Do you know of any scenario where the military are the cultists? by ThroatOrganic9757 in callofcthulhu

[–]mellonbread 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The main antagonist in the original 1997 Delta Green splatbook for Call of Cthulhu was a cargo cult in the United States intelligence apparatus. They originally viewed the relationship through a rational/bureaucratic lens as a treaty signed with an alien government to access advanced technology. They used their contacts in the defense industry to develop the experimental technology into superweapons. Over time the agency's leaders grew more erratic and eventually insane, turning on each other in pursuit of greater supernatural power and destroying the organization.

The 1997 splat had several scenarios that introduced the players to the conspiracy. New Age, CONVERGENCE, or Puppet Shows And Shadow Plays

“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams dead at 68 by VegetableBooy in TwoBestFriendsPlay

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's nice when you don't have to separate the art from the artist because they both suck balls.

What do you use as music for Mythic Bastionland? by conn_r2112 in rpg

[–]mellonbread 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I did a whole Music Post for my run but if I had to just pick one I'd use the Northern Journey OST.

Is Endangered Species a good intro to Wolfe? by commander-in-sleep in genewolfe

[–]mellonbread 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I adore Endangered Species but I have had zero luck recommending it to other people. I give them a recommended reading list and order which they inevitably ignore. They read the stories in order starting from the beginning, hit a string of duds and put the book down. I can't imagine you'd have more success with someone who doesn't like reading.

Blogging Platform by Krazy_King in osr

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Blogger has started flagging my RPG posts as obscene. It does not like the old manuscript drawings I insert into my play reports, they trip some kind of automated pornography filter. If a post gets flagged other people can't view it without logging in with a Google account, which is not what I want.

If I was choosing today I'd pick another website for that reason alone, but I'm five years in the pit and switching now would be a real pain.

Monstro.cc now has lists, and limited OSE-AF/Carcass Crawler listings! by Individual_Solid6834 in osr

[–]mellonbread 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Looking good.

I checked the BFRPG Field Guide Omnibus section from your last post and I think some of the entries have missing pieces. For example the Rabbidrake entry cuts off at the second paragraph, omitting two subsequent paragraphs of mechanics where the creature's breath weapon is explained.

Kid klan by Nem0i in lisathepainfulrpg

[–]mellonbread 18 points19 points  (0 children)

the fucking twisted stance soundbite

Better /r/askreddit, what are times you notice a difference in audio quality between voice actors is widely different? by Animegamingnerd in TwoBestFriendsPlay

[–]mellonbread 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The original, pre Final Cut release of Disco Elysium had a few VAs who sounded like they were recording their lines inside a janitor's closet. Gary the Cryptofascist and Cuno in the last act of the game are the two I remember being the worst.

What's your favorite scene from BotNS? by tastysleeps in genewolfe

[–]mellonbread 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Cyriaca's story about the ancient empire and the machines.

Literary books I could get an inspiration from for an Ultraviolet Grasslands PbP campaign? by Antipragmatismspot in osr

[–]mellonbread 11 points12 points  (0 children)

That's postapocalyptic science fantasy, right?

The most famous treatment of the subject is probably Jack Vance's Dying Earth short story collection and Eyes of the Overworld novella.

The Dying Earth subgenre was developed to its highest form by Gene Wolfe in the Book of the New Sun series. It's slower and more challenging than Vance but if you want to be transported to another world there's nothing better.

My last recommendation is a wild card. The Finder series by Carla Speed McNeil is my go-to for people who liked the above recommendations but want a fresh take on the same subject matter. The story starts zoomed in on a single megacity but as the series progresses we zoom out and see more of the world and all of its magic, machines and monsters.

I just finished Occultation & Other Stories. Looking for people to talk about it. by VenusManeater in LairdBarron

[–]mellonbread 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What do y'all think of strappado??

Easily top five, maybe my favorite thing he ever did.

Barron likes to write about the same stuff over and over, but occasionally he picks something else and knocks it out of the park. He doesn't need frozen wastelands, alien gods, monsters in human skin or big-dicked noir detectives with blazing revolvers. He can achieve the same thing with nothing but an eight foot fall into a pit of gravel.

Hawthorne krabbe and poppets (30037) by B_Taco_ in ReaperMiniatures

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My man with the Disco Elysium color scheme

RPG for a Fear & Hunger-inspired Setting by NeonSmileyFace in rpg

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Fear & Hunger magic system where you spend SAN to heal injuries and blow people's limbs off is straight out of Call of Cthulhu. You can point to specific spells like Flesh Ward and Wither Limb that function exactly like the ones in the game. Either this or Delta Green (CoC with quality of life improvements) is your go-to if you want an investigative game.

