Eisenzahn

Queue's for Virtue and Freedom aren't too surprising... what is a shock is Justice flickering in and out of Queue status, and at least one other hitting it for a few minutes... Infinity, I think. Forgot to screenshot it when I was logging in.

An Elec/Elec Dominator and Elec/Storm Controller. This will keep me distracted for about two weeks from the final nail being put in the coffin on New Villainside Content as players abandon the Isles in droves. Then despair will settle back in, and I'll likely unsub until issue 19.

So, in the RP Pet Peeves thread, I mentioned for illustrative purposes a pretty awesome campaign that I used to be in, and it prompted some interest. Well, ok, one post. But I've been looking for an excuse to talk about this for a while.

The game drew heavily on material from the following productions: Ars Magica, In Nomine, Shadowrun and the old World of Darkness (mainly Mage: the Ascension and Changeling: the Dreaming, with very thin slices of the others, like lifting the Tremere back out of Vampire: the Masquerade). All run using a version of 2nd Edition GURPS so heavily modified that Steve Jackson would either break down crying at the sight of it, or crown us the kings and queens of Awesometopia for the audacity of the whole experiment.

Some background.

Medieval Europe. Wizards, Witches, Warlocks, other W words, they exist. They mostly keep to themselves. They don't get along with the Church. Some of them get along with the Government, some don't. The biggest group of them in Western Europe is called the Order of Hermes, it is old as crap, it is highly structured and has far superior financial resources and political connections to most of its nearby rivals. It's formed of a number of Houses, groups of wizards who trace their training back to one of the Order's founders, who fight about stuff with each other, but band together in the face of greater opposition. One of these houses recently got another house killed off to steal their magic, used that magic (and other stolen secrets of more sinister origins) to turn themselves into Vampires, and got kicked out of the Order. This will be important later.

Time passes. Another rival Order rises up, the Order of Reason (much later, they become the Technocratic Union). They're Technomancers - their "new magic" is Science, and as they convince people that it's better than the old magics, those old magics become harder to work in public. The Order of Hermes says "Hey, these guys are better at getting the people to play along than we are. We need backup." They call together a massive group of mystics and slightly more flexible-thinking natural philosophers to try to recruit them to their Order, or when that idea turns out unpalatable to most, to convince them to form their own allied groups and band together in a larger "Council of Nine Mystic Traditions".

This is where our game first jumped off White Wolf's rails; the 2nd Council of Mistridge failed. There were a few small interested groups, but no improbable cross-cultural organizations formed out of nothing saying "You're an animist shaman/monothiest/any kind of asian or martial artist/whatever? Hey, me too! Let's ignore centuries or more of profound cultural differences to join a big club based largely on these White European Academic's observation that our 'backwards mumbo jumbo' has some similar themes" So instead of becoming one of nine Traditions, the Order of Hermes picked up some new Houses and Sub-Houses of like-minded mystics from slightly farther away than Northeastern Europe, some allied groups that weren't similar enough to join up but were friendly enough to at least keep in contact, and mostly just pissed everyone else off by being smug ******** about the whole thing.

Time passes. The Order dwindles, hides. The Technocracy is able to spin history so much that few even know the Order ever existed, and those that do think they were just a bunch of crazies who inhaled too much mercury trying to unlock the secrets of Alchemy. The major organized religions who were once the early Technocrat's allies begins to lose influence as well and get shoved to the side. Reality-manipulators affiliated with major religions become a little more friendly towards the Order, but only in the limited arena of their mutual loathing for Vampires (all of whom, excepting a handful not numbering into the double digits, are now of the bloodline of the accursed outcast House Tremere). In fact, pretty much everybody in the occult community will set aside their differences to stamp out Vampires, because being turned into one robs you of your ability to do Magic (or "Enlightened Science", as the case may be), and that scares the living crap out of everyone.

The Order keeps trying to stay relevant, as Dark Ages give way to Reniassance, Industrial Revolution, and successively faster upgrades to the technological paradim, each changing the way of life so hugely that people from just a generation before are often completely lost. Ancient Immortal Wizards have just as much trouble getting around via cars and airplanes as they do getting on the internet, but remain relevant to younger members of the Order because of their ability to (maybe) BLOW UP THE PLANET WITH THEIR MINDS. The Order never get really great at recruiting and training new Wizards again... or not for a long time, at least... but they keep a purely mortal front, a traditional secret society aspect that keeps up the Money and Politics game, ensuring that they never become completely irrelevant.

