In Golden Flame

[vague fog]

Yeah it's a bit of a feelsbad for me when I have all this extra content and like... Nobody does anything

[heady vale]

I guess sometimes I forget how lucky I am, with my friend group. They like really difficult scary combats. And they also like heavy roleplay

(Can you tell my friend group has a lot of Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk enjoyers? )

[vague fog]

With some of the extra NPCs in the world and stuff I'm honestly gonna kind of just... Throw them at the players

We're basically at the end of mission 1 and they've only met the militia people plus Siren, and BARTENDER-MOTHERFUCKER lol

And I've given them a few times where they could explore hells gate but they kinda just... dont

[heady vale]

Yeah that's kind of what I was thinking might be beneficial

Taking some of the optional stuff and restructuring it as stuff that you purposely put in their way in between each part

Or stuff that you put in their way during each part

It can help get them more used to interacting with stuff that feels """less important"""

[regal forum]

If you just say "ok you guys can explore the station now" (idk if that is what's happening) you will get silence from a lot of players. More engaged players might start asking questions but imo a better way is to set the scene for them. You can tie in their backstories (if they don't have backstories just make things up and tell them it's from their past) to npcs and locations in the setting. For example, in my group we have a religious former pirate who bumps into the Faith and Calamity around HG pretty often. To set this up, I might say "your character is walking down a corridor in the aft hab when suddenly the lights fizzle and go out (this also represents the station stability clock). After a moment you see the flicker of candle light and begin to hear chanting through the din of panicked voices around you." Then that character will go investigate the chanting and see that local faith priests are handing out alms and leading a prayer, and maybe another npc I want them to interact with is in the crowd and approaches them.

That's just one example but things like that really help engage even quiet players in my experience. Especially if you can try to show not tell. Easier said than done, and the quieter your group is, the harder the gms job becomes so I wish you luck.

Even if you have a big map and a list of npcs they know and could go talk to, I think a lot of people need some lead in to start engaging with that. Maybe once they've met and connected with some npcs they will start to take more innitiative but ya never know.

[quaint pebble]

I can sympathise with it being hard to introduce NPCs because my guys do like to roleplay and I still always feel later like "oh oops I could have brought X in on this scene"

[vague fog]

This actually helps me a lot, thank you

[maiden ferry]

I’ve had npcs straight up seek out the players - Switch wants an interview, Striga wants to vent, Makayla wants to ask a pc to go grab her synthmod from the icebreaker. Give the players sidequests, and the reward is they get to rp and make connections that might help them later

[quaint pebble]

Yeah I have done a bit of that and definitely need to do more of it

[digital raven]

This is the correct move. I view the NPC lists as setting up playdates for the PCs. Like some will click with the player and some won't but once they find a buddy, you can just drop them into the background a ton. I gave all 4 of my PCs short one on one scenes with an NPC that seemed interesting to pair them with before I ran a single combat in the campaign

[digital raven]

I always justify this by outright telling the players the convoluted social circumstances but making it clear that it's player knowledge not PC knowledge. For example, Cerulean Enceladus has a crush on one of the PCs but doesn't understand they have a crush on them so they keep just dropping in and accidentally bickering with them and then storming off and neither Cerulean or the PC understand why this keeps happening.

I don't run a ton of romance in my games but I run a ton of failed social interactions on the NPCs' part.

[heady vale]

I think it's really funny for me by the way, that I know that I'm going to have the opposite experience running Golden flame, But to a point where I'm going to have to make the combats harder.

I'm running it for a group of six, which means I'm already probably going to have to increase the numbers a little bit. On top of that all of my friends are super into role play which means I'll need to like make sure I have plenty of stuff for them to do, I've got to keep them entertained at all times /lh/j .

We also all agreed upon making the game a bit harder, as a trade-off for all of them to be allowed to start with 2 free liscences (they're still level 0, so they have the stats of a level 0 character, but have 2 bonus LLs into a mech of their choice so everyone can start with a nonGMS and play more easily into the idea that they're slightly more established Lancers)

(Not funny in the sense that I think what you're struggling with is funny, But funny that it's like. I know I'm going to have the opposite struggle at some points.)

[tame tide]

Thinking back too, group I ran for wallflower the players actively sought out the NPCs like Brava and Fielding yet the group I'm running IGF for I need to throw the NPCs at them... I think I need to go for "event happens in hell's gate which NPC is coincidentally also at" that's posted above rather than "NPC bumps into you and starts a conversation" apart from for Striga, I'm going to have Striga appear in front of the PCs many times and they can't stop that

[digital raven]

yeah, my players regularly body the combats, I have to tweak things up constantly

[rough bluff]

We had a player who never wanted to initatiate roleplay and whenever you asked him, could never think of anything for his character to do. My friend, when GMing him, discovered that he THRIVED if you treated it like aa Choose Your Own Advenure. "You're back in town, anything you want to do? Off the top of my head, you could get a drink at the bar, go check out the weapon store, or see if there's a job board." "Oh, let's go to the bar." "Okay you're at the bar. <Description.> You notice a couple interesting people, first of all..."

[heady vale]

Right now, My party is going to be looking like the following;

• HORUS Lich
• HORUS Kobold (might be replaced with a Scrapper mech from New Wild West, so, wildcard)
• IPS-N Pharos (Castor and Pollux)
IPS-N Caliban
IPS-N Lancaster
IPS-N Nelson

[digital raven]

Mine are still all in Everests, they just have good tactics

[maiden ferry]

You say that like the everest isn't the best mech in the game

[heady vale]

Hey hey, Chomolungma is also there /lh

[thorn hinge]

add a sagarmatha for that two turns of half price overcharges and an all GMS team is something to be feared.

[maiden ferry]

I was genuinely considering giving them a shitty raptor 4, and unlocking the gms mechs when ||they got to act 2||

but I am a generous god

[thorn hinge]

all the way to ||Act 2|| holy shit

I knida dig it though?

[maiden ferry]

Every single build I've seen this group make that involves a gms mech past ll3 is nuts

[thorn hinge]

One of my players is doing asura everest right now. I understand. This isn't an action economy anymore it's an action monopoly.

[heady vale]

Playing action economy solitaire while everyone else is playing lancer

[maiden ferry]

it also makes the end of mission 2 more impactful, in a ||get me the FUCK off these shitter mechs|| kinda way

[thorn hinge]

yeah

||I want to revamp a ton of my landing screen graphics when act 2 starts, to reflect the sudden support from Union, it'd be nice to have somethign else like mech frams to offer a mechanical benefit too||

[maiden ferry]

||Imagine getting an everest as exotic loot||

[shrewd sorrel]

my players are also all absolute savages
i am bullied at every opportunity
they pull no punches and revel in tearing down all my well-laid plans
I only have 3 players but I usually run the 4 player opfor and they still bully me
its just what players do 😔 (i also do this as a player)

[quaint pebble]

Yeah I've started including some of the 5 player NPCs in my 4 person sitreps and they've handled it fine 😅

[shrewd sorrel]

I subtly suggested in chapter 3 that they could ||shoot the orbital laser down from the sky, potentially. and they deadass looked at me and went "ok but what if we launched ourselves up there in the orbital accelerator like that one scene from Armored Core 6" and now I might have to just make up a space combat around an obrital laser to end the chapter, because its too cool not to let them try||

[quaint narwhal]

My team has two Sag's, and they have so far been really good at timing thier Core Powers to have 4 rounds of Happy-sauce for the party...
#GMS4TheWin

[thorn hinge]

Don't I know it. They took down ||CAUSTIC|| and finished that fight on the second activation of turn 3. I got hosed, hard. And that's WITH one player spending their whole first turn ||scanning Annabelle McKenzie to make sure she's alright, because she's that character's long lost love|| and another player starting the first round ejected out of his mech due to shenanigans resulting from a foolhardy Power At A Cost bargain.

[thorn hinge]

pretty sure ||the description says the acceleration is fatal,|| but props to you if you go through with it, that sounds baller. Although make sure they still get a chance to do all the ||outlander scenes they might not have done yet||. a

wait a minute, also, ||how do they plan to get back down and actually attack the arena?||

[shrewd sorrel]

They for sure have not thought that far ahead

they usually just send it and hope for the best

[quaint narwhal]

https://tenor.com/view/malcolm-reynolds-no-comment-speechless-nope-none-gif-3747889

[shrewd sorrel]

I have siren perpetually linked up to the tortuga (the only one without an NHP) just so any time they're about to do some bullshit siren can be like
"Uh, marines, that's probably a bad idea..."

they dont always listen 😔

I don't know if there would be a reason to blow up the orbital laser after they rescue everyone but also i think launching themselves into space with a mass accelerator would be rad and I dont wanna shoot down all their ideas (even if they're potentially fatal)

thankfully I wont have to worry about it for at least a week because this session is ||The crone|| so between the combat and all the other nonsense i'm sure they'll get up to, it'll probably take our full session time.

Also now considering that i should run ||Bad Star, even if they don't fill up the attention clock all the way, and make it a 1v3 so he can get bullied and I have a reason to give the tortuga a new gun||
and just run it as is if they do fill it all the way.

[polar glacier]

@vague fog I've only now caught up on the thread but holy shit you have my apologies. I do not envy you. I've described this problem before of training DnD players to enjoy other games as being like cult deprogramming. It's not easy and there's no one way to do it.

Like others have said, IGF is an intensely narrative campaign that happens to have some tight combat scenarios. Players who are interested in character development and relationships are going to get far more out of it than people who just want to ride the rail, see the sights, and get to the finish. Lancer as a system doesn't lend itself well to full freedom sandbox gaming; the fact that you're running a campaign book means there's going to be some railroading, and that's okay. If your players are going in expecting to kill people and take their stuff... they're not in the right campaign and they're not in the right game.

The fact that you can lose a fight and continue on is a feature. It's called failing forward, and it's the antithesis of DnD design. It's also one of the most basic features of non-DnD games, going back decades. There are worse things than death, if you actually care about the world and the people. You can lose every fight of act 1 except the last, but you will NOT have the same game as a team that won every fight to get there. Maybe give them examples of how that works? There are fights where losing means you'll be captured, and the story continues with you figuring out a jailbreak. There are times where a primary objective might be destroyed or killed, and you'll have to deal with the fallout from that. You can fuck up ||chapter 2|| so bad your boss gets fired and there's a whole station you should probably stay away from.

I don't know how to make your players care. All I can say is if you buy in to the setting and get attached to the people in it, including your own characters, it can be a transcendent experience.

[vague fog]

thats a lot to read

[polar glacier]

sorry ><

I'm not good at not going overboard lmao

[vague fog]

Im hoping chapter 2 will be much better for me and the players know that im kinda going into it with a fresh start almost and some actual ideas on how to try and get my players wrapped into things

Having never DMed lancer before and only DMed dnd is also something im having to get used to

Also on a separate note, we've been playing on tabletop sim and we found a good board for it which has made it a good experience, but lemme tell ya having to hand craft every single map is painful

[quaint narwhal]

I shamelessly plunder the work of the community's cartographers at every opportunity, as well as being a patreon to stuff like Cze and Peku, and 2-Minute Tabletop. Well worth the money.

[pliant ibex]

That's a bit more difficult to make work on Tabletop Sim, where everything is physical pieces and generally you want to convey 3D space to make things easier for players

[quaint narwhal]

Fair point

[vague fog]

also whats a sigdiver?

nvm I just found it in the book

[shell bison]

Not going to lie, I'm actually really excited how my party members are going to handle the Chapter 3 fights.
Atlas
Calendula
Sunzi
and a Raliegh

[digital raven]

To be fair to my players, they are still in Everests because they are LL1

[tame tide]

Seeing people use my maps I decided to upgrade Mission 2 ||Killer sound|| to include lights rather than just saying "skill issue use foundry" as that's just mean

[vague fog]

||In the Anti-Capital fight, what HASE stat do I choose for the veteran sentinel?||

[tight pier]

||Whatever you feel like, really.||

||Agility, perhaps||

[vague fog]

||I was thinking either Agility or Hull||

[thorn hinge]

...I have forgotten the vet HASE bonus on almost every single fight I've run lmao

[tame tide]

So true 😔, now gonna go through all prepared NPCs and give them a random stat

Also got my M2: ||ANTI-CAPITAL|| ready, no way near as cool as Defendi's godsend but using his map will probs make my head explode, made using lots of tiles so I can delete ||Flying platform chunks as the strut smacks them|| (assets on the drive I aint uploading them all here)

[heady topaz]

I just used a template shape and copy pasted it over top of destroyed areas

[tame tide]

That is the CLEVER way of doing it! Luckily! I am not that!

[heady topaz]

Lmao

The glory of learning how to break Foundry's back over your knee

[quaint pebble]

i'll be honest i just stretched a black rectangle wider every round behind the "aoe here" indicator

[heady topaz]

That also works

[tame tide]

Also more clever

My brain went "WHAT IF TILES!" immediately and didn't back down then proceeded to have to make it all essentially on a green screen in Inkarnate and smack my head onto my desk trying to cut enough of the background off so you couldn't see it but there was also anti-aliasing so trying not to just remove details off the edges of the tiles... And if I didn't cut enough off there was a horrible pink outline on all the tiles...

So yeah...

Don't use green screens in Inkarnate

[heady topaz]

I always find that for battlemaps, K.I.S.S. method is the best: Keep It Simple Stupid.

[tame tide]

No 😩

[heady topaz]

I suppose you shall perish then.

[tame tide]

😩

[heady topaz]

https://tenor.com/view/you-just-have-to-be-gif-15522725

[vague fog]

Its not perfect but I created my own map for ||ANTI-CAPITAL|| in tabletop sim and I think it went pretty well

||And yes, there is indeed a floating crane :)||

||Also speaking on the topic of this mission, does anyone have art for a mini for Sunbird 1?||

[maiden ferry]

ooooh, the heroscape version

love it

[wild flame]

here's what i plan to use

[vague fog]

thanks

[tame tide]

ooh, is that the ||big strut on the left?||

[vague fog]

||Sure is ||

[tame tide]

MMMM might swap to that, my one currently doesn't have a matching colour scheme ||with the rest of the fire people||

[vague fog]

||I think the floating items really added a lot to the map, its hard to make space combat look good / cool in tabletop sim.||

[heady topaz]

I can post mine in a bit. It's the same model as ThatOne, but different color

[vague fog]

Im fine with the color tbh

[tame tide]

This one

[quaint pebble]

Mine was this (plus wolfhound)

[heady topaz]

Ye

[heady vale]

Finally went and ordered a custom print so I can have a physical copy of the campaign for running it

[shrewd sorrel]

Just finished running || The Crone. Holy dam. Everyone had a bad time (affectionate). It was 2 hours of each PC desperately trying to hold onto their secrets and being horribly uncomfortable with the amount of information she has, and wanting to ask questions but not questions that could potentially reveal their secrets to the rest of the party. Then one PC asked about something related to their backstory and the crone just said "You already know, but I know you want to keep it secret from your friends. So you tell me. How much do you want to me to tell you?" and that just fucked them all up.|| 10/10. Very fun session. New favorite PC (after striga because I love striga)

No NPC has unnerved my party in such a deep and fundamental way and it was great

This was the "Background Music" (i dont always use music but sometimes i find something I vibe with)
I've always found the hurdy gurdy kind of hauntingly beautiful, which I thought fit really well
https://youtu.be/fdsPe-kc17g?si=4QRFVXZ3mbVSuZiw

[rough bluff]

Also, I didn't want to do a full background scroll but adding some foul-looking vapors to the tunnel for movemet help to sell front and back in my foundry.

