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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Disagree on the looks, they look closer to actual Oldhammer 80s GW orcs than anything produced since the 90s. I was there for when the proto-Warcraft aesthetic took over the range and I could never really embrace it Is the Warcraft aesthetic when they decided that Orcs (or at least girl orcs) should be fuckable?
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Oct 4, 2021 21:49
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Everyone posted:Is the Warcraft aesthetic when they decided that Orcs (or at least girl orcs) should be fuckable? Look at this coward.
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Oct 4, 2021 22:10
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Everyone posted:Is the Warcraft aesthetic when they decided that Orcs (or at least girl orcs) should be fuckable?
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Oct 4, 2021 23:34
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Everyone posted:Is the Warcraft aesthetic when they decided that Orcs (or at least girl orcs) should be fuckable? Blood Bowl always had orc cheerleaders. I'm not sure I'd call them fuckable
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Oct 5, 2021 00:42
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neonchameleon posted:Blood Bowl always had orc cheerleaders. I'm not sure I'd call them fuckable Well there's always going to be that one person looking at the iron bra and protruding tusks thinking, Oh yeah, I'd hit that.
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Oct 5, 2021 01:26
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 1.INTRODUCTION + CMC The Labyrinth is an expansion for the Delta Green RPG. It serves an important purpose, as the modernisation of the setting led to a lot of the big antagonist groups getting shuffled gently off-stage. The Karotechia, MJ-12, the Fate and many others were dissolved over the interim years between editions, either being wiped out by Delta Green itself or falling victim to internecine struggles. This did leave the game with a problem, which is that it was suddenly light on antagonist groups! A throwaway line in the Handler's Guide suggested that big mythos cults just don't really exist any more, but that's an unsatisfying answer for a number of reasons. The Labyrinth is an attempt to fix that, featuring a swathe of new organisations that can serve as allies or antagonists for any game. Is it good? Let's find out!  The book opens with a piecemeal introduction explaining the purpose of the book and the broad strokes of each group featured. There are three ally groups, four antagonist groups and one ally, singular. There's some faffing about talking about how you can link these factions together to create a 'labyrinth' but I don't find it to be particularly useful - I don't know why you would plan out an operation and then try to force an overarching campaign villain into it afterwards instead of making a series of scenarios specifically about that villain. The problem with this approach is underscored by the trite published scenario list that gives a suggestion for how to retrofit a Labyrinth group into it. For example, if you're running Reverberation, you could link the Centre for the Missing Child by adding in a teenage Reverb addict. Uh...cool? In addition, most of the groups have little to do with the factions that were already described in the Handler's Guide. For example, the guide described a massive cold war happening between the Lloigor and the Yithians to control humanity's future, which would have been dope to get more info on, but the one Lloigor threat in the book has nothing to do with that. That's connected to an overall problem I have with what the book chooses to focus on - but we'll get into all that. We also have a new game mechanic for Cracked agents. This is a mechanical representation of the thing in horror stories where the person who is most psychologically hosed up has a secret insight into the real workings of the world. If an agent's SAN ever goes below their original POWx4, they become Cracked, though they can eventually recover. Players do not get to know about this and the only benefit is that the Handler might elect the craziest agent to see something special. I'm personally not a fan of this. It doesn't give any benefits to the player and it's a hard mechanic, something with a numerical value, that has entirely arbitrary effects. I would also argue that it's redundant in Delta Green specifically. The Unnatural skill already represents sanity-destroying insight, and putting that aside, are the agents not already Cracked? Hell, one of the options for damaged agents is literally that you know things man is not meant to know. Anyway. Our first faction:  CENTER FOR THE MISSING CHILD The CMC is a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting law enforcement in searching for missing and abused children. It was founded in 1981 by Jordan and Sarah D'Onofrio after the abduction and murder of their daughter. They were horrified at just how inept and unprofessional the cops were in pursuit of the case and took it upon themselves to raise the bar. They funded the fledgeling org out of their own pockets and recruited heavily from former law enforcement. By the time their daughter's remains were discovered 15 years later, they had the cooperation of local and federal police with a track record of successful cases that used their refined methodology. As the Internet grew more prevalent, they worked with tech companies to establish standards for uprooting child porn rings and other online child crimes. In the modern day, the CMC has even gone international and works with diplomats in cases where a child is abducted from the US. Most of the CMC is based in their head office in Chicago. As well as handling the day-to-day running of the org, the HQ has state-of-the-art forensics tech for identifying extremely decayed bodies as well as a tech lab for busting cybercrimes. They work with the four field offices spread out throughout the US, each of which has about 25 employees. They work on case analysis and run training programs for local law enforcement, as well as sending data back to the Chicago office to help them identify multi-state crime patterns. The CMC doesn't really do field work. When they do, it's in the form of Rapid-Response Consultants and Cold Case Specialists, both of whom are recruited from volunteer ex-law enforcement. RRCs offer support for families, including counselling and emergency accommodation. They also join up with task forces to offer logistic support. CCS volunteers 're-heat' cold cases, collecting relevant data and updating it, possibly offering new insights into the case or giving fresh data for CMC's data analysis. CMC's reputation is golden: the fact that they can have civilians attached to active task forces is mainly possible because they have proven that they are completely dedicated to their mission. A few of the CMC's important cast includes: Detective Joe Dawant: An elderly and retired former homicide detective from Atlanta who was instrumental in solving the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-1981 (more on him later). Annabelle DePasqua: A crime-scene tech who runs the Chicago lab and has a childhood memory of encountering an unnatural entity, one that she believes was the ghost of her great grandmother. Christopher Mudede: A gay case analyst who does great work but is having his soul ground down by the endless parade of human suffering to which he is forced to bear witness. The CMC are natural allies for Delta Green. If there's a case where a cult or a monster is doing something bad with kids, the CMC will happily offer support. They have a top-notch forensics lab and a massive archive of missing persons cases going back decades. Their cybercrime lab has facial recognition tech and machine-cracking software. And they are actively looking for recruits with law enforcement experience, which probably includes the PCs - not only can they infiltrate the organisation and avail themselves of its resources, they can get themselves put on task forces that would otherwise be off-limits to them. So what else can you do with the CMC? Have Joe Dawant gently caress everything up for everybody.  gently caress THE POLICE Joe Dawant is haunted by the Atlanta Child Murders case. The man they convicted could only have murdered two of the 28 victims, but the rest of the cases were closed nonetheless. Dawant spent the end of his career reinvestigating those cases to no avail. As an African-American he had seen first-hand how white cops treated his community, how they would deploy excessive force and then do poo poo like leave drop-pieces to justify the killings retroactively. He now believes that the majority of the killings were committed by a gang of white officers within the force and that the cases were buried by the powers that be. Dawant worked hard and dug up the real dirt on four of the cops involved with the case, finding a history of unseemly police brutality that had been conveniently unreported. He believes ten of the killings were carried out in cold blood, with the others being petty criminals who did not need to be murdered. He believes two of the Kops are Klan with the other two being fellow travellers. He presented his findings to the Dekalb County police, who assured him they would pass his findings up the ladder. Not long after that, the Dekalb County police chief was forced to resign and the investigation was closed. Dawant's evidence vanished and he was forced into retirement based on fabricated medical results from his next departmental vision test. While working on the case, Dawant had worked with the CMC and was impressed with the organisation. He signed up as a volunteer immediately. He lives off his pension and takes care of tropical fish. He also keeps tabs on the four cops he investigated, all of whom have retired as well. Sometimes he just cruises by their homes and watches them. The book suggests the following progression of events: Joe Dawant joins the agents on a case related to a missing child, either as rapid-response or as a cold case analyst. He's smart enough to figure out that they're hiding something from him and will be keeping a close eye on them even as he plays up being a retired old veteran. Whatever happens, he gets exposed to the unnatural and it blows his socks off. He tells the agents to keep in touch with him outside of the CMC. Now obsessed with his experience, Dawant gets to thinking that maybe those Ku Klux Kops had something else going on. He goes out of his way to make himself useful to the agents. He might go so far as to tip them off to a potential incursion based off something he sees on the news. He links them up with Mudede, who is himself extremely useful and excited to help. At some point, Dawant will try to talk to one of the agents about his special case. His attempts to link the crooked cops to the unnatural will probably make him look like the paranoid kook that he is. With great effort, they could steer him from his current path, but then he offers up something useful: a separate unnatural case, scientifically analysed by DePasqua. The agents might want to humour him for just a bit longer. DePasqua will be absolutely fascinated by anything connected to the unnatural. She will work with Dawant and Mudede to get resources assigned to their case. They effectively become the agents' very own mini-Delta Green inside of the CMC. They'll even come out on location during the next opera, doing the grunt work of analysing evidence while the agents hose down monsters. The whole time, Dawant gets crazier and crazier, now believing that those four cops were actually emissaries of evil. On one of his private stalks, he catches two of them playing golf together - clearly conspiring against him! He properly loses his marbles. The next time the agents hear from Dawant, it will be during a hostage negotiation. They get an emergency call from Atlanta PD. Dawant sniped one of the cops while he was driving and has taken another hostage. The cops have surrounded the house they're in. Dawant says he'll only surrender if he can talk to the agents. When he's patched through, he immediately goes on a terrible opsec-violating spiel about his investigation, the conspiracy to get him thrown off the force and his work with Delta Green. He's got it under control. They need to fight the good fight. Do it for the children. The captain will ask what the gently caress was that and whether or not the police sniper should take the shot he's been lining up. Whether or not Dawant survives, the agents gets have hosed up big time and are publicly associated with a crazy cop-killer. Their superior rakes them over the coals for this and demands that they fix this poo poo up. They'll have to lean on DePasqua to swap Dawant's DNA sample with one connected to a teenage prostitute from the Atlanta case - which seems a little questionable to me. Dawant's reputation is already ruined, why draw more attention to the case by putting in another exciting twist? At any rate, if the CMC finds out about the cover-up, that puts them off-limits for any future collaboration with Delta Green. That might be preferable to a future where they work closer with DG and become more entangled with the unnatural.  So that's the Center for the Missing Child. I like the org and I think they're cool allies to give to the players. If you somehow end up with a team that's all murderous special operators, they can cover the egghead stuff. However, I'm not that interested in the Dawan storyline. I think the idea here is to give players a hard time for taking advantage of someone's senility, but I'm not terribly enthused by the idea of this entrapment bullshit where you give someone a resource with strings attached then slap them on the hand for taking it. This is also the first instance of a repeated problem with the book where in this game about cosmic horror, the big plot hook is dealing with a completely mundane crazy man. It also occurs to me, because I'm cool and sexy, that if I was playing an extralegal special operator and an NPC I liked told me about some racist cops that hosed his life up, I would be filling a burning car with their decapitated bodies before he even got to the unnatural part. I presume there's people who play Delta Green like an anal retentive LEO sim and that's their business, but I only run games for people who would see this as an opportunity to feed a Kid-Killing Klansman to the funniest unnatural entity they can find. Next time: Dream Syndicate!
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Oct 5, 2021 02:16
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Down With People posted:This is also the first instance of a repeated problem with the book where in this game about cosmic horror, the big plot hook is dealing with a completely mundane crazy man. I feel like this might be an over-correction to how the previous mythos cults were pretty much untouchable.
