#just for like a third of the cast to go and martyr themselves anyway

[queeriboh]

Oz crying over his pos dad but not Elliot pisses me off soooo baaadddddddd

[eljackinton]

Anyway, here’s how I’d do Necromunda as a Mass Effect style RPG

Warhammer video games have been coming in fast and loose over the last half decade, there’s been hits and there’s been misses but what’s been most noticeable is the absence of Role Playing Games. Despite both Fantasy and 40k being fertile ground for exploration, levelling and loot, we’ve only really seen the waters tested with the Inquisitor Martyr game, and I never played that, so don’t ask me about it.

I know a lot of people probably have their own idea of what would be the best conceit for an RPG set in a Games Workshop world, but for my money, I think Necromunda would be the best starting point for something like this, and hopefully talking you through how I’d envision it, you’ll see why.

The scope of the game should be a grand adventure set in the Underhive. We’ll create our own character, buy weapons and level up skills over time, but we’ll be exploring and talking as much as fighting, with communities to engage and barter with and characters to appeal or argue against. Gameplay wise, I’d see it playing a little like Mass Effect 2 or Deus Ex Human Revolution. Sort of third person with a bit of a cover system, stealth should be an option and there would need to be a more robust close combat system to show off all the fancy melee weapons the 40k world enjoys.

Unlike Mass Effect, or Deus Ex, however, this game will not have golden endings. Necromunda is set in a brutal world where every man is looking to get one foot up over the other. It’s a game where everyone is out to screw each other over and the only form of honour is how much advance warning one person gives to the other. There will be moral  choices to make, characters to empathise with, but at the end of the day this is a game where you can trust nobody, and nobody trusts you.

So the game begins. Here you create your character a-la a lot of RPGs where you design their look, their face, their colour scheme. You choose one of the 6 Clan Houses, and depending on which one you chose will not only dictate what weapons/skills you have access to, but also optional sidequests and a few ways the plot unfolds.

So starting the game we’ll get a little tutorial section. You’re a new recruit to the gang of choice, and word has gotten out that that an Enforcer convoy is heading trough nearby territory. They’re escorting a crate of something extremely valuable, so they’ve decided to send you and your fellow recruits off to prove yourself and retrieve it.

After being given the basics of the game by a mentor from the gang, you get to choose whether your starting class is a Juve (an all-rounder, with access to most weapons) or a Prospect (more restricted weapons/skills but access to special weapons and abilities) the Prospects would differ from house to house, as they do in the table top game itself.

Things go south when the attack on the convoy begins. All the other Clan Houses arrive to try and claim the crate. Just when you think you’ve got your hands on it, a Ratskin ambush happens, they seize the crate, and you end up falling through a decrepit hive floor only to be lost in an industrial labyrinth.

Fighting off hive critters, you come across other survivors of the raid, one for each gang you didn’t join. This will be the main cast of characters, who, like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, or Baldur’s Gate et al, have charismatic characters, interesting backstories that we discover over time, and the possibility of romance (though as mentioned before, not without the risk of betrayal.) The character from the gang you picked will be absent from the crew, but will appear in some capacity as the mentor that trains you at the start.

The characters are none too keen to team up, but lost in the dark, they are left with no choice, as something is beginning to pursue them. Initially thought to be some hive horror, a high tech Spyrer Hunter has decided they also want their hands on the crate, and fast become one of the groups many adversaries.

Escaping the maze, the group rest up in a small Underhive community to take stock of their situation. Here the player gets the chance to talk to characters, read up on backstory and take on a few side quests as a sort of starting village. While here, we discover that t each gang has a mole for the Enforcers within it, and that they were all betrayed in an attempt by the Enforcers to draw out the most dangerous fighters. Unable to trust their own gangs, the group agrees to stick together and go after the crate on their own, and hopefully get answers along the way.

