Post your OOC conversations here.

This is also where you should point out knowledge you have discovered in-game that you would like to see added to the Rules Thread.

For example, how much specific Miracles cost.
This message was last edited by the GM at 04:03, Fri 11 Feb 2022.

We have three players! Feel free to start posting in the IC whenever you want now.

Lol I'm a shark

Fabulous, I’m a memory!

fantastic, I'm a ghost.

A ghost that remembers being a blind man.

You all probably know who I am.

Hey, Kovacs!

Hey folks, disembodied soul here. :)

Hey Kovacs.

Huitzilopochtli guy here.

Waiting for Skelos's first in character post before moving time forward. I appreciate everyone else gathering together.

In case I haven't mentioned this explicitly: once you acquire any followers do all, the civ-management aspect of the game will begin.

Do our Believers need to take any particular form, ie human?

When the Storyteller takes something mentioned in your backstory and allows it to become the starting point, you aren't sure if you should be flattered, or concerned.

The problem with memory loss  when its the consequence of direct damage, isn't what you can't recall, but the bits you can, but can't say why.  Yes, I'm running with that.  Don't worry, my character will recall who he is, or was, and why he's a ghost eventually, but that bit of useful info escapes him at the moment.

It's just the first piece that's been revealed. There's stuff from everybody's brief backstories.

 No, no, Fate, play up the fear factor.  Sit back and grin, and let your players sweat  a little.

I'm mostly joshing though.

Game map uploaded. Not my best painting, but it passed the time.

Yes, that's how big the city ruins are. As far as your eye can see, at your current level.

Better than i could manage, anyway.

Are we at the Father of Otters or the beach peninsula right now?

You've entered the sewer outlet pipe that leads to the Father of Otters. Unfortunately the Road With No Name is way too small to be seen at that scale, meaning it's a much larger map than I intended. I might paint a zoom in of that area.
This message was last edited by the GM at 12:18, Sun 13 Feb 2022.

 Fate, my next post will contain strong elements of memory,  reality might paint a very different picture.   Meaning, there might not be any water processing equipment left when   I get where I'm going.

Skelos, that's perfectly fine. Please be sure to describe any industrial process as necromancy, or make up your own magical words to describe any industrialized process.

---

Apologies for the delay in replying this weekend. My friends have been having Valentines drama, and it has eaten up all my interest in being online.



You'll be able to pick their physical form, within reasonable limits. Players will not get a choice in their cultural habits and beliefs before getting adopted. I expect a lot of early game conflict to be between who these people were before entering the story, and who you shape them to be.

There will be ways to alter their physical appearance with Miracles after the fact, for substantially reduced Belief cost.

 Power has been having fits for the past couple of days,  and its the whole area: working on a post, which I hope to have up later today.

Knock on wood, and all.

Figured i'd share a nice webnovel to help get us in the mood:

https://tiraas.net/2014/08/20/book-1-prologue/

What does the skeleton look like btw? Just human skeleton or are there any different traits?

So, one of the things about this game is going to be that as Small Gods, you "know" what a thing is, with an extreme bias, and will need to make a concerted effort to look at things. Vision is not your primary sense, Belief is.

I've already spilled the beans about how "necromancy" actually means "industrial process." There's going to be a few others like that, though having started you near a major ruin, it may be a while before you find any of the others.

Since Grootwithaai is "contemplating the skeleton," I'll be posting a visual description of it, probably sometime after midnight CST, when I'll have time to do a proper bit of creative writing.

How I picture grootwithaai

https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/File:Nightwave.jpg
This message was last edited by the player at 05:24, Sat 19 Feb 2022.

We have faith points?

I'm using one point of belief, I think I said faith, which was wrong, and since I have zero idea how much anything costs, I'm experimenting.  My ghost is fixated on the city, because well, he's a ghost, and the city is what he recalls.

Ah gotcha! I know I have a habit of skimming past important posts or information so I just wanted to ask in case there's a post detailing mechanics that I missed.

Right, we have a few problems.

1. We blind folks can't use discord.
   
2. We blind people can't use Google maps. 

So, how you want to do this boss?

Oh, just as a headsup, and I'm not sure about others, but you need to give me permission to edit my sheet. checkboox associated with that.

Right. Sorry about that. You see how quickly I forget important details?

Do you want to use a real world location that you've been to or can easily reference? Or you can describe the sort of neighborhood you're thinking of.

I originally wrote a "4 block radius," but then I remembered that I was thinking of Chicago city blocks, and that not everybody lives in that particular flavor of urban sprawl.