I tried to post that but the webm was too small to see. 🙂

[tame tide]

Looking good, def an interesting fight. Just curious without flight how you get from train to train due to the walls.

Also just a word of warning IMO the hud elements look a tad overloaded, especially on the right side and it looks as if it could be quite confusing to play on

[rough bluff]

Yeah, there's a reason I have a no zones version of every map, so you can turn them off and on during play as needed.

And as for your first question, I didn't design the encounter, but I assume that if the||breacher doesn't knock down walls, they can just shoot them like any other piece of terrain in Lancer. Also, the encounter talks about climbing on top. But I assume that's at least one reason why the breacher exists, because freight cars don't have access between cars. Why would they?||

[rough bluff]

||(BTW, I always try to implement notes I'm given, I just don't immediately see a way to implement yours that aren't "Stop using the published Lancer map style" or "Change the encounter so it doesn't play as written in the adventure." So don't take my comments as argumentative. I think the answer to your first question is intentional design by Vex, if you don't force people outside they will spend the whole fight avoiding the tunnel mechanics, not engaging with them, but as for the second, I worry about that on EVERY MAP and if you have a note that improves that on this one, let me know, I just didn't see a way to make this fight less crowded.)||

[rough bluff]

Oh! Maybe I have an idea that alleviates a little of the congestion. What is I remove the enemy deployment zone and combine it with the Ingress Zone on the left. Also, I make a whole other set of outputs that are missing the enemy zones entirely. So the GM can either eyeball them and use the other version, or have that map the first three rounds then swap out as soon as the zones are relevant.

[tame tide]

||Yeye DW, they were'nt as much criticism kinda observations, My word aint Gospel so DW don't do everything I say||

[rough bluff]

Right now you're the only one with concrete feedback, so it's getting extra weight. 🙂

[tame tide]

Ah fair, that combat looks really cool and I want to run it so it's a shame it's a ||double failure state|| ;-;, but TBH looking off the description of it it doesn't look easy to make the map

[rough bluff]

Remember though, it's a ||double fail state with the note, "But run it anyway, if you want, this is a game about mechs fighting mechs."||

[tame tide]

TRUUUUE

Then aggain I struggle from deviating from books so I don't know how to implement it + dunno how long the mission woulda been and if me players woulda wanted to move on

[rough bluff]

One of the reasons I wanted to make these last two maps is ||I don't want people to see that note, go looking for maps, not find any, and decide not to run them just because they couldn't handle the extra prep.||

Don't they give notes on how to run in the adventure if you want but your players don't get to them organically? I thought they did.

[tame tide]

You've mentioned. Truly heroic

[tame tide]

Maybe... BUt also pacing

IDK, I'll figgure it ouit

[frail kayak]

I just ran that one before ||Thermopylae. I was planning to give out extra repairs by having the train engineer say " too bad that crate of mech parts earmarked for Harrison Armory got lost during the fight, wink", but the players trivialized the fight, and so it wasn't necessary||

[rough bluff]

That's pretty awesome, though...

[rough bluff]

BTW, this map makes a great argument for playing on a square grid. 🙂

[rough bluff]

I uploaded this map to the pinned share. Also, my realization about some maps being better in hex and some one square led me to try some of my own maps in square and I found a flaw in the square versions of ||Denial of Service||. I reuploaded.

[tame tide]

Oooh, that's actually much more clear!

[dusky cradle]

Hoooo wee, this design is actually kinda brilliant by leaving out a train lane, if only I can get my players to fight on, in, and around a speeding train- sighs

Who am I kidding they downed ||the Thermopylae cruiser in two turns|| I'll definitely have to switch this one out with a regular fight

[dusky cradle]

Technically I think the links themselves, unbroken, can just work like difficult or dangerous terrain? Failing that you can just move outside and boost back in, you get thrown back only at the end of the turn after all.

Now I'm having images of two trains side-by-side with dynamic maps like one of those maps Defendi did previously, buuuut I'm just talking on top of my head here

[frail kayak]

I started making terrain for (mission 5)||Lift The Veil, and I'm not sure whether this design for the platform the firegate is on is too silly for the finale of Act1 (I haven't found a sprite for the firegate pillars, the rocks are a placeholder )||

[fallen geyser]

So I was on the WinWithDice podcast!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jlcTS3C-nQ

I talk a lot about IGF, there may be minor spoilers for both Act 1 and Act 2.

[tame tide]

wait it's pronounced "Kal-ee-oh-pee"?

[amber viper]

...if it is I owe one of my players an apology

She's playing a Calliope native and pretty much everyone else in the group (and my NPCs) pronounce it Cal-eye-oh-pee

[austere prism]

then that is correct in your version of calliope

[tame tide]

Then again people of Calliope can recognise where you're from for how you pronounce it

[quaint pebble]

Cally-oop

[tame tide]

Callp

I should probably try and remember and massively pronounce calliope differently depending on where the NPC is from

[thorn hinge]

I started out saying cal-eye-oh-pee, then I started talking with vex and hearing kal-ee-oh-pee, and now I have absolutely no consistency even while running, I swap back and forth and don't even realize that I'm doing it.

[rough maple]

Is this the right place to ask a question about the (intended) interaction of a Golden Flame exotic and an existing frame?

[rough maple]

(normally I'd just ask the GM but I am the more rules-fluent of the two of us so I want to know before I do)

[thorn hinge]

You can ask here.

I'm going to guess... Stortebeker and Golden Hand?

[rough maple]

Stortebeker and Hyperkinetic Gauntlet

I don't know what the Hand does but I guess it has a similar "you can attack with it while unloaded"?

either way, my question is: if my Stoer attacks with an unloaded Hyperkinetic Gauntlet and activates Truesilver, does it count as a Loading weapon (IE the damage is paracausal) or Not A Loading weapon (IE it's a guaranteed crit)

(also, fun thing my GM did. Missile podded the ||Wolfhound missile|| into its target)

[tame tide]

Holy fucking based

[rough maple]

I should point out that A: I was the target and B: he felt it would be cheap, I told him to do it

[thorn hinge]

The profile is the mechanics of the weapon, I'd count it as non-loading (guarenteed crit) since the secondary profile doesn't have the loading tag

which does mean a automatic critical, which does mean it reloads for free

as far as what Vex would say, she brought that interaction up once during an act 2 planning discussion. She's playing a Stortebeker in another IGF campaign and recently realized that this combo was possible.

[thorn hinge]

One of my players boosted behind the ultra to kite the wolfhound into it, but I got her with a cataphract impale and dragged them out where she and the cataphract both got blasted. I love wolfhound missiles, there's so many fun ways to play with them.

[rough maple]

the GM ruled that the missile could just fly through (or around) the ultra without colliding with it, since it's an allied character; I agree with that interpretation

[rough maple]

I'm curious as to Vex' interpretation before I present it to the GM either way :)

but the fact it's a different profile makes me lean towards the "it's not loading" interpreatation, which is favorable to me

[quaint pebble]

My players had a lot of fun ramming the missiles into NPCs

[wild flame]

Wolfhound is a great player side weapon

I can't wait for my 2 Chomolungmas with h0ros1 to do silly shit with them

[rough maple]

I don't think h0ros would make it collide, but BCL should

[wild flame]

Bcl the missile, h0ros npcs into the missile

[rough bluff]

What's BCL?

[wild flame]

Balance Control Lockout - invade option unique to the GMS Chomolungma. Push 2 + prone, if they were already prone then push 2 + immobilize (each npc may only be immobilized by this system once per scene)

[quaint pebble]

it's very good

[rough bluff]

You know, I HAVE two players with BCL in my game, I just couldn't figure out the acronym. 🙂

[wild flame]

Ah lol

Yeah it's really solid movement control (and a good delivery system for feeding prone npcs to the TCB everest)

[rough bluff]

Do you let it work on NPCs already prone? My players do that ALL the time. I ruled the moved half because of crawl speed. Basically rolling over.

[quaint pebble]

Can't see why it wouldn't, Prone doesn't affect involuntary movement

If you couldn't use it on NPCs that were already Prone then the "Targets who are already Prone become Immobilized" line would not be very useful

[wild flame]

I do, yeah. Push doesn't care that they're on the ground.

also I usually describe "prone" as a general gyroscopic off-balancement/internal system scramblement rather than "mech on floor" - helps players remember that it gives acc for tech as well as gun.

Cause "mech on floor" doesn't intuitively translate to "easier to hack", but "mech is confuckulated" does

[rough maple]

That is the RAW interpretation. The push is halved because difficult terrain

If you’re prone, you ignore knock back 1

[rough maple]

That’s the slowed part but prone also makes you treat all terrain as difficult

[wild flame]

Cringe. I will be ignoring that because I think big push is funny.

[quaint pebble]

Makes sense, but my Chomolungma player is in a Minotaur now so I don't need to worry about ruling it wrong

[tight pier]

[tame tide]

Prone counts as being in difficult terrain and makes ALL movement cost double (I'm p sure)

[quaint pebble]

well the question originally was "should it work at all" 😅

[tame tide]

Ah fair

My brain is only reading every other word so I only saw what Defendi mentioned about it being half speed

[rough bluff]

@fallen geyser Listened to your podcast from earlier. Great stuff. Insightful.

[fallen geyser]

Thanks 🙂

[warped ibex]

similarly listening to it now and even though i have not heard anything about him past this excerpt of the podcast ||i love this lucas character and cannot wait to play him||

[rough bluff]

Which character did @fallen geyser play in the initial campaign, is that common knowledge?

[fallen geyser]

That would be Switch

[rough bluff]

Cool!

[fallen geyser]

Hence why my avatar is literally them

[rough bluff]

Oh, I see it! The glasses threw me.

[fallen geyser]

That is because Switch is cosplaying as Dave Strider

[rough bluff]

See, that makes total sense.

[rough bluff]

If anyone calls this "A workman effort" I will take that as compliement enough. 🙂

[willow cloak]

This is “A work man-effort”

(But seriously, good job)

[dusky cradle]

W H A T

[rough bluff]

It's the Greek pronounciation. I assume @fallen geyser uses it since it's named for the Greek character.

[dusky cradle]

And my whole group had been pronouncing it like Ka-LEE-oh-phf

Damn you! Language barrier! (Man, learning english is hard enough, now greek)

Anyways, the tokens usd for representing the reactors look really good! Especially the power-coupler-esque thingamagigs

[rough bluff]

Thanks! Campaign Cartographer. Instead of carefully crafting all the aspects of this map like I did ||Anti-Capital||, I just kit bashed a whole bunch of symbols. 🙂

[fallen geyser]

There is no single canon way to pronounce it

It is canon that different settlements pronounce it differently and that's how you can tell where someone comes from

[rough bluff]

I JUST realized where the combat ||Anti-Capital|| gets its name. I was staring at my token for the ||Sunbird 1||, remembering the podcast from earlier, and was suddenly...oh!

Sometimes brain no worky.

[austere prism]

okay, so I'll base the Asphodel accent on them pronouncing it "cal-owp", got it

[warped ibex]

one of my players just rolled a 33 on a skill check i just wanted to pop in to say that

[woeful saddle]

nat 20 + 6 on accuracy die with +7 to that trigger?

[warped ibex]

yep!

+6 from the trigger default, +1 ||astral stigmata bonus||

[woeful saddle]

neat

oh yeah. you can't get odd triggers

[amber viper]

Was about to say, witchcraft be afoot

[warped ibex]

literally

[amber viper]

Hehe

[shell bison]

PFFF

@amber viper We have to tell Jess next session about the pronounciation

[tame tide]

Yeah I Def need a sheet of different pronunciations on hand

I rock up to golden flame session all session prep I have is a book and a really well formatted Google doc with many titles, player names and the only content in the Google doc is
"KAL-EE-OPE
KAL-EE-OH-PEE
KEL-EEP
'AL-EYE-OPE
CAW-LEE-OPP"

Fuck it I'm doing that

[amber viper]

I shall concede defeat

[rough maple]

hey @fallen geyser , I would sometime like your input on what's your intention for this interaction

[fallen geyser]

A Loading weapon is always a Loading weapon even if it's unloaded

As a tag, Loading is an intrinsic property of a weapon that allows it to be in either the loaded or unloaded states.

Weapons without the Loading tag aren't loaded or unloaded

[wild flame]

Otherwise we get into a weird superposition thing with the unloaded profile

It's only usable while unloaded, but while using it (lacks loading tag) it is neither loaded nor unloaded, making the profile unusable

[rough maple]

that's fair! You could make for a case that the unloaded profile isn't Loading but, yeah, weird edge case interaction

[quaint narwhal]

I am absolutely in love with "confuckulated"

[wild flame]

It's a great word!

[rough bluff]

I have a prediction, when I do the map for ||Surprise, Surprise||, it is going to look HEAVILY inspired by @quaint pebble's map. So much so you might ask, are you paying homage, or stealing outright? 🙂

[quaint pebble]

I'll be honest in retrospect I think I could have done a lot more with that one 😅
but the rest of the chapter should be a fun mixup from the environments we have been using so far

[rough bluff]

I probably will to a bit more, but what you have is so good it really inspired me. 🙂 (If nothing else I have to do my "every use case thing" otherwise, I might just use yours.)

[wild flame]

Today on IGF:

||We're on mission 2, party's investigating all the stuff (and doing an exceptionally good job of it). During the course of the investigation, they start looking into the Faith (specifically in connection to Makali's death). Part of this is online presence, and I decide that the Faith has a big forum thing - basically Nextdoor specifically for Faith members, combined with reddit and twitter. Nice community engagement thing, keep all your members engaged with each other, keep tabs on them, all nice and good.||

||One of the party's tech-people floats the idea of making a dummy account to try and get an inside perspective. This is a good idea, they do it, they follow a bunch of higher-ups in the church, all is good.||

||And then I'm asked what the name of the site is - I say it's called The Golden Forum - and we all come to a realization. That party member is now jokingly reffered to as The One Posting In Golden Forum.||

[maiden ferry]

||The Forum of the one plumed in golden flame||

[quaint narwhal]

I have ||5 players currently||, so this is likely to get use with me too.