So begins a journey down and deeper into the Underhive. Starting with industrial levels, forges and trading posts, down to dark caverns, sump rivers and more. Along the way the characters have to contend not only with the Spyrer hunting them, but also Enforcer squads trying to reclaim the crate, and other bandits, bounty hunters and hive scum.

Early in the game the player will be contacted by their mentor, which will be filled by the member of the team from your house that would normally be included. This way the player still has the opportunity to find out their backstory and have a potential romance. The mentor states that they were aware of the double-cross, but they still need more info, they’ll hang back and let you carry on with the group, in the hopes that they may spill crucial information your house wouldn’t get otherwise. At numerous points in the game you’ll be given the option to slip away and do sidequests for your own house, and you’ll be given the choice to show more loyalty to your new rag-tag group or the Clan House you chose at the start, but unsure if you’re just being played by whoever the mole was.

Mid game the player levels up to a full ganger, carrying forward their skills from the class they picked at the start. Later on they’ll get the chance to level up to a champion, or do a house specific sidequest that lets them become a special prestige class (like Death Maiden or Stimmer.)

Eventually the player catches up with the Ratskins, only to find that they ended up losing the crate to a bunch of Ash Waste Nomads anyway. You’re lead on a further search far beyond the foundations of the hive, uncovering an ancient production facility for the Men of Iron, and you have to carefully work your way through without waking the titan sized juggernauts that will want to eradicate mankind.

At the crux of the game, you end up out on the edge of the hive, carefully navigating gantries as near poisonous ash wind blows you from side to side as the Nomads attempt to get the crate beyond the hive’s reach. You battle the Nomads, the Spyrer and Enforcers, and the mole reveals themselves. Maybe it was your mentor, depending on your choices. At the end of the game you can choose to stay loyal to your house, where you must fight off and kill your fellow companions you’ve fought alongside for the entire game. On the other hand you can reject your house for your new band of brothers, who will unfortunately all turn against each other anyway in a final stand-off that leaves you fighting for your life and having to kill them all.

I told you there would be no golden ending. The game, however would have multiple bittersweet endings:

If you stayed loyal to your house, and your mentor wasn’t the mole, and whether you romanced them or not you both return victorious and well respected by the clan. If they were the mole, you have to fight them, or if you romanced them you can protect the lie or give them the chance to go on the run.

If you choose your companions, and didn’t romance any of them, you successfully fight them all off, seize the crate for yourself , and go on to be a lone hive fighter of legend, but always looking over your shoulder in case your old house wants vengeance.

If you romanced one of the characters from a rival house, then you’ll be asked at several points in the game for your thoughts on what their future would be as lovers from rival houses. Each character would have a different take, and you really have to pay attention to their foibles and values in order to figure out what the right thing to say is.

If you didn’t gain your love interest’s trust, then during the final showdown your character will hesitate, giving your love interest time to get the upper hand and shoot you, taking the crate for themselves. If you did gain their trust, they are the one who hesitates. You’re given the chance to kill them anyway, or let them live, where you both take the crate and go on to become a legendary duo who always has each other’s backs against the clan houses who want revenge.

What was in the crate? You never find out.

And that, hopefully, will give you an idea of the kind of Necromunda game I’d like to see. Obviously it’d take deft writing, great environmental design, and gameplay with a flow that fits the world and manages to take on the strengths of the tabletop game. So, not a small ask, sure.

I know I’ll probably never see it, but who knows? Maybe some aspiring video game dev will crib some ideas. In the meantime, I can’t wait to check out Underhive Wars, and I’ll be playing that as soon as I can.  

[dukeofriven]

So, you probably don’t care, but your rant about computers all sucking came up as “in my orbit” because I follow a lot of computer science blogs. The people tumblr is most likely to show your anti Computer Scientist rant to, is computer scientists.

