Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

LornMarkus posted:

Seriously, just reading the signs they have up in that forest is pretty heartbreaking. They don't even bother to be official "no trespassing" or anything like that, they're straight up pleas like, "think of your family."

Part of me thinks that if it's that much of a problem, maybe they should develop the land or something.

Nobody will commit suicide if they put up a Walmart there, only just work themselves to death.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Alien Rope Burn posted:

In general I think I've gotten to the point where Nazis are so overexposed in genre fiction I barely want to see them at all. I'm pretty exhausted on the idea of Nazi exceptionalism - that is, that Nazi Germany was so advanced that they were on the verge of discovering X and it's great that ordinary folks defeated Hitler before they invented time travel or the atomic bomb or clone cyborg Thor or whatever. I'm just tired of them being mythologized and given a lot more credit than they actually deserve.

It's always great to run into what the German Army's military minds of the WW2 really thought of the weapons that a lot of folks consider to be superior to the arms of the Allied forces. Stuff like Panzer general Heinz Guderian bitching about the questionable effectiveness and waste of resources going into the Maus tank and then praising the Russian T-38, going so far as saying it was the best tank produced during WW2. Or Luftwaffe ace Adolf Galland asking for a British Spitfire when asked by Goering if he could have any plane. It's funny because even now there's been some reconsideration regarding the Sturmgewehr 44, the first "assault rifle", that perhaps the gun wasn't as revolutionary as it was first claim, since you had personal automatic weapons chambered in rifle calibers like the Cei-Rigotti and the Fedorov Avtomat existing 20 years before it and that it's contemporary counterpart, the M1 and later M2 carbines, probably saw much more acceptance and action than it ever did.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Evil Mastermind posted:

Anyway, we get the usual list o' weapons here. The normal firearms don't have too much that's really worth talking about because it's all "modern guns, just a point or two better" stuff, although it's interesting to note that a bunch of guns publicly sold by the Kanawa Corporation's subsidiaries are made from plastics, which means they don't set off metal detectors. I'm sure that isn't causing worldwide problems.

No mention of the Impala Chaingun? Man-portable gatling gun being used in Yakuza wars sounds like it's pretty important. But, you're right, there only really difference with Nippon Tech weapons is that they're chambered for higher calibers like the 13mm Chunyokai (being the Desert Eagle point-five-oh before Magnum Research even created the caliber) or having huge magazine capacities like the SC Kyogo T11 assault rifle, with "four times the ammo per clip as the AK-47 or the M-16".

Then the better guns like the Hachiman "Big Thunder" pistol and the Militech A-35 rifle ended up in the Kanawa Personal Weapons book, taking the whole shine off those guns.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I feel like Nippon Tech is right up there with the Living Land in terms of being a really interesting setting idea that falls flat due to bad presentation and lack of thought about what you'd do there. I realize that the 90's were a ways before we as a hobby started asking things like "so what do we actually do with this?". But even so, there doesn't seem to be any effort put into things apart from there being martial arts and megacorps.

I said this before, but Nippon Tech should be "Robocop and Judge Dredd by way of John Woo". All the elements are there: the out-of-control corporate culture, the huge gap between the haves and have-nots, the inbuilt crime drama and revenge story motifs.

But none of it hangs together. Each concept lives in near total isolation from the others, leaving everything feeling disjointed.

I remember someone saying that in the original Feng Shui that the Buro was included so that people had a place to get high-tech guns from, but the developers didn't expect that people would want to go to that juncture and hang out.

I get the impression that Nippon Tech suffered from the same problem. They needed a place for PCs to get weapons and high-tech gear, so they created this realm. But oddly, they didn't realize that if you make a region in your setting and earmark it as being important, then people are going to want to go there and learn more about it.

