#(some immunity sure and neat handling of it but like this new encounter is extra spicey *tm*)

[godzexperiment]

nix the first time he's made aware of his darkness!eye thingy like 'what the fuck you mean my pupil seems to be melting into my iris? in a little tear manner?'

[webspace-informations]

Viktor Strobovski

"Counterpoint: we're not mortals. We can do whatever we want, if we can find a way to do so." - Viktor, chapter 8

Handle: Viktor (@VSTROBOVSKI) Game Origin: Advanced Education with Viktor Strobovski First Appearance: Ch 01: My Atypical Encounter Counterparts: ?? (Merged) Species: Tarwill Gender: Male, He/Him Height: 180cm / 5'11" PURPOSE: UNITE -> COALESCE. Brings others together despite differences -> Makes everyone on his side fight with more finesse than usual, including himself Weapon: Woodcutter's Axe Relationships:

Tiara (Wife)

Ben (Friend/Player)

Alice (Friend/Employee)

Angellica (Friend/Employee)

Erie (Friend/Employee)

Captain Gonzalo (Friend/Employee)

Laura (Friend/Employee)

Marzia (Friend/Employee)

Billy Lė (Employee)

Dave 82 (Employee)

Candice (Friend)

Denied Lė (Friend)

Olivia (Friend)

Scrina (Friend)

Aldurra (Acquaintance)

Baldi (Acquaintance)

Dave 1 (Ex-friend/Ex-employee/Enemy)

Alex (Enemy)

Appearance

In his humanoid model, he will appear as a fair-skinned man wearing a salmon polo, a brown jacket, dark brown jeans, dark blue shoes, with short, neat auburn hair. His face, however, is completely obscured by his almost-white mask, resembling that of a drama variety. The eyeholes are black, with white, ring-like irises that glow.

In his true form, he becomes much more lanky, and without proper hands or feet. His skin is black, with no hair or clothes. When angered, his mask will grow black, patterned marks. He may sprout extra pairs of arms and/or stretch them out toward his opponent.

If he enters COALESCE mode, his irises and axe will glow a golden yellow color. Anyone who gets injured with this weapon while in this state will not be able to recover what was lost, regardless of species.

History

In 2018, his game was downloaded by a human named Ben. Sometime in 2019, Viktor, his friends, and his school entered the Internet. At some point, he became the leader of The Webspace, hiring many others to work for him in various fields. He married Tiara, and all seemed to be going well.

He and 1 became close friends, until Alex's arrival, who inadvertently drove a wedge between them. Over the course of dealing with Alex, not only did this lead to a string of somewhat controversial decisions, but also his loss of power for a short while. After the Battle of Infinity School, he and Tiara were captured in a Tarwill Container, until Captain Gonzalo and his crew found and freed them.

Not long after his return, he went to face 1 and take him down himself. He was successful, but it wasn't in a way worth celebrating.

He is currently alive.

Skills

Exclusive to Tarwills:

Transformation: Can swap between humanoid and true forms at will. However, this is amplified by each having their own physical conditions - if one is hurt, the other won't be.

Super Strength: Exactly what it says on the tin.

Regeneration: Only in his Tarwill form. He can regenerate his entire body so long as his mask is intact, and isn't trapped in an enclosed space (such as a Tarwill Container). He can also retreat into his mask for safety.

Mass Generation: Can extend limbs and body, grow whole new limbs, etc.

Cold Immunity: Tarwill body temperatures are very low, so equally chilly environments pose no issue for him.

Exclusive to The Webspace:

Long Jump: Can leap at great distances.

No Fall Damage: Will always land unharmed, no matter the height.

Trivia

He is one of the few characters from his game to take the "merging" route.

He's terrible at naming things.

His PURPOSE color was originally going to match his canon subtitles, but gold looked more aesthetically pleasing than the tan.

His game's "Curse", as well as any Alex's Basics copy, comes from an unknown Accurser. As noted by 1, it's long since been patched out, so it's impossible for Viktor or any of his affiliates to be controlled by it.

Considering that Billy's FORTIFY beam cracked his mask from the heat, Viktor has chosen to experience temperature changes.

References

Not sure what quantifies as "this sounds crazy can you prove it" yet. Will add if there is.

Categories

Advanced Education with Viktor Strobovski Alice Freudenmacher | Angellica | Erie | Laura | Marzia V@@@@@ | Scrina | Tiara | Viktor Strobovski (u r here)

[dapperkobold]

Review at Random: Alien Bestiary (Starfinder)

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

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

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

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

Presentation

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

Final Presentation Score: B-

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

Mechanics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what does the Alien Bestiary have, specifically?

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

Meteor Dragon!

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

Phycomid!

Moon Flowers and Moon Beasts!

Various Giants!

Kytons!

More Kytons!

SERIOUSLY this book has 11 different Kytons in it!

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

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

Who needs this many Kytons?!

Golems.

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

Fairly creative monsters specific to the Aetheria Campaign Setting.

New robots!

WHAT IS IT OH CRIPES GET ME OUT OF HERE

Clockwork Constructs!

Daemons?

John Carpenter’s The Thing

Obligatory Great Old Ones

Starship stat block for Cthulhu!

Trappers and Mimics!

Mobster leeches!

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

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

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

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

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

Final Mechanics Score: B+ C-

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

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

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

Writing

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

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

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

Final Writing Score: B

Overall

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

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

Presentation: B-

Mechanics: B+ C-

Writing: B

FINAL GRADE: B C+

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

Awards:

MAXIMUM KYTON