Behemoth: Revelations

[Gnyahaha]

So, I was wondering. People make games about mad scientists, vampires, werewolves and fae in the World of Darkness, things that dwell in our society but remain hidden.

How come nobody has made a game about DaiKaiju?

Huge monsters.

Oh Yeah.

No, seriously, alla this crap about hiding in human society? All this drivel about hidden ecologies of supernatural beings? How about playing HUGE MONSTERS that hide as humans using their powers. There could be 30 of them in the world, dwelling in the depths of the oceans and in the so far unreachable reaches of the world (and lets face it, theres a lot of those left in the world, Umbra included).

Lets do away with discretion and hiding folks. Let;s make a game about the last remaining peoples of the time before Time, fighting to protect the world from the Horrible Horrible Things that threaten our world.

[Caedrus]

Well... okay... but only if we get to reduce Tokyo to molten slag with radioactive fire while little people run around screaming asynchronous horror in badly dubbed engrish.

[Gnyahaha]

Well... okay... but only if we get to reduce Tokyo to molten slag with radioactive fire while little people run around screaming asynchronous horror in badly dubbed engrish.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Also, consider this stat-wise. Kaiju forms get 10 extra dots on their physical stats (until you feed that aspect some xp) and of course you ge to breathe fire, cloud the minds of men, conceal areas from detection and shed minions from your own skin.

[Midnight_v]

LOL! Sounds like fun... reminds me of that warren ellis book planetary. Never saw a better exlplanation for monster island than them.
Okay so ... what do they fight? Cthulhu other types of aliens...
Okay and you gotta watch the trailer for "big man japan" if you're gonna do this.

Edit: for the awesome... I dont' know why it took a min to hit me but Behemoth: The Revelation.
Brilliant title. Flubbed the reference for some reason right then.

[Username17]

Leviathan: The Tempest was going in that direction.

Honestly, World of Darkness is a horrible system for giant monsters, and you should do something else instead.

-Username17

[Gnyahaha]

LOL! Sounds like fun... reminds me of that warren ellis book planetary. Never saw a better exlplanation for monster island than them.

Seconded for awesome.

Okay so ... what do they fight? Cthulhu other types of aliens...
Okay and you gotta watch the trailer for "big man japan" if you're gonna do this.

Behemoths have been the guardians of earth since before Time. Born from raw material might and elemental fury, the Behemoths have stood guard for billenia, protectors of all life on earth from the forces of the Outer None.
In the beginning of Days, the Behemoth were many in number, formidable force that dwelt in the far reaches of the then limitless earth, in its waking dreamscapes, in the caverns beneath its rocky skin, inside its molten core.
But the forces of the Outer None struggle to break their line of defence. beings of no sanity, dedicated to the eternal work of devastation, annihilation, consumption. The beings from the Outer None are expressions of anti-life, elementals of Anthelios.
Some of them, stragglers from the ancient crusades against life, dwell on earth, hidden among men, hunted by the Behemoths, attempting to build societies and to contact their more awesome brothers.
A handful are anti-beings that have taken dwelling in the lightless depths of the ocean or the earths crust, beings that live at the rate of a heartbeat each decade, waiting for strange circumstances to spring them back to life, according to nameless conditioning.
Lastly, numerous and terrible, the aristocracy of the Outer None. The beings that are not of this world, that are a crude parody of life and sanity and dwell at the edge of reason, who loathe earth, life and form. Who wait for a breach in our defences to storm inside Earth and annihilate all that we know.

The idea is that there are three types of enemies for Behemoths:
-The Outer None, who are essentialy Mythos-like entities who wish to annihilate life on earth and the planet itself. They dwell in the places that man cannot access or experience, such as the Umbra or Deep Space.
-The Society: A secret society of men who follow the insructions laid out by Maximillian DeGodard, a mad prophet who claims to know the secret of the Behemoths power and wish to make it their own
-The Courts of UnMan: Essentially a society that icorporates werewolves, vampires and other supernaturals from Wod (lets ignore the other factions, theyre just splitting hairs eh?)
-The Dwellers in Shadow: A population of shadow beings and demons, forgotten things that for some insane reason, worship the Outer None.

fixed broken quote tag --Z

[Gnyahaha]

Leviathan: The Tempest was going in that direction.

Honestly, World of Darkness is a horrible system for giant monsters, and you should do something else instead.

-Username17

I will, actually I just want to mine the forums for ideas

[Xenologer]

Okay so ... what do they fight? Cthulhu other types of aliens...

I'd be perfectly well-amused by them fighting us.