[rough bluff]

Well the non-large party one has EXACTLY enough for up to 5 players. That one does 6-9.

[quaint narwhal]

How to say "I haven't read the whole book" withot saying "I haven't read the whole book"

[rough bluff]

Heh. Yeah, and you have to read the "Battlefield" section of that one to know ||there are two reactors for every PC.|| I often skim that until I'm prepping the battle the week before, personally.

[tame tide]

Holy hell that's... A lot!

[rough bluff]

Yeah, when I run it for 8, I might just change the conditions for each objective to make them take twice as long, then use the normal map, but someone might want to run it as close to as written as possible.

[lilac tartan]

IGF Chapter 2 and Neon Genesis Evangelion spoilers
We are in Act1 Cpt2 and had met ||Loki
Loki:Thanks to my father Odin,I lost my sibling Baldur
In the ooc channel
Me:That looks like Odin forced his son to pilot an Evangelion then triggered some 400%
Our Sherman guy:So we will meet Baldur at the final battle,in a HA mech
Me:And that will be a Sherman,you two will have a Sherman duel||

[rough bluff]

This is mainly my proof of concept on this map. I'm not sure what I might change or tweak, but MASSIVE kudos go to @quaint pebble on this one. I was really inspired by the lighting effects when he did this map and didn't even know it was possible in my CAD software until I started researching it. The fact that he didn't make a stink when I basically said I was going to rip off his map just shows was a good bloke he is, because I NEEDED to try to copy his map, at least once, to learn the process. If he'd objected I would have had to do this whole map twice. So if you end up liking the final result when it's done, full credit really goes to @quaint pebble.

[maiden ferry]

Is this the first combat of ||mission 3?||

[rough bluff]

Yeah, it's ||Surprise, Surprise||.

[amber viper]

Oh that's a really good map

I dig it

[rough bluff]

The neat thing is this one is easier than most to play without zones on. The length of the shadows is a clue to whether an object is tall enough to grand cover.

[tight pier]

finished the lobby screen :)

[lunar panther]

athena wants me to send this

[tight pier]

we are 20 minutes into the session and we are already writing the most unhinged notes

[tame tide]

Holy shit Halo 3 lobby vibes!!

[tight pier]

yeah its the halo 2 lobby :)

its a complete reconstruction from a reference. i'll add the PDN files to the GM resources doc when im truly done with it

[tame tide]

Twas too young for halo 2 💀

Either way I love it so much

[shrewd sorrel]

[tame tide]

"Guys stop cancelling the loading"

[tight pier]

our player's reaction to simply the appearance of gabriel

[tight pier]

this encounter with evelina bondarchuk is going fucking terribly lmao

i think somebody is going to die before this investigation even starts

they rolled a 19 to find a good bar, though

[tight pier]

LMAO one of the PCs had a "secret" meeting with loki and now the other PCs think that they're dating

[lunar panther]

it's very funny to me that the PC accusing the other of dating Loki is absolutely the most likely to be dating that PC

accidental tsundere

[shell bison]

Not a real card, more of a shit post. Please enjoy this painful Steele meme

[heady topaz]

sees phonk Goddamnit he would make Sigma Male Phonk Compilations...

God I can't wait for my players to punch his lights out.

[shell bison]

Act 2 baby

[rough bluff]

Huh. I just looked at the Solstice Rain maps and realized they are smaller than I remembered. I gonna make most of my maps a bit smaller, now, I think.

[covert pike]

ok maybe odd question: I'm looking for something to run for a 28 hour ttrpg game, and I'm wondering if In Golden Flame could be finished in that timeframe?

[rough bluff]

How long are the sessions? Do you know enough about your group to know if they'll finish a lancer combat in a session or less?

[covert pike]

no as in 28 straight hours

combats probably can be beat in 2-3 hours

[rough bluff]

Then no.

You're looking at 30 or more just for the fights.

You can probably do Solstice Rain and MAYBE another adventure in that time. Solstice Rain would take 12-18 hours.

[rough bluff]

Here's a finished version of ||Surprise, Surprise|| with zones. I made two versions, depending on how the PC's start the combat.

[maiden ferry]

The player-run objective bulletin, as of mid-chapter 2

[frail kayak]

||I really like the second one there||

[rough maple]

I joined a campaign partway through mission two and I gotta say I did NOT expect to fight a ||missile corvette||

so I'm into this

[shell bison]

Chapter 2 really is the LAUNDRY LIST arc

[heady topaz]

How'd that fight go for ya? Did anyone die?

[rough maple]

ya, the ultra

it helped that we (I) soaked the Big Whammies Ultra Optional with a sagarmatha core

[heady topaz]

Niiiice

I killed a PC. Not just the mech the actual Pilot

He got better

dw

[maiden ferry]

||The pcs took S1gn3l and the gang prisoner and looked through his stuff, I decided then and there to make S1gn3l relevant to a pc’s backstory by having them know who Lyra was, and intercepting a nhp dead drop meant for the pc. That nhp? CAUSTIC. The handle S1GN3L sold the info to? arcanofex ||

[frail kayak]

||oh shit!||

[orchid seal]

Has anyone run OSR -> Dustgrave -> In Golden Flame? My thought for how to narratively link things is to ||have the Rio Grande stop at Dustgrave for refitting, have Rio get kidnapped, and then come up with some reason why the Rio Grande HAS to continue on, leaving the PCs behind to investigate and rejoin the Union Cavalry as soon as they can by hopping freighters/catching the next Union ship to pass through... cue some amount of time passing and they've ended up stuck in the Long Rim at Hells Gate.||

I'm happy to hear any suggestions/alternative options for ending up there. My bigger question at the moment is how well In Golden Flame will play starting at LL4 and if that's even a decent idea in the first place. I imagine the combats will need some adjustment, but could it be as easy as bumping some of the enemies to T2 at the start and then slowly transitioning to everything being T2?

[maiden ferry]

||So the thing with igf act 1 is that technically, not much of it has to happen. Capella needs to eat dirt, but overall the first three chapters are about making friends on the gate, the icebreaker, and furnace city. Now granted, your pcs are gonna have a hell of a time trying to get invested in hell’s gate showing up at LL4, especially since that’s the last mission of act1, where they go kill capella again. It hits a lot harder when they had to kill Capella once to begin with. If you want, you can reflavor a LOT and maybe make solstice rain take place on Nestor, time-jump the pcs to calliope and have dustgrave both reflavored and take place on furnace city, and then make the campaign about protecting furnace city?

Personally I’d just play igf start to finish though. It’s an amazing story that deserves an act 1||

[rough bluff]

So I see one issue with your initial plan...

||I can't see the Rio Grande actually LANDING at dustgrave. I know it's the smallest carrier, but it's still a carrier. If it doesn't land, Rio can't be kidnapped. However, I did OSR to Dustgrave, so I put some thought into this...||

[orchid seal]

Yeah, I fell in love with In Golden Flame pretty much immediately, but I also feel like OSR is the straightforward introduction to Lancer that my players need, and I'm gonna have an easier time hooking them on the combat first before throwing them into the narrative deep end

[heady topaz]

I personally wouldn't be too worried about narrative deepends. IGF Starts out slow enough to ease newbies into the setting

[rough bluff]

||What I did was have the PC's transfered after OSR. If you're transfered to a new ship, typically you'd take a military transport, but we move GI's all the time on commercial civilian transports when none is available. So I had stavros stopping at the planet for to get a cargo and had Union pay for his expenses if he'd take the PC's to nearest proper jumpgate. I then had him stop at Dustgrave and have the kidnapping happen. The rest of that adventure played out as written, except that the PCs were Stavros's clients instead of coming to him for transport.||

[maiden ferry]

I agree, igf takes the setting one location at a time per mission for a bit. It also has a lot that you can take and just give to your players as setting material, and they can look through it and pick stuff from it to get more invested in both the world and their characters beyond “I am an ex Harrison armory fighter pilot”

[rough bluff]

||Then you just need to get them to Calliope, but they could end up transfered to the Union ship there. Then you just need an excuse for them to get invovled with Hell's gate. Maybe an outreach program like we did in WWII, stationing airmen with other countries before we joined the war...||

[maiden ferry]

It’s also a bit strange because it takes 10 years to get to Calliope, compared to the 6month max to get anywhere else in union

[rough bluff]

It only takes ten years planet time. I'm pretty sure not every planet in union is a half lightyear from a gate.

[maiden ferry]

Oh my god why didn’t I think of that

[rough bluff]

The map I use for union has all the bubbles around the gates reaching out about ten light years (I think). The weird thing about the Long rim isn't the distance as much as the ammount of traffic for a place with no worlds.

[quaint pebble]

Calliope is real out of the way, because it's in the Long Rim
It only gets any through-traffic at all because there's as-yet no frequent Blink access to the Dawnline Shore, as soon as that comes online (within like... less than a decade of narrative present) then virtually the only source of external income for the system will disappear

there won't be a need for a truck stop to get there any more at that point

[orchid seal]

My initial thought was to start them from the beginning of IGF while scaling the encounters to their level. Is there a reason you'd advise against that? I know eventually if we get to act 3 I'll run into issues with them hittling the level cap early, but I feel like I'm already planning and thinking too far ahead

[rough bluff]

I haven't looked at the breakdown, but if I was going to do it, I'd get player buy-in (super important) and then slow play the LL in the first and second act. Give them a bit less than one per mission maybe make it take two mission 4 times, then by the time they hit the end of two, they are in parity.

But I haven't looked at that to see if it works.

[quaint pebble]

Lancer is structured such that you shouldn't necessarily need to make a lot of adjustments other than occasional uptiering if you run a campaign above the recommended LL, but when it covers 0-2 it can do to throw on a couple more optionals on the NPCs because the author would have presumed the players to be much less flexible than they actually are

[rough bluff]

(I did this in my D&D campaign because I wanted to run the original Phandelver advenure, then Tomb of Annhilation, so they didn't make many levels throughout the first part of Tomb, but since the players were PART of the decision, no one complained seriously when they had a long desert at mid levels.)

[dim pelican]

This is what I'm doing! I gave the option to my players: start at LL0 and lvl up normally or start at (where we were) LL3 and level pace would be about half through act 1. They took LL3 and seem happy with the choice even now that we're in ch3.

[rough bluff]

They'll complain, but if they chose it, it's good-natured complaining. 🙂

[orchid seal]

@rough bluff Thanks for the narrative linking suggestions! ||I'm still partial to finding some way to have Rio get kidnapped in Dustgrave and have her replace/be combined with Siren in IGF, but that's in part because I'm playing up her importance as an NPC in OSR and hoping my players latch on to her||

[rough bluff]

||I did that too, I just went HARD on the manic pixie dreamgirl stuff with Emily, so they latched on to her fine. Rio is practically their boss throughout a lot of OSR since most groups have no faith in the Lt., so the dynamic with Rio isn't the same as you can make it with Emily.||

||If you have Rio kidnapped, that's two "superiors" captured in two consecutive adventures.||

[rough bluff]

||If you decide to go your route instead of mine, you have to do a lot of thinking about how to rewrite Dustgrave from the ground up. It's actually way worse of a problem child than IGF. (I was just thinking about how I would do it, so I have a lot of problems jumping into my head.) Here's the problems with Dustgrave as you want to implement it, as I see it.||

||1) Virgas' plan just simply doesn't work with a union carrier. They have their own staff and even if they rely on subalterns, Virgas's plan requires no one to be watching. It falls apart if the entire carrier goes into full alert the moment their NHP stops functioning. This means you need to rewrite most if not all of the investigation. 2) Dustgrave relies on the PCs being alone and without resources. If Rio is kidnapped, they have the might of a light carrier behind them. You lose Creighton immediately, because he couldn't be part of the kidnapping plan, if you want him you need to invent a reason for them to go to the print shop when they have no need to go to the print shop. The relationship with the Port Authority is very different if they are there with a carrier showing the might of Union through all this. The PCPA probably only gets contacted as a courtesy. 3) There's no reason at all for the PCs to be doing this. You don't send mech calvary to investigate a kidnapping, you send your MPs. That's their job. Also, every combat has to be recast in the light off, "Why are the PC's doing this combat when the captain can just send ALL the carrier's lancers. All those people that just helped retake Nov Elysia? Dozens of lancers and scores of infantry? They have all the same connections to Rio. You have to eliminate them from the narrative somehow.||

[orchid seal]

||Ooooh, that's a good point. My plan is to play Rio as the person passing along their orders but also watching out for them and trying to keep them safe. In my head they go after Farris because they're ordered to, vs Rio because they want to, but it is a bit repetitive regarding plot beats. I like the idea of keeping Emily and personifying her and just having Rio straight up disappear on shore leave, hinting very heavily that something is going on here and these events are related. Your points about the carrier make sense as well, which leads me back to the idea that the Rio Grande is forced to depart immediately and doesn't have the time to throw the full force of Union behind an investigation, but allows the PCs to stay and rendezvous with the Lancer Corps later (a later that never comes, as the PCs and Rio end up at Hells Gate).||

[rough bluff]

BTW, I've moved on from trying to talk you out of it and now I'm working the problem (as of last post.) Problem is at this point I don't have any solutions, so if I sound negative, that's step 1).

[orchid seal]

haha, I'm coming around to your ideas tbh, I just need to figure out a good justification for ||Rio coming along on the transfer||

[rough bluff]

||The problem with THAT is two fold 1) how on earth can you justify the ship taking at multiyear journy without it's NHP when it just needs to hang out a few days to resolve the issue. The ship is essentially down for repairs once it loses Rio. 2) you lose Stavros and Emily also, since there's no reason for them to be involved until the party has to leave.||

||Oh, yeah, Rio and the Rio Grande cannot be seperated voluntarily. That just doesn't work. It's a no starter. The carrier HAS to be there the entire time she is. HER NAME IS THE CARRIRER'S NAME. She's its actual mind. It's all or nothing with Rio and the Rio Grande. Your plot falls apart otherwise.||

||Okay, here's a solution to ONE of the carrier problems. It's very possible that no one on the Rio Grande has investigative training. Usually you send a JAG out for this stuff, but I discounted that because the ship has to be able to be self sufficient for years at a time, but it could have regular MPs that are just street cop-level, and RIO could be in charge of all investigations. That doesn't solve your other problems, but it solves that one.||

||In that scenario, the PC probably aren't the only ones investigating. There are probably a dozen team, bordering on AWOL, taking matters into their own hands, and the PCs are just the ones who start making headway.||

[orchid seal]

@rough bluff Thanks for the help and guidance! I can probably figure it out from here, I have plenty of time 😛 . Everyones input was really helpful and answered my biggest questions about how to handle the LLs, thanks everyone!

