Thrythlind aka Luke Green – Page 14 – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

This is really rough…pretty much just written up quite quickly and probably needs a lot of reworking. Plus I…

This is really rough…pretty much just written up quite quickly and probably needs a lot of reworking. Plus I didn’t do the gear section yet.

Cyborg

Your Implants

Choose two features describing your implants:

Flawless Operation

Low Maintenance

Subtle Modifications

Tactile Sensation

Fully Functional Reproductive Organs

Impressive Looking

Choose two flaws describign your implants:

Glitchy Prototypes

High Maintenance

Obvious Prostheses

No Sense of Touch

More Machine than Person

Kludge-y Appearance

Drama Move: When you bury your emotions, mark corruption.

Intimacy Move: When you share a moment of intimacy – physical or emotional – with someone else both you and the other person may either mark Corruption, or erase one Corruption mark depending on whether you felt the moment of intimacy reconnected either of you with humanity or drove you further away.

End Move: When you die, you can choose to trigger a self-destruct sequence and anybody who does not vacate the area quickly will be caught in the blast.

Corruption Moves:

Feel No Pain: Mark a Corruption to reduce the Harm you suffer by 1 for the rest of the scene.

Electronic Possession: Mark Corruption to temporarily shift your consciousness into a computerized device and control it.

Killing Machine: Mark Corruption to turn a missed Unleash roll into a success once per scene.

Backups: When you die and self-destruct, Mark Corruption to be downloaded into a new body. All Faction marks you had built up will be lost.

Character Creation

Name: (the examples are drawn from film, TV, video games and anime)

Adam, Alex, Armitage, Barrett, Denton, Ed, Eighteen, Federova, Ginga, Jaime, Jenson, Mike, Murphy, Namir, Nove, Steve, Subaru, Victor

Look:

Ambiguous, Female, Male, Transgressing, Robotic

Asian or South Asian, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic/Latino, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, _________________

Trench Coat, Expensive Suit, Military Fatigues, Casual Clothing, No Clothing

Starting Character Stats (Add 1 to one of these)

Blood 1, Heart -1, Mind 1, Spirit 0

Starting Factions (Add 1 to one of these)

Mortality 1, Night 0, Power 1, Wild -1

Intro:

Who are you?

How and why did you become a cyborg?

Why are you in the city?

How long have you been in the city?

Gear

Debts

Someone is connected to how you became a cyborg one of you is fine with the results, one of you regrets the circumstances. You each owe the other a debt.

Someone knows one of your secrets but hasn’t confronted you yet. Decide if you know they know (and the rest of the predictable joke.) You owe them 2 debts.

You did a favor for someone recently, they owe you 1 debt.

Moves:

Weapon Configuration: Whether via having multiple versions of the same implanted weapon, nanomachines rebuilding the weapon from the molecule on up or a bizarre blend of science and magic, you can change the material of your implanted melee weapon. Roll +Mind, on a hit you successfully change the weapon’s material to something else. On a 7-9 choose one of the following as well:

The strain of the change was painful, take 1 Harm (ap).

The weapon is weakened and may break in the course of use.

It takes longer than normal for the weapon to change.

Defensive Measures: You can activate some sort of defense. Roll +Mind.

On a hit choose one:

+1 Armor

+1 Ongoing to resist attacks.

Immunity to one energy type.

On a 7-9 also choose one:

Activating the defense was painful, take 1 Harm (ap).

The defense only lasts for a short time.

The defense attracts unwanted attention.

Social Enhancements: Via expression and biometric readers, pheromone production and other methods, you have an easier time talking to people. Use Mind when Persuading or Figuring someone out.

Flattering Imitation: You can mimic the voice and biometric readings of another person. Mark Corruption in order to alter your physical appearance as well.

Wireless Interface: You can interact with any other computer that has the ability to receive wireless communication. Mark Corruption in order to be able to interface with computers in sight that don’t have a wireless hook up.

Mobility Enhancements: You have a +1 ongoing to any escape attempt.

The First Step: You suffer no damage from falls.

Heads-Up Display: You have a lot of information always posted to your sight. Roll +Mind. On a 10+ you hold 2, on a 7-9 you hold 1. Spend the hold at any time during the scene to do one of the following:

Ask one of the following questions:

Is there any threat that’s not obvious?

