Val Ritz

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.

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.

The perfect weapon for striding up to someone who's been studying what they shouldn't and separating their head from their shoulders. Bravo.

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.

All hail the Midwestern Nexus, apparently. This is really shaping up into a web one can get caught in.

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.

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.

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!

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

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."

"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?

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.

Thanks! I'll be sure to look at those.

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.

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.

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"

It is a pretty decent draft, I'm glad you used hex map for that and ... I already have a homebrew D&D geneforge-based setting. Not in Terrestia, but in a homebrew world. I'm using the flexible D&D next rules. I would be glad to assist you since I had to overcome a few hurdles, if you so desire.

 

But first, a warning: Unless you're playing with 1-2 players, be veeery careful about Shaper classes. It's NOT a balance issue; you could always put more enemies.

It's a "I have 3 PCs each with 4 creations against 10 enemies = I have to keep track of a couple dozen things in the encounter".

I use shapers as NPCs only.

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.

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.

More insight into the ancient history of the Shapers! If we're going back to Sucia Isle, we have to have some stuff with Heustess and the Spirit City.

It might just be that it's 3 in the morning, but I'm having trouble spreading my brain over the piece of toast that is that post.

If I'm as peanut butter as I think I am, one of the things that tends to go wrong with games is the divide and at times imbalance between story and gameplay. Ideally I'd like a game whose story is as engaging as its gameplay, but where both halves of the whole are also linked such that they feed into the other. Portal was great about this because while the story didn't necessarily have a lot of volume, the plot that existed and the gameplay mechanics were indelibly linked in a way I haven't seen a lot of games replicate.

Three words: magical surge protectors.

Adventurers. Feh. Nothing but snot-nosed brats with a couple of screws loose thinking that just because they killed some bandits or drove off some vampires they have free reign to start banditing themselves. Granted, some of them are smart. For example, some of them are me. They get one too many battle wounds, one too many clocks to the head by an undead, one too many arrows whistling their way, and they think about what's really important in life.

So, the next time some uppity adventurer with a dinged-up steel sword he can barely swing that still has the stench of death on it from the tomb he looted it from, I pull a Daedric arrow from a very special quiver at my side and just say one thing to remind them of how quickly things can change. Just a few words.

"I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee..."

Just a comment: It's Diarazad

Man, and here I am with all the liberal arts

Counseling 1

Youth and Adolescent Pathology

American Thought and Culture

Survey of Biblical Literature 1

Quick bit of advice: they have very different movement styles.