The Gaming Den

Someone put a lot of work into this setting. And it is much richer and more authentic feeling than most D&D settings. If memory serves, at one point there's a rant by one of the two authors --95% sure it was Rich Baker -- about how when he was trying to get hired by TSR, he hauled out a 500-pag...

My copy of the Dragonlance hardback is in the attic somewhere buried under a crapton of other stuff, so I can't easily get it out and check, but my recollection is that hogarth is correct about it being sort of a proto-PRC. The stuff at the link looks about right, down to the different colors having...

The thing with elves is that apparently the scent of a scared elf is like the Thri Kreen equivalent of fresh-baked apple pie, or chocolate chip cookies. It's a good thing I am not a thri-kreen, because I am pretty sure I would not only support eating elves, but also having farms where elves are kep...

So, I've been looking into Xcrawl. The art is terrible, their weird "Earth, but we've always had elves and dwarves!" thing is... well, could probably be better if they were better writers. And I have no clue why they decided the North American Empire should be run by Immortal Ronald Reaga...

Erol Otus.

The hoarding gold thing makes sense if you think of it as "shit, if someone gets hold of this stuff they could really fuck me up, I better minimize the amount there is in circulation."

If anything, I think the Garou are less sympathetic than Tradition Mages. Yes, the Mages think the advancement of consistent, reproducible science is the largest problem in the world today, and, by inference, they want to return the world to a mythic era when things like "gravity" and &quo...

I put it to you that Pentex is, indeed, more sympathetic than the Gaian werewolves. I'm not saying they're good people, but, let's be honest, "more sympathetic than Gaian werewolves" is a pretty fucking low bar to clear. If the Black Spiral Dancers are sympathetic because they're accepting...

Whenever you write a vicious parody of someone you hate, there's always the risk that you'll go too far and wind up making the reader sympathize with them. The more you go overboard frothing about how they eat babies and intentionally poison the elderly and how literally any means whatsoever are jus...

The pint of blood as a complaint needs to go without a book ref. It still doesn't work anyway unless they break out 100lb people having 8 blood points and 220lb people 12. VtM Revised, p.138, "Blood Pool", first paragraph, third sentence, states that "Each blood point corresponds rou...

IIRC, the book says if you drain 10 blood points from a mortal, they die, do not pass go, do not roll system shock. How much blood does a person have to lose in order to die from blood loss? Would 10% of that be a reasonable measure for 1 blood point? Could you lose and regenerate that every day li...

Considering how few fucks seem to have been given to real-world feasibility in many other areas of the game, I would be pretty damn foolish to try and convince anyone otherwise.

Vampire: the Masquerade posits vampires who have to drink a tenth of a human's blood every night just to stay alive. And then drink even more to use a lot of their powers, heal, or have sex. A tenth of a human's blood is about a pint of blood. Now, Vampire: the Masquerade never really thought throu...

For quite a few years, arguably the single most feared man in MMA was a pudgy Russian dude who also happened to be a multiple-time Sambo world champion, although it's worth asking which way the arrow of causation points in this particular case.

I don't have much confidence in my ability to outrun someone even if I haven't just been punched. And ideally I'd rather not turn my back so they have another free attack. If there are other people around or it's right near a place where there are people, that's another matter. The thing is, runnin...

I'm guessing that "runningthefuckawaydo" was heavily involved. Gregor Clegane would have a hard time beating up three-plus armed opponents who have the element of surprise.

Once you get done with the core book, be sure to go into detail on the Chrysalis mechanics from Aberrant: Teragen, which allow you to convert Taint into XP and thus reward you both coming and going for getting it in the first place.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VDz6rYGEZOA/UTJuiqqCzkI/AAAAAAAAALM/N6Cs4M_z3HU/s1600/Back+cover+of+Tzimisce+Book.jpg Is that a random dude with a vagina instead of his mouth ? A vagina with teeth inside ? ... I'm don't think you can get that in Corruption of Champion . Maybe some hentai explored that po...

White Wolf did in fact make an Aberrant hardcover. But it wasn't the standard, which it should have been, so ... yeah. I could have dealt with the meh gamesystem, but the descent into Big Penis NPCdom was a shitton faster than it was in Vampire. One of the published Aberrant adventures was literally...

Thaumaturgy (Lure of Flames) and Dark Thaumaturgy (Fires of Inferno) both shoot fires. The soak progression is identical (and you can only try to soak if you have Fortitude), but Fires of Inferno does more damage per turn. Daimonion has firebolts at 3 dots, and they are pretty shitty. 1 damage die ...

They could just, you know, keep the villains you can't plausibly negotiate with and have people negotiate with villains from other lines you can plausibly negotiate with. And maybe write in some more werewolf-centric villains that can be negotiated with. It's worth mentioning that they eventually d...

So basically the same "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG" they printed 15 years ago in the Vampire Revised Storytellers Guide, only with a couple of find and replace operations? This is my shocked face.

Any discussion of L. Sprague de Camp's fiction should really include mention of his collaboration with Fletcher Pratt on the "Harold Shea" series, a/k/a "The Incompleat Enchanter", "The Compleat Enchanter" and "The Complete Compleat Enchanter", depending on wh...

I blame Justin Achilli. And, while you can say that about almost anything related to Vampire once he got involved with it, I'm actually kind of serious this time. See, early on, Vampire actually did expect you to beat the elder evils. Among the very earliest Vampire material published were adventure...

Probably the more accurate explanation is not "we can't afford to add more factions", but something on the order of "we could add more factions, but then we wouldn't be able to sell as much DLC."