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Oct 5, 2021 03:29
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The basic flaw of Labyrinth is that none of the traps in it are baited very well. It's full of friendly NPCs who will eventually gently caress the Agents over, but none of them are obviously helpful enough to overcome the players' natural suspicion of involving random strangers in Delta Green business. And that's the ones who aren't obviously untrustworthy from the beginning, like some people we'll meet later.Down With People posted:We also have a new game mechanic for Cracked agents. This is a mechanical representation of the thing in horror stories where the person who is most psychologically hosed up has a secret insight into the real workings of the world. If an agent's SAN ever goes below their original POWx4, they become Cracked, though they can eventually recover. Players do not get to know about this and the only benefit is that the Handler might elect the craziest agent to see something special. Down With People posted:For example, the guide described a massive cold war happening between the Lloigor and the Yithians to control humanity's future, which would have been dope to get more info on
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Oct 5, 2021 05:24
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mellonbread posted:The Cracked mechanic is how the Unnatural skill should have worked: You see the world differently as your SAN goes down. As it stands, all Unnatural does is give you a small percentage chance to know mythos stuff on the rare opportunity you have to roll it. It's never going to be high enough to actually do anything useful. The ideal solution would just to fix Unnatural and make it more useful, instead of coming up with a separate mechanic. But applying changes to core rules written by someone else is out of scope for a splatbook by an author who's no longer part of the main dev team. I'll freely admit my impressions of the Cracked mechanic are coloured by the way it's utilised with regards to the Sowers, which I felt was really clumsy.
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Oct 5, 2021 05:30
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Down With People posted:I'll freely admit my impressions of the Cracked mechanic are coloured by the way it's utilised with regards to the Sowers, which I felt was really clumsy.
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Oct 5, 2021 05:35
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Down With People posted:It also occurs to me, because I'm cool and sexy, that if I was playing an extralegal special operator and an NPC I liked told me about some racist cops that hosed his life up, I would be filling a burning car with their decapitated bodies before he even got to the unnatural part. I presume there's people who play Delta Green like an anal retentive LEO sim and that's their business, but I only run games for people who would see this as an opportunity to feed a Kid-Killing Klansman to the funniest unnatural entity they can find. In my experience of Delta Green, getting a chance to have the collateral damage of your investigations be people who absolutely deserve whatever the hell is coming to them would be a breath of fresh air. "Oh, you think these cops, who are definitely murderous white supremacists, are also a cult? Better kill them all just to be safe, then go through their documents." Also how did they not just have the cops be a cult? Seriously, it's Delta Green. Of course the Klan has actual cultists in it. Of course there's a decades-old cold case involving racist cultists that you can solve. Honestly it's a genre crime that his cold cases aren't actually a series of ritual killings intended to summon The Whitest Available Mask of Nyarlathotep, which the PCs can get involved in helping him finally lay to rest.
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Oct 5, 2021 08:33
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Down With People posted:but I only run games for people who would see this as an opportunity to feed a Kid-Killing Klansman to the funniest unnatural entity they can find. Yeah, the people I run games for/play with tend to have a very direct sense of justice. They'd find some way to wipe out those cops and their entire PD in short order.
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Oct 5, 2021 08:40
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Brikwars 2020 Part 3 – Heroes and Horses Bored of making regular minifigs slaughter each other? Want to spice things up a bit? Thankfully, the core rules allow for some additional units with different capabilities. Let’s go over Heroes and Horses! Heroes The Hero is defined as a minifig who’s better than everyone else not because of competence or anything inherent, but because they have sick armor and a cool cape. In the world of BrikWars, this is everything.  A Hero is more complicated than a minifig. Thankfully, the card above summarizes it – they have a better action die, move faster, and roll 2d6 for armor. Remember when I said minifigs that roll their maximum on an action can add an extra d6 to any related statistic? In reality, this is fixed on a roll of 6 or more, meaning Heroes have a 50% chance to get, say, an extra damage dice in close combat. They are blenders. The main thing worth unpacking here is the Heroic Ego speciality. This gives a Hero the ability to do a Heroic Feat according to a Cliché you give them. If your Hero is a shirtless brawny soldier, he should be doing things Arnie does. If they are a cool gunslinger or a secret agent, they should be doing stuff related to that. Once a turn, a Hero can declare they will do a Feat, and then roll a die. An opponent that would like the feat to fail rolls their own die. If the Hero ties or beats the opponent, they do the thing – otherwise, they suffer a Homer Simpson-esque consequence. Notably, the rules don’t say what happens if nobody wants to oppose. This is probably just an order of operations failure, and if nobody opposes then the Hero gets to do his Feat, and nobody should have to roll. This is the kind of rule that BrikWars needs to make the basic game more attractive, and to lean into the more rules-light mayhem that it’s claiming to promote. Making your hero do dumb stuff and seeing if it succeeds or fails is absolutely the kind of thing meant to generate laughs at the table – that, combined with their Redshirt ability and the possibility of rolling Snake Eyes on an armor roll, is a good way to create a center of weird events that you can enjoy without getting too invested in them. The nerd in me would like to turn that armor rating into a 7 and have less rolls in the game, but a) that might make them too tough with the Redshirt rule, and b) that’s kind of not the point. Additionally, if a piece of armor or a weapon is sufficiently cool, you can make it a Heroic Artifakt, which grants its wielder a Heroic Feat according to what it is. One of my favourite lines: Heroic Artifakts posted:“A Heroic Artifakt is limited to Feats that satisfy its Cliché, similar to that of a regular Hero, but Artifakt Clichés tend to be tautologies. Excalibur's Cliché, for example, is that it's Excalibur.” Horses You remember those one-piece horse figures that you could put a saddle or barding on? They have rules too!  Technically, in BrikWars, any single-seat vehicle that is roughly the size of a horse is a Horse. Motorbikes, dragons, buggies, chicken-legged walkers – these all make good Horses. Notably, Horses are faster even than Heroes, making them excellent transportation. However, Horses aren’t bright. If your Horse is a living creature and one of your minifigs isn’t around to attend it, one of your enemies controls it instead. This can result in the Horse turning on their masters! As an aside, “half-mind” isn’t a great name for that rule! I don’t like it very much! Additionally, a Horse can take an extra hit compared to a minifig (although being wounded makes its stats suffer). It moves faster and thus gains more momentum on charges, can be given armor, and is better at grabbing and shoving. Riding a Horse is a complicated affair. Unless your minifig is a Rider (which we’ll get to), a minifig must use his hands and his Action to control the horse. Both hands mean he has full control and can use any weapons affixed to it (like if the Horse is a sick attack bike). One hand means he can’t use its action but can attack with weapons or use objects in his other hand. No hands mean he can only move the horse in straight lines but can make it Sprint and use his hands freely. This is… a bit much. I would basically make this a binary check of if a minifig wanted to control the horse or not, and this check may as well not exist if you’re relying on weapons mounted on a bike or similar. Thankfully you can just ignore all of this.  The Rider is our second specialist. He’s the exact same as a regular minifig, except he doesn’t make any of these checks and can be treated as a single creature with the horse, including making combined attacks with them. There’s basically no reason not to do this so you can ignore the dumb riding control rules, since in the core rules a Rider is still worth 1 minifig. The next section is a very long explanation of how combat on horseback works. Combat from atop a horse works the exact same, but you can target a horse or rider separately and get a bonus on action rolls for targeting a horse. Minifigs can be knocked off horses, and if they were charging or fall at least four inches they take damage. There are very in-depth rules for jousting, which basically work like a weird mix of charging and reactions. Horses can do 1 point of damage by trampling on people, which doesn’t kill a minifig normally but might add up during a charge (e.g., if a minifig took 4 damage from a charge attack and the horse has movement left). I think this is a thing where you keep these rules handy and then look them up whenever the situation comes up, because there’s no way I’m remembering any of these. So, the Core Rules. This is the engine BrikWars 2020 runs on. And it’s… okay. Mostly. It’s far too fiddly and detailed in places for its own good and it has a very bad sense of humor. But the simplicity of the stats, the addition of Heroes and some of the more useful tables and explanations do a lot for me. It’s definitely not as wild or reactive as Mobile Frame Zero can be, but going for the intuitive nature of a minifig holding a sword makes sense. The presentation of the rules is bright, colorful and sometimes a bit all over the place. But I’ve been keeping something from you. This might be how turns and actions and damage works, but its not the real SOUL of BrikWars. Where do these stats come from? How does a Horse get more health? Is it all just arbitrary? The answers will be answered in the next book, although the answer for the last one is “yeah, sometimes it is”. Next Time: Brikwars is genius, actually? The Deleter fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Oct 5, 2021 |
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Oct 5, 2021 11:34
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Joe Slowboat posted:Also how did they not just have the cops be a cult? Seriously, it's Delta Green. Of course the Klan has actual cultists in it. Of course there's a decades-old cold case involving racist cultists that you can solve. Honestly it's a genre crime that his cold cases aren't actually a series of ritual killings intended to summon The Whitest Available Mask of Nyarlathotep, which the PCs can get involved in helping him finally lay to rest. In Delta Green there was a cult inside the Chicago PD that did ritual human sacrifice in the 1960s.
