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I'm like 1500 posts behind but the daily fun of reading through RPG writer's weird choices, and how games reacted to them, has been a joy.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 18:34 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 05:45 |
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atal posted:I never post but I've had years of fun reading the content in this thread and if this ship is going down I wanted to say thanks to anyone who has taken the time to post a dumb RPG review. I just want to echo this. I got into SA through the Fatal & Friends CthulhuTech review and this thread has introduced me to a lot of cool games.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 18:38 |
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I guess the F&F archive might have to take posts directly?
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 18:45 |
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Guess I'll just have to do the rest of the Mutant books on a WP blog or something if things goes full Hindenburg. Time will tell I guess.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 18:49 |
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I joined SA for this thread, so thanks for all the years of interesting RPGs.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 18:51 |
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Yes, thank you so much to all the wonderful posters in this thread. You've provided many hours of joy.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 19:21 |
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Leraika posted:If I got at least one person to purchase the itch.io bundle with my reviews, they'll have been worth it. I bought the itch.io bundle because of your reviews
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 19:21 |
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Kaza42 posted:I bought the itch.io bundle because of your reviews
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 19:22 |
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This thread has been one of my mainstays for years though I never contributed a review. Thank you all reviewers and especially Inklesspen for the archive. The forums are unlikely to be deleted anytime soon for several reasons so don't panic about preservation of what's here, but making plans for a future elsewhere is probably not a bad idea.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 19:23 |
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Kaza42 posted:I bought the itch.io bundle because of your reviews Also, I'd like to salute Inklesspen for her peerless service archiving all the thread's reviews I love being able to consult them whenever I have questions about an RPG; I've used a couple of reviews as system references for planning my own games. I can't think of any equivalents to this thread elsewhere. Are there any anyone knows about?
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 19:28 |
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Inklesspen I vow that I will review that second adventure because you are providing an important service to all rpg nerds.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 19:35 |
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If the forums go down I hope someone finds a way to keep the F&F magic going. If I don't get to finish my Buck Rogers overview, it's a good game and probably kinda hard to find now, but keep an eye out because there's a lot of good stuff in it.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 19:40 |
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This is one of the best threads on the forum. I appreciate all the work everyone has put into this over the years.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 19:41 |
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I'm new and mostly a lurker, but this thread is what drew me to SA and everything about has been fantastic. I have such a deeper appreciation for the craft (or lack thereof in some cases) that goes into an RPG now that I never would have without this thread. Someday I will run a much better game group because of the posters here.
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 20:15 |
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Maxwell Lord posted:If the forums go down I hope someone finds a way to keep the F&F magic going. According to Inklesspen, she'll be able to continue processing posts from the thread even if the forum goes down. Also we nerds on the tradgames discord are debating what to do and where to go if the forums to go down, so consider joining us: https://discord.gg/p8WqNV8
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# ? Jun 24, 2020 20:56 |
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Even if by and large I've dropped off this project, F&F will always have a special place in my heart for helping me hone my writing voice and helping me actually learn how to dissect, critique and improve TTRPGS.
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 02:14 |
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PurpleXVI posted:According to Inklesspen, she'll be able to continue processing posts from the thread even if the forum goes down. Also we nerds on the tradgames discord are debating what to do and where to go if the forums to go down, so consider joining us: Then I'll be damned if I stop now! The Outer Planes: Limbo and Pandemonium Limbo (Chaotic) is both the epitome and antithesis of . While it's all shapeless matter at its base, most of Limbo takes temporary concrete forms that echo things from across the cosmology before dissolving again. You need just to survive entry, since portaling into the plane may find you embedding yourself in rock or in the middle of a bonfire. Once in, the defining feature of Limbo is sentience’s effect on it. Any intelligent creature can control a certain amount of territory around them, shaping its matter however they please. The size of the area depends on the INT of whoever’s maintaining it: creatures with 1 to 4 control 10 feet per point, with 5 to 10 10 yards per point, 11 to 18 100 yards per point, and 19+ 1 mile per point. The effects stack when they work together by adding one increment to the radius controlled by the one who maintains the area as long as they’re less than two steps down the chart; a magic user with INT 16 supported by a marginally intelligent familiar and the four plebs they brought with them controls 2100 yards, even if some of those plebs are nearly as smart as they are. The magic user can’t cast spells, though, since it takes enough concentration to maintain at that they can’t use magic or sleep (though they can take other actions). Others can use magic in there just fine, though. Anything outside of a sphere of influence either breaks down (if it’s temporary or made out of Limbo matter) or just glides to a stop (if made from actual matter) 1d10 turns after it leaves it. As far as I can tell, if the sphere manager has