Messages

91

General Chaos / Re: So, music. What's that all about?

« on: November 13, 2014, 03:58:58 AM »

Sleater Kinney -  Bury Our Friends - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRNDB9VqI3Q
Pretty much the definitive grrrl rock band and one of the best alt rock bands in the last ten years. Also, just come back together to be amazing again! This makes me happy, in my parts. Lyrical but powerful, especially when they were being super-political in the early-2000's.

Sky Larkin - Overgrown (Dreamtrak Version) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3isfLFl2ww
Sky Larkin are a Northern English indie-rock band that I've been following for a while now and I don't think they've seen me yet shh. This version is a serene bleep-bloop rendering of what's honestly one of the saddest songs I've ever heard and adds a dreamlike quality to what is basically a song about a car crash.

TV On The Radio - Dear Science - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_9j9cpuvx8&list=PL9dThdR6I6dM9NXR05kN5jFf5tobEvSJO
The whole album. Yes, the whole thing. Front to back, start to finish, making everything that came before or after it look amateurish in a way all the more impressive because they were famously high during the recording of it. Everything punches and rocks and spits and snarls and aches in ways you must know, you must know.

Final Fantasy (Owen Pallet) - He Poos Clouds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDX5dyCJV5o&list=PLlZ7pbciqFlhybzjop8qqH3yPNVBNzIxO

Okay, I'll be impressed if there's a nerdier entry in this thread. It's the solo project of one of the violinists from Arcade Fire and again, this is the full album I'm talking about listen to it listen. Because in 2005's He Poos Clouds, 8 out of the 10 tracks are based around the schools of magic from Dungeons and Dragons. (This Lamb Sells Condos, which is about conjuration, also references both the Drow and Canadian realtors. Many Lives ->49 MP is about divination etc.). Of the other two songs, one the title track (He Poos Clouds), a love song to Link. Yes, him from Legend of Zelda. It's better than it sounds.

Los Campesinos - Hello Sadness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V5SiMKkZrs
LC are one of my favourite bands because of the story they imply; they started out as a university hipster-pop band with songs like "You! Me! Dancing!" and then somewhere between album 1 and album 2, something changed. It's not that someone broke the lead singer's heart, they shat in his soul. So a lot of their songs have these great disconnect between the poppy melodies and rhythms and then crushing lyrics. This particular one stands out to me more for the video than most, which is like a wedding video directed by Eli Roth. So, there's that.

Yourcodenameis:milo - 17 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LVi04TmJdY
Just.. just watch the video.

 

92

General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: October 30, 2014, 07:22:01 PM »

If you like bullshit superpowers and bodybuilders striking Vogue poses, Jojo is for you.

93

Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)

« on: October 23, 2014, 09:02:42 AM »

A "Call the Midwife" CoC adventure is definitely needed.  I always suspected there was more to Sister Monica Joan's insanity than Alzheimer's.

As a British listener, it's really strange for me to hear you guys talking about what is, for me, middle-aged-lady TV. Though, yeah, our cuisine isn't great. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is great, but beyond that.. Yeah, my stomach is a fan of globalism.

If you're looking for more British TV for inspiration, I really recommend Peaky Blinders. It's the right period (post WW1 Birmingham), deals with insanity and conspiracy from the perspective of a small local bookie's gang. Several major characters have severe mental problems following the horror of the Somme. And a major inciting incident in the first season's story is a petty heist at a factory ending up being something They Weren't Expecting when they nabbed the wrong shipment, which can go Cthulhu pretty fast.

Also it has Cillian Murphy and Sam Neil, which is nice.

94

RPGs / Re: Advice for new Keepers?

« on: October 21, 2014, 08:57:01 PM »

Well, I personally play as little D&D as possible and probably wouldn't have kept up with tabletop gaming if D&D had been the only option available. The players I know who are most responsible for that style of uber-conservative play are the older generation of D&D players when it was much higher lethality and adversarial GMing was the norm. The ones that come up with the "never split the party" rules and treat them like religious doctrine even in situations where splitting the party is a major strategic advantage, treating every room like they've just entered the Tomb of Horrors, that kind of thing.

Also, I find D&D games (and other games with less of an investigation focus than CoC) are set around the mentality of "the story comes to you and you react to it", whereas in CoC the players are expected to be much more active in investigation and pursuing leads once set off by the story seed. Again, this is really my experience with a certain subset of gamer rather than a broad comprehensive statement on the entire gamer.

