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Seriously missed opportunity to title that entry Duergar Duerguard.
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Oct 7, 2020 04:16
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Bieeanshee posted:I remember that! When I first heard about spelljammer, I thought that image was supposed to be a sneaky early teaser. Well now that it's confirmed not to be a figment of someone's imagination I want to see it too.
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Oct 7, 2020 04:28
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Xiahou Dun posted:Much appreciated but in addition to how often the content from the OSR winds up being yikes, I'm just kind of over that game-play loop. Every once in a while I'll kind of miss old D&D out of pure nostalgia for back when I was a kid, but I'm much more interested in other stuff these days. There have been so very many dungeons and crypts, please, let me play something different. You really should look into the Ultraviolet Grasslands setting. At base, it is a Oregon Trail caravanner point-crawl in a psychedelic and spray-painted-Wizard-on-the-side-of-a-van world. I find it refreshing because it is unique. There are psychic cat-lords who make dogs fight giant rats for their own amusement, Rainbow colored peoples (literally, Bluelanders have a history of being necromancers), Porcelain Princes, carnivorous hyper-tech wild mechanicals called Vomes, Glass Houses, a Grassland Colossus, and a Near Moon just hovering over a valley with treasures to be explored therein. Watch out for the changes in gravity! And the weird world is all wrapped in a trade and barter game.  An introduction to the UVG is free and can be found here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/produc...0fuzzy%20riffs.
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Oct 7, 2020 04:30
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Warthur posted:
That turtle looks so mad / disgusted, it rules.
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Oct 8, 2020 05:02
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Oct 8, 2020 09:09
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Slam sector
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Oct 8, 2020 12:42
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Hollandia posted:Slam sector
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Oct 8, 2020 15:53
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Man that axe was undersold, looking at the stock... handle.... thing it's a shovel/axe/blaster, perfect for that Spacedwarf Spaceprospector on the go
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Oct 8, 2020 23:43
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Darwinism posted:Man that axe was undersold, looking at the stock... handle.... thing it's a shovel/axe/blaster, perfect for that Spacedwarf Spaceprospector on the go This image was the first time early teens me had ever considered adapting a rule set for a different genre. Not that DND was the best but it was the early 90s and I had limited access to non-DND / GURPS / SR / Cyberpunk 2020 rule sets. Hell I hadn’t even found WOD yet.
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Oct 9, 2020 01:13
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Robert Facepalmer posted:Riiiight.  I mean, that's the vibe it gave me, don't think I was far off 
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Oct 10, 2020 12:52
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Deep Rock Galactic had humble beginnings I see.
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Oct 10, 2020 12:56
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Robert Facepalmer posted:Riiiight. 
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Oct 10, 2020 12:59
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Hollandia posted:
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Oct 10, 2020 19:36
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What book was this from? I know I've seen it before but I can't remember where.
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Oct 11, 2020 16:39
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It was used an ad in Dragon Magazine a lot back in the 90s
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Oct 11, 2020 16:54
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whydirt posted:It was used an ad in Dragon Magazine a lot back in the 90s I only ever saw it in Dragon. Did the 90’s TSR space RPG (not gammaworld) have dwarfs?
