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Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Mostly I just want more independent Death factions.

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PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

The Lone Badger posted:

Are there any options presented for the PCs to surgery out implants, dispel mind control and otherwise reconvert the agents?

Sadly none presented. It would likely require some heavy-duty magic(Heal, Wish, Regeneration, Limited Wish) or complex psionics(Psychic Surgery) to rebuild these people's minds. Though the book doesn't explicitly say none of them are saveable, it also doesn't detail HOW they would be saveable.

Comstar posted:

...so ah..how is the party supposed to survive this fights? The adventure sounds good enough so far.

Mainly the "how the gently caress"-fights are coming in the front door to Enoch's tower where dealing with two stone golems which an invisible 16th-level Mage blasts you with Prismatic Spray is a "gg, reroll"-event, the Illithid strike team where three simultaneous Mind Blasts starting the fight is one hell of a way to deal with things and the players being dumb enough to use the front door of the thieves' guild warehouse where pure numbers and thief tactics will almost certainly ruin their day.

So two out of three are avoidable by the players not being bungling dorks, and the third could be handled by either A) not having the illithids use their mind blasts or B) having them be disoriented for a moment upon arrival, giving the PC's a round of movement to place themselves so they don't all get whammed by each blast. The Mind Blasts are wide angle but not 360-degree.

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:
it's a shame they made a new model for nagash instead of just converting the old one to plastic and letting everyone experience it

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

90s Cringe Rock posted:

it's a shame they made a new model for nagash instead of just converting the old one to plastic and letting everyone experience it

The new one has a much larger base, which makes conversions of the old t the new rules really, really funny looking.

Like, more than normal for it.

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:

Mors Rattus posted:

The new one has a much larger base, which makes conversions of the old t the new rules really, really funny looking.

Like, more than normal for it.

It got even better with age, you mean.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Indeed.

Dallbun
Apr 21, 2010
The secret to casting a “mind bondage” spell in real-life is secretly encoded in

The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 41: The Deck of Local Inns and Lycanthropes
(Don’t do it, Debbie!)

207: Lurking
The PCs are following a treasure map into “a small building in the back of the local inn.” Like some kind of shed? It’s run-down but there’s a trap door underneath debris. It leads down to a 20 ft square chamber with a wooden door on the far end. Only one entrance/exit, but there’s a pressure plate pit trap in the middle of the room (with a secret door that the treasure is behind.) There’s also a lurker on the ceiling.

Something is lacking here, and I think it’s the “transition to the mythic underworld” that the OSR scene likes to talk about. I accept 20x20 square rooms, secret doors, and static monsters in other contexts, but under a shed behind the tavern? I dunno. Pass.


208: The Strange Voyage
“Rumors abound of a new dungeon which has opened up on a nearby island, but the information is a few weeks old. It could be cleaned out by the time the PCs get there, so time is of the essence.”

I’m sorry, could we back up a little? “A new dungeon which has opened up?” What are the setting assumptions here again? Are we playing The Nightmares Underneath?

Anyway the quickest way is to hire a small ship that’s heading in that direction, the Sealion. If the PCs hang out while it’s loading up, though, they’ll notice a lot of livestock and very little other rations. Then once they leave it’s a full moon, and the crew turn into lesser and greater seawolves and try to eat them.

In a very particular sort of playstyle and setting, the premise works fine. I guess it can stay. Keep and adjust the dungeon lead as necessary.


209: Look Before You Attack
In the mountains. It’s cold, and snowing. “The PCs are looking for the home of a great warrior to help them with their quest.” No they aren’t, stop saying things like that definitively.

They find a house (in the mountains?). Nobody comes to the door if they knock. Signs of a struggle inside, up to and including a corpse. A brown bear enters from the back, and “assumes a defensive posture” but does not attack.

If they can speak with animals somehow, they learn that this is the warrior they seek, and he’s cursed to stay in his werebear form until he “fulfills a quest.” Implicitly, a specific quest, but we get no details on that.

Err, I like the cursed bear warrior NPC idea, but why’d he get cursed? What quest is he supposed to complete? Why is he hanging out in a house in the mountains? What’s the deal with the corpse? This is just a sketch of an encounter. Pass on this, keep bear as possible future PC idea.


210: Town Without Men
The PCs are hanging out in an inn in a town when a woman and her child burst in the door, seeking help for their nearby village. An elven woman came through and pied-pipered away all of the men.

It’s easy to track them to a home in the woods, surrounded by a field worked by charmed men. The werefox responsible will come right on out and meet the PCs, flanked by her “prime companion.” She’ll claim the men are here of their own free will, and let the PCs to stay the night if they want. (In which case she’ll try to “cajole” male PCs into joining her.)

You know, this raises an interesting conversation about what “free will” means in a magical context and hahahaha, no it doesn’t, charm magic is not consent. But it is a slightly more interesting encounter than if she was trying to disguise herself and play totally innocent.

It's got potential, but I'm personally not a huge fan of creepy charm rape (and in D&D, there are plenty of female monsters who are all about that). Also the card specifies that “if violence is threatened, the prime companion comes to her aid” but completely fails to give that dude stats, and that’s not cool. Pass.


211: Bounty Hunters All
Takes place in tropical plains. The baron has been posting handbills offering large bounties for lion and tiger tails if delivered within the next week. Secretly, it’s because the baron’s daughter has been infected with weretiger lycanthropy (tigrithropy...?) and they need a weretiger’s tail for the cure. (So why the lion tails?)

“The PCs encounter several small prides of lions before finding the trail of a fast moving group of tigers.” False - actually, after murdering one or two small prides of lions, the PCs head for the baron’s estate to turn them in, because hey, big bounty on lion tails! Anyway, the card says they’re supposed to run into six weretigers, the same ones that infected the daughter, resting under a large tree in tiger form.

Trim any mention of lions and this is workable. It might help to have a GP price on the bounty. I like the idea that party druid-types might be indignant about the mass tiger murder, not knowing the whole story. Keep.


212: Keep Your Guard Up
The encounter specifies that the PCs “have had a recent run-in with lycanthropes, especially werewolves, and now their cousins seek revenge.” I’m already side-eying this card pretty hard. What are the odds of that being the case in the campaign?

Anyway someone comes to the tavern (a.k.a. Murderhobo HQ) and begs an audience with the PCs. He’s from the next town over, and claims he saw the mayor and sheriff there turn into wolves and kill his brother. Since they’re famed werewolf slayers, could they come deal with it?

But it’s a frame-up. They are not werewolves at all. If the PCs kill them they’ll be arrested for murder. If they don’t take the bait, they’ll be set upon the next night by a pack of sixteen werewolves “impatient for revenge.”

Requires too specific a setup to use as even a semi-random encounter. Pass.

SirPhoebos
Dec 10, 2007

WELL THAT JUST HAPPENED!

90s Cringe Rock posted:

it's a shame they made a new model for nagash instead of just converting the old one to plastic and letting everyone experience it

I myself am outraged at the erasure of Chuberism from modern culture (R.I.P. Robert Z'Dar :( )

Angry Salami
Jul 27, 2013

Don't trust the skull.