I always figured that Nippon Tech was really more the place for James Bond-style gadget-based superspy espionage adventures. 3327 himself looks like he's a Bond villain and the higher-tech meant you could have explosive pens and fight guys with prosthetic claw hands and metal teeth. Or stuff out of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD: a Helicarrier and rocket bikes wouldn't be out of place in Nippon Tech. I don't think NT was meant to be a catalog for "high-tech guns", because you have if you wanted straight-up high-tech gear and guns, you had cosms like the Cyberpapacy and later Tharkold that produced gear that would blow away anything produced by Kanawa. Even the one-off prototype Rijato Battlesuit pales in comparison to the Chod power armors from Tharkold or the GWI Devastator, which are mass-produced power armors. I really think they wanted Nippon Tech to be the "Ninjas and Superspies" realm, just like Nile Empire is the "Pulp Adventure" realm, Asyle being "High Fantasy" realm, Orrosh the "Horror" realm, Living Land being the "Edgar Rice Burroughs' Lost World" simulator, and Cyberpapacy as the "Cyberpunk" realm.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Hostile V posted:

Botlickers are explicitly blackshirts, people who are firmly on board with the robot regime just to save their skins. And even then, that doesn't always protect them especially when you consider that Zone Denver will eventually pluck their brains and their baby-making components for its experiments. You could play an all Botlicker party but...I wouldn't want to, it sounds incredibly dire and bleak.

I think the correct term is "kapo" or "sonderkommando".

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

LatwPIAT posted:

I don't, by itself, mind that the book references things I don't know. I just find the examples used to be particularly striking in their obscurity; a "significant pop-culture figure" is someone who until reading M20 I had never heard of. Geronimo is rated above Elvis and Batman. These examples are supposed to provide context and guidelines, but to me they fail to do so. I know who Grumpy Cat is, I don't know who Janis Joplin is. I know more about Elvis than Geronimo. This makes it very hard for me - and I reckon I'm not alone in this - to determine where on this scale something falls. Is Fritiof Nansen an obscure 1-dot legend, or a major 4-dot legend?

You're a non-American citizen, aren't you?

Geronimo was the leader of an Apache tribe, who waged a small war against both Mexican and American armies throughout the Southwest for almost 30 years. They even captured him, put him on a reservation, to which he escaped and continued to wage war against the U.S., until they captured him again and put him on a military base. He became famous after his capture, because he represented the disappearing West, and he lived out until the beginning of the 20th century. The "skull" in the exclusive Skull and Bones society at Yale is rumored to be his skull, stolen by Prescott Bush (the father and grandfather of two American presidents). American airborne troopers, because of the early Native American cultural influence on the 101st Airborne, use his name whenever they make jumps. There's places he stalyed at during his campaign that have since been named after him. He's probably akin to Che Guevara, for a more international analogy, an iconic rebel who stuck to his ideals.

Janis Joplin was an American songstress during the 1960s. She's pretty much a contemporary of Jimi Hendrix, having performed at Woodstock and, also like Hendrix, dying young from a drug overdose pretty much around the same time.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

LatwPIAT posted:

Adulthood at 2.25 and aging-rolls at 6.25, actually. Short Lifespan 3 divides all ages by 8. (2.25 years is, probably entirely coincidentally, about the time it would take to grow an adult human spine from stem cells.)

Wait, wait, wait, how do you know this? Is there a chart somewhere that theorizes the growth of cultured tissues?

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Kurieg posted:

Basically: Fields has been doing this poo poo for years on the periphery of the d20 shitware business and most people wouldn't even know he existed if he hadn't stumbled his way into the limelight last august, but he can usually be ignored. People who like White Wolf can't ignore Brucato because he keeps turning up in the worst places.

Wait, wait what? What did Fields do last August? All his poo poo d20 stuff and the Otherverse America stuff has largely been under the radar. Did he finally pull something that got him some infamy?

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Mors Rattus posted:

Published the Tournament of Rapists via DTRPG, leading them to remove it and institute new policies about being able to remove reported content.

Oh man, no wonder why I didn't hear about that. I was kinda busy with a job at the time.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

mcclay posted:

The first hit on Google search is Britbert yelling about "SJWs" attacking Table Top Gaming, so Field's isn't alone.

Which is hilarious because Field is like a militant pagan. Otherverse is like some weird wish-fulfillment for him.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Kurieg posted:

no, the idea was "SJWs are trying to take down Fields free speech"

No, I get that, it's just that they would be letting Fields' hang if they knew who he actually was.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Evil Mastermind posted:

Now, I know some of you are thinking "superior numbers are one thing, but 1930's military technology probably wouldn't stand up to modern military hardware". And you're pretty much right. For that exact reason, Mobius has pushed the boundaries of weird science and reality-based technology to develop the reality bomb. These bombs don't do any physical damage; what they do is temporarily alter the reality for two miles around the explosion point to a Nile Empire pure zone. And since it's a pure zone, contradictions are impossible. Anything not allowed by Nile Empire axioms simply won't work, which will generally include most Core Earth military hardware. And while everyone's trying to figure out why everything is busted, Mobius' troops can mop up easily.