to go take a nap or gets enchanted, someone else can immediately take over and stabilize it before it dissolves back into the plane; it’s how githzerai can maintain their own fortresses. Everything outside of a sphere of influence is in constant motion. Physical objects imported from elsewhere exists just fine but get carried away the moment you let them go, as are travelers who don’t stick together using standard planar mental travel. The only objects that sit still are portals, which take the shape of any kind of aperture sitting motionless in the midst of changing matter: since motion is relative, the best way you can tell a portal’s a portal is if it only seems to move in one direction. In theory, the plane has five levels (ruled by the Githzerai and Slaad, Agni, Susanowo, Indra, and… someone, in sequence) but in practice those divinities drift between layers and locating a boundary comes down to pure luck or . The only important difference is portals only open up on the first. The two intelligent species in Limbo, the Slaad and Githzerai, mostly inhabit the first level (hence the name), with the first probably being the lesser threat; while unharmed by the shifting local conditions and able to maintain their own spheres without effort, they take damage from spells as normal and work alone. The githzerai operate in groups, though, and though they seem content to peacefully ignore the slaad, they like to mount raids into the Astral on the Githyanki and capture visitors to Limbo as slaves. Maybe 10,000 of them total live in fortresses across the plane with wizards, a few hundred citizens and a smaller number of slaves (meaning there spheres can extend for several miles, enough to build proper settlements). Add that to the occasional spirit that gets sucked in and turned into a pseudo-Lovecraftian “chaos elemental” and Limbo’s just not a nice place. Pandemonium (Chaotic Evil) is a giant mess of caves full of howling winds. It’s dark, the wind rips light objects away (at its strongest it can even sweep away a halfling), and the noise is so intense you go permanently deaf after one round without protection (while certainly helps, you can neutralize the effects with wax stoppers just as well). You can’t even use spells with vocal components because the sound doesn’t reach the target. Of course, the book also tells us you can shout to anyone within 10 feet and still be heard, I guess before you lose the ability to hear anything else seconds later. Natives (i.e. creatures that have lived here for generations, nothing’s actually native) ignore the wind, just like natives to other planes ignored local conditions, but the noise still deafens them. Unlike Limbo, Pandemonium’s layers have definite differences and inhabitants, though all keep the darkness and wind and gravity always pulls down towards the nearest surface. The barriers between them look like blank rock walls that the wind roars through without stopping, signifying an invisible hole. The portals between Pandemonium and its neighbors, on the other hand, resemble squares carved into the rock with colors that indicate which plane they lead to; you can enter them just by flying through, but there’s a one in five chance they’ll whisk you away to one of the other realms.
Since the thread’s attention span is understandably low right now, I’ll leave it to those two planes for now, just a bit of a breather for everyone between worrying about the future. Next time (whatever that happens to mean), we’ll start rounding the bottom of the Outer Planes. How many layers would you think the plane of demons has? 666? You’re right! Counter: 32.5 But seriously, I doubt the forum is going to suddenly implode. I 'd say we have at absolute minimum a few days before anything starts to change on a practical level. So even as we plan for the future, let’s keep on enjoying the same stuff we came to this thread for.
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 02:23 |
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Hell yeah, let's ride the into hell
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 02:23 |
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I always felt like Pandemonium was criminally underused as a location. Between the persistent darkness and noise, almost every visitor will be near deaf and blind, in endless tunnels, some of them partially flooded, others just narrow. Just imagine the horror of being stalked by something in there that can see perfectly well in the darkness and has all the patience in the world.
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 03:14 |
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i'm using these manual of the planes writeups for my game right now the gamma world influenced precursor culture left arcologies with planar bleedthrough to the demi-planes which have become megadungeons reading all of these write-ups for years instead of watching tv has been great preparation for actually running games, i can rattle off complicated nuanced bits of background worldbuilding as if i'm coming up with it on the spot when in fact i'm hazily remembering something someone posted here like six years ago thanks everyone
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 03:25 |
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edit: stop spamming random threads
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 07:59 |
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Sharkie posted:Hi! So, I don't think I've ever posted in this thread, but I've lurked it for a long time. I genuinely love what's been created here, and reading through these reviews has gotten me through plenty of hours of being bored, sad, hungover, etc. So please let me shill for breadnroses.net. It's an SA replacement web forum that was created by goons earlier this year and in the past 24 hours it's gone from a few hundred to over 3000 posters. I’m not going anywhere near a forum created and run by c-spam posters and these advertisements spammed in every loving thread on SA are tiresome.
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 08:01 |
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i haven't posted in this thread in ages, i kept putting off my Dead Gods review, but i wanted to post now to say it's a Good Thread and also I did end up finishing my Great Modron March review (currently labeled on Inkless as "abandoned") and I hope the rest of it gets uploaded and not lost to the sands of time.
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 14:53 |
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Night10194 posted:Hell yeah, let's ride the into hell Fatal & Friends 2020: Hell Yeah, Let's Ride The Smug Wizard Into Hell
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 15:20 |
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Geez, all this lovely stuff is coming to a head just as I've been finishing up the AD&D Deck of Encounters Set 2 in preparation for posting. If something decisive happens with the forum or the thread before I'm ready, I'll follow wherever Inklesspen goes!