95

General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: October 21, 2014, 08:44:15 PM »

Fools up to 30% of pediatricians

Fools any pediatricians?

Also, that statistic means they tested this thing. Someone went into multiple pediatric offices with a presumably-miserable dog in a latex bag and said "doctor, there's something wrong with my baby".

They were paid to do that. That is their job.

96

RPGs / Re: Advice for new Keepers?

« on: October 20, 2014, 12:10:09 PM »

Make sure everyone is on the same page, explicitly. The fastest way for a game to spiral out of control is for one guy to think this is an action-adventure, or a comedy.

Also, make sure they know not to approach it like it's D&D because the play styles are VERY different in CoC. If you go at it like a D&D party - never split the group, try to avoid potential dangers etc - you end up with a really dull game that doesn't go anywhere.

97

RPGs / Re: Eclipse Phase

« on: October 20, 2014, 11:57:21 AM »

Had the first session with the college group recently and that was... an experience.

I tweaked some things around to change how they all knew each other - they're all members of the same therapy group for Post Apocalypse Stress Disorder (thanks Caleb!) which is actually a way Firewall on Titan keeps an eye on People of Interest. One of them, an uplift professor, gets tapped by Ming to investigate a missing post-doc of his who ended up running afoul of Etemenaki 157 as he was contracting with the work group on creating the skillsoft for the language.

I wasn't expecting half the group to upload it, willfully ignore the fact that it was eating away at their sanity really effing fast, and deliberately and willfully attempt to eradicate humanity with it. No, seriously. They went from "we have to find this guy" to "this is doing bad things to my brain, LETS EMAIL IT TO EVERYONE" with no reason. College players, right?

The game ended with the few members of the group who DIDN'T instantly form a spontaneous doom-cult fleeing for safety, calling for help and Firewall intervening properly to wipe out the infected PCs with an exploding spaceship. The surviving PC's have become sentinels, the dead ones resleeved and shanghai'd into the organization so their 'friends' can keep an eye on them (with kill-switches secretly installed in the replacement morphs in the event that Etemenaki is incidental and no, THEY'RE the actual x-risks) and they've been reassigned somewhere less populated to minimize damage if they go off the rails again.

I'm going to have to come down a bit Dick GM on them to prevent this kind of thing happening again and pretty much say that right now Firewall has their balls in a vice and further bullshit is going to lead to them being permanently wiped from all back ups, make new characters.

98

RPGs / Re: Eclipse Phase Campaign Idea

« on: October 20, 2014, 11:37:20 AM »

I would recommend.. care with this concept because I ran a similar idea a few months back (players are a cell assembled to reinforce Firewall in Lunar orbit following a breach of their security) and one of the players just became super-paranoid and simply REFUSED to do anything because 'it might be a trap'. I mean, refusing to even receive mission briefings in case the file contained a virus etc. Obviously dude has his own problems, but I think the mistake on my part was introducing the possibility of double agents and so on too early. It meant that the early sessions were a real struggle against the paranoids who literally didn't want to do anything that might pose a risk.

What I would recommend is starting off a bit vanilla - you are Firewall, go place, stop threat, hurray good job - and introduce the idea of a possible mole in the second session or even later. The realization that you might have already been given bad info is unsettling,  but you have to keep going to find out what's going on, whereas the Player Logic if you START OFF with "someone might give you bad info" is often to distrust EVERYTHING and not do ANYTHING.

Which is a shame, because I was actually kind of pleased with how the double agent thing I'd written out had ended up even though the game petered out before they could unravel who it was; using the ideas of forking/merging and psychosurgery, I realized the best double agents are those who don't KNOW they're double agents and had a Firewall agent who was two modified beta forks. Individually, neither fork was aware of their own betrayal and thought they were doing internal security for Firewall.

99

General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: October 01, 2014, 05:53:52 PM »

You just entered the wrong neighborhood, baka.

