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I've said this last thread but I'm gonna just repeat this on page 1: never just write your review in the browser. Always do it in a document you can save. Also never feel bad about letting something drop if you run out of steam or if you're doing too much or for whatever reason. It's okay to abandon stuff.
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Sep 10, 2019 02:58
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Cassa posted:Thanks Inklesspen
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Sep 10, 2019 03:47
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So wizard money is minted by Bitcoin-mining child slaves. It seems obvious when I said "wizard money" but I just wanted to boil it all down to that sentence.
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Sep 10, 2019 04:41
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Oh, that's just Unhallowed Metropolis except made by a bunch of European digital artists instead of Anglophile goths.
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Sep 10, 2019 16:54
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Sun (Invisible)
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Sep 10, 2019 20:06
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Yeah that whole thing with Bubba The Love Gelatinous Cube's wife and the lawsuit was real lovely.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:29
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megane posted:Nobody likes visiting the Quasi-elemental Plane of Corn.
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Sep 15, 2019 19:57
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On paper I understand that Prometheans can literally eat anything because their metabolism is powered by Azoth and Azoth can burn anything. And this is incredibly helpful for their nomadic lifestyle. If you're down and out in an urban environment, dumpster dive. If you want a drink in nature, just sip whatever scummy pond water, it's 100% safe. Old roadkill, raw corn, uncooked bones, unknown berries, whatever. A Promethean can eat it if they need to, but they often don't necessarily need to. It helps with playing roles to actually cook dinners or reheat leftovers or subsist on noodles and energy drinks. You're doing what humans do to get by, it gets you that much closer. Which is what makes it such a good reminder that the Petrificati are wrong and Prometheans can eat anything to have what they subsist on listed. Because they say "Petrificati just feed themselves, do their role and stare into space" and you're like "oh okay that doesn't sound too bad." "One of them just eats kudzu by the pound by grabbing leaves and vines off the wall and the other shovels handfuls of rancid dumpster grease into his mouth if he can't pull food out of an active fryer when nobody is looking." "  "
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Sep 17, 2019 00:44
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The Lone Badger posted:Both of those are organics that could feed something, even if not a human. Could a promethean eat gravel?
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Sep 17, 2019 04:01
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Mama's pretty dope but the ending drags quite a lot. "HELLO AND WELCOME TO CHECKERS WE'VE GOT TWO NEW FLAVORS FOR WINGS IF YOU'RE INTERESTED FOR OUR SPECIALS WE'VE CURRENTLY GOT THE CHEESE-LOADED BURGER AND SIPPABLE ITALIAN ICE SLUSHIES CAN I START YOU OFF WITH AN APPETIZER OR A BASKET OF FRIES" / 
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Sep 20, 2019 01:02
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Leraika posted:thank god "C" isn't for "catgirl". 
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Sep 24, 2019 01:13
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If it's that much easier to make a Promethean out of a clone, I'm just imagining how an Osirian Limb Tree would look. "Yes I used to have seven arms" said Six Arms the Osirian.
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Sep 25, 2019 03:04
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 Merry Ghostmas, have some zombies! I’m overworked and I stare at my computer as I desperately wait for social media to update when I’m not working so I think a more productive creative project will be a better outlet! Plus, it’s October and I’ll probably never resume covering every single AFMBE book so here’s one of my favorites! In all seriousness this is one of my favorite AFMBE books. Worlds of the Dead is a wonderfully weird book that’s perfect for the F&F treatment because it’s absolutely light on the mechanics. Worlds of the Dead is just a collection of premade Deadworlds (various alternate realities that have zombie outbreaks as a lynchpin) for a GM looking for inspiration, a one-shot or a campaign. Some of them are pretty meh but as a whole I enjoy most of them. They just go all over the drat place in idea and I love it. Plus, the nice thing about talking about them is that I don’t have to go too deep into the weeds. They’re barely over 15 pages apiece, ish, and that’s including stats for the various zombies and players. This time I’m probably going to cut out the stat blocks in addition to the lore/in-character slash setting intros (which I will forever tout as being the highlight of these books). I want to relax a little and be more informal/less in-depth and discuss/criticize what we’re looking at. I’m also going to include a one-sentence summary before getting into the real meat of the Deadworld if you just want to skim and not read further. So without further ado and fanfare, Worlds of the Dead! ACES HIGH: WORLD WAR I Summary: In 1917, the Red Baron becomes a revenant leading a squadron