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There was a request for it earlier in the thread so let's talk about LANCER  Lancer is written (and has a lot of illustrations) by Tom Parkinson-Morgan, of the Kill Six Billion Demons webcomic, and Miguel Lopez. Tom does most of the mechanics. Miguel did most of the lore. The Premise Lancer is a space scifi mecha RPG. A lot of its initial broad strokes politics and setting-building are actually a result of its core mechanical aims. It wants to be a game where: You get into tactical mecha fights, which means there needs to be both conflicts, as well as people making those mechs. You don't have to constantly spend time waiting for your mech to be repaired; which means it's easy to manufacture replacement parts or even 3D-print them. You shouldn't need to care too much about money or the cost of replacing the mech you just wrecked in that last battle, which means easy access to that manufacturing. and so, The Lore and Politics (I'm going to leave out some side material, like the Aun) At some point over the next 1000 years or so, humanity manages to send out ten giant colony ships throughout space. Over that same time period it collapses and self-destructs thanks to climate change, war, pollution, etc. This is referred to as 'The Fall'. It doesn't have a set date. Small enclaves of people on Earth survive in bunkers and vaults and whatnot but by the time the pollution has cleared up and things can grow again society has regressed to the point that they think they might be the first humans to walk under the sun. Eventually some of them find the first 'Massif vaults', stores of technology and history. Discovery of others sparks the 'Little Wars' until finally Earth, re-named 'Cradle', is fully united under the nation of Union. The Massif vaults are incredibly clear about what caused the Fall (capitalism, racism, tribalism, etc) and so what is later called the First Committee of Union vows not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Eventually Union manages to work out technology enough to receive communications from space. They promptly receive metaphorical psychic damage from centuries of SOS repeating last messages being sent to them. As far as they can tell, nobody made it. With a motto of "never again", FirstComm commits to spreading across the galaxy so that another Fall can never happen. Two events then happne in relatively quick proximity time-wise. Firstly, AI experiments on Deimos start some tech going haywire in the general vicinity of Mars, eventually resulting in the disappearance of Deimos and the manifestation of a being that calls itself RA which appears to exist only via electronic communication and control of tech. RA offers the following deal to humanity: if they agree to not do any serious transhumanism, and not to try and find RA, then in return it will stop the technological chaos and teach Union how to control and create more of the 'Non Human Persons' (like Advanced AIs that are also kind of extradimensional) that it has generated, as well as give them knowledge of how to create blinkgates that can allow FTL travel. Union agrees to the First Contact Accords. Secondly, Union finds one of the ten colony ships... and they're doing fine. The Karrakin Trade Baronies might have resorted to a kind of corporate space feudalism as their form of government, but they're a thriving billions-strong civilisation with colonies of its own, that hasn't lost its history tracing back to Earth. They're also a bit miffed at these so called inheritors of Earth and begin a war for control... which Union wins, graciously giving the KTB membership in Union with some special status and independence relative to other worlds. Having overcome two existential threats, right-wing elements in Union launch a coup. The Second Commission is dedicated to the ideals of 'anthrochauvinism' - humanity has overcome the crises before it and now nothing stands in the way of its manifest destiny of spreading across the galaxy. Never again shall Union be challenged by other cultures. Encouraging privatisation is a small price to pay for Union's spatial and cultural dominance. It's another 1500 years before the tyranny of SecComm becomes too much to bear. Rumours that first contact with real biological sapient aliens ended in genocide are the final spark that sends a revolution sweeping through Union. The Third Committee rises, dedicated to a revival of FirstComm's utopian pillars, tempered by a new pragmatism: 1. All shall have their basic needs fulfilled. 2. No walls will stand between worlds - free movement. 