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Selachian posted:Maybe because Through the Looking Glass is set on a chessboard, with the terrain Alice moves through divided into squares? Makes sense and it'd be cool if this was a chessboard instead of cityblocks of apartment buildings and only one of the warring sides has a chess theme. If you want the map to be a chessboard that's cool but you have to actually make it a chessboard not just use square graph paper and probably should actually make the war a chess game.
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Sep 27, 2021 19:25
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"Lamentations of the Flame Princess" is such a bad title. It just immediately makes me think the author is someone who would make me want to leave a party entirely if they were there. i know nothing about this zak guy so sorry if that seems.over the top.
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Sep 27, 2021 19:36
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I'm not sure if the title means anything beyond "We included some pictures of a hot redhead being gruesomely murdered." (To be clear, this is not a defense of any kind!)
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Sep 27, 2021 19:38
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MonsterEnvy posted:Soulbound souls don't seem to shatter right away. There is seemingly a short amount of time before they do, which can be used to save them in a few ways. Are there mechanical ways for it? So does AoS have a possible afterafterlife where Arkhan is now a citizen? Do Wyghts or Ghosts dying also produce a Soul that turns into an Unliving? How does that work with leftover Ossiarch soul bits? can an enterprising skeleton start a cult Mor with that endeavour?
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Sep 27, 2021 19:42
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ohhhhh its the name of their 18+ Maturr Content RPG system. i stand by what i said.
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Sep 27, 2021 19:42
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punishedkissinger posted:"Lamentations of the Flame Princess" is such a bad title. It just immediately makes me think the author is someone who would make me want to leave a party entirely if they were there. i know nothing about this zak guy so sorry if that seems.over the top. Please don't be too mean to (alleged) serial abuser and (alleged) Chik-Fil-A pants-shitter Zak S. (the S stands for "Shat his own pants in a Chik-Fil-A (allegedly)")
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Sep 27, 2021 19:52
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punishedkissinger posted:"Lamentations of the Flame Princess" is such a bad title. It just immediately makes me think the author is someone who would make me want to leave a party entirely if they were there. i know nothing about this zak guy so sorry if that seems.over the top.
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Sep 27, 2021 20:05
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JcDent posted:Are there mechanical ways for it? There aren’t really mechanics around resurrection, just the nebulous “sometimes something intervenes?” opening the door for GMs to do stuff. Arkhan’s soul got fuckin’ dissolved by pure Hysh energies - if he’s coming back, it won’t be for a long, long time because if he still exists his soul is going to still have to come back together form being inside a giant nuclear reactor of light. Wights and ghosts just stop existing when they die for good, though it’s very hard to actually permakill a ghost, since they usually just discorporate and then pull their soul back together. (Actually, all undead don’t have an afterlife. Once you’re undead, you’re gone for good if permakilled, it’s just variably hard to permakill you.) A wight’s bones could be incorporated into an Ossiarch, tho, and I’d allow Fuse Soul to incorporate the last remnant of the Wight into the Ossiarch that way. And yes, you can use the cult-making Endeavor to start a cult to Morrda. There is nothing limiting what your cult or secret society can be focused on.
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Sep 27, 2021 20:06
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SkeletonHero posted:Please don't be too mean to (alleged) serial abuser and (alleged) Chik-Fil-A pants-shitter Zak S. (the S stands for "Shat his own pants in a Chik-Fil-A (allegedly)") Terrible Opinions posted:LotFP isn't made by Zak, noted serial abuser and rapist, he's just making content for it. LotFP is made by Raggi a different piece of poo poo who stalked a woman who looks suspiciously like the title character of his RPG. i really hate my hobbies
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Sep 27, 2021 20:13
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Selachian posted:Maybe because Through the Looking Glass is set on a chessboard, with the terrain Alice moves through divided into squares? I figured it's just because the map is a grid. How much Carrol do you think this guy has actually read?
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Sep 27, 2021 20:15
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punishedkissinger posted:"Lamentations of the Flame Princess" is such a bad title. It's the title of Raggi's old metalhead fanzine: "The name Lamentations of the Flame Princess... at the time I was really into bands like Opeth, Sculptured, My Dying Bride, and others that were a bit more poetic with their titles and lyrics. Even harder bands like Emperor, come on, "Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk," "Thus Spake the Nightspirit..." Floofiness was running wild in metal. The Flame Princess idea was inspired by the website that this one Finnish girl had made about herself... she had long red hair down to her rear end and I'd never seen anyone like her. I sort of created a little mythology around her pictures that I was starting to explore in my earlier writing, and so when it came time to come up with a name for my zine, it seemed like a pretty natural choice."
