#anyway is this a good post? Does this feel like fun usable rpg material?

[keganexe]

Meet The Agents of Rot

I've been working on Blister City, an upcoming far future setting guide for playing survivors on the last city of Mars, for what feels like an eternity now. I want to start sharing some of my favorite factions, npcs, locations, and mechanics from the guide just so I have something to point to if folks want to know more about it as I ever approach finishing the game.

Follow that link up above if you want some basic information on Mars and the setting, because I'm gonna dive right in like you know everything else already.

So first up, lets meet one of my favorite factions, The Agents of Rot.

Who Are the Agents of Rot?

In the simplest form, The Agents are a doomsday cult devoted to the teachings of a long dead and unnamed scholar. They believe the destruction of humanity is already happening, and unstoppable; and they long only prepare everyone for the oncoming end times, without any desire to hasten the coming end.

In 2143, The Agents of Rot first landed in the city of Ambition (which would later become Blister City) after having been chased off earth by The Crusade for their heretical religious beliefs. With them came the first of the Prophet Machines, cobbled together old tech that spits out endless streams of numbers and letters, from which adherents claim the future can be known and prepared for. Upon their arrival to Mars, The Agents had a dire portent, Mars would fall in 2191.

Their portents were ignored, but history would go on too stare back in wonder as their preaching was true. Down to the minute. Ultimate Mars does fall, and today The Agents of Rot occupy a strange space in the city, their heretical beliefs seemingly true, but their message still unpopular for the folks in the last city.

Where Are the Agents of Rot?

In The Mids, the second layer of the three layer Blister City, sits The Smokestack District. In The Lowers, directly under this district the industry of the Blister is booming. Miasma is refined, plasteel is produced, and the toxic smoke of industry pushes up through the levels unstopped by those with the power to demand better.

It is in the worst of this toxic runoff we find The Smokestack District, and herein find some of the worst of the city. The folks who call The Smokestacks home are a combination of those with the expensive lung bionics that make breathing here safe, trading a lifetime of debt for an opportunity to live in an apartment they can afford; and those chased out by the rest of the city, largely unmodified and suffering short lives as the air toxicity kills slowly but painfully and surely.

In The Smokestack District you can find The Rot Chapel, one of few wooden buildings in the city, although the building itself is dilapidated, rotting, and covered in soot. A walk through the church shows mildewed religious statues, sitting undisturbed next to rack after rack of advanced computers; each beeping away at impossible maths. Cries echo out across the church as more prophets discover portents of the future in the hodgepodge of numbers lighting up across screens.

The Agents of Rot in Play

In Blister City, you can find yourself working alongside or against any number of factions in the city, each with a list of pros and cons for helping or harming them. While the factions usually only provide these boons and banes during missions for or against them, The Agents of Rot instead always provide boons and banes for players.

If You Make an Ally of The Agents

+1: The Agents consider you a fledgling acolyte of their faith. Rot Shops are open to you, as are their churches for those looking to lay low.

+2: The Agents consider you a true believer. You gain a discount in Rot Shops, and gain access to their medical centers.

+3: The Agents have begun to see prophecies of you. Once ever you can go to them, and have them tell you a terrible but true fact about events yet to happen.

If You Make an Enemy of The Agents

-1: The Agents of Rot are scared of you and your crew. You are actively turned away from Rot Churches and Rot Shops, violently if necessary.

-2: The Agents consider you persona non grata, and take to the streets preaching of the dangers of being near you, and your allies.

-3: The Agents have begun to see prophecies of you, and it terrifies them. The Agents pool all of their resources, and will hire whoever it takes to kill you, and challenge the hands of fate.

Final Thoughts

The Agents of Rot are but one of 25 named factions, and have (like all the factions do) complicated ties to the city and the other factions. They frequently find themselves allied with The Children of The Red Sands, other religious outsiders to the city; and working against The Rusakli, a quiet order of well liked healers who The Prophet Machines keep spitting out warnings against.

[dapperkobold]

Review at Random: Alien Bestiary (Starfinder)

Welcome to Reviews at Random, today we’re not doing a video game. Today, instead, we’re doing a third party product for a tabletop role-playing game. I’ll try my best to make this friendly for people who don’t know about Starfinder, but whatever.

The Alien Bestiary product is published by Legendary Games, made for the Starfinder system (a space fantasy system made by Paizo, the Pathfinder people) and fueled by Kickstarter (including me, full admission). It came out between the Alien Archive (the first official monster book) and Alien Archive 2 (the second official monster book). This makes it... interesting in how it relates to the official products.

Near as I can tell, the intent behind this product is twofold: One, to port some of the more obscure Pathfinder monsters over to Starfinder, and Two, to serve as a dedicated monster book for Legendary Games’ Aetheria setting. That’s not a bad thing, setting-specific monster books can be lots of fun as long as they’re not too tied up in the lore of the original setting, keeping people from understanding the lore of the monsters, and they don’t make you read a different book to use the monsters in your game.

But! We’ll come to that later. For now...

Presentation

The art and design of the Alien Bestiary are fine, the art is from a few different artists and one or two didn’t get the message that the art is for a Sci-Fi product, but it’s overall nothing too jarring or ugly. At least, not artistically ugly; abominations are all suitably hideous. Apart from that, there’s a few typos around (last I checked) and while they’re rare and mostly harmless they can be annoying on the occasion you find one.

Final Presentation Score: B-

It’s not really a super pretty book, but whatever it works and works well.

Mechanics

RPG books have less ‘gameplay’ per se, and more Mechanics. In this case, the mechanics of the monsters in question. And for the most part the mechanics seem fine... except that they relate to the official Paizo Products oddly.

