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Comstar posted:I keep seeing Sigmar as the US and it's relationship with the rest of the world. And you better not choose a Significantly less. A person born in a Chaos tribe can in fact change and leave it, and there are instances of negotiation and temporary alliance between low level Chaos folks and Stormcast. E: basically, the line seems to be when you go from ‘this is my only option to survive’ to ‘I am really enjoying this.’ The former are not great but can be worked with and given a better life. The latter, uh, not so much. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 14:49 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 14:47
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Pathfinder But It's Just the SRD An unusual attempt So I think this is an interesting concept for a review, and I've pondered trying it for awhile. Rather than a full readthrough of a book (usually with too much detail put on the fluff because I like writing about fluff) I'd like to talk about the experience of running a game using only the Pathfinder SRD and having no prior experience in Pathfinder. With a group with no prior experience, either. So this is more a report about an old game and how the game system both felt genuinely necessary to it (to the point that I am still looking for good D20 alternatives, in hopes I can pick this setting up some time) but also hindered it, and what it is like to try to approach Pathfinder 1e itself with a group with no actual prior experience playing it (but plenty of experience with other RPGs) and no experience running it (though I had both played and run 3.5, so I sort of knew the gist) and who were much more interested in a 'fluff-first' approach. I have no idea how long this will be, but I think it provides an interesting perspective on the merits and issues of Pathfinder 1e. Believe it or not, there were definitely some merits. It wasn't all bad. First, the setup: Alternate History Europe (I wanted to do a sort of 7th Sea-esque thing) is having a big war in the Med. One of the not-Italian states, the Serene Republic, is trying to unify not-Italy into a single state and is also intent on leashing the papal states. This being an alternate history, there was no Protestant Reformation; there is primarily the Messian Church (named for the Messiah, whose name they don't use because they don't believe it's appropriate to speak the name of God), so attacking the center of the Messian faith is a big deal. They were fairly successful up until they made enough enemies and the Pope was able to use her connections (One of the alt-hist bits: Much more gender-equal world) to get together an alliance to oppose them. At which point the war turned against them, and their Doge pulled his 'in case this plan isn't working card' and uh, summoned a Pit Fiend. Yes, an actual Pit Fiend. From the D&D cosmology. One that had been scratching at the walls of this world for ages, trying to enter the world and open up a new avenue to grab souls for the Blood War. Players were present at the desperate battle where this happened, and where the possessed Doge was struck down, as soldiers across the field began to change form and mass possession and strange monsters strode the battlefield. Magic had come into the world and it wasn't leaving. Their previously sane planet was now a battleground for the cosmic forces of dickbag parasite D&D Gods, aloof angels, murderous demons, and conniving devils. The PCs themselves were a bunch of backline clerks with the army: An Inquisitor of the Messian Church (whose main job was editing theology books to see if they had major academic errors; this was well beyond the 'executing heretics' times) who found herself partially possessed and turned into a tiefling, an Osmanli (Turkish) Chemist (Alchemist) who was originally just there to help keep the gunpowder working and supply the army and who suddenly found the old alchemy he studied as an academic interest had real power, and a Yahwehist clerk from the Commonwealth (Polish Jew) with an interest in the Kabbalah (her scholarly abilities and inspirations represented by Bard). After defending the cannons with their new powers and managing to shoot a greater demon in the face with one, they would end up a party of adventurers in their strange and altered new world, forming a sort of ecumenical council of asskicking as they investigated wizard crimes. They also had a musketeer mercenary for awhile, though his player dropped out over some other issues, and a cavalrywoman from North Africa, but work picked up for her and she didn't have time to keep participating, sadly. The three scholars sort of ended up the core of things. I had originally come up with the setting for a different friend who was way more familiar with 3.5 and PF, hoping he could help me learn the system through running it for him; the alternate history elements were both because it made it easier to just write silly stuff without needing exhaustive research and because it let me alter the setting more easily to be more gender inclusive, to edit out a lot of pogroms and awful things from history so we could focus more on swashbuckling early 18th century adventures against D&D nonsense, and to make a bunch of the D&D trappings easier to apply. I wanted 7th Sea (with less Wick) vs. D&D. It didn't work out with that player and his group (the pitch didn't grab them, it happens) but did catch on with my other friends who had never played Pathfinder. I had not initially planned for all 3 Abrahamic-esque faiths to be the main characters, nor for all of them to be scholars of some sort, but it ended up being one of the really fun parts of the campaign. Having three very different, educated perspectives on everything going on was definitely one of the highlights of the campaign. It also worked out nicely (accidentally) with the mechanics of Pathfinder. They didn't pick their PCs by trying to build a powerful group, but rather all of them found that various half-casters or fighters were the most interesting sounding classes. The poor musketeer had the misfortune to play a Pathfinder Gunslinger; this didn't contribute to him dropping out but I'd absolutely understand if it had. He was stuck with a worse-than-a-normal-fighter situation while the three scholars all had fun abilities to play with from Inquisitor, Alchemist, and Bard. One of the first things we learned is that the Inquisitor was a real winner of a class as far as being fun to play without feeling like they overwhelmed the game. Same for Alchemist and Bard. I genuinely think the various 'half-casters' kind of hit the nail on the head for actual fun playability in Pathfinder after that experience and after running a much more mundane game about Bohemian mercenaries in the same setting: They still got to have the occasional exciting swordfight and physical combat for flavor reasons, but had lots of fun powers and interesting abilities to throw around. The Inquisitor's Judgement ability was just fun to use: It created moments where the Inquisitor got to dramatically pronounce her judgement on her foes, because her whole thing was going from out of shape Italian clerk to part-demon badass in a world that suddenly expected a theologian to be hunting the actual demons and actual witches that were actually threatening the actual world. The Bard had great fun fluffing her magic and her inspirations as the wisdom of the Most High, switching the fluff on some spells to calling down plagues of locusts and frogs or inspiring the others with the word of Yahweh. The chemist liked coming up with strange formulae and old 'stuff that never worked before' as he tried to re-research what had once been his hobby and combine it with the chemistry he actually knew. Even the musketeer really enjoyed 'just' being the guy with the gun while he was playing with us; shooting a devil in the face is satisfying, even if his class wasn't very good. They didn't really minmax their stats or spells, though. I remember the players settling on some low-level spells whose flavor they loved and tried to come up with reasons to use those all the time, even if something else would be better. My own inexperience with the system didn't help; I had no idea what I was doing, either, as I just didn't have the experience with 3.PF to really know its optimization well beyond 'play a caster' being the best option. I think most of the party ending up on half-casters was a big stroke of luck that helped keep the game much more engaging, especially as those were the three players who stuck around long-term. They got to use interesting abilities without being as insanely powerful as full casters. They tended to pick abilities by what sounded fun, and as the game went, started to dread leveling up because it meant looking for Feats. There's no way around how bad Feats were. I had never quite experienced how bad the Pathfinder Feat List was until I was hit with a full SRD with no guidance. There are a fuckton of them. Maybe 30-50 are actually worthwhile. I did know enough to warn players away from some of the worst ones, and I felt the players frustration with them often. For instance, the Inquisitor wanted to use a longsword and pistol once she really got into the whole Inquisiting thing. But that would require Two Weapon Fighting, and looking at all the nonsense required for that, she had to give up on the idea and settled for mostly wielding her longsword two-handed and carrying a double-barreled pistol she never really used because she'd have had to invest in ranged stuff a bunch to use it. To get the flavor she ended up fluffing most of her ranged attack spells as being gunfire enhanced by holy power. The Bard was never sure what to take, nor was the Alchemist, and just kind of ended up taking whatever sounded somewhat interesting. They were still quite playable, because they were mages; if they were full martials I'm pretty sure picking feats by what sounds fun would have made for a way worse time. Their Musketeer was more experienced with d20 games while he was in the group and so was able to remain somewhat effective since he had more of a sense of what he needed to operate. I also just couldn't guide them through it; I'd never played a caster much and didn't know what kinds of stuff they wanted besides Metamagic, and I had no idea how useful that was if you were only a half-caster (it's still very useful). I have no idea if working off the core rulebook rather than a dry pile of the rules with nothing in between would have given more guidance, but given 3.5 I suspect not. I also found myself just coming up with general 'templates' for human-type villains because constructing high level enemies was something I only had the time to do if they were going to show up more than once. The possessed Doge who had renegotiated his terms with the Pit Fiend as it was too desperate to stay in the world? Main campaign villain, 20th level Sorcerer, so had to do him up. Some crazy guy who has fallen to worshiping the Beast of Gevaudan as an evil Druid? General 'mid-low level Druid' template. I had to make a lot of NPC templates to handle the fact that a lot of adventures were people-focused. It was generally a relief when I could just look up a monster of the week for them to face, like the sea serpent or the Lantern Goat (Goddamn I love the Lantern Goat. It's an evil goat! With a magic lantern full of souls it steals! It's ridiculous) or the first time they ran into the Owlbear and declared they were a thing against God and nature. Parsing monster stats was also sort of a nightmare; I'm used to 'monsters are built like PCs' from WHFRP but WHFRP characters are much simpler than 3.5 ones and you can also mostly distill a monster down to a couple stats and combat talents if you need to parse it quick or generate one on the fly. With PF, there wasn't that same ability; I had to carefully flip through the bestiary looking for stuff that would be fun to hunt or be attacked by, then check the stats, consider altering them if there was a really cool enemy that would fit perfectly but was too weak or too powerful, and I wasn't really qualified on the system to do that. I'm fairly sure if you've been running Pathfinder/3.5 for 8 years straight you can probably manage it, but I have to imagine it would be a more complex process anyway just because of how much more complex the stat sheets are and how much more central combat is to the game. Next Time: Progression and Fiction in Pathfinder: The march of epic power and how it changes character and tone.
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May 22, 2020 15:08
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I should also add I used Pathfinder somewhat because I had heard (incorrectly) the Gunslinger worked reasonably well and that it had properly integrated rules for firearms and I wanted to do a D&D-style game for the person and group I initially planned it for before the non-D&D people expressed interest instead. All of this was a lie. Nobody ended up really using muskets or pistols because they are basically crossbows with all the flaws magnified and even a group of rookies was able to see that.
