Posts made by Packrat

Personally I dropped out of university thanks to a car crash, tried to go back when a little older and dropped out again thanks to major depression (which went un diagnosed), then did random shit jobs for a couple of years before only starting on my current career at 25.

Now I have the thrill and excitement of being a middle manager for a 'Blue Chip' company whilst still in my early thirties, despite not having a degree or indeed any professional qualifications. A degree is definitely not required but it does let you start a few rungs higher up the ladder and also opens the possibility of 'Graduate Recruitment Schemes' which are hard to get into but can launch people right into positions of minor importance and fast track them if it works.

The big thing seems to be to get work experience in an in demand field then be willing to move to take advantage of new jobs, along with interviewing well, spending money on a properly fitted suit is essential! You do not even have to be good at your job if you can talk the talk and come across well in interviews, I know one person who is a horrible human being with no integrity and minimal knowledge who talked herself into a senior role in another company before she could be sacked, then jumped ship into consulting after a few years and now earns more than most doctors.

As far as I am aware, Custodius has actually been on staff on Kushiel's Debut before, some years ago, but was kicked off after he tried to twist the theme into something else and conduct his usual bullshit? I forget the precise details but do remember him complaining about it elseMU* then popping in and reading the 'We got rid of him, yay!' post on the game.

There are tons of serious issues with the default Fading Suns system, for a start character generation is absolutely full of traps, massively rewarding min maxing of attributes to the point where a hyper specialised idiot savant type character is literally dozens of game sessions/weeks of xp ahead of a generalist.

Start with four skills at 2 in character generation because it fits your concept to have them? Equivalent to 16 xp. Start with one skill at eight instead? That is 'worth' 68 xp. Spiritual attributes are also just messed up with there being no mechanical reason not to max one side of the scale outside of a handful of psi paths, not to mention Introvert being a complete waste of points whilst Extrovert is used for almost all social rolls. There is the semi standard issue of Dexterity being a god stat also.

Cybernetics are broken as hell, you can for a fairly significant investment get cybernetics that are invisible and maintenance free which make you a living god. Certain combat maneuvers are ridiculously effective compared to others, for example did you realize that even with a readied parry action and a sword in your hand you have no defence against being grappled? Disarming is also much easier than actually hurting somebody in armour leading to serious combatants carrying an array of swords. Throw group is especially odd, being able to fight more than one person is super hard in the system unless you have this one maneuver which lets you toss entire rooms full of guys around in a single action.

One which note the main thing that influences who wins in a fight is armour, an averagely competent person wearing medieval plate armour and with a longbow is approximately as dangerous as some kind of commando in a bulletproof vest with a rifle. Absent powered ceramsteel or assault/battle fields everyone wants to wear plastic full plate or energy shield/synthsilk if they do not wish to be utterly doomed in a fight. Also shocker weapons are cheap and essential for hurting anyone in armour so if you do not want an electro sword? Sucks to be you. As another weirdness a light tank is as durable as a burly individual (Stamina 7) wearing plastic scale armour.

Combine with the entire system being horribly swingy of course, I am not saying that fun games cannot be had using it but that is probably despite not because of the system, which really does not encourage it.

Psi-Theurgy paths are... Odd, some are sort of neat but nothing special whilst others are amazingly strong and allow you to utterly dominate a campaign. The fact you gain a point or Urge/Hubris on average every 20 rolls regardless of anything else and that losing those is very difficult does ensure that you inevitably turn into a disaster though no matter how careful you are or how effectively you hide your powers. The dramatic effects of high levels of Hubris also imply that one really messed up priest in a hut somewhere on a planet (or just one who uses their theurgy every day for two years) can and will kill it unless you somehow find and stop them.

That said the actual Fading Suns system is utterly terrible, worse than first edition White Wolf stuff.

I am definitely looking to make a character and have poked my head in as a guest, people certainly seem extremely friendly and receptive to ideas. Now to hope that I can recover sufficient energy over the weekend to actually apply - it is not holiday season in other countries!

