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I think a big problem with the perception of Williams and TSR is that most the other principal actors are these mythologized gaming icons. Gary Gygax is held up on a pedestal even though he made terrible business choices and most likely spent most of his time during the Hollywood period using TSR money on hookers and blow. After reading the history of the gaming industry in the 70's it's pretty obvious that the founding fathers of D&D were incompetent, consistently misjudged the market, failed to innovate, and were unnecessarily vindictive against other hobbyists. TSR was killed mostly by Dragon Dice and unsold backstock, which killed most companies from that era in the 90's. The Buck Rogers stuff didn't sell well but it's not like Indiana Jones or some of the other pre-Williams side stuff sold well either. The infamous no playtesting rule, which apparently might not have been a thing, wasn't that big of an issue as well because no one was playtesting their books or editing them during that era.
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Mar 13, 2015 15:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:What was that like? I remember they even made a PC game out of it and I saw it once on G4TV or whatever the equivalent of it was in 90s and seeing 3d dice get thrown across the monitor blew my teenage mind. It was kind of like the Marvel Dice Masters game but they had more than d6's. This was also in 1995, back when Magic the Gathering was a high concept game and no one was ready for anything collectible like that beyond a card game. The game had no real branding too which I think hurt it big time. All the dice were just generic D&D monsters. The thing that helped Marvel to me is that when you buy those dice, it's a character you're probably intimately familiar with. You want Cyclops, Magneto, or Spider-man because not only are they good in the game, I don't actually know if this is true so don't hold it against me, but you also want them because you like the characters. Very few people are going to get excited at the prospect of owning a die that's a "remorhaz" or a "beholder" without a stat card with artwork that grabs the player.  I think Dragon Dice is only really getting a shot now is because of word of mouth over the Internet, gamers having this nostalgia for the "good ole days", and the fact that people are so familiar with collectible everything it's now a lower concept item.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:02
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My favorite recent CCG rose tinted nostalgia glasses was an article from Kotaku that a friend posted on FB about how the Decipher Star Wars card game was a perfect, balanced experience that should still be made and played to this day. The friend totally believed it too even though he used to bitch about power creep and the last sets when the game was still going.  Everybody remembers how cool the EU sets were because they had real people portraying characters like Mara Jade but no one remembers the convoluted set only rules and a rule set that relied on silver bullet cards.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:11
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MadScientistWorking posted:Supposedly, the Blumes used TSR to acquire latchook rug kits but with Wikipedia being Wikipedia its not exactly something I would believe right off the bat. There's something about that in Designers & Dragons: The 70s. I believe they were propping up the business of a relative under the banner of diversifying the company's portfolio. There's nothing especially damning but that's because the book is really objective about everything and doesn't take sides.
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Mar 13, 2015 18:14
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I'm surprised no one brought up the other two original Doctor Who RPGs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doctor_Who_Role_Playing_Game, and Time Lord, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Lord_(role-playing_game). They're both probably on par with the other licensed RPGs from that era and Time Lord was apparently released for free online. Adventures in Time and Space isn't a bad game by any stretch and it does a great job of using story elements from all of the seasons as adventure material instead of relegating you to being a random loser who will never be as good as the Doctor. It's also being supported by Cubicle 7, they're almost caught up with the Doctor books, and is pretty well received. The older ones would be better. I don't think the older games will elicit the same response AITAS would because these deal with the 8th Doctor at most and most of the Who fans are obsessed with the second generation of Doctors. You might get the old time Who fans who carry on about how much better written and meaningful their show was when it was just inflatable couches eating people and the Doctor being chased through a quarry by a guy in a rubber suit. That's about on par with the people who really care about Elric these days.
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Mar 30, 2015 23:43
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It's a shame they never made the Weird Science TV show game. It had a great deal of potential.
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Apr 2, 2015 05:43
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Nippon Tech Mostly because I'm pretty sure it'll end up being like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km6bFBSVty4
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Apr 7, 2015 00:35
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Evil Mastermind posted:You're actually not that far off, except in Nippon Tech they expect you to kill yourself if caught. If you won't kill yourself, they'll take care of that for you. So it is pretty racist.
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Apr 7, 2015 00:52
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm actually kind of surprised that Nippon Tech is taking the lead here. Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXGsvlnn1Cs
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Apr 7, 2015 16:02
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Oh God, it's like the tech breakdown of the computers in the novel version of Jurassic Park.