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 17:55 |
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Dallbun posted:Geez, all this lovely stuff is coming to a head just as I've been finishing up the AD&D Deck of Encounters Set 2 in preparation for posting. I know Inklesspen hangs out on the tradgames Discord where most of this thread's posters are also present. Scroll up a bit for the link.
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 18:22 |
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PurpleXVI posted:I know Inklesspen hangs out on the tradgames Discord where most of this thread's posters are also present. Scroll up a bit for the link. Thank you! I just meant that I'll follow and post if Fatal & Friends moves to some other forum. (I asssume nobody wants me to dump pages and pages of encounter reviews in a Discord channel.)
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 19:50 |
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Another lurker checking in to tell you all that you've been great and that I'll be following any migration. InklessPen, if I get a chance at some point in the future, I'm nominating you for sainthood.
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 22:57 |
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This has been a really good thread to read about a bunch of RPGs I will never read or play myself. Y'all are diamonds and I hope you keep on shinin
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 23:31 |
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I hope someone else manages to take over SA, because it's had a good run and I've been here so long, even if I mostly haven't ventured out of Games for like a decade. But whatever happens to this thread I'll follow, it's one of my favorites ever.
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# ? Jun 25, 2020 23:43 |
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I have exactly 4 opinions on the proposed move:
The Outer Planes: The Abyss and The Abyss (Chaotic Evil) has a theoretically infinite number of layers; the whole “666” thing is an estimate probably chosen for reasons. Each layer contains its own ecosystem of demons of every kind up and down the power scale, though usually any given layer has a demon that claims control over it and likely neighboring layers (effectively making them a Lesser Power). While not necessarily hostile to foreign life, visitors to the Abyss have to deal with demons, always an iffy proposition. The book gives a listing of several powerful demons and evil deities and what their levels look like (Lolth’s is a series of massive spiderwebs around a permanent storm, Demogorgon lives in a multilevel jungle packed with appropriate monsters, Orcus has a bone palace stocked with undead, etc.), but you can expect to run into some ruler controlling every level. While demon rulers can and do die, some underling always takes their place after a brief break and drags the layer into line. I suppose evil players could do this, too. The top layer of the Abyss is called Pazunia because it’s ruled by Pazuzu, a demon of the air that also controls the sky above every layer by respect and recognition; for all the power that nets him, he only uses it to shuttle people between layers, making him about as popular as a demon can be. Aside from a typically hellish landscape, the layer contains iron portals leading to neighboring planes, fortresses built around those portals that house demons who monopolize them, the river Styx (which flows through the layer same as the rest of the lower planes) and a series of holes in the ground that lead to other layers deeper in. At this point the mechanics get somewhat vague and confusing. Occasionally the Styx flows through those holes, which I think means you can ride it back to the first level and out of the plane, but most just lead to other layers and dump you out hundreds of feet above the surface. I think you have to rely on Pazuzu or not to splatter, but I don’t know how you might negotiate a way down with him. Unless you know where a given hole leads, it deposits you into a random level with terrain rolled by the GM; these range from Prime Material-equivalent to solid rock (though you always pop out in a relatively safe area) to Mustafar to somewhere that looks like a Prime Material but everyone wants to kill you to a plane that can instantly kill good visitors. Like, save versus spell or die, good creatures that survive and neutral creatures get flung into a random level and evil creatures turn into demons on the spot. You have a one in 20 chance of hitting this plane. It’s just… I know AD&D tends to be lethal and unfair, but the idea of making your way all the way into the Abyss only to die because of two unfortunate rolls just sucks. Also, note: no Tanar’ri here. This book came out before the Satanic Panic, so no name changes to avoid censors. This will come up later. Tarterus is a nonstandard romanization of the name for a part of the Greek underworld and I refuse to use it. Tartarus (Chaotic Evil) looks like a series of nested solar systems – well, endless strings of planets suspended in breathable space. I think, the wording’s a bit confusing. Each level contains countless planets about the size of a Prime Material world but whichever Power dominates a sphere dictates local conditions (to a point). The ancient Greek Titans were the first to really take control of the plane and gave it and its layers there names, but most of them have long since been largely usurped by some mixture of demons and daemons across the spheres; the two sides use the plane for low-level proxy wars that their higher-ups mostly ignore. While you get out through touching big monoliths that connect to neighboring planes depending on their size, you go deeper into the plane by finding barriers at the lowest points of each planet; after crossing them you find yourself on the corresponding smaller planet in a similar pseudo-solar system, though interplanetary conditions vary from level to level. I can’t tell where you come out after passing through a barrier or how you get back, but I think it’s through corresponding barriers at the top of the tallest mountains. It’s possible to fly through interplanetary space – the heirs breathable in most levels – but as far as I can tell you don’t have mental movement like you do outside of the Outer Planes: I think you have to either your way across or catch a ride from somebody. Or you could use the Styx? I don’t know how the Styx crosses Tartarus so
This section reads like Grubb was trying not to fall asleep while he wrote it; every time he nodded off, he skipped another bit of description before waking up again and writing like there was no interruption. It’s still interesting stuff (there’s a reason this post is longer than several previous ones), it’s just I wish it gave me a better grasp of how the planes worked. Next time we hit the bottom of the Lower Planes and enter the home stretch; we’ve got maybe four more updates before we wrap this up. Counter: 38 PS thanks to all the lurkers crawling out of the woodwork to talk about how much this thread meant to you, you make this thread worth posting in <3 E: Tungsten posted:i'm using these manual of the planes writeups for my game right now Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jun 26, 2020 |
# ? Jun 26, 2020 04:01 |
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Falconier111 posted:I have exactly 4 opinions on the proposed move: I am inclined to believe them. If only cause it would be the best situation. Also always been a fan of the Abyss. If only for being able to do whatever you want there. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jun 26, 2020 |
# ? Jun 26, 2020 04:48 |
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Tart(a/e)rus seems like such a squandered opportunity for adventuring hooks, if I'm reading it correctly—an infinite number of full-on planets, often very close to each other, and half of them are like "yeah this is just rocks or mountains (tall rocks), rip." Like, you know how big the Earth is, right, how much stuff's on it. Jam that into an infinite number of Tartaran planetoids, go nuts man!
