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TRIGGER WARNING: BLUEBEARD'S BRIDE HAS BASICALLY EVERY TRIGGER YOU CAN THINK OF BUT A WHOLE LOT OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE THE NORTH WING, PART ONE The Book of Rooms begins with a short explanation of what these rooms are. Every room has a description of what the Bride sees once she enters, four mysterious objects that she can investigate, the room threat, and the horrors behind two of the mysterious objects. The GM is supposed to improv the other two. Also, I apologize: the first chapter is the rooms in the North Wing. There are ten rooms-the first five will be covered in this post. opening chapter text posted:“A home as old as this demands its own penance,” he says THE MUSIC ROOM [img]music-room.png[/img] Every room has a full-page illustration, with the mysterious objects highlighted. The art in Bluebeard’s Bride is definitely one of its best elements, IMO. The music room’s door has handles shaped like the keys of a piano, and pressing the keys makes ‘a soft plinking’ that opens the doors. The music room has a tall, domed ceiling and is filled with musical instruments, including a theremin because Bluebeard can time travel apparently. The walls are decorated with frescos of musicians on parade, the floor is patterned with musical notes, and the theremin is surrounded by a circle of chairs, each one with a blue candle on the seat. The room’s threat is Religion-Underworld. (Every theme has subthemes, but they're more just sort of categories and not as 'what' as the theme moves'. I guess the chairs are a summoning circle? The horrors detailed are the theremin and the fresco. The fresco depicts musicians cheerfully running from men dressed as devils while parading and playing instruments. No matter where the Bride looks in the fresco, a bride in a nightgown whose ‘guts are strung up around her throat like the neck of a cello’ (direct quote because I can’t quite picture this) appears. I think the moving picture is nice and creepy, though. The Bride brings her hand near the theremin and it begins to play, as theremins do. there's a lot of instruments that look more like women's torsos, idk why you're having it transform from a box posted:As the instrument’s wail grows louder, crying out like a woman in pain, it contorts into the shape of a woman’s torso. Her breasts are mutilated, intestines strung up and tied around her neck, and crimson blood pours onto the floor and mats her flaming red hair. The musical notes laid into the marble floor take on an eerie glow. The screams intensify and a dark power surges through your veins. Insects fly from the instruments with a cacophony of sound, forming a swirling mass around you—the eye of the storm. THE FENCING ROOM quote:As you enter the room, your soft cheek presses against the cold silver of two swords carved into the polished door, one crossed over the other. Why the hell is the Bride pressing her face into strange doors? Anyway. The fencing room has a glass ceiling through which moonlight comes through and a row of fancy chairs with attached chains and shackles. Both are in disrepair, the ceiling is dirty and the velvet upholstery on the chairs is rotting. The central chair is decorated with carvings of wolves hunting deer. There's a row of rapiers over to one side of the room, and the other side has a bunch of training dummies and a portrait of Bluebeard, a woman, and a young boy. The theme for this room is Motherhood-Grief. The rapiers and the chairs are the ones detailed. The rapiers have their hilts carved with ornate carvings of beautiful women crying. If the bride touches a rapier, the edges are razor sharp and she will prick her finger. The wound from this is very small, but will never heal. All of the chairs are dusty and in disrepair except for the one in the center, which 'sits, perfectly clean, as if waiting for you to sit in it'. (WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT.) If, for some godforsaken reason, someone is dumb enough to do that, the shackles close around your wrists and ankles in a twist surprising to literally no one. The Bride is forced to watch two ghostly figures-one a 'shadowy terror of bones' and one a young boy who looks at her lovingly-fence with practice rapiers. The boy scores a lucky hit on the Totally Not Bluebeard's shoulder, and there is a tense silence before the creature breaks the rapier against his thigh, grabs the boy by the neck, and stabs him with the broken rapier. The Bride is consumed by a terrible grief that isn't hers. I actually like this room. It's creepy and it tells a story. Perfectly serviceable. THE GALLERY The door here is greenish metal and is exquisitely carved, but clearly neglected. The art gallery has 'canvases' hung all over the room, but they're barely visible at a distance because of the dying sunlight and the fact that they're covered in dust. The room smells like beeswax from a bunch of unlit beeswax candles in sconces, though one candle is on the floor. The room is filled with incredibly lifelike sculptures of women in the same greenish metal as the door, but they are apparently not a mysterious object. At the center of the gallery is an unfinished sculpture of a massive skeletal hand and a stand holding a picture covered by a stained blanket. The theme of this room is Body-Illness. Only the sculpture and hidden painting are detailed. If the Bride touches the sculpture, it crumbles into dust and something white that, if the Bride investigates, she will see are splintered bones. quote:'It takes you only a moment to recognize them as not only human, but as the thin, delicate bones belonging to a young woman, probably one around your age. The blanket is heavy and feels greasy-the Bride has to put in effort to get it off. It reveals a painting of an elderly, drawn woman with a face and eyes that are uncannily realistic. Looking closer will let the Bride see that the skin and eyes are real and extremely well preserved, over a rough sketch of an emaciated old woman. Like the Fencing Room, this room is perfectly serviceable. The painting in particular is creepy as hell. THE GAME ROOM The room we're covering last is actually before this one in the book, but I believe in saving the best for last. The door here is plain oak, and the doorknob 'shrills' and the door 'groans' as the Bride opens it. The room reeks of cleaning chemicals and the gaslight bulbs lighting it hiss. There is a 'wooden pool table with red cloth' that holds numerous pool balls of different colors. Behind it, three sofas face a cold, blackened stove which is in the game room for some reason. At the far end of the room is a crimson cabinet with an unhinged door that is almost closed. (In the subheading on mysterious objects, UNHINGED is repeated again in semi-transparent spooky font below this.) The theme is Sexuality-Humiliation. Examining the pool table reveals scratch marks disguised by a recent layer of fresh paint. There are bite marks at the edges and the pockets are filled with a 'dark, thick substance'. For some reason, the book proceeds to explain what happens if you touch the liquid for some reason. red, viscous substance posted:f you touch the liquid, the whole table trembles as if possessed. The pockets start spewing their viscous red substance, and the pool balls—made of human bone—fly at