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May 22, 2020 15:51
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 Heart: The City Beneath 16 - Legendary Adversaries So... a bit of a break there, but now we're onto Legendary Adversaries. These are the kind of creatures (and people, to be fair) that you could quite easily base a campaign around. Blight Unending: The Basilisk The Basilisk is a reprehensible, unlovable thing; light refuses to touch it, and rocks crack and shatter to be free of its gaze. It's a concentrated, pathetic clot of venom and entropy, that really just wants not to be alone any more. Scholars suggest that it's an experiment on the part of the Heart; an attempt to understand poison and corrosion. Whether this is true or not, every time it's killed (usually torn apart by those who can't bear its presence a second longer), it is reborn, more wretched than before. If you want to kill it (and really, you should, it's the merciful thing to do), it's easy - any success will do. Getting close is the hard bit - enduring the venomous degredation its very presence causes. The venoms of its corpse are valuable to the right people, and armour made from its skin would protect the wearer from any toxin - but the very world around you will start to loath you. Nicodemai Shadow-Damns-The-Seedlings: The Gorgon Once there was a sect of wealthy Aelfir in the City Above who convinced themselves that surely the faces of the High Elves reflected the glory of their gods, and that mortals looking upon them unmasked would be struck down by their radiance. Obviously, this isn't true - there's a multitude of evidence, but stubborn pride, faith and a hell of a lot of drugs (plus some casual black magic) made it true, at least for members of the cult. Eventually, excessive use of their abilities (and the wrong council-member's son getting petrified) led to their exile and decay in the City Below. Unable to bear the thought of their perfection rotting away, cult-members 'married' each other, gazing into each others eyes, leaving only statues. Pity there was an odd number of members... Nicodemai is a broken, wretched creature, spending his waking hours hunting rats for food and desperately, longingly trying to use his gaze upon himself, before it's too late. If a party of delvers could help him, he'd be very grateful (and has a hidden library of occult tomes ripe for the picking), but otherwise he's still dangerous in a fight thanks to his petrifying gaze.  Carotid Forest: The Hydra Everyone knows that when slaying a hydra, cutting off one head causes two more to sprout in its place. Usually a clever-enough hunter can get round this and slay the beast before it does too much damage. But once, no such hero turned up, and the lizard, stupid as it was, realised that it could cause its own heads to re-grow. Now it is a vast forest of tree-like necks, leading to a blubbery, immobile, and ever-hungry body; the Carotid Forest. It's eaten pretty much anything within reach of its heads now, but any animal or traveller foolish enough to take shelter amongst the 'trees' is quickly ripped apart. The main body, with its vulnerable heart would be pretty easy to kill; it's entirely defenceless, but there's more than a hundred heads in the forest now, so reaching the center could be a bit tricky. Lady Salvatious Gryndel: The Huntress House Gryndel is one of the great noble families of the Drow, who still rule over the Home Nations of Ys. Lady Salvatious Gryndel is a scion of that House, who came to Spire and the City Below as part of her search for ever-more dangerous prey to hunt. A good sixty years ago, she set up her Hunting Clubs throughout the Heart (or Hunting Club, as all the doors lead to the same physical space), and promptly dissapeared into the depths, never to be seen again. At least if you're lucky. She's long since moved on from simple animal prey; even the Godbeasts of The Forest hold no interest for her. Now she picks on sapient prey; she finds people she deems 'deserving' (although what that means is a bit vague) and re-works them into new quarry. Magical concoctions are slipped into their food, ancient beast-songs sung to them in their sleep. The fortunate retain some measure of their humanity (often the ability to use weapons), but in the end it just comes down to the hunt. Yes, she's a just a little old woman, but one with unparalleled hunting expertise, access to weird and occult magics, and a very big gun. That-Which-Escapes: The Minotaur The Labyrinth curse that afflicts the unfortunate of the City Below is a side-effect of The Labyrinth itself - a parasitical dimension grown fat and bloated on the energies of the Heart. It's not without purpose, as the great maze was build to seal away something even more terrible - the Minotaur. It can't hurt the Labyrinth, and there's no way it can fit down people-sized spaces, but every so often you hear it - howls of pain, the cracking of gargantuan joints dis- and re-locating as it constantly tries to get out. No one's seen the whole thing - maybe a scrabbling, hairy hand the size of a man, or a colossal eye pressed to a window. It's not malevolant; you're more likely to be crushed accidently by its flailings - you can't fight something that big anyway, just drive it off. Maybe, if you could get to its face you could reason with it, but that's no easy task. You could even try to help it escape... but no-one knows exactly what would happen, or why it was sealed away in the first place. Next: Wrapping it up, and the Sourcebooks
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May 22, 2020 15:52
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It wouldn't be Necromunda without a Spyrer, I suppose. For the hunting lady. Mind I am 100% down for the people down in the underhive hell dungeon having to deal with 'crazy rich person who came down here to hunt, has moved on to people'.
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May 22, 2020 15:59
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Soulbound Life and Death  Nagash, the Undying King, is also called hte Great Necromancer, the Black Harvester, the Reaper-Lord and Elder Bones. He rules over the Ninefold City of Nagashizzar at the heart of Shyish, and he goes into battle with many potent artifacts - the Nine Books of Nagash, the Staff of Power Alakanash, Zefetnebtar the Mortis Blade and the mystic armor Morikhane, to name a few. In the Age of Myth, Nagash swept through Shyish, hunting down the death-gods that ruled over its many underworlds. Now, he is one of a bare few survivors, and the others...well, many are imprisoned, though some say that a few escaped. (One Stormhost, for example, maintains a dual worship of Sigmar and their ancient death god, Morrda, who seems clearly to be Morr and whom they claim escaped Nagash, though he was forced into hiding.) Nagash takes great pride in being the sole ruler of the Realm of Death, and hates being reminded of the lands he was unable to conquer, like Hallost, or the ones forced from his control by Chaos. Nagash rarely appears except in Nagashizzar. He greatly prefers to work through his chosen servants, the Mortarchs, and their underlings. His undead legions are vast and ever-expanding, after all, so why bother doing work personally? When he does appear, he is a terrifying skeleton in armor of black metal and bone, ever surrounded by a whirling storm of screaming souls. His gaze can kill, and his magic can tear armies apart in minutes. His terrifying power was first unleashed when Sigmar rescued him from the Black Cairn, in exchange for his aid in taming the realms. They worked together well, but they never trusted each other much. Despite this, Nagash set his undead servants to work alongside the living, helping to build the greatest cities of the Age of Myth. In secret, Nagash worked to create weapons that would let him defeat the other gods. He experimented with the creation of a new form of undead, made from sculpted bones and composite souls. This would eventually be used as the basis for his Ossiarch Bonereapers, the army that Nagash considers his finest work and the tool he will use to conquer all of reality. The others gods knew nothing of this, and could not understand why, when Chaos attacked, Nagash refused to commit any real percentage of his forces to defend anywhere but Shyish. At a critical moment, he betrayed and abandoned Sigmar, and the forces of Death declared war on Azyr even before the Age of Chaos fully took hold. Nagash fell in battle against Archaon, and was thought to be greatly weakened. In truth, Nagash spent those centuries preparing. His skeletal servants brought gravesand to him, grain by grain, to construct his Black Pyramid. But for the Skaven, it would have allowed the Undying King to take control of all magic. Instead, he merely inverted the natural energies of Shyish, forming the Nadir and causing the Necroquake. While it wasn't his original plan, he took advantage of the massive uprising of the dead, and the Nadir still serves his purposes, albeit more slowly than he'd like. The Bonereapers continue their conquest, and Nagash will, he has sworn, rule all the realms one day. He just needs to conquer them. Despite all this, Nagash still has mortal worshippers throughout the Realms, and most of them are peaceful. Some, however, are violent fanatics who engage in what they name Mortis Crusades, the granting of the freedom of death to the living. The peaceful cults are mainly fatalists who feel Nagash's victory is assured and the best they can do is to try and placate him so their afterlives will not be terrible. Most Nagash-worshippers wear purple or black clothes, often with symbols of death or bones on them, and the warrior cults prefer bone and skull designs on their armor. Tattoos and ritual scars are also common, especially in the form of catechisms taken from Nagash's Epistle of Bone. The strictures of Nagash are very simple: 1. All are one in Nagash, Nagash is all. 2. Do not deny the Undying King his due. 3. Justice must be harsh, but appropriate. 4. Praise no other god before Nagash.  Alarielle, the Everqueen, is also called the Queen of the Radiant Wood, the Lady of Leaves and the Goddess of Life. Her throne sits in the Verdant Palace of Ghyran, and in battle she wields the Talon of Dwindling and the Spear of Kurnoth. Her form and power reflect her mood. In happiness, she gives off an aura of warmth and rejuvenation, but her joy is rare in these days. In anger, she is surrounded by a heat haze or a killing frost. Wherever she goes, nature expands and thrives. Flowers spring up in her wake, vines run rampant. She always appears as an Aelven women twice the size of a normal human, and always of immense beauty. She wears gowns and robes, and has great wings sprouting from her back, made from branches and leaves. In battle, she fights from atop a massive Wardroth Beetle, which she may transform into a cloud of glowspites when she takes to the air and reform beneath her when she lands. Ghyran has always been the home of Alarielle, and it is the birthplace of her favored children, the Sylvaneth. In the AGe of Chaos, however, Nurgle swept into her realm, perhaps drawn by the rivalries among the Jade Kingdoms and their efforts to poison each other's fields. Nurgle sought to control and corrupt the entire realm, and he believes even now that Alarielle is key to doing this. At the time, she had focused on her loving aspect rather than her martial one, and she was said to be the kindest and most loving of the gods, though she always held the Sylvaneth above other peoples. Her unfamiliarity with war in the late Age of Myth allowed Nurgle to drive her into retreat, and while she ordered the Sylvaneth to keep fighting, they lost more and more as she went into seclusion. The Wanderer Aelves fled Ghyran, and Alarielle became depressed and despondent, sealing herself away in her hidden glade, Aethelwyrd. She expected to die there, but Nurgle was unable to find her, and she was awoken not by his soldiers but by the Stormcast. They found her, weakened and reduced to a single soul-seed, but a desperate bid by the Stormcast and Sylvaneth kept Nurgle from claiming her and allowed the seed to be planted at Blackstone Summit. Alarielle was reborn there, fed by the blood of her heroes, and she returned as the wrath of nature. Now, she stands as a great foe of Chaos, no longer isolated. She works to spread the Sylvaneth across the rea`lms and to destroy the Dark Gods. Her alliance with Sigmar is sometimes strained by the way his followers treat nature; while she loves those who protect it, like the people of the Living City, she is not happy about the way that Greywater Fastness has defiled her lands. For the most part, she chooses to focus on her own battles rather than calling her allies for aid now. She is more interested in restoring the natural order than in the founding of cities, which can sometimes cause problems. All Sylvaneth are followers of Alarielle, for each contains a tiny spark of her divine essence. This is what allows them to unite their voices in the Spirit Song, conveying their prayers to their mother and receiving her wishes for them. The Wanderer Aelves also worship Alarielle still, though she has neither forgotten nor wholly forgiven them for abandoning Ghyran in the Age of Chaos. Some humans also pray to her, mainly Ghyranites and farmers, but full-time human devotees of Alarielle are fairly rare. Alarielle's commands to her children, adopted or born are: 1. Respect the natural order. 2. Take only what is needed from the land. 3. Honor whatever must be taken, for it is a sacrifice made for your benefit. 4. Oppose the taint of Chaos in all its forms. We also get a sidebar on the lesser deity Kurnoth. Kurnoth is worshipped by the Sylvaneth, but even then, mostly by the Kurnoth Hunters, who conain an echo of his power. He is depicted as a tall humanoid figure with cloven feet and antlers, and he is usually seen as Alarielle's consort. It is said that his strength grows and fades with the seasons, and certainly Nurgle assaulted his stronghold of Kurnotheal in winter, at the Battle of Tears. Nurgle killed Kurnoth's body, but his spirit endures in the land and in his spear. Only once she took up the Spear of Kurnoth were the first Kurnoth Hunters born. They are granted divine sanction to call the Wild Hunt in the way Kurnoth once did, calling other Sylvaneth to aid them in battle. A few humans and aelves also worship Kurnoth at times or invoke him to protect and guide them in hunting, but no one worships him exclusively. Next time: Gorkamorka (or Gork and Mork) and Grimnirseke
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May 22, 2020 18:44
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God drat does Heart nail sympathetic, yet terrible things. The basilisk and minotaur are 
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May 22, 2020 19:11
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Loxbourne posted:This poo poo needs to be illuminated, and then stomped on very hard. FFG should never ever have put playable loving 40K Commissars in the game, let alone give them "shoot the players' buddies for buffs" powers. "Are there playable commissars?" was my very first question to the college buddy who explained Only War to me and his answer ensured I would never, ever touch the game. This is a few pages back but I can't help but agree, I'm playing a commissar in my only war game currently and it's very underwhelming I've managed to avoid most of the roleplaying pitfalls by generally being more like a very supportive headmaster than a sadist but the actual mechanics are really rough. The one saving grace is that the bolt pistol is pretty good and you have pretty good aptitudes to just build a complete melee character which is pretty fun. It's a fun challenge to roleplay if you're not an rear end in a top hat but it probably helps that there's a stormtrooper who is basically my comrade and vice versa.