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# ? Jun 26, 2020 05:15 |
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Tart(a/e)rus seems like such a squandered opportunity for adventuring hooks, if I'm reading it correctly—an infinite number of full-on planets, often very close to each other, and half of them are like "yeah this is just rocks or mountains (tall rocks), rip." Like, you know how big the Earth is, right, how much stuff's on it. Jam that into an infinite number of Tartaran planetoids, go nuts man! That’s the tragedy of the Manual of the Planes. Grubb specifically decided to avoid anything that didn’t reflect his sources; he wanted to leave the fluff up to GMs to provide them creative freedom. Instead, he left the book without hooks GMs didn’t have to make up themselves. He gave his readers too much creative freedom and the book paid the price. Also I’m in the part of the US hit by the Sahara Plume and my allergies are going nuts, so I don’t know how much I’ll write today. I’ve kind of given up on the “it’s done when it’s done” thing
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# ? Jun 26, 2020 16:13 |
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Tartarus ended up becoming Carceri in later editions, an outright prison plane that's exceptionally hard to escape from, the eventual fate of traitors, specifically. Similarly to the bottommost layer of Pandemonium, generally used by the Powers as a dumping ground for anything real nasty and dangerous they didn't want to deal with again but which they couldn't(or for some reason wouldn't) outright put in the deadbook. Also on the first layer, in the void beyond the orbs, vast creatures from before the dawn of time are said to be imprisoned, older than the Titans, unknown to most of the planes, trying to lure travellers to them so they can attempt escape. Seems like a bit of Lovecraftian influence. Also something of interest from 2e Planescape is that the fucky local magic conditions can be overcome with "Keys" that allow you to use a school of magic normally on a plane that would normally gently caress it up, or channel your god's powers normally despite any planar distance.
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# ? Jun 26, 2020 18:44 |
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The Outer Planes: Hades and Gehenna Hades (Evil) would in later editions be renamed the Grey Wastes, and you can see the seeds already; the entire plane is almost entirely gray, leaching the color out of visitors and their items after a week or two of exposure and eventually turning into human-headed worms called larvae (the book implies pulling those larvae out of Hades will return them to normal, but rescuing them before their transformation or magic can also bring them back). Hades is so gloomy it drains the emotions and hope of the gods that live in it; they even call the layers glooms. Though the plane is theoretically ruled by Anthraxus, the God of daemons, he and his servants only control the top layer; the other two are controlled by gods from other pantheons appointed to oversee that pantheon’s dead and guard entrances to their home realms (which I’ll cover when I get to the layers). The whole point of Hades is showing how evil gradually corrodes a personality until only a shell remains. It reflects the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. Of course, going too deep into analysis means examining the nature of good and evil in D&D and Hades has three
I love how they immediately forgot they were trying to call Hades’s levels glooms. Also note that they call them daemons, not Yugoloths like in later editions. This will also be important. Gehenna (Lawful Evil) has gravity that pulls “at a 45-degree angle to the level of the ground”, which means a misstep can send you tumbling down its mountainous slopes until you hit some outcropping and take damage like you fell straight down on it. Every level of the plane is rocky (the plane is boiling with volcanic activity), hot (bring to counteract the resulting heat or take steady fire damage), and packed with various daemons and devils (most of whom are on the run from rivals in neighboring planes). You do find fortresses built into carved out of the rock, but they rarely house anything wildly dangerous; there isn’t enough to squabble over for either side to launch invasions into the plane, so you find very few Powers down here unless they themselves lost a serious power struggle elsewhere. While you can easily ride the Styx in and out, both portals and barriers tend to be hard to find; barriers tend to be horizontal holes in the wall and portals tend to be vertical and marked by the locals with information on where they go (surprisingly friendly, given circumstances).
