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Hey, goons! This summer I posted a thread about METAL WORLD, which is the RPG I've developed after beginning the very first words of it six years ago. In the time since then I'd worked on it on and off until 2016, when I finally began to make the push to actually finish the thing. It's now in a state that I think is not just playable but should be ready to Kickstart once I can actually afford some promotional art, including a decent logo. What is METAL WORLD? METAL WORLD (properly written in all caps)— set on a planet known as Ferra— is a tabletop roleplaying setting where the entirety of the heavy metal aesthetic exists together. If Dio sang about it either with Black Sabbath or solo, it fits. Could you imagine seeing it in a Dethklok video? Sure! The artwork of people like Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and Julie Bell or anything else you might have seen in the core AD&D 2nd Ed. books or early M:tG, where you didn't necessarily know exactly what was happening but it didn't matter too much because it just looked awesome? Oh, Hell, yes. The general tone of the publication (and movie) Heavy Metal? Sure, why not? Hell is both a continent and an afterlife. You can just physically go there like you would Walmart, but with probably less suffering on your part. You can get a guided tour, which the MegaDevil himself might even give you while offering you the chance to try the microbrews he's taken to making. On the Howling Plains, there's a self-appointed and demon-possessed lawman— the Fire Marshal— who rides a rocket-powered robot horse while dispensing hot justice with his 666-shooters. There are several Atlantises. An undead ship sails the seas, searching for ships to attack so that it can add the dead sailors' body parts to its own structure. The gnomes of Ferra— called ge-nomes— are mad scientists who compulsively focus on new ways to tinker with the genetic structure of life in general. The crown jewel of balls-to-the-wall over-the-topness is Mount Fafnir, better known as the Dracano. It's a volcano that erupts not only lava but dragons. Some of those dragons get trapped in the flow and become part of the mountain, so yes, the Dracano is a volcano made of dragons. The system Mechanically, I've tried to make METAL WORLD as simple as I could while keeping it a playable system with some definition appropriate to the subject matter. I mean, sure, I could have used something like PDQ, but where's the flavor in that? I wouldn't have been able to have five stats so that I could place each of them at a point of a pentagram on the sheet I'll eventually have. Those stats are Death, Power, Prog, Speed, and Thrash, each named for a subgenre of metal. The system is d12-based because A) going to 11 wasn't quite enough and B) when I started making it a d11 wasn't available. The major points of a character are stats, skills/combat maneuvers, Good Things (advantages), Bad Things (disadvantages), and most importantly overall concept. Much of the finer aspects are explicitly left to the players and Metal Lord to work out, such as "Doug has the skill Eat Anything and Live, which lets him diminish or even avoid the ill effects of any ingested toxin", "Rip-Roar has the Good Thing Born In The Driver's Seat, which allows him to drive any type of vehicle he's at all familiar with", A character's inventory is pretty much defined by what it should reasonably have given its overall concept along with anything it's explicitly acquired. Similarly, whether a character knows how to do something comes down to the same question, with the difference between basic knowledge and a skill being that a skill gives you a bonus whenever it applies. One unique thing about the setting's narrative-driven mechanics is that it doesn't even care about travel distance or general continuity unless it's important. How long will it take that Raptorian invasion force to arrive? That depends on if you want the band to evacuate as many of the non-combatants as they can or if you want to give them time to make sufficient preparations to drive back. How long will it take for the band to reach the Temple of the King from here? Do you want to focus immediately on what happens there or do you want getting there to be half the fun? Didn't that cliff side get blown up a few sessions ago? As soon as nobody was paying attention it snapped back to the way it was. Nobody notices any of this because it's just how reality is in METAL WORLD. The Gods™ keep it this way to make sure that in a world where rear end is constantly being kicked, it's kicked so there's enough left for the future. Noticeable things only change if it's important to the story or if the PCs have otherwise made a point of it somehow. As far as character types, there are 11 templates (basically races, but a bit more expansive than that) you can apply to your character besides a standard human. Some of them are stackable with certain others. There are no classes, so you can build whatever kind of character you can work out with the Metal Lord. You can build a cyborg barbarian, a 'shroom-chomping shaman who drives a bitchin' airbrushed van, a robot wizard, a dwarf with chainsaw hands, or a demon hunter graveborn. What's a graveborn? It's a METAL WORLD original— the living(ish) child of two undead! The book Counting illustrations and the TOC, METAL WORLD currently sits at 172 pages, so I'd say it's fairly beefy for a first-time write/publisher. It treats the subject matter with a mixture of playing it totally straight and humor. After all, metal can be pretty ridiculous at times, so you can't take it completely seriously. Sometimes you have to look at metal lightly or you risk becoming that "Den ve haaates it" record store owner in