Is there anything out of place in the environment?

Who’s likely to attack first?

Create/Discover an opportunity to escape.

Give yourself or someone else +1 Forward on an action.

Basic Advances:

+1 Blood (Max +3)

+1 Spirit (Max +3)

+1 Mind (Max +3)

Add one feature to your cybernetics.

A new Cyborg Move

A move from another archetype

Change your Faction

Gain a Workshop

Upgraded Advances:

+1 to any stat (Max +3)

+1 to any Faction (Max +3)

Erase a Scar

Remove a downside to your cybernetics

Advance 3 basic moves

Add another implanted weapon.

Erase a Corruption Advance

Retire your character to safety

Change to a new archetype.

Sort of off-topic. Just a realization.

Okay, with reading Urban Shadows I’ve figured out why the idea using the rules in Monster of the Week, Urban Shadows or Monsterhearts to run a Divine Blood setting is difficult for me to get started.

The matter is one of base assumptions.

Most urban fantasy style games assumes the existence of certain conceits or tropes. I’m going to focus on three of them:

There is a fundamental difference between a normal person and a supernatural one.

Supernatural characters are regularly involved in life-and-death circumstances and used to risking their lives.

Someone with supernatural powers is inherently more dangerous than someone without them.

Supernaturals are inherently antagonistic to normals.

None of these conceits is true in Divine Blood. In fact, Divine Blood operates with conceits that oppose those three:

A soul is a soul is a soul. It doesn’t matter if that soul currently resides in a human, a werewolf, a God, Demon, is now a ghost or has not yet lived in a physical form. Their base existence is the same.

The way a brain processes data is inherited. Morality, ethics and other values are learned. As result, due to humans being by far the most populous sentient species, human morality, ethics and values are by far the most dominate even among entities that predate humanity.

Most inborn supernatural abilities give roughly the same level of advantage as being born especially tall, smart or strong. Even Gods and Demons who are connected to the vast pool of power of their kin rarely have the permission to use much more than their inherent power which is usually pretty low. Heck, most vampyr are born, live and die without ever learning what they are and simply believe they have medical issues which appear from time to time in their families.

The average supernatural of the twentieth century has never been in any situation where someone is trying to even seriously hurt them or vice versa. Most would freeze up if their life were threatened. This extends to even immortals like Demons and Gods.

Training surpasses talent. The most powerful and dangerous mortal supernatural organizations are almost entirely populated by humans that were born with no inherent talents but were lucky enough to be born to families with lots of knowledge on sorcery, magic and/or feng shui (practices anybody can learn). The most dangerous Immortals, the ones whose names appear in myths, are those trained for military, espionage or law enforcement purposes.

Most surviving supernatural species are ones that fit in with humans and work with them very well. There is nothing that “needs” to feed on humans that isn’t a self-made monster and those are rare and inappropriate for play.

All of this means that I’d essentially have to come up with completely original playbooks/archetypes. The agendas work for varying parts of the world.

For example, a Pysche freelance team that hunts beasts and witches would be easy to represent using MotW’s agenda. And a look at the intrigue between the sorcerer families or between Yomi and Nirvana or between the various secret societies like Avalon, the Path of the Golden Dawn, Thule Society and Psyche. All that would work with the agenda in Urban Shadows.

But the archetypes focus heavily on what is or isn’t human about a character and that’s counter to the base assumptions of Divine Blood which focuses more heavily on what is human about every character and the least human things are often normal, non-supernatural humans (population thing. There are far more humans thus there are far more monstrous humans than monstrous demons).

Sort of off-topic. Just a realization.

Edited to be less of a rant.

The matter is one of base assumptions.

While the agenda and faction system of Urban Shadows works great for some of the possible political campaigns of Divine Blood, the agenda of MotW works good for some of the more action elements and the agenda of Monsterhearts is good for a more soap-opera-ish civilian campaign…the archetypes/skins/playbooks are where the problem exists.

In general those three games focus on how supernaturals are NOT human, even if they look human.

Divine Blood focuses on the idea that a soul is a soul is a soul…ie, it focuses on how supernaturals ARE human.

So a lot of the archetypes and playbooks don’t make sense with Divine Blood’s fundamental world rules.