Next time we finally finish off the Lower Planes and take a peek at what it might look like if Dante’s Inferno and Paradise Lost had an extremely entitled baby. Counter: 41.5
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# ? Jun 26, 2020 22:11 |
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In Planescape, Gehenna and the Grey Waste became more important locations to the general cosmology. While Good and Neutral petitioners more or less instantly assumed their new forms in their relevant end location on death, evil petitioners instead got turned into "larvae," big fat barely-sapient caterpillars occasionally used for all sorts of evil purposes by Baatezu, Tanar'ri and Yugoloths. Sometimes just eaten, sometimes used as juice for powerful magics and items, but most importantly the basic ingredient for the lowest tiers of all three types of creature. Gehenna and the Gray Waste were also home to the Night Hags, creatures that made it their business to capture, herd and trade larvae, alongside other evil shenanigans.
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# ? Jun 26, 2020 23:19 |
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 1: OVERVIEW Hey FATAL and Friends. With the fate of the forums up in the air, there's no better time to start a new review. So let’s read Esoteric Enterprises! Esoteric Enterprises is an urban fantasy dungeon crawler, released by Dying Stylishly Games in late 2019. There was a draft floating around several months before that just had the chargen rules, but this is the complete package. The setting is an Unknown Armies or World of Darkness style occult underground. Wizards and magical creatures exist, but they live in the sewers and cast spells using garbage. You’re a homeless supernatural criminal, here to get rich or die trying. The rules are a hack of a game called Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is a hack of one of the super early D&D editions. It’s a perfectly serviceable “retroclone” and also a huge can of worms I’m not opening right now. Esoteric Enterprises makes a handful of cool changes, a handful of dumb ones, and a lot that just awkwardly crowbar the Lamentations mechanics into a new setting. Why do I continue to play this game, and why am I posting about it? The mechanics range from mediocre to bad, but the game’s world creation system is its killer app. The rules for generating and populating the occult underground make it worth sifting through the busted rules. After a couple sessions of play the game really comes alive. I’ve run about 20 session of Esoteric Enterprises, so I’ll be interspersing descriptions of the book with how they actually work out during play. PRESENTATION I’m using the PDF copy of the book I got off drivethroughrpg. There was also physical book that sold out pretty quickly. I hear the hardcover is pretty good. There are still a couple copies on the UK storefront that I actually considered buying, but I can’t justify dropping fifty dollars AND paying international shipping for a game I already have digitally. There isn’t much art to look at, and most of it is public domain photos or artfully fair-used images from other media properties. This is a shame, because there are a couple places in the book where a couple instructive illustrations would actually have been really helpful, and could have been easily generated by the author using nothing but a cell phone camera. On the plus side, the lack of relevant images makes editing these posts a lot easier. I'd credit these if the book had annotations for them The book has proofreading problems that affect the usability. Words are spelled using the American spelling in one place and the Commonwealth spelling in another (mold vs mould) making it difficult to ctrl-f for things like monster stat blocks or spells. Tables are always referenced in the text by table number rather than page number, which is annoying for both a physical book and a PDF. INTRODUCTION The game gives us this descriptive text to tell us what it's about. Esoteric Enterprises, Pages 4 and 5 posted:This is a world much like our own. The nations and cities of the familiar world are all there. The mundane apparatus of modern society – Walmart, the police, hospitals, Google, churches, and the rest – do their normal jobs. Billions of people live their mundane lives just like anybody in the real world. Following this, we get the usual “what is an RPG” section that I’m not going to reproduce, along with a player advice section that reproduces a lot of “what is OSR” primers you can find on the internet. Don’t start fights you don’t think you can win, you’ll die if you’re not careful, you’ll die if you’re unlucky, use your brain, the world isn’t fair, etc. Then it’s off to character creation. See you there in part two! mellonbread fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Jun 28, 2020 |
# ? Jun 27, 2020 03:59 |
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PurpleXVI posted:While Good and Neutral petitioners more or less instantly assumed their new forms in their relevant end location on death, evil petitioners instead got turned into "larvae," big fat barely-sapient caterpillars occasionally used for all sorts of evil purposes by Baatezu, Tanar'ri and Yugoloths. Sometimes just eaten, sometimes used as juice for powerful magics and items, but most importantly the basic ingredient for the lowest tiers of all three types of creature. Gehenna and the Gray Waste were also home to the Night Hags, creatures that made it their business to capture, herd and trade larvae, alongside other evil shenanigans. While most of that is present here, the book doesn’t add it up in into a coherent whole like that. I think the only part it doesn’t mention in the Lower Planes section is the whole “this is where evil things come from” part, which you’d think would be worth emphasizing. mellonbread posted:ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 1: OVERVIEW Looking forward to world creation and praying for random roll tables, since the .pdfs where those two combine usually end up in a sale for me.
