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Davin Valkri posted:That sounds like absolutely gorgeous post-apocalypse imagery, to be honest. I think more and more people are getting clued in that a post-apocalypse environment might look more like the involuntary nature reserve of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone than endless desert. Even Wasteland 2 featured an overgrown L.A. in it's later half.
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Apr 5, 2016 13:51
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chaos rhames posted:It doesn't fit with the mad max aesthetic/themes of environmental degradation and systematic control of resources. It'd be neat somewhere else. I get that. I'm reminded of a quote in an article from the Japan Times about the Warring States era in Japanese history and Oda Nobunga's influence, when "a physical wasteland bred a moral wasteland - a morality of the sword". That line particular stuck with me in regards to reading or watching the post-apocalypse genre.
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Apr 5, 2016 14:14
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Kurieg posted:The “downside” of Automatic weapons is that Armor and Fitness are allowed to reduce the damage of each individual shot, but they’re still doing more damage than anything short of a superhuman with a greatsword. Someone who knows more about guns than me will have to look through this, but Assault Rifles seem absolutely busted. Also Bows apparently have Magazines now? I would hope Soto had enough faith in her audience to understand how quivers work. Looking into it with AnyDice, a starting Furie that hasn't popped her Arcane Athletics or Avatar of Kali or anything will be killed in a single shot of a Hand Gun about 15%, Semi-Automatic Pistol more than 50% of the time, a Submachine Gun about 75% of the time, and an Assault Rifle about 95%. Seems okay to me. An experienced Furie that dumped her 4 attribute boosts into Fitness to a Superhuman Fitness of 7, with a Metal Armor chestplate, will keep her from getting killed but not uninjured: Semi-Auto Pistols while get her knocked down to 2nd level Fine at less than 20%, about 30% for Submachine Gun's single hits, and about over 60% for Assault Rifles. However, the multiple hits from "automatic" weapons will increase the chance of injury or knock off more HP until something bad happens (for instance, the experienced Furie that activates both Arcane Athletics and Avatar of Kali has a 5% of being knocked to 2nd level Fine or 10% of her health, but the average burst increases that chance to injury to 15%). That means guys with firearms are loving deadly, especially to beginning characters and in groups. All it takes is a failed initiative roll and your witches are going to be splattered across the asphalt. Even superspiffy, top-tier witchdom has to fear from guys with guns because an ambushing fireteam can whittle them down to nothing in a single turn. It doesn't matter if you can turn single individuals into cigars or jackasses or pigs, the other 9 guys are going to pump you full of lead. Which makes images like this hilarious... ...because a beginning witch can't handle a soldier carrying an assault rifle and wearing a plate carrier.
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Apr 5, 2016 21:36
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Kurieg posted:I think your math is a little wrong somewhere. A starting Furie would have 30 hit points, and a hand gun could, in theoretical math fantasy land, deal 66% of that, but that's highly unlikely. Bellum Maga's d6s are "-1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2" in anydice. 2/3 is a failure, 4/5 is a success, 6 is two successes, 1's subtract a success. I used standard d6 so that's likely why. I wasn't sure how Bellum Maga actually used dice, despite looking over your previous posts.
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Apr 5, 2016 22:06
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Barudak posted:At first I was going to say the Water Heart would be extremely useful on Athas what with it being a free, endless source of water but 100 gallons of fresh water a month would take approximately 10 years to fill a single above ground pool's worth of water at which point you might as well travel across the ocean, learn to surf, and fight the techno-brain suckers for all the fun roleplaying that would be. What if I told you that you get about 61 gallons of water from using the daily Wall Of Ice spell instead? As far as I know, melted icewater from Wall Of Ice acts like regular water, with it turning to steam if it's melted instantly. That would be about 1930 gallons per month, including the 100 gallons of fresh water. And that's not assuming the Water Heart is treated as a 7th level cleric like the Fire Heart. Otherwise, that 100 gallons of fresh water per month barely satisfies the water requirements for a single human.
