First game of 5E as a player this afternoon. I don’t get to play much (as one of those perpetual GMs), but I’ve realized I have a one track mind when I do play. My brother and I are totally opposite in this regard. He wants the boss defeated and to save the day (while crushing stuff when needed in fair combat), but I’m displeased unless everything’s Kid Miracleman’s London in order to get there. He’s the St. Cuthbert, I’m the Double Henderson (most of the time, we must not forget Tono and Kono).
This is a post about people that made some cool shit that just came out. We’re all into the high end AAA video game titles and polished D&D 5E and 13th Age books, but today this post is about two titles that are not AAA by any means, very few people on the planet will ever notice them, but are still fantastic.
First is Venger Satanis’s Girls Gone Rogue, a companion adventure to his recent Space Station module, Alpha Blue. Because I got Alpha Blue along with another module of his that I just couldn’t put down (Purple Putrescence) I hadn’t looked at AB too much except reading it on the shitter here and there. It looks cool, and if you don’t want to use the game system in the book it would be a great setting for Runequest Star Wars (yes, this actually got made by Design Mechanism), White Star (even though the rulebook is the most fucking boring thing ever, the rules are solid), or if you haven’t already become completely disillusioned with FATE like any normal person, Bulldogs! If you are a fucking masochist, you could use Star Frontiers, but no one would do that would they?
slutbot
That said, there’s not much adventure in AB driving the players. Lots of hooks, yes, and very interesting stuff as a setting, but no flat out adventure. GGR solves this problem where players are tasked with taking down a slutbot gone rogue. I haven’t read much yet but first, the HOOK is just fantastic and unexpected and the art– holy shit. Tits everywhere, alien orgies, some sort of vaginal… I’m not even sure what that is…where Alpha Blue was pretty tame with the art, GGR is gonzo with the nudity and space robot fucking. The names Satanis chooses are ridiculous and some of the charts are incredible. ie: What the Fuck did I do last night??!
All in all, along with Purple Putrescence, which is excellent BTW, GGR solidifies me as a Venger Satanis fan. He’s got a ridiculous sense of humor and he knows his genre and his slavering, sex starved middle aged, children of the 80’s audience as well. If I’m ever having a bad day at the fucking office, I can come home and read some of this crazy shit, and if the feeling takes me, I can run it and you know they’ll be cascades of space piss into your open mouths.
The second item doesn’t have any tits or nudity, but it sorta DID in it’s first printing. Palace of the Silver Princess is a pillar of D&D obscurity, the ORANGE cover version was pulled as soon as it was printed and few copies exist (since I grew up in WI, I know I saw one in person before, but can’t remember where or who had it or if it was on the shelf at the hobby store in Brookfield Square). Why was it pulled? Well there is a part of the adventure where 9 dudes are (maybe) tearing the clothes off a woman tied up. Remember when this came out. Early 80’s? Kids getting into D&D and not just old beardies? Yep. They pulled it even though AD&D and Fiend Folio had drawings of boobs right there for us to beat off to.
It’s unfortunate because the Orange version is better than the Green version that eventually came out because it details an entire area, not just the dungeon/palace. I’ve been thinking about running Orange for awhile (the PDF is around) but it’s got some of those ‘stock your own stuff’ rooms that I just don’t have time for. Christ no.
Bam, then what happens? A bunch of the LotFP writers got together and rewrote the entire module, indoor, outdoor, upstairs, downstairs using the original maps! Raggi, Kowalski, Green and others that I don’t know, probably promising n00bs specially selected. I haven’t read this yet (I hate PDF’s and need to get it printed on lulu before I can read it), but there are good snippets I’ve seen. It lists the writers of each section so you’ll know if you are walking into something interesting and crazy (Raggi, Kowalski, Green) or something boring and pretentious that takes itself too seriously (won’t mention names) and you can then skip the overwritten or lame parts or revert to the original module as needed.
I’ve been playing a good deal of Fallout 4 in the last few months, like everyone else. I just plowed through the Mechanist DLC last week (good, but a bit short) and really liked the new robot/raider mixed faction that appears as well since the regular raiders become, well, fucking fodder.
In addition to the Mechanist stuff, last week, a major new playstyle was also released: SURVIVAL difficulty mode. In this mode you get to suffer hunger, thirst, fatigue, disease along with the normal people trying to fill you will bullets or eat you or burn you with lasers. Sound fun? What’s more, you can only save when you sleep in a bed. While it’s not exactly hardcore, you have to be very careful, especially if you are far away from a bed as all your hard work will be lost when you croak– an you WILL croak. Damage to you and that damage you do to others is super spiked in this version, and healing is much slower. Get shot outside your power armor with a double barrelled shotgun at level 5? You’re dead!
