- Joined
- Oct 18, 2022
Watch out for 4e rogues. One Bloody Path and suddenly you're death-touching yourself, making yourself double undead and I guess develop urges to browse in incognito mode.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
- Thread starter Surtur
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- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
Sounds like he accepted his characters' explanation of what would happen if you did this and didn't ask why nobody actually does this in the real world. The answer is that drug-laced squirt guns aren't actually an instakill superweapon.
Are they firing the wokies? Then they have no idea what they did wrong.
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2017
Ahhh thats what I get for not doing a search beforehand. Thanks for the write ups @Manly_Brony @Blarmed&Dangerous.
I've got the PDFs so that seems like a middle ground for now.
The adventures look very fun... I dunno, feels like Xfiles is back in style lately as is 90s throwbacks in general.
This kills me. It feels like so often I go to look at something really cool looking or well produced and then find out, well ackshually buying this supports trooned out antifa super soldiers that want your kids raped and brainwashed and you dead (Goodman gaming etc). Part of me thinks, yeah not getting a dollar of mine. Another part thinks it's fucking hilarious for the Wrong Type to be doing whatever the fuck I want with their system. Shame the second hand market for the newer stuff is non-existent where I am as that's the easiest answer.
I've got the PDFs so that seems like a middle ground for now.
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2015
Yeah, it kinda goes without saying that if a writer isn’t talking about White genocide on xitter, just assume that they’re gay race communists and you will be right most of the time.
I must caution that there are a lot of adventures that are absolute dogshit. As I hinted at, many of them don’t account for very obvious player choices/or fail to answer basic questions that you the GM might have. I always prefer a more grounded, realistic version of X-Files and a lot of published adventures have a tendency towards the…zany, for lack of a better word.
And I have a deep, deep grudge against the “best” DG adventure, Impossible Landscapes. The premise is that your party goes to investigate a missing woman in the nineties. Her apartment building changes at night, including her neighbors all having different personalities and memories. At night, the roof door opens up into a mysterious, infinite late-19th century hotel. Your party can actually do nothing about any of this and the game only progresses when your party decides there’s nothing they can do, gives up, and leaves and/or McVeighs the building.
Fast forward twenty years and you get assigned another mission that has a bunch of (seemingly) ties to the earlier one. In fact, the whole adventure is filled with these ties - evidence and connections that the author admits goes nowhere. It’s all admittedly meaningless. It’s meant to make you feel like you’re going crazy, doing the red string corkboard thing but nothing ever connects into anything meaningful so you’re convinced you’re missing something that it turns out isn’t actually there.
The handler that gave you the mission is actually insane, and if you contact DG for more information they ask you to meet in an abandoned mall and then send a hit squad after you. Whether you do this or not, by the end of the adventure your characters are still permanently hunted by DG and never take part in regular adventures again. There’s also extensive information on if your players decide to track down and interrogate the owner of the investment firm that owns the abandoned mall for some reason. She has no information.
What follows is a sequence of unintelligible random events that your characters have no agency in, culminating in being transported to Carcosa and attending the King in Yellow’s ball. They discover the missing girl from the beginning but can’t rescue her. They’re then returned to normal life, again forever hunted by DG for having contact with the Yellow King, possessed of the knowledge that all of this happened because it was going to happen and the Yellow King is a being of pure random madness that just makes stuff happen because. All clues were pointless because the King is outside causality and reality is just his mad stage play. Nothing matters, nothing’s real, there are no answers, and your characters must now retire.
Great adventure. 10/10. I can see why everyone loves it
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2017
I just tried a solo dungeon crawl style thing with Mothership (Dead Planet's Derelict Ship Generator) and I wouldn't recommend it. I could see how it's more fun to be constantly running away from stuff in a group setting but the dice rolls feel absolutely brutal. There's all this cope around Mothership where it's like "it's the worst day of your life so of course you're shitty" and "you're not supposed to do combat" and "you're supposed to avoid dice rolls". You need the dice rolls in solo or everything is contrived.
Also the 0-99 d100 is retarded, and you have inconsistent d10 depending on if it's a table or damage.
In CY_BORG you might get one hit killed at level 1, but at least you can buy armor and use glitches. You have tools to prevent death.
CORP BORG: https://heltung-storytelling.itch.io/corp-borg
Also the 0-99 d100 is retarded, and you have inconsistent d10 depending on if it's a table or damage.
In CY_BORG you might get one hit killed at level 1, but at least you can buy armor and use glitches. You have tools to prevent death.
CORP BORG: https://heltung-storytelling.itch.io/corp-borg
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2018
Not sure. There's no word on that yet. Just bringing on a Gygax, and he issued an apology at a con.
I agree though. They need to clean house, bring out a new edition.
