain. They're not especially strong or good at things, but they're tough and they don't stop. As long as they are in the presence of the Grandmother, in her domain or within a mile of an area of the Flesh world infested by her threads, they can perfectly perceive the world around them regardless of light level, and they ignore even magical concealment. Beyond that area, however, they are completely blind with all senses ut touch. They can spend Essence to infect someone they perceive with a desire to investigate an area of Granny's threads.  The White Agora is a spirit of isolation. Humans and werewolves are social animals, but also tend to have trouble with constant social stimulation. The balance of this, the cries of the lonely for some kind of interaction - these are the prayers White Agora answers. Once, it was weak, but the modern world has made White Agora strong, as people grow ever more isolated while in the middle of physical crowds. It is not a creature of physical solitude, after all, but psychological. It (or possibly she) is the spirit of that absence of connection between people, the fear or desire to be alone in a crowd. Her blessing is sensory deprivation from the entire world, and her name was given to her by a werewolf that felt her touch. She empties the world, makes it blank with a tinge of static. She has grown potent in the modern world of electronic devices shutting out all around their users. She feeds on people who do that, then heads out to deliver her gift to those who want to get away but cannot. This would be fine...if it weren't for, oh, drivers in traffic jams who wish they could be anywhere but here, or those barreling down empty highway thinking about anything but the road ahead. White Agora has caused a plague of traffic accidents wherever she's gone, though no one's yet noticed the pattern. White Agora is not cruel or sadistic. In her own way, she offers mercy. However, she's still a spirit. She doesn't care about people who die because of her gift. In fact, she's slowly starting to learn that violent death causes loss, and loss can make people withdraw into themselves. Which feeds her, of course. She hasn't started trying to kill people in order to cause that, but it's certainly a thought that may strike her. She does not appear to or name herself for those that subconsciously pray to her. If she did, after all, they wouldn't be alone. In the Shadow, though, she appears as a slender, apparently humanoid figure draped in endless folds of smooth, ivory-colored linen or perhaps thin leather. Her hood conceals no face, her sleeves end in no hands. Her garment-skin trails after her in a train of unraveling strips. When she speaks to those able to sense her or she is otherwise forced to show herself, she is aloof. She occasionally does things that seem almost maternal or soothing, though. She never, ever speaks to more than one person at a time, and if dealing with multiple people, she ignores all but one. If someone interrupts her, she attempts to leave in silence. One good way to figure out what's going on if your territory is having a weird spate of inexplicable traffic accidents is to talk to the survivors - because there are going to be some. Any survivor of a blessing from White Agora is going to give the same description: a giant empty white space just...opened up before them, and didn't go away for what seemed like almost an hour. The cops are unlikely to accept this as meaningful information, of course, but a werewolf should be able to figure out it means something's up. The book also provides a story of White Agora killing a werewolf. The dead wolf had been avoiding her pack until one night she just vanished, turning up a month later with signs of having been murdered by the Pure. Essentially, her pack had been investigating the whiteouts White Agora caused and had figured it they were caused by some kind of spirit, but not which one. White Agora really didn't like the attention, so she picked one of the pack at random and focused her power on them, focusing on isolating the wolf from the pack. Over time, this caused the wolf's bonds to fade until she just went off on her own and got jumped. White Agora is a rank 4 spirit, which gives her a pretty good set of pools, especially Defense and Speed. She's fast as gently caress. Her Influences are Isolation 2, Silence 1, Electronics 1. This means she's not quite so good at generally influencing the world; rather, it's her ability to make people hallucinate via her Numina that is her big threat. Well, that and her ability to drain people, shove thoughts in their brains and control their emotions, also via her numina. She's not going to be much of a fight except in terms of raw dicepools, but getting her to fight is not going to be easy, and she can absolutely gently caress up your friends and relations. Her Ban is that if conjoined twins request her to leave, she must flee to wherever they tell her to. Her Bane is the milk of a mother who gave birth with no other living person within a mile of her. Next time: The Plague-Shuck and the Usurper