I agree with Frank that WoD would be terrible for it. The only WW system I've seen that even attempts to power-scale high enough to stomp around Angel Grove is Scion, and that would just be silly. Potentially hilarious, but silly.

GURPS is always fun, but considering that system starts you on your mecha-battling journey by requiring you to calculate the volume of your big robot, I am a little afraid of what the process of creating a big monster would look like.

[PoliteNewb]

I say HERO/Champions could probably do what you want...flexible enough, and the power level can scale as high as you want (I seriously worked out the point cost of having a hiroshima-type nuclear device one time...it's within the point range of a starting character).

Also, someone needs to fix a tag.

[Gnyahaha]

I'd be perfectly well-amused by them fighting us.

You need a reason for that and also supernatural baddies. The idea is that Behemoths are guardians of earth and occassionally end up having a romp with us, but that's all it is.

I agree with Frank that WoD would be terrible for it. The only WW system I've seen that even attempts to power-scale high enough to stomp around Angel Grove is Scion, and that would just be silly. Potentially hilarious, but silly.

Isnt Scion supposed to be 21st century exalted?

GURPS requiring you to calculate the volume of your big robot.

You're kidding, right?

[name_here]

GURPS requiring you to calculate the volume of your big robot.

You're kidding, right?

I can't attest to the actual truth of that, though.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Yeah, the GURPS 3rd edition vehicle design rules were incredibly math-happy and produced highly questionable results. I have no idea if they've been addressed in 4th edition.

[Gnyahaha]

Let's focus on the game idea however.

I think that these monsters should not all be godzilian. I keep imagining them more like Shoggoths or super-deep ones or maybe giant amphibians. The idea is that these things come from nature and protect earth, while the Outer None Behemoths should be creatures with strange abilities.

For example, a Behemoth should for example appear to resemble a giant reptilian. its powers would include flight, fire breath (atomic) and regeneration. The being does have the power to slide to the spirit realms of the earth to make itself invisible to human beings.

An Outer None Behemoth should be something alien though. Possibly a mish-mash of organs, hovering and sliding through the higher dimensions back to our own and here again. Its powers could make it much harder to spot or to be able to hide in a human mind for a sort amount of time to avoid detection.

All Behemoths should have the power Guise Of Man. The Behemoth's true form becomes invisible by sliding in the Umbra and is replaced by a human form. The form can deceive anyone at first glance, but the projection will crumble if attacked and the silver cord connecting it to its real body can be seen by accomplished practitioners of the occult.

Killing the avatar of a Behemoth is not in itself enough to kill it. If the avatar is killed, the Behemoth suffers and is unable to recreate avatars for a certain amount of time, but the attackers still have to find the means and resources to kill the damn thing if and when they find it.

Behemoth avatars are severely diminished in power from behemoths. Though human guises are formidable in battle, they cannot properly channel their awesome might. A stray bullet will most probably not kill them, but weapons designed to kill Behemoths will most probably harm them grievously.

Behemoths can instantly manifest where their avatars are, unless the silver cord is severed. In that case, the avatar crumbles and the behemoth cannot reach it.

Lastly, Behemoths do not appear before humans, unless given no other choice. The size and mere presence of a behemoth is enough to drive men into amok, never mind the clash between two of them! Human minds and bodies caught in the clash of these monsters suffer greatly and their lives are severely threatened. Like them or not, the Behemoths know that they have a responsibility to protect humans, no matter the cost.

[Xenologer]

I'd be perfectly well-amused by them fighting us.

You need a reason for that and also supernatural baddies. The idea is that Behemoths are guardians of earth and occassionally end up having a romp with us, but that's all it is.

I never said they wouldn't be thinking of themselves as guardians of the planet. I thought of it when I read this part of your initial post:

Let;s make a game about the last remaining peoples of the time before Time, fighting to protect the world from the Horrible Horrible Things that threaten our world.

So we could do the old standby and have them be watchers against the Elderthing from beyond Plane X or from beneath the edges of our dreams or whatever, but I would still be more likely to play a game where the Horrible Horrible Things that threaten their world are homo sapiens.

However, it looks at this point like you've got the setting laid out and you just want a system for it. Am I right?

[Gnyahaha]

However, it looks at this point like you've got the setting laid out and you just want a system for it. Am I right?

Id really like to hear more opinions and suggestions on the setting idea. I was thinking on using Savage Worlds or BESM for the system, sth open ended as all hell to do what I want to do. The idea is currently a small cloud of possibilities in my head, but nothing definite.

[CCarter]

GURPS Vehicles in all seriousness does use cube roots somewhere, e.g. point cost based on displacement for water vehicles.