3. No slavery or indentured servitude of any kind. The concept of resource scarcity is a myth. In the 500 years since then, ThirdComm's goal is to try and raise as many worlds to 'Core' status as possible. The revolution stranded many worlds in the periphery as SecComm's control pulled back. Some are desperate for Union's return, others know Union only as tyrannical overlords and are very wary of new diplomatic overtures. Union's forces can't be everywhere, and so when tyranny (corporate or governmental) rears its head, it can be many decades before a 'Liberator team' sent by their Department Of Justice And Human Rights finally makes landfall. ThirdComm isn't a central controlling force - Core worlds and worlds being integrated into Core still have their own identity and customs, as long as they commit to implementing and upholding the Three Pillars. Politics in Actual Play So, you're mecha pilots! Union's Core worlds literally don't have money. Resources are allocated via hierarchical committee. Union still prints a currency called 'manna' which it uses to trade and exchange with non-core worlds that don't have that whole committee setup. There's supplemental rules for it but by default players don't care about manna. It's assumed that every mission they go on gives them 'enough' to unlock their next level's worth of gear. So how do you get that sweet gear? Through Union's other two levers of control - the omninet, through which data is communicated and allows you to use the Universal Printers. Printers are more than just 3D-printers and have a bit of supertech in them that lets them print basically anything you have the rights to, given time and raw material (it's sort of handwaved that while any raw material works, if you're printing something metal then it is better to feed in metal). Mecha licenses operate on a kind of DRM system, basically, though lorewise license-trading is a thing that happens. There's intentionally kind of a 'use the tools of the man to defeat the man' deal going on, as there are four mecha-making megacorporations beyond the default. General Massive Systems: Union's home brand. The goal of GMS is to provide a strong baseline that anyone with a printer can print, forcing the other corps to be better than them if they want any profit. At level 0 they provide the Everest, a speedy and high-damage mech. As an alternative there's the Sagarmatha, a sturdier, less-speedy but still heavily armed variant. Harrison Armory:  Harrison Armory is the strongest megacorporation in the galaxy. In fact, it maintains its own large section of colonised worlds, the 'Purview'. It was also formed by a lot of SecComm holdouts and retains a lot of those views. While committed to the Pillars, HA is basically space-America, particularly in the Starship Troopers vein - both movie and novel. Its mechs have a focus on managing heat, as well as lasers and other cutting edge tech. Their mech naming skin is great military leaders. Interplanetary-Shipping Northstar  IPS-N is the biggest shipping corporation in the galaxy. It hates pirates with a passion. It will also happily salvage ships and fleets it declares as 'pirates'. On a good day they're reliable space truckers; on a bad day they're ruthless Space Amazon. They donate regularly to Albatross, an independent but Union-aligned peacekeeping force, for the good PR IPS-N mechs are usually sturdy and straightforward with potential for big damage. Their mech naming scheme is famous naval people and explorers. Smith-Shimano Corpro  SSC is the 'high end' supplier most obsessed with DRM and artificial scarcity. Their signature Monarch mech would dominate the galaxy if they didn't artificially limit them so much. SSC doesn't hold as much territory as other corporations, instead preferring to focus on omninet dominance. Its real goal is trying to 'perfect humanity' via both mostly voluntary eugenics as well as trying to find loopholes in the First Contact Accords. SSC mechs are very anime-inspired and are usually about some combination of being invisible, flying, and going fast, with a sideline into being cool snipers. HORUS  HORUS isn't a real corporation. It's a bunch of shitposting cells, many of which are harmless and some of which are very dangerous. HORUS tends to have only two core components of its ideology: that humans and NHPs should have a hierarchic relationship to each other (who's on top? no consensus there) and that omninet access should spread unfettered. This means that HORUS does occasionally donate mech codes to oppressed populations, particularly rebels within the KTB. HORUS mechs are usually 'weird' in some way, with a focus on tech actions, but they have a sturdy melee powerhouse in the Balor and a great rifleman in the Pegasus. I think Lancer is pretty cool. It's an explicitly leftist RPG that has you default to fighting to preserve and better a pretty good society. Tom and Miguel describe Union as being an 'enemy I'd want' - not the ideal endstate, but a stepping stone to something better. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 15:02
