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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 13d: Gizmos and gadgets: Keep rollin' rollin' rollin' (what?). A big part of 30's pulp is the weird technology. Jet packs, shrink rays, mind-projection helmets...all the toys that shouldn't be remotely possible and yet feel right at home in the setting. Torg has two types of pulp devices: gizmos and gadgets. Yes, there is a mechanical difference. Gizmos are...well... quote:A gizmo is a technological tool with abilities expressed in terms of attributes, skill, powers or Special values (such as armor values). Thus, cars, guns, microwave ovens, and invisibility belts are all gizmos, as are shrink pills and knockout gases (these too are technological tools). A construction crane, for example, would have Strength since it is capable of lifting heavy objects, while an invisibility belt would have the invisibility power, and a wonder drug would have the medicine skill because it is capable of curing illness.  Ah, such a level of trust in the players... Even after all this time, I'm still amazed that the game feels the need to point out that this system isn't a full-blown technological process and is, in fact, an absrtracion. It's important to point out that, in order to be a gizmo and thus built using these rules, the object must be technological in origin. A helmet designed to project your thoughts is fine, but a mystic amulet that does the same thing can't be built with this system, even though you can build a gizmo that contains magic skills. How would you get that amulet, then? I don't know, make something up or buy the Aysle sourcebook, I guess. At the highest level, there are four steps to creating a gizmo: 1. Decide on the purpose of the gizmo. 2. Draw the blueprint 3. Gather the components 4. Build the gizmo Building or repairing a gizmo requires either the science or weird science skills, but using them does not.  I don't know why they felt the need to point out that Mobus is TEH BEST. The first step (decide what it does) is the only easy step. A gizmo can contain any attribute, most of the skills in the game, and all the available pump powers except super attribute and super skill. For this example, I'm going to build Starman's Cosmic Rod. The cosmic rod let Jack fly, it could lift objects in a gravity field, and fire bolts of energy. In game terms, that'd be the electro-blast, flight, and telekinesis powers.  I think that's sufficiently pulp-y, don't you? So that's done. The next step is to draw the blueprint. See, when I said this was a system to build a gizmo, what that means is that the player actually has to draw out a blueprint and assemble components to do this. Before we can really get into the blueprint phase, we need to discuss components. There are a bunch of them, and you need to know how they all work before you can really get going. First off, every component needs a housing, which is basically the object you're building the gizmo into. It can be pretty much anything; a belt, a car, a giant-rear end laser, and so on. The housing will determine the gizmo's base Toughness. Each attribute, skill, or power you build into a gizmo requires its own system, which are the real mechanical chunks of the device. Each system can have boosters that increase the values of the abilities built into the system but make it harder to use, and compensators that offset the booster penalties. Every system, without exception, requires a power source. If a system uses actual powers, it needs a Possibility capacitor to function, because powers only work by having Possibilities dumped into them. Anything else requires a power plant. Lastly, there are adapters and caps. I'll get back to those later, but for now just keep them in the back of your mind. Now that we know what all the components are, now we have to assemble them. Gizmo creation involves assembling all the systems one at a time, then adjusting the inherent values with boosters and capacitors. The first step of building a system is to generate a science or weird science total against the tech rating of whatever you're building into the system. The result of the roll is the value of the ability... ...except that every ability you can jam in a gizmo has a limit rating that caps it. To go higher, you need to use boosters. So let's start with the Electro-Raysystem. Electro-Rayhas a tech value of 27 and a limit value of 7. That means that, barring boosters, I can't get the ray's damage value above 7, which is actually pretty crap (that's the same damage rating as a throwing knife). For the sake of example, let's say I have a weird science skill of 15 and I don't roll below a 4, which would put me into the "0 or less" range for the power's final level. So now I have an Electro-Ray system at 7. Since I want my Electro-Ray to actually loving do something, I need to install boosters. This is another skill roll, this time on the General and Push Results Table (remember that?). The result on the table is the modifier on the system's strength. If you're using the normal science skill, you can only add one booster to a system and use the speed column of the table, but if you're using weird science then you use the power column and can add as many boosters as you want or until you fail a weird science roll, at which point you have to stop. So let's boost the Electro-Ray. My first booster roll total is 10, which is +4. I'll add another booster, and rolling again gets me a total of 15, which is +6. That's a strength of 17 so far, which is the same as a flintlock. Guess I better keep rolling! One more roll gets me another +6, for a total final strength of 23. Four rolls to make a weapon barely stronger than a .357 Magnum.  Yeah, I know how you feel. By the way, if I had failed any of those rolls, then I would have had to stop trying to improve the system, and couldn't try to add more boosters at all until I take another add in my weird science skill or find a GM-fiat component. So it's entirely possible to try to build a gizmo, tank the roll to determine the system's strength, tank the first booster roll, and wind up with a useless gizmo I'm stuck with for at least a few adventures. Anyway, every booster on a system increases the difficulty of using that skill/power/whatever by 1. On top of that, the difficulty to repair a gizmo is equal to the total number of boosters installed throughout all its systems. On top of that, if a gizmo is using two systems at once (like using the cosmic rod to fly and blast people), the difficulty of using those systems goes up by +2 in addition to any other penalties. The only exceptions are adding boosters to the housing's Toughness, which won't count in terms of penalties, and powers that don't need a roll to use, in which case the penalty becomes a side effect that limits its usefulness. To counter these penalties you can build compensators into a system. You can't start adding compensators until you're done adding all the boosters, because the difficulty of the roll to to add them is the final boosted value of the system. Also, you can't add more compensators than boosters. Adding compensators works the same way as boosters, so in our example gizmo I can roll my weird science up to three times to counter the penalty for the three boosters. For the sake of example let's say I only managed to install two compensators at +3 each. Now the Electro-Ray system has a final strength of 23, +1 difficulty to the attack roll, and a compensated value of (base power+value of boosters-value of compensators)=17. Compensated value will come into play later. But we're not done yet! Now I have to add a Possibility Capacitor to actually fuel the power. See, powers in a gizmo still have an adventure cost, it's just that the cost is reduced by 2, then increased by one for every booster attached to the system. This cost needs to be payed out from a capacitor the first time it's use each adventure. More than one system can draw from the same capacitor, but a capacitor can only hold a maximum of 10 Possibilities so if(when) poo poo starts getting expensive you're probably going to need multiple capacitors. The only upside to this is that we don't have to roll to add it. So what happens when the capacitor runs out? It'll need to be recharged, of course. This requires a laboratory of some sort, a day, and someone to donate the Possibilties to put into the capacitor. Because even with a gizmo, a PC has to pay out the loving points to allow someone to keep their goddamn powers. Jesus loving Christ. Oh, and although we're not going to have one in this gizmo, systems that grant an effective attribute or skill use power plants instead. Power plants require a roll to build, and the plant's value is the result of the roll. Power plants just work until a hero setback or hero stymied result comes up in combat. When that happens... quote:[T]he gizmo operator must generate power plant totals for every gizmo currently in operation. The difficulty number is the largest system value which draws power from the plant. If the plant powers more than one system, use the One-On-Many Table. The number of successes is the number of systems still working. On a stymie, the player decides which systems are still powered. On a setback, the gamemaster gets to choose. Any systems which lose power may not be used until the power plant is repaired or recharged. Recharging requires a laboratory and a full day. One last thing we need to take into account before we can actually assemble this drat thing is housing integrity. Remember back where I said that every housing has to have a Toughness stat? That's because a housing can only safely use systems that have a compensated value equal to the housing's Toughness+5. If a system's compensated value is higher than that, the housing takes a damage result equal to the difference between the housing integrity and the system's compensated value, ignoring KO results. If the gizmo takes too much damage, it'll stop working and need to be repaired. The cosmic rod probably isn't that strong, let's say it has a Toughness of 7. The housing integrity is therefore 12, which is 5 less than than the Electro-Ray's compensated value. In this case, that's an O3, but using Electro-Ray does two shock damage to the user each shot, so it's really O5. Every time I fire the Electro-Ray, the cosmic rod takes 5 shock. Because a character can take up to its Toughness in shock before getting knocked out, I can fire the Electro-Ray three times before the whole device breaks down. And that's assuming it's not taking damage from other sources. Oh hey, I haven't designed the flight and TK systems yet! Let's just assume I didn't roll super-high on those, which is fine because I don't need to break the sound barrier or fling tanks around (or get into making more boosters and compensators). I generate a [/b]flight[/b] value of 10 (100m/round; about 35 mph) and a telekinesis value of 12, which lets me lift 250 pounds. Both of those are under the housing integrity so we're good there, and I'm not going to bother adding boosters. Oh, and I need to figure out the adventure costs for everything. Electro-Ray actually costs one more than normal at 5, flight costs 1, and TK costs 2. Given that a capacitor only holds 10 Possibilities, I'm going to have to recharge this drat thing at least every two adventures if I give Electro-Ray its own capacitor.  The reason mad scientists go mad is because of this system.  So now we have all our systems. Now we actually get to assemble them by drawing the blueprint! Here's the blueprint symbols for all the available components:  They're like Legos, only they make you want to kill yourself. Every component in your gizmo needs to be drawn out. Each system is pretty much a loop that links the power/skill, the power source, and any boosters and capacitors together. Also, you see how every component has so many lines for connections? Those are fixed connectors; a housing will always have four connectors, and if you only need two of them, then the other two need to have caps attached to them. Likewise, adapters have to be used to attach multi-component systems to a housing. So now we get to draw everything out. Here's the Electro-Ray system:  Thank God for free flowchart programs, is all I'm saying. And here's everything attached and capped:  Now, you're probably wondering what the hell the point of drawing out the blueprint is. I mean, we've already gone through the hassle of defining what everything does, right? And the answer is "yes, but..." Because now we come to the point where we actually have to build the loving thing in-character. That means actually buying all the components, and making more loving rolls to actually create all the connections between components in-game. See, I've been doing this out of order. What you're supposed to do is draw the blueprint while designing, adding all the components and rolling to connect them as you go along. In addition to the normal rolls for adding boosters and compensators, you have to roll to attach the power source to each system, adapter, and cap. Each roll you make while building the gizmo, pass or fail, requires a day of work. The only consequence of failing to connect the generators, adapters, or caps is just wasted game time. In addition to all the rolling, you also need to buy every single component off the equipment list. The cosmic rod has a housing, three boosters, two compensators, three adapters, three Possibility capacators, and a cap. A small housing costs $30, systems up to value 15 cost $500, systems range from $400 to $40000 depending on the system's value, the capacators cost $5000 a pop, caps are $5, adapters cost 10% of the value of the system they're attached to. Oh, and each booster and capacitor costs as much as the system it's attached to. So assuming I lowball the system prices based on the given ranges: pre:Housing: $30 Cap: $5 Electro-Blast: $41,600 Value 23 system: $6,000 PCP: $5,000 3 Boosters: $18,000 2 Compensators: $12,000 Adapter: $600 Flight: $5,560 Value 10 system: $500 PCP: $5,000 Adapter: $60 Telekinesis: $5,560 Value 12 system: $500 PCP: $5,000 Adapter: $60 Gizmos, despite their nature, are still subject to the rules for Tech axioms: the tech value of the gizmo is the highest tech value of all its component systems, and using it outside that axiom level will risk disconnection. That said, they never cause contradictions inside Nile Empire axioms. So what happens if you want to play someone who just uses the gizmo, but isn't the one who actually made it? I guess you better hope the GM gives you an NPC scientist with a decent skill, or hope that you roll really well because the whole shebang assumes that the character is the one making the device, not that it was given to him or he found it or whatever. And you're also going to need someone who can fix the drat thing, because (as stated previously) gizmos can take damage. A gizmo that is "knocked out" has to be restarted with a simple science roll, but repairing damage can be done with either of the construction skills. The difficulty to repair a gizmo is the gizmo's highest value, plus one per booster. In the cosmic rod's case, that's a 26, which is pretty drat hard. So there we are. About 20 skill rolls, $50k in-game cash, and I have a gizmo that I can use to do things assuming it doesn't shake itself apart with shock damage, and an attack that's as strong as a loving pistol and yet costs $40,000.  Why any of this? Why is this so complicated? Why are there so many goddamn steps and limits and drawbacks? When you get right down to it, building more than one power into a gizmo is barely cost-effective in any sense of the phrase, especially since you still have to pay out Possibilities to fuel powers.  This whole thing is giving me a headache, so here's some kitties. But don't worry! The Terra sourcebook realized that this whole process is too complicated, so it had a "simplified" gizmo creation system. And by "simplified", I mean that you don't draw blueprints anymore. That's really the only significant change in the process. Oh, and under the newer system boosters and compensators work differently; now boosters do a point of shock to the gizmo every time the power is used, and compensators can reduce that damage. The reason for this? Because the old way let players "chuck the limit values out the window". GOOD! Those made no goddamn sense! Letting people be powerful should be the point of a self-styled cinematic system, especially when it takes place in a pulp reality! Not forcing a bunch rolls and mechanics to make your device worth a drat. Also, this being Torg, there's literally two pages of explanation as to why the Terran gizmo rules are different from the Nile Empire gizmo rules, because people needed an in-game explanation apparently. Like when there was the Time of Troubles to explain the changes between 1e and 2e D&D. The short form is that Mobius' understand of pulp technology (which is what informs the Empire's weird tech) has become outdated from recent developments back home on Terra. Just to over-complicate matters even more, what the Nile Empire book calls a "gizmo" is called a "gadget" in the Terra book, and the Terra book uses "gizmo" to refer to a one-shot pulp device, like a strength-boosting pill or a one-shot teleporter made from spare parts. They're built like bigger devices, except they don't use Possibility capacitors, and instead have to be fueled by someone spending Possibilities when the device is used. Whatever. -- Christ. Why? Just why? NEXT TIME: Why should gizmos have all the overcomplication?
