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Halloween Jack posted:On reflection, the trend that was running through most media I was exposed to in the 90s, gaming included, was that it was thoroughly adolescent. Adolescents are preoccupied with entertainment that's "serious" and "not for kids" but their tastes are still simplistic and indulgent. This is why the 90s gave us things like a Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon with cybernetic body horror and comic book superheroes with names like Deathblow and Hellstrike. And now you've got me wondering what 90s media looked like in countries that had a lot more reason to be happy, broadly speaking. I'm probably wrong, but I can't see that sort of "pseudo-dark and nihilistic" mood prevailing in, say, Poland or the Baltic states. (And I don't think it's just you, either. I turned 18 in 2009, and I remember seeing stuff like the Men in Black cartoon, Gargoyles, SWAT Kats...then again, there was also stuff like Pokemon, Freakazoid!, and Samurai Pizza Cats, so it wasn't all darkness  )
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Jan 9, 2014 20:11
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Spoilers Below posted:And this, I think, is one of the reasons that the Guide to the Technocracy was such a good book. Unlike the previous convention guides, it transformed the "I didn't understand 1984!" style mustache twirlers who wanted to crush all dreams and hopes and creativeness into a group of (mostly) well-meaning people who were terrified by the Randian psychos who thought it would be alright to reshape the world into a brutal nightmare and undo things like preventative medicine and hygiene in favor of whatever they feel like at the moment. Sure, your bosses are jerks, and some of the people on your side are fascist assholes, and some of those Iteration-X guys are pretty creepy, and those Progenitors clones are downright weird, and the Void Engineer guys who spend too much time in space tend to come back wrong, and the Syndicate guys keep falling to the Wyrm, and the NWO guys were cooler when Hulk Hogan was their leader... but, you know, they kept Ravnos from killing most of India, and have dropped infant mortality rates to almost nothing, and have finagled it so countries with McDonalds in them don't go to war with one another. That's progress, ain't it? It sounds like White Wolf's Mage series is like the Gumshoe book The Esoterrorists...told from the POV of the Esoterrorists? 
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Jan 9, 2014 20:38
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I wonder what a campaign to try to penetrate the World Serpent into Eastern Europe would look like? Maybe a valkyrie/weapons scientist chara takes an interest in what they're doing way over there? (You want ideas, there's an idea, right?)
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Jan 20, 2014 04:52
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Night10194 posted:Everything about Unhallowed sounds like it would be more fun if you were actually playing when dark and terrible things first rose and you had a shot at putting them back into the ground with your Lee Enfield, instead of all this 'hopeless and nihilistic because we said so without any cultural or technological progress for 200 years' stuff. Kinda sounds like Kriegszeppelin Valkyrie if the main villain were more into voodoo and occultism instead of "galvanic" computing. It'd be a zombie game I'd actually want to play.
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Jan 20, 2014 16:59
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pkfan2004 posted:•Zoophagus Mania: I immediately wondered where the hell you'd find animals to have sex with before I read it closer. This one is weird. Very weird. It's like OCD but you have an obsession with feeding animals to other animals then eating them. Like, say, feeding flies to spiders then eating the spiders. Or flies to spiders to birds to cats to...you. Or up to and involving cannibalism and forcing others to engage in it. If the ritual of the feeding cycle is interrupted, you get -1 to all rolls if you make a composure roll. If you fail, you single-mindedly obsess over completing the cycle. I don't know who the gently caress would take this or think it's a good psychological disorder to ever use ever. Sounds like what Renfield had in Dracula. Something to do with supposedly "magnifying life essence" or silliness like that. That's probably why it's in there.
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Jan 21, 2014 00:43
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hectorgrey posted:I get the feeling that that bit of Phoenix Command would make for an awesome Jagged Alliance type of computer game. With emphasis on the computer game, yeah, it seems like an interesting base system for a Jagged Alliance/7.62mm alike. I just can't imagine doing it with dice in a tabletop setting, and I'm pretty alright with gun prawn too.
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Apr 1, 2014 16:27
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Ratpick, will you also be analyzing the limited edition skins? This is a very interesting review of my favorite PbtA hack; keep going! 
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Jun 4, 2014 20:10
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Mors Rattus posted:Having actually played Cthulhutech using just the core, though: you really don't want to play it. You want to play a game that has anime Cthulhu and mecha influences, similar to Cthulhutech, but better designed and not running on a dice mechanic that makes basic success at tasks often unlikely for stuff you are not focused on being able to do, and which does not produce parties in which one member can literally do more than all of the others combined. What he's saying is you want "Nyarlathotech: A Paul Ettin Game".
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Jun 5, 2014 04:20
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raverrn posted:In Knights of the Old Republic using poison to kill a few hundred slaves gives you dark side points. Where in KOTOR did you get to use poison to kill slaves? I can't remember this happening. Closest would be the Korriban training room area. Unless there's some other KOTOR that isn't Bioware (probably not Obsidian's) that you're talking about?
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Jul 16, 2014 19:20
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Did proper mechanically-backed genre emulation really only happen in the 2000s? It feels weird hearing about stuff like that Indiana Jones example in an age where Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, Leverage, Atomic Robo, and Double Cross are all readily available. (Not saying those are the only ones, but they've all been noted, here or elsewhere in TG, as being very good at thematic reinforcement.)
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Jul 24, 2014 23:37
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Oh my god, it's like someone took a Hind and made it even THICKER. Although they swapped out the pods and pylons for a fixed system, for some reason. It doesn't look cooler, it just looks more bulbous. Although the idea that a swarm of upgunned Hinds can KO a god sounds pretty cool. Davin Valkri fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Aug 11, 2014 |
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Aug 11, 2014 15:12
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wdarkk posted:I sort of like the idea of post-post-apocalypse, where there's been a somewhat uneven recovery going on. Not that I'd use Rifts for it. Is there an official Fallout New Vegas RPG? That's the tone I'd go for for a post-post apocalypse. Unless I were going full Ghibli or something.
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Aug 11, 2014 19:54
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Halloween Jack posted:Let's be real here. Honestly, if writers traced military hardware the result would look a lot less derpy. Comic book style artists seem to come up with the dumbest ways to draw military stuff. Davin Valkri fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Aug 11, 2014 |
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Aug 11, 2014 23:00
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Simian_Prime posted:Can the Hollow be used to play a Frankenstein monster, or is that more The Ghoul's territory? I think that's actually one of the stated influences on the Hollow, so yeah, you could definitely do Frankenstein's Monster.
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Sep 20, 2014 19:34
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:What is it about people wanting to play angsty messes? Like Gaz said, it's fun. For my part it lets me play up a certain aesthetic that's frowned upon in more actiony games, and Monsterhearts is much better about its subject matter than other games that sell themselves as deep and mature. Like, even when playing up maximum silly dumb teenage clusterfuck, it feels a lot more solid and sure about what it wants to do.
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Sep 20, 2014 22:24
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Stupid shadowy cabals. Just a bunch of old men playing at running the world. Are Shadowy Cabals of Superhumans/Unemphatic Humans literally everywhere in 90s metaplot, or are we just seeing the worst ones?
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Nov 11, 2014 03:16
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Kavak posted:"Ancient conspiracies orchestrate human history except when it's too politically or socially sensitive for them to do so." Of course, White Wolf had moments of tone deafness there, like making Himmler a vampire in an early book and the entirety of the Revised Children of Gaia sourcebook. Did they ever talk about the Yugoslav Wars? Funny you should mention that, because at least one other vampire game being reviewed here calls out the Yugoslav Wars by name. Where's GimpinBlack with regards to Nights' Black Agents?
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Nov 11, 2014 04:17
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Right now it sounds like Golden Sky Stories with a lobotomy...or maybe a trepanning. The viewpoint characters would probably prefer a trepanning. Stupid 1990s; I guess all that existential angst that went out with the Soviet Union had to reestablish itself somewhere.
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Nov 14, 2014 23:21
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Wow, he sounds like a complete passive-aggressive jerk. How was he still getting players after the earlier ones quit?
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Dec 3, 2014 02:44
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Shouldn't bait-and-switch games be done with eyes open? I mean, I would expect a game with evil Jedi to at least give a heads up like, say, "we'll be using some assumptions from KOTOR 2 about how the Jedi aren't as great as they make themselves out to be, so make your characters along that lines."
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Dec 3, 2014 05:26
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The Deleter posted:If you don't play the battlebabe as a smouldering sexy male that defeats enemies with a glance and a single bullet, I send you a disappointed letter explaing your poor RPG choices. Oh, good, I'm not going to get a disappointed letter from The Deleter, then!
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Dec 20, 2014 02:20
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Pretty sure that's literally the Werewolf, down to the high stats, but I'm not certain on that.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:35
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Erebro posted:The really hilarious bit is that you can spin "Lovecraftian god" to teenager metaphor; the Complete Outsider. They enter at the exact bottom of the social hierarchy because they've never been a part of it, maybe they were at a much different school or even homeschooled for much of their childhood. This is obviously a bad thing, but the thing is that the Outsider understands how ridiculous the whole dance is. They're something alien to the social web, something who can examine it clinically and guess at who people actually are beyond its bounds, and that scares the social web. Holy crap, that is a wonderful skin idea, and somebody should try drawing it up.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:31
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Kurieg posted:They also released worldbooks that described real life areas and talked about relatively recent events in authoritative tones, only occasionally adding the "oh yeah this is only actually true in GOTHIC PUNK WORLD" caveats. Wait, how exactly did they go about doing this? I ask because Night's Black Agents freely sows ideas like "frightened criminal interests in former Yugoslavia kill gay people because they think they're vampires" and "earthquakes in Romania are actually tied to the summoning of Count Dracula" in technothriller po-faced tones, but I wouldn't actually believe they were serious. Did White Wolf go too far in their straight-facedness, or not far enough for people to see the parody?
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Jan 29, 2015 07:51
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It might be funny if White Wolf started with a historical event that was entirely 100% human caused and motivated, then had every supernatural faction on the block lining up to claim, oh, yes, that was absolutely totally 100% our idea, uh-huh, yep!, in such a way as to make it clear that they're all just trying to cover for something that blindsided them. Like, the jokey incompetence version of the stuff I'm reading about here.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:51
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Cythereal posted:It's very consistent, actually: some of the Nazis once they were in power colluded with supernatural powers, including a few advisors like Goring, but Hitler himself? Absolutely, 100% human no dealings of any kind with the supernatural. The Holocaust? Completely absolutely 100% human doing, absolutely no supernatural involvement or supernatural victims. How does MachineGames' Wolfenstein have a better treatment of Nazis with mythic science powers than White Wolf?
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Jan 29, 2015 21:31
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For a game with a name like 3:16, it sounds very thematically...shallow. Like, I'd expect a game that basically uses "For God so loved the world..." as a tagline and war as a theme to be a lot more philosophical about the relationship between a nation-state and/or its governing body, the bloody but important to study mess called war, and the soldiers sent to fight in those conflicts. It feels like it should be a game about officers sending their commands to die and the consequences thereof.
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Feb 5, 2015 19:16
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Just to confirm, is Ron Edwards the guy who's writing that alternately boring/awkward game set in the "TOTALLY REAL AND REALISTICALLY CRUDDY" middle ages that had the questionable stance on women? Or am I thinking of someone else?
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Feb 5, 2015 20:07
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Wasn't the early/mid 1990s about the time that the Japanese economy's boom started to turn around and go bust? Or is that something only seen with the benefit of hindsight?
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Apr 7, 2015 20:45
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Different spider tank.
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Jul 12, 2015 00:19
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Forums Terrorist posted:This seems to be a theme in loving everything: "oh no our sometimes-secret orginisation/society/whatever is secretly evil/undermined by another even more secret conspiracy" How do people resolve this in universes where concepts like Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, etc., have literal definitions? It seems that themes about corruption of institutions and "the only morals one can trust are one's own" should be more relevant in cases where there isn't a factual god you can appeal to about the Rightness of whatever, which places like Blue Rose and baseline D&D seem to embody.
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Jul 29, 2015 05:47
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Forums Terrorist posted:They resolve it by taking their biases with them, usually, because people are people no matter what you play I mean more like, if you wanted to play a game where cynicism and doubt are the only truths, why would you use a system and world that hew in the exact opposite direction? It seems that the likes of GRUNT, Night's Black Agents, or even Kriegszeppelin Valkyrie (if run by a scholar of interwar political movements, with all players agreeing) would be better fits for those themes than "there is literally a god of justice and a god of evil" D&D, or worlds and systems designed on that template.
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Jul 29, 2015 06:20
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And now you all have me wondering why no one has jumped to produce an SMT licensed RPG, either here or in Japan. (I mean, they have a Log Horizon RPG, and this seems at least as suitable for conversion.)
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Jul 30, 2015 20:39
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Does this theory of "the 2nd atomic bomb and Japan's surrender cut the old magic from the world" turn the Kyujo Incident ringleaders into the last defenders of magic or something? That's...dark.
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Jul 31, 2015 06:19
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Forums Terrorist posted:I'm working on a hack for Mercenary Air Squadron to fix some issues I ran into last time I ran it and i've been bouncing ideas off IRC, and invariably the plane list ballooned because a) it's easy to dump stats into a list, and b) people like going "but what about $thing". It's not my fault the J35J is so cool-looking! 
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Sep 9, 2015 15:18
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