you with vicious accuracy, as if thrown by a powerful arm. I THINK this substance is blood in very purple prose and needlessly written around but I'm honestly not sure. The cabinet is in perfect condition except for the unhinged door and some 'ruby' stains on said door's handle. If the Bride pulls the door off, the contents(which are not detailed any further) fall on the floor with a loud crash and we're starting to have to go heavy on the quoting because Sexuality. quote:Before you can do anything, a female form emerges from them. She is made of leather and latex; her head is a whole head mask with no eyes; she has whips for arms and high-heeled boots for legs. She mumbles as she gets closer and closer to you. When she is a breath away, you finally understand what she has been saying all along, “I shall give you pleasure.” Then she strikes you with her whips and tries to stab you with her heels. Honestly, the fact that she tries to stab you is kind of a weird twist because...well, you'll see in our next room. THE TEA ROOM The door to the tea room is a double door with a white oak frame and glass interiors 'decorated by straight and sinuous lines in a seductive composition', with glass handles that must be handled carefully if you don't want to break them. It's a suffocatingly close room with 'very feminine' blue floral wallpaper and cabinets of delicate, hand-painted china everywhere. All the space that isn't a china cabinet is taken up by a massive blue silk sofa, with a small wooden table besides it that has a teapot with a gleaming gilt lid and a golden teacup. The room's theme is Sexuality-Sexual Violence. You should be afraid right now. The teapot's lid cannot be opened. When investigated, tea pours out of the spout and the top and forms a puddle on the floor. A woman rises from the tea and tells the Bride to relax and stop being such a tease and tries to rape her. If the Bride sits on the couch then the couch comes to life, traps her, and orally rapes her. I am not joking. This is, literally, what happens. quote:The sofa’s back closes in, trapping you in its embrace. The blue fabric ripples, caressing the Bride’s body even as the sofa tightens its grip until you can’t breathe. The silk forces its way past your lips, pushing into your throat in a rush. The silk takes on warmth until it feels like skin, and the part inside of you pulses as if alive. Next time: the Ballroom attempts to one-up the couch rape in the Tea Room with even weirder sexual violence.
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Jul 23, 2022 19:18
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This is just filth. I can and have laughed at a lot of stuff in these threads but gently caress everything about this.
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Jul 23, 2022 19:50
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Seconded. This is just gruesome shock value bullshit that exists for your group to torture and psychologically torment a fictional young woman.
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Jul 23, 2022 20:11
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So what you are saying is  the house and then Bluebeard. I can work with that.
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Jul 23, 2022 20:21
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By popular demand posted:So what you are saying is Yeah, I definitely don't mean to discourage t3isukone from continuing the review, this is one I can just feel good about hating.
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Jul 23, 2022 20:39
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By popular demand posted:So what you are saying is
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Jul 23, 2022 21:02
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What is the point of this game again?
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Jul 23, 2022 21:21
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Midjack posted:Yeah, I definitely don't mean to discourage t3isukone from continuing the review, this is one I can just feel good about hating. I am. This is unpleasant to read, has vile content made very explicit, and seems to serve no purpose other than to point out that there are some real hosed-up people writing 'games'. Which I think we already knew. Maybe some of the themes are worth talking about, but this barely counts as a 'game', even less so than Beast. But I am only one person and I don't get to tell people what they can and cannot write about, only that I would not and I'm going to skip pages where it shows up. (The original post is easy to skip, but responses and quotes are less so.) Prism fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jul 25, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 21:31
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sasha_d3ath posted:Could this game end with Bluebeard getting attacked by an AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE I'm pretty sure NFTs are too horrifying for even this game.
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Jul 23, 2022 21:32
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Quackles posted:I'm pretty sure NFTs are too horrifying for even this game. You open one room and after a bunch of vague descriptions the players realize it's Bluebeard's bitcoin farm.
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Jul 23, 2022 22:49
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There's something to be said about games that deal with really challenging subject matter and what the players can get out of it but uh  I'm not sure this nails itEdit: and it's a shame, I think the premise is interesting at least from a "you're not fighting elfs in this one" way!
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Jul 23, 2022 23:04
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I do like that Bluebeard's Bride's rooms have an evocative and unpleasant sense of feminist doom horror and I like the focus on the feel and aesthetics of the rooms, making each door unique and kind of a mystery as to what context to the door you might find on the other side, and it does help that you're not all a bunch of doomed maidens scrambling around the killer bridegroom's party castle but are all parts of one woman having a deeply bad time. That said the interactivity and lack of control that gets emphasized for horror and to make a political point doesn't feel like it really jives with tabletop? It feels like it would work really well for a descriptive interactive fiction game where you're putting in commands and can choose to have a Disco Elysium style chorus of certain voices and lenses comment on the bad poo poo that's happening to you. Games don't always have to be feel-good and sometimes it feels really good to feel really bad but the mechanism of exploration and emphasis on details of the rooms really feels more like IF with either a command line or Twine-style interactive details, and also it would feel less weird to have a game interface telling you all this as opposed to real person telling you these details and what happens to you for your curiosity. This is Monsterhearts levels of "everyone needs to be on board and be well versed in safety tools and ready to use them" but...well, moreso. In summation it could work, but I don't think this is the medium.