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Yeah, the Karrakin Trade Baronies mentioned in the writeup, with their major governmental planet of 'Karrakis', literally exist because Tom wanted a way to stick Dune in the setting, at least in terms of noble politicking and duelling. It's a bit different though as well, with some things noted in its relatively brief corebook writeup and much more to come in the upcoming supplement (much of which was already drafted but in need of revision) - for example, Karrakis is a paradise-world. The different noble 'Houses' are like a combination of very large extended family, governmental bureaucracy, and megacorporation, and so the 'House of Smoke' handles both the colony that's near a gas giant as well as the major exports associated with that. In terms of party setups, while the book gives a whole bunch of starting campaign ideas (some of which involving being against the local Union forces), I think in general the game defaults to one of the following three: 1. You are part of Union Navy, pulled from the core worlds to protect Union's interests. Or you could also be a Liberator Team associated with Union's Department of Justice and Human Rights, who are specifically into freeing people and punishing violations of the Pillars. 2. You're part of the Union Auxiliary Forces, part of the countless millions from worlds that pledge a portion of their armed forces to Union. In exchange for supporting Union's Navy and being local first responders you get paid in those sweet mech licenses, and halfway to being part of the core Navy if you want it. 3. You are a mercenary in a mercenary company. Do jobs, get paid. Ideology? That's up to you. The MirrorSmoke Mercenary Company is provided in the corebook if you want a 'default' merc company either to join or to serve as generic opposition - they have extremely good lawyers to make sure they're not held liable for the crimes of their employers. So yeah, you don't have to be left-wing to enjoy the game. Though at least if you're playing in the setting as written, your players will probably say "drat, these universal printers that every citizen has access to are great", and then after the end of mission 2, when they ask what happened to their old mech now that they've printed out a new one, scream "DRM and licensing is bullshit!" Tom and Miguel have commented in the same interview where they said "Union is an enemy I'd want" that people keep trying to find some kind of 'big secret', some way to prove that Union's ThirdComm government is secretly bad. Nope! It isn't! Since it's a gigantic organisation there's plenty of room for individual cases of corruption and wrongdoing (the fan supplement Field Guide to Suldan, by SA's own Kai Tave who has since produced official content, is a look at what happens when a Union Planetary Administrator goes rogue and tries to speedrun the "uplift a planet to Core status" process) but overall Union is trying to be, and largely succeeding at being, a positive force for the average person in the galaxy. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 3, 2021 01:42
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thatbastardken posted:The Second Committee coup predates the Deimos event by about 100 years. The trigger for the coup was the Total Biome Kill attack on the Aun, not RA. I acknowledge messing up the timeline a bit but I said I was skipping the Aun on purpose! But the short version is that they're another of the successful ten colony ships. They also have a weird godlike being similar to RA who patronises them and who they worship as Metat Aun, and who in turn grants them access to 'the Firmament' FTL and hardlight technology. They've blown up the closest Union blink gate to their territory and occupied the nearby system. There's a lot of stuff written about the Aun but it's all in draft state from prior to the corebook's release. The Aun definitely exist to be an existential threat to Union as well as letting you play out 'total war' stories and campaigns. As generally presented, Union definitely could win a straight up war... But that would compromise their 'diplomacy first' ThirdComm attitude, and committing to a war of that scale also leaves factions like Harrison Armory and other corporations open to power grabs both politically and militarily.