[signal canyon]

Just bought this the other day after having my eye on it for months (I think it was the Win With Dice interview that finally sealed the deal).
I've never made a purchase like this before but gosh, there's just soooo much to work with here!

[hazy monolith]

I did this, I added an extra mission (without a LL reward) at the end of the OSR that got the team dissapeared and sent out to Calliope by the UIB, and I just had Dustgrave be a stop on the way where they transferred ships. (Now having a UIB contact, they were asked to look into it since they were there.) I started IGF at Tier 2, and have overall buffed most encounters to be harder.

[signal canyon]

Like, I don't even have any players lined up yet, nor do I have any GMing experience but I feel like the Lancer setting is just so much richer for having Calliope in it.

Sorry, just needed to gush about the book for a sec.

I do have a question actually

I haven't read everything yet, but I was thinking of floating the idea to my potential players that one of them actually play as Howl.

Would that cause any huge conflicts that can't be easily worked around?

[warped ibex]

oh! PCs playing as NPCs is actually a thing a lot of GMs permit for this module -- ||with Howl specifically, it might require a decent bit of modification to the Impact Dynamics plotline in Act 2||

[wild flame]

Plot conflicts: Probably!

That can't be worked around: depends on how brave you're feeling

If you're down to go off-book then Fuck It We Ball

[austere prism]

Howl has a fairly big role in Act 2, but honestly you can slot in other NPCs in there

[warped ibex]

||i can't say how much modification it'd require, given its only drafts||

||of course, you'd also obviously have to change the Hellfire League downtime||

[signal canyon]

Thanks for the info

No matter what I'd want to (gently) push for at least one Nestorian on the team, but I really like Howl's backstory in particular.

[pliant ibex]

For reference, I believe Howl was one of the original PCs for the campaign that turned into IGF, the others being Switch, Ratio Salvager, and a character you won't meet until act 2 (||Harris/Johan||). That's why they're involved in specific missions for each faction, iirc.

[past agate]

VEX YOU'VE DONE IT AGAIN

Wasn't past the first page of the preface before I threw my hands up and declared this the best damn thing I've seen all month

[thorn hinge]

Many such cases

[past agate]

I am a new addition to the fan club (almost spelled it flan club by mistake)

[wild flame]

It can be both

[thorn hinge]

Join the fan club, we have flan

[wild flame]

But yeah, FIVE MINUTES is so fucking good

[rough bluff]

It is so good. I remember a similar post from myself

[wild flame]

Due to a minor communication error, the flan club consists of people interested in air circulation devices, while the fan club is about flan. Both clubs consist entirely of the same people, who find the entire situation hilarious and refuse to fix it on general principle.

[thorn hinge]

Welp, that sounds like Hell's Gate canon to me

[wild flame]

Put it in the Community Canon Compendium (non-Comprehensive)

Aka the parts of our brains where this setting lives rent-free

[shrewd sorrel]

I got another friend of my to run IGF the same way
they weren't sure what to run so i sent them my players version of the PDF (just like the first 30 or so pages?) and was like "read Five Minutes"
and im p sure they're running a campaign now

[wild flame]

yesss, it spreads

[thorn hinge]

One of my players started running IGF, but my players are just finishing up chapter 4 so I cut him a "spoiler free" version of the book up to that point carefully redacting ||the andros and switch secrets||. One of my other players is in that game too, for extra weirdness.

[thorn hinge]

but yeah Bullet, I had a very similar initial reaction when I first read one of the earliest playtest releases. I actually had gotten through session zero when I discovered that there even was a Pilot Net thread for this, and I threw together a cut-and-paste meme about it. I still have it somewhere...

okay technically it was the other thread, this one didn't exist yet. If you're interested in more spoiler free GM talk and act 2&3 reveals, check out https://discord.com/channels/426286410496999425/909574961931362365

ah, found it

[past agate]

ya

[shrewd sorrel]

I just remembered a thing
one of my players scanned ERROR
i gave them the info but also I described scanning it as sort of "infecting" their mech in a way
so they get weird flashes of symbols and random code that pops up in their sensors and visuals now, probably until at least the end of the mission
but i'm thinking i could go a little harder. i don't want it to mechanically effect them in any way (i'd honestly like to give them a boon of some kind, if anything) but i do want to do something interesting and kinda techno-horror with this
anyone have any good ideas for how I could fuck with my player while still giving them a smol boon of some kind?

[frail kayak]

"fuck with the players while giving them a small boon" seems to be the design of ||Astral Stigmata, and while giving them one tick might be boring, if the party gets the second one from The Crone, fun stuff starts to happen. If you do this, I wouldn't tell them about the Astral Stigmata tick until after they finish speaking to The Crone, though, as I'd want to preserve the ominous ambiguity of "Something is Coming". ||

[shrewd sorrel]

thing is, ||they already all have astral stigmata, and they know they have it from letting "something's coming" tick down. not because i told them but because they're pretty smart and 2/3 of my players have played call of cthulu||

||i can't give them another astral stigmata when they've already got one, and i've specifically told them having one is bad||

unrelated, we might run lowest bidder work tomorrow
its not the best, but i'm pretty happy with this map

all but the furthest CP is within move boost OC boost

I added a bit of difficult/dangerous terrain (clouds of acid)
except for the size 4, my tort is gonna be able to pull anyone they want off a control point and towards them and out of cover for our sherman/empakaai

the acid clouds are gonna deal 2 energy and 2 heat to anyone who ends their turn in them, otherwise its just difficult terrain

also have guardian angel ready, if they decide to go that way

I really like tht foundry lets me add fucked up green smoke clouds to maps

really sells the aesthetic

[maiden ferry]

dude that map is fantastic

very fallout

[shrewd sorrel]

The whole planet feels very fallout
dont go outside without your hardsuit or you die
everything is awful and covered in acide rain

||Barbatos is the Elite Demolisher, but he also has +5 sensors, Tear Down, and Predatory Logic, because I'm a cool and nice GM||

also my party fucking H A T E S seeders and engi's, so any chance i get to torture them I do

[maiden ferry]

where did you get the maps if I might ask?

[shrewd sorrel]

I made them with starcraft 1 map maker and starlight furnace assets

I'm a jerk. The regular seeder i've turned into an Elite Seeder because I know it will specifically traumatize my party

But yeah, I just downloaded scm draft (http://www.stormcoast-fortress.net/cntt/software/scmdraft/)
and then used a bunch of starlight furnace assets and some foundry lighting stuff

it looks better at a distance than it does up close

[maiden ferry]

thats really cool, thanks!

[rough bluff]

I've probably asked this before, but does anyone know any IGF actual plays?

[maiden ferry]

I almost ended up doing one with my group but just... didn't

regretting it now but oh well

[thorn hinge]

I have recordings of every session but.. haven't done anything with them yet...

[maiden ferry]

dunno if people would want to watch a fairly rp heavy campaign starting in the second mission

also would need to ask my group

[rough bluff]

That WOULD be a big ask of the listener.

[maiden ferry]

yeah lol

[shrewd sorrel]

I know my players wouldn't really be into it
and we've very chill, our game definitely isn't suited to a podcast/actual play

25% shitposting, at least

Every. Single. Session.

I love my players i swear

[maiden ferry]

Im terrified, my "least horny pc" is a|| knight of the dark core ||and I dread the intro to ||mission 3||

"grand mistress" AHHHHHHHHH

[wild flame]

Yeah that tracks

[thorn hinge]

That's much how I made all my maps, though for Guardian Angel I used a tilepack and tiled to make the clifface. I wanted that ravine to have some real depth. It's Asphodel, don't forget the rain!

I love seeing all the different ways people make these maps, it's really cool, and there's so much talent going on

[rough bluff]

That's a nifty intro. I'd steal it if I didn't already have my passive scans. They take more work than I like.

[shrewd sorrel]

I couldn't find anything to let me add tons of depth to the map (and also i'm lazy)

but if you squint and dont think about it too hard the ravine looks kinda deep

[thorn hinge]

Oh, this is a module I made, it triggers on every activation and has a similar animation for the start of each new round.

[shrewd sorrel]

[maiden ferry]

thats rad

I keep wanting to switch to foundry, but Im too comfy on r20

[thorn hinge]

I wasn't sure it'd be worth the effort to make a deep ravine, but then my duskwing player flew up over it after the hornet and got immobilized. They failed the check to recover fell 13 units of height and hit the bottom

[shrewd sorrel]

THE BEST FEELING

i dont have any flying PC's, and no one who's gonna interact with the ravine (unless they get pushed in)

[thorn hinge]

The Hornet got away, and Kraken is NOT going to forget that. They're still trying to track the fucker down

[shrewd sorrel]

so i feel a bit safer not making it a huge threat

[rough bluff]

In Solstice Rain I had two pyros in the first fight. I gave them the call signs Aloe and Vera. They killed aloe but Vera escaped. Still, one of the PCs was trying to kill him as he fled and he developed a vendetta. Every mission since, he's appeared, with ONE MORE template or boost. They are on the last mission now and he's as tough or tougher as the boss in the boss fight.

[shrewd sorrel]

actually if I do bring a hornet my tort is just gonna puppet systems them into range of our empakaai and it's gonna get fuckin' wrecked ><

they hate hornets almost as much as they hate engi's and seeders

[shrewd sorrel]

I have an engi that survived
every time there's an engi in a combat i upgrade them
last time it was a veteran
now they're an elite

[rough bluff]

Vera's final form.

[shrewd sorrel]

[rough maple]

oh that's a cute token

also, heh, leave it to me to write " a few words" of backstory and end up with 800+

[tame tide]

I never actually read last final minutes

BUT GOD DAMN I WAS MISSING OUT!!!!!

||“Three of you in my last five minutes,” I answer. “Took
four of you to take me down. Make sure you mention that when you’re drinking over this tonight. Oh, wait,
but you don’t have anyone left to drink with, do you?” Despite everything, I crack a smile.|| Goes SO HARD!

And all of the passage after that IS SO GOOD

[pliant ibex]

if you've got NRFaW, there's a similar thing from there you could use, with a table about how it affects them out of combat (NRFaW spoilers) ||Its name is Cynosure, it's gained in a very similar way to what you're describing (getting extra info out of malfunctioning robots), and it causes them to be a bit unstuck in causality and time,|| iirc

[rough bluff]

What's NRFaW. It's too early to figure out an unfamiliar acronym. 🙂

[wild flame]

No room for a wallflower

[rough bluff]

Ah!

[pliant ibex]

I should have said the full thing the first time, apologies

[rough bluff]

No worries. No one ever does. I just usually shorten it to Wallflower, so I didn't think of that accronym. Now I wouldn't have a problem with it, mental realestate is just precious for the first hour or two after I wake up. 🙂

[rough bluff]

Hey, I can't download the tokens @fallen geyser created and posted here: #1059603134504255528 message Does anyone have them that can post them somewhere else? Maybe @thorn hinge and Vex would be cool with Ada putting them on her google token share?

[fallen geyser]

Huh, weird, I can still download them. I wonder if this is Discord doing some fuckery.

[rough bluff]

I think it's fighting with my virus scanner, maybe. Let me try that. Others might have the issue, though, even if I solve mine.

Yeah, it was my virus checker. I just didn't want to put in an exception until I had confirmations something bad hadn't happened to the link.

I have them.

(I'm about to actually prep the first fight with hell hounds. My maps are ahead of my personal prep.)

[past agate]

no fucking way

[thorn hinge]

:3 a bunch of those entries are easter eggs and references, but they're all jsut obscure enough to be fun objects if you don't know what they are.

[past agate]

I've gotta keep looking

[frail kayak]

I had The Game Master (the Athena class NHP) ask for something called "Contained Sprit: Perplexingly on its Own", and kept them guessing for an entire mission before they were able to seek it out it in the Bazzar

[wild flame]

Contained Sprit: Perplexingly on its Own
oh fuck me that's good

[past agate]

You'll have to explain that one to me

[thorn hinge]

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

[past agate]

aaah

[past agate]

still reading the module for the first time

I am in awe. This is the best thing I've ever read

[maiden ferry]

when you're done, make sure to read the act 2 draft and watch your jaw hit the fucking floor

[pliant ibex]

Only if you want to! It helps if you're wanting to GM knowing what comes after act 1, but it's still a WIP and not really feature-complete yet

Does contain another piece of starter fiction on par with Five Minutes, though (imo)

[maiden ferry]

Thats fair, I definitely look at it from a gm perspective. Theres so much foreshadowing in act 1 that gets paid off, even for things you didn't think could possibly be foreshadowing like ||bartender mf||. Tbh learning that was the final push that got me to run the campaign

[pliant ibex]

It definitely should be read by anyone who wants to GM act 1, but like, some people like surprises, and some people don't like when there's placeholders for certain things (like between combat beats)

[heady topaz]

My favourite twist from Act 1 to Act 2 is Chaac, especially if the party picks him up.

[shrewd sorrel]

Me: So you see an old friend. They're an elite seeder.
My Party: So, we Orbital Drop...also, my solid core is maxed out

[pastel tiger]

Does anyone have any good minis for Andros? I swear I saw some here before that looked like the depiction in the book itself, but can't find it again. Want something ready for when the players meet him in Chapter 1 Soon ™️

[rough bluff]

Yeah, hold on, I was just collecting them from Ada et al.

||Ignatius,|| ||Andros 1||, and ||Later Andros.||

Not mine, I was just doing this same search last night.

[wild flame]

@shrewd sorrel has a banger andros token. Not sure if he's posted it in here.

[maiden ferry]

Sorry for the ping bunzi but here's the token

@pastel tiger there you go

[shrewd sorrel]

probably has already been posted here, but if I can find it I'll post it again

[shrewd sorrel]

p sure theyve been posted before, I didn't make these, but these are the Andros token im using

[maiden ferry]

one of the coolest facts that one of my players had to tell me is that pentaborane-9 is both one of the most flammable substances known to man and also is green fire

||I let that slip when I was trying to convince my plot-savy players that andros was not, in fact, a phoenix after they killed him in mission 1||

[shrewd sorrel]

||My party guessed it and I've spent the last 2 months throwing them off the trail||

[pastel tiger]

Thanks all, got my pick here, these are all great

[shrewd sorrel]

unrelated, they met ||the weather witches today, and Sunny (my Tortuga Pilot) now has a crush on the youngest witch. the witch is very cute. she gave sunny her number. there wasn't a ton of info on the witches so I just leaned hard into what my party expected them to be (which they elaborated on as I set the scene): a trio of ladies that were slightly unhinged, as covens tend to be. One old, one middle aged, and one young. they're just all related, cause why not. 3 generations of witches. we spent about an hour just chatting, hanging out, and of course casting the bones to determine the future. it was all very fun.||

[maiden ferry]

Dude wait that’s perfect that’s how I get my pcs to care about furnace city - one of my pcs would get into a relationship with an eidolon if they gave him positive attention

[tame tide]

You wouldn't get into a relationship with an eidolon?

