Racial Template: Elduman

Elduman Racial Template

30 points

Attribute Modifiers: HT-1 [-10], IQ+1 [20]

Advantages:

• Crystalline Flesh [2]: Eldumans are crystalling creatures, and while not immune to the effects of heat and cold, they are more resistant to them. They have Temperature Tolerance 2 (1 Heat, 1 Cold)
• Elduman Resilience [18]: In times of great stress, the Elduman have the ability to reinforce their crystallince flesh with psionic power, making them much more difficult to harm. They have Damage Resistance 10 (Semi-Ablative -20%, Costs 1 FP -5%, Emergencies Only -30%, Psychic Healing -10%). 
• Elduman Repletion [10]: Elduman are creatures of the mind and are sustained by their own psionic power. They have Doesn't Eat or Drink.
• Immortal [15]: The Elduman are immortal crystalline creatures and cannot age or die of old age. They have Unaging.

Disadvantages:

• Unhealing [-20]: While the Elduman can sustain their bodies with their psionic power, they do not heal naturally. They have Unhealing (Partial). 
• Unusual Biochemistry [-5]: The Elduman are crystalline creatures and their physiology is very different from normal races like the Uncout and reacts differently to drugs and chemicals sometimes. They have Unusual Biochemistry. 

Suggestions

Advantages: Damage Resistance (increase levels or buy off any of the limitations), psionic powers like Mind Reading or Telekinesis, Trained By a Master. 

Disadvantages: Callous, Disciplines of Faith (Asceticism).
Skills: The Elduman society is very rigid and very dedicated to self reliance and monastic traditions so martial arts skills and survival skills are appropriate.

The only real changes from the Pathfinder version are the ability to pay power points to increase saving throws. I don't quite know how to manifest that ability in GURPS, as having Resistance to everything would get very expensive. I also added in Unusual Biochemistry and Unhealing to show that the Elduman can play at being normalish "humans" but really aren't. 

Racial Template: Dwenoren

Alright, so this is going to be the Dwenoren of The Known World. Dwenoren are the most populous race on Hekinoe and the most ancient of the native races. You don't see them too often in The Known World because they live underground in massive kingdoms of stone and dirt and don't have much need to venture into the daylight world. Interestingly, at one time I had decided that they were a kind of flightless bat humanoid, but then I settled on them being some sort of sexless grub humanoid. 

Dwenoren Racial Template

9 points

Attribute Modifiers: HT+2 [20]

Advantages:

• Large Ears [4]: The large ears of the Dwenoren are specially adapted to catching even the faintest of noises in their underground kingdom. They have Acute Senses 2 (Hearing).
• Oily Skin 1 [8]: The skin of the Dwenoren secretes a slick fluid that protects them from cold. They have Damage Resistance 2 (Limited: Cold -20%).
• Oily Skin 2 [1]: The oily fluid on a Dwenoren's skin makes them more tolerant of low temperatures. They have Temperature Tolerance 1 (Cold). 
• Oily Skin 3 [2]: The oily fluid coating the skin of the Dwenoren is quite slick and makes them more difficult to get a hold of. They have Slippery 1.
• Sensory Spines 1 [20]: Though blind, the Dwenoren have the ability to emit a form of echolocation that their chin spines can read to tell them of their surroundings. They have Scanning Sense (Sonar).
• Sensory Spines 2 [10]: The sensory spines of the Dwenoren also have the ability to sense air currents and vibrations in the air to read their surroundings. They have Vibration Sense. 

Disadvantages:

• Blindness [-50]: The Dwenoren are completely eyeless and have no means of conventional vision. They have Blindness. 
• Sexless [-1]: The Dwenoren have no sexes nor do they reproduce sexually. They have Sexless. 
• Unusual Biochemistry [-5]: The Dwenoren are inhuman creatures and their physiology is very different from normal races like the Uncout and reacts differently to drugs and chemicals sometimes. They have Unusual Biochemistry. 

Suggestions

Advantages: Acute Senses (increases levels), Damage Resistance (increase levels), Temperature Tolerance (increase levels).