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Oct 5, 2021 11:51
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 2. THE DREAM SYNDICATE The Dream Syndicate is an online support group of sorts for a group of teenagers and youths who like to talk about their dreams. Not just any dreams, but clairvoyant dreams, eerie visions of events in the past, present and future. The Syndicate was started by Jeevana Pawar, a high school honor student from Tulsa. She was minding her own business in 2014 when she suddenly started having vivid dreams about Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. Sometimes she was aboard the plane as it lost cabin pressure. Sometimes she was watching its rapid descent from the surface of the ocean. Sometimes she saw its wreckage beneath the waves amidst the pylons of a strange, sunken city. Though it appeared in fragments, she felt that she was seeing what really happened to Flight 370: that the plane had made a rough water landing only to be pulled into the ocean by something. She started posting about her dreams online under the pseudonym Pepper. She found that there were others like her who were having the same dreams, and stranger ones beside. They dreamed that they were Romanovs in 1916, or saw conical aliens moving through underground tunnels. However, the Dreamers mainly focused on Flight 370, corroborating and collaborating to build a clearer image of the flight's final moments. Pawar has a clear image of one passenger in particular, a woman by the name of Xiu Zheng from Henan Province in China. If the Dreamers can find a detail about her in the dream that no one else would know but her family, then it would confirm the significance of their dreams. The Dreamer community has identified several other 'core scenarios'. These are identifiable because they're fragmented, recurring, not relevant to the dreamer's life and dreamed by several people concurrently. Alongside the Flight 370 dream, some other core scenarios include: - Vignettes from the daily lives of the Romanovs, including a strange candlelit ritual presided over by Rasputin. - An underground city full of giant conical aliens (obviously Yithians, though the Dreamers don't know that). - A woman in animal skins working on a cave painting in torchlight. Glowing eyes appear in the cave and she fends them off with the torch, only to have her head bit off by something above her. - Strange, organic shapes flying through an asteroid field, dimly lit by an orange sun. They pass by a blue moon, which is suddenly wracked by storms. - Cockroaches scuttle through overgrown ruins. A vast shape blots out the sun. A sinkhole opens further away, causing the wreckage and vegetation to tumble into the void. (If I was using the Dream Syndicate, I would also be inclined to chuck in something related to a past operation.) The Dreamers are an online community of troubled youths with all the resources that entails. They have no money and no field operations. They have no opsec and no idea why they're having these dreams, though they have plenty of outlandish theories. 'Teens have weird dreams' isn't exactly a smoking gun for unnatural incursions. You would probably only involve the Dream Syndicate if you wanted to give an agent the same dreams. All of this is fine, if a little bland. Until you get to Vega. CALL THE POLICE ON Santino Vega (known online as 'Dominator') is a teenage hacker and loathsome oval office. He loves pwning n00bz and selling illegally-obtained data on the deep web. He is not actually a Dreamer and all of his dreams are either fabrications or based on Pawar's. That's the thing, is that he's just in it for Pawar. He stalked her and uncovered her real identity, then hacked her webcam and installed a keylogger on her computer. He has worked himself into a position of authority as a moderator in the Syndicate and has cultivated a clique of loyalist members. He doesn't give two shits about the Dream Syndicate except as a way to get close to Pawar. If the agents try to get in contact with the Syndicate, Vega tries to position himself as an in-between - he would love to impress Pawar with his awesome FBI connections and will convince her that this is the ticket to the Dream Syndicate achieving legitimacy and popular awareness. He will offer up comprehensive data on both the dreams and the personal lives of the Dreamers. He will try to find out what kind of operations they're on and then edit the dream database to include references to it. If the agents are real numpties, he will send them a flash drive with the data, along with enough malware to seize control over all of their devices. The book assumes that the agents will think Vega is just a real wiz with these new-fangled computers. They'll probably be less enthused when they find out about Vega's hacking habits. Vega will at first desperately try to get back into their good books (assuming they don't like, shoot him), but will take it personally if they tell him to gently caress off. He will try to turn Pawar against the agents while siccing his script-kiddy clique on them. The big turning point will be if the agents finally get direct access to Pawar, which will be overheard by Vega on all of her bugged devices. He confronts her directly and tries to force a confession of love from her, which will not be forthcoming. Vega goes berserk. He SWATs the agents and all of their loved ones, probably leading to someone getting shot. He flies across the country to meet with Pawar at her dorm in Stanford, hitting her with a stun gun and tying her to a chair when she once again spurns him. One of his followers tries to notify the agents of his plan, which is now to livestream his deranged rant against the agents while taking Pawar hostage. He will have tens of thousands of viewers by the time he's taken down.  THIS poo poo loving BLOOOOOOOOOOOWS This poo poo loving blows! This is why they got rid of the Karotechia? To make room for poo poo like this? 'Teenage hacker livestreams assault of girl he's stalking' isn't a Delta Green storyline. It's a loving Law And Order SVU storyline (literally, I think - the Gamergate-inspired ep in particular). It's not interesting, it's not scary and it's not relevant. It has nothing to do with cosmic horror or spy thrillers. The Dream Syndicate could easily fit into the mythos, but I don't see why this is presented as the default way to use them. Even the lesser fanmade scenarios tend to have a loving monster in them. Santino Vega is not an interesting villain, he's a nuisance. A completely bizarre series of actions have to take place for him to even be a threat. The agents have to be so completely ignorant of operational security that they will let themselves be taken for a ride by a gamer with the handle 'Dominator', then they have to be willing to let him walk away from the whole affair - I'm pretty sure you don't need to make a lot of Bureaucracy rolls to get a teen in trouble for loving with feds. What is happening to Pawar is terrible but also completely banal and absolutely unrelated to the unnatural phenomenon that this is supposed to be about. Without the Vega storyline? The Dream Syndicate is the start of an idea. You would need to do a lot of work to make them cool, let alone relevant to a Delta Green game in particular. They are not useful allies and they offer no useful plothooks. I also think the inclusion of a somewhat recent tragedy is crass. I do not understand the Dream Syndicate. I don't think I'm missing something here. I think this could be the stupidest Delta Green scenario ever published. Next time: Agent Renko!
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Oct 6, 2021 00:46
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Down With People posted:The Dream Syndicate Maybe there's a hook where after they save her from her rear end in a top hat stalker, the agents get a huge in with Jeevana Pewar and effective access to an (unorganized) group of semi Johnny Smiths. Call them... The Dream Police So far this is two organizations for two describing events that would occur if the agents were just clueless passive morons. Presumably they'll get into a much better positions with their potential allies by, y'know not being clueless passive morons.
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Oct 6, 2021 01:22
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I dunno, my mind is drawn to the idea of the Syndicate starting to dream about past operations of the PCs and their currently ongoing plots - and they piece together enough in their dream visions for one of them to contact the PCs with knowledge that no one outside the PCs should have. Where to go from there is open-ended, but if you start with presenting to the players that these peoples' dreams seem to be legitimate and relevant to what's going on in your campaign, that could open an interesting can of worms.
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Oct 6, 2021 02:34
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Vega could be a decent subplot if he was a complication in a seperate mission. A B-plot for the PCs to work through whilst getting access to the real dream data they need. But he certainly shouldn't survive the episode. Ideally he'd get eaten in an ironic manner by whatever threat his assholery is holding up the agents from investigating. The Act 2 corpse, if you will.
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Oct 6, 2021 02:59
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The obvious play, though not stated in the book, is for the Agents to participate in the shared dreams using the Cracked mechanic - take enough SAN loss to pass your first breaking point, and you begin having the dreams. This at least gives them a reason to care about the Dream Syndicate in the first place, even if the conclusion is still "why do we care about this".
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Oct 6, 2021 04:14
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The obvious way to involve the PCs is to have one of them start dreaming of being someone else living a normal life and not bother telling anyone because it's relaxing. You can't rip off Stargate SG-1 for everything, but...
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Oct 6, 2021 09:55
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Yeah, there's plot hooks both organizations have that the writers never seem to realize but instead they throw it away for 'stop the crazy from doing a mundane crime and blow up your connection with that group forever in the process'
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Oct 6, 2021 16:19
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So, at what point in this Delta Green book do we actually get to the occult terrors that you're supposed to be investigating? I like the part where dreamers are coming together to discover shared dreams, but these scenarios are really low key. Although in some ways it does remind me of the normalcy of an X-Files episode - so that's good, but at the same time I don't know how to get a group interested in this stuff. Also, is it me or do these feel better as Unknown Armies scenarios?
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Oct 6, 2021 18:15
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Ithle01 posted:So, at what point in this Delta Green book do we actually get to the occult terrors that you're supposed to be investigating?
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Oct 6, 2021 18:34
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mellonbread posted:The first half of the book is allied organizations and NPCs. The antagonists come in the second half. Might be why they are so low key. Make them well meaning but harmless hoping players start caring about them as characters somehow? Then give them a more or less 'mundane' problem that hits the PCs on the non-lovecraftian side? But without groups offering some actual utility I can't see a group bothering and the problems caused are just another barrier to getting to the creepy mystery game the Delta Green Core wants to be.
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Oct 6, 2021 21:07
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The Dream Syndicate really feels like players in a totally different game, honestly. Vega seems like someone who gets arrested in five minutes by federal agents especially if he's dumb enough to send them malware lol. I assume at least one of the roles is forensic psychologist.
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Oct 6, 2021 21:18
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Yeah, there's no way he's sneaking his claw onto a plane.
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Oct 6, 2021 21:38
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Halloween Jack posted:Yeah, there's no way he's sneaking his claw onto a plane. Remember, Vega is apparently a stooper-genius able to outwit trained Delta Green agents with the powerz of hackerings. He certainly wouldn't get dumped into prison/a landfill half a second after the PCs meet him and figure out exactly who and what he is. I don't mind occasionally shaking things up with non-supernatural stuff. Hell, in the original X-Files, one of the absolute creepiest episodes was Season Two's "Irresistible" featuring (at the time) completely mundane killer Donnie Pfaster. I mean, I can get that yeah, sometimes the Swamp Monster really is just Old Man Buckethead in disguise trying to smuggle gold or something. However, in a game like Delta Green, poo poo like that should be very much the exception that's thrown in to surprise players expecting something genuinely supernatural/uncanny. So to have two factions/scenarios be mostly mundane (as well as written as though the agents are loving morons) is not giving me confidence about the rest of the supplements. At the least a GM will have to re-work a few things to make these situations work for their game.
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Oct 6, 2021 23:11
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The Labyrinth has some very solid ideas inside that really either belong as shotgun scenarios or just should be disconnected entirely from the bog-standard mythos canon and iterated into something else or a more fitting RPG. While I legitimately do like the idea that most of the mundane allies are going to fall prey to paranoia or problems in their ranks, I don't think they need to be institutions gone awry but just people (which is why of all of them Renko is the strongest of the allied forces in the Labyrinth IMO but I don't want to spoil on that). I think Delta Green sings a lot when you pull away from the esoteric eldritch horror and you get to just focus on the mundane for a second and show the problems in this world that still exist despite these things you can't talk about, y'know? It's going to be hard to run a DG campaign properly, and it's especially hard to show threats aimed at Helplessness, but I think it's incredibly necessary to focus on the ground level now and again to just ground everything and remind people what they're fighting for (and if you're that kind of GM make them question if it's worth being part of a fascist/anti-intellectual conspiracy that destroys everything it finds because it can't/won't contextualize what it learns if that's what you're protecting). Dawant should be a good force in that vein but probably exists best as his own independent entity that you cut and paste into a campaign as needed, and while I think it's particularly easy for a bunch of PCs to just kick down Vega's seventeen firewalls and house of cards, the entire thing doesn't really work as a series of adventures because he's easy to clown on and the core idea of a bunch of people on message board creating the new Phenom-X for the Web 2.0 and social media age is way more interesting and it's a shame they didn't go that route. As for the other friendly-ish groups, Renko's the best and I don't remember the last one's name but it's kind of forgettable and doesn't serve the point it means to make well at all. I'll probably talk about the villain factions when we start getting them but really the only one I like is The Lonely and I wouldn't use them in DG at all, I'd port them over into The Esoterrorists.
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Oct 6, 2021 23:48
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IMO Renko is emblematic of the basic problem with Labyrinth's "allied" NPCs, namely being so obviously untrustworthy that there's no way the players will get baited into the trap. He's definitely a more interesting and active threat than the other characters in the allies section.