I’m not too far into it, but I tell you I’ve quit a couple times because I forgot it wasn’t saving the game at various points. My advice? Remember when you are dicking around in settlements that if you wander off and are killed, all the mundane building and assigning workers will be completely lost. Remember this!
A few other tips:
Get all the bottles you can early and use the bubbler in the vault to fill those bottles to create purified water. This will save you from drinking radioactive shit early game before you have anything.
Maybe run away from the first Deathclaw. You know where the power armor is, you know how to get it, but you also have to face down a deathclaw right after. Maybe run away? You likely won’t be able to establish sanctuary but you’ll have power armor and won’t be dead…
Watch out for ‘regular’ fights. Raiders can easily kill you and you no longer have the auto spotter dots on your radar for enemies, so you have to sneak, get in position and shoot, then move. Rather than just running and gunning everything and stimpacking out of danger, you’ll get to see that the raiders/gunners actually have an AI!
Watch the rad away– it increases thirst and hunger and leaves you susceptible to disease from stuff you eat. So drink fluid AFTER rad away, but maybe don’t eat right away or eat before. You will eat very yucky stuff, and you want your immune system to be tanked up– rad away will drop that down a lot.
Reexamine the perks. Some of the perks you ignored before so you could blow stuff up real good become powerful for survival, especially the ‘drink shitty water’ one.
Remember you have to walk everywhere so the game world that was once much smaller will feel HUGE. You will need bases of operations (and beds) all over the place if you expect to get anywhere in the plot. If you pick up shitty power armor with no fusion cell, it may be a long, long way back to your base– slowly, slowly walking…
Speaking of plot, remember when you accidentally wandered the wastes for 10-12 play sessions and were super tanked up for the plot missions and they were too easy? Maybe that’s a really good tactic to use now…
Ghouls are horrible to face now. After the first few levels you can swat them like flies in the normal game, but in Survival, look out. Use VATS to shoot their legs off so they can’t move and then finish them off when it’s safe.
That’s it for now, I am going to go back in and see how far I can get.
So we belayed 13th Age for a bit to try out the new playtest rules for Lamentations of the Flame Princess last night starting the new World of the Lost module from Rafael Chandler. There IS confusion around the new rules, since it’s no longer JUST a better version of B/X, there are some biggish changes, and I’m not sure I like all of them yet (hence playtesting which will round off the burrs), so let’s see how it goes.
Main things are:
Everyone has some random skills, specialists have more skills that they can choose
There are fighting ‘styles’ now and Fighters can use all of them
Saving throws are different and use D6’s
All spells can be cast at first level. This makes things a bit crazy because now spells can go awry (a la Warhammer Fantasy Battle/Roleplay).
Session stuff
Characters:
Rainer Keeling – Magic User (1 hp)
Van Hagan – Specialist (tinker, bushcraft)
Udo Quatellbaum – Fighter with a man catcher
Bernard Dreu – Fighter (I’m glad matt picked a good name this time)
Anton Schleiss – Magic User
Isaac Netherwood – Specialist (languages)!
The characters joined a ship’s crew in Cornwall under one Richard Trower who sold them on the idea of heading over the ocean to Africa, finding the city of Khirima all for a hoard of the “Negro silver!” After months on a boat and weeks of travel from the Portuguese port of Lagos along with a Portuguese caravan, they made it to Khirima and settled in to start to look for the silver. Trower took 6 Germans from the crew and went off, supposedly to meet a contact and then come back the next morning– and that was a week ago. While they waited, they stayed on the down low but got some rumors from the tavern.
As money ran short, the characters talked about what to do and decided to leave the tavern they were at to search the city for trace of Trower or the Germans. When they did so, they were approached by an obviously sick and recently beaten Portuguese brass caster (who was with them on the caravan from Lagos) who kept repeating: “they put a disease in me.” He told them that since Trower was now ‘gone’ THEY had to fulfill his debt for the crime he committed by fulfilling a task for ‘them’. They were to protect a caravan from attack while also murdering a noble that would be a long with it. They were suspicious and tasked the Portuguese hard but he only had so much information.
When he wandered off, they followed him into the Royal district, where he dropped dead while walking. After being accosted by guards (Leopards) and a barber surgeon who noticed them following the man (as Europeans stick out quite a bit in Khirima), they dragged the body off, dumped it in an alleyway and high tailed it back to the tavern. It was only a Portuguese anyway right?
They decided to scout the caravan they needed to guard the night before departure, but couldn’t find it, and then headed back to the tavern where they caroused. Someone slipped them something in their drinks and they woke up in the jungle tied to stones by vines with something crawling towards them screaming.
Welcome to Africa!
Of note, the characters were constantly exposed to languages during this short session, so there were rolls for Hausa, German, Portuguese and nearly French as well. The linguist specialist speaks nearly ALL of the languages they will encounter during this game and I tell you that helps. I wasn’t sure what to do with languages since with a normal party, they wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone except via hand signs, with a linguist specialist, they have it made.