The map, incidentally, is based off the Gulf of Taranto in Italy, which is where the "heel" of the boot meets the sole. Plus two visible rivers, the location of the 3rd river is still unknown. The ruins sprawl across approximately 12 square miles. The Sky Whale Corpse is about a mile long, with a half-mile wide diameter. The local terrain is hilly.

You should all now have edit access to your character sheets.

This message was deleted by the player at 03:16, Thu 24 Feb 2022.

OH MAN! I Totally a missed opportunity to play Calcifer from Howl's moving castle or a soot sprite! I would have loved it!!

But I am shark and the shark is me, and this is alright with the world
This message was last edited by the player at 20:21, Fri 25 Feb 2022.

You can always try to find a soot sprite in the world and make him your friend.

 Or try and create one.

I don't mean now, but later.    After you've got some worshipers, or something.

I do like the idea of the moon being blown apart and the Tides no longer being a thing.

So, a lot less tides, but still some, since the solar Cor interaction is still a thing.  Honestly, I was thinking Yellowstone blew its lid again, and that was the cause of a lot less population... one of the reasons I'm really for the   creation of the Yellowstone Thermal project.

Yes, I'm on hold.

 I've been somewhat swamped with various  volunteer related issues, I should have a post ready sometime next week, which will hopefully not only be interesting, but provide other Godly beings some fuel for Godly things.

To me it kind of sounded like a terminator style robit uprising. The maelstrom might be a human or robot made phenomena akin to humans darkening the skies in the matrix.

But that's just my impression.

See the Miracle rules. Altering an existing thing costs less than Innovating something brand new from scratch.



I forget if I've mentioned the moons already, but there are two moons, one of which is was forged with necromancy and is referred to as The Eye of God (bonus points if you get the reference).



It's a Mystery(tm). You can investigate this, either directly, or through your Followers once you have them. There are rewards for doing so.

+sigh+ Somehow, rpol didn't tell me about any of your posts until somebody PM'd me, and I was foolish and didn't check manually.

Apologies, folks. Adjudications incoming.

Man these threads are so layered in metaphor and symbolism I get so lost.

The only way this makes sense to me is that the everstorm was triggered by a machine to sweep across the world opening Bunkers and fallout shelters killing thousands of mortals

The gods of an alternate universe (or possibly several, depending on races selected) have all tried to save their followers by opening a portal to this world, and they're all jumping through. The Everstorm broke the door into several doors.

The machine stuff did cause the Everstorm to expand significantly. Original plan was to have everybody land within a 200mile stripe of the planet. Now they're all over the place, but in smaller starting pops, meaning more Small Gods are getting followers.

It's not so much a metaphor as it is easily translatable to things that are comprehensible in the modern day. The thing I said earlier about using "necromancy" wherever you'd normally write "industrial" is a player conceit to help translate into the world. In-game, it is necromancy.

Anbaric Forces basically means electricity, but Anbaric Forces are going to be semi-sentient (though maybe not sapient, I haven't decided yet).
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:14, Fri 11 Mar 2022.

Oooohhhh that clears things up considerably. I took necromancy to actually mean just regular industry so all of our perceptions of a normal world were just warped and distorted.

My head canon was that the apocalypse was an AI revolt a la terminator and we perceived machines and robots as evil because we they were not natural and had no souls.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:22, Fri 11 Mar 2022.

Got to pull out here folks.

Life tossed a wrench into my plans, kind of personal, so I'll leave it as that,  but I've got to find the exit.  Have fun.

Sorry to see you leave, Skelos. Hoping you'll return when things quiet down again on... whatever tossed that wrench.

Take care :)

Sorry to see you go, Skelos. One day, we'll be in a game together, I swear :)

Let us know if you're ever ready to rejoin.



Well, you've got the "because" half correct, I'd hope that I had made that part clear by now. Although, they have no "spirits," which may or may not be different from "souls." Hmmm, going to have to find a buddhist to argue that one over a pint or three. Maybe grab someone versed in one of those western religions to join in.

I believe the only info you have is that there was an apocalypse and the skeleton/bots survived it. Kinda prejudiced of you to assume that the skeletons are responsible for it :P , just because they're soulless automatons hellbent on....well, I mean, you haven't even met an (un)living skeleton yet to see what they're hellbent on.

Poke, apparently Fate sometimes doesn't get poke updates for this game

Happens to me too on occasion. I see there have been replies, i check the thread and make a mental note to reply later when i'm home again.

Then, once i get home and log onto RPoL, because i checked the thread earlier the number's back to being white and i mistakenly assume there have been no new replies.

Okay, so that's 60 Belief in both cases.

To get an indication of scale, how much Belief do i actually have?

Per the Rules thread, we start with 10 Belief

In reply to Iridiana (msg # 50):

No, a legendary alteration is base 6.

