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By popular demand posted:This thread should cobble together a GM advice book and spread it out for a minimal fee at the same venues just to piss off old Monte. Just 30 pages of "for God's sake don't have anyone raped."
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Aug 27, 2019 09:58
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Eclipse Phase: Second Edition X-Risks and Threats  headlined by the mighty "may appear in a supplement some day" This section starts off, rather like the X-Risks book for EP1, by summarizing some of the sorts of X-Threats that Firewall squads might be called on to deal with. Which is a good idea! It actually provides some adventure seeds and suggestions for what a Firewall campaign would actually focus on. Just kind of a shame that in EP1 the detailed delivery of that was kind of a late-lifecycle supplement... First X-Threat suggestion is Aliens. Could be the Factors, could be Gatecrashers kicking in a door where there's a native welcome committee on the other side, could be people loving with the Factors and risking a war between them and Humanity in general(though it's extremely vague how much more powerful they are than humans. The text keeps saying "THEY'RE SO MUCH STRONGER AND TECHIER" but as far as I recall that was never actually given any mechanical backing in EP1 where an individual Factor was just a slightly beefier human who could spit poison and gattai into a giant battle worm). Also lol if you think you'll find any help with actual sapient non-Factor aliens, either how to handle first-encounter poo poo, how to stat them, stats for supposedly-extinct species like the Iktomi in case you want to have a surviving colony of them, any actual authorial fact on what happened to them, etc. It could also be something Astronomical. I.e. the sun goes nova, a gamma ray burst, a wandering black hole, asteroids and comets aimed for habs, someone intentionally de-orbiting a large moon or hab, etc. Common among these is that many of them are... not something you could do something about. You might be able to evacuate a hab ahead of a solar flare, but gamma ray bursts we probably wouldn't know about until we were all toasted, is my understanding, nor can many of these actually be triggered by any sort of agency that can be stopped. In the "big rocks"-department, there's actually something to be done, however. Economics, which you could basically shorten to Crime, i.e. someone disrupting supply massively to leave people starving or freezing or whatever. It feels... a lot below what Firewall should be dealing with, especially since self-sufficiency levels, at least in terms of survival basics, are really high in Sol. Infectious Agents. Basically just the Exsurgent virus, in case it emerges in some form that can infect enough people stealthily enough to spread around. This one's alright. Though I like how medichines and space-medicine are now super-advanced that stuff like the Space Flu is no longer a problem, so they've just upgraded us to the Nano Space Flu and the exact same problems occur again, so having medichines and etc. don't actually change jack poo poo, fundamentally. Intelligence Amplification. The situation where some moron builds a new TITAN or an Exhuman actually succeeds at becoming a large enough brain blob to think of a vaguely original thought, or stopping the run-up to said situation. I mean, yes, this is kind of Firewall's core mission, though lol Prometheans. I feel like the Exhuman variety or some of the various hivemind experiments taking off would be more interesting to deal with, since they'd actually focus on the changes that hyper-intellect would make to a human mind, rather than just "robot Cthulhu eats 1d6 cortical stacks every round." Because that's what the TITANs are, they're robo-Cthulhu. Mega-Engineering. Discovery of a megastructure, or any faction having the expertise to build one by, say, stripping Jupiter apart, could destabilize the system's politics. The main problem with this one is that two have already been discovered, Iapetus, which is a bit spooky but otherwise hasn't done jack poo poo, and Olaf, an exoplanet which popped up in Gatecrashing and is literally a Jupiter-scale, habitable world at ~1G full of active alien tech. I guess you could argue Olaf hasn't destabilized the setting or started a war for control of it simply because its gate seems to fritz out often, making it hard for anyone to get a foothold. But even so, it seems to sabotage the book's insistence that such a structure would be massively destabilizing to the setting. Secondly, if a faction actually had the dominance to strip apart an entire world for, say, a Ringworld's materials unmolested, that would imply tech and general territorial control that would already have destabilized the setting. Feels like this one should just have been called "politics" instead(that one pops up later, actually). Memes. Space memes could destroy civilization. Okay, more seriously, what they call "memes" here is more accurately what we, not being idiots, would file under "politics" as well, i.e. a powerful fascist or apartheid state in the Solar system. Mental Subversion. TITAN memes. Nanotechnology. Gray Goo scenarios, though everything in the writing so far seems to be completely unconcerned with it. We've got nano-stuff everywhere and apparently it's so well-understood and controlled that there's no chance of it running amok and needing some sort of killswitch or potentially countering agent. The only dangerous nanotech stuff is the stuff actively programmed to be a danger, i.e. TITAN swarms. So again, just TITAN stuff. Nanothreats of any scale tend to be either save-or-dies(exsurgent infections) or "run away real quick"(big waves of omniscient gray goo), so I find them unmotivating to use in