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May 23, 2020 00:11
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Pathfinder But It's Just the SRD I Should Probably Introduce The SRD So, the Pathfinder Systems Reference Document that I used for this campaign is a free on-line compilation of the rules for Pathfinder. Just the rules. None of the guidance on how to use those rules, none of the fluff (lol, I think the only fictional world people care about less than Golarion is Greyhawk anyway), etc. Just 'this is this class' etc with fairly convenient hyperlinks to important concepts. What's the +X Sacred Bonus from using the Inquisitor's Judgement? Just click on the blue text and get taken to its rules entry. In many ways, I suspect that was more useful than the rules-guidance that might have shown up in the actual Pathfinder core rulebook. I certainly don't remember 3.5 being particularly good at pedagogy, and I suspect the quick reference effect I got from this was more useful. So we were working with the system in the raw rather than any kind of guidance. One of the things I found interesting is that the character progression of Pathfinder actually worked perfectly with the general tone the game was going for up until about level 10. We started play at level 3, because we knew enough about 3.PF to know you never want to play level 1 D&D. Characters could take a hit, had a few interesting powers, but the early parts of the game where they had no idea what was going on had sometimes had a distinctly horror tone to them. After all, these people weren't originally grand heroes, and were facing all kinds of strange monsters and outside context phenomena. As they grew in experience, for quite awhile progression actually did match the general feeling of the characters coming to understand their new magic, figuring out how to fight demons and undead and owlbears, and solving mysteries and wizard crimes. The problem came with the fact that they started to outgrow lots of threats as they got to around level 10. By level 10 they were very powerful, to the point that it limited what sorts of foes and dangers I could use; even demons and devils weren't especially dangerous at that point unless I started throwing the really high up ones. It also started to necessitate making high level PC-style enemies when they were going to oppose other people, which was a pain in the rear end to create since building a level 10 Pathfinder character (or more) takes a long time. One of the things I found Pathfinder to be lacking was ways to really make numbers matter. During the later game, they were meant to be fighting the devil Doge's armies; they spent most of those battles fighting the dangerous monsters and things that were summoned for the fight, rather than actually fighting musketeers or troops, because '3rd level fighter with a musket' didn't really matter against a 10th level party. I found the way characters sort of grew beyond things became a problem for the writing. In WHFRP, 10 guys with muskets are the sort of threat you only ever ignore if you're a Chaos Lord with full armor. Here, making the dudes with muskets dangerous would have required making them higher level (which is more work), giving them a wizard and some monsters as backup, etc. So we just skipped the musket dudes and mostly got to fighting the wizards, the generals, the devils, etc. Another thing that really hurt Pathfinder progression was the gear treadmill. Initially we had the idea that they'd find items of folklore, myth, and religious significance that had 'caught' magic when it came into the world and become magical, or wrest magic items from their foes like some kind of early modern X-COM. But you really can't do that when you have a GP-per-level 'how much magic poo poo should you have' thing built into character progression. At that point, why not just make item bonuses go up as people go up in level? I know later material came out to do exactly that, but D&D and D&D Adjacent games' resistance to this idea reminds me of their insistence that rolled stats are okay in a system where that creates such a gulf of power between individual characters. Eventually we just said the Alchemist was upgrading their gear with his manuals and texts as they leveled up, letting them rejigger their bonuses to match expected magical treasure levels based on the wealth-by-level charts. Another mistake: I was relatively unfamiliar with the system myself and really didn't appreciate exactly how much rolling stats messes with D&D compared to something like WHFRP. The difference comes because stats are mostly static in Pathfinder. Your stats don't go up. And the difference between a high stat bonus and a poor one is much, much more significant. Stats are weirdly inconsistent in how important they are, too. Charisma on your Bard? Insanely important. Charisma on a Fighter? Eh. It's some points in Diplomacy, that skill you shouldn't be raising because it's cross class. We really should have used stat arrays rather than rolling. It didn't end up fully unbalancing the campaign; we didn't really get one god character and then one terrible one or something, but the possibility is part of why you shouldn't roll. That was a lesson learned by subsequent forays into this system. We also just had to remove the traditional 'you find tens of thousands of gold pieces' style treasures. We just came up with our own currency, and it was used for everything that wasn't upgrading magic items. After all, when's the last time a D&D party actually spent on significant expenses that weren't upgrading magic items? Skills were another area that the players and I both struggled. It took awhile for it to sink in that in PF/D&D you really just want to pick X number of class skills and keep those at max, where X is how many SP per level you get. Players wanted to take extra things to round out their characters or let them 'try' stuff, because that's what other games we played generally rewarded (like the original Dark Heresy). They liked the idea of playing as people who knew how to do a lot of things, rather than hyper-specialists. This is not a system for that. What this meant in practice is I ended up adjusting the DCs of what they were trying to do to be things they could potentially succeed at. Which really went to highlight how artificial DCs can feel in Pathfinder. Why is that simple task DC 20? Who knows? With DCs theoretically unlimited and mostly set by the GM, it can make skill progression feel a little pointless. If everything you face 3 levels later has generally 3 point higher DCs, what did it matter that you put the extra 3 points in as you leveled to stay at cap? The 3.PF skill system just never really did it for me and didn't have particularly satisfying progression. And if I'm adjusting the DCs so that the players can do anything at all with their spread out skills (because that's what they wanted to play) and it's working well for them in practice, why are the suggested DCs for actions higher? I don't think system guidance would have helped here, because I remember the exact same thing being a big problem in Spycraft and base d20, and Pathfinder wasn't really in the business of fixing major systemic issues of d20 so much as giving you higher numbers and more places to advance your character. Which was another thing I noticed: Much of Pathfinder is about having somewhat higher numbers than 3.5. The Inquisitor especially was able to get an armor class that sounded frighteningly high to other friends who played 3.5 often, which was necessary since she was the other tank. Which also necessitated having the enemy target the scary blue devil-woman in red robes and a mithral munitions armor without any actual mechanics to make them do that (rather than going for the well dressed turkish fellow throwing grenades at them or the poorly armored, mousy scholar calling down plagues), but that's been a part of the D&D milieu forever. Hell, the front line getting stuck in and enemies actually focusing on them is GM fiat in the vast majority of traditional RPGs, most don't actually have MMO-style tanking mechanics. To get back to the original point, those high numbers on their part were matched by similarly high numbers on the enemy's part, which made them rather irrelevant. Also, trying to explain 3.PF bonus stacking to people who aren't steeped in the stuff was a loving nightmare. Even now I still have to look it all up again to remember how it worked. Which spells actually provide bonuses that stack with one another? In practice it was mostly 'all these different types of bonuses stack with one another, don't use the same type twice' but this led to an array of Sacred Bonuses and Deflection Bonuses and Enhancement Bonuses and Dodge Bonuses and ugh. It was a mess to deal with. The biggest takeaway I got was that the progression system was a very mixed bag. They enjoyed having the powers and abilities after leveling up was done, but leveling up took considerable time and a lot of guidance/looking through the books to try to make sure they didn't screw themselves as they cottoned on to the fact that Pathfinder very much would let you screw yourself. Trap feats, spread out skills, poor spell choices, gear upgrading; there were so many things that took attention and this wasn't a group that especially liked going through the books over and over to find the optimal build. Once they were leveled up properly and had new things to actually play with, it was usually fine. The funny thing is, you'd think the firmly designed class system would provide a lot of guidance and guardrails, but it really doesn't in practice. Feats and other choices (not to mention the dizzying array of possible class variants, which trade out some class abilities for others) are so important to your PC that even having a firm base of abilities in your class doesn't really provide as much of a safety net as you'd think on a first readthrough. Next Time: Monsters and Adapting to a Custom Setting Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:07 on May 23, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 14:39
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Also, since people asked for it, I've started working on setting/campaign summary stuff for our WHFRP and the wild stuff that happened in it. I'll be putting it up somewhere and probably just posting a link here or something once I figure all that out and have enough of it written. That should work as a compromise. I mean I'm still going to be locked in my apartment for the foreseeable future, so it's certainly something to do.