Skills: Dwenoren society is a society ruled by the merchant class and dwen of learning, so their society places a lot of emphasis on the economy and money making while also holding science and technology in high regard. They also still have a few warrior traditions from earlier eras of their race, though those are regarded as somewhat silly by other Dwenoren. Skills dealing with theses aspects would be appropriate for a Dwenoren of Whurent to possess.

Racial Template: Children of Volung

So I am going to start listing all The Known World GURPS racial templates here on the blog for shits and giggles. These aren't going to be lengthy posts that take hours to write or read, so I'll just be posting them one a day till they're done. One thing I dislike about the way GURPS does racial templates is that they just write out the statistics with a brief paragraph long description of the race. So you have a suite of abilities that make the race, but no real description of what and how they do it. To be fair, most racial templates are dwarf, dragon, elf, etc and they are well known enough that we don't really have to think too hard about why the dwarf template has the detect advatange tied to gold and minerals. One thing I also do not care for in GURPS is that a lot of racial templates tend to have skills added into them as well. Pathfinder does the same thing, but I've never cared for it. Your race shouldn't really determine your skills or skill bonuses, that's really more of a background thing and should be up to the player. Yes, fine, most elves use bows and live in forests and should have some skill based experience with both, but that sort of thing shouldn't be mandatory. It should be optional dependent upon your background. For instance, all elves in Pathfinder have weapon familiarity with some bows and swords and any weapon with elven in the title. Ok, fine, that makes sense for elves raised with elves in elven kingdoms. What about the elf slave living in some distant country with no contact with other elves? How would they learn about elven weapons and gain familiarity with them? Hmm? Doesn't make sense. Ah well, just a bit of picking of nits I guess. Anyway, Children of Volung. 

Children of Volung Racial Template

44 points

Attribute Modifiers: ST+2 [18] (Large -10%), HT+2 [20]

Secondary Characteristics: SM +1

Advantages:

• Hardy Constitution 1 [3]: Children of Volung have a hardy constitution and are resistant to disease. They have Resistance: Disease (+3 x1/3).
• Hardy Constitution 2 [5]: Children of Volung have a hardy constitution and are resistant to poison. They have Resistance: Poison (+3 x1/3).
• Immortal [15]: The Children of Volung are immortal and do not die of old age or weakness. They have Unaging. 
• Northern Blood 1 [8]: Children of Volung hail from the far north where winds can freeze flesh with ease and are resistant to the effects of deadly cold. They have Damage Resistance 2 (Limited: Cold -20%).
• Northern Blood 2 [1]: Children of Volung are comfortable at much lower temperatures due to the icy conditions of their homeland. They have Temperature Tolerance 1 (Cold)
• Plated Skeleton [3]: Children of Volung have plates of bone like scale mail beneath the skin of their chest, making it more difficult to injure them. They have Damage Resistance 2 (Semi-Ablative -20%, Tough Skin -40%, Partial: Torso -10%).
• Sharp Teeth [1]: The mouths of the Children of Volung are filled with needle-like teeth. They have Teeth (Sharp Teeth).

Disadvantages:

• Berserk [-10]: The rage and ferocity of the Children of Volung are well known and they have a long history of extreme violence with little, if any provocation. They have Berserk (Self Control Roll: 12). 
• Bloodlust [-10]: The Children of Volung are a warrior race and have little sympathy for enemies, they see no purpose in leaving a foe alive to fight another day, and if they do, their berserk rage often weakens the logic. They have Bloodlust (Self Control Roll 12).
• Callous [-5]: The Children of Volung have little empathy for other races and little room in their hearts for softer emotions. They have Callous.
• Unusual Biochemistry [-5]: The Children of Volung are inhuman creatures and their physiology is very different from normal races like the Uncout and reacts differently to drugs and chemicals sometimes. They have Unusual Biochemistry. 

Suggestions

Advantages: Damage Resistance (increase the levels in either type), Fearlessness, Hard to Kill, Hard to Subdue, High Pain Threshold. 