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Jan 26, 2016 20:27
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Bieeardo posted:I like how Evil Mastermind keeps labeling the PSC as PCP. Because whoever came up with this whole scheme was definitely on something. Listen, that was an update I had to loving power through to get done. You're lucky I made sure to fix my bbcode mistakes.
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Jan 27, 2016 00:18
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 13e: Nile magic agic agic agic The Nile Empire (and, to a lesser extent, Terra) is a world where both magic and technology more-or-less coexist. It's common knowledge in the Empire that priests and engineers can produce miraculous effects, but unfortunately this is Torg which means we have to have a ton of new rules to cover them, because in case you haven't noticed Torg does not know how to model tone. As a result, the Nile Empire has two new types of magic: mathematics and engineering. Both of these types of magic also share a subsystem based on astrology, and all three of these new magic bits is a separate skill you need to take on top of the normal magic skills. In fact, to be a magician from the Empire you have to take either the mathematics or engineering skill in order to cast spells, and you need astronomy to cast spells or perform miracles. On top of that, the Terra sourcebook has pulp sorcery, which works completely differently from normal Torg magic and Nile Empire magic. While you bear all that in mind, you might want to go re-read how magic works and how miracles work, because Nile characters actually require more skills and mechanics. First off, we learn about Astronomy and how it applies to magic. quote:Magic and miracles in Mobius' reality rely upon the positions of various heavenly bodies for spell casting. Accomplished astronomers, the ancient Egyptians of Terra were so proficient in the art of astronomy that they had mathematically proven the existence of all nine planets in the solar system thousands of years before many of the planets were officially "discovered." They also charted the profound influence the planets had on magic and miracles. Every spell and miracle in the Empire has two astronomical parts: which planets directly influence the spell, and the minimum number of planets from that list that must be taken into account when casting the spell. The planets are all named for the Egyptian gods, and in an amazing coincidence the Core Earth solar system and gods correspond to Terra's. What were the odds? quote:Mercury = Ra (god of the sun) Anyway, the way it works is that you start by determining how many planets you want to bring into the spell, and which planets you're going to use. You then use the Planet Chart to get the highest difficulty of the selected planets.  Because if there's one thing Torg doesn't have enough of, it's tables. This number becomes the difficulty of the astronomy roll. You then take the result of the roll and look it up on the One-On-Many chart to see how many planets you "hit", starting from the innermost and working out. For each planet you've successfully configured into the spell this way past the minimum, you get the planet's listed bonus to your actual spellcasting roll. On the plus side, Egyptian magic doesn't have to worry about backlash. For example, the Rot spell (which causes inanimate objects to decay) requires one planet and is influenced by Ra, Nut, Anubis, and Set. I want to cast it and I have an astronomyskill of 15. I bring in two planets: Ra and Anubis. The highest difficulty of these planets is 18, so I need a +3, which means I need to roll a 16+ to get both planets. Assuming I did, then I'd get a +7 to my actual spellcasting roll. What happens if/when you fail the astronomy roll? No idea. The book doesn't say. I guess the spell doesn't go off if it required a planet? In case that's not enough unnecessary mechanics for you, there's an optional rule for Planetary Cycles, where you have to (and I am not making this up) track the overall positions of the planets. You see that "Cycle" column on the planet chart? That's the number of days that planet becomes "naturally" aligned, and will automatically self-configure into spells, and thus you don't have to roll for it. quote:As gamemaster, you have to keep a record of the days which have passed in your campaign in order to use the cycles. Each time Mobius invades a cosm, the calendar starts again with Day One. The events written about in this sourcebook go up to Day 65 of the Pharaoh's invasion. Begin your campaign calendar with Day 65, and mark off one day for each day of game time which you and your players spend in the game world.  I honestly want to know how many people bothered doing this, mainly because I'd guessing it's a number pretty close to zero. So let's pretend that last part didn't happen and move on to Mathematics. And before we can actually learn how to do this, we apparently need close to a page about the organization of mystic mathematicians in the Nile Empire. quote:Most practicing mathematicians on Terra and in the Nile belong to an organization known as the College of Mathematicians. The college serves as both a forum where mathematicians can gather and share any new secrets they may have discovered, and a support organization for the training and guidance of young apprentice mathematicians. In the Nile, the College also serves as an official arn of the Imperial Government. In this capacity, it is one of the resources that Mobius frequently exercises. In fact, practicing mathematics in the Empire without being a recognized member of the College is a crime. Oh, and you can't just have the mathematics skill, either. You can't increase your skill without a teacher (until you get 3 adds), and learning your first rank costs double the normal cost. So when you cast a spell, in addition to the astrology bullshit above, you also have to roll your mathematics skill. If you succeed, you finally get to try and cast the spell. Failure means the spell doesn't happen and you have to roll on the Mathematics Backfire Chart). So this is how you cast a spell as a Nile Empire character.
As near as I can tell, the mathematics skill adds nothing to the process apart from making you roll an extra time and take an extra round. Well, you don't have to worry about the arcane knowledges, but that's not a huge benefit compared to adding another two potential failure points to the process. So given how much more difficult it is to cast mathemagic spells, they must be pretty awesome, right? Ha. There are 17 mathemagic spells in the Nile Empire book, and they're a mixed bag. Some highlights: Animate Mummy does what it says on the label, only requires one planet, and has a difficulty of 15 so it'd be pretty easy to pull off. Calculate Weakness is difficulty 10, requires one planet, and gives one person a +3 to their next attempt at a task. So that's three skill rolls and a round to give someone a +3. Commune with Crckets is a very specific version of "speak with animals" that's one point easier than animating a mummy. Death Shout is an attack spell that does magic total+5 damage. Given that the difficulty is 20, that's about as powerful as a heavy pistol. Gemwork doubles the value of a single gem. This is one point easier than talking to crickets, and therefore two points easier than animating a mummy. Prepare Mummy is a fairly easy spell that mummifies a body. Given that Animate Mummy doesn't require the use of this spell, it begs the question of why it's a spell in the first place. Sundew only requires one planet from Ra, Osiris, Horus, and Nut, and will "heal the wounds" of everyone within 50 feet of the caster who shares his Inclination. The thing is, it doesn't say what "heals the wounds" means in a mechanical context; does that mean that the spell heals all a person's wounds? If so then this spell is ridiculously powerful, even at difficulty 20 and a one-round spinup time. Wing of the Hawk lets you fly at speed value 11, or about 40 mph, for three hours. Note that even with all the rolls this is objectively cheaper than the Flight pulp power. So that's one type of magic down. Now we get to the most useless magic type: engineering. quote:Exactly how the ancient Egyptians of Earth built their huge pyramids and sculptures remains a mystery. The Egyptians of Terra built their monuments using a magical discipline known as engineering. Engineers have the ability to design fantastic structures and monuments, as wellas abilities that facilitate the construction of these monuments.  He may be an insane megalomaniac dictator, but Mobius still makes sure everyone gets a lunch break. Engineering uses some metaphysics wonkery to get around the normal Torg magic restriction of the Principle of Definition, the short form of which is that it's possible to cast more than one spell on a building. Because that's the point of Engineering Magic: enchanting an entire building with temporary or permanent effects. Engineers have access to exactly five spells:
The main strength of engineers is that they can construct buildings with inbuilt devices, spells, miracles, or pulp powers. That's why they have that Imbude with Mystic Energy spell. Installing something into a building requires the creation of a maat matrix. A matrix is a magical construct that takes a week to make, and can have pretty much any spell, miracle, skill, gizmo, power, or mundane device bound to it. If successful, then the maat matrix will power the ability from the building's Possibility pool. It only costs one Possibility per year to power the matrix, and bound devices will never decay over time, but will still use any materials needed to operate. So if you have an automatic machine gun mounted on a wall, it won't rust but someone will still have to reload it. That said, most things will require some sort of activation device: a tripwire, a pressure plate, IR sensor, and so on. Each of these is considered a separate device and therefore needs its own matrix. The building can use any ability bound to its matrices at the cost of one Possibility per use This means that a tripwire/fireball spell combo will require two Possibilities to work; one for the sensor and one for the spell. Once activated, though, inbuilt devices will remain active for about 24 hours. Oh, and it's worth pointing out that if the structure is a pyramid, then you don't need the Imbude with Mystic Energy spell. It'll generate Possibilities on its own. ...I don't understand what the point of the engineering stuff is. I mean, is this supposed to be something PCs are expected to do? I mean, I suppose characters could make a base of operations, but unless they put it in the Nile Empire they're going to have to deal with disconnection issues, and Torg is supposed to be a game of globetrotting adventure. And if it's not something PCs are going to do, why is it there? Is the GM expected to roll all the NPC skills and track this stuff? (spoiler: of course he is.) The final new type of "magic" I'm going to cover is Pulp Sorcery. This was added in the Terra sourcebook, so it's pretty much a GM call if it's allowed for Nile Empire characters. On the plus side, pulp sorcery doesn't cause a contradiction if used in the Empire. Sorcery is considered a pulp power, and costs one Possibility during character creation. Its function is to allow you to mimic other pulp powers through the use of mystic rituals. Sorcery has a base adventure cost of 6, so it's expensive out of the gate, but you also have to pay Possibilities for any rituals you use. Ritual cost is the duplicated power's normal adventure cost, minus two, minimum of one Possibility. You only need to pay the cost for rituals you actually use during the adventure. So if I have a pulp sorcerer and I used rituals for mind reading, fire blast, and telekinesis, that would cost me 6 for sorcery, 5-2=3 for mind reading, 5-2=3 for fire blasting, and 4-2=2 for TKing. That's a grand total of 6+3+3+2=14 Possibilities I'd have to pay at the end of the adventure. If I only used mind reading and fire blast, then the final cost would be 12; I wouldn't have to pay for the ability I didn't use. You need a separate ritual for every power you want to duplicate. Rituals cost one Possibility each at character creation and you can only start with three tops, but you can learn more later by finding a teacher/mystic item/what have you and paying the adventure cost of the new ritual between adventures. Unfortunately, the powers you build rituals around can't have flaws attached to them, meaning that you can't reduce the cost beyond the two-point reduction for being a ritual.  Do you have a minute to talk about our lord Skeletor? Using a sorcery ritual involves looking up the copied power's "ritual difficulty" on yet another chart. You then have to roll your pulp power: sorcery skill against that difficulty. That said, most of the difficulties are in the 20's or 30's. quote:The difficulty numbers deliberately run high so as to encourage the use of the modifiers to flavor spellcasting (multiple modifiers can be placed on the same ritual). Try to imagine Hadji (from the cartoon show Johnny Quest) without his trademark "Sim sim Salabim!" command and you get the idea of what spells without modifiers are like. Modifiers are things you can require on your rituals to reduce the difficulty number. They all have associated charts but they boil down to a few categories, three of which are the old vocal/somatic/material bits from AD&D that nobody ever used. You can also increase the casting time (requiring more rounds to use the ritual), take fatigue, or perform a sacrifice. No matter what you add, the modifiers are permanent; if you can't meet one of the ritual's requirements then you can't use the power. -- It's amazing how hard they try to be "thematic" with pulp magic, and then drop the ball so completely. Pulp wasn't about fiddly details, it was about action and lots of it. What's more, mathematics and engineering add nothing to the game beyond more rolling. Mathematics is bad, but there's absolutely no reason to learn engineering because all it does is let you make a location you probably won't be spending a lot of time at. And again, the pulp powers aren't so overpowered that you need even more checks and balances in place. A pulp sorcerer needs to pay like 8 Possibilities just to use one power, but unless you have a lot of powers it's not cost-effective at all. And again, you're really not gaining any benefit in terms of usability or cost because you still need to buy all the powers in advance. For as popular as the realm was, the Nile Empire really does make itself hard to use. NEXT TIME: Realm-wide roll call!