The whole adversarial feudal politics thing does seem to be pretty much designed to cause everyone to OOCly hate and distrust each other along with leading to literal fief building among staff. I mean Vargo had multiple incarnations of people running it and the reign of Paulus/Lextius was frankly significantly less corrupt and biased than what came before not to mention infinitely more active, regardless of how railroaded a lot of that plot might have been.

Plus nobody with a wiz bit coded up an object named after the IC angel of death, set with various game crippling and player character object removing commands, and left it rigged to be remote controlled by their primary character, which is definitely what one person who staffed on Vargo did.

To be entirely fair, the Kurgan dropping from the sky were not actually made up for the occasion, there was a huge spreadsheet with available Kurgan troops, quick cheat sheets for the positions and skill levels of their commanders, etc. They actually only had 2/3 the military strength of the known worlders with a very similar proportion of 'fancy stuff'. That contingent of power armoured guys had been hanging around in orbit on the station since the game started.

Of course almost all of them actually fought as a single side instead of being at each others throats thanks to the political situation having been deliberately structured to cause internal conflicts. Combine that with the aforementioned 'You won the battle? Well it does not matter!" Tendencies already mentioned, for maximum effect. Also almost all of the Kurgan leaders were as good as the best player character commanders.

I do find it weird that Paulus tried to claim minimal losses from a victory in particular, he loved outrageous casualty rates, I know that Caelwyn lost almost a quarter of his troops in a battle he won for example and that was with the enemy badly outnumbered.

Well I will go on record as having quit staff, then the game, over a lot of this stuff. Lextius in particular was terrible for just seemingly wanting to shaft players, win a narrow victory? Now time to describe the aftermath in a way that makes it clear you really lost! A player character could respond to some crisis in an entirely optimal way taking advantage of pre planning and resources put in place to cover the eventuality and he would still try to work out how they were going to lose.

Actually that happened on Vargo, Custodius (not the most popular example I know) responded to hints that there might be a famine by immediately buying up all of the available grain using his character's entire savings, then storing it in his already existing fortress granaries so that he could feed his vassals. He also allocated a substantial proportion of his troops to guarding shipments, struck deals with guild PCs to buy/transport the stuff, etc. I mean it was frankly the best set of responses possible to the situation and I still had to argue Lextius out of trying to 'Get' him.

The fief management system behind the scenes basically never worked and barely existed, it was a bunch of spreadsheets plus a lot of handwaving, whilst also being ridiculously detailed and needing updating by hand. It was both not fit for purpose and contributed hugely to staff burnout given the huge amount of manual work required to update things even every couple of months. Stuff like mass combat, economy stuff, even equipment lists, were thrown together on the fly without any testing at all, at the point the game launched there was not even really a solid idea about what the demographics of the setting looked like.

I seem to remember that the idea was that the best way to keep staff engagement and focus was to have a game to be on - but once the game opened the influx of players was absolutely insane, for the first months I was basically reviewing character applications for 5 hours a day and everything kept being pushed back or rushed resulting in the flash in the pan and recrimination filled mess that was Star Crusade.

The degree of staff favouritism is being hugely overstated though (Though not the degree of railroading), it seems that EVERYONE decided that their IC rivals were being ICly unfairly favoured by staff and themselves punished. Literally every Count level player ended up spending more time complaining about how the other three count level players had unfair advantages over them than they did anything else as far as I could see while I was staffing. Custodius' character, Renaud, had the richest County (I still do not know WTF Paulus was thinking giving him that position, it was well known what he was like at that point). But his character also sucked at being a Count, he was a really big guy who was kind of decent at hitting people and riding a horse along with knowing about Kurgans but had very minimal management or political skills. Obviously the player then tried to play him as some kind of cunning mastermind showing the face everyone wanted to see to each individual. Also he kept getting sent incriminating letters from the Kurgans and answering them and nobody ever took advantage of that.