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Sep 27, 2021 20:23
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Mors Rattus posted:
I reckon one could make a campaign from "characters travel to Lethis to pick up Morda lore and end up helping to rebuild"
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Sep 27, 2021 20:26
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Literally the campaign I’m prepping for now is about a Binding Teclis made just before leaving Shyish trying to keep the momentum rolling and trying to turn Morrda into a rallying figure against Nagash. (With help from a Crematorian Parrha outcast who is on unofficial assignment to find ways to fix the Crematorian exploding problem.)
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Sep 27, 2021 20:29
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Ghoulslayer depicts fall of one of the Amethyst Princedoms and efforts of its people to save the souls of their ancestors along with their version of afterlife from Nagash (this is post Soul Wars if I recall correct). It is solid hook for finding people who followed non-nagash mortuary traditions and would very much like to have their stuff back
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Sep 27, 2021 21:01
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That and, in lore atm, Nagash doesn't have a physical form and is just "large skeleton ghost". I like to imagine he is grumpy about this.
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Sep 27, 2021 22:17
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LatwPIAT posted:It's the title of Raggi's old metalhead fanzine: "Lamentations of the Flame Princess" is a totally sick name that has been tragically tainted by its association with "Lamentations of the Flame Princess."
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Sep 27, 2021 23:15
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 Hi, I'm Down With People and you might remember from my write-up for Horror On The Orient Express. I'm currently running the critically-acclaimed Delta Green, which was originally a set of COC modules before getting updated for the 21st century with a whole new ruleset and setting. I think it's exceptional! I love running it and like its grand-daddy COC, one of the things that makes it so good is it has just an awesome array of official adventures. Also like COC, a bunch of them are hot garbage! And one of them was making me so angry I felt like complaining about it for 3000 words! And it's this one: EX OBLIVIONE In which the PCs board a railroad to watch a completely invincible unstoppable ghost do something hosed up. The backstory for Ex Oblivione ties into some of the poo poo that I think is really cool in Delta Green, which is the mythos alt-history where the US government has been loving with the mythos for nearly a century with typically dodgy results. The titular Delta Green conspiracy got started with the government raid on Innsmouth, which resulted in them disappearing over 200 Deep One-human hybrids (read: fish people) to a concentration camp in the middle of Arizona. Designated YUMA YUCCA LOT II (YY-II) in survey reports, the proto-DG organisation wasted little time in doing just the most hosed up things possible to the fish-people, subjecting them to a battery of deeply unethical scientific experimentation that included vivisection. Being completely cut off from the ocean eventually drove the hybrids mad and the survivors of the experiments went into comas. They were kept in sealed tanks filled with salt water where they still remain in suspended animation up to whatever year you decide to place this scenario. One of these was Albert L. Marsh. The Marshes were the religious backbone of Innsmouth, the leaders of the Esoteric Order of Dagon that held the town in thrall. Albert wasn't vivisected, but he was starved, deprived of sleep and electrocuted in a series of brutal interrogations. He was also a powerful sorcerer and even going into a coma wasn't going to slow him down. He made an escape, the only hybrid to do so, by performing a hypergeometric (read: magical) ritual that destroyed his body while freeing his mind. The ghost of Marsh is still bound to the area, his sentience and his power waxing and waning over the years but never losing his desire for vengeance against the humans who destroyed his community. He now feels his power waning for what might be the last time and plans to use it to perform a final all-consuming act of destruction on the nearest civilian population: the sleepy little town of Mustang, which has no idea what's about to hit it.  The book lays out what the intent of the scenario is in fairly straight-forward terms: it is a 'worst-case scenario' where everything goes wrong and the agents are lucky to survive. The events of the scenario are, in order: 1. Agents arrive to investigate a grisly crime scene. 2. They find the ruins of the Naval Medical Annex where the atrocities happened. 3. Albert Marsh discovers the agents and invades the mind of one of them, thereby finding out every single thing they know. 4. Marsh, wishing to incorporate the agents into his big revenge plot, draws them into Mustang at the right time, on the summer solstice. 