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Feb 1, 2016 20:18
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I'm a little late to the Deadlands "keep the war going" chat, but there is an in-game reason for why the war is still going: Confederate president Grant has been killed and replaced by a manitou. It keeps the South fighting because the Reckoners want to keep everyone fighting as long as possible, because the larger war keeps attention away from the smaller-scale supernatural threats. It also plays into their long term plan. The Reckoners want to accelerate human technological advancement so we'll develop ghost rock bombs, which will eventually turn most of the world into Deadlands.
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Feb 4, 2016 13:25
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jadarx posted:Hey kid, do you like 90's metaplot characters? That said, while I'm curious to see how this pans out, the overarching metaplot of Deadlands needs Stone, Raven, and Hellstrome to stick around until Hell on Earth because of the major part they play in events; Grimme was the only servitor who canonically died between Deadlands and HoE. So this should be pretty interesting.
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Feb 11, 2016 18:36
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 13f: Miracles, monsters, machines, and men of mystery The last few chapters are pretty short, so I'll just cover them all in one post. The chapter on Miracles of Faith starts with a list of the tenets of the Terran Egyptian faith (as filtered through Mobius, of course).
I really don't think the people behind Torg really understood the point of religion. Anyway, now we get a section on worship in the Empire. The Egyptian religion doesn't have weekly masses or anything, instead having large services on specific holy days. That said, there are weekly ceremonies held on Tuesdays because that's the day that Horus' planet naturally aligns, so it's a good time to get those ritual spells in. And apart from a bunch of stuff about the church hierarchy (which is mainly focused on NPC skill levels), that's all there is about the  ...as I was saying, that's all there is about the Egyptian faith. To absolutely nobody's surprise, there are modifications to the miracles rules for the Empire. quote:Unlike the miracles of Core Earth described in The Torg Rulebook, Egyptian priests cannot perform many of their miracles without concurrently enacting a special ritual consisting of sacred chants, movements, and sacrifices. The more powerful the miracle, the more complex the associated ritual. This ritual is always timed with the movement of the planets, and is affected by astronomy in the same way as mathematics. In game terms, whether or not a priest knows how to configure a ritual with the movement of the planets is reflected by his or her Egyptian religion score. So once again let's take a look at some miracles. Battle Bless increases the Toughness of a unit of 1,000 men, with a difficulty of 38 and ritual time of 2 hours. It lasts until the "position of Set is next 0", which means I guess you have to track the drat planets. Great Curse gives the target a -1 penalty on all actions, makes them always stymied (loses their first reroll), grant enemies +1 to all actions against them, and if they draw stymied from the Drama Deck they take a setback (lose next action). The effect lasts for a week, but the caster can maintain the effect by making sacrifices to either Set or Horus depending on the Inclination of the target. Invest Pharaoh is a day-long ritual that includes a feast for at least 100 people, and will formally recognize the target of the miracle as the Pharaoh of the people. The Pharaoh gets one free Possibility a week, and the difficulty of all miracles cast against him increased by 7. Technically you could cast this miracle on a person to make them the new Pharaoh, but you'd have to beat the rolled total of the current incumbent. Given that Mobius' ritual hit with a final total of 74 (technically 81 with the penalty), good luck with that. Pronouncement of Doom does the same thing as Great Curse, but lasts for a year and a day, and every time the target performs an infraction of some sort against the caster's god, the penalty increases by 1. Snake Staff does what you'd expect. It only needs two rounds and lasts for an hour, and the snake created can poison victims. This is another spell where you need to track when certain planets are in the "0" position.  This guy looks awfully bored. The next chapter is Creatures of the Empire, and it's pretty dull. Mobius relies manly on human agents, so there's not a lot of real "creatures" to be had. I mean, there's your giant Egyptian animals (crocodiles, asps, spiders, and so on), but there's not much else. That said, they things we do get are odd. For instance, there's the Terran Martians. quote:ln the pulp reality of the Terran cosm, an advanced scouting party from that cosm's equivalent of the planet Mars (Horus) has secretly infiltrated human society. Their motives are, at this point, unknown, but invasion is suspected by those few who know of them. It should be pointed out that 1) in the Terra sourcebook, Mars is just called "Mars" because Terra isn't completely Egyptian-themed, and 2) Terran Martians never come up again outside of being re-mentioned in the Terra sourcebook. There are stats for gospog, even though it was stated that Mobius only has a handful of them. Unsurprisingly, they all look like mummies, and basically each generation is stronger than the last. Nothing really interesting here. The shift in axioms has created one rather severe threat: walking gods. Technically they're not gods; they're more major tomb guardians that take the form of Anubis, Bast, Sebek, or Set. Each version has its own special abilities (Anubis has a giant sword an eye-lasers, Bast can cast spells, Sebek can clamp down with his giant claws, and Set has a giant spear and a sonic blast), and are generally intended to be "end bosses" in tombs.  Optic Blast! Optic Blast! Gene Splice! Equipment is up next, and it's really just a list of weapons and gear available at the 1930's tech levels. You can't just buy pulp gizmos and doodads, so really it's just mundane gear. It is worth pointing out that Mobius has instituted a new economy in the Empire: the base unit of currency is the royal, which equates to $10 American. Crowns are dime-sized coins minted from 14k gold alloy, and are stamped with the Eye of Horus. Government taxation is pretty heavy: 20% of all legal earnings per month. Needless to say, this creates a pretty heavy divide between the upper and lower economic classes, and really does a number on people of Good Inclination since they're not going to try to make a little money on the side.  "Wow, this calculator makes all my magic a lot easier." And lastly, we come to the character templates, and things get a little wonky with these. As you may or may not recall, there's no direct line between Terra and the Empire, so there was really no way for "good guys" to sneak in with Mobius' forces from home. Likewise, there was a one-time bridge created where Dr. Frest sent a bunch of pulp heroes on a one-way trip to Core Earth to help out. That means that technically there are two types of Nile Empire characters: ones from the "Nile Empire" (people who've transformed) and "Terran Expatriates" (people actually from Terra). Unfortunately, you wind up with weird situations where characters were apparently from Terra despite working for "the Pharoah", even though he didn't become Pharoah until he left Terra. Three templates were included in the base boxed set: The Fast Hero answered an ad in the back of a Terran magazine looking for volunteers for "enhancement research", which actually gave her superpowers. But when she was expected to use her powers in the service of the Pharoah, she jumped ship and started working for the good guys. She doesn't have a tag skill, but starts with the flight power. The Gadget Hero was the kid who spent all his time reading science journals and messing around with HeathKits. He was one of the forerunners of weird science, working for Mobius before learning about the Pharoah's expansion into other realities. He had his moment of clarity as he was moved down a maelstrom bridge with Mobius' forces. The Gadget Hero was made before the pulp gizmo rules existed, so he has a "gadget belt" that lets him fake one the pulp powers provided in the core set at a value of 17.  You got hit by...a smooth criminal. The Tough Hero is...well, look. You know the drill; there's scum out there in the streets, preying on the innocent. Sometimes you need someone who's not afraid to get her hands dirty cleaning it up. Starting gear includes half a ham sandwich, a pack of gum, and a checking account with a minimum balance. World-weary receptionist is optional. Her tag skill is unarmed combat. The Nile Empire book adds another ten: The Amazon was a Core Earth college student who was on Hespera when the axiom wash happened. Now transformed to Nile's reality, she's now a skilled warrior-philosopher with some nice blessed gear. She also has two super attributes for an overal +4 to STR and +2 to DEX, with an adventure cost of 6 Possibilities, and the flaw that if a man taunts or tricks her and she suffers a setback from it, she loses the stat boots. Her tag skill is melee weapons. The Dark Hero's loved one was killed in a bank robbery, so he grabbed two pistols, dressed all in black, and made them pay. Now he doles out .45mm justice on a nightly basis. He has the option of starting with either darkness, fear, or fog screen, which he learned from monks in Tibet. His tag skill is either stealth or intimidation.  The Engineer was a former member of the cult of Khem (the guys who resurrected Mobius), and followed him through the various realities building facilities for the Pharoah's forces for promises of wealth and power (not to mention not getting killed by the rest of the cult). After a while, he realized the promises were empty and that he couldn't just keep his head down any more. His tag skill is engineering, and he has access to the magic skills. Oddly, the picture for the Engineer is of an older woman; either there was a mix-up between the artist and the writer, or that's pretty drat progressive for the tim.  No, she doesn't start with any armor. Why do you ask? The Egyptian Princess's father and grandfather were both members of the cult of Khem, her grandfather being one of the people who resurrected Mobius. Unfortunately, she were dragged along for the ride when Mobius began conquering other realities because her father received a favorable sign from the gods. Turns out that the sign was faked, and her family was tricked into Mobius' service. Time to make up for the mistake. Her tag skill is egyptian religion and can take the faith and focus skills. The Jungle Lord's parents were anthropologists in Ethiopa when the axiom wash hit, and they were both killed by Mobius' forces. He managed to escape into the jungle, where he was found by Ooorook the gorilla and her tribe. They took care of him, trained him, and taught him to communicate with the creatures of the jungle. Armed with his newfound strength, it's time for a little revenge. He starts with the animal friend power, and his tag skill is maneuver. The Mathematician is another former Khem cultist, although he were really just an apprentice to one of the full-fledged cult members. Dragged along when Mobius began creating his new Empire, it wasn't long before he realized that Mobius' promises of glory were just that: promises. He managed to escape the pharoh's clutches and is now trying to make amends for his past. His tag skill is mathematics and he can also buy magic skills.  