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Maxwell Lord posted:Why would you turn the sound off on the RWBY Red trailer, it's literally just a music cue that's kinda neat. It's such a baffling inclusion I can only assume Old Man Zak was desperate to show he was still hip to the Internet. It's not like you can actually do spectacle fighting stunts in an OSR game
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Sep 28, 2021 12:08
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It's an adventure structure that's designed to end in tragedy; the ghost has no rules for interacting with it or abilities with any chance for victims to resist, so it's an unstoppable force as strong and clever as the DM wants it to be, which means players have no agency for defeating it. Which is fine I guess? Par for the course for Cthulhu stuff; things tied to the Elder Gods are supposed to be powerful and unknowable and scary. If you wanted to craft a scenario where the PCs had to fail because you wanted to see their reactions to failure, an all-powerful ghost isn't the worst implementation of that I've ever heard. But then it makes the PCs watch as it forces the town to kill itself? Which...why? Seems horrifying. Why would you take away the players' agency just so you could horribly traumatize them with violence.
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Sep 28, 2021 14:02
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Froghammer posted:But then it makes the PCs watch as it forces the town to kill itself? Which...why? Seems horrifying. Why would you take away the players' agency just so you could horribly traumatize them with violence. The answer is usually because the GM "wins", or is getting off on it. Ha ha made you look and you couldn't do anything to stop me!
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Sep 28, 2021 14:29
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Froghammer posted:But then it makes the PCs watch as it forces the town to kill itself? Which...why? Seems horrifying. Why would you take away the players' agency just so you could horribly traumatize them with violence. The players can try to run away and will probably have to. However, there’s really no thought given to how the players might try to save anyone, aside from noting how calling in the cavalry will add random State Troopers to the death toll and the National Guard will arrive too late. It’s clearly meant to be inevitable and a backdrop of violence and chaos for the players to escape from, but that’s the kind of thing that works really well in a film, not an RPG.
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Sep 28, 2021 14:33
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Froghammer posted:Which is fine I guess? Par for the course for Cthulhu stuff; things tied to the Elder Gods are supposed to be powerful and unknowable and scary. If you wanted to craft a scenario where the PCs had to fail because you wanted to see their reactions to failure, an all-powerful ghost isn't the worst implementation of that I've ever heard. I've always felt like there's a tricky balance with CoC scenario design--the core of the setting are these enormous indifferent radioactive cosmic forces that the PCs can't really meaningfully effect, but you also want to let the PCs have some moment to moment agency so you often have a bunch of human cultists and evil wizards who are trying to spread that radiation but are small enough that they can be stopped. This is a weird worst-of-both-worlds, where you have a foe who is both non-interactively powerful, but is also just a petty (mostly) human with a mundane agenda (revenge). A CoC villain with the goal of 'gently caress you' doesn't really play to any of the strengths of the setting or system
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Sep 28, 2021 14:46
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Soulbound: Champions of Death Running for the Dead The GM advice chapter is pretty good! It opens with a solid section on how Death-aligned campaigns especially and even generally campaigns involving Death can go to sensitive places, and so it's absolutely vital to make sure everyone's okay with the themes and tone of the game and are able to relax while playing. It emphasizes the importance of setting expectations before the game and making sure everyone's on the same page and buys into what's going on, with content warnings discussed and everyone clear on what materials should be avoided. Certain forms of death and body horror are both things that can and will come up if you run the various Death factions fairly straight, and so if folks aren't okay with that and don't want to deal with it, best to get that all taken care of before the game starts and make sure it doesn't come up later. The game also advises coming up with means to handle when something unexpected happens in play that they aren't able to handle, like x-cards or traffic light systems. Very useful and very important, especially when handling undead and assholes like Nagash. Death theming is noted as a way to talk about the importance of the past, given the long legacies that many undead have, or the reverse - a fresh start, cleanly broken from the old life, dealing with found family and outcast status in normal society. Either way, you have plent of places in the timeline that Death-related games can take place. Soulbound of Death can and have existed since the Age of Myth, when Nagash spent his time conquering Shyish and consuming or imprisoning the old and terrible gods of death (and the less terrible ones) and bound the monstrous godbeasts that roamed Shyish. In the Age of Chaos, Nagash was slain by Archaon, and the Soulbound were among the forces to help resist the coming of Chaos, as the Mortarchs defended their lands and schemed against each other while Nagash reformed. He was back in one piece by the late Age of Chaos, when he began to retake his holdings from the forces that had disrupted Shyish. In the Necroquake, of course, Nagash's power swelled massively, though the Skaven kept his plans of total world domination from happening. The Nadir was created, the Ossiarchs revealed, and the Nighthaunt legions swelled massively. And most recently, Teclis went to war with Nagash and defeated him, binding much of his power away and ending his advance. All of these periods are possible settings for a game. A recurring issue you're going to run into with Death games is that pretty much all undead are, in some sense, cursed. This can be literal, as with the false perceptions laid over ghouls or the blood hunger of the vampires, or metaphorical, in the constant hunt for more bones that the Ossiarchs engage in or the endless dedication to ancient tasks that wights follow. This may seem grim, and a group can lean into how these curses and hungers and faded memories affect them daily, but they don't have to. After all, the life magic inherent in the Binding helps ameliorate the effects of these curses, and if you want to, you can just declare that any aspects of undead existence that players are not comfortable with fade into the background and happen offscreen if the Binding itself can't take care of them. After all, you don't necessarily spend a lot of time on how often your Stormcast needs to piss or your elf needs to shave, and drinking blood or dealing with ghoul courts can be treated similarly if folks want. Especially following the Necroquake, many Free Cities, especially in Shyish, will have gone to some effort to prevent undead invasion and infiltration. Guards may have goggles enchanted to help them see invisible spirits or pierce illusions, gholems may protect the walls with blessed weapons to make zombie assault harder, idols may have been raised that project fields that repel lesser ghosts. Hell, house cats may have proliferated and be used to spot spirits and other undead infiltrators who lack the scent of life. But your PCs should not be wholly thwarted - all of these countermeasures are imperfect, and if you have human allies or thralls, they can be bypassed or sabotaged more easily. Hell, some artifacts could even allow massive Ossiarchs to pass themselves off as, say, helpful ogor mercenaries. It is also of note that in an Order binding, it should not be especially hard for the party's patrons to ensure that the city the party's based in will allow an undead member to exist, possibly by having a dedicated escort for them or a symbolic token that shows they're officially allies. This may or may not be enough to assuage the people - that's down to what your players want to roleplay - but it should at least keep a PC from being randomly assaulted. Dark Rituals also get a section in here - they're one of the bigger ways that Death Bindings can achieve goals in ways distasteful to many Order Bindings. Raising an army of zombies might pass muster for some Order Bindings, but many will balk at grave robbing, let alone kidnapping someone to let a ghost possess them and infiltrate the enemy that way. A group that uses Dark Rituals cleverly can approach problems in ways that a GM may not anticipate. The fact that they may take weeks to perform does change the narrative pace - often an Order Binding operates quickly, with little preparation and intense activity over maybe a few days. However, a more Death-focused campaign can slow down, operating on problems on a scale of weeks or months in order to engage in sinister plots, manipulations and rituals. Which will almost certainly be interrupted or complicated by outside forces, but, y'know, that's what you expect when playing as grand manipulative undead masterminds. This kind of long-term mindset is good for an undead game - you have eternity to exist in, so scheme and solve problems for good and cackle madly over your plans. That said, it's probably important to consider how your campaign is going to approach death and danger. A loyal Ossiarch probably isn't worried about their body being destroyed, because they know they can be rebuilt. Many Nighthaunt may actually seek their own destruction rather than exist under their curse overlong. Both of these attitudes can be problems for a game, or at least complications. Thus, it's important to have everyone talk to each other and discuss how deep they want to stay in a dangerous situation or what might compel them to leave it - perhaps they have personal goals to pursue or unfinished business elsewhere. These are both classic undead motivators, after all. They may also have orders not to fight to the death every time, though this should only be done with full player buy-in. Once the group agrees on how dedicated they are to fights and how much risk they consider acceptable, it's important to structure combats with that in mind - both for fun fights and for drama. After all, a wight sworn to protect their family line that has to fight some of their own descendants is a great dramatic situation and one with much higher stakes than a random brawl with bandits, even if it's not actually more difficult. Next time: Working for Nagash or Sigmar - a study in contrasts. Also, new pets!