Yeah I was pretty cranky when I wrote that. My quest to read everything Andrew Hussie ever wrote dumped me into a 1700 word article of his where he kvetches about Apple and a trip to Macworld in 2006. The first half is maybe the most infantile, exhausting, shitty thing he ever wrote. Worse than the HIC/Hitler thing, worse than Stoner Lou, worse than the racist chicken - it’s just one part boring to one part childish. It wasn’t until I was talking to @rahkshirock​ about it that I realized he was throwing an honest-to-god Karkat tantrum for a thousand words, ripping Apple to shreds in really lazy and strangely hostile ways. (Podcasts. He goes on and on about how horrible the very idea of a podcast is. It’s almost comically petulant.)So I got so sick of his shit and I vented about it to Tumblr then went back to the article. At which point he had, of course, calmed the fuck down and the second half makes some really good and valuable critiques about problems Apple actually had/has - but that first section was so specious and exhausting I just kind of lost it.I’ve been bitter about computers ever since my university days. There are, broadly speaking, two types of CS students: those who graduate knowing nothing about computers save that the devil machines are not to be trusted, and those who graduated knowing everything about computers and who feel that they (the student) should be worshipped because they posses the secret digital mysteries that lesser mortals are not gifted enough to be able to comprehend. (It’s a neurodevelopmental disorder that falls under a diagnostic umbrella called STEM-Up-Their-Ass Syndromes. It kills tens of thousands of promising personalities every year, and there is currently no cure.)The former type tends to live off the grid in shacks on mountains and occasionally posts some fragment of code via phone phreaking that is an incredible thing of beauty and will improve society as a whole, or else they, like Jonathan Gillette, know that computer literacy is the only way civilization can save itself from predatory tech companies and they do their best to teach some crumb of their wisdom to the common people before they go mad from the strain of oracular vision and vanish from the mortal plain. (Jonathan Gillette is the only reason I can get anything to run under wine. Though I retain essentially zero working knowledge of Ruby I feel his spirit forever at my back urging me onwards to at least try so as not to disappoint my pet ham).The other kind of CS student is among the worst specimens of humanity this side of Peter Thiel: they retain a deep sense of resentment because they were oppressed for their religious beliefs (Early-Day Conservative Weeabooism) in high school, think having a natural facility with math places them highly in a caste system of their own fevered imaginings, and are forbidden by their religion from applying deodorant because mortification of the flesh is a way to show their devotion to their church’s martyred founder. (A guy called Kevin Johnson, a COBOL programmer who preached his gospel unto Usenet from his parent’s basement in Plano, Texas and was taken from this world in 1993 when a large Bubblegum Crisis poster fell upon him and pinned him to the ground, where he subsequently drowned in a puddle of Crystal Pepsi - although, according to traditional ‘Cweeaboo’ beliefs, before his mortal body perished his true essence was freed from its sweat-slick shell by the Incorrupt And Perfectly Rational Pneuma of Bertrand Russell and stored in the Russian/Spanish subtitles on a bootleg betamax of the finale to Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. The day this bootleg is rediscovered and played the rivers will run with ramune, the air across America will buzz with the sound of Tanna japonensis, and Anime Will Finally Be Good Again. (A splinter-sect of Cweeaboo, known as Conservadox Weeabooism, believes that it was not an Macross bootleg but a pristine laserdisc of volume 5 of The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, and that on its discovery the rivers will run red with Jolt.))These CS students are almost universally white, cis-male, in need of a remedial course on fundamental hygiene tips, and think Deadpool is straight.If this sounds like a grossly unfair stereotype you are correct and I would normally never stoop to saying something so nonsensical, but in university I had courses in the Computer Science building and I encountered these people every single day. It was really rather incredible from a sociological standpoint: ‘oh my goodness how can you possibly exist as a real legal adult quick point me to the TV show you escaped from and I’ll help you return.’ But, no, there they were in the flesh, with thirty more waiting in the wings - they had some psychic power that told then if you had watched an anime at least once and they would pounce while you waited for class to start in order to interrogate you and ensure you had The Right Beliefs About The Choicest Waifus. They were in constant competition with the economics students for ‘conversation I am most willing to chew my own arm off in order to escape’ and are a good reason why I advocate for Misdemeanor Douchebaggery statues in institutions of higher learning across the continent.The first type of CS student will help you with your tech problems, never shame you for your hardware or the hows and whys of why you own it, will listen to your woes, and survived their CS program without murdering their fellow students - which probably qualifies them for sainthood. They often, but not exclusively, identify as female, tend to have a wicked sense of humour, and can usually debone and serve a sexist male like a Wimbledon Champion in under fifteen seconds.There is also supposedly a third kind of CS student, the so-called ‘ordinary person’ who is said to have graduated without making an ass of themselves at a party, runs the servers at their local insurance company, lives in a suburb, and finds The Big Bang Theory funny. I have never met such a person and have come to believe they are a myth created by car companies as the ideal buyer persona for mid-range sedans.Anyways since university I have approached computers and their advocates with great suspicion and mistrust. The last decade of rising technocratic malevolence has really only proven the correctness of my position: you’d have thought that weebs would have known better than to not only build a soulless android but also allow it to attend Harvard, but the Objectifying Women protocols were so wearingly on-brand that the apocalyptic hubris of the Zuckerborg Project isn’t all that surprising.Anyways, computers suck, and anyone who wants to make you feel inferior for using one kind of computer over another kind of computer is the sort of person who will try and convince you that there’s a meaningful moral distinction between Gatorade and Powerade. Also Andrew Hussie has, or at least had, a bee up his ass about podcasts that made him sound like an iPod-fixated Alex Jones and his rant on the subject is very hard to sit through.This probably didn’t answer your question, if you had a question, but I’m sure it created a lot of questions, which is all you can really expect from me.