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Aug 26, 2019 21:34
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Kinda like these weird ghost monsters, not gonna lie.Mr. Maltose posted:The X-card is actually an extremely good rule that is occasionally used to paper over other due diligence but if you find yourself complaining about it every game you review that doesn’t sound like an X-Card problem. Yeah, the X-card is great. Sometimes things just take a turn and you didn't expect it to affect you in a certain way and being able to just wordlessly indicate that you are affected and you need to stop is great compared to forcing people who are currently disengaging to talk about it. Script Change is good too, but they key part is not having to explain yourself. Codifying it as a mechanic makes people more comfortable doing it. It's like PbtA games codifying GM things as "Moves" helps a lot too, yeah "you can do anything, you're the GM!" but how much of anything and what anything and when? It's just good to codify things sometimes. megane posted:I wonder if there's a word for "advice which is awful in that specific way that makes it obvious that the writer never thought for a second about putting it into practice himself." its such garbage oh my god EthanSteele fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Aug 26, 2019 |
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Aug 26, 2019 23:32
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EthanSteele posted:It's like PbtA games codifying GM things as "Moves" helps a lot too, yeah "you can do anything, you're the GM!" but how much of anything and what anything and when? It's just good to codify things sometimes. When I write PbtA rules, I try and phrase as much as is reasonable as a "When you..." move. Those get applied to characters, the GM, and the players as distinct from their characters. It's mostly just style, but I think it helps bring everything together.
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Aug 26, 2019 23:47
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Kobolds Ate My Baby!: Part V – Spells! Kobold Magic Okay, the reason I set this section aside and skipped ahead for a bit is because this section, IMO, gets this game, and I wanted space to do it justice. Kobold magic is dumb, it’s fun, it’s goofy, and it’s flavorful. The biggest disappointment I have is that it’s so gated off; when 9th Level did Ninja Burger they gave magic to every ninja (because of their supposed omnicompetence), but KAMB has always emphasized that kobolds are impulsive little trash babies who should never be trusted with it in the first place. Only kobolds with Lackey! get to have spells*, and they get one rolled at random. Casting a spell requires taking a KHDC (with the rules assuming they happen at the same time, so the spell goes off even if your kobold dies) and a verbal or somatic component performed by that kobold’s player (which grants another KHDC if forgotten, and makes the spell misfire). Strap in, because it’s time to Mors this poo poo. *okay, technically I am being unfair here. One of the items kobolds can get as gear – this time from the Dangerous! Gear chart – is pages ripped out of an evil wizard’s spell book, which when crumpled into a ball and thrown at the target (which you the player must actually do and succeed at or the spell goes wild) take the effect of a random spell. Even scrolls get it, magic is buckwild.  