[shell bison]

All good!

[lilac tartan]

ngl I was determined to join a IGF game after read Last five minute by chance

[tame tide]

I'm sad I missed out

[lilac tartan]

can find great or even zealous courage,spirit of sacrifice and heroism,also violence and self-destructive tendency in the passage

I'm soooooo love it

This IS Calliope

[past agate]

YOU GOT IT BOSS

[fallen geyser]

The terrain is looking pretty good

Conditions on Asphodel are meant to resemble Earth in the Archean Eon

[rough bluff]

Oh, that's a great reference.

I'm aiming for "This looks good on it own, but in Foundry with rain effects turned to full, it looks AWESONE!"

[quaint pebble]

This terrain looks great

I am excited to see how it looks with the vfx you want to add

[heady topaz]

Those first two are mine

[rough bluff]

Awesome, I had posting something without attribution.

Seriously, it bugs me. 🙂

[heady topaz]

tis fine m8

I'm probably gonna upload them to the community folder

just remember next time

[rough bluff]

I'm glad, but I'm more glad you took credit. Yeah, get those in the folder. 🙂 I'm using the pyro.

[heady topaz]

The big firey one? Yeah that's one I'm gonna use for ||Cappella's second fight||

[rough bluff]

Ditto.

[maiden ferry]

||The plan is that there’s two mutually exclusive choices, and if they pick one it locks out the other. Inferno/Love, Continuance/Abstract (names pending). The first is temperament, the second is a grounding in reality. Not sure if I want to do it this way or reward them with the abilities for developing her personality in rp|| man I need to get better at spoilering stuff on phone

@heady topaz babe wake up new nhp dropped

[long otter]

Abstract looking here like it is an incomplete abstract of itself is funny

[maiden ferry]

Yeah I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I’m considering having it be “until the end of your next turn, you may count spaces adjacent to your allies as adjacent spaces”

And [LOVE] is a bit generic and is gonna get reworked

[past agate]

Until the end of of your next turn, your allies may

[meager vine]

do y'all have music suggestions for ch2 on the icebreaker?

[maiden ferry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUQrAnuof5o

I use vaporwave backing tracks for everything

[thorn hinge]

vaporwave, mallsoft, electroswing, synthwave for combats

[maiden ferry]

Carpenter Brut is the sound of lancer for me

[meager vine]

love it

ty

[heady topaz]

For the ||Sunbird|| fight, I'd suggest the following:
||- Sol Squadron, Ace Combat 7

• Showdown, Project Wingman
• God Shattering Star(rain), Fire Emblem 3 Houses
• Contact WIth You, Armored Core 6
• Daredevil, Ace Combat 7
• Mechanized Memories, Armored Core Verdict Day
• C Weapon, AC6
• The Man Who Burned It All, AC6
• Echoes Of Coral, AC6
• Kings, Project Wingman
  ||

[past agate]

Finished the book. Had me on the edge of my seat just reading the GM instructions

[signal canyon]

Might try to get around this by trading GM responsibilities for act 2 with the player who wanted to play as Howl if and when we get that far.

[shrewd sorrel]

||Contact With You|| Is the single most appropriate song for this fight ever (and it helped that 2/3 of my players got bullied by that boss). There's also a very solid synthwave version of it. Would recommend

[tight pier]

|| https://youtu.be/JN6Jr1yyLis?si=mpU_Ux6DHJV9Liov ||

this or ||Skirmish 3||

||sunbird one|| is THE time to put the ||Battlestar Galactica music|| on full blast

[rough bluff]

I have a question. I've never tried exporting a scene so others could import it. Do you think it would be a good idea for me to export my completed scenes with lighting, etc, for others to import?

[tight pier]

it would certainly make foundry setup easier

just make sure you dont rely on many/any plugins that people dont have

[rough bluff]

I don't think I do, I just have lighting and some walls the channel the lighting on the maps. If I did anything really fancy, like a leveled map, I'd call out modules.

I might need a volunteer to help me test as some point. 🙂

[woeful saddle]

feel free to ping me if nobody else is around at the time :) i plan on running IGF sometime after my current campaign resolves

[maiden ferry]

So here I am, running mission 2, my party is deciding to hit every single possible investigation line and inventing some new ones before getting to either arc, and they visit the Gift Bronze casino. I have the floor master security casino guy pull them aside as they're being conspicuous af, and the influencer rolls everybody is a fan and hits nat 20. I have to then have this guy be both very helpful and point them in the wrong direction. I even reminded them that its not mind control, not a single "read a situation"

[meager vine]

that would be rad, feel free to ping me as well to test if needed

[meager vine]

thank you 🙏 I am noting all y'alls suggestions down

[grizzled wasp]

Look i just saw the Vex tweet about the gun with attitude and a partner it wants found and let me say I adore this

[maiden ferry]

I'm attempting the very risky gambit of having a pc meet ||Lyra Von Krannen|| in mission 2 with full knowledge of who she is, an in-game day after meeting Loki. Im feeling incredibly smug since this was a private rp thing (horizon stuff) and the pc didn't put it together, even asked if she knew Dr. Nyambose (she did ofc), but ||didn't realize that Loki's father and Lyra's husband are the same guy. Even snuck in some complaining about Switch.||

[maiden ferry]

Wait is it Van or Von

Because it’s spelled Van but I’ve never met anyone with that

[rough bluff]

I believe one is Dutch and one is German.

[heady vale]

The Forbidden Book (I had it custom printed so I could more easily DM with it and notate it, i need a phys copy to dm)

[frail kayak]

tasty

[rough bluff]

Is the materials clock mentioned on the 102 downtime supposed to be the salvage clock? I think the term got changed but not all the references were updated.

[dense crescent]

I believe so

[rough bluff]

@fallen geyser Is the material clock vs the salvage clock references on page 102 a known typo? It looks like it's supposed to be one clock, but two clocks are named. It's in the salvage downtime.

[fallen geyser]

Can you remind me to fix this tomorrow maybe

[rough bluff]

Yep!

[heady vale]

FINALLY did art of my whole golden flames party im dming for

[digital raven]

@rough bluff my players just finished Anti-Capital and have the highest praises for your map. They all run their own games so it's definitely an informed approval.

[rough bluff]

Did you use the static or staged version? Just curious.

[digital raven]

oh, the staged, that's why it blew their socks off

The shifting dangerous terrain kept the fear in them even after they knocked out the non-ultra units by round 3. Finished the fight at the beginning of round 6.

[tight pier]

player (minor ch2 spoilers) ||went off alone and took their Icebreaker downtime and acquired the ID390 rifle, and the write-protected storage device,|| and drew this awesome art of the incident

[thorn hinge]

I love that ||gun. I need more DMRs in my mecha.|| The fun part for me is that I added that as kickstarter backer gear, and then in the remix game I acquired it; committing an obscene act of metagaming by editing the book my GM is running to inject gear I wanted to see into the canon so I could use it.

When I edited my token for it I patterned it off the ||SVD 'dragunov'||, but like all lancer bits that's a matter of personal taste.

[rough bluff]

That is awesome.

I should build a character around that story in my humor series. 🙂

[heady vale]

~~I'm so embarrassed, Vex reblogged my art but the post had voice to text pick up of my DMing of a game lmao ~~

Anyway I want to try to do this in color now, ill share if i update it

[tight pier]

that's hilarious! there is nothing goofier than editing the book itself to make your GM let you get you something you want

the ||SVD|| is a fucking fun gun honestly. big wooden rifles make me happy (FAL ❤️). i gave my player the ||Halo Reach DMR|| for reference though since i thought it fit the "||compact, accurate marksman rifle||" description perfectly

[rough bluff]

I told my group tonight that for the wallflower campaign the other GM is starting, I want to play an escaped John Harrison III clone. Then I mentioned that gave me 13 escaped brothers, and somone suggested we ALL play John Harrison clones. 🙂

[maiden ferry]

The plot of the hobbit ensues

[rough bluff]

This is your reminder to fix the clock issue in the salvage downtime on page 102. Two different clocks referenced when I believe you meant 1. Also, feel free to tell us the fix. 🙂

[thorn hinge]

my team is Having A Normal One™️

[fallen geyser]

Fixed

[shell bison]

PFFFF

[rough bluff]

This hour on CLOCK WATCH!!!! It's ||Enemy Attention|| clock on 166, ||Enemy Awareness|| on 167 in the red box.

[fallen geyser]

Fixed

[rough bluff]

I think I've checked every clock refrence now, BTW. 🙂 I was setting up clocks today and yesterday, as you might have guessed.

[signal canyon]

Been skimming through here as I prep to (hopefully) run IGF, and I've seen a lot of folks post some really nice maps, but I was wondering if anyone had publicly shared a full or partial set of maps?

[thorn hinge]

Check the pinned comment here, we have a community share document

I donpt think we have full map coverage yet, but we're close. My 'map' for ||Event Hoizon|| probably isn't something anybody else might use, and I'm missing ch5 maps because I'm not there yet. I'm ending ch4 next session though so I'll be making those soon

Defendi has been making rapid progress on some killer top down maps

[rough bluff]

I’m putting up the second map from chapter 3 and exports of the mission one maps tonight.

Thanks!

[thorn hinge]

Oh also my set is missing ||Railroaded and Powerhouse|| from ch2 because ||they're optional fights and my team missed them||. I hope to make them eventually.

[quaint pebble]

a few of the folders you will see in the community archive aren't full because they're being made for in-progress campaigns, but that does hopefully mean they wil be complete (or near complete, there's some optional scenes) eventualy 😅

[thorn hinge]

I was gonna share my latest map and updates from my campaign tonight but we're in a windstorm and haven't had power for ~4 hours

[quaint pebble]

I should start on mission 3 maps myself, we've got at least one more session of narrative before I'll need any but I'm not sure what route they will be taking

[rough bluff]

You were likely not perusing when I made the original offers, @signal canyon, but I have an open offer to make a map for community members if they need one I haven't done yet. I have no need to do the maps in order.

[signal canyon]

I might have to come back on desktop to see yall's pinned comments

I can usually see them on mobile but I'm not sure I can in this case.

[wild flame]

#1059603134504255528 message here, a direct link to the post

[signal canyon]

👍

[rough bluff]

There are a lot of great tokens in some of those links too. I just raided them as I started prepping the end of mission 1.

[rough bluff]

Uploaded ||Guardian Angel|| maps and the grid settings for the square form factor. Also the imports of the first three as Foundry exports, with lighting etc. I'll probably do the readme for the Foundry newbies tomorrow.

[frail kayak]

oh right, I should upload some more of the tokens I've made

[rough bluff]

YES! (and give us a little preview or something so I know if I should check it right away.)

[frail kayak]

@thorn hinge, I made a Faith Of The One recolor of your ||Parrallel||, can I upload it?

Alright, the new minis can all be found under the Minis/Faith of the One folder.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ROBRODVRXoIMJyVxu7Fwfe6QD4j_2Dwb?usp=drive_link
||Deluge and Lobber||

Elite Variants of base NPCs

And some Suldan NPC classes (pictured are Phantom and Titan)

[thorn hinge]

Of course! mine's a barely edited pile of retrograde gms sp1, I made it a year and a half ago lmao.

[frail kayak]

alright!

[tame tide]

Oo

Looks fancy

[rough bluff]

I fully intend to phone this one in. 🙂 One sentence description and all that, and there are a lot of maps in this part, so finding an "easy one" is a win.

[quaint pebble]

well it's a very pretty kind of phoned in 😅

[rough bluff]

Sometimes you get a really good background image to start from and think, "You know, this works if I just throw some mist, debris, and zones right on this image." 🙂

Although, honestly, everything feels phoned in after ||Anti-Capital||.

[quaint pebble]

Well I can think of at least one act 2 draft map you might be able to put a similar amount of effort into if you get up to it :p

[rough bluff]

I haven't looked at Act 2, but I'm hoping to finish Act 1 before it's out.

[tame tide]

Is that the ||falling skyhook?||

[rough bluff]

That sounds fun. Like it's right up my alley. We'll see if this one turns into a particle simulation by the end like ||Anti-Capital|| did. 🙂 I was seriously afraid it was just going to stop rendering at some point.

[maiden ferry]

You could also make several maps staged not during the fight, but ||by virtue of their position in the crisis. The timewave stuff comes to mind||

[heady vale]

Hi I can't find peoples different maps of calliopes because mobile discord is dog shit to search on now

There was a labelled map of calliope someone made

[rough bluff]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SUZx4YIG9xyEtBwYjZGqicFdYQk05vFzSw_Z97O-fMY/edit#gid=0

[heady vale]

Looked there, what i was looking for wasn't there

[rough bluff]

If you mean the pink/purple one, that's in my archive. If you mean the blue one, I'm not sure who made it.

[heady vale]

If i find it I'll update!

[rough bluff]

ARe you looking for the blue one?

[heady vale]

This was the one, plus yours

I wanted both

[rough bluff]

I'm sure I can find it if you give me more info. I'll search real quick, hold on.

#1059603134504255528 message

There's another, still looking.

#909574961931362365 message

That second one is the one you're probably looking for.

[latent lintel]

Hmmm?

[heady vale]

There's a red one not labelled i have saved i cant find the credit for

[heady vale]

Oh i just like your calliope planet ref!

Saving it for my players

Oh the red one is yours!

I think?

[rough bluff]

Oh, yeah, that was a WIP before I added labels.

[heady vale]

This one may just look similar to yours aaaaaa

Got it!

Ty

[rough bluff]

Mine is in my link on the spreadsheet.

[heady vale]

Bet!

[rough bluff]

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1dHD2TQHWJ-2GVgQNQvv_nFF6O6mjY_JP

[tame tide]

Oh I forgot to upload mine

[heady topaz]

These look awesome

[heady vale]

Thank you guys!

I've got like, 4 different maps of the place now

[light mist]

are the coolant pipes in face to a name meant to go off one at a time, or is it a cumulative thing where they're all active by the last round?

[rough bluff]

Are you asking if they are persistant, once broken. My read on the description is yes. They don't seem to have a duration.

[light mist]

yeah, that's what i was asking
that sounds like the more fun way to run the map anyway
thanks!

[tame tide]

||??? Teleports when it moves doesn't it?||

||God damn that amount of cover is going to look painful with teleportation! Looks great!!!||

[heady vale]

If I may ask out of curiosity, how far into act one with maps are you :0 ?