5. The half of Mustang's population that is possessed by Marsh brutally murder-slays the other half. Probably the agents too. You'll notice that there's nothing in there about stopping Marsh. This is because Marsh is quite literally unstoppable. He is completely intangible and imperceptible to the human eye. He can see everything that happens within a radius of several kilometres, which means he can sense everything that happens within Mustang. He can control any living creature within his sphere of influence, turning them into puppets that obey his every whim - and he can control them all at once. In addition, he can attempt to read the minds of anyone in the area, which costs him nothing. The only counterplay offered to the players is the ability for scientifically-minded agents to detect Marsh as a kind of energy field and thereby build an electromagnetic device that blocks him out over an area of about 10 meters. Since Marsh can control about 300 people, and he can make a dozen of them shoot guns at your dinky magnet backpack until it breaks, this is not impressive. What all of this means is that as soon as the scenario starts the agents are on rails. They cannot stop Marsh and it's extremely unlikely they will get to leave with their lives. They are completely hosed and the players only get to engage with this scenario as your audience. In any and every game, regardless of setting, regardless of theme, this is bad adventure design and it baffles me that anyone thinks poo poo like this should make it to print. WELCOME TO THE poo poo SHOW Delta Green activates the agents in response to the horrific murder of the Abril family in their home just outside of Mustang, Arizona. There's details for how that process differs for either the illegal Delta Green Outlaws or the 'gets a cheque from the Pentagon but still deeply illegal' Delta Green Program. The result is the same: the agents have to figure out what's going on and try to put a stop to it. Accessing the crime scene is more of a headache for Outlaw agents who may not have figured out a legal way to get in and the book describes several things they might try and the results for each. My advice: do not make it hard for them to get access to the crime scene. I've found most players to be cautious in their investigations to a degree that bores me shitless. Do not encourage them to waste even more game time playing crime scene Ocean's 11 by forcing them to make Persuade rolls with penalties to even get started on the meat of the scenario. The Abril family was the only family living in this housing development, which is mostly desert McMansions in various states of construction. Now they are all dead. Private Homer Ryan was last caught on traffic cameras going to the house to pick up his fiance on June 2nd. Carpet cleaners stumbled upon the coyote-picked bodies two days later. There are six bodies here, including little baby Beth Ryan. They've been stabbed 'at least 60 times each'. Their lips, ears and eyelids have been removed and there are weird occultish sigils cut into their bodies. Carved into the living room drywall are the words HOME DAGON HOME YHANTHLEI SEA TO THE SEA which is what really set off alarms for DG. There are a few key pieces of evidence here. The first one, determined by Forensics 40%, is that there were several killers, at least one of whom was extremely light and short. If the agents think to Search the backyard they can eventually find a set of bike tracks that lead toward the ruins of the Yuma Naval Medicine Annex. The final noteworthy piece of evidence is a teddy bear nannycam in the baby's room, forgotten and unnoticed by the investigating police. Going through the tapes on its internal hard drive will find one of a crazy blood-soaked naked ten-year-old girl toting the corpse of Beth out of the room. Now killing a baby is already kind of funny in terms of just like pure edginess, but having the baby killed by a little girl feels excessive. I don't doubt it will wig players out but when you swing for child-on-child violence as the first really scary thing in your scenario, where do you go from there? In my experience you can give players the heebie-jeebies much more effectively by going for the subtle route - little turns of phrase in an NPC's dialogue, little tics and movements, little uncanny coincidences, that kind of thing. If I was a player and you dropped this poo poo on me I think my genuine reaction would be bewildered laughter. Moving on.  KIDS THESE DAYS Agents will probably scope out the ruins of the Naval Medicine Annex. This is actually the high point of the scenario to me, as the Annex is a good creepy place that isn't as abandoned as it appears to be. Despite it looking like a blown-out concrete ruin from the outside, agents will quickly discover that it has seen plenty of traffic as of late. As well as the litter of beer cans and cigarette butts that typically indicate awesome teen hang-out spots, the walls are thoroughly graffitied with Deep One religious iconography. The book suggests that this is quite hard to find and requires successful Occult or Unnatural rolls, but it also describes a wall that has DAGON and HYDRA written on it real big, so you can make your own judgement. There are the big salt-water tanks that used to hold the comatose Deep Ones, with one in particular brightly painted and decorated to become something like a shrine. And all throughout the place are piles of animal bones from what have apparently been ritual sacrifices. Agents will probably want to set up a stakeout. After a series of unnecessary Luck rolls they will be rewarded by seeing three hosed-up little kids entering the ruins. One of them is Eve Bright-Wuornos, who they might recognise as the little girl from the nannycam. If the agents watch and don't try to interfere, they will be rewarded by getting to