Disadvantages: Berserk (increase or decrease the self control roll, or add the battle rage modifier), Bloodlust (increase or decrease the self control roll). 

Skills: Volungshemle society places a strong emphasis on martial traditions, so skills dealing with warfare and weaponry would be in keeping with the nation's traditions. 

So that is the Children of Volung. Normally GURPS racial templates don't have a suggestions area, but I felt that since I know the world and races better than my players, it might give them a better place to start when building characters. 

Comparing this version of the Children of Volung to that in the campaign book, we lose a few things. The first is that there is no Charisma or equivalent stat in GURPS, so we lose that penalty. We also lose Bloodthirsty Mien, which isn't too big of a deal, just buy the Intimidation skill. Cornered Fury doesn't have a real nice analog in GURPS that I've found, but the ability of the Berserk disadvantage to keep you fighting with relentless ferocity to -5xHP covers that ability. 

Like I said, this is just something I am doing for shits and giggles, not really intending to switch from Pathfinder to GURPS any time in the remotely near future, perhaps for the next campaign though. 

Cartoons

So I kind of had this silly idea for a campaign setting the other day. It has a little bit to do with the whole concept of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thing I've been intermittently discussing here as well, but only as a kind of inspiration. The gist of it is to basically create a campaign world based around a bunch of 80s cartoons like Transformers, Care Bears, Gummi Bears, the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, He-Man, Thundercats, Silverhawks, and so on.

Now, to make it entertaining for a group of late twenty-somethings/early thirty-somethings I'd use the cartoons as the base idea, rather than copying it perfectly. For instance, the Care Bears might be an empire of humanoid ursines or wearbears gifted with the use of magic or something living in a bunch of floating cities. The Gummi Bears might be similar, but more geared towards alchemy. With cartoons like the Silverhawks and Thunder Cats, I would likely leave them as technologically advanced aliens that had crash landed on the planet long ago and gone native or some such. With the Transformers, I'm not sure as to what I would do beyond make them kind of steampunkish warforged type creatures. I don't know what they would transform into though.

This type of campaign idea wouldn't require too much work for the majority of it. I mean, with He-Man, the DnD cartoon, and Thunder Cats there is already a lot of fantasy to the cartoons themselves. The Silverhawks wouldn't necessarily fit into it though, unless we want to make them some manner of silver skinned flying warforged.  The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon obviously fits in perfectly with such a world and it would likely be the main continent with the other cartoon areas being nearby smaller continents or islands or some such.

I dunno, these are just the initial ideas, I'd probably have to do more research. The bad guys from the cartoon the Inhumanoids seems like they might have some fun potential to act as underground evil guys. Like I said, this is just a bare bones campaign idea that might be some silly fun in the vein of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen campaign. 

Anno 2070

So I purchased this game called Anno 2070 on Steam the other day, about a week before this posts to the blog. I am pretty much obsessed with it. I played it for eight hours straight the other day. Every two hours or so a little notification in the game pops up to say "Hey, you sure you don't want to take a break?" or something to that effect. They get increasingly more amusing the longer you play. Its a nice touch and a clear sign they knew how addictive of a game you had. The game is set in the year 2070 and humanity has taken to the massive ocean, as climate change and pollution and whatnot have melted all of the ice everywhere and drowned the world, leaving lots of islands all over the place. 

I am a big fan of the RTS genre, I like getting resources and building units and such. Anno 2070 is built in the vein of that, but it is a lot more complex than your standard "build a barracks and but footmen" style RTS. The production chains are a lot more complex and rely on a variety of resources. Actually, let me start with the factions. There are three. 