Fast forward, and the Order and Technocracy are more "polite rivals", and all other factions are too small or fractured or reclusive to matter much. The techies are aware that reality is full of layers of freakish weirdness that they'd rather not deal with, and they are working to eradicate such concepts from the minds of the public, but in the meantime they're willing to look the other way while crazy old wizards clean up the Chaotic Dungeon Dimensions. There's no Ascension War as such. The relationship the Technocracy has with other Mages is more like a single very dominant political party's smug tolerance of the wacky fringe parties that it thinks can never get enough support to threaten it, and are therefore allowed to stand on the streetcorner and hand out pamphlets as much as they like.

During the 2nd World War, and unsurprisingly supported by Nazi Scientists, the Tremere Vampires manage to find willing volunteers in really massive numbers. Mages, Priests, Scientists, Shamans, Witches and so on of every variety band together briefly to keep Nazi Vampires from taking over the world, behind the scenes of the larger public conflict. Despite this, the influence of House Tremere becomes much more solidly dug in during this time.

Diplomacy still exists with the Faerie World, but it's strained. Rumors suggest that the High King and Queen are missing or dead, but no Fae will speak to outsiders about it. A few walled fort towns near the borders of the Dreaming still admit travellers, but no one's allowed to go deeper inside... like China in its most isolationist periods. There are Changelings, exiles from the Faerie World hiding out in Human Bodies, but it's a lot more political than spiritual/metaphysical as in the Changeling: the Dreaming setup.

And then... it all goes screwy in 2012, when Marauder Zooterrorists (Chaos Mages who like to break other kinds of mages hold on how people believe reality works by magicking impossible mythic beasts to life in public places... rarely successful, their antics usually get mind-whipe from the few survivors and blamed on escaped circus animals) at last succeed on amajor scale and unleash an ancient slumbering dragon from Mt. Fuji, forcing the world to recognize the existence of Magic. The Technomancer Paradigm doesn't quite shatter, but it begins to blur, admitting elements of High Magic. The Order moves fastest, cementing their brand of Sorcery in public belief as the 'right way', although a group of Native American Shamans in the Northwest have a noticable level of success on their own, Weird Science types (like the inimitable Society of Ether, a.k.a. the Electrodyne Engineers) manage to sneak in a few ideas, and the Order's influence of the new magical paradigms forming in the Far East (as much pop culture as ancient tradition) is pretty negligible.

Those Changelings hiding out as people begin to manifest their faerie selves on the material plane... and some people who had no idea they had Fae blood undergo transition into fantastic beings (this occupying and expanding on the emergence in Shadowrun of Elves, Dwarves, Orks and Trolls). Fae from the Dreaming itself who've never had mortal bodies find that they can visit Earth again without withering away, but few of them opt too, as their magic is far less flexible there.

The Technocracy responds by pushing forward the timetable, getting as much crazy new tech out there as possible to try to convince people that it's better, cleaner, safer, more trustworthy. Cybernetics. Advanced weapon systems that can compete with Fireball-slinging warlocks. Fully immersive VR. Crazy advances in medicine, especially in the pharmaceutical area. Radical shifts in the global economy bringing most money directly into the control of massive corporations. Travel to and colonization of the Moon and Mars get scrapped as too expensive and impractical though, and the Void Engineers finally tell the other conventions where to shove it. When they team up with their old ex-Technocracy buddies in the Electrodyne Engineers, who were similarly shafted back in the late 1800's, then start an independent corporate-funded Moon City and find naturally occuring deposits of an ore startlingly similar to Primium (which repels/resists magic and reality-warping super science), they become a major player again, now as an independent group.

The wild places get wilder, and the cities huddle tighter together, many of them morphing into paranoid police states as the masses lose themselves in panic over the possibility that they're surrounded by Witches and Ghosts and blood-drinking nightmares.

