The Gaming Den

Orion wrote:Vital source material for the Dark Reflection book.

That is enough to make me want to get back on writing the Dark Reflection book.

-Username17

Nice. If you do that, some information on how demons and fey react to getting Mind Rooted by a Dryad looking for minions would be pretty cool.

The hide and seek writeup doesn't make sense. It refers to making a stealth check to set the time frame, but then gives a table based on the size of the area, with no explanation of how these mechanics interact. Also it's kind of weird to divide the time by the number of hits rather than staging it down.

EDIT:

Do the dicepool penalties for jogging apply to dodge rolls? How fast do you have to move to the get the passive +1 TN to hit?

Trying to run an AS game. If someone wanted to play, say, Hellboy*, are the non-playable splats generally balanced with the playables such that they could just use Troll or Akuma, or should something else be used to representthe half spawn son of the devil and a mortal witch with the fist of the world-creator bound to his arm?



*you cannot tell me that Hellboy is not genre appropriate.

Edit: also, I love how Frank says that space aliens are right out, and then quotes an alien robot from outer space in the Evil Plants blurb.

Particularly if you make use of AS' already strongly present Lovecraft elements, it's pretty easy to bridge to horror-style space aliens. Greys, mi-go, and xenomorphs can fit right in alongside the rest of the AS crew. If Frank says otherwise, he's wrong.

To answer the question asked and not the footnote, though, is there any particular reason you can't just use a Fallen?

Chamomile wrote:Particularly if you make use of AS' already strongly present Lovecraft elements, it's pretty easy to bridge to horror-style space aliens. Greys, mi-go, and xenomorphs can fit right in alongside the rest of the AS crew. If Frank says otherwise, he's wrong.

He never really said that aliens were unable to fit, but that a setting needs more restrictions than aesthetic in order for player agency to matter; and in After Sundown's case, aliens were on the chopping block along with weresnakes and manananggal.

Yeah, see, here's the dealio: world-changing tech is world-changing, and After Sundown's core setting is supposed to take place in a more or less "normal" human society. So it's OK if the first Pod may have been inadvertently carried to earth by an asteroid or something similarly wacko, because that doesn't really change anything because the Pods are mute, territorial horrors with nothing for mankind to really learn from. But the Greys or Klaatu and honest-to-god advanced tech? They presumably have the power to change the setting big time, and so it's way easier and more coherent if they're just assumed to not be around at all or that their tech was stolen already but only brought us up to current speed. I mean, really the whole Vow of Silence thing is already on shaky enough ground as it is without things going all Independence Day on people.

On the other hand, if you are willing to modify the setting in big ways or have a group that's willing to agree to a Reed Richards is Useless pact regarding any tech they find, then go ahead, knock yourself out. But understand that by definition then you are in a game AS wasn't prepped for. In other words, Frank isn't wrong, he just didn't bother to do a "The Day After The Day The Earth Stood Still" expansion or otherwise address what happens when Dracula builds a moonbase.

Orion wrote:The hide and seek writeup doesn't make sense. It refers to making a stealth check to set the time frame, but then gives a table based on the size of the area, with no explanation of how these mechanics interact. Also it's kind of weird to divide the time by the number of hits rather than staging it down.

Yeah, it's really bad. And since you're dividing by the Seeker's hits, if an exceptionally bad Seeker looks for someone, you can end up dividing by 0 to figure out how long something will take.

A better system would be to move up the chart one space per hit on the Hider's Intuition + Stealth roll and down the chart one space per hit on the Seeker's Intuition + Perception roll.

Whipstitch wrote:Yeah, see, here's the dealio: world-changing tech is world-changing, and After Sundown's core setting is supposed to take place in a more or less "normal" human society. So it's OK if the first Pod may have been inadvertently carried to earth by an asteroid or something similarly wacko, because that doesn't really change anything because the Pods are mute, territorial horrors with nothing for mankind to really learn from. But the Greys or Klaatu and honest-to-god advanced tech? They presumably have the power to change the setting big time, and so it's way easier and more coherent if they're just assumed to not be around at all or that their tech was stolen already but only brought us up to current speed. I mean, really the whole Vow of Silence thing is already on shaky enough ground as it is without things going all Independence Day on people.