Which, when you start thinking about it and you start looking into stuff released later, reality bombing Africa is a bad move, since most of the militaries and militias are using WW2-level equipment anyway.

Your warlord's Toyota technical might change into a Studebaker but the DShK in the bed was made in 1930s and those AK-47s everyone's armed with are cutting-edge Tech Axiom 21 infantry weapons, because whoever wrote the Torg books knew of the similarities between the Sturmgewehr and the Kalashnikov.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Evil Mastermind posted:

Torg struggled with the screwed-up edge cases around axioms, especially the Tech axiom. Situations like "this gun would work with X axiom value but was manufactured under X+3 axiom value so it's still a contradiction" crop up all the time.

This is the common problem with anything with a Tech level or axiom. Nothing is built in a vacuum and there's hundreds of examples of someone doing it first 20-50 years from it's mainstream introduction. For instance, electrically-powered rotary guns like Vulcans and Miniguns might have entered into military service around in the '60s, but even Dr. Gatling put a motor to crank his gun when electric motors became available in the 1890s. I found out the other day that Calico-style helical feed magazines have been around since 1870s with the introduction of cased cartridges.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Like, a 9mm pistol is allowable under Nile Empire 1930's tech level. But if that pistol was made in the Cyberpapacy, even if it's a bog-standard 9mm pistol with no cybertech, it'd still be a one-case contradiction because it was made using materials not available in 1930-whatever.

Which they then contradict later when Tharkold comes out, saying that their Cornucopia Machines can produces equipment at any axiom level.

Evil Mastermind posted:

It's why Kanawa's weapon factories all operate at different tech levels. Swords intended to be sold and used by people in Aysle aren't mass-produced, they actually have to be forged from scratch because even a modern alloy would cause a contradiction.

This is what I usually handed it down to, a case of how it's machined and materials science. Transformed objects made from alloys would decompose and their machining would grow more crude and less refined. With complex objects like guns, which tend to be made of dozens of finely-engineered moving parts, a pin suddenly growing enlarged and turning square is going to jam up the entire thing.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Simian_Prime posted:

Holy Crap, when a friend first mentioned this game to me in college, he told me about the Demon of Stale Bong Water, but I didn't believe it until now! :lol:

But my friend must have been best buds with Imbap because he drank bongwater all the drat time!

I love that Imbap is the Demon who didn't apply himself and is totally cool with it.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

LatwPIAT posted:

Watch on the Rhine by Tom Kratman, writing for John Ringo's Porsleen series. It's about Germany resurrecting the Waffen-SS to fight against invading aliens because the Waffen-SS are the only ones tough enough to fight the aliens. Modern Germany's military is weak because of liberals. And the liberals are the true antagonist, not the aliens. In other words, a bog-standard Kratman novel. You can put it on the shelf next to the one where Hillary Clinton's election to POTUS leads to civil war with Texas, and the one where KratmanKratman's author avatar kills his gay cousin so he can use the inheritance to personally hunt down Osama Bin Laden and sell all the children of Osama's village into child sex slavery.

(Also, yes, at one point the Waffen-SS recruit some Jews into their unit to fight the aliens.)

So, almost exactly like John Ringo himself, given my knowledge of the man from the legendary horrific read-alongs of his Ghost series in TFR about a former Navy SEAL/rapist of underage girls/goth band aficionado-turned-North Caucasian warlord directly sanctioned by George Bush in his global efforts to kill most of the world's Muslims.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Doresh posted:

Man, I was already coming up with stuff for the Godwin version of this strange setting (which will be about Mammoths instead of dinosaurs):

"And then in 1948, Chancellor Rommel ended the Holocaust."

Though i think a more historically accurate version of this alternate history (if that even makes sense) would pit East and West Germany against each other on a faraway planet, with the book lavishly fellating East Germany's joke of a planned economy.

That reminds me of one of those game setting ideas I've had was an '80s retrofuture alternate history where space exploration in the '60s and '70s didn't get curtailed and, with a little help from extraterrestrial MacGuffins, the 1980s and 1990s has the U.S./NATO fighting Russians in an interstellar Cold War, with both sides banning WMDs from being employed on Earth, but going hog wild in the Off-World Colonies.