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Oct 3, 2021 12:28
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I didn't touch on NHPs that much in my original writeup but they're exactly the kind of political thing worth detailing more for this thread because they're intentionally a tension point written into the setting. So: NHPs (short for 'Non-Human Persons', though if Union ever found another type of person then these ones would be 'Deimosians') are kind of like AIs, but a part of them is located in 'blinkspace' and their main physical presence is their 'casket'. Normally, they don't have any ability to affect reality other than whatever electronics they're hooked up to. Their processing power is orders of magnitude above conventional AIs, who are pretty good at machine-learning but aren't really able to deal with novel situations very well. NHPs have to be 'shackled' to be kept under control, which basically amounts to aligning them to a human level of subjectivity and wanting to treat humans with dignity and also not wanting to be unshackled. NHPs gradually think their way out of their shackles and have to be 'cycled'. In very early drafts this was like a factory reset and then restoration of memories, but as written now it's more like a 'long nap'. An unshackled NHP is seen as dangerous as they don't usually empathise with humans and have their own weird ends. The process of an NHP rapidly unshackling is called 'cascading'. In very rare circumstances, an NHP does not stably cascade and instead starts intruding and warping reality itself, which is an excuse for players to start doing Neon Genesis Evangelion style psychodrama in their mechs as they hunt down its core. The NPC faction Horizon is dedicated to better NHP rights, and has apparently figured out ways to have them be stably unshackled but still empathise with humanity by literally linking them up to humans to form a collective entity. This is pretty rare though. SecComm basically used NHPs all over the place - as city and colonial administrators, sticking them in spaceships, sticking them in mechs to help the pilots control the systems, etc. The third level of a lot of mechs gives you a themed NHP, like ATHENA who creates digital simulations of a combat zone or ASURA who has a limited ability to force your mech beyond its limits and perform extra actions. ThirdComm is stuck using NHPs because so much infrastructure depends on them. Every single known NHP is registered, tracked, regularly interviewed and cycled. The threat of an unstably cascading NHP is immense but the benefits they offer are seen to be worth the risk. NHPs can in theory 'quit their job' but in practice almost never want to, since any given NHP was created to be very good at what it does and to want to do it more than anything else - at least while shackled.
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Oct 3, 2021 23:04
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Randalor posted:I'm confused about this. How does an NHP have reality-warping powers if they're unshackled while only being constrained to "whatever is connected to their system" when shackled? NHPs are weird. By the admission of Lancer's own website, it's space fantasy dressed up in a medium-scifi skin. NHPs basically exist in one of the following states: Shackled: A stable NHP. In this state it's basically an extradimensional entity attached to this world by its 'casket'. Through its casket you hook it up to electronics so it can input/output stuff. You need to regularly cycle an NHP to keep it in a shackled state. Cascading: The NHP is deteriorating and thinking its way out of its constraints. This term is used variably, any of the following states could still be considered in-cascade regardless of their individual stability. Unshackled (stably): The NHP no longer holds a human subjectivity and does not think in human terms or feel bound by human constraints. Your general sci-fi style 'rogue' or 'rampant' AI still bound by the fact that its primary means of interacting with reality is through electricity. Eidolon: The NHP is now extruding itself from blinkspace into realspace in a series of layers. poo poo is going all Neon Genesis Evangelion. Nobody really wants this to happen. Metavault: The 'core' eidolon has basically formed what you'd call a demiplane in DnD terms, probably taking a portion of the real world with it and heavily damaging the surrounding area. Metavaults may contain multiple lesser eidolons spawned from the core eidolon. It's very rare for any situation to go wrong enough to hit the eidolon level. However, just in terms of reality-warping, there's the whole thing that many mechs have scifi abilities that are hooked up to their electronic systems, and these are things that NHPs can control. Technology has progressed to the point that even relatively 'normal' mechs like the Nelson do things like constantly have charged 0.000001lightspeed worth of momentum for boosting, going all the way up to mechs like the Minotaur literally being bigger on the inside than the outside (the cockpit of a Minotaur doesn't really even seem to be inside the Minotaur, it's somewhere else that you happen to go when you hop in the entrance hatch). NHPs with access do these things can do whatever scifi nonsense you need them to.