Dallbun posted:

208: The Strange Voyage
“Rumors abound of a new dungeon which has opened up on a nearby island, but the information is a few weeks old. It could be cleaned out by the time the PCs get there, so time is of the essence.”

I like the way that it's phrased, it sounds like dungeons are some sort of franchise. "Did you hear? They finally opened a new dungeon down the street! It's going to be so much more convenient than that old dungeon out in the Forgotten Realms!"

I also do like the idea of someone hiring the party to take out 'werewolves' but it's actually just a murder contract.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Angry Salami posted:

I like the way that it's phrased, it sounds like dungeons are some sort of franchise. "Did you hear? They finally opened a new dungeon down the street! It's going to be so much more convenient than that old dungeon out in the Forgotten Realms!"

Or maybe dungeons are just naturally occurring, like veins of precious minerals, and are considered a general source of wealth and industry. But considering that they tend to be shallow and emptied out in a few weeks' time, there's a gold rush every time one pops up.

megane
Jun 20, 2008



Ugh, they opened a new dungeon right across the street from the old one. Lazy millennials won't even cross the road to get attacked by skeletons.

e: Some of the cards have also suggested that parasitic service jobs pop up around dungeons, too. Is there a guy who hangs out in front of the dungeon selling knock-off dungeon merchandise? Is there a shady valet service who will park your horses for you but is required by law to state that they're not officially associated with the dungeon?

megane fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Aug 19, 2020

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Angry Salami posted:

I like the way that it's phrased, it sounds like dungeons are some sort of franchise. "Did you hear? They finally opened a new dungeon down the street! It's going to be so much more convenient than that old dungeon out in the Forgotten Realms!"

I also do like the idea of someone hiring the party to take out 'werewolves' but it's actually just a murder contract.

This is actually a thing in a comedy game I'm working on with a friend. Dungeons are an important part of the adventuring economy, and Dungeon Keepers strive to hit the right mix of lethality, infamy, profitability, and inventiveness to make their dungeons too popular to give Adventurers a reason to actually overthrow them. After all, you don't want to kill the golden goose. And of course, the Keeper has to go out and gather macguffins and kidnap people and do exciting (but not TOO harmful, lest people try to actually get rid of you) crimes to give people quests to come into their dungeon.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

JcDent posted:

Nagash is a named character with a €98 model about three years old (I have forgotten when AoS came out) at this point, so that is another good thing that will never happen.

I mean all we need to do is wait 2 more years and they will drop it to sell more miniatures.

But yes, more independent undead, more excuses to tell Nagash to gently caress himself and/or get run over by a chariot.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

PurpleXVI posted:

Or maybe dungeons are just naturally occurring, like veins of precious minerals, and are considered a general source of wealth and industry. But considering that they tend to be shallow and emptied out in a few weeks' time, there's a gold rush every time one pops up.

Dungeon Meshi kind of goes with this, where Dungeons spontaneously appear and grows bigger/worse once they latch onto someone and feed off their wishes/desires.

Epicurius
Apr 10, 2010
College Slice

megane posted:

Ugh, they opened a new dungeon right across the street from the old one. Lazy millennials won't even cross the road to get attacked by skeletons.

There was that time they opened a dungeon inside another dungeon.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

Epicurius posted:

There was that time they opened a dungeon inside another dungeon.

Sounds like a fancy way to describe it having a passage into the Underdark to me. :v:

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
Would you put a dungeon in a mall, or would you put a mall in a dungeon?

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017
MOTHERSHIP PLAYER’S SURVIVAL GUIDE - Part 3: Skills, Saves and Survival


Welcome back to Mothership. In this update, we’ll go over the basic mechanics.

DICE SYSTEM
Mothership starts by explaining its dice notation. There’s instructions for rolling a D100 and instructions for rolling D10s and adding the results together. The only unusual element here is a third type of die roll: if the rules ever show a number of D10s with an underline below them, that means you roll the dice, add them together, then multiply the sum by 10 to get the total.

The dice system itself should be familiar to anyone who’s played Eclipse Phase or Delta Green. It’s a D100 roll-under system with criticals on doubles and blackjack opposed rules. That means that whenever the dice match (eg you roll 44%, 55%, 66%, etc), it’s either a critical success (if it’s equal or below your target number) or a critical failure (if it’s above). It also means that when you make an opposed test, both parties roll versus their target number, and if they both succeed, whoever rolled higher wins.



Mothership also uses advantage and disadvantage to adjust success chance. This is the same as in 5E, but with D10s instead of a D20. If you have advantage, because something about your circumstances makes you more likely to succeed, you roll twice and take the better result. If you have disadvantage, because something is harming your chance of success, you roll twice and the worse result. Advantage and disadvantage can be applied to a D100 roll, a damage roll, or any other roll in the game.

Usually when you roll a D100 to do something, it’s versus one of your four stats - Strength, Speed, Intellect or Combat. If it’s something you’re supposed to be good at, you can add a bonus from your Skills.

SKILLS
Skills have three ranks. Each rank costs more, and grants a higher bonus. You need at least one prerequisite in order to take a higher ranked skill. It’s all explained in this flowchart, which is the same one as on the character sheet.



Lets talk about D100 systems. In Mothership, a character has an average of 30% in all stats. That means a 40% chance of success in things they’re supposed to be skilled at.

This is a problem D100 games usually have: unless the players are deliberately building min/maxed characters, the base chance of success is quite low, especially for starting characters. Game designers have addressed this in various ways. One common canard is to instruct the GM not to call for die rolls for the majority of things, since players rolling dice for mundane poo poo and failing is not interesting or fun. Which I totally agree with, but is not really a solution to this specific problem. As a player, hearing “you only gently caress up 70% of the time when it really matters” is not reassuring. Games like Eclipse Phase and the early 40K RPGs address the problem by letting the players stack modifiers like there’s no tomorrow. Games like the new Delta Green address the investigative side by giving guaranteed successes if a player has a skill at a certain threshold, usually not a super high one either.

The way Mothership tackles the issue is through the Advantage system. If your stat is 30%, and you get to roll twice, you have a 51% chance of success. If you’ve got a skill bonus on top of your stat, taking you up to 40%, then advantage gives you an effective 64% chance of success. What this means, however, is that the players have to be very aggressive about seeking ways to improve their chance of success. Or the Warden (which is what Mothership calls the GM) has to be very lenient about letting them get away with stuff without rolling.

I think part of it is also down to design philosophy. In addition to the difficulties with all D100 systems, Mothership is also designed by people who believe that players having low chance of success is an important part of horror gaming. And, that players should do everything in their power to exhaust their options before picking up the dice, because engaging with the game’s mechanics should be a last resort. Mothership is descended from OSR games where this philosophy is commonplace.

Personally, I think that low chance of success makes the players cowardly. And not in an “it’s a horror game and they’re scared” way, but rather a “they think anything they try will fail” kind of way, causing the game to grind to a halt. I really hope the GM facing book they’re working on addresses this. It’s a big problem with the game, and I don’t think it needs to be.

Here’s another issue: take a look at the skill list and find me a skill relating to stealth. It turns out, there isn’t one. So you might think “ah, stealth is probably so important in an Alien-like that they wanted to make sure everyone could do it, rather than making it a specific skill”. But no, there are no mechanics for hiding or sneaking anywhere in the book.