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# ? Jun 27, 2020 05:34 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 05:45 |
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 2: CHARGEN Chargen begins with random rolling ability scores. 3D6 in order for Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. Then you apply your ability score modifiers using a table. Like most D20 games, you use these modifiers for everything, and only occasionally glance at the ability scores themselves. So far this could be any grog D&D game. The fashion now is to include some safety mechanism so you don’t end up with a character who’s totally useless. Esoteric Enterprises lets the player “invert” their ability scores by subtracting 21 from each and taking the absolute value. This makes your good scores bad and vice versa, so if you’ve got more bad scores than good, inverting is a good idea. Next you choose your class. Since this is old time D&D, you’re encouraged to choose a class that fits with the random ability scores the game gave you. This game does some stuff with the skill system that makes choosing a class that fits your stats more important than in other retroclones. More on that in a second. After this you roll Flesh and Grit, based on the class you chose. You might get anywhere between a D4 and a D10 of each. Flesh and Grit are a good design and we’ll talk about them once we get out of chargen. Next you copy down your saving throws. There’s five, all reskinned versions of the ones from Lamentations. Stunning, Poison, Hazards, Machines and Magic. Saves are D20 roll-over the value on your sheet, but the game also modifies them based on your ability scores. Then your skills. They all start at “1 in 6”, unless you’ve got a special class ability that sets them to a different value. Again, straight out of Lamentations, but there are a lot more skills, AND they’re modified by your ability score modifiers.
Now starting equipment. You get five items, plus or minus your INT modifier, plus any class bonuses. In a genre of games that prizes fast and simple character creation, equipment selection has always been the biggest pain in the rear end. Shopping through huge gear lists and price sheets, which the players are usually seeing for the first time. Starting equipment packages are an obvious antidote, and Esoteric Enterprises doesn’t have them. It at least dispenses with starting money and just asks the player to choose a flat number of items, while ensuring that no more than a certain number have the “rare” tag. In addition to physical items, you can also use your starting allotment to buy “social advantages” that give you always-on perks, like access to a safehouse or laboratory. These can’t be bought outside chargen, so like Eclipse Phase 1e there’s a tiny incentive to eschew physical items and load up on positive reputation modifiers. There are actually a couple other steps you have to take care of, but they’re not in the character creation section of the book. CLASSES Let’s talk about the classes. I’m going to include a little editorializing with each one, based on how I’ve seen them shake out in play. BODYGUARDS Bodyguards are a combat class with decent saves, a bonus to Perception (most people start with none), big hit dice and a free CON bonus. They can carry twice as many items as everyone else (this is a LOT more important than you might think). They also get the ability to use “combat maneuvers” without taking any penalties, in essence giving them free positive modifiers during combat. The only downside is that they don’t actually have the ability to bodyguard people. The NPC bodyguard stat block includes the ability to step in front of an attack directed at an ally, but the player version of the class gets no such ability. By the author’s own admission, Bodyguards are a reskinned Dwarf from Lamentations. They have the same slightly-slower-than-a-fighter XP advancement rate, requiring 2,200 points to reach Level 2. Bodyguards are awesome. Play a bodyguard. CRIMINALS Criminals get 6 skill points to spend how they please, plus 4 more each level afterward. Esoteric Enterprises has an extremely punishing skill system, and the ability to reliably succeed at a couple important things should not be discounted. If you’ve got even a small positive modifier to something like CHA or INT, those 6 points can buy a skill up to 6 in 6 - an almost guaranteed chance of success. Criminals also get two extra starting items, but they MUST be taken from the “adventuring gear” list. Criminals are ok. Personally I think they should have made the skill system not-bullshit, rather than having one class that was good at anything. DOCTORS Doctors get free points of healing that can be applied to a patient’s Flesh points (which are harder to recover than Grit). They start the game with 5 out of 6 medicine, meaning if you have a +1 INT modifier you can start with 6 in 6. They also get the “experimental medicine” ability, meaning they can use body parts taken from dungeon monsters to upgrade their allies via grafts and surgery. Having a Doctor makes a MASSIVE difference in the trajectory of the average group. First of all because half the results on the game’s death and dismemberment table include a “bleeding out” condition that’s fatal if not immediately treated with a Medicine roll. Second, because those results also include a bunch of permanent injuries that make your already-garbage character borderline useless. Injuries the doctor can rewrite out of existence in their lab. Finally, because they can give you special powers from the creatures you kill. The experimental medicine system is explained later but barely covered in any detail. Aside from a Medicine roll and a saving throw the book just tells the DM to wing it. EXPLORERS Explorers are movement machines. They start with 5 Athletics and 3 Stealth, allowing them to zip around the dungeon