On the other hand, if you are willing to modify the setting in big ways or have a group that's willing to agree to a Reed Richards is Useless pact regarding any tech they find, then go ahead, knock yourself out. But understand that by definition then you are in a game AS wasn't prepped for. In other words, Frank isn't wrong, he just didn't bother to do a "The Day After The Day The Earth Stood Still" expansion or otherwise address what happens when Dracula builds a moonbase.

I was just amused. Frank said "sorry, no space aliens, no space." then a few pages later. quotes a quasi-organic alien robot who can turn into a velociraptor and frequently quotes Shakespeare.

Whipstitch wrote:Yeah, see, here's the dealio: world-changing tech is world-changing, and After Sundown's core setting is supposed to take place in a more or less "normal" human society. So it's OK if the first Pod may have been inadvertently carried to earth by an asteroid or something similarly wacko, because that doesn't really change anything because the Pods are mute, territorial horrors with nothing for mankind to really learn from. But the Greys or Klaatu and honest-to-god advanced tech? They presumably have the power to change the setting big time, and so it's way easier and more coherent if they're just assumed to not be around at all or that their tech was stolen already but only brought us up to current speed. I mean, really the whole Vow of Silence thing is already on shaky enough ground as it is without things going all Independence Day on people.

Nearly all horror-based space alien media involves the aliens having a ton of technology that is not available to the general public, and the general public not generally being aware of the aliens existing at all (at least until the big climax when the mothership arrives to invade). Now, granted, the aftermath of such encounters would usually lead to groundshaking changes throughout the world so you wouldn't want to drop your standard alien invasion horror plot as a side adventure into an ongoing After Sundown campaign. Still, it's trivial to have alien antagonists whose existence won't change everything forever anymore than mad scientists making androids will.

Reptillians/Yeerks walk among us undetected, infiltrating society for an inevitable coup. The Men in Black have cut a deal with powerful alien governments to keep humanity in the dark about advanced tech and the existence of aliens in exchange for humanity not being vaporized. The aliens have sent a few scouts and probes down to Earth but the expeditionary fleet won't be here for a hundred years, and the governments of the world are going out of their way to keep things quiet and prevent mass panic while they throw together an X-COM project. Whatever.

So... non-standard is non-standard. Glad we cleared that up.

In After Sundown, it's more like a bad 80s movie all the time. The thing about not having good telecommunications makes it nothing like the modern world; it's literally more like the 80s or 90s than it is like modern day.

There's a lot of space alien stuff you could work into the After Sundown system, but not as much that you could work into the After Sundown setting. Which isn't to say that you can't change the setting, just that you need to know that you're doing it when you start down that path. You could do X-Files, you could do Animorphs, you could do Men In Black, you could do Close Encounters of The Third Kind as a one shot, you could even do Stargate maybe. OWoD even had Mage as a MIB setting after all, it's just that the MIB were cast as the evil guys because of whatever.

After Sundown also works pretty well for some sorts of super hero games though. Like, almost every part of the 1994 Spiderman Cartoon could be done in After Sundown if you just ease up on the "everything has to be all horror all the time!" requirement. Or Justice League or whatever.

The main reason to not do setting additions seems to be that when you're ass-pulling things every week your player agency goes down the tubes because the players can't meaningfully predict what they're going to find or get in response to their actions. So, just be careful about that and it should be okay.

The After Sundown (which I think we need an actual name for...) system is pretty flexible, about the only thing I've heard it doesn't handle super well is combat heavy stuff. This is why I started writing Divine Legacy assuming use of AS system (I just haven't done much with it for about a month).

After Sundown itself was designed to be a fix of World of Darkness which, as much as people play it like "A Team+Supernaturals," is a horror game, and thus things are meant to be bleak and depressing (though not as much as in WoD were you literally are not allowed to win as far "the Dot" is concerned).
Aliens were left out due to maintaining that dark, depressing feel and conceptual space (even though several things in it are, so far as I know, aliens in their source material).
I argued, when Frank was writing AS, for a larger conceptual space, because my friends are primarily gamers first and everything else second and have the conceptual space in their heads to handle at least five of each supernatural, if not more. We can generally keep straight at least two entire WoD splats.
But, my friends and I are lonely gamers, not everyone who will play AS will have that ability, or if they do, they will not necessarily want that much stuff.