The Spells of KAMB: In Color!!! Bail's Floating Frying Pan Effect: Creates a magical frypan that gives a big bonus to Cook rolls and can be used as a really good weapon, duration equal to on the caster's number of KHDCs Component: Must ask the other players, "CAN YOU SMELL WHAT THE [Your Name*] IS COOKIN!?" *does not clarify player or kobold, so do whichever you think is funnier Big Bee's Slapping Hand* Effect: A magic hand smacks a target of your choice for damage and Save or Knockdown. Component: Shout "Who's your [Daddy/Mommy]?" at the target *see Jef & Jon, they made it better six years before you even pointed out the problem. Not, like, all the way better, but still... Count Rein•Hagen's Vampsfuscation* Effect: The caster turns invisible! But still makes noises and smells, so watch out. Component: The kobold is only invisible for as long as the player keeps their arms folded across their chest. *this one has always been a favorite; my home group had some ex-LARPers in it, and we all adopted the MET LARP signals for convenience/mockery; when I read KAMB! for the first time I knew exactly the gesture being referenced Lord Elmer's Web of Glue Effect: It's the web spell from D&D. Still good. Component: "The player must sing/hum/chant a ditty about a friendly, local, web-shooting spider person!"  Löwërbräü's Wall of Beer Effect: Create a wall of protective, delicious, healing beer for 1D6 turns. Component: Do a happy dance and chant "tappa tappa kegga, wall of beer omega!" and then "pretend"* to chug a beer. *I mean the book says to pretend, but let's be honest with ourselves Poof! Effect: BAMF away Nightcrawler style, sulfurous cloud and all. Component: "POOF!" The book recommends giving the player a bonus if they supply the sulfurous cloud, but I cannot bring myself to approve. Restor's Spell of Somnolence Effect: It's the sleep spell from D&D. Also still good. Component: Make a mighty yawn. Anyone at the table who then yawns automatically falls asleep as well, and doesn't count against the original # of targets. Sandor's Spell of Summoning Chickens Effect: Pull a chicken from your hat*, which is a loyal summoned creature until it dies or the caster takes another KHDC. Component: Do a bad chicken impression, emphasis BAD *a kobold who knows this spell also gets a free hat (1 Armor Hit). It is specifically noted as a "keen hat". Spell of Mostly Unspeakable Horrors Effect: ??? It's all very unspeakable. The target takes a KHDC and damage equal to the caster's KHDC total Component: Howl and wail madly like an evil cultist Summon Horrible Demon That Enjoyeth Eating Kobolds Effect: Your kobold didn't actually learn a spell, but you told people you learned this one so they would back off. Component: Do whatever you want  Tabriz's Ball of Flaming Death Effect:  Component: Point at the target, laugh maniacally. How It Plays They clearly understood the value of having the players do loud stupid poo poo for laffs, because there are more spells in the supplements, including the kobold equivalent of clerics (risky business when your god hates you and wants you dead) and a shield spell that doesn't give a KHDC if you do an MC Hammer dance, can't touch this I loving love the spells. AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 27, 2019 04:28
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Also inklesspen, I went back and timg'd the banner on all my posts because I had been inconsistent about it. I don't know if your archive does timg-ing or not, but figured I should mention.
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Aug 27, 2019 04:29
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I love Monte Hall just copying and pasting in the character arcs from Invisible Sun, but with all the Nouns replaced. Birth - if your player's baby dies, they will experience one Sad, but if the baby lives, they will experience one Happy.
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Aug 27, 2019 04:54
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I was against X-Cards when they came out, but I was a shithead back then. The "codified system" aspect of them is really a good point in its favour.
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Aug 27, 2019 06:22
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now that I actually get Chuubo's, Monte Cook's character arcs really do feel like just an attempt to jack that but infinitely worse
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Aug 27, 2019 08:18
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hyphz posted:
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Aug 27, 2019 09:22
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This thread should cobble together a GM advice book and spread it out for a minimal fee at the same venues just to piss off old Monte.
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Aug 27, 2019 09:46
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By popular demand posted:This thread should cobble together a GM advice book and spread it out for a minimal fee at the same venues just to piss off old Monte. Just 30 pages of "for God's sake don't have anyone raped."