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Oct 7, 2021 00:13
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 The Dueling Fops of Vindamere is a short (44-page), GM-less, player-versus-player RPG by Greg Stolze, in which players take the roles of sleazy, dissipated, conniving aristocrats in a fantasy city. Each player's main character is the head of a fencing school and strives to outdo the others socially, romantically, and on the dueling fields, producing a game that’s very much like Bridgerton, Dangerous Liaisons, and Cobra Kai run through a blender, with a little Fritz Leiber on top. Characters have four statistics: Foppish, Duelist, Serious, and Aristocrat. The attributes are divided into two pairs -- Foppish and Serious and Duelist and Aristocrat -- each of which must always total 10. If your Foppish is 4, your Serious is 6, and if an event makes you lose a point of Foppish, then your Serious also goes up to 7. You determine your character's Foppish and Duelist ratings at the start of the game by rolling a d6+2 for each one. Besides being used to do things, the ratings also double as hit points; if you go to 10/0 in either pair, your fop is eliminated from the game. For instance, if you’re pushed to Foppish 10/Serious 0, you drink yourself to death; if you go to Aristocrat 10/Duelist 0, you give up all this dueling nonsense to focus on your duties to your family. The fop with the highest starting Duelist rating runs the most famous school and owns Ye Baron’s Clayemorre, the trophy for winning the annual Ye Alle-Valley Fencinge Championeshippe. The rest of you get to grumble about how they bribed the judges and won with a clearly illegal maneuver. Your fop also starts with two Beloveds, minor characters who are important to them. Your Beloveds are determined by a chart roll, and can range from Scorned Lover to Badass Granny to Hot-Headed Student to Goofy-Faced Failson. You play the part of your Beloveds in scenes they’re involved in, and a big part of the game is trying to steal other players’ Beloveds. Your Beloveds start out neutral to everyone but you, but can become Infatuated with other characters. An Infatuated Beloved who gets Infatuated again becomes Devoted. The original player loses control of them and they are transferred to the player they’re Devoted to ... where they can once again become Infatuated/Devoted and swiped by someone else. A fop who has no Beloveds left is out of the game, because what’s the point of carrying on if you have no one left to love you? (Infatuation and Devotion don’t necessarily have to mean romantic passion, I should note. A Beloved who’s Infatuated with you might believe you’re a superior fencing teacher, or see you as a parental figure and want to impress you, or just like you as a good buddy and drinking companion.) Task resolution is done by a d10 roll, to which you add two of your attributes, depending on what you’re trying to do (seduction or spreading scurrilous rumors about a rival: Foppish+Aristocrat; showing off your amazing sword skillz: Duelist+Foppish; trying to injure someone for real: Serious+Duelist; asserting your superiority over the lower orders: Serious+Aristocrat, and so on). A total of 15 or more is a success, and competitions are settled by opposed rolls. A game of Fops of Vindamere covers seven scenes and is intended to be playable in a single session. It is possible to end before the seventh scene if two players are eliminated before then, or if the players all agree the game has reached a satisfying conclusion. Three scenes are mandatory: the game begins at Ye Midwinter Balle, followed by two randomly determined scenes, then Ye Springe Cotillionne, two more randomly determined scenes, and finally Ye Alle-Valley Fencinge Championeshippe, which determines once and for all who's the greatest duelist in Vindamere ... for the next year at least. Each scene specifies who’s present -- at least one fop or Beloved per player, sometimes more -- and what occurs to start the scene. This is followed by a list of possible actions in response to the scene, with required rolls and consequences for success and failure. The players, going clockwise (in odd-numbered scenes) or counterclockwise (even-numbered), describe their responses and make the appropriate checks. Some scenes can be resolved with a single action from everyone, but others have multiple stages to be resolved in turn. Results can include gain or loss of stat points, changes in the affection status of Beloveds, or more serious consequences like the death of a Beloved. Once everyone has played the scene through to the end, the group moves on to the next one. Besides the three mandatory scenes, the game includes twelve random scenes to fill out the session, including the inevitable tavern brawl, a romantic triangle, a locked-room murder mystery, a peasant revolt, an ugly breakup, and more. Since you only use four per game, there’s decent replay value there. The game finishes up with a five-page appendix on important locations in Vindamere, in particular spots frequently used for dueling. Selachian fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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Oct 7, 2021 01:16
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I think the problem with the two plots we've been shown so far is that they make good wrinkles in an encounter, but don't really have the meat to be the main drama itself. Like, Vega makes a nice little trap for careless agents who think they're dealing with a bunch of scared kids dealing with a weird supernatural experience: he's going to try to make it all about him, and if the agents don't play along, he's going to do everything in his power to turn the group against the cell or generally make a mess of the whole operation. He's a dumb hacker kid, so he's not a real threat, but he can make the situation needlessly messy in a way a DG cell doesn't like. Or a more unscrupulous cell could see that Pawar is being spied on by this creep, go directly after him and start threatening to turn stuff over to the police/expose him if he doesn't tell the agents what he knows or turn over all his records. The real meat of the mission is about whatever you're doing about the visions (there's no end of options for what you can do with that), with someone like Vega there to suddenly throw an unexpected wrench in the plan.
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Oct 7, 2021 01:27
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  Part 13: Haha Bootleg Edition goes brrr The last edition of Nightlife was published in 1993. As late as 2008, you could buy the PDFs from Tri Tac Games--they’d even send you a compact disc! But for some years now, the IP has languished with no apparent interest in republishing it. But wait...is that Bradley McDevitt’s music? quote:"gently caress You, Stellar Games."  I know I’m only getting one side of the story, but the other guys seem to have dropped off the face of the earth. Street Velocity is a 40-page free supplement for Nightlife, originally published as a series of Word documents on the Nightlife Yahoo Groups. It serves as a compilation of house rules, errata, and some expansions on the setting. There are unfinished sections and places where the text stops abruptly, unfinished, which I find charming. First, there are some small but significant changes to the basic mechanics. It’s a percentile system, like before, but the rule for degree of success has been expanded to include all rolls, not just combat. When you make your 1d100 roll and succeed, the “tens digit” measures your degree of success. (So you want to roll as high as you can without going over.) Opposed rolls between characters are won by whoever has the highest degree of success. Interestingly, you score a critical hit not by rolling 00, but by rolling your exact Skill/Edge score. You can also designate rolls as Easy or Hard by either doubling or halving the base score. Seems very swingy; I’d rather just have bonuses and penalties or use an advantage/disadvantage mechanic. Next, character creation. McDevitt suggests generating Basic Abilities by rolling 5d10, drop lowest instead of 4d10. He also suggests making a roll to see how many times you’ve died since becoming Kin. Skills are now a pool of points, 80+INT, instead of rolling a pool of d10s. PCs should also have listed Goals, which were part of the NPC writeups in the corebook. These can range from something as simple as making money to conquering the world. Factions also now give you some bonus skills. Communists get Alertness and Streetwise, Complex gangsters gets Streetwise and Underworld Etiquette (aren’t those the same thing?), Red Moonrise gangbangers get Intimidation and Streetwise, and Morningstar employees get Administration and Business. There’s nothing for Failsafe or the Laughter Factory here. Factions also give you some extra Contacts. The Commune gives you any kind you want, The Complex has gangsters, Morningstar has businesspeople, Moonrise has street thugs, Failsafe has political and military contacts, and the Laughter Factory has homeless people. The Commune, Morningstar, Red Moonrise, and Failsafe all get a mole within another faction! That said, there aren’t any guidelines on playing a group as extreme as Red Moonrise or the Laughter Factory. In addition to Contacts, you’re supposed to write out at least a little detail on people your character knows, including human friends (Crowleys) and surviving family members. You can also have a small “Flock” of Addicted mortals. A typical Commune cell--that is, a PC group--will have several Crowleys among them. There are a few small changes to Skills. Martial Arts skills get a couple new maneuvers--Kick is less accurate but does more damage, Combat Acrobatics can be used to buff your next attack roll or debuff your enemy’s. Drain can now only take a fraction of its value in SP per turn, so you can’t suck someone dry in a few seconds. A new Edge, Photogenics, makes you immune to being photographed or recorded. (The default immunity that all Kin enjoy was removed for being too unrealistic.) A large part of Street Velocity is more information on the Races of the Kin. This includes some updates to their Edges and Flaws, but it’s mostly setting information. McDevitt says that while Nightlife and Vampire are very different, White Wolf’s success convinced him that people wanted more depth to the types of characters you can play. He expanded the background of each type of Kin to include unique customs, habits, and belief systems. Wyghts even get a few pages of background devoted to their origins. Unfortunately, this also includes some White Wolf style sections of what System Mastery called “snarky bullshit,” where Manitou tell you why they’re cool and everybody else sucks. We’ll start with Wyghts, since they’re the ones who get the most  . Wyghts, like Daemons, are actually an alien species from the Twisted Dimensions. They were a dark-haired, golden-skinned people, organized into nomadic, patriarchal clans of hunter-gatherers. The environment was harsh and dangerous, made even more so by constant tribal warfare over scarce resources.(Before now, I had the impression that the Twisted Dimensions are basically Hell, rather than some parallel universe with galaxies and solar systems and literal Star Wars.) A technologically advanced species, the Fomori, invaded the Wyghts’ planet and met fierce resistance. The fighting was so bitter and prolonged that the Fomori offered a deal: give us some of your best warriors to help us invade other worlds, or we’ll blast your planet to bits. If we can’t have it, no one will. The Wyghts agreed. The Fomori changed these Wyghts to make them even more potent shock troops. This went on for centuries until the Fomori invaded another dimension--ours. Specifically, they invaded Scotland. The Scottish resistance so impressed the Wyghts that they decided to switch sides, and drove the Fomori back to the Twisted Dimensions. But in their retreat, the Fomori activated a latent curse--which is what transformed Wyghts into the shriveled, bleached, undead, lifeforce-sucking Kin we know and love. The surviving Wyghts hunted down those who gave in to being amoral monsters, which explains why Wyghts are particularly humane, despite being particularly scary. “Wyghtish society” is organized by clans that all have Celtic names--Welsh, Irish, or Scottish. There are three types of Wyghts: Brethren are deliberately Infected, Bastards are accidents, and Outcasts are, well, outcast. Clans have Patriarchs, with leadership rotating among the Elder Kin. They also have a religion, the Cult of Lug. Its principles boil down to “Help humans, fight monsters.” Wyghts now have a unique mechanic: Honor. It measures the respect of other Wyghts and recognition by the Elder Kin. Wyghts with high Honor get names like “Slayer-of-Horrors.” You can even become Patriarch by getting enough Honor and fighting all your Wyght Dads in hand-to-hand combat. I would never, ever use this. It doesn’t even operate on a 00-100 scale; it can be negative or positive without limit. You gain Honor by performing valorous deeds, and a high Honor actually makes Edges cheaper to buy. (I suppose cheaper Edges is not a bad advantage for Kin who have a Flaw that makes them look inhuman.) Wyghts also get some new Edges: Carapace turns your skin into a hard shell. It’s cheaper than Armour, but obvious, and needs to be activated to work. Growth lets you grow to enormous size. You get a bonus to STR, Armour, and SP, but also become less accurate and much easier to hit. You can only maintain it for Score/5 turns, after which it has a cooldown that can last a few days. And remember, your clothes and equipment don’t grow with you. Vampyres aren’t much different from the published version. They began as a cult in Northern Africa...that’s it. (Remember when I said that there are places where the text just stops?) Vampyres, even more than most Kin, have strong social bonds from one “generation” to the next, and the expectation that you “raise” your progeny and teach them what’s up. These relationships work out much better with people who are willingly Infected. Relations between “siblings” Infected by the same “parent” are often strong and cut across factional lines. There’s a list of small factions within Vampyre society. The Feast of Blood takes its name from the original novel featuring Varney the Vampire. They’re not exactly pro- or anti-human. Thanatos is a small cadre of wealthy Vampyres looking to help each other get even richer. The Sanguine Sisterhood is a woman-only group of Vampyres with strong feminist politics. A breakaway group, Carmilla, are lesbian-only and refuse to feed from men. The Blood of Christ Congregation is a Vampyric religion. Christian, very pro-human, and like to point out the parallels between Christ’s resurrection and that of Vampyres. (I don’t think I mentioned it before, but it takes three days.) The Brotherhood of the Firstborn believe that the first Vampyres are gods worthy of worship. “They spend a lot of time and money tracking down members of the tribe of [text cuts off].” I love this. In McDevitt’s house rules, Vampyres get an additional Flaw: Death Stench. Being reanimated corpses, their breath smells loving