of damned fighter pilots. Unfortunately, the summary kind of speaks for the entire scenario. After his mentor dies in battle, Manfred “The Red Baron” von Richthofen takes control of his aerial unit. Wracked by guilt over his mentor’s death, The Red Baron makes a vow to serve Germany even in death. His plane is eventually shot to pieces in a skirmish and goes down in a tailspin. Before the Allied pilots can confirm the kill, the rest of the unit chase them away. A sweep of the area where his plane went down doesn’t find the plane and the Allied conclude that The Red Baron managed to make the landing and get to safety. But, no. He really did die. His vow mixed with his will causes something to get back up out of the wreckage and command his destroyed plane to reconstruct itself. The reborn Red Baron flies back to Germany and tells his horrified superiors “yeah I died but, uh, I made a promise I’m gonna go keep. Well. Bye!” and flies right back to the front. The Flying Circus, lead by the Red Baron, continues its assault on the Allied forces because the Central Powers really do not want to try to stop him. Because they’re not stopping him, the Baron’s got his own necromantic scheme going. Each unit of the Circus has 12 pilots for a total of 48 pilots across 4 units (including the Baron). He inducts living members into the Circus and when they die in battle, he brings them back as a revenant like him. However, his undead pilots can be destroyed, whereupon a new living pilot takes the finally-dead one’s place. Rinse, repeat. Note how I said his pilots can be destroyed. The Red Baron can’t. Nobody has been successful in shooting his plane down a second time, which creates a sizable problem when he can just keep refilling his ranks. Also, off-handedly mentioned is the fact that the Germans have found Victor Frankenstein’s notes and are using them to kickstart a zombie army. Put a pin in this idea for later; it’ll come up again in other scenarios but this is just barely mentioned here in an attempt to pad the setting out a bit. There’re a few sample ideas for adventures in this world which amount to: playing as fighter pilots using hexes and figures, trying to stop the production of zombie soldiers as Allied special forces in Switzerland and playing as spies to figure out the Baron’s weakness. From here it explains the weakness and…treats it as a metaplot thing…yeahhhhhhhh. “Whether the Cast is allowed to find this out or not, the Red Baron is invincible until his destiny comes to pass.” No, c’mon, please, don’t do this. Bad game designer. In real life there’s debate about who exactly killed the Red Baron. Aerial dogfights aren’t a place for precision answers in service of who killed who. Forensic evidence has actually even proven that the Red Baron wasn’t killed by another fighter pilot but by someone on the ground shooting up. In this Deadworld, the one who can kill the Red Baron is the ghost of his 79th victim, the ghost of Richard Raymond-Barker. RRB’s ghost wanders the trenches and no-man’s lands until the day he sees the Red Baron flying overhead and seizes his destiny (and a nearby mounted machine gun) to shoot him down before passing on to his eternal rest. And, canonically in this Deadworld, nobody wants to admit that a ghost killed him so they give credit to the man commonly credited with killing him (from a plane, even though [gestures up at the forensics]), Arthur Brown. The rest of this installment are zombie stats and stats for World War I airplanes in case you do want to model aerial battles. HOW THE ZOMBIES WORK Depends on the zombie. If they’re one of the Baron’s hand-raised men, they’ve got human/above-human attributes, damage resistance, the ability to sense life, a bevy of skills (including speech) and heightened strength. They also have the supernatural ability to coordinate with each other in the air without speaking or indicating commands. They don’t need any form of sustenance but they can’t make more of themselves. They also don’t have weak spots, so depleting their health through sustained damage is enough to put them down. If they’re zombies raised from the Frankenstein techniques, they’re still pretty intimidating. They move quickly, they’re trained in fighting, they’re pretty strong, they sense life, they’re smart and they also have damage resistance. Their big weakness is the limited amount of skills they have (though they do have language) and the fact that despite their resistance they’re destroyed through health damage. They also don’t reproduce or need any nourishment. The only thing that makes more Uber Soldats is the reanimation technique being used in specialized preparation centers to bolster the ranks of the zombie army. THOUGHTS I like this Deadworld…with some caveats. First, okay, sure, have the Red Baron only be killed by the ghost of whatshisname. That’s okay. But the entire adventure absolutely has to be a limited campaign of the PCs figuring out how to beat him and maneuver the ghost where it needs to be. Otherwise it’s kind of just a boring one-shot of doing whatever while an invincible undead fighter pilot runs around karate-chopping people out of the sky. “Possible other adventures” in this scenario nothing. Stick with that. Two, ditch the Uber Soldats, they don’t really add anything and they’re used much better in future Deadworlds in this friggin’ book.. You have an undead doom squad of fighter pilots! Focus the scope on that business! But outside of that I just really enjoy that this world is the same as our world with a very bizarre hiccup of “one time a famous fighter pilot became an undead vanguard and everyone was very concerned about that until a ghost killed him”. That’s just a good speed bump of weirdness. A lot of the Deadworlds kind of tend to craft this big