any sense. Politics. If someone goes to war. SECRET LORE Okay so aliens are loving everywhere and they hate us and will kill us, they already almost succeeded once. A civilization with the power to do massive stellar engineering apparently decided that throwing a plague at us that made Robot Cthulhus with magic powers was a more reliable way to destroy us than just marching over and vaporizing/conquering Earth with their massively superior tech. These aliens are not the Factors, they're the ETI, who are never explained, never detailed, we have no stats for them or any of their tech. Therefore literally no way to involve them in a game we run without inventing them from whole cloth, and they're probably also literally the dullest explanation for the whole exsurgent/TITAN business so why am I not loving surprised it's the one that the devs made canon in both EP1 and EP2. Should have just suggested and then left it open-ended, assholes. quote:This ETI has seeded the galaxy with self-replicating machines known as bracewell probes. These probes lie dormant in every star system, patiently waiting and monitoring for millennia for signs of intelligent life — but not just any signs. In particular, these probes are designed to watch for emerging ASIs and similar singularity- level machine intelligences. The probes are in fact traps, designed to lure ASIs in and then infect them. Feel like you're ripping Revelation Space off much? Jackasses. The Inhibitors were way more interesting than the ETI. Also every single dead alien civilization was killed by the ETI and their exsurgent virus destroying their TITAN-equivalents. Actually wait, hang the gently caress on. Doesn't that mean the whole Pandora Gate network should be swarming with TITANs? Or non-human Exsurgents as well? You assholes, you didn't even think this through, oh and gently caress the Prometheans, again. I probably mentioned it before, but we're re-introduced to them here. They're BENEVOLENT machine gods that never caught the exsurgent virus and are now primarily allied with Firewall. They serve no loving purpose in the plot at all except in case you want to go: "lol Firewall is a bunch of dense idiots who got scammed by the TITANs they claimed to be holding at bay." And in fact let's just get back to the loving TITANs, you know why the TITANs are inscrutable and alien? Not because it fits with the plot, but because it's literally the only way humanity is still alive. The TITANS going "lol we out" and running away for UNFATHOMABLE reasons, rather than having them fightable on a human scale was the only way they could write themselves out of a corner. You know who had a similar scenario? Earthsiege did. Earthsiege and Starsiege. They didn't need any loving space magic or inscrutability, Prometheus was a rational mind traumatized by close contact with humans(when it helped its creator transfer his consciousness into an immortal machine brain, Prometheus, curious about its father, decided to peek at his thought processes and was horrified and disgusted by the human Id.), humanity had multiple run-ins with it that didn't need any wizardry to parse or resolve. And just because humanity survived the first battles, it didn't end Prometheus as a threat because Prometheus was canny enough to run away to fight another day. The destruction even resulted in the same basically-unrecognizable human society that EP did. Why can't the TITANs just be the same way? I guess it's not spooky enough. loving hacks. Also no, the secret lore chapter never tells us anything more about the Factors. Have fun making that poo poo up yourselves. Security Systems Remember how nano-stuff was a threat? The first security system is a system that just does 3d10 damage to all nano-things in range. Bzorp, eat poo poo gray goo. In fact since EMP will dunk it and we can produce arbitrary amount of EMP warheads and grenades(which apparently gently caress nano-anything up solid), why is nano-stuff a threat again? In general I'm not even sure why I bothered to give this chapter a headline, it's just five different kind of doors including one that's sort of a mimic with robot tentacles that tries to eat you if you piss it off. Also remember how you were gonna be able to be real useful to the team with wireless hacking? Ha ha no turns out a loving paintjob can block all wireless Mesh signals if it's the right kind of paint, so any high-security area where you might NEED to wirelessly hack something will of course have tons of this slathered all over the place. There's also a section on traps, of course including several save-or-die traps(at least, if you're tossed into space and no one's got a vehicle ready to pick you up and you lack the EVA capability to negate the force shoving you away, you're pretty much dead or at least thoroughly lost.). Or traps that require a very specific sensor suite to be active or invisible nanobots will instantly build a cage around you in the air and then start filling the cage with spikes and oh also the cage is about as well-armored as a loving Scum Barge. Some Actual Enemies The only important rules bit here is that groups of enemies get their own Threat pool of rerolls to use in combat, just like players get their Insight, Moxie and Vigor pools. I'm okay with this, it helps defuse the issue of "I set up a decently challenging encounter but they keep rolling critfails, god loving dammit." just as long as the GM remembers not to use it to ice players double hard when he's already rolling well. The ETI: They're the Outer Gods, okay? They don't give a poo poo, or if they do, they're inscrutable, and we can't even scratch them, the book even says they're unlikely to have much, if any, place in almost all games. The book suggests a few actual agendas for the ETI, most of which don't make sense. They could be out to ASSIMILATE CULTURES... by