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Aug 27, 2019 09:58
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"Don't spend exorbitant sums of money backing 'Experimental' systems by pompous old farts who don't actually have that great of a track record for innovation"
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Aug 27, 2019 10:02
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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon Just Doing My Job  how does he close his mouth Every human society has had legends of plague spirits or something similar. (Mors' note: close enough, there's probably some that don't but the idea of something spreading disease is common.) This is because humans recall, vaguely and through various cultural lenses, the efforts of disease spirits, some of whom treated the spreading of plague as a sacred duty. All of the Firstborn took on broods of their own as their personal spirit-courts. Rabid Wolf chose the spirits of fire, passion and disease. He blessed his favorites with wolf-like form, sending them out to cull the human herd. Nimmursagu, He of the Fifty Stinking Teeth, the Plague-Shuck, still performs this duty as a sacred trust. Occasionally, Fire-Touched ritemasters will invoke Nimmursagu and request his aid, but for the most part, he does his job without need for that. He favors above all cramped quarters - cities in which humans share breath and taste each other's leavings. Places without space to breathe. Nimmursagu brings sickness to sleeping lungs and bites deep of weary blood. And yet, even more than this, he is clever, always watching the future. Rabid Wolf has many sickness spirits in his entourage, but the harriers are his favorites. Most are mid-range spirits, but some old ones are truly potent. The Fire-Touched speak of them with care and reverance, offering much to propitiate them. This is because the harriers are not required to obey Rabid Wolf's tribe - just Rabid Wolf. Most are shaped vaguely like wolves, but some take other predatory forms or those of scavengers. Most, like Nimmursagu, hunt alone unless someone has driven them to war. The Plague-Shuck is a dutiful son of Rabid Wolf, spreading disease to the weak, the young and the old. It gives him a sort of satisfaction to do his job well. He'd be practically pleasant to deal with, if you never saw him smiling cheerily while killing babies with plague. While he is loyal to Rabid Wolf, he does not hate the Forsaken. Indeed, he seems to like just about all werewolves, seeing them as having similar goals to himself. It would not be hard for a Forsaken pack to make peace with him. He'd be strained at first, annoyed at being distracted by his job even if he does like talking to werewolves. Your main issue would be that he gets annoyed and contemptuous of anyone who tries to tell him there is worth in protecting or feeling compassion for the weak links of the herd. His form is a gaunt wolf the size of a werewolf dire wolf form, hairless and black and with a leathery, corpse-like hide. His jaws are far, far too large for his head, and a fetid black goo coats his gums and drips from his yellowed fangs. He smiles often. Some attribute legends of black dogs of ill omen or hellhounds to Nimmursagu and his kind. In truth, there's a lot of entities that could be called "black dogs" and many of them are signs or causes of bad things. This means that if you hear about a black dog, it could be Nimmursagu, but there's just too many things out there for that to be a reliable identifier. However, if you hear about one hanging at a hospital...that's more likely. Nimmursagu has adopted a hospital in his territory. Novice werewolf shamans might think he means to destroy or corrupt it. They are wrong - the disease spirit quite likes the place. It is not a well-funded hospital, and poor or uninsured people are not treated well. Some leave no healthier than they arrived. Rumors of child ghosts causing the problems are likely rooted in the fact that, in his own way, Nimmursagu enjoys visiting children. The hospital's seen a lot of dead kids. Nimmursagu is a powerful spirit, rank 4 and with Influence (Sickness) 4. The dude has a job and he's obsessed with doing it. He's also very dangerous in a fight, between his spirit-size dicepools and his ability to terrify people with his presence, fire off disease blasts, drive people nuts and cause things to rot and decay. He also regenerates, similar to a werewolf, if he wants to. However, he's not unstoppable. His Ban is that he can't attack the healthiest person in any group, even in self-defense, which means there's always going to be someone he can't fight personally. His Bane is the sharpened bones of a human that died of a fatal illness affecting the skeletal system, like a bone cancer.  