Antonio was +sheet wise competent at ruling, a good if not the best battlefield commander and almost certainly the single most personally dangerous character on the game, he also had like twice the forces of any other count through his playing up to Crusader sentiment and collecting hordes of frothing maniacs, though he had also the most 'at risk' territory. Then again he also had that assault lander full of elite murder fanatics. He then proceeded to have an OOC meltdown at staff after finding out that Sans had a Melee skill 1 higher than his, as one example.

Amber was kind of middle of the road? She was pretty good at ruling and politicing and stuff +sheet wise, had moderate lands that were moderately at risk (she did have some hardcore raiding going on against her if she did not bribe certain Kurgans away, which she did).

Lyov did have to deal with Chiaka which I can only sympathize with but I seem to remember he had psi powers that allowed him to remotely spy on pretty much anyone anywhere and never used these for blackmail, reconnaissance or intelligence purposes? I am afraid that I did approve the traitor baron who turned that fortress over to the Kurgans but I had assumed Lyov would unmask him sooner rather than later and the player was apparently okay with the character being at severe risk of being caught by the Decados.

A lot of the character who were commonly being accused of being 'staff friends' really were not though. Amber, Hugh, Caelwyn, (Or Antonio) they were nobody known to anyone on staff before applying for their characters, I mentioned before but it was this weird lottery where you had to luck into the secret of asking for the world if you wanted to get a lot of stuff. (Stuff being big numbers on your +sheet, private armies, etc).

The problem with staff setting people's sheets was that it was a complete lottery, it all ultimately came down to a game of applying for somebody who was as big a badass as possible and specifically spelled this out in their background if you wanted to be actually good at things. If two people applied for a knight, one who specified they were a super badass and the other did not? Most of the people on staff would happily just set up the first as vaguely competent at some stuff and the second just as competent but also with the stats to be a badass, this happened even if the latter player was hated by staff and the former loved in a lot of cases. Some people would be inexplicably terrify however and others inexplicably good with no real reason behind it and there was a weird aversion to giving high levels in certain skills, I got a huge amount of flack on staff for giving Hugh (who was like, a general) a Warfare skill of 7 since he had not just put a few paragraphs in his background suggesting he was an amazing general (nobody else had applied for a general at all at this point!). Needless to say people would never be told that they could/should put that they were great at stuff in their applications.

That said I did notice a comment above about Rosario being a powerful character I played? Yes he was my character, but he was... Well, a knight who was particularly good at waving a sword around, but then terrible at almost everything else apart from riding horses and with no particular influence or importance. There were quite a few player characters who were better than him in a straight fight including Cephus who not only did beat up Rosario three times but was also say, a competent military commander who spoke Kurgan and other useful things. Off the top of my head I think two of the Brother Battle would have beaten Rosario in a fight, Antonio definitely would have, there was that Dervish who mauled him utterly at the tournament, the Baron of Helborg was great at shooting, plus at least one of the Muster, that Vorox. There were another couple of knights who would have definitely had the edge in a duel if they fought using energy shields and thus took advantage of their superior combat maneuvers. He was definitely below average when it came to total points on +sheet, though thanks to the random +sheet lottery there did exist some poor people who got characters who had no goals higher than say, 11, just randomly, including people who were weirdly favoured by staff.

Fadila was a character I applied for after quitting then coming back to the game not as staff, quite frankly I took advantage of knowing what type of character they liked to give high stats to then pitched to it, though if I remember correctly her 'Holy Visions' were actually due to a Decados mind control chip in her head. I ended up giving up on her after running into the brick wall of staff obfuscation that effected everyone else. Want to know what your army actually consists of so that you can actually political/military RP? Wait six plus weeks! Want to try to move said army away from the capital? Welcome to having to deal with Custodius' creepy as fuck self. (Though it was hilarious getting him to agree to feed her army as it marched through his land, her 'army' which was far larger than its military strength suggested due to consisting in a large part of fanatical beggars with huge knives and lunatic priests.)

