07-25-2017, 12:16 PM | #31 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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In any case, optimism is fine if that's the theme you want to explore. In this particular case, it isn't. Quote:
On the other hand, I bought two nWoD books, Mage and Promethean, and detested both of them. Mage: The Awakening in particular left me with a bad taste, because it basically said that the Western occultist tradition was right about everything and that no other culture had any magic worth mentioning. And over and above that, it had a really strong formalist aesthetic, in contrast to the romanticism of Mage: The Ascension—I suppose that fits with the Western occultist stuff, but it wasn't to my taste. And I didn't like the way everything had to fit into fivefold patterns; it felt artificial.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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07-27-2017, 10:05 PM | #32 | |||||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: my new campaign ideas
I find some of these quite interesting. Others, not so much.
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That said, this would probably move up to slot 2, if it used GURPS.
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. |
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07-27-2017, 10:51 PM | #33 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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In a way this is akin to Stross's Laundry novels, but this isn't Case Nightmare Green or Red or anything like that; magic is not coming back as daikaiju or Elder Gods or invading elven armies or anything splashy, but as glimpses out of the corners of people's eyes as twilight descends. With maybe a hint of The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. Last edited by whswhs; 07-28-2017 at 08:54 AM. |
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07-28-2017, 12:41 AM | #34 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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But . . . your avatar?! What flips your opinion when applied to RPGs? |
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07-29-2017, 08:26 PM | #35 | |||||
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Republic of Texas; FOS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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07-31-2017, 12:55 PM | #36 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
LokRobster: Your top choices are actually the ones I prefer. After that there's more divergence; I've been running the GURPS Mars one for a few months now, and I'd be happy to take up something else for a change.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
08-21-2017, 07:29 AM | #37 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
Update: I've now ascertained a consensus of my local players. The outcome was interesting.
There's a clear favorite: Mage: The Ascension. No one ranked it below 3, and it was two people's first choice. There's a clear unfavorite: GURPS Space, with the realistic future Mars. No one ranked it above 3, and it was two people's last choice. GURPS Supers, Sorcerer, and (a continuation of) GURPS Mars were all grouped in the middle, with a wider range of rankings, and each was one person's first choice. The sum of rankings was respectively 10, 20, 15, 16, and 14, with no one giving an X to any campaign. So it's going to be Mage. Set in London, in 1905, and the players get to decide if they'd rather play Traditions or Technocracy. That's very different from the ratings here, where GURPS Mars was the top choice, followed by GURPS Space, and where we had a couple of people giving GURPS Supers an outright pass. Of course, those differences are precisely why I hand out prospectuses!
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
08-21-2017, 11:47 PM | #38 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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I mean, you don't have to use hit locations, if you don't want to, or anything in G:Martial Arts; G: High Tech gives you all the guns you'll need for such a campaign. You've got G: Powers if you want to throw in some psionics, and you can always throw in some Action rules if you want a cinematic feel. Quote:
The Shadow dates back to the pulp magazine days, prior to comic books. He's contemporary with Doc Savage, Zorro and other larger-than-life pulp heroes who went on amazing adventures, although Lamont Cranston is a ruthless, lone-wolf, crime-fighting vigilante. He's one of the few who successfully made the transition to comic books, but he didn't really fit in with them, very well, even back when Bill Sienkiewicz was drawing it in '87-'88. During the CCA days, Shadow stories in the comic were watered down they counted as emasculated tripe. I like the Shadow's powers, I like his planning and precision, and I like the fact that, because he can read minds, there is never any question about the guilt of his targets. That said, if I were to actually get such powers, I wouldn't waste too much time hunting down drug dealers. I'd go after the real villains -- those who abuse positions of power and authority out of arrogance and greed, and make life more difficult for people than necessary. However, none of that is conducive to team play, and that's what RPGs are all about. The only pulp hero who interests me does not play well with others, which makes superhero settings pretty problematic. I mean, who wants to play in a superhero game with a guy whose character would rather blow a corrupt cop's brains out, than fight a supervillain?
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. |
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09-07-2017, 03:43 PM | #39 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
As I mentioned, the consensus of my local players was for Mage: The Ascension. Naturally, I've been fiddling with it a bit; I hardly ever run anything completely straight! In particular, I don't want to use the Werewolf or Vampire rules, which seem to me to be too focused on making the respective monsters the centers of the game universe. So I've been puzzling over how I think supernatural beings should fit into the game world.
For werewolves and other lycanthropes, I think I want to borrow a motif from Jack Williamson: lycanthropy is a matter of projecting your consciousness out of your body, as a spirit entity, and having it take on animal form to manifest itself. That seems to account fairly well for the difficulty of harming lycanthropes with mundane weapons, and also for their not behaving like actual animals—their behavior comes from the human image of the critter, and from the emotional drives of the person. I can define the spirit manifestation of the person reasonably well by saying that Willpower equals Willpower, Rage equals Strength, and Gnosis is based on the average of Mental and Social traits (possibly modified by the number of points invested in relevant abilities; I need to fiddle with that). But I'm not sure how to handle Power. A first thought would be to make it equal to Quintessence, but I think that lycanthropy ought to be a static magic path, and hedge mages don't use Quintessence. For vampires, the obvious hint seems to be that beings who are "unnatural"—for example, people with big boosts to their Physical stats—become thaumivores (a really misformed word; it ought to be thaumatophage, or perhaps virivore, "eater of vis"), needing to consume Quintessence or start devouring their own Health levels. Taking blood from other humans could be a specialized source of Quintessence, with each Health level granting one Quintessence. This would imply that vampires are either mages who've pushed their own bodies outside the natural limits, or legendary creatures that can only survive in the physical world by preying on mundanes. I can also see an analogy to the way that Marauders export their own Paradox to the people around them, so maybe vampirism is a vice that Marauders fall into. Changelings and wraiths aren't such a problem; they seem to be spirits that inhabit, respectively, the Middle and Low Umbra. I've also been thinking about groups. I definitely don't want the Disparates as they appear in the recent reissue, and not just because my campaign is set more than a century too early. The whole point of the Disparates is that they were groups that refused to join the Nine Traditions; the idea of taking a bunch of nonjoiners and having them join together to maintain their common nonjoinery just doesn't feel right. Certainly I want there to be Crafts out there in the world! I also like the idea that Crafts tend not to make a sharp distinction between dynamic and static magic, and include members of Crafts who have suitable static magic Paths. I'm more bothered, though, by the Nephandi. For one thing, they're presented as embodiments of entropy; but there are also the Euthanatos, who are masters of the Sphere of Entropy and are members of the Traditions, and I don't see how those two concepts fit together. But more importantly, it seems as if Mage has done the same thing that RuneQuest did long ago by having many different Runes and gods, in a relativistic worldview, but then having Chaos, which was apparently an objective evil that all the gods were against: You have a theme of conflict between different worldviews, but then you have a faction that is the Evil faction. It's kind of like having the Slytherins be the Evil House at Hogwarts. If I'm going to run a campaign based on a relativistic worldview, I think I want to have it be relativistic all through. This isn't going to affect character creation, which is a good thing, as the character creation session is ten days from now. But it's interesting to puzzle over.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
09-07-2017, 07:21 PM | #40 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: my new campaign ideas
A relativistic view of the Nephandi is that the universe needs to be destroyed in order to be rebuilt because of the imbalance caused by the Weaver. It is like the thing in Promethea where she realizes that the thing trying to destroy the world is herself.
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