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Jul 23, 2022 23:07
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The idea of using a similar concept for something like the Disco Elysium experience is interesting...
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Jul 23, 2022 23:25
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Hostile V posted:Bluebeard's Bride: I agree, a tabletop game is absolutely the wrong medium for what the writer is trying to do here. IF and Visual Novels would work better.
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Jul 24, 2022 01:10
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When you're playing BlueBeard's Bride, what do the player(s?), like, do? It feels like they just wander from room to room, being horrified and never touching anything, because why would you touch any of this poo poo, until they get to the end and are murdered? Could the bride fashion a set of weapons and armor from this random poo poo and fight bluebeard? Can they take one of the spooky torches and just burn everything, so they both go down together and no one has to go through this again?
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Jul 24, 2022 01:34
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Mr. Prokosch posted:When you're playing BlueBeard's Bride, what do the player(s?), like, do? Yeah, I know this game apparently wants to restrict the agency of the players but it's a basic RPG rule to not give your players literally no real agency at all, which is what this feels like. It's not a game if you can't actually PLAY in it.
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Jul 24, 2022 01:44
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Nessus posted:The idea of using a similar concept for something like the Disco Elysium experience is interesting... I'm actually currently playtesting a more or less feature complete game that does Disco Elysium, using a number of mechanical elements from Bluebeard's Bride. You can find the current playtest version here; I'm hoping to make a PDF version and actually put it up on itch sometime in the next few months! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sPku8AGaHkio4CBtMz_zCNIJ5-TKtLTkKLA_izDIJxE/edit?usp=sharing
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Jul 24, 2022 02:04
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Mr. Prokosch posted:When you're playing BlueBeard's Bride, what do the player(s?), like, do? As I understand it and I could be wrong, you don't actually play the Bride in the game. You play aspects of her personality or something. So it's like a rape-happy gothic/feminine horror version of Herman's Head
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Jul 24, 2022 02:06
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So feminist horror Everyone is John.
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Jul 24, 2022 03:22
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I don't even understand how you're meant to deal with some of the rooms. Like, some it's just "You see a spooky thing and get creeped out", fine, and the players narrate the woman's reaction - but then there's stuff like the Game Room. Do you actually take damage from being stabbed, or is that just narrative? Can the fetish woman actually kill you? Can you fight her? Does she follow you out if you leave the room?
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Jul 24, 2022 05:39
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Angry Salami posted:I don't even understand how you're meant to deal with some of the rooms. Like, some it's just "You see a spooky thing and get creeped out", fine, and the players narrate the woman's reaction - but then there's stuff like the Game Room. Do you actually take damage from being stabbed, or is that just narrative? Can the fetish woman actually kill you? Can you fight her? Does she follow you out if you leave the room? Yeah, I'd actually really like to know at least some of the mechanics, and I'm not finding much in the older, fragmented review? I know they mentioned an equivalent of the Harm move along with some others, but no idea what those do. I totally understand not wanting to cover that cause it's not the real point, but unless I go out and buy a copy to read, this is all just kind of frictionless vacuum in the fiction and guessing what might happen. Also really want know how you'd go about making billiard balls out of human bone. The best I've got is the head of the femur but unless you're harvesting this off of some massive chunguses it's gonna be really small. I'm guessing the disemboweling "like a cello" means with the intestines drawn up to the head/neck but left anchored internally so the torso is like a fretboard? (Note to horror writers : while mystery and a lack of detail can be a great source of dread and spoopy fun, it should be more like trying to imagine horrifying things beyond mortal ken and less me scratching my head and curiously sketching things out on scratch paper or looking up human femur dimensions.)
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Jul 24, 2022 06:05
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Xiahou Dun posted:Also really want know how you'd go about making billiard balls out of human bone. you could seal bone pieces in epoxy resin, maybe? kind of a cop-out though.
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Jul 24, 2022 07:50
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Room idea: The Workshop. It's full of bits of bone and mangled body parts, the remains of various half-assed attempts to make 'spooky' versions of everyday objects, abandoned by Bluebeard after he realized the idea wasn't really physically feasible.
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Jul 24, 2022 08:10
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Angry Salami posted:Room idea: The Workshop. It's full of bits of bone and mangled body parts, the remains of various half-assed attempts to make 'spooky' versions of everyday objects, abandoned by Bluebeard after he realized the idea wasn't really physically feasible. "A bookshelf full of skulls? I don't get it." "It's a spookshelf." "Go gently caress yourself, Bluebeard."
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Jul 24, 2022 08:20
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PurpleXVI posted:"A bookshelf full of skulls? I don't get it."
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Jul 24, 2022 08:21
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Angry Salami posted:Room idea: The Workshop. It's full of bits of bone and mangled body parts, the remains of various half-assed attempts to make 'spooky' versions of everyday objects, abandoned by Bluebeard after he realized the idea wasn't really physically feasible. Just how many spoons do you possibly need? -well they just are easy to make.....FEAR ME
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Jul 24, 2022 08:49
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Nessus posted:"Yarr -- if only I could." Bluebeard was never a pirate, you're thinking of Blackbeard. I think I'd like to see a game about Blackbeard's wife, however.
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Jul 24, 2022 08:56
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Nessus posted:The idea of using a similar concept for something like the Disco Elysium experience is interesting... Everyone Is Botchcop.