World of the Lost is pretty fucking badass, got to run it more, but so far: recommended.
While I think LOW, one of my current favorites, may have jumped the shark with sentient MICE, I was happy to find issue 3 of Head Lopper sitting on the shelf and it’s superlative. Think viking violence mashed in with adventure time. I also picked up Miracle Man Olympus from the Alan Moore period where he teams up with the soon-after-to-be Swamp Thing artist. Also just finished Junji Ito’s UZUMAKI, which I had only read parts of on the internet in the past. Highly recommended.
Alphago took all three games from Lee Sedol in GO, winning the 5 game series. They played on and Lee won game 4 yesterday.
GOBASE.ORG has all the games set up so you can play through them and try to guess the next move. I worked through both game 3 and the last game and while I’m a complete novice, what I saw was complete blockage of anything that Lee tried to do in game 3 and frankly, couldn’t follow game 4 well. In game 3, watch white in the game simply close off areas with brilliant shunting moves. I can only describe it that way because I don’t have the Go knowledge to do more.
So what now? People still play in chess tournaments even though no human will ever beat the top computer again. With go, I have a feeling people will start to study the way AlphaBlue won the games and played and we may get better over time because of it. However, if a computer can beat a human at Go, which seemed impossible 10 years ago, why is it that a casual novice can beat the hardest difficulty of nearly any other computer game unless the computer full on cheats?
As for me, I have been frustrated the last few years because I got (for me) really good at 9X9 go vs the computer and now I suck ass!
Master of Orion is in early access and I jumped on that fucking space pysse bandwagon right away, they couldn’t take my money fast enough really. Last weekend I spent most of Sunday powering through a game and I have thoughts and feelings. If you don’t want to read it all here is what I think: they’re not done, but the game is fun and is a solid base from which to build the new MOO. The economy part works and is not annoying at all, the space combat needs some work but is pretty fun to watch. You don’t make a lot of choices during it (like games such as Star Hammer or BFG), but it’s FAST which is the most important part. Multiplayer will be unbearable turn angst and will never be played by normal humans.
I started off this game missing the Meklars, who are my go to race in MOO. My secondary has always been Humans because they always have an extremely strong trade and diplomacy aspect. As long as you can keep your fleets sort of large, you’ll be in the game and be able to stay out of wars until you are ready to crush everyone.
So comparing the game to Master of Orion 1 and 2, they leaned heavier on MOO 2 than 1 for the galaxy design and management of systems. Each system is a dot on the galactic map connected to other dots via star lanes. You can only move from one system to the other via star lanes and not directly (at least at first). This is quite a change from MOO1 where you can just move your ships anywhere (even to the furthest star in the galaxy) if your ships have the range. I do not mind this.
Systems, like in MOO2, are solar systems with multiple planets and not just one dot like MOO1. Ships move around these systems, not freely, but from object to object. So they can move from a planet to an asteroid to another planet or to the star gate. Fights take place at these locations and not, again, freely within the star systems. This was good. While not as simple as MOO1, it works.
I left the cats for last…
Colony managment does not use the sliders of MOO1, which is something I was hoping they’d keep in. However, they have these little people that you can move from FARMING, INDUSTRY, SCIENCE. These little people may be members of your race or other races after you conquer them. Some racial bonuses apply I think, so ‘collecting’ the other races to help you in science or manufacture is appealing. Think a Human empire with Meklar building stuff and Psilons in science! It’s clearly presented overall and works. You can easily see when people are pissed off and not working as the little guys sit down with a protest sign.
Colonies gain pollution, and while this is a somewhat annoying feature, it’s easily seen and dealt with. You can see planets with bad pollution from the galactic view so it’s clear when things have gone wrong without having to drill down into the system.
Building stuff is in your typical queues where you can line up ships and planetary upgrades, up to 5 items at a time. Building is slow in the new MOO so far and I really think they will change this going forward. It takes a long time to get a bunch of ships made for example, and in that time I usually have 2-3 science upgrades.
Science. It’s a tree we’ve seen over and over, and not much different there. They do an interesting thing with some of the techs in that when you discover it, you choose between two applied technologies rather than getting both. This is a trade opportunity with the other aliens who may have the other applied science. You tech up FAST in the game compared to production. They will likely balance this out. I got up to TITAN ships before I mercifully ended the game for the Mrshaan, so not all the way up the tree.
Ship building is easily done, but I did not see a way to point ships to another ‘gathering’ system as they are built, they have to be moved manually. Like the other games, ships are organized into fleets which move together at the slowest ship’s movement rate. I don’t know how fleets are auto merged, but what I think is that it happens most of the time when ships are at an object together, which is sometimes good, sometimes bad.