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Apr 6, 2016 17:34
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well. It could be worse, somebody could have named a game VOR or something.  That monster is going to totally eat whole and slowly digest that soldier there.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:50
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It wasn't so bad. Goddamnit FASA, why didn't you just expand Renegade Legion instead of taking on another brand?
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Apr 9, 2016 03:04
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TombsGrave posted:Reminded how much I wanna run Promethean: The Created one of these days, though. It makes me want to hash out that proposal for Alien: The Invasion that I'm enamored with after reading that WoD fanbook based off the Prototype games and said "You know what, it would be better if you threw in some The Thing From Another World and "Parasyte" in there as well".
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Apr 9, 2016 13:30
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Night10194 posted:"Look, you rear end in a top hat. I'm here to arrest you. I don't know what kind of hosed up, weird Slasher you are, but you're wanted in connection to breaking and entering, missing persons, and you're a person of interest in six murders. Are you coming quietly? It'll go better for you." "My heart bleeds for you, as a child. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. At the same time, as an adult, you're irredeemable. You butcher whole families to pursue trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow you sick gently caress out of your socks."
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Apr 10, 2016 05:24
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Doresh posted:Unfortunately, Beast seems to be going for "Those other splats are total losers compared to our shiny new monsterkins! They try to pull off their shtick on you, you'll totally destroy them with words!", which is a totally mature and good idea to include in your franchise. So, Beasts are the SovCits of the World Of Darkness?
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Apr 10, 2016 10:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Scenario Ideas Literally the plot to Roger Zelany's "Damnation Alley". Like to a T. Hell Tanner has to make the drive through Damnation Alley because air travel between states is almost impossible due to freak storms caused by environmental damage from the apocalypse. Terrible Opinions posted:Also it's a personal thing, but I hate all of those monsters that are totally x monster from mythology but look like normal humans for "reasons". It's some hardcore bullshit that is pulled in tv shows for budget reasons, but tabletop games have no excuse. The "real" monsters in your fictional world should be those monsters not xmen whose theme sorta ties into those monsters. When you put it like this, I keep thinking that Beast is White Wolf's answer to Monsterhearts. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 04:13
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theironjef posted:Hi everyone! Sorry about the April Fool's shenanigans last week, but hey, here's an actual review of 7th Sea in case you wanted to hear our very mixed opinions on the matter. Never knew that John Wick's ideal world would leave off Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East.
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Apr 12, 2016 03:23
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Rand Brittain posted:All those things are actually being added for the second edition. Goddamn, I never noticed that really. But yeah, it's supposed to be Fantasy Europe, but it ignores all the intercontinental trade that went on to make places like Italy the center of the universe off-and-on for more than a millennium and why Spain was so loving important.
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Apr 12, 2016 03:39
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theironjef posted:Personally I sort of figured he was leaving the rest of the world for sourcebooks, which is fine (I mean, no one busts on core Rifts for only mentioning that the NGR is governed by a Rahu-Man). I'm really more incensed that the game lacks a proper Caribbean for pirates to pirate around in. I haven't listened to the podcast yet, but I know when a couple of my friends were looking for a new group, we "interviewed" a married couple who played 7th Seas. I know from the game is that it's related, sort of, to Legend Of The Five Rings and that there was some sort of wall of fire that kept 7th Seas from interacting with the rest of the world, I think including the Empire of the Crescent Moon and Cathay. It felt strange then that there was no New World to exploit, since that's why the "age of piracy" was so big and memorable, because there was so much wealth in the New World that even criminals can live like kings. River piracy was laughably minor in comparison and Mediterranean piracy was more an extension of "War of Civilizations" between Christian Europe vs. Muslim Ottomans. FMguru posted:TBF, the Middle East is there (Empire of the Crescent Moon). And it's probably overall a blessing that we didn't get to see a 1990s-era John Wick attempt at making a Mythical Africa. True, but I read Empire of the Crescent Moon initially as pseudo-Japan or another Asian power and not the Middle East.
