Mostly Not Broken: After Sundown

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Mostly Not Broken: After Sundown

Post by Lokathor »

Topic Title was formerly, "Anatomy of Failed Design: After Sundown".

You knew what this was as soon as you read the topic title, much less clicked it (I guess I lied here). In reviewing some old work that would have gone into After Sundown 2e, Frank said that he's unable to perform this particular AoFD. So, this being the den and all of us being pretentious assholes, I'll do it. It goes against the traditions of Gaming Den reviews, but I'm not really a drinking sort of guy, so I've got a pot pie and orange juice as I start this. Today's music is the Crusader Kings 2 soundtrack. Deus Vult and such. I expect that this'll be a multi-sitting sort of affair though.

AoFD: After Sundown
The year is 2011 and some crazy guy has finally posted his 200+ page tirade about horror movie monsters. This thing is brought to us by one "Frank Trollman", and I'm just going to assume that all his mobster friends refer to him as Franky T. He was half the duo that brought us the DnD Tomes series back around 2006, and he also did some paid work on Street Magic and Augmentation for SR4 around that time I guess. He did a whole Matrix thing for SR4 because he was bored or pissed or something. So, we've got a lot of examples of portions of an RPG being made at a time, but can he put a whole RPG together and keep it sane? Well, this isn't called Anatomy of Pristine Design after all. Sure, we've got some good points to look at, but the point of this thread is to tear into the cracks and flaws when they show themselves.

So the first mini-section... well normally we'd talk about the cover and inside the cover and TOC and page count and all that but this is put up as a forum thread, so we have to be a little liberal in our interpretations of things. Anyway the first mini part is like 3 paragraphs, which are two sentences, three sentences, and then four sentences long. Probably was not intentional, but fun fact. "This is an RPG, play with your friends", that sort of thing.

Then we get to a Table of Contents, which is marked Index for whatever reason. We'll go over all this as we go, but basically while the information presented is often enough to play the game, it's often presented in a haphazardly ordered way.

So we have an introduction, and we start to see that the little tagline thing is going to be a thing for the whole book. This isn't unique to Frank, it's in Shadowrun, Earthdawn, and probably other things I can't think of right now. Probably other things that once came from FASA. Sometimes the text blurbs are in quotes, like someone said a cool thing that was worth writing down, and sometimes they're not. I'm not sure how we're supposed to interpret those parts that aren't in quotes. Are they just spare thoughts from the author himself? I've never known.

So we're going to play as a universal studios monster, and all the monster movies are real at once, at least all the ones that you can semi-sanely fit into one setting at once. That's fine, if you're like 80 years old or whatever. I'd like to see more modern connections being made myself. Most people I know that aren't major film buffs haven't actually seen many movies from before 1970. Even films from before 1980 are usually unlikely. There's also a lot of stuff about keeping things to a limited number of stuff, so I guess things will work out. We also have boilerplate stuff about how a paper and pencil rpg will probably necessitate paper and pencils. And character advancement is... a deck of cards? The hell? So... then we have some stuff about the MC, which is this game's name for DM/GM/ST/Whatever. They do the NPCs and stuff. Totally normal so far, other than that cryptic deck of cards comment.

Terrible Places
So the game is set on Earth, but like Spooky Earth. Also "coterminous" worlds that aren't Earth I guess. Which really is a fancier word than I think the situation calls for when you're in the first paragraph of the first real chapter and trying to be all introductory-like. Anyway, then it's insisted that this game is a horror game, and anything you do must be horrible, and if you try to play this game in a non-horror way of any kind the men in black helicopters will break into your house at night and force you to play it the correct way.

So we get the three bullet points of how Spooky Earth is different from Earth. The police are no help at all, telecommunications are shoddy, and people don't travel much. But these are all true in real life, where's the difference!? Zing! And we have four worlds. Three of them are hell planes that have a cool name and theme, and one of them is earth, which doesn't get a cool name or a theme. Sucks to be us. They're introduced in a bulleted list and then they each get a section I'll get to in a second. First we're told that each hellscape has two levels: the Shallow and the Deep. Shallow is earthy-but-themed, and deep is 100% themed. In the shallows you can get attacked by earth stuff I guess, but you also aren't on earth exactly, but then in the depths of a hell plane you're in a totally different place without even the same stars. So, instead of the Four Worlds, this section really should have been called the Seven Worlds, because there's really seven different places you can be.

Maya
So Maya is called the dreamlands because it's literally the land of dreams and you project your mind there when you dream sometimes. It also has giant monsters and jungles and things like that, which is cool. It's unclear if the shallows are all tropical jungles, or if it's part tropical jungles and also like crazy endor forests and stuff too. The deep part is almost 100% tropical jungles, and "There are few reasons for the sane to want to go to the Deep Maya". The book literally introduces a whole spare planet to explore, and then immediately says "fuck you don't go here". What the fuck kind of setting building is that. I want hell planes with shit to do. Some group we haven't been told much about yet is building an "Arcanotower" in the Brazil-connected part of Maya (but Brazil is spelled Portuguese-style, with an 's'). I checked, this word doesn't appear a second time in the entire book. Evocative, but pretentious. "Things to do in The Dreamlands" is more like "people who will probably immediately try to murder you", without any explanation of what you'd actually want to try to do in The Dreamlands. Like farming leylines for dream tears which you can use to power dark and elder rituals or whatever. It's not that there's a lack of mechanics for that, there's not even a suggestion that you'd really want to be in this place ever.

So that's one hell plane description that's totally fucked.

Limbo
Next up after the jungle hell is the fire hell. It's got some nicely evocative writing that describes how everything here is dull, tarnished, sooty. Ash filled skies and shattered glass. "Limbo is home to what the unenlightened would call demons, ifrit, and shinma", but then he calls them Demons a few sections from now. Guess now we can say for sure that Frank is just as unenlightened as the rest of us. There's rules for getting out of Limbo that mention specific dice values, but since we don't know how to roll dice yet I don't know what that really means. "Things to do in Limbo" once again is a list of people that will try seemingly try to murder you with little provocation rather than a list of things you'd want to try and do. It says there's almost no food, and survival is a "brutal" matter we were told just above. Humans can get out easily because they lack a Potency (some sort of monster stat I assume, we'll find out later). Seemingly everyone wants to get out all the time. In fact the whole theme of this entire fire hell planet is that no one wants to be here ever. And we don't have any interesting things that we'd want to do here that would offset how shitty the place sounds.

Also, Limbo is technically only the outer edge of Hell in Christian lore, so really this plane should more properly be called Infernum if we wanted to be mythologically correct, which is also a cool name for a hellscape and all. Either way, you don't want to be here, and you don't ever want to go here, and you seemingly don't even have a reason to go here, and all the people here will brutalize you for food, or maybe use you as food even.

So there's a second hell plane with no reason to adventure there ever.

Mictlan
Normally letters don't go together like that, but this is a Nahuatl word. WP tells me that it's pronounced kinda like "mik't-lawn", with a long a sound. Mictlan is cold, and dark, and there's no wind really, and no waves in the water really, and nearly no life. It's basically like being on the moon, except that you can still breathe (but probably only kinda). Mictlan has ghosts (which are solid in mictlan, just not in the mortal world) and zombies and other "undead" sorts of things. "Things to do in The Gloom" tell us that things erected in Mictlan just sit for eternity, so you can find other people's old shitty minecraft huts I guess. Some ghosts have whole "cities" that just sit there forever once they're abandoned. Even though "never entropically decaying buildings" is about the last thing that an oppressive death zone would probably do. The bulleted list mentioned that plants only grow with blood, and that there's blood sucking insects too.

So this is our third hell plane with essentially no reason to visit here given. Everything tries to kill you and there's no prizes to be had for your strife.

Being In Between Worlds
The Mortal World doesn't get its own section, because most of the rest of the game is about it. Instead, we're straight on to inter-world movement and positioning. Did I say Seven Worlds earlier? Wow, was I wrong! Between the fact that you can be Mortal, Shallow Hell, Deep Hell, "Between" any two touching planes, and possibly in a Bleed version of being in between two places, there's like 19 different dimensional realms you can be within in this game.

Terrible People
Hey what the hell? Yeah, I guess we're suddenly talking about people while we're in the places chapter for some reason. And this isn't even in the Table of Contents. Whatever.

First we learn about Extras and Luminaries. This is actually a good concept, and you can consider using it in other games as well when you're conceptualizing a world. Basically, some people are important to the plot and they get names and interesting stuff to do, and some people aren't and they're there to take up space. Maybe they speak some, but they're really just there to take up space. What's not talked about is what the proportion of Luminary to Extra is. Extras that are monsters are Spawn, so since we have lots of non-spawn monster NPCs to talk to they're all definitionally in the Luminary group. And then some portion of NPC humans are probably luminaries. But there's really no way to tell I guess.

Now we get to talk monster types. Vampires are obvious, Animates are golems and stuff, Lycanthropes are were-things, Witches are 'human' magic users, Transhumans are 'human' science users, and Leviathan are monster-people like fish-man and mole-man. It's a totally arbitrary but totally fine list. We also have Zombies, Fey (not really very fey), Demons, Ghosts, Giant Animals, and Evil Plants as non-playable types. Which is also a fine list.

There's a an argument put in here about how you need to outline every possible antagonist type for the narrative to maintain cohesion or whatever, but it falls pretty flat with me. I've played DnD for over 15 years with hundreds of made up monsters and had plenty of narratives. Given that we supposedly have all these hell planes floating around, they might as well be filled up with mysterious whatevers.

Running The Game
Yay! We'll finally know what getting 5 dice on your test to pass through The Gauntlet means!

The dice are, unsurprisingly, basically the Shadowrun 4e rules. Except that there's no rules about glitches. You'd think that in a game intending for horror, that there'd be a rule about stuff going extra wrong unexpectedly every so often. Like, at least as an optional rule. I guess not.

And we learn about the basic stats and special stats. Strength, Agility, Intuition, Logic, Willpower, Charisma. Which is, again, basically the Shadowrun stats with Body taken out (that's all part of Strength now) and Reaction taken out (merged with Agility). We're introduced to the terms Physical Resistance Test, Mental Resistance Test, and Social Resistance test, as if they're going to be important terms later, but they're not. Social is mentioned in one power, and the other two aren't mentioned ever. We're told that humans have a stat range of 1-6, but we aren't quite told that 3 is the average, or maybe a 2 is an average, or something.

You also have Edge (which lets you resist better and gives you luck points), Power Points (which are basically mana points), and Potency (which raises your attribute caps mostly).

Edge is a cool stat, and it will come up a lot in your games. Power Points are similarly a cool thing to have and you're often sad when you run out of them. Potency is kinda... not impressive. It says that you get potency at the sorts of times "when a monster would become nearly unstoppable", but really it doesn't actually do much of anything. If you get a Potency point your attribute maximums all go up, but you have to go on even more adventures later to actually get those stat points after that. If every NPC in the game that you ever faced secretly had +2 Potency, you'd hardly notice unless they were already pushing maximum. Jumping ahead a little bit, some magic abilities have ranges and stuff based off of Potency, but since the game assumes that you'll have Potency 1 anyway, things are kinda alright ranged even with just Potency 1. The big deal power that you'd care about the most is Vigor (the bonus Strength power) which is capped in how much bonus Strength you can get by 3+Potency. Other than that, you'd almost not notice if every NPC had +2 Potency. And for a stat that's supposedly so cool that you'll kill each other Highlander style over, that's pretty weak.

Once we learn about Attributes we're suddenly on a section about Advancing Goals, followed by a section about the types of Missions you might be called upon to do. Then we finally can talk about Character Creation some. Goals and Missions is solid advice and all, but it doesn't belong here in the book. Along with the "Placing Opposition" section after Character Creation, that sort of stuff needs to be collected into an "MCing the Game" chapter or "Campaign Structure" chapter. Or at least somewhere not literally between the "these are the numbers you'll have to have" and "here's how you pick those numbers" sections.

So character generation depends on the sort of adventures you want to go on. Options include: "Origin Story", for humans that might become supernaturals or might stay X-files investigators; "In Media Res", for when you can't spell "In Medias Res" correctly; and "Power Fantasy", for when you don't want to give any more character creation rules and you just say "do what you want".

We have no guidance so far on building a party, or what sorts of roles and tasks you'll be asked to do on a regular basis, so I guess everyone is expected to do everything all the time. Perhaps things will become clear as we keep going.
Last edited by Lokathor on Fri Oct 28, 2016 2:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Lokathor »

Session 2. Today's snacks are anger-at-being-up-this-early-in-the-morning, and we've got Twisted Blackberry Poweraid to drink. Our ears are filled by the sounds of Civilization 2 of course.

Monstrous Society
"And here he put another period before a conjunction instead of a comma like it should be."

So, we're immediately told that supernaturals are so rare that they seriously might go their entire life without ever meeting another one. But also there are all these secret societies going around doing monster shit that we should care about. What the fuck. We're never really given a number of supernaturals worldwide, though later entries for individual cities could maybe let a person try to extrapolate something. It really seems like he's trying to have it both ways at once.

Like I've read that Anatomy of Failed Design for NWOD where he talks about the problem with OWOD being that you had all these secret societies and it was clearly impossible for them to all be minorities of the majority with that many minorities without the majority being insane. I understand there's some sort of upper limit on how many monsters you can claim live in the shadows of the world. But there's also a lower limit before you get into Skyrim territory, where there's claims of all these things to do, but not enough people to interact with in town to actually do all sorts of things. So is it like 1%? Is the world secretly 1% more populous than we think it is, and all those extra people are monsters in hiding? 7 million supers spread among the 18 types in the book, I could believe that. Much less than that, spreading across the globe, and also presumably some in the hell planes (that you never want to go to ever), and there'd just be too few people in most places.

Bands are what you call your adventuring group. With only 3-8 members or so, you can have a band that's as weird or not as you want.

Syndicates are what you call a pseudo-governmental club that everyone knows some stuff about the organization and they have "territory" and stuff around the world. They're relatively light on the theme stuff because they want to be a world-spanning organization and all. They go out of their way to get members and grab territory and generally be a big deal. The biggest effect they have is that they're Lone Star and they will arrest you if you talk about monsters to the public or otherwise let the public know about monsters. However, they're also from very ancient times, so instead of putting you in jail they might just eat you. Also if you're a club member you can go to the meetings, but you can only be in one at a time, and you're not supposed to switch around. Where do any of these world governments control? I dunno, there's no map and all the locations given are relatively vague.
  • The Makhzen: These guys are the oldest club. Stone tablets, the whole deal.
  • Cauchemar Communes: These guys are the newest club. They're "reformers" in the 1700s sense, so they might even let you vote on important stuff instead of just what color paint you want for the clubhouse.
  • The Covenant: Basically the catholic church but you can't be excommunicated.
  • World Crime League: Is a Viet pirate/navy gang that cares about money more than the rest of them.
Basically if you're in a syndicate and you do a bad thing that a different syndicate goes after you for, then sometimes you just get deported back to your own syndicate instead of eaten. So it's a pretty good deal to join one of them I guess.

