https://empiremush.org/map/interactive_map/

Channeling my inner Bilbo Baggins here. hell yeah, a map!

@Pavel said in General Video Game Thread:

@somasatori said in General Video Game Thread:

I think he tends to lean heavily into the parody of “sassy gay friend serving,”

If he were the only queer character, I’d agree. But I think, at least to me and in my opinion only, he simply is a sassy gay friend/foe serving. But perhaps that’s my view only because I am the sassy gay friend who occasionally serves…

I haven’t run into any others yet! that’s a good point. I was anticipating this being the only queer character.

If a game could be considered good on vibes alone, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 would be great. The aesthetic, vibe and appearance of the game is gorgeous and definitely on theme with VTM. It’s not really like… a true sequel to Bloodlines from what I can tell yet, maybe something will come up in the story. It’s also only tangentially a VTM game. The main character has telekinesis powers and can glide through the air like a sugar flyer, which is a bit weird for my Lasombra. Hopefully that’s explained somewhere. Phyre is extremely edgy, but I guess that makes sense for an elder from Constantinople who calls themselves “The Nomad.” Fabien, the Malkavian Johnny Silverhand, is a cool character. His interludes (or the one I’ve seen so far) is fun and more focused around investigation rather than the pure violence/conflict that Phyre does. I do kinda wish they’d just married the two gameplay mechanics into one character and if you didn’t have the disciplines that Fabien does, you would have different methods of accomplishing similar goals, but eh.

The characters are pretty cool. I like Safia (Tremere) and Tolley (Nosferatu), though in the latter case I think he tends to lean heavily into the parody of “sassy gay friend serving,” but it is a big change from the usual way Nosferatu are shown.

I don’t really know 5e as much as Revised/20th but the Anarchs are effectively the Sabbat now? They seem like super anti-Masquerade, burn-everything-down types who are militantly opposed to the Camarilla. It feels like they basically took the Sabbat scripts from the first game and copy/pasted them on this one with the Anarchs.

Outside of it having the Bloodlines tag, it’s a nice action stealth adventure game. It’s not terribly RPG-like, just an action game with some RPG elements like very limited skill progression, but that’s fine if that’s what you want to play. They do a good job with that sort of gameplay.

I have a quick suggestion for the Empire devs:

Right away in the very first section of the introduction to your world information, make a lexicon of your terms.

I still am not entirely certain what a Greytide is, despite looking through the introduction to the Empire, the explanation on magic, etc. I know there are three of them, that the empire was formed as a reaction to the third, and that according to the “ideas behind the game” document “The Greytides were somewhere between the Blights and Chaos, and an early iteration looked more like the scale of Tolkien’s War of Wrath.” That still doesn’t entirely tell me what happened. Chaos in Warhammer could be a surge of cultist humans and champions of chaos, or it could be demons. The War of Wrath had orcs. Is the Greytide all human-based, or are there other species of humanoid creature involved? I don’t need to necessarily know why or how they occurred, as I assume that’s part of learning the story, but having the basics in a central section would be great.

I’m assuming demons because of the Grey Below (referenced in the Magic document), but did my ancestors fight demons or just demon-obsessed barbarian tribes?

Some of the locations are kind of like this as well, like the Scorchlands. It’s where the Cinderkin come from, and they’re clearly distinct from the Red Waste, and it sounds like they’re very close to Wend, but I’m not exactly sure what they’re supposed to be in general.

It’s very interesting information and clearly a lot of love went into the world building. I mentioned above about the too many proper nouns. Generally people are going to look at the bare minimum they need to play their characters, so their house information, the intro to the empire, and maybe the document on magic and one of the religion documents. There are some mentions within these that don’t quite make sense if you don’t cross reference into other things and I might not necessarily know where to look (good on you for having a search feature). Being able to quickly reference a layperson’s guide to basic information on things is extremely useful, especially if someone referenced something in RP.

@Tez said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@somasatori You know, that’s fair. The tone of the question wasn’t great though, and that’s what I think I’m responding to.

That’s fair as well! For me, the comparison statement was a bit of a kneejerk on account of people using it disingenuously about certain real life things that I won’t mention.

On my part, I’m particularly interested in House Heshbeh, but there is a kind of proper noun overuse here. I think I probably just need to read the lore files more thoroughly, tbf. Especially since I always complain about people not reading the lore files on games. Be the change and all.

I’m not trying to be testy here, but it is a bit of a logical fallacy to say “X doesn’t exist anymore, therefore comparisons between X and Y cannot be made, even if Y is a direct copy of X.” I never played on Arx and to my knowledge most of my friends didn’t play there, so no skin in the game with that specific comparison or what “how is it different from Arx” is intended to mean. Just noting that something can absolutely compare to something from the past.

Cortex Prime Evennia fantasy game?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m-MUz2Rihs

I like the use of the West Marches thing! If I have time I might swing by, though I’m historically pretty bad at sticking around Ares games.

If I don’t stop by, then I can’t make my “berem? I hardly know 'em” joke and it will just remain in my head to torment me

“The staff lost interest in this MUSH and let it fizzle out so play with them at this other one where that absolutely won’t happen again”

As a wise thinker once said: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee - I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on-- shame on you. Fool me, uh – you can’t get fooled again.”

I think we all know where we should go

edit: wow that’s a big image

@MisterBoring Ah! It’s you! Thanks so much for doing that!

@bear_necessities Well, true. What was that old fairly toxic staff motto? It’s not work if you enjoy it?