see the three kids pull a struggling cat from a backpack and tear it to shreds in front of the fish tank shrine. If the agents do try to intervene, Marsh will seize control of the kids and make them bust out their best 3 Ninjas moves. They act in freaky unison with the strength of adults to try to take one of the agent's guns and blow them away. Any murdered child incurs a fierce 1/1D10 SAN. Any kids captured alive immediately go catatonic, and any that get away kill themselves. Their fingerprints match up with some of those taken at the Abril house, but otherwise the kids cannot be identified - I'm not joking either, the book says that. The other big thing that happens with them is that when the kids see the agents, Marsh tries to read the mind of the agent with the lowest POW. There's a few pages devoted to what the agents can discover if they research the history of the Annex. This information does nothing but make them a target in Marsh's eyes, who will incorporate them into his summer plans. THE BLOODENING As I mentioned before, the agents are hosed. They are now targets of the invincible incredible Marsh, who probably knows every single thing about them. To make this poo poo really pop off, he needs to lure them back into town for the summer solstice. He can make the kids suddenly wake up babbling convenient directions, or he can even just call the agents directly and give a New England-style supervillain monologue. In the most crass and manipulative option, Marsh has one of his puppets abduct one of the agent's loved ones, automatically succeeding on his attempt to drag them back to Mustang. Regardless of what brings them in, the agents are drawn to the abandoned Izaldo Theatre. Assuming they stand there slack-jawed without doing anything, they will get to witness Marsh's whole violent ritual. The half of Mustang that is not currently possessed by Marsh gets marched down Main Street to the theatre by the possessed half, with any who try to escape unceremoniously shot to death. As they begin an amuse-bouche of crude machete executions, a team of about 20 locals start putting together a big papier-mache effigy of Dagon in front of the theatre. The executions ramp up as the effigy is completed, with the sacrifices piled up around it. After all non-puppet residents are executed, the puppets kill any of the agents' loved ones, then the agents themselves. The puppets industriously chop themselves to pieces as the sun rises, with the last one setting themselves and the effigy on fire. The end! No moral! Assuming agents don't want to have their extremities hacked off with machetes, they have a hell of a fight ahead of them. Chances are your players did not all roll heavily-armed special operators with full tactical gear rolling up in a riot truck, so if they stand their ground and fight they will die. Even if they did come kitted out for combat, the stats of the puppets are ridiculous. They're pretty poo poo with guns but they do have them, as well as Unarmed Combat 70%. What's really loving nutty is that 10% of the puppets are just carrying around loving dynamite for some reason - shouldn't Delta Green have noticed at some point that this town was stockpiling enough nitroglycerin to blow a hole in God's rear end? The only thing holding them back is that they want to take the agents alive, but since they're also absolutely fearless in trying to achieve that it's a moot point. It gets worse. Puppet children are much better with guns and are carrying whole bundles of dynamite. If an agent tries to get back in their car and drive away, the kids light the fuses on their dynamite backpacks and jump in front of the car. This is absolutely hilarious. Not so funny are the snipers, all nine of them, who are lining the rooftops and get a 50% chance to maim any agent who fumbles a Luck roll - and once the agents know the snipers are there, any agent that fails a Luck roll gets sniped. And remember, there are about 300 puppets out for the agents' blood. The book seems to think that the agents can hide out somewhere, but it says right there in Marsh's stat block that he can see everything that's happening in Mustang. Their only hope is to steal a car and try not to get action-bombed on the way out.  GAME OVER MAN If the agents somehow manage to survive, they gain 1D6 SAN, which is a pittance considering how much they've probably lost at this point. The book ludicrously suggests that the Program hushes up the whole event by pinning it on some made-up separatist militia, complete with fabricated video evidence. First of all, I call bullshit on this just from the state of the world we live in where people are seconds away from being able to film just about any atrocity imaginable, especially one on such a massive scale. Second of all, there's a chunk of subsystems in the game for tracking the agents' accountability. If their superiors see them doing weird hosed up poo poo on the job, it's supposed to bite them in the rear end. If the Program can just disappear away 600+ ritual homicides, then why aren't they just doing that all the time? It's not clear what happens to Marsh after the ritual. I assume he just fizzles out through no fault of the agents. CONCLUSION Ex Oblivione is one of the worst Delta Green scenarios available. It takes a part of the setting I find interesting, something that is rich in potential, and does this to it. It is a linear railroad that probably ends in death for the PCs. It tries to shock you with gory ultraviolence to the point that it becomes comedic. Even if the agents survive, nothing they did mattered and no mysteries were solved. One of the big things the new Delta Green team did was shoo out a bunch of the weirder cartoony poo poo from the first edition of Delta Green - the Cult of Transcendence, the Fate, even the Karotechia. The vibe is that this a super serious spy horror game and you are supposed to take it seriously. I find this design philosophy at odds with a scenario where an invisible fish sorcerer murders 600 people on Main Street. The premise of the scenario is faulty. It is not inherently interesting to have bad things happen to the PCs, especially when they're entirely predetermined. Anything bad that happens in Mustang happens because of decisions made decades before the agents joined Delta Green. I am baffled by the whole drat thing. Do not purchase or run Ex Oblivione. NEXT TIME: I don't know! Maybe I'll review a good scenario. Down With People fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 00:01
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I like the idea of someone having this furious suicide burst like that and I also like it being a doom ghost that's been poisoning this town for years to make its final push but I think having the Agents get their minds read is kind of too much? It's fine to me if they're caught in the middle of this colossal fuckup and trying to bring the intelligence back to their superiors, and sure a lot of eldritch/Lovecraftian horror is predicated on the fact that the monster knows your every move and isn't impressed with your attempts to do anything. But also you're an outside-context problem and while you might not be able to stop the entire drat thing, I think it at least makes for a really eventful adventure for you to be lead by the nose up to a certain point where it changes into player-driven action and the GM reacting as you try and outfox/react to this implacable body-puppeting threat, y'know? It's a small change but it'd make things a lot more interesting to force the baddie to have to change their plans a little to account for outsiders on the eve of its victory. And then you can get the "nothing you do matters" gut-punch of horror by bringing the intel of the experiments back to your bosses and for them to not give a poo poo.
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Sep 28, 2021 01:15
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 Things to Know So this section is basically… guidelines for how the GM should run the setting. They’re all awful in new and exciting ways. The very first section is Behavior of Creatures in Voivodja. It’s a page of some of the worst instructions to a GM ever put in an RPG book. Because the entire thing is basically “Be as annoying as humanly possible.” So there’s 7 rules for how things behave in Vovodja: Offense taken is inversely proportional to offense meant. What this means is that characters will get super pissy at minor things but ignore dire insults and offenses. This exists to piss your players off. Real violence, injustice, oppression, and general lovely behavior is ignored or misunderstoon intentionally while minor, accidental, and imagined breaches of etiquette are met with… violence, oppression and injustice. I think this translates to little poo poo gets disproportionate responses while seriously antisocial behavior is ignored. In all conversations random tangents are more important than the actual topic of discussion. Everyone is difficult. No further elaboration, so I guess just be SUPER obnoxious beyond what you’re already doing. No-one is unalterably hostile, but well judging by the others this would be a temporary state of affairs. No-one can be made to understand anything. This is really going to make your players want to interact with NPCs in any way shape or form right? Information is usually accurate. Well, that’s nice I guess? Though I’m betting you could drive a bus through the “usually” in this clause. Zak goes on to explain better how this translates to behovior: mainly that the GM should make any conversation as long an annoying as possible by making everyone you talk to go off on rambling tangents and asking inane questions. Explicitly unless the characters do something for force action, every NPC will just talk endlessly while reaching no point. This is meant to emulate the rambling conversations of the Alice books, which works fine when you’re reading a book but when you’re actually forced to participate in them I can’t imagine them lasting long. Any PC group is going to quickly learn that talking is useless and just start forcing their way through situations with action because socialization is not only of questionable value it’s actively unpleasant. Next is a section on buying stuff and getting items. Now in a stupid move that creates infinite logical holes Vovodja is basically depopulated of humans by the Vampires (Why would they ever listen to your mortal PCs instead of eating you if all the food’s gone?) and so it’s basically post apocalyptic. Merchants exist as dumb video game magic merchants, because he basically just takes the Merchant from Resident Evil 4 and sticks it in his game. They magically appear wherever, are never bothered by vampires, and their stores are magically bigger on the inside than outside. This is dumb but at least it’s a major improvement on Maze because he acknowledges that there’s gotta be a way to convert treasure to gold and then spend that gold on actual stuff you need to not die like food. Which, by the way, is a pain to get outside of shops. You