Cults are what you call an extra double-secret club that's so small it probably doesn't have much territory and stuff, instead they have magic training and also they each have a strong theme for like, what they get hired to do and stuff. Most people probably know the Cult's name but possibly not even their public presentation of themselves, and definitely not their private plans. Honestly, that last sentence I might have just made up, because it's not obvious how much of the world necessarily knows that "The Stellar Oracles" even exists. Maybe it's like Liechtenstein, where people can tell you "that's in Europe, right?" but they don't know what it's about or how it's different from any other germanic country. Can you be in more than one cult? Who knows. With all the double-secrets they've got going on, you could secretly be a member of several cults I guess.
  • Ash Walkers: Mercenaries that don't break contracts
  • The Black Hand: Assassination / Counter-assassination
  • Church of Set: Hedonists with an Egypt theme.
  • Chain of Coronis: Weird pagans that live in the woods and are hardercore pagans than any of the pagans that you might know.
  • The Order Daziban: Magic librarians
  • The False Face: Explorers for hire
  • The Hashshashin: Druggie Drug Dealers
  • The Hollow Ones: A victorian-era corp that tries to manage their public image by doing all their hedonism and freak outs in private, deniable ways.
  • Laughter Factory: Distributed information freedom nuts
Holy shit there's too many of these things to care about them all. There's still like six more to go.
  • Rolnicy: Research scientists that honestly sound more insane than the rest.
  • Stellar Oracles: These guys are such classic good guys they almost don't even belong in this book. Also +10 points for using a tagline once spoken by Kamina.
  • The Storm Lords: Scientists and authors that try to push science and the public consciousness into the realm of the weird as part of a plot to one day reveal all the actual weirdness to the world.
  • The Ulmians: Basically a mafia that failed to make it big.
  • The White Lotus: They want to control land to get a criminal monopoly on all the gates to Maya.
  • The Wreckers: Weird bandits that somehow developed a religious idea
So the reason you'd join a cult is that they each have a favored magic, so you can learn the magic of your cult super easy. But first of all there's only four total powers in each school of magic that you're likely to learn during the game, and also you might even start with some or all of those magics learned, and also the powers you actually want are usually spread among a bunch of magic schools, so you'd have to join all these cults. I guess that's fine and all, but then it should say more clearly if you can join more than one cult and stuff like that.

Antagonistic Organizations are the ones who actually will possibly shoot you on sight if you're not part of their crew (but probably not). So you can play as one of them, but the entire group has to be the same one if that's the case. Normally you could have a group that's like half Makhzen and half Commune and they'd be fine. Not so with the Marduk society. At least, that's what Frank would like you to think. Really though, if the Marduk Society and the Communes have "strained relations" that sometimes have shooting wars, and the Covenant and the Communes have more amicable relations that still sometimes have shooting wars, it doesn't seem like it matters heavily. Your team still might sometimes end up in a shooting war with the team of someone else in the band. And you're told that Band loyalty is generally thought by supernaturals to be above Syndicate loyalty.
  • Marduk Society: The Men In Black, essentially. They're the monster CIA and they want power over all monster society, but by now they're also run by monsters. The entry literally says that they just have a slightly different philosophical hat and are otherwise just like you.
  • The King With Three Shadows: A Limbo-centered organization with the king and all the king's minions and all that. He wants to conquer the world and all, but he needs special circumstances to enter the world with his fey and demon army, so they go around trying to set that up. You'd think these guys would actually be kill on sight to the rest of the monster world, since their vision of the future is inherently contradictory to the rest of the supernatural society, but whatever.
  • The Shattered Empire: Monsters that want to rule the empire based on a vague notion that long ago some kingdom somewhere ruled the world and they're part of its legacy. They also want to push humans back to pre-bronze levels of technology so that they're easier to lord over.
So what's the real difference if everyone defaults to "we will talk now but might also kill each other later" status with everyone else? I'll tell you. The next section is Political Aspirations, and it doesn't list what aspirations you might have within any group tagged "antagonists". You only get hints for the four main syndicates. That's the difference I see.

Skills
"I can't tell if the word 'may' in this tagline should be 'will' in all Englishes, or just in American English."

So we have seven skills in each of three categories: Physical (no default penalty), Social (-1 default penalty), and Technical (-1 default penalty based on if you have the correct spec, not just any ranks at all). I guess it makes a nice little grid on a character sheet, and most of the things that you'd want to do as a normal person or as a monster in a "modern day" era setting probably fit into one of the skills there. Note that there are no specific examples for common thresholds of any type given in this chapter, just a general chart of "awesomeness" per hit. The Danger chapter will also tell you some target thresholds, but it's mostly up to you to figure out what's "Professional" (2) and what's "Hard" (3) and stuff.

Physical
  • Athletics: Moves your body around with Strength or Agility. Very obvious skill.
  • Combat: Does attack rolls with any weapon. Also obvious when you use this.
  • Drive: Lets you pilot vehicles. Okay, good. But then some things are Operations instead. Ugh, I guess we'll see that in a bit.
  • Larceny: the "be a thief" skill, I guess. It lists "bypass security systems" and "picking pockets" as things it can do, and then implies many other potential options should be available to you as well. This is where you'll probably start being sad at a lack of examples to reference during the game.
  • Perception: Notice things. Easy to understand.
  • Stealth: Also easy to understand.
  • Survival: So it lets you survive in the wild (which i bet you'd want example thresholds for!), also scavenge items, also track things. Cool skill, if you knew how much you had to roll. Also, does it use Logic or Intuition or Willpower most of the time? Who knows!
Social
  • Animal Ken: Anything to do with animals is a single skill. Sure.
  • Bureaucracy: Lets you navigate both human and supernatural bureaucracy, laws, paperwork, etc. Also lets you manage teamwork tests. This skill seems silly at first, but actually is cool once you start using it because it lets you do "red tape" montages that you can't normally do well in other games.
  • Empathy: this is like a person-tuned version of Perception based on their body language and stuff. So if you're autistic you take a -1 hit penalty to this skill all the time. People understand the idea of trying to "sense motive" to avoid being bluffed or whatever, so this skill is easy to understand once you get past the unusual name.
  • Expression: This lets you "influence people through art", so it's like singing, but also oratory and dancing and stuff. I guess it's distinct from "making art" in the physical sense (like a painting), because that's the Artisan skill later on, but this skill doesn't tell you that. If you want to make a painting to influence people I guess you have to make this check to see how much they'll be influenced and then another check to see if you can actually paint something as cool as your idea. Based on all the artists I know, this is actually a quite accurate problem to represent mechanically.
  • Intimidate: For when you need to scare someone into helping you.
  • Persuasion: For when you need to talk someone into helping you.
  • Tactics: This is like... a command skill. I guess you can give orders well and also come up with battle plans. It's a somewhat unusual skill and I don't feel like I really find myself reaching for it when I call for the players to make a skill check too often. Maybe I don't know when I should be asking for this over Intimidate or Persuade, I dunno.
Technical
  • Artisan: This lets you physically make things. Art-wise or utility-wise.
  • Electronics: This lets you do hardware and software of all kinds.
  • Medicine: This lets you put bodies back together.
  • Operations: Okay, so, this lets you run power plants, but not if you run the power plant via a computer (that's Electronics). And not if you need to build a replacement part for the power plant (that's Artisan). This lets you operate heavy construction vehicles and devices, but only if there "isn't a 1:1 correspondence" between the controls and the actions (otherwise it's Drive). And the example use of what you'd control with this rather than Drive is "walking a mech". So the game has mecha in it now? So do airliners and fighter jets use this skill? Because Drive says that "light aircraft" are a thing it can do, and it says that "wheel and stick" based craft are a Drive thing. But Operations is all about switches and things, and making a Jet go properly is all about knowing which little switches to do when. It's all kinda just poorly spelled out is what I'm saying.
  • Research: lets you look up data when you don't know who to talk to about what you want to know. Along with Backgrounds they let you do info montages. It says that it works for libraries, piles of books, and even computers. Using computers is supposed to be Electronics through. I dunno.
  • Rigging: This lets you macgyver things of all sorts. Which can let you bypass obstacles or set traps or whatever I guess. I don't know if this lets you be a car mechanic, or if you need Operations, or if you need Artisan.
  • Sabotage: This lets you break and bypass stuff. So, it's pretty bullshit that it's not part of Rigging, given how broad every other skill in this game is. I think Frank just ran out of ideas for good Technical skills. I'm at the end of the list and I'm not sure what skill you'd be an archeologist with. There's a whole cult that does archeology and weather and science stuff as part of their long con, so we could have a Science skill maybe. I don't know if that's Research or not.
Specializations can be had on skills, and you get +2 dice when the specialization applies. You can have any number of specializations per skill as long as you have at least 1 rank in the skill.

Backgrounds can be literally anything, and they're basically Montage skills. They're either Academic (where you look up a thing, which isn't much different from Research when you think about it), Social (where you go talk to someone who knows what you want to know), and Occult (where you either look up a thing or you talk to someone, but either way you wouldn't be able to tell the public about it without having problems).

So, the first problem here is that there's no actual Knowledge skills, just Montage skills. What does your character know right now without leaving the room? It's impossible to tell, because there's not really any rules for that. The game says that you can "just know" any fact you want to know. Sure. Except that a lot of the time it's something like "you see an inverted yellow triangle on the door, with a black circle in the middle" and the player says "is that some cult symbol I should recognize?" and you say to them "fuck if I know man, I guess you'll have to go ask someone in a Montage", but they're in a dungeon mission and they're on a time limit so it matters what they know right now compared to what their contacts can tell them.

The second problem is that the background categories are borderline stupid. Researching things is exactly what the Research skill does, so Academic backgrounds shouldn't be characterized like that at all. Occult doesn't even specify what you're doing exactly, just that you shouldn't tell at least some people in the world about it. So really all backgrounds are actually mostly like Social backgrounds, but some Social backgrounds have [Masquerade] and [Illegal] tags and stuff on them. So just do something like that instead. Or just use common sense, since all backgrounds are made up anyway. I mean I think it's obvious to everyone that if you put "Yakuza 3" on your backgrounds section that you shouldn't tell the cops that you talk to the Yakuza that much. The two example Occult backgrounds actually in the book right here are "Marduk Society Histories", which presumably is you researching stuff in an exclusive library, and "Tarot Readings", which I can only assume are supposed to be magical and also actually accurate some of the time, which should just be some magic power in the Magic section if it's going to be a thing at all. Later we have some more examples:
  • ETA (some sort of Basque separatist group I guess) which has one example use where it's more like a Resource (which we'll get to later) and one use that's like the Tactics skill.
  • Chinese Monsters is used for a "similar background" (in a moment) and as a knowledge skill.
  • Hell Mouths gets used in place of Perception kinda, and also in place of Survival kinda.
Oh shit did I just see a knowledge skill use? Well then why did we have all this fuss about caring about when you go look something up and when you go talk to someone, if you can just know stuff on the spot half the time? Maybe only Occult backgrounds let you know things on the spot. Except then also there's an example of a Social background making an educated guess based on data (Truckin). Then you look at the Academic background examples, and some of them let you push around thresholds on other skill checks rather than affecting the dice you roll. No rules for that given, it just somehow happens I guess.

So in addition to being pseudo-contacts, a background also lets you make a few types of social check against people that you have a "similar" background with. So if you know about LA Crime, and they know about Triads, then you can talk about Triads in LA, and if you know Chinese Monsters, and they are a chinese monster, then you can talk to them about stuff. These kinds of checks usually use Charisma + Background, depending on exactly what you exactly want to do, instead of Charisma + one of the 7 social skills. It even has a weird sort of logic to it, where some dude with no social skills but a love of cars can still just talk to a mechanic about cars super well as a distraction. I'd probably watch that scene in a movie.

So with backgrounds out of the way, we get to Using Skills. You'd think that the skills chapter would start by explaining this, but you'd sure be wrong. We get the Awesomeness Chart once again. We saw this once before in the Basic Dice Mechanics section. So this section just reiterates the dice mechanics? Nope, there's new rules for buying hits, using edge to roll even when modifiers give you 0 or less dice, extended tests, and teamwork tests. These are familiar things if you've played Shadowrun before. The biggest new thing is that an Extended Test has you roll once and then net hits can push down the time taken. There's no rule for being allowed to take more time if you didn't get the hits you need though, which seems like maybe it should be a thing. I mean you can't really fail to paint a house (the example task) given enough time and paint, it might just take you a lot longer than you expected.

Also there's a carrying capacity chart just before the end of the skills chapter. Given there's no Equipment chapter in this book really, I guess it's as good a place as any. I don't know moon units though so I can't tell too well if AS people are way buff or not. I guess that's my fault rather than the book's. If we're still assuming that an average human is Strength 3, that means they can pick up a body but not "walk home" with it. So how long can they carry that body? Sure doesn't seem to say.

Getting What You Need
This chapter has a number of rules for obtaining things. Largely information, but sometimes goods or services. Of note is the fact that these rules call out the difference between Interview scenes (where you talk line by line to an NPC) and Montage scenes (where the camera does some quick cuts and you get results). It's not that other games don't have this distinction as well, but they don't really talk about it much.

You can Keep Things Quiet, which lets you suppress info, which is a good rule to have in a game about hiding monster info.

Montages can be done via bureaucracy, via burglary, via socialization, or via research.

Interviews let you ask different kinds of questions to people. There's more example thresholds in this section alone than in the entire Skills chapter, so that's cool.

Argumentation lets you convince people of things. There's lots of options, and each option is suited to different situations, and each option also uses different sorts of skills. It's cool, but it's also the sort of thing where you'd want a reminder bubble on the character sheet where it lists each argument type and you fill in the boxes for quick reference. Like how technically your Initiative is always just your Intuition+Reaction in Shadowrun, but you still probably write "Init: 9" on your sheet somewhere anyway.

This is supposed to be Anatomy of Failed Design, but really there's not much failed in this chapter. The fact that there's any guidelines at all for most of these things kicks the crap out of almost all other RPGs, so bravo this time around.

Danger
12 second rounds. Okay.

Up to 4 passes, Intuition+Agility, all very familiar to Shadowrun players.

Attacks go against a fixed threshold based on range, and in melee it's either 0 (if they're surprised) or half their Agility+Combat. Doesn't say if you round up or down, feels like you should round up I guess. Then there's some modifiers as well for cover and concealment and all that. We're mostly comparing to Shadowrun so far, so it's worth mentioning that by Eliminating the "Dodge" roll you speed up combat quite a bit.

We get a bunch of special attack actions, aiming, suppressive fire, that sort of thing. Notably we have "Lock on" which lets you get the drop on people without literally having to attack them, and that's great for all sorts of scenes.

Movement is up next. It offends my DnD sensibilities that movement is described after attacks and not before, though it's not technically wrong or anything. Anyway so you pick a movement mode and then you pick a movement route and that's all at the start of the round, then you get to resolve everyone's passes in order, and you count as being at all points in the route during your whole turn. This, like all those "declare shit at the top of the round" systems (ADnD, Earthdawn, etc) is maybe more bookkeeping than you need. However, it functions. Players are often upset mid-round that they can't do a thing because they already routed their movement at the top of the round, but perhaps that's just life.

There's rules for diving into cover, parting attacks, intercepting parting attacks... When you intercept a parting attack, "The threshold to strike the new target is unchanged.", and the threshold is 0 to hit someone fleeing and "non zero" to hit someone who's defending. So, I don't know which of those it's unchanged compared to.

Here's a fun fact, when I first used these rules, one player tried to throw a smoke grenade around another player. He got his attack off and all, and the grenade landed right where it should have. And then enemies went to shoot at that player. So, the player is in smoke "now", do they get the cover? I dunno. I mean there's no cover to dive for, they're already in cover. Does the player that threw the grenade roll the dive for cover check to see if they threw the grenade before the shots went off? Just a little gap in the rules that came up. Not even a thing you could predict would need to be in the rules ahead of time probably.