[rough bluff]

I'm three into chapter 3. I haven't counted the total in chapter 3, so I don't know how far through that I am. 🙂

[wild flame]

8 total

[rough bluff]

So a bit until the adventure's halfway point. Maybe 45%

[maiden ferry]

Yeah missions 4 and 5 have like what, 6 combats between them?

[rough bluff]

Maybe more than half, then. The first three chapters are loaded with maps.

[tame tide]

+chapter 2 and 3 are basically "you need all these maps available cos you don't know what your party are doing first"

My game is sadly on break for a month which is painful so I should when I have free time just make the next missions worth of maps... Maybe even pulling a defendi and making maps my players might not even encounter

[rough bluff]

I like that version of "Pulling a defendi," as opposed to the current version, "saying something super inappropriate during a funeral."

[tame tide]

Uh oh

Hopefully I don't accidentally do that when "pulling a Defendi"

[rough bluff]

"Boy, I never realized how much he looked like Kissinger." "Somebody set their makeup to party!" "I'm not the only one here who's stoned, right?"

[tame tide]

Aight

[rough bluff]

||[Error]|| uploaded to the share.

[willow cloak]

I think that we, as a community, can come together to change the commonly accepted meaning.

[heady vale]

Are you doing all of the maps or just the ones your group does? It would be entirely valid if it's just the ones your group does

[frail kayak]

no he's an absolute madlad (appreaciative)

[rough bluff]

You can choose between the answer "All" and "I don't know." They mean the same thing in this case, since I haven't started running. 🙂

[heady vale]

I- wait what

Wait are you pre-prepping all of this

[rough bluff]

So I'm prepping every map in the multiple styles from Solstice Rain (Hex, Square, with zones and without.

Yeah, I often start prepping a game a year or more out. That way I can take my time if I need to.

Get an idea of what's necessary. Not always every session. Like my D&D campaign I've secured all the adventures, etc, through level 20, but I only prep about two months out because I know there won't be any surprises.

[wild flame]

defendi has gone mad with power

(and by power i mean image editing software)

[wild flame]

meanwhile i'm here prepping week-to-week for 2 games

[past agate]

defendi'd

[maiden ferry]

deployment zones 30 paces from each other

[rough bluff]

Was that a suggestion or a joke? 🙂

[maiden ferry]

both

[rough bluff]

I do have 30 spaces to use. I haven't looked at the enemy mechs yet.

[shell bison]

The key player in that fight is the ||Elite Slinger|| who, thanks to an optional has a range 8 on weapons and abilities instead of 5, but some extra space for the allies should suffice

[rough bluff]

Usually I put them far apart when they have 15 and 20 range, not 8. 🙂

[shell bison]

Fair point, just that particular enemy has a mechanic that uses protocols for set up then pay off.

[rough bluff]

Ah, you didn't mention that. I haven't read that NPC yet. So they advantage from breathing room is what you're saying.

[shell bison]

Mhm. There is also the potential inclusion of a ||Sniper|| for a certain number of players. So adjust to that info if you feel it is needed.

[rough bluff]

I'm willing to follow you all's advice, I not asking questions to argue, I'm asking because some of the responses I was getting seemed to contradict the advice, and I was trying to understand what you meant. I love imput on these maps, especially when they are past the point where I've done a really deep read, because I can miss stuff.

[tame tide]

Oo major improvements from the first one you posted

Those small details and rivers really add to it

[toxic stump]

Another art from our campaign

[rough maple]

got no art (that isn't stolen) but I suppose I -could- plug the drabble I wrote for a character backstory?

[rough bluff]

Yeah, sometimes I post these for direct feedback. Sometimes I just do it so that people can see how the sausage is made. That first posting I didn't like much. I was in my "This is shit. I am shit. The world is made of shit. Why would I even do this, I'm so bad at it" phase of creation. But it can be interesting to see the awkward phases so that people can say, "Oh, so that's how things come together. Maybe I should keep plucking away at my own project even if I don't like how it looks." Tim Powers (author) once told me "All first drafts are bad. If your first draft isn't bad, you are doing something wrong."

[quaint pebble]

yeah I often find that I'm iffy on something until I add more detail and then I'm like "oh this is good actually"

[tame tide]

Definitely

For me it happens when the flat seamless textures stop being flat and seamless as it starts getting more cluttered with detail. Be that things on the floor, shadows, lights, cover, etc

[rough bluff]

I really like what both of you do with light.

[tame tide]

Thanks :D, I do it and add a bunch of filters because without it. The maps kinda look flat

[shell bison]

Oh jeez, I didn't mean to come off as defensive. I just look at the enemy op first and consider how the maps I use can benefit both the players and the opfor. I love your work and can imagine many of your maps have been life savers for current GM's.

You do great work Defendi and I'm glad you're receptive to our input.

I d like this one being more building focused. If the players go in it can create some nasty close quarters skirmishes of a prolonged gun fight at range with diving into cover in that no mans land road between them.

[rough bluff]

No, you didn't sound defensive. I was afraid I was. I wanted to make it clear I wasn't arguing because I need the notes, especially on these later ones where people have more experience with the fights than I do. For instance, when someone asks me to make a map out of order, I start a private chat with them to get their thoughts on the combat and sitrep, because I've probably not looked at it much before the request, but they've probably been thinking about it a lot since they realized the fight was about to happen for their group.

[shell bison]

Oh! Good, I was so worried there for a second.

I completely understand, I am in depth a lot in the current fights and rosters of enemies as my players are very well versed in combat and the mechanics of the game so I am much more attuned to the balance of the fights. I appreciate the honesty. Here's hoping we can get more of these amazing maps very soon!

[tame tide]

Want opinion for ||getting railroaded||... ||Open roof train cars yay or nay? I'm indecisive...||

[rough bluff]

What is the nay option? You can't see inside?

[tame tide]

The two leftmost ||train cars are regular, got doors leading into them and on the sides. Same as the rightmost as the same description. Middle two train cars (ones with no lights) have no exterior walls or roof||

[rough bluff]

Oh, you mean ||flat cars||. I think they're fine.

[tame tide]

Yee

Adds more variety imo... More open sight lines which is a pro and a con...

[rough bluff]

It's definately an advantage to the enemy, so that can be a pro.

[tame tide]

And artillery PCs

[rough bluff]

Well only in the PCs come out. All their advantages are inside.

[tame tide]

True, need to also figure out where the holdout zone will be

Could be open or inside... or 3 of them... which is cruel

Then again it's up to whoever plays the map ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I have no clue if I'm ever gonna play this map

[rough bluff]

I mean, having it outside kinda flies in the face of the concept of the combat. They are trying to hold out with not tactical things to defend. Forcing them outside by placing the zone outside is artificial, unless you change the narrative of the fight.

[tame tide]

Tru...

MMm

I can easily swap the ||open trains|| as I've got them saved as objects

Having ||train 1 or 5 feels too out of the way... 2 and 4 feels weird... 3 should be holdout zone and you raised a good point on it being against the point of the combat... I feel like maybe I should make train 4 (or maybe 5 only) be open roofed||

1 being furthest left and 5 right

[tame tide]

Mission 2: ||CHOO CHOO MOTHERFUCKEEERS!!!!!!!!||

I just clocked I forgot to flatten the connectors to BG 💀

[shell bison]

||Guns at Noon?||

[rough bluff]

Yes.

[shell bison]

Wonderful, Love the sight of it

[rough bluff]

I'll do all the alternate zones for this map tomorrow, which has me starting the last four of the chapter sometime this weekend. Anyone have any advice on them? Feel free to DM me or spoiler tag your responses appropriately.

[rough bluff]

I've added instructions for importing my exported scenes. For those who might not do that very often.

[rough bluff]

Also, ||Guns at Noon|| is uploaded

I often have implied stories in my maps. For instance in ||Denial of Services||, you might ask ||"How often did they wreck the buggy trying to jump those ramps. Or "Are those the ONLY showers, no wonder they are angry."|| In ||Guns at Noon|| it's:|| "Who thought they could just put up a greenhouse on the hell planet. Also, how much effort did it take to get the trees in there that big before they died?"||

[pliant ibex]

i need that 999 one

[heady vale]

gotchu

[pliant ibex]

thank you very kindly

[maiden ferry]

4 man party. It turns out that Choms are really, REALLY good against enemies with 2 heat cap.

This fight is actually where I wanted it on difficulty. Sunbird is gonna be ROUGH

one player structured twice. The good news is that I didn't buff sunbird

[frail kayak]

what are the Legionnaires from?

[maiden ferry]

Advanced combat

basically an alternative to grunts - they move in units of 4, deal 2 damage a hit, and 4hp/2heat

[tame tide]

24 Legionnaires???

[maiden ferry]

The plan had nowhere near that many. But they had two chomolungma, and wide-area code pulse + system crusher means that a full action kills every single one in sensor range.

This happened twice

[tame tide]

Lmao

13 structure before the Legionnaires 😩

[maiden ferry]

4 on each side several times

Yeah no kidding, my group is nuts

They killed almost everything too, only an avenger, 4 legionnaires, and the last sniper lived that fight

[tame tide]

I don't know how some groups do it, my players are probably gonna struggle with the default encounter (3 players)

[maiden ferry]

For groups that tend to have good builds, I recommend more structure per reaction, it lets the individual enemies have time to shoot back and take structure/stress without just vaporizing, and the alternative is to spam enemies, which just feels bad when you take 5 turns after the players

[maiden ferry]

That’s fair. I set up the default for 5 players and went “no wait this isn’t even close to enough”

[tame tide]

Bruh I feel bad when I forget to activate an elite during the players turns so I get 3 activations off once done including 2 of the same elites actions

Also how did the map play? 👀 📝

[tame tide]

Im also curious what the light blue sections are on the map, for the open train cars

[rough maple]

I love how I ended up the straight guy of my IGF party

in a very The Comically Serious kinda way

"Oh wonderful, I always wanted to go to a theme park! :|"
"Did they... not have theme parks where you're from?"
"We had three. All themed after Great Leader."
"Sounds... fun?"
"It was! The fun was mandatory."

[shell bison]

Is that the cast from the first Nonary game?

I still remember how much of a character moment my character had to go through being accused of being a hypocrite for attacking the ||squad in send in the clowns|| fight.

She was praising the idea of giving people a chance then that mission uses her engineering weapon in the blast template to remove an enemy. Love when the unexpected turn of events leads to a character moment.

[heady vale]

Yea

[shell bison]

Lol, nice

[quaint pebble]

my party had someone who had never been to a theme park before, but that's because they are from Calliope and there aren't many theme parks in the thousand habs 😅

[rough bluff]

I have 7-8 players on any given weekend. I've found that instead of scaling up the number of foes, its better to take the 5-party opfor and add a template to every non-grunt that increases structure. Then double the grunts. That scales it up to right around the proper level, maybe just a little more, but my group has two-three build obsessed fanatics, and four tactical madmen, one of which is the tactical equivalent of Mozart (beat his mother at chess at 5, she never beat him again after 8, decided Chess was too boring to engage him). So I often throw in a few more groups if I think they are going to overpower the sitrep with activations.

[willow cloak]

7-8? Wouldn't have guessed that from your maps, they don't seem large enough for that size of warband. They don't ever get cramped for you?

[rough bluff]

I've mostly run the 7-8 party in Solstice Rain. Solstice Rain has pretty big maps, and my version of them in the early maps here were even a bit bigger (30x40). I noticed it on an escort mission, but other than that they usually have to scatter for objectives, and it doesn't get crowded at all.

I've noticed with a smaller group that there are sections of the Solstice Rain maps that are hard for a party to even GET TO in a combat.

I don't see that an actual ||arena battle ||ever happens in Act 1. Has anyone needed a map for an ||arena battle||? Later Act playtests count.

[quaint pebble]

technically parts of mission 3 take place around one but uh, not really
most people who are ||competing in an arena are probably doing it via the downtime action, which doesn't involve a sitrep||

[rough bluff]

That's what I thought. And also, there's an arena map as one of the optional paths in ||Dustgrave||. So to need one, a party needs to basically do everything SO wrong not even the adventure accounts for it, and they also have to have no one in the group who owns ||Dustgrave||, so they can't just use that excellent map.

Anyway, if anyone see that eventuality happen in their group, let me know and I'll whip something up. I think I have a D&D map that fits, so I can probably get you SOMETHING in just a couple hours.

I think one of the Echoes of Heaven adventures I wrote has an arena fight.

(I'm getting that all out for people in the future, in an emergency situation, doing a map search. 🙂

[willow cloak]

Bless your dedication, you are a boon to time-poor college students everywhere.

[rough bluff]

Thanks. This is the map I was referring to, if the "future people" just need to grab it. With an hour or two work, I could put out a hex version. With longer, I'd make a sci-fi version.

[rough bluff]

Yeah, I remember being a time-poor college student. 🙂

[wild flame]

hi its me

time-poor college student, using defendi's maps

you're an absolute hero

[rough bluff]

My blushes.

[jade shell]

So, dumb question, but what is supposed to happen in Acts 2 and 3?

[wild flame]

uhhh.... things and stuff

act 2 draft available in #909574961931362365

prolly don't read it if you're a player in a game unless your gm is cool with you reading ahead

[jade shell]

I'm more curious for story purposes rather than strictly a GM or Player, but fair

Thanks regardless

[thorn hinge]

I can give you a quick TLDR but note, there's a lot still yet to be set in stone, especially for Act 3.