Grabbing 10 souls is +1, but doing it in harmony with your inclinations is -1, so the total cost factor is 1, which is x1, so the cost for 10 legendary souls would be a 6 Belief.

You start with 10 Belief.

Okay, so what's that 15 doing there? And how does 2 * 15(6) equal 60?

Because a 6 on the lookup table is x30, not x15. Apologies. I spent over 30 minutes trying to pick an instructive example and went through several variations, and there was a version where the Cost Factor was 5 not 6.

And is there a downside to running out of Belief* when you have no Followers?

* This is obviously a bad idea without having a way to recover it, just asking for completion.

Rules as Written, your god instantly dies with 0 Followers and 0 Belief.

In my setting, you become even less self-aware and magically smaller, no longer a Small God, but a Tiny God.

Your maximum Belief Gain is capped by your followers, so without Followers, you can't gain any Belief. Without Belief, you can't do much of anything that will earn you Followers.

Out of game, your character is effectively dead. You might be able to get someone to gift you Followers or Belief, but outside of Player whims, that seems pretty unlikely to happen, and the exchange rate is pretty poor. You might be able to luck into taking credit for something miraculous-seeming that a Follower witnesses, at which point you'd have 1 Follower and 1 Belief.

Figured, thanks :)



So can i ask what the difference between these two options is? The multiplier is i assume the cost factor thing?

You're correct about the multiplier.

Since your character understands less about how miracles work than you do right now, I'm going to ask you to make a choice based on the info you have available.

Do you want to gather these souls as they're getting up from their seats (ie, moment of death), or as they're leaving the platform (ie, dead fora couple of seconds, but still within range)?

Hmm... Hard choice.

The original idea was 'moment of death', but then on the second option i see two separate mentions of 'This will have a story effect' which looks interesting as well.

So let's see if i understand correctly. Since 'Leaving the platform' ignores the multiplier, would that mean i just pay the base cost and every multiplier counts as x1, or would the multiplier be unavailable and i could only use it to gain individuals?
This message was last edited by the player at 00:22, Tue 22 Mar 2022.

See what I did with Ninth's post. The miracle will be like that. I'll roll randomly for the factors that increase the cost

Hmm.. Okay, you know what, for the purposes of learning the game, let's go for broke.

I'll spend 8 Belief on harmoniously gathering 10 Legendary Souls.

6 for the souls themselves, +1 for them having both a high Mind and high Spirit stat and another +1 for gathering them for the duration of the Everstorm.

It's a bit of an investment, and i'll likely end up growing the slowest out of all the players due to how much Belief this is going to cost me, but i'll get a nice 'core' of heroes for my future religion out of it.

A second high stat is a higher base cost (a more impressive miracle), so it'd be base cost 7. Duration is a Cost Factor, and will be offset by using a harmonious inclination.

I really don't recommend spending the bank on gathering a team of ghosts. You'll be spending most of your belief, you won't be getting any immediate Belief from the awe of spectators, you won't be creating the slow trickle of belief that comes in from having faithful believers.

The core conceit of the game is that the player's God characters are only as strong as their believers. I started the PCs off essentially naked and hungry and with a paltry starting pool of belief,

It's a bit like going to a Brazilian steakhouse and ordering a salad.

Unless you have ideas about how you're going to gather followers using this team of ghosts using your remaining belief, I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd get any.

Well, the idea was for me to eventually use Alteration Miracles to have them act as my Divine Agents and indirectly generate Belief for me. Would that work?

That will work, but I'm worried about the amount of Belief you'll have left to grab followers. I suppose with the 3 Belief you'll have leftover, you'll be able to grab 10 standard (d6s, with 3 followers with 1 stat at d8) followers. Assuming at least one of them has a higher Spirit stat, you'll get back 1d8(x1) Belief back from the second miracle....

Okay, nevermind. I just needed to math it out. You'll be able to eke out a few followers, and having 10 Legendary*2 ghosts at your command will be pretty useful in keeping them alive and gathering more.

Took some liberties, let me know if I'm off base anywhere

Writing was great. I only ask that you give me a summary sentence of each miracle in your OOC, so I can understand what why you're doing one at 100 peeps, and another at 10 people.

Sure!

Updated. Happy Thursday everyone.

Okay, so what's the result of my Miracle again?

*waves*

Just lurking, but want to pop in and say  hello.

Hey! I hope things are going OK by you

In reply to Iridiana (msg # 69):

I am waiting for you to give it to me in a final form after all that number crunching and what-if'ing I forced you to sit through.

Hey, Skelos! Hope you’re doing ok

Yeah, I'm good, just stupidly busy.
Thanks all for the interesting listening material.

