The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:market days

Redarkhanfest is probably the closest thing you'd have to a modern holiday. Might be worth working it into the calendars of the nations that trade only modestly with the larger world.

<Shrug> Leaving aside the oft exaggerated risks of genetic bottleneck, that's true, provided you're willing to embrace the paradigm of uncle dad.

It works that way - but it's beyond my personal squick threshold.

Josh_Kablack wrote:Ghostbusters RPG

It makes me happy that such a thing existed. That's a setting where you'd be expected to fumble all your sucesses.

Twenty children would give you, on average, two who are capable of reproducing. At the limit of unlimited children, you'd observe a roughly even split between the sexes, and population maintenance. Since truly random distributions contain streaks, however, and since every streaky deviation is unfavo...

zeruslord wrote:I think I'd prefer the mythical Egypt, with armies of slaves, the chariots of kings, and a half-built pyramid.

Especially to starvation diets.

Hear, hear.

Also, ($setting == meta_eurasia) is some bad tired mojo.

Strike "supposedly doesn't trade with" and replace "doesn't trade in large quantities with" and you have my full consensus. Redarkhan needs high trading volume as much as it needs monopoly, or it can't get rich enough. And we want them rich :) It's kind of fortuitous that the two...

Skyships aren't necessarily trading between every village, but if there's a thousand kilometer route between cities, then they can definitely undercut someone who has to pay for the animals. We're not disagreeing (hence the glassblower on a yak example) :) What I want is for Redarkhan to undercut s...

Wunderlich proved... My totally unsolicited (and probably condescending) advice is: when you see a book ostentatiously authored by Professor So-and-so, and their Professor ship is in some field unrelated to what they're writing about? Raise your hackles, because they're trying to slip you an implie...

With regard to funerary cults: Reading through the Culture Foci thus far, I have a much stronger sense of Angkor than I do of Knossos, in pretty much every urban area - and that's even been raised as a design axiom. Though Angkor Wat was a site for funerary rites, not even the king who commissioned ...

How would you feel about not really having a distinct kind of skellingtons and restricting types to spirits and 28 Days Later style zombies? They're scarier, they make better top predators, and they give Wuvu-lu-aua sound reasons to master puppeteering others - when one of those suckers breaks the l...

So, if Basalt Road evokes too much Silk Road imagery (and it rather obviously did - I should have seen that, sorry) it'll want renaming. The idea there was that it's a scar from tangental meteor impacts. The ones that triggered a summerless year but also gave a barely neolithic group of troglodytes ...

angelfromanotherpin wrote:If you haven't yet, check out the Black Company stuff by Glen Cook. Very solid work.

The first three, at least, are some decent, unbowlderized war pulp. I couldn't hang with The Silver Spike or anything after that, though.

Robert Heinlein wrote:Some "Protocols of the Elders of the Nation of Islam" bullshit

Wow. Just wow.

You can get by with exploding d20 (where 20 = 19 + whatever you get on the second roll) and by rolling a separate fumble die (which is colored safety orange and is ignored unless it comes up 20). With both rolls at the same time it doesn't really slow the game down. I've not seen that approach in a ...

Nah. The reproductive system (other than the heart and brain) is one of the last things to go haywire when you're starving. No menses means no children, pretty much. I'm glad you're bringing up Senicia in this context though. Right now I can only see them sitting there, totally self-sufficient and s...

Judging__Eagle wrote:The article gives me really scary visions though. The christian-foods brand idea mostly.

Made with real Christians? [/Wednesday Addams]

One for Lago, via Pam's House Blend.

There's something appealing about the synonymy between "Oh, Christ!" and "Oh, Crap!" Not that "Let's stop at the bathroom, I gotta take an 'Isa," is ever going to enter the lexicon.

Maybe sometimes juvenile blasphemy really is the right choice.

...the Tower beats almost anybody. They certainly do; not only faster than boats but safer, more reliable, and more nimble as well. And if I've a choice between loading up my yak with spun glass tchotchkies for a three year journey or just handing off those tchotchkies to airborne capitalism, I'll ...

Christian salt, not kosher salt.

Mommy, what's "kosher" mean?

Huh.

That thing where every Hive Mosyna queen has to have over twenty offspring just to keep up with the death rate is really going to suck for them, then.

Hive Atalayan "Those who remember history are pleased to reenact it." [hr] Hive Atalayan comprises half a dozen feuding city-states and dozens of smaller villages scattered along the Huachten Bay and the river valleys of old Atala. Each of the city-states, ruled by multiple queens, engage...

Cool :) For Life, I was thinking that emotional manipulation would be sympathetic and transactional? Sympathetic magic just "makes sense" in the intuitive way. So if your combat action is offpissing a swarm of wasps you could do that with: Fire: the wasps are frenzied now, hope you set up ...

If possible, I'd like to shunt the elemental system towards abstractions and away from pure alchemical taxonomy (Fire is red. Rubies are red. Ergo, Rubies are Fire. Quod erat boring) Something like the following, thus far? Air: Never still Air Copper, Bronze, Brass Breath Motion Wisdom Lies Earth: C...

How would that change the Lifarian League writeup (wherein they pretty much have all the powers of formaldehyde)? Would they divert Death away with ghost wards, extend life with ghost binding, sterilize rye with ghost purgatives? /edited to add I agree that it's a better system where two elements ar...

Yeah. If everything is a keyword then saying something is a keyword conveys no information at all. I spent years modding the Infinity Engine (used in Planescape: Torment), so picking an example from that: You can't cast any spells if you're silenced. "Vocalize" is a spell in the game, and ...