MAJOR SPOILERS (obs) for act 2:
||Act 2 kicks off where the epilogue of Act 1 left things; Calliope is suddenly host to a SSC skyhook, the flagship of the kingdom Anneline, and a HA battlegroup. There are four major crisis points around the system, and the players have to decide what order to tackle them in. While they take time cleaning up each mess, the ones they haven't gotten to yet get worse. This means there's four missions in act 2 that can come in any order. However, there's only time to complete three of them; the fourth mission of the Act gets interrupted by the Cult staging an attack on Hell's Gate. The fourth remaining mission will get a lot worse for the delay, and need to be taken care of at the start of act 3. Each mission in act 2 has multiple plots weaving together, and may take different shapes depending on how the players approach the problems and in what order / how late they are getting to the mission; the exact objectives may change depending on player actions, who they care about, and how they want to solve problems. The four missions of act 2 are, in no particular order:||
||1. Help Howl take Impact Plaza and finally put an end to Rodericke Steele's food scalping||
||2. Save Three Sisters, a saturday morning cartoon hero, an illegal pile of technology/new best friend, and/or the saturday morning cartoon hero's clone from SSC||
||3. Solve the succession crisis of the kingdom anneline and save furnace city from being ransacked by their forces as the search for a missing king-clone apparent / contender for the throne||
||4. Resolve whatever the fuck the Valentinian family has going on, stop (or maybe support) Odin's experiments with the anomaly over chameleon, and deal with HA's pop-up prison.||

Oh discord, you just gotta be weird about formatting lmao. Okay.
Act three is more of an outline and largely still sitting in Vex's head at the moment, but I've picked up enough to give a very broad overview of things. Spoilers ahead again, but also none of this is authoritative, complete, or unlikely to change and adjust.
||Act 3 starts after the battle for hell's gate. The Cult used that fight as a diversion from another goal: finally cracking Kantele. While Hell's Gate recovers, the fourth unfinished mission of act 2 is in full catastrophe mode, and the players absolutely have to get involved now. SSC is throwing nukes at civilians, HA is causing reality to flicker about, The kingdom anneline is laying siege to asphodel, or Howl has launched an attack on impact dynamics without you and it's not going great after the resident station manager NHP cascaded, killed Steele, and took over. ||

||After that mission, things are more hazy, but some highlights include feather terraforming asphodel in an instant, a chance to redeem Ignatius Aurum, and in the end... an assault across fractured timelines where every reality (which means every game group running IGF ) is rising up in an infinite wave of angels against an infinite tide of falling demons led by infinite Andros Capellas, with people from other timelines able to jump across and help each other||

[willow cloak]

||That climax sounds sick as hell, and also very familiar lmao. Basically just, what if the dream bubble ghosts were the heroes of Act 7? Love that, hope it makes it into the final version.||

[tight pier]

i must ask - ||is the pyro/witch combo in Mission 2 the one in Getting Railroaded?||

yo?

[rough bluff]

@fallen geyser Now if you feel the need to put in a Battle Arena fight, you know, I'm a bit ahead of the game. Complete with decorative (or maybe non-decorative) cover.

[rough bluff]

I think I'll just make the deployment zones generic, so a GM can do whatever they want with them.

[tame tide]

Wait vex made that! So this is switch who's going insane here in a Tortuga

[digital raven]

How do the segments work for the Hellfire League Championship

The first reward is 1-4 segments in my copy of the book and the second reward is 4-7

[silent lance]

gonna be running the end of mission 1 tomorrow, realized i didn't have a cool token for ||Andros||, put this together, as well as a version for the act 1 climax. Really happy with how especially the extra-spicy one came out but i have nowhere to post them cause all my lancer people are in the game lmao.

its him
the One Wreathed In Golden Flame

[tight pier]

players going through ||Eye of Balor|| and they are taking so much stress lmfao

[tight pier]

||they heard about rose bottlé and one of them just said "did they fucking teleport?"||

C L U E L E S S

[wild flame]

they don't know

[past agate]

chat. they do not know

they are not aware

[tight pier]

||theyre calling Loki "Purple Guy"||

[heady topaz]

||my players' first assumption was time travel lmao||

[rough bluff]

Mech Arena map uploaded. I made a special Bonus Maps folder on the same level as Act 1 and Act 2, since I don't know when in the campaign a GM might use them.

[rough maple]

gotta love wanting to guess how many fights there's gonna be between rests

well, full repairs

[tame tide]

My last map for M2: ||“Rita to fireteam! We’re getting cascading power failures across the station! Whatever you’re doing, you need to hurry!”||

[rough bluff]

How are you handling the|| reactor placement mechanic for setup||?

[tame tide]

||Which ones I choose to be active if I have less than 5 players you mean?||

[rough bluff]

Yes! I did it with tiles, but I'm not sure how you do it from the map posted.

[tame tide]

||Just highlight any of them as "these are the active reactors" or something||

[past agate]

why he ourple

[digital raven]

Campaign spoilers ||I had to randomly pick a militia member to be a cult traitor for the Thwart the Cult action so I grabbed Printloaf off the NPC table and am now evilly rubbing my hands together having looked through the rest of the book and see they get name dropped in Apocalypse. I love it when I accidentally set up a ticking clock||

[light mist]

what happens if denial of service ends in a draw? is the narrative outcome the same as if the PCs lose?

[wild flame]

Crb says both sides must withdraw in the event of a tie, in this instance I'd say in the event of a tie then it goes to the defenders (aka s1gn4l and his crew)

So I'd run it the same as PC defeat

[tame tide]

You could go down the middle: PCs don't get full information but the defenders are unable to hold the listening post. So defeat but without the loss to station stability

[tight pier]

Our group tied. We ruled it that the platform was actually destroyed by the Demolisher, and neither side got anything. Station Stability didn't tick down, but players didn't get repairs and didnt get the telemetry package.

[light mist]

ah, these are rly neat ideas, thanks

[heady topaz]

Aight time to show off the newest mechs for my players. Argo's player decided to keep Phlegethon the same this time around. Bellerophon-1 has become Bellerophon-2(the big snek), a Pegasus frame that's potentially packing the ||big fragoff laser exotic|| from Mission 2. Spoiler Alert has become Risk And Reputation Management(the purple mech), a Phaon Crescent from Burning Memories. And finally, FUBAR has become The Fuck-I.T. Bucket, a Bligh from Enhanced Combat with axe wielding Swabbers and his turret drones becoming little guys.

[lunar panther]

we (mine and @tight pier's group) did still show our players the telemetry package because it's too cool of writing not to, but the PCs do not know this information

[tight pier]

now that i think about it thats probably why they all ate absolute shit during the andros fight 💀 lol

oops!

[lunar panther]

yeah lol

all they are aware of is the mission went horribly, and when the briefing for Beat 6 came up they were given a formal apology from Jerry and Chief McArthur

coincidentally this was also when two of our players ducked out (in a "they never existed" sense) and one came in their place, so I was able to twist it to be "quick, speed up the recruiting process". i got to make Chief McArthur very pissed off at the party for the printer issues though, which was fun

the transmissions they were able to recover still revealed the existence of the Tachyon

oh we also decided on this

||Because of Denial of Service, Capella arrives just after the PCs board the Tachyon. After combat, if successful, players are allowed to explore the ship. Remaining Time clock gets extra segments, though.||

[tight pier]

oh right we did do that

[pastel tiger]

Going to be running the last part of Mission 1 soon - anyone have music recommendations to use for the || 1st Andros boss fight? ||

[thorn hinge]

This is a popular ||andros fight theme|| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEInnWH8FKY

I used the first ten seconds of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVSAV7GVFyI then switched into a playlist of fight music which included Everflame. ||I plan to bring this song back for chapter 5. This time I'll start at 0:25, and read through the "In all his terrible glory" test on page 249, timed to land "Andros Capella steps out of the Fire Gate." right before the beat hits at 2:13. The song will go on from there, and I'll include some extra narration to fit a story arc I've put into my game. ||

[tight pier]

YESSSSSS

i love de staat

[thorn hinge]

hell yes

[tight pier]

im totally going to find some excuse to use Witch Doctor at some point

probably ||during the HA or SSC arcs in act 2||

[heady vale]

Has anyone else considered bumping up the difficulty of the final fight of act 1, and giving the party the level 5 level up before the fight, instead of after, for leading into act 2?

If you have, how did that go for you?

[heady vale]

Also, now that I'm finally getting into the meat of the campaign structure, im spotting a lot of keynamed NPCs for fights that. Dont have stats in the book.

Are those only on comp-con?

[maiden ferry]

which ones?

[thorn hinge]

After ch4 when my players ||dumpstered CAUSTIC without breaking a sweat||, I'm planning on upping the difficulty, but giving them LL5 would give them +1 grit which can be a significant boost. At LL5 they should be fighting tier 2 foes. I don't know exactly how that'll affect the balance but it's possible you'll make the fight easier. I have 4 players, so my plan is to give ||Andros the 5PC level upgrades at least, and I'm taking my melee monster PC off the field for the first round, maybe even first two. Might bring the Assault, or even the Aspect in as reinforcements when she comes back to the fight.||

Story context for why:
||Calamity is going to see Andros come out of the fire portal and think "I don't know what the fuck that is, but it brings people back to life." Andros comes out screaming her name, and she's going to push past him and dive into the fire gate. Then combat actually starts. She'll come back no earlier than round 2, and I'm going to aim to make the rest of the team nervous about it. When she does come back, I'll simply announce that she's impaired for the fight, because she doesn't have an expanded compartment and her mech isn't build for two people. She dove into the fire portal to get her girlfriend back. Annabelle Mckenzie from chapter 4 was her long lost love, and she died in Calamity's arms after they defeated CAUSTIC. Currently this downtime (4) is going to be the longest and most depressing one of the game, all to set the stage for this moment.||

[thorn hinge]

also curious about which ones you mean. From what I know, if an NPC shows up in a fight then they've got stats.

[heady vale]

Like maybe I'm dumb? But for example
Signal, can't find a stat block
ANDROS – ELITE PIRATE PYRO, can't find a stat block

Can't find those anywhere in the book.

[heady vale]

I mean, I'm willing to put in the extra effort, I'm already going to have to do extra work in making every combat harder because I have a six-player party.

It just feels really anticlimactic to give them a level up as a reward..... When we plan to do Act 2 and 3 together, And that means we probably won't touch this game after act 1 for at least a year

[thorn hinge]

S1GN4L: ||page 89: Elite Mirage with Metafold Shove||
Andros: ||page 99: Elite Pirate Pyro with Boarding Leash, Explosive Jet, Self-Erasure*, Siege Armor (and also pg 251 with new bits)||

[heady vale]

Lmao how did i miss those using pdf word search

Ty

Felt like i was losing it

[maiden ferry]

I had to send this in a gauntlet sitrep in order to get a total of 3 structure and 2 stress off my players, I feel your pain

[wild flame]

this was my ||Andros Capella|| theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ5yvWAnOHM

[maiden ferry]

Im considering putting a "lefarsi mode" out when my group finishes act 1

[thorn hinge]

Then yeah, I could see giving them the LL early if you want. Bump the NPCs to tier 2 as well, and add 2-4 total structure and activations to the sitrep in extra NPCs or templates on the existing ones and you should be fine.

[heady vale]

👁️✍️

Ty

[past agate]

I saw some people using transparent versions of the NPC art. I'm not sure where to find that, anyone know where?

[rough bluff]

NPCs as in: Pyro, Assault, Scout. Or NPCS as in the named people from the adventure.

?

[past agate]

Named characters

forgot that NPC could have meant enemy tokens, ha

[rough bluff]

I know I've cut mine out and deleted the background in photoshop or GIMP. The mech npcs we're making ourselves, but the art from the book aren't ours to share. (If you mean the special mechs for named NPCs done in Retrograde, like the ||Andros ||mechs that go around, I just search the discord for them unless they are in the pin up top.)

[past agate]

alright, thanks for explaining

already dug out board tokens beforehand

I supposed I could simply screenshot the character and their name, pronouns, quote, etc

[rough bluff]

There are a couple ||Andros|| ones in the pin. Maybe a ||L-Kay|| too.

[tight pier]

there are methods of extracting images from PDFs but im not going to share them (because i dont know them (block does it)) but it can be done

[rough bluff]

Oh, yeah, I cut their protraits out for handouts and journals all the time.

[heady topaz]

Open the pdf as like a document in an editing software like Google doc might work

or use Cutting Tool

[rough bluff]

You can just export the PDF as jpg. It will make a jpg for each page. I suggest dumping them to a dedicated folder.

They I cut out the pages as needed.

[past agate]

thanks folks

[tight pier]

memorializing the players that left the campaign in our NPC list

[rough bluff]

Green are the objective zones. You can ignore the red text, it's cruft from another map I haven't cleaned up.

[frail kayak]

My 7-person party is LL5 for mission 5, and I'm planning to run the whole thing as Tier 2, with extra NPCs, because they already shredded the T2 enemies in the previous chapter. I might be increasing the difficulty too much, but I'll see how they handle the first encounter on Friday, and report how that goes. (mission 5)||For the last fight, I'm planning to add an Aegis and a Veteran Reaver (From Suldan), because both are extra sources of burn to set up Andros||

The one in front of the EDZ is going to be a gimme for the opfor for the first round at least, but I think that's okay. The players will have an opportunity to get it once the enemy spreads out or thins out enough on subsequent rounds

[rough bluff]

Yeah, usually I try to make things a little more equal, but 1) that wasn't as easy on this map, and 2) they are assaulting|| kinda the heart of the enemy territory||, so I thought forcing them to dig out enemy control was apropos.

A lot of this is because I wanted to make the|| tower round, and this map is already the size of a football pitch||.

Another option would be to move all of them so that the middle ones were right next to the PDZs and the other two were right next to the EDZ. That would mean both would grab two effortlessly in the first round and then have to fight the others for their objectives.

[frail kayak]

I actually did a very similar layout for mine, and it worked out

[past agate]

loving the monitors

[rough bluff]

Where were the PCs and opfor deploying?

[rough bluff]

I know, right? I kinda wanted to steal that, but didn't have a good way. 🙂

[past agate]

when I get around to running it, they will be targetable objects

absolutely no game effect

however if they are shot at, it's a message that I played 'em well enough

[rough bluff]

Just to mess with the PCs?

Oh, the monitors.

YEah, I put monitors on mine too so the players can shoot them, you're just seeing them on edge from above, so they ain't so cheeky. 🙂

[past agate]

hah

[heady vale]

omg thank you! id love to hear how it goes. im 50/50 on whether ill up to the bonus ll, but im still gonna need to bump it a little for 6 people

[maiden ferry]

some easy ||astral stigmata|| bait

[frail kayak]

PCs deployed in the 3 rows on the bottom, Opfor was the same, but on the top

[rough bluff]

So it was a lot like mine. Okay, cool. If no one else complains by late tomorrow, I'll leave it like that.

[frail kayak]

They looked like this at the end of the fight, as the players damaged and/or hacked them
(note the ||Ace Grunt|| crashed into in the bottom one)

[past agate]

HOLY SHIT PEAK

also: a titan!?

[rough bluff]

Did THEY paint the clown makeup on the big guy? 🙂

[frail kayak]

I added the titan, because challenging 7 players is hard. They stuck its wreck on a ground vehicle, and used it to transport the ID personnel they took as prisoners in subsequent encounters

[frail kayak]

That was the "hacked" sprite 🙂

[rough bluff]

"Hold my beer, I have a custom invade I need to write."

You have 7? We should talk scaling philosopies. I have 7 or 8 depending on the week.