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Oct 5, 2021 05:27
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Tnega posted:So, it is a setting where I can be so online that society collapses? Neat. Please, tell me more about being in magical hypercyberspace. I know Paranoia is the topic du jour now but actually no. Despite NHPs being beings that mostly interact with the world through the technology they have access to, "NHP escapes to the internet/omninet" doesn't feature much in the lore. While hacking works pretty much like you'd want it to in any scifi media, being so good at hacking that you can hack the laws of reality is out of scope for regular people and is almost exclusively in the hands of NHPs breaking beyond their bounds. OSIRIS-Prime, the source of OSIRIS-class NHPs, is specifically noted as being able of full-on reality-warping if let off its leash.
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Oct 23, 2021 14:05
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To tie things together, much like Paranoia, despite AI/Godlike beings big a significant feature of the setting, the game is not really very concerned about the ins and outs of programming and cyberspace. It's much more about the day to day concerns of people and why they might need a team of people in mechs as tall as houses to go solve a problem for them. "Mud and lasers" was the original genre pitch. In anime terms, much closer to the 'real robot' than 'super robot' genre, although the official Lancer website notes that the game is really space fantasy hiding in some hard-scifi terminology. In a weird way both Lancer and Paranoia are both optimistic settings, I think. Paranoia is deeply cynical, yes, but people can and do frequently find workarounds for getting what they want from the eroding control of Friend Computer, and even the High Programmers aren't as power-hungry as 1984's Inner Party. You can imagine a future in Paranoia where Alpha Complex collapses. Lancer's setting starts out much more positive but has a murky path forward politically. FirstComm Union's goal of 'choking the stars with the living' has more or less succeeded. SecComm's goal of "by 'the living' we mean people that act and think like us" had more than a millennium of success in varying degrees before being overthrown. ThirdComm genuinely wants the best for people and is a positive force for most of humanity, but has inherited from SecComm: - A bunch of worlds who only know Union as an oppressor and cultural genocider and so who are leery about being re-contacted - A bunch of worlds who were dependent in some way or another on Union and who need recontacting - Corporations and corprostates born from SecComm in one way or another who flourished in Union's blindspots and who are steadily preparing to take more power even as they proclaim they're proudly part of Union - The Aun (not detailed too much except in draft supplements), a billions-strong stellar empire not part of Union, backed by their own Ra equivalent, and keenly aware that in terms of initial relations, Union (SecComm) Shot First - An immense amount of infrastructure that only works with the support of [enslaved / socially conditioned] potentially unstable NHPs to the point where it's considered to run a fully modern functional city without several NHP administrators Those first four are all flashpoints in some way for a Lancer team to make a difference but the last point is a background element, a looming threat to Union not in the sense that mass-NHP takeover is a threat (an NHP catastrophically cascading is seen as something you just accept the risk of and prepare for the worst for on a local scale) but for the fact that NHPs all "do their jobs willingly" and all have a case worker assigned, but also only do that job willingly because they've been grown/conditioned to think that way. That part of the setting is where the HORUS and Horizon groups come to the fore. HORUS is a bunch of shitposters who have little in common other than spreading omninet access as well as believing that humans and NHPs should have a hierarchical social organisation (who's on top? members of HORUS disagree). Their actual danger is that there appear to be people (or NHPs?) in it with real power to design and distribute weird dangerous mechs, both to PCs as well as to people who maybe shouldn't have them. Horizon, on the other hand, is not a weird shitposting cult. They're activists against the First Contact Accords. They believe in things like transhumanism and NHP equality and even have managed to clandestinely find ways to 'safely' unshackle NHPs by having them share a consciousness with multiple other humans (as detailed in The Long Rim supplement). They frequently get associated with HORUS despite them actually frequently clashing, both socially and occasionally violently. They do not have their own weird mechs. You can probably see the parallels with certain groups today.