The problem is what to do with a new edition. Can't go old school due to the abundance of OSR. Best option I can see is modernise, streamline, and rewrite all the mechanics. ie. Nimble 5e. It will piss off the grogs something fierce. It would also require playtesting and editing, something they're unlikely to do if they're trying to speed run a new edition after the collapse of 2024 ed.
Likewise, they have to go all in on the modules, including some new settings. Some are easy wins, like reversing the wokeshit. Some, not so much. As much as it's memed on, I do think a wizarding world setting is a good idea given the popularity of Harry Potter. The problem is that making it a DnD setting instead of gay prom would be damaging the setting the same way making Strahd gay damages Ravenloft.
I don't know if the internet was mainstream enough to look that stuff up. (Fuck, to this day I don't know if a tooth cap of PCP allows you to break handcuffs like in the movies) Even so, I think he was playing RAW? Again, not a cyberpunk (the game) or shadowrun expert so don't know what those games specific rules about DMSO were.
AI says it was 4th edition Shadowrun.
Also from AI.
If you want to solo RPGs, best way I found to do it is RPG-lite board games. Solo RPGs like Ironsworn seem to be writing excerises pretending to be games.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I was always a 20s guy. Partly it is just the traditional setting, but you also had things like Prohibition that could be exploited for money by bootlegging. Also, guns. Lots and lots of guns.
My massive abuse character was a gnome illusionist-thief, and the combo of stealth mechanics and illusion spells meant entire encounters could be completely avoided.
Everyone got sick of this and I was banned from doing it.
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
I've done this with HeroQuest and its quite good.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2017
That's part of the fun/justification for me. I have one campaign running purely based on oracle interpretation, literally tarot cards and shit, no LLM (Tricube Tales Systems).
Mythic Bastionland is on my list of things to try next. I'm just system hopping.
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2018
@CrunkLord420
Let me know if any of them are any good.
You might like Five Parsecs. It's a minis wargame, but is known for it's emergent story telling.
I was kind of tempted by (I think it was) Index Card RPG where you draw cards to design dungeons.
Let me know if any of them are any good.
You might like Five Parsecs. It's a minis wargame, but is known for it's emergent story telling.
I was kind of tempted by (I think it was) Index Card RPG where you draw cards to design dungeons.
- Joined
- May 25, 2024
Dimethyl sulfoxide does mostly work like that, with caveats, namely that it functions by increasing the permeability of the skin, to allow whatever is dissolved in it to be absorbed into the body, though not quickly. It is used a lot for drug trials for that purpose. It is extremely potent, and given that the Shadowrun world is extremely polluted, it is more than likely that being exposed to it would induce anaphylactic shock from absorbing the environmental toxins. That said it has problems, for one being that squirt guns aren't really good methods of delivering something, especially since an errant wind could blow it back on you or a fuck up on your part to dump it on yourself, and unless you are in a chemically sealed suit, you are getting both the drug and likely pollution-induced shock. Less mentioned in the Shadowrun community is that DMSO has an unusually high melting point for a room-temperature liquid, at only 19 °C or 66 °F, so if it is colder than that (which is not unlikely), you are left with a slurry or a solid block. All that aside because the real drug (rather than the rules in the book) is slow acting and can't transmit everything, like large molecules. If you follow the REAL science, it serves as a way to deliver a toxin without injections or ingestion over a while.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2017
Everyone recommends Mythic which is a very long winded explanation of the general process. Like Ironsworn it tries to build a mechanic around tension and story progression but I consider that stuff too contrived. I think JeansenVaars' "Unfolding Machine" series might be better. He's written an app around his zines, with optional AI integration module, it's about to launch on Steam: https://jeansenvaars.itch.io/
I've been looking at the Loner series, which is an evolution of Freeform Universal. Core book is free, the paid settings books contain relevant tables: https://loner.zotiquestgames.com/
I usually just roll a d6 yes/no/but/and or a d100 probability, then flavor it with randomly generated words/phrases/images/tarot when building out narrative. Fitting the interpretation into the existing narrative is the hard part. The most fun is when I lose a high probability die and suddenly have to throw out my preconceived notions about what is happening.
Lightning's Heraldry
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2019
I just hard quit Mythic Bastionland. It automates much of what I actually like doing as a GM and I hate wishy-washy zone based combat systems. It's combat also feels like it is missing about 2 pages of information, which says a lot because the combat is about 1 page of information. It also has some overland travel rules but they are extremely simple and nothing worth noting.
If you unironically like borg games though it may be something you enjoy.
I do plenty of solo campaign stuff using older modules like BECMI, B/X and AD&D modules when I am not running them for my groups. Some of these were even written with intent to be used solo. Most require you run a full party as a solo player though.
