H-... How do you lose your penitent engine?
"It's true... For my heinous crimes against humanity, I have been sentenced to live out the rest of my days in this gibbet."
"...what gibbet?"
"Oh, I forgot it at home."
He's got a serious talent for it. He's in the past played an airship captain who lost his ship, a paladin sworn to no oath, he wanted to play a rogue trader captain who had no ship, penitent engine pilot with no engine, and most recently suggested playing the mother of a martyred sister repentia - even though the sisters of battle almost recruit exclusively from the schola progenium, who are
orphans. He plays captains with no ships, mothers with no daughters, orphans
with mothers, clerics with no gods, paladins with no code, and I swear next one'll be a CEO with no company. He's addicted to the subversion
And ah yes, the intricate multi-layered scheming of feral worlders... I believe Machiavelli himself was one!
To be fair there is a fair bit of room for scheming feral worlders; the first character they met was the King's eunuch who was a sneaky breeki kinda politics type guy. But there's different flavours of multi-layered scheming you know? There's "go Perseus, go forth and bring us the medusa's head" and "welcome to this episode of the CIA destabilises a nation for drug money again"
Ooh ooh pick me pick me!
If I ever get around to it, I'll defo post a link here as a call to arms. But I'm not going to be doing anything of the sort for at least the next month, as I'll be travelling around a lot :<
Lots of mechanics to do with not being entirely in control of the characters, and accompanying mechanics to encourage players to go with the flow of their inner beast from time to time.
It's very much a game about playing psychologically damaged people with super powers and a vulnerability to addiction.
Well now I have to give it a look. I liked the rules for Mage: The Wizardening so I am optimisting about Vampire: The Secret Gothening
Pitch 2 was them being Byzantine vampires in the lead up to the Fall of Constantinople, facing the approach of the Ottoman army and the vampires of the Ashirra (Muslim vampire organisation essentially, as opposed to the more Christian Camarilla.) Idea was more of a focus on politics, looking for ways to assure their own survival and the safety of their assets and freedoms in the event the city falls, but without looking like traitors in the event that the city doesn't fall.
Secret ending B: Turkic Vampire and Byzantine Vampire continue their 1,000 year war from their neighbouring apartments in Germany
In completely unrelated news
I am yet to try LOTFR or booty shorts
Ideally I should be going battlemaster with dual wielder but instead I've gone cavalier with polearm master & mounted combatant. Battlemaster can use all of this equipment very well, has special tactics related to drawing and throwing weapons as part of the same action, and a whole bunch of other nice stuff. It even has its own version of cavalier marking. But I am playing with a player who detests when another char is useful in all situations, so I'm going to stick to one that kills goblins but runs away from skeleton pikemen, so he can deal with the skeletons for me. After my friend asked me to find him a system that;
-featured magical things rarely
-had more player mortality/risk, but not "punishingly" so
-started off the chars as weak, scaling them up to great power, but stopping just short of mythic martial prowess
-similar enough to DnD that it is not a far departure from what he and his players are familiar with (d20 system, same attribute system & class system)
-different enough to DnD that it does not suffer from the usual issues surrounding spell lists, HP bloat, non-combat RP support, (no spellcaster classes or restricted)
In short he wanted DnD... But not DnD
And I seem to have actually found one called Low Fantasy Gaming, which as the name suggests, is all about Low Fantasy Gaming. I've yet to see it in try or try it myself but this >very specific niche< has apparently been filled