(Not to say that Christianity wasn't still considered the "default normal" in much of Western society, but that other modes were increasingly mainstream and there was a big spectrum regarding how much Christianity or other modes dominated one's attitudes.)
@Anaphory Steampunk settings usually exaggerate and accelerate the 19th century's physical causes for cultural and faith-based diversity: more efficient travel and communication spreads multicultural philosophies, while the rapid rise of scientific understanding changes the role of faith in the life of the individual and the community.
Historically these processes gave rise to a diverse set of syncretic belief and anti-belief systems; how much more so in a steampunk-accelerated world? It's the sort of implication I'm always disappointed to see mainstream steampunk dismiss.
I've got the broad strokes of his character, and a lot of the fiddly bits, but he hasn't... gelled... for me.
@doppelgreener Something not entirely dissimilar happened in India around that time; with the collapse of the East India Company's influence, the Company's permissiveness in allowing "local religions" to be practiced was blamed in part for the Indian's failure to assimilate.
I'm still keen on the old skinny bald dude look, somehow him getting pudgy doesn't seem like something he'd ever allow himself. Or something he'd never get, out of constant activity and good physical health (or, when he was strapped up to the device, a bit of a lack of both too).
Ok. Bald, skinny, weathered. Intense charisma and presence without conventional attractiveness. Lanky, may have a walking stick nowadays. Style of dress, not sure - certainly a suit on formal occasions, certainly no longer anything regal or cultish, but I'm not sure specifically what on other occasions.
@BESW I like the idea of this guy, and his voice, I think, is close enough to McKellan's in the ways that matter that we can say James is played by Tony Amendola.
He looks old for his age, but he's got surprisingly good spirits. He's had a life that's been hard, kinda freaky, kinda twisted at times, and despite being friendly and energetic (which would be a beautiful turnaround) he can go Serious Mode. (So, like the guy he played in SG-1.)
@Asteria [shakes 8-ball.] I foresee Indian in your future.
Ugh. I just bought some "soft baked" cookies... Half-baked, more like. I don't mind them a little soft, but these are ridiculous. (I'll probably still eat them)
@Asteria For me it's usually "What's about to spoil or go out of date, and what do I have that can be added to make it a full meal?"
Like: week-old spicy vegan sausage, three-day-old spaghetti noodles, and about-to-wilt green onions and bell peppers. Add some garlic and onion, whip up a sweet caramelising ginger-sugar sauce to stir-fry it all in, and you get something not entirely unlike pancit.
Speaking of things spoiling: I missed using up the strawberries by one day. Curse you, strawberries, my greatest love and my greatest sorrow, for your lives are as fleeting as a spring rain.
We usually bulk-buy staples like veggies and beans that can go into a lot of different meals, and then to get a special thing for each meal or several meals.
Like, really good bell peppers are hard to get here. So when I get a bag of good fresh bell peppers, that becomes the focus of the week's meals.
And I try to make enough for leftovers; it gets eaten for lunches, and if any's left I can turn it into something new for dinner the next night.
Is this question a callout? http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/78491/what-is-kryans-full-set-of-houserules-for-dd-3-5e
It seems like a lightly veiled way to communicate with another user outside of the chat system, but at the same time it seems like the answer should be relevant to the knowledge base given KRyan's reputation.
@Pixie depending on where you live, upick might be your best bet
@Axoren yeah, that probably needs to be discussed on meta. I'm not sure it's a real question, but I'm not sure there's a good reason to kill it via mod power
@waxeagle It is weird...I could understand if KRyan did it as a self-answered question for the sake of having something linkable (obviously not the right way to go about it but I don't think he has a blog), but I have no idea what the motivation is in this scenario.
@Miniman I just spent the last few minutes trolling through KRyan's answers and questions under the tag 'House-Rules' and didn't really find any information on HIS rules of note. (I am super bored, and will do anything to avoid writing this case study) his best chance might just be...messaging the guy
> I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it doesn't draw on the Stack's collective expertise; only one person can answer the question and the rest of the community can't contribute. This is the sort of thing that would be best handled by inviting KRyan to a dedicated chat room.
@Asteria While they mean the same thing, I suggest using "trawl" instead of "troll" on the Internet, because of the unique situational meaning given to "trolling" when used online.
Nothing wrong with "troll," but "trawl" will help the reader to parse your intended meaning.