Similarly, there are no rules for social interaction. Again, you might think "maybe that’s because the modules aren’t about that. They’re about delving derelict spacecraft, or a strange abandoned colony planet". Except, I’ll break my corebook-only rule and bring in a couple of the modules. Both The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and Dead Planet involve rich webs of social deduction with NPCs. First party modules are an indication of how a game is supposed to be played. Which means the lack of any mechanical framework for social skills is a bit of an oversight. My guess is you’re supposed to “just roleplay” it. But you know how it is. If there are rules for one thing in the book, but not for another thing, the thing that gets the mechanics is going to be what the players and the GM gravitate towards.

Anyway, enough bitching about the skill system. Let’s dive into Saving Throws.

SAVES
Saving throws! You’ve got four of ‘em, just like in character creation.

Mothership, Page 7 posted:

Sanity is your ability to explain away logical inconsistencies in the universe, rationalize and make sense out of chaos, detect illusions and mimicry, and think quickly under pressure.

Fear is how well you can cope with emotional trauma, and covers not only fear, but also loneliness, depression, or any other emotional surge.

Body is your reflexes, and how well you can resist hunger, disease, or any other organism that might attempt to invade your insides.

Armor is how resistant you are to damage sustained during combat, whether that be through bullets, claws, teeth, etc.
You make a saving throw when the Warden tells you to. That might be because you encountered something horrible, you were attacked with a weapon, you were attacked with something that has a special horrible effect on your body, or because you’re in a generally stressful situation.

You make saves by rolling a D100 and hoping to get equal to or below

In addition to whatever the situation-specific consequences, failing a save adds one Stress to your character. What’s Stress? We’ll get there in a couple updates. Just know that Stress builds up until your character has to make a Panic check. Then it either goes down, or there’s some serious gameplay affecting consequence.

Oh, you make a Panic check if you ever critically fail a save.



SURVIVAL
This section is a grab bag of mechanics.

Crisis Checks
A crisis check is an extended skill test. You make two or three skill tests in a row, and you have to succeed them all in order to accomplish your objective. Otherwise, you take Stress equal to the total number of skill tests. You can reattempt a crisis check by immediately taking D10 Stress.

The math on crisis checks makes it unlikely that a character would ever succeed at one. The odds of succeeding on three D100 rolls at 30% each are about 3%. The odds of three 40% rolls are about 6%. Rerolling isn’t going to help you here. In a game where passing one skill test is unlikely, multiple skill tests are a middle finger to the players.

Food & Water
If you don’t get enough food or water, you get disadvantage on all rolls. Not getting enough water also runs the risk of passing out, if you do anything strenuous and fail a Body save.

Oxygen
I’m going to quote the book directly here, since there’s some math that has to be accounted for.

Mothership, Page 8 posted:

In space, you can last 15 seconds without oxygen before you fall unconscious. After passing out you can survive for 3-5 minutes before dying.

If all of a ship’s Life Support modules are destroyed then divide the ship’s current hull subtract 1d10 and then divide by the number of living humans onboard (Androids don’t need oxygen to breathe). This is how many days of breathable oxygen remain per person.

Take the allotment of oxygen and assign it to every human onboard the ship. If a crew member dies, divide their remaining days amongst the rest of the crew. If a crew member engages in strenuous activity (like running, combat, mechanical repairs, etc.) then subtract a day from them and randomly from one other person on the crew.

Once per day (when dealing with Rest) take a look at the total remaining oxygen amongst the crew:

»» If more less than half of the original oxygen remains, every roll is made at Disadvantage. All crew suffer headaches, fatigue, anxiety and general clumsiness.

»» If less than a quarter of the original oxygen amount remains, players must make a body check once per day (and after every strenuous activity) or fall unconscious. All crew suffer panting, dizziness, severe headaches, and impaired vision and tinnitus.

»» If a player runs out of oxygen, they must make a Body save. Failure means they die. Success means they fall unconscious and leach oxygen from a random player every day.

Crew members in cryosleep or doing nothing but resting take up 1/4 of an oxygen unit per day.
Pay attention to these detailed figures for life support and oxygen consumption. They’re given in these terms because they plug into the game’s ship creation rules, which we’ll encounter later.

What’s missing here? There are no rules for decompression. I know that calculating the speed at which X volume of air passes through a hole of Y size into a vacuum is a complicated calculus equation that you can’t put in a game, but some guidance would have been nice here. As it is, we’ve got rules for air and rules for vacuum, but nothing for when the two meet.

Earning Credits
This section is just a D10 table. There’s nothing in here about negotiating jobs, or about how much money you can make from any of these activities. There are no treasure tables or price sheets.



This is basically just a table telling you what Mothership is about. It’s a series of premises without any accompanying information.

That does it for this section. Next post, we hit the Combat section.


Night10194 posted:

I wonder why they did 6d10 instead of something like 2d10+20 or 30? You'd still be pushed strongly to the 30-something average with 6d10 and outliers would be very unusual, but possible.
It would also require rolling fewer handfuls of dice, and less addition, making the process faster. My guess is that the designers think significant variation and outliers are a desirable outcome for ability score generation.

Falconier111 posted:

This might be heresy, but I really don’t like that character sheet. Maybe it makes more sense with the book alongside it, but trying to follow all the crisscrossing arrows and sift through all the information about every class it provides and figure out what goes where is making my head spin. It’s just so busy and I feel like I’d have to hunt for information every time I consulted it. Maybe I just like my character sheets as simple as I am, though :saddowns:
The character sheet sacrifices ease of reference for ease of character creation. That's because because the developers believe the game should be high lethality, and players will need to create characters often.

I think they may also think that players should not be referencing their character sheet during play. Nobody associated with the project has ever said so explicitly, but it's a common belief among OSR designers that players looking at their character sheet for options is a failure of imagination.

I think you could make an excel or google sheet where you check a few boxes for class, skill and equipment, and get a complete sheet with all your saves and stats and so on. I actually did this for one of the less-functional subsystems we'll encounter later in the book.

Snorb posted:

Does this game strictly limit you to Aliens-like scenarios, or can you do something like The Black Hole or Event Horizon or Saturn 3 with it?
I don't know anything about those other media properties, or whether you'd be able to replicate them in Mothership. I have three published modules for the game on my shelf at the moment
  • The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is a straight Alien-like about hunting a monster that slides around in the vents
  • Dead Planet is about being trapped on a graveyard world filled with cannibal colonists, and a dead city that literally generates creatures from your nightmares
  • Pound of Flesh is a detailed description of a huge cyberpunk space station, along with a dungeon crawl through the abandoned sections of the habitat to fight Mother Horse Eyes style "flesh interfaces"

There was also a scenario in the original pocketmod, the pamphlet which preceded the full Mothership game. It was called Stowaway and it was about a serial killer, who used a derelict ship as bait to trap and eat other spacers

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Legions of Nagash
Every Heaven and Hell Imagined

Shyish, as the Realm of Death, is actually heavily influenced by mortal expectations. Every civilization has formed its own image of the afterlife that awaits them after death, and by some process that no one truly understands, those imagined afterlives actually do form in Shyish through a mix of Amethyst magic and shared belief. New afterlives form and are settled by the souls of those that believed in them in life, growing in power and size as more people die and come to them. As memories of a culture fade, so does their afterlife, and eventually, lacking any link to mortal minds, they may disappear into nothing.