Who needs a costume when you have dense body hair? The Mystery Man is from Terra, where he grew up incredibly rich and incredibly bored. Then all these costumed heroes and villains started popping up all over the place, and he thought, "I say, that sounds fun!" He had the money to afford the best training and to travel the world learning amazing techniques, and it wasn't long before he was thwarting the bad guys. It also wasn't long before it stopped being a game and became something he genuinely cared about, so when he learned that Dr. Mobius hadn't actually vanished but travelled to a new world, he leapt at the chance to follow. He can start with a pulp power if he wants, and his tag skill is disguise. The Old Professor was never the heroic type until the maelstrom bridge dropped while she was on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean with some colleagues. She were caught in a reality storm, which caused her ship to crash on shore just as Mobius' troops were establishing their territory. She were captured, but managed to escape when the same storm destroyed her captors. It wasn't long before she realized that reality was different, and that the old laws of physics aren't what they used to be. Now she's got a whole new field to discover. She start with a few gadget parts: four system components, five boosters, four adaptors, two caps, and two possibility capacitors, which is all actually worth a small fortune. Her tag skill is weird science. The Private Detective spent ten years of his life as a cop walking a beat. But he butted heads with his corrupt superiors one to many times, and found himself kicked off the force. Now he works for himself. One day, a dame came in asking him to investigate the mysterious death of her father. Turned out is was one of those masked weirdos by the name of Mobius. He didn't realize there was more to him than a headdress and evil laugh until he learned he'd skipped town, and by "town" you mean "reality". He met up with a bunch of masked types who were going to follow him, and you agreed to come along. His tag skill is evidence analysis.  Thumbs up...for FREEDOM! The Rocket Rangers were created during The Great War on Terra (WWII hasn't happened there yet). They're a international police force with a strong moral code, and this particular Ranger is the exemplar of that force. To quote the book, "You're almost too good to be true. Everyone likes you, and it's no wonder; everything about you is nearly perfect. You always know the right thing to say to make people happy, and you don't suffer from a single negative personality trait." Your only piece of starting gear is a Rocket Ranger Battlesuit, and your tag skill is flight. The Rocket Red battlesuit is pretty drat powerful; it grants the wearer STR 14 and TOU 19, +7 armor (max 23), flight 11, and mega-sight. The downside is that it imposes a -1 to DEX, and the suit tends to overheat meaning that you take extra stress when a fatigue result comes up. The Terra sourcebook added another handful of templates that are supposed to be exclusive to Terra, but they fit into the Empire pretty easily. The Adventuring Archaeologist spent the majority of his life in one hole or another in some corner of the world or other, digging up relics of the past. Of course, this is on Terra, so that means that sometimes you have to deal with ancient curses, magical artifacts, and pre-Nazis. But we all know that just makes it more fun, right. And yes, he does start with a fedora. His tag skill is science(archaeology).  What's all this, then? In a world of super-villains, jetpacks, rogue sorcerers, gangsters, spies, and lord knows what else, there's gotta be someone looking out for the common man and protecting him from the threats beneath the notice of the superheroes. That's the job of the Beat Cop. His tag skill is scholar (local neighbourhood), which may be the most useless tag skill ever. The Ex-Gangster used to own these streets. People paid him tribute and gave him respect. Now these wingnuts are coming in with their capes and their ray guns and they don't know nothing about respect. They sure as hell didn't respect him when they vaporized half his gang. That was a pretty loud wake-up call. Maybe it's time for him to take a look at what he's doing, y'know? If people are paying him for protection, then shouldn't he be protecting them? He did buy a super-strength serum from some scientist, just so he could play on the same level as the capes (super attribute TOU+3), and his tag skill is petty crime. The Government Spy is a loyal operative armed with a few hidden gadgets, a tux, and a rock-solid ego, and always gets the job done. Stopping terrorists, thwarting Martians, getting the lovely scientist's daughter, no matter what he does he looks drat good doing it. He starts with a device that boosts his stealth by 3 and a pair of dark vision goggles. His tag skill is espionage, of course.  Smoke me a kipper, I'll be home for breakfast! If it's got wings, the Pro Pilot can fly it. His father was a pilot in the Great War, and he grew up at his father's knee. The Great War was over by the time he were old enough to fly, but nowadays there's plenty of would-be conquerors out there, and if you're lucky, they've got some forces you can dogfight with. He do start with a plane; either a two-seater fighter or a junky old passenger plane. His tag skill is air vehicles. The Pulp Sorceress was a normal student, bored with her mundane classes. Then she met the Old Man. He sensed power in her, and took her under his wing and taught her the ancient secrets of sorcery. She learned how to bend the world to her will, but before she could learn why she were chosen to learn these abilities, the Old Man vanished. Guess it's time for her to forge her own destiny. She get a few pre-designed spells and her tag skill is pulp power (sorcery). ---- And with that, we finish up our visit to the Nile Empire. It should be no surprise that I love the Empire. I mean, why wouldn't you? It's your standard-issue Nazi-punching pulp action, but instead of Nazis (which were starting to get overused even back then), you get Egyptian cultists. It takes the whole idea and spins in it a really fun new direction that lets you deal with an old concept in new ways. But the Nile Empire brings Torg's biggest flaw into stark relief: the mechanical overcomplication. Pulp gizmos are way too involved to create, with a ton of unnessesary extra rolls. Magic has a ton of new subsystems that are supposed to add tone but just make you roll like three extra times to do one thing. Adventure Costs on powers make them very non-cost-effective in the long run. I mean, I get what they're trying to do, but the way to make things thematic isn't to jam more and more mechanics onto your already overdesigned mechanics. Tone requires a gentler touch. And speaking of tone, I want to bring up the idea about how pulp heroes aren't supposed to be "costumed tights-and-logo superheroes", then in every book after this one people with powers were always presented as costumed tights-and-logo superheroes. They couldn't even keep their non-mechanical tone consistent through the books. Despite all that, the Nile Empire was the most popular of all the realms that appeared throughout the game line. Pretty much every published adventure had at least one scene in the Empire, and it received so much focus that other realms suffered a bit from lack of attention. The Empire was popular with the game's writers, too. Not only did they write up on Terra (the only "home cosm" to get that honor), one of the writers' pet characters was the pulp hero Destructo Don, who appeared in the novels and a few of the adventures later in the line. But for now, we leave Mobius' artificial sun in our rear view mirrors as we fly to the distant horizon, smiling at the memories of thrilling adventures and shaking our heads at the stupid mechanics. ...everyone has enough Possibility points to keep their abilities, right? NEXT TIME: New adventures! New realms! New dumb mechanics!
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Feb 11, 2016 19:01
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Everything about Abby Soto's art makes me really, really uncomfortable. I mean, the snuff porn yeah of course is really loving  , but even in a general sense it's all very unsettling for some reason I can't put my finger on.
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Feb 16, 2016 18:43
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That would require her to give a poo poo about them in writing something like this. Or people in general. Oh god I hate that I just typed that ew ew ew
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Feb 16, 2016 22:19
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NGDBSS posted:So I managed to find a weird unfinished RPG called New Horizon while participating in a video for the Fangames thread over at LP. Long story short, the mechanical basis has some interesting combat but lacks any comprehensive non-combat mechanics beyond rolling for some gradation of success/failure. But the setting? Hoo boy. The creators originally wanted to make some fangame spinoff based on the Mega Man Zero series and market it to Capcom. (Hence the video I mentioned.) For obvious reasons this didn't pan out so well...and thus they decided to make a foray into TRPGs instead. (They still kept the MMZ styling and mixed it up with some JRPG fare.) And I have no real clue as to why. For now, I'll leave the thread with some art from this heartbreaker. I like that their "innovative system" is just "roll 2d20, take the lowest versus a DC"
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Feb 17, 2016 03:46
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Ratoslov posted:I have absolutely no idea what's going on in this picture. Were Bikini Robot Lady and Slobbering Brokenhearted Giant Poor Anatomy Guy playing cards, and she suddenly turned towards the camera to pose? What does the quote mean, given that there are a total of zero humans in the artwork? I am totally confused.
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Feb 17, 2016 04:45
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Nessus posted:Regarding the "too much treasure," I believe it was from the days when people had characters and they went around to multiple different campaigns, so Bob would bring B'hob the Dwarf to Jim's house on Thursday nights and Mohinder's place on Saturday afternoons. I remember joining a game in my teens where all the characters had lists of magic items that literally filled both sides of a sheet of notebook paper.
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Feb 17, 2016 06:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks But of course this jackhole has to crank that poo poo up to 11 and do it out of spite instead of a desire to make the game more fun for anyone who isn't him.
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Feb 17, 2016 15:59
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Jesus gently caress I hate this game.
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Feb 18, 2016 05:39
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Zereth posted:Based on evidence from earlier works, making transforming people into helpless or fatal-for-them poo poo might have intentionally been made really easy, but not for subversive reasons.