either eat Vampire Food ie Cannibalism, or you go hunting in the woods for wild animals, or you barter it with the hidden villages. Currency rules suck and I never got why you’d care if the standard is silver, copper or gold for whatever you’re using. This runs on Gold even though LotFP is Silver based, whatever that matters. Firearms: pistols exist if you want but no long guns by the author's opinion even though that makes no sense. This section is literally useless because it’s just “IDK I guess you can have guns if you want, but I say only pistols, but it’s whatever.” Thanks for that bold authorial stance Zak. Growing and Shrinking Presumably there may be things later on that will invoke this, and also it seems that maybe LotFP also has shrinking and growing rules? Anyway sizes are Too Big, Normal, Too Small, and Mouse-Sized. You can talk to small animals while Mouse-Sized. That’s it. Kings, Queens, and Levels So this section is… lies? Stupidity? Zak seriously thinks that this module can be played as and I quote “intrigue heavy style of play this setting is meant to encourage” which is nonsense. Remember the thing I just wrote about how every NPC from here should be as intentionally obnoxious and crazy as possible? Also I will say it right now: Basically every major named NPC is either inaccessible or violently horrifically evilly insane, or both. There is no reason to work with the insane murderous randomly acting cruel monsters that fill this land. Everyone logically wants to eat you, and if they don’t they’re almost impossible to deal with in any way. Maps, Locations & Overland Travel The maps squares cause he thinks it’s easier, that’s explained. The map is blank and nothing but the two palaces is detailed because Zak wants y ou to customize your map and put stuff wherever you want! Use your imagination! I’m not lazy! Each square is approximately 10 miles across and you can travel 3 squares per day. Remember this entire setting is a network of stone skyscrapers that plunge deep into the earth as well. All the advice here assumes the world is a traditional 2Dish plane, not this decaying megacity. Zak seems to forget a thing he wrote previously quite often in this book, creating some weird inconsistencies if you try to actually run and portray this land as he describes. The Unreasonable Alice in Wonderland is kind of like a dungeon crawl if you think about it y’know? There’s mapping and scale problems, jokes, animated objects… Thats I guess why he decided vampire war needs wonderland too. “Most of the ideas in this book make no sense and some are deeply silly” is a direct quote and I’d agree, but not for the reasons Zak wants. I also think a lot of the ideas are stupid, like a bad idea. This section reveals that Zak can’t tell the difference between actual surrealism and silliness and complete randomness or nonsense. “...these people pay real money for adventures here you try to win a goblin beauty contest or marry a giant space bee” he says, because I guess he has to convince the grimdark black metal listening LotFP players he’s selling this too by thumbing his nose at the Bad Kind of Silly not HIS kind of silly which is the kind that can easily be made creepy! Basically he wants you to use his stuff, to be silly and whimsical, but then make it creepy and uncomfortable and weird in the bad way. Or you could leave in innocently whimsical, but that clashes with the fact the game’s major NPCs are GENOCIDE VAMPIRE WARLORDS. I end this section with his recommended media list for understanding A Red and Pleasant Land: 
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Sep 28, 2021 02:20
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Hostile V posted:I like the idea of someone having this furious suicide burst like that and I also like it being a doom ghost that's been poisoning this town for years to make its final push but I think having the Agents get their minds read is kind of too much? It's fine to me if they're caught in the middle of this colossal fuckup and trying to bring the intelligence back to their superiors, and sure a lot of eldritch/Lovecraftian horror is predicated on the fact that the monster knows your every move and isn't impressed with your attempts to do anything. But also you're an outside-context problem and while you might not be able to stop the entire drat thing, I think it at least makes for a really eventful adventure for you to be lead by the nose up to a certain point where it changes into player-driven action and the GM reacting as you try and outfox/react to this implacable body-puppeting threat, y'know? It's a small change but it'd make things a lot more interesting to force the baddie to have to change their plans a little to account for outsiders on the eve of its victory. And then you can get the "nothing you do matters" gut-punch of horror by bringing the intel of the experiments back to your bosses and for them to not give a poo poo. Yeah, I think to make this scenario work you would want to make it smaller and give the agents more opportunity to be active rather than reactive. This would still be scary if you had to deal with even 30 people rather than 300 and Marsh would be more interesting if he was pathetic rather than extremely awesome and powerful - you could even have something that involves the children in a way that's chilling rather than forcing the PCs to mow down suicide-bombing action tykes. As it is, it's just too much of everything and nothing the PCs do matters - not even the massive loss of life is their fault.