with relative ease compared to their 1 Athletics 1 Stealth brethren. They also get a free boost to DEX and AC, making them even harder to pin down. The downside is that they treat any weapon as one die-size smaller than it actually is when rolling for damage. It’s fluffed as the Explorer being a pacifist and unaccustomed to violence, but in reality it’s because the Explorer is a reskinned Halfling from D&D. The explorer is a weird inclusion and a little redundant. You can already make a guy with 5 Athletics and 3 Stealth at chargen by taking a Criminal and buying those skills, and you don’t get a penalty to weapons. AND the Explorer takes more XP to level up than the Criminal. MERCENARY Take a Bodyguard, make the saves worse, take away the CON and perception bonuses, remove the ability to carry more items, but give them +1 to hit and a couple extra items that MUST Be taken from the weapons and armor list. Yes, mercenaries get +1 to hit every level, and yes they’re the only class in the game that does. Considering how often you actually level and how much +1 to hit is worth, I’d stick with the bodyguard. MYSTICS Charisma based casters who can cast a small number of spells a potentially infinite number of times, but must beseech a patron deity every time they do. How do they beseech that deity? By rolling Charm. What’s their base Charm? 1 in 6, same as everyone else. What happens if they fail the Charm roll? They have to roll on a miscast table to find out. But hey, once you reach level three, your Charm goes up to 2 IN 6! Wow! Mystics suck. They have a miniscule chance to cast spells because the game doesn’t give them a bonus to the thing they HAVE TO ROLL in order to do so. The miscast table ranges from “you don’t cast the spell” to “you don’t cast the spell and something bad happens to you”. I understand what they were going for here - a combination of warlock and wild-magic sorcerer that has all kinds of wacky cascading magical effects. But guess what? When death is a single round away, a 2 in 6 chance to cast the spell you need to survive isn’t an exciting opportunity for emergent gameplay, it’s a giant gently caress-you. They have the ability to “bless” other characters by giving them a prepackaged spell for use at a later time. What happens when the other character casts the spell? THEY have to roll Charm, and then the mystic rolls again on a DIFFERENT miscast table, even if the spell actually succeeds (it won’t). Don’t play a mystic. OCCULTIST Your bog standard vancian caster, and better than the Mystic in basically every way. You’ve got your tiny spell list to start, but you can add more at chargen by buying tomes with your starting equipment. You have a small number of spell slots, but you can cast any spell you want from your spellbook without memorization, as many times as you want, as long as you spend a dungeon turn (10 minutes) doing so. You can even cast spells above your level, requiring a save and risking a roll on an admittedly much more dangerous miscast table than the Mystic one. The one downside to occultists is that once they’re out of chargen in-the-wild, they have to make a Translation roll to copy new spells into their spellbook, or get boned by ANOTHER miscast table. What’s their translation skill? 1 in 6. Even they aren’t immune to the awful skill system. Occultists are better than mystics in just about every way. If you want to cast spells, play an occultist. SPOOK The “monster” class. Choose a supernatural origin, then choose special powers from that origin’s theme. You’ve got garbage skills and mediocre saves, but your origin and the power you choose give you a suite of special strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. Be a goblin who erases people’s memories, or a vampire who climbs on walls, or a machine-man who ambushes people and slashes their throats. The Spook powers aren't listed in chagen. They're in a separate section of the book, like the magic user spells, and we'll cover them in another post. There are a lot of borderline-useless abilities and some pretty good ones. So far I haven’t seen anyone make a really broken character. So far the “fey” origin package has been most popular with my players. Overall Spooks are fun, and a good way to salvage a character whose ability scores are uninspiring even after inversion. That's all the classes the game has to offer. After that comes the gear list. EQUIPMENT The equipment list isn’t huge, but I’ll stick to the high points anyway. To start, the game offers a spread of weapons. Hand weapons offer increasing damage in exchange for increasing encumbrance and decreasing concealability. Firearms offer a similar gradation. Pistols don’t take up an inventory slot, shotguns do high damage up close, and automatic rifles let you take the “covering fire” action. You’ve also got grenades and flamethrowers, which let you make an area attack without rolling to-hit. Unlike a lot of games, the tradeoff between weight and the benefits an item gives you is actually meaningful in EE. You don’t have many inventory slots, and encumbrance is actually simple and well integrated into the game, rather than being a pain in the rear end or irrelevant afterthought. Most players end up rocking pistols and light hand weapons if they want space for treasure. Armor similarly runs the gamut from light to heavy, with increasing protectivity along the way. The leather jacket doesn’t fill a slot, the flak vest takes one slot, and the riot armor increases your encumbrance by a whole level. Don’t take the riot armor unless you’re a bodyguard. Adventuring gear. You’ve got flashlights, night vision goggles, smart phones, smoke grenades, door spikes, etc. Some of the items have defined mechanical uses, like boosting skills. Some of them just have a text description. It’s not always clear what they do in-game, like the difference between a first aid kit and surgeon’s