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May 23, 2020 15:18
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Man, there’s too much GW in this thread. Let’s switch to another company. I’ve always been a fan of strange settings – not completely alien ones, necessarily, but settings that stand out from the crowd. Getting into RPGs opened that field up even further, and I was so interested in the fluff I found in sourcebooks that I rarely paid attention to the mechanics. Exalted… Is not one of those settings. Leaving aside all of its issues, from the Infernals to the creeping Orientalism to the faint stench OG White Wolf tends to leave behind, I just never found it all that inspiring. My only acquaintance with it, aside from some fan stuff I liked, comes through Internet cultural osmosis. Except for one fraction of the setting, one I discovered a couple months ago. It’s a setting people talk about like Planescape: a GM’s dream they can never hope to make players use. A setting within the body of a dying machine god where his mechanical failure manifests as literal gremlins and serial killers. A setting where the only organic inhabitants are humans who industrialized prayers, farm by tapping nutrient slurry, and weave their clothes out of harvested fiber optics, where great heroes turn into cities as they age, radio announcers are friendly spirits, and the fundamental elements include lightning, oil, and steam. A setting that is both figuratively and literally metal as gently caress.  Introduction and Chapter 1, Part One: Autochthonia First of all, I have no idea how Exalted’s system works, at least directly: I do have some experience with the Storyteller System through World of Darkness games I’ve played in, but that’s it. As such, I’ll be heavily focusing on the fluff. Also, if I choose to go the extra mile, I will in fact review the two books they released for Alchemicals, this book and to the setting-specific Autocthonia sourcebook which has maybe one stat block and no other system material, which will make that whole thing much easier. Whatever, we’ll see when we get there. Finally, get ready for a bunch of bizarre terminology; don’t worry if you get lost in the weeds because I will too. I want to show off and explore this setting, but it isn’t always organized or coherent and I’ll try to point out inconsistencies or interesting contrasts when I run into them. Each chapter starts out with the obligatory White Wolf setting illustration comic. These ones are actually pretty good, though you can tell they assigned different comics to different artists. The book starts out with three in a row, one after the table of contents, the next before the obligatory White Wolf glossary, and the other before the first chapter. The first comic involves a Sovan Preceptor and his wife asking the Champion Stern Whip of Industry to leave his work among the Populat to search for their son, a Lector who went missing after trying to preach to the Tunnel Outcasts. He finds the young man in the Reaches, where he seems to have joined and been corrupted by a Voidbringer cult, then attacks him. In the second, a Champion meets with a Grand Autocrat before discovering his messenger was murdered and had his Soulgem removed, and the last one covers a group of dying explorers in the Reaches and their rescue by a Colossus just when their faith in the Maker runs out. Confused yet? The glossary the writers plopped down halfway through these comics doesn’t even help, it just throws even more terms at us without the context we need to decipher them. Not the most promising start, but at least the comics tell clear stories and help set the mood.  Chapter 1 proper kicks off its setting overview by covering Autocthon’s origin and history and… Look, my understanding of Exalted lore is pretty spotty so I only half-know this stuff. As far as I can tell, here’s the rough series of events up until the point where the settings diverge:
 While the gods and a few other sympathetic Primordials went off to play their parts in the plan, Autochthon captured 600 of one type of Primordial before anyone noticed, vivisected them one by one and broke down their souls as they died  to learn how they ticked, and used the data he collected to build six blueprints for different kinds of super soldiers. As they chose which mortals to empower, he helped the gods adapt the blueprints for practical use and implement them until the time finally came and the Primordial War kicked off. Autochthon’s Revenge of the Nerds went too well. His creations proved way more powerful than he anticipated and completely wiped the floor with the Primordials. He did not like what he saw, especially after the gods left and he watched the Exalted take over, stoking his paranoia. Eventually, when the Exalted called the gods on him and made him place a curse on his dwarves to make them easier to control, Autochthon decided his time was up. He gathered up his followers, kidnapped hundreds of thousands of confused tribesmen, stuffed them all into his body, set up a soul reservoir with 100 million more souls, and left reality, leaving a powerful enchantment called the Seal of Eightfold Divinities behind that prevented anyone from following him.e: I should have included this here but the relevant sidebar is on the other side of the chapter. The Seal of Eightfold Divinities is impenetrable from the outside, even from Solars or other gods. Flat-out, no exceptions. They can't even tell where it is. However, it can be broken from the inside with the sort of focused power in a nation can muster, an option for the truly desperate. At least one God is considering breaking it too. One of the last sections of the book will cover what might happen if the Seal breaks, so I'll go into more detail than. Turns out, though, the insides of a creator deity isn’t exactly the most hospitable place. They call it the Realm of Brass and Shadow for a reason: humans are the only biological anything in Autochthon‘s body outside of the special nutrient slurry it produces to feed them. The first couple centuries were really rough on Autochthon’s new inhabitants and after a while they faced extinction, so he came up with a new plan. Those six blueprints for Exalted? No one had ever actually used them directly, just as the base for other kinds of Exalted. So he gathered the souls of the eight human champions he’d assigned to lead his followers when they first set out, had human technicians assemble eight artificial bodies based on those blueprints, and 3-D printed eight gems made out of pure Essence, each of which contained the soul of one of those champions and also a bunch of other souls I guess? Anyway, they loaded these bodies up with their new soulgems and made the first Alchemical Exalted, and their followers would eventually make up the eight major nations of Autochthonia. With that accomplished, Autochthon went to sleep and left eight component souls to form basically a pantheon and oversee his body, enchanting them to make sure they’d never turn on him while he slept.  poo poo went south pretty quickly. Though the Alchemicals proved capable of fending off a lot of the greater threats around them, they didn’t prove immune to human failings. While those extra souls, all of which had belonged to accomplished individuals and heroes, combined to reinforce ambitious and prosocial personalities for the good of their followers, that never meant everyone agreed on the best actions to take. One of them, the leader of a nation called Estasia, decided he wanted to be Alexander the Great and fought a series of devastating wars with the other seven, causing Autochthon to break down from lack of maintenance wherever he showed up. While he never managed to win anything and his opponents drowned his armies in numbers whenever they encountered him, the nature of Autochthonian geography prevented any permanent victory; territory moves around as part of Autochthon’s natural processes, and Estasia always drifted away before their enemies could enforce terms. Eventually though, Estasia stepped down and every country got to struggle to survive on their own, now making new Alchemicals on their own to keep themselves and their home safe and stable. The next phase of Autochthonian history kicked off about 500 years in when a couple of very old Alchemicals consumed themselves and barfed out cities. Up till then, Autochthonians mostly lived in shanties of metal huts and scavenged parts, but these cities were made for human habitation in style; they had built-in industrial complexes, defenses, ways to tap into Autochthon’s body to safely extract the clear water and nutrient paste veins he’d designed for human use, and the still-present consciousness of the founding Alchemical who now had access to a variety of powerful abilities called Municipal Charms. They revolutionized life for their citizens, and within the next few hundred years all eight nations housed most of their populations in ex-Alchemicals (called patropolises and metropolises, depending on the gender of their originator).  But the thing is? Alchemicals have the obligatory White Wolf morality stat, this time called Clarity: it measures how close an Alchemical is to normal human experience, and as they become powerful enough to found cities their Clarity gets intense enough that they lose track of how ordinary people think, even though there overall morality remains intact. With patropoli and metropoli influencing national leaders, the nations started engaging in destructive ideological wars based on what their leaders thought were good ideas. Maybe 1800 years in, Autochthon’s geography started bringing the eight nations into closer contact, and, afraid of these wars growing out of control, the eight nations held a conclave that imposed a universal social system designed to meet everyone’s standards enough to keep everyone on the same page. I’ll go into the exact workings of Autochthonian society later, but the main takeaways were that all nations use the same class systems and Alchemicals were relegated to advisory roles. Everybody’d adopted them by 2000 years in. After another 1500 years of stability, the next crisis emerged in the small, highly religious nation of Jarish, where it turned out a Voidbringer cult had sucked in an Alchemical. You know how Autochthon was always kind of sickly? Wherever his body starts to fail due to that sickness, the whole area warps and starts producing gross monsters and movie-nihilist cultists. People call it the Void, link it to the space outside Autochthon‘s body, and when cultists start worshiping it, they call themselves Voidbringers and try to corrupt everything else. Up till that point Autochthonians thought they were keeping the Void under control, but the aftermath of the cult’s discovery and the 20 year long manhunt for the fallen Alchemical threw everything into question again. Nobody thought Alchemicals could get corrupted like that, and since by that point they become basically exemplars of Autochthonian society that fact undermined a lot of the assumptions that held it together. They also realized the sickness was spreading a lot faster than they could handle. The current year is 4878. Autochthonia is declining. Due to the spreading sickness, sources of vital metals, nutrients, and magic keep dwindling, while corrupted areas – called blight zones – and corrupted spirits and machines – called gremlins – keep pushing up against human borders. That well of souls Autochthon put together is running out since it turns out it doesn’t recycle souls nearly as well as he thought it would, so soul shortages are causing stillbirths everywhere. Conveniently, everything’s ready for a set of heroes to step in and try and fix/break everything.  This is what that cult was doing. Other cults have done worse. Though different nations vary in culture and organization, they all follow a basic social structure. Since life inside Autochthon is so demanding, society tends to be both strictly regimented and meritocratic. I’ll get into more details if/when I get to the setting book, but for now, get ready for bulleted lists and bizarre terms!
 Speaking of which, nations are the fundamental units of Autochthonian society; while they share an identity, the vast majority of Autochthonians identify with the nation and culture of their birth, and the national Tripartites determine how society and international politics work. There are eight major nations, each of which descends from the followers of one the champions Autochthon brought with him:
Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 23:20 on May 23, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 18:13
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Posted separately to make Inklesspen’s job easier: is there any standard way to format images in a review? I never know how tall or wide to make them or what image format to use.
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May 23, 2020 18:28
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I just want to say that's the best summation of what happened to lead to the creation of Exalts that I've ever seen.
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May 23, 2020 18:31
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Night10194 posted:I just want to say that's the best summation of what happened to lead to the creation of Exalts that I've ever seen. I feel like that's the same summary I've seen every time? Like 'the gods were bound by oaths not to attack the Primordials, but human beings were the mistletoe of this universe' isn't news. As an Exalted fan, though, I appreciate the Autochthonian history summary, it's nicely streamlined and communicates the basic issues with the Eight Nations. I am already looking forward to the Viator of Nullspace, as well as the Eight Ministers, since the big spirit/god entities in Autochthonia are all pretty cool. Same with the Elemental Poles of the industrial elements. Mechanically, 2e Alchemical Exalted are notable for two things: Being relatively balanced within their own sub-setting, because the designers didn't give them the mechanical widgets that made 2e Exalted such a rocket-tag-and-boredom affair outside Autochthonia, and Charm Slots. Instead of having a permanent suite of powers, Alchemical Exalted have to swap charms in and out as physical installations on their bodies, so a given Alchemical will have multiple different loadouts for different tasks. This plays into their place in society in cool ways which I'm sure will come up, but that's where the crucial mechanical stuff lies; the charms themselves can help illustrate what Alchemicals can do for society, but are much crunchier than the basic slot concept. Also, everyone loves the neural override spike. Loving the neural override spike is mandatory, Citizen.
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May 23, 2020 18:40
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I more meant I appreciate it being succinct and flippant.
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May 23, 2020 18:41
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tokenbrownguy posted:God drat does Heart nail sympathetic, yet terrible things. The basilisk and minotaur are Of the Legendary Adversaries, it's probably just the Hydra that can't be reasoned with or circumvented without killing it.
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May 23, 2020 19:19
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Has this thread talked about the new Zweihander? I have it, like what I’ve read (mostly), and I thiiiink I want to convert a whfrp2e module/adventure to run with it (which sounds fairly straightforward). Have people had success with that? Is there any existing discussion on the game?
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May 23, 2020 21:08
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 Thanks guys, I try. I hadn’t realized how much fluff was embedded in the Charms section so I’d skimmed over it in the past, but on further examination it looks like I’ll have to cover it in depth. I would have missed it otherwise.
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May 23, 2020 23:23
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Falconier111 posted:
It's one of those things I find endearing about Exalted, which really does lean into 'yes, the powers section is part of the setting fluff' in a way that can be quite cool at times and quite frustrating at others. Charm bloat is famously an issue for the game, though Alchemical charms are one of the better written sets in 2e. They really benefited from being one of the last splats to be built in 2e, which meant that the designers had a handle on the flaws in the engine - that combined with their closed-off sub-setting meant they could blissfully ignore the meta of charm powers in Creation and rebalance themselves. Also, again, the Viator of Nullspace rules. Terrifying monster, extremely cool, A+
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May 24, 2020 00:33
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There's a new Zweihander?