Savage Worlds reputedly isn't great for mega-monster battles since its HP system doesn't track incremental damage well - bad guys are "up, down, or off the table". A big bad will tend to just ignore most hits. So, it trades functionality for PCs-vs.-megamonster battles to handle mass combats with less bookkeeping instead- the opposite of D&D in this regard. It'd probably be a good system if you wanted to say run a Pirate type game with ships of too many guys vs. ships with too many other guys.

Any dice pool system will probably run into scaling issues with kaiju (too many freaking dice). I don't have an offhand suggestion for what a good system for it would be though. Marvel Super Heroes maybe. Or possibly a system that uses an exponential stat scale like DC Heroes or TORG/ Shatterzone, though I haven't actually seen either of the latter.

[fectin]

Actually, tweaking Danger Patrol's system would probably work great for this. Call the danger track "destruction" (or whatever) instead. Everything else is vague enough that all you'd have to do is change some names.

It's not exactly a serious system, but I doubt "Behemoth: Revelations" would really suffer for it.

[Username17]

Yeah, you're going to want some system that can track really large amounts of damage delivered in small bite-sized packets. Some sort of HERO port would be obvious, as would a Feng Shui port. A game system like aWoD would obviously not work, because you want to keep track of damage that is way less than 10% of the total to drop a giant monster. Some system like M&M or Savage Worlds would be even worse, because of how nearly binary everything is. Seriously, you'd be better off hacking the old Palladium TMNT game than using Savage Worlds.

Anyway, the first thing you have to decide is whether the monsters are giant all the time like Godzilla or Gamera, or grow to appropriate size like they were in Ultraman or Power Rangers. The second thing you have to decide is what range of size monsters you intend to have. The adventures of 4 meter tall Incredible Hulk are very different from the adventures of 17 meter tall King Kong, and those are very different from the adventures of 80 meter tall Godzilla.

-Username17

[Gnyahaha]

Anyway, the first thing you have to decide is whether the monsters are giant all the time like Godzilla or Gamera, or grow to appropriate size like they were in Ultraman or Power Rangers. The second thing you have to decide is what range of size monsters you intend to have. The adventures of 4 meter tall Incredible Hulk are very different from the adventures of 17 meter tall King Kong, and those are very different from the adventures of 80 meter tall Godzilla.

-Username17

I was thinking that the Behemoths work and investigate in human society through their avatars, in human sized proxies, which allows them to unravel mysteries and investigate the works of the Outer None.

Maybe the Behemoth sizes should increase as their power increases. A behemoth pup could be up to 10 meters tall and weigh at 10 tons, like hulk. Older Behemoths can go up to 30 meters and only the oldest grow to theeimmensely impossible sizes that godzilla and the big hitters work with.

I was thinking, as a rule of thumb, that Behemoths cannot be harmed by human weapons, unless those that have the impact power to harm heavy armor (or nukes). Firearms are useless against them, naturally and behemoths can be harmed by weapons specified to harm them, which ignore their armor appropriately.

Behemoth hit-points should be calculated as those of regular human beings, with the exception that they can only be harmed by weapons able to harm them. A human avatar of a behemoth is far sturdier than a regular human, but it can be killed by firearms or regular means. A true form Behemoth can only be harmed by Patriot missiles.

[Vebyast]

Yeah, you're going to want some system that can track really large amounts of damage delivered in small bite-sized packets. Some sort of HERO port would be obvious, as would a Feng Shui port. A game system like aWoD would obviously not work, because you want to keep track of damage that is way less than 10% of the total to drop a giant monster. Some system like M&M or Savage Worlds would be even worse, because of how nearly binary everything is. Seriously, you'd be better off hacking the old Palladium TMNT game than using Savage Worlds.

I'm short on time this today, so I'll expand on this further later. For now, short post.

I'm not sure how you guys stand on BattleTech and similar games, but they had an acceptable system for dealing with big stuff. It's been a long time since I saw it played, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Basically, instead of tracking abstract hit points, you had an heavily pixilated drawing of your mech, with different mech components mapped to different boxes. When you took hits that got through your armor, you marked some of those boxes. Lose enough boxes from a single system and that system would explode and become unusable.



Now, before you attack this idea for its complexity, remember that breaking things down into small bits makes things go way faster. You may have had four armor and a hit point per box and forty or fifty boxes, but because tracking hits was "mark three ticks off of three boxes in your left arm", tracking hit points was trivial. It took seconds. BattleTech was designed as a wargame, and it shows: you could field six or seven mechs on a side, each with this level of complexity, and action resolution was still fast. The people I watched may have just been good at it, but the game didn't bog down at all.