[glimpseofamemory]

Persona 5 as antifascist political allegory

Tremendous Persona 5 end-game spoilers follow. Like, all kinds of spoilers for everything.

Friends, Persona 5 has some politics. I wrote a bunch of words about them for another site! But I thought I’d edit that post up a bit and post it here, too, because I suspect many others will find it extremely relevant. The long and short of it is, the entire last third or so of the game is essentially a leftist political allegory for the rise of fascism in Japan (and even abroad), and a call to action for us to rise against it. I’ll hide the Big Stuff past break.

Shido's relevance to this allegory is obvious, as a nationalist and populist right-winger promising to #MakeJapanGreatAgain. His whole story is a pretty direct jab at political corruption in Japan, and more broadly, the dangerous rise of “populism” around the world. Everyone loves Shido because he says he’s gonna fix everything and make Japan the strongest, most beautiful country in the world! He’s also a rapist and a murderer who’s really only interested in himself, but he sure knows how to speak to a crowd. The whole metaphor of a cruise ship of the wealthy and elite floating carelessly over the sunken ruins of the rest of the country is both extremely on the nose and extremely apt for what’s been going on in the world lately. But of course, taking down Shido doesn’t even really solve the problem. The people around him are corrupt, too! And they know how to play the media to downplay his confession and discredit the Phantom Thieves, how to control the narrative to make him look like a martyr, and how to push their agenda through anyway. Boy, all this hits a little close to home, doesn’t it? Anyway, time to go change the heart of society itself, because a full-on democratic revolution is gonna be the only way to change this. So, the Prison of Regression at the bottom of Mementos. The metaphor here is also fairly direct: society is afraid of change. The prisoners - us! the people of society! - allow themselves to remain "captive" because they believe that they will get what they want in life as long as they keep their heads down and don't try to challenge the status quo. Change is scary. The status quo is comfortable. Why bother going against the System, dude? The System always wins anyway. The Holy Grail is that status quo. The grail of legend is claimed to grant you immortality, or to heal all your wounds, or any number of miraculous things if you are to drink from it, fitting with that previous metaphor of people putting up with the status quo to get what they want out of their lives. However, the Grail is also sucking the life force out of all the prisoners. The status quo survives both off of our complacency - our willingness to let ourselves stay prisoner - and off draining us so dry we don’t have the energy to fight back. It’s hard to find the time or effort to fight the power when you’re barely making it by flipping patties at Big Bang Burger, folks. The game says that Yaldabaoth/The Holy Grail (they are the same being) is the Treasure of Mementos, and that it used to be just that - a Treasure. But society grew more and more corrupt, and our desire for “comfort” and “safety” grew so distorted and fucked up that The Grail became basically a god. I think some people, particularly those new to the series, interpret the way the game refers to Yaldabaoth as a “god” as if it were a god as we think of them - some higher plane of existence. In Persona lore, though, they’re really more like extremely powerful Shadows formed by the collective will of people. In this case, people became so dependent on the status quo that their collective wish for a world where they can just depend on the System and not think for themselves manifested into an extremely powerful Shadow, Yaldabaoth. Yaldabaoth (unsubtle metaphor for fascism that he is) at