|
The nice thing about UA is the way that skills work, and how magic is a skill like anything else, sure you could have a 40% skill in cutting yourself for magical energy, but a 40% in First Aid or similar is going to come in handy pretty often too. It allows relatively normal characters who are still interested in the occult underground to play with the big boys. Of course they should still probably learn some rituals or something just in case.
|
#
¿
May 27, 2010 00:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:50 |
|
|
Kemper Boyd posted:Rpg.net melted down at Stolze because men can't ride horses in the world of Reign. In the setting that is included with Reign. Anyway I know in this thread we're going all UNKNOWN ARMIES I WANT YOUR BABIES but Reign is a really good fantasy game where it's easy to throw out the setting and use it for any fantasy adventure you want. Does better with gritty fantasy rather than DnD, since because of a system quirk, barring armour and special traits, everyone's 'hit points' are roughly the same, and you can die from a good strong blow to the head. Reign's included setting (the world of Heluso and Milonda) has a LOT of quirks that are different from Tolkien-derived fantasy to the point where it turns people off, but if you like cool fantasy rules or you think the idea of a world where the continents are shaped like people and gravity is towards the 'bones' or 'centre' of the people and there's a whole country on the underside of an 'arm' that never sees the sun and so on then Reign is pretty awesome. edit: http://www.gregstolze.com/reign/ hell just look at the website and the moving image, that's what the geography of the known world looks like literally.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2010 15:43
|
|
|
Ansob. posted:Blargh, now I'm officially interested. Don't suppose you could give me a summary of what it's like? The website tells you most of what you need to know, but: The world (more accurately, the known continents) is shaped like two people. Gravity is almost always oriented towards the 'ground'. When you're on water, though, gravity is oriented towards the sea floor/water. This means that standing on a shore, you see a wall of water in front of you. When you step onto the water, you 'shift' gravity orientations, the wall of water becomes the ocean beneath you, and if you look behind you, the land is a wall of cities and plains curving away. There are no elves or dwarves. I mean there could be, but everything's more focused on humans. There are demons and monsters and other stuff (about as much as you want there to be, the focus is on human vs human). If you murder someone AFTER they plead for their life, they become a ghost and haunt you. I think they have minor poltergeistic powers, but mostly they just yell in the ears and otherwise annoy those they haunt. This means that starvation is the usual means of execution, and provides a reason to have recurring villains (the party can't kill the captive unless they want to be haunted). The sun and the moon are fixed in position and brighten and dim on a daily basis. Days work generally as normal, but shadows are constantly fixed in place, and there's no concept of sunset and sunrise. Some plants (because of ambient magic, whatever) live off moonlight or darkness or whatever and grow in these permanent shadows. This also means some regions of the world (like behind the spine of one continent) are in perpetual darkness. It's a widely held, self-confirming (? this is a point of contention but you can easily ignore) superstition that riding a horse astride makes men infertile, and men who do so are treated as social pariahs or eunuchs. This is a setting element basically just to justify gender equality by requiring any nation who wants cavalry to employ women (or chariots I guess). The culture is more Bronze-Agey in feel, hardly anyone is literate, language hasn't evolved enough yet to have spaces and an upper/lower case distinction, nobody has figured out reading silently. The way the language skill works is actually interesting and useful in Reign, a globetrotting/nation-politics game will really benefit from a guy who can translate. Magic is 'ambient' in the world to the point that everyone has a sixth 'magic sense' that tells when spooky stuff is going on. Nearly every type of magic has a different style of casting it. Anyone can learn any magic, but to get the really powerful stuff, you have to 'attune' yourself to a style which bars you from other styles. You can also gently caress up attunement so that you get the benefits of the magic but you look ugly (example: one attunement process has you getting wings and you can fly as well as cast thunderbolts and stuff. loving it up still gives you chucking thunderbolts, but your wings can't fly and look weird). Oh right and of the four(?) cultures detailed in the book (more are mentioned or hinted at), only one of them is predominantly white (they're the freak cannibals that live in the sunless plains). So yeah that's all the interesting stuff about Reign's default setting that I remember offhand (which I stress is FREELY DIVORCABLE FROM THE RULES IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT). The next setting he's putting out for it, Nain, is inspired by Harry Potter and Gormenghast and is full of magic and wands that choose wizards and all that sort of thing.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2010 16:32
|
|
|
I managed to run the Jailbreak one-shot for a mixed group of newbies and RPG veterans yesterday. I can confirm it is still The Best One-shot Scenario For Any Game (that I know of). Only downside was that I made a mistake with giving one player Janet, they weren't really comfortable playing a more talky character, but it was a lot of fun for everybody anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2013 09:21
|
|
|
Jailbreak, as a stand-alone is literally available for free from the Atlas Games website. Or if it's not meant to be, then it's freely available via Google Search, typing in 'jailbreak unknown armies'. https://www.atlas-games.com/pdf_storage/jailbreak.pdf There's none of the UA rules in there but the entire scenario is in there.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2013 04:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:50 |
|
|
I wonder if it's going to keep the Street/Global/Cosmic split of the 2nd edition corebook, or split it up differently. I guess UA 2e could also claim to have three books of core, Postmodern Magic (adepts and stuff) and Statosphere (avatars and stuff).
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 03:11
|
|