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Val Ritz

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Everything posted by Val Ritz

  1. Is there a way to disable things like Terror on the player character, like they were in the original series? I'm trying to run an Agent, but I'm kind of tired of seeing a vlish and immediately writing off a zone as Reload City.
  2. Monarch was a man with infinite power and no sense of scale--a madman, as we'd call such a creature in our own world. There's a pretty great John Mulaney skit where he says the line "That's the thing about crazy people, they just have unlimited crazy currency, the things they say don't mean anything to them." This was someone who was at a power level where he could lift a finger and wipe out a swathe of countryside with a horde of ravening beasts. If he wanted to be rid of society (either as an end in itself or as a means to get peace for his research) it took comparatively more effort to pick up and go someplace else rather than just raze and kill everything within a hundred-mile radius of his laboratory. We see that canisters erode a user's empathy, and indeed their ability to care about anything but their own pursuits, their ability to so much as recognize the sentience of other life forms. What if Monarch was so far down the rabbit hole that this was just his solution to finding a mess on his kitchen counter? What if everything he did, from his perspective, was no more unreasonable than taking some Clorox bleach spray and cleaning house?
  3. So the Spiderweb Software Facebook page just dropped an article from GeekWire interviewing Jeff. Most of the content focuses on Avernum III, but a little over halfway through, we get this gem: I'm yelling, I don't know about you guys. It's in the cards, even if the original IP is probably going to happen first.
  4. Val Ritz

    Rah.

    Favorite meme - Incorrect quotes and modified image text, such as the following gem: [Edit: Image removed for mild swearing] Least favorite meme: Those things with the expanding brain.
  5. Bastard Bonds is neat, but the lack of an autosave function really knocks you in the teeth, considering the difficulty curve. Honestly, the title that's felt most like a Spiderweb game has been Tyranny, right down to the faction-picking and Omnicidal Neutral option.
  6. I'm with Lilith on that front. The Five-Factor index is too much like homework. Specifics and no sweeping generalizations to give me a sense of artificial identity and pride.
  7. Easydamus has a pretty great test for what Dungeons and Dragons alignment you are. It's not horrendously obvious what options lead to where, and I like it a lot.
  8. Eradicate them. Hyper-intelligent, magically gifted, naturally-procreating creations with tendencies toward sociopathy and megalomania? The fact that they were ever allowed out of the Rebellion's warrens is a testament to their madness.
  9. The perfect weapon for striding up to someone who's been studying what they shouldn't and separating their head from their shoulders. Bravo.
  10. For Geneforge I would absolutely suggest a baton, but I'd also suggest a Control Rod. The weapons of the Shapers are far more than just steel.
  11. All hail the Midwestern Nexus, apparently. This is really shaping up into a web one can get caught in.
  12. I don't, mainly because I haven't needed one yet. If one of my parties winds up wandering out that far past Dillame, then I'll consider putting one together.
  13. 438. Dilemming - Savior dies for your sins over and over again A potential problem with any model of salvation that is not committed to the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice: If he didn't completely take care of it the first time, he'd be required to do it over and over until it was fixed, resulting in God being some sort of divine lemming, running toward death. If he didn't do it, though, he wouldn't be omnibenevolent. Dilemma. I'm reaching for this one.
  14. Night Claws. The best worst only low-budget sasquatch horror movie you'll ever need. Howling 2 is the same, but with werewolves. It gets bonus points because Christopher Lee is in it!
  15. 426. Obake Opaka - What you get when an alien baby is forced to attack distant, psychic relatives of its foster mother An obake is a Japanese changeling, and the Opaka is the spiritual leader of the Bajoran people, who serves as their conduit to their Prophets. The Changelings in Star Trek sent out one hundred of their young into the universe to gather information. Thus, an Obake Opaka would be a Changeling Opaka; one who is forced by their adoptive, foster "mother," Bajor, to wage war on the Dominion, ruled by the psychically-linked Founders. 3/6
  16. 413. Hermeneutikos - An essential part of speaking Greek. Hermeneutics is the branch of study dealing with interpretation, and thus would be very necessary for anyone trying to speak Greek. 411. Breastless Pilgrims and Tragic Views - They're too important to be lies, according to Shah Zaman, according to John Barth An excerpt from John Barth's Chimera, where Shah Zaman describes the eponymous story as "too important to be lies - fictions, maybe, but truer than fact."
  17. "Durdling around and contributing nothing" is kind of the national motto for the Ashen Isles, so he's at least consistent with everyone else trapped on that string of rocks. Maybe he's got a similar thing going to Diwaniya, where he's been quietly sidelined by the Council?
  18. In a lot of ways, the conflict at work (totalitarian control of Shaping vs. use of it by all) is not unlike the information revolution and the struggles we're running up against now with internet piracy. Before the Internet, it was a simple matter to track down bootleggers and people making unlicensed copies of movies, albums, what have you. You had a physical trail to follow. Similarly, prior to the advent of the Geneforge and related technologies, anyone trying to learn Shaping was easy enough to track down: just follow the trail of stolen books and research implements. Now, though? The Internet allows for the transfer of information without physical media. The Geneforge and canisters allow for the proliferation of illegal Shaping without a single scrap of Shaper text or lab equipment going missing. Sure, you can crush the individual offenders one by one, but as long as one copy survives on the Net, as long as there's one Barzahl, one Ghaldring, one Akhari Blaze, you're screwed. The cat's out of the bag, Pandora's box has been opened. You cannot, as they say, unring a bell.
  19. Version 2.0! Now with landmarks mostly... uh. Marked. Some of them are of my own invention, but quite a few are where they're supposed to be. I've also started cleaning up some terrain and making the place a little more wide-open, as opposed to just Mountains Everywhere.
  20. Going forward, I'm definitely going to have to change the habitability of the place as well as the simplicity of the map. Having all these different patches of different terrains is cool and all, but it makes it kind of hard to understand. As far as scaling goes, I'm going for something like 24 miles to a hex, which would make the place roughly the size of Pakistan. As far as the key goes, if you're super committed to it, each of the terrain tiles is labeled in the Hexographer free app, so you could potentially figure that out. Otherwise, I'm kind of hogtied as far as legends go, I'm afraid.
  21. Well, frankly, Shaping is a lot like necromancy in general. You take something organic and turn it into an ambulatory thing. Heck, most forms of necromancy in games allow you to summon up skeletons and zombies and such on the fly, just like Shaping would. With this, we've still got the sprawling research complexes and warrens full of magitech, at the cost of some of the instant fire velociraptors. In terms of setting coherency, I feel the former is a lot more crucial to the Shaper vibe than the latter. And, either way, the world I'm piecing together isn't pure Geneforge anyway. I'm splicing a whole lot of things to it, and it's closer to "D&D with Shapers" than it is to "Geneforge in D&D rules"
  22. Oh, absolutely. I'm basically entirely dodging the idea of Shaper PCs, mostly by eliminating spontaneous Shaping. Shaping is entirely the vats-and-pools system in the homebrew world, and basically results in monsters under the mental control of the NPC in question. Fluff-wise it's very similar, in terms of actual effort it means that I just build an encounter with one wizard and four or five orcs or hobgoblins. EDIT: It would also seem that the ability to configure and generate a key is exclusive to the pro version.
  23. Sup guys! I'm in the process of constructing a Geneforge-inspired Dungeons and Dragons homebrew setting, and to that end, I basically traced both world maps into Hexographer to create a semi-coherent map of the entire continent. There was some creative resizing and filling in of gaps to get them to mesh properly, but I think it's a pretty decent rough draft.
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