terrible, and even high Humanity doesn’t help. “For this reason, many use lots of breath mints.” Manitou get the most White Wolfy writeup of all the Kin. It’s written in-character, and it’s like, listen, my child, we are the sons of the Moon and the daughters of the Sun, the Badger is your uncle, and never forget that the rocks and the trees and the crawfish are your cousins, blah blah blah, we are Manitou. I do like the way it acknowledges how, despite being “nature spirits,” Manitou are created by Infection. (Also, the published version of Nightlife calls them Inuit, which McDevitt corrected to Manitou here. It was much-needed.) Manitou society is divided into “tribes,” but there’s no pretense of corresponding to real indigenous culture. Tribes are usually just all-Manitou cells of a few people, like the ones who run the Magic Bus. There is an anti-human, Manitou-only faction, an eco-terrorist organization called Nokomis’ Fist. (This just reminds me of the I Love Lucy episode where they put on redface and sing The Song of Hiawatha.) Manitou are the only Kin who get a section listing their stereotypical attitudes toward every other type of Kin. Surprise surprise, they’re snobs who look down on everyone else. Vampyres are unnatural, Werewolves are violent, Daemons are mean, Wyghts are pitiful, Animates are unnatural and mean, Ghosts are supposed to be dead, and Sorcerers are loving around with unnatural forces. It sucks. Rules-wise, Manitou get a change to their Flaws. Instead of being repulsed by holy objects, they’re vulnerable to toxic waste. They also take damage and lose Humanity for doing anything that “harms nature.” They also get several new Edges. Cold Snap causes frostbite, while Heat Stroke causes, well, you know. Drum lets you mess with someone’s heart rate, which can both do harm and treat someone having heart problems. Quake lets you do the video game thing where you punch the ground and knock people down. This is a good time to say that Manitou are my least favourite type of Kin. The indigenous stereotypes are a good enough reason on their own. Even setting that aside, Manitou are just people with superpowers. They don’t need to Drain, and they have no serious Flaws. (I, too, am vulnerable to toxic chemicals. That’s why they’re toxic.) There’s no downside to being Manitou whatsoever, and thus no tension. They’re a bunch of hippie Planeteers who get to crow about how they’re better and more “natural” than everyone else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvEb9jU8O5M Ghosts are now called Shades. Unlike Manitou and Wyghts, they have no complex society of their own. Most of the updates here are mechanical. There is a Shades-only, extremely anti-human faction called Hiroshima Dawn, formed in the wake of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atrocities. They want to incite World War III, so that they can rule a world populated only by Shades. They’re opposed by the Lodge of the Honorable Dead, a pro-human Shade society led by Taw-Sureh. Shades no longer have the Corporeality Edge. Instead, they have a power called Tangibility--it’s not an Edge because it has no score and costs nothing to use. Shades can only remain tangible for as long as they maintain concentration, so things like suffering injury or making Fear Tests provoke a WILL Test to stay tangible. For a game that accommodates plenty of combat and dungeoncrawling, I don’t think it’s a great idea. Shades now have Anchors and Chains, instead of a single Relic. Chains can be places, objects, or Goals. All Shades have 2-6 Chains, randomly rolled, with 300 “Chain points” divided among them. The strongest one is the Anchor, where the Shade rests each day. You can spend Humanity points to strengthen Chains, but there aren’t really rules for losing points anyway. Shades also get some new Edges. Lambent makes you glow, becoming a mobile light source. Death Pangs incapacitates victims by making them feel the pain of your own violent death. Knock curses a victim, penalizing their LUCK Tests, while Wail Drains Willpower. Shiv is an alternative to Claws that lets you manifest a weapon. Stretch lets you play Mister Fantastic. The writeup on Daemons gives us some background on their culture, since they’re an alien species from another dimension. To clear up some things, the “Demons” that enslaved Daemons in the Twisted Dimensions are the same Fomori who enslaved the Wyghts. Daemonic culture is matriarchal, divided into “Creches” ruled by female Elders. Marriages are typically arranged, and property passes through the female line. These Elders defer to a Queen of all Daemons. That is, reluctantly, WO Babylon, who is Queen by virtue of being the oldest and strongest. Some Daemons reject this tradition for various reasons. (Norcross, the CEO of Morningstar, would like to become the first Daemonic King.) Daemons have long names in the Demonic language which convey their ancestry. Although Daemons have a habit of manipulating and using humans, their history with slavery motivates a lot of them to fight in wars of liberation--they had a hand in the Underground Railroad and the early Republican Party. They’re hostile toward Kin like Hafgryr and Rakshasa, who are willing to work for the Fomori. Daemons tend to be arrogant towards other Kin besides Wyghts, who also resisted the Fomori. A couple of Daemonic religions are given. The Church of the Black Towers worships the original Daemonic deities, the Invinati, and teaches that Daemons will return in triumph to their home dimension some day. The vast majority of religious Daemons are members of the Church. The Children of the True Masters are a sinister cult of Fomori-worshippers, who only elect male clergy to spite Daemonic tradition. The only significant mechanical change to Daemons is in their Flaws. While almost every other Kin is vulnerable to fire, Daemons are extremely resistant to it. They also get the Burn Edge. Not really necessary, since they already have Fiery Breath. Werewolves don’t get a lengthy treatment. Despite their kinship with pack animals, they have few societies of their own. The Way of the Berserker are Nordic neo-pagans who believe that it’s good to be in touch with their bestial side, but not when losing control. They’re required to learn meditation techniques and take an oath to help other Weres. Feral is what Werewolves call Weres who reject both Kin and human society, living as animals in the wilderness. Most Werewolves leave them alone, but some seek them out, assuming they must be learning cool, unique Edges out there. Mechanically, Werewolves get a “Beast score,” the combination of their Lupine Form and Lyncanthropic Form Edge scores, divided by 10. It’s a negative modifier to interacting with normal people. I’m not a fan of this unique mechanic either. Animates are the loneliest Kin. They don’t have a culture, or even a lineage, since many of them are created spontaneously by unknown forces. They tend to be egocentric and self-involved; some even believe that they created themselves, living acts of will given form. They usually view humans and even other Kin with greater or lesser contempt. In addition to the published rules for Animates made out of different materials, there are more modifiers based on how they were created. “Reborn” Animates were humans recreated as Animates, or created by a human act of Will, like Adam Noire and Wally AshWits. The Engendered were created deliberately by someone else, and the Self-Created were just somehow created spontaneously. Unlike other Kin, Humanity doesn’t affect how much Animates are hurt by their Flaws. Instead, their Humanity score acts as an upper limit on social Skill Tests when dealing with humans. Only one uniquely Animate faction is detailed: The Brethren of the New Flesh. They believe that Animates should rule the world, both humans and other Kin. They’re even willing (and somehow able) to work with the Virus to achieve their goals. The next chapter of Street Velocity concerns magic. Since we haven’t gone over that sourcebook, there’s not much to tell, and a lot of this is just tweaks to how various spells work. But there are a few things of interest. First is a note on “Fomoric Temptation.” The Fomori want allies on Earth, and one of the ways they do this is by offering magical power to covens of sorcerers. They can “lend” stat points in Magic that can be distributed among members of a subverted coven. They can also offer covens new and more powerful Black Magic spells from the Twisted Dimensions. Second is a couple of covens. The Coven of the Burning Spear is the biggest manufacturer of magical weapons on the East Coast. They’re basically amoral arms dealers, but they won’t sell to extreme anti-human factions like Moonrise. The Cult of the Horned God is one of the biggest covens in the world, with over 3000 members worldwide and almost 80 in the New York area. They’re devout Wiccans. Finally, the Green Card Club is one of the only Black Magic covens that is well-known. They hire themselves out as assassins. There’s also some purely aesthetic background on how different types of spells create different aesthetic effects, what it actually looks like when Sorcerers suffer the draining effects of spellcasting, and so on. Just stuff to help you visualize using magic beyond “I spend 10 SP to cast Fireball.” The last part of Street Velocity is a City Planner’s Section, written with the aim of fleshing out the setting. First is a note on Kin population. From McDevitt’s point of view, some of the population figures in the published are just implausible. Remember the Kin street gangs I discussed? Most of these gangs have dozens of Kin members, while controlling one neighbourhood in Manhattan. (The Slay-Riders control half of Greenwich Village, and there are 150 of them.) McDevitt says to cut that down to 10 or 20%, with the rest being human affiliates. It makes a lot of sense. The rarest Other Kin, like Medusae, may only have a handful of living members worldwide. This is followed by a longer section on Feeding. The essence of it is that since most Kin need to Drain to live, their feelings about it are as rich and complex as people’s feelings about food and sex. Vampyres and other blood-drinkers tend to feed during sexual or otherwise physically intimate encounters. Most blood-drinkers can Addict mortals, and some Kin pursue serious relationships with their victims while others want to keep things no-strings-attached. You could say that some make feeding part of their relationship, while others make a relationship part of feeding. Because their Drain is addictive, a Vampyre should have little trouble splitting the difference and finding a circle of willing suckbuddies. Then there are callous, anti-human Kin who are perfectly willing to use seduction to obtain victims, but don’t give a drat about how they leave them. (Anti-human Kin seem to prefer to Drain ‘em and dump ‘em, rather than maintain a deeply manipulative, abusive relationship.) For Kin who drain lifeforce, or youth, or bioelectricity, feeding is somewhat more removed. It can be intimate, but this type of feeding can be accomplished with nothing more than a firm handshake. Psychologically, this is easier than biting someone to drink their blood, though the Humanity cost is no different. It’s also possible to feed on someone in full view of other mortals without anyone understanding what happened. Daemons enjoy feeding coupled with physical intimacy, but they’re taught to keep themselves at an emotional distance from their victims. Since Wyghts Drain youth, they don’t like to Drain victims to death and avoid elderly victims, because it leaves a shriveled corpse. Fear is a more tricky kind of feeding. People aren’t as scared of ghosts as they used to be, and many take the existence of an afterlife as a comfort, so simply materializing usually isn’t enough. Shades often have to use Fear Projection to set up their victims for Draining. (It doesn’t mention Ekimmu, but they probably have no trouble feeding when they drop their Mask and reveal themself as a rotting corpse.) Fortunately, Shades don’t need to Drain regularly. Kin who feed by maiming people or eating their flesh have it tough. The Commune frowns on it, obviously, and even the more genteel anti-human factions disdain the mess and the attention it brings. (Morningstar keeps Trolles around for muscle, but they don’t get invited to the company Christmas party.) Since Werewolves don’t need to Drain, many see it as a last-ditch resort, and some would rather die than feed on the agony of a mangled victim. Races like Hafgryr have no compunction about eating people, and Rakshasa can even cause Addiction, forcing people to desire being eaten. Hey, Barker and Schow are right there in the list of inspirations. Here’s a house rule for Kin feeding on other Kin: You get way more SP, five for one. Draining another Kin to death causes the True Death. But among Kin this is considered cannibalism, and it’s one of very few things that will get members of all factions to hunt you down and kill you. There’s also a rule on feeding after resurrection. When Kin die and come back, you roll a Maximum Humanity Test. Each degree of success gives you 10 minutes to find food without going berserk. Even then, you can make another roll to avoid attacking a loved one or just attacking someone in the middle of Times Square. Speaking of Barker and Schow, there’s some very brief advice on GMing, starting with “the gross-out.” Simply put, don’t be afraid to describe violence in grisly detail. Don’t trigger your players, but also don’t reduce the act of murder to “You gain 8 Survival Points and lose 12 Humanity Points.” Another important setting detail, which was left out of the published version, is sexuality. New York City has the largest population of LGBTQ people in the United States. Many Kin are queer in some way; the lifespan of Kin lends itself to growing and changing sexually, and some have very unusual tastes--Vampyres, for example, may be more interested in blood play than anything else. McDevitt advises you to gloss over sexuality if it makes people at the table uncomfortable, and always, always eschew puerile, hateful stereotypes. The next-to-last bit of GM advice is ignoring the dice. Never let them dictate the story! Finally, the most important NPC in Nightlife isn’t Golgotha...it’s your version of New York City. The setting as you’ve established it is the most important storytelling tool. That's all of Street Velocity. The ideas here are a mixed bag, but if nothing else I appreciate the LGBTQ inclusion and at least trying to deal with the issue of "Inuit" as a PC race of nature spirits. Sorry about the total lack of cool art; that's why I had to throw the bit from Wigstock in there. Next Chapter: I’m doing this whole product line in order of publication. I’m not going to be able to post these at the same rate I did the corebook, because I haven’t read all the books yet. But coming up next is:  Can Stellar Games improve on Vampire’s problem of putting Wizard Supremacy bullshit in their urban horror-fantasy game? I don’t know yet. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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Oct 7, 2021 02:39
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I love that cat.