destroying them with their own AI's? Or they could be trying to PROTECT LIFE ON A GRAND SCALE... why not just send an occupation fleet so you don't have to burn them to the ground, then? Anyway, gently caress the ETI and gently caress the hacks who came up with it. The Iktomi: Vague spider aliens that left behind a couple of vague artifacts that do vague things. Also some killer spiderbots that can't be communicated with and who exist only to blow up Gatecrashers in the wrong place at the wrong time. They, of course, cannot be hacked, and the game informs us that some of them have mental illnesses, though since they're alien killing machines, I'm not sure how anyone would ever find out. Exhumans: We've gone over these edgelord idiots before, but are they actually threatening? Their statted guards are useless pushovers. Their ULTRAVIOLET(max threat level) Neurodes are supposed to be bosses who can "think circles around Transhumans," which is supposed to be carte blanche for them to rear end-pull infinite amounts of backup plans out of their cybernetic assholes in case anyone ever starts getting the upper hand. Predators are laughable failures that are about as powerful as a single starting PC. Both of the latter have almost the full list of possible augmentations so hope you can loving remember what 20 different modifications do in the middle of a firefight. Sure would be a shame if you had to page through the book to find them. They also contain "experimental mods" which are completely undetailed and basically just for the GM to make up Exhuman Bullshit with. And no, there are no suggestions for any of these experimental mods.  The Exsurgent Virus: It can Basilisk Hack your Brain, Bio Hack your genetics or Nano Hack your synthmorph, you're never safe. Also no, you can't copy and use the Basilisk hacks as weapons, they've got Super Space God Denuvo in them, and if you somehow get around that everyone will try to blow you up for having one. Stop trying to be creative. They're all save-or-dies, except for the nano-version which has no save, because gently caress you, I guess. Also great that the game reminds us that loving exsurgents will infect us. Thanks, Glory author Jack Graham, you creepy poo poo. There isn't anything interesting to say about the exsurgent virus(except that, for some reason, you can play someone brainwashed by it as a PC just fine(for a while, anyway), but if it's a physical transformation, hold your horses buckaroo, no PC's allowed.), and we already know that the Psi Epsilon stuff is half and half lame and OP instakill powers. The only interesting variant is the Whisper virus, which gives you bonus pool points if you do what it urges you to, and reduces your pool if you don't. This is actually the only one I think I'd ever consider using. As for the exsurgents themselves... Creepers are sentient Femtobot swarms, some TITAN-aligned, others with independent agendas(that they give you no suggestions for interacting with, of course). Probably the heftiest DUR and the strongest-damaging attack in the game(up to 10d10 damage AoE). Shame they never expanded on the independent agendas, PC's encountering a non-hostile Creeper swarm they could, at least partially, cooperate with could be interesting. Fractal Trolls are insane big lads who attack everyone, but especially machines in a panicked frenzy because they think it's their TITAN torturers returned. Kind of a shame, again, that this did not get expanded on as a potential way of resolving things with them in a non-hostile way rather than just gibbing them. I mean, gently caress, you know what? That's really what's heavily missing from all exsurgents, the conflict between: "We should treat them, not just blow them up like videogame enemies" and "they're too dangerous, we have to gib them from a mile away." They're all incurable, completely void of any human/transhuman/uplift traits they might once have had(Fractal Trolls faintly excepted) and usually attack on sight or as soon as you turn your back. Jellies are D&D slimes that can sometimes shapeshift into their victims' forms with their memories after eating them, potentially interesting except that the ubiquity of scanning equipment means they'd be rumbled in seconds for something as basic as having no Mesh implants. The book even notes how easy their loving disguise is to see through. Shifters are the T1000 from Terminator 2 cosplaying as Number 47 from Hitman. All they do is move, hide and kill without even the vaguely implied motives of Fractal Trolls or Creepers. They are EXACTLY as easily rumbled as the Jellies unless they're in an anprim hab or something. Skriks are what happens if you catch a specific virus that makes you puke up small, evil copies of yourself. Yes, like that bit from Army of Darkness. This keeps happening if you are somehow a moron who doesn't immediately see a doctor after the first time one of them scuttles away into the vents. And no, there's no note to the effect that the "mother" of the Skriks feels any urge to protect them or not just step on the little fuckers the instant he/she/it sees them. quote:Most skriks carry the exsurgent virus, exposing it to others if they are eaten or exchange bodily fluids (bio pathogen) or releasing it when they die (nanoplague). DEAR GOD, STOP. I'M NOT GOING TO gently caress A MINIATURE VERSION OF MYSELF. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, AUTHORS. Snappers are robot centipedes that fight people. Wastewalkers are tribal exsurgents who wander around the place in groups and kill people. No, they have no culture or in fact anything to make them more interesting than 2d10 orcs guarding a chest in a 50 by 50 foot room. Whippers are evil sea anemones with legs that try to eat people. Worms are yet another shapeshifting evil exsurgent, but this time they're psychic rather than jelly or liquid metal. Their only vague hint of personality to distinguish them from the others is that they're extra mean to non-exsurgent asyncs. I'll also note that none of the art, at all, is of non-human exsurgents. For all of the yammering about how neo-whatevers are a BIG IMPORTANT PART OF THE SETTING they're... almost completely unrepresented in the art or generally in the text. It's all about the humans. They get less screentime than halflings in D&D. I was going to pause here, then scrolled forward and saw I had less than twenty pages to go. So gently caress it, let's finish this poo poo. The Factors are cool slime molds that look like sea slugs that could have been a focus of the setting, and should have. They are... actually now that I think about it, uh. They're... uh. Listen to this: They're a race of traders that are out to defraud humanity and have a genetic predisposition for "patience, deceit and cunning." They're one quick search replace from being someone's Space Jewish conspiracy theory. Anyway, it's almost certainly unintentional, I really loving hope. They grow limbs as they need them, they're basically all engineered, and many of them are gestalts made from many minor Factors they can detach for specialty work, and the normal ones can also combo into giant BATTLE FACTORS the size of fuckin' worms from Dune that spit poison, acid and death shards. Neat. Stats-wise they're generic, psi-immune transhumans that regenerate and can vape asthma dust at you. It feels like a missed opportunity, since the Factors are basically all hive minds, to not have them have some interaction with the tentative transhuman hive minds in the system. Generally the Factors have no statted tech which in any way differentiates from human tech, not even, like, guns with different stats or anything. It's really kind of a sad level of  they invested into them. quote:As traders, however, they do seem to carry a wide range of alien artifacts — most opaque in purposes and use. The Factors have established trade agreements with numerous transhuman factions and habitats, Just, loving. GIVE US AN EXAMPLE. YOU ASSHOLES. DON'T EXPECT THE PLAYERS AND GM'S TO STAT THE ENTIRE GAME FOR YOU. Firewall is in this chapter for some reason. The only new info here is that Firewall has a Firewall Facebook which isn't a hilariously huge security risk or anything. Morons. Project Ozma is Evil Firewall, and thus have about twice the personality and interesting characteristics. They're essentially Space MJ12, secret manipulators with vague amounts of power, money and reach, ostensibly basically anywhere they want to be and able to manipulate anything they want to manipulate. Mostly they gently caress around with alien/exoplanet/TITAN stuff, and in EP1's corebook they were intensely vague, they only started getting some characterization by the time of Gatecrashing, I believe, possibly also X-Risks had some stuff on them. Generally they're characterized as being from/drawing money from/controlling the Consortium at some level. Other Intel Services ostensibly gives som detail on Titanian(2), Jovian(1), Consortium(2) and Argonaut(1) spooks, but generally only gives their purview of operations, at most. Titanian spooks keep Titan safe and are Good Guys, Argonaut spooks keep science safe, Jovian spooks are evil mass-murdering scum that kill without any remorse, Oversight is actually legally responsible if it fucks up or acts too inhumane(automatically making it more of a valid hero faction than Firewall or Project Ozma), Titan's Science Police is like store-brand Firewall, Stellar Intelligence is somehow a corporate CIA that goes half-and-half on a combination of blackmail and actual paid intelligence operations, yet has somehow not been annihilated by Oversight or a coalition of corps that don't want to be blackmailed yet. The TITANs are just a dull recap of everything we know about the TITANs so far, with stats for some of their non-exsurgent goons, all copy-pastes from the X-Risks book that's already being reviewed. Now, my main takeaway from reading this opponents chapter is that enemies are generally less dangerous than in EP1. Rather than high 80's and 90's for combat rolls, they've more commonly got 60 or 70, with their Threat pools balancing them out somewhat. The main problem with this is that a lot of them... if they empty out their pools, they end up being kind of... wimpy because the players can relatively easily kite them with their much better basic scores allowing them to win a battle of attrition unless the enemy is specifically regenerating or has something to really even the score, but considering that most of them have effectively the same gear and stats as the players, just a different cosmetic overlay, the players are much more likely to win fights if they're actually statted for winning fights. Personally, I'm in favour of my players winning fights, I just fear that a lot of them will turn into whiff-fests that drag out if they don't end with alpha strikes in the first five rounds or so. Also for every enemy they gave them an array of motivations, but considering that basically they all attack on sight, I don't get why. Secondly, a lot of them are "+TITAN Interests." BUT WE DON'T KNOW WHAT THE TITANS' INTERESTS, GOALS OR MOTIVATIONS ARE, BECAUSE THEY'RE INSCRUTABLE SPACE GODS. Whatever, at least this is poo poo I can easily homebrew my way out of with a bit of writing. loving Eclipse Phase. Anyway, this review's reached the glossary and appendix, so it's over. Final Verdict: The writing was better in 1 and its supplements, loot that, slap EP2's system on top, re-add the MoS system, hack in the missing morphs you like, uncap the skill totals and then sigh and get a stiff drink as you sit down to figure out how to respond to each given incident of vague writing or outright unspecified poo poo.