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Apr 7, 2015 16:31
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Halloween Jack posted:The peak came at the very end of 1989 and the Nikkei lost a third of its value in the following year. The bubble burst, and I think the impact was felt quickly in Japan, but I think the idea of the Japanese economic juggernaut continued in the Western imagination for a few years. A good deal of the initial impact of the bubble bursting was in the real estate and lending market so unless you were buying a house in Japan, you didn't see it unless you closely followed Japan and ignored the "experts". This is also the early 1990's so people don't have the Internet and finding out what's going on in another country, especially in Asia, that isn't a big event can be difficult. I also think Japanese corporations and banks were actively hiding things from lenders and investors because it was on the level of the Great Depression in some cases. The bubble bursting was initially more of a lead into economic stagnation which was offset by massive public works projects pumping money into constituencies, most of them rural*. There was a belief well into the late 90's that economic crisis just didn't happen in Asia because the rules were different, everyone helps everyone, or some other Orientalist garbage. People just looked at the numbers too, like they do with China today, and didn't look at the micro issues effecting Japan. Now Japan is feeling the impact of the 90's because building highways to nowhere and paving rivers doesn't build a competitive economy. *Japan is afflicted by the same "rotten boroughs" problem Britain was in the 19th century but they won't fix it. LDP legislators from rural, dying, constituencies wield inordinate power due to the voting districts not being restructured and then win votes through pork barrel spending. The supreme court has told the Diet that the makeup of the Diet is unconstitutional and the Diet just laughs.
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Apr 7, 2015 22:10
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Kurieg posted:My favorite bit of BJ Zanzibar stupidity were the were-squirrels that were stronger than the Garou in every conceivable way. Are they just were-foxes that exist everywhere then? Were-foxes could learn any changing breed or tribal/whatever gift or rite. They also had access to broken origami magic and were the only changing breed to survive the apocalypse. Not in the sense that they're written as surviving in the Apocalypse book but in the Hengeyokai book they're guaranteed to be the only changing breed to make it to the next age. Their metis were also perfect beings and super rare/special. They are problem World of Darkness character incarnate.
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Apr 8, 2015 21:57
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theironjef posted:People beat Sauron up all the time, so presumably by now some hero has definitely confiscated his tech and can therefore cure cancer. So why haven't they? Maybe Iron Man is also busy turning people into dinosaurs. Wakanda has cured AIDS but won't give the cure to the other nations of Africa because they would "abuse" it. Black Panther is a stone cold mother fucker. This is from the terrible Reggie Hudlin run of Black Panther where every white hero and villain was racist. EDIT: Kurieg posted:For everyone else, Iron man's still evil as far as I am informed. It's called capitalism.
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Apr 9, 2015 19:41
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theironjef posted:RE- Space 1889 Savage Worlds: I could see that actually working. The story has potential. Like a few of the other games we've covered, it suffers from being a decent kernel of an idea that the author did their level best to bury under thick layers of boring obsessive half-relevant detail. It was the same with Furry Pirates, which y'know, if you were to change the name to like "Cartoon Pirates" could have some potential. I wouldn't mind playing something like Disney's Robin Hood only set on a pirate ship, that'd be fun! But instead it's 150 pages of someone's book wikipedia entry on the age of piracy, only with Furry replacing Man. It's peak GDW. They come up with some interesting concepts but they're often held back by too much detail on unimportant things. It's also telling that their most financially successful book was a book of facts on US military hardware that they put out right before the First Gulf War. Just imagine a game company of grogs who play historical wargames and get mad because your Panzers are the wrong color for the Spring of '43. Alternatively, TG versions of Walter from the Big Lebowski.
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Apr 28, 2015 18:38
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Space 1889 is creator owned and licensed out to other companies like most former GDW properties that you see around. When GDW voluntarily closed its doors in 1996, most properties were given to their original creators. This is why Marc Miller has the rights to Traveller and licenses it out to people. EDIT: Designers & Dragons is a great series by the way even though it's a little too comprehensive at times. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 23:14
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Can someone give a breakdown of Zir'an? It sounded interesting but there's not much out there on it.
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May 18, 2015 18:03
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Xelkelvos posted:Arguably, it's a subgenre spun out of another subgenre. Tokatsu specifically. Whereas toku is male oriented and features mostly science based or extraterrestrial based powers (at least initially), magical girls are the opposite with magical sources and female oriented. Both run off of some sort of emotion with friendship/camaraderie as part of it. Hot-bloodedness, courage and bravery in toku and love, kindness and hope in magical girls. They're both two sides of the same four colored and sometimes campy coin. This is all pretty true. Sailormoon, which was the first big magical girl series, shares a lot of similarities with Saint Seiya. Saint Seiya is pretty much magical boys and shares a similar team motif. There had been magical girl series before but they were more Kamen Rider-esque and more geared towards young men like Cutey Honey. Saint Seiya was one of the biggest series of the 1980's so it's not a shock they would copy some of the dynamics from them because everyone started doing it.