There are chase rules, and they perform.

There are hiding rules and I can't even parse them. "The way this works is that the seeker announces how long they are going to look in an area and makes an Intuition + Perception test. The hider makes an Intuition + Stealth test to determine how long the base time to find them would be, and that time is divided by the hits on the Seeker's Perception test to determine how long it would actually take them to find the hiding character." What? I'm not sure how you convert hider hits into a time (presumably using the time chart somehow). Then once you do that the time you get is divided into the base time based on how big the seeking zone is, which gives you the... I don't even know. Maybe it actually is a functional rule when you wargame it, but I don't know how to attempt to wargame it because there isn't a play example. There's a play example of how Potency affects your max stats, the most obvious thing in the world, but not for the most complexly written rule in the book.

There's some vehicle rules, but just their speeds really. Hints about how to resolve shooting at a vehicle, or smash a car into a zombie, or things like that, none of those are there. Also the speeds are once again in moon speeds so I'd have to go get a conversion chart because I'm an Imperial dummy.

Wounds are next, even though they should really be closer to the "attacking" section. Like, immediately after the attacking section. So there's a geometric conversion chart, and the net wound level after soak determines how many boxes you fill in (0=>1, 1=>3, 2=>6, 3=>10, more=>all your boxes and you're bleeding to death). Also you always have 10 boxes. So, good enough, but kinda rocket tag. You might usually get 3 hits on soaking, but in a dice pool system you seriously might just get no hits at all, and then you're fucked cause that's all your boxes right there. Now, in an errata the thresholds were all bumped by +1, but still, you can be fine a few hits and then explode suddenly. Indomitability (one of the magic powers later) says that people with it "don't go unconscious" before you die. Incapacitated says that you might or might not be conscious... so is a heavily injured vampire Incapacitated but just always for sure still conscious? Or are they not even Incapacitated? Or what the hell is going on there?

Ranged Weapons gives us some weapons that are all commonly seen in movies. We're told to not sweat how many bullets that a person has on them for reloads and such. We're told to not even count how many bullets you happen to literally fire in a 12 second round. We're also told that every bullet eventually hits something, and so you might kill extras. But since we don't know how many bullets you shot we can't tell how many extras you might have accidentally killed I guess. Also, you can have special ammunition that will be super effective against different creature types. I guess whenever you have that you have an unlimited amount of it because you don't track ammo in this game. Unless you're in a "survival horror segment", in which case you suddenly do track ammo in some unspecified way.

Special ammo in shotguns can let them dispel magic from very far off, but it doesn't say if an auto-shotgun can get its +3 dice to the dispelling. Pretty cool if so.

There's Crossbows, but not Bows. What the hell is up with that part.

The ranges are all given in a format like "(Accurate) Maximum", which hurts my brain, but I guess maybe to others that's fine.

Oh, yeah, and you can get silencers, but they only work for "five shots", which probably means five attack rolls, but it's hard to know since it's not one bullet per attack roll. Either way they should probably last more like hundreds of shots at minimum. I only know what a quick googling tells me, but "five" seems pretty fake. Also they "reduce" the noise, but in a sort of vague and unspecified way. It's not like, "+2 threshold to hear the shot". In fact there are no specific rules for hearing gunshots at various ranges anyway. Which normally I wouldn't mind, if you just forgot about the issue entirely, but when you've put in a paragraph on silencers you've obviously considered the issue and then dropped half of it.

Melee Weapons is largely the same. Unlike in Shadowrun, since Strength is part of the attack pool, you don't get to add your Strength to the damage value. There's an entry for "Chainsaw", but no entry for "Chainsaw-arm", which seems like an obvious oversight.

Explosions do not have a "chunky salsa" rule, which is probably good for the world.

Throwing Things is easy to understand, as is Damage Over Time. Then we get to Other Hazards which means Falling, Shock, and Poison. You might expect "fires" to be in there too, but that's covered as a DOT. Really, DOT should probably have two or three times as many examples as it does. Falling is easy to remember (even the chart is easy to remember), and Electrocution is also easy to remember. Poison is... less easy. It's one of those "big random chart" types of deals.

So poison is a DOT, but it also has a Timer that will eventually run out, and then when you take extra doses you either bump up the timer or you leave it alone and cut the delay. And then poison counters can either cut the Timer value or increase the Delay value. And then once at least one box of damage has been inflicted, most poisons have a secondary effect that triggers. It's not even hard to resolve exactly, it's just a lot of fiddly numbers, and like half the monsters are immune to poisons, which means that you'll learn these rules relatively rarely probably, and then you'll probably have to look it up each time.

The table notes also say "Poisons in Quotes are the magical poisons available with Tongue of the Serpent. The damage level may at the character's option be increased by the character's Potency.", but that doesn't make sense since poison doesn't have a Damage level, it has a Delay level, and increased delay would only slow the poison's effect, and it's not really explained what a Delay below 0 would do. Maybe it just counters hits on the target's soak test? I dunno. Speaking of which, you probably soak poisons with Strength, but I really don't know because it doesn't say. It says they work like a DOT, but it doesn't say in DOT for sure what kind of resistance test you get, just that you get one.

There are Conditions, most of which are inflicted by poisons, but some of which I guess you might end up with in some other way.

Wind and Water gives us tables for storms and fog, as one might expect.

Armor shows up unexpectedly at this point, and tells us that characters can get up to 6 dice on their soak tests by wearing armor. Also you can buy hits 3:1 instead of 4:1 if you have armor, up to the limit of your armor rating. So that's fine. Armor is split into "Ballistics", "Melee", and "Heat" ratings.

Healing and Death tells us about how to heal those marks we've got in our condition tracks, but in the process we learn that secretly they've been separate types of marks the whole time and you can get weird things like having more lethal marks than normal marks so your rightmost box might end up being a backslash on its own or something.

Also, you heal the lowest grade marks first (2 at a time), and in doing so you get 1 mark of the next highest grade added back to your track (unless you healed 2 aggravated, there's no mark above aggravated). This is supposed to simulate the idea that a small wound can fester and potentially kill you if you're not careful or whatever, but it doesn't really simulate that at all in almost any normal case. Like, even if you fail every single healing test, a person with a track full of Normal damage will never be in danger unless the initial hit itself was a Terminal wound. A person with 6 Normal and 6 Lethal marks (such as from a single Serious wound) will... never be in danger. You need to have taken in excess of 6N/6L and then also fail basically every single healing test to be killed by this goofy rule. Sure, a single Incapacitating wound would put a person in major danger, but really that's just better handled as a damage over time, since you already have rules for all that. What I'm saying is that burdening the normal case of "no actual danger possible" with an extra dice roll all the time is dumb and this part of the rules needs fixing because the goal of "a small cut could become infected and get worse if you don't treat it" is blatantly impossible. So really it's just a super complex set of "bleeding to death" rules, and it should be modeled as a DOT or something. Even the wound festering could be a DOT, it could just all be a DOT mechanic. Incidentally, the magic power that makes you ageless and immune to poison doesn't say if you're still affected by possibly bleeding to death, so I guess you can be.

And here is where we break for now.
[*]The Ends Of The Matrix: Github and Rendered
[*]After Sundown: Github and Rendered
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Post by Maxus »

Reminds me, I got a backlog to update...

Anyway, looking forward to more of this
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Post by Mask_De_H »

You're not very good at being flippantly funny Lok, so you probably just go with rage or some shit.

Review's good though, although I thought there was a bit on how running superheroes with fangs was totally cool in the Terrible Places section
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Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
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Post by Username17 »

This seems more like a drunk review than an anatomy of failed design.

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Post by OgreBattle »

Background skills and some technical/social skills do feel like they overlap in places, especially research. I figure research could be dropped and anything relating to info gathering is background skills, social skills to ask people with the background skills, etc.

Perception also seems like it could be left a physical attribute and not a skill.

Rigging and sabotage could be folded together and I don't think anyone will really mind. Both together feel like they'd have some overlap with Artisan or possibly Operations depending on the situation.

S'more examples of skill use per skill would be nice. Tactics and bureaucracy feel like they have some overlap but could also do different things.

I like the idea of magic being skill based but it does feel kind of odd that conjuring storms means you're good at macguyvering or running a factory. Something I've been mulling over for my own heartbreaker whether to do magic as existing skills or as its own skill.
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Post by Username17 »

OgreBattle wrote:Perception also seems like it could be left a physical attribute and not a skill.
I think that having the mental stats be Perception and Intelligence would be better than Logic and Intuition in a lot of ways. If and when I can find the time to make the second edition be a thing rather than a set of notes, that's way up on the list of changes.

That necessitates a revamp of stealth, but that's also necessary because I don't think the way I wrote stealth was as intuitive as it should be.

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Post by Harshax »

OgreBattle wrote:I like the idea of magic being skill based but it does feel kind of odd that conjuring storms means you're good at macguyvering or running a factory. Something I've been mulling over for my own heartbreaker whether to do magic as existing skills or as its own skill.
This is pretty much how RuneQuest works. If you want to be good at Storm Magic, you have to belong to a cult, guild or brotherhood that provides Storm Magic. To get access to the most powerful Storm Magic, you have to improve your rank within the organization you belong to and to improve your rank, you must prove competencies in the types of skills and activities important to your organization.

A Thief cult with spells that let you leap between shadows, become two-dimensional, suppress light, or whisper incantations of insanity might require you to have a really high skill in a variety of Stealth Skills, Bluff and pertinent lore skills as well as credentials proving you've infiltrated the local constabulary, blackmailed or bribed a high ranking customs official or otherwise undermined some authority.

And while this isn't a direct correlation between skill = magic, it does neatly provide mechanical reasons to give a shit about certain skills as rites of passage to higher level magic as well as help define the types of activities important to the organizations that offer magic to their members.
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Post by Prak »

If ever there was a clear sign that you should change the way something works in your RPG, it's the words "this is pretty much how RuneQuest works"
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Pixels »

I'm pretty sure that the various other worlds are places you don't go because the action is supposed to take place mostly on Earth. Terrible monsters leak into an area sparking off a horror movie plot, and you have to smack them down or work together with them or whatever. The various factions make their own trouble or complicate existing issues and its all a wonderful time. Adventuring into Maya or Limbo or the Gloom is something that you can do, but would have a very different flavor than a normal adventure. It would be more like a D&D dungeon crawl. The Skeleton War stuff you posted sounds like it will be similar in a lot of ways to fighting in the Shallows of Mictlan, with relatively few people around and a lot of spooky undead.
And then some portion of NPC humans are probably luminaries. But there's really no way to tell I guess.
Aura Perception will tell you whether a particular person is a Luminary, unless they're using another power to conceal their nature.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

This review is as long as the actual book. Next time consider cutting out the parts that aren't failed design.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Personally the biggest complaints that I've heard have been that character creation is not cohesively &/or front and center in the game's chapter structure.
Prak wrote:If ever there was a clear sign that you should change the way something works in your RPG, it's the words "this is pretty much how RuneQuest works"
After Sundown goes a step further than Runequest in terms of obfuscation; but also in terms of granting agency.

Most of the Stealth powers... only matter if you're being stealthy; the Disciplines tend to make their them "better". The variation to that would be in sorcerous Powers; which have two options for most powers. Although Sorcerous powers use two skill types for the whole set of powers; which skills are used for which powers isn't clearly outlined to any reader of the rules. Which can lead to characters being at different scales of power; even if they're the same creature type.
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Post by hogarth »

CatharzGodfoot wrote:This review is as long as the actual book. Next time consider cutting out the parts that aren't failed design.
For what it's worth, I'm enjoying the comprehensiveness of the review so far.
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Post by Lokathor »

All my replies to your replies are in a spoiler block for simplicity:
Mask_De_H wrote:You're not very good at being flippantly funny Lok, so you probably just go with rage or some shit.

Review's good though, although I thought there was a bit on how running superheroes with fangs was totally cool in the Terrible Places section
I wasn't really going for flippantly funny, so I guess it's alright that I'm bad at going for it? Most of this is just in my normal narration/explanation type "writing voice". I probably couldn't do rage, because I don't have much rage in me. It's very undennerlike of me, I know.

Also, yes, that bit is there in the section on Goals, which I largely glossed over at the time.
FrankTrollman wrote:This seems more like a drunk review than an anatomy of failed design.
Fair criticism of the criticism. However, to borrow a phrase, I'd say that After Sundown is in the "mostly not broken" category. I would have picked "Drunken Review" as the category perhaps, were it not that specifically the phase "anatomy of failed design" were the one you used when you talked about it.
OgreBattle wrote:<many things>
I'd love to see Sabotage merged with Rigging and then a Science skill added into the game. Specializations like Physics, Biology, Archeology, etc. You don't fight with a Soldier background, so you probably shouldn't do sciency things with just a science background. A science related background would be that you work at a university and have accreditation and stuff like that. And, of course, you might even be some sort of hack professor where you have a background but not enough science skill ranks to actually back it up.

I've played in a game with a Perception stat but not a "notice things" skill on top of it (Earthdawn 1e) and it's dumb feeling most of the time. If Perception becomes a stat in place of some other stat, you'll just need an Awareness skill in its place. You're just repainting a bikeshed at that point I think, unless it's part of some larger design revolution.
Pixels wrote:I'm pretty sure that the various other worlds are places you don't go because the action is supposed to take place mostly on Earth.
Says you can run the game as a four planet sized sandbox game. But you probably can't since the hell planes are overly hellish even to supernaturals with powers. If they killed humans that wandered into them all the time that'd be fine, but even a supernatural can't really adventure there it seems.
Pixels wrote:Aura Perception will tell you whether a particular person is a Luminary, unless they're using another power to conceal their nature.
When I say that there's no way to tell, I don't mean "which people are luminary", I mean "what portion of the population is luminary".
Judging__Eagle wrote:Personally the biggest complaints that I've heard have been that character creation is not cohesively &/or front and center in the game's chapter structure.
Here's some highlights so far
[*]Potency is shit
[*]Hiding is nonsense
[*]Combat is rocket tag. I didn't even cover it at the time because Monsters hadn't been talked about yet, but two players in the same party are almost guaranteed to have wildly different Soak values, so creating encounters that are appropriate to a group is terrible.
[*]The skills chapter is like 50% innuendo about what skills should do without concrete examples.
[*]Backgrounds are nonsense
[*]World demographics unclear
[*]Needs better examples of what you'd want do to and why you'd want to do it. (yes I know there's a chapter called Character Options and Motivation that I've yet to get to. Spoilers: Estas malpli instiganta ol oni esperus.)
And none of that gets to any of the monster stuff this post is about to contain.
hogarth wrote:For what it's worth, I'm enjoying the comprehensiveness of the review so far.
That's cool to hear.

And, yes, I mean it's not really just an Anatomy of Failed Design, but I don't think anyone else will be doing the close-read OSSR type of review of After Sundown any time soon, so I might as well hit the whole thing while I'm at it. I guess I could change the topic title.
So we've got some Peanut Butter Crunch, a last gulp of Twisted Blackberry Poweraid, and Stellaris to full our ears. (note, in the end this chapter alone took several days to get through, and there were many snacks along the way.)