There are the environmentalists, the tycoons, and the technologists. Each faction needs different resources to grow their population to rake in taxes to pay for their industry, and the whole game is set up on islands, not continents. Each island has a set number of resources available. The environmentalists like tea and health food. So to meet their requirements for stuff to drink you need to build tea farms, which can only be farmed on an island with a tea resource (each island has three agricultural resources and the ability to be seeded with a fourth one if you purchase the seeds). Health food requires vegetables and rice. The tycoons like booze, which needs rice to farm, and convenience food, which needs meat and flavoring. Flavoring can only be farmed from an island with a vegetables resource and meat comes from beef farms, which can be built anywhere. It gets more complex, the tech faction likes algae based food that can only be farmed from undersea plateaus. Only rarely do you find an island that naturally has two resources that synchronize with one another (like rice and vegetables) and if you use your fourth open resource spot there will always be something else you don't have. Plus, each island has mineral resources like copper, sand, coal, iron ore, uranium, and so on with only a limited amount of nodes it can be mined from. To make pasta you need wheat and a river slot to put a mill, but river nodes are also used for gold mining and sand collection. Sand is also used for computer parts or glass creation. So it gets pretty complex and irritating trying to balance what resources you need with what resources you have available and what nodes you have open. 

You have to establish pretty extensive trade routes to keep your islands supplied appropriately. Your technologies and the resource collection factories and farms you can build are unlocked by upgrading your population. Upgrading your population also increases your tax income. However, your population needs to be 80% satisfied with six total categories to increase the population, so you need those supply lines. As your population increases more categories that need satisfaction are added, you start at two with just food and drink. You can force your population to upgrade by just building a shit ton of dwelling areas, but that just increases the amount of demand in your populations in the long run, which will net you income but make the next population upgrade more difficult to achieve because no one is fully satisfied with everything. You also have to worry about actually getting the resources to your people, so you have to have a bunch of warehouses built all over to actually hold everything you collect. It is all collected in one unified warehouse, but each warehouse has two or more transport robots that actually have to wander out across your island taking goods from point at to point be. This can make it a pain in the ass to make tools when your tool factory is on one side of the island and your iron smelter is on the other and there is a long ass road between the two. It find it easiest to just build way more warehouses than you need, increases your storage space, adds more transports, and ensures most of your production facilities are near enough to a warehouse that delivery and pick up are nice and quick. 

You can also trade with other factions by selling surplus to them or purchasing stuff you need from their trading ships, but that can get expensive if you have a serious need. Additionally, if a population stays unsatisfied below a certain point for a certain amount of time, people just up and leave, which leaves you with no tax income to collect. Your factories and resource gathering sites are all automated, so you don't need people to run them, but they do have maintenance costs and electricity requirements. So you have to pay to keep shit running and you have to keep a functional electrical grid running. If you put too many demands on the electrical grid, your factories run at a slower production rate. There is also an ecobalance to manage, if you pollute with a bunch of factories it impacts the satisfaction or your citizens and causes your agriculture resources to produce at a slower rate. However, if you have a positive ecobalance, it increases the rate of production for your farms and such. I'm not sure if you get a bonus to factory production facilities if your electrical grid has a positive balance. You can also find islands with nuclear waste or special eco devices that inflict massive penalties or bonuses on your ecobalance. Fires, crimes, and diseases can also break out in your population centers as well and reduce your population, destroy buildings, or reduce population satisfaction. 

Long story short, it is a really complex game that is very fun. I love tweaking the system and attempting to set up the perfect supply chain, that rarely happens however, heh. I've had a lot of "one more hour, one more hour, one more, oh shit it's five a.m., well, one more hour" situations crop up while playing it. It is a fun game for me, there is plenty of complexity and entertainment value to be gained from it. You can build military units, but they're mostly ships and submarines and a few air units. I haven't played around with fleet battles too much, just kind of sticking to playing with the economy. There are also quest givers among the other factions. They also sell special devices to improve a unit or collect a resource you otherwise can't, seeds for different resources, and upgrades to afix to your warehouses that improve certain production rates or reduce maintenance costs on that island. The quests can involve fetch and carry or destroying a unit, or running around on the bottom of the ocean with  a sub using searchlights to find sunken tech. 

Its a fun and involving game. I like it. 

Writing Nonsense

I've recently kind of taken a lackluster stab at trying to re-write my story about the Nel and Keroen Skathos. There isn't a real strong purpose or intent to this post, it'll kind of just be me meandering and wondering and talking to myself about my story.