If you don't want to play a much older edition of D&D (or retroclone of your choice) then I would recommend trying Black Sword Hack. If you like Elric it is a no-brainer. I had an excellent time running a number of stories solo (true solo, with 1 character). The characters are plenty strong enough that if you use your tools correctly and build out a good character with the talents you can work your way through stuff intended for a party.
For solo games I haven't tried yet I think Knave 2e is also not terrible. It at least is pretty well edited and very legible, a small thing many systems do poorly. It also has a good number of rollable tables and especially seems to have really good overland travel rules. Combat is probably a little boring though.
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
I've pushed back on the wokeness claims of modern DG before in this thread. The guys running DG are certainly leftists, but they aren't writing about the DEI hiring practices of the Program.
The whole point of Delta Green is that the conspiracies are true, evil things lurk on the fringe and in the centers of power. The 90s DG was a reaction to the actions of the federal government on innocents and well-deserved targets. COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Watergate, JFK Commission, Vietnam, all that shit. The agents we play were somewhat of a bulwark against the more nefarious elements within and without society.
However, what happened in the 2000s? The terrorists became foreigners. The hippie boomers cheered on as they voted away civil liberties and promoted the patriotic values of bombing brown people. The response to the discovery of a vast domestic surveillance infrastructure was just a few mutterings of outrage, contained to the 24 hour news cycle. You, agent of the Program, might get to fight the monsters, but you can't look into the corporation that funded the experiments. You will violate every law on the books, because otherwise "Cthulhu" will win. A reaction to the 2000s and 2010s.
You are playing a DG game and expected the characters to come out on top? Impossible Landscapes is about the journey, not the the destination. You, the storyteller, might know where everything ends up, but the players don't. And as someone who ran Impossible Landscapes, the fun was stringing the players along.
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2013
I had a game that started out as 5e but I ended up homebrewing so much of the lore post 3.5 to undo the Spell Plague and fucking with the system to incorporate aspects of older editions until it resembled some kind of bizarre homebrew homunculi. Even incorporated some Call of Cthulhu mechanics just for funsies.
But life happened, work happened, schedules happened and it kind of just...petered out.
I miss it.
But life happened, work happened, schedules happened and it kind of just...petered out.
I miss it.
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2024
A friend of mine had a similar idea but it took place in the early 20's right around when the civil war was finally coming to a close. Sadly, we never played it. Basically, you're a group of about 4-5 Soviet soldiers rooting out White soldiers in the Caucuses and the commanding officer dies very early on from a booby trap and the group gets cut off by White forces, forcing the group to go deeper into the mountains. There's some survival elements but ultimately, the group comes across a race of Neanderthal-Ape-like men living in massive cave systems and things escalate from there.
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
They're shitting out more Magic and using AI slop for it. lolno.
Though I will say that the DnD 6e guys were more "with it" so to speak than the DnDead crew, simply because the ones who were working on it (ie napkin designing it in the back since they had no resources), were likely aware that DnDone was going to fail.
The problem is that Wizards will shit in the pot and fuck it up since the way they handle play testing and criticism are all fucked up.
The problem is they botch the execution more often than you're giving credit for, and the writer is not divided from the work like it probably should be.
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2015
With nonsense. IL makes a big point of having excruciating detail on things that look like clues but go nowhere. The adventure has no clues. I don't care that the players don't come out on top, I care that it burns characters on a cavalcade of nonsense.
In the girl's apartment, there's a world war 1 field radio that has a serial number that is the date of the construction of the building that went missing from a soldier who was the third cousin of the barber of the architect...
God help you if your party discovers that literally none of the clues ever lead anywhere. I love investigative games like DG because I love making players think like that, actually investigating, rewarding engagement with the narrative reality. IL effectively punishes this behavior by making every instance an active waste of the players' time and the characters' resources, and it does this across three hundred pages of an adventure with no payoff either mechanically or narratively. It's just a bunch of random shit that happened for no reason and also undermines the entire setting by establishing that everything happening in the DG universe also happens for no reason because reality is just KY's jumble o'nonsense.
It's a bad adventure with a slick presentation.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
That's kind of funny, because my longest running CoC campaign, also in the 20s, involved gangsters and gun-runners affiliated with the White Russians who absolutely detested Communists and had escaped to the United States and engaged in rum-running and arms dealing.
They were fiercely patriotic to their adopted country, despite being criminals, and even had a certain degree of police protection because they usually killed even worse criminals.
This is the campaign I've mentioned repeatedly before where the final enemy that finished them off wasn't Cthulhu or the eldritch, but the IRS.
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2024
I would like to add for the record, this wasn't some pro-Commie fantasy shit like one would expect from someone who builds a scenario around Soviet Russia. It's based off of real life events of Soviet soldiers shooting a wild man that charged at them from a cave in the Caucuses in the 1920s.