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Feb 18, 2016 16:30
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 14a: Orrorsh  A mutilated body is found in a misty side alley, ripped to shreds, the blood still warm. The passerby discovering it is frozen in horror at the sight, completely unaware of the still-hungry vampire stalking up behind him. A man runs through the city, pursued by a shadowy fiend soaring above the gaslit streets. The creature is invisible to everyone but its target, and the people on the street just see a raving, running madman. The man will spend the rest of his life in an asylum tormented by a beast only he can see. A woman creates an effigy of her cheating husband out of old rags and a lock of his hair. In the light of candles and surrounded by a magic circle, she slowly lowers a pin towards the doll's eye. This is life in Orrorsh, a carefully tended garden of horrors cultivated by the being known only as the Gaunt Man.  I say, that's not cricket! For Queen And Empire Orrorsh was the first invading cosm to touch down on Core Earth, and did so in secret. By picking relatively isolated countries, all the outside world was aware of were strange storms around the Indonesian island chain that seemed to cut off communications. Before the world at large had a real chance to address this, Baruk Kaah dropped his main bridge on Shea Stadium just before game 1 of the World Series and suddenly people had bigger things to worry about. Which, of course, is what the Gaunt Man wanted. By keeping the realm isolated from the rest of the world, he kept people out of his business and the inhabitants trapped in a world of terrors. You see, Orrorsh isn't the reality that is invading; "Orrorsh" is the original home of the Gaunt Man, an invasive reality that has spread from cosm to cosm over countless millennia. Until recently, the Gaunt Man was content to allow Orrorsh to decimate the worlds it came across and leave nothing but ashes in its wake. Then he came across the world of Gaea. Gaea, like other cosms such as Terra and Magna Verita, is very similar to Core Earth, except that it "exists" at an earlier point in Core Earth's history. In this case, the Gaunt Man found a world at the height of the Victorian Empire. A world where England had conquered most of the world "for its own good". A world ruled by a people who know that only they are truly capable of being in charge because they are the only truly civilized people in the world. A world where colonialism has run rampant for centuries fueled by xenophobia and evangelical religious fervor. A world, to be frank, where The Gaunt Man could truly cultivate fear. He did so by sending horrors across bridges in what the Victorians considered "heathen lands", further fueling their xenophobic tendencies while spreading his influence through the government. Once he had arrived and brought his Darkness Device Heketon over, the Gaunt Man was able to completely halt the societal advancement of the world while adjusting it to his particular desires. For three hundred years he slowly eroded the world of Gaea away and replaced it with the reality of Orrorsh. He possessed members of the government to help steer things along, driving Victoria's development down whist overrunning the rest of the world with the Ecology of Fear. The Empire itself never understood what was happening, believing the events to be caused by the forces of Satan as punishment for "moral laxity" and turning more to their increasingly rigid state religion for support. Now the island of Victoria is the last bastion of "civilization" on Gaea. The Gaunt Man keeps his forces from overrunning the nation, because he enjoys the hopeless fear of the population. In fact, the Gaunt Man has altered the cosm's rules so that he gains more possibility energy from ords when they're afraid. So he keeps the Victorian population afraid all the time. When the time came for the invasion of Core Earth, the Gaunt Man let a Victorian scientist named Dr. Wells "discover" an ancient treatise that described the existence of the multiverse, as well as a way to break the dimensional barriers and travel from one world to another. Wells saw this as a potential way to aid the Empire; if he could reach other worlds, he could call in allies to help fight back the darkness. He managed to use the knowledge in the treatise to create a reality bridge to another world, but when he activated it he never expected what would happen next: the creatures that had destroyed his world began streaming down the bridge to this new world! Unable to stop the machine, all he could do was watch as his actions doomed this "Earth" to the same nightmares that destroyed Gaea. Unable to deal with the guilt, Wells informed allies in the government and took his own life. The Victorian government knew that clearly they were the only ones who could stop these invaders (after all, what could the natives do? They're not us). Military forces were assembled and sent down the bridge to establish a colony and fight the horrors they had unleashed upon this new world. Which is exactly what the Gaunt Man wanted. The Gaunt Man's invasion force wasn't the monsters that went down Wells' bridge. Actually, they didn't even exist in the first place; it was just an illusion to fool the doctor. When the Victorians came down the bridge into Indonesia, they were the Gaunt Man's unknowing invasion force. They were the believers needed to power the stelae planted well in advance. They were the ones that brought their reality into Core Earth, allowing the true horrors to exist here. The Victorians don't see it that way, of course. It's their job to drive out these "backwards natives" and protect them from the horrors they can't comprehend due to how ignorant they clearly are. As it is, all these "darkies" clearly drove the original white settlers out and took over, because how could they create any of this technology? It's the Empire's job to establish the colony of Majestic (formerly known as Indonesia) and save the world. It's their burden, their God-granted purpose. And really, once Core Earth is under the aegis of the Empire it'll be much better off. After all, who knows better than the Victorians? Pax Victoriana. So to speak.  The Realm of Orrorsh, about three months after the initial invasion. The Gaunt Man So let's talk briefly about the Gaunt Man. The Gaunt Man is the mastermind behind the whole invasion of Core Earth. He's come closest to becoming Torg than anyone else in known history, and he knows more about the nature of the cosmic entity known as "The Nameless One" than pretty much anybody else. The Gaunt Man's backstory isn't given in the RPG, but was the subject of the novel Interview with Evil. I'm not going to get into it here (mainly because I haven't read the book because it's terrible), but what matters right now is what the current situation of the Gaunt Man. The Gaunt Man rules Gaea, even though nobody there is aware of it. Unlike the other High Lords, the Gaunt Man keeps a relatively low profile on his world. That's not to say he's not involved; at the time of the invasion he was posing as (read: "had taken over the body of") Lord Byron Salisbury, a highly-placed cavalry officer. He uses magic to hide his decayed appearance from the Victorians, who consider him a war hero. Interestingly, a few of the other High Lords do refer to him as "Salisbury" from time to time, but in general he is mainly known as The Gaunt Man. He's also been out of the picture for almost the entire invasion. As part of the events of the prequel novel trilogy, the Gaunt Man is currently trapped in a pocket dimension by an eternity shard known as "The Heart of Coyote", trapped in an unending cycle of destruction and recreation. The only person who knows that the Gaunt Man is out of the picture is his lieutenant, the techno-demon Thratchen. Thratchen has told the other High Lords that the Gaunt Man has sequestered himself away to "prepare for the next phase of the invasion", but everyone knows that's bullshit and has started the scramble for territory and power among themselves. There's also the various operatives and horrors that are trying to take advantage of their lord's absence, but for the most part Thratchen doesn't give a poo poo about them. What he is trying to do is attune himself to the Gaunt Man's Darkness Device so he can become High Lord of Orrorsh, but so far he hasn't had any luck. What this means is that the Gaunt Man's personal forces aren't so much in disarray as realizing that the boss is out of the office and now it's time to work on more personal projects. Some of the High Lord's agents are still steering the expansion of the realm and the planing of stelae, but for the most part everyone is just engaging in whatever terrible acts they feel like. Axioms and World Laws quote:The reality of Orrorsh bases itself upon the central tenant of horror. This horror manifests itself as ghouls and oozing terrors, but this is only the realm's clothing - what it shows to the world, how it interacts with people. The core of Orrorsh is that it encourages people to do evil and discourages people who would oppose evil. Heroes who travel to Orrorsh from other realities might be surprised to discover that they are not as powerful as they are in other realms. In Orrorsh the villains have a distinct upper hand - and the monster hunters need to find the secret weakness of creature's before they can expect to be successful in defeating the beasts. The Gaunt Man has taken a very personal interest in Gaean and Orrorshian advancement, guiding it like a gardener tending a flowerbed. He's spent centuries guiding and shaping Orrorsh into the realm it is today, allowing a certain amount of progress to happen just to keep things from becoming too stagnant. Magic Axiom: 15 Orrorsh has the second-highest magic axiom out of the initial raiders (Aysle is still first), which is what allows the innumerable horrors to exist. Magic is possible in Orrorsh, but "traditional" spell-based magic is very rare. Instead, there is occultism, which is a ritual-based form of magic capable of performing pretty much whatever the caster wants...as long as they're willing to pay the price, which is usually "too much". What really makes occult magic dangerous is that it can be performed by anyone without any special training. Spiritual Axiom: 17 Surprisingly, the Gaunt Man has allowed the religious side of Victorian culture to keep existing. Of course, it's because allowing people to believe they have souls allows the trade in same, but also because despair is better when it comes from broken hope. The Sacellum is the state religion of the Empire, and has its roots in evangelical Christianity. The unending onslaught of horrors from the rest of the world has caused the Sacellum to become a source of desperate hope from the people, despite the fact that the Sacellum is focused on the idea that salvation can only come from unwavering dedication to the principles of the church. As a result, Victorians believe that any form of change will bring the world down around their ears as punishment for their "sins". Social: 20 As stated, Victoria is pretty much England in the mid-to-late 1800's, only stagnated over the last three centuries due to the presence of a Darkness Device. Victorian society is very...delineated. There's a place for everyone, and everyone has their place. Of course, if you're not actually a Victorian that place is very far down the ladder. Not that Victorians are equal amongst themselves; women are still considered the "lesser sex" and don't have equal rights, and classism is very prevalent. The government itself is very bureaucratic, and is heavily influenced by the Sacellum. In fact, the Sacellum is involved in day-to-day life it even controls entertainment. Public "entertainment" mainly consists of long Sunday sermons about sinners repenting their evil ways, and live out their lives listening to long Sunday sermons about sinners repenting their evil ways. Novels and plays run along the same lines and with the same themes. There is a sort of underground writing movement forming, currently focused on tales of 'orrible murders and adultery, but for the most part Victorian entertainment is focused on the concept of redemption and resisting the evils of the world. Technology:19 It goes without saying that Victorian technology isn't very advanced. In Core Earth terms, it's about as advanced as 1891 England. The Victorians have not done much technological advancement on their own, even though the Gaunt Man hasn't interfered much with their achievements in this area. In fact, on a few occasions the Victorians have willingly ignored what would be considered major technological advancements because they were "unnecessary" or "beneath us". This also means that, disconnection aside, the Victorians pretty much refuse to use modern Core Earth technologies because it wasn't made by them. This makes life even more difficult for the Indonesians as they try to survive the occupation because the Victorians deny anyone access to Core Earth tech. Back on Gaea, steam power and gaslight are the norm, although electrical systems exist. They just don't see widespread use. Telephones are used for communication in the cities, and telegraphs are used for long-distance communication. There is a "Transdimensional Cable" running up the bridge from the Gaean city of New London down to the Majestic colony so the military leaders can maintain contact with the government. The main focus of innovation is in the weaponry field; unsurprising given the nature of their world. Bolt action rifles and hand-cranked machine guns are still relatively new developments, and the go-to military strategy is still lines of riflemen firing in sequence. This is because the monsters they have to deal with back on Gaea do not (for the most part) attack en masse. A Gatling gun is great for taking down a zombie horde, not so much for stopping a pair of vampires before they decimate the regiment. Now, the World laws...whatever World Laws Gaea used to have are long since erased and forgotten. In their place, the Gaunt Man has instituted three of his own: The Power of Fear, The Power of Corruption, and The Law Of Eternal Corruption. These laws are so pervasive they will actually affect anyone in the realm, even of they're in a reality bubble. The Power of Corruption rewards acts of unnecessary evils. Whenever a person commits what is generally considered an "evil" act for no reason apart from their own desires (which the game refers to as a "Wicked" act for convenience), they receive an automatic up result (free roll again and add) on the action. They also get a new "skill": corruption, which always starts at 8. Every time a character commits a Wicked act, they get the free roll-and-add, then their corruption increases by one to five points depending on the nature of the act. The character must then make a corruption check against a difficulty of 12. If the roll succeeds, then the character gains some physical manifestation of their evil nature. The more they "succeed" by, the worse the deformity. Narrow success may result in body-wide sores or your eyes becoming cat's eyes, but at the extreme end you can actually transform fully into a horror of some sort and become an NPC.  "Pacifying" the natives. The Power of Fear is, um...well, let's let the book tell you. quote:There are two reasons that the Power of Fear exists in the reality of Orrorsh. The first reason is part of the logic of the world within the game world, the second is a logic of game mechanics, exterior to the "fictional reality" of Torg. The last World Law is the Law of Eternal Corruption, and is actually not a player-facing law. This law allows the soul of any killed monster or corrupt human to bypass being brought to the afterlife for judgement and the inevitable eternal damnation. Instead, the soul can allow itself to be reborn into a new, monsterous form and return to torment the world of the living. These three Laws form the foundation of what the Gaunt Man refers to his Ecology of Fear. He's created a cycle where monsters can roam unchecked and people can be tempted to commit heinous acts for power. Anyone fighting against the forces of darkness just reinforce the system, because they weed out the weaker horrors and allow the stronger ones to thrive by defeating would-be heroes. And even if you defeat the monsters, they can just choose to come back a month, a year, a decade later and start the whole cycle all over again. As a result, the realm of Orrorsh is like a stagnant pool of fetid water. The willing unchanging rigidity of the Victorians prevents them from really being able to effectively fight against the darkness, and the Gaunt Man's laws ensure there will always be another beast ready to feed on the fear of the populice. To say nothing of the terrible things done to the natives of the Indonesian island chain by the Victorians themselves in the name of the Empire. It's a vicious cycle of terror, a snake so busy devouring its own tail it fails to notice it's being devoured by a wolf. Even without the Gaunt Man guiding things, the cycle continues unabashed. You can't defeat the darkness, all you can hope to do is delay it for a while. Really, hope isn't worth it. You're barely even delaying the inevitable. Give up. It's just easier that way. NEXT TIME: Southeast Asia, then and now Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Feb 22, 2016 |
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Feb 22, 2016 16:53
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Fossilized Rappy posted:I'm going to take a wild guess and put down my money on there not being any monsters of Southeast Asian mythology in Orrorsh ( But that's okay, because we do get that staple of classic Victorian horror, the Video Cassette Recorder of Death!
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Feb 22, 2016 17:23
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), even though that would be more interesting than just having Victorian horror monsters dumped around there.
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Orrorsh really suffers from the line's usual lack of commitment to tone. There's some Victorian/Chtuhluesque monsters, yes, but you also get 60's B-movie monsters like the Blob or the Crawling Hand. And yes they can be effective monsters, sure, but they don't quite fit into the kind of atmosphere they're trying to create.
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Feb 22, 2016 17:39
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Zereth posted:To where? Oops, sorry about that. I went back and fixed it.