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Oct 7, 2021 06:32
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Precambrian posted:I think the problem with the two plots we've been shown so far is that they make good wrinkles in an encounter, but don't really have the meat to be the main drama itself.
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Oct 7, 2021 16:23
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Degenesis: Exalters That’s right folks, you can’t escape it.  As work on the next metaplot book moves on, the “writers” at SIXMOREVODKA have been releasing these little 30-40 page books, and they basically seem to alternate between little setting books and adventures and that would take 1-2 sessions. I haven’t been covering them mostly because, well, while the adventures themselves are bad, they don’t interest/infuriate me enough to motivate me to do another write-up. Here’s a quick summary of them though, in case anyone gives a poo poo.  There’s a few different Clan supplement (Clans of the Moloch, Rhone, and Frontier) books that add a bit of non-metaplot lore and different progression/ranks, they’re mostly boring as poo poo and the only thing I remember really are the Pictons. The Maruader Argyre keeps a bunch of british techno-barbarian savages hopped-up on a mixture of drugs and farmed algae, and sends them out to gently caress up Space Musk’s evil plots. They’re not really playable (what with being mind-controlled drug-addicted slaves) but they’re got word count devoted to full-progression tables for some reason. Last Watch basically a tower defence scenario with two friendly npcs and a bunch of Cockroach barbarians (basically the muscled rape cannibal clan) trying to murder you. The only way to not die is to eventually find and activate an ancient minefield left behind by the Exalters. One of the friendly npcs shows up in another adventure. Pnuemancers is a bit more interesting than the other clan books, there’s a bit of really dumb metaplot in it. A really important part of the clan’s history is when a large meteor slammed into the city of Nupellia and killed most of the ruling Taunar clan, the books hint that it wasn't just some rock but doesn’t really say much more than that. Pnuemancers straight up reveals that Triglaw straight up hacked an orbital spacecraft full of 100’s cascade sleepers, which then caused it to crash into the city. The plan was they were supposed to stay up there in cryosleep until the world below had been prepared for them by the other sleeper cascades, whereupon they’d complete the last step of Gerome Getrell’s (evil space Elon Musk) evil plan. (As a quick reminder, Sleepers are sorted into different cascades and tattooed as such, and they get more powerful as they go. A 500 will have better memetic training and nanomachines than a 600 cascade for example.) In turns out their nanomachines were so potent that one of the sleepers who should have died instead turned into some sort of grey-goo sphere thing, everyone at the crash site was basically consumed for their carbon as the nanite intelligence thing expanded and grew larger. Luckily, the Marauder Gusev showed up a couple days later and traded them seeds that literally grew a wall of thorns around it, keeping both sunlight and people away from it. The sphere is still active but is still slowly dying. Gusev was able to extract some of the nanties, and the person who used to have the nanites in them was high-up in GG’s plan so that’s probably a lot of important intelligence stored within. The book neglects today what Gusev learned from the nanites though, no big surprise there. Oh, and one more thing. Apparently all of the 100’s cascade of sleepers all have had their literal DNA re-written with nanomachines so that they’re literal half-clones of GG. Apparently the final stages of his plan are so important he can only entrust it to himself, or some poo poo. Lex Talionis is basically a prisoner transport adventure, in which the Judges want the party to escort this one VIP prisoner to a Anabaptist town for a high-level prisoner exchange, and as you can imagine it’s all hush-hush. You also can’t play it if you have any Chronicler PCs, like it just flat out does not work. The Judges are doing all sorts of poo poo to keep it on the DL because they don’t want the Chroniclers finding out about this guy for reasons, and will refuse to involve any loyal Chroniclers with the operation. The adventure itself is filled with all sorts of dumb moments, like when a group of black black-clad Jehammedan assassins literally camouflage themself in a herd of all-white goats, in fact they’re so well hidden the book doesn’t even bother to give you a roll to spot them before they attack your horse drawn armoured carriage. I’m also a big fan of how the prisoner knows some memes and unless you make a difficult check you’ll just automatically let him go at one stage. Aside from that, it’s not super objectionable from what I remember. Just kinda boring, if a little more open that their previous adventures. There’s bits that allow for some divergence at least. And that brings us up to speed. I wanted to do this book because as I was covering the adventures and later sourcebooks of Degensis, JcDent was covering the corebooks and how the Exalters were portrayed seemed to vary quite a bit. So, I figured covering their sourcebook would be worthwhile. But first, I need to show ya’ll their new disclaimer. First, a little bit of context. The mini adventure Rising Ravens ( it takes place in between the second and third metaplot adventures) has a scene in which you have to roll to resist what is basically a gross old lady trying to rape one of the PC’s she’s attracted to. Fail, and she fucks you. So uh, some folks new to Degenesis found this scene, and went on their discord to basically ask “the gently caress is this?” They mostly got mocked for not understanding mature themes or whatever the gently caress, but the drama was big enough that Marko crafted this new disclaimer page that now comes as a separate page (it’s not actually a part of any book lol, it’s just in the unzipped folder as another single page doc).  I just wanted everyone to see one of the worst content warnings I’ve ever seen. No mention of fading to black or any other tools for managing touchy themes. Even when doing a content warning SMV still manages to be shitters, which is honestly kind of inspiring. It takes work to be that much of a tool. Anyways, onto the main event!   Ya’ll remember how VTM would just quote music lyrics in jumbled layouts? Marko sure does, and still thinks it’s cool. The Exalter Clan finds it’s origins in the Era of the Beast, the time after the apocalypse in which everything was poo poo and the people were dumb barbarians who killed each other with rocks over scraps of food. Not really much in the way of culture or society here, is what I’m driving at. A nameless tribe that’s wandering around suddenly discovers a large, warm concrete building, and as they took shelter there they followed the geometric patterns along the walls and felt like they belonged there. As you have probably already guessed, this concrete building was the city of Exalt, or at leas the superstructure that Project Free Spirit finished prior to the end of the world. Exalt was born out of one of the two competing visions for humanity that Gerome Getrell had. Whereas Project Tannhauser was all about freezing the elites of Bygone humanity and having them take control over the post-apocalyptic barbarians with memes, Project Free Spirit was all about cutting off centuries of cultural cruft and uniting humanity under one culture, and one vision. The city itself would shape whomever settled in Exalt in a perfect monoculture that lacked all the baggage of previous human cultures. Beneath the city lies a large maze, filled with massive black basalt pillars. For the first couple years it didn’t really do anything and the nameless tribe didn’t think much of it. However, they discovered that if you enter the maze from different entrances and certain times, different areas will come to life and grant access to additional pathways and previously locked rooms. Eventually some of the braver tribe members climbed the Basalt pillars, and things really came to life. Those that mastered the challenges of the maze that they eventually called the Grindworks “emerged forever changed, as a living part of a synergistic group. United.” While other tribes were still making rat traps from salvaged wire and old table legs, these guys were so in sync they were creating new forms of mathematics while they built granite skyscrapers. Everyone needs to read this next page.  Setting aside just how loving stupid it is taking VTM’s RP archetypes and making them immutable in-game psychological phenotypes, I just cannot get over the libertarian wank fest that is this page. The fatal flaw of humanity is that unity is impossible? Get the gently caress out of there with that poo poo. (Also, as someone that once worked as a cleaner in a slaughterhouse, let me tell you they don’t walk in willingly. Your metaphors suck Marko) Anyways, by the time the first sleeper cascade wakes up Exalt has been going for a while and is easily Borca’s most advanced settlement. The Chroniclers are few in number and the Spitalians are still hiding away in the Spital at this time. Team Castor (sleepers) receives a mental reprogramming signal sent by one the Marauders to go and gently caress up Exalt, because gently caress GG and anything that bastard touched. However, due to issues with PT they woke up too late and Exalt was already established and thriving. Each time an Exalter walks the Grindworks they remove any trace of memetic programming, so they can’t infiltrate them with mind control memes, and they don’t have enough men for a war. Yet. GG really wanted Free Spirit to succeed (it seems PT was meant mostly as antagonists for FS and not really as an alternative plan), so he planted a mole in Team Castor. Agent Daimondal, one of the seven Free Spirit agents. While the rest of Team Castor is bringing the other societies of Borca together, Daimondal ventures to Exalt and shares GG’s wisdom with them. Eventually he becomes friends with them, and is allowed access to the Grindworks himself. He leads expeditions that uncover a ton of new tech and knowledge, but he’s only one man and can only do so much. (The Grindworks is also guarded against anyone with nanites in their blood, so he has to wear a dangerous nanite blocker helmet which only works for a few hours). Exalt needs more people. So Daimondal seeds a few prophecies here and there, and eventually some Palers from a nearby dispenser (Sleeper cyro-bunkers) come to Exalt, where the Grindworks purges the memetic conditioning from their minds.  This is Daimondal with his special nanite blocker helmet. No, I don’t know why he looks like a Mysterio knockoff. I’m sure it has nothing to do with Marko’s day job and a lack of imagination. While Exalt is all perfect and poo poo, the Anabaptists are watching and really not liking what they see. Apparently a society with no leaders that functions basically as a hive-mind is kinda unnerving, who knew? Their materialistic philosophies are abhorrent to the religious Anabaptists, and they get together with the other cultures of Borca and form a ring around Exalt. Lets stave these atheist bastards out basically, and if they step over his line, it’s war. Exalt shrugs and just sends out cultural ambassadors to preach their ways. While some do get the King Leonidas treatment, others find success. The city of Ferrapol soon declares itself an outpost of Exalt.  Setting aside the facist overtones that seem to imply literally all modern culture is corrupt and needs to be utterly destroyed, this text block tells me that Marko knows gently caress all about history. Claiming that your fictional city state (whose influence is mostly confined to post-apocalyptic Germany and eastern France) has had more influence that loving America is certainly a dumb take in a game line filled with moronic views. Anyways, Exalt’s history is grouped into three phases. The Rise, the Peak, and the Fall. During the Rise Exalt is boring (peaceful). They accept anyone who comes, expand in and entirely peaceful manner when their neighbours voluntarily accept their ways. Human knowledge advances and everyone is happy. The experiment so far is a smashing success, and Exalt is truly the city atop the hill. Yawn. The Peak is where things start to get interesting. Nobody can say exactly when or why, but Exalt’s foreign policy shifts from openness and benevolence to outright hostility. Ambassadors to city-states that had kept refusing Exalt no longer brought Exalt’s philosophy, but instead brought demands for tribute and vassalization. Things get really hairy when two Free Spirits (Trice and Enceph) lead different armies across the border the Anabaptists set. Rumor has it they declared a hunt on the Marauders, with Enceph heading north into Briton to hunt Argyre and Trice heading south to hunt Gusev in his hidden city of Nochet. While the northern army has more success (and almost gets Argyre) the southern army is pretty much obliterated by a coalition of Enemoi and AUSUMOS (robots). All the important NPCs survive in these wars, ‘cause metaplot. As you can guess, the Fall is when things really go to poo poo. During this time even PT is having a bad time (thanks largely to Aspera telling the Chroniclers about the Sleepers and helping them root them out). This is when Exalt starts experimenting with the Grindworks by doing heinous poo poo and then using said techno-maze to wipe away their guilt, it’s all part of some dumb transhuman project.  