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Sep 28, 2021 02:35
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It kinda seems like the lesson of this is that the horrible experiments were justified??? "If we don't genocide them, they'll violently slaughter hundreds of innocents unconnected to the people who hurt them while cackling and rubbing their ghost hands together."
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Sep 28, 2021 03:01
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:It kinda seems like the lesson of this is that the horrible experiments were justified??? "If we don't genocide them, they'll violently slaughter hundreds of innocents unconnected to the people who hurt them while cackling and rubbing their ghost hands together." But yeah this sounds like a dogshit adventure. I wonder if the giant squad of minions is meant to evoke the 'giant crowd of Deep Ones' at the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
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Sep 28, 2021 03:15
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No I get that it's because they're cops they'll get away with it all and justify it etc., but a) everyone gets mad at me when I call Delta Green "The Cop Game", and b) Genuinely the events of this scenario are exactly the kind of thing they set out to destroy in the Raid on Innsmouth, and the fact that the PCs can't affect it under any circumstances tells me nothing except that they were right to do this and their only mistake was keeping his body alive in a coma rather than killing him before he passed out.
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Sep 28, 2021 05:13
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Zak obviously hasn't read Flatland in the slightest, because it's not a very long book and it's not remotely about puzzles. Some of it's math but that's so much set dressing for proto-feminist social satire. Edwin Abbott even had to say so in the forward to the second edition because readers were getting confused by the first one.
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Sep 28, 2021 05:24
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I cannot for the life of me see any iota of influence from Barry Lyndon in this pile of rubbish. Maybe he thinks Kubrick invented the cravat.
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Sep 28, 2021 05:26
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Mors Rattus posted:Wights and ghosts just stop existing when they die for good, Wait, so there's no downside to them w/r/t Soulsplosion? Makes them a lot likely to join than, say, Vamps, who'd love to live forever and ever. Still, a better than for Sylvaneth, who are actually robbing their entire peoples/species by not going back into soulpods after death. E: a Deathmage in an Order binding doesn't seem like a troublesome thing, since you'll have plenty corpses to make Idoneth-orc stitches and chaos cultist zombie hordes without getting out of your way anyways. In fact, it's one of the ways you can turn all those Aqshian chaos marauder and beastmen hordes into productive members of society.  Ee: ex oblivio is really the Glory sans weird sex poo poo of Delta Green adventures, huh? Look, but don't touch, and here's an equivalent of endless Greyhawk hordes if you stray from the path. There are also endless hordes if you don't. JcDent fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 06:11
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As mentioned it takes a bit more then killing them for them to die for good. Nighthaunt discorporate when killed. But the remnants of them can still be called back by magic, causing the gheist to reform assuming the soul has not entirely faded away with time. Wights meanwhile if their body is destroyed their souls will just stick around in their body until it fades away leaving a normal skeleton. Like the Nighthaunts a Necromancer or Wight King can revive the wight at that stage with magic. For both cases souls their souls will linger so long as something else did not destroy them. Like the Soulbound soul explosion for example.
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Sep 28, 2021 06:29
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NGDBSS posted:Zak obviously hasn't read Flatland in the slightest, because it's not a very long book and it's not remotely about puzzles. Some of it's math but that's so much set dressing for proto-feminist social satire. Edwin Abbott even had to say so in the forward to the second edition because readers were getting confused by the first one. Yeah, Flatland is basically a picture book, just one with some interesting math ideas.
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Sep 28, 2021 06:41
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 Ah.
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Sep 28, 2021 06:48
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Reviews of Ex Oblivone (ones that I could find in like 5 minutes) are all raving about it why do so many people like trash games
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Sep 28, 2021 06:52
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Because it has a brand they like.