[frail kayak]

Yeah! My group is also an LL ahead because I padded out the first mission with extra content, and gave them an LL /full repair in the middle.
I also ran the chapters in a weird order: 1, 3, 4, 2, 5 (I'm just about to start mission 5)
I started doing Tier 2 enemies at LL4 (mission 2), which made ||The Faith|| into a startlingly competent opponent. I should have started sprinkling them in at LL3 (mission 4), because it was very easy for them as soon as they got core bonuses.
I added NPCs to ||Killer Sound|| until I was at 10 activations, 11 structure, and that seemed to be the perfect balance for this party at LL4, I destroyed 1 player mech in that fight, because I got really lucky with an ||Elite Breacher||

[frail kayak]

(the Titan is an NPC from Suldan, if that's what you were asking)

[past agate]

I’m aware. Just interested in how I could sneak one I-

OH MY GOD THATS PERFECT

STEELE WOULD

He fucking WOULD build one

[rough bluff]

So the way I've been scaling is to add a significant template to each enemy in the 5-party group, then double grunts. (If they had no grunts and I feel I need to eat up their shots, I had a handful, but that's an eyeball thing.) So, for instance, in one battle in Solstice Rain, my scaling went from 12 structure and 14 activations to 24/18, and that seemed actually challenging.

[maiden ferry]

dude I almost made sunbird-1 a behemoth, but this works too

the most extra mf builds the most extra mech

[frail kayak]

damn, yeah, It's weird with such a large group, because each round takes 1.5 to 2 hours, so with some RP setup, we often only get 2 rounds in a night. That is usually enough for them to tear through a fight, but this does mean that the sitrep objectives become distantly secondary, and it becomes more of a Deathmatch style fight. I'm going to try shortening objectives from 6 to 4 rounds (or from 8 to 6), so at least there is some pressure from the objective. I'm also making sure the "rush distance" between player and enemy spawn is shorter (down to ~20 from ~25) (credit to Gherkin's player for both of these ideas)

[rough bluff]

My group has gotten down to a half hour a round (after I came up with the scheme that has fewer activations)...maybe 40 minutes, but I have to ride them and keep them on point to go that fast. A more comfortable pace for us is an hour a round. That allows the fast players to be done in a couple minutes and give the ones that agonize 5-10 minutes a turn.

I'd love to see your adjusted sitreps, if you have them written down. I'd like to crib ideas from them.

[frail kayak]

do you mean the encounter lists, or the sitreps themselves? The sitreps aren't tested yet, and I'm just reducing the round limits on them
also what scheme with fewer activations did you mean?

[rough bluff]

I mean the encounter lists. I don't have Suldan, so I'd have never thought of adding a titan.

[frail kayak]

oh sure, I'll see what I can come up with

[rough bluff]

You can DM me if you don't want to spam the channel.

[frail kayak]

This is what ||The Crone told them was at Steele Dome|| for mission 3 ||(They had two charges of a reserve to deploy Howl as a Veteran Gladiator for 1 fight each, the description of her Blackbeard wasn't published yet, or I'd missed it)||
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13StLADs7Is30PUZIePkjyG9Ee2d4xgCL-rivEn2o4ic/edit?usp=sharing

[rough bluff]

That's great. If you have the other missions around, I'd love those too. I've already fully prepped 1, so that's a lower priority.

[frail kayak]

Yeah, I'll send the rest along in DMs, because it would get a little spammy (if anyone else wants this info later, feel free to DM or @ me)

[tight pier]

lol holy shit youre right

[tame tide]

I find it funny, howl appears for the ||bad star fight then for the following fight to hotwire the ships, she just dips and isn't there||

||as a possibility... Since they do have her as a reserve...||

Actually it makes more sense because I glossed over the fact they have her as a reserve... ignore me it's the morning

[tight pier]

i think this menu is done 💀 now i just have to put the rest of the info in

(Possible Chapter 1 & 2 spoilers)

[worthy root]

I have got to learn Foundry.

[rough bluff]

I don't know if they have a good lancer theme but Baileywiki has a great easy to configure landing page. You have to sub his patreon, but FYI.

[willow cloak]

It’s not that bad, once you get through the setup. I was banging my head against the port forwarding for a while due to my ISP, but after that, the documentation made the rest simple.

It has so much better hex grid support than Roll20, I hated running fights on that VTT.

[thorn hinge]

For bullet and anybody else wondering how to get the art from the book with transparent backgrounds, there's an easier way than @rough bluff's "clip it out and remove the background". If you have photoshop, you can open the PDF in there and select to just open the pdf's images. This gives you every art piece in the book directly. You can also use any number of online tools to extract the images, like this one I randomly googled: https://tools.pdf24.org/en/extract-images

There are some higher quality versions of some images that have been posted by Vex or R0xy on the feedback channel when that art came out, but you're going to have to dig if you want that.

[past agate]

[thorn hinge]

Spoilers for Chapter 4, and a glimpse of a moment in Act 2!

I pulled off some cool presentation in one of my recent sessions, and I wanted to show off a bit. Rather than just sharing the effect itself, I wanted it to be in-context, so I edited up the session I used it in, along with a few fun moments from the night. So I present: my supercut of session 31.

Again, spoilers for Chapter 4, and a glimpse of a moment in Act 2!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeSczSeH0pg

It's messy and I keep seeing/hearing things I should have edited more carefully but I already put too much time into it and I'm not uploading it to youtube for a third time, I give up.

Some context for the last bit: Calamity Havok's backstory is that she was "Annabelle Vasquez" a bodyguard for a minor karrakin noble's daughter. They fell in love, got caught, and she got dumped in the long rim after 30 years of cyrosleep / realtime debt. Became a pirate, a Hell Hound, then got caught by Pear. Now on the SRT, and sent ||to clear out Boltzmann||, she heard a familiar voice on a data pad. Her long lost lover was here. ||Annabelle McKenzie||.

[warped ibex]

i have never been so left in awe of foundry effects. i'm not particularly a coder, or technically skilled to any regard, but i cannot even begin to fathom how the actual hell most of this was done

[thorn hinge]

Well, in rough order or appearance:

• These scenes rely on the LockView module to keep players from being able to zoom or pan on the scene, and to stretch the images to fit each client no matter what their screen size is.
• I made macros that change the current background image, and I drop them into my notes so I can trigger them as I read through scenes. Similarly, the tile video of the whiteboard (I found a video on a free clip site of that ink blot thing, and edited it to be mirrored like that, then exported as a tiny webm) I kept hidden, but then used a macro to reveal when it came up in narration.
• I use narrator tools most of the time for anything that's read out of the book verbatim. You can see it in action during ||Jerry's sacrifice||. I just used macros to call that text (it's just a bunch of chat macro with something like /narrate All is silent.) because then I can drop the macros into my notes and click them to trigger them.
• The bright flash around 2:00 is just FXMaster, crank the bloom and brightness and i think saturation all the way up and it does a nice ramp up for you. Put that in a macro too, and made a macro to return to standard settings after when they ||return to the backrooms||

All this stuff is pretty easy once you try it, and can very quickly upgrade your presentation. I started doing a lot of this in the session prior to this one ||Vorsehungsmotor, where I expanded the scene quite a bit to send my players through ~25 alternate timeline simulations||

But... if you've played with a bit of scripting then all of that is probably not what you're interested in.

From 3:30 on, the background image is actually a small video, made by taking an image of the Cave of the Crystals in Niaca Mexico, photoshopping the heck out of it, and using a video editor to put a shifting color tone on it.

[rough bluff]

Do you plan to put any of these files on your drive? 🙂

[thorn hinge]

I started that scene with narrator tools (you can see the last bits around 3:35), but then I went to a very simple macro that ran the Sequencer module. This module is great for combat effects, but here I use it to run a video that plays in the full foundry window and on top of the UI. This video has a transparent background and long moments with 'nothing' on them to let the game's usual interface show through. It's all just video editing effects and a lot of glitchy free clips I found online, lmao

[thorn hinge]

absolutely, and I'll cut a version of the video without Stoneleigh or Moira's comments at the end so they can be used in other campaigns ❤️

[warped ibex]

AHH okay okay that makes it make a lot more sense in my brain. i was under the immediate impression that a lot of the effects were done separately (and via code) -- like i figured you somehow set up a macro or something of that sort ||to get CAUSTIC to appear over the chat box, with that specific fade in effect||

i still can't understate though, even knowing that, that is still a lot of damn work, and it turned out really well too!

[thorn hinge]

That fade in effect is actually chroma-key (aka greenscreen) with the settings starting out so sensitive that the whole picture is removed, and then tweened over time to drop until the sensitivity is so low nothing is removed from the image. That's how I get that strange, pixelated, grainy and almost random fade in

Oh and other than the one song which is credited in the video, the audio is all me. Background is me playing with a korg MS-20 synth, and the voice of ||CAUSTIC|| is myself recorded three times; one screaming at the top of my lungs (which got pitch shifted), once growling harshly, and once whispering loudly near the mic. All three are distorted and have different types of delay/reverb and then they're all lined up and balanced to sound like a single voice.

These two files were kept separate but I think I could have baked the audio into the video. I don't think discord respects the video transparency, which is part of why I wanted to share from the actual session recording.
Here's the script that kicked off the whole sequence at 4:25

new Sequence()
  .effect("Ada-IGF/sfx/finalreflection2.webm")
    .screenSpace()
    .screenSpaceAboveUI()
    .screenSpacePosition( { x: 0, y: 0 } )
    .screenSpaceScale( { fitX: true, fitY: true } )
  .sound("Ada-IGF/sfx/sounds/RAGE.ogg")
    .delay(8500)
  .wait(87*1000)
  .thenDo( async function(){
    await game.scenes.getName("EVENT HORIZON").activate();
  })
.play()

AGAIN AGAIN SPOILERS FOR CHAPTER 4

oh right here's the other video, with a bit stolen from signalis because I have that brainrot obsession. This happened before the one above it, I split them up for timing reasons that ended up not being necessary

Again again again spoilers etc

[shell bison]

Our former HA catboy has spilled the beans they know who ||The Thief|| is but has not put the pieces together that they are ||A fed||
Players got to meet the ||weather witches|| and offered a sound system when their music started looping like a bad record to gain their trust to call in weather effects for the fights.
Clip Magazine continues to be Soldier TF2 with an emotional support assault rifle.
Anastasia helped with the swallowtail from a junk yard to get through the mist and located signals from ||The Thief|| and now they are mid boss battle time.

also spoilers.

[thorn hinge]

every bullet point there made me giggle in some way

[tight pier]

[shell bison]

Then I am doing my job well.

[shell bison]

My players adore Ana by the way. The RV shenanigans during the travel of Chapter have been beyond hilarious.

Clip Magazine being such a short king cryptid sleeps in a tea cuboard.
Ana is big T shirt sleepy mode and offer to adjust the room so the 8foot tall vol woman can actually sleep stretched out.
Mechanic temporary has been using her saxophone as an alarm clock for those who sleep in and been fanning over the fact one of the players NHP daughter is friends with Cerulean back on the gate.

[tight pier]

short king clip magazine

awesome

white/grey hair gang

[shell bison]

My players are very creative with nick names.
Jerry is Jare-Bear
Shelly is Shelly-Welly
Elske is Future Wife
Samouran is Grandmama
Mikela is Top Dono (for our Catboy Infleuncer)

[tight pier]

your campaign sounds like an absolute blast lmao

mikaela has earned the Ire of one of our party members after embarrassing them on switch's stream

on session one

[shell bison]

PFFFFF, No way!

[tight pier]

the rest of the party pressured him into maybe getting cat ears either as a body mod or installed on his mech after mikaela reccommended it

[shell bison]

Thank you, we have many a time derailed for 10 minutes laughing our heads off over silly things said. For example.

[tight pier]

[shell bison]

THE FLAME ITSELF BLESSED THAT TURN

I probably should have put Ana in an engineer npc instead of scout, but ah well. I'm sure the combo of Clip Assault and Ana Scout will be mvp for the you know what fights soon

[tight pier]

you gave her a swallowtail??

awesome

[thorn hinge]

that's cool as hell

[tight pier]

in our game she isn't a pilot at all, but ||her sister was (friendly fire incident says not anymore), and now is part of the inner cult||. One of our PCs is her brother :)

[shell bison]

OH

Oh jeez.

[thorn hinge]

It's cool how different characters get repurposed and reimagined like that

[shell bison]

Yeah, my pcs really got friendly with you know who and worked a deal for something to help them get some backup. Old swallowtail is given and clip has his old Everest from back in the day to also be npc aid

[tight pier]

it's wild! James was originally a character I played for a oneshot in a different system & universe, same with Ana but for a campaign, so its weird now that the GM for those games is his player now

[tight pier]

also Assault + Scout is an amazing combo with Rank Discipline + Spotter

[shell bison]

It's beautiful how sometimes that just works out.

[thorn hinge]

Two of my PCs are SSC gene project kids, and unknown to them, Mikaela has been offered discounts if she gets close to the team. She thinks they're just setting up to try and pitch a marketting deal to the big heroes later, but she doesn't mind the savings. She approached Calamity about her cybernetic arms. Calamity was hesitant at first, until the mallgoth catgirl pointed out that her arms were "severely underweaponized". Now Calamity's looking through SSC catalogues.

Clip Magazine I... basically didn't use, and I'm still kicking myself over that.

Anastasia though, she showed up just as the team touched down in furnace city. I established that she and Siren are friends, and she'd be doing some drive tuning on the ship while they were there. I meant to stress that Anastasia was a particularly gifted mechanic, but in the moment I chose the wrong words about her being "talented with her hands" and basically implied that she and Siren are hooking up. After the mistake I just decide to canonize it.

[tight pier]

esp if the assault is a Pirate

[shell bison]

How'd you know that's what I did :)

[tight pier]

ive ran it before in oneshots, its a fun combo to work in with other NPCs. very powerful if the enemy players let them stay adjacent to each other, but if theyre prepared they can displace them really easily

[tight pier]

ehhehehehehhe

i might end up doing something similar ||if block doesnt gun me down for trying||

honestly im not sure how our players are going to react to Clip

[shell bison]

I couldn't not show Ana little bit of love. She's a really sweet character and very simple. She's a little beacon of sunshine. I just want to give her a little smooch on the forehead.

which my player character does because they're in a relationship

I am that meme of pushing all the big name NPCs out of the way so I can point.
"That one. That's my hyper fixation "

[thorn hinge]

I am more this meme

[shell bison]

Aww

[warped ibex]

wait hold on,, im not the most technically. adept as i stated prior but just to make 100% sure, having the link to the foundry visible at all times is safe right? given i think it uses your ip i just want to make sure that something unsafe didn't slip you by there,,

[thorn hinge]

yeah it's fine that's a local ip

[warped ibex]

okay cool!! just wanted to make sure

[thorn hinge]

if someone can use that, I've got far bigger problems

[rough bluff]

Have passwords for sure. Wed DURING LANCER someone joined my game on a user account I hadn't passworded.

[thorn hinge]

yes

[rough bluff]

But that has to be a public IP because my players are remote.

[thorn hinge]

I also do incremental backups including off-device backups in case anythign happens.

[tight pier]

yeah, i use a hosting provider