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Apr 12, 2016 04:01
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Ratoslov posted:River piracy is a wierd way of saying Chinese bronze-age river piracy. Because clearly what I am expecting in a game of swashbuckling adventure set in the middle of the Age of Sail with art of western pirates with tricornes everywhere is goddamn bronze-age Chinese river piracy. River piracy existed in Europe as well, but there was no difference between a river pirate and your average road brigand. For example, this is the most famous of Europe's river pirates, Yermak Timofeyevich, a Cossack pirate who operated on the Volga river ended up exploring the Siberian frontier for Ivan the Terrible...  Not exactly Calico Jack material. Supposedly, it's still a big deal in Europe, with Serbian river pirates along the lower Danube between Romania and Bulgaria, but judging from this article on the matter, their loot is less gold and precious metals and something akin to what meth-heads in the United States would steal from construction sites.
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Apr 12, 2016 05:44
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FMguru posted:Yep the geography of the world means there's no reason for anyone to develop anything more sophisticated than the equivalents of shore-hugging dhows or junks. Maybe if you wanted to go far in rough seas someone would build the equivalent of a Viking longship. Certainly no reason at all for anyone to develop all the intermediate steps that lead to fully-rigged multimasted age of sail vessels. poo poo, anyone who has played Civilization knows that if you can maneuver around in Triremes, there's was no reason to invest in Navigation and building Sailing Ships until later in the game or obtain the Advance through trade, theft, or invasion. The best is when you play the real world map and go for the Leif Erickson route and get a head start on colonizing the Americas before any of the other civilizations can. NutritiousSnack posted:I honestly don't care at all about this line of thought, normally. Nearly all fantasy fiction takes place in Not Europe, because Western Europe's mythology is unsurprisingly popular in the west and is ingrained in our culture to require next to no research to bullshit on the game table while African mythology isn't. At the same time, it's ignoring that the geography plays a large part in the histories and mythologies of nations. You can't just move poo poo around and expect it to have the same effect. France and Germany are different countries largely because one got invaded by the Romans and one didn't, as well as the various interplay between France and the British Isles. The reason Italy wasn't a hell hole of squabbling ethnic groups and the Balkans were is largely because the latter was the front line between Europe and the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Spain could never exist without the Moors invading the Iberian peninsula and occupying it for 7 centuries. There's no real Spanish Inquisition if there isn't a Reconquista to cause the new owners to hunt down the old occupants and anyone who allied with them. NutritiousSnack posted:The problem is pirate fiction, doesn't usually take place near...ummm...Europe or Not Europe. It takes place in Africa and the Caribbean or if your going more niche covering Chinese pirates, Korea and China. I mean pirate crews and even most naval time crews had a surprising amount of diversity too, so while NotEurope nations should make up a lot of the fluff for character backgrounds, even on that count those places should be where you draw a lot of your mythology and historical goodie digging. This is kinda why I like the Shadowrun splatbook "Cyberpirates", despite it's artwork not really matching the content. The art direction predates the conception of the modern piracy being "Somali fisherman-turned-raider with an AK" so it's more "sail the seven seas with a cyberleg", otherwise it would totally be that because that's what the content is: it concentrates on the Caribbean, the Gold Coast of Africa, and Japanese-corporate-occupied Philippines islands and the desperate, desperate people involved in piracy, guerrilla warfare, and drug smuggling and why you'd get involved in that poo poo in the first place. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 10:50
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Nessus posted:I'm actually super stoked for Savage Worlds RIFTS, I know people who want to do a play podcast or whatever for it. (Do we have a thread for that stuff?) Anyway, if it lets you mine all that goddamn Palladium insanity into a system that isn't ball-twistingly painful to wrangle, it would be a beautiful thing. I've got a copy of Splicers sitting right beside me that I should try to review at some point.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:07
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Halloween Jack posted:Between this and the Kickstarter thread I am in love with so much new stuff. I may do Fragged Empire at some point if no one takes up that banner. Please, my friends have been harping me on Facebook to give that a try.