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May 24, 2020 00:36
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Joe Slowboat posted:It's one of those things I find endearing about Exalted, which really does lean into 'yes, the powers section is part of the setting fluff' in a way that can be quite cool at times and quite frustrating at others. Charm bloat is famously an issue for the game, though Alchemical charms are one of the better written sets in 2e. I like that Charms have flavor text, but I do not appreciate how often they recklessly blend it in with the rules text (which is itself written in an airily ambiguous plain-language style). Keep your crunch and fluff separate!
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May 24, 2020 00:43
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megane posted:I like that Charms have flavor text, but I do not appreciate how often they recklessly blend it in with the rules text (which is itself written in an airily ambiguous plain-language style). Keep your crunch and fluff separate! A small bit of fluff at the top, then a completely plain accounting of the mechanics in a different, clearly marked off box. Works in Double Cross, works in Cardinal, makes my life easier. E: Admittedly, Double Cross's translation makes that more difficult than it needs to be. Goddamn but reading that game makes me think early 90s JRPG. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 01:05 on May 24, 2020 |
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May 24, 2020 00:51
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While Exalted as a whole I'm cool on, even if I'm looking forward to Essence, I have a lot of love for Alchemicals and Autocthonia. It's just a weird, dopey little niche you can tell a lot of fun stories in and about.
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May 24, 2020 01:09
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https://nighthams.wordpress.com/ For those who were interested, I set up a blog and will be updating it with hams. A lot of hams. That way the people who wanted more can get it, and I can keep writing to keep myself sane during the pandemic.
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May 24, 2020 06:14
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well this is cool and also seems that it will tie together all the loose threads in the Hams history. keep it up.
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May 24, 2020 07:25
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Night10194 posted:https://nighthams.wordpress.com/ This must be what it felt like when they started sharing around a NEW Testament.
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May 24, 2020 10:55
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Night10194 posted:https://nighthams.wordpress.com/ Ohhhhh yeah, time to shoot the good poo poo straight into my eyeballs.
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May 24, 2020 11:22
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Yggdrasil Part Two: Gimme That Odin Time Religion Yggdrasil decides to start broad and zoom in gradually on the Norse world, so appropriately enough we start with cosmology and religion. We'll cover the creation myth, the Nine Realms, the gods and goddesses, and how Norse people actually practice their faith. (Weirdly, Ragnarok isn't discussed here, but gets its own very brief chapter wedged in between Magic and Allies and Adversaries, well after all the rest of the setting material. But first: Pronunciation. This is something Yggdrasil doesn't provide any guidance on at all, but I figure it might be helpful for folks reading along. On the other hand, written attempts at pronunciation guides invariably turn into increasingly tortured attempts at rhymes or an imcomprehensible mess of IPA charaters and technical terms like "unvoiced bilabial fricative," and nobody's got time for that. So instead, please enjoy 12 minutes of a dreamy cowboy teaching you to pronounce Old Norse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_zjXZwD42Q All caught up? Good. Then let's dive in. In the beginning was the void Ginnungagap. In the north was the endless ice of Niflheim, in the south was the endless flame of Muspelheim, and between them, where the ice met the fire (with no song involved), the frost giant Ymir was nursed by the frost cow Audumla. This frost cow licked salt from the rocks (yes, apparently there were also rocks mixed in with all the endless ice and fire, just go with it), and this created the jotnar (singular jotunn), which is usually translated as "giants" even though they're not necessarily any bigger than gods or humans. Some of those giants in turn gave birth, presumably in the normal way, to the first three Aesir gods: Odin, Villi, and Ve. Proving that he was a massive dick from the jump, Odin led his brothers to kill Ymir so they'd have a place to put their stuff, then proceeded to make the world out of his carcass: His bones became the rocks (guys, we just established that there were perfectly good rocks already, and if you lick them hard enough a giant pops out), his blood the waters, his skull the sky, and so on. They also made dwarves out of the maggots infesting his corpse, so, y'know, those guys are probably charmers. A couple of jotnar--the giantess Sol and the giant Mani, decided they had not signed up for this poo poo and took off across the sky in their chariots, but a couple of big gently caress-off wolves did what dogs always do when they see a car go by and started chasing them. So now we have day and night, not because some orderly divinity parted the light from the dark or anything, but because oh poo poo oh poo poo oh poo poo there is a wolf the size of a planetoid chasing me gently caress gently caress can't these horses go any faster? The gods went down into the world they'd made and decided that it needed some people in it. So they made a man out of an oak tree and a woman out of an elm (probably. The word used in the Edda--Embla--is only used in this one place, so nobody's entirely sure what it means). We can only assume that the first "got wood" joke followed immediately thereafter. Also around this time, the Aesir met another group of gods, the Vanir. They were a more primordial, elemental bunch, representing nature and fertility and the cycle of life and death. So naturally the Aesir started killing one of them over and over because she kept getting back up. The war that followed was vicious, but at the end of it the Aesir and the Vanir exchanged hostages and made peace. Shortly thereafter, a jotunn stonemason showed up and told the gods he could build them a magnificent fortress city, Asgard, in three winters, provided he received in payment the Sun, the Moon, and the hand of the Vanir goddess Freyja in marriage. Creepy dudes demanding Freyja's hand in marriage is, uhh, going to be a recurring theme. Also, I have no idea how he was planning to deal with the giant wolves chasing the sun and moon, but one assumes some variation of the old "show the dog the ball then pretend to throw it and watch him chase nothing" gag. Anyways, Loki convinces the gods to agree after talking the giant down to one winter and restricting him to only the help of his horse Svadilfari (which means "disaster," so you'd think the gods might have been a little suspicious). Of course the horse is magic, and by the end of the winter the giant is nearly done with the whole project--so Loki, with Thor patting his hammer meaningfully in the background, turns into a mare and, err, distracts the stallion. The giant blows his deadline, and when he tries to complain to Thor, Thor bashes his skull in with his hammer, and the whole story ends with no consequences whatsoever. Except for Loki's eight-legged horse baby. And that whole "undying enmity of the jotnar, leading directly to Ragnarok" thing. This is also the earliest known use of the Norse Crisis Flowchart:  Moving on from the creation myth, no doubt you're familiar with the concept of the Nine Realms or Worlds in Norse mythology. What you might not know is that we have no definitive idea what those realms are. The term is used in a couple of places in the Poetic Edda, but there's no list of the nine that's survived. Presumably this is either something everyone was expected to know, or else it had simply become idiomatic the way we might use "the seven seas" today without readily being able to list them all off. Yggdrasil's take is slightly different than a lot of pop-culture lists of the Nine Worlds, but it's one I kind of like.
So, on to the gods. There are a lot of gods in Norse mythology, but Yggdrasil gives the bulk of its attention to six: three Aesir and three Vanir, who are the most commonly-worshipped by the Norse. Yggdrasil avoids framing them as "god of X" or "goddess of Y," because with few exceptions the Norse didn't really classify their gods by purview--at least not exclusively. There's no one "god of war" or "god of fertility," for example--lots of gods are associated with these concepts, and people prayed to different ones at different times and for different reasons. Odin is the chief of the Aesir, Allfather, a god associated with wisdom, poetry, victory in battle, and magic. He's also a huge rear end in a top hat, who drums up war and conflict specifically to kill the best and brightest warriors so they will come to Valhalla and fight for him at Ragnarok. He knows all kinds of magic, even those arts that are considered "unmanly," and is above all a sacrificial god: he sacrificed his own eye to drink from Mimir's Well and gain wisdom and sacrificed himself to himself by hanging from Yggdrasil for nine days in order to learn the runes. He's also pretty much the only character in the sagas who actively tries to change his fate--he's constantly trying schemes to avert or at least delay Ragnarok. Common heiti for Odin include such cheerful names as Gallows God, the Fearsome, Glad-of-War, and "Valfadir," which is commonly glossed as "father of the slain" but is more accurately translated as "father of corpses left on the battlefield." (We also get a sidebar on skaldic metaphor here: heiti are simple, alternative titles for someone or something, like calling Odin "Alfadir" or Thor "giant-slayer." Kennings are more complex, allusive metaphors--like calling the sea the "whale's road" or a sword a "wound wand." Kennings can get loving wild, because poets can start replacing parts of a kenning with even more kennings--so if "sleep of the sword" means "death" and "blood-serpent" means "sword" and "wound sea" means "blood," then you could say "the sleep of the wound-sea serpent." Snorri Sturluson, who wrote the Prose Edda as a poetry manual, says that going beyond five levels of kenning is indulgent, but the longest kenning in the sagaswe know of is "fire-brandisher of blizzard of ogress of protection-moon of steed of boat-shed," which means "warrior." Like I said, loving wild.) Thor is, well,you know Thor. There have been a couple movies about him. Kind of. Thor is the most beloved god, because not only is he a huge bluff warrior who wrecks jotnar for fun and drinks like a goddamn fish, as a storm god he's associated with crops and fertility. The sheer number of hammer pendants we've recovered from Viking Age sites show that they were as ubiquitous, if not moreso, as cross necklaces are among Christians today. Thor is the quintessential "guy you'd want to have a beer with--" just don't try to get the marrow out of the bones after he throws a feast for you, or he'll make your kids his slaves. Other than that, though, great guy. Tyr is a god we don't really know a whole lot about, other than the myth that he sacrificed his hand so the gods could chain up Fenris, the great wolf. He's associated with laws and the thing, and is sometimes called the god of war, though that's probably due to classical scholars equating him with the Roman Mars, because Romans were real good at looking at other cultures' gods and saying "oh, this guy is vaguely martial/kingly/sneaky, he's clearly just Mars/Jupiter/Mercury in a funny hat and a fake moustache." His name is also cognate with "Deus" and "Jupiter," suggesting that at one point he was the chief god of the Aesir rather than Odin. On the Vanir side, there's Njord, worshipped mainly by sailors and fishermen (so, y'know, pretty much everybody). He's the oldest of the Vanir and father of a bunch of them, including Freyr and Freyja, the divine twins/lovers (look, it's not weird if you're a god, okay?). Both are associated with love, beauty, and fertility, but also war and death. And pigs. Also pigs. Freyja notably taught Odin the art of seidr, a kind of ecstatic magic that's normally seen as a woman's domain. A few other gods are less prominently worshipped, but still important. Frigg is Odin's wife, and like a lot of "queen of the gods" figures she's a patron of marriage and childbirth, but she's also a seeress and the only one besides Odin who can sit on his all-seeing throne. Heimdall is the watchman of the gods, and according to one myth, is the father of the three classes of norse society: noble, freeman, and slave. He's also called "hvítastr ása," which has been translated as "whitest of the gods," so you know smug racists brought that up when Idris Elba played him. (The exact meaning, for the record, is unclear, but given that "white" as a racial signifier wouldn't exist for another several centuries, it definitely doesn't mean that.) He also has gold teeth and nine moms. Guy's kinda weird. Loki is, of course, the trickster god who is tolerated by the Aesir, despite the fact that Odin, at least, knows that he will turn on them and lead the forces of destruction at Ragnarok. He is also the master of the diss track, and I highly recommend finding a colloquial English translation of Lokasenna from the Poetic Edda--it's basically just Loki crashing a party and spitting fire at all the other gods. Baldr is dead. That's pretty much his whole deal. Hel is, of course, the goddess who presides over the dead. Modern writings like to draw a firm distinction between those who go to Hel and those who go to Valhalla, but this is likely a result of Christian writers thinking in terms of "Heaven and Hell" as binary states or places--the sagas and the Eddas are much less rigorously-defined about the afterlife, and it seems entirely probable that the dead could be in Hel, in Valhalla, and also in their grave-mounds simultaneously--and that's before you get into the edge case afterlives, like how the giantess Rán catches sailors who drown at sea in her nets. Also very important to Norse beliefs are the Dísir, or Goddesses (literally "Ladies"). These are sort of an aggregate of female deities, probably associated with fertility, death, and fate. They're seldom named individually, but they are a major part of Norse religion. The Norns, or Fates, are probably a subclass of Dísir, as are the Valkyries, Odin's maids who choose who will go to Valhalla. Of note about the Norns: while there are three prominent, named Norns, everyone has their own individual Norn--they aren't a trinity like the Greek Fates. Also, they don't weave Fate--that again is the Greek Moirae. The Norns carve your fate, and whatever day they decide you will die, that's the day you'll die. So that's an overview of the cosmology--how do people actually worship all these beings? For starters, it's very different than what most readers will be familiar with, either from their own lives or from fantasy settings. There is no dogma in Norse religion: no revelation or codified holy text, no formal, standardized prayers or rites (at least, not that have survived to us). There aren't even a specialized class of priest: a person who takes care of a sacred site and administers rites is called a godi, but that's not a full-time occupation. Usually it's the head of a social group: the patriarch or matriarch of an extended family performs the rites for the family, while the jarl or king performs those for the larger society. The chief form of worship is the blót, or sacrifice. There are four major ones every year, at the solstices and equinoxes, but smaller blóts are held whenever people feel the need. Typically, a blót involves a sacrifice (usually an animal, rarely a human being unless poo poo's really dire), with the blood collected in a bowl and sprinkled over the holy place and the participants. The gods are invoked and entreated, and afterwards the meat of the sacrifice is cooked, usually boiled in a stew, and eaten at a feast. (There's some scholarly suggestion that this description might be a Christian invention trying to make these rites seem like an unholy mirror of a Christian rite, but since this is the only real description we have of Norse worship practice it's all we've got to go on.) Temples are extremely rare--there's one in Uppsala, but most worship takes place outdoors, in sacred groves, or at small shrines. Holy places are typically marked off with hazelwood fences, which is also how areas for formal duels are marked out. We know that weddings and funerals were significant rituals, but we don't really know what happened at weddings. Funerals involve the deceased being washed, their hair and beard (if any) combed and styled, and their eyes, nose, and mouth closed to keep the ghost from escaping. Alternately, a hole may be knocked in the wall so the ghost can escape and not stick around the house. Most people are buried in mounds, with the quality of their grave goods and internment depending on their status. Most people do not get cremated on a boat, that was how the gods sent Baldr off, but it wasn't terribly common for mortals. Ships were clearly an important part of funeral traditions, though: rich people were often buried in funereal boats, while the poor make due with laying out marker stones around the grave in the shape of a boat. We wrap up this chapter with two specific rituals: the rite of blood brothers and the blood eagle. When two people want to become blood brothers (as the name suggests, the assumption was definitely that this would be two men doing this), they cut a long strip of turf from the ground and lift it up on their spears, so it makes an arch. Then they cut themselves and stir their blood into the earth while swearing their allegiance to each other. Thereafter, they're considered brothers in all respects--including inheritance and obligations of mutual aid, and vengeance should one of them be slain. The blood eagle probably didn't exist. It's described as a means of execution or human sacrifice where the ribs are severed along both sides of the spine and the lungs are pulled out through the back, making "wings." It's mentioned a couple of times in the source material, but the prevailing theory is that this is either the result of a 13th century Eli Roth trying to write the grossest death imaginable or another misunderstood kenning: possibly "to carve the eagle on" someone's back meant to leave them facedown on the battlefield, where carrion birds would "carve up" their backs. But it's metal as gently caress, so yeah, it probably does happen in extraordinary circumstances in the world of Yggdrasil. Next Time: Who are the free-born, who are the high-born, The noblest of men that in Midgard dwell? GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 15:25 on May 24, 2020 |
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May 24, 2020 15:21
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Ah, the good ole' Norse Flowchart.
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May 24, 2020 15:28
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 Chapter 1, Part Two: Alchemicals Fundamentals The process of creating Alchemicals (they come in batches, both because it’s more resource-efficient and because it offers an excuse for party formation) is a difficult and complicated one. It starts with the Tripartite commissioning them gathering a huge amount of material for the process, including a variety of clays only rarely manifesting in mostly-mechanical Autochthonia, magical metals, enchanted crystals, and even the bodily fluids of Populat workers (in game terms, building one will drain a person or organization with Resources 4 to Resources 2, while making them in a batch does the same for Resources 5). It also requires the right kind of soul. I don’t know the specifics of the top my head, but Autochthonians all have soulgems placed in them at birth that seem to contain their actual souls. Alchemicals need the souls of people who have distinguished themselves through multiple reincarnations (so THAT’S what the multiple souls thing is about) in order to function, so they have to hunt the right soulgem down first. Soulgems of recently-dead Alchemicals can be reused, but they tend to develop memory gaps going on full Rip van Winkle if re-implanted too often so they are usually sent back into circulation instead. Once everything they need is assembled, specialists from each Sodality (as in, experts with specially-cultivated mutations that help them survive knowing one-fifth of a process that directly channels divine knowledge) huddle up and go through a five-step process that Frankensteins the Alchemical(s) to life. The Sodalities usually handle specific technical aspects of Autochthonian life, but they started out as secret societies based around the part of the Exaltation process they knew, so their roles in both reflect each other.
 Alchemicals emerge fully conscious with a name, largely set identity and knowledge of their circumstances. Their initial personality is a hodgepodge of memories and skills from past lives; they might remember being a lever-puller in a arms factory, a battlefield surgeon, a commander, and a falsely-accused Lumpen – or another Alchemical or a fervent patriot of another nation – and inherit some of their skills and personality traits. However different their past lives were, though, they always come out with coherent and human personalities. Their bodies are always humanoid, at least at first, though they are so obviously nonorganic no one’s going to mistake them for human anytime soon. Yes, this includes the ability to have sex, but any ERP capability is left thankfully unexplored. As they age and grow more powerful, Alchemicals can alter their body plan as they like; the same Sodality members that put them together can switch out body parts and Charms or even change their entire body plan with enough time and materials. The most common and important body plan change is when powerful Champions upgrade themselves into 12-feet-tall war machines called Colossi. A Colossus is by nature both powerful and detached from other people, and the process of increasing power and Clarity culminates in the patropolis/metropolis transformation. However, most Alchemicals never finish their transformation process: there have been tens of thousands of Alchemicals in Autochthonian history and over 3000 active today, but maybe 50 of them have become cities. They tend to avoid going Colossus if they like having human relationships or any subtlety at all, and they avoid the city route if they like the ability to move around or think about anything other than infrastructure (though they can build drones to interact with people when they hit that stage). Unlike basically every other Exaltation type, Alchemicals were specifically intended to serve mortals instead of lead or dominate them. Still, they do have the social status of any Tripartite member by nature and can act with authority when they need to use it. But even though an Alchemical has a great deal of authority and independence by nature, a freshly-unpotted Champion lacks the network of favors and social connections even a middle manager can leverage (and the fact that middle managers can and do successfully throw their weight against new Alchemicals in disputes says a lot about Autochthonian culture). Between their inherent skills and immortality (the oldest base-form Alchemical currently active is about 3000), this weakness doesn’t last long, but they remain beholden to mortals in fact as well is in theory for their entire lives. In return, they gain enormous personal freedom as well as, you know, supernatural powers. While Autochthonian society depends on everyone filling their roles as assigned to maximize efficiency in their harsh environment, Alchemicals, between their inherent skill and drive, the loyalty to the state that comes with nationalism (one of the most important reasons why nations have such strong identities in the first place), and the way they rely on Sodality technicians for upgrades and repairs, are trusted to experiment, innovate, and challenge social norms as they see fit. They spend most of their time fulfilling requests from the Tripartite and advising various leaders, but they can and do break social norms to test social cohesion and reveal flaws. Without their input, Autochthonian society would stagnate to the point of collapse. Still, most Alchemicals use their skills more to troubleshoot and carry out special missions assigned by the Tripartite (i.e. player stuff); examples that show up in the book include busting cults non-lethally, search and rescue in dangerous areas, and military action (as far as I can tell, despite the fact they were not designed for it, Alchemicals can and do fight against humans and Alchemicals from other nations). State propaganda tends to emphasize their public achievements, though failures and missteps can become national embarrassments. So don’t do that.  Alchemicals need social bonds to stay sane just like the rest of us. Without maintaining friendships or relationships with humans, they gradually succumb to Clarity. Other Alchemicals don’t count; while they can form friendships with each other just like anybody else, they don’t have any effect on Clarity. Relationships have to be managed carefully though, since they tend to disrupt the lives of the other party between people trying to take advantage of them, condescension from those who think the Alchemical is doing their work for them, and even punishments for distracting the Alchemical. Romantic relationships deal with all of the above but even more so, though high-placed Tripartite members usually handle the pressure better since their status can’t go much higher. When it comes to non-humans, Alchemicals seem to possess the status of maybe middle-ranking spirits; they do get some deference both to their power and their importance to maintaining Autochthon, but as inherent subordinates to human leaders they have no real command in the spiritual hierarchy and can be ordered around by major spirits (even though an assembly can usually take one down in a fight). No word on befriending/seducing spirits for Clarity-alleviating purposes. Is that even a thing in the Exalted universe? I don’t know. When it comes to powerful spirits, though, they have a special thing when it comes to Exalted. See, I mentioned there being six blueprints (not all of which were used for Exalted in Creation), but Autochthonians only have access to five of them. The last caste, the Adamants, are secret servants of the Divine Ministers made… Somehow, I don’t think the book elaborates what the Alchemical creation proIncess is like when it doesn’t involve the Sodalities. They act as a mixture of shock troops and secret agents among humans. To Autochthonians, Adamants are the sort of fairy tales you tell the children to make them behave, but they definitely exist. The fact that they are supposed to be secret doesn’t prevent them from joining assemblies later on, of course; you can’t have that restriction on a party. While there are a few stable societies based out of Alchemical cities away from the eight nations, none of them have access to their own Alchemicals (though they often have the means to pull it off and many are considering it). Most Alchemicals beyond the eight nations are Apostates: followers of the Void, the closest thing Autochthonia has to Satan. Most local theologians believe Autochthon floats in basically outer space and the Void is what happens when it leaks in. This is wrong. There is nothing outside of Autochthon, as he’s in a pocket dimension. The Void is what happens when the illnesses Autochthon kept under control with god-Claritin and divine antibiotics back in Creation run out of control. It tends to take over chunks of territory and spread outwards through a mixture of spirits and people that stumble across it, driven by a corruption that in Alchemicals manifests as a disease called Gremlin Syndrome. They become the aforementioned Apostates; they can install dangerous cybernetics called Voidtech that can spread Gremlin Syndrome and gain Dissonance, a pseudo-power stat covered later. In society, Apostates sometimes out themselves and get destroyed, but they often act like stereotypical serial killers; they put up a front of normalcy while doing awful things behind the curtains until someone finally puts the pieces together. Since Alchemicals are contractually obliged to do weird things, those curtains can be pretty thick. Apostates that flee before discovery tend to set themselves up as a mixture of cult leader and petty warlord in the Reaches, leading Gremlins and corrupted humans against healthy parts of Autochthon. The big Void-related bogeyman in Autochthonian right now is Erlik, the City of Ten Thousand Blasphemies: the story goes one that Apostate managed to hit city status and is currently caring his way through the Reaches, corrupting and destroying as he goes. No word from the book on whether it exists or not, but there’s nothing preventing an Apostate from climbing that far, making the concept terrifying to Autochthonians.  Alchemicals never existed in Creation; Autochthon didn’t build any until after he’d left. It’s been so long since then that Autochthonians don’t remember anything about creation except in abstract; even Alchemicals’ soul-borne memories from that far back have usually faded into insignificance, and though there are a few archives and museums deep in Autochthon’s body humans can’t access them. They don’t even believe in plant life. They certainly don’t have any non-Alchemical Exalted there, though a few souls were once Exalted before they got spirited away; one of the big reasons why Estasia tried to conquer Autochthonia way back was because he was a Solar in a past life and he felt that elevated him above everyone else. But since the various Creation Exalted were based off Alchemical blueprints and also because I guess the Exalted devs couldn’t help themselves, if and when Creation Exalted face off against Alchemicals from the equivalent caste, they take penalties to their Limit Breaks (and also have serious déjŕ vu and symbolic dreams later). The effect doesn’t place any more restrictions on their actions beyond that. Though the book covers this in detail later, between Autochthon’s prep work, how his body works when connected to Creation, and author fiat, when the Seal finally breaks, Alchemicals and other Exalted work equally well in either setting. Most Exalted rules in Creation start applying immediately once the Seal is breached, though no Alchemical can receive an Exaltation of any kind; for instance, Solars can reincarnate in and activate among Autochthonians and Lunars have ways to transform into Alchemicals. The final part of the chapter covers four sample Alchemicals (without character sheets or stats, just descriptions).