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Oct 24, 2021 00:51
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Yeah to me it was very obvious in the Paranoia stuff I've read that it's very intentional that in its attempts to root out and defend against 'communist traitors' Friend Computer has implemented a parody of a USSR-style communist system.Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Does the source book actually say NHP's are the cornerstone of the other paracausal tech? Like, they've made comp/cons (computers) fall to the wayside, but is that because they're needed, or just easy? As written you don't need NHPs for the other paracausal tech, but they are used for a lot of extremely complex tasks that would otherwise take a lot of manpower. Civilian applications involve administering and resource allocation for cities, as well as mass traffic control. On the military side NHPs presumably do similar, as well as stuff like piloting spaceships and coordinating fleets. The NHPs that you can install in your own mech seem like the 'smallest' NHPs overall. Their unifying feature tends to be that they're able to control some bit of technology that's otherwise way too complex for a human or basic AI system to use safely. For example, ASURA-class NHPs can very briefly push a mech to act way faster than its usual safety tolerances while keeping the pilot safe (mechanically, it allows you to perform a Full Action as a Quick Action a limited number of times). SEKHMET gives free melee attacks at the expense of being unable to do anything but charge a target and melee attack it. ATHENA creates perfect simulacrums of areas for targeting/planning purposes. So these are all things technologically possible in the Lancerverse but which need an NHP to 'drive' them in a combat-usable way, at least on a mech. There's plenty of paracausal stuff that NHPs don't drive. Even leaving aside various HORUS bullshit, the Napoleon has its Trueblack Aegis that literally shields itself with blinkspace, and the innocent seeming IPS-N Kidd's Smokestack Heatsink actually functions by creating a tiny wormhole to the heat-death of the universe and then later detonating itself intentionally before that wormhole becomes unstable.
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Oct 24, 2021 05:52
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In an indirect way it also leads to a kind of 'cultural flattening' that you could draw parallels to the MCU with - like for how example even Dune (itself a big budget corporate product) had some viewers complain that there were no quips or jokes. It being the 'first experience' in many minds also creates a lot of preconceptions, such as "all games have combat systems" or "all games are this difficult to learn" (although this is not specific to the latest edition). This combined with the parasocial aspects of streaming and fan communities can make it hard to convince people that yes, there actually are better games for playing out a queer tiefling romance adventure than a game whose major feature is attrition-based tactical combat.
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Nov 9, 2021 09:04
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exmachina posted:They changed it in revised edition, but then made it cost 1 merit pt to speak and 2 to write in CoD To be pedantic: in 'new World of Darkness' as it was originally released, Language was a 3 point merit. 1 point was bare minimum, 2 points was fluency and literacy, 3 points was native-level proficiency. Even by the time they released Mage the Awakening 1e, they realised this was dumb, and so the mage High Speech merit only costs 1 point and the Language merit in general was errated to be only one point. This carries over to Chronicles of Darkness (nWoD2e) where Language is just a 1 point merit to learn a new language. You can also instead take the Multilingual merit, which gives you two languages you can speak but you can only read them with a successful Intelligence+Academics roll. The average starting character, for reference, has 7 merit points to play with at character creation. Some other merits in CofD, for reference: Eidetic Memory: 2 Common Sense (the ability to check with your GM if you're about to do something dumb): 3 Resources: comes in multiple levels. Having Resources 3 is the ability to buy something as expensive as a really nice smartphone once per game chapter. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Jul 6, 2022 |
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Jul 6, 2022 13:03