machine or world that just runs on the zombies being there to justify it. I appreciate the small scope and weird historical fuckup of this one. BLIGHTED ISLE Summary: The Irish Famine threatens the entire world in a cross between the beginning lore of Unhallowed Metropolis and justified anger at the British Empire being a bunch of imperialist assholes. This one is also a little bit…on the nose historically as well. “What if the Potato Blight was supernatural?” well I dunno I guess there’s zombies, I suppose. The Potato Blight happens in 1846 and causes a mass panic in Ireland to escape the country. The Irish bury their starved dead and do their best to survive on the island or take a gamble on going to America/Europe in a ship stuffed full of other hopeful souls. The plan to stay in Ireland hits a huge snag when the dead start to rise from their mass graves in 1847 with a hunger for human flesh. There’s not a lot of confirmation that this is happening until the undead besiege Dublin and are scared away in a fire that razes the city. The dead are buried…and promptly get back up the next day, along with the burned corpses. In short, if you die on Irish soil, you get back up if there’s enough of you left. Period. The Blight put something awful and necrotic in the ground and the armies of the dead grow by the day as people keel over from starvation and get back up. On the British side of things, their evaluation of the situation is mixed between “…this is all our fault by not letting them own their own land and forcing them to become a monocrop country” and “gently caress them they’re Irish”. They do offer aid and expeditions are launched into Ireland to study the Blight, but then the dead rise and Britain promptly says “well. That’s that” and quarantined the island. You can leave to move to another country but nobody’s allowed into Ireland without specialized and highly restricted allowance. Or at least that was the case until London police discovered a conspiracy of Irish expats emptying Blighted soil smuggled from Ireland into British graves. Now Ireland is completely cut off and has been for two years. Any ships going in and out are sunk by the naval blockade surrounding the island. The year is 1849. Nobody is any closer to understanding the situation in Ireland. The British are happy to maintain quarantine and just let them die. Ireland has become a collection of well-defended enclaves holding back the dead and nomadic bands of survivors scraping by. Priests are an important social part of the survivors because the survivors are generally desperate for redemption, salvation and hope. Sample Adventures:
HOW THE ZOMBIES WORK The Blight zombies have a symbiotic relationship with the blighted earth itself. If a body is left on blighted soil, it will inevitably rise with a speed depending on how corrupted the earth is (as fast as a hour, on average around 12 hours, rarely a few days). Burning the body prevents this, as does hucking it in a peat bog because the dead can’t get out of a peat bog. The Blight burrows into the nervous system to resuscitate the dead and modifies the mouth for feeding, rotting away the back of the throat and inside of the mouth to expose the arteries and veins (with little flaps of skin that cover these blood-lines that…make weird flapping smacking noises when they engage and disengage). They also actually feed on Blight spores. See, the Blight animates them but it’s also absolutely everywhere. They can’t ambiently exist thanks to how contaminated the island is; the pollutant levels of the Blight are high but the spores are too diffused into the environment. However, because it’s in the air, the water, the food, the animals (doesn’t affect animals) means that the Irish are constantly accidentally ingesting Blight spores. Which is fine. It’s harmless to the living. However, the human liver and kidneys is really good at concentrating weird particles from all over the body into a handful of spots. This is what makes the Blight zombies attack the Irish: they can smell their digestive system being full of delicious food and they’ll disembowel people to get at the sweet meats, mash them up through chewing and swallow the paste into their veins directly to the metabolic center, the heart. Physically they look like the walking dead except for the blood that pools in their mouths and runs down their faces whenever they attack. Think old-style vampire myths where they dig up the corpse to find it bloated with blood on its lips due to decomposition gasses. They’re also not an enormous threat. They’re slow, except for when they lunge. They’re as strong as a regular person. They’re not smart. Their big advantages are, well, numbers and the fact that their rotting mouths double as an attack. The smell of the putrid blood bubbling up from their mouths when they feed is enough to sicken people and force them to freeze, giving the Blight zombie the opportunity to grab its prey. Their hearts are also the weak point…but guns are in short supply and nobody’s really willing to get in melee with one. Most Irish settle for incapacitating them and burning them or herding them away. Outside of Ireland, I don’t think the Blight zombies are a threat at all due to their single-minded focus on only feeding on sources full of concentrated Blight. The book doesn’t really go into that. THOUGHTS This one kind of walks the line between “tone deaf” and “needs more fleshing out”. It’s not the worst idea to jump-off from, especially because the book directly notes how complicit the British were with the Famine and how the Irish wanting to get some measure of revenge are outweighed by the people who just want to live. Most outbreaks would be complete accidents on par with a refugee ship accidentally becoming a hot-box of super strep. That said man it’s super 2019 up in this world we’re living and the idea of this zombie outbreak having refugee/geopolitics parallels are a little too eeeeeeesh for my liking. I don’t entirely want to play Irish dealing with impending genocide caused by the undead and British indifference. The more compelling scenario is the one where the world is dealing with this crisis and how that plays out, and it’s kind of shallow in that regards. That said, I like the internal physics of the zombies and how their construction accidentally asks the question of “are they actually an international threat or is the Blight the bigger threat?”