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Jul 24, 2022 10:05
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Angry Salami posted:I don't even understand how you're meant to deal with some of the rooms. Like, some it's just "You see a spooky thing and get creeped out", fine, and the players narrate the woman's reaction - but then there's stuff like the Game Room. Do you actually take damage from being stabbed, or is that just narrative? Can the fetish woman actually kill you? Can you fight her? Does she follow you out if you leave the room? The answer is the players don't leave the room. Leaving the room would be playing the game "wrong" (not as expected by the social contract), akin to D&D PCs deciding that this underground passage looks too dangerous, let's all go home. A while ago I said I suspected Kingdom Death was so hard because its playerbase liked to imagine their buxom mostly-naked explorers getting defeated, beaten, raped etc when they lost. That was based on experiences with other games and other communities. Bluebeard is one of those other games. The whole point is to steer your innocent heroine into peril and menace so the players can get off on her being menaced, escalating up to the wanky stuff and ending in her death. It's like that module where the PCs had to repeat sexual acts in front of mirrors to open doors.
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Jul 24, 2022 15:24
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Loxbourne posted:The answer is the players don't leave the room. Leaving the room would be playing the game "wrong" (not as expected by the social contract), akin to D&D PCs deciding that this underground passage looks too dangerous, let's all go home. The TTRPG equivalent of a snuff film. This is up there with Beast as edgelord cruelty for a substitution for creativity.
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Jul 24, 2022 15:35
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 Part Sixteen: See a Nazi,Punch Him Out Flying Circus' GM chapter is pretty typical for a good PbtA game--which is not at all a slam on the game, Apocalypse World is still one of the high water marks of GMing rules, and being of a piece with it is no bad thing. But I'm also pretty sure, given the community in this thread, that most folks are already familiar with Principles, Agendas, and hard and soft GM moves, so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of details here. I will say that one thing Flying Circus does is split GM moves into categories depending on what the PCs are currently doing, which can definitely help when you need to discreetly remind yourself what your options are and you don't want the players to catch you running through a big list. One of those categories, incidentally, is stuff that can go wrong with a PC's plane. This is a nice, if somewhat specific, category to have, because even with the quantum uncertainty philosophy of air combat, the very nature of a TTRPG means there's a certain unavoidable certainty that comes along with basic math. The player always knows how fast their plane is going and has specific, hard numbers for things like stall speed, overspeed, how many G-forces they can take, etc. GM moves that can gently caress with that re-inject some of the uncertainty of actual piloting--though the book does make it clear that the GM should almost always precede said fuckery with the soft move "forecast problems with sounds and sensations," because while it might be realistic for, say, a stray crosswind to just throw you into a flat spin with no warning or recourse, it's not very fun. Also, one of the moves in this category is "spray something into their cockpit," which is just delightful. Anyways, let's talk more about threats! Most threats, you can just assume they were doing whatever until they came on-screen and you can retroactively justify it when they're in the spotlight, but if you've got a specific big bad in mind, or if players latch onto a particular baddie, you can turn it into a campaign threat. Just give them a plan with however-many concrete steps you feel it needs--then, unless the PCs intervene, every routine they accomplish one step of that plan. Naturally, news of this accomplishment, and rumors of what the next step is, need to get back to the PCs, or what's the point? Unsurprisingly, threats in the air are the most detailed--NPC planes are greatly simplified compared to player-facing ones, but they still have enough crunch to them that you might want to have a few cards pre-prepped that you can grab whenever you need one:  Weapon profiles work the same as for PC planes, since PCs need them for the Take Fire move, but instead of fully tracking the enemy's Speed, NPC planes just have four Speed values and use whichever one best fits what they were last doing--so if the enemy just dove on you from out of the sun, it uses Overspeed, but if it's been engaged in a turning fight it uses its Combat speed. I do kind of wish there was a little more of a way for players to exploit these. In real air combat, of course, catching your enemy with low energy is a vital tactic, but since NPCs don't spend energy the way PCs do (e.g. by Committing to the Turn in a dogfight), that's a little less relevant. Structure is just the plane's hit points--NPC planes don't track G-forces, so they also don't separate toughness and max strain--and Handling is just like for PC planes, used as a comparison with the PC's to calculate the maneuverability bonus for Dogfight! The little circles are for crits, which are, again, simplified for NPCs. For example, an NPC plane that takes a fuel crit is simply forced to bug out from home, while the first engine crit just shifts the plane's speed categories one step to the right to reflect its reduced power output, while subsequent crits will stop it working and set it on fire. A crit to guns will stop that weapon system from working, but you can only crit a plane's guns if you're attacking from within their firing arc--i.e. you have to be in a head-on attack to crit an enemy's forward-mounted guns. This rule was a relatively late addition to the game, because without that rule it was way too easy to make a crit-fishing build and absolutely no-sell enemies by shooting their guns out. We also get some simple rules for making more experienced enemy pilots by increasing some of their base stats and, for aces, giving them a unique move or two. These abilities are things like "automatically vanishes after any attack and must be found again with Eyeball" or "ignores the first crit scored against them," and they can be fluffed however you want--I remember hearing about one campaign where that "automatically vanish" move was used by a Green Knight style Fae Ace whose plane could dive into the canopy and merge with the forest, only to pop up somewhere else, for instance. Ground-based threats are much less detailed, and closer to the PbtA standard of "no real stats beyond maybe a weapon profile." We are reminded that the primary goal of a pilot getting into a fight on the ground should be to get the gently caress into their aeroplanes, after all.  