While the areas ruled by Nagash tend to suck, not all parts of Shyish are bad, grim or even foreboding. The land of Athanasia is peaceful, populated by enlightened scholars and believers who fade and are reborn cyclically. Hallost, the Land of Dead Heroes, is the paradise of several warrior tribes, who fight endlessly against any monsters that endanger the area around their underworld. They die and burn to ash each night, returning to life in the morning to take up arms once more. Latchkey Island is the mythical paradise of thieves, a labyrinth of tunnels and mazes full of shining treasures, locked portals, vicious traps and self-serious guardian monsters. Those dead souls that pride themselves on their criminal talents compete to pull off ever more daring and rewarding heists of the ghostly treasures within.

Shyish isn't solely populated by the dead, either. The Prime Innerlands that form the central part of Shyish are the least suffused with Amethyst power, and so the living have found safety there. It's still a harsh life, as the land does not grow plants easily. The peoples of Shyish tend to be ruled over by traditions of the past - not least because often, their dead live among them, working alongside them, and the dead do love their traditions. This can be good or bad - in the tomb-city Gharnost, the rulers are skeleton lords who enslave their living descendants, forcing them to build grand mausoleums and tombs to the glory of the dead, or butchering them to become new undead soldiers for their armies.

In the Age of Chaos, many of the nations and underworlds were overrun by Chaos. Most of the mortal civilizations of the Innerlands fell to Chaos purges, and the forces of Chaos still control large chunks of the Innerlands despite the best efforts of both the natives and Nagash's reclamation forces. The center of the realm, though, is Nagashizzar, and that has been wholly lost to Chaos. The Black Pyramids hurl magical power outwards, marking the boundaries of Nagash's realm, and the living and dead alike near the place have learned to fear the raids of the Legions.

In theory, each Legion is specialized for a specific purpose. The Legion of Blood under Neferata wields the tools of stealth and corruption via the Soulblight curse of vampirism, hiding amongst the Free Peoples and sabotaging them from within. The Legion of Night under Mannfred von Carstein is the iron fist and the cunning claw, serving as the most openly martial tool in Nagash's toolbox. The Legion of Sacrament under Arkhan is the most loyal and trusted, used when Nagash cannot risk any chance of betrayal or when he requires people that actually understand arcane mysteries on more than a base, practical level. The Legions aren't especially organized, though - they are collections of smaller armies led by warlords that serve under the Legion's Mortarch. Size and composition of these forces can vary wildly.

Mannfred favors choosing Vampire Lords from his court as his warlords over necromancers or wights, using their loud and bloody attacks to mask his actual deviousness...and, often, his plans to break free of Nagash. (None have yet succeeded.) Arkhan favors his Black Disciples, each a powerful necromantic priest in their own right. Neferata, on the other hand, most famously employs the Wight King Cortek as her right hand, leader of an army of zombies and skeletons that have destroyed many kingdoms that dared to question her majesty. Occasionally, the Legions make alliance with the Ghoul Kings of the Flesh-Eater Courts, but they are never predictable. Nagash can't control most Mordants, as they are not technically undead, and many of the Ghoul Kings hate Nagash. All, however, recognize his power as the God of Death, even if they see him as a tyrant bent on conquering them. Some of the lesser courts are happy to work with him, as the lands where the Legions pass become full of delicious mortal meat for a time afterwards.

Zombies, skeletons and other largely mindless undead are simple fodder for the Legions, deathless soldiers that can be easily summoned and bound to the will of a good wizard. They feel no fear and do not tire, but most of them lack even the most basic ability to think for themselves. They are simply slaves bound to the will of their dark masters. Only the more dangerous and powerful undead have minds of their own. These must often be compelled to serve by powerful necromantic rituals or offered powerful incentives to serve. The Hexwraith ghost cavalry are typically promised mortal souls to devour, while Banshees are offered the chance to torment the living that they so crave.

We've already talked about Nagash, so I don't really need to go over him again. Instead...

Next time: the Mortarchs

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




Mothership has some interesting stuff in it, but I think you'd be better off using the Alien RPG which doesn't have the obvious gaps in the rules. The Mothership adventures should work just fine in the other system.

Nemo2342
Nov 26, 2007

Have A Day




Nap Ghost

PurpleXVI posted:

Or maybe dungeons are just naturally occurring, like veins of precious minerals, and are considered a general source of wealth and industry. But considering that they tend to be shallow and emptied out in a few weeks' time, there's a gold rush every time one pops up.

I’ve definitely encountered the concept of dungeons as a naturally occurring resource in multiple manga/light novels. Usually it’s paired with the idea if you destroy the dungeon’s “heart” (or sometimes just the boss monster) the whole thing collapses.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I think that's an excellent insight about the danger of low chances of success in horror games leading to overly conservative players. Because you don't want the players to be hyper-conservative in a horror game; you want them taking risks so that the horror happens, and fun things occur. Give players a 70% chance to do something and they'll try it much more often, and if you have players taking risks consistently something terrible is going to happen to them eventually anyway.

Also, no mechanics are ALL for sneaking? In a horror game where you almost certainly are trying to avoid combat, or if you use combat as anything but a last resort you're probably trying to ambush something? That seems nuts!

E: Also, 'multiple checks in a row under stress' is the death of d100 systems in many cases. As you correctly point out, every check is a point of failure, and every check greatly reduces your chances of succeeding the sequence. Just a bad, bad idea.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Aug 19, 2020

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Maybe you'll discuss more when you get to Stress and Panic, but I really hate the old-school D&D separate save system. If you want a class to be good at taking damage/fighting in melee but are worried that if they roll bad stats they'll be useless - maybe guarantee they have a good fighting stat rather than having a separate save vs. toughness system. (I also don't like the Fear and Sanity saves either: I wrote a small hack aimed at getting rid of them).

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

Nemo2342 posted:

I’ve definitely encountered the concept of dungeons as a naturally occurring resource in multiple manga/light novels. Usually it’s paired with the idea if you destroy the dungeon’s “heart” (or sometimes just the boss monster) the whole thing collapses.

I guess they took the cliché of "load bearing boss" and just ran with it.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Call of Cthulhu, 5th Edition

Get the Boat

Call of Cthulhu is a deeply influential, interesting game, with a lot going on. It's had an enormous impact on how people think about horror games, and I'd argue it has more of an impact on how people imagine Lovecraftian fiction than Lovecraft did, as if it was a second August Dereleth creeping in the wings, categorizing weird things and slipping manuscripts to publishers. It's where you get ideas like 'guns are mostly useless', 'combat won't help you', 'PCs are going to die. A lot', and my favorite (not my favorite): lovely Sanity Systems. Yes, I'm gonna put my cards on the table right now and say that one of the most important and influential elements of Call of Cthulhu, the addition of a system to track players' mental health as they encounter vile horrors from beyond, is not only a lovely system in and of itself (it's deeply ableist, inaccurate to how insanity works, and just seems like a poor way to track what it's trying to track in play) but is the origin of a thousand imitators that want you to track madness points and roll on the DSM to see if you became schizophrenic or acquired Generalized Anxiety Disorder from seeing a weird fish.