Alien Bestiary came out after the Alien Archive, but was set in stone before Alien Archive 2 came out. Alien Archive 2 brought with it a lot of cool space-like creatures from Pathfinder that were really neat. See where this is going?

While Alien Bestiary neatly avoids overlap with Alien Archive, there’s some things in 2 where the overlap is notable, and for the most parts Alien Archive 2 wins out. You might say to yourself, “But if the two stat blocks are different, they can be used for different things!” and you would be right but they’re mostly NOT. Since both companies went off of the Pathfinder version as a cheat sheet, they’re strikingly similar save for some stat changes. 

Now, I haven’t side-by-sided many of the overlapping monsters, but my bias is to default to the Paizo stats, because at this point Starfinder is still young enough that Paizo has the best handle on their own system. And if you are the sort to side-by-side them, you still need to put forth that effort and decide which is better.

Otherwise, things like wild animals, dinosaurs, and dragons give Paizo an edge because Paizo doesn’t just give dozens of Dragon stat blocks at various ages and colors, but instead a system that lets you plug-and-play dragons fast. Will that result in samey dragons? Maybe, but if you’re worried about dragons feeling unique you’re likely putting some effort in tweaking them anyway. Same with dinosaurs, herd animals, predators... with the creation system in the Paizo products, you can just MAKE custom dinosaurs using the super easy monster creation system from the FIRST Alien Archive. If you have an obscure dinosaur you’re super fond of, the Paizo system will let you use it without trouble!

Though the Alien Bestiary has dedicated stats for a dunklesteosis, which is free brownie points from me.

...That and the soulbound shell, which is like a sorcer’s spirit encased in a robot, and that’s pretty darn neat!

See, when you get into third-party books, especially monster books, there’s going to be overlap. Whether you buy a given book is more about whether there’s enough from that book that you care about.

So, what does the Alien Bestiary have, specifically?

Traditional abberations like intellect devourers, aboleths, cloakers, chokers, and flumphs!

Meteor Dragon!

Allips and a host of other undead who died in exceedingly evil ways!

Phycomid!

Moon Flowers and Moon Beasts!

Various Giants!

Kytons!

More Kytons!

SERIOUSLY this book has 11 different Kytons in it!

The Alien Archive 2 has one Kyton, under a different name, but none of these Kytons overlap with it.

There’s even rules for tweaking other Kytons fit the rules for the Aetheria Setting Kytons!

Who needs this many Kytons?!

Golems.

DOWNSIDE: Still using the whole ‘golems are immune to spells’ thing.

Fairly creative monsters specific to the Aetheria Campaign Setting.

New robots!

WHAT IS IT OH CRIPES GET ME OUT OF HERE

Clockwork Constructs!

Daemons?

John Carpenter’s The Thing

Obligatory Great Old Ones

Starship stat block for Cthulhu!

Trappers and Mimics!

Mobster leeches!

I TAKE IT BACK THIS ONE IS WORSE GIVE ME THE FREAKY HEAD BACK

A TON of other classic and original (or at least obscure) monsters!

So, yeah, even with the overlap this book has a LOT to offer.

However! Be aware that this is a dedicated monster book, and NOT the Alien Archive. There isn’t really any bonus material like items or PC options with a very few exceptions. This is standard for Monster books, yes, but I thought it worth bringing up in case you got used to Alien Archive.

(Though I hope that they give PC-usable rules for the poisonous squid people in a different product sometime.)

Final Mechanics Score: B+ C-

Though I can’t vouch for the balance of the book, for all I know it’s a mess, I didn’t see anything immediately alarming and the selection of monsters is very wide. It’s possible that the makers were more using Pathfinder design philosophy than Starfinder, but the two are close enough that shouldn’t be really damaging.

HEY THERE! Future Kobold here! I was going over the thing for session planning/another post on it, and was looking closely at the stat blocks. Turns out that the mechanics are split about 50/50 on whether they’re a complete mess or not. Even the ones that aren’t messes tend to have presentation problems that might be confusing for new GMs. A lot of entries are missing space/reach, too. This is really disappointing, and I’ve amended the grade to account for it.

(Who needs 11 different Kytons? I’m not sure if the original Pathfinder Bestiary had 11 different Demons, sakes alive...)

Writing

So, for some of you, it will be enough for me to say ‘it has a Bullette in it’ and you will go buy it. Other people will wonder if the monsters are usable in their stories, mainly that they have solid descriptions so the GM knows how to present and run them. And... yes, they do. Some more than others, and there’s one or two that are so out there that I have no idea how to put them in other than as an extra random encounter.

Other than that, while this book WAS made as a monster book for a specific setting, nothing really shackles it to that setting. The few monsters with setting-specific mechanics have those mechanics detailed in the indices of the book, and the mentions of in-universe organizations aren’t really too complex. With a little bit of creativity and replacement, you can pretty well swap things out without too much strain.

Overall, I do wish a few of those odd monsters were better explained, but it’s no real lost traction.

Final Writing Score: B

Overall

While it lacks the polish of Paizo’s first party products, the people involved knew what they were doing. Everything is fine. Nothing is really amazing, but something doesn’t need to be amazing to be good. It has some fun ideas, and it does cover a lot of bases the official products don’t while both pandering to the classics and showing some originality itself.

(Or at least knowing obscure enough classics that they count as in-jokes, whichever)

Presentation: B-

Mechanics: B+ C-

Writing: B

FINAL GRADE: B C+

Release some old terrors on your players. And then some new ones, just to keep them guessing.

Awards:

MAXIMUM KYTON