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Apr 19, 2016 17:10
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I hate for my first comment on this to be superficial, but wow, that piece of art I'm glad someone finally brought this up. I can see why the need photorealistic artwork for a kinda-realistic setting, but the art's like this odd mishmash of photos, some from copyrighted and/or well-known sources, that have been gone over with the Blur tool. I remember seeing one character that was literally a stock photo of Hilary Clinton from a few years back that had been smudged all to hell and another was James MacAvoy from X-Men: First Class overpainted and put through a filter]. I think I also saw Idris Elba in the before-last character post, also with retouchment. This looks like someone stuck Jacquin Phoenix's beardo phase head on another body. I know this has been going on for recent years, since a lot of concept artists will use photo reference or directly paint over a photo or manipulated it for a quick turnaround time, but that stuff isn't for public release. Anything that gets published really needs to use royalty-free stock images, creative-commons-licensed, or original photos. I'm reminded recently of the whole Ryan Archer fiasco over in the Star Citizen thread, where the artist for a related project used a still of Jessica Biel from Stealth and Star Wars fanart from another artist in order to sell the game he did artwork for. Turns out that wasn't the only thing he did where he either used unattributed photos and/or stuff that has a copyright.
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Apr 21, 2016 02:52
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Foglet posted:The Show playbook, I suppose. "When you play, your instrument shoots fire (2-harm messy loud)." Story checks out.
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Apr 25, 2016 10:23
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Falconier111 posted:For that matter, you could spin this a little for the alien thing. instead of being turned into beasts, you get abducted by aliens and turned into one of them so they can keep their numbers up. You struggle to choose between empathizing with humanity and following the inhuman call of your alien creators (morality stat!), fight against the WoD bullshit that followed your creators here, replace the Dark Mother with said creators fused with Talsoth's idea and have them setting loose you and your comrades to throw up a smokescreen of destruction and shenanigans they can hide behind, etc, etc, etc. Doresh posted:Or you make it like in Parasyte where the alien entity that was supposed to take over your body failed in doing so and is now forced to join you in some jolly co-operation. Poltergrift posted:Was working on a concept semi-similar to this a while back -- except the parasites/foreign entities didn't fail to take over humans' bodies; in fact, they basically replaced the immune systems and important internal organs of the infected. But the parasites had a limited understanding of human society, so they'd retain the human's original consciousness to use to fit in with the herd, etc.; if that consciousness became a threat or useless to the parasite, it would just pare it down until the brain was compliant and barely sentient (which was how the Humanity-equivalent worked). I love that everyone has kinda came up with the same idea and I'm pretty sure that you've read that fan splat that was based off the video game Prototype, which kinda inspired me. This is my concept for Alien: The Invasion: you're a human that has been infected with an alien organism but the organism hasn't fully taken you over, be it some fluke in your body or the infection vector was unreliable. The titular alien is an unknown, nobody is really sure where it came from, how it did, or how long it's been around. It could be a recent arrival or been waylaid in the Antarctic ice for eons and only recently unveiled (you can see where I'm going with this). What you do know is that the alien has stored it's knowledge and experience in it's genetic memory, replicated and decentralized into fragments that are now contained in you. You get glimmers of its past or its motives. You also have some symbiotic control over the infected body part. When you're infected, you're infected for good: it's like a cancer, you can excise the tissue but you're not guaranteed to be rid of it. Suicide also not an option, not unless it involves inflicting massive trauma, ingesting large amounts of poisonous or corrosive chemicals, or setting the body on fire, because the infection will take over the rest of the body as you're dying and it wins. So, the option is to find other infected, discover what it's plans, and stop them. Since it's a White Wolf game, the "families"/"tribes" I came up with were based off the body part you have the most control of or where the infection has been isolated: the Hand or the Arm, the muscle, where the parasite, spore, or infection got trapped and allows you to do cool strength tricks, transform into gnarly weapons and the other poo poo see in Parasyte or Prototype; the Heart, where the infection has transformed the heart and surrounding cardiovascular tissue into providing superhuman endurance, speed, strength; the Body, who have not only the ability to mimic other people, but, at higher-levels, mimic other lifeforms, create themselves into chimeras (the image I want is a guy who has transformed his hands into wolf and alligator heads), create orifices that can be used to attack or store stuff; the Spine or Backbone, who have superhuman reflexes and willpower due to the infection rebuilding their central and peripheral nervous system. I'd want to make one the Brain, but I'm not sure what to do with that, maybe psionic stuff. Opponents would be higher-level infected symbiotes, who are cannibalizing others to gain more memory and powers; the CDC, who've realized there's these outbreaks going on; a biomedical corporation, who has some control over the organism and have been using the knowledge gained from samples to develop supersoldiers and the like; "zombies" created accidentally suicides or sudden non-violent death, or intentionally by other symbiotes (the idea is that the organism hasn't gained full control but the host has died, so it's stuck in this "zombie" phase until it can build up a consciousness to take over the rest of the body); and, of course the Alien itself.