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Sep 28, 2021 06:53
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Hostile V posted:I like the idea of someone having this furious suicide burst like that and I also like it being a doom ghost that's been poisoning this town for years It would work better if run as a combination of Desperation and Needful Things, with Marsh having direct control mostly over "lower" lifeforms(bugs and animals), and having slowly turned a small group of people insane enough to actually control, and rather than just going on a sudden massacre, his direct devotees are instead making sure everyone has access to guns and explosives(maybe there's a mine nearby or something that has blasting supplies?) while fomenting community drama so that once the first bullet gets fired, it'll be a chain reaction of people getting revenge. Maybe Marsh intends to harness the lifeforce of those killed to somehow re-incarnate himself, so that even if the agents fail to stop most of the murders, they can then roll up and blow off Marsh's head or toss a stick of dynamite at him, preventing him from having a complete victory. It would allow the players a few days before things really gather steam to stop the problems by undermining some of Marsh's work.
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Sep 28, 2021 06:55
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Nessus posted:
It’s probably meant to be a callback to the first half of the Chaosium campaign Escape from Innsmouth, which involves investigating the town and then fleeing from a giant crown of hybrids, cultists, and deep ones set out to kill the players. However, Escape doesn’t, to the best of my knowledge, make the players feel bad for escaping without saving anyone. (Instead you get to go back with the US Marines, a submarine, and a coast guard gunship to free the town from the Esoteric Order of Dagon) TK_Nyarlathotep posted:everyone gets mad at me when I call Delta Green "The Cop Game" They get mad because it’s reductive and nobody likes having people come in and tut-tut their gaming preferences. Down With People posted:The end! No moral! It’s really a very classic horror structure: the Town With A Dark Past, in this case Mustang basically existing to prop up the YY-II concentration camp and human experimentation programme. Marsh, a representative of the people wronged by the US government’s crimes (specifically, the deportations, concentration camp and human experiments at YY-II; generally, the deportations, concentration camps and human experiments of the period) then surfaces to exact just revenge on the US people, who have failed to address their complicity in the US government’s crimes. The moral is that injustices will come back to bite you. (And it’ll start with the 21-year-old who shacked up with a girl when she was 16, because gently caress that guy.) It’s a bit of a weird fit for Lovecraftian deep ones and the story has just too much pointless edge (you can’t do anything! you have to kill children who’ll blow themselves up so your conscience is hosed either way!), but it does have a moral.
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Sep 28, 2021 06:57
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Hell, if you want to make a point of how what happened to the Deep Ones was hosed up, have it be possible to negotiate with Marsh. Maybe if the agents promise(honestly, at that, Marsh IS a sorcerer who can partially read their minds, after all) to bring the still-living parties to justice(either through the courts or just by murdering them), Marsh might release the town from his baleful control and let them go, after giving them what evidence can clues he can. He might be insane, but he might still value meaningful revenge over slaughter if he can get it.
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Sep 28, 2021 07:09
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Yeah, the metaphor is there, but there's very very very very little way for the PCs to learn most of the actual mystery before they're completely obliterated by Vigo the Carpathian's kid from In the Mouth of Madness, the trained squad of crack commando snipers, the 1-in-10 out of 300 people holding wielding lit loving dynamite, or...
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Sep 28, 2021 07:15
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Also, you'd think that with whatever LEOs, spooks, and deniable operators, and whatever other tools of the imperialist war machine Delta has on call, at least a few of them would know how to deal with untrained snipers in an urban environment to not just rely on luck to not get shot. I remember Roland the Gunslinger had to deal with a possessed town at some point, but it wasn't a possessed bumrush. What's the significance of the author?
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Sep 28, 2021 07:48
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Wapole Languray posted:I end this section with his recommended media list for understanding A Red and Pleasant Land: Why would you turn the sound off on the RWBY Red trailer, it's literally just a music cue that's kinda neat.
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Sep 28, 2021 08:09
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JcDent posted:I remember Roland the Gunslinger had to deal with a possessed town at some point, but it wasn't a possessed bumrush.
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Sep 28, 2021 08:52
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Just Dan Again posted:The hints are neat (floating libraries, touch-statues, reversal magic), but I can come up with cryptic ideas by cracking open a book at random. Without substance, they're just more noise. The super-secret creative technique Zak poo poo (in his pants) doesn't want you to know about! Thank you very much for the comprehensive review, the Maze turned out to hit almost every negative note I was afraid it would. Now, was Magic's Emrakul, the Aeons Torn named in homage to Chronia Torn...? 
PoontifexMacksimus fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 09:55
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Pakxos posted:Well, it is more of a slow burn, but eventually the town does rush him and he kills everyone in the town. I thiiink it is the first time the reader actually sees his super gun skills. You're prolly right, I read that book as a teen like 15 years ago.
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Sep 28, 2021 11:53
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