Of course, that's also pretty much the premise of William Gibson's script for Alien 3.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Kurieg posted:

Yes, though it's free of references to actual slavery, meaning the primary conflict is actually about states planets rights.

It helps that the core systems are actively villainous in other ways as well.

I would have loved if that debate showed up on "Firefly".

"The war was about planets' rights"
"Yes, the right of the planets to own slaves"

Honestly, we never get a counterpoint to why the Alliance went to war with the outer planets. Just that "they meddle" and, until Serenity, it was not known that they accidentally created the Reavers. The closest thing I can see is the crime syndicate guys like Niska would pretty much own the Independent Planets if it wasn't for the Alliance.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

FMguru posted:

Western games are hard to do because the setting is high-lethality for typical player characters (who get into gunfights all the time) so you'll be forever rolling up new characters unless you have some sort of magical healing or generous hero point mechanic, which is tricky to pull off both mechanically and thematically (this also applies to pretty much all no-magic "realistic" historical games and settings).

This could easily be fixed with period-appropriate body armor. Most would be heavy, since they would be made from iron and steel, but would provide an enormous amount of protection against pistols and shotguns. Layered silk vests and jackets were also known for their bullet resistance, and, overseas in Korea, the warriors of the Joseon kingdom wore "myeonje baegab", a padded cotton vest that had bullet-resistant properties.

I really just want to see more Ned Kelly get-ups, to be honest.

Young Freud fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Feb 4, 2016

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Kavak posted:

I prefer "The south survives by the skin of its teeth, but collapses back into the Union over time" or "The North and West end up better developed and more powerful over the long term without the millstone of the agrarian south to support".

The one I've thought up was "With it's expansionism checked and economy broken by both the Civil War and burning out their arable land due to non-sustainable cotton farming, early Communism, forced out of industrialized North by robber baron capitalism, takes hold in the South, turning it into an American form of Stalinist Russia or North Korea."

Simian_Prime posted:

I've always like "The British used the South's moment of weakness to swoop in, conquer the Confederacy, and reclaim its former colonies for the Empire. The Second Revolutionary War has begun!"

(Or Third, if you count the War of 1812)

Actually, this would probably work better with the French, since they were in a position to actually do something since they had a puppet state with Maximilian I in Mexico.

Britain had little reason to enter the war, since they both had ample reserves of cotton (something the South misjudged) and were developing their own cotton sources in Egypt and later India.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Doresh posted:

You'd think having guns would give them a definite edge and defining feature over the other standard medieval fantasy races. Aside from being crazy fundies. Which come to think about... does this setting have clerics? Do the guys that are the most obsessed about killing dudes with a different belief gain power out of it? Or do they just delude themselves into thinking their wizards are totally clerics, paragons of their god who most likely isn't really around in this alien world?

Oh well, these Banestorm could potentially barf out the Soviet invasion force I was fantasizing about a couple pages ago...

Considering it sounds like the Banestorm has been going on 2000 years our time, a displaced good 'ol boy redneck militia would probably be a serious threat for a while. A regiment sized military unit would be a world-changing event.

BTW, how does the Banestorm look on the other end? Is it just dudes putzing around and just vanishing in clear day or a major atmospheric event and people disappearing?

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Cthulhu Dreams posted:

Given the nature of Lee's WWII service that isn't even particularly implausible

Yeah, it was on the tip of my tongue when Cushing was mentioned. NBA choose the wrong Hammer actor.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Count Chocula posted:

For some reason the main character of Salem's Lot basically turns into a D&D style Paladin at the end, which fits with Ravenloft.

Fun fact: Stephen King originally had a mysterious government agency tracking and using supernaturals in his first few books, but dropped it. Like Night's Black Agents in Carrie.

Are you talking about The Shop? Because they weren't so much tracking as making and attempting to control individuals like Charlie McGee in "Firestarter" and Harlan Williams in "Golden Years" as well as creating incidents like Project Arrowhead in "The Mist" or containing the mutation from the space craft in "The Tommyknockers".

gradenko_2000 posted:

Well shoot that's a perfect campaign seed

How do you think the Shop made Charlie McGee?

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Robindaybird posted:

It's bad tracing with lovely inking and coloring.

I'm gonna say it, Soto is tracing - that kind of rigid stiffness that pervades her art is often a tell-tale sign of sometime that is using a light box and copying a model. Or how some art look, I wouldn't be surprised if she was taking poser models and and just slapping a paint tool over it if she can't find a reference pose.