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Apr 27, 2016 23:16
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Count Chocula posted:This sounds great. I could have used this game when I was a teenager who thought being smart made me better than other people and gave me some vague supernatural background (Splat 1: MENSA) and when I got older and realized my tastes made me better than other people (SPLAT 2: Hipsters). It really sounds like a game about playing overpriveleged Bushes or Kennedys, though. Might be fun to pretend to be an entitled rich kid, and you could spin a whole character archtype out of Jeb! Haha, I was reading one of the descriptions of the Beast business leader who feeds off his oppressed workers and went "So, you can play Rick Snyder poisoning Flint, Michigan? He's just teaching all those poor black folks that it's better to be rich and white." It very much is the Republican Party game.
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Apr 27, 2016 23:39
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Looks like Savage Worlds RIFTS is going to be a thing finally. The Kickstarter cleared $177,000 on the first day, beating it's goal of $8,000. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/545820095/rifts-for-savage-worlds As a result, they've dropped the first sample, the Glitter Boy. https://www.peginc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Savage-_Rifts%C2%AE_Glitter_Boy_preview.pdf I kinda like it. It gives you the benefits and drawbacks of the Glitter Boy pretty concisely, something you really couldn't get with the five pages of cruft you got with the original.
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Apr 28, 2016 15:09
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Okay, Siembada's ship if ever attitude vs. Hensley's we will not start the KS unless it is 98% finished product. Who will win? Well, pretty much the conversion looks to be entirely on Pinnacle's end, with only Siembedia giving his blessing, so it looks like a done deal. Also, it looks like Mega Damage is going to be done the same way as Heavy Armor in other Savage Worlds games, where only Mega Damage weapons can affect Mega Damage Armor. That said, you can easily just chunk it and have things still be reasonably powerful. The Glitter Boy's boom gun seems to be as powerful as a tank gun from other settings.
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Apr 28, 2016 15:48
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unzealous posted:So what kind of character concept do you want to see built? Well, after that fiction, a twink male prostitute who has become a part-time detective and vigilante after a few of his friends have turned up dead by mysterious means.
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Apr 30, 2016 20:03
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kaynorr posted:The thing about Aberrant is that it got more support than Adventure! (which is to say, any follow-up whatsoever) and it was more interesting that Trinity which suffered from being somewhat bland. And for all the system problems and mediocre writing, it has a genuinely interesting notion at its core (society copes with superheroes by turning them into celebrities) which still sometimes shines through. TBH, that's not entirely original. Underground alludes to the same thing in several places, with combat veterans attaining fame and fortune by selling out and getting corporate sponsorship. Even comics in the '90s where doing "celebrity superheroes" trope, the most obvious being Captain Amazing and his costume festooned with corporate logos in the adaptation of Mystery Men from Flaming Carrot Comics. Aberrant wasn't doing new. In fact, I remember going through Underground for the first time in 15 years and wondering where the "designer mask" thing was, not realizing that it was really from Aberrant. Edit: gently caress, Rob Liefeld's Youngblood is this. I forgot which Image comic had that premise of a high-profile superhero team getting TV deals and endorsements and it turns out Pouchy McNofeet was the guy who came up with that. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 04:47 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 04:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, not all RPG fans read comics, or necessarily read a lot of comics even if they do. So it would be new to them. Even I don't believe that. The reason it was called "Ray Winninger's Underground" was because Winninger worked with Alan Moore on the Watchmen supplements for D.C. Heroes, so his career was built up on the popularity from that comic book.