Monsters
Slaying Monsters tells us that we'll need three kinds of weapons to cut through supernatural resistance. You don't know it yet, but basically everyone is going to end up having 2-4 dice of supernatural resistance because of how the powers work out and stuff, so picking the right weapon is like AP -2 on all your attacks. Also wounds from effective weapons are Aggravated damage, which mostly doesn't matter when fighting NPCs. The big effect of Aggravated damage is that it takes more time (or more power points) to heal, but in-combat healing is next to useless anyway, so the enemy will probably just die before a difference in damage grade would ever make a difference.

Weakening Supernatural Creatures gives a non-damaging way to weaken a creature. It's why vampires avoid the sun, and why witches can't get wet, and why werewolves... can't.. get drunk? Okay, whatever. These weaknesses are obviously not even close to balanced with one another, but maybe they weren't supposed to be. A water weakness is just straight up the worst one to have given the supposed frequency of rain storms in this game. A sunlight weakness limits where you can go in some sense but it'll rarely get dumped on you by surprise. Alcohol weakness is more like an RP element than anything else.

Power Schedules tells how you get your power points. Some are supposed to be better or worse than others from time to time, but really Lunar is just a harsh deal compared to Ritual or Feeding. Continuous is for some NPC types, but really it's a kludge. As discussed in the AS2e thread, all that should just be shoved into Lunar instead.

So some of the time you get powers based on the moon. Here's a thing, do you have to literally see the moon rise for you to get your powers? I ask because the skies are supposed to be covered over in rain and fog and storms half the time according to the Danger chapter, so it should make a big difference. If you don't literally need to see the moon, then all that stuff with the hell planes maybe having moons or not is all crap because any werewolf ever would be able to tell you in a day if there's a moon in any hell plane just based on when they got their PP back.

Tragic Flaws tells us about both Master Passions and Tragic Flaws. Passions send you into a crazy frenzy (the details of which depend on your passion), and Flaws are just bad effects that you get. Normally you get one Advantage for each Flaw you take, but by being a supernatural creature you get one Flaw without a matching Advantage. The Passion options are suggestions, and you can pick others if you want. The Tragic Flaws are fixed and you should not change them. Full details for this stuff is given in a later chapter.

Lycanthropy
A curse/disease thing that gets passed from luminary to luminary via mauling. No culture of their own, they get absorbed into the culture of whoever picks them up. But also as discussed earlier they might never get picked up by anyone, so whatever.

Weak to silver, always a lunar power source, master passion is usually rage. There isn't one master passion type per creature type, but Lycans are the only ones who get Rage among the playable types. They're weakened by alcohol but this section doesn't remind you of that.

There's also a... bizarre paragraph about use of the greek language to re-derive new words like "Therianthrope" and "Zoanthrope". I guess it really depends on who you know, because I've never heard anyone try to use these words.

Werevolves, obviously, are the first lycanthrope given. Astral powered. There's some description given of the history of werewolf-thropy, or whatever you call the werewolf specific version of lycanthropy. What their "war form" looks like, and the fact that they turn into all sorts of canines. Werewolves always have the Temperamental flaw.

The bulk of the section is given over to a list of starting magical powers. They are given as a Core Discipline, Basic powers, and Advanced weapons. The term "Core Discipline" is only ever used in monster power lists. I'm not sure if it's a concept that got dropped along the way or what.

You get 13pp / day, and all your cool powers take some PP (we'll mark them as we go). It's a very "nova" type character it seems. If you go into war form with quickness that's half your daily PP right there. Celerity lasts for "a scene", but War Form gives no duration at all.

Nezumi are a fancy word for "wererat". Instead of getting huge, they flip out without getting huge. This makes their rage "flip around" in a sense and they get afraid of stuff because they see all the things they want to fight but can't win against, and they worry that someday they'll go crazy and make a suicide charge anyway. Nezumi are always caught up in Red Tape, and they have an Infernal power source.

They're sneaky and nothing really competes with Revive The Flesh for power point consumption. But if they are hit they'll be hit for a lot more than a werewolf because they're missing the bonus Strength effects, so they might just straight up die instantly like I talked about before. Gotta rely on those stealth powers.

Bagheera are weretigers. Well, any great cat I guess. They're "creatures of death", and also animals don't like them. They've got an Orphic power source.

Bagheera are pretty "nova" style as well. There's a trick that I didn't explain when I first mentioned a Celerity power though: When you spend 3PP to activate a Celerity power, you actually activate the entire discipline, so a Bagheera spends 3PP to get +2 Initiative Passes and 6x movement speed. You can also go into War Form on top of that. They certainly strike me as being better on average than a Werewolf in a fight, but when you start In Medias Res you get your default powers and some bonus powers, so the werewolf could easily catch up. Frankenstein and Reborn, which we'll see later, are also in the running for "best starting combatant". Celerity is really just that good.


Vampires
Can't be in the sun, have to drink blood, and vampires can choose when the person they drink from will become a vampire (compared to lycanthropes, who auto-convert any luminary they maul). So vampires themselves are less different than the types of were-creatures you might come up with, and we instead focus on three "bloodlines". Every vampire is part of one of these, and it gives them their power source and all that. It says that drinking blood to sustain yourself is what defines a vampire, and their whole not dying thing, but that part feels kinda weak because all Leviathans and all Animates also are ageless by default. And if you don't use your power points much a vampire doesn't even need to drink blood much. So anyway vampires are harmed by wood, and Hunter is their Master Passion. This is also the second time we hear about "spawn" creatures.

Nosferatu are gross vampires with gross teeth and ugliness. Not just a little ugly, we're usually talking "put a paper bag on your head" ugly. Instead of normal-ish fangs, they've got some random thing that's gross and weird like a mosquito tube or a leech beak. The book says they're "Information brokers" because they can sneak around and stuff, but every sneaky power they have is also available to Nezumi, and at least Nezumi don't automatically scare children.

I'm not impressed with these powers and would basically never play as one of these guys, but I probably would never play as a vampire to start with. I'm the idiot who played Mage: The Watever instead of Vampire: The Whatever. I think vampires are just usually chumps. Too much Buffy or something, they're simply not really cool to me. Dracula was pretty cool in Monster Squad I guess. Anyway, they don't have to use PP much if they're avoiding social interaction and stuff as often as they supposedly are, so they don't actually have cause to feed that often.

Strigoi, these are the "nobility vampire" that you'd get from Dracula and stories like that. It says they have to consume blood on a regular basis, but if that's gonna be a thing then like make a rule for that man. Say that vampires use up 1PP per night to sustain themselves and that's why they're feeding all the damn time. Do something with that whole "need to feed on blood" deal. Strigoi are Orphic. Fun fact, when After Sundown was being made out of the ashes of AWOD, Strigoi got picked as a name for a vampire type based on a list of suggestions that I made. That was my big contribution to this game.

As with Nosferatu, on a day to day basis the Strigoi has really no need for their power points, and so they really have no direct need to feed on a regular basis. Patience of the Mountains (a power every Vampire has) literally says "the character doesn't eat, drink, or breathe", so it's hard to argue that your hunger for bread and thirst for water has become a thirst for blood to sustain you now that you're a vamp. Just give us some small mechanical justification Frank, that's all we need. I guess their "Compulsive Behavior" flaw is supposed to be compulsive blood drinking? But then the other types of vampire still wouldn't be very frequent blood drinkers. Just say, "they need to spend a power point to wake up at night if there's a full moon out", or something like that so that they will eventually have to go feed on blood even when they're not throwing down in street fights. I know it's maybe not "fair" to give vampires a PP loss that others don't have, but gosh.

Daeva are the coolest type of vampire by far. They can fly and they're immune to fire. It says they've got an affinity for bats, and "small bat wings" out of their back, but they don't get any Call of the Wild powers at all. Daeva are Infernal and Blatantly Magical.

Daeva are the vampires that are most likely to drink all sorts of blood all over the place. Attract should really be tossed out for a basic Call of The Wild ability (either Animal Form or Tongue of Beasts) and then things would go together a lot better in terms of having that bat affinity deal.


Witchcraft
So if you're a human doing magic you'll go insane quick. That "human soul" thing is pretty antithetical to magic use it turns out. So... you just have to get rid of your soul. The way that you get rid of your soul determines the kind of Witch that you end up being. Witches are vulnerable to silver, suppressed by water, and usually have Master Passion Greed. Unlike the types so far, not all witches have the same feeding schedule.

Baali burn out their soul with infernal fire. It makes them distant, and they get enraged by things that reminds them of themselves. They have a feeding power schedule, and "feed" by inflicting harm on people near to them (within 1 meter per potency). Their flaw is Disloyal.

Oh, look, they've got no powers at all that use power points. You get some additional Basic and Advanced power on top of your starting powers, but it's entirely possibly that a starting Baali would end up with no way at all to spend their power points. So much for caring about them even having a feeding schedule at all.

Dryads replace their soul with a seed, because plants aren't harmed by the channeling of magic. This changes their blood into sap over time and stuff. They have Ritual power, and the Aimless flaw.

They've got plant powers, like you'd expect from a seed mage. Pain Drops is shockingly powerful against "big and tough" things, and the Strength 13 combat player will be really sad when suddenly they're soaking with their Willpower 4 instead. A dryad could use the Puppetry power to literally play out Plants vs Zombies, if they wanted to do that.

Khaibit get rid of their soul by killing themselves with some sort of setup that will bring them back to life soon after, sans soul. Either a dark ritual or a weird medical thing. Khaibit are also Ritual power, and the ritual depends on if they used dark magic or medical stuff. They've got an Orphic power source and their flaw is that they're always Haunted by things that followed them back from the land of the dead.

Ghost powers and zombie powers. I'm not entirely sure why Tongue of the Serpent is in there. It feels like maybe they're just given one power too many to start so they got a "close enough" power. Also, the monsters generally give the power's name as "Bite" not "Tongue", but the power itself has the name Tongue so that's what we'll use here.


Animates
Animates have been created by someone, and the reason for their creation (rather than strictly speaking their composition) determines what category they fall into. Vulnerable to wood, weakened by Alcohol, and Master Passion Loneliness.

Frankensteins know that their name is wrong but they go with it anyway. They've been made by someone who wanted a child, but inevitably abandoned because they aren't actually childlike at all. Orphic and Ritual. Tragic Flaw is Conspicuous Consumption.

These guys are kinda combat monsters like the Bagheera and the Werewolf. Not to much to say I guess. Celerity is good in a fight, and they get it.

Golems were made by someone who needs a task done. As a tool, as a weapon, as a guardian. They are made by someone who can't do whatever they want done on their own. The golem itself has a body of matter, but they actually "are" a spirit bound to that matter, and they can even move themselves into new bodies if they need to (though it says that it'd take a day or so). Astral Power, Ritual Schedule, and for a Flaw you get to pick between either Anachronism or Naive.

Golems are the coolest supernatural type. Lycanthropes are pretty cool, and Reborn and Icarids, but Golems are the coolest of them all by a big margin. Frekkin Iron Giant robot monsters that can also be like Transformers. And then they can move their spirit from body to body? These guys are a major win for sweetness. It's weird that the Astral animate doesn't get a single Astral power. Summon Spirit is an odd choice to me, but I guess since golems are spirits they can call up other spirits? What about Curse of Failure or Howling Winds instead?

Androids are attempts by someone to create a lover. At least, this is the implied story, though we're not strictly speaking told that in this section exactly. The tagline is "how fully functional are you?", which is almost surely in reference to Data from Star Trek, but he'd be either a Frankenstein or a Golem under this split-up of animates, since he was created to be an offspring of Dr. Soong, and to assist humanity and all that. Either way, despite him being "an android" in the technological sense, he's clearly not an Android in the After Sundown sense. The next android-like character that I'd think of myself is R. Daneel Olivaw, and, again, Olivaw would be classified more like a Golem under the After Sundown take of "it depends on why they were made".

Whatever, so Android emotions are too strong, I guess. I'm not sure what the hell "They are beyond autistic, their emotions are simply ones and zeros" is supposed to mean. Autism is largely an issue of problems in the "IO process", so to speak, of a person, where you can't read the world around you properly, and you often can't express yourself properly as well. Androids don't really seem to have that sort of issue according to anything in their description. Further, it says right there that androids aren't purely digital, they can be clockwork or polished stone too, so I'm not following the ones and zeroes part of the sentence.

The section lists some story inspirations, some of which I either watched (where possible) or read the wikipedia article (for the non-films). I had hoped to glean a little more of a sense of what the theme here is supposed to be, but I don't think that I did.
  • Pygmalion: a myth about a man who marries a statue he carved that was blessed by the gods to turn into a real woman. They have kids and happily ever after and all that.
  • Metropolis: This is largely about a worker's revolt in an oppressive future city kind of thing. However, meanwhile, a crazy man makes a robot to replace the woman who left him when he was younger. When the factory owner man goes to meet with the crazy man, he is shown the robot and then the owner says they should use it to trick the disloyal workers by making it look like their leader woman. The crazy man who built the robot does this, but he also secretly orders the robot to betray everyone and just destroy as much of the city as she can. Riots and fires and floods ensue, and things work out in the end once the robot is caught and revealed to be an imposter and the crazy man is thrown off a roof.
  • RUR: So this is a play, about "robots" (biological ones; more like human-form cylons) being possible because of a discovery on a strange island, and then robot labor displaces all human labor, and then robots eventually rise up and take over the world. There is a robot that's made as a lady-bot by the robot maker before the uprising, he tried to replace his wife with a robot as an experiment. So, it's mostly about what AS would call "Golems", but we'll give points for a romance-replacer-bot being there.
  • Weird Science: So, two highschool boys see a frankenstein type movie on TV while they're at home on a friday and then "simulate" a girl on the computer and hack a government facility for added stimulation powers until lightning strikes and the simulation becomes a real woman with casual magic powers and then wacky hijinks ensue. I give it a solid 10/10 actually. This is a high quality 80's film in all the ways that the 80s gave us good films.
  • Ifruta (El-Hazard): This one is an anime, and it seems like there's an OVA timeline and also a "tv series" timeline. That's a lot to watch, so I just read the article about it. I guess this is a show about some folks from Japan that get transported to an alternate world and there's bug people. Ifruta is some sort of bio-machine girl, but the wikipedia article says that she's an ancient weapon basically, and also that when one character has the staff that controls her she executes all orders with a complete lack of emotion. In the alternate TV series timeline, she has a different costume and personality and plot role and stuff, but it doesn't mention anything about her being made as part of a doomed romance.
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: So I didn't read the book but I did read the wikipedia article and I also saw Blade Runner. The replicants of Blade Runner are basically people made as laborers, with lifetime limits and stuff as a way to prevent rebellions. So, that would make them golems.
What I'm getting at is that, as much as I don't like vampires, I still get what they're about and all. Androids don't really seem to come together for me. Before I forget, Androids are Infernal powered, Doomed Romance flaw. In terms of powers, none of the Android examples that I saw really struck me a being stupendously physically strong, so I'm not sure why Clout is their core discipline.

Androids strike me as being kinda a mess, and in an After Sundown 2e they should probably get a good hard look as to what really makes them tick. Because Golems and Frankensteins also have their narrative space partly defined by what Androids are, they might all need to re-divide the pie among themselves. That's probably a good thing, since right now I honestly couldn't tell you if Daneel Olivaw would be an Android, Golem, or Frankenstein. You could probably make an argument for him being any of the three. That's probably not a good sign.