Unless you are, wait for it, the Skyborn. They're the exception. And now, some specific threats: Bandits and Pirates are two sides of the same coin--both use planes to rob other people, either by shaking them down with threats or by hijacking cargo planes and trade balloons. The main difference is that bandits are generally doing this because they have no other options to survive, while pirates have decided that this is a good way to make a profit and have some fun. Bandits usually try to walk a fine line between "being scary enough that people won't resist their shakedowns" and "being so awful that a town will pool its resources to hire a circus to shoot them all down," but pirates are more inclined to shoot down the militia, firebomb the town, and have a party in the ashes. Both are pretty basic enemies, usually good for the early arcs of a game. Warlords are, in Flying Circus parlance, anyone who maintains their rule through a monopoly on force. Most are remnants of the world before--either minor states that weren't big enough to be wiped out in the final armageddon, surviving military units, or regional defense groups that seized power in the aftermath. They aren' necessarily evil--some of them really are trying to create a safe, secure place for people to live--but they are fundamentally exploitative. They're also, compared to the nations of the old world, pretty pathetic. We're generally talking about a few so towns at most, and armies in the hundreds or so.  "Do not become addicted to castor oil, my friends!" Town militias and trade companies are pretty much what you'd expect--you can assume most towns have about 3+Wealth combat-ready planes and probably fewer than 1 full-time militia/night watchperson/cop/whatever per 50 people. Trade companies are basically the same, but instead of being a population center they're a corporation. Apparently some of those survived the apocalypse. Everybody loving hates Whalers. See, pretty much every culture on Himmilgard considers skywhales sacred: to the Gotisch people, they control the weather. To the Skyborn, they are the spirits who first taught humanity to fly. To the Rishonim, they are the physical manifestations of angels. Unfortunately, as mentioned in the Skyborn writeup, their bones generate both lift and thrust through some magical process, and their blubber is a source of cheap luftane, a lifting gas more buoyant even than hydrogen. Whalebone can be ethically-sourced from underground graveyards, and luftane can be produced synthetically, but it's cheaper to send up airships to harpoon living whales, drag them inside, and butcher them, so naturally that's what capitalism does. Whalers are a good excuse to start introducing high-altitude gameplay, since their airships operate at altitudes of up to 6 km--plus, who doesn't want the opportunity to rescue an adorable baby skywhale? Something something the abyss, the abyss something something you, because other Flying Circuses are likely to be one of your biggest threats. After all, Flying Circuses are basically mercenary companies, and not all of them are particularly choosy about who hires them. Even if they're not assholes or working for fascists, they might still just be after the same prize as you. We also get a few examples of some of the more famous circuses in Himmilgard, like Checkmate, who are so large they actually have a rank hierarchy based on chesspieces and can field as many as fifty planes, or Torschlusspanik, a group entirely made up of actual Great War veterans. And now for our feature presentation: the goddamn Goth Armies. So, first of all, we need to clear up some terminology here. Gothic (more commonly rendered as "Gotisch" in the game) is the dominant cultural identity on Himmilgard, and also the name of their language. Gotha was the name of (at least) two extinct polities, ostensibly related but really the latter was just trying to get extra legitimacy by claiming the name of the old empire. Goths are loving Nazis. Okay, there's a little more to them than that. They're a mix of the actual fascists that coalesced into the Nazi party, the relentless militarism of Imperial Gemany, and a healthy dose of Mad Max: Fury Road's Warboys and Fallout: New Vegas's Caesar's Legion.  Hmm, I don't see it. Their leaders are survivors of the military and military-industrial elite of the old Gotha Empire, and their rank-and-file are a brainwashed army of too-young men. They're a death cult fighting for a philosophy of hatred, and they have just enough of an industrial base to be an existential threat to anyone in their vicinity. (They are very much not the 'hyper-advanced, deadly efficient' Nazis of popular culture, I want to make that clear: their logistics are dogshit, they're tweaking on meth basically all the time, and they're as riven by internal factionalism and infighting as the real Nazis. They're dangerous, they're not cool. In fact, one of the game's best pieces of advice is that, whenever you introduce a Goth officer, you should include at least one way in which he's trying way too hard to look cool, like a giant gold skull belt buckle or a pickelhaube with like a two-foot spike). Next Time: Actually Clockwerks and Dragons, Oh My! 
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Jul 24, 2022 16:11
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[cannibal corpse voice] FUUUUUUUUUUUCKED WITH A COOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCH
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Jul 24, 2022 16:43
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The other important thing about the Goths is that you can humanize the footsoldiers but not the officers. The rank-and-file grunts are suicide troops driven by desperation and need whose main job is to try and take the enemy and their equipment alive to keep feeding the Gothic war machine. They take slaves but are slaves themselves. You can make a Nux out of one of them but it's not...redeeming a character to apologize for their actions or Nazi apologia, it's rescuing someone from a horribly abusive situation and let them live for themselves in whatever form that takes. The officers are irredeemable. The officers are people who choose to dress in fascist leather outfits and send their troops into the meat grinder in horribly unstable frankenplanes because this situation suits them quite nicely as they are so far removed from the danger and reality of Gothic life that this is good for Bitcoin actually. Don't get me wrong the footsoldiers die by the droves; Gothic planes double as troop carriers where a pilot and multiple harpoon gunners go in to snag the plane while the wings are bristling with hooked-on boarders whose job it is to leap onto the plane and disable it while it's tethered so they can take it all back. They just can be saved or made to stop living like this with concerted effort to take them out of the lovely situation they're in (and they may not even want to be saved). Officers have just made their bed long ago and decided to never stop being monsters because there's never going to be consequences in their eyes. And that's a detail I like a good deal.
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Jul 24, 2022 16:48
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Quite similar to some real world terrorist organisations, a pyramid scheme built on sending young men to kill civilians.