Came down with the flu the past few days, post's going to have to wait for a bit ^^;

While folks are waiting on me to finish coallating notes and responding the latest miracles, could I talk y'all into posting notes in the OOC about the parts of the setting you're most interested in so far?
This message was last edited by the GM at 01:13, Fri 01 Apr 2022.

I do like the idea of the maelstrom, especially if it turns into a recurring threat.

The post-apocalyptic setting that we are breathing life back into is also nice. Usually you only survive, not have a chance to resuscitate the landscape.

https://i.redd.it/4ez37lmk50r81.png

Personally, i like the idea of being able to mold the game world to our liking. Still need to get around to pushing out the numbers for the Miracle, and i still feel like i only know 20% of what i'm supposed to, but oh well.

Does anyone have access to the full game rules? It looks like they are not for sale or download anywhere

I found this: https://newgodsofmankind.wordp...edition-basic-rules/

Edit: Was a bit of a pain to get to, apparently, but it seems to be the correct rules.
This message was last edited by the player at 14:27, Sat 02 Apr 2022.

In reply to Fate (msg # 76):

For me, the tension between belief and necrotic engines seems intriguing, and the emergence of culture from a hodgepodge of worlds

I've got a pdf of it that I'll try to get to all of you, probably through GDrive. I paid for it, so I don't mind sharing it as long as it's only with players in my game.

 I probably should have taken 'I got my life back' for my tag line.

Yes, the current phase of insanity is over... for now. By this I mean my life doesn't revolve around wanting clones/ robot helpers, and trying to battle time to be doing multiple things at once.     I'm actually working on an  an OOC  post to help me eventually do an IC post, so you'll actually find me active again.

Huzzah!

Agreed, huzzah!

 I've altered my belief points back to nine, since Fate has informed me to not build up miracles in small parts, and technically, since I had already bonded with part of the city as part of my previous miracle, what I'm working on will be part of that miracle.  Please note the statues that will be formed of all four of you will be as Skelos  thinks of you now, and are not to match you perfectly.

Which reminds me, i still need to actually stat my own miracle out.

I'll get to it eventually...

  Yeah, I'm kind of curious what you are going to do with those souls of yours.

Well, imagine ancestor worship in that "the spirits of your ancestors will guide you"... only literally.

Also, occasionally having them be reborn through a Miracle. Every society needs its heroes after all. ;)

 1. that was something I considered.
2. It also fits given your name as associated with lore and knowledge. I've had a long-running mental image of you being the head of records or some library before your character died, and became a ghost.

Note, while this miracle seems like three distinct things, they are all related to the three aspects of Skelos: chemical transformation; machines, and more importantly modernity; and lastly, the city.

Yup. The ten Legendary Ghosts are all about me going for retention of knowledge :)

 And now to await the answer of if I have this  remotely correct, and then begin the second of a three part miracle set.

If anyone's interested in learning a little bit about Skelos' personality and general character, there's a hint up at the top of my Miracle in the  other OOC, which should be informative.

Gentle nudge for Fate :)

*waves*

Fin wave back

Going to be trying to get back to this, this weekend, if folks haven't disappeared yet.

 Totally disappeared.

Gone without a trace.

You'll never find me.

☺

I'm in!

Still here as well (and i STILL need to stat up that roll!) >_<

Back. Or here. Or something

 I'm probably going to toss up an IC post, of what I'd like today tomorrow, and we can hash out if it works or not, or to what degree, and what my character has to pay for it, tomorrow.  That will be Tuesday, since I'm stupidly busy at the moment.

I need to go back and take much better notes on what all has happened already, that (and, to be frank, a crippling depressive episode), is what's been keeping me from moving the game forward.

Sorry to hear that, those can toss a real heavy wrench into the mix. I'll hold and wait. No point in adding more stuff for you to take notes on.

As for the game, its not going anywhere, and I don't think any of us really are either, so no pressure from my end. You worry about you first.

ooh nice!

Did you make it or was it a commission?

Just came across it on reddit. Thought it was too perfect not to share

Oh, definitely. If it weren't for the plane it'd have fit straight into the game as-is, and even with it it's still good for providing a sense of scale :)

I'm guessing... I'm guessing its an image of something... a map?
If you forget I'm blind, I'll shatter that illusion at some point.

In reply to Skelos (msg # 109):

Umm... It looks like a shark with the bottom half of a squid jumping out from clouds, and the edges of the creature are really wispy. There's a small jet (around 10 seater going by size) in the picture as well, and by comparison the shark thing is large enough to be able to swallow it whole. It's implied to be jumping out to catch the plane in flight.

Nice.