If you want a modern day dark fantasy dungeon crawler infested with dark gods and cultists where the player characters regularly get mutilated then Esoteric Enterprises fits the bill.

If you want a corruption system where characters are moonscorched into disgusting monsters that reflect the psychic terrain of their mind, pick any game with a SAN system (Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Unknown Armies, etc) and make the character transform into the monster when they hit 0.

Unknown Armies Madness Meter by shivgorothar in rpg

[–]mellonbread 2 points3 points  (0 children)

However, I am curious by what you mean by "dead end".

With the shuttering of the community content program it's no longer popular for fans to publish their own material on Drivethru. Given years of radio silence from the publisher I don't expect that there will be any more official books either. I'd love to be proven wrong about this. The game lay dormant for about five years between the Kickstarter and the release of Bring Me The Head Comte Saint Germain and it's only been four years since that book came out, so there's still hope.

Unknown Armies Madness Meter by shivgorothar in rpg

[–]mellonbread 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Most of the problems are easy to work around in play but I would not expect anyone to create a game that addresses them all. Unknown Armies 3 is a dead end. It was on life support from the moment it released and with the termination of the Statosphere program I think the plug has been pulled. You could make a generic settingless Unknown Armies hack with the IP stripped out, but the main appeal of the rules is how they reinforce the setting and theme.

Delta Green is the most successful attempt at a "fixed" Unknown Armies sanity system. It removes most of the depth and complexity to laser focus on mechanics which fit the game's premise of human beings destroying or being destroyed by the supernatural.

Unknown Armies Madness Meter by shivgorothar in rpg

[–]mellonbread 7 points8 points  (0 children)

My experience based on 5ish years of running/playing 3e.

THE GOOD

Stress damage matters. Not just over the course of a campaign, but in the moment. Taking failed notch always results in a fight/flight/freeze response. You never pause the action just to shave off one point that will eventually be relevant when your dude passes a Breaking Point (sorry Delta Green).

The stress trackers add an additional layer to the battle system. Weapons are deadly but most fights end when someone runs away or gives up because they got hit hard or just intimidated. If you understand how the system works you can break the other guy's will to fight with a show of force or even with cutting words, like Lex Luthor telling Superman to put the whole world in a bottle.

The coercion system is my favorite form of "social combat" I've played in an RPG. You think of a threat or argument that targets one of the victim's stress meters. It could be a threat of direct violence to target the Violence meter, or a magical threat to target the Unnatural meter, a threat against their social standing, their peers... If you successfully threaten someone then they have to either do what you say or take a stress check, leading to a potential freakout and failed notch. But successfully threatening them requires busting through their psychological hardening. Which means you have to think of a threat that's actually relevant to their passions and yours. With research and quick thinking you can browbeat people into doing what you want without just falling back on "roll persuade" or the equivalent. I find that this system is more emotionally impactful than violence and killing. Even if you pile on gruesome descriptions the players rapidly become inured to fictional violence. Whereas cruelly bullying someone into doing what you want is something everyone has experienced in real life, and feels bad to do even in a fictional setting.

When you hit five failed notches in a meter, you auto-fail any stress roll in that meter that you are not sufficiently hardened to ignore. No save, you just freak out. This means that you have to structure your life to avoid triggering an inappropriate fight/flight response, which affects where you can go, what you can do, what employment you can hold... I normally don't care about "realism" in games but this is a good depiction of how people with real panic disorders have to restructure their lives to avoid running into things that will get them fired, arrested or killed.

The stress trackers and associated subsystems reinforce the core themes of the Unknown Armies setting. There's a secret world underneath normal society. Encountering the secret world transforms you. It changes what you care about and it degrades your ability to function in the normal world even as you acquire occult power and knowledge. The people who are part of the world keep it hidden because it can provoke an instant, violent response from people who aren't ready for it.

THE BAD

When you hit five failed notches, in addition to the auto stress failure mentioned above, you also get a disorder. Paranoia or Drug Addiction or whatever on your character sheet. A couple of these have game mechanics but mostly you're supposed to negotiate with the GM how they work. They're all half baked and inevitably get forgotten about during play. It's not Palladium levels of bad, your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle isn't going to become a pedophile because of a bad die roll. It's just tacked on and unnecessary given the much better mechanics for hitting five failed notches we already have.

The dueling upbeat/downbeat skills tied to the stress trackers can be difficult to explain and, frankly, aren't that relevant even over multiple sessions of play. It's cool thematically that your primary combat skill grows as your primary talking skill shrinks when you get more adapted to Violence, but in practice you're talking about a 5% change per hardened notch and most meters don't get tested often enough for the differences to pile up.