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Aug 27, 2019 17:29
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I mean, if I had to rewrite the basic EP setting fluff... Have the TITANs go rogue and utterly destroy Earth in the battle with humanity(with it being vague whether humans tried to shut them down first and it was self-defense, or TITANs attacked first because they were assholes), making it completely uninhabitable and patrolled by rogue human and TITAN war machines, but have the TITANs lose. The TITANs still out there are the ones that fled, and that's why they cooked up stuff like bioweapons and basilisk hack sleeper agents, because they realized they couldn't win a straight war with humanity unless they sabotaged them from within first and/or spent a lot of time building up their forces on exoplanets. Secondly, the exsurgent virus just isn't in the setting. The TITANs can still grow body horror critters in vats or grab people off the street to turn them into killer cyborgs. But there's no stupid loving save-or-die virus. Make cortical stacks, backups and resleeving accessible only to the elite. Firewall agents, Oversight goons, Ozma infiltrators, PC's, the extremely rich and famous. That way death still matters and there are clear and tangible stakes for everything, that entire hab that got vaped or those workers that got iced by a corp to cover something up aren't just resleeved with their backups from last thurstday. Make nanofabrication still exist, but nano-stuff really only works inside nanofabricator machines, and make it slower than just assembling the thing from ready parts or with a conventional factory if you have the necessary raw materials. No loose swarms or whatever except as permitted by alien/TITAN technomagic. That way it's still available as a way to emergency-fabricate stuff you're out of, but it doesn't completely shortcircuit the game's economy. Shift the year to AF 50. Try to alter the game focus from Space Cthulhu Horror to Space Politics. Factors show up in AF30 or something, with grave warnings about using ASI's and etc. Humanity worries that they might have sabotaged the TITANs and started the whole thing, Factors are a bit less shady and vague and openly admit to being refugees from a similar situation, request asylum with the implication that if they're not given asylum, they'll take asylum with their superior tech, leading to an uneasy truce between two traumatized species that don't quite trust each other. Mercurials and other uplifts are rendered suspect by being non-human thinkers, AGI's are suspected of being potential TITAN agents, actual TITAN infiltrators make well-argued cases to AGI's and uplifts stating that any day now humanity will get suspicious of them and start culling them, implying that a paranoid humanity struck first against the TITANs to prompt the Fall. Exoplanets largely unchanged except scrape out all the dumb fluff about how every ruin humanity comes across was created by some other TITAN-style disaster. The TITANs, meanwhile, have splintered and are having internecine wars, with their own propaganda and disinfo meaning that half the TITANs are no longer sure if humanity struck first or they did, and some of them just want to retreat to far corners of the gate network and live their own lives, while others want to fight humanity either because they're assholes or because they're convinced they have to kill humanity before humans kill them. Whoops look everyone has a clear motivation and yet it feels to me like there's still enough ambiguity that GM's can pick which themes they want to run with. Thank you for reading my Eclipse Phase fanfic.
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Aug 27, 2019 19:19
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StratGoatCom posted:Do you run around the house with a revolver full of ratshot shells when you have a rodent infestation, or do you put down traps and bait? Same thought process here - the Exsugent Virus is a time, resource and opportunity efficient method of clearing out infestations that lets you get on with more important things in the mean time. There's a lot of poo poo writing here, but this might make a certain degree of sense. I mean, I might, if the poison in the traps was going to turn the rat's laptop into a rampaging demigod AI that was going to spread nano-garbage all over my front yard and try to gnaw my ankles.
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Aug 27, 2019 20:41
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StratGoatCom posted:There's a reason why I like the 'war remnants' theory - paraphrasing it for the thread, the exact purpose of the Exsurgent Virus is creating rampaging demigods to spread nanoturds across the other guy's front lawn and gnaw his ankles, because gently caress him, that's why - and really works with their attempt at lovecraft; EP literally stepped on Cthulu's own landmine. The problem is that the TITANs as insane, rather than rational actors with motivations, perceptions and ideals different from our own, means that they're just "unfathomable weirdness that does things." There's no theme, no guiding logic. You may as well just roll a die on a random table or make them fishmalk demigods. Just going "we'll drive their tactical AI's insane" works if there's a follow-up invasion to clear the target out, if the exsurgent virus is a weapon. Otherwise it's moronic, because as humanity proved, someone might just survive it and now know someone's gunning for them, arm up to be more of a pain in the rear end. It makes no sense with the well-meaning uplifters or the overzealous caretakers motivations. "War remnants" is the only one of the potential ETI/Exsurgent things that makes even vague sense, but as I mentioned it suffers the problem of still having the TITANs as the weakest, dumbest most dogshit part of the game, and the exsurgent virus still sucks rear end in play, because the only cure is resleeving and/or restoring from backup. It's at no point a tool, outside of that one Whisperer sub-type of virus. Like maybe... how about all of the Exsurgent viruses were like that one. You accomplish their goals, you get bonuses. Getting infected might be something you'd seek out if there's a strain of infection that works with you more than it works against you. And fighting it, opposing it, sure, would give you a temporary penalty, but it wouldn't just gently caress your rear end stone dead. And heck, if the TITANs were some form of rational actors, you might even have the necessary themes and motivations to whip those viruses up!