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May 7, 2016 00:08
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Count Chocula posted:Of all the weird things I've seen in this thread, I didn't expect 'if JFK wasn't assassinated, he'd end up a dictator. Can you stop him?' I think in a previous post it was revealed that the metaplot actually had JFK killed but was replaced by an imposter, Mystique-style. Personally, I wouldn't have nuclear weapons play any part in the world. The Russians were further behind than anyone else in World War 2 and it was largely the result of the Rosenbergs that they got the knowledge boost that allowed them to produce a working bomb. They gleaned some from the Germans when they captured German territory, but the German nuclear projects at the time were geared toward energy generation. So, no Manhattan Project, no Russian nuclear weapons program either. Japan would have probably produced a working weapon before the Russians, given they had their own batch of Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicists and working independently of everyone, especially if they sued for peace or something following Germany's defeat and didn't have to deal with an occupation. Just have the world getting wrecked by alphas as powerful as nuclear weapons and, when the alphas vanish, superpowered covert actions and terror strikes quickly become commonplace. Also, it doesn't sound that bad registering. Also, if you register and are a law-abiding delta that doesn't pull vigilante shenanigans, then why would you even get enemies that could blackmail you with your family in the first place?
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May 8, 2016 11:21
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Halloween Jack posted:For one, It's easy, and lets the writers insert in-jokes and/or recreate a TV show character as a vampire (or whatever). A Gangrel clanbook has a character that is obviously a female Indiana Jones, and a Toreador one has Rob Liefeld. Over time this went from in-jokey and mildly clever to unbelievably lazy. It reached its terminal point in the Hollow Ones book, where all the characters are blatant ripoffs and just say "You want to be like [movie character], he is your idol." I'm not going to lie, one of the starter character templates in my on-again, off-again cyberpunk heartbreaker is straight-up Dolph Lundgren from Johnny Mnemonic, so I see the benefit in doing this.
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May 12, 2016 20:38
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The only way Beast will seem to be redeemable is if you can play Beasts that feed on other Beasts. Also, why is there on The View From Without: Hunter? Hunters are more of a line than Geist or Mummies.
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May 22, 2016 20:33
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Hostile V posted:So what's America like on a smaller level? Most citizens are armed on a daily basis with minors carrying knives or self defense tools. You can't buy a gun if you're a felon or been convicted of a violent crime, but the background checks are optional for private individuals who can simply buy a gun and give it to their friend. There are more people carrying open or concealed and when someone starts shooting, there are a lot of scared citizens who draw their guns and join in the gunfight without knowing what the hell is going on. Spree shootings are up, most gunfights are bloodbaths, people are dueling out west over insults and there's been a rise of homegrown militias and "American defense" types of groups. People are scared and they want to protect themselves and their loved ones and property, so they ignore the bigger picture and fight for themselves instead of joining with other citizens. Haha, what?! It's interesting that the oppressive dictatorial dystopia that is build around superhuman supremacy led by a President who has survived a brutal assassination attempt and trampled over rights to privacy and liberty has allowed for citizens to keep privately-owned firearms to defend themselves. Seriously, why hasn't JFK, Superior, and/or Delta Prime just disarmed the bulk of America? It doesn't make sense here given all the suppression of the rights of Deltas. It would at least give a reason for Deltas to be vigilantes prowling the streets. Hostile V posted:Scandinavia: Norway and Sweden have probably the best programs for Deltas on the planet. If you manifest, you go to a training camp for six months where you learn your powers from other Deltas. After the training is done, the government matches you with a job that needs their help and would be stimulating/interesting for a Delta employee. That's pretty nice! It's just a shame that Soviet Finland is kind of just looming menacingly over both countries. Wouldn't Soviet Finland just be Russia? Hostile V posted:THE MIDDLE-EAST: Why is there even an Ayatollah? If Superior and Delta Prime can influence world events, why would even the Iranian Islamic revolution even take hold? That's something that Alan Moore even brings up in Watchmen, with the Comedian returning home from rescuing hostages from Iran, presumably by crushing the gently caress out of the revolutionaries for the Shah. And why would Iran even think of the Deltas as being halah? Iran is relatively lenient when it comes to it's version of following religious doctrine, compared to the Wahhabist Saudi Arabia: it's the only Middle Eastern country outside of Israel that maintains a condom factory and the Ayatollah himself sponsored sexual reassignment for trans people (not that it's that progressive, since it's also an alternative to execution for gay people). I mean, why does Israel view Deltas as a gift from god and not Iran? Israel is filled with the same religious conservatards as Iran, they just happen to pray to God in a different way. I'm guessing it's clear where the author's politics lie. And, before we made deals with Saddam Hussein, he was Russia's son of a bitch. He nationalized the oil industry and pursued socialist policies when he was running the Ba'ath party prior to seizing control of Iraq, which made him an enemy of the US. In fact, the 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation he signed with the Soviets was the reason the US started backing Reza Pahlavi in Iran, because him allying with the Russians upset the whole regional security sphere we were setting up. So, we would either still be backing him if the Shah lost power or his head would be on a Delta Prime pike for even thinking of trying to corner the oil supply.