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Feb 22, 2016 18:03
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 14b: Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child This is going to be a rough book to review, because it's one of those ones where the information is interwoven throughout the book instead of being laid out one concept at a time. So occasionally an important bit of background info is revealed in passing two chapters after it should. The first chapter of the Orrorsh sourcebook is about Southeast Asia and is presumably about the region before the Gaunt Man showed up. Instead, well... quote:We do not intend this book to cover every detail of so many different countries. Adequately describing even one of these nations would require a book containing hundreds of pages. Well, anyway, lets take a look at that part of the world. The territory now overrun by Orrorsh consists of over 13,000 islands of varying size, the largest being Borneo (which is also the third-largest island in the world). The overall population is around 150 million spread throughout the region. quote:Many of the people live in isolated tribes and by the laws of their ancestors. Others live in huge cities such as Singapore and Jakarta, the business people and factory workers and miners. Any discussion of Southeast Asia must keep in mind that the area has a tremendous mix of ancient traditions and modem technologies. The regions are described in what appears to be a pretty random order, so we might as well just run down the line. Malaysia is split between the southernmost archipelago of southeat Asia and the northern edge of the island of Borneo. It's a constitutional monarchy (meaning the king or queen is the Head of State, and actual legislation is performed by an elected Parliament), with a population of about 60% Malays and 30% Chinese. The country has been hit pretty hard by the invading reality, with the seat of government retreating to Japan (in their defense, nobody knows about Kanawa yet) and leaving the cities to pretty much fend for themselves. Singapore is a small republic that is actually the only city-state in the world. It's incredibly densely populated, and most of the major world religions have a presence here. Because it's really just one big industrialized city, Singapore is completely reliant on import for its agricultural needs. Singapore appears to be a Core Earth hardpoint, given that the horrors of Orrorsh seem to stop just outside the city, but in fact it's just in a mixed zone. A powerful dark entity named Skutharka has claimed the city for her own, and is slowly twisting the available technology into new and disturbing sources of fear. For the most part, Burma hasn't been nailed too hard by the invasion. It's lost territory, yes, but it's still mostly outside the stelae zones. Unfortunately, this means that they have to deal with the influx of refugees from Malaysia and the nearby islands. The country's infrastructure is completely overwhelmed by the influx (not to mention trying to keep Orrorsh from pushing further north), and the Red Cross and the Cyberpapacy's Soldiers of Mercy are rushing in personnel, food, and medical supplies as fast as they can. Thailand is in a similar situation as Burma, but has recently undergone a strong religious revival as the faithful flock to Bangkok. The strength of the Buddhist and Islam faiths does seem to have slowed Orrorsh's advancement into the country, but unfortunately that just means that the forces of darkness are putting more attention on Burma. The Philippines have suffered very heavily from the invasion. Because the country is actually a collection of islands out on the edge of the overall region, they were cut off from pretty much everyone when the Gaunt Man dropped his personal bridge on Borneo shortly after the Victorians invaded. They haven't lost much territory (yet), but the invasion has fractured the Phillipine people pretty heavily. The government is currently focused on trying to reunite the islands before Orrorsh can make a significant push. Indonesia is the largest country in this mess, and the one hit hardest by it. Indonesia consists of 13,667 islands (half of which aren't even named), but about a third of them are under Orrorshian axioms. Orrorsh has taken over Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Timor, with the Victorian having conquered a sizable chunk of Sumatra as the colony of Majestic. The Gaunt Man also has a bridge of his own in Borneo, which is (well, was) the center of his operations. Indonesia has been invaded many times in its history by the Dutch, the British, the Portuguese, and the Chinese, and in fact did not achieve independence until its first general election in 1971 after 500 years of being under other people's thumbs. Until the invasion happened, the capital of Indonesia was Jakarta, its largest city. The city is still there (and is an actual hardpoint), but the government has bugged out to Irian Jaya (now known as West Papua after 2002) because it's outside the stelae zone. The government is trying everything it can to get aid from Japan and the Soviet Union, but so far only the Soviet Union has seemed to be willing to send any form of aid. Technically speaking, Australia is not part of Orrorsh, but given that they're within spitting distance of its southern border they're pretty much forced to be involved. They've allied themselves with the displaced Indonesian government, and have begun very cool relations with the Victorian forces. This is because the Australian government is treating the Victorian occupation as a revolutionary movement that has illegally ousted the old government, and the Victorians treat the Australian government like bunch of ignorant children who should mind their betters. Monsters and horrors are starting to appear in northeastern Australia, but so far it seems that Core Earth weaponry is more than capable of taking out monsters. But as we will learn later on, this is not actually the case.  Pictured: the view in Borneo And that's pretty much all we get for Southeast Asia! There's a little more, yes, but for the most part everyplace but Indonesia gets maybe two paragraphs, and most of Indonesia's entry is concerned with the history of the nation. The next chapter is The World of Gaea, and is about the most recent world the invaders are coming from. quote:There is no longer a home cosm for Orrorsh. Like the other invading realities, the reality moves on from world to world. The reality of Orrorsh was so brutal that it eventually consumed each world the Gaunt Man invaded. He left no trail. The main divergence point between Core Earth and Gaea happened in 43 AD, when the British chieftain Caratacus led his people against the invading forces of the Roman Empire. In our world, he failed and the Roman forces took over the island. quote:In the history of Gaea, the Brits had in their number a warrior-woman named Viictoria. Just when the Romans seemed about to win, she turned the battle and brought her people to victory. They rallied around her and she unified the people of her island. She was a politically astute woman who realized that she would have to focus her peoples' attention upon an external force. Focus against Rome eased dissension in Britain. She turned her people toward the Roman Empire. Her subjects coined the phrase "Victoria For The World," and it never lost its value. Over the next century, the Victorians cut their way through Gaul on their way to Italy. But unlike Rome, Victoria didn't leave conquered territory to its own devices under the empire's aegis. Instead, they set up colonies everywhere, replacing the native cultures with their own and taking any available land or resources along the way. Once Europe was conquered, Victoria turned its sights on the rest of the world. The Victorian naval force was very primitive compared to their neighbors such as the Vikings or Huns, because the arrogance of the Victorians made any form of technological advancement very difficult. When confronted by a new societal advance (especially if it was from another culture), the Victorians tended to dismiss it out of hand.  Really, it's for their own good. Interestingly, the one major discovery they adopted for themselves was Christianity. Where the early "Martyr cults" were dismissed by the Romans, the Victorians saw a religious system that worked very well with their belief that dying for a cause (be it God, or the expansion of the empire) was the highest goal one could aim for. Victoria was the Roman Empire of Gaea, except that the Victorian empire was much, much longer lived. The empire spread across the face of Europe and the Middle East, leaving colony after colony in its wake. The discovery of Islam led to three solid centuries of warfare as the Victorians finally found an enemy that could match it in religious and tribal furor. The only nation able to hold them back was Japan, although Victoria did enter (begrudging) trade with China. Despite everything, some outside ideas did permeate into Victorian culture, shaping it into what we would consider "Victorian English culture". Overall societal advancement was still very slow, but by the 17th century Victoria controlled most of the Eurasian continent and was starting to move into what we think of as North America. American colonization more or less followed the same path as they did on Core Earth, albeit for different reasons. Instead of seeking religious freedom, the colonists were interested in the potential for profit that could be wrung from this new land. At the end of the 17th century, the second major world-changing event happened: the Battle of Medway. A series of strange murders occurred in the American colonies involving dismemberment and cannibalism. Believing the attacks were the work of the "heathen" natives, open warfare began between the colonists and the Native Americans. To the colonist's shock, they learned that the "East Indians" were capable of powerful mystic feats (or, as one colonist put it, "alive with the fire of the Devil"). This was the Victorian's first encounter with anything supernatural, and they had no idea how to deal with it. quote:In 1692 ten girls in Salem, Massachusetts were convicted of murdering their own parents. The girls claimed to have been corrupted by the satanic powers of an East Indian named Tituba, a servant of the Reverend Samual Parris, and two other women of Salem. The girls all decreed that hell was unleashing its demons upon the world; only a return to the old way of blood and conquest could save the world. The morning after the girls made their statements, their bodies were found completely charred in their beds. Fire had touched nothing else in any of their rooms, including their bedding. (I should point out, by the way, that while Gaean history does involve real people from our history, the book doesn't actually point this out. If I hadn't thought to Google one of these names, I never would have realized that this was all a twist on human history. I guess they just assumed that the readers were familiar with the major players of the Salem Witch Trials and would just recognize the names.) The supposed demonic work of Tituba resulted in a backlash against all the East Indians as being servants of Satan, and the push to kill the so-called "forces of darkness" led to a full-on holy war in America. And while the more monstrous beasts were an obvious target for the military, it wasn't long before creatures started appearing that could blend in with normal humans; werewolves, vampyres, and sorcerers began spreading through the Empire. What the Victorians couldn't know, of course, was that the sudden appearance of the supernatural was the work of the Gaunt Man, who had dropped a bridge in the Grand Canyon. He sent his minions out under the guise of working for the Native Americans in order to ferment the natural Victorian racism into something larger. He also began possessing members of the aristocracy in order to begin steering Victorian culture to his desires. He cemented their instituional racism, he pushed for the growth of sweat shops for the "benefit of the lower classes", and generally encouraged the worst aspects of Victorian culture. Some of his followers learned what he actually was and worked with him voluntarily, but for the most part nobody realized how they were being manipulated both from within and without. Eventually, Orrorsh managed to overwrite most of the reality of Gaea and reach the borders of the island of Victoria itself. Victoria was forced to write off its colonies as being destroyed, but every now and then a missive would work its way back home from the besieged colonies. The ruling class managed to put enough information together to learn the name of the force behind the invasion: The Gaunt Man. But to the evangelical Victorians, this is just another guise of Satan. For the past century, the Victorians have been fighting to keep the horrors off their shores and maybe start pushing back. The Gaunt Man is smart enough to allow the Victorians the occasional victory so they have just enough hope to keep going. The Gaunt Man has learned how to gain more possibilities from people who were under the grip of fear, and has molded both Orrorsh and Gaea into a self-sustaining source of both possibility energy and unrelenting terror. He gains so much energy from the remnants of the Victorian people that it's worth not just wiping them out and moving to the next world. In fact, he's been known to provide aid to those who can fight back against the darkness in order to weed out his weaker creations. But eventually the time came when the Gaunt Man discovered Core Earth, and with it his best chance at becoming Torg. So he allowed the plans for a makeshift maelstrom bridge to fall into the hands of one Dr. Wells, and...well, we all know what happened there. Currently, the Victorians have taken over about a third of the island of Sumatra, driving out the native Indonesians and renaming the colony "Majestic". Technically the Victorians are here to fight the horrors they think they've unleashed on Core Earth, but what's actually happening is that they're feeding into the Gaunt Man's short-term plans. The Victorians are convinced that the "primitive" native Indonesians have "driven out the white settlers" of this region, and they honestly believe that it's their job to take the colony back and elevate the natives to a proper level of civilization (i.e., the Victorian's level). White Man's Burden, and all that. Of course, the Gaunt Man has a few loyal followers in the governments on both sides of the Victorian bridge, so that official stance isn't going to change anytime soon.  That'll teach her to not be White. What this all boils down to is that the situation in southeast Asia is one of the worst out of all the conquered territory. Indonesia, having just regained its independence, finds itself dealing with a threat that might have stepped out of its own past. Monsters are spreading throughout the region, working their way out with no seeming way to stop them. The Victorians are driving people out of their homes in the name of an Empire that refuses to accept even the possibility that it might be doing the wrong thing. It's a downward spiral of hopelessness, crafted with care by a madman who seeks to destroy both worlds, both in a physical and a spiritual sense. And to make matters worse, he's not even controlling it anymore. The hand is off the leash, and now the beasts are running wild. Yeah...this is gonna get uncomfortable. NEXT TIME: As you sow, so shall ye reap.