One of the things that frustrates me the most about my writing is that it is so haphazardly done. The one truly complete story I've written was written in essentially three parts with one or more years separating each chunk of the work. I wrote the earliest beginnings almost right out of high school, the middle chunk perhaps five years ago, and the final I'd say third of it maybe three years ago or so. I'm bad with the passage of time, so these times may be off. The writing fluctuates a bit not only in quality, but in intent. As I get older, like we all do, things change in importance to us and our mental state changes with it. We have different values and goals and likes and dislikes. We're constantly evolving. Sometimes when I reread earlier and middle sections of the book it seems almost as if another person wrote it and not me. I just run into these phases where I feel the urge to write and create all the time, and then I get these phases where I just don't give a fuck, which leads to big gaps in working on the story. These phases are what tell me that I could likely never make it as any sort of "professional" writer with deadlines and such. 

Additionally, the earlier sections of the story are based very lightly on the mythology of faeries and the Tuatha De Danann. Loria was once called Danu, Braldenon was once called Balor, Aubernach used to be Oberon, Grenaldeen used to be Avalon, and so on. So there are chunks of it where all the names have been changed but it still has that facet of the myths and legends to it. Back when Keroen was Cromm and Braldenon was Balor, it made a lot of sense (sort of) for Balor to have the Evil Eye. In folklore and myth Balor was called Balor Evil Eye or some such and he was a giant that had two dudes riding his back that had a crane that opened up his eye and laid waste to everything before him. With Braldenon, it's just some power he has. Now that I think of it, I'm not even sure he has an evil eye power in the context of the story's mythology anymore. I kind of went into a slash and burn phase when I decided to change all the names and places to stuff of my own devising to throw it into Hekinoe. 

I like the name changes and the place changes and making the story my own. It's a good thing. So many tales have been told and recorded and written and whatnot through the various media available to us that is hard not to step on anyone's toes these days. The story isn't by any means unique, but I like that it is now mine and not some mish mash of stuff from Jim Butcher's version of the Fey and some helpings of my own take on folklore. It's mine, I made it. Aubernach isn't the version of Oberon from Gargoyles anymore, he's mine. I made him the self-centered, tricksie little shit he is. Nostathon isn't some Fey version of Death anymore, he is the caretaker of The White Halls of Oblivion and the shepherd of all fallen Nel ensuring that they find peace and rest in his halls when they are cut down. 

As much as I like the story, I feel it is weak and inconsistent. The title makes little sense, The Last Blade. It made sort of sense when the Feronel were still called The Court of Blades and Keroen was the last of them at the end of the story. That's not as much of a spoiler as you'd think. I didn't think it was a particularly witty or descriptive title in the first place when I came up with it, it was meant to be there as a placeholder that kind of fit until I could think of something better and I just never seemed to get around to it or devote any mental energy to that idea because it kind of worked. After the revision though, it made absolutely no sense and Shawn said so many a time. 

The prologue has Nostathon sitting beneath the red sun of The Nightmare Lands trying to see the future because it whispers to him of death for his people. He stares at the sun and suffers and bleeds, only gaining a vague idea of what is coming. So he retreats to a timeless place only he can go (wtf?) to sit and plot and ponder. Over the course of the book, his plotting and pondering never amount to anything. He didn't plot anything or plan anything that occurred in the story. All he does is wander around behind the scenes verbally sparring with Aubernach and Contuck and periodically crossing paths with Keroen so Keroen has someone to talk at when I need to give him a monologue. 