Here's a suggestion for a totally new way to split up and explain the animates (which could have holes, and could use refinements, etc etc)
  • Animates are sapient creatures that are constructed by others rather than being born or transformed. They are best characterized by the fact that their body is ultimately replaceable, and what makes them really "them" is their persona, which is connected to something which would not normally have one. The distinction between animates is based on what is hosting that persona. Though an animate can sometimes replace their body, they can't actually change the medium required to host their persona. Of course, this being After Sundown, they're all actually powered by evil magic in the end, but it's the thought that counts.
  • Frankenstein type animates are named after the famous doctor that created Adam, and they are whenever you've implanted a persona on a biological form and animated the result. Core examples remain Frankenstein, Edward Scissorhands, Subject Two, and Herbert West's creations. However, Pinocchio is no longer a Frankenstein. The robots of RUR, as well as Human Form Cylons, would count as Frankensteins under this system.
  • Androids are when you're supporting the creature's persona in a digital (or perhaps mechanical) form. Short Circuit is an Android now instead of being a Golem. Other examples include nearly every "artificial person" type character from the 80s forward, but notable examples might be: Terminator, Blade Runner Replicants, Dorian (Almost Human), Ash (Alien), Data (Star Trek), R. Daneel Olivaw (Asimov), Kryten (Red Dwarf) and so on.
  • Golems are when the Animate's persona is supported by no physical element at all. If you just bind enough raw life energy into a thing you can get it to start moving around anyway. If you're a Luminary and you do it right your Golem can even itself be a Luminary. Once created, a Golem's persona is held together by the ritual words and runes and so forth. Talos is still a golem of course. Pinocchio and Pygmalion's wife both become golems. Lisa from Weird Science could be put down as a Golem or as an Android if you want. Someone like Alphonse Elric (Full Metal Alchemist) would also count.
  • Power Source stays the same as before. Frankenstines are Infernal, Androids are Orphic, and Golems are Astral. Everyone still is on a Ritual schedule as well.
  • Powers would probably be adjusted all over the place.
  • Distinctive Flaw would remain as Conspicuous Consumption for Frankensteins. Androids now have either Eerie Presence or Naive: they often look perfectly human, but their persona never quite is, no matter how hard they or their creators try. Golems can now pick either Offensive to Animals or Haunted: the process of creating them always gives them a spiritual imprint that upsets others who can sense that sort of thing. Kind as they might be, their soul is still ugly to look at.

Leviathan
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not eat the monster"
-N. Dog, probably

The monster spawn of Tiamat, when eaten by humans, taint the human form into being monstrous as well. It also makes the human able to live forever, so many are happy to make that trade. It's my own take (based on text in the Marduk Society section) that none of the "true" Leviathans are left at all, and all the Leviathans that exist now are simply tainted humans that have fed off of other tainted humans in the past. However, this isn't spelled out specifically, and if you wanted to play different in your game it wouldn't be a big deal.

Leviathans are split up based on which child of Tiamat they draw their bloodline back to. Leviathans are hurt by Iron, and weak in the Sunlight. They have Master Passion Fear.

Deep Ones are fish-folk, like the creature from the black lagoon. I read the picture book version of this movie that was in my school library when I was in 4th grade (there was a whole series of old black and white horror movies as picture books they had). It seemed cool. Seemed like the creature got a pretty raw deal, but I guess he did try to kidnap someone. I don't really have much to say about Deep Ones I guess, since there's not much "design" to have happen with this concept, it's all sorta obvious and pretty spelled out by the various sources. Notably, Zaat isn't on the list of inspirations, but that movie should be on the list. Astral/Lunar/Infectious Mood

Cool powers. Looks like they might easily have no way to spend power points, but since they're on a Lunar schedule that can just fall into the background anyway. To me it only really makes a difference for Feeding and Ritual people, since they're either doing some special behaviour or not. Lunar people don't change their activities much based on if they need their PP back or not, since there's no way to make the moon rise any faster.

Troglodytes are a type I misunderstood for ages. I just assumed they were lizard-like, like in DnD. It wasn't until ages after I first read their entry that I happened to realize that they're actually mole-like... er... sorta. So anyway, I actually watched The Mole People just earlier, and it's a better movie than I thought it would be. Only about 77 minutes long, solid story, solid pacing. Did make me wonder why there's not much mention of flashlights anywhere in After Sundown though. Or like, darkness penalties and stuff like that. Maybe somewhere in the Perception skill, or in the Danger chapter. Anyway, trogs are Orphic/Feeding/Unattractive.

Looking at their powers... yep, that's the mole men alright.

Mi Go are so unsettling that not only do I not want to play one, I don't even want to play in a game with one of them. Let's move past this quickly. Infernal/Lunar/Flake. Bug powers.

Transhumans
So if you intentionally burn out your soul so that you can do magic without going insane, you become classified as a witch of some kind. But if you don't even believe in souls and do some sort of weird/horrific thing anyway, then you're classified a transhuman.

Super injured by Iron, weakened by Water, Master Passion Despair.

Reborn are people that have been reincarnated and then recalled their past memories. Easy enough to understand, and you can use the concept in a lot of ways. They've always got a Distinctive Appearance it seems. Orphic/Lunar. Not really much more to say about that. Cool power list and all.

Fallen are a type that I didn't really like ever, until I read them just this very most recent time. I'm starting to warm up to them a little bit now. Basically, they've been irradiated with Limbo power until now they can direct it around into effects. Infernal/Ritual, and either Minor or Feared By Children. Powers make sense for a Limbo thing.

Icarids are when you do a science experiment to make augmented humans. Invisible Man, Green Goblin, Captain America, Icarus, and so on. Astral/Ritual/Prideful. I think that having a base power list on these guys at all is borderline a mistake, and in a later edition that looked to reform how powers were handed out, giving more options to some types than others, this is an obvious spot to mostly let your players pick whatever powers are in theme for the experiment that they did to themselves to become an Icarid.

Holy shit we're done with all the PC types.


Zombies
You got your slow zombies, you got your fast zombies, you got your luminary zombies that can talk. I've never been too big on zombies really, they're just okay. They're all Orphic of course, weak in the Sun, harmed by Wood, all that.

For some reason the "fast zombie" (Soulless) is on a Lunar schedule instead of a feeding schedule like the Revenants are. Since "they hunger for brains!" is kinda the whole deal with zombies, it seems silly that eating brains isn't related to them refilling their power. The only thing they have to spend PP on is Nimble Feet, so I guess it doesn't matter too much.


Fey
So, the fey type aren't really fey in a modern "cute pixies and fairies" sort of sense, they're more like fey in the sense of classic Grimm's fairy tales. Some people don't like this, and really the whole type could be changed to "Goblinoid" without any changes to the creatures in the category and people might like it better. They're all Infernal, all weak to Iron. They used to control Earth, until humans developed Ironworking.

This seemingly minor plot detail actually makes a person wonder why Iron has this mystical association with "the industrialization of man" that causes it to be effective against some types of creature... if other types were supposedly weak to Iron before it was part of any major industrialization scheme. Seems inconsistent, but I guess magic doesn't have to be consistent if it doesn't want to be. The mystery could be much deeper than anyone knows, and the "Iron is industrialization" could just be bullshit made up by the monsters themselves because they don't actually have any idea and they're just trying to rationalize an increasingly insane world.

So there are three types of Fey.
  • Mirror Goblins look like this guy or maybe this one, about a meter tall. They're used as cannon fodder all the time.
  • Spriggans are the size of a mirror goblin, but without bones really, and they're all infested with worms. They can flip out into a giant sized war form that does have bones though.
  • Trolls are huge and hulking and they never tire and they always hunger and so on and so forth. Interestingly, they have the most varied list of suggested appearances given so far, and an ability to automagically tell when something else is also a troll.
So, while Zombies were mostly a template race applied to humans, Fey all have "non-standard" attribute ranges. I guess the average stats of a whatever with a non-standard array are just base +2 maybe.


Giant Animals
Classic creature features are all right here. Unlike with other groups, we've got four types:
  • Behemoths are somewhat oversized versions of any animal.
  • Swarms are a swarm of normal sized creatures, or rather an energy field hive mind that controls some type of normal animal.
  • Chimera are, as you'd expect, two or more creatures merged into some sort of monstrous thing.
  • Kaiju are so stupendously big that the fact that they don't crumple under their own weight is called out as being remarkable all on its own. It's not a magic power, but it probably should be a magic power. I say this because kaiju have got a Strength of 35 and a horrible, horrible vulnerability to falling effects. Since you don't get your Strength or Armor to soak a fall, just net hits on Agility+Athletics and your Edge roll, the normally unstoppable Kaiju could end up dead or near to it just by being knocked off a 35ft tall office building. And that might be "realistic" , but it's sure unsatisfying. How about a basic Fortitude power that lets you use your Strength on soak tests from falling damage. Kaiju would get it by default, and others might care to learn it as well.

Ghosts
Damaged by wood, weakened by sunlight of course. Ghosts are always forced back to Mictlan by the sunrise anyway, so that second part doesn't technically matter much.

We've got Whisps, which are colored blobs that are kinda like ghost spawn without specifically being called spawn. Wraiths are like the complete person as a ghost sorta, and an obsession over unfinished business in life and such. Finally there is the Poltergeist, which is like a bunch of whisps merged into a storming hurricane of ghost energy that just rampages about. I don't have too much to say about ghosts. They're fine. The fact that they get Aura Discernment seems like a result of the Devotion rules rather than being a thing that they should necessarily all have. Funnily enough, Ghosts don't get Supernatural Senses or Eyes of Night, so they can't see in the dark. Seems to me like there should be a physical advantage for being able to see in the dark that could just be handed out to the correct creature types if needed. I guess since there are no Darkness rules at all that'd be a good area to update in the next edition.


Demons
Damaged by silver, weakened by Water.

Akuma come in all colors of the rainbow, they're 3 Meters tall, and they have extra parts or even new rules of parts a lot of the time. They feed on sapient things to get their powers back, and they have 3 master passions despite the game not quite telling us how that works.

Asura are humanish looking demons. There is a line about how they are "superficially similar to Daeva", and how it lead to Daeva persecution in the past, and only later investigation discovered differences. That's an exceedingly stupid plotline since vampires are affected by Wood/Sunlight and demons are affected by Silver/Water. It would take you all of 2 minutes to sort out which is which, you just throw water on them and then make them left heavy weights. Which is already the kind of insane task you'd make people do during a medieval heretic hunt. Or stab them with a silver knife and if they can heal the wound within seconds instead of hours they're not a demon. Or something else like that.

It also says that Asura are a good pick for an otherworldly character, except that the fact that they were never human and don't want to be human somehow makes for "difficult role-playing". I don't really understand that claim at all to begin with, but even if so why wasn't that same warning given to us about the Golem or Frankenstein?

Ifrit have a description that reminds me of this guy in the bottom right more than anything else. They're immaterial when not in Limbo (kinda like a Ghost with Mictlan), but I'm starting to think that giving Empty Body to those sorts of characters as a power on their list is a mistake, and instead they should have a "Planebound" power/flaw that's keyed to a specific plane. Normally Empty Body has this thing where you can take it a second time to let you turn it on and off, but Ifrit and Wraith and so forth really shouldn't be able to control their version of plane-based immateriality.

The more I review the non-playable monster types, the more that I wish they had greater depth to each entry in terms of goals that the monster might commonly and/or frequently have. I've not seen Wishmaster, just read the article. The powers given kinda match up with what I read I guess, but I still don't really know what an Ifrit would want to do, exactly. Just that they don't work with mortals. Work at what? I guess they have a lot of Asura under their command and stuff? Just general power amassment? Are they like Queen Metalia or something? If demons are so alien that they need a warning before trying to roleplay as them, surely their goals and desires should be given more clearly than not at all.


Evil Plants
The last type of creature, but not the last section of this chapter.

Evil plants have the most alien psychology of everything, and they come in a few types.
  • Man Traps are like piranha plants from Mario. They get Clinging on their power list, but that strikes me as absurd since they're rooted in place. "Oh it's to explain how they stick to walls", you say. No that's silly they just stick to a wall if they're rooted in a wall you don't need a power for that, there's just literally packed dirt keeping them in place or whatever.
  • Triffids are shaped like... I don't even know what. "vaguely describable as humanoid" is about all we're told, also poison barbed tendrils coming out of their mouth. The "actual" triffid (which is of course copywritten) is a three-legged thing with a long neck and a tongue and all, but no arms, so I think that if the AS triffid is even vaguely humanoid it must be some new thing. Also of course it must be some new thing to avoid copyright violations. Well, what's the dictionary say? Seems like the Oxford English Dictionary says that John Wyndham came up with the word for his book, which would make even the word itself a copywritten I guess. I honestly don't know how these things work for sure, but I think that's kinda how it works. Anyway, besides perhaps needing some new name in a later version, they need a better description of what they look like.
  • Pods are evil watermelons that can mind control people. We're told that it's not clear what they actually want, but we are least told what they frequently try to do, which is close enough really. We also know very clearly what they look like, so we'll call the Pods a successful entry.

Spawn
So, every supernatural that you meet that's worth talking about is a Luminary, and when an extra would potentially be turned into a supernatural they're (probably) turned into a spawn version instead. I'm suddenly not clear on if any of the non-playable types discussed above are supposed to be Extra or Luminary. Or maybe versions of them show up in either category. I can't really imagine an Ifrit that's an Extra with all the fanfare they get about never being below Potency 4 and stuff, but I could imagine that a Mirror Goblin might be a Luminary or Extra depending on the story.

Anyway, Spawn are supposed to be the rank and file fodder versions of a creature that shows up in hordes in movies. Except they're given this rule about going into frenzy all the damn time, being little more than guard animals to be released. This makes it hard to imagine that you could much control an army of them to do anything specific. And like, the fact that any supernatural that isn't a spawn is forced into automatically being a luminary kinda fucks with the point of extras and luminaries I think. Like, if you gun down 20 werewolves in a running battle on motorcycles through the woods or whatever (a classic sort of scene), that sure seems like "those guys are all extras" to me.

So we get a treatment of what the spawn form of each playable type is:
  • Vampires are obvious and well done. I think that saying that the bloodline difference doesn't account for anything among spawn is good for homogenizing them. If they are going to show up by the handful, they should all have stats that are as identical as possible.
  • Animates using zombie stats is similarly good because it's easy. These guys are also the most obvious case that they should probably not be frenzying all the time, they should largely be following their orders (and only go berserk at the end of the movie).
  • Cultists should similarly not be frenzying much, they should be smoking opium, drinking kool-aid, and chanting dark ritual words. The Cultist entry, as well as the Baali entry, as well as some of the magic stuff we'll talk about later, hint at the idea that perhaps individual disciplines and powers should be tagged as either "sorcerous" or "innate", instead of the current setup where all universals are innate, and all hellplane powers are sorcerous.
  • Mutants are fine, I guess. I like the idea of a board full of old white men who've all eaten leviathan flesh to make themselves live forever, and I guess we can still do that, but now we just have to live with the fact that Board Member #14 way down the table is a Luminary and not an Extra.
  • Transhuman spawn shouldn't exist. Icarid Spawn don't exist, we're literally told that in the Icarid entry. Reborn spawn similarly do not exist at all, as we're told in the Reborn entry. Fallen Spawn should just be left as humans, not promoted into spawn. They're just the sad people wandering Limbo as humans. Maybe radiation sickness victims who get taken to a hospital, if it's the "too close to an artifact" version of things. Either way there's absolutely no reason for the concept "humans who go past the impossible" to have a group for the ones who can't go past the impossible.
  • So now that we've concluded that Transhuman Spawn can't really be a thing, let's see what the entry says. Oh, so the Jalus are all extras, and they're all spawn. Well, that fucks up what would otherwise be a totally good conceptual space to expand out later on. And some humans get adopted by spirits and become a Seer. Fineish. And then Fallen Extras just become Fallen Spawn. Welp.
  • So Lycanthropes don't get spawn, extras inflicted with lycanthropy just die from it. So, that's easy enough to keep track of I guess.
So, that's like 13 pages of reviewage from this chapter alone, and the whole review up to the start of this chapter was 17 pages of stuff. This is a big chapter. Overall the complaints and improvements might be "needs more clarity, needs more uniformity so that key details are easier to find", things like that. I think that monsters have too many automatic powers, which leaves less room at the lower end of things. At the same time, you don't generally get to pick enough of your powers so you end up with really similar power lists all the time and they're mostly picked by your archetype alone. That's fine for NPCs, but not for PCs.
Last edited by Lokathor on Fri Oct 07, 2016 5:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Your revision to animates looks sound, android still seems kind of vague.
Maybe splitting each archtype into three distinct subtypes should be tossed out and a grab bag of options be given instead so we don't have to worry about what category Bladerunner organic replicants and Rockman metal replicants fall under based on the purpose of their existence, and then you can have all the were-animals you want.