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Feb 25, 2016 16:30
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Alien Rope Burn posted:a wizard ejaculating magic from his fingers
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Feb 29, 2016 18:17
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OvermanXAN posted:One thing I've gotten from reading these threads is that a lot of RPGs seem to have this problem. I mean, on the one hand with Rifts, White Wolf, or [Insert Heartbreaker Here] you can credit it to lack of (good) editing, amateurishness, or what have you, but it seems to just be common in general that people don't consider probabilities, how numbers are going to scale, or how things are going to balance in general. It seems like a systemic thing in the industry. A lot of it is also probably a lack of blindtesting.
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Mar 1, 2016 22:15
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Every time Witch Girls or that other one like it get brought up, my soul throws up.
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Mar 2, 2016 22:16
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 14c: The architects of fear And now, it's finally time to really talk about The Gaunt Man. Very little is known about the Gaunt Man's history. Where the other High Lords will spend hours monologueing about their greatness and conquests, the Gaunt Man rarely (if ever) talks about his past. The commonly held beliefs are that he either doesn't want to accidentally let some obscure weakness slip, or that he actually doesn't remember it himself.  The Gaunt Man, High Lord of Orrorsh and mastermind behind the Core Earth invasion What is known is that the Gaunt Man is not really "human" in any traditional sense anymore. He is an entity capable of possessing body after body in order to further his goals. This possession is very rough on the host bodies and gives him his defining characteristic, but he is capable of casting illusions over himself to blend in with mundanes. Currently he's posing as Lord Bryon Salisbury, a Victorian cavalry hero, and this is the name the other High Lords also know him under. As stated previously, the Gaunt Man is the mastermind behind the whole Core Earth invasion. He was the one who managed to get the other High Lords to work together to help him become a god, promising that he would give favorable treatment to those who aided him in this endeavor. His overall plan was to strip Core Earth of its incredibly high amount of Possibility energy, then kick off a major natural disaster to give him the physical energy needed to complete his apotheosis. Unfortunately for him, during the events of the original trilogy of novels, the Gaunt Man was trapped in a pocket dimension by a Core Earth eternity shard called The Heart of Coyote. The Gaunt Man and the Heart are currently "outside" our reality, trapped in an eternal cycle of creation and destruction. The Gaunt Man is painfully disintegrated and reformed hundreds of times a minute, leaving the Possibility Raiders without their mastermind and Orrorsh without its High Lord. He is slowly draining Possibilities from the Heart of Coyote, so really his freedom is only a matter of time. That said, despite being trapped and cut off from his power, the Gaunt Man is still High Lord of Orrorsh. His Darkness Device is still bound to him (and vice versa), and until it decides to release him and find a new High Lord nobody will be capable of taking the realm over. The other High Lords don't know what's happened to the Gaunt Man yet. They do know he seems to be out of the picture for a while, though. The Gaunt Man's lieutenant Thratchen has been telling the other High Lords that the Gaunt Man is in seclusion to prepare for the next stage of the invasion, but nobody's really buying that. Until the Gaunt Man can break free, the other High Lords are free to pursue their own agendas and possibly become Torg. All that being said, what's the Gaunt Man's overall priority list outside of "escape the eternal reality storm"? His top priority is gaining knowledge of the Nameless One. The Gaunt Man is obsessed with this entity, and believes that the only way to gain true understanding of a cosmic entity is to become Torg. (Remember the Nameless One? Of course you don't; it's because the Nameless One is one of the two cosmic entities mentioned in the brief description of the creation of the multiverse way the gently caress back in the Basic Set, where he's only mentioned in the creation myth and that it's the force that created the Darkness Devices in the first place. The Nameless one (and Apeiros) are actually really important to the overall three-and-a-half-year metaplot, despite being brought up in official material once in a blue moon. It really does bring into sharp relief how the overall metaphysics and such weren't for the players, they were for the writers.) Anyway, his second bullet point is to gain as much power as possible. This feeds into his overall top priority; after all becoming Torg requires an insane amount of both Possibility and physical energy. Third, he wants to spread the reality of Orrorsh across Core Earth. Inspired by the Victorians, he wants to set up "colonies of fear" across not just Earth but the realities of the other invaders. Ideally, Orrorsh would spread across Core Earth, over the various realms, then up the now-conveniently-placed bridges to the other High Lords' cosms. Fourth is maintaining the culture of fear throughout his realm. He does this by creating horrors and letting them lose on the general populace. That said, he's always careful to keep things to the shadows; he's smart enough to realize that if the horrific becomes common, the fear will vanish and people will be able to really fight back. So he keeps things subtle (for the most part) in order to reap the benefits of fear. Lastly, he wants eternity shards. There are two reasons for this; first off, he wants them as sources of Possibility energy. Second, and more important, eternity shards are the only weapon effective against him. Unless killed with an eternity shard, he'll just come back like nothing happened. Despite being a total megalomaniacal tyrant, the Gaunt Man is a surprisingly calm person. He comes across as very cool and calculating, and that's the case for the most part. The only times he shows any real emotion are when he flies into a rage when his plans are thwarted, or the disturbing joy he feels when his machinations instill more fear on his subjects. In a lot of ways, he's a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass, laughing when they flee and throwing fits when his toys are taken away. The Gaunt Man's Darkness Device is Heketon, which appears as an obsidian heart about the size of a fist. Heketon is one of (of not the) oldest and most powerful Darkness Devices. Heketon and the Gaunt Man have worked together for millennia, and together they are the only known force ever able to defeat another Darkness Device. Long before discovering Gaea, the Gaunt Man and Heketon invaded the feral werewolf cosm of Kantovia and defeated its High Lord, Dairoga. While the Gaunt Man was able to brainwash Dairoga into being one of his personal agents, Dairoga's weakened Darkness Device managed to dimthread out of there and escape to a new cosm: Earth. This is how the Gaunt Man learned of Core Earth, and was the spark that set off his whole plan. This being Torg, both the Gaunt Man and Heketon are given full stat blocks. This is despite the fact that the Gaunt Man is (as of the release of the book) out of the picture and unreachable, and that Heketon (being a Darkness Device) is impossible to destroy. And to make sure that they can't be beaten before the metaplot says so, their stats are through the roof because somehow that makes more sense than saying "these are entities that can squash you like a bug". The Gaunt Man's lowest skill is an 18, and the skills he can use to inflict effects like stymied or setback are in the mid-30's. On top of that, Heketon itself has completed an occult ritual that allows it to use any of its powers through any active Orrorshian stelae. quote:Heketon carefully observed the opening days of the Possibility Wars. It was disturbed by what it saw, and what the ravagons reported. While not likely, the chance of defeat existed. One or more realms might fall, and then the possibility energy of Earth would surge in a storm across the remaining realms, shattering the stelae which bounded them. All the work of Heketon and its High Lord undone in one furious cataclysm. The Gaunt Man believed the plan still worked well enough. Heketon did not. Currently, Heketon is waiting to see if the Gaunt Man can escape from the Heart of Coyote's reality storm. It's maintaining its bond with the Gaunt Man for the time being, but if it becomes clear the Gaunt Man is gone for good, or if he escapes and is too weak to stop anyone trying to usurp him, then Heketon will abandon him to his fate. Which brings us nicely to the Gaunt Man's inner circle. Only one of his lieutenants is detailed in this book, but I'll mention the others as well. The most powerful of the Gaunt Man's inner circle is the techno-demon Thratchen. Thratchen is from the cosm of Tharkhold, which you may remember suffered a one-two punch of losses when its High Lord first attempted and failed to invade the transhuman cyberpunk reality of Kandara (which would lead to the creation of the Cyberpapacy), then got his bridge in Russia destroyed thanks to the Soviet psychic Katarina Tovarish (groan) and the Soviet psychic research program that was secretly bankrolled by the Kanawa Corporation. Thratchen was the Gaunt Man's second-in-command, and is currently stuck on Core Earth thanks to recent events.  Thratchen, techno-demon and pretender to the throne Not one to rest on his cyber-laurels, Thratchen has declared himself Regent of Orrorsh. He knows what happened to the Gaunt Man, and is trying to find Heketon while maintaining the illusion that the Gaunt Man is just "in seclusion to prepare for the next phase of the invasion". So far it's working, but the other High Lords are beginning to suspect that something's up. Currently, Thratchen's main priority is seizing the Darkness Device for himself before anyone else can get their hands on it. Slightly below that priority is killing the poo poo out of 3327 for causing the Tharkhold bridge in Russia to fail. As a techno-demon, Thratchen is cybered to the gills. He has all sorts of fun toys like retractable hand blades, internal computer systems, and wing enhancements. He also has the ability to cast miracles, but these being miracles of his rather...unique culture they're rather messed up. Only two are given in this book: Mechanization turns a person into a literal robot slave for five minutes, and Animate Cables causes any cables touching a person to either tie them up or choke them. For the sake of completeness, let's see the rest of the Gaunt Man's special followers from other books. Kurst is a werewolf, and was the Gaunt Man's primary hunter. He's also actually Dairoga, former High Lord of Kantovia. The Gaunt Man wiped his memory after Kurst's Darkness Device abandoned him, and used him as an assassin for a few centuries. Kurst's defeat happened around 1250 BC our time, and his Darkness Device Tagharra fell into the Olmec empire and influenced the peoples of that region over the next few centuries. Over the course of the novel trilogy, Kurst regained his memories and allied himself with the Core Earth forces, and is in fact the one who threw his former master into the reality storm. He doesn't seem to know that Tagharra is on Earth, and really it's hard to say what he'd do if he did. Really, Kurst pretty much vanishes from the line after the novels, getting like a dozen mentions here and there until popping back up during the War's End adventure, a.k.a. the "poo poo this is the last book we have to tie up all these loose ends NOW" adventure. Malcolm Kane is your standard-issue 90's RPG badass serial killer. He's from Core Earth, and was recruited by the Gaunt Man to hunt down the main characters of the novel trilogy. He's supposed to be hunting down Storm Knights for the Gaunt Man (like Stone was for Deadlands), but again he doesn't even get a mention in the core game line. In fact, he's barely mentioned until the adventure High Lord of Earth, where Kane learns about Tagharra and attempts to seize it for himself. Technically he dies in that adventure, so again kind of a waste. Lastly, there's Utherion. He was (technically) the most successful of the Gaunt Man's lieutenants, in that he was allowed to become a High Lord. Specifically, he became High Lord of Aysle, but in a rather roundabout way. The Gaunt Man convinced him to let his soul be removed from his body, at which point he possessed the queen of Aysle, Lady Pella Ardinay, and attuned her body to Aysle's Darkness Device. This didn't work out too well for him; during the novel trilogy he was ousted from her body. It turned out that the bond between a person and the Darkness Device is tied to the body, not the soul, so now Utherion is stuck trying to find a new body to take over so he can re-attune to the Darkness Device, which is still bound to Ardinay. We'll see more of this once we get to the Aysle cosm book. With that little detour taken care of, it's time to discuss The Structure of Orrorsh. This section starts out with close to a page of Kurst monologing in a very unnatural manner about the overall tone of Orrorsh's power structure, and if you think you're strong enough try and get through this: Kurst posted:"Know that fear rules Orrorsh. The Gaunt Man made it no secret that he drew his power from Heketon, the Darkness Device of Orrorsh. He let all under his command know that it is fear that appeases the device, and that he received the device's favor for creating fear on Gaea and Earth. In turn, whichever subjects created fear on Gaea and Earth would receive rewards from the Gaunt Man. Orrorsh became a pyramid of fear, with zombies vying to create fear beneath the powerful vampyres, each creature supporting the fear of the greater monster above it. Atop the pyramid rested the Gaunt Man. Above him, floating just over the pyramid's peak, was Heketon. The entire structure served the Darkness Device; it was the system's sole purpose.  While the realm is ultimately controlled by the Gaunt Man and Heketon, the actual "control" of Orrorsh is done by a group known as The Hellion Court. They're the power level below the Gaunt Man himself, and report directly to him. The Court consists of powerful supernatural creatures and power-hungry morals whose job it is to maintain the atmosphere of constant fear throughout the realm. The membership has shifted throughout the centuries, but it always consists of the most powerful nightmares of the realm. Since the Gaunt Man's disappearance, Thratchen has instituted some personnel changes to the Court, eliminating those he didn't trust and paring it down to five members:
 Basjas has a guest over for dinner. The majority of the Gaunt Man's empire is controlled by beings collectively known as Nightmares. Each Nightmare controls its own territory as assigned by the Gaunt Man himself. There are hundreds of Nightmares throughout Gaea, and the Gaunt Man brought down about 200 Nightmares to control the Orrorsh realm, and has spread them across the islands to start building up the atmosphere of terror. A few of the more active Nightmares are listed:
 It creeps, and seeps, and glides and slides across the floor... Now, given how many creatures there are running around, the question arises about how this whole system actually works without collapsing in on itself. The answer to that is what is referred to as the Ecology of Fear. quote:Unlike the other realities that have invaded Earth there is no room for a true society in Orrorsh. Societies are designed to provide comfort and structure. Comfort and structure discourage fear, and since it is fear that Heketon wants, society has no place. However, a High Lord and his Darkness Device draw power from the possibility energy drained from people living in the realm. If the monsters and terrors of Orrorsh are too fierce and chaotic and destroy too much of the planet's population then the invasion is for nothing, for there is no more energy to be drained. On the other hand, if the monsters are too organized, like the Cyberpapacy or Dr. Mobius' Empire, then although they are strange invaders they produce less fear. Much fear rests in the unknown. An army of werewolves might be terrifying at first, but soon they are no more frightening than any other army. The horrors of Orrorsh are the terrors of the dark comers and footsteps walking behind you late at night. It's taken him centuries, but he finally managed to hit a state of equilibrium where the entire system is self-sustaining. The monsters of the realm do not actively fight each other for territory anymore, and can focus on the humans. The humans, meanwhile, have just enough hope to keep fighting back, but not enough power to win. The whole system runs off three points, which the Gaunt Man has transformed into Orrorsh's world laws: The Power of Fear, the Power of Corruption, and the law of Eternal Corruption. I touched on these in brief back at the beginning of this book's posts, and will get into more detail on them next chapter. So where do all these beasts and monsters come from? It turns out, from a bunch of places. Monsters of the "Nightmare tier" or higher are capable of creating monsters on their own, and they tend to do so quite often. Generally these monsters follow the thematic mold of their creators; Ahjebax creates ooze-like monsters, Dr. Sconce creates patchwork creatures, and so on. This is where a good chunk of your "fodder" monsters come from. Humans can become horrors if they tap into the Power of Corruption enough times. Once someone has taken advantage of the Power of Corruption for any reason, when they die they will have the option to enter the Gaunt Man's cycle of reincarnation and keep coming back to the world instead of going to the afterlife and receiving his just deserts. Third, some horrors can turn humans into other horrors against the person's will. This is the purview of vampyres, werewolves, and things of that kidney. It's interesting to note that then a person is transformed this way, they're not subject to the reincarnation cycle. Instead, their soul is released to whatever afterlife awaits it, and a waiting corrupted soul is taken from Heketon's "storage" and used to animate the body. Interestingly, this means that every horror has a soul of some sort, even lowly creatures like zombies. Lastly, there's "wild horror". Wild horrors are very rare, but no less dangerous. These are horrors that are created on their own, with no guiding hand other than the general belief of the humans of the area and the local magic and fear levels. Wild horrors tend to not slot into the Ecology very well, but the Gaunt Man and Heketon find them useful to give the humans a target they can fight without knocking the rest of the system out of whack. quote:A prime example of "wild horror" is the fortress of Muslim zombies that sprang upon Majestic's northern shore when the reality of Orrorsh washed over the land. The zombies are the corpses of Muslims of Earth desecrated by Portuguese sailors hundreds of years ago. The souls of the zombies are the same souls of the Muslims who died hundreds of years ago. Orrorsh is not part of controlling this terror. The zombies are acting on their own will. The arrival of Orrorsh only acted as a catalyst for the creation of the zombies.  I say! One thing that does need to be pointed out before we close this section out is the concept of Strong Life and True Death. As pointed out, the horrors of Orrorsh are technically immortal. When they are "killed", their souls are fielded by Heketon and sent to special storage zones known as Waiting Villages. There, the soul waits for a new body to become available through one means or another, and once that happens it just re-enters the world and picks up where it left off. Corrupted souls can "degrade" if they reincarnate enough, but that's just survival of the fittest. As souls become weaker, they get put in less and less powerful bodies until they are so worn down that they just remain in the Village, used for nothing and feeling nothing. In order to keep his monsters in line, the Gaunt Man instituted the rule of the True Death. Every corrupted soul has one specific weakness that, if used on a horror, will kill its soul off for good and send it straight to the afterlife. Sometimes it's well-known (stake through the heart for vamps, silver for werewolves, destroy the head for zombies), but for the more individual horrors it's going to take some research to figure out what the monster's weakness is. And even then, it's probably not going to be easy to do. For example, Basjas needs to be wrapped in her own webs for three days (at which point she will die), Skuthharka must be decapitated and have a mixture of bee's honey and rose petals poured down his throat, and General Wellington must be killed at sunrise in a one-on-one duel. The more powerful Nightmares go to great lengths to keep the methods of their True Deaths hidden (for obvious reasons). The longer a horror can stay in the world, the more powerful it gets, and the hard it is to kill. Even a non-True Death death is a major setback, the first step in a downward spiral towards becoming a forgotten voice in a Waiting Village. Every horror knows this; the Ecology of Fear is a world of survival of the fittest, and a moment's weakness towards stormers or other horrors can result in a loss of rank and territory. Every Nightmare knows, deep down, that all it takes is one misstep to fall out of favor and wind up in Hell...or worse. It's very rare that a Nightmare realizes that it's trapped in the same web of fear as the humans. And when one does...the Gaunt Man just laughs. NEXT TIME: People, places, and...things.
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Mar 7, 2016 16:41
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quote:Failing a Build Repair rolls means the Build or repair fails.
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Mar 7, 2016 21:54
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Kai Tave posted:From what I've heard, Abby Soto literally doesn't grasp the concept of consistency. Apparently she would do disruptive poo poo in her weird MUD/Mush/whatever games to other characters but then act completely baffled when they held a grudge about it afterwards, as though every scene was supposed to be a fresh start and nothing really counted.
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Mar 7, 2016 22:04
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Mors Rattus posted:It really does.
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Mar 7, 2016 22:19
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I remember a player on a Marvel Comics MUSH that was like that, she'd do insanely questionable poo poo and then next scene would be like "well I'm evil why don't you just accept that" like it was just a natural condition and not, say, abuse. She'd throw terrible tantrums if you called her out on it, and was kind of obsessed with murder and transformation and- huh. I have a friend who's still active in MUSH roleplay circles, and she always described people like that as not looking at the game as "we are all in this story", but as "you are in my story". They tend to end up getting serially banned from various communities because they just end up pissing everyone else off.
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Mar 8, 2016 01:57
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Maxwell Lord posted:I love this. unrelated side note: The other day one of the game stores I frequent got a bunch of used Torg books in for sale. That now makes two store within 10 minutes of my office that have Torg books. Somebody is trying to tell me something.
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Mar 8, 2016 15:41
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unseenlibrarian posted:Skutharka is amazing just for being the guy behind great plans like "What if...we just wholesale stole the plot of Videodrome and/or the Ring and turned it into a monster. Huh? Huh?" Then you get stuff that's literally just "killer lawn mower what kills people".
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Mar 8, 2016 16:41
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The last game store I did Organized Play at had YuGiOh on the same night, and they got the lion's share of the space (because they bought YuGiOh cards), and they were always super-loud, and had constant issues with people stealing each other's stuff. One night someone actually punched someone else because of a card play.
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Mar 8, 2016 19:46
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Well, that's what happened at my last store. He had YuGiOh and D&D Organized Play happening on the same night, and the YuGiOh players pretty much got away with murder because they kept buying cards. Meanwhile, the rest of us got shuffled off to the side, half the time they didn't have a table ready for my group even though we were there every week, and charged $5 per person because we didn't buy anything. Never mind that he never carried RPG stuff for us and could never get stuff when asked. Last I heard he's shifted from YuGiOh to Dice Masters on the same night because that's the new hotness. The last time I was there to play a board game with one of my players (since the rest of the group couldn't make it), he had some guys come over and try to teach us how to play so we'd buy Dice Masters poo poo, even though a) we didn't ask him to or want to learn, and b) Dice Masters would have been on the same night we were playing D&D.
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Mar 8, 2016 20:16
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If I remember correctly, the card game was based on the manga, but the manga didn't have any rules beyond what was needed at that moment. This meant that the original game was pretty much unplayable by normal means, so people had to come in and try to duct-tape some rules together based on what they had on the cards. So technically the game was released, then designed.
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Mar 8, 2016 21:41
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hyphz posted:In the Manga, originally Yugi played all kinds of games, and the CCG he played was called "Magic and Wizards". It wasn't planned at all, it just happened on its own.
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Mar 8, 2016 22:44
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I'll admit I've never gotten into either genre, but a game where characters of either gender can be magical "girls" or kamen riders, their choice, would be pretty cool.
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Mar 9, 2016 00:33
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I should have known Ewen would have me covered.
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Mar 9, 2016 01:27
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Hunt11 posted:The concept of San could work if it is more like a stress meter. As in spend too long fighting off evil without having a chance to hang out with your friends or go watch a movie or whatever and you start to burn out. Lynx Winters posted:A stress meter is a sanity system. Don't. Night10194 posted:Put in a stress meter but when it fills up you're gripped with heroic virtue and resolve because of the terrible evil in front of you and may now use your superest attack. No downsides, only 'This is how close I am to snapping and going EVEN MORE HEROIC.' 
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Mar 9, 2016 02:10
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But seriously I really want to take those ideas and what Covok said about FAE and make a "magical teens fighting evil with the power of LOVE" game. I mean, I know I won't. But I want to.
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Mar 9, 2016 02:16
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Night10194 posted:Don't call it a stress meter. Call it the Outrage Meter. When the forces of Darkness have pushed you too far and expect you to break, they are now going to have a Bad Time. I'm already thinking in my head that this FAE thing would have a seventh approach that depends on your type; magical boys/girls get Compassion, and the tokusatsu action types get Bravery. That's pretty much what your hero type embodies. You can add that stat to rolls when directly fighting the forces of Darkness on top of your normal approach, but you can pass that bonus along to someone else with Create Advantange, or when you're Taken Out instead off you big honkin' attack. Because while compassion and bravery are powerful, when combined they become even stronger, and one isn't as effective without the other.
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Mar 9, 2016 02:58
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Maxwell Lord posted:I just adore the image of a giant werewolf playing pretend business man. quote:He dresses in tailor-made suits designed for his massive frame. His offices are populated by about a dozen corrupted individuals who serve him. They work at desks and function as a typical office. This is part of Skutharka's style: the dog-eat-dog world of business held great appeal for him as soon as he heard about it. He mimics the mannerisms of capitalists - going so far as to pick up phones not in use, speaking into them and laughing the whole way through an imaginary conversation.
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Mar 9, 2016 03:05
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I just can't help but think of Break Keys. For those that missed out, this was a game debuted at Gen Con '03 that took the gaming world by storm!... ahaha, but seriously, I can't even find any images of the things, they were that popular. They were these plastic keys that locked together. Then, you twist them against each other, and the key to break first was the loser! Then, you buy more keys and play again. Even back then it was such an obviously terrible idea.
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Mar 9, 2016 03:14
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