It also does nothing to deal with the problematic elements of Lovecraft's work, so we'll just get that out of the way eight o' clock, day 1. For instance, in Call of Cthulhu itself, which is used as the intro fiction for the book to introduce a prospective player to Lovecraftian writing, every single cultist is a non-white 'degenerate' and they plot the overthrow of the current paradigm of earth. Note they are not actually plotting 'Cthulhu will come back and eat everyone, killing us first in mercy' as the joking 'cultists will be eaten FIRST!' cliche goes. They are promised a world where they will become like the Great Old Ones, casting aside all conventional morality and law as they revel and shout and kill, and learn new ways to do all these things. Tension is built by the primary character (and the others in his account) seeing 'sullen negroes' out of the corner of his eyes, and wondering if in secret, they too are part of this plot to overthrow the order he lives in and kill all the white people. The game does nothing to address any of this, outside of one pretty good scenario that is in part instigated by racist bullshit. It still cheerfully refers to Cthulhu's cultists as 'degenerates' outside of the original story (which could be forgiven for just straight quoting the original author), still has a race of evil cultist pygmies, etc etc. It is not interested, in this edition (and this printing of this edition was in 2002) in talking about any of the problematic and fundamentally extremely racist elements of Lovecraft's fiction. It does not mention them as such, it uncritically repeats their tropes, etc etc. Just assume this book is No Good on that front. I hope later editions address these concerns, but this is the edition I have, and so this is the edition we'll be talking about.

At the same time, there's plenty of genuinely interesting and good design work in this book (there's also plenty of baffling weirdness). The GMing advice is very solid, and we'll get into it in detail. Call of Cthulhu is a game relatively opposite my tastes as a GM (I am a soft-hearted person who likes developing casts long-term, so I struggle with super high lethality games), but I think it frames its lethality in a particularly intriguing way that merits discussion and works well with the solid GMing advice. I've run several of the scenarios in the back of the book, and unlike normal, 3 of the 4 are pretty good! The Haunting is a genuinely fun time if you just want a solid horror/investigative one-shot you can drop on anyone. Dead Man Stomp is a genuinely good adventure idea that I've heard is improved in later editions. And Edge of Darkness is definitely my kind of thing, even if I also feel it reveals some of the mechanical weaknesses of the system. The Madman is a little unguided and also has a 28% chance that rocks (well, a blizzard) literally fall and kill everyone for every day you spend on investigating, and that seems like a crazy thing to do to players. We'll get into it.

Similarly, Call of Cthulhu's book does an excellent job of conditioning play; it's very up-front about what gameplay will be like, what sorts of characters are useful and fun to play, and that you are probably going to die. Not certainly, but probably. But if you do, that doesn't mean the entire adventure fails, or that gameplay stops; there's always finding your old PC's notes as you're looking for how they vanished, then getting drawn into the mystery anew from a new perspective as you slowly get to the bottom of it. This is what I mean by its framework for the lethality being very interesting; being a PC is treated as a heroic act, despite the PCs' fragility, *because* there was a very high chance they'd get murdered. At the same time, its GMing advice will also spend a lot of time on telling you how not to murder the players all the time the way the base mechanics suggest you might, which suggests a little bit of a mechanical mismatch. It wants to have mechanics for PCs slowly feeling the pressure of stress and horror, but at the same time you're pretty likely to be ripped to shreds, shot to death, dissolved, or something else like you were a particularly unlucky Sierra protagonist well before a PC starts to feel the 'breath of doom' from slowly eroding mental balance.

And so into this land of contrasts we go, to talk about the people who poke at horrible abominations from beyond the stars and why they're fool enough to do it!

Next Time: Making A Victim Investigator

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Night10194 posted:

I think that's an excellent insight about the danger of low chances of success in horror games leading to overly conservative players. Because you don't want the players to be hyper-conservative in a horror game; you want them taking risks so that the horror happens, and fun things occur. Give players a 70% chance to do something and they'll try it much more often, and if you have players taking risks consistently something terrible is going to happen to them eventually anyway.

This feels like a few lines of thought (that I'm generally into) combining into something that doesn't fully come together.

I think it's pretty common in OSR games to think of skill checks/dice rolls as a backup plan. The "real" gameplay is positioning the fiction so that you have an overwhelming advantage--playing pure RAW and relying on your stats to overcome challenges is as boring and underpowered as playing 4e and only ever using basic attacks.

It sounds like the 'advantage' system intrudes on this a lot, though. It's normally a great system, even for OSR games, since it takes you from "the odds are 50/50, but you only need to lose a few times to be hosed" to "the odds are strongly in your favor, but there's always a chance for things to go wrong" really elegantly--which can be a nice 'default' way of representing having found an advantageous position (but not one so strong that you just don't roll).

It sounds like here it just takes you from "you're probably hosed" to "your odds are 50/50", while also discouraging you from letting good ideas lead to auto-successes. That is annoying.

BinaryDoubts posted:

Maybe you'll discuss more when you get to Stress and Panic, but I really hate the old-school D&D separate save system. If you want a class to be good at taking damage/fighting in melee but are worried that if they roll bad stats they'll be useless - maybe guarantee they have a good fighting stat rather than having a separate save vs. toughness system. (I also don't like the Fear and Sanity saves either: I wrote a small hack aimed at getting rid of them).

I'm generally really against having stats, skills, and saves all in the same system. Hell, I love systems that can get it down to just one of those three (using stats as both saves and skills). That said, Mothership's set of saves is pretty evocative--the four saves are probably the most clear "hey, this is what this game is going to be about" statement on the character sheet. Making them distinct from the skill system does feel a little unnecessary mechanically, but seems like it's probably good from a "communicating what the game's about" perspective

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Not having stealth really seems like a huge oversight for a sci-fi horror game, and I third-etc that skills with very low chances of success just invites players to turtle and stop the game to spend hours discussing how to mitigate those chances or to avoid rolling entirely.

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017
MOTHERSHIP PLAYER’S SURVIVAL GUIDE - Part 4: Combat


Welcome back to Mothership. Still working from home, and still waiting for replies to emails. So here's another update. Let’s see what’s going on with the combat rules.

SURPRISE
If you get surprised, make a Fear save. Pass and you get to act normally that round. Otherwise, better luck next round.

INITIATIVE
To determine who goes when, everyone rolls a D100 versus their Speed. Everyone who succeeds gets to go before the NPCs. Everyone who fails goes after them. Crit success can grant an extra action, while crit failure means you lose an action.

The book isn’t clear whether you make the initiative test every round, or just use it to determine the order and then stick with it. After a single combat, I immediately gravitated toward the latter. Having the players roll every round and then reordering initiative to reflect the results was a pain in the rear end with no real benefit.

ROUNDS VS TURNS
A Turn is an individual player or NPC’s action. A round is the time it takes for all players and NPCs to complete their actions. I bring this up because the rounds vs turns distinction was important in another game I reviewed here, and in there it was reversed.