Regarding Lextius I am honestly not sure what the fuck happened to him. He was just toxic when it came to running plots, dealing with jobs, whatever, he was always looking for the way to most screw over all of the players involved. Years ago (like ten years ago) he used to be huge fun to RP with and run really great plots where you got to do awesome baddass stuff but at some point he lost that, admittedly I have not spoken with him since before Star Crusade went down but it was in full force long before that. I mean I still have fond memories of on The Dark Between The Stars my Hazat Baron having a rivalry turned friendship turned enemy thing with his Decados Baron, sword fighting assassins on an airship, ultimately betraying his Decados Baron and having him murdered, etc.

I have to admit being curious about what caused that, admittedly it was years ago but the worst thing I recall happening to anyone in a scene I ran was Sofia losing her hand? She won the naval battle and got plenty of loot to get a robot hand though.

There was one guy who was nearly incinerated by a gigantic laser but he dodged it then shot the gunner to death. I also remember some Brother Battle getting really indignant after a lucky roll let him get slightly injured in his powered armour by the Kurgan lord he then killed?

To be honest I did not run that many many scenes.

Why you were pressured into being a count definitely eludes me though, I mean you were not a "staff favourite"! It did seem to be a weird pattern that every count player thought that all of the others were staff special friends while at least half of staff denigrated each of them constantly on channel. Having been a player on a P run game thought I do know just how frustrating it was though - you are in this horrendous information vacuum and punished for every possible mistake while if you send in requests to try to do something they are normally actioned like a month after they were relevant.

It was not deliberate persay . . . But so much of the strategic level stuff was kept to Paulus and Lextius whilst being redicilously admin heavy, with no economy system and everything ultimately decided by entirely subjective fiat.

I actually handled the applications for and approved Amber and Antonio myself if I remember correctly, neither were known to anyone on staff prior to their applying and they were the first two people to actually ask to be a Count from the point I joined staff.

Yara though... I am not sure why Yara was staff, did she do anything other than play her creepy characters? Wait, she did, she backed up Paulus on anything provided he pressured her.

Well actually working on this basically stalled in the absence of anyone else involved and my deciding to buy a house, I can however confirm that the plan was very much 'If you want to play a Count, you pay in chargen for it', I mean a Count gets the spotlight because they are a Count, they do not also need to be just as much of a badass as the person who's thing is that they are a Badass Knight. For that matter the person playing a Badass Knight should probably be spending a modest amount in character generation to be a knight rather than a freeman mercenary or specialist of some sort, that social ooomph matters.

It is probably not happening though given I lack the time and energy to launch a game, I would certainly not be able to run one.

Regarding the stuff from Star Crusade though I am not going to disagree, to this day I have no idea why Principe thinks that having staff stat characters what is effectively randomly is a good thing to do or likely to lead to a better game. That kind of shit is a lot of why I quit and stopped playing there though I should note that the Count positions were very much not handed out to friends:

All four literally went to the first people who asked for them and submitted character applications. The real ridiculousness happened when it came to allocating people's +sheets where it essentially came down to who set it along with... I do not know, the phase of the moon? It was some kind of weird lottery and when I attempted to go through and rationalise it I was told to stop. Bizarrely some of the most hated players ended up getting the best stats while there was one staffer who, especially if in a bad mood, would happily approve people with no goals over 10 in anything.

I do not know, there was this weird dissonance where the core staff wanted player characters to engage in bad ass pulp heroism then gave some of them stats equivalent to some random dude, before taking delight in punishing them for 'Being Stupid' or simply failing rolls.

Red Rising sounds amazing in principle, but I have to imagine it would need to focus down the setting and it would need to be carefully managed to have characters who were not Golds matter, outside of the odd outlier like a Ragnar equivalent.

Also most of the people playing Golds would fail to be brutal and arrogant enough to make it convincing.

As a note, since this might well be contentious with the history of Fading Suns games past, I was Emanuel on Star Crusade and Vargo along with I think Packrat on The Dark Between The Stars.

Past player characters include Rosario (On Star Crusade), Arie (On Vargo) and Buford (On Dark Between The Stars).