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Jul 24, 2022 16:53
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GimpInBlack posted:In fact, one of the game's best pieces of advice is that, whenever you introduce a Goth officer, you should include at least one way in which he's trying way too hard to look cool, like a giant gold skull belt buckle or a pickelhaube with like a two-foot spike). When I first read this, my mind instantly went to those WW2 belt buckle pistols (that were probably fakes) - only it would be a black-powder matchlock, so the officer has to keep a lit slowmatch in their pants at all times.
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Jul 24, 2022 16:57
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sasha_d3ath posted:[cannibal corpse voice] FUUUUUUUUUUUCKED WITH A COOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCH  I was trying to come up with an overly wordy medical sounding name for that ala a Carcass song title but I got nothing 
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Jul 24, 2022 17:12
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Infinity RPG: Tohaa Space Man's Burden To really understand the goals of the Tohaa and their paternalistic arrogance, we need to talk about Exaltation. Exaltation is considered one of the most important parts of Tohaa society and culture by the Tohaa, and the sales pitch for it is simple: the Tohaa have a duty to help their fellow sentients by bringing them up to full equality of power with themselves and other powerful species. Exaltation is, in theory, intended to end the power disparity between young and old species and ensure that all species can operate on an equitable and equal level. It is the prime method the Tohaa intend for interaction with other species - friends, not subjects. It is also extremely paternalist. See, Exaltation is a process of evaluation over centuries by the Tohaa to determine what species on a planet is the dominant one. If they're already sentient, that's generally pretty easy - you pick the species that can talk intelligently. On worlds in which there are no lifeforms more sapient than an animal, they'll capture a bunch of promising specimens and test them to find which is most adaptable to genetic modification or most capable of intellectual development or, ideally, both. Once the species to be Exalted has been picked, it's time for a long and difficult process of developing specialized retroviruses to alter their genetic makeup, introducing subtle changes to push them towards sentience, suchas increasing brain density and encouraging neuron creation. Once the species is considered to be sentient, the Tohaa will arrive openly to administrate their cultural development, though they position themselves as teachers rather than controllers. They try to leave as much work as they can to the species they are Exalting, so that the Exalted species can feel it has earned a right to exist rather than been created as a lab experiment. Exaltation doesn't always work out. Some species have rebelled against the Tohaa, seeing them as interlopers, meddlers or otherwise distrusting the benevolent space elves who have come to offer them a chance to skip the evolutionary line. The Tohaa, when a species either proves too unruly for them to work with or asks them to go away en masse, will leave peacefully. That's the good part. If an Exaltation candidate demands freedom, they get given it, albeit at the cost of all further aid from the Tohaa...until a few generations later, when they'll show up and make the offer again, though in a few rare cases they've actually left a species alone for good. The Tohaa attempt to analyse their Exalted species for what traits would become dominant via natural evolution and focus on these culturally. Species with dense muscles, whether because of heavy gravity or other reasons, are often pushed towards labor and engineering, while those that seem to be naturally inclined towards tool use are often given more access to scientific education and ways to support Tohaa biotech. The Tohaa want each species to be relatively specialized, including a combat-focused specialty that can be used in the Tohaa Trident against the forces of the Combined Army. From the Tohaa perspective, Exaltation is the greatest gift that can be given, a sharing of their knowledge and information with a species they consider to be potentially an equal - eventually. While other species cannot know the instinctive empathy that the Corahtaa offers the Tohaa, they can still be given a chance to reach full potential. Some Exalted species such as the Chaksa or Koldinuk treat the Tohaa with grateful thanks and respect, and they are rewarded with serving not only as soldiers against the Combined Army but even being given chances to earn political power in the Trinomial. However, unknown to most Tohaa, even those engaged in the Exaltation process, there is a darker edge to it than mere paternalism. Early on, the Tohaa were significantly choosier about who they tried to uplift, taking their role as Heralds very seriously but afraid of abusing their own power over others. They also knew that an Exalted species might at some point become a danger to the Trinomial once it went its own way or if relations suffered. They did their best to monitor new Exalted species, offering their full medical knowledge and scientific tools to the best of the lot. And it went terribly. Several of their client species viewed them as conquerors and oppressors and resisted them violently, while others were only interested in gaining access to new technology and then selling it on outside Tohaa control, even to those who were enemies of the Tohaa. Others used the tools they were given aggressively against their neighbors and had to be reined in constantly. At that point, the very top ranks of the Trinomial came to a decision: they would need to use the process of Exaltation to subtly alter the characters of the Exalted. First, they would find individuals with undesirable personality traits and remove them from the breeding population - not through mass murder, never that, but instead via secret sterilization protocols or genetic markers that would ensure nonviable offspring. Because, y'know, eugenics. They also decided that all future Exaltation would be of species with strong pack or familial instincts so they would feel more inclination to work with others, rather than ever Exalting solitary predators. This has generally led to Exalted client species that are more compliant with Tohaa requests and more willing to fight to protect the Trinomial, which they tend to feel a part of rather than a client of. Most Tohaa involved in Exaltation are entirely unaware of the covert eugenics programs that are enacted through it, and it is likely most would not approve. Rather, these projects are the ones controlled by the Triumvirate, who care only about Tohaa survival and not about the Exalted species at all. Triumvirate agents are seeded into the Exaltation program management to make "hard" decisions without the approval or knowledge even of some high ranking members of the Trinomial. This is what allows the Tohaa Trinomial generally to continue to believe it is morally justified in its program of Exaltation. Such a secret couldn't be kept forever, though, and it's been revealed