This dude is shockingly human in outlook. Linggan Zhao is a spirit that acts like he likes werewolves. He wants to help. He travels Shadow, seeking out packs that need his strength and power as a patron. If necessary, he will assault and drive out the old totem and then arrange for a demonstration of how much the pack needs his help. He will promise to help the pack grow stronger, gain more territory, spread fear through their rivals and neighbors. He will teach them tactics, find allies in the spirit courts of the region, and even generously teach occult lore. His true, harsh teaching begins only once the pack has strong borders and has driven off outsiders. As totem or patron, based on opportunity and need, he will seek to isolate and test each member of the pack, pushing to partake of harsh physical training and emotionally scarring work. He pushes them to break their oaths and pursue power and glory, looking to see how far they'll go and who will break first. He will indoctrinate his chosen into secret truths, teaching of devourers that will eat the world and end all things. Only the most powerful can hope to survive this, united in a new tribe sworn to Linggan Zhao. The spirit will lead those who accept his teachings into the Shadow to bring discipline and order there, eradicating any spirits that don't fall in line, promoting loyalists and calling in Linggan Zhao's own court to take over and enforce his will. All in service to the pack, of course. Always in service. Once the Shadow is secure, Linggan Zhao has a final test. He will name the weak links of the pack to those he considers loyal and strong, telling them that their final test is to sacrifice these weaknesses on fiery altars dedicated to Linggan Zhao. This will temper the pack in fire and make them forever strong. Those few who refuse at this stage or try to flee are prey for the rest of the pack in a grand Sacred Hunt alongside their spirit allies. Special favor will be given to those who capture the renegades and bring them to Linggan Zhao for torture and burning as avatars of weakness. Once the pack is loyal and obedient, Linggan Zhao installs a loyal retainer as their totem and moves on. This is not the end - the pack knows he may well call on them for aid later, so they must be ready. Now, they are one of his Claws, who must keep true to his vision and hide it from others, who are unworthy, while Linggan Zhao goes to find a new pack in need of his guidance. Linggan Zhao appears as a set of 13th-century Chinese armor, covered in iconography of fire and bristling with spikes. The design and color vary with his mood. His limbs can alter themselves into any weapon or appendage he desires. More rarely, he may return to his original form, a bird forged of steaming metal. This is the form he uses when he must move subtly and unrecognized, or when he must flee. Regardless of form, his eyes glow blue and he smells of burning metal at all times. His ego is immense, and he truly believes his cause is noble, but he is very secretive and reluctant to tell about the coming darkness unless he's certain he's speaking to his loyal followers or people he can easily kill. He avoids speaking of his origins if possible, and will not speak of other packs in his network of Claws until the time is right for them all to come together. He knows that these independent cells are more secure, especially because spirits are natural gossips. He takes great pains to hide his goals even from his servants, hoping to avoid werewolf attention outside of his chosen packs. In truth, Linggan Zhao began life as a minor fire spirit inside a Chinese arms factory at the start of the Boxer Rebellion. He watched as stronger spirits devoured his brethren, and he hunted and devoured any spirits he could find until he became leader of his little brood. He was eventually defeated by a pack of Forsaken, and he hated that they demanded his submission and even more he hated that he gave in. He vowed revenge even as he befriended their totem, a potent wolf spirit, and made himself indispensable to the pack. He even had the patience to work at turning spirit politics to his favor, until at last he could lure the totem into a trap and drink deep of its Essence. This inspired him to usurp the totemic role with the pack, becoming their new patron. They were his first victims. Among the many spirits Linggan Zhao has devoured and taken on part of the nature of, it was a particular spirit of lies that really changed him, though. The spirit smelled of sulfur and, before he ate it, it spoke of its dark masters (the Maeljin) and their willingness to be allies. Other, similar spirits often end up congregating after Zhao leaves a newly conquered territory, for his sadistic torment of his werewolves sometimes tears open Wounds. Linggan Zhao is willing to serve as a patron to Ghost Wolves, Forsaken or Pure. He absolutely hates the Firstborn, believing them to be wielding unearned power, and therefore that they are unworthy of recognition. His Claws are kept strictly in the dark from each other and know little of other cells. Indeed, none of them are aware that he has recruited both Forsaken and Pure into his little empire. In his rise to power, he was often rebuffed and chased out of at least one territory after a human sorcerer saw through his web of lies and warned his pack of his true intentions. Ever since, he has developed a strong, powerful hate of human mystics, witches and wizards. He attempts to kill them whenever possible. The more werewolf packs that Zhao takes over and crushes, the greater knowledge he has of werewolf society and beliefs. He's heard about how Lodges are used by Uratha to connect with each other across the world, and his desire to expand and gather followers has led him to seek to bind his wolves together as a Lodge. He still doesn't fully understand how they work, though. Even more, he wants to understand the Hosts. If he could, after all, it'd be a great addition to his arsenal to be able to split himself into independent but connected pieces to spread his "divinity" further. He's obsessed with learning more about them. It should also be noted, Zhao's plans are not perfect. One of his more powerful Claws has broken free of his influence and now plots revenge for all the terrible things Zhao convinced him to do. He now travels around, hoping to build an alliance against the spirit for a preemptive strike. Zhao's many spirit-spies are dangerous, though, and so he can't speak of it freely if he wants the ambush to work. Oh, and not all of the folks that want revenge are werewolves. One of Linggan Zhao's victims was made to sacrifice her own son on the pyre, and when he fled, he found himself in a realm of thorns and madness. He has returned now, years later. He is no longer human, but he is still very, very angry. He bleeds candle wax, and flames dance to his tune. He is bringing his eldritch allies with him, eager to set themselves up deep in Zhao's conquered territory so they may both have a home and help their friend in his revenge. They believe that the boy being driven into the thorns was no accident, that Linggan Zhao's sacrificial pyres are a sacrifice to the Hedge's cruel Masters. (They're wrong, but it's not like a bunch of Changelings being mad at Zhao is a bad thing.) Linggan Zhao is a rank 4 spirit, quite powerful and oddly, not a magath despite the vast number of spirits he's consumed and integrated. His Influences are Fire 1 and Metal 4, and that last is scary potent. Metal's all over and he has a lot of control over it. He's a powerful warrior and has quite a few social powers, including Dominate, which lets him spend Essence to just feel overwhelming to deal with and cow people, and Usurp, which lets him sever the ties of a totem to its werewolf pack and steal its place temporarily. His Ban is that he cannot tell three truths or three lies in a row. His Bane is any gun made in the factory where he was born. Next time: The Wolf-That-Was and the Broken Mirror
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Aug 27, 2019 13:07
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PurpleXVI posted:Just 30 pages of "for God's sake don't have anyone raped." Picture of John Wick (the game designer, not the fictional character) with "Don't do this" next to it.
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Aug 27, 2019 14:14
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My guess is that the guns and war and lies spirit isn't magath because there's a very coherent line of symbolism that lets him integrate all of those flavors of essence into a single theme. He's still able to pursue normal predation, with no particular internal contradictions.
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Aug 27, 2019 14:21
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Selachian posted:Picture of John Wick (the game designer, not the fictional character) with "Don't do this" next to it. Hey, negative examples are still really instructive. Play Dirty is infuriating, but also a great example of exactly how not to GM. All his actual rules work is also a great example of how not to design games. It checks out.
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Aug 27, 2019 14:35
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Speaking old farts who have a pretty good track record, anybody have thoughts on Cyberpunk Red? (Say what you will about Eclipse Phase, at least they're not charging $15 for a playtest document.) It seems like he did save some of the ideas from Cyberpunk 3.0 and implement them in a plausible way.
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Aug 27, 2019 14:48
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Man, the plague wolf and usurper armor are the worst. But so are the rest of the folks in the book. A werewolf can really never stop killing.
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Aug 27, 2019 15:24
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By popular demand posted:This thread should cobble together a GM advice book and spread it out for a minimal fee at the same venues just to piss off old Monte. Honestly, that's something I half considered actually suggesting. Flavivirus posted:This sounds like an interesting insight, could you expand on the differences between the four styles? Wargame style is a grid map, basically. Everything with precise distances, and enough to.. well, to play Attack of Opportunity rules properly, basically... Movie style is a map without distances, but still a complete map with everything on it that's visible from the start. There might be odd cuts and nobody has a measuring tape, but there can be a panning shot. Book style means there's a general description of what's around and possibly where some larger items are, but not enough to actually draw a map. The example I thought of most for this would be a statement like "a web of walkways criss-cross the ceiling". You don't just not know exactly where they are, you also don't know how many there are, but you can still interact with them with a certain amount of leeway. Radio Theatre style means there's pretty much nothing except a general description of what the scene is, and everything is brought into being or position by being interacted with. The only game I know which mandates this style is Puppetland and it doesn't mention that's what it's doing.
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Aug 27, 2019 15:40
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