You heard it here first folks, ultimate freedom means humans descend into loving their family members in public. Into this mess of sexual depravity (always Marko’s lazy go-to whenever he needs to drive across the point that these are bad guys) comes the end of Exalt, the City Wars. But first, for some reason the text jumps back in time a bit. It keeps playing fast and loose with its timeline, and I hate it. Anyways, the Free Spirit Daimondal and his Paler Halos explore the Grindworks for literally over a century, bringing back their finds and delivering them to the Exalters above. Eventually Daimondal realizes two things. First off, this stone techno-maze is like GG’s brain, its shifting corridors and unlocked rooms are like neural pathways and memory storage centres. Wow, so deep. He also somehow (it doesn’t say how, he just does) realizes that there are other sleeping free spirits like him down here, and he needs to wake them up. For some reason GG designed the Grindworks so that everything has a cost, and when he frees Enceph he loses several Halos to the dangers of the Grindworks. Ditto with Trice. I’m not really sure why you’d purposely design these unavoidable drawbacks, and the best the text comes up with is “He is certain that the Grindworks is a series of balances and scales: for every reward there must be a price.” Except at other times in the book it describes people and descending into it over and over without consqeuence, especially in the later days when they're experiment with it's ability to remove guilt. So I dunno how it's supposed to work, maybe we'll find out in the next book. Anyways, Trice and Enceph are kinda problematic. Not because of any gross poo poo, but because they clash with the themes of the Exalters. Remember all the stuff about Exalters being perfectly in sync, having no leaders, not needing to be compelled to do things? I do, and when the text describes these nanite superpeople emerging from cryosleep and emerging as warlords, I find myself scratching my head. Anyways, they position themselves as harbingers of judgment, warlords who can lead the Exalters against the myriad of enemies that surround them. This is when they launch their (ultimately unsuccessful) raids against Gusev and Argyre. However, Daimondal knows he isn’t done with just them. In the very center of the Grindworks, at a place nobody has yet breached called the Golden City, lies Cultrin. After he wakes him up, Cultrin is let free while the doors slam shut, leaving Daimondal trapped inside, forever. Get hosed I guess. That’s what 100 years of service gets you. He's still down there, waiting for rescue from an Exalter skilled enough to make it to the center of the Grindworks. Cultrin emerges, decides that this incestuous society isn’t quite lovely enough, and they could really take things up a notch by becoming fascist imperialists as well. ”Exalters” posted:Cultrin’s speeches crack the atmosphere of the Exaltian paradigm, grant focus to the empire, and lock their cross-hairs on the conclusive target. There’s a world out there, ready for the taking. The humanitarian imperative can only be truly victorious if enacted in totality – not as a gentle breeze or a whispered offer, but as an unavoidable ultimatum. Acquiescence or death. Exalt rumbles, spurred into action as it sheds the haze of a century of relativism. Cultrin is the lightning bolt of energy that ignites the golden civilization with ambition and determination. To become exalted, Mankind must be embossed. Every last one of them. Keep in mind, this is a society that up until this point had been largely peaceful and benevolent, but more importantly they were almost psionically linked. They were perfectly unified, so much so that other nations couldn’t even engage in traditional diplomacy with them because they had no leaders or political systems that fit within the traditional paradigms. And yet, nanite Hitler comes along after they gently caress their aunt a few times and now they’re ready to drown Germany in blood with him at their head. It’s a pretty big paradigm shift that isn’t really adequately addressed. Furthermore, at times the book seems to imply that the decay of Exalt wasn’t intended, and that the experiments the Exalters undertook to transcend ethics weren’t meant to happen. And yet, the Free Spirits Daimondal awakens are clearly meant to be aggressive military leaders who channel the current zeitgeist and turn it outwards. However, Exalt society only changes because the Exalters themselves are falling into decay thanks to their experiments. It’s like the experiment itself was designed to fail, and the clashing themes make for a confusing read.  There’s nothing new here about the actual City Wars themselves. Exalt’s superior tech and Cultrin’s leadership carries them to victory after victory for a while, but Anabaptist hordes, Enemoi, AUSUMOS, and various Clans manage to hold them off long enough for the tide to shift. The Mother of Ravens uses memes to kidnap Cultrin and mindwipe him. For some reason the disappearance of one guy throws a society that was “backed by a flat hierarchy without leadership” and its army into complete disarray. When the book talks about the descent of Exalt, it never says that they lost this unity (only that they started doing heinous poo poo and then using the Grindworks to wipe their memories), so it’s not clear why the loss of one leader was so utterly devastating to them. It probably didn’t help that the Spitalians had some biological WMD’s given to them by Gusev, which they planted back in Exalter territory behind the battle lines. The plagues within these canisters infected a culture already infested with hereditary diseases (thanks to all that sibling fuckin’) and utterly ravaged them. The army heard about this and rushed back to Exalt itself to save what was left of their future reinforcements. When they got back Daimondal wasn’t there to help them explore the Grindworks, and he was the only one with the helmet that let a nantie-implanted person inside safely. Enceph tried once and almost died, and Trice refused to try at all. All the other Exalters didn’t have anywhere close to the mastery that Daimondal had, and their people were dying. So they got impatient, (they lacked a cure for these newly engineered plagues) and started trying to blast their way in. A lot of Exalters didn’t like that, what with the Grindworks essentially being a sacred place, cue a civil war amongst the plague ridden survivors. That’s pretty much the end for Exalt proper. Thousands do flee the city, but those that aren’t killed or enslaved by a Borca that hates them are few in number. The only ones to get off relatively okay as those who make it to the city of Liqua. In decades past the rulers of Liqua were Sleepers, and the Liquans rose up and threw off their influence. They saw something of themselves and their own history in the refugee Exalters (puppets of nanite superpeople), and let them establish a quarter in the city. When I say this book is confusing, it’s because of stuff like this. ”wut” posted:The rise of Exalt was meteoric. From the mills of the Grindworks, a civilization without dead ends emerged – one that avoided failures and was inherently ripe with possibility. The years 2146 to 2482, more than three prosperous centuries, resembled nothing less than a golden age for the city and its people that could have been the blueprint for the entire Black Lung and, ultimately, Europe as a whole. I mean, it only took them three centuries to think “hey, what would happen if I hosed my kid’s dead corpse in the town square before using lostech to wipe my memories?” How perfect were they really? The Exalters that survived have kept their history alive and have tried to reclaim Exalt three times, with each attempt ending in failure. They’d either get sold out by Scrappers, savaged by barbarian clanners, or get lost within the guts of the ruined Grindworks. However, they’re nothing if not stubborn, and are determined to reclaim the untarnished part of their humanitarian legacy. In order to get powerful enough to set themselves against the powers that be, they’ll have to start up the Grindworks again. That means killing anyone currently occupying it, restoring it’s failing power supply, and walking the maze once again. Currently, the Exlaters are gathering in Neo-Exalt, a city quarter of the water city of Liqua. Ther current leader plays at being a bigger idiot than he is, while his city guards are all wearing terrible uniforms and are equipped with caveman-teir weaponry. They look about as well trained as a bunch of drunken monkeys. The current crop of Exalters stay alive by appearing to be a nonthreatening clan unworthy of serious regard, all the while maintaining the last bits of their culture in hidden, yet well fortified city blocks. While they gather their strength, the Free Spirit Enceph hides within Liqua as well. While she cannot penetrate the grindworks herself (and got super-hosed on the one attempt she did make) she can prepare others. She’s spent the time since the fall of Exalt mapping the movements of the Grindwork’s explorers, interviewing the oldest members of the clan, and collecting intel from her Halo minions. She’s put together a decent package of knowledge, which she then carefully shares with promising young Exalters. Those Exalters gather into scouting parties called Constellations (which share a Concept and a goal), led by an Apex. An Apex is a leader who’s been to the Grindworks and has been Embossed (basically let it work its meme magic on perfecting your psyche). Getting to Exalt itself is tricky, it now lies in an area controlled by the Cockroaches and the Bale Lords, and there’s only one road that will take you along the 100 mile journey. You need to pay off Scrapper thugs for supplies, pay for guides along the route, and probably fight a few cannibals looking for a meal of long pig. The Constellations that do make it spend about a month there, mapping out the terrain, affecting repairs, and killing intruders before returning back to Liqua. Eventually, they play to return to Exalt in force once it’s been made ready for them.  This is what a modern day Exalter looks like. Apparently a lot of them dye their white and paint their skin with ash in remembrance of their Paler Halo allies. The next section (and last few pages) is basically what would be their writeup in the main book, basically a short blurb on who they are + their Clan rank structure and special mechanics. Exalters get to choose five skills to be preferred at chargen (+1), the ability to purchase the Apex potential (which requires a fuckton of XP thanks to the pre-reqs and the necessity to be Embossed, so basically not goona happen anytime soon if at all for a PC), and whatever benefits come with the ranks that they achieve.   I wanted to post these two images mostly because it really points out how the text just outright contradicts itself over and over. It’s written with a fairly neutral tone and there’s no mention or hint of what could be construed as this book being delivered by an unreliable narrator or anything, aside from a brief nod that the conventional attitudes towards Exalt were written by the victors of the City Wars. But you’ll constantly get reminded over and over about how Exalt was this perfectly united ultra-liberal community where people never submitted to authority, because they were so perfect they didn’t need too. And yet, all that goes out the window as soon as the Free Spirit agents emerge from cryosleep. Anyways, here’s the Exalter clan rank ladder. The book does adequately explain how now that the remnants of the clan don’t have access to the Grindworks and the benefits it provided, they were forced to assume some structures and have leaders in place.  Imperfects are bottom tier bitches, they get nothing besides a token to prove they’re an Exalter, and are limited to t3 tech. The only way to advance (aside from going to the Grindworks) is to climb the clan ladder in Liqua. Solemns are philosopher-priests who keep alive the memories of Exalt’s glorious paradigm, and serve as ambassadors and spies. They get +3 resources to be used for bribes (they like to infiltrate and destabilize enemy orgs), but if you fail the roll you get -1 to this bonus. If you hit 0 you get called back to Liqua for “readjustments.” Benigns are creepy as gently caress. ”yeesh” posted:The core philosophy of the Exalters recognizes no difference between the human elements of the empire and the equipment, material, and constructions that make up its infrastructure. All of the pieces of the grand puzzle have their own blemishes, conditions, and breaking points, the only difference is whether blood or oil flows through them. After all, just as an engine can be sent into a workshop, so too can a person be sent down into the Grindworks and return as an improved, refocused version of themselves. It’s all the same, in the end. Anyone unnerved that the people of Marko’s perfect libertarian wankfest cannot tell the difference between a machine and a human being? Anyways, they get medical or engineering tools, and something called a Pattern Weaver. Those are detailed in this release’s companion book, but basically it’s a high-tech monocular eyepiece+earbud that gives you a bonus to a couple different skill combos as it recognizes patterns in the environment and relays that info to you. Vigils are the fighty ones. They find lost Exalters and return them to Liqua, as well as escorting other Exalters on dangerous missions. They get bonuses to Ego recovery and their Resources/Authority background increase by +3 while other Exalters are in danger. They get a bunch of equipment like Exalter Battle Armour (not all that great tbh, it’s not power armour and is worse than the Hellvetic harness), a Type-97 rifle (basically a modern cartridge rifle that far outclasses the lovely muskets of the Judges), a sword, frag grenades, and something called Pasiphae’s Stride. Flipping over to the next book, we find that’s a powered exoskeleton that gives you a big boost to BOD+Athletics. However, they’re only meant to work within Exalt’s city limits and lock up when you take them far enough away. So they’re basically useless unless you happen to be right there. Ariadnes are Exalters trained how to run the Grindworks thanks to Enceph’s reconstructed notes and maps. Sometimes they go in themselves to be Embossed, and sometimes they’re guides for someone else. The latter is risky. They get a map of Exalt with notes on it, plus a Delver’s Crest. It’s basically a metal circle that predicts threats and draws lasers towards them to warn you, and gives you a +1 to both defenses if the threat is less than 25m away. Imperatives are leaders who have to guide the clan. That;s basically it. They get a symbol that says as such, and gives them a big bonus to social rolls with other Exalters. Zodiacs fulfill a role the Exalters never needed until Exalt fell. Back in the good’ol days, Constellations arose naturally for whatever task was ahead. Nowadays that doesn’t happen naturally, so the Zodiacs test other Exalters to divine their concept and construct these Constellations manually. “They assemble the expeditions to Exalt, assign duties, and provide instructions as to which Alignment is necessary to propel the Clan onwards.” They get basic meme training and +2 to discover and Exalter’s Concept. Concordants are utter nonsense, or at least their entry is. Look at this poo poo.  