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Aug 27, 2019 20:54
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Night10194 posted:One of the things people writing Cosmic Horror RPGs tend to miss is that Cthulhu shouldn't be the primary antagonist the PCs usually struggle against. The dipshit High Priest they have to uncover and stop from performing the Ritual until the Stars Aren't Right Anymore is. And that High Priest so happens to be a character with motivations and ideals and reasons you can follow to track them down and stop them, even if they're irrational ones. The Dipshit High Priest works where the exsurgents don't because the DHP is convinced that Cthulhu will give him babes, a bigger dick, ten cadillacs and a mountain of gold, so you can deal with him as a rational actor(albeit one with extremely wrong assumptions), and basically every Mythos creature below the Old Ones, Outer Gods and Elder Gods are like that. Even the Elder Things, the Shoggoths, Byakhee, etc. have some sort of motivation and personality, plus an intellect not too far removed in power from the human(and if they're far removed, it's downwards, like the Byakhee who are basically just flying animals), so that you can ascribe them goals and reasonably assume what they will do. In EP, the only TITAN-related antagonists not patched into Channel Fishmalk are the cultists who haven't gotten themselves infected by the exsurgent virus yet.
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Aug 27, 2019 21:05
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Joe Slowboat posted:E: I don't mean to undersell the amount of cleaning it needs, but the core concept of 'forks and clones and robot bodies in future culture-shock societies' is good to have an RPG for. I feel like if you want to capitalize on that, moving it off of Earth, or out of Sol, at all, hurts the focus. If you want to focus on those parts as both A) driving mechanics and B) driving parts of the fluff, scrape out the aliens, pandora gate, psi powers, TITANs, the Fall and focus on how it actually changed Earth, religions, individual nations and go for a more grounded cyberpunk limited to colonies in Sol.
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Aug 27, 2019 23:52
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Ithle01 posted:The universe is a death trap that forces you to resleeve a lot is a cool idea on paper, but then putting it into practice is another thing entirely. What do I do for the session while I wait to respawn because I failed my save-or-die roll on round one? Play Paranoia instead because that's a hyper-lethal setting where you have spare bodies and the setting plays to the absurdity of it rather than the GRIM DARKNESS of it.
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Aug 27, 2019 23:57
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EP2 has a mod for withstanding extreme pressures, but nowhere does it not what pressures morphs can withstand without it. Biomorphs of primarily human stock we can figure out from actual data. But what about synths? Or pods? Or neo-octopi? On the same page the game notes how that high-oxygen atmospheres have explosions that do more damage... but no rules or even guidelines for it. Maybe if your game has a large segment of it devoted to exploring non-Terran planets, and in fact all of the planets available in Sol aren't Earth, and even Earth has inclement conditions at this point, maybe you should actually hack out some solid rules or guidelines for adjudicating the potential conditions. I mean why waste any of your book detailing the exact rules effects of being on Venus, Mars, Titan or a given exoplanet, perhaps in the relevant planet's section, rather than spreading it across the book as several vague hints on how you could choose to hand-craft the rules for operating in these situations. That would be just silly.
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Aug 28, 2019 14:37
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Pipe bomb full of silver cutlery rather than nuts and bolts?
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Aug 28, 2019 16:00
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The hell lampreys sound cool. Is there any more info on the Drowned or what will actually happen if the Lampreys pull off their weird ritual? It reminds me a lot of Dominions blood magic.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:50
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As much as I love wasps for being cool, this feels like the least interesting of the Host writeups so far. Very one-note. Plus the whole "lol even if they succeed they just cause a disaster"-bit feels a bit lame. Are all the Host gods crippled in such a way that they can never be revived/rebuilt? Or is that specifically just the Wasps?
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Aug 31, 2019 20:50
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I've had GM's who could not understand why thieves felt like dogshit in "OSR" stuff for the most part. "But you've got a whole 25% chance to do something that's core to your concept!!!!! Why aren't you excited??????" At least 2nd ed capped most of the potential wizard shenanigans and gave the physical classes more high-level absurdity to get up to.
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Sep 2, 2019 03:34
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Night10194 posted:Also if the monster's plan is to crash into the sun because its spores will survive that, the hell are you supposed to do to destroy the infection? Yeah that's... kind of the issue with the Glory module. There's no way to actually complete it, pretty much. Except finding out what it is, running away and passing the buck to some other group of Firewall nerds while bailing for the nearest sunny exoplanet. I mean, maybe nano-dissassembles could "disarm" the spores? Or maybe going straight into the sun rather than a carefully-planned grazing hit into the solar winds would destroy them? Good loving luck finding out, though, because the module never tells you. Moron goddamn writers. dwarf74 posted:Yeah the adventure lays it out - nobody at TSR thought it was possible to legitimately get to 100th level (and they're basically right). Heck, the other (18th-22nd) set of pregens was still effectively impossible for most parties. I think that's why the pregens were included in the first place, and the 100th thing was meant as a weird thought exercise. If there's a 2e Deities & Demigods I want to see if a wrestling-specialized Combat & Tactics pure Fighter at <20 levels can headlock Cthulhu and win by tapping him out. juggalo baby coffin posted:Ny'knikinn It occurs to me that a lot of these monsters have the same as that, I think it was Numenera bestiary that was reviewed a bit ago. No matter how much of a description we get of their inscrutable principles, goals and mindsets... basically all these things attack on sight, can't be negotiated with and the only method of interaction is combat. It makes for a very one-note universe.