Ancient seals break down and the forces of Heaven and Hell now stride the earth openly, battling each other, siring Nephilim, and generally getting ramped up for the End of Everything. Some of the Celestial Host fall anew... but for the first time in history, some of the Fallen are allowed to Rise and return to the good graces of their maker.

King Arthur has been sighted leading a motorcycle gang towards London, and his most trusted lieutenant used to be Michael, the Archangel of War, who left the Heavenly Host after a disagreement with his Creator, but was still compelled by his nature to find the Kingliest King he could track down to work for. Excalibur and Merlin both remain unaccounted for, but more parties than I can count are looking for each.

Mountaineers, Spelunkers and Oceanographers have discovered Olympus, Tartarus, and Atlantis in that order. Zeus' throne is shattered, his citadel defiled and irradiated. Hades' gates are shut, although the lights still burn in his fortress. The Underworld, or at least the part of it that's Greek, is eerily vacant. No one wants to talk about what they've found in Poseidon's sunken abode. None who have come back (and there are very few of them) retain any faculty for human languages, at least.

In Germany and many Scandinavian countries, Valkyries open active recruitment centers for the Einherjar (or, for the living idiots who will die bravely and become them). Odin and his family return to Earth in a big way, largely prompted by the fact that they don't want to let God finish his Armageddon before they can play out Ragnarok. Loki is released and admitted back into Asgard, but with an understanding that it's only so they can work towards the prophesied point where they'll all kill each other. Odin's stroke of genius that really makes the Norse Pantheon relevant again is inviting the "honored slain" from all cultures to his side, even if they're not really warrior material, since even the ghost of an child can be given a gun and made a soldier in this modern era. The ranks of the Einherjar swell with refugees from other more horrible afterlives. Hell in particular is nearly emptied out, drawing the ire of Lucifer and associates and turning Armageddon into a three way free-for-all between Heaven, Hell and Valhalla.

The Russians, surprising the crap out of everyone by being the only remaining nuclear superpower after the US dissolved, invent a magical teleporting bomb to intercept the wolf Garm if he tries to eat the Sun, after he was barely prevented from doing so the first time by Wizard tourists to the greatly expanded city-sized international space station. They watch the gathering Einherjar warily, well aware of the tendency for armies from that direction to decide to invade them. Odin doesn't seem to have learned from Napoleon or Hitler's failures, but then neither of them was a God of War and Death with an army of fearless ghosts. Baba Yaga may have unified the Russian Crime Families. The Unseelie court of the Faeries has closer political connections to the Russian Government than any other nation in the world, and roughly one in five citizens is some kind of goblin. Local technology, influenced by the goblin population, takes off in weird and grotesque directions, and "Glamourpunk" fashion, based on their crazy solid-illusion based magitech, spreads like wildfire across the globe.

China declares even-more-Martial-Law instantly at the first sign of craziness, and imprisons anyone with pointy ears or animal features. The prisons are only there because they can't execute them fast enough, though. Some wizards survive by becoming hunted freedom fighters, others by selling out to the government. The whole place is a Technomancer's dream come true... except that the Technocratic Union isn't in charge, can't get a foothold in, and can't figure out who the real power players are. Broadcasting from a mobile television studio (probaly) in Hong Kong, the Monkey King hosts a hugely popular geurilla TV Gameshow.

America sticks closer to the Shadowrun material. Megacorporations carve up the east, Shamans and Elves take the west, and big stretches in the middle get turned into haunted wastelands. Everybody wants the Order on their sides though, so Hermetic Wizards can at least get into most places legally. Mexico City becomes the new economic center of the continent after New York is devastated by plague. It also becomes the new headquarters of the Catholic Church, after terrorists more directly affiliated with Satan than usual blow up Vatican City. As a result, the southern half of the continent becomes an inviolable no-man's-land for vampires and other creatures of the night, and one of the more stable and welcoming centers of civilization. Canada builds its own Great Wall across the arctic circle, because of the really awesomely terrifying shadow monsters that have appeared there. The Paladins of the Great White Shield become the most internationally renowned badasses in the world, headquartered in Greenland, made up 90% of Canadians, but with membership drawing from all nations with territory approaching the pole. Australia, Chile, South Africa and a few others tentatively send commandos to train with them, just in case similar weirdness erupts from the South Pole, but nothing much happens there.