Metalocalypse who's way too elitist and serious about what he's into. The looseness I mentioned above shows in the fact that you can run METAL WORLD as seriously or comically as you like. I currently have METAL WORLD: The Rough Cut available as PWYW on DriveThruRPG to A) get more eyes on it to tell me any last things I need to fix and B) get at least a little residual revenue to pay for promotional artwork. The Rough Cut has all the actual gameplay rules and enough of the setting— including some adventure seeds and parts of Chapter 666: The Number of the Bestiary— to give the reader a good idea of what METAL WORLD is like. I'm currently targeting somewhere between mid-February to March 1st for beginning the Kickstarter so I can get my ducks fully in a row to make as closely to certain I have a successful KS campaign as possible. If METAL WORLD sounds like something you'd be interested in, download the Rough Cut and see what you think. Even better, tell me and if there's something I need to fix, I will*! Edit: My main social media channel is the Twitter feed (@METAL_WORLD_RPG). I also have a Facebook Page and a linked Group. I have a Discord and a subreddit, but I haven't done much with those given that I only have so much time, plus there's not really a sufficient community to support those things yet but I wanted to get them before someone else did. *Since putting up METAL WORLD: The Rough Cut I've identified that debilitating (as opposed to lethal) poisons didn't mechanically work at all as written, so I've fixed them. I just need to get around to updating the file on DTRPG. ManiacClown fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Dec 3, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 18:00
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You had me at Death, Power, Prog, Speed, and Thrash.
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Dec 2, 2018 19:56
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Will I be able to throw the first key into the Sea of Hate?
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Dec 3, 2018 03:56
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Atlas Hugged posted:Will I be able to throw the first key into the Sea of Hate? If you want, sure. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from making up your own regions. The canonical seas are the Sea of Light and the Midnight Sea. I didn't name any others explicitly (that I recall).
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Dec 3, 2018 05:10
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File Size: 6.66 mb Brutal.
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Dec 3, 2018 12:38
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Nessus posted:File Size: 6.66 mb I know! That had to be sheer luck that it ended up that way because I definitely didn't intentionally engineer it to happen. Have you looked it over yet?
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Dec 3, 2018 21:10
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ManiacClown posted:I know! That had to be sheer luck that it ended up that way because I definitely didn't intentionally engineer it to happen. I appreciated your footnotes. Those were good.
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Dec 4, 2018 04:56
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Nessus posted:I was (appropriately enough) kind of drunk at the time but the introductory material seemed decent. Closest thing for advice I have here - and I'll be real with you that I'm pretty loving bad at math, so almost all my advice will be about fluff poo poo - is to lean into the halfway-seized voice as if you're Jack Black or Bill & Ted explicating what's going on. What do you think of the background for the footnotes? As one of those "I just put my head on my pillow for the night" thoughts I thought of a musical staff because of the lines. Then when I got up to tell my wife I realized it works on a whole other level— footnotes.
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Dec 4, 2018 16:35
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I really like this, mechanically and otherwise. It makes me want to build a game out of it where a punk band is on a quest to throw a toilet off the highest roof.
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Dec 4, 2018 17:47
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ManiacClown posted:What do you think of the background for the footnotes? As one of those "I just put my head on my pillow for the night" thoughts I thought of a musical staff because of the lines. Then when I got up to tell my wife I realized it works on a whole other level— footnotes. However, consider: Could you make them guitar chord charts instead?
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Dec 4, 2018 17:56
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Deadmeat5150 posted:I really like this, mechanically and otherwise. It makes me want to build a game out of it where a punk band is on a quest to throw a toilet off the highest roof. That said, why stop at a roof? Why not a mountain, or even the Dracano? Also consider filling the tank with nitroglycerin so it explodes when it hits the ground. Nessus posted:Whoa, I never thought about that. I had thought at first that it might have been a little bit of a design artifact cuz you were doing roughs, but drat. Your lady is wise.  As for the guitar chord charts, I just checked what those look like (I'm not a musician) and two things work against that. First, I think the vertical lines would make it too busy and interfere with readability. Second, I hadn't looked at those before anyway and I'm honestly lucky I got the regular staff to look as good as it did with the text. I am really, really not a talented graphic designer.