The prologue and first chapter are kind of irritating because they kind of information overload a reader. There is no skillful presentation of knowledge. They just spam a bunch of names and kingdoms and different kinds of Nel so you know all the players and races with explanations of relationship and physical appearance and capabilities in just a few paragraphs. It is a snarled mess of information. There's no finesse to the process, just a sledgehammer of information. I mean, this isn't a normal fantasy story where you have elves and dwarves and orcs and the reader has a bunch of preconceived notions of those races and how to relate that information to the context they are spoken of in the book or to fill in the gaps when they are just spoken of by name. This is a book where the main characters are a dead immortal that can turn into a crow thing with insect eyes and feathers of insect chitin (I won't lie, there is a possibility I based this on the deep crow), a sleepy immortal that regularly culls the entire race for shits and giggles, a drunk immortal made of fire and light clothed in flesh, and an immortal made of clay that uses a club. There isn't the ability to say the word Nel or lastborn and have an unspoken agreement between writer and reader that says something like, "We're both nerds, we've heard of Lord of the Rings, this is an elf and you and I both know elves are foresty, have pointy ears, and are usually good with bows."

Although, to be fair, I haven't read a fantasy book that actually had an elf or dwarf or orc in it in...shit, over a year at least, and I read a lot of fucking fantasy novels. Though, I did just read a sci-fi novel series a month or so ago that had the Tuatha De Danann in it. Hmm, the A Land Fit For Heroes series did kind of have elves in them, but not elf elves, more like dimension hopping aliens that had elfy aspects to them and weren't called elves. I dunno, fuck elves. They had "dwarves" too, but they were more like a race that used geothermal energy to hop from planet to planet and made really tough metalwork. They were also black, so we're not channeling much more than "we live underground and mine shit" if we want to say they were kind of dwarves. 

Now, this meandering monologue about my writing brings me to a frequent question. I don't intend to try and get the book published or self publish, so what is the point of rewriting any portion of it for shits and giggles? I honestly can't say why, beyond I feel like it. I've thought about it for over two months now, since well before I wrote out that little Inconsistencies Continued thing on here. I feel like creating something, so I do. It's the same reason I act on some harebrained idea like making a castle fortress thing out of lava in Minecraft and spend an hour digging and plotting out the dimensions of the ground floor and spend a good forty-five minutes setting up the perfect lever controlled redstone circuit to operate the pistons that open up the floor above a pit of lava to drop enemies into before starting on the walls of the place. I'm fucking nuts and when I really truly get the urge to create something, I get all fucking autistic focused and ocd obsessive about it and do it, even if I can't come up with a reason why I should. 

So it has been a few days since I wrote the above portion there. I've rewritten the prologue and the first little bit of the first chapter of the story. I renamed it The Fading King, which while more appropriate than The Last Blade, I'm still not sure it fits or I really truly like it. Like The Last Blade once did, The Fading King works for now as a placeholder. 

The prologue is fundamentally the same, Nostathon attempts to get a glimmer of the future because he feels prophecy scratching at the rotted remains of his brain. So, with the power of his sleeping brothers, he goes and stares at the red sun of The Nightmare Lands and tries to perceive the future. Just like the original, he gets a few hints at what the future holds for the Nel but no clear data, so he resolves to be vigilant, rather than retreating somewhere to plot and plan like he does in the original. 

That's another flaw with the original story, there are way too many convoluted deaths for the Nel. The don't age or anything, but they can be killed. They can also Fade. When killed, they can opt to be reincarnated as the undead Sokarnel and lose all memories of life. If they refuse that option, they can rest in peaceful slumber in The White Halls of Oblivion. Ok, that's not really that many, but in the original prologue Nostathon does a lot of muttering to himself about fleeing beyond life and death and occupying some timeless realm of death that only he can access, and I have no idea what that is. The Nightmare Lands are kind of the underworld of the Nel, at least it is where the Sokarnel reside. But Nostathon states there is some other realm he can travel to beyond that, a realm that is outside of space, time, life, and death. This other realm is sort of intermittently hinted at and used once or twice, but never really defined, explained, or fleshed out beyond "I can do this because I'm dead and stuff."

I dunno, like I've said, I like the story. I've edited and re-edited it quite a few times but it just seems like there are so many flaws and quirks that need to be fixed and altered to make it decent. I don't know if my rewriting represents an actual dedicated effort, but we'll see I guess. 

I Can't Decide Whether I Hate Myself Or Anno 2070

Huh, probably should have posted something here today. Whoops. Wednesday...probably.