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May 18, 2015 19:35
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Kai Tave posted:What I mean is that the people complaining about Blue Rose's venisonocracy probably weren't similarly impassioned over, say, the various lines of succession and forms of government in the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, and in most D&D gaming groups how the king of such-and-such gets put on the throne is probably, at most, a background detail that never really matters in the course of actual play. But for some reason the fact that Aldis' sovereign gets picked by a divine, otherworldly force that just happens to take the form of a magic deer is a huge problem, and I'm inclined to think that it's only a problem because people upset about Blue Rose were looking for any and everything they could point to and decry as bad. Most of the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are composed of oligarchies at that. You pretty much only get to be a ruler through magic or cash. So when King Arthur draws or is given Excalibur or when Donald Blake wield's Thor's hammer, is that the work of social justice warriors as well? It's pretty much a concept that's existed in storytelling since the dawn of time so you know who the good guy is without going through that person's whole backstory or take the time to build them up into a hero from nothing. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jul 24, 2015 |
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Jul 24, 2015 04:48
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Count Chocula posted:That sounds like a Danger 5 character. Gumshoe is a pretty rules light, narrative focused system that is easy to learn but Dreamhounds is super ambitious. You would really have to modify it to play it with non-RPG people because it's incredibly high concept for even experienced gamers.
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Aug 8, 2015 13:58
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Bieeardo posted:Explains Cohen the Barbarian. I think it's a tradition of the 80's and 90's to have impenetrable Elven homelands. Tir Tairngire in Shadowrun was the same.
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Aug 20, 2015 12:56
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Pope Guilty posted:Tir Na Nog wasn't exactly welcoming, either. I kind of forgot about them because anytime anything starts going on about how magical and full of elves/fairies Ireland is, my eyes glaze over and I black out. An Elvish Israel was a better concept despite the terrible execution, which they've been dealing with lately oddly enough.
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Aug 20, 2015 21:20
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Flavivirus posted:Pretty certain sex hitler was Dali's creation - one of his many efforts to shock the other surrealists though transgression. Like a lot of the weirder stuff in this book, it's a direct reference to an event that actually happened! It is. Dali was quite obsessed with Hitler, not in a believing in fascism sense but as a mass figure and fascination. Dali wasn't a Stalinist or communist either like a good deal of the movement and Breton disliked him for that. Dali disliked both ideologies but didn't say bad things about fascism or Franco because he wanted to visit Spain again.
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Sep 2, 2015 12:15
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theironjef posted:They already recast a West African non-dragon god as a dragon, I figure they'd just say that your sire is the legendary monkey dragon Son Wukong and call it a day. After all, having a soul that isn't a dragon wouldn't be cool. I'm sure this was made during one of those long periods where cartoon weren't cool. Making this game now would be impossible without also including that your soul might be that of a mythic pony. That would be pretty funny because the Dragon of the East Sea is a major character in Sun Wukong's early adventures.
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Oct 1, 2015 05:07
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Cooked Auto posted:To answer your question, C3P0 did talk to the Ewoks in ROTJ. He most likely created their new religion by telling them the Campbell mono-myth.
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Dec 19, 2015 03:47
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unseenlibrarian posted:At a guess, Wick's probably talking about the whole Courtly Love thing there, which: A: Really more of a French thing and B: Pretty much almost entirely a literary convention instead of a thing real people actually did. This. It's kind of like people's obsession with Bushido. EDIT: Which, without even thinking about it, is another Wick thing. I can't wait to see his new version of 7th Sea. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Dec 21, 2015 |
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Dec 21, 2015 05:53
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Are there any videos of Wick gamemastering? I just want to see the way he handles himself and the player's reactions.
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Dec 21, 2015 19:50
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John Wick is pretty much the equivalent of that rear end in a top hat who comes into the game store and talks at you about his "amazing" campaign and how stupid his players are. All of this right down to his too detailed descriptions and obsession with Bayushi Kachiko.
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Dec 22, 2015 14:22
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
It doesn't. Hedge magic is mundane and allowed by the consensus of reality so it doesn't invoke paradox. Awakened or enlightened magic are completely different and only superficially appear to be similar. The player wouldn't be incurring a residual backup of paradox from using hedge magic, just like a theoretical physicist wouldn't for writing up their theories on quantum mechanics. For those unfamiliar with Mage, those two might not seem related but they're two ends of the spectrum in the Ascension War. Wick could run it that way but it's just a dick move all around, done for no reason other than to gently caress over the player. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Dec 23, 2015 |
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Dec 23, 2015 02:37
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occamsnailfile posted:So, I'm in the minority here who doesn't think Wick was being a total tool with the Nick scenario. Nick wanted to play a Mage; Wick started him out as unawakened but kinda magical. Violating the WoD theme doesn't bother me since it's full of swiss cheese holes already. He then used Nick's ambition to offer him what he wanted with a large raise in the stakes and it sounded like it was pretty exciting, but they all survived in the end. This is all true and shows some growth. I elaborated on this because this isn't so much theme breaking, it's mechanic breaking to have paradox fall on him in that manner. By the rules as written, nothing should happen to him. After he becomes awakened, he has plenty of opportunities to get hosed now that he's in a whole new dangerous world. There's nothing wrong with upping the stakes and there are plenty of avenues for that but how he handled it was unsurprisingly done poorly.