. But I don’t think I’d want to play 19th century British dealing with this whole shebang either? It’s a solid enough nugget of an idea that needs to be worked out more and handled with care. I could get down with a more politically/sociologically-minded short campaign or something like that, but that’s not really what this is. I guess the safe option would be to play the pretty interestingly dark one-shot of “only one of you is meant to leave and the exfil zone is full of undead, how are you going to justify you getting out and who’s being left behind as bait” and pretend that the Blight isn’t being carried by the Irish passively. NEXT TIME: 17th century France and the 8th century Abbasid Caliphate in the Golden Age of Islam! I’m kind of obscuring just what they’re exactly about by mentioning the time and place! They may not be as interesting as the time and place imply! Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 05:54
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In all seriousness Wendys' is a reprehensible company and giving them free advertisement for their free product is not a good idea. It's not the most interesting corporate-backed game out there.
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Oct 16, 2019 22:57
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Also the UN and Ronald McDonald are bad guys working together with Ronnie as the lead villain backed by the Not-UN because the latter is a competitor and the former...publicly lambasted the company for tacitly supporting slavery.
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Oct 17, 2019 00:05
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...wait, wasn't there a monster-hunter class, the Chosen? Or am I misremembering things based on Monster of the Week.
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Oct 31, 2019 01:32
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Ahh, dope. Honestly a smart move.
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Oct 31, 2019 01:55
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But the Ghost can still just fly.
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Nov 1, 2019 12:46
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Don't forget Lovecraft and Howard more or less broke up over their mutual love of pessimistic fascism because HP was like "civilization is the only metric of worth and sanity!" and Howard believed "trust nobody, only your own fists and living a life of barbarian badassery will protect you".
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Nov 8, 2019 01:21
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Modern AGE sounds like a neat universal system, I'll have to check it out somehow without giving Green Ronin any money for it.
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Dec 21, 2019 17:02
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An analysis in Sigmata in 2020 would be pretty decent mostly because my whole approach on that was just. More or less from a place of despair? I was band-wagoning the review based on Popular Interest of the time and I was in a transitional place between my old lifestyle and interest groups and an incredibly uncertain constantly-changing future which is why the old review...starts how it does (fun fact: a lot of that? No longer accurate to who I am!). Considering how things have generally shaken out, it could be worth looking at that sack of crap again and addressing something that grabbed a lot of left-wing minds in the time and immediately disappointed them. And then continues to disappoint them because Sigmata Guy keeps making centrist mistakes in the form of "ill-concieved world-building ideas". ...also I realized I never got around to proper chargen and never realized my stupid idea of statting Admin of DaShareZone out as a cyborg antifascist with 0 Judgment. Such is life. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Jan 20, 2020 |
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Jan 20, 2020 00:27
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God drat that new title kicks rear end.
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Jan 27, 2020 01:06
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The STEM education is not tempered with liberal arts, sociological and philosophical courses as it should be, leading people with a limited skill-set to discover and invent their own language for concepts like "religion" and "Hell" and "ethics".
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Mar 15, 2020 22:32
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Mutant Chronicles is a gloriously egregious mix of just enough to not be plagiarism and weird ideas and I'm looking forward to this after the last time I tried to get into the core book of a more recent edition.
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Mar 25, 2020 00:50
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Might also be good for Industry Chat seeing as how it involves the...industry. Not gonna lie, little surprised at the mechanics for Dishonored. I was expecting it to just use the same d6 pool system as Tales and Mutant.
