High TL 9 vs TL2+RPM

[dfinlay]

Originally Posted by ericthered

There are a couple of things you can toggle that really effect the outcome:

I know. That's part of what I'm asking you guys for help on: figuring out where I should put those things in order for my desired outcome to be plausible. I don't have enough RPM experience to figure it out. That said, some answers:

Originally Posted by ericthered

How abundant are mages? If you have one per 10 people, that's very different than one per 10,000. And it makes a huge difference in the relative strengths of the two sides.

This is one that I'm not super fixed on. That said, they should be reasonably common. I could really go anywhere from "Everyone has some level of magic, but many will have very low skill (11 or 12 in one path, say)" to "one in two hundred", but wouldn't want mages to be rarer than that.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Where do you fall along the sliding scale of stat normalization? This makes a huge difference, because it decides how good your mages are. if your average mage only has a highest path skill of 12 or 13, you have a lot weaker mages than if your average mage has a skill of 14 or 15, and the curve for RPM power really gets going at about 17 -- so where you put the end of your curve is really important too. Do skill 20 people exist? more than one of them? which paths?

What I'm planning for stat normalization for this campaign, in general: For attributes, before genetic engineering, drugs or weird defects (low IQ due to brain damage, for example), I usually go with roughly a +1 being a standard deviation: roughly 68% of the population has between 9 and 11, 95% between 8 and 12, 99.7% between 7 and 13. A 14 is about 1 in 30 000 and a 15 about 1 in 3 million. A 15 (or on very rare occasion a 16) is what I consider absolute human maximum and I usually require an unusual background for PCs with an attribute greater than 14. That said, drugs and genetic engineering can probably squeeze out a +1 or +2. For skills, I'm a bit more generous: I usually go with competent professionals having 12+, people who's skill is really notable having 16+ and top (or near top) in the world at a skill being 19+. I usually require PCs to have an Unusual Background for skills over 18 and 22 or so is about the highest I'd allow.

That said, I'd be perfectly fine with having magic use a different scale than this. If I need to say Path skills over 15 require UB and are extremely rare or if I need to have several people with Path skills of 25 to get the results I want, I can do that. In terms of which paths, I'd say that the distribution of paths is pretty even.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Related to that is how common are grimoires and places of power? are +5 places hard to find, or is there one in every province? can I round up 10 +10 grimoires of 'armageddon fire' for a magically oriented set of nukes?

So, I'd say places of power in the +1 to +3 range are relatively common, but there are maybe a few dozen +5 or higher places of power in the setting, with the most powerful being around a +8 or +9.

As for grimoires, what I do know is that when I set the campaign (about 50-70 years after the war), I want good grimoires to be rarified: say similar rarity to equivalent places of power above. That said, a lot of grimoires would have been destroyed in the war or afterwards (magic has been illegalized since) and so there could have been many more during the war.

Originally Posted by ericthered

How united are the low tech folks? It'd be a rare world where a single empire has conquered the entire world. When a small high tech group takes on a small low tech group, its best for the small group to initiate and hijack an internal dispute. At which point its tech and magic vs just magic. Or they can use divide and conquer.

Even on a given planet, they wouldn't be very united: there would definitely be local nations, wars and divisions. Different planets in the solar system would be quite disassociated, with powerful magic needed to move back and forth or even communicate. The invaders would definitely use divide and conquer style tactics against them.

Originally Posted by ericthered

I don't allow sacrificed in RPM. At least not in mass. RPM is generally an exponential system (and that which is not exponential is inefficient), while adding sacrificed energy from laymen is quite linear. It really does break things, and break them hard. And if a player figures out any linear way to get energy for RPM, I object. I do allow players to use an exponential scale to add energy though: the first input is at full strength, the next two at half, the next four at a quarter, and so on. Try the legion trick and you get 30 energy from 1023 people. That's just my house rule, but you don't have a classical magic-using society if you allow the legion of FP stunt -- someone already used it to cause a nuclear level holocaust.

My feeling was always that large scale sacrifice was hard. That's because iirc, anyone who doesn't fully have the interests of the ritual at heart screws it up pretty badly and sacrifice hurts. Trying to force people into giving sacrifice just won't work and any attempt to gather large groups to sacrifice without carefully vetting them leads to people ****ing up the ritual. If it is an issue in spite of this, I will probably do something similar to the scaling recommendations listed above. I've read RPM, but only run a game with it briefly, so I don't have a good sense of exactly what issues emerge in play.

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

If Magery is even genetic in the first place. The OP didn't specify.

The desired post-war setting might influence that choice. Is the original population gone? Still a few magic-wielding refugees? A subjugated remnant? Co-existence with the invaders, with varying possible degrees of hostility? In some of these, you might want magic to remain the exclusive province of the aborigines. In others, the invaders might take over magic along with everything else, or might need it to maintain their foothold.

It is possible for the high-tech invaders to learn magic, but they will be unlikely to have anyone very good at it before the end of the war, as magic takes a large amount of study. I've decided to go with Magic being purely learned (though, as with, say math, some people will have more of a knack for it), but Ritual Adept having a genetic component.

Originally Posted by starslayer

There are so many questions I have-
Why is an interstellar group bothering with conquest; with no FTL and no FTL coms they would have known that the place there were going was inhabited LONG before they got there, and should have steered away (doubly so when they could not identify any signatures of how those people travel interstellar distances, assumption should have been: They have technology way in excess of us, run).

Ah, sorry, maybe should have fleshed out the timeline a bit more. The short of it is that they were desperate. The long of it is below:

• An AI goes rogue (paperclip maximizer style) and humanity winds up in a desperate war that they cannot win.
• Eventually, desperate and losing against a vastly more intelligent foe, the survivors create another AI specifically to combat the first one and protect humanity. The ensure it will self-destruct on completion.
• Both AIs are completely destroyed, but the Solar System is as well. Due to the deployment of very heavy-duty weaponry (including nuclear), no planets are left inhabitable.
• The survivors build a fleet of generation ships and set out for a system with what appears to be multiple inhabited planets.
• Several generations pass and a proper social structure slowly re-emerges on the ship: top down, bureaucratic and authoritarian by the necessities of survival in space.
• After several generations, the ships finally notice the system they are heading towards is inhabited, not too long before arrival (bear in mind that there are no radio signals or similar for them to pick up on). Redirecting somewhere else isn't really an option for a couple of reasons: one being that they have enough fuel for the deceleration, not for a whole ton of redirection and another being that the people have been promised a new world and don't want to spend the rest of their lives in space.
• As a result, they decide to conquer the locals, who after all, don't have the trappings of a high-tech society.
• Due to magic, the war is harder and longer than expected and many die, but eventually, they seize control of the system and set up their authoritarian regime here.
• People now have a deep fear of magic, so mages are hunted down and grimoires are destroyed. Tests are supposed to be run on newborn babies people who test positive for the Ritual Adept gene are taken, brainwashed and recruited into the Mage Killer corps, the only legal mages, who use the Path of Magic to hunt down other mages and wear antimagic collars (a tech developed after the war) that are remotely controlled by their handlers.
• More than half a century later, hidden in the shadows and the farther corners of the System, renegade mages teach each other their secrets and try to keep their traditions alive, working with smugglers, pirates and rebels. This is when the campaign is set and I'm going for a bit of a Firefly feel.

I do like the suggestion of having them get scrywalls given to them by defectors, though. I might use that.