ACTION ECONOMY
On your turn, you get two Significant actions. That means you can move twice, attack twice, attack then reload, move and operate a machine, operate a machine and use a computer, etc. In addition, the Warden can also allow you an infinite number of Insignificant actions, like talking or looking around.

ATTACKING
To successfully attack, you need to roll under your Combat score, plus or minus any modifiers. If your attack hits, the target makes an armor save. If they fail the armor save, you roll your damage and subtract it from the target’s HP.

There are essentially three ways you can do armor in an RPG. Reduction in chance to hit (AC in D&D), damage reduction (subtract armor from incoming damage) and active defense (target rolls something to cancel the hit). Mothership goes all-in on active defense. The problem with active defense is that it doubles the amount of rolling necessary to resolve a single attack. Additionally, there are weapons with properties that modify the target’s armor save, which have to be negotiated and applied before the dice can be rolled. I do not like active defense.

Oh, in a hand to hand fight you can roll Combat instead of your Armor Save (to counterattack) or Body (to run away).

MOVEMENT
Equal to half your Speed in meters. If you’re wearing something heavy, you have to roll under Strength, or you only get half movement.

HIT LOCATIONS
The game says this probably isn’t important, but just in case, they give you this little diagram.



DAMAGE
If you get hit with a critical hit, you make a Panic test. You also make a Panic test if you lose half or more of your HP from a single blow.

HEALING
The standard method for recovering HP is to spend six hours resting. When you do so, make a Body save. On a success, you recover HP equal to the number shown on the dice. On a failure, you get nothing. You can get advantage on the Body save for being in circumstances conducive to healing, or disadvantage for the opposite. Oh and you can only do this once per day. Once per 24 hour earth day? That’s all the book says - once per day.

DEATH
If you hit 0 HP, you pass out and make a Body save. On a failure, you die. On a success, you roll on a D10 table, with results ranging from temporary penalties to nasty permanent injuries.

IN PLAY
How does it all work in practice? Seems like a pretty slick, lightweight system, right?

Combat in Mothership is sssssslllllloooooowwwwwwwwww. Everyone gets multiple attacks, but has garbage chance to hit, so there’s a lot of rolling for no effect. Then someone gets in a hit, but the target gets an armor save to negate the damage. Since the base armor save is usually buffed by worn armor, this means that the chance to avoid damage is usually higher than the chance of the attacker hitting the target.

But let’s say an attack gets through. Most weapons in the game do chip damage anyway - the average player character is rocking 60 HP, a revolver does 3D10 damage. That means the most likely outcome is to slice off a quarter of the character’s HP, IF the attack even hits and does damage. Now, there are a few weapons available that do massively increased damage. The Combat Shotgun and Flamethrower do 2D10 times 10 damage, an average of 110 per hit. A fragmentation grenade does half that, averaging a still-impressive 55 damage per hit. It’s possible for fights to end quickly, if someone has the hardware to make it happen.

In practice, it doesn’t happen. In a way, it feels a lot like Darkest Dungeon. Combat is a grind, with attacks slowly chewing through HP pools and piling on stress. In concept, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In a space survival simulator, encounters eating up pools of limited resources is a big deal, even if they don’t kill you right away. And longer combats are great if your system is built around players and NPCs choosing from a menu of special abilities, since the fight lasts long enough for them to matter. But Mothership is not one of those games. It does not have the mechanical depth for lengthy, detailed combat. It clearly wants encounters to be fast and brutal, and they just aren’t.

Combat is the worst part of Mothership. The players finally encounter the Alien after a tense game of cat and mouse spanning the whole session, battle is joined, and everyone flops around ineffectually at each other. It takes a long time, does not produce decisive results, does not fit with the game’s setting and tone, and is not fun. When I ran the game, I learned to love “the NPCs realize they aren’t winning and run away” because the alternative was a protracted slap fight with a foregone conclusion.

I really hope they overhaul the combat system when they do whatever rules update they’re planning.

Next post, we’ll tackle weapons, armor and equipment.


mllaneza posted:

Mothership has some interesting stuff in it, but I think you'd be better off using the Alien RPG which doesn't have the obvious gaps in the rules. The Mothership adventures should work just fine in the other system.
The Alien RPG has mechanics that are similar enough to Mothership that I wonder if they weren't deliberate attempts to iterate and improve on them.

We'll talk about this more when we get to the Stress and Panic rules.

BinaryDoubts posted:

Maybe you'll discuss more when you get to Stress and Panic, but I really hate the old-school D&D separate save system. If you want a class to be good at taking damage/fighting in melee but are worried that if they roll bad stats they'll be useless - maybe guarantee they have a good fighting stat rather than having a separate save vs. toughness system. (I also don't like the Fear and Sanity saves either: I wrote a small hack aimed at getting rid of them).
Ditto

OtspIII posted:

I'm generally really against having stats, skills, and saves all in the same system. Hell, I love systems that can get it down to just one of those three (using stats as both saves and skills). That said, Mothership's set of saves is pretty evocative--the four saves are probably the most clear "hey, this is what this game is going to be about" statement on the character sheet. Making them distinct from the skill system does feel a little unnecessary mechanically, but seems like it's probably good from a "communicating what the game's about" perspective
I honestly think 5E handles saving throws better than any other game. It doesn't take three stats and arbitrarily rename them (Fortitude, Reflex, Will) and it doesn't slice them up into esoteric categories based on what's attacking you (Breath Weapon, Spells, Rods, Staves, Poison, Ligma). It reuses the six attribute scores you already have on your sheet. Easy enough to understand and calculate, yet differentiated enough to be used in a variety of narrative circumstances.

Night10194 posted:

I think that's an excellent insight about the danger of low chances of success in horror games leading to overly conservative players. Because you don't want the players to be hyper-conservative in a horror game; you want them taking risks so that the horror happens, and fun things occur. Give players a 70% chance to do something and they'll try it much more often, and if you have players taking risks consistently something terrible is going to happen to them eventually anyway.
When I run convention games of Delta Green, I make all the pregens slightly min/maxed. Powerful characters make the players braver, which makes them more likely to get into dangerous situations that move the game forward within our limited timeslot. And actually have fun, instead of spending the whole time trying to mitigate risk and reduce their chance of failure. Plus, in my experience, repeated failure and being given a “useless characters” are two things that quickly turn new players off a game. Convention players are happy to be eaten by monsters or have their mind ripped to shreds by alternate spatial topographies, but if they fail over and over at basic door opening, ladder climbing or clue finding, they’re going to disengage early.

Robindaybird posted:

Not having stealth really seems like a huge oversight for a sci-fi horror game, and I third-etc that skills with very low chances of success just invites players to turtle and stop the game to spend hours discussing how to mitigate those chances or to avoid rolling entirely.
Negotiating fictional position to improve odds of success is something that shows up in lots of OSR games, but also appears in many narrative based games as well. Blades in the Dark is the best example of a system where players and the GM having this conversation is considered gameplay, rather than a misunderstanding to be quickly resolved and sidelined. And like Mothership, Blades crashes and burns if the players and the GM are not on the same page about the importance of negotiating their fictional position and effect in order to get mechanical bonuses.

Falconier111
Jul 18, 2012

S T A R M E T A L C A S T E


Chapter 2: Character Creation (Witchbreeds)

All right, fluff’s done for now, so I can cover some information I really should have earlier. Accursed was specifically designed to cross classic movie monsters – vampires, werewolves, Frankensteins, you know – with dark fantasy in order to stand out in the market. And yes, the introduction admits the concept started out as a marketing decision. In Accursed, the war has already been lost; any hope to return things to how they were vanished long ago. The characters fight to save what’s left and maybe carve out something new. I suppose that’s why they chose Savage Worlds for the game; it’s gonzo, dangerous, and dramatic enough to support that scene.

Full disclosure: I actually really don’t like Savage Worlds. I ran a full campaign in it once and found it a lot slower than it thinks it is. Between dealing with all those initiative cards and working out the exploding dice… I ran a Dark Heresy hack with a total of 900 pages of rulebook to consult and it actually went faster. I also struggled to design and run encounters because goofball crits consistently threw the planning out of wack; I remember running a miniboss that was supposed to be a moderate challenge for the party, and on the first turn of the first round a PC’s attack roll exploded twice and killed it in one hit. That said, I’ve run more Savage Worlds games than every other system combined because of that campaign alone, so we’ll see if this looks like it would run differently, I guess.



At the end of the day, Accursed is just a hack of Savage Worlds; mechanically, it only differs in character creation (obviously), a few new setting rules and minor mechanics, and a couple new subsystems. If you don’t know the system this review should give you everything you need to know. I won’t retread that territory because if I wanted to review Savage Worlds I would review Savage Worlds (I don’t want to review Savage Worlds). Just about everything I want to cover system-wise comes up in the process of character creation, meaning I can hit things as we go by walking you through making a character. All I’ll miss is one subsystem, the most interesting one in the game, which deserves its own separate exploration.

The first part of character creation is choosing your Witchbreed (what kind of Accursed you are), each of which comes with its own character template and modifiers.



The Blood Witch took many of her victims and used the supernatural connection between blood and passion to enhance them; those overwhelmed by their passions became vampires devoted to her will, while those who retained their sense of self became the less powerful but more flexible and free-willed Dhampir. Dhampir are the only Accursed that can easily pass as human, though their long fangs and red eyes can give the game away; they become graceful and charismatic, with enhanced senses and ability to spot threats. In return, though they do not need to drink blood, doing so is dangerously pleasurable and addictive, and they face suspicion in the Order since the differences between vampires and Dhampir are subtle and easily masked.

(Obviously, Dhampir fill the role of social expert in a party, but they get some Agility bonuses to offer them a stealth focus and role in combat for when that doesn’t come into play. A bit unfocused, though.)



Golems were made by extracting the soul of a human and implanting it in a body made from some single material, anything that can hold a shape. Named after an ancient Hebronite legend of an unstoppable, rampaging construct, they served as shock troops who absorbed blows that would cripple any mortal and go back into the fight once their bodies were repaired. But the Crone who built them is gone, and they now must survive on their own. Even after years or decades in their new forms, Golems suffer from permanent body dysmorphia rarely fully connect with their bodies and remain clumsy and awkward, even dangerous to those around them. In exchange, they can shrug off enormous amounts of damage or pain and keep fighting, even learning to use their artificial nature to manipulate the substance they were made of or detach body parts and send them to do tasks.

(Big, tough tanks with a few unusual combat options and a crippling weakness to a common form of damage (fire for organic materials and blunt weapons for inorganic materials). They also can’t heal naturally or raise their Agility. Between their weaknesses and a drawback I’ll get to a few chapters down the line, they make probably the worst Witchbreed in the game, though with careful planning and Edge choice they can mitigate most of it. I can imagine a trans person playing a Golem and taking advantage of some of the rules for a meaningful personal story, though.)



Mongrels are fusions of humans and animals carrying traits of both; no Mongrel carries the same combination of body parts. Created by the Chimera, a Witch obsessed with experimentation, mongrels are defined less by their surgical grafts and more by the enchantments that force their parts to work together; while it keeps their bodies from dying of shock and lets them use abilities borrowed from their components, it leaves them in constant debilitating pain that left them vulnerable to the Chimera’s control. That pain rendered the Mongrels she left behind animalistic and aggressive until the Order discovered an alchemical painkiller that could keep them sane. Mongrels in the order offer their flexibility and toughness in combat for the same reasons other Accursed join, and to keep access to the expensive, rare potion that keeps them from descending into agony.

(You play a Mongrel when you want to cheese the combat system; the right combination of choices can put them head and shoulders above their peers. You can also tweak them to be stealth specialists, but there are better Witchbreeds for that. You have to make your most important choices at the start and can only develop your character along those lines, though.)



When the Djinn revived the ancient dead of Hyphrates, most became mindless Banes. A few, however, had been wealthy enough to afford sarcophagi with cartouches that happened to absorb her magic, granting them a measure of free will. These became the Mummies, her Accursed. While the same type of magic drives them as the other Accursed, unlike their counterparts most Mummies died centuries ago. Many decided to use the opportunity to repent for past sins or start a new; they mostly joined the Order. Others sought power or concluded a second life was proof of their ancient rights; they became the commanders in Memmon’s army. Both share the unnatural resilience of undeath, a rot only partially covered by bandages, and reconstructed sarcophagi that serve as both armor and a weapon.

(While Golems have bonuses to sheer toughness, Mummies get natural armor, better resistance to the consequences of damage, and a wonderful natural weapon. They also get the single most broken endgame ability in the game. They have a harder time building Charisma than any other Witchbreed, but… who cares?)



Ophidians are Melusine’s creations, former humans given iridescent scales, venomous fangs, forked tongues, and sometimes even prehensile tails. Naturally stealthy, Ophidians often served as scouts and assassins, slipping through improbably tiny cracks and delivering death before leaving in the night. During the Bane War, the Gorgon rarely deployed them in the Grand Coven’s armies; instead, she send them out alone with both her will and a death mark against them if they broke to keep them in line. Of course, with the war over, many Ophidians have gone rogue anyway. Cold-blooded like all snakes are, Ophidians falter in cold climates and struggle with a body chemistry that makes building their stamina difficult, but they gain a powerful paralytic venom, sharpened senses, and great flexibility in exchange.

(Ambush predators, first and foremost; their natural abilities synergize best when they sneak up on a component, bite them, and let the paralytic poison set in before killing them. That’s highly situational, you say? Yes, yes it is. They also suffer from having an extremely difficult time raising their Vigor and the whole cold-blooded thing basically restricts where you set your campaign. They do get a special Edge later on that lets them pull a boa constrictor and entangle someone, basically giving them two attacks against the target per turn until they break free. Hooray?)



Most thrown in the Dark Cauldron emerged mindless monsters; Revenants are those who kept their minds. Without exception, Revenants are driven by some single overriding goal, something they believe in strongly enough to drive every decision. As such, they can be impatient and restless whenever unable to pursue it and almost unstoppable while they do. Revenants never tire, fear little, and can often push their dead bodies past limits that would disable a living person, but between their harsh personalities and disgusting appearance (they are, you know, still undead), Revenants rarely make few friends.

(They specialize in sheer endurance; they have an easier time building Vigor than any other Witchbreed and they can sub it in for Spirit when resisting fear. They also get a few other combat bonuses in exchange for empowering the GM to punish the player whenever they do anything that isn’t pursuing their goal, which… can lead to conflict.)



Shades are as alive as any human, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Every part of their appearance is muted, dark, or transparent; even the clothes they wear seem to lose color. Created by the Dark Queen Hecate with the same processes she used to create her mindless ghosts (they differ by having maintained a sense of self through the process), Shades acted as roving saboteurs; they phase in and out of reality, allowing them to slip through walls and enemy attacks while delivering their own, they frighten animals with their presence, and by gathering their will they can spread a paralyzing fear to those around them. Unfortunately, at first blush they resemble ordinary Banes, and many priests treated them as such by violently “exorcising” them; only recently did the Order of the Penitent make their status clear and welcome them among their ranks.

(Combat-wise, specialize in being harder to hit, resisting environmental effects, and getting surprise attacks by Shadowcatting through walls or the ground in exchange for lovely Strength (why they use guns). Out of combat, they can act as OSR-style forward scouts or be the party rogue (as they have a substantial natural bonus to the skill that handles basically all rogue checks). With the right Edge they can also learn how to fly :hellyeah:)



Vargr, while clearly intelligent, are also clearly animalistic; they were designed by Baba Yaga as her primary shock troops. While visibly hairy and constantly hungry in their human forms, Vargr can turn into lupine monsters with incredible strength, sharpened senses, and a savagery even their often-uncivilized other form and hope to approach. The book spends paragraphs talking about how they make unpleasant company, but that has no mechanical backing. “Thoughtful and sophisticated (if rather hairy) Orthodox priest who turns into a wolf to defend his congregation” is also a valid character concept.

(Almost entirely built around switching into their war form, which gives huge bonuses to Notice, Fighting, and Strength. It’s only downside is -4 Charisma, which implies that it can still speak, it’s just really unpleasant and rude. The transformation takes a couple rounds on average in combat, making it a good idea to just stay in war form whenever you might get into combat and switch out only when you need to deal with people diplomatically.)

So let’s get started making our character. I decide I want to make a Mummy, so I choose the Mummy template. And that’s it for today!

Next time I deal with numbers and stuff.

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Aug 20, 2020

BattleMaster
Aug 14, 2000

Dallbun posted:

205: Cry in the Dark
On a trail, the PCs pass an abandoned caravan. The wagons are partially loaded (with undefined stuff worth 4000 gp total), the horses are still tethered, a campfire is burning. Seems like only the people disappeared, within the last few hours.

The PCs hear cries for help off in the distance, which lead them up to a ruin (of...?) on a nearby hill, wherein the leucrotta who ate the merchant’s company attack them. I guess they left the horses there… just to make it more mysterious what happened to the people, so other travellers would be inclined to investigate?

Anyway, a pretty normal use of the leucrotta’s weird schtick. Fine. Keep.

I've pulled something like this a bunch of times with a bunch of different players and it creeps them out each time. Leucrottas aren't just beasts but are intelligent enough to understand how to lay traps, so I figure that they'd figure out quickly that hanging out near a wrecked caravan (attacked earlier by bandits or something else) imitating humanoid cries for help would be a pretty basic way to attract more prey.

Whenever players are looking for a lost caravan or chasing after someone who left in a horse-drawn cart or carriage, I like to have them stumble upon a similar vehicle in the wilderness. Wrecked, broken wheels or overturned, horses and passengers long gone, cargo picked over but maybe some usable stuff left. Old enough that it probably wasn't what they were looking for. But then they hear cries for help off in the distance, in the woods or nearby hilltop.

Many players are rightfully suspicious but I've never had a single person refuse the bait. As they approach the source of the cries, calling out to them, I have the voices shift over to distorted and repeated imitations of what they were saying (think of the Predator imitating voices.) Then when they've had a moment to go "ohhh nooo" they catch glowing red eyes peeking out of the darkness of brush-covered holes, before the leucrotta(s) lunge out at them.

I do it every chance I can with new players because it never fails to get a good reaction out of people.

Dallbun
Apr 21, 2010

BattleMaster posted:

I do it every chance I can with new players because it never fails to get a good reaction out of people.
You've sold me, sounds great now that I think about it playing out at the table.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Night10194 posted:

Call of Cthulhu, 5th Edition

Get the Boat
Awesome, looking forward to your thoughts. I have a copy of 7th edition laying around, if you would like I can check on nuances to see if there are major differences on core topics.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

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Falconier111 posted:


So let’s get started making our character. I decide I want to make a Mummy, so I choose the Mummy template. And that’s it for today!

Next time I deal with numbers and stuff.

Could you make a very strong mummy? An invincible mummy perhaps? One that cannot perish?

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Nessus posted:

Awesome, looking forward to your thoughts. I have a copy of 7th edition laying around, if you would like I can check on nuances to see if there are major differences on core topics.

I'd love that, actually. I've never read the updated editions, I bought the one I have many years ago when I was making my own horror game and thought 'I should read CoC, it's The Big Deal'.

Ithle01
May 28, 2013

Night10194 posted:

I'd love that, actually. I've never read the updated editions, I bought the one I have many years ago when I was making my own horror game and thought 'I should read CoC, it's The Big Deal'.

I bought the 5th edition long ago and I'm looking forward to your take on the Mythos and the adventures in the back of the book.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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Night10194 posted:

I'd love that, actually. I've never read the updated editions, I bought the one I have many years ago when I was making my own horror game and thought 'I should read CoC, it's The Big Deal'.
Excellent, tag if you want specific things addressed - I will be reading but may not always be prompted. 7E made some additions which I think introduce a dose of modern design pretty well.

One of the problems with CoC is that it has a strength (you can use essentially any module or content written for it since its invention with, at most, slight adjustments) which is also a weakness (this provides a titanic incentive to make changes relatively small).

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

Angry Salami posted:

I like the way that it's phrased, it sounds like dungeons are some sort of franchise. "Did you hear? They finally opened a new dungeon down the street! It's going to be so much more convenient than that old dungeon out in the Forgotten Realms!"

Sometimes miners dig too greedily and too shallow and break through into a vast cavern filled with unnatural colours. It's always a rush to evacuate before... things come through the breach to slaughter everything that moves and carry off any item of value back to their strange home.

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017

Nessus posted:

Excellent, tag if you want specific things addressed - I will be reading but may not always be prompted. 7E made some additions which I think introduce a dose of modern design pretty well.

One of the problems with CoC is that it has a strength (you can use essentially any module or content written for it since its invention with, at most, slight adjustments) which is also a weakness (this provides a titanic incentive to make changes relatively small).
I'm interested in changes to the skill system, specifically how finely sliced the skills are. I always hated the CoC skills for being overly granular (eg. spot hidden vs listen), and I figured they avoided simplifying it for the aforementioned backwards compatibility reasons.

Tibalt
May 14, 2017

What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee

Something visceral and terrifying in the duck call being used on you. It was the most effective scene in the recent Predators movies, in my opinion.

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Hypnobeard
Sep 15, 2004

Obey the Beard



Hey, Falconier111, could you use spoiler tags instead of strikethru tags?

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