before, shortly before the war against the Fenrig Imperative. The Shawoke had been a species of explorers and scientists that discovered the Gwyff, a species of methane-breathers in the middle of Exaltation. The Shawoke were confused about why the Tohaa were genetically altering the Gwyff and began to question them and gather specimen samples of other species within Tohaa space. The Shawoke analyzed the samples and worked out what was going on with the eugenics programs. This, in fact, is what rallied the previously fractured peoples of the Shawoke into the Four Shawoke Nations that came together to attack the Tohaa. They attempted to alert the Exalted and other Tohaa allies of the truth about Exaltation, which is why the Tohaa committed so completely and ruthlessly to putting down the Shawoke Nations in battle. They also abandoned the Exaltation of the Gwyff entirely. The Shawoke are now reduced to only their four home systems, which are under constant guard by Tohaa ships, and all evidence of the Gwyff Exaltation, including all genetically modified Gwyff, has been destroyed. The Tohaa public consider the Shawoke to be rebellious monsters who seek only to disrupt the unity of the Trinomial. The Triumvirate consider them a dangerous nuisance that will need to be utterly annihilated in the future so that they can never threaten to reveal the Triumvirate's actions again. However, that is a project for the future elf illuminati, because right now, the Combined Army is taking up too much attention and resources to spare any real forces to exterminate the Shawoke. However, the Triumvirate also believes that as long as Tohaa society is focused on the El, none of them will listen to anything the Shawoke say anyway, dismissing them as warlike aggressors who are lying. So yeah the Triumvirate are genocidal shitbirds. We knew that, though, given we knew what they did on Paradiso, capturing and vivisecting a T'zechi Digester to gain knowledge of weapons it would not give them freely. We also know that blew up in their faces, as the Digester gave them 'weapons' that had treachery built into them, wiping out both the Tohaa and human forces on Paradiso at the time. The Triumvirate also deliberately left evidence behind about the Digester so that future humans on Paradiso would get drawn into the view of the Combined Army. The leaders of the Tohaa Trinomial not involved in the Triumvirate have some vague idea about what happened to their original colony there, with several Tohaa generals aware of the original Digester and the plan to use it as bait for humans and the Combined Army. However, they are under the impression that the Digester was dead when it was discovered, and so this use of its corpse, while culturally abhorrent, was still doable if it meant gaining an ally against the EI. Other members of the Trinomial believe that humans are a chance for the Tohaa to get some breathing room, and the Trident tends to view humanity as a wonderful source of fresh troops and materiel that may allow for final victory against the Combined Army, even if humansa re weird. The greater public and armed forces of the Tohaa genuinely like humans and want to give them a chance, but the Triumvirate and many top leaders of the Trinomial consider humans somewhat expendable and certainly worth manipulating to their own benefit. O-12 and humanity at large remain mostly unaware of the degree to which their first contact with the Tohaa was manipulated and planned and how much the Tohaa did to push them into war against the EI. The Tohaa would prefer humans remain that way, because as they see it, their goal was not to wipe out humanity by doing so, but rather to force a conflict without having to beg humans to willingly assist them - something they believe would not have worked. Humans and Tohaa generally find each other weird. Tohaa are used to very close communication with others in which it is nearly impossible to truly lie, and they are trained from childhood to shield their own thoughts and feelings to make other Tohaa around them more comfortable. They aren't used to dealing with a species that focuses as much on semantics, vocal tone and physical gestures as it does the actual content of words. They're also used to dealing with species that have already unified before reaching space travel, not least because Exaltation encourages political unification similar to the culture of the Tohaa. While Tohaa from the homeworld, the colonies and the Errant Fleet differ in viewpoints and lifestyles, they are all of the same culture and government. The idea that humans, while having much in common with the Tohaa, remain culturally divided is very weird to them. Comprehending the human approach to language and politics took the Tohaa several years. Some things they got easily - they could tell that dealing with each nation would have to be handled separately and differently. What surprised them was how well humanity as a whole could come together on collective projects despite their divisions. The idea that you can work well with people you don't like or trust is...weird. If a Tohaa triad doesn't like another triad, that tends to become obvious quite quickly due to pheromonal communication. The animosity between the groups is clear to everyone involved, and the unpleasant sensory experience of it means they are not able to functional well when near each other, as all they can feel is their mutual hatred. Humans don't work like that - two humans that utterly despise each other are still physically able to cooperate perfectly well if they so choose, and often do. Soldiers whose nations are enemies will pretend to be friends for as long as their joint project lasts, shutting out their hatred to protect each other out of self-interest. The Tohaa do not really get that. It's admirable, but super weird. For the most part, Tohaa tend to see humans as loud and obnoxious, too focused on verbal communication and either completely uncaring about how they smell (in which case their body odor does little to convey emotion) or coat themselves in synthetic perfumes that overpower even the ability of Tohaa to smell each other's pheromones nearby. Human literature tends to confuse the Tohaa, who recognize several mythic archetypes but can't figure out why humans are always so divided in their stories. Humans have had little access to Tohaa literature, and what little has been shared tends to be seen as badly written, as it frequently portrays the Tohaa as perfect champions incapable of wrongdoing. Tohaa and humans have somewhat different auditory ranges, which means neither tends to enjoy the music of the other, too. Humans tend to find Tohaa music simple and childlike, while Tohaa are incapable of perceiving some of the complexities of human music as the frequencies leave their auditory spectrum. Both sides tend to have great interest in each others' food, though. Tohaa are especially fond of Earth crustaceans and vegetables, but humanity has found few Tohaa foods that taste good to them, despite the best efforts of some ambitious chefs. Humans tend to be even more confused by the Exalted. O-12 has only recently received information about Exaltation as a concept, and opinions within the Space UN are split. Some believe it's best to let the Tohaa do as they please as long as they obey the Tohaa Contact Treaty, but others