Many Asian mythological beings that live/adventure/bang with humans would fall into the demon/asura category so they should be playable.

An idea I got (that might be a terrible diea) for the background and skill distinction is that skill is what you roll and background is when you can roll. So having a "US army" background lets you drive military machines and diplomance patriotism out of red blooded Americans. A wilder idea is removing "Animal Ken" as a skill so instead having an animal related background lets you use Social skills like intimidate/persuade/empathy on animals.

Could see 'survival' moved into a technical skill so you're encouraged to specialize in a variety of terrain types.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

I always assumed Daeva had Attract instead of CotW wirh their bat wings because their reference point is Morrigan from Darkstalkers. I also remember them having Hand of Flame at some point specifically for Soul Fist, but that just might have been my AS character.
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Post by nockermensch »

If one the references for Daevas is "Darkstalkers", they really need the power to become a bat swarm, since both Dimitri and Morrigan do that.

Would taking Swarm Song with "Bats instead of Insects" as a special effect work?
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

My own direction with Artificials (as "Animates" only serves to confuse, not clarify the type) was as follows, and based on the definitions Frank gave that all Artificials are "abandoned" creatures:

Simulacrum:Meant to resemble interact with, and resemble, living creatures. Their body's form is their essential nature. Recharges by interacting with their internal mechanisms.

Inscribed:Purely functional construction; resemblance to living creatures is superficial at best. Recharges by "repeating" their script, which is their essential nature.

Homunculus: Meant to be an attempt to "manufacture" life; resemble grotesque amalgams of malformed flesh and artificial components. Recharges by repeating the process which created it.

I believe that in an thread regarding expansion material; Frank proposed some additional Artificials with their own abandonment backstories.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Animates are definitely a tricky one to sum up and categorize satisfactorily given that relationships are a two way street and it's the discord between what the Creator wants and what the Animate wants that creates the primary conflict. For example, it's pretty damn accurate to describe Blade Runner Replicants as golems in the sense that they are created to be and are treated as inherently disposable but the other two Animate themes also get played around with given that Pris was a genius relegated to the role of "basic pleasure model" while Roy Batty eventually revenges himself upon Tyrell because he views the man both as his slave master and his unworthy father. I feel like the three types make for a somewhat interesting writing prompt but that ultimately the whole business is messier than necessary when you factor in that in an In Media Res game the PC's creator is often going to already be out of the picture anyway.
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Post by hogarth »

Which chapter explains what "Orphic" and "Infernal" mean?
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Post by Grek »

The next one. Orphic vs Infernal vs Astral has to do with how your magic is detected and dispelled.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

The physical nature of Replicants inclines me to say "Homunculus" (Frankenstein); however their visible nature as 'beautiful' human clones... makes me feel that they're "Simulacra" (Android).

The fact that their relationships are doomed; their combat prowess relies on things other than speed; their superior social abilities; and their limited emotional spectrum inclines me to label them as Simulacra despite their bodies being made from cloned flesh.
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Post by Lokathor »

Magic
Oh boy! So, before, I mentioned in an offhand way as to what each monster type could do based on its default magics, but now we're going to actually delve deeply into all the abilities that the game presents.

The Limits of Magic tells us that there are obviously things that magic can and can't do that are different in each story, and that in a cooperative storytelling game we need to know what those sorts of things are explicitly rather than implicitly. This may seem obvious to people that have done a lot of roleplaying stuff, but it's actually an important sort of essay to have in a product like this, because so much of the book spends time saying "this is just like the movies, you can always look to the movies for reference, etc". This is one part where things aren't like the movies. Monsters and their magic aren't mysterious and unknown, they're actually very, very known. Playing as the monsters instead of as the humans running away from monsters changes the tone of the game in a very real sort of way. There's no "sense of the unknown" left to be had when all the things a monster can do are written down right there on the page. And that's shitty. And that's also required to have a game. It can be a difficult thing to come to grips with the fact that cooperative fiction largely has to cede this sort of story element to maintain playability, which is why the first paragraph of this section is one of the most important paragraphs in this entire book.

So we're told that there's Inherent Magic, which is what you can do because of who you are. Golems can just throw cars around because they're Golems, they don't "know" how they do it. You start with some, and you get more later on as you're a monster for longer I guess. There's also Sorcery, which is magic that you have explicitly learned. Alright, that seems easy. Except, as soon as you look at some of the power lists, there's plenty of creatures that have Sorcery abilities as automatic powers. So if you have to learn Sorcery, where did they learn it from? The entry on werewolves explicitly says that one werewolf might never meet any other supernatural in their life other than the one that mauled them into becoming a werewolf. Yet they have a sorcery discipline (Call of The Wild) as their core discipline. Where did they learn that? It's not a contradiction really, but it's certainly a plot hole of sorts.

Sorcery comes in Astral, Infernal, and Orphic forms, which matches up with the three power sources that supernaturals are split among. If an ability is used against you and your power source matches the ability's source then you get +3 on your resistance test.

Last we're told that you can detect the use of magic in different ways, depending on its source, and that any universal magic used copies the source of the one that uses it for detection purposes.

Detecting and Countering Magic gives the details of dowsing and countering. We're told that sorcery requires a lot of effort, and that can be detected and countered. Moments ago we were also told that you can detect universal powers too though, and we're also told that they don't require any effort. So I guess it's not the fact that it takes effort that determines if you can detect things or not. You can just detect anything I guess.

It's a Simple Action to counter magic, which reduces its effective hits, and if you counter a power to zero then it's canceled and it also that ability can't be used again during the same scene. Since it's just a Simple Action, if your enemy has the ability to counter you at all, you can basically assume that it will be countered. Now, not everyone is holding on to counter supplies, but if they are then you almost might as well not use your magic with a duration. Notably, it doesn't say if you can "ready an action" (or whatever) to use countering against instant duration magic effect (such as magic attacks).

You can dowse for the use of magic, which is threshold 2 at "normal range", but it doesn't say if the threshold is higher or if you just can't dowse at all when you're beyond normal range. Or if the threshold goes down when you're well within normal range. Seems like an important detail. Elder powers or the use of 5 or more PP is detectable "out to remote range", but Remote has no maximum range, so. I guess that's the fault of the Ranges rules more than the magic rules.
  • Astral is detectable with magnets, and countered with salt.
  • Infernal is detectable with water, and countered with sand.
  • Orphic is detectable with flowers, and countered with seeds.
The actual countering can be done "by hand" with a fistful of stuff grabbed out of a bag and thrown, or you can do it with some more style using specialized shotgun shells.

Powers begins to reveal that the official terminology used to describe magical things that you can do has perhaps gone through a few too many revisions without a full edit for consistency. You see, until now, we've had phrases like "Core Discipline: Call of The Wild" and "Core Discipline: Celerity" which heavily implies that the name for a group of abilities is "discipline". Now we're told about Powers which appear as either Universal or Sorcery, and also mentioned are Physical Powers, but that's kinda just a typo for for Universal Powers we might assume. Also, "every discipline with a dicepool to activate presents two different Skills that they can be activated with.". So at this point we're suddenly forced to think that "discipline" is being used to refer to a particular ability within a group, and the groups are called "Powers", with a capital 'P'. "There are three levels of discipline within each Power", that agrees. "A character must have at least one Basic ability in a Power before they can learn an Advanced ability of that Power", so they're also abilities sometimes fair I guess. "Some powers are Protean abilities", oh fuck. No entire group is Protean, so the word "power" there (with a lowercase 'p') is clearly referring to an individual ability and not a Power (capital 'P').

So the individual things that you can learn have been called
  • disciplines
  • powers
  • abilities
And the groups that those things are collected into have been called
  • disciplines
  • Powers
It's largely obvious what's trying to be said, but it's just bad when the terminology can't be kept consistent. Throughout the rest of the review I'll attempt to stick to "ability" for the individual things you can do or not, and "ability group" for the collections of said things whenever possible.

Power Levels explains that magic comes in Basic, Advanced, and Elder forms. No player character type starts with any Elder powers, and you can't get Elder powers via the normal advancement scheme (which we'll get to later), and so Elder powers are basically allowed to be whatever insane thing they want to be since they're sorta NPC only. They really should just be listed elsewhere in the book, in a "building the opposition" chapter or whatever, but a future edition can make that change easily enough.

Protean Powers says that shapeshifting powers are "protean", and if you know more than one you can activate any or all of them in a single action that's the biggest of all the required actions. Also, you can return to your own form with a power point and a Complex Action even if you were shifted by enemy magic. There's no duration given on the protean powers, so I have to assume that you always must spend a power point to shift back to your normal form, you can't just choose for a power to end.

Universal Powers
For like the 4th time we're told that universal powers are general powers that hold no link to any of the hell worlds, that they have no magic words or special gestures, and so on. We're told that they're not spells and that you can't muster a counterspell against them. In truth, 9 (ish) of the Universal abilities, out of 30 basic and advanced, actually can be countered. Also, you don't need a book or a teacher to learn them.

Since Elder abilities aren't really for PCs to use, we'll skip over those as if they weren't even there, but we'll talk about all the Basic and Advanced abilities from each group.

Also, almost every grouping gives you some sort of bonus effect simply for knowing things from that group, but most of them are just number pushers (+2 Physical Resistance, +2 Perception, etc) that aren't really interesting, so we won't go over those. Really, they should probably be cut from the whole game.

Authority
It's an unfortunate artifact of alphabetization that the very first grouping we go over is one that is both Universal and subject to counterspelling. After all that insisting about the distinction between Universal and Sorcery groups, the first group we actually look at is the most obvious one that breaks the rules. Well, technically your Authority abilities are only counterable when you only know a Basic authority without any Advanced ones, but still. If you know an Advanced ability then your commands last until you die or someone uses Purify The Mind on the subject.

If your target is commanded to do something against their ideology, they can spend a Complex Action to dither and make another roll against your net hits. If you still have any hits after that they're finally under your control though.
  • Command A Complex Action to make your opponent do something you specify that takes a Complex Action or less to complete.
  • Mesmerism This lets you issue complex instructions to someone and have them go do it.
  • Suggestion this is a weak form of the "jedi mind trick". Fun fact: no creature at all learns this power by default.
  • Cloud Memory lets you alter a target's memories. 5 minutes at a time base, net hits increase the allowed span of alteration. It's a Complex Action per use.
  • Conditioning lets you spend several days to turn a target into a thrall that follows all of your orders.

Celerity
"The problem with going faster than light is that you can only live in darkness."

Celerity lets you go fast, and it has powers that are all either on or off as a group. You can spend 3pp at the start of any round to turn the entire group on, and then they all last an entire scene. Also, at the start of any round you can say that you'll limit the ability for a round to avoid letting muggles see your super speed during that round.
  • Quickness is +1 Initiative Pass
  • Nimble Feet gives an improved movement rate
  • Alacrity is +1 Initiative Pass
  • Quicken Sight gives you +4 on Dodge Tests and also lets you ignore the multiple attacker modifier.
Basically if you don't have some Celerity powers you're a sucker and you'll probably die to the first enemy you face that does have them. It feels like the repeating of a well known mistake to basically require that people always take Celerity powers if they want to do anything significant in any fight. Also it makes the game horribly slow to resolve. I don't personally know how to fix the "super speed is super slow to resolve" problem, but it sure didn't get solved here.

Clout
The theme is that you're strong.
  • Clinging lets you slowly walk on walls and also reduces the threshold for parkour tricks.
  • Vigor lets you spend up to 4 power points to get an equal amount of Strength points for the scene. Technically the limit is 3+Potency, but basically that's always gonna be 4.
  • Devastation is a touch telekinesis that lets you lift and move fragile things carefully by spreading out the force of your lift. It also lets you multi-attack like you were 6 people at once. You can spread your attacks to more than one person or your can focus them all on a single person. The phrase "you can strike multiple enemies without penalty" also serves to remind us that there are normally no rules for multi-attacking at all because the Danger chapter forgot to include that.
  • Giant Size is an ability that is only a default ability for NPC types. You grow to 3.5m tall and get Strength, Armor, and Damage bonuses.
Discernment
You can see why kids love cinnamon toast crunch!
  • Supernatural Senses This is like half a power because it lets you get overstimulated and then you need to also have Sensory Damper to not open yourself up to overstimulation.
  • Aura Perception lets you see when stuff is magical and also up to one world away from wherever you are.
  • Sensory Damper is a power that is not an automatic power for any creature at all. It prevents overstimulation and also prevents you from being knocked out by pain, but you are still affected by the wound penalties.
  • Psychometry lets you touch a thing and then ask questions about what happened to it or around it in the past.
  • Telepathy lets you be Professor X. You can communicate telepathically at a distance, and also you can forcefully read someone's thoughts by touching them.

Fortitude
The theme here is toughness. In a physical way. You might still cry if you watch Old Yeller.

Fun fact: the tagline of this discipline is a quote from one of the coolest video game characters ya ever done see.
  • Patience of the Mountains makes you immune to poison, fatigue, and you don't need to eat, drink, or breathe. All the vampires get this, but it's still a big deal that they "need" blood. Future editions could adjust the wording on this power to specify that it prevents you from dying of hunter or thirst, but that it doesn't actually remove those feelings. Like that machine from the future in Chrono Trigger. It would help enforce the idea that all this evil magic is horrible and stuff. This power doesn't say how it interacts with the whole bleeding to death deal, which I think it really should talk about.
  • Revive the Flesh lets you pay power points to heal yourself. This power is cool because it lets you avoid the insanity of the normal healing over time rules.
  • Restoration allows you to bring yourself back to life. I've seen a lot of people fret over how this power might interact with things like the Continuous power schedule, but really it doesn't matter. The power specifies all sorts of limits already, so it's hard to accidentally make things "unkillable" or whatever. Mostly, the fact that this power exists means that you'll end up making a habit out of chopping off everyone's head all the time when you kill them just to make sure they stay dead. That's pretty in-theme for a horror game. Can be counterspelled.
  • Indomitability lets you ignore wound penalties and carry more stuff for longer. It says that characters "don't go unconscious before they die", but I honestly don't quite know how this interacts with the Incapacitated and Terminal conditions. Like do you end up Incapacitated but still conscious? Or do people just have to shoot at you like mad and use the Death Threshold rules to finally get you down but you can keep fighting even while you're bleeding to death?
Magnetism
These let you attract and repel people with supernatural charisma.
  • Attract makes you the center of attention.
  • Repel makes you scary and frightens people away. Can be counterspelled.
  • Dismissal makes you super intimidating and people can't oppose you without first resisting the power.
  • Summons lets you send a tweet to someone and you can also try to compel them to come to your location. Can be counterspelled. This power is a default power of Asura, but not of any playable type.