It’s less of a problem in MotW since most of the playbooks are assumed to be human and it’s simple to just have a non-human from Divine Blood in one of the normal playbooks and represent their innate abilities via Use Magic (vampyr, for example, mostly go through life not realizing they aren’t human…so most would more closely fit the Mundane playbook from MotW). Or I could represent a spec-ops soldier grown numb to violence using the Monstrous playbook. But with Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows, where most of the playbooks are assumed not to be human, its an issue.

I’ll have to consider the necessary reskinning before working on a packet for adapting DB to these rules.

I have a one-shot/tournament Monster of the Week scenario that would be rather easily reworked into this game.

consider something like the Tournament of the Dragon from Champions 3rd or 4th edition….every 60 years it’s held to choose the most worthy warrior to face and defeat the death dragon in combat…the winner gets a few mystical boons as well (assuming the Death Dragon does not defeat them, is not released and does not destroy the world), or Mortal Kombat (lose 10 Mortal Kombats and get invaded), or Fate/Stay-Night’s Grail War.

Every 60 years, five artifacts are created and distributed as part of a re-occuring ritual. People seek out and earn these relics and then try to win the remaining relics from the others, finally using the five to reseal a big bad evil thing (I usually go with Typhon from Greek Myth). Only the boons come from the magic siphoned off the Big Bad Evil thing, so some of those immortals that have participated multiple times start to turn evil…and the cult that initially created the ritual to gather power has turned to evil and seeking to release the BBE…

The one-shot is assuming every artifact has been collected from around the world and the various parties are meeting to have the confrontation and decide who gets to perform the ritual. With the players being the group holding one of the artifacts.

The campaign would be first spent learning about and getting one artifact…followed by learning there are five of the items and then heading to the city of the ritual in order to compete in the tournament.

It could easily be scaled from a global competition to a city one.

So put in a request to join the RPoL game someone here advertised.

So put in a request to join the RPoL game someone here advertised.

What I’m putting forth is a “Tainted” the concept: the bearer of the Mantle of Medusa.

There are some pre-Hellenic matriarchal religions that are likely precursors to the Medusa myth. It is thought by some that the Medusa myth was an active demonization of these rival religions. In that other religion, Medusa acted as a mediator between the worlds, both the underworld and the overworld. Past bearers of the Mantle have been good, evil and in between, but the Mantle is just a cosmic force, not an intellect so it doesn’t care, but misusing its power is likely to lead to corruption.

So I figure her “Patron” is the Mantle and all the arcane and no-longer documented laws that it expects her to follow as the Mediator…not that it is actually sentient, but misusing it could be dangerous and she will occasional have issues she has to negotiate as her tasks.

I also figure that she was unaware of her inhuman heritage before accidentally taking on the Mantle and that there may be many other gorgons who feel that she does that deserve it…and thus out to recover the Mantle the only possible way: beheading her…or maybe the followers of Zeus will want to recover the force that imbued the Aegis with its power…also by beheading her.

Does this sound like a good tainted? It’s a variation of a character I’ve played off and on in a few places (created her in 2004 or 2005 for City of Heroes)

Due to numerous comments on the art showing that it was giving an impression I had not intended and was getting in…

Originally shared by Thrythlind aka Luke Green

Due to numerous comments on the art showing that it was giving an impression I had not intended and was getting in the way of people looking at the game, I’ve cropped the image to focus on the computer player.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/153922/Just-a-Game–Playtest-Packet

The other image might still eventually get used as a piece of internal art…but it was distracting from my purpose for now.

Due to numerous comments on the art showing that it was giving an impression I had not intended and was getting in…

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/153922/Just-a-Game–Playtest-Packet

The other image might still eventually get used as a piece of internal art…but it was distracting from my purpose for now.

Author: Thrythlind aka Luke Green

Here we go.

Is there a section for looking for a game?

Is there a section for looking for a game?

This is really rough…pretty much just written up quite quickly and probably needs a lot of reworking. Plus I…

Sort of off-topic. Just a realization.

Sort of off-topic. Just a realization.

I have a one-shot/tournament Monster of the Week scenario that would be rather easily reworked into this game.

So put in a request to join the RPoL game someone here advertised.

Due to numerous comments on the art showing that it was giving an impression I had not intended and was getting in…

Due to numerous comments on the art showing that it was giving an impression I had not intended and was getting in…