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May 26, 2016 01:44
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Nessus posted:Maybe the gun'sbrasting thing in Dystopia America there is because the superheroes realize that they have nothing to fear from the petty iron of the plebians and as a result let them have whatever shooting tools they want. All they're going to do is murder one another, after all. Of course, I gather this Facade dude is not a Superman-type, so who knows. I had thought that same thing but, as a satire, it was something that was done better and way more obvious in Ray Winninger's Underground. I think it was something I touched on in my review of the game, the developers got the appeal of big iron but also viewed it as an almost self-destructive quality that was subject to manipulation by the elite: the gun book that's not really a gun book "Fully Strapped Always Packed" has a meeting transcript of some gun manufacturer execs and an advertising executive from "Demo Fear", specialists in capitalizing on fear-based marketing, discussing marketing guns to scared housewives and kids, up to including .22 ammo in Happy Meals from the cannibal fast food franchise Tastee Ghoul, which produces this handy infographic to describe where everyone fits in the Circle of Life...  And that's just one example. There's loads where Underground apes NRA slogans juxtaposed with the image of an emotionally-crippled, 'roided-out maniac fondling a long arm, and parodies of gun ads and culture, including a NRA-catered Bible narrated by Charlton Heston. It's just another element of the free market libertarianism gone mad that makes up Underground's America. But here, with Brave New World, I don't get that. It's clear we're supposed to view Delta Prime, JFK's America and this society as being oppressive, but for a government that's controlling the media narrative and making people's lives hell so much there's a resistance group and Texas secession is not only possible but morally correct instead of being a pipe dream for sovcits, it's weird that Facade's/JFK's America respects the 2nd Amendment while trashing the rest of the Bill of Rights. Especially when you have to register your Delta powers, no matter how useless in combat they may be, but guns don't have to be.
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May 26, 2016 04:03
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Count Chocula posted:I had to explain the concept of Church-sponsored vampire hunters in great detail yesterday after my housemates were confused by them in the pilot of Preacher. Actually, were they in the comic, and did the comic come out before BNW? Predates BNW by 5 years.
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May 26, 2016 12:21
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MonsieurChoc posted:
I would say probably more like Francis Dollarhyde, which is funny, because the game pretty much expects you to be playing like Hannibal Lecter.
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May 28, 2016 16:30
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That's perfect!
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Kurieg posted:
I just got to the point where you talked about the Storytelling chapter and 
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May 30, 2016 03:52
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Alien Rope Burn posted:This is amazing to look back at with after reading a game like Progenitor, which takes people like J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King and uses them as superhumans in interesting ways you might not necessarily expect. Brave New World, on the other hand, has Kaczynski gain exploding powers and go and explode. Because of course he does. *looks up who made Progenitor* Author: Greg Stolze 'nuff said. 