Veil
These let you be sneaky. Notably, this group doesn't have a passive bonus of any kind just from knowing Veil powers. However, to even hope to defeat a Veil power the viewer must have an active Discernment power or carefully search the area you're in. This allows you a roll at all. Without one of those things you can't even roll.
  • Hide From Notice makes people overlook you as long as you don't do anything too obvious to give yourself away. Can be counterspelled.
  • Mask of a Thousand Faces gives you a changeling type effect where people think you're someone else. Can be counterspelled.
  • Lost and Found lets you sustain a Veil effect on an object even after you let go of it. Can be counterspelled.
  • Hide in Plain Sight lets you activate a Veil power while being observed. Normally you have to be unobserved to activate them, but this lets you do it while being watched. Onlookers get one free Perception check to notice what happened, but otherwise their memory quickly fills in some explanation of what happened.

Sorceries
Now we're on to the sorcerous powers, which can definitely always be countered because it takes mystical effort and stuff on the part of the user. There's no way we'll suddenly run into an exception to this rule as soon as we get to the first sorcerous group that comes up. (hi Mask_De_H, am I being flippant properly?)


Astral Sorceries
Spells powered by the depths of Maya. You detect them with magnets and you counter them with salt.


Call of the Wild
Feels like this should be stylized as "Call of The Wild", but whatever. These are animal related abilities, things like turning into a dog or a bat, and being able to talk to animals.
  • Beast Form turns you into a normal animal of some form. It's fixed when you learn the power, but you can "learn" it more than once to get more forms.
  • Tongue of Beasts lets you talk to animals. They're usually not very bright, but whatever. And, wait, what's that? You say this is a sorcery but it can't be countered? Well, fuck that whole distinction then I guess. I mostly jest, there's only a total of 5 spells out of the 61 we'll talk about are undispellable. Still.
  • The Beckoning calls a selected type of animal to you from farish away. This power would be a lot cooler if there were more suggested stat blocks for more types of animals in the NPC section of the book.
  • Transformation lets you turn people into newts, but they'll eventually get better. The default time is "until the next sunrise/sunset" but you can increase the time with net hits, but that time doesn't technically exist on the time chart, so I guess you're supposed to pretend it's something like "5 hours" or whatever. Anyway, it looks like this power isn't learned by anyone by default.

Chasing the Storm
Storm and wind related abilities.
  • Howling Winds lets you increase or decrease the strength of the wind by the number of hits. However, with no cap you can just make Category 5 Hurricanes anywhere you want any time you want. While that's not exactly broken mechanically, it's certainly silly to me.
  • Rising Mists lets you make vision obscuring fog.
  • Lightning Strike lets you be a druid and drop lightning bolts on people. Nobody learns this by default.
  • Tumultuous Rain is also not learned by anyone by default. It lets you summon up a storm.

Coil of Thorns
The group for Dryads and Evil Plants.
  • Bitter Fruit is the ability to make potions, and all the potions look like fruit.
  • Grass Rope lets you have plants grab people and hold them in place. No range given, so I guess just line of sight or something. First you roll to determine the Strength and Agility of the grass, and then you... roll again to have it make the grab? Does it use your own Combat skill, or just no Combat skill at all?
  • Mind Root is not a spell that players know, but it lets Pods turn you into a brain slave thing.
  • Puppetry lets you play out Plants Vs Zombies in your yard by having the local flowers come to life and walk around a bit.

Trail of Tears
A group where the theme is curses and misery.
  • Curse of Failure lets you place a curse on someone and then trigger it later to force them to reroll all the hits on a test. It says the test is opposes but doesn't say what you oppose it with, so I'll assume that the target has to roll one of the two dice pools it lists maybe.
  • Pain Drops is one of the best combat spells in the game. Why? Because it's an attack with Willpower+Rigging (or Agility+Combat) that uses Willpower for damage, and then the target soaks with Willpower instead of Strength. All those huge combat monsters with Strength 20+? They crumple like a paper tiger when you use this spell. And it does illusory damage so you can't even accidentally kill someone that you want to capture alive. Here's a fun question: the Fortitude group gives bonus dice on Physical Resistance Tests. Does that bonus apply with Pain Drops? I dunno for sure, but I say yes, because the spell says "standard ranged attack", and then specifies the exceptions, and a standard attack allows Fortitude on the soak.
  • Dark Night of the Soul triggers a Despair Frenzy in the target, regardless of their normal Master Passion.
  • Water Prison makes you into a waterbender. It doesn't specify a range, or a duration. Despite it being kinda like Grass Rope the resolution is different; you roll directly for the grab effect and the Strength score of the grab is set by your Willpower.

Veil of Morpheus
The theme here is that you're manipulating some sort of veil between the mortal world and the astral world, that we weren't ever really told about previously. It gives you dream powers.
  • Enchanted Slumber is like a sleep spell.
  • Dream Vision lets you send vision into a sleeping target's dreams. Works at any range as long as you know their name, but has a base time of an hour.
  • Denial of Privacy lets you mind read the dreams of a person that's asleep
  • Horrid Reality causes the effects of a dream to "become real" and have biofeedback on a person. You can target someone at any range as long as you know their name and where they're sleeping.
I don't really like the parts where you can target people at any range, that feels like it's just primed for abuse.

Infernal Sorceries
You detect infernal magic by watching for momentary ashy discoloration within water, and you dispel it with sand.


Descent of Entropy
This group lets you "unravel"... "things"... with entropy.
  • Abyss of the Body gives immunity to all disease and also lets you control and inflict a particular disease on people. If you learn the spell more than once you can learn to inflict additional diseases.
  • Light of Ennui gives you an aura where you "unravel emotions" and it basically prevents Frenzy along with any other Appeal to Emotion (which is a socialization style that was given back in the Getting What You Need chapter).
  • Aura of Decay degrades and corrodes things with entropic energy. Chimeras are the only ones that learn this spell by default.
  • Contradiction lets you get someone to do something they'd never do, but doesn't help you get them to do something that they're "merely moderately opposed" to.
The theme here is... a little muddled I'd say. If you didn't explain to someone ahead of time what the theme was supposed to be, most people would probably not guess that "entropy" is what connects a disease spell, a despondency aura, a corrosion aura, and a weird power that only lets you make people do opposite things but can't make them do kinda different things.


Names of the Blasphemies
The theme here is based on names. With a basic power you can see into Limbo, and when you learn an Advanced spell from this group you get the power to know people's name by looking at them, like the devil's eyes in Death Note. It also says "Upon learning each ability from this discipline, the character is able to choose for themselves a True Name" and then powers that target your name can only target your True Name, not just anything you're called by. I'm not sure if it means you're picking an additional True Name each time you learn an ability, or if you can just re-assign your True Name when you learn an ability, or how that's supposed to work.
  • Learn the Heart's Pain lets you do a brain scan.
  • Poison Heart lets you "fill the target's heart" with a litany of lies, though the power is covert so I guess you don't actually yell the lies at them out loud. Of all the people that might know this power, you probably would not guess that "Trolls" are the ones to learn it by default.
  • Bind the Name lets you set a curse by targeting a name. The curse is that the hits on this test add to the named person's threshold to escape Limbo. Only the highest applies, but the curse can only be dispelled at the place that the curse was invoked, not at the person it targets. So, is there some way to track the curse back to its source? Seems like an important thing to know. There doesn't seem to be a duration on how long a Name Binding lasts, and if you can't track a binding back to its source then it seems like soon enough everyone in the whole setting worth anything would have a relatively unbeatable binding stuck on them. The only hope for the world is that no one at all knows this spell by default.
  • Banishment lets you throw a target into Limbo. This is another spell that no one knows by default, but it has obvious synergy with Bind the Name.

Progress of Glass
You can use mirrors super well. Despite the variety of effects, the theme is well maintained throughout.
  • Distant Reflection you look into one mirror and it shows you what you'd see out of another mirror. You need to know where both mirrors are pretty well, and both have to be within 100m or so. The base time to activate this spell is 1 hour with net hits reducing the time, which mostly adds up to this power only being useful if you can regularly get 3 or 4 hits. Only Ifrit get this spell.
  • Deny the Gauntlet removes the effect of The Gauntlet on a Limbo portal for a short time, but only if you don't have a Name Binding stuck on you.
  • Mirror Pocket makes a mirror into a mini bag of holding. Another spell that only Ifrit get.
  • Rain of Glass is a breath weapon attack where the "breath" is deadly shards of obsidian. Not a default spell for anyone.

Song of Swarms
This is the group with the bug related effects. The theme is bugs and you sure do get bugs when you use these abilities. This is another of those groups (like Veil) that doesn't exactly give you a bonus just for having abilities in the group. Instead it talks about how bug swarms can inflict an automatic Damage 1 attack on people in the swarm which doesn't get staged up by net hits or anything.
  • Body Colony is the next of the very few "spells" that can't be countered at all. It's the mi-go thing where your body is full of bugs.
  • Small Witness lets you see through the eyes of the bugs near you (notably your Body Colony, if you have one) and says that it can be dispelled as if it has 3 hits. However, I have to assume that what's meant is that only the part that lets you remotely see from bugs out to a kilometer per potency is dispellable. Otherwise, all that mi-go consternation about "am i a person full of bugs or am I bugs shaped like a person?" would really be kinda bullshit, since your bug vision can be shut down with a handful of sand your person vision can't, so clearly one is a fragile magic spell and the other is real.
  • Magnify the Swarm requires that there's a few insects to start, but lets you summon more of them out of nowhere.
  • Swarm Body is a spell that no one learns by default. It's a Protean power that lets you explode into a cloud of insects and doesn't really give you any specific modifiers like most other Protean powers do. Individual bug deaths don't affect you, so I guess you're immune to bullets and swords, but each 10% of bugs lost deals you a lethal damage when you re-form, so you're not immune to area attacks. The book says "lethal wound" but I'm fairly sure that's a typo and it means "lethal damage", otherwise you'd die as soon as you lost 40% of your swarm.
Walk of Flame
Spells that have to do with flames.
  • Fire Walking is our third spell that is undispellable. It makes you immune to fire, and it makes you a little sad that the spell isn't called "Fire Walk With Me".
  • Hand of Flame gives you a melee weapon (of sorts) that made of heat. You don't get extra damage from net hits, but you do get your Logic as the damage value, and a Damage 6+ weapon is impressive enough as it is.
  • Fire Starter lets you do firebolts. Cover applies now, and they're inaccurate (threshold +1 to hit) beyond Short range (20m/65ft). However, there's no maximum range, and the damage rating is still equal to your Logic stat. You can also aim the attack with your Logic stat. So if you're serious about using this spell we might as well assume that your Logic is at least 6.
  • Flames of Panic lets you "start a fire in the mind" within anyone you can see other than yourself, and it's basically an area of effect panic spell. Which is cool.
Orphic Sorceries
Magic... of Death! You counter it with seeds and detect it with flowers.

Lure of Destruction
The theme is that we're all called to the end I guess, and then this magic is magic that you get from being close to the end. Somehow knowing these abilities gives you a better Death Threshold. Maybe a good Death Threshold is like a muscle you can work out by going close to the edge all the time. Anyway this is the Orphic version of Descent of Entropy, by which I mean that the theme is not clear and if you told someone what the powers did they probably couldn't tell you what the theme is supposed to be.
  • Tongue of the Serpent gives you a poison bite. It can be on all the time or not, and it's covert if it's always on and non-covert (gross? vulgar?) if you can toggle it being on. Also you're immune to poisons, but I somehow don't think many people will pick this power up before they pick up Patience of the Mountains.
  • Touch of Darkness is undispellable, and also makes your "physical attacks" inflict aggravated damage. I don't know if it's your natural attacks only, or your melee attacks maybe because the darkness waves can spread into anything you pick up, or really any physical attack you make even guns and stuff. Also you can claw and bite into metal. Sure wish we had some rules on damaging materials to go with this power. You couldn't really be blamed if you thought that this power belongs in the Play of Shadows group which we'll get to in a second.
  • Glimpse of the Abyss give you the power of the Anti-spirals. You show a vision of the end to a group, and all affected targets are stunned for a round with absolute despair. Also no one knows how to do this by default.
  • Withering lets you sap the Strength of a target. Notably, this doesn't offer a resistance roll of any sort. It doesn't stack, but it's also a simple action and doesn't have a maximum range listed. Another spell no one defaults into having.
You can poison bite people, claw at metal, give visions of the end, and wither away strength. What's the theme?


Necromancy
"The tagline of this power group makes little sense in a world where people can casually live forever."

This group makes you a necromancer person. One of the relatively few non-numeric group bonuses, if you know a Basic spell you can see into Mictlan, and if you know an Advanced spell then when you look at a Wraith you can tell what its fetters might be and where they they might be.
  • Compel Spirits lets you transfer spirits along the Mictlan "direction". This game doesn't really have "spirits" in the shadowrun/dnd/shinto sort of way, so spirits actually just means ghosts. The way this power is worded makes me think that it's 100% useless if you're in Limbo or Maya.
  • Summon Spirit lets you use a part of a body to summon up the ghost from that body. Unless it's been "bottled" (I don't know what that means, that doesn't seem to be a thing), destroyed, or absorbed into a Poltergeist. Interestly it doesn't say what happens if the ghost doesn't exist yet, despite ghosts not forming until like 3 days after death or whatever. I mean we can assume that the ghost doesn't show up of course, but all the other things that'd stop the ghost from showing get special mention. Maybe you can force the ghost into early existence? That'd be cool. The power doesn't say if you can draw a ghost to you if you're in Limbo or Maya, though I assume that you can't.
  • Nightcry lets you summon up a Poltergeist and sic it on a target. The power offhandedly mentions being in the Material World, so once again I don't know if it works in Maya or Limbo. No one defaults into this power.
  • Reanimate is very much a spell to let you pull a Herbert West. There's a version on Netflix, go watch it, Jeffrey Combs is cool, look under "Re-Animator". Anyway, you can make corpses into Zombies. The process can be dispelled as it's happening, but once they're a Zombie you can't dispel that. It doesn't say if you can dispel the control you get over the Shamblers when you make Shamblers, so I dunno.

Play of Shadows
The group where you can manipulate shadows. It punched out Veil and stole the Stealth bonus that you might expect the Veil group to give you. Also there's an Intimidate bonus. The text offers up the idea that "needing shadows" is often a small formality when most of the game takes place at night and in spooky places, so you can basically use these spells anywhere.
  • Eyes of the Night let you see in perfect darkness. You'd think that Troglodytes and Vampires and all kinds of night monsters would have this ability. You'd be wrong. If you weren't able to guess that the only monster that learns this spell by default is "that one witch type that's like Herbert West" I would not blame you. Zombies and Ghosts wander around Mictlan totally blind I guess. Notably, this ability is covert but still dispellable, so everyone can be equally blind in the dark if you just throw some seeds around.
  • Shadow Casting makes your lighting look like a pro did it, so you can get a bonus to be the center of attention or to escape attention.
  • Cloak of Shadow has you wrapping a shadow 100% around yourself and turning invisible. Except you also still leave a shadow on the ground if anyone is watching closely enough. So I have no idea how that is supposed to interact with a Stealth check, but it seems like there should be something about that here. No one knows this spell by default.
  • Solid Darkness is a third way to make a thing come alive and grab people for you. This time you're making shadows come to life, and they can move at a specified speed. So maybe the water stuff couldn't move before. They also specifically attack with their own Strength and your Combat, so maybe the water and grass ones don't use any Combat ranks.