Another possibility is that she's rendering them directly in Poser or DAZ with a comic art filter. I remember the "goat transformation" breakdown in WGA looking like she applied a line art and cel shader to some Poser models.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Evil Mastermind posted:

The funny thing is, a lot of those bits about using terrain to make combat more interesting instead of just having the fight on an infinite flat plain is actually good GMing advice. Terrain was a huge part of 4e's combat assumptions.

The thing that gets me is how much of it would get invalidated by casters, such as flying monsters and the like.

Doresh posted:

I think the justification here is that as a series of video games, they can't really expect every buyer to have beaten the previous games.

At least back then. You could probably do it now.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:



Sorry to double post but I'm sickeningly entranced by Daria Pierre Polnareff here's giant muscle-y arm and normal arm, and her giant muscle-y leg and normal leg, on opposite sides.

I love how detailed the women look, but when you look at the soldiers, you can tell there's some wonkiness in the art, like the rifle on the guy on the left and the helmet on the guy on the right.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Black August posted:

Yeah, that'd be the fun though. A bunch of bullied and fearful chumps stammering "Well she's an anti-hero and still with us!" before the mass serial killing starts and most of them end up dead and saying "Shoulda gunned her down when we had the chance."

EDIT: And then you call in Delta Green and the real fun starts

Or she gets an one-way foreign exchange trip to Al Amarja and have her fall prey to either the locals, the various conspiracies and dark forces there, or just the general weirdness.

Simian_Prime posted:

Telluric vampires sound cool.

I was think of using a similar explanation for the powers of Twilight vampires, since they're basically made of a sparkly, granite shell around a chewy crystal center.

I always joked that the "sparkling" came from extraordinary regeneration powers. The sparkling came from how the reacted to the common vampire drawback of sun exposure, with the "sparkling" really being their outer layers of skin shedding and catching fire.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Fossilized Rappy posted:

This reminds me, are there any current RPGs out there that have tried to wrest back the idea of steampunk from the whole "just glue some gears on it" fad trend? Like, one with actual social revolution, anti-colonialism, and anarchism that dotted the real Victorian era?

The biggest joke is that if you go with that, it's not really steampunk but Communismpunk, since that's what Marx and Engels were reacting to when they wrote the Communist Manifesto. Actually, a steampunk story with young Karl Marx, Jenny von Westphalen, and Friedrich Engels as the protagonists would be completely hilarious and putting that rebellion back into steampunk.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Count Chocula posted:

If you believe Velvet Goldmine, David Bowie and glam rock came from a magic green rock from space. That's pretty magic.

You've got your mother in a whirl
She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I'm not convinced Synnibarr is more complicated than AD&D. I mean, seriously.

Maybe not, but Palladium/RIFTS is literally AD&D with more clutter.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

theironjef posted:

Afterthought 28 - Car Vore has become live and ready. I think the intro might be tuned a little high, so watch your headphones. Otherwise this is a fun one, for some reason the questions were really just clicking for us.

Hahaha, I just started it up right now and that intro just took me by surprise.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Evil Mastermind posted:

It's interesting; after the history of Gaea name-dropped all these people who the writer just assumed I'd be familiar with the major players of the Salem Witch Trials, I tried to look up the names in this chapter to see if they were based on real people. Turns out the people weren't, but the text was.

Which is another problem I have with this stuff. They drop these historical names and chunks of important text, but next say "oh by the way, this is based on our real-life %THING", but they always present it like I'm just supposed to get these references. I mean, this was 1992! Google didn't exist yet! Hell, if I didn't just search for the Salem names on a whim, I never would have known those were real-life historical figures.