Our first generation of characters were the architects of the New Mercurian Order's rise to prominence in the early days of public awareness of Magic, and eventually the political heads of most of the North American part of the Order. The second generation of characters, mostly their kids, were the backbone of an elite anti-Vampire strikeforce that had limited diplomatic protection pretty much everywhere but China, provided they were on the hunt. The third generation (playing right now) are working to circumvent Armageddon and/or Ragnarok, which are fighting out which gets to be the End of the World, because they'd rather not have the 6th Age be the Shortest Age Ever, especially while they're living in it. My first generation character's grandson, and my second generation character's nephew, stars as the reluctant Antichrist! I swear, I had the idea before I read Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

Err, anyway. That's most of the good stuff, I think. Well, not really. We've been fiddling with this setting since the early 90's, gone through four different GMs and dozens of players (I think I'm one of two originals left), and more characters than I can count.

...

So, hey! So this thread's not just me jabbering to myself... fellow Tabletop Gamers, tell us about what really badass custom settings or interpretations of canon settings you've been involved in, either as GM or as a player!

It's just a matter of time... Disney's partnership with SquareEnix in the Kingdom Hearts series, Marvel's friendship with Capcom... an ultra-epic cross property fighting roster expansive enough to make the last Smash Brothers game look about as diverse as a pickup basketball game at a summer camp for... uh... really similar boring kids... crap.

Anyway, my team would be The Beast (Disney), The Beast (X-Men), Blanka (Street Fighter) and Kimahri (FFX). They would have a combined quadruple super move based on waxing each other's back hair.

The recharge times on the Accolades are as high as they are for a very specific reason: to make them a panic button/emergency overdrive power rarely used, rather than a regular part of your combat strategy. Several of them are EXTREMELY POWERFUL. About the only Accolade Power I'd agree needs its recharge dropped is the Immobilizer Pistol, because that thing's close to worthless as is.

It is extremely unlikely that we'd see any reduction in recharge to most of the Accolade Powers without a substantial corresponding drop in their effect.

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My uncle's utterly insane ex-wife claimed to have been *ahem* physically intimate with him, in San Francisco in '70s. I'm still not sure if that's awesome or not.

Anyway, rock on in the hereafter... hopefully in the good parts, the parts you weren't always making music about. Hopefully any alleged groupie freakiness with crazy aunt Donna didn't irreparably scar your immortal soul.

In order of preference (based on total levels of current characters combined):

Brutes
Dominators
Stalkers
Scrappers
Corruptors
Blasters
Masterminds
Controllers
Tankers
Defenders

Brutes win by a landslide, and Dominators are the only AT to even rank respectably after that. My one and only surviving Defender is a 50, though... so that probably gives you a good idea of how bad my altitis is, that the AT still ranked lowest for me.

Khelds and SoAs... eh. Never been able to get out of the 30's with 'em, and all my most recent attempts have been deleted to make space on my main servers for GR. I like how Khelds look, but not how they play, and have the opposite problem with SoAs. If I can't get behind both the concept and the gameplay, I lose interest very quickly.

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Downloaded the patch two hours ago. Since then, I have crashed every single time I try to do anything that will bring up a window with a picture of another player or an NPC. Speaking to contacts, trainers, vendors, tailors, contacts, opening my own contact window, trying to speak to the bank teller in the mission I was working on last night before I gave up, trying to open my own costume window, etc. Every single time. I am up to 12 crashes now, with a 100% failure rate of attempting the above listed activities. It was only about 50/50 before this patch. All this patch to the "rare" crash bug has done is transform it from a chance into a certainty.

I can open the black market just fine now, though although, no matter how long I sit there with the Black Market open, the "Find", "Get" and "Post" buttons never turn available for me to click. I can sell things by hitting enter, retrieve money with the "Get All" button, but if I put an item I didn't actually want to sell into the AH, it seems like it's stuck there for now. Even so, that's a dramatic improvement compared to pre-I17 Black Market performance for me... So. Great. Wish I had some way of accumulating things to sell more interesting than street sweeping.