So a while ago I posted up a very Fading Suns looking 'system map', namely this:

It did gather some enthusiastic attention via messages but the main person I was using as a sound board to bounce ideas off then kind of went silent, combined with my work flaring into extreme business and stalling progress.

Basically I have been working on hashing out a 'Lost World' setting for a new Fading Suns game but it has been hard to maintain motivation and inspiration by myself and I welcome collaborators, here is a summary of the current setting though:

The setting is Nestoria, a Lost World system that was cut off from the jumpweb approximately three hundred years before the 3995 starting date, post Vladimir but well before the start of the Emperor Wars. There are two habitable worlds, Nestoria is a large, cold, metal poor planet that required minimal terraforming. Well industrialised and heavily populated it has historically been dominated by two Hawkwood dukes in bitter competition and is potentially a decisive factor in the balance between the Royal Houses given its wealth and power are likely on par with Sutek or even Delphi. This is the primary focus of the game.

Khangai is smaller, colder, its atmosphere shedding as its terraforming fails. Civilisation clings to deep rifts and valleys while abandoned and ransacked Second Republic cities litter the barely habitable highlands. Ruled by a Li Halan duke, this world is dying yet rich with technological treasures and several Annukai Gargoyles, a place for adventures and quests, the Scravers guild also a major power.

Further out are gas giants with myriad moons and two sets of major asteroid belts, much of Nestoria's industry is fuelled by metals mined in the Inner Belt, leading to bustling trade and also powerful space borne factions and in system pirates.

The thing is that while the jumpgate to the Known Worlds has just been opened (a few months before the game starts) it has opened deep in Decados space and this was not the first link that was re-established, fifteen years ago Nestoria, until then an isolated world, made contact with the so called Third Republic.

The Third Republic was founded around a newly established colony that lost contact with the rest of the Known Worlds during the collapse of the Second Republic and the sack of Byzantine Secundus, losing their technology and regressing only to claw themselves back up over the course of centuries. While they make profligate use of technology they lack the Second Republic infrastructure that the Known Worlds still replies heavily upon, perhaps at Diasporan level at best. The Third Republic can manufacture energy shields – but they are inferior to those worn by every minor noble or paranoid guild member of the Known Worlds. They can mass produce starships, but their hulls are alloys far weaker than ceramsteel.

Eleven years ago they invaded Nestoria without warning, swarming the system with their starships and launching an unexpected attack upon Panticapaeum, the second city of Nestoria itself.

Never having gone through the Emperor Wars, the Nestorian system did not maintain significant standing armies and the Third Republic struck while the Duchess of Panticapaeum was visiting her offworld holdings with the bulk of her fleet in a grand procession. Advance infiltration caused surprisingly extensive local uprisings while cybernetically enhanced Republican Guard overwhelmed the token garrisons.

Over the next few months the bulk of the northern continent of Nestoria was seized by the Republic as the Duke of Diospolis, the titular overlord of the planet, stood by and watched, reportedly relishing in the fate overtaking his bitter rival. The Duchess of Panticapaeum did not stand idle though, always the greater power in space, she called upon allies, traded favours, formed up her armada and then struck at her cousin's void ships without warning of mercy, seizing them and adding them to her fleet before he engaged the Republican force.

For weeks the heavens were filled with fire but in the end, the duchess won a stunning victory, capturing dozens of their transports, driving the Republic from the system and seizing complete control of the void around Nestoria. She had still lost almost all of her holdings however and lacked any way to take them back, the PTS guns and shield of her capital making mockery of her dreadnoughts.

Since then the victorious armada has mouldered in orbit, no doubt damaged to some degree but also blockading the planet and trying to interdict all trade, 'taxing' all traffic. Occasional skirmishes with elements of the Republic's fleet have also been a factor but the Duchess appears unwilling to press home full scale fleet engagements even after the proven inferiority of Republican vessels – they never seem to lack for new ones and have continued to be able to run resupply to their new holdings on Nestoria.