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Sep 28, 2021 15:01
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LatwPIAT posted:The players can try to run away and will probably have to. However, there’s really no thought given to how the players might try to save anyone, aside from noting how calling in the cavalry will add random State Troopers to the death toll and the National Guard will arrive too late. It’s clearly meant to be inevitable and a backdrop of violence and chaos for the players to escape from, but that’s the kind of thing that works really well in a film, not an RPG. Even in a movie, I'd find the Evil Mind Control Ghost kind of lame. The times where that sort of thing works well is when it's a force that tempts/threatens/blackmails/corrupts by inviting people to participate in evil, by appealing to their worst natures and hooking as many as possible in clever ways, slowly getting them deeper without them realizing they're getting deeper. Where it's uninteresting is when it's just Blizzard-style "you touched the corrupting rock/ghost/book/pool/funko pop, you're a bad guy now" and there's no path backwards or forwards along the corruption track, just an instant jump.
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Sep 28, 2021 15:12
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It feels like they forgot the "obscure ritual/item/macguffin" that lets the players counter the ghost in some way.
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Sep 28, 2021 15:15
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I'll come in on the other side, and point out that The Crazies But With Literally The Ghost Of DG's Past Sins seems like a fun short campaign. Give the investigation/"Building Tension" part of the story more time to breathe and make Marsh less of a Puppetmaster and more of a baleful influence that drives the locals to murderous violence... I think it can work. I do agree that DG as a game line steps into it a bit by not examining Lovecraft's prejudices WRT the Deep Ones. You could switch out Marsh with "Native American Burial Ground" a la Poltergeist and have the adventure work functionally the same, which I think really highlights the underlying problem.
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Sep 28, 2021 15:48
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As written the DG scenario is a real stinker but there is a real question to ask in the sense of "How do I make cosmic horror fun to play in?". If you're playing DG you probably should check ahead of time for player expectations vis a vis asking the players if they are okay with no-win scenarios or scenarios where survival alone is considered an acceptable outcome. That's true of all games, but more so in horror games where ending with the players triumphant against their foe is not the default conclusion. So, when we're reviewing games like CoC or DG I think we should ask ourselves if the authors are delivering a fun horror game, but keep in mind that a fun horror game can at times feel unfair to the players. That being said, this was not a good example of a fun horror game because it does not look like it had a real point of interaction for the players. edit: let me put it this way. There are a lot of really good X-Files episodes where Mulder and Scully show up to a spooky event, dick around, accomplish nothing, and then go home after having had no impact or minimal interaction with the spooky event. But despite that it's still a good episode of the X-Files. However, pen and paper games are not tv shows so how can we model a scenario so that it works out this way and is still fun for the players? Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 18:59
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Honestly, investigating stuff can be fun in and of itself. Discovering the answers to setting mysteries and NPC backgrounds and that sort of thing. But like, a few sessions of, "you go to Spooky Creek and research the history of Spooks and Creeks and how they tie together," are still vastly different from, "you show up at an ongoing event, can't do anything, should just go home and take a nap." Like if something is actively happening then I think it's fair for players to expect that the major moving parts are in the same dimension as them and thus something they can interact with, or at least that the symptoms on their side of reality are something they can profit from, stop or encourage in some way. If Mulder and Scully show up at an event where a monsterman is actively monstering around and eating people, 90% of the time they end up managing to kill off the monsterman or at least stopping his rampage for the time being. Even one of their less interactive "something is happening" events, like the one with the bugs inside ancient trees unleashed by logging activity, they have ways to reasonably increase their chances of survival and to try to make a run for it, and usually those, if nothing else, imply something about the depths of knowledge other government agencies have of what's going on, which might tie into later episodes or at least set the mood for them.
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Sep 28, 2021 19:13
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A lot of games diligently copy the setting assumptions of an existing genre without considering that that genre was created for a non-interactive medium like TV or literature. Cosmic horror loves pontificating about how utterly insignificant human endeavor is, which is fine in a short story but sort of counterproductive in a game about a group of PCs, who are presumably humans engaged in one or more endeavors. The "why not just bomb everything on Barsoom" problem is related; John Carter gets into the loincloth swashbuckling because his actions are dictated by the same guy who made up the setting, but players have free will and are only going to play along if they want to.
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Sep 28, 2021 19:18
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It's a really weird mission in that there isn't a way to counter Marsh, which is pretty odd for Delta Green missions because they usually have a way to "stop" it. The game does have a bad history of having unknown and unsaid things unceremonious kill PC's in scenarios, like Convergence. Per the history of Delta Green, the agents should be given the tools to beat or contain Marsh because Deep Ones got wiped out over the years by the US and later the allies since the Deep Ones were friendly with the Nazis. It got to a point where Deep Ones will not answer summon spells in modern times because Delta Green was just summoning them to machine gun them. EDIT: In the original Delta Green, the Deep Ones and Karotechia, the Nazi occultists, are presented as down and out former adversaries who got close to wiped out by the fall of Delta Green and the rise of MAJESTIC. There's some groups around but Karotechia is presented as a group to finally wipe out at the beginning of a campaign and the Deep Ones are just down and out. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 19:30
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Go screw yourself Zak I'm the hottest bitch at this goblin pageant and that space bee is mine.
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Sep 28, 2021 19:31
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A lot of famous Delta Green scenarios like Let's Learn Aklo and Polybius are about investigating a hosed up event that already happened, with little opportunity to alter the outcome. It really does depend on how much your players enjoy investigating and finding clues, versus making plans and taking action. It's harder with Deep Ones because they're a stock monster, and if you're familiar with the source material you aren't really "discovering" anything you don't already know. Back before Delta Green had even released the Handler's Guide, I did my own riff on Deep One internment camps, with the Agents sent to deal with the descendants of the original Innsmouth captives at a facility in the desert. It similarly had plenty of weird poo poo for the players to discover, but was quite weak as a scenario. The ultimate resolution was either "leave them alone" or "kill them all", neither of which were satisfying from a narrative or gameplay standpoint. I did eventually recycle the best elements of it for My Big Fat Deep One Wedding, which is probably my most popular scenario.
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Sep 28, 2021 19:36
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They drove a boat into Cthulhu to send him into the deeps, so it's not all being scared by weird fish. And this scenario is just a lovely GM construct that's obviously - with leering and gloating about Happy Fun Ball's frustration - made to be airtight against player agency. With facility blown up and overgrown, do the players even have a way of learning who the ghost is?
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Sep 28, 2021 19:56
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Ithle01 posted:So, when we're reviewing games like CoC or DG I think we should ask ourselves if the authors are delivering a fun horror game, but keep in mind that a fun horror game can at times feel unfair to the players. That being said, this was not a good example of a fun horror game because it does not look like it had a real point of interaction for the players. For me the answer is to ratchet down the stakes. The biggest flaw of Delta Green or CoC is the books spend pages and pages talking about these big picture threats and conspiracies, zooming out to try and capture the whole of an intelligence service or team and that just doesn't work. If your players follow the clues and save half a family, take out one sorcerer, foil a front selling kombucha spiked with Cthulhu juice that's A) Doable and B) at the level where the characters the game lets you build can actually effect the outcome, even if they get partial successes. Otherwise, if you want horror and the inability to affect the story, have the group watch The Lighthouse - prob would make for a better night.
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Sep 28, 2021 19:57
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PurpleXVI posted:Honestly, investigating stuff can be fun in and of itself. Discovering the answers to setting mysteries and NPC backgrounds and that sort of thing. But like, a few sessions of, "you go to Spooky Creek and research the history of Spooks and Creeks and how they tie together," are still vastly different from, "you show up at an ongoing event, can't do anything, should just go home and take a nap." Yeah that's exactly why this scenario sucks and it's because the points of player interaction are really bad and there's nothing to investigate or engage with. Not because the players can't win or stop the ritual because sometimes losing is the point of cosmic horror games. However, obviously, this depends on the group. So, some groups might want a magic McGuffin to stop the ritual and others will want to fight for survival as they flee from the revenge of the ghost wizard, but DG doesn't have to supply that - it just has to supply an experience that's fun for a tabletop group to play assuming that they want to play government agents up against the Mythos. The episode you're thinking of is called "Darkness Falls" and while it's definitely good horror X-Files it would be a terrible tabletop scenario without more to do besides argue with the loggers about how best to escape. So, can we create a scenario like that in DG and make it fun? JcDent posted:They drove a boat into Cthulhu to send him into the deeps, so it's not all being scared by weird fish. And this scenario is just a lovely GM construct that's obviously - with leering and gloating about Happy Fun Ball's frustration - made to be airtight against player agency. With facility blown up and overgrown, do the players even have a way of learning who the ghost is? I feel like this a great point about the scenario. The backstory literally does not matter in the slightest. So, instead of wasting word count telling us about this ghost the author could have just created an unknown entity that is doing some terrible thing and then left it open as to why this is happening with a few different possible explanations to help GMs who run it. Pakxos posted:For me the answer is to ratchet down the stakes. The biggest flaw of Delta Green or CoC is the books spend pages and pages talking about these big picture threats and conspiracies, zooming out to try and capture the whole of an intelligence service or team and that just doesn't work. If your players follow the clues and save half a family, take out one sorcerer, foil a front selling kombucha spiked with Cthulhu juice that's A) Doable and B) at the level where the characters the game lets you build can actually effect the outcome, even if they get partial successes. Otherwise, if you want horror and the inability to affect the story, have the group watch The Lighthouse - prob would make for a better night. That works, but sometimes people want it differently and like cosmic horror stuff that's on the cosmic scale. Also, there is a difference between not being able to affect the outcome of the story in a large way and not being able to engage with the story. The problem is making that fun. This DG scenario does not do that. The scenario needs better degrees of success and what role are the players playing in the story because if the scenario can't tell you what the players might do then it's just the GM flapping their lips for four hours and everyone goes home. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 20:03
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Ithle01 posted:Yeah that's exactly why this scenario sucks and it's because the points of player interaction are really bad and there's nothing to investigate or engage with. Not because the players can't win or stop the ritual because sometimes losing is the point of cosmic horror games. However, obviously, this depends on the group. So, some groups might want a magic McGuffin to stop the ritual and others will want to fight for survival as they flee from the revenge of the ghost wizard, but DG doesn't have to supply that - it just has to supply an experience that's fun for a tabletop group to play assuming that they want to play government agents up against the Mythos. If this is DG, Agents are told by Cell A to clear out a dead drop in the middle of the forest due to how the forest lost its protected status and logging of the area has already started. The dead drop has something in it, Cell A won't say what, but it is Bad. Problem is, no one knows the exact location of the drop, so DG need to find a local friendly, convince and convince them to help. While doing the investigation thing, uncover a history of missing people. Then have someone go missing, either a local hiker or logger at night, but his friend, who either had a light source or run under some lights wasn't harmed. In the daylight, logging continues. Now the agents have time pressure, enough knowledge to know the things in the forest are repelled by light. More investigation could turn up the town had a fad for a unique flower that grew in the forest two years ago, and now those flowers are almost completely gone. Then a logger trips over the dead drop. Or, the agents hear the loggers will be spending more time in the forest at night. Will they let get eaten? Or the agents could hear, gossip, radio tap, etc, the loggers found 'something' in the forest, but it is almost dusk. Do they go in? Also, you could throw in various complications - they could be suspected of the disappearances, the things in the forest might get hungry enough that it takes bright light to ward them off, etc. Throw breadcrumbs by way of library, bored National Park Services retirees until it becomes clear the flowers ward off the bugs. So how can they use gov contacts to get more flowers delivered? And if they are ruthless group and let people get eaten, later sessions can explore how Cell A reacts. Otherwise, if they go in, you run a tense, you might be eaten if you are in the dark for too long scenario. If they are able to loggers out, they get a win.
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Sep 28, 2021 20:20
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Soulbound: Champions of Death Are We The Baddies So, a Death-based campaign is...well, playing the bad guys, pretty much. There's no real getting around that! It also means that there are likely to be no normal mortals in the party except maybe necromancers - everyone else is probably undead. Unlike Order Bindings, Death Bindings also tend to have an actual boss. It's frequent for Order Bindings to have multipke patrons or essentially to exist as autonomous problem solving crews, but Nagash won't put up with that poo poo. He believes in strict hierarchy, and so his Bindings either answer directly to him or to one of his Mortarchs. There's always a superior giving the orders out, and who that is is going to impact what your Death Binding game is like. In general, though, a Death Binding generally has less freedom to pursue their own causes than an Order Binding, but greater freedom in regards to methods that contravene traditional morality. Obviously, the goals of a Death Binding are also going to be quite different. Bindings of Order generally work to help people, save lives, spread hope and otherwise do good things to help the civilians of the Mortal Realms. Nagash does not give a poo poo about civilians. They are entirely superfluous, their work able to be done by mindless undead. The Soulbound of Death do not help them out except incidentally, and they may well be set to cause problems for civilians and innocents because Nagash is mad at whoever is in charge of those people. They may do some of the same activities, like seeking out lost artifacts or magical lore, but they aren't doing so to help anyone but their boss. You're the villains, and while you may face worse villains in the form of Chaos warlords or some of the nastier forces of Destruction, you're just as likely to be fighting heroes whom Nagash feels the need to get rid of. However, this doesn't mean Doom works any differently. Doom represents the inherent danger of the Realms and how close organized civilizations are to collapse. When things get bad for everyone, that makes life harder for Death Bindings, too. That some of what you're doing is likely to increase Doom doesn't matter - Nagash wants to see the Realms preserved forever against Chaos, and having everything collapse would be bad for him. He can be self-destructive like that, and as his minions, you have to unlive with that. But then, you might be playing undead in a Binding of Order. In these cases, you're heroes! You're actual heroes, even if you're monstrous. An entire Order Binding could theoretically be made of undead, even, if they all swore to fight against Nagash. The number of undead in a party will obvious affect its tone and themes, and probably will change how trusted they are by the forces of Order, what privileges they can expect in allied lands and what methods are available to them. But, overall, they're on the side of the good guys and are trying to restore the safety of the Mortal Realms. Undead heroes may have done this in life and now seek to do so again. The general adventures in books prior to this (and which come later) will likely need some tweaking to make room for the undead. Some difficulties for living people are harder for undead parties and some are made trivial by their status. Mortal NPCs are generally going to react differently to a talking skeleton than they are to a Stormcast or even an Idoneth or Khainite. Still, most adventures will be able to adapt to heroic undead - you just might have to change things around some. There's also a number of means that a heroic undead might hide their nature or otherwise be able to interact normally with a community. Open interaction is likely to always have at least a few social complications, especially when a character is new to the area and has yet to prove their good intent to the locals, but it's doable. The forces of Order have a long history of working with more dubious allies - see also, the Daughters of Khaine. They're largely accepted everywhere even now, despite Morathi's own betrayal of the Stormcast, because the Cities of Sigmar have been aided by them many times. (Recent lore actually has an Idoneth/Khainite alliance of rebellion going on against Morathi in Ulgu, which is interesting and I hope we'll see more about them in the line.) While many still distrust the Khainites for good reason, they have proven invaluable in the battles against Chaos, and an undead PC can easily do the same. They may not necessarily be loved, but they can find a place to belong, between heroic actions and use of things like the Join Community Endeavor. No matter what, when designing encounters for undead, it's important to keep in mind their special species bonuses. Nighthaunts are able to go around a lot of otherwise hazardous terrain because they can do things like move through walls and other physical objects. Vampires are easily able to heal themselves with their "unarmed" bite attacks, and wights are able to shrug off conditions - plus all undead are immune to Charmed and Frightened. You need to know what your party is capable of and build around that - but also you should not be afraid of their abilities and limit them too much. Don't sanctify every wall so ghosts can't pass through them. Instead, encourage your party to use their traits as tools to solve problems and feel cool. Maybe a ritual is going on in a place only ghosts can easily get to, or have the party outrace a rival by going through a toxic swamp that less resilient living beings couldn't. Limit their powers when it is narratively exciting, but let them shine most of the time so players don't feel they're being deprived of their rightful power. Another thing to keep in mind is that undead PCs generally have much greater ability to call on minions besides Loyal Companions. Dark Rituals can be used to summon up hordes of zombies, ghouls can set up new courts (though this is morally fraught for people that care about that sort of thing) and anyone with the proper skills can create undead abominations. PCs might spend most of their time sitting back and cackling while their minions do battle...which is fine. That's just how villains act sometimes! The trick is that things can become boring if minions solve all your problems. Therefore, a GM should always look to include objectives only the PCs themselves can accomplish - maybe they use their giant undead monster to storm a fort, but then have to deal with delicate machinery or arcane wards themselves. Maybe you let an encounter spread over multiple fronts, so the vampires and their zombie army fight in one location to hold off enemy forces while the rest of the party works to uncover a secret away from the front lines. Now, new pets! Bat Swarms are common sights in Shyish and honestly a lot of places with Shyish realmgates that let the bats migrate. They live in caves and forests and travel in large numbers by night. Shyish is just where they are most common, because many undead cultivate bats as pets and spies, using them to watch over their surroundings. This is especially common with vampires, to a degree that many counting rhymes and children's tales in Soulblight lands are all about bats. A Bat Swarm is a Tiny Beast Swarm with 10 members. They're not good fighters by any means, but their presence in a Zone is very annoying and causes a penalty to Melee and Accuracy for everyone else in the Zone. With ten swarm members they're also reasonably good at surviving a hit or two, and when at full membership (and thus health) they have a pretty big dicepool even if any given die is not likely to succeed. If they do land a hit they have a small chance of reducing the victim's Body, but I wouldn't rely on it. Fell Bats are not a Loyal Companion option, but they are an option for a form vampires can turn into. These are giant bats, bats the size of horses, which feast on dead carcasses like vultures. They are insatiably hungry, and their existence is largely a result of death magic in a landscape affecting normal bats. Their wings are large and muscular, as are their jaws. Fell Bats are Large Beast Warriors, with not especially tough individually but with some armor. They're also decet attackers that deal heavy damage, and if they ever cause a victim to become Mortally Wounded, they instakill that victim. They also get a bonus to Melee if there's a corpse nearby. So they're kind of a glass cannon, really. Hit real hard but cannot take more than a single hit or so. Corpse Rat Swarms are undead rat swarms. Rats, of course, are exceptionally common pests no matter where you are. They spoil food, foul water and spread plague, and they're hellishly difficult to get rid of. Necromancers and undead often make use of dead rats as weapons rather than dealing with mortal extermination practices. This way, the rats can kill each other, and also serve as useful spies. They no longer need to eat, they don't spread disease as much (well, unless you count the ones in rotting rat corpses) and they don't gnaw on things until you tell them to. Of course, they hunger for mortal flesh, but they're easily bound to service and will attack people on command! This is a Tiny Undead Swarm with ten members. Like a bat swarm, it is extremely fragile but has a decent HP pool. Its attack is anemic at best unless it's at full health and thus has a large dicepool, but it has Lifeless and any Zone it's in is considered Difficult Terrain for all non-undead. Deadwalker Zombies are, y'know, zombies. They aren't intelligent, they can't speak, they're clumsy and slow, but they never get tired, don't feel pain and don't question orders. They will do what you tell them to do until their body falls apart, as long as what you tell them to do isn't very complicated. They don't have supernatural strength, but it turns a human body that doesn't care about physical damage is pretty strong most of the time. Occasionally they do suffer from brief glimmers of mortal memory, but this mostly means they might pause and stare at something for a few seconds before going back to what they were doing. Also, they smell terrible. A Deadwalker is a Medium Undead Minion. They're extremely easy to kill, but if you get three or more in one Zone, they turn into a Swarm, getting a large dicepool and health bar based on numbers as normal. While they are a Swarm, they instakill anyone they would Mortally Wound, and their basic attack is good enough that they actually become threatening in numbers. (On its own, well, it's not great but it's better than the animal swarms have solo.) And, of course, they're Lifeless. Deathrattle Skeletons are likewise mindless undead, but they're more organized infantry soldiers for the Soulblight Gravelords. Many vampires and necromancers see them as the perfect labor and combat force for general use, as they have no need for food or rest and they move at pretty good speed compared to zombies. They also are generally more capable, though still not sentient. They're also still generally used as hordes to throw at enemies rather than individual combatants. A Deathrattle is a Medium Undead Minion, but has basic armor because bones are tougher than meat, making them about twice as hard to kill as a zombie. They also are able to wield weapons, which means they can, among other things, throw spears or shoot bows. Their individual attacks aren't any better than a zombie's, but they move faster, can have gear (so they can use shields or attack from range) and they possess the same swarming ability as Deadwalkers, though not the instakill. They are Lifeless. Dire Wolves are what you get when you raise a pack hunter such as a wolf or dog from the dead. Vampires love to keep them as pets. They may be gross and smelly, with obvious bone and sinew showing through their rotting flesh, but their senses are just as good as a living beast's. They don't tire, so they can chase prey as long as it takes, and they kill without mercy. They fight like starving dogs, for nothing they eat can fulfill the phantom hunger they feel. Even if their teeth should rot out, they will tear with their bony jaws and skeletal claws. They do actually, genuinely love their packs, much like mortal wolves, and will stay with them and fight alongside them whenever possible. They prefer to act as ambush predators rather than chase down running prey, but will give chase for hundreds of miles if ordered to. A Dire Wolf is a Small Undead Warrior, relatively fragile but fast and with a pretty nasty attack that has Penetrating. They're also Lifeless, and their Melee increases when there's at least three of them in a Zone, as they operate as pack hunters. Mortek Thrones are like wheelchairs, but with legs instead of wheels. The Ossiarch construct them to carry ranking Mortisans into battle (or, presumably, for Mortisans whose legs are rendered inoperable for some reason but who don't or can't get them repaired). This is not just for mobility or pride-based reasons, though - it's also to amplify their magical power. Each leggy chair is fitted with crystals similar to soultrap gems, which are designed to focus and amplify soul magic - just the stuff their riders tend to use. Therefore, in battle, a Mortisan can tap into the throne's power to make their spells better. While the thrones are quite potent as battlefield tools, they're also at least in part propaganda efforts as well. Each one is hand crafted as a tribute to the glory of the Empire and Nagash, covered in talismans and symbols of conquest, majesty and strength. They are called thrones for a reason, and they are meant to be as grand and majestic as possible. A Mortek Throne is a can kick people and has a decent attack roll for doing so, plus decent armor, but their poor HP pool means you don't really want them to do that much. While you're seated on it, at the start of your turn, you get to roll 1d6. On a 4-6, you get a bonus die to all Channelling rolls this round, and on a 6 you also get to cast a spell as a free action. Making this easily the best Loyal Companion in the entire game. Oh, and bonus: you can use Train Companion on it with Arcana or Crafting instead of Beast Handling. Undead Steed covers ghostly, skeletal and Kavalos steeds. Most mortal horses are cowards and refuse to carry the undead unless forced. An undead horse, on the other hand, is much more useful. The tormented souls of horses are bound to serve the Nighthaunt, while wights prefer simple but relentless skeleton horses. Vampires prefer Nightmares, who are similar but have more fleshy bits still attached to the skeletal frame. And the Ossiarchs? Well, they make their own - Kavalos steeds, made out of a mix of horse and other animal bone, infused with the souls of predatory beasts mixed in with that of an Ossiarch who failed in their duties and was demoted to mount. All undead steeds are fragile but have decent attacks, and all have Lifeless. they also get a special trait based on their subtype. An Ethereal Steed only takes half damage from non-magical attacks, has a Fly (Normal) Speed and can pass through solid objects. A Kavalos Steed gets increased Weapon Skill, Melee and Armor, making them actually pretty good fighters (though still quite fragile if their armor doesn't stop the attack completely). And a Skeletal Steed is Fast, ignores Difficult Terrain and has slightly increased Armor. The book also provides NPC statblocks based on various Archetypes from the core and Champions of Order. Most of them are pretty straight transitions of the automatic Talents of those Archetypes and their narrative skillset, though not always - the Aqshian Battlemage also gets a bonus to casting rolls when near a fire-based Hazard, for example, while the Aetheric Navigator can summon a small tornado. The End! Options for next: Chaos: Blades of Khorne, Disciples of Tzeentch Destruction: Orruk Warclans Order: Fyreslayers, Stormcast Eternals (3e Update)
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Sep 28, 2021 22:43
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Warclans the update if we can.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:05
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Oh, I have both new books, I just haven't done original Warclans so I don't need to specify it'd just be an update.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:08
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LatwPIAT posted:It's the title of Raggi's old metalhead fanzine: This makes too much sense. Metal is full of the worst people.  Also makes sense why this setting book is set in a place which is a mashup of Canadian metal band Voivod & Serbian autonomous region Vojvodina. That's almost clever.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:43
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forkboy84 posted:This makes too much sense. Metal is full of the worst people. Voivode is just a slavic word that means "king" or "prince" or something close to it. And by Eastern Europe I mean Wallachia.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:58
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Ithle01 posted:The episode you're thinking of is called "Darkness Falls" and while it's definitely good horror X-Files it would be a terrible tabletop scenario without more to do besides argue with the loggers about how best to escape. So, can we create a scenario like that in DG and make it fun? I mean, yeah, it would've needed more moving parts and interactivity, more choices to make, but as an example of situations where the catastrophe can't be averted, but where the players still have an active role in their own survival, it was the closest to hand since X-Files had already been brought up.
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Sep 29, 2021 00:45
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Orruk Warclans (both the original with the updated materials included). Having finished Death, let's finish Destruction as well.
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Sep 29, 2021 01:34
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Thirding Orruk Warclans!
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Sep 29, 2021 03:39
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Age of Sigmar: Orruk Warclans So, this particular book - and the new Stormcast one - can only be gotten in physical form. Unlike past AoS releases, it has no ebook or PDF version, which makes it a bit more of a chore to read for lore stuff as I do. Still, let's take a look! Our most notable overall fact is that the greenskins are very much not a united society. They are, after all, rather anarchistic. Still, each clan tends to fall into one of three major subcultures - the Kruleboyz, the Ironjawz, and the Bonesplitterz. All three are dedicated to their own interpretation of the strictures and worship of the deity Gorkamorka, and that faith is fundamental to understanding their ways. Gorkamorka is two gods in one - the mighty Gork, who is brutal yet cunning, and the vicious Mork, who is cunning yet brutal. In times of strife, the two component halves split out of the combined god and fight each other over what should be done - sometimes just with shouting, sometimes with violence. They then recombinedc, having reached a conclusion, and turn their fury onto whoever they want to fight next. Generally, these splits are relatively short-lived, but their existence at all has led the three different orruk cultures to develop, each favoring a different aspect of the Greenskin God. The Kruleboyz are but recently risen to the world stage. They've long existed in the swamps and bogs of the Mortal Realms, but until very recently largely kept to themselves, preparing and plotting. This is because they focus on the worship of Mork over Gork. Typically, Kruleboyz are leaner and more sinewy than other orruks, with longer limbs and a tendency to fight as dirty as they can. They reject the idea of honor as a good way to get killed, and a smart orruk never gets killed. The key of following Gorkamorka is to achieve victory over all else. How you win doesn't matter - that you win does. They are liars and cheaters as a rule, and they love nothing more than proving their own greater cleverness over their foes. They especially enjoy taking down enemies that look down on the orruks as brutish or idiotic, and they're more than happy to resort to terror tactics, sabotage and magical trickery before they launch their true killing intent. They are known to tame and break a number of horrible, gross animals to service, unleashing their swampy terror on the enemy. Their swamplands are sure death for most enemies to invade, and they take a sadistic glee in making sure their foes live long enough to understand how badly they've been beaten. The Ironjawz, on the other hand, are focused on the worship of Gork over Mork. They are massive, muscular and usually found wearing thick metal armor, the better to show off their strength and power. While their armor is usually made from lovely iron, it's often quite thick and weighs more than half a ton per suit. Their weapons are no less crude and no less potent - they prefer massive, metal-hafted axes and huge slabs of vaguely sharpened metal referred to as choppas. The strongest of them ride powerful gruntas, which are like boars but angrier, or gigantic Maw-Krushas, which are basically giant flying crocodiles that can punch people. The group that try to balance Gork and Mork together are the Bonesplitterz. Their fluff is...actually pretty okay, but just a fair warning: their models are the most racist models that Games Workshop currently sells. There is no way to get around that. It loving sucks. Most other orruks consider the Bonesplitterz to be a little crazy, because they forgo armor entirely in favor of bright warpaint powered by their faith. (Personally, given their other ethos, I'd have gone for armor made of monster bone.) The Bonesplitterz, y'see, believe that the true power of Gorkamorka and the true magic of the Mortal Realms live inside monsters. Specifically, inside their bones, and therefore cracking open bone and eating the marrow is the greatest way to gain strength. They seek the power of monsters in their pursuit of being like Gorkamorka, trusting in raw aggression, endless faith and monstrous might over any metal. It works out - their magical strength repels attacks that should pierce their flesh, often enough. When the three come together, they are known as the Big Waaagh! The word 'Waaagh!' is an orruk term that can only be said when shouted at the top of your lungs, preferably loud enough to hurt ears and send your spit flying. It is a word meaning war, battle, imminent danger and virtuous crusade simultaneously, and it is the war cry of the combined forces of the orruks. Once they start shouting about it, it's very hard to get them to stop. As their war fury rises to its zenith, they empower each other with raw power, sometimes even carrying local grots or gargants along in their enthusiasm. The air itself glows green under their joy and anger, and cities shudder for fear of what will be done. As a species, the orruks are much stronger and more robust than humans, adapting themselves to any landscape. They can survive practically anywhere, and orruks can be found in every realm save Azyr, where the locals exterminated them during the Age of Chaos and the Realmgates were sealed so they couldn't get back in. The only area they are known to be unable to live is the Perimeter Inimical of each realm, as while they are quite tough, they can't withstand constant magical danger all the time. The peoples of Order are not entirely clear on how orruks exist in the numbers they do - some say they reproduce by the same manner as humans or aelves or duardin, but if so, no one has ever managed to find proof of this. Some scholars instead theorize that the orruks are actually closer related to fungus than humanity and that they just sprout from the earth rather than being born. According to Dzantaster's Bestiary of Ghur, orruks are spawned from the corpses of other orruks. He claims that on death, an orruk's body breaks down into a green-white jelly, which quickly flows away. Then, somewhere in the dank places nearby, barely-formed infant orruks emerge from the ground, rather like tadpoles. These tiny creatures survive by eating insects and small animals, licking dew off stones, until they become large enough to hunt bigger prey. At this point, they will grow the needle fangs and red eyes that the orruks are known for and begin what Dzantaster says the orruks refer to as "yoofs." They head out into the wilds and naturally are attracted to various warclans, which they join and begin learning the ways of the culture, becoming properly orruky. They grow and then die, and the cycle begins again. Is this true? Well, it's certainly a possibility. The orruks themselves actually tend not to know or care that much about their own biology outside of who is bigger (and therefore stronger) and who is most likely to kick whose rear end if they fought. Many orruks have no desire to think more deeply about where they come from than 'sometimes new orruks show up,' and indeed have little desire to think very hard about existence at all. Things just are, and it's better to focus on what you plan to do than why they are that way. Anyone who gets in their way is asking for a kicking, and that's all they really care aobut. Likewise, outside of the Bonesplitterz, the spirituality and religious belief of the orruks is often somewhat nebulous. They are strong believers in the power of Gorkamorka and the importance of being like him, but they don't generally think too hard about cosmology or theology outside that. Most warclans have a general belief that when an orruk dies, their soul becomes one with the Great Green, the strange and undefinable energy which animates and sustains Gorkamorka. Their spiritual essence may one day return to the Mortal Realms in a new body, but it's not important to think about how that works. It is generally held that if you live violently and die spectacularly, things will go well for you in death. Plenty of Shyish's afterlives contain plenty of orruks, and indeed, the orruks have actually conquered several entirely, which has led to some belief in great paradises of combat after death for worthy orruks. It's unclear if this is actually the result of orruks going to these afterlives in death or if it's because a bunch of orruks wandered into Shyish and conquered some spots. It probably doesn't really matter at this point, either - the end result is the same either way. The warclans are generally speaking fairly self-sufficient, and the many tribes within each warclan take care of themselves well enough as long as they have something to fight in the near future. There's often generally little internal conflict, as they are united by their shared desire to punch things. An orruk tribe will make their way happily through the realms, singing war songs and attacking whoever catches their eye for a good scrap. When they do find someone to fight, they often charge in and deafen the foe with their cries of joy. If there's no one else to fight, however, they will quite happily fight each other until someone else happens by. This casual internal combat is also the main way they decide who's in charge - whoever wins ends up the new leader, generally as quite an informal process. The leader is not usually all that important as long as the rest of the tribe is having a good time killing stuff, though. The orruks are not generally well educated by most mortal standards, and many outsiders think of them as pretty stupid. They aren't, really, just differently focused. They're often quite skilled at figuring out how to insult people in a way that stings. Thus, they never have to be bored and peaceful too long - it's very, very easy for them to find a way to piss someone off enough to want to fight them back. Individual orruks are extremely tough and can be quite long-lived, provided they don't killed in battle. They're muscular, rugged and strong, and their skin tends to be thick, wrinkled and somewhat waxy, closer to that of an elephant than a human's. Their lower jaws often house large tusks, which they refer to as "teef," and most orruks have a prominent underbite. They also tend to be ridden with fleas, ticks and other insects, which they will eat as tasty snacks, along with many scars and scabs. Most other species consider them horribly ugly, which they take as a compliment. This is most clearly explained by the Kruleboyz, who are fond of pointing out that someone who is grossed out by or afraid of you before the fight starts is that much easier to beat. The orruks, regardless of which warclan they claim allegiance to, do tend to agree that a leader should be big, strong and charismatic. Most orruk tribes are led by a single voice, and while it isn't always the biggest and strongest member, that's true around 80% of the time. Orruk leaders are called bosses, and a smaller boss can take over if they're cunning enough and good enough at fighting dirty - a fact which has actually meant some orruk tribes have ended up led by grots before - but this is typically an anomaly. Most of the time, it only lasts until the clever but runty boss gets cornered and is unable to withstand the might of a challenger. And there's always challengers - orruks live to fight and most will happily take the opportunity to fight the person in their tribe most known for being good at fighting - the boss - as soon as there's no outsider to go after. The greatest skill a boss can have is the ability to turn their tribe from a sprawling mass of fistfighting weirdos into something vaguely military moving in the same direction. Each group will have its own sub-boss, who obeys a bigger, scarier boss. They may be united under a Kruleboy Killaboss or an Ironjaw Megaboss, or even a Savage Big Boss of the Bonesplitterz (god I hate the use of the word 'savage' this way but it's gonna be a constant), but all generally share the same approach to leadership: if someone gets in their face, they take them down hard in a display of brutal power. If that doesn't work, the challenger wins and takes over, with the old boss usually accepting their lot as a subordinate without too much anger. Orruk society just tends to accept that the strongest take lead, and if you aren't strongest, you should listen to the one who is. This is an idea they tend to apply even in diplomatic dealings, which is why so many orruk tribes have signed on under Kragnos. The earthquake god may not be an orruk, but he's very strong and shares their mindset, so they will happily follow him into battle. Grots tend to hang out on the frignes of orruk society, usually bowing and scraping for their larger kin to avoid getting beaten up and often to manipulate the bigger greenskins into doing stuff. It may be a bit humiliating, but having a big angry orruk around to protect you keeps you alive longer. Grots are more about cunning than raw strength, and so they are often tolerated best by the Kruleboyz rather than the Ironjawz or Bonesplitterz, and can even rise to positions of trust, such as warbeast handler. Their larger cousins, the hobgrots, also are often found near Kruleboy camps, trying to make deals of mutual benefit. The hobgrots prefer the Kruleboyz best among orruks because the Kruleboyz tend to be most interested in things like long term pacts and alliances and are often rather less distractible than, say, Ironjawz. Next time: Life in Ghur Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Sep 29, 2021 |
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Sep 29, 2021 18:08
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I'll just leave my one mention that Kruleboiz now also read as un-orcy in the fluff as well as looking* closer to an upscaled goblin than an orc. *obligatory "great models, still don't feel like orcs"
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Sep 29, 2021 19:00
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Like, I haven't paid attention to Warhammer or Age of Sigmar since the mid-90s or so, but 'Kruleboyz' sound almost word-for-word like how Night Goblins used to be.