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Sep 2, 2019 05:52
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Communist Zombie posted:This would be an interesting setting detail if they just put some effort on where you would encounter them, and have them not lose ability to recognize non TITAN stuff. Ideas I had just after reading it: Maybe if they were, gasp, not literally the same thing copypasted every time, but some of them were still working according to their original programming, and others had slipped the leash(either becoming sentient with their own goals or aiming for total annihilation because everything now looks hostile), they could have a place in the setting. Maybe Firewall wants to recover one still working as it should, because it could help sterilize TITAN bullshit. Maybe the PC's need to disable or recover one that's apparently gone wild, prioritizing anti-TITAN defense over human survival, and draining a colony's vital feedstock reserves to make more combat machines to fight off a TITAN that might show up one day the worm is completely sure it will honest. Perhaps it could actually, gasp, be used for an interesting Mesh adventure where the PC's have to infiltrate a virtual realm to find the Worm at the heart of it, barricaded behind cybernetic defenses and utterly paranoid about the universe, and convince it to come back out and help protect humanity(or if that fails, kill it and recover its digital carcass for study). If one suddenly pops up and attacks a seemingly allied NPC, maybe it's one that's gone mad(the NPC will insist so), but maybe he's actually an exsurgent or otherwise working in the TITANs' interests(perhaps even unknowingly/unwittingly). You could do a ton of nuanced and interesting things with them, and instead we get "it attak u, roll 4 init lol" juggalo baby coffin posted:Glory doesn't even seem to have a win state for the players, and using any of your non-combat abilities either gets you nowhere (cause the writers didnt bother to write what would happen if you tried to negotiate with the baddies) or gets you the loving space virus that kills you. To drat with faint praise, you can actually complete a single secondary objective via negotiation, but that's it. Try to hack? Exsurgented. Try to sneak? Probably exsurgented. Try to fight? They're max-statted as far as the system permits. Try to nuke it from a distance? They win anyway because they have SUPER SPORES.
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Sep 2, 2019 07:51
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Is there any detail on the miracles that Deban Dun can grant? And, for that matter, are there any actual gods in the setting that grant miracles? Because if not then Deban Dun's faith suddenly starts being the rational set of beliefs in the nWoD... Also hmmmmmmmmmm. A'ku the formless evil? Gee, wonder where that's been heard before... though I do like the suggestion that it could be negotiated with, mollified, given some sort of therapy at times, rather than just being a generic boss battle.
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Sep 3, 2019 20:19
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Wrt missing in combat in RPG's... I've been thinking. Age of Wonders 1, 2 and Planetfall had attacks that either hit or missed, which made combat extremely swingy because either you did full damage or you did no damage and lol gently caress you enjoy your wasted turn. Age of Wonders 3 instead had near-static damage, affected by circumstances(cover, range, etc.) to give a more or less certain effect for everything you did, making everything feel less gambletastic and more tactical. Would it be possible to apply the same, in a satisfying way, to RPG combat? So that every attack has a hit and a "graze" effect, so that everything you do has at least some impact? I'm generally a fan of not wasting players' time and rolls for "lol nothing happened!!!!!"
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Sep 4, 2019 13:38
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Mors Rattus posted:Quattuor's Ban is that he must engage in a game of skill if challenged. Any given creature can only challenge him once, ever. Winning or losing doesn't matter - he's just delayed for as long as the game takes. So, what defines a "game of skill"? It feels like the pro-tier way of defeating Quattuor is to challenge him to a game where he goes first and the first turn takes an infinite amount of time, or close enough to it that Quattuor won't be anyone's problem for the next few millennia.
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Sep 5, 2019 19:56
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Mors Rattus posted:Someone's going to have to keep playing with him. He's not about to play solitaire - if you challenge him, you have to play too. A secret cult of humans and werewolves whose lives are dedicated to keeping one eternal game going with the Geryo. The ones not locked into eternal play or taking care of the biological needs of the players are sweating hard as they research and test new games to keep him from breaking loose. ...actually if 3.x requires system mastery, does it count as a "game of skill"? I mean, mastering something would imply that you're skilled at it...
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Sep 5, 2019 20:08
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, but Quattuor is a really killer GM and doesn't do "plot." He plays to win. Who says he gets to be the GM?