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Mar 28, 2020 15:21
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Night10194 posted:Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Thousand Thrones
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Apr 9, 2020 00:30
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Night10194 posted:This campaign is about on par with the Abandon Hope one. It's that bad.
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Apr 9, 2020 00:58
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"An absurdly inconsequential task leads to the protagonists destabilizing the balance of evil and politics in a nearby area" is top-tier adventure kickoff fuel but yeah this is kind of coming in way too late to be anything other than pushing them towards the plot. "For want of a lost chicken" should be the inciting adventure. Also good move press-ganging an otherwise doomed NPC into gaining party armor.
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Apr 10, 2020 16:50
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 Bretonnian rubbish panda.
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Apr 18, 2020 00:41
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Boy am I not surprised considering the source material.
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Apr 21, 2020 12:36
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System Mastery just covered Darwin's World which means I never have to (except for when I did as a joke). Thanks Jef and Jon for continuing to bring us quality podcasts all these years. https://systemmasterypodcast.com/2020/04/21/darwins-world-system-mastery-172/
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Apr 21, 2020 23:32
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 The Welves will shut up and forgive Syphan when the first crop of maple syrup comes to fruition.
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Apr 23, 2020 16:16
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Everyone posted:I never really got into 40K at all and admitted don't know that much about it. That said, from what I understand, it's not that the Imperium are "the good guys" exactly so much as that every other major faction or power group is measurably, horrifyingly worse. There are better groups of people than the Imperium, namely The Tau who are Space Communists with a Star Fleet bent who exist separate from the whole Warp/Chaos thing (and even then the Tau have problems because the writers realized they're relatable so they tacked some atrocities on). The Imperium is held up by fans because A: satire/social criticism is really hard to write but at its heart it's there in the construction of the Imperium and B: a lot of people aren't using the same interpretations, ideas and themes to write them/fans get hired to write on lines so you end up with "wow, cool fascist decrepit empire!" in fans who really like skull pauldrons and mechas that treat their pilots like Baby Bjorns. The writing is also meant as a form of irony. The immense xenophobia of the Imperium is actively making everything worse constantly, making Chaos look like a viable alternative to the learned helplessness they know and focusing on destroying everything not made by mankind is loving over some of the groups who are older and more learned than the Imperium who could solve some of the problems of the setting. In fact, the bent of Wrath and Glory is "whoops now people have to work together", a plot thread really only unofficially explored by Dark Heresy giving Inquisitors a wide berth and officially explored by Rogue Trader because they have a writ to do whatever the hell they need to do. The factions as a whole are crumbling. The institutions as a whole are corrupt. When faced with Evil or The Lesser Evil, the choice in-setting is "be a loving protagonist, be revolutionary, go your own way as best as you can", not "swallow your pride and believe in The Lesser Evil".
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Apr 26, 2020 22:27
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Nessus posted:I think you're also having a difficult time adapting material intended to provide fluff justification for why any wargame army can fiight any other wargame army into a human-scale conflict. And selling spin off novels, etc. death to lore, death to canon
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Apr 26, 2020 22:45
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Yeah as an adventure itself it's incredibly on rails and kind of just "well what are we supposed to do". RPPR's cover of Rough Night at Three Feathers (in Zweihander, sadly) is pretty good mostly because the PCs are just bumbling around raucously and one of the players (who is of the "GIVE ME THE PLOT OR I'LL DO WHAT I WANT UNTIL PLOT PRESENTS ITSELF" bent) sets up a doctor's office at the bar and just stays there for a good chunk of the adventure doing his best to cure various complaints. Also he's an Ogre named Herr Doctor Buttman. Herr Doctor is in.
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Apr 27, 2020 23:45
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Skaven steel is simultaneously top of the list and bottom of the list depending on who it's pointed at.
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May 2, 2020 01:41
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I just think the names are kind of bad because GW names in general are kind of bad ever since the whole "we'll sue people who use the term Space Marine" money-making scheme backfired. The content is fine. The names just suck because they want to license all their playsets and toys and if I ever play the game I'll just loosen my tie and be like "fuckin' call them Sea Elves or Dwarfborgs or whatever you want around the table". Lean into the Big Dumb 1980s Filmation Setting where people are named He-Man and Man-E-Faces and Beastman and the heroes are optimists fighting to do good.
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May 10, 2020 00:34
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And this is why barter still exists.
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May 11, 2020 02:53
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"Science Team has warpstone for brains."
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May 12, 2020 02:07
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Thank you for the good hamtimes, Night.
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May 17, 2020 21:20
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