You could also offload a lot of the ST duties to players and have them run PrPs, which would probably suffice, especially if you don’t have a particular grand narrative you want them to follow.

@bear_necessities said in Missed Settings:

@Ominous I tooled around with a Delta Green concept MUSH for precisely half a minute, mostly couldn’t figure out a centralized location where everyone would interact with one another since (I think) the whole idea is that you have a Normal Life until you are called in to Do Stuff and then you go back to your Normal Life? And I didn’t want to run a town mush.

Take the guiding principles behind a West Marches game for this: make the standard town area be your home base where people get refueled and are generally safe. The plots and scenes run by GMs/Keepers/player-STs-if-you-allow-PrPs are where the danger comes in. All of the in-town stuff is handled by players and any player ST reps you have, the only staff involvement in plot stuff happens when you assemble investigatory teams to search out the Mythos lore. You wouldn’t be running a town MUSH, the players would just be doing their social RP and whatnot while you occasionally (weekly or semi-weekly basis) come in to run mythos stories.

@dvoraen said in Everworld of Darkness:

Don’t we just call them eldritch horrors and assume tentacles?

yep! Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I do think you could do this without delving into the oWoD stuff. There’s a lot in the Hisil that you could use, especially if you were going the Mage route. The Shadow is part of the invisible realms and can link to the Underworld, the Supernal realms, the Abyss, etc. There are spells that allow for Mages to do things in the spirit world and create large-scale things.

If you go a little beyond that and draw some conclusions about Changelings, you could have the Hedge. It would probably just all be located in one area, near a gate that leads to the Supernal Realm of Arcadia. Then having bits and pieces amalgamated into a kind of island of matter (I’m just going to call it “island” from here on) that has a city constructed on it; if you’re leaning fully into Mage, could even be an old piece of Atlantis. The Changelings would be able to leave the “elemental pole of the fae/chaos” and also go close to it in order to acquire some of their tokens and hedge fruit. It’d be very Stalker-y/risk vs reward. If it was all centered in a single city, the area nearest to the Hedge/eventual entrance to Arcadia would be a terrifying and anarchic mess, likely with (probably extreme) arts and entertainment venues, and probably be stuck to the whims of the local Courts.

Uratha would be tricky but could work, especially if you had a verge or something within the island that humans could wander into and suddenly were outside of the protection of whatever was holding the island together. The Uratha would basically be beset on all sides since they’re occupying a small island of physical matter in a giant sea of Hisil/Shadow. If you had it all centered in one city, there would need to be a big park, maybe a small mountain or large hill with a lot of greenery and lush foliage around it, a sort of “elemental pole of nature/the earth” in the City and likely would be heavily guarded.

I don’t really know enough about Demon to figure that one out.

If you had a big city upon the island then Vampires would be pretty easy to add in with minimal updates other than noting that the Masquerade is undeniably shredded, so individual vampires would need to be strict about their personal Masquerades.

Sin-Eaters would probably require some connection to the Underworld. I think I would probably identify that as similar to the Changelings and the Hedge/Arcadia, where the Underworld is very easy to get into and as you get closer to like the “elemental pole of death” or something, you run into more and more ghosts that are causing problems. If it’s all contained in a single city, that part of the city is probably a rundown shithole that no one wants to visit, but socioeconomic elements force them to remain there. Where else are they going to go, after all? The world ended.

I can’t really imagine Prometheans lasting very long here, but that could be a kind of Bas-Lag Remade (Perdido Street Station/The Scar/etc.) sort of deal, where people are punished by being killed and made into Prometheans, or maybe just Remade (a la Deviant).

@Jennkryst said in Everworld of Darkness:

You don’t need this for Alien Gods, that’s stock standard Void Engineer plots!

Oh yeah, I know, but if there’s a mention about alien gods anywhere it’s definitely my thing. Time to fuckfight Cthulhu!

you had me at “alien gods”

@Jennkryst said in Missed Settings:

Actually, everyone in Small Town knowing about the supernatural enough that the Masq/Veil/whatever is lax, but also somehow forced to not tell outsiders about it… feels like it has legs? Now you can idly chat in the bar about your werewolf’s cool kill and maybe get looks because murder/death is gross, more so than because it’s a horror from beyond reality.

But it’s also not giving ‘reality, but secret monsters’, because the monsters aren’t really secret.

This definitely would be fun, though to some extent it steps away from canon in oWoD games – I would say specifically, since CofD/nWoD often feels a little looser with the various Masqs with the exception of certain groups that have a personal stake in upholding the Masquerade or Veil or whatever like the Guardians of the Veil.

But yeah, I think this would be interesting! Fictionally/genre-wise it would probably feel like True Blood or Twilight, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a thing.

In the Time of Thin Blood book from revised there was a description of a vampire running an entire Midwestern rural town out of their lair. All of the major players in town served that vampire, and I think there was some mention of childer but I can’t quite remember and I don’t have access to it at the moment. The idea of that was always striking to me, especially since I was living in a fairly rural Illinois town outside of Chicago at the time. I could see that being something that you would run into in a ND town. It would likely not make for a good MUSH, though.

There was a game set in Honolulu in the late 90s! I played myself (basically) and became ghouled to the toreador primogen.

@Jennkryst said in PyReach:

I guess I’m finally finishing that post about one of trans ally and author of Animorphs Katherine Applegate’s other series, Everworld.

Animorphs is one of those Missed Settings things for me. Where are the animorphs mushes!