I originally was just asking about balance on the off chance that someone has a concept best fit by a "non-playable." After posting, I saw the "Next time I'll shoot my salad before I eat it" quote in the book, and, well, Dinobot was my favourite character in Beast Wars, so I was just amused that the book says no aliens, and then quotes an alien. Hell, the cybertronians totally could be animates, and could be reworked to not be aliens (time travel, or something), just like the system handles Triffids, pods, and Mi Go, with no mention of things coming from space.

tl;dr: we can drop the alien thing.

Prak_Anima wrote:Trying to run an AS game. If someone wanted to play, say, Hellboy*, are the non-playable splats generally balanced with the playables such that they could just use Troll or Akuma, or should something else be used to representthe half spawn son of the devil and a mortal witch with the fist of the world-creator bound to his arm?



*you cannot tell me that Hellboy is not genre appropriate.

Hellboy would be a troll, just like your post
He'd start with Touch of Darkness, Flesh of Marble (actually some kind of red stone), and Fire Walking, which would bring him up to the appropriate in media res number of powers. The continuous power schedule might become a balance issue, but probably not with his starting selection of powers. Plus, Hellboy is supposed to be better than everyone else anyway.

Well, the special talent agents of the BPRD are basically a Deep One, a Fallen, a Golem and a revolving cast of minor beings. The only real problem is that in an actual game, Hellboy shouldn't be notably better than the other PCs. Glad I pegged him as the right splat, though.

Prak_Anima wrote:Well, the special talent agents of the BPRD are basically a Deep One, a Fallen, a Golem and a revolving cast of minor beings. The only real problem is that in an actual game, Hellboy shouldn't be notably better than the other PCs. Glad I pegged him as the right splat, though.

The fact that Hellboy is potentially overpowered does not mean that he would dominate an actual game. His powers are extremely narrow in focus, especially compared to his team mates. If the player of Hellboy started grabbing powers like Summons, Phantasmagoria, and Aura of Decay, then he might start to be a problem.

Yeah. I think he does learn some magic, but it tends to be less flashy. Of course part of that is that actual spell magic is almost universally used by villains in the setting.

Questioning:
"...there are only about six hundred thousand supernaturals..."
Does this mean that there are six hundred thousand supernatural Luminaries, or six hundred thousand overall? Because a world where the supernatural landscape is like 60,000 luminaries and 540,000 spawn is a really different one from the world with 600,000 luminaries and upwards of five million spawn.
On a similar note (not that this is necessarily answerable, due to it mostly being a device for explaining "special people" in media) what does the Luminary vs Extra distribution look like in the first place? One in a hundred? One in a million?

There's one supernatural for every million normal people, I think.

Luminaries are probably higher, but not everyone's going to find out that they could have been a vampire or a werewolf

downzorz wrote:Questioning:
"...there are only about six hundred thousand supernaturals..."
Does this mean that there are six hundred thousand supernatural Luminaries, or six hundred thousand overall? Because a world where the supernatural landscape is like 60,000 luminaries and 540,000 spawn is a really different one from the world with 600,000 luminaries and upwards of five million spawn.
On a similar note (not that this is necessarily answerable, due to it mostly being a device for explaining "special people" in media) what does the Luminary vs Extra distribution look like in the first place? One in a hundred? One in a million?

For the record, I believe Frank has said he doesn't really follow this forum and if you want to ask him questions about After Sundown you should do it in IMHO.

Is there currently a PDF available that has the most recent errata (last-minute changes to monster discipline sets, for instance?)

Does anyone have the super-special-awesome Blackguard Press PDF that was uploaded as a torrent to ThePirateBay but is not on ThePirateBay now?

If I recall right, it's the one where Frank served as the camera model for a picture on the Leviathans.

Yes.

Is there a PDF of the AfterSundown rules somewhere?
And if so, can someone point me to them