So we have a prick, a Mary Sue, an rear end in a top hat, and a flawed but capable young woman trying her best. Alright. Anyway, instead of segueing into character creation at a natural point, next chapter will cover Autochthon’s spiritual hierarchy. Character creation comes after that. Between that, a number of misplaced sidebars, and the way the text rambles from topic to topic, I think this book might be badly organized. Don’t expect these updates to go up this quickly in the future, I’m kind of stunned this one went so fast. I guess this is the power of positive reinforcement 
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May 24, 2020 22:29
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): the Alchemical construction process channels Autochthon’s power and without access to it the whole effort fails. This part is what will likely trip up any Creation attempts to make Alchemical knockoffs, though from what this book has to say about Solars those guys can probably find a workaround.
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How dare you insult Voice of Authority, Robocop Batman who was made to be secret police but just loves being Batman too much is fantastic. The important thing about him is that he’s terrible at being Soulsteel Caste; his body was literally forged from the souls of the damned and his angsty anime Bruce Wayne personality is in large part a mismatch with his expected social role, which is why he turns secret police operations into wild chase scenes and spectacular set pieces. Also, the thing with soul gems is that they’re basically cybernetically implanted soul interfaces that get more or less piston-hammered into Autochthonian babies, and then the soul is absorbed into it on death; tearing one out generally kills a person and traumatizes their contained ghost. The intent is for the soul to then be siphoned into the Well of Souls after cleaning, since Lethe (the system of reincarnation in Exalted) is not accessible from Autochthonia. This is one of many examples of a well-intentioned technology introduced by Autochthon to handle a problem his humans were having that had long-term negative consequences: specifically, soul gems can get lost when someone dies irretrievably without breaking the gem, which worsens the already critical soul shortage. Meanwhile, the cleaning process gets covered in the setting book, which reveals that Autochthonians have no idea what ‘ghosts’ are because the cleaning process shunts them into a giant storage tank, and ghosts are part of the soul - so anyone who would form a ghost in Creation instead ends up in metal hell, unable to reincarnate. Soul gems and the soul recycling system are a huge set of plot hooks for Alchemicals to deal with.
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May 24, 2020 23:03
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Night10194 posted:Ah, the good ole' Norse Flowchart. Even though it apparently didn't make the Liber Fanatica cut (and apparently "Defenders of the Forest" did), somebody did a Tilea sourcebook that at least starts out kind of cool: http://www.liberfanatica.net/Tilea_Estalia/Spears_of_Maiden_Colour.pdf
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May 25, 2020 00:38
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I think Defenders will be the only fanbook I cover. It was funny and terrible, and instructively bad in interesting ways because the ways people gently caress elves up in fantasy fiction fascinate me. Also I have played too many Estalians to write up a Tilean book. It is a matter of honor, Myrmidia, and adorable baby catbirds.
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May 25, 2020 02:30
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Joe Slowboat posted:How dare you insult Voice of Authority, Robocop Batman who was made to be secret police but just loves being Batman too much is fantastic. The important thing about him is that he’s terrible at being Soulsteel Caste; his body was literally forged from the souls of the damned and his angsty anime Bruce Wayne personality is in large part a mismatch with his expected social role, which is why he turns secret police operations into wild chase scenes and spectacular set pieces. The more of the review I write, this more I realize I missed. I completely forgot about that and I’ll include that in the review when we get to that part of the setting book. Autochthon’s inventions backfiring after millennia of no maintenance practically defines Autochthonia. This becomes exceptionally clear in the next section, which frames itself by ennumerating his mistakes when determining how the environment worked. I refuse to back down on Voice of Authority, though  . It’s not that his Batmanime thing isn’t cool, it’s that he’s the sort of self-absorbed success story that players love to hate. When placed across from the sympathetic and compelling Eternally Vigilant Bell, they all look a bit... dingy. 
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May 25, 2020 04:02
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Falconier111 posted:The more of the review I write, this more I realize I missed. I completely forgot about that and I’ll include that in the review when we get to that part of the setting book. Autochthon’s inventions backfiring after millennia of no maintenance practically defines Autochthonia. This becomes exceptionally clear in the next section, which frames itself by ennumerating his mistakes when determining how the environment worked. He gets an expanded writeup in Compass: Autochthonia that makes it clear his success is a lot less complete than he'd like. For one thing, he's falling in love with a heretical-but-decent target of his spy operations, and kind of really needs players to come in and help him get his head straight (however they define that). Plus he's not actually fantastic at being a Soulsteel Caste because, again, his whole action hero schtick isn't what they're for and Autochthonia is an extremely caste-based society. I like him, I think it's good he exists both as an example character to help players understand 'you can play against your material, and in fact it's encouraged, here's how a Nation handles an Alchemical who does things 'wrong' but gets results' and as an NPC that they'll find intermittently infuriating and likable and who can get them involved in some fun action sequences, or need to rely on them for things outside of his personal wheelhouse. Thousand Facet Nelumbo however is unbearable, which is a shame because 'mystic hidden Adamant Caste martial artist who has become obsessed with plants, which is incomprehensible to all your PCs but clear to your players' is a great NPC mentor in martial arts and a way to get involved in Divine Minister and Ex Machina nonsense. Unfortunately, she's written as a protagonist, not a secondary character, and she gets a number of the comics in at least one of the books. She's terrible when she should be cool. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 05:20 on May 25, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 05:16
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Chapter 7: Battle, pt. 4 Degenesis Rebirth Katharsys Chapter 7: Battle Wounds Not every attack causes damage! The calculations look like this: Weapon damage + Triggers + Potentials = Damage Damage – Armor Rating = Wounds Flesh wounds Flesh wounds is like wounds in FFG's games: ablative meat. Losing it that doesn't do any actual long-term damage. Trauma If you go over your max Flesh Wounds, you start getting Trauma, which is just another HP track. Each point of trauma imposes -1D penalty on actions – hope you're no encumbered. Max Trauma means death. The example returns us to the Hellvetic shooting at the rushing Usudi. The first paragraph talks about the DM opting to not defend actively, and should have been put in the section about active defenses.  Here's how the rest goes: quote:The stubbed Trailblazer does 11 damage (+1 Trigger), and the Usudi wears a rusty torn mail shirt, giving him a protection of 2. 10 points of damage (12 damage - 2 armor) go through. The Usudi is torn apart internally: through his BOD+Toughness 4, he can stand 8 Flesh Wounds. The Trailblazer’s projectile penetrates the armor, reduces the sustainable Flesh Wounds to 0, and causes 2 points of Trauma. Mental attacks Some ranks and Potentials allow you to MINDCRUSH the enemy. Such attacks are countered by PSY+Faith or PSY+Willpower, but does not use up an action, so you can't just taunt-lock an enemy. Mental attack damage is subracted from Ego points. Absolute Zero If you own a person hard enough for them to reach Ego 0, they are demoralized... though it does not say explicitly that if it causes you to be unable to act. What do you do to overcome the  ?Well, the book says that “at the end of the next combat round, he rolls PSY+Faith/Willpower (2),” which means, I guess, that you need to get at least two successes. If you win, you get 1 Ego point. This can only be done once. Regeneration You may think this bit is about healing, because that's something an absolute idiot would think. No, it's about regenerating Ego points. You get one 1 every 24 hours and you get points for roleplaying your concept. Now, that's somewhat impractical in combat, so you can instead do Burn or rely on your Potentials. For example, a Judge may meditate on the Codex for a round, which sounds like a) a very practical thing to do while an Apocalyptic is trying to stab you and b) meditation is just the thing you're down for when you're broken down and frantic. In Battle  The guy on the right tripped on a rock while retreating, fell back and accidentally stabbed an Usudi. Without much of an introduction, we're dumped into an example of play. It continues the battle against the Usudis that was developed in the examples in the chapter. I'm not gonna write it all out, 'cos its long. It starts with Falberg attacking a wounded Usudi who can "only actively defend." The tribal gets just a single success due to injury penalties and dies. Falberg uses his second action to attack another Usudi, taking -2D due to running. He fucks up his roll and the Usudi aces his, and Falberg eats 8 points of damage (down to 5 after armor). This mostly acts as an argument against multiple actions. However, this forced the Usudi to waste his only action on defense, so when Vedran shoots him with his Trailblazder, he can't dodge. Since Trailblazer grants a second attack if you roll 2 triggers, two rounds of fire take down the moon worshipping savage.  Notably the second attack doesn't get any additional penalties as it doesn't count as a new action. Incidentally, the Usudi was supposed to go next, but he's dead. Degenesis thus handily avoids showing that spending your single action on defense leaves you with nothing to do on your turn. We learn that Vocoders – the Archivist banshee scream – deal Ego damage. The Usudi Colossus attacks with his spear, dealing 13 damage to Falberg. Armor absorbs 3, Falberg takes 10 damage, which pushes him into Trauma. He gets another Trauma from the poison coating the spear. The spear has “stun (3T)” quality which very intuitively means that the Colossus can neither attack nor defend his next turn (unless he gets 3 Triggers on the attack, I guess?). The last character uses his MG to attack twice, as his gun has the same quality as the Trailblazer. Magdumping with the MG, he does more than 13 damage and takes the monster down. The Colossus was notably unharmed before this attack. So this is good, because making the combat last longer would be a very great illustration of how 2 Trauma would make Falberg nearly useless. So this wasn't great. Next time: vroom vroom JcDent fucked around with this message at 06:14 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 07:08
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Just discovered that Continuum's lost GM guide was found and scanned in 2015.