I figure that if you replace "components" with "internal organs" (such as "radioactive fire organ" and "regenerator" and "radio transmitter from mind-enslaving alien overlords") and build a really simple musculoskeletal model, this system could work pretty well.

[Username17]

Actually, yeah. While Battletech feels deeply "mid eighties" all around, and it would need a huge overhaul, but the basic damage system works great. It looks Like This. You have armor on various hit locations, and when you take enough damage you start taking critical hits that impair you. Really gets the feeling of hugeness going, even though the battlemechs were only actually 6-10 meters tall (although they were portrayed much larger in the video games).

-Username17

[Gnyahaha]

I figure that if you replace "components" with "internal organs" (such as "radioactive fire organ" and "regenerator" and "radio transmitter from mind-enslaving alien overlords") and build a really simple musculoskeletal model, this system could work pretty well.

This sounds eerily appropriate. How does this system work exaclty though? How can you determine hit locations etc?

[Username17]

I figure that if you replace "components" with "internal organs" (such as "radioactive fire organ" and "regenerator" and "radio transmitter from mind-enslaving alien overlords") and build a really simple musculoskeletal model, this system could work pretty well.

This sounds eerily appropriate. How does this system work exaclty though? How can you determine hit locations etc?

Mos of the important Battletech charts are Right Here. Basically, you roll 2d6 and have a slightly different set of potential hit locations depending on facing. It works well enough.

There's a couple of major differences you're going to want to throw in. The first is that you want to cover different chassis types. That is, not every giant monster should be humanoid. You want to set up some alternate templates so you can play Gamera, Ghidra, or Mothra. That shit is important. Sometimes you want to play a giant bug.

BT had a mech customization system in which devices cost critical slots (which were fixed in number for all mechs), weight (different mechs had different weight allowances), and credits (which was just however much money you happened to have). During battles, some weapons used ammo and most weapons produced a fatigue mechanic called "heat", and yes other weapon systems used completely separate resource management schemes. You aren't presumably going to do much involving looting empty corpses (unless you go way deep into Evangelion references), so you'll probably want to have some sort of point system to replace cost and weight. But the critical system is probably good to keep.

Depending on what size range you want the characters to be in, you will naturally gravitate to various systems of property destruction. I could really see systems involving Jenga towers being in use, for example.

But I could totally see Mothra, Ultraman, the Pink Ranger, and Shinji Ikari adventuring in the same party. Mothra has fairy priestesses that are under the player's control during the human bits. Ultraman simply grows to giant size. The Pink Ranger summons a titanic Zord to fight on her behalf. And Shinji Ikari jumps into a giant robot to fight star monsters. But in every case, you have a character to move around in the human sized part of the adventure and a giant monster to play during the brawl in Tokyo.

In any case, you'll want to be able to have some really out-there combat styles. I would say looking at Evangelion is at least as good an idea as watching episodes of Voltron or Godzilla movies. You want characters who fly around leaving a trail of radioactive acid behind them. You want characters who run around brawling things. You want characters who send out magnetic pulses or gusts of wind that hit things with other things. You want weapons that are way fucking crazier than battletech weaponry.

-Username17

[Gnyahaha]

Behemoth powers include:

-Solar powered rays. The accumulators are based on their wings, backs or carapace.

-Shedding minions. The Behemoth can generate a number of lesser versions of himself and shed them off its skin to swarm the opponent.

-SuperFog. The Behemoth can generate fog from its nose, skin or some other mechanism, that concelas its presence or clouds the mind of its enemy.

-Breath weapons. Behemoths can spew radioactive fire, absolute zero fog etc.

-Organic weapons. The behemoths have made melee and ranged weapons specifically for use in their true forms. These weapons are made out of dead behemoth bodies.

-Dimensional slide. The behemoth can move upward to other dimensions, popping into 4-dimensional space occasionaly. The behemoth becomes nearly impossible to detect or hit.

-Clones. The behemoth can make an exact, though diminished in power, duplicate of itself to fight with it for a short period of time.

-Regenration. Speaks for itself.

-Reflection. The behemoth has the ability to reflect an energy-based attack against it back to its opponent.

-Attunement. The Behemoth can synchronize itself with the spiritual vibrations of an area up to twice its size and command it to aid it in battle or in other tasks.

[Fucks]

So, I was wondering. People make games about mad scientists, vampires, werewolves and fae in the World of Darkness, things that dwell in our society but remain hidden.

Mad scientists? Which one would that be?