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Dec 23, 2015 19:45
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smeared liberally over a few bits of genuinely good advice, and really poorly-researched historical comparisons. I'd expect no less from the creator of Legend of the Five Rings of course. (no hate for 5R, but its issues have been covered in this thread a lot already)
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I just want to finally make a vampiric werewolf. The World of Darkness has held us back for too long with its prejudice against mixed races. Abominations have been a thing since second edition Werewolf the Apocalypse. They have perpetual werewolf depression but it's still an embraced werewolf.
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Dec 25, 2015 00:23
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theironjef posted:Here is an Afterthought for you guys, hopefully you want to discuss favorite campaign settings with us. I like Traveller 2300AD a lot and it's probably one of my favorite space settings because it doesn't fall into a number of traps space sci-fi normally falls into. It was also a setting made by a proto-Microscope like system. Edit: Isn't Wick's Scorpion waifu his creepy, "perfect" version of his ex-wife, not an actual PC? RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Dec 29, 2015 |
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Dec 29, 2015 20:41
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Halloween Jack posted:It's kinda sad how literally every take on Carcosa is better than Derleth's. Even all the dumb irrelevant stories in A Season in Carcosa. Derleth is the only writer I know of who could completely mess up a well known Lovecraft alien race on top of it all being in a serious story that had multiple Edgar Allen Poes.
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Dec 30, 2015 02:33
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Isn't this making fun of Golarion, the Pathfinder setting? Even if it isn't, it's uncanny how close they are but I guess that comes from being the most generic of generic settings.
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Dec 30, 2015 13:34
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PurpleXVI posted:So, Hc Svnt Dracones had its first expansion officially launched today. Is everyone tired of it or does anyone want to hear what 200 pages and 14 dollars gets you? I think the answer is always yes.
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Dec 31, 2015 21:18
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When I saw it pop up on Drivethru, I immediately thought it was the core book, which is $3, with extras. $14 for a source book seems steep when the core is $11 cheaper. The name doesn't help things either.
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Jan 1, 2016 23:39
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Covok posted:On the subject of the name, what does Hc Svnt Dracones mean? Is it some bastardization of latin? "Here be dragons." It's such a weird game. I did a double take when Roleplaying Public Radio interviewed the creator, who seemed normal enough. It was just really shocking to see that in my feed. EDIT: Beaten
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Jan 1, 2016 23:47
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PurpleXVI posted:Hc Svnt Dracones: Extended Core They actually managed to fit those lovely, Nomura anime pants on a creature with a god drat flipper.
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Jan 3, 2016 19:11
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Kurieg posted:I'm not sure if there are plant changelings, but the closest thing in Werewolf are some of the stuff from Book of the Wyld and he had less than no part in that. There's a group of Inanimae, elemental and inanimate object Changelings, called the Kuberas who are usually anchored to a tree. They're kind of dryads but they're not really addressed beyond the book they appear in, like everything else in Changeling. Changeling has a ridiculous amount of ridiculous character types. It's like 3.5 or a Star Wars RPG when it comes to the number of character racial types there have. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 03:09
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Just to give an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes if the write up for Changeling the Dreaming ever gets this far. http://wod.ottershome.net/types/chankith.php The ones with book page listings are official ones. The Hsien though aren't really changelings or fae even, they're weird Japanese spirit creatures that gain their power units from people praying at shrines.They had no connection to the dreaming and had no idea what a changeling was. I would have liked to been a fly on the wall for that meeting where the Changeling person had to pitch something for Year of the Lotus and had nothing. Most the other game lines were essentially ravaged by globalization but Changeling just about had a special regional kith, fae, or whatever they could slap a Changeling the Dreaming logo on to get some rabid fan to buy.
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Jan 4, 2016 05:43
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Doresh posted:*Goes to write up a Changeling character that is a catgirl ninja maid in case he ever finds a Changeling campaign to derail* It'll be great because you won't even be able to perceive anything Changeling related going on unless they dose you with glamour, which is pretty much magic LSD. It would just be a bunch of crazy people carrying on and doing some SCA stuff but with garbage. Also, probably kidnapping and trafficking children. That's how stupid that whole thing was. Not only are they not Changelings, or related to them in a round about way, they can't even see their miens, the dreaming, or powers. Your character would also probably die in an area outside of East Asia because you're not getting prayer kickbacks.
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Jan 4, 2016 19:42
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