@trogdor I find it fun, a great way to be creative and to make cheap gifts. But if someone said "Oi go crochet me the alphabet and have it done in 3 weeks" I would suddenly have a passionate hatred for it
@doppelgreener That's gonna depend on where and when we're talking about. It's stereotypically women's work in our popular culture, but that's not a universal trope throughout our history.
I think the Shadowcraft "essence" mechanic for magic would work really well for a vampire NPC.
When you do something vampire-y, you never fail; if the dice say you fail, instead you succeed at cost, with the cost being a new aspect describing how you're physically or mentally more of a monster and less of a human.
The aspect should be beneficial, like gaining a claw attack or gaining a superhuman sense of smell.
But if you get five aspects at once, you go full vamp and become an NPC permanently (barring some super-epic quest the rest of the party undertakes the reclaim you).
If you've only got one or two of these aspects, you can remove them by just doing something to remind you of your humanity.
If you've got more than two aspects, you'll have to drink blood or do something complicated and elaborate to remove them.
@Asteria In Shadowcraft, PCs are mortals infused with the magical essence of illusion, earth, or animal powers. As they use their magic, they become more like their infused essence. Use it too much and you may merge with it permanently and vanish forever.
So you like being partway there, because you've got rocklike skin or can climb things like a lizard or can walk through walls. But it's a knife's edge you're dancing, especially when you try to do something big.
@BESW As the newbiest newbie to ever be new, I have a feeling I would quickly loose control of the character. But it sounds like a really interesting concept, I love the idea of it
Shadowcraft's setting is a fairy world populated by the descendants of humans who were kidnapped by elves, infused with magical energies, and then abandoned. There's a cold war between mortal factions, and the PCs are secret agents and spies for one side.
So it's basically "Mission: Impossible: Fairy Edition."
But because it's a Fate game, it throws in "And your highest competencies have a direct impact on your character's identify and may destroy them utterly... in the most awesome manner possible."
@BESW well, part of what I meant is just the whole idea of having powers that make you always succeed at particular things, but at a cost when the roll is low
with the things connected to all that too of course
@Anaphory In my group's games, we tend to start with a broad sense of the kind of setting we're in, and define/discover details as we go, so the world emerges from the play.
@BESW I think this is the first time in our ARRPG thing I'd recommend this as an extra. Not a stunt taking a stunt slot, but something there on the character sheet.
@Anaphory Absolutely. When Trogdor made a cyborg dragon character, he established that our game setting has both dragons and ridiculously advanced prosthetic technology.
@doppelgreener Ben and I also toyed with the idea (before we talked about Shadowcraft's mechanics) that as a cost for his vampire-magic extra he'd be unable to use his moderate and severe consequence slots to absorb physical stress.
That'd mean physical attacks are the sort of thing he can shrug off a few scenes later (mild consequence), unless they're so dire that they permanently change his character (extreme consequence).
(For in-between stuff, faction consequences could take up the slack.)
Hmm. That sounds like an odd mechanical fallout, because it results in the opposite effect: any physical problem greater than a sprained ankle is liable to destroy him utterly in combat.
The real effect is: "consequences shift down a slot at the end of every issue." Or something like that.
Throw in a vampire weakness and that'd make a decent stunt. Mild stuff vanishes. Everything recovers faster.
We cannot after all address faction consequences as easily as we can address personal consequences, necessarily.
Or bulletproof, the only stuff that damages him is dire and he can take it. (But maybe others in his vicinity can't. See Tesladyne survival guide's chapter on don't be the guy standing next to Robo.)
As long as he can continually take mental consequences to represent physical problems, we can keep up the illusion that everything is either insignificant or badly scarring. Worth playtesting, maybe?
@BESW Where would would I even start reading up a broad overview on such a niche topic as “second half of the 19th century religious views in new colony upper class”?
@doppelgreener That's actually one reason I ask: I realised I made an Inquisitor sample character looking for heresies, and then doubt struck me as to how fun this type of conflict would be.
Understood. It does make things a little spottier.
So, the difficulty isn't finding overviews (see here, here, etc), but of finding ones which simultaneously go broad and deep without stopping being overviews.
A lot of them focus too closely on a narrow band of subjects.
And it's more interesting how they influence politics, and how they differ in influencing politics far away from Europe, than what they actually believe, I think.