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May 25, 2020 07:41
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Yggdrasil Part Three: Scandia, the Place Where You Live Now that we've looked at the Norse cosmos, it's time to dive into the physical setting of the game: Midgard, or at least the region of Midgard the game calls "Scandia:" mainland Europe around the Baltic and North Seas. By far the most detail is reserved for Denmark, Norway, and Svithjod, but we'll get a brief discussion of some of their neighbors, trading partners, and raid targets. (Even though this game is set several centuries before the explosion of Viking raids all over Europe and the middle east, raiding is still very much a part of Norse society at this point--it's just that they're mostly not raiding literate cultures until the attack on Lindisfarne in 793, so we don't have many records of them.) They're broken down really well--each nation is split into Geography, Human Settlement, Country Organization, Current Situation, and Important Figures, and all of them are laden with story hooks and ideas rather than dry demographic details or trade matrices. But first, we get an eagle-eye view of Scandia as a whole. As this point in history, pretty much all of Scandia, bar the highest mountains and glaciers, is covered with forests. At higher altitudes, this is of course mostly pine and other evergreens, while at lower levels you see a range of larch, beech, oak, birch, elm, cedar, and linden. (Incidentally, if you've ever come across something talking about shields being made of "limewood," that's not talking about the tree that produces the citrus fruit, it's an archaic term for linden.) There's wood enough to satisfy even the most demanding artisan--which is good, because Norse woodworkers like to select trees that already have the shape they need rather than carving pieces out of planks or timbers--but of course this is mythic Scandia, which means that on top of dangerous animals like bears, boars, and wolves, there's trolls in them thar hills. In lots of places, overland travel is quite literally impassable, between dense forest with thick undergrowth and mountainous terrain. Winter travel is especially fraught, and "roads" are something that happen to other people, which is why, whenever possible, Scandians prefer to travel by sea. The sea is absolutely vital to Scandian culture--coastal communities fish and whale, and almost all the major trade settlements are on the coasts. But even inland communities are seldom far from the sea--Norse ships are flat-bottomed and ride high in the water, meaning they can sail up surprisingly shallow rivers, and of course large sections of the Scandian coast (especially Norway) are marked with deep inlets and fjords. But the sea is also treacherous: storms can brew up seemingly out of nowhere, and are often extremely violent. Most shipping stays close to shore so they can put in to land and wait out the storm--but even that carries its own risks, because the bays and fjords are often full of reefs just below the surface. A skilled local navigator, who knows the waters around where you're sailing, is a valuable resource. The most common open-sea journey at this time is the eastern way from Svithjod to the Baltic lands of Eastern Europe, and you definitely need an experienced navigator for that. To the west, we're told that the ocean is the final frontier, and sailors dream of testing their skills on it. Personally, I think the Norse had at least a vague awareness of the British Isles at this point, given that there were Saxon settlements in England as early as AD 410 and the Norse had regular contact with Saxons for trade and warfare, but I could be wrong about that. From the sea, we move on to the mountains. A huge mountain range splits Norway and Svithjod, and though there are plenty of passes over them, unpredictable weather, to say nothing of monsters, wild animals, and what the book describes as "savage tribes" with no further explanation, makes a sea-route preferable. Outside of a few open-pit mining settlements and the aforementioned monsters and hostile tribes (seriously, I have no idea who these are supposed to be--I'd say this is a really lovely exploitation of the Sámi, but the Sámi get their own section later on and aren't portrayed as savages or intrinsically hostile, so...  ), there's not much human presence in the mountains. The valleys between the mountains are far more settled--in the south, there are loads of broad plains that are great for agriculture, but farther north you have to clear a lot of forests to get arable farmland. Peat bogs are also valuable resources--not only is peat great for fuel, the bulk of Scandian iron is found as bog iron--and in the Migration Period when Yggdrasil is set, human sacrifices are still sometimes offered up to the bogs.Villages and cities are mostly on the coast, at the mouths of rivers and fjords, or along navigable rivers--but large settlements are pretty rare (and "large" is a relative term--Uppsala, for example, is a major political and trade center and probably had at most 1,000 people). Most people live in isolated farmsteads or small clusters of farms, usually along with extended family. These farmsteads are generally built on hills and near a source of fresh water--wells are dug if there's no other option, but people prefer to have a creek or stream near their houses. Likewise, while larger settlements have their own markets, most large-scale trade happens at trading posts. These are the closest thing the Norse have to urban centers--usually they're a collection of workshops and processing centers located in a good harbor or on a major river. Raw materials are brought in and sold, and artisans produce finished products which are then bought by merchants and sold all across the Norse world. Some of these trading posts are permanent fixtures and are major influential cities, but others are seasonal, like the Kaupang whaling post in northern Norway. Norse trading posts can even be found outside Scandia, in the lands of peoples like the Jutes, Saxons, and Sámi. Denmark The southernmost of the Scanian kingdoms, Denmark is mostly lowlands. It has lots of islands, from tiny reefs to lands big enough to have their own petty kings, and lots of good bays for ports. Most of those bays are inhabited by at least a watchtower with a signal fire, but there are plenty of uninhabited islands throughout the Danish archipelago. The Kingdom of Denmark proper comprises the islands of Sjaeland and Fyn, Scania (what is presently the southern tip of Sweden--where I live!), and most of the islands of the archipelago. The Jutland peninsula, while part of modern-day Denmark, is not part of the kingdom at this time, being mostly uninhabited in the interior, with Angles, Jutes, and Saxons living along the coasts. There are some Danish settlements on the peninsula, and they tend to say that Jutland is part of Denmark, but naturally the Jutes have other things to say about that. Denmark is a very rich country--it has lots of excellent farmland, rich coastal seas, plentiful iron deposits, and is excellently-situated for trade. Its major cities include Hleidra, the capital city, where an annual thing of the Danish jarls meets to discuss matters affecting the entire kingdom. Given that the current king took the throne violently and is not exactly popular, it's pretty heavily policed by the kings hird, his full-time personal guard, which is an unusual thing in Scandia--elsewhere there's really not a concept of "law enforcement," just personal responsibility and recompense determined by the thing. There's also Haven, a large fishing town on Sjaeland which is also the home of a fleet charged with repelling raids from Norway and Svithjod (and, one assumes, raiding them in turn). Because the jarl of Haven is so important, he's frequently the recipient of extravagant rewards from the king, which makes other jarls jealous. Odense is the kingdom's religious center, built on the shores of a huge lake sacred to Odin. Legends say that this is where Odin appears when he wants to walk in Midgard, and an order of local women maintain a shrine to the one-eyed god on the shore of the lake. More witches and sorcerers live in Odense than anywhere else in Denmark. The island of Bornholm is a minor settlement, but located on a vital sea route. Its jarl is fiercely loyal to the Danish king, but Svithjod has been trying to woo him into changing his allegiance. So far it's just been diplomatic efforts, but that could change at any moment. The Danish royal family are the Skjoldung. They claim descent from a king named Skyld, who, according to legend, washed up ashore as an infant, alone on a boat, surrounded by sheaves of grain, swords, and axes. The Danes, recognizing that this was an auspicious as gently caress baby, made him king. He actually turned out to be good at it, once he grew up--they say he was a grandson of Odin, and when he died they put him onto a ship and sent him back to the west from whence he came. The Danish nobility has always been ambitious--the kings would love to firmly solidify their control over Denmark, annex Jutland, and become the mightiest kings in Midgard. Unfortunately, most of the jarls have similar ideas, and while they all nominally recognize the king's authority, the fact that so many of them are scattered across isolated islands means that they kinda just... do whatever they want, most of the time.Which usually includes raids and piracy against their neighbors over ancient inter-clan grudges. The current situation in Denmark is Important figures in Denmark include King Frodi himself, who we've pretty much covered. Regin Erlingsson, the old (as in age, not as in former) jarl of Hleidra, was the foster-father of the sons of Halfdan who had them secreted out of the capital when the fighting turned against them. He hates Frodi with a passion, and the king has a strong suspicion that he had something to do with the boys' disappearances, but he can't afford to alienate the people of Hleidra, who love Jarl Regin, so for know the jarl keeps his post. He's probably too old to lead a rebellion himself, but if someone were to come along and try to unseat Frodi, he'd happily join the fight for one last chance to honor Odin. Sveijar Einarsson, the jarl of Haven, was Halfdan's son in law. An intelligent, calculating man, he was one of the first to kneel to the new king--whether out of genuine loyalty or as part of a longer-term strategem, he's keeping to himself. Plenty of people would rally to him if he raised spears against the king, but plenty more dismiss him as a bootlicker. Complicating the matter is that, since Frodi married his mother-in-law, the king is technically kin, and that demands loyalty. Still, as the jarl in charge of Denmark's maritime defense, and a man who is drat good at his job, he knows that he has a fairly secure position, and he's Next Time: The fair-haired son of Odin's race, Who fled before fierce Tunne's face
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May 25, 2020 14:36
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If I remember properly from an old bit of coursework, wasn't a popular segway in sagas for when the author didn't want to have to describe a journey 'And then they all got on a ship and sailed there' since it was that much easier to sail/boat than travel any other way?
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May 25, 2020 14:43
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Night10194 posted:If I remember properly from an old bit of coursework, wasn't a popular segway in sagas for when the author didn't want to have to describe a journey 'And then they all got on a ship and sailed there' since it was that much easier to sail/boat than travel any other way? I don't know how much of it was lazy saga authors vs. just the reality of travel in early medieval Scandinavia, but yeah. Yggdrasil even points out that the inland terrain is so nasty (at least in Norway and Svithjod--Denmark's islands are much easier to trek across) that, even if the straight-line overland route is much shorter, it probably won't be any faster than sailing, and by sailing you're far more likely to actually reach your destination. EDIT: Incidentally, I forgot to add that Frodi, at least, is a semi-historical figure attested in various sources, and the story is pretty much what it is here--he and his brother were co-kings, Frodi killed his brother, and was in turn revenged upon by his nephews (that part hasn't happened yet in Yggdrasil, but given that one of the untranslated adventure books is called The Sons of Halfdan, I'm pretty sure that's where it's heading). Different versions mix up the exact relationships and names of the figures involved; the version in Yggdrasil appears to be primarily based on the Saga of Hrolf Kráki. Frodi is also probably the "Froda the Heathobard" mentioned in Beowulf, and he's not the only character from Beowulf who shows up. The other NPCs, as far as I can tell, are fictional. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 15:23 on May 25, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 15:10
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