Ship upgrades and modding is extensive, but frankly in the first play through I didn’t do much here. I made some bombers and some large fighter carriers. Otherwise I just did stock upgrades (which are nearly automagic) when I got tech advances. Sub-optimal? Yes.
Combat. This is the one thing that the designers brought from MOO3– real time battles and they did it far better in the new MOO. You can choose to auto-battle and for many fights, just like in Total War games, will be handled this way. The important battles though, you can fight out in real time. While moving ships around is possible, I just pretty much ‘went straight at them’ 90% of the time. There are asteroids and other objects in space, and you can hide behind them to dodge shots, but really there’s so much stuff flying around that getting in close and just blasting everything is the way to go. It’s pretty satisfying to see your ships blow the crap out of everything so I’m liking it. As a Total War fan, I prefer the real time option to anything else. This ruins multiplayer though, so I will say right now that just like MOO2 and 3, multiplayer will NEVER be actually played, and was a waste of time for them to add. The only way to do multiplayer is the way Illwinter did it for the Dominions games. You give your armies orders and in between turns ALL battles are resolved which you can watch, but not control. This makes Dominions games PLAYABLE in multiplayer for people not sitting intheir dorm rooms for a full week, instead of not.
Planetary invasions don’t look finished, but it’s exactly like MOO1. Your guys land, they fight and whoever wins, wins. My only issue here is that marine transports can be tough to build, and even if 99% of your marines survive the attack, you don’t have those transports anymore and the marines sort of disappear into the aether.
The Races
Not all the races are in the game yet, but you’ve got your ‘humans with animal heads’ races represented already (Alkari, Mrshaans, Bulrathi, Psilons, Sakkra). They are cartoony and silly and that’s just fine. The Mrshaans are just ridiculous. What I liked is that the race’s ambassador shows the emotion that they have for you with their body language– whether pissed or afraid or happy. Very Civ 4 like and Good stuff. Some people may be put off by the space kitties and doggies, but that’s MOO. Space kitties suck in a game like Twilight Imperium or REX which are otherwise DEAD SERIOUS, but since MOO is campy all around, it works.
The only thing good about MOO 3 was the 3d art for the races. I think the races are OK in newMOO compared to that, but they could use some tweaks.
Mid and End game management
My biggest complaint about MOO1 and 2 is that the galaxies were too small. Espeically in MOO2– it felt fucking tiny even in the huge galaxies. While I played only a medium sized game last weekend, it felt pretty big and meaty. I want the shorter games like that to play for a couple of days, but I mostly want the MASSIVE galaxies that take months to conquer.
Management of big empires can be a bitch but I think it will work well in MOO and I certainly was not annoyed while playing the first game. There is a queue of work items that need your attention before the turn can be run. This helps direct you to where you need to make decisions and after that you can do your other stuff. You will never forget to change your tech or deal with a REALLY polluted planet for instance the way it’s set up.
Of course, near the end of the game you are basically running and adding fodder too a few big fleets and that’s what you want to focus on, I think that the new MOO caters to this by allowing you to just do what’s absolutely needed, and forgetting the rest. Autobuild is there, so you don’t need to work too hard on colony management if you don’t want. Like Total War games, I want to get to the fucking fighting and not dick around with my colonies, especially when I have a massive empire. I want the money and fleets pumping out, and let me get to the dropping of bombs on the Silicoids and destroying the fleets of the Psilons.
I like the game, looking forward to playing again (will be waiting until the next big patch) and one of the things I like is that these guys are not saying they want to make the best game ever, they want to make the best version of MOO ever, and here’s to that. There is competition these days to MOO, but it’s Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilization and Endless Space and those are all complete trash none of which I would play over MOO 1 or MOO 2.
I’m also looking forward to Maurice!Bastard playing and reviewing the game.
We made it around 10 and it was already hopping at the Grand Geneva. Great con to wander around in, but like all small cons, if you don’t have a game going on, there’s not a ton to do (except eat and drink!). It was far from the mass insanity of Gencon. We pretty much played Numenera all day as the Into the Odd game I wanted to get into is going on NOW rather than when I though it was.
Stuff that was good:
Location – The Grand Geneva is just that, it’s a grand hotel on massive acreage. in summer you wouldn’t have caught me dead inside any buildings there.
Focused convention— Gary Con is an old school D&D convention with all that that means and all that that excludes. There were no LARPers, very little cosplay, few board games– people were there to game as well and not jag around.
General friendliness- it’s Wisconsin after all. WI people are a grim folk generally, but they are nice. The staff at the grand Geneva were very friendly and accommodating.
Lots of indy stuff. There were games played that have never and will never see wide publication or even publication outside of someone’s typed up notebook.
Food – was good
Beer – was cheap and good
Gaming – a bit more chaotic to try to get into games, and yet the con is so small you could just walk around and find the people that you want to play with. Next year I will probably run something (Lamentations most likely).
