Does it seem to envision any scenarios where the PCs might engage in D&D stuff… outside of Dungeon? Willfully wanting to eliminate that is a really alien way to engage with high fantasy, to me
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It’s really inconsistent! Like when you’re reading the entries on NPCs and the world at large and the species and even the classes it’s an admittedly not grimdark, but definitely pretty normal D&D setting. Just one not at the verge of war. Like one paragraph it says cops keep all crime under control and in another there’s giant crime networks. Stuff is basically fine and nobles are just rich people with swanky clothes in one paragraph but there’s a new paladin oath is to help proletariat revolution (nice).
It’s less boring than the forgotten realms, and it has a build in explanation for why anacronistic technology happens exactly enough for an Actual Play Podcast-like experience, which I actually dig. Having some asshole with a polaroid charging you five gold for a photo is a thing that can happen, as is walking through a neon soaked redlight district, or a mansion with Thief style electric lighting. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
…the longer I read it the more it makes sense it’s a furry RPG not because of the quality but because of how much it kind of doesn’t give a fuck about something entirely making sense? Like you can be a vegetarian tiger because the important part is that you’re covered in fur and have big claws. Species can mix because [shrugs shoulders] and will either produce hybrids or just the same species as the parent. Stuff exists because it needs to support the aesthetic.
This is illustrated by how it specifically has a list of products at a pet store so you can buy them for the party even though this doesn’t make sense outside of it being a thing IRL furries do.
It’s all really well thought out for a very specific sort of play that is admittedly a real sort of play that real people do, which does put it ahead of 90% of games from the 90s at least. Mostly color and character scenes but sometimes you kill monsters in a surreal hole.
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this is why i can only run d&d as a black comedy about colonialism. or, like, about an actual military campaign
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Met up with some friends in Salem on Sunday, stopped by a spooky comic store:
I bought this one ^
Strongly considered getting this ^
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Slipgate Chokepoint looks a bit more playable than Qvke Borg but I’ve learned my lesson and won’t be running a video game based setting anytime again soon.
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my standard D&D setup is to take the ‘dungeon’ part of the title literally and run the start of the campaign as a prison break situation. Straight up Hard Times MDickie adventures.
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Ah, so it’s a “this is all the stuff I want in my dnd game and I don’t care too much to make it all make sense together” approach. I mean, fair enough. Kind of crazy to see a lushly produced printed product with the same vibe as like, a cool 15 year old’s dnd game.
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Man I have seen the face of the Bowie-except-he-also-looks-like-Bon-Jovi guy so many times, what a nostalgia bomb.
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We talking about that Torg cover? Has always looked like girlmode Val Kilmer to me
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It’s not just kitchen sink more like…
Ok so the thing about furries as a concept is that you start with the premise that there are going to be furries. You probably aren’t actually thinking of the reasons why there are furries because the point is the aesthetic and the sensory elements that are implied by anthro animal characters.
In the RPG, yes sure there is an explanation for why there are both anthro and non anthro animals, kind of, but it exists because of the first premise that anthro animals exist.
There are conscientious aesthetic considerations at work here beyond simply throwing everything together. The next obvious thing is: in a lot of webcomics and podcast fantasy worlds you will have occasional, non-ubiquitous, anachronistic tech. Like a basically medieval world that occasionally feature a wizard with a toaster or the aforementioned Polaroid camera.
But again, it’s aesthetic first and foremost. The aesthetic isn’t a mish-mash of conflicting ideas, but having it make sense inevitably leads there because D&D pseudo medieval (actually early modern) fantasy but sometimes you have a story arc about hot rod races does. Especially if you don’t want there to be hot rod races all the time everywhere.
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Dark Conspiracy is a pretty neat game. I’ve never played it by have some of the books, including that one. It shares mechanics with Twilight 2000, which has pretty detailed modern combat rules, so I think it would work well as a pure cyberpunk game. As it stands it is more of a cyberpunk-ish, cthulu-ish take on the x-files. From what I hear the base D10 mechanics do have some issues in play but later supplements improved the situation with a modified D20 system for task resolution.
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Ok so the thing about furries as a concept is that you start with the premise that there are going to be furries
spot on general explanation of furry fandom tbh
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from the series that brought you the term “psychic damage”
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Ahhh the Shadowrun reddit…
My friend who ran the Shadowrun 5e game a while back did a one-shot with Cyberpunk RED. Overall, with Foundry and macros, pretty solid little system. Nothing at all out of the ordinary, but it’s at least pretty simple. It only uses a d10 system, where you roll a d10 and add both your relevant stat and skill to the thing you’re trying to do. Solid character-build app too.
We had a fun session where the running joke was that fentanyl was the main recreational drug of 2045, appearing in mixed drinks and gas station pills.
I will note that my character, who was essentially just Julie from Motorcity, couldn’t actually use her muscle car in any meaningful way with this system, which seems like a miss.
The GM plans to go back to Shadowrun 5e for his next game, which will evidently involve space travel and be modeled after The Expanse. God knows if it’ll still be in the Shadowverse or not. I hope it is, it’s a cool universe.
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To be fair to Shadowrun, yeah, one of the reasons it’s so unplayable is that it wants to separately model each of these realms to endorse specific fantasies - personal combat, hermetic magic, shamanic magic, rigging (driving & vehicle combat), decking (hacking & digital combat) - each of which is robust enough to drive its own separate game. That’s incredibly ambitious. I mean, it’s too ambitious, it’s stupid actually, but… what if it could work…
Why. Whyyyyyyyyyy
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Look if you’re going to do a heavy point by trad game that was and is outclassed by hundreds of better games at least do it in Gurps the outclassed heavy point by trad game the expanse was originally run in when it was tabletop game.
EDIT: In all seriousness while gurps isn’t really a thing I’d recommend I do genuinely think it’s better than Shadowrun 5e. 4e is a little more debatable but definitely 5e.
DOUBLE EDIT: IT was D20 modern apparently?? I swore I read it was Gurps. It feels so…gurps-ey.
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Wait is it confirmed that the expanse was originally a gurps transhuman space campaign because it def had that vibe
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Nope, got it completely wrong it was D20 modern. Weird, I swore it was Gurps. Where the hell did I get that idea from?
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the whole setting feels like it was lifted straight from transhumans space so I think we all just assumed it was gurps
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