No joke, I spent about half an hour reading two different books trying to parse this pile of proper noun word salad. Mostly because these proper nouns aren’t well-defined in the text, at least VTM had a loving lexicon. Anyways, Constellations seem to be Exalter groups with the same Concept, who are in alignment with each other. They’re also maps that guide your path in the Grindworks towards the Concept that you want to change to. That’s right, the Grindworks just up and lets you change this immutable aspect of your psyche. An Affinity is the purpose that unites the Constellation, there’s six of’em and I’ll cover them in the next book. Suffice it to say, Concordants are special people who become Avatars of something like Ambition, Destiny, or Vengeance. (Your Affinity basically guides what a Constellation is meant to do, one of Vengeance goes out and fucks with the Marauders for example, while one bound by Ambition might build cool defenses) With a simple act of will they can shift their Concept to any one of the 24 and instantly break any memetic conditioning. However, it does have a downside, as you can see in the image. As far as their equipment, they get the good poo poo. KERES is futuretech fabric armour and an Ancev is a cybernetic strength implant. The book ends with three NPCs. Dekkah is kinda interesting. When you go into the Grindworks, you have to go in groups of at least 4. She’s so addicted to the Grindworks that she shows up and offers to help any groups with three members, and leaves traps to kill off a member or two should a group happen to arrive at Exalt in one piece with all four members intact. The irony of murdering her own people to descend and emerge as a better version of herself seems to be lost on her. She’s a decent antagonist for any PCs seeking to be Embossed. Pherxies is Liqua’s ambassador to Justinian. He’s in deep cover, nobody knows he’s an Exalter and he plays political games to help his people. There’s no plot hooks provided here, and most PCs will never interact with him. Yawn. Ziphod is the public leader for Neo-Exalt, and his entry reveals that he’s being played by his own people. He thinks he’s their leader, and that when Exalt returns to glory he will emerge as their Emperor. He’s actually just a powerless figurehead propped up by the Exalters really in charge. If he finds that out, he’ll probably go ballistic and seek revenge against them. PCs set against Exalt might have reason to do so, so he could see some use in a game. And that’s it for this book. We’re not done though. Join me next time for Exalters, the Grindworks, in which we go in detail with regards to this magical techo-maze that can alter what is otherwise an immutable part of every person’s psyche.
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Oct 7, 2021 17:24
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I remember watching the trailer and looking through degenesis art and thinking this might be a neat game. Then I've read the review here and did some more reading of the books and art seems to be only salvageable part of the whole mess
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Oct 7, 2021 17:40
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Age of Sigmar: Orruk Warclans Until All Walls Fall  Kragnos, the End of Empires, hails from an ancient age, a time early in the Age of Myth. In this time, the gigantic, centauroid Drogrukh people ruled over the many plains, mesas and steppes of Donse in Ghur. They were a proud and aggressive people interpersonally, but restricted their hunting only to what they needed to survive and went to war only defensively, when their nomadic way of life was threatened. At last, until the birth of Kragnos to the warrior Gorgos. Kragnos was a vicious person, prone to violence and rage. He nearly killed his brother over the right to court a mare, and after his father scolded him for his brutality, Kragnos set out with his best friends to find a new way to live. Their adventures can be found painted on cave walls across Ghur, charting the rise of the Drogrukh warrior from champion to deity. At the time, the human peoples of Ghur were terrified of Kragnos, while the orruks were impressed by his power and named him Da Boss Trampla. The stories of Kragnos' strength spread through the warclans - he strangled the Seven Serpents, his voice alone tore down the walls of Ur-Haracho, and he shattered the frozen coast of Bjarl himself as he fought to reach a geomantic nexus in order to forge the head of his Dread Mace. The shamans claimed that he retrieved the metal disc he made into his shield, Tuskbreaker, from a deep canyon left by Gorkamorka hurling the metal aside after having broken a tooth biting it. It is said that the bronze inherited power from the spit of the Two-Headed God, gaining his ability to eat magic. Even now, legends tell about the rise of Kragnos. The Bonesplitterz of the Age of Myth believed that Kragnos was so strong, he could only be a god, and they offered up monster bones to him in tribute. While Kragnos was not divine then, he was all too happy to feast on the marrow offered to him - and that is how he grew more potent, more divine. He ate the marrow and amberbone tributes and he became empowered by the beliefs of the Bonesplitterz - which went on to inspire new beliefs among other orruks, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. Where he had once been mere mortal Drogrukh, he became something greater. Hordes of orruks began to follow Kragnos about, and he was happy to listen to them chant his name as they fought. They respected him, and subconsciously he may have realized that they were giving him power. Among humanity, word also began to spread - he was a lord of ruin, an earthquake made flesh. As the magic of Ghur and the Waaagh! congealed around him, the legends became true. Remade as the Earthquake God, Kragnos became an enemy of his own people. His father had allied his tribe with the Draconith, a race of dragon wizards from the northern mountains, to fight the Dragon Ogor shaggoths that had claimed the Thunderscorn Peaks. Kragnos destroyed the alliance by attacking the Draconith, and the war he started destroyed both Droghrukh and Draconith alike. His fury was only ended when the few surviving dragons were united for one last stand by their prince, Krondys, and his brother, Karazai. They worked alongside the Seraphon slann (who apparently are their distant relatives which is new to me, but sure???) and the godbeast Dracothion to trap Kragnos under a mountain's heart in a sphere isolated from the flow of time. Thus, Kragnos was trapped forever, the last surviving Droghrukh. So it would have been forever, had Alarielle's ritual of life not freed him even as it ended the Necroquake. The Twinhorn Peak was cracked open by the growth of new roots, and Kragnos was freed from the zone of null time, allowing him to punch his way out of the mountain. From his ruined prison, Kragnos looked over the new world he had returned to and he felt his fury rise once more. His people were gone, and more importantly, he was the Living Earthquake. He began his destructive rampage once more, tearing upon a canyon behind him. He resolved that if his own people were lost and forgotten, no other people should be allowed to last, either. The first city he saw became his target - Excelsis. It narrowly escaped destruction, and the nearby Dreadspine Fortress was not so lucky, shattered under Kragnos' wrath. Ever since, the orruks of Ghur have once more flocked to his banner. The shaman Gobsprakk has taught his legend anew to the orruks, and he has become the focus of a new age - the Era of the Beast.  Gobsprakk, the Mouth of Mork, was already infamous before his alliance with Kragnos. He is the greatest of the Swampcallas, perhaps the greatest prophet known to any orruk. The favor of Mork is obvious in him, just as that of Gork is in Gordrakk, and even the leaders of the Kruleboy clans have learned to fear his spite and anger. Those that make the mistake of crossing him multiple times tend to die suddenly, their lungs full of swam pwater and poison gas in the middle of a dry area. And yet, he uses his power to support Kragnos, not himself, apparently without any rancor at Kragnos' greater position. Since the Earthquake God's appearance, Gobsprakk has acted as if possessed. His visions guided him and his Corpse-rippa, Killabeak, through the fog. He, as thousands of orruks did, sought out Kragnos - but where they looked at Fraktoa Crevasse, where the god emerged, or at Excelsis, where he fought, Gobsprakk went to where he knew the god would go: Dreadspine Fortress. Gobsprakk waited at the Dreadhold, and when Kragnos smashed directly through it, the orruk was there, waiting. And he spoke to the Droghrukh in a tongue no living being has spoken in millennia - the native language of his people. A language even Gobsprakk didn't know he could speak, in fact, but Mork gifted him the power. He told Kragnos of his visions, of the Earthquake God destroying all at the head of a Waaagh! of impossible size. Kragnos, who was temporarily satisfied with the carnage he'd caused, actually stopped to listen and consider alliance. And so, the Living Earthquake returned to the swamps of the Ghurish Heartlands in the company of the Mouth of Mork, who told his story and spread his faith. Gobsprakk is rarely away from his new master. He serves as translator for the Droghrukh's commands to other orruks, who tend to be in awe of him but can't understand a word he says. The Swampcalla also summons up the mists that hide Kragnos' movements and the hordes of Kruleboys that follow him around. It's proven a very successful teamup so far. Kragnos can finally direct his followers in more than just pointing and roaring, while Grobsprakk can get him to crush anyone that dares to try going against his ideas. Anyone that gets in their way, well - that's their own problem. Like most Swampcallas, Gobsprakk cares about actual physical possessions rather more than most Kruleboyz tend to. It's not rare for the shamans to wear shells, skull or armor from their most impressive kill to prove they're more than just a wizard, which could range from the carapace of a bull-bug or legsnapper terrorpin for a young swampcalla to a larger and far more showy trophy for, say, obsprakk. His is the skull of Da Big Rippa, a massive super-predator that he defeated by summoning the Foot of Mork to kick it to death. He also bears four banners which hold the severed head of Methusai of Hallowheart, a mage who was unable to stop his onslaught of tapewyrm squigs, and the feather of a juvenile phoenix he once ate raw. (He regrets doing that - it gave him terrible heartburn that remains to this day.) He also bears the eyes of the Seven Seers and some magic mushrooms he took from the corpse of the grot Snazzgar Stinkmullet. His staff bears the severed hand of Skeinclaw, a Lord of Change. Strictly speaking, that should be impossible - daemon corpses do not remain. However, the hand is kept physical by the sheer power of Gobsprakk's determination to show it off. Lastly, Gobsprakk has a favorite grot friend, Rinklefinga, who carries around a rare screaming mandrakk, which can unleash a psychic scream to blow up heads. Next time: Who leads the krule? Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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Oct 7, 2021 17:54
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Halloween Jack posted:Speaking of Barker and Schow, there’s some very brief advice on GMing, starting with “the gross-out.” Simply put, don’t be afraid to describe violence in grisly detail. Don’t trigger your players, but also don’t reduce the act of murder to “You gain 8 Survival Points and lose 12 Humanity Points.” I have to admit, this is more adult(in the good sense) than what I expected after reading that "HOW DARE THEY MAKE MY CREATION SAFE"-quote at the start.
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Oct 7, 2021 18:09
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Marko defaults to incest really easily, doesn't he?
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Oct 7, 2021 19:21
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JcDent posted:Marko defaults to incest really easily, doesn't he? Yeah, basically any time he wants to use dark themes he reaches for some sort of sexual assault/grossness.
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Oct 7, 2021 19:29
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