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May 30, 2016 21:41
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Mors Rattus posted:Why exactly will pulling back Aysle's warping kill the local Ords? It's been explained before: Ords are likely transformed or their Possibility energy has been cut off from their core realm. If a stelae is pulled, they would be destroyed in when Core Earth reality pours back in, killing millions. The only way to avoid that is give them Possibility energy to survive the return to their reality. So either Lady Ardunary taps into the Darkness Device and likely succumbs to it before she can do so or Storm Knights gotta do what they gotta do to save those people.
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Jun 2, 2016 16:17
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Hostile V posted:The Truth About Patriot Yeah, it was pretty clear that Patriot is Forbeck's Mary Sue, but this pretty much seals the deal. Like you said later, he gets to be a martyr and still live. I would honestly respect Forbeck more if he would have killed off the Patriot and had him speak from beyond the grave in prison writings and such instead of get into whole lovely prison escape that's covered up. Hostile V posted:Ravaged Planet mentions that there was destruction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because the A-Bomb wasn't built yet because of Superior, something else happened to them that won't be elaborated on here. This is like the whole thing with "Why is there an Ayatollah in Iran and not the Shah?" or "Saddam invades Kuwait" from last book. There's literally no reason for those two places to be destroyed in an alternate timeline if there was no nukes. Hell, there was little reason to bomb Nagasaki, it was just that the primary target of Kokura was obscured by smoke from a firebombing sortie the previous day and Bockscar had the orders to drop it visually. Kokura was the secondary target if for some reason skies over Hiroshima weren't clear, so it's a complete fluke that it wasn't bombed. Any other day besides August 6th and August 9th, Kokura would have been a crater. poo poo, now that I think about it, nuclear weapons would be a bitch to develop into a functional weapon, since there's almost no way they would pass the bomber phase, since Alphas and Deltas would easily intercept them and they would be too large initially for Deltas to deliver given that they're single power set (Alphas might be a whole other story). Nukes really got their world-ending capability when they got to the ICBM era, but I don't think they would be feasible enough that they would even get to that point when you have literal supermen flying around, even with your own supers as escorts. Little Boy and Fat Man (and it's Russian copy Joe-1) weighed about just under 5 tons, which took up more than half the bomb bays of contemporary bombers. It took less than ten years to get them down to under a ton, and that was largely because of the Soviet entry in the nuclear arms race accelerating development. Also, Delta Prime has the laziest costume. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 05:04
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Halloween Jack posted:If I remember right, he's specifically taken aim at the "Let's give someone superpowers by torturing them and making them hate us!" cliche. And, even with drones and nukes, we're still trying to develop powered exoskeleton and cybernetic interfaces and selfaiming weapons with the end goal of achieving the same power equivalence in infantry combat that we have in air combat. In short, an American infantryman would be equivalent to a F22 fighting guerrilla prop planes. quote:Kinda related, since I've been ragging on Brave New World and Underground: Garth Ennis' The Boys is, to a great extent, all about the idea of superheroes as a defense strategy. To make a long story short, superheroes are a poo poo idea for national defense for a number of obvious reasons, but that doesn't mean that a multi-billion dollar corporation won't lobby (and downright infiltrate) the gently caress out of the federal government to try to make it happen. The thing with Underground is that it's more Superpowered Blackwater than Superpowered SAC.
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Jun 3, 2016 16:15
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, Captain America had an origin devised 75 years ago and Jenny Sparks had more the notion of an origin than anything else; I'm not sure they're comparative examples. I think Wolverine was the one who popularized this sort of origin, thought he wasn't the first (Power Man and Miracleman also come to mind). I always wonder why, when it comes to the trope of Nazis supersoldiers, we don't have some concentration camp prisoners hulking out from Ubermenschen serum/treatment/process and tearing guards and doctors in half before running into the wilderness to pursue a superpowered guerrilla campaign? Because those are the guys they would have experimented first on. You can tell I think the best thing about BNW is the Superior origin story Also, I know Captain America's origin had a "Tuskegee experiments"-style retcon with a group of African-Americans being experimented on develop a copy of the Super Soldier Serum.
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Jun 4, 2016 01:19
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