I high-fived dean. The lovely Lunaticia was so thrilled that her Clone Factory would allow her to expand the membership of the Captain Mako Appreciation Society and Scrapbooking Club beyond just her and her Grandma (who is in fact not at all enthusiastic about the Captain, but stops by twice a week anyway to tidy up the clubhouse and leave some homemade lemon bars), that she would have made out with Dean if there'd been an option. She'd have felt guilty about it later, though... all her love is for the Captain.

She also saved her clone. I'm not really sure why... but Luna's never really been a "thinking about the consequences" sort of gal.

I'm grateful this is getting worked on even over the weekend, but I wouldn't call the Random Crashes "rare", unless you've only fixed a few of their sources. I'm lasting about half an hour on average before I get kicked out of the game. I've got a character stuck in the Villain Tutorial, because one of the "rare" crash bugs is happening every time she tries to select one of the two new contacts after completing the very first mission for the very first contact, two others who crash any time they try to change into another costume or access the tailor, and all my characters seem to have about a 50/50 chance of crashing if I try to access another player's information window, try to speak to a contact (including through Ouroboros, so I guess I'll check out the new missions later...), try to open my contact window at all even if I don't actually call any of my contacts, try to speak to a trainer, try to sell things at an NPC store, try to change my difficulty settings, or really try to interact in any way with something that could cause a Character Picture to load.

If a player is contributing little enough to our success that I actually notice them as a gap in our effectiveness amidst the chaos of CoV battle, then they get kicked. This is usually a case of them standing around without contributing, spending more time chatting than fighting, etc. I usually won't kick a person for powerset choices, if they're at least trying to use those powers... even if they're a petless mastermind who ignores their secondary to use nothing but crappy Thugs pistol attacks. What I will do at that point though is start looking for someone else to take the star, and go start another team. And if I know in advance that a person is playing that kind of combo? I won't invite them in the first place.

When I'm starting Strike Forces, it's a totally different matter. I find out AT and Power Sets before inviting anyone. I don't have any requirements ("Need a Granite Brute and Kin, or we can't start!!!"), it's just a sort of basic competence test to bounce a couple questions off of people, just to make sure they can communicate. But if they join the SF team and I see that "Thugs/Poison" actually means "Crappy pistol attacks/Poison", then they're out before we start the first mission.

No matter what support set we're looking at, I rank the Ally Rez at or near the bottom of the priority list. A teammate has the option to take one and skipped it? Doesn't bother me for an instant.

Death in this game is just not that big of a deal. Awakens are incredibly easy to get. Travel powers trivialize the return from the hospital, if it's necessary. The only real penalty for dying is Debt (and even that barely counts), and Rez powers don't do anything to it. It's not like in FFXI, where there were no self-Rez powers, your Home Point Crystal was often 20-40 minutes away by the fastest travel methods the game offered, and depending on the tier of Resurrect spell you could eliminate 10-75% of the EXP Penalty you'd just taken. In that game, yeah, if your Red Mage or White Mage skipped their Resurrect spell it was the kind of thing that ended teams and expanded blacklists. In this game? Death is overcome too easily on my own for me to expect anyone else to waste a power slot taking care of it.

Also, on the subject of the Rez + Something Else powers... very rarely do I find that the dead guy is in a convenient location to get any real value out of the Rez-Nuke or Rez-Mez or whatever. And picking up Recall Friend for corpse-carrying would mean TWO powers wasted on a trick I wasn't that enthusiastic about in the first place.

Edit: Howling Twilight is, of course, the exception. But I've never deliberately used it as a Rez. I think there have been some dead folks around a couple of the times I've used it as a Mez + Debuff, but that was purely coincidental. Paying attention to the Rez potential in HT would feel like slotting my Katana Scrapper's attacks for Defense Debuff instead of Damage.

Every time I get a Carnival of Shadows Boss in a Newspaper mission talking about how hot Silver Mantis is, it makes the world a better place. And yet, every time a 4000 year old CoT Ghost Wizard in a stolen body, a Sky Raider Robot, or a Troll who suddenly speaks perfect english does the same thing, I have no such favorable reaction. Huh... crazy.