believe that the Tohaa are gathering an army of slave-species and manipulating them through unethical biological experiments. O-12 has no power within Tohaa internal politics, of course, but they have sent agents into Tohaa space to get as much information about Exaltation as they can, so they can learn both how it works scientifically and how large a project it actually is. Generally speaking, both species are grateful for the aid in the battle against the Combined Army, but neither fully trusts the other. The Tohaa fear that their actions will be discovered, and particularly the Triumvirate believe that the truth coming out will turn humanity against them. (Which is probably true, because they suuuuuuck.) The Tohaa leadership generally respects human ingenuity but fears human curiosity, believing that they may steal Tohaa biotechnology and other secrets that they will use wrongly. Humans, obviously, want the biotech but are aware the Tohaa aren't totally trustworthy. Information leaked by EI sources portrays the Tohaa as conquerors, and O-12 is not actually less xenophobic about the Tohaa than you'd expect a human government to be. The idea of aliens just showing up to help without ulterior motives is hard to accept, and there is now a fairly sizable shadow war between the intelligence agents of humanity and the Tohaa to learn as muchabout each other as possible while revealing as few weaknesses as possible. Next time: The Tohaa at War
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Jul 24, 2022 17:23
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yeah, I'd actually really like to know at least some of the mechanics, and I'm not finding much in the older, fragmented review? The way the mechanics work is that each player/facet of the Bride's personality has a Trauma track. When spoooky things happen in the rooms or the Bride decides Bluebeard is to blame for something, it causes trauma. Some of the player moves can heal trauma, as does remaining faithful to Bluebeard. When Trauma gets to 5, the facet of the bride's personality 'shatters' and the player effectively becomes a co-GM-they can no longer dictate the Bride's actions, but they can add details to the house and what's going on and they can say what happens when the Bride fucks up a roll. The Ring Moves are the only real way the Bride defends herself-dirty yourself with violence is exactly what it sounds like. On a success the Bride chooses to silence, disable, or mutilate whatever she's fighting against, so I guess she's stronger than she seems. The 'caress a horror' move makes the horror 'direct its attention to another victim in the house', and Cry for Help has the Bride call out for a servant. All of these are stat moves you have to roll for. How exactly dealing with horrors works isn't I think really established. I don't think they can leave their rooms. The Examples of Play in the core don't really show any 'combat', but the game has no combat system. Bluebeard's Bride is a Gothic, not a 'things jump out and stab you' horror, so why the fetish woman even exists is an open question. That said, the Witch playbook has the single most OP move I have ever seen in a PBTA, which can probably deal with your enemies. Slight diversion here, but seriously, the Witch's Face(every playbook, instead of 'moves', has three Faces) of the Viper is hilariously broken. Which doesn't really work for the game's atmosphere. The Viper posted:When you care for a servant by poisoning them with your lies, they choke on your words and die. Care for someone is not a Ring move. The Witch can freely use this at any time. Not only that, but there are no restrictions or drawbacks. You don't even have to Roll. There isn't even something about whether the Servant is willing to let you care for them! You just lie to someone and they die. It's a very flavorful move but it kind of kills the tension. So the answers to the 'what do you DO in the rooms in Bluebeard's Bride' question is that the Bride fights back, distracts them, gets someone's help, or, if it's a servant, just loving instakills it with magic.
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Jul 24, 2022 17:25
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"The sky is green." "Hrhglr. BNgnrk. Nhgk. Hhhh..."
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Jul 24, 2022 17:59
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| # ? Jun 7, 2024 14:17 |
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I'm pretty sure the Witch has that because 'killing your way through the Servants' isn't actually that useful. You've quietly offed someone who works for your husband, who was causing you problems. Congratulations! The game's fundamental structure isn't about hacking and slashing your way out of this marriage - you just married Bluebeard. Immediately before the game starts. By your own choice. You are now in his house, which is full of weird and horrible apparitions. The game is about the Bride, the character which is the set of the players, deciding whether or not she trusts Bluebeard (who we, the audience and players, know is a serial killer of wives who don't trust him). The mechanical structure plays to that central question - does she stay faithful, because that's easier (it prevents Trauma, which can end play) or does she 'betray' that marriage (risking more trauma but correctly diagnosing reality as the players know it to be)? The game obviously inclines players towards betrayal, because... duh. He is actually a serial killer. But the actual form of play the game encourages is in that decision between loathsome fidelity and terrifying, dangerous betrayal. Which is why it's about the Bluebeard story. The play loop focuses on a psychological horror movie kind of story; a good comparison would be Crimson Peak, the Guillermo del Toro gothic movie, which is all about a newly married woman exploring a house full of ghosts to find clues that her husbands' previous wives didn't die natural deaths. My largest critique about the game is that it feels obligated to go for really heavy-handed gory metaphor and the Book of Rooms is a clear illustration of the authors reaching their limit for pre-written room ideas and stretching beyond that. A more surreal, unsettling approach to the ghosts in Bluebeard's house seems far more likely to work better to me, but grindhouse is more compelling to a lot of people, apparently. E: I think the woman in bondage (who shows up in some Actual Plays of the game with one of the authors playing the part of the GM is a good example of like, the point of that room is to ask 'was this an accident or did he kill his previous wife? Did she genuinely enjoy this intense fetish poo poo or was this coerced? What does being married to this man mean?' But clearly the grindhouse aesthetic can be hard to look past, which is why that's my point of criticism. However, it's clear that the author GMing has her own aesthetic of gory horror, as well, so possibly this is just what the authors wanted the game to be like and my criticism is pointless because the aesthetic is part of the goal, because they seem to have been pretty united on that front. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jul 24, 2022 |
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Jul 24, 2022 21:50
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