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Dec 5, 2018 06:20
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You could do it as tab instead of chord charts. Tab is horizontal and has six lines, one for each string.
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Dec 5, 2018 07:57
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ManiacClown posted:Wow. I really, really need to play that song— which I think may well still be stuck in my head in the morning— for my daughter. Because Punk. Punk music works likes Idea -> Insane idea -> Going after insane idea without a plan -> Insaner idea comes about -> etc etc etc It would start off with a quest to throw a toilet off a roof and end with throwing a toilet full of explosives off the moon. Oh man my GM itch is a itching.
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Dec 5, 2018 13:43
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Deadmeat5150 posted:Because Punk. Punk music works likes Idea -> Insane idea -> Going after insane idea without a plan -> Insaner idea comes about -> etc etc etc Go for it! If you can run METAL WORLD without my input, I'll learn two things. First, I'll know what works and what I need to fix. Second, I'll know the mechanics make sense to someone who isn't me. After all, I know what I wrote and what it's supposed to mean, but if other people can make sense of it, that's when I know I'm on solid ground. By the way, remember that Ferra has five moons, with a minimum of two visible at any given time. Funny note: A friend of mine ran a session for some people. He reported that it went well and that one of the people involved said that METAL WORLD "reads like it was written by a madman with a law degree." I don't know what drove her to say that, but she was 100% correct! ManiacClown fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 14:10
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I feel like you really missed out on something by not naming the health stat as my favorite metal subgenre, "DOOM."
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Dec 5, 2018 15:18
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EdsTeioh posted:I feel like you really missed out on something by not naming the health stat as my favorite metal subgenre, "DOOM." I can see the argument for it, though I could also see the argument for naming the combat stat Doom instead of Thrash because it's your ability to bring doom to your targets. However, there's a region dedicated to the religious imagery present in so much of metal, partly inspired by doom metal (which religion dovetails nicely with) and partly inspired by Ghost. Basilicus isn't in The Rough Cut (I can't give away the store, after all), but it's essentially the default place for a religious center to go, with giant cathedrals or whatever all over the place. It has a couple notable sub-regions that play into a good/evil dichotomy. Oh, and for Deadmeat5150's idea, I'll also point out that there's a region called Kaijujin where giant monsters attack on the regular. You could become pilots of some kind of giant plumber mech, like the Mighty Muratic Plumber Rangers or something. Absolutely nothing in the game stops you from doing that. It's just a matter of figuring out how to work it.
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Dec 5, 2018 15:51
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My problem with GMing is that Im incredibly inconsistent, forgetful, and flighty. That fact that I ran a 5 year campaign on these here forums is actually pretty much my only success as a GM. However... this really tugs at me. GMing a game that is pretty much Brutal Legend on steroids, with people able to destroy with the power of RAWK! is basically my dream.
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Dec 5, 2018 17:28
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Forgetful? Bollocks. METAL WORLD cares about continuity only as much as you do. Hell, retcon things mid-game if you have to.
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Dec 5, 2018 18:00
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drat it, Deadmeat5150, I listened to The Toilet Song twice last night and I favorited it on Spotify. It won't get out of my head! I'm now tempted to make "appliance hucking" a sport in METAL WORLD.
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Dec 7, 2018 15:44
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Deadmeat5150 posted:I really like this, mechanically and otherwise. It makes me want to build a game out of it where a punk band is on a quest to throw a toilet off the highest roof. *Me First & The Gimme Gimmes* ~Climb every mountain, Ford every stream, Follow every rainbow, Tooooo droooop thaaaaat latriiiiiiineeeee~
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Dec 7, 2018 16:20
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ManiacClown posted:drat it, Deadmeat5150, I listened to The Toilet Song twice last night and I favorited it on Spotify. It won't get out of my head! I'm now tempted to make "appliance hucking" a sport in METAL WORLD. If you like that for punk you you listen to War of the Superbikes by The Meatmen. It's good classic punk about a motorcycle deathrace. Also when I find time Im going to do an interest post about seeing who would want to play. I already have a couple people interested on discord.
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Dec 7, 2018 17:28
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I made a thing
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Dec 8, 2018 07:31
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Woo-hoo!
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Dec 8, 2018 16:41
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This looks amazing.
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Dec 10, 2018 23:15
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Signal posted:This looks amazing. Then have a go at METAL WORLD: The Rough Cut! Do please let me know what you think. Every time I look at it I see little things I need to tweak ever-so-slightly and clarify.
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Dec 12, 2018 05:35
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