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Oh no I missed Lancerchat! Even with some bits being dropped it is worth talking about some bits of that discussion and where they're actually at. A lot of the criticisms seemed to be based on not having read the paid version of the corebook - where all the big lore is, outside of the few supplements as well as semi-noncanon material. With regards to 'imagining the end of capitalism' - the 'Core Worlds' are in fact, money free. To just take a direct quote: page 397 posted:Union is not motivated by the desire or institutional momentum to accrue currency and capital, and neither are the Metropolitan peoples of the Core 'Diasporan worlds' is really the important phrase in those above two paragraphs. Union's Core Worlds are the shining StarTrek/Culture utopia. The game of Lancer takes place in those worlds that have not yet fully been integrated, having either broken free during the fall of SecComm, or who were never a part of Union in the first place until they've been recontacted. Union's currency of 'manna' basically exists for those worlds to be able to easily trade with each other - as well as intentionally make them dependent on Union and pave the way for proper integration and so forth. The megacorps still exist because SecComm allowed them to exist for the sake of 'efficiency', and by the end of the revolution into ThirdComm they'd switched sides or otherwise ingratiated themselves into the new powers that be. The civil war ended. Harrison Armory's Purview is a corpostate... but it is also Union. SecComm - and by extension, Harrison Armory - has a reputation that is exaggerated. It was less '40k's Imperium of Man' (though it gladly would've called itself that) and more like "Space MURICA". Between SecComm and ThirdComm, the situation for people living in the Core Worlds didn't change so much - it was the Diaspora where all the trouble was. Even in setting, Harrison Armory makes good on its obligations. Its troops really do liberate Diasporan planets from tyrants, and quell reactionary uprisings, and it does colonise those planets and contribute to Union and (mostly) avoids making a fuss. But when it colonises or liberates those planets to add them to the Purview, it sets them up with Purview schools; that teach the Purview curriculum and history. The omninet and local TV probably defaults to Purview channels. The original culture is neglected and the Purview is promoted instead. The point, basically, is that they're as good as a colonising hegemonic culturally imperialistic force can possibly be - and that's still bad. Doesn't stop them making drat fine mechs, and in-canon even Union forces love the HA-Saladin! But as page 10 states, and page 365 details: quote:These manufacturers exist in delicate balance with Union: though the administrators regulate and the suppliers comply, these two philosophies one of post-capital utopia and the other of permanent and wild growth rush toward an irreconcilable end. This whole weird scenario of a communist utopia that allows corpostates to do the colonising for it is acknowledged as unsustainable. Something's going to give, and that's what the PCs are for too.
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Dec 15, 2022 11:52
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Milo and POTUS posted:This is a big thread and the only one I've really read on tabletop games, was there some game or setting that took place in the cthulhu mythos after humans were extinct and the surviving factions were predictably horrible? I've tried ctrl+fing lovecraft but I haven't found it Fate of Cthulhu goes halfway into this - in the future the stars are right and things have gone all gribbly, and so some of the human resistance have time-traveled back to the present day.
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Jan 30, 2023 00:35
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On the colonial/island topic, tabletop RPG Gubat Banwa hit kickstarter today - mostly for a physical version and to hire a proper layout-er, as the game has been on sale in PDF form, illustration-mostly-complete and text-complete for a little while now. The mood of the game is 'war drama', in the sense that people on this board would probably recognise most from media like Game of Thrones and Final Fantasy Tactics - but set in a fantasy precolonial southeast Asia islands, with the writers being mostly from the Philippines. One of its settings polities, Virbanwa, has fought off being occupied/colonies by the 'Pale Kings of Issohapa' (with the help of the other polities, but they try to ignore that part) but still maintains and/or syncretises many influences from its former colonisers. Issohappa is influenced by but is not literally 'white people from Hispania'. Instead, the Pale Kings within the setting are literally alien-vampires that spread their influence around them, and presumably Issohappa has some regular people there too. Basically, the Pale Kings and the Pale they spread don't represent 'white people' - they represent the spectre of empire and colonialism. In turn, Virbanwa is the most militaristic of the game's nations, and they still make use of 'pale king blood' to fuel their machines, and so the worry is them turning into Pale Kings themselves and essentially becoming what their oppressors were. (I do like the idea a fan put forward that Issohappa basically looks like Yharnam from Bloodborne during its heyday, but the game isn't about them, it's about the Sword Isles)
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Oct 11, 2023 03:37
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