There's a great bit in the Tharkold book where they bring up the free humans' (the Race) mythology and it's the quote from the fictional Book of Man from Lester del Ray's "For I Am A Jealous People". This make me wonder if the weird intergender creation mythos quote for the Tharkold might have been pulled from somewhere.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Count Chocula posted:

Refresh my memory? If it involves a hermaphrodite being who gets split in 2 by jealous gods its originally from Plato, tho I know it best from Hedwig & the Angry Inch: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_zU3U7E1Odc

It's definitely not that, because the Tharkold are hermaphrodites to begin with, so there's no splitting off and what's given of their creation mythos indicates that the Progenitor of Demons basically sprang from whole cloth. Here it is from the "Kraznavekta" as described in the Tharkold splatbook...

quote:

Omoo-Zhan, Progenitor of Demonkind, the self-begotten, Itself It bore, inseminator and gestator, within the womb of stars. Wings flaring, eyes burning, did Omoo-Zhan fly Its hunting dance among the stars. Talons tearing, fangs biting, did Omoo-Zhan seize Creation by the throat and bear it down. Before Omoo-Zhan, the Universe did bare the throat. Unto Gestator Omoo-Zhan did Inseminator Universe submit. And <She'> bore many children from <His> seed, and we shall rule worIds.

Yeah, that's the Demon God basically raping the Universe. There might actually be some creation myths that include that. I know Shinto creation myth is kinda skeevy.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

wdarkk posted:

The main characters of Strike Witches are named after actual historical pilots, one of whom is still alive as of this post.

I really hope nobody told him.

Chuck Yeager? I think he knows and either it was couched as an honor and no one told him of the fetish material behind it or he just doesn't care.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

ProfessorProf posted:

Raccoon Dog Henge



Riko is a raccoon dog, age 3 (13 as a human). She's been transforming for over a year, so she's practically a veteran.

Raccoon dog henge are masters of transformation. They can change into things other than humans, or even imitate someone they know. They can turn leaves into money, but would obviously never do anything bad with these powers. Most of them wear glasses, since raccoon dogs have dark circles around their eyes. They're often seen with thick clothing and tend to be a bit more heavyset in human form than most henge. There are tales of older raccoon dogs, over a hundred years old, who drink booze and emit wisdom.

Raccoon dogs as animals, also called tanuki, look kind of like raccoons, but aren't. They have shorter tails, and are fluffier and more plump. They live in thickets and dens or under old houses, but don't really care about territory. They're good at climbing trees, and like to eat persimmons. Of all the animals that typically become henge, they're probably the slowest.

I'm a little disappointed that they leave out the tanuki's more memorable attribute, but, given that the example characters are fairly young, I guess they didn't want to bring up the enormous size of their genitals in something like this.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Tasoth posted:

Now I almost wish the Australian flightless bird species could be found somewhere in Japan. An ostrich or rhea henge sounds fantastically odd.

Nah, cassowary henge.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Crasical posted:

I have Opinions about Car Wars, and yeah, part of it is that Mad Max is always brought up to explain it and it gives bad expectations. There's a regulatory body for Autodueling, and cloning, and the like, and big automotive manufacturers are churning out these cars new, they're not salvaged, armored and armed wrecks.

It's not really post-apocalpytic at all.

It would be possible to have post-apocalypse that's not evenly-distributed. You could have economic and environmental pressures, such as an automated transportation industry killing highway towns and global climate change making exurb life expensive, force most people into the big cities on the coasts (considering Gulf region as a Third Coast), leaving middle America into sometime akin to the town in The Cars That Ate Paris, with the townsfolk causing wrecks to bring in cash from selling scrap autos and welfare money from disabled drivers while the local teens going wild with car parts and small town boredom, creating automotive monstrosities. Then you can layer the various forms of pansexual biker gangs from the Mad Max series and armed professional mercenaries riding shotgun through the new Wild West.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Count Chocula posted:

Please tell me there's an article or something with a bunch of gangs and characters named after Springsteen songs, like the Suicide Machines that are sprung from cages on Highway 9.
Connecticut is accurately boring, though we do have WWE Wrestling headquarters. Maine is just begging for Christine stats.

There are a few good classic sci-fi stories about autodueling. Didn't Bradbury or Harlan Ellison write one?

Harlan Ellison's "Along The Scenic Route" is very much the epitome of autodueling as it's presented in Car Wars/Autoduel. It probably had a bigger impact on the game than Mad Max did.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Kurieg posted:

Yeah, I love the game thematically but the rules are just painful at times, and it's definitely not a World of Darkness game.

And after having thought about it yesterday North Dakota should be more important in most Post Apocalyptic scenarios, as long as they take place during or shortly after the cold war. It has two Air Force Bases and, during the period between the end of the Cold War and the US Nuclear Disarmament program, had North Dakota seceded from the union, they would have become the world's third strongest nuclear superpower.