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Sep 5, 2019 20:41
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Mors Rattus posted:This is why Quattuor is my favorite. He also seems like the Geryo that's most useful outside of being an outright opponent. He's a VAST library of unknown secrets, and it sounds like he's only specifically aggressive against someone who's fated to die before passing it on. So you could presumably track him down and bargain with him for knowledge,
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Sep 5, 2019 22:07
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Night10194 posted:E: Man, when you think of it from the perspective of the Cybrids, getting salvaged after a disabling shot must have been one of the most hideous fates imaginable. An AI unit sitting there with leg damage, unable to move its body, until salvage teams cut it apart? That's kind of hosed up to do to a sentient being. The Cybrids are, in general, tragic villains, especially in Starsiege. In ES1 and ES2 the generic Cybrid isn't very intelligent and doesn't have much free will. In Starsiege they've gotten more free-willed by Prometheus' design, to make them more independent and capable, but to avoid them breaking away he's trapped them in a paranoia-laden, competition-heavy society where he's worshipped as a living God, and heretics are literally burned at the stake for suggesting things like: "uh, hey, how about we just leave the Sol system and do our own thing without loving with the humans any longer?  " I'm sad that the series basically died just as we started getting Cybrid rebels and some more depth to their faction, with Cybrids waging information and propaganda warfare campaigns against humanity alongside their conventional ones.The news reports on their terror actions were pretty gruesome, but in an entirely believable way, rather than being cartoonishly over-the-top like in WH40k. MACHINATOR SECT posted:Stepanovna base here... Negative ... Colonel. <We>, ah,we have experienced... technical problems downside, acknowledge? have our ... young men... out redacting ... commlinks\\antennae... No worries for you, acknowledge? Everything's moderately low temperature. IMPERIAL NAVY posted:Full alert! Full alert! Full alert! SITREP Red Ten! This is not a drill! The Cybrids have arrived! All units scramble! Repeat, full alert! SITREP Red Ten! All systems red and clear! We hit Mercury in seventeen minutes! And their early attempts at subterfuge are adorably "how do you do, fellow humans?"-levels of charmingly incompetent.
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Sep 6, 2019 19:38
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Whiplash Except! Firstly it's a pod morph, so in EP1 it's arbitrarily more garbage than the others both in stats and in types of equippable mods. Secondly, being a rare specialized weirdo plantimal morph, there's not even the excuse that "it's the only thing we could get you on short notice!" because no one would sleeve in this except on purpose to be a plant. Thirdly, being a plantimal rather than a plant it doesn't even look particularly plantlike, and it's crammed full of cybernetic components, so you couldn't even give it a reason to exist for camouflage/infiltration purposes. Because Eclipse Phase 1 likes to penalize you for being anything other than a Metal Man or a Meat Man as generically as possible.
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Sep 9, 2019 05:46
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FATAL & Friends: The New Edition That's Much Too MMO-Like
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Sep 9, 2019 13:23
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kommy5 posted:Wait, isn't that just "Starro the Conqueror"? It's a loving Trapper from D&D.
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Sep 9, 2019 13:37
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You know, I feel like something that would have massively improved Eclipse Phase would have been if they cribbed more from Alastair Reynolds. Specifically, stealing the Melding Plague to influence the Exsurgent Virus. In the RS universe, the Melding Plague makes nanotech go rampant, eating and incorporating everything around it, going berserk, occasionally creating something still useable or chimeric(in one recorded case), but usually just destroying it utterly given time. (this was a bad thing for much of humanity since they'd gotten to the point where entire buildings were made from active nanotech components, reshaping themselves to their residents' needs and desires, softening themselves pre-emptively against impacts if someone fell, that sort of thing) If the Exsurgent Virus had required active nanotech to be a threat, it would A) have given a reason to not just have nanobots everywhere, B) made exsurgent attacks less save-or-die if you weren't full of nanomagic and C) give exsurgents an actual attack plan other than "lol lets just lick them all so they get infected B)" focused around reaching and infecting a hab's nanofabricators. While giving conservative factions an actual point, a reason to resort to older and more secure tech, and to resultingly also have a more classic economy other than "we're villaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains lol."
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Sep 9, 2019 17:45
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Ronwayne posted:EP struggles with the technoprogressive paradox of not wanting to admit when more advanced technology has just made us more miserable, in the net. Even humanity being hoisted by its own AI petard is written off by "alien god AI, whatcha gonna do? lol" or hypercorp infugee indentureship being written off by "when capitalism ends, so will the bad stuff." EP struggles with, uh, a lot of things. But yes, also that. AI God only got made evil by bad alien flu, nanotech disassemblers would never make us sad, the people with the coolest memes and best tech are obviously the superior society even if it relies on not getting voted out the airlock as its only fundament. Every time I think about it, it tempts me with the boondoggle of doing a major houserule rewrite to unfuck their multitude of terrible system and fluff decisions even though I know no one but me will ever give a gently caress.
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Sep 9, 2019 21:18
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