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Sep 29, 2021 19:27
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They’re kind of intended as a mix of old world Orcs and the parts of Night Goblins that didn’t go into the Moonclan Grots, I believe. With the idea being that they’ve never really shown what Morky AoS Orcs are like, just Gorky ones.
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Sep 29, 2021 19:31
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Presumably the Bonesplitterz models SHOULD look like a middle point between Kruleboyz and Ironjawz if they weren't still using old Warhammer Fantasy models for Savage Orcs.
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Sep 29, 2021 21:02
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I reckon Ironjawz without iron slapped on top would be the look - since they are still gorky just going commando. There probably is a markest for naked muscly orks.
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Sep 29, 2021 21:08
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Kruleboyz are some of the best things to come out of Warhammer orcs I think. I really like the idea of cleverer orruks, especially in Age of Sigmar. Love the image of a Stormcast Eternal charging into battle all oversized hammer and pauldrons blazing, only to get clotheslined and kicked into the mud by a Kruleboy trap. When the Destruction playbook for Soulbound comes out I know what I’m playing.
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Sep 29, 2021 21:48
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Wapole Languray posted:Presumably the Bonesplitterz models SHOULD look like a middle point between Kruleboyz and Ironjawz if they weren't still using old Warhammer Fantasy models for Savage Orcs. The middle point would be then old WHFB orcs then, and they're RIP. Would love to have them back instead of Savage. updated sculpts + the leering face shields Kruleboyz demonstrated the tech is there for. And smart orcs is always a slippery slope towards overdoing like with the Beast Saga or w/e and making the too smart. Outside of like Ghazkhul or Grimgor or Azhag, a smart orc catching the enemy off guard because the enemy thinks that orcs are stupid should be... an orc that just used what text book tactics rather than just "1. Charge 2. WAAAGH 3. Profit." That would be the joke! Not Napleorc Orcmmel winning through five-dimensional chess, but just tactics that enemy wasn't ready for due to hubris.
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Sep 30, 2021 06:17
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Halloween Jack posted:This is a problem with the kind of "weird fantasy," "sword and planet," etc. that I love. It usually doesn't survive contact with an adventuring party. quote:playing Goku or a Goku-equivilent is conceptually fine, sure, because as-written Goku is a complete idiot, terrible father figure, and to blame for like 90% of the problems within his own series yet incapable of understanding how or why, only that He Must Punch. The problem with playing Goku is that the people wanting the Goku threshold of power want to play Rational Goku, who is in fact very smart and so smart in fact he will use his genre-awareness to solve every issue before it occurs and become a beloved overman who can detonate planets. When writing up encounters and settings, I found that assuming the players would engage in industrialized total war with the setting should be a base assumption and work around that. That way when they take a lower key option it can be a pleasant surprise. "What is the worst, most extreme actions the PCs should be able to take before the GM says "what the hell, folks, no." and once you have that as the far end of your bracket, you can build things inside of that range of expectations. Mors Rattus posted: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.) That sounds really neat, Mors. Is it going to be here, another community, or in real life? Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 12:11
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They got baby-legs
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Sep 30, 2021 16:34
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Ronwayne posted:That sounds really neat, Mors. Is it going to be here, another community, or in real life? Bunch of my friends on Discord.
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Sep 30, 2021 16:40
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JcDent posted:The middle point would be then old WHFB orcs then, and they're RIP. The Kruleboyz from portrayal have not been super ultra smart. They are primarily cunning and mean. For example in the story Thunderstrike, they lure the Stormcast into a ruined fort by putting a bunch of their prisoners in it. The Stormcast go to rescue them while the Kruleboyz set up outside their enemies now having no area to retreat to. Once the Stormcast have let down their guard and were focused on the captives. They had the Hobgrots run up and toss grenades into the fort blasting a bunch of people and filling it with smoke which the now obscured Kruleboyz attacked in. The Stormcast still managed to fight them off and escape the fort with the freed captives. The issue they had is that they now had to trek for miles through swamp that the Kruleboyz knew better then them, and could easily follow and pick them off during. Did not help that the group now had a bunch of exhausted and weakened normal people with them.
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Sep 30, 2021 17:40
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Age of Sigmar: Orruk Warclans Yellow, Brown and Green The lands of Ghur are full of amber and ochre tints, often marked by the blood of predator and prey. Draconic monsters, giant insects, horrible parasitic worms - pretty much all animal life in Ghur has evolved to hunt each other in some way. Meat is more common than any other food, but there's few places of safety, even inside city walls. Even the plants tend to be carnivorous, and many predators have learned to blend with the landscape. Not that the land itself is much safer - the rivers tear into the rocks, the mountains try to crush the forests, the canyons shift and move to funnel travelers to dangerous locations. Even the landmasses of Ghur hunger, and the indigenous civilizations hold that Ghur's land is alive, slow-moving but ever hungry, and that the continents are slowly shifting to try and consume each other. They are correct. This belief is especially strong among the Bonesplitterz, who believe that each continent actually has a skeleton, and that within the continental bones, the rawest and most primal Amber magic waits to be tapped. The orruks first arose in Ghur, and they have evolved alongside the beasts and the landscape. They excel at hunting and tend to enjoy it, often making an effort to drive prey into amber pits or other traps to better take them down and strip them for meat - particularly lumbersaurs, a favored and tasty species of reptiles. Of course, they're hunted in turn - the Thondian rok birds, hungry squig-ticks and myrmidon ants are all known to grab and carry off orruks. (The ticks and ants are not that much bigger than normal insects, but the Bitey Deff, as the orruks call it, come en masse to drag sleeping orruks off to their nests for feeding.) The plant life has also got a weird relationship with the orruks - their armpits are excellent breeding grounds for itcher moss, while the growl-oaks have developed a tendency to make loud and booming noises when their roots sense the movement of orruk tribes. This causes the orruks to thump them, which scatters their seeds widely. The wilds grow most alive and dangerous around the rim of Ghur, where the Amber magic is strongest. At the core, it's pretty similar to other realms, just with more aggressive wildlife. However, near the Realm's Edge, however, the land spasms wildly, quaking and rising to smash at things moving atop it. Nothing remains still for long, and even the orruks avoid the dangers of those places. Lakes of molten amberbone sizzle and snap, waiting for living things to come near so they can be trapped, and some areas tainted by Chaos get even worse. The touch of Chaos has left deep scars in Ghur, and the Chaos armies slaughtered hundreds of tribes in totality for having the temerity to resist. Surrender to any enemy has never been in the soul of the Ghurish peoples, after all. Most tribes preferred to die than be enslaved by Chaos, but a few turned to worship of the Dark Gods in order to compete with the orruks, whose strength they felt required help for them to overcome. Most came to deeply regret this mistake, for Chaos claimed their very souls in return. By the time the Ghurish human civilizations called to Sigmar for aid, he had already retreated to Azyr. They asked too late, and no aid came. Chaos spread, corrupting even the beasts of the land. The orruks loved every minute of it - fighting the spiky lads of Chaos was good fun - but suffered horribly in the