Path of Blood
Your blood has a blood theme, in your blood.
  • Gift of Health lets you transfer power points into someone else by having them eat your blood, but also it's hyper addictive. It would be nice if there was even a basic one-liner rule for the addiction like, "the target must pass an Edge test each time they consume the blood, or they will gain a Rating 1 addiction", or something. If you don't have any blood (such as a Golem) then you can't use this spell and you can't have this spell used on you.
  • Thaumaturgical Forensics is the coolest spell in this group, because it lets you be CSI. Small snag: there's two example lines of inquiry given, and they tell you a name at different thresholds. So, I dunno.
  • Blood of Acid is a spell that no one knows by default but that gives you the Xenomorph blood thing where it burns whoever you're near when you get injured. It says "anyone within melee range is subject to being sprayed with black caustic fluid", so I guess you don't get an Agility roll or anything, you just soak the Damage 3 effect. If you don't have blood then you can't use this spell, but you can still have it used against you.
  • Theft of Vitae lets you suck out a target's blood. If you don't have blood then you can't have this spell used against you but you can still use it yourself. After describing the attack process it says "Every net hit causes the victim an unsoaked Lethal damage level", which I think means that you use the normal Wounds To Boxes chart, and so you just die if they got 4+ net hits on you. When you think about it, this is a lot like having a ranged attack where the Damage rating of the weapon is equal to the target's ranged defense. Which is weird, but not too weird. Also your power points are sucked away by the enemy, if you have any. The specifics might not matter too much because no one learns this spell by default.

Symphony of Silence
The idea here is that you play music that has ice effects. Which strikes me as kinda weirdly specific, but maybe it doesn't matter because nothing in this entire discipline is a default ability for anyone. So really you could play the game like this discipline didn't exist and you wouldn't be particularly affected.
  • Frozen Note is a really weird sort of attack spell, where you can lower the temp of a thing or creature enough to cause Damage equal to your Hits on the test, but you can't target anything more than once per round. It says you can target an "area", but doesn't specify how big of an area you can target with a single Simple Action.
  • Missing Voice lets you make sounds seem to be from somewhere other than where they're really coming from, which would be cool, except you always have to be playing music while using spells from this group, so it's a lot less covert than you'd think. You can control the apparent origin of all sounds within a range based on your highest tier Symphony of Silence ability, but even at Basic it's 3m per Potency
  • Silent Toll has you playing music, and then you can suppress any sound equal to or less than the volume of the music, so the playing itself actually seems to be silent while you're doing it.
  • Prison of Ice seals a creature within a 1 meter cube of ice. Since it specifically says that you can cover up someone's mouth we can largely assume this is an instant death spell to any human sized opponent with Strength 7 or less. You cover up the top half of their body and they're just plain unable to move (the block is about 1,000kg, which takes Strength 8 to lift), and you can slice open their legs until they bleed out. Or just hack at their legs until you get a Terminal wound inflicted or whatever if they don't bleed. The spell has you rolling to determine the "workmanship and solidity" of the ice, but doesn't offer a suggestion of what more or less solidity would mean. Does the target break out of they roll a Strength test equal to your Solidity or something? Who knows. Oh, and once the ice is created you can't dispel it.
  • Death Note uses an oddly specific phrase that also shows up in The Ends of The Matrix, which makes me think that "the song that ends a man" is some reference to something. This is a powerful attack spell, though not as powerful as Pain Drops. You attack with Logic+Artisan or Agility+Combat, though that second dice pool doesn't make sense to me, since you're playing a note not aiming a literal weapon of any sort. The base damage is equal to your Charisma, and the target resists with Intuition, also you ignore Armor, also the target can't go on Dodge to evade it. So really this spell will totally make your head explode and if you're targeted by it you probably have little hope of living. Thankfully, there's a limit that you have to have been playing music for a minute or more to use this spell.

Devotions
These are special advanced universal abilities that aren't part of one group, they're on the line between two different universal groups. It's goofy, and all of them should probably just be put into one group or another in the future.
  • Adaptive Resilience is interesting because it makes it so that if you can survive the first hit you can probably survive every future hit from the same source.
  • Betrayal of the Tongue makes targets unable to lie, though they can also just not speak at all.
  • Blind the Senses lets you blind someone. This would be more interesting if there were mechanics for being blind.
  • Burrowing gives you a really weak tunneling ability. The way I'm reading it, each power point lets you burrow into the ground up to 1 meter per hit on the test. It doesn't say that the power point lets you keep burrowing for the whole scene though, just that it can be repeated to dig farther if you need to dig farther. So I guess this is a way to use up all your points really fast if you want.
  • Chain of Eyes is a totally weird ability where you link up the sight of two or more creatures and you can pick who can see out of each other's eyes while they're all linked up. This would be cool, but it's a power point per person beyond the first two to have them in the chain so you can't really link up your whole squad or anything without spending a big pile of points.
  • Cleanse the Body lets you heal other people. It costs power points to set up, and then "Once the character has healed one Lethal wound (or two Normal wounds), they can choose to heal more wounds on the same target with a Free Action each round.", so I don't know if future healing is power point free or what.
  • Desire Reflection makes you appear to be exactly what another person wants, with such accuracy that it can trigger a Loneliness or Greed frenzy. However, it counts as a Veil power, so you need Vanish From the Mind's Eye to do it while someone is watching.
  • Empty Body makes you "intangible (but not invisible)", which I assume means that you fully block light and cast a shadow, people can just go through you like you're a soft-light hologram or whatever. This power is largely weird because it's supposed to be the "ghosts are immaterial and unable to affect things in the mortal world" power, but also you can still hit them with a baseball bat. I'm really not sure how I feel about that. Of course, it's also a power that others can gain, and with enough special considerations you can almost live a normal life/unlife with this power and just be immune to most normal attacks and still participate with a normal adventuring group.
  • Façade of Nonchalance sets up an area where people won't notice the abnormal going on, but you have to set it up before things get weird.
  • The Familiar Stranger is a Veil power that lets you appear to be something that belongs in the scene. Notably, this power is individualized and so it probably doesn't make each person see you as the same thing. Hilarity ensues.
  • Flesh of Marble lets you become stone-like or metal-like or whatever. You're tougher, stronger, and immune to shock attacks.
  • Flight lets you fly. You can fly "3 to 5" times as fast as a person walking, but it seems like the difference would matter so maybe just pick a multiplier.
  • Holistic Ventriloquism lets the sights and sounds that you make appear to be from another spot. If it didn't say you could do it I wouldn't have guessed that you can make them "appear to be underground", but that's what it says.
  • Phantasmagoria is the only devotion with a tagline. It's the only ability at all with a tagline. It's a good line, so I want to excuse it, but it feels out of place.
  • Purify the Mind lets you heal madness, mental control, and things of that nature.
  • Shifting Sands is a time control thing that works only like a second back in time, with the effect that you can dodge out of the way of attacks or traps, dodge into the way of an attack to take a hit meant for someone else, or reroll a social check if you got specifically 0 hits. It's actually a really cool ability and I wish more of the abilities were this cool.
  • Shorten the Fuse lets you induce a Fear or Rage frenzy into a target.
  • Telekinesis lets you manipulate things with your mind, but fine control is really hard and shitty and slow I guess.
  • Tracking Echoes of the Muse is an odd one where you can spend a power point to know where the "source" of a stimuli is, such as where the speaker on the other end of a call is located. That part makes sense. You can also tell where a painting was painted by looking at it. Uh. And so on. Uhhh... okay I kinda get what you're going for I guess.
  • War Form is like giant size, but it's not quite giant size. You're only a little bigger, and the bonuses are different.
  • Will to Power lets you go past the eye contact restriction when using Authority powers. I don't like this power being in the game really, but whatever. I mean it sucks in some sense for the player that wants to focus on Authority to solve all problems against monsters that monsters will just wear mirrorshades all the damn time. I'm not entirely sure that using Authority to solve everything should necessarily be allowed in the first place though. I'm also not really satisfied with the binary "oh, suddenly you can do it again" thing. Like maybe if you could do it with a 1 hit penalty or something.

Summary Of The Problems
It was mentioned that the specific complaints aren't being clearly enough stated, so let's take a moment to focus down on some concrete issues. Just for fun, we'll name each issue in the flourishy style of the sorcery group names, and to be as helpful as possible we'll have a suggested fix for each of these issues.

Naming of The Game Terms: This stuff is confusing. I read the rules three times before I even noticed that "Powers" is actually one of the terms for the ability groups, that's how much a sentence like "Vigor is a power within the Power of Clout" flies in the face of common sense and usage of English.
  • Suggested Fix: In common English, a "discipline" is a branch of knowledge (such as sociology or biology). So we should call the groups of related abilities (such as Clout and Discernment), which we can imagine as being the "branches" of our thaumatology, to be the disciplines of the game. Individual things that you learn one at a time can be an "ability" or a "power". Part of this transitions into the next issue...
Play of Sorceries: The sorcerous and universal abilities claim that they've got very clear cut separation along the line of "you can dispel this or not", but they don't. There are fewer sorceries that can't be countered than there are universals that can be, but it's really still kinda unacceptable that there's even one. Given that that's nearly the only gameplay split they claim to have (there's also a learning difference), it's crap that they don't stick to it.
  • Suggested Fix: To borrow a term from Earthdawn, just call any ability that cannot be dispelled a Talent, and any power that can be dispelled a Spell. Then you drop the rule that all the non-universal abilities are always spells, and you're done. There would be some Universal Spells and also some (for example) Astral Talents. It wouldn't even be split up along the line of the groups, it would be split up ability by ability, and given in the ability's entry. What would be the point of the Universal groups if you did this? They'd still have no fixed power source of their own, so they'd always copy the power source of the user when you go to dowse for or counterspell them.
Lure of Ability Descriptions: We've had structured ability descriptions for as long as RPGs have existed, and Frank has literally worked on two different books (Street Magic and The Ends of The Matrix) that managed to have very terse ability descriptions while maintaining good clarity, so it seems really dumb to have a totally disorganized block of text per ability.
  • Suggested Fix: Just add some structure to each entry, there's a ton of commonality among most of the abilities. I'm sure there's a lot of styles you can go with. You want to have the name of course, a space for tags on abilities, such as Talent/Spell, Protean, and so on. List the action used (Reflexive, Free, Simple, Complex, or a base time if Extended), the dice used (if any), the PP cost (if any), and then give the general description.
Call of The Grabber: There's three abilities that make a thing that grabs someone, and none of them have the same mechanics. There's two ways to get big and powerful, and they don't really have the same mechanics. Some damage spells are fully normal ranged attacks and some skip some of of the steps. We might be able to come up with more, but we get what I'm after here.
  • Suggested Fix: This one is easy. Similar abilities should use mechanics that are as close as possible to each other whenever possible so that you don't have to remember all the little special cases.
Chasing the Bonuses: Getting number bonuses from the power groups is a little bit weird, and the power groups don't even have bonuses for many of the stats and skills in the game.
  • Suggested Fix: Rather than adding enough groups that every possible stat and skill can get the same number of bonuses, it's probably better to just eliminate the bonuses from having Basic and Advanced abilities in a group. Many of the groups that give non-numeric effects could have those effects either made into Advantages if they're small enough (eg: the Perfect Pitch effect from Symphony of Silence), or they're even already a thing you can go with another power (eg: seeing into Mictlan with Necromancy, or Limo with Names of the Blasphemies is already a thing that Aura Perception does). If they're big enough and they're also important enough that they can't be tossed out then they can just become a Basic or Advanced power of their own or merged into a slightly weak existing power (eg: Patience of the Mountains could maybe give the Soak bonus from Fortitude).
Walk of Devotion: All of the Devotions are sorta easily forgotten about because they're in their own section of powers way at the back. It's easy to overlook the footnote that says that they count as Advanced Universal powers and then misread the Karmic Advancement chart and think that they're nearly impossible to learn. They insist that you remember two randomish requirements instead of just knowing the group they're in and then automatically knowing what the requirement is.
  • Suggested Fix: Cut them, all of them, the whole concept. Any devotion can be put into one of the existing groups. There's a soft suggestion that each group is 2 powers at each of the three levels, but already some of the groups are breaking that, and really it's not actually important that they're all the same size, so we can just make each group kinda bigger.
Path of Damage: The damage codes given for these attack spells are totally bonkers. Because of the proportional damage system, 3 net hits of wounding will fill all your boxes. Even if you follow the errata that later came in the PDF Frank made (which didn't make it back into the It's My Own Invention posting, I might add) then 4 net hits will still fill in all your boxes. And then there's these abilities giving out damage codes based on stats (Pain Drops, Hand of Flame, Fire Starter, and Death Note) with gives an effective damage value of like 5+ for anyone that's serious (possibly even above 6 since your stat cap goes up with potency and all that), or abilities that just go right to the soak step (Theft of Vitae rolls against Strength and unsoaked hits are automatically the wound inflicted). It just exacerbates the "rocket launcher tag" effect of the proportional damage system. And the high damage code is in some sense "needed" to have a chance to injure or kill the super Strength combat monsters that are soaking with 16 or more dice. Except that while some players and NPCs will roll 16+ dice on Soak, others will roll like 6, and at that point you actually do start to break the RNG a bit.
  • Suggested Fix: Boy howdy I don't even know how to fix the whole rocket tag thing, but we can at least fix the damage on magic effects by having them all key off of Edge. That locks them into the same 0 to 6 scale that most other weapons in the game exist within, and all players will start with Damage 3 magic. Then at least whatever else you do to try and fix rocket tag, magic isn't out of bounds with the rest of the situation. If you need a thing that can injure high Strength targets (since Strength is the easiest stat to bump in the game) then Pain Drops and Death Note could still keep their effect where they target an alternate defense (Willpower and Intuition respectively). Another magic might be added among the Infernal abilities to do a similar thing so that each power source has at least one way to target an alternate defense. For like, thematic balance and stuff.
Last edited by Lokathor on Sun Oct 16, 2016 11:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

I've read through After Sundown dozens of times but never noticed Symphony of S was ice magic. The names do get confusing and not quite obvious.

What do you think of the attribute+skill combo of different spells
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Judging__Eagle
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Yeah, Infernal gets fire; Astral gets lighting; and Orphic gets cold. In terms of "elemental" attacks that is.

Only if you've actually got a player playing with Symphony of Silence; will that be apparent.

I like that Pain Drops gets special mentioning for being the most OP damage spell in the game. A Dryad character (that I styled after Caerfyrddin/Merlin; for an Arthurian based AS game) was barely noticeable in a fight when they had several 100 kgs of force in their Telekinesis; however once I started using Pain Drops, the rest of the players were shitting their pants as to how hard it was to resist.

The fact that my character had maxed out Willpower in addition to one of the relevant Skills, so the damage would have been hard to resist, even if they were soaking with Strength.

I'm also loving all of the call-outs to the edge cases and fiddly bits that don't work well enough with all of the others. Thanks for making this thread Lokathor.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Sun Oct 16, 2016 7:03 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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