Unless there was a WW3 between then and it's secession, because it probably would have gotten bombed during a nuclear exchange for the same reasons.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Kurieg posted:

True, but the reason why there are so many nukes in NoDak is because it's the geographical center of North America, 70s-80s era nukes would take a long time to get there giving them time to either retaliate or shoot them down. Launching a nuke at North Dakota was a surefire way to ensure a nuclear winter. Which, still, should make the state somewhat important.

On a similar vein, since I've been playing a bunch of Fallout lately, why is it that post apocalypse games always have the area be a temporate desert. Fallout specifically says that the nuclear war made most of the planet into a warm desert which just makes no sense to me, and I was wondering if there was any truth to it.

It's debatable, mostly because it's one of those things that would require WW3 to actually prove. While volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa produced intense sunsets and a 1.2 centigrade drop in global temperature for five years, proponents of the nuclear winter theory like Carl Sagan thought something like Saddam Hussein burning the Kuwaiti oil fields following Operation Desert Storm would have produced a nuclear winter effect, but never did. Supposedly, the key element is the fires from burning cities and landscape going into the stratosphere, which massive fires like the Kuwaiti fires apparently weren't able to do. Homeland Security did an assessment in 2010 and the fire experts brought on the white paper claimed that modern city design would likely not generate a firestorm in event of a nuclear detonation. Although large fires would still occur, they just wouldn't coalesce into a firestorm that could penetrate the stratosphere. (Interestingly enough, DHS had similar papers where modern buildings would likely prevent the radiation casualties given that most modern buildings and foundations are made of reinforced concrete, the same thing used when making blast bunkers and fallout shelters. We're talking about 90-99% survival rate for sheltered occupants, I guess as long as the structure doesn't get obliterated in the blast wave)

Also, even if the particulate matter entered the stratosphere, it would largely be isolated to the Northern Hemisphere, since that's where all your nukes are going to be used against, either targeting cities and military installations or destroyed in their launchers in a first strike attempt. The jet stream would likely prevent any fallout from crossing the equator, leaving most of the Southern Hemisphere relatively intact, with maybe a few exceptions, and even the effects of those exceptions would be minor, given the large distances of open ocean between landmasses. Supposedly, this is one of the reason there was a lot of the pursuit of American-friendly regimes like Chile and Colombia back in the '70s and '80s, so the American government, military, and business elite can go into exile while most of the CONUS glows in the dark.

So, tl;dr, nuclear winter turning everything into a desert may or may not be feasible or may or may not effect globally.

The Crotch posted:

In the case of most of the Fallout games, I presume it's because Black Isle and Obsidian are/were based in California. Same goes for inXile and the Wasteland games. Hell, New Vegas' Honest Hearts DLC probably had its origins in one of Rope Kid's camping trips.

And Wasteland, as well as it's sequel, where based along the Arizona/Nevada/California border.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

oriongates posted:

Less dramatic than it sounds.

Basically the theory is that large-scale nuclear war (nuclear winter isn't something that's going to happen on a small scale) will throw enough dust, soot and particles into the atmosphere to dim light from the sun, resulting in global cooling as light gets blocked off. The effect is similar to what happens when a powerful volcano erupts, or a large meteor hits the earth.

The effect would, presumably, be a drop of a few degrees average temperature. If it happened in the modern day it might actually largely cancel out global warming, leading to the same average temperatures we saw about 100-200 years ago. However, if the effect is more extreme then it leads to colder and longer winters and cooler springs and summers. In general this means less food (especially smaller harvests) and possible mass-extinctions of some species of animals in plants that aren't adapted to the climate change in areas where the climate is on enough of a tipping point for the change to be dramatic.

It would be catastrophic for human society because it would cripple large scale agriculture but its not going to be a literal ice-age or anything.

Actually, a 2007 study called "Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences" published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, suggests that a nuclear winter caused using existing global arsenals would be –7 °C to –8 °C global cooling a couple years after a major nuclear war and –4 °C after a decade, but North America and Eurasia get hit with a –20 to -30 °C drop.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

I'm legit surprised that SJG was making Arlington the most major city in Texas and not Dallas-Fort Worth. It's likely it gets a mention because of the GM plant there, because that's the only auto industry that I know of. Dallas-Fort Worth is more known for it's oil industry, with Halliburton and Exxon Mobil, and defense industry, like Bell Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, as well as Texas Instruments headquarters in Dallas, than for auto industry.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5