some point decided, hey, I think humanity might just be happier if they just shut the fuck up and stopped thinking for themselves and did whatever I tell them to. After all, he was formed by the collective wish of people who’d given up on going against all the problems in the world and just wanted to leave a peaceful life under the current order. But Yaldabaoth wants to be a “fair” god, so he goes up to Igor like, let’s play a game. Let’s give these two kids Personas and see what happens. Akechi will represent the current order (as he goes around murdering people in the Metaverse to help Shido and those in power), and Joker will represent the hope for people to change (as he uses his Metaverse power to help the weak and suffering). j/k, fuck that, I’m gonna kidnap Igor and hijack the Velvet Room and have Joker murdered if he’s too successful. Fascists don’t actually care about playing fair, it turns out! So, anyway, Yaldabaoth/The Grail decides to subplant the Metaverse into the real world, where Mementos and Tokyo become one. Giant ribs and bones and spines start bursting from the ground, blood starts raining from the sky, and no one even gives a fuck. I’ve seen multiple people saying the game doesn’t clearly explain why nobody sees what’s going on at first, but it actually does, and the answer is: they do see it. It’s just normal to them. Again, political allegory: the world is going to shit around us but we’ve gotten so used to it that we don’t even react anymore. But the Phantom Thieves and our confidants (here, standing in for those of us in the world who DO care that everything’s going to hell) definitely react. People, the world is literally transforming into a nightmare hellscape all around us! Why aren’t you all doing anything about it? So the Phantom Thieves set off and start killing some archangels, and slowly but surely, people take notice. Is that the Phantom Thieves fighting over there? Wait, is there blood falling from the sky? Oh shit people, are we in an apocalypse right now? As your confidants start spreading the word, and more and more people take notice of what you’re doing, they start waking up to what’s going on in the world. It’s a metaphor for political activism (and one which the game will revisit more directly in a bit). The battle against Yaldabaoth is a battle against the powers that be. The whole game, really, is the weak fighting against those in power, escalating from a creepy volleyball coach to the next prime minister of the country. The Yaldabaoth battle is more metaphorical. You aren’t fighting an individual. You are fighting the society that allows those people to rise to power. You are fighting the system that protects them and shelters them and lets them get away with all the shit they do. And it seems unwinnable. But once you’ve woken up enough people, and raised enough support for your cause, and gotten the votes— Did I mention this is all a political allegory? Because even the Phansite meter is used here as a political metaphor. Anyway, the point is, you can win against the powers that be. You can summon a ridiculously massive Satan from the sky and put a fucking bullet through the System’s face. If we all get together, and make our voices heard, and cast our votes, we can stop the distortions and save the world from ruin. The game ties this whole theme together with the final story, which is getting Joker out of prison. This is where all that metaphor gets put into actual real-world action. Joker is unfairly held prisoner even though he saved the world, and even though his original probation was unjust from the start. But the Thieves and your Confidants all get together and spread the word, and with enough hard work and activism, they get Joker freed just in time for his girlfriends to murder him for cheating on them. tl;dr the phantom thieves are all antifa SJWs trying to make the world #woke, the end