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Oct 12, 2020 00:55
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It's on page 7 of issue 177 of Dragon - given the placement, I suspect it'd be a recurring spot: 
UrbanLabyrinth fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Oct 12, 2020 |
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Oct 12, 2020 01:03
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is that supposed to be a space dwarf or a space hillbilly
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Oct 12, 2020 22:42
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theironjef posted:Was the thing where Duergar have fire elemental hair quills new to 4e? Because it was rad. I fought a bunch of them on a campaign two weeks ago and they used the quills and everyone was amazed because we never knew that they had this poo poo on 4e
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Oct 12, 2020 22:43
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Plutonis posted:is that supposed to be a space dwarf or a space hillbilly yeah
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Oct 13, 2020 03:37
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I wasn't sure where exactly to put this post, but I hope this thread is germane enough. When there was online discourse about the problem of D&D portraying orcs as being "naturally evil" or something similar, there was this tweet from The Alexandrian:  It never sat well with me because it felt far too exculpatory of old-school D&D and of Gygax, as though the portrayal of orcs in this way couldn't have come from this. And it mostly derives from the technicality that A. alignment didn't have a good/evil axis until AD&D, and B. orcs were capable of being in the neutral category of the law/chaos axis in OD&D: from D&D Book 1 - Men and Magic  Because OD&D relied a lot on "reading between the lines" in terms of describing its fantasy milieu, it's true that you're not going to get an explicit declaration of orcs being evil, but even at this early stage, you already see functional descriptions of orcs that imply less-than-civilized behavior, to put it mildly. from D&D Book 2 - Monsters & Treasure  from D&D Book 3 - The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures  ___ By as early as the Holmes Basic Set (1977), orcs were already being described as "evil":  ___ When we get to the D&D Box Sets from Moldvay and Mentzer, the "evil" part of their alignment is dropped, but the descriptions of orc behavior still regards them as being rather barbaric: D&D Basic - Moldvay Edition  D&D Basic - Mentzer Edition  D&D Rules Cyclopedia  ___ Of course, by the time we get to AD&D 1st Edition, which was written by Gary Gygax, this is how orcs are described:  My overall point in digging up all this is that the part where he says "anyone going for straight up orcs must be evil because gygax is just ignorant" is... wrong, because Gygax was a big influence in how orcs were portrayed over the years, and leading into the standardization of them as being evil as a matter of course.
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Oct 14, 2020 06:35
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Honestly even without the history lesson that Alexandrian post just feels like one of those classic liberal “pro-life is pro-death!!!” gotchas where you behave as if your opponents are arguing in good faith when they are most definitely not.
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Oct 14, 2020 07:03
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Has anyone reviewed Infinity RPG fully? Alexandrian wrote it.
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Oct 14, 2020 10:59
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“Tribal colors”. Yuk.
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Oct 14, 2020 12:17
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Even if much of those statblocks and flavor text don’t say “Orcs are always evil,” they still have some pretty racist language devoted to telling you how horrible orcs are.
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Oct 14, 2020 12:31
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hyphz posted:Has anyone reviewed Infinity RPG fully? Alexandrian wrote it. I did not know that and it cracks me up. It's a fine game. It's a little crunchy for my taste, but given that 2d20 keeps trying to be Cortex Prime / Fate more and more, I would like the pendulum to swing back that way. The book is arguably the worst reference book I own (I remember once trying to figure out how to use a grenade launcher I had picked up, and "grenade launcher", "grenades", and "explosion damage" were in different parts of the book), but the system is pretty rock solid.
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Oct 14, 2020 15:10
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I like the Infinity and Conan rpgs a lot more than I expected. Really hope the Dune game with that system is just as good. It took a little while to get used to, but it works pretty well for narrative heavy action adventure with some meat on the bones. Fate just never clicked with me, so I am glad it has become a mostly forgotten relic.
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Oct 14, 2020 15:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:from D&D Book 1 - Men and Magic It's sad because the concept of law vs chaos could have been interesting in a game that was willing to approach it in a nuanced way. But D&D was a wargame and they needed two sides. They gave it away when they called high level chaos priests "Evil High Priests" instead of something badass.
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Oct 14, 2020 15:41
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Not only is Evil High Priest bad, it's wrong. It should have been Evil Patriarch. Also, third level should have been Evil Village Priest, just calling it Shaman is weird and racist as it's the only other one that isn't just the regular level title with Evil in front. E: (Evil) Acolyte, (Evil) Adept, Village Priest/Shaman, (Evil) Priest, (Evil) Curate, (Evil) Bishop, (Evil) Lama, Patriarch/Evil High Priest, for those unfamiliar with it. Yes, it's stupid. 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Oct 14, 2020 |
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Oct 14, 2020 15:52
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DalaranJ posted:It's sad because the concept of law vs chaos could have been interesting in a game that was willing to approach it in a nuanced way. But D&D was a wargame and they needed two sides. They gave it away when they called high level chaos priests "Evil High Priests" instead of something badass. The chaos = baddies and law = goodies is an element pulled from Three Hearts and Three Lions, along with a few other specific D&D quirks. I know a lot of people also point to the Elric books as an influence on the law/chaos axis, too but there's a least more ambiguity there in what's objectively good or bad that I think you see later D&D writers extrapolate out when law/chaos becomes a separate axis from good/evil in D&D.
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Oct 14, 2020 15:53
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it's also kinda dumb to claim that the Chaos alignment doesn't represent evil when that's where the Evil High Priests exclusively belong to
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Oct 14, 2020 15:57
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IIRC the gods of Law and Chaos in the Elric books are both Cthulhu-grade horrors inimical to humanity, it's just that in Elric's time the gods of Chaos were ascendant and the gods of Law were incredibly remote and uninvolved in mortal affairs.
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Oct 14, 2020 17:10
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Not only is Evil High Priest bad, it's wrong. It should have been Evil Patriarch. Also, third level should have been Evil Village Priest, just calling it Shaman is weird and racist as it's the only other one that isn't just the regular level title with Evil in front. It made a certain kind of sense to me as a kid GM, read as a chart of NPC titles. Like, if I was populating a haunted church and I wanted the villain to be an evil Bishop, I could look at that chart and go "Ah, very good, 6th level". I never once thought it was that you leveled through those unrelated jobs. Naturally that's extremely pointless design information though and I just was a dumb kid.
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Oct 14, 2020 17:18
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hyphz posted:Has anyone reviewed Infinity RPG fully? Alexandrian wrote it. I need to pick back up my Infinity F&F, but *gestures at everything* right now. He was the line developer, not the writer, although I guess he could have written for it too. It's serviceable enough, I suspect the fact that he's working within a premade system and everything fluff had to be approved by Corvus Belli probably mitigated his tendencies.
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Oct 14, 2020 17:42
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DalaranJ posted:It's sad because the concept of law vs chaos could have been interesting in a game that was willing to approach it in a nuanced way. But D&D was a wargame and they needed two sides. They gave it away when they called high level chaos priests "Evil High Priests" instead of something badass. gradenko_2000 posted:it's also kinda dumb to claim that the Chaos alignment doesn't represent evil when that's where the Evil High Priests exclusively belong to The 1974 edition of D&D is so badly written that it's at times unclear whether evil and chaos even are synonymous. When Holmes approached TSR with his attempt to clean up the rules, he had interpreted Gygax' drunken scribbles to mean that Law/Chaos was separate from Good/Evil, and nobody at TSR bothered to correct him.
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Oct 15, 2020 00:50
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:IIRC the gods of Law and Chaos in the Elric books are both Cthulhu-grade horrors inimical to humanity, it's just that in Elric's time the gods of Chaos were ascendant and the gods of Law were incredibly remote and uninvolved in mortal affairs. Law isn't presented as being better than Chaos, but Chaos has classic demon iconography, and the very last line of a Chaotic entity is to tell Elric said demon was much more evil than Elric, so I think it should be remembered that Moorcock's Chaos at least looked a lot more like D&D Evil than D&D Chaos.
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Oct 15, 2020 01:32
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Can we just all take a minute to appreciate how lovely Gygax's fantasy biological determinism worldview was? This entire idea that you need races of inherently evil monsters to slay is just so off-putting to me. You can very easily get unambiguous bad guys that the PCs aren't going to feel bad about killing without going down this insane, 19th century scientific racism route!
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Oct 15, 2020 17:41
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KingKalamari posted:Can we just all take a minute to appreciate how lovely Gygax's fantasy biological determinism worldview was? The argument would be "orcs are not people, they are inhuman abominations made by evil gods" and other signifiers you could get by reading fantasy of the era, or really any horror. This argument is undermined by making them playable characters and giving them any sort of human culture. There is a growing presumption over time in D&D that everything should be playable, especially as the settings grow more complex.
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Oct 15, 2020 19:37
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Sodomy Hussein posted:There is a growing presumption over time in D&D that everything should be playable, especially as the settings grow more complex. D&D had aspirations to and has positioned itself as a generic fantasy RPG, but is at its core incredibly restrictive in how it says magic works and which races must be playable. Making everything playable is kind of the natural development of a need to meet the demands that come with the position of being ostensibly generic. Then they'll release a new edition and the playable races will be pared down and the whole process has to start over again.
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Oct 15, 2020 20:12
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admanb posted:Honestly even without the history lesson that Alexandrian post just feels like one of those classic liberal “pro-life is pro-death!!!” gotchas where you behave as if your opponents are arguing in good faith when they are most definitely not.
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Oct 15, 2020 20:45
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