100

RPGs / Re: Your most RIDONKULOUS character evah

« on: September 21, 2014, 11:46:05 AM »

Unfortunately the campaign didn't go anywhere, but we built a small mythos around Ball of Arms Man, who we eventually decided was a vaguely-benevolent Lovecraftian horror, a living rip between worlds leading to a horrible "elemental plane of arms". There was a kind of Chicken Boo thing about him where everyone went around as if he was normal - he even had a secret identity as a hand model - and only this one demented journalist was going "CAN'T YOU SEE, YOU FOOLS? HE'S NOT A MAN! HE'S A BALL OF ARMS!"

101

RPGs / Re: Eclipse Phase

« on: September 20, 2014, 04:19:15 PM »

Got signed up to GM a game at my local college and I really want to do something using the Outer System, so here's what I've figured out.

• AF 8:PC's are reinstatiated infugees from the Fall
• Their egos are recovered by the Titanian Commonwealth
• Part of character creation involves their "interrogation" by TC security
• Sleeved, given lodgings in Nyhaven and all, one way or the other, come to know Magnus Ming
• Ming keeps an eye on them as potential Firewall assets
• Ming taps them to investigate a missing friend who got involved in Oligarch gangs

From there, the Reboots trail leads them to a smuggling ring that sells ice-circuitry from Iapetus to singularity seekers and exhumans and the operation will serve as their introduction to Firewall, ideally before the mid-semester break and then the second half is broader Saturn orbit dealing with x-risks.

Depending on the group, I might have one of the re-instatiated egos is actually a Firewall mole working for Ming to keep a close eye on them.

102

RPGs / Re: Your most RIDONKULOUS character evah

« on: September 20, 2014, 04:00:55 PM »

When a magic-themed Mutants and Masterminds (2e) edition was being put together, I decided to make a golem so that the party had a bruiser and it wasn't just a team of mechanically-identical casters. I decided it would be modeled after something historical or mythological, to fit in with the theme, so after having spent all my points to make a nice efficient punchman, I decided to drop some points into Additional Limbs. Thus I created Gyges, a stone golem that had formerly been a weapon of Cerulean, the evil archmage, before Arcane bent it to his will and set it to protect his apprentices (the other PC's) Now, the GM took offense to my golem being modeled after one of the Hekatonkhire (for some reason) and insisted I have fewer super-strong arms. In my defense, he only had over twenty - not THAT many arms.

Well, being contrary I decided to draft a character who had nothing BUT Additional Limbs as their power. Which at PL 10 - 150 PP, Rank 150 in the power - was a LOT of Arms. In fact Hero Lab literally couldn't calculate it, which I took to mean "functionally infinite arms".

Thus was born Ball of Arms Man, three hundred and sixty degrees of PUNCH.

103

RPGs / Re: THE QUEUE: Whacha got in YOUR gaming pipeline

« on: August 09, 2014, 03:18:21 PM »

"You review the business tax records. ROLL SAN"

^me irl 

"We gotta tax deez kiiiiids!"

104

Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Timeline of Eclipse Phase

« on: August 03, 2014, 07:07:55 AM »

I've heard all the theories about when EP takes place, which I think kind of misses the point of the BF/AF dating system but whatever. Honestly, I kind of prefer EP being a bit further along than 2190.  One of the things that's kind of cool about the setting is that it's in this transitional phase between post-cyberpunk and The Culture, so it could be a pretty long time after the 21st century - or with accelerated technological development, it could be really soon. I think it's up to your individual tastes, but I definitely fall in the "couple extra centuries" camp.

105

RPGs / Re: THE QUEUE: Whacha got in YOUR gaming pipeline

« on: July 24, 2014, 09:52:31 PM »

An idea I'd been bouncing around in my head, ran past my group and they seem to like it so I might run it sooner or later.

World of Darkness: Tin Kickers

The game starts out as a fairly regular Mortals game. The players go through their daily lives, connected in some way or happening to simply be in the same place at the wrong time. Then Final Destination happens, a massive traumatic catastrophe that takes dozens of lives in a totally unexpected fashion. The players then receive their Geists and wake up again as Sin-Eaters.

Through their Geists, the Sin-Eaters learn that things are not quite going right with death. They already knew with things like ghosts getting bound to our world that the mechanics of the afterlife were... imperfect. Inelegant, perhaps. But these statistically-improbable accidents are happening more and more, escalating in pace and scale. Some people are getting killed, but not dying. The Geists are uneasy, the Kereboi are frantic. Somewhere, deep in the Underworld, something is wrong. Death is broken. And someone's got to go down there and fix it.