Nobody knows how long the 'Pirate Duchess' can maintain this state of affairs, while considered a champion for her victory that was a decade in the past and what kind of duchess rules only a few holdings on airless worlds along with a perhaps rapidly decaying fleet?

The Duke of Diospolis took advantage of the war to cross the equetorial straights and seize the County of Tanais, leading to a decade of skirmishing warfare with the local levies of the Republic along with increasingly intensive naval confrontations. The duke is now dying though, kept alive only through the ingenuity of his Engineers and coherent for no more than a few hours a day, decisions increasingly irrational.

The Li Halan Duke of Khangai has tried to remain neutral, though the 'Pirate Duchess' seizing many of his remaining void ships is a bitter point of contention. The Republican Fleet is entering the Nestorian system in increasing force though, teams landing upon Khangai in attempts to retrieve Second Republic technology or foment uprisings.

The outer system outposts and colonies have been a battleground for over a decade, the Republic has no experience of ground warfare it seems but while their starships are inferior to those of Known Worlders their fleet is highly efficient and crewed by large numbers of Changed void born. The Brother Battle cling to a bastion upon the outer world of Nisibis, rather more fervent in pressing the offence against the Republic than the Duchess of Panticapaeum but increasingly lacking in resources.

Of course a few months ago Nestoria did regain contact with the Known Worlds and that potentially changes everything. Will there be a crusade against the Third Republic? Will the Nestorian Dukes acknowledge the Emperor, will they join with their extended families or suffer annexation to the Decados who are able to offer more immediate aid? Unlike in previous Fading Suns games though the world the game is set in is a major power in its own right, even if a Royal House or the Emperor did decide to throw its entire weight onto Nestoria it might be matched by the local lords and guilds, who given their monopoly looking ways are in general not in favour of the Third Republic and its free market hyper capitalism.

So game wise my current thoughts – The setting is big, the population of the Nestoria system over a billion. The ducal level characters would be NPCs but very much existing to drive plot rather than belonging to particular characters (with the most powerful, the Duke of Diopolis, liable to die or require a regency council). Counts, Earls, Barons, etc would be opened as PC positions at a measured rate that concentrates on the nobles doing interesting things with a good proportion remaining NPC so that things like IC reputation or ability to orate and argue can gets its mileage.

The church would rule approximately a quarter of the land and have immense power, especially with the 'antagonists' being a resurgent Republic that imperils everyone's souls, a good portion of the County level positions would be landed Bishoprics.

All cities run by the Guilds, mostly under charter to a noble, but while nobles might have manpower and be titularly in charge, the bulk of the wealth would belong to the Guilds. They have a major choice to make as well – the Republic is potentially what many of them want, but just how much power would they retain under such a regime if they shared their secrets?

So that is my probably over extensive summary. Are you interested in helping or discussing? Then say so, I am based in the UK for fun timezone based shenanigans but if you are seriously interested then I am happy to Skype.

I have made a character and did not run into that kind of problem, it was hideously slow though and I am unsure why they apparently only have one staff person handling applications - there are seven on the list and that seems like something you should have more people doing.

From my experience I made a few minor fuck ups in character generation setting my +sheet, received a pretty polite response to them within a few hours of submitting... Then after fixing them had to wait something like four days to get approved despite no further changes being needed.

That said the game seems otherwise pretty solid with some good quality RP and no difficulty getting involved in plot, which is actually happening! Very light on people being awake in Euro times though.

From the looks of character generation the game is set up to work with 3rd edition when it goes live if they want to make a new game or reboot this one - most likely the former given the new version will not allow most of the different splat types I guess.

This looks to be the Nth initeration of the Exalted MUSH and from what I recall the code is really nice, no idea what the game is currently like though I have spotted a few of the usual suspect's obvious characters from a glance at the wiki.

@mietze said:

*Fading Suns (I so very much want this. Have contemplated trying to start one a few times.)

So on this note, I am working on something, though there is obviously a lot more to do. A teaser though: