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Evil Mastermind posted:c.f. people flipping their poo poo because of tieflings and dragonborn becoming core races. God forfend we have fantastical elements in our fantasy game. God dammit you will be a human, a pointy eared human, or some variety of short human as god and Tolkien intended. Seriously though the 13th Age bard with "Former Bird" as a background is one of the best things.
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Jun 11, 2015 20:11
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Pieces of Peace posted:God, it's just so true that every time you take a look at Unknown Armies you start seeing everything in that vein. Unknown Armies is one of those games that makes me come up with bad guys I'm not sure I'd trust myself to actually use in a game.
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Jun 11, 2015 21:47
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It's been a long stretch of depressing games about the misery and fundamental corruption of the human condition. It's enough to make anybody depressed. Let's see if we can't lighten the mood with some good old-fashioned kids on adventures. That's right, at long (long) last, it's time to start in on: Further Afield is the first (and so far only) for-pay supplement for Beyond the Wall. Published earlier this year, it expands Beyond the Wall's Scenario-based play into material suitable to a long-term campaign. It covers world-building, expanded rules for character progression, travel, and exploration, and adds a new system in the form of Threat Packs. Threat Packs are a bit like large-scale Scenario Packs, except that they dictate the course of events over the length of the campaign, rather than setting up a single adventure. If you've played Apocalypse World or its descendants, you'll recognize a lot of Fronts' DNA in Threat Packs. This book gives us four: the Blighted Land, the Grey Prince, the Imperial City, and the Vengeful Wyrm. We'll talk about those later, but first let's dive into the Shared Sandbox approach to campaign building.  Holy poo poo, Saxons! Shared Sandbox Further Afield recognizes three basic structures for building a campaign: there's the traditional campaign where the GM does all the work of world-building and drops the players in. There's the zero-prep option of just running multiple Scenario Packs back-to-back (possibly even returning to the same Pack from time to time, since different rolls on the random tables can produce very different stories). And finally, there's the shared sandbox, where the GM shares world-building authority with the players. As you've no doubt guessed from the title of this section, that's the one Further Afield focuses on. The chief advantage to this approach is, of course, a much higher level of player buy-in. Since the players are coming up with major locations to populate the world themselves, it's safe to assume that they'll be excited to go explore the adventure hooks at those locations. The downside is that you can lose that sense of mystery and discovery, for the very same reason. Fortunately, Further Afield has us covered. To start the shared sandbox process, the GM takes a blank piece of paper (or the campaign worksheet that comes with the book) and places the characters' home village in the center. Then you go around the table and let each player roll 1d8 to determine what kind of location they'll be placing on the map. It might be a Major City (and here we're talking like Rome or medieval Paris), a Source of Power (like a sacred stone or a wizard's tower), or maybe a Monster Lair. At this point you're not mapping things out precisely, so the player should just specify a general direction and an approximate distance from the village (near, moderate, or far; roughly 20-40 miles away, 40-80 miles away, and more than 80 miles, respectively). Exactly how many of these you create depends on how many players you have and how long the campaign is intended to go, but the recommendation is two per player. So what's involved in creating a major location? The d8 roll gives you a broad archetype, but the player needs to flesh that out a little bit with a description and a hook. Maybe that Monster Lair is the home of a local river goddess and she's been flooding out of season, or maybe that Human Settlement far to the south is the home camp of a raiding tribe who are attacking the outlying farms. Character playbooks and Scenario Packs can provide inspiration here; lots of them have vague mentions of mysterious places that make great fodder for this step. Finally, the player decides whether her character has seen this location herself, heard about it in rumors from travelers or local gossips, or learned about it in old stories or books. This comes into play in the next step. Once everybody has created their major locations, each player gets an opportunity to add a little embellishment to one of another player's locations, then the GM commences with fuckery. For each location created by a player, the GM rolls a secret Intelligence (for learned about locations), Wisdom (for seen locations), or Charisma (for heard about locations) check for the character. The results of the check indicate how accurate the character's knowledge of the site is, ranging from "hilariously off-base" (the "ghosts" are just old man McGuillicuddy trying to scare people away!) to "not only completely accurate, but here's another hook for you." This is how Further Afield deals with keeping that sense of mystery alive in a shared sandbox game, and it's one of my favorite mechanics in the book. You do have to be mindful of what, specifically, the player is excited about and not be a dick by rug-pulling that, but it really adds a nice bit of tension when the party starts exploring the map.  Geddit? Geddit? The rest of sandbox creation is the group kibitzing, tying things together, figuring out what Threat Packs might apply to the setting, what the characters' motivations for adventuring are, and stuff like that. Figuring out where the party wants to go first is also advised, so the GM can prep for the first adventure. If languages are going to be an issue in the campaign, this is also when you start nailing down the languages spoken in the campaign world. Finally, there's this nice little sidebar: Further Afield posted:Telling Stories I kind of love this as a way of reinforcing the difference between "character knowledge" and "player-authored fact," and would absolutely recommend doing this. Maybe run a Scenario Pack adventure first, just to establish the characters and their world a bit, then do this as the denouement before kicking the campaign into gear.  Next Time: The GM takes the map home and starts fleshing it out, and we add Threat Packs to the campaign world.
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Jun 12, 2015 16:50
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Count Chocula posted:I really don't want to derail the thread, but the 'white woman passes as black enough to become NAACP' official' story is all over my Facebook feed, and that's gotta be at least a Significant Personomancer charge? At least. Once the review covers Avatars in more depth, remind me to tell you about the Personamancer/Avatar of the Rebel that I'll never actually use as the antagonist in a UA game.
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Jun 12, 2015 20:20
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Tulul posted:Mundane poo poo exaggerated into mysticism is sort of the point of magic in UA. This is also a point I try to impress on players when they're picking Obsessions during character creation. They're not just "something you're really into," they're "something you will chase down weird rumors and underground black markets for." Somebody whose Obsession is "fitness" isn't just someone who spends three hours a day at the gym, they're the kind of person who will hunt down some shady back-alley gym in Little Uzbekistan where they sell homeopathic steroids made of, like, bear uteruses smoked over a fire of old copies of Muscle Magazine from the 1970s.
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Jun 12, 2015 20:48
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theironjef posted:Wow I don't think I noticed anything about halflings living near swamps in the PHB, did that even make it? IIRC "Swamps" became "rivers" in the final product. theironjef posted:Honestly I absorbed the Eberron halfling into anything I do immediately after I read it. Nomadic tribes wandering a Cretaceous savannah living in houses built on the backs of slow moving dinosaurs? Best halfling. Eberron has pretty much the best take on most fantasy races, TBH.
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Jun 15, 2015 16:25
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Kellsterik posted:I'm not actually sure that's true- the whole point of being an Avatar is that you don't necessarily have to buy into it, as long as you don't break taboo. You don't have to buy into it, no, but you absolutely have to act out the precepts of the Archetype. Someone can think kids are all a bunch of snot-nosed brats who are only good for unpaid labor and still channel the Mother, they still have to help children, nurture them, ease their suffering, etc. Having a PR team convince the world that you're doing that when you're actually not won't get you jack.
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Jun 21, 2015 16:19
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wiegieman posted:This was caused by Dermott Arkane as the opening salvo in his fight against the Mesenger for the seat: delivering a message that that stops an ascension is perfect for a man who wants to replace an avatar of vital truth and ascend as what is basically the Spin Doctor. Which brings up another neat thing about the setting--unless your take on the Archetype puts some kind of new spin on that figure within the cultural zeitgeist, you basically can't replace that Archetype. Like, the book specifically talks about how the current Godwalker of the Savage is some guy Tarzaning it up in the Australian Outback somewhere, wrestling crocodiles with his bare hands and howling at the moon and what have you. He's never going to Ascend, because he's doing the exact same thing every Savage Avatar since the first one Ascended is: rejecting society and living like an animal in the wild places of the earth. In order to oust a sitting Archetype and take its place, you have to not only find a new, semiotically valid interpretation of that Archetype, you have to make your vision the thing most people immediately think of when they think of that Archetype.
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Jul 3, 2015 22:06
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Count Chocula posted:What's interesting is that since UA came out, we'd had all the Wikileaks stuff, which does go back to the earlier Messenger idea of pure facts/truth. This is the great thing about Unknown Armies: Once you get how it works, you start seeing story hooks in drat near everything in the news. Pop culture trends become fronts in an invisible war. Major events start to look like plays for Ascension or Godwalker status. It's one of the easiest games to come up with adventure seeds for, even as it can be drat hard to figure out how to actually build a campaign for. One of my favorite throwaway bits, and I can't remember if it's in the core or one of the supplements, was a suggestion that the spate of magical girl media in the mid/late 90s (Sailor Moon, Buffy, Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, etc) was part of a concerted effort by a female Avatar of the Magus to shift the image of the archetype from masculine to feminine. The Archetype's counter-move was to make sure that Harry Potter exploded in popularity.
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Jul 6, 2015 15:49
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Someday, I will run an Unknown Armies game centered around these: http://www.vinyloftheday.com/2014/06/18/soviet-banned-western-music/ Somewhere out there, there's a bootleg recording of Song From Moulin Rouge with a B-Side of the Stargazers' Broken Wings pressed into Stalin's last brain scan after his fatal stroke that every cantomancer in the world would kill to get hold of.
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Jul 9, 2015 15:44
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Daeren posted:Ruby and Mr. Gold were also very, very early sneak previews/concept tests of Demon: the Descent demons, if I remember my scuttlebutt correctly. WoD writers enjoy seeding potential future lines or weird poo poo to hook into later in the things they write. The God-Machine got a lot of cryptic nods for a couple of years before Demon and 2e in general got announced. IIRC Ruby and Mr. Gold were more a case of Demon developers looking back over the previous WoD lines and going "hey, these things kinda look a lot like Unchained/GMC angels" than a deliberate nine-year-in-advance sneak peek--we're not that organized.  But yes, Ruby & Mr. Gold are cool, Sapphire and Steel is amazing (the second series with the train station haunted by the ghost of a WWI soldier is very dear to my heart), and now I, too, want to track down Whispering Vault.
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Jul 19, 2015 18:40
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Bieeardo posted:I was in a group that tried to run an apparently modified Bill in Three Parts here on the forums, and the result was frustrating all around. The GM expected us to be a lot more proactive than we were, but we had no idea what we were supposed to do, or how. It really didn't help that we got pinned down in the grocery store and lost a PC (blew a Stress check, ran for it, and got splattered by a shotgun blast) and then lost that part of the scenario. We met Bill the Fleshbender and Chester the Molester, already leery of violence, but Bill was in no mood for conversation. We killed him by accident after he painted a room in shades of cop, but when we got to the cult standoff scenario we just stared at each other in bafflement. I was actually thinking about stealing the basic setup (of the guy whose timeline split in three parts, not the Comte or the railroady teleportation bits) for a Mage: The Awakening game, because there at least even if the PCs have no clue what's happening they're better equipped to poke the situation with a stick.
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Aug 8, 2015 04:28
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