Age of Chaos. Their courage kept the land from being wholly conquered, and helped save several of their neighbors among the human resistance, but also meant many, many orruks died. Stil, Ghur was never fully tamed nor broken by Chaos, and in the coming of the Stormcast, the warclans have grown even happier. These are new foes to fight, great warriors against whom they can test their strength. The once pathetic remnants of the human civilizations have come back together and proven their determination and skill with science and magic. All the better - it makes them fun to fight again. Of course, Ghur fights back all on its own, and Sigmar's push to establish new cities in the lands once held by the ancient tribes of Ghurish humanity have often failed, destroyed by monsters...or by the orruks, who don't really care why the humans are doing stuff, just that they're a good fight. We've heard a fair bit about the Age of Myth's matches between Sigmar and Gorkamorka, though here we get details like the two-headed god actually managing to beat Dracothion senseless before fighting Sigmar to a standstill and joining the Pantheon of Order for a while. We also get the origin of the Kruleboyz - the youngest of the orruk warclans. They formed only late in the Age of Myth, almost mirroring the development of human civilizations. They claimed cunning as the greatest source of power, and their mean streak became so infamous among their fellow orruks that some Bonesplitterz now claim that Chaos must have influenced them in the early days by introducing bitterness and spite to Gorkamorka's mind. Other orruk spiritual leaders reject this, though, instead claiming the Kruleboy signature nastiness originates in the time Mork tricked a star into blowing itself up with rage by cunningly insulting it. Either way, the early Kruleboyz pioneered the art of hard finkin', using it to defeat monsters and rival orruk tribes to conquer the swarmps of Ghur, learning to stack the odds in their favor there. As the Age of Chaos began, the orruks celebrated for a new era of war. The Ironjawz rose to cultural dominance in this time, thriving in the constant battles, while the Bonesplitterz found many new monsters to hunt in the ranks of the Chaos armies. The Kruleboyz make a great effort to outwit and destroy the forces of Chaos sent a t them, finding them much more driven and therefore more fun to beat than the humans of the past. Five hundred years of war lead to many orruk deaths, but deaths they find celebratory and worthwhile. Archaon decides it's time to wipe them out because they are becoming a major problem, especially in Ghur. He sends out one of his greatest servants, Darkorn the Devourer, to commit orc genocide in Ghur. Uncountable numbers of orruks are slain, but there always seem to be more ready to fight. At Splitbone Pass, htey manage to fill an entire valley with Chaos Warrior bodies, and at Sundeth Caves, the Deffspikerz clan of Kruleboyz spend three weeks slaughtering Chaos marauders with their ingenious war machines. Darkorn's campaign fails utterly, and the orruks retain primacy in Ghur, though Chaos manages to latch onto several strongholds. Archaon uses Darkorn's s kull to decorate his castle ramparts and refocuses his efforts on Shyish. The Kruleboyz of Lake Innis soon find human refugees invading their wetlands, seeking to avoid the Chaos invasions. The Grinnin' Blades take this as a chance to practice their trapping, developing a number of new tricks - including a new favorite: poisoning water supplies with their own filth, forcing the refugees to hunt further afield for supplies. The refugees, in desperation, turn to Nurgle for aid. A swarm of maggots and flies answers their call, and disease spreads through the wetlands from the very poisoned water holes the Grinnin' Blades created. Lake Innis flows into the Garden of Nurgle, and the Grinnin' Blades survive there for several weeks by a mix of bloodyminded determination and sheer toughness. Nurgle is impressed and allows the clan to survive within his Garden as disease-riddled test subjects. They Lake Innis Grinnin' Blades remain as a small population in the Garden to this day, doing their best to survive and cause problems for any daemons they can, though they're mostly a curiosity at this point. The coming of the Stormcast changed everything and nothing for the orruks. With the new enemies came the meteoric rise of a new Megaboss in Ghur - Gordrakk, the Fist of Gork. Gordrakk leads his forces against the Stormcast and Chaos alike several times, and is most notably present at the battle which frees the godbeast Fangathrak from his Chaos-forged chains. Gordrakk's growing respect for Sigmar starts to fade when he realizes Sigmar loves peace more than war, and he decides to get back at the God-King by going after a nearby Stormvault in the Crawling Pits of Gharrentia, which had long been thought protected by the wild spiders of the region. He returns bearing the skull of the great bull-godbeast Hammergord, which he uses to make a giant battering ram that he plans to use to smash his way into Azyr so he can challenge Sigmar to a duel, once he takes down the city of Excelsis. Gordrakk's clan, the Ironsunz, begins a massive race - a stampede of boars, gore-gruntas and swamp monsters that ends up destroying the Free Cities of Blackwall and Taberna essentially by accident. The orruks are unconcerned - the destruction of the stampede adds to the sport of the continent-crossing race. Gordrakk continues his occasional battles with Excelesis until the Necroquake, referred to by the orruks as the Deffstorm. The Kruleboyz that showed up for the race return to their swamps because they find the ghosts annoying, and the Ironjawz likewise start to grubmle and falter. The Bonesplitterz, led by the Drakkfoot clan, set out to crush daemons and ghosts alike, angry that they don't follow the rules of the living. The Wurrgog Prophet Rakkatak declares that Gorkamorka is extremely upset about all these spooks and leads the massed Drakkfoot against the Nighthaunt, using blessed choppas to take them out. Their firm and infectious belief that they actually can destroy all ghosts becomes a powerful weapon in itself, inspiring their gargant allies to assist them and stop fearing the dead. The defeat of Nagash in Hysh and the final ending of the Necroquake sends a wave of life magic across the Realms. This magic cracks open the ancient prison under Twinhorn Peak where Kragnos, the Living Earthquake and last of his kind, has been sealed since Age of Myth. Gordrakk and his grot allies end up running into Kragnos soon after. They fight each other, and Gordrakk actually manages to survive the match, though he and his forces lose it. Kragnos is impressed by his ferocity and, despite sharing no common tongue, the two reach an accord and set out towards Excelsis together. The Seraphon appear to help protect the city, and the Hammergord battering ram is finally destroyed. Gordrakk is severely wounded and the combined power of Lord Kroak and Morathi defeats Kragnos just before he can smash through the heart of the city, teleporting him across Ghur. Gordrakk takes on an entire force of Astral Templars solo and fights his way out to the Morruk Hills. Receiving a flash of inspiration from Gorkamorka, Gordrakk sets out to find the worm-godbeast Fangathrak again - not particularly hard, since it's left a giant trail behind it. He and his Maw-krusha, Bigteef, stomp on the ground to attract the worm. They lure it into the chasms of Gharrentia and use Arachnarok webbing obtained from Skagrott the Loonking to wedge it into the canyons, which attempt to crush the godbeast. Between the webs and chasm, Fangathrak is trapped and poisoned by a small army of Arachnaroks. Gordrakk has its motuh forced open, invading the Eightpoints at the head of a massive Waaagh!. In the meantime, a new shaman rises to power among the Kruleboyz of Thondia - Gobsprakk. He leads the Grinnin' Blades of the Morruk Hills to great victories, earning a reputation for prophecy and revealing the will of Mork. He tames a massive vulcha, Killabeak, and sets out to find Kragnos. Gobsprakk claims the name Mouth of Mork for his gift of languages, and he explains to Kragnos that he has received a vision of the Eathquake God trampling over all the realms at the head of a massive army. He plays up Kragnos' ego and convinces the last Drogrukh to work with him - not least because Gobsprakk actually understands his language. Gobsprakk returns to the Grinnin' Blades with Kragnos at his side and plans of new conquests. The Kruleboyz begin poisoning the lands of the Thondian coast in an effort to starve out Excelsis, but are stopped by the efforts of the Lions of Sigmar and the huntress-Stormcast Yndrasta. That's where things stand at present - the Kruleboyz are prepping for a greater campaign against Excelsis while the Stormcast are trying to regroup and be ready for them. Next time: The Kruleboyz in depth. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 18:11
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