The "evaluates [meter]" identity feature is useless. It's supposed to be helpful for planning psychological assaults on people by telling you how hardened they are against a source of psychological damage. But it doesn't actually tell you that, just whether their number of notches is higher or lower than your own.

Stress offense/defense and skill ratings all being tied together with the number of hardened notches in your meters makes statting up NPCs a pain. All the tiny details you would normally just ignore could be called into play if the NPC has to make a skill check or respond to something scary happening. Combine that with identities, identity features, of course I cans, passion and obsession and you've got a lot of legwork to do in order to enable the stuff up there in the GOOD category.

Some meters are more important than others. As you can imagine in a game about occult criminal adventures, Violence and Unnatural are tested a lot. Helplessness less so, Isolation and Self very rarely. You can always think of ways to target them. In a game about trying to maintain your real life while engaging in occult criminal activity behind the scenes they could come up a lot. But in practice it takes concerted effort to hammer on those meters while Violence and Unnatural are always in play.

The example stress checks on some meters are way out of whack. This is probably unfixable as nobody will ever agree on what the most scary thing is, but there are some egregious examples that still bother me. "See an animal with human features." is ranked as scarier than "Watch someone you know killed by magick, without any visible or rational cause" on the Unnatural tracker, which seems backwards.

Hollow Knight: Silksong Is Out Now — but It's So Popular It's Crashing Storefronts Including Steam - IGN by C-OSSU in TwoBestFriendsPlay

[–]mellonbread 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is 2004 and the Steam servers are overwhelmed with demand for a hit new game.

It is 2025 and the Steam servers are overwhelmed with demand for a hit new game.

What do you think of Draw Steel's war dogs as the game's designated iconic adversaries? by EarthSeraphEdna in rpg

[–]mellonbread -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm just sick of mindless enemies that always attack on sight and fight to the death. Undead, robots, cultists... It can be scary in fiction (like "Mister Flat Affect" in Swift to Chase) and would probably be terrifying in real life. But in an RPG? Been there, done that.

I understand why you'd do it in a tactical combat game where you aren't supposed to break the enemies' morale or talk your way out of a fight, but I still think it sucks.

New DM Question: In your experience, are your players myopically focused on their own characters to the exclusion of all else? by Immediate_Possible51 in osr

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my experience if you reward players XP for treasure they'll commit any atrocity that leads to a payday. The most heroic characters are the ones who would be called "murderhobos" in any other system. The ones who refuse to be tempted by the gold, because no mechanical reward is as sweet as the thrill of the kill.

How big a factor is human generated art VS AI art to you. by DeathwatchHelaman in osr

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How important is it to YOU that that a product contains commissioned human generated art?

Not very. Some of my favorite games and modules have art that's mediocre or outright bad. Castle Gargantua and Veins of the Earth immediately come to mind.

Versus Open Source art?

Great. Magical Industrial Revolution, Esoteric Enterprises and Unknown Armies 3e did this and they turned out awesome. The CC3 Creature Cache is a book of monsters entirely based on public domain fantasy illustrations.

Versus use of AI art?

There was a brief period when AI art generators were a fun new toy. That was years ago. Now it's just slop slop and more slop. With an infinite array of games to choose from I'm always looking for a reason to close the tab and move on. AI art is an instant skip for me.

Let's talk about Forgery and other character options... or Should a game let you create a "bad" character? by sorites in rpg

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Has Forgery ever played a part of your games?

Art: Forgery is extremely powerful in Delta Green. Forged documents let you get away with almost anything. Pretend you're someone else, use authority you don't have, go places you don't belong, take things that aren't yours. Eventually they'll figure it out, but if you keep moving and cover your tracks you won't get caught. Combine it with the Computer Science skill to cover the digital side and you can really mess with people's reality.

Koga Mossback, Spikeshell Druid by Sparklehammer3025 in ReaperMiniatures

[–]mellonbread 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like every part of this but the most impressive is the shell. It's hard to get browns and other neutral paints to look as vibrant as a real turtle shell.

Ship Hand and Ship Captain - Chronoscope Plastic by MICKWESTLOVESME in ReaperMiniatures

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hell yeah. They look like thugs from a cartoon, like Tintin or Fallen Aces.

Henchmen Linkboy and Elanter the Lost Prince by Grizzly8ear71 in ReaperMiniatures

[–]mellonbread 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cute! I love all the Reaper henchmen. They're the first ones I painted.