tools - neither of which have any effect on your Medicine skill, apparently. The most essential items are a light source of some kind, climbing gear and a gas mask. The dungeon is dark, full of holes filled with horrible things, and full of spores, gas and corrosive fumes. Then there’s a list of grimoires that Occultists can buy, to expand their starting spell list. I’m going to include this as a screencap, since I like it. Lots of flavor, but notice that the spells aren’t listed by rank. The player has to open the game’s spell list to see what they can actually use at level one. After this, a list of “esoteric equipment”. Weapon modifiers like blessed bullets and silver plating, to deal bonus damage to different types of underworld creatures. Stuff to increase your saves when casting different types of dangerous magic. A holy symbol, required for the mystic to cast spells, which is NOT MENTIONED anywhere in their class description. A few vehicles. This depends on how much of the game you play on the surface, versus how much time you spend underground. In the first campaign I ran, almost nobody had a car. They took the bus and awkwardly stuffed their weapons in duffel bags when they needed to get around town above ground. One time they caused an outbreak of bubonic plague on the transit system. Finally, social advantages. A lot of these interact with the game’s “resource level” mechanics. This isn’t explained in the character creation chapter, but in brief, wealth is abstracted based on experience level, which is used to calculate your ability to acquire gear. HOW DO I PLAY AS... This section lists different character archetypes the players might be interested in, and then how to create them using the game’s mechanics. I don’t know how effective the whole thing is when your attributes are randomly generated. Some of it definitely feels like a kludge, using the system to create stuff it isn’t really good at representing. Some examples of the advice given. Esoteric Enterprises, Pages 30 to 31 posted:...Drug Dealer? This section is far from perfect, but “here’s how you mechanically do X to create Y” is good advice, and more books should include it. TABLES TO FLESH OUT PCS A set of tables to roll interesting character details. You’ve got
EXAMPLE CHARACTER Let’s put together a character and see how all this fits together. First, we roll 3D6 six times. I did this at my desk and got an 11, an 8, an 11, a 17, a 16 and a 13. STR 11, DEX 8, CON 11, INT 17, WIS 16, CHA 13 Our modifiers are, respectively, 0, -1, 0, +2, +2, +1 I’ll be honest, this is a lot better than I was expecting. No need to flip these results, we’re doing quite well overall. With all that intelligence, let’s make an Occultist We’ve got a D4 of Flesh and a D4 of grit. I rolled again at my desk and got 4 Flesh and 3 Grit. Again, we’re ahead of the curve. We save versus Stunning on a 13+, versus Hazards on a 13+, Poison on a 16+, Machines on a 13+, and magic on a 14+. Remember also that when we actually roll these, they’ll be modified by an ability score modifier. Next we fill in our skills. They all start at 1, but get modified by ability scores.
Speaking of spells, we start with a single one, randomly determined from the first level list. We’ll cover the spell list in full over a later post, but right now a D20 roll of 12 gets us… Light. Not a show stopper, but nice to have in the back pocket. We have a +2 INT modifier, so we start with seven items instead of the usual five. I’m thinking
Just for fun, let’s give our Occultist some personality using the random roll tables. A roll of 3 for Social Class gets us skilled working class, a 4 for How the Occultist Learned Magic gets us Experimentation whilst taking like, so many drugs, man, a 4 for our tragic flaw is Overly curious about things best left unknown, and our criminal record roll of 8 is Worship of an interdicted inhuman being. So our wizard is an acid head who accidentally plugged into the dreaming mind of a minor deity through abuse of strange chemicals. This was a positive experience and she continued doing it until she got caught (for the first time) by the MIBs. She will try anything once and if I had known this is the kind of character I was working on, I’d probably have picked a different spellbook. Something with more mushrooms and astral projection in it. OVERALL How do I feel about character creation in Esoteric Enterprises? Full disclosure, I’ve run the game for a few months, but never actually experienced it as a player. Logistically, it’s in an annoying place: just barely too complicated to do quickly at the table, but it also doesn’t offer much customization outside a couple of the classes. Retro games have always annoyed me with their huge tables of saving throws and unnecessarily detailed equipment purchase lists, and Esoteric Enterprises manages to offend even more by requiring the players to factor their ability score modifiers into both their saves AND skills. I had a player describe it as “the worst possible combination of OSR and 5E” and I agree. There are some redundancies among the classes. Bodyguard and Mercenary are almost identical, and the Explorer is just a specific build for a Criminal. The Mystic is distinct from the Occultist, but also sucks and nobody should play them. In spite of all that, it works. It’s hacked together and I’ve further muddied the waters by houseruling the poo poo out of it in my own game, but it’s functional and even fun to make characters with. We’ll be covering other stuff in future segments that interacts with the character creation mechanics, but that’s it for now. See you in part three, when we dig into the base rules. Falconier111 posted:Looking forward to world creation and praying for random roll tables, since the .pdfs where those two combine usually end up in a sale for me.
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# ? Jun 27, 2020 06:47 |