To my mind, the potentially most interesting part of a steampunk setting is how it exaggerates the era's proliferation and cross-pollination of ideas, both mechanical and philosophical.
In this case, I come from being more interested in combining autocratic feudal-style local lords with a steam punk aesthetic, which is not to say that adding more actual steampunk elements (in the above sense) won't be interesting.
That's a difficult combination for me to reconcile, because autocracy and the steampunk ethos seem very much at odds to my way of thinking.
....unless....
If we go back to the original concepts of *punk as an appropriation of the oppressor's resources by the oppressed to forge tools of resistance, that could be fascinating.
But then, I'm probably overthinking this as usual.
I'm very much of the mindset that society and technology go hand in hand, feeding on each other, and transplanting one setting's technology into another setting's society will foment civilisation-shaking change.
@BESW True! That's why we (I and the other person starting this thing) went for the abstract colonial idea, where the gentry among themselves show at least some parts of the steampunk ethos, while how they deal with the local population might be an entirely different matter which should be interesting to explore.
@BESW Yes!
For the moment, I have a hacked combination of HotB's Blood and Tears system on a colonial setting with steampunk aesthetics. This will either go forward and melt together into something that makes sense to me and potential players, or it will break apart as unreconcilable.
The current step is understanding more about our colonial setting (which is quite emergent/bottom-up for the moment), and seeing how it fits the Blood and Tears mechanics and ethos, which centers on drama, conflicting interests and player-collaborative PCvPC.
@Anaphory I guess my struggle is imagining a feudal society embracing the egalitarian and individualistic Romantic/Enlightenment ethos common to steampunk.
Not that I don't think it's possible, but I'm having a hard time imagining a fusion that can still be considered both feudal and steampunk.
Like, it'd make more sense to me if steampunk were emerging amongst the locals of the colonised region, rather than being engaged by the elites of the colonising group.
(Which, all on its own, is now a game I want to make.)
@BESW Somehow reminds me of Discworld's Moist von Lipwig series…
@BESW Given that I don't have a Steampunk-Society any more since I moved, I might as well drop any pretense of doing Steampunk and go back to playing the Noble Blooded Houses of the Ven, but with a simplified system…
It used to be: To organise a game that would also be interesting to Southampton's KrakenSoc, a university society of people who subscribe to Steampunk aesthetics or ethos in general and like to dress up in waistcoats, monocles, top hats, victorian gowns, being polite to each other and drinking tea.
And I had lost the player characters and only found my example characters, and a lot of them belong to different groups of Christianity/have different stances on it, so I thought “How can I actually make that fun?”
So it sounds like the answer to "What is your game about?" is "My game is an LRP about squabbling and scheming Victorian colonists of various Christian denominations."
(Or become convinced that the hack does not work for me and return to the core.)
> For the moment, I have a hacked combination of HotB's Blood and Tears system on a colonial setting with steampunk aesthetics. This will either go forward and melt together into something that makes sense to me and potential players, or it will break apart as unreconcilable.
"My game is a LRP about squabbling, scheming and romancing Victorian colonists." The original “Blood and Tears is a LRP about scheming and romancing Ven feudal lords&ladies”.
Do things theatre-style, in this case in some rooms in someone's flat.
@doppelgreener It tries too hard to be compatible with Houses of the Blooded and make everything in that tabletop game r🐘, and I have not played a vanilla game of it, but it appears to.
@doppelgreener I have been waiting for this opportunity quite a while since I found out that that unicode character exists and someone confirmed that they see it as it's supposed to look, for I don't ;)
But I might not need a Game recommendation. I might need a phone recommendation. Or a source for a Dutch house shared with nice people with garden. Or wonder which kind of cheap shelf fits under my roof.
When it's some other question, the stack is a good place. But for shopping questions?
Being Nice is just generally appreciated. Actually knowing stuff is what I'd like to see, yes.
Currently, officially we're sending people off to forums for shopping questions. But forums are no better than this site for getting answers, they just don't have such restricted conditions for fit as we do.
Which is a sort of catch-22, as we only field questions we can answer well and we don't make any extra effort to field questions which other sites can handle, whether we can handle them well or not.
So when something is handled okay but not great on another site AND the Stack can't handle it really well, then it's Somebody Else's Problem to find a better way to answer 'em.
