Best quote in this forum ever!!!
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@Cortillaen If you start it over with different people I’m always down for a Saturday game. Or if you need an extra body for it currently.
I’ll keep you in the loop if I decide to reboot it. Probably won’t be making any decisions for a couple weeks, though.
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What kind of campaign are you running @Cortillaen? Do you have a high level description or introductory doc to give a sense of the theme of it?
Let’s see, if I were to do a Paizo-style blurb for it, it would go something like this:
The world of Erinith has three constants: rulers scheme and fight, monsters and worse threaten the people, and adventurers put troubles to the sword for the right price. From your humble beginnings as fledgling members of Erinith’s adventurer population, you and your companions will explore the world, uncover ancient mysteries, and find yourselves drawn into a millennia-old conflict that has been forgotten by the world… but not by its enemies.
There are a lot of places with a lot of things going on, though, so what events the party gets involved in along the way (and which ones happen without you) is left up to the players to decide. The most important thing is to realize what your characters “know” may not be true, and pursuing why things are happening is just as important as dealing with the immediate threats. Note-taking is highly advised. I try to run things about half-and-half between RP and combat, though a given session generally leans heavily one way or the other, depending on whether you are exploring hostile areas, in a settlement, etc. Also, I have a thoroughly ridiculous amount of stuff written about the world as a whole (several dozen pages of fairly dense notes), but I usually build out what’s happening in a specific place based on a combination of my own ideas and the goals/interests players provide. I’d also been working on getting everything moved over to WorldAnvil to help organize stuff for everyone, but I haven’t really had much motivation for that lately.
The player world doc is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19slYhMbHlvv34ISRNGLqf1anHQdNFTK3G9djpZngIXc/edit?usp=sharing
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Well, I for one would definitely be interested in playing a homebrew campaign like this, assuming I’m able to keep my gaming commitments balanced with my real life commitments.
I would still love a chance to play a dual wielding fighter or ranger with sawtooth sabres or a dhampir sorcerer. (APG can’t come out soon enough 
)
Hello.
Usually just lurk about but I stumbled across this thread and thought I might chime in.
@ocelot Given the reference to 40k and Harlequins, have you tried any of the 40k RPG systems like Dark Heresy?
Some friends and I played a few sessions of Dark Heresy many moons ago - I quite liked the system and there’s enough expansions / player created content to allow for Xenos/weird stuff - I believe there is a statted-out Harlequin’s Kiss somewhere for example.
@Rando The drow-in-space character concept seems fine to me, even with penalties in bright light. Very cinematic, ala Riddick in the movie Pitch Black - walk around with a signature pair of darkened goggles.
I’m very familiar with Pathfinder, but have not seen much about Starfinder - interested to learn more about it. Would be cool to have a sci-fi RPG system that could be adapted to the “Endless Space” universe - huge fan of that game series.
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@Wrex, I haven’t tried Dark Heresy or any of the 40k systems that FFG published. I wasn’t playing TTRPGs when they came out, but they do look really interesting. There was also a new 40k RPG published a year or two ago called Wrath & Glory but it looks like it wasn’t supported very well. I haven’t tried it either. Makes me wonder how much effort would be involved in reskinning the starfinder rules for 40k. Probably much more than I am willing to take on!
@Wrex I already tried to offer Rando some cool nanotech shades that collapse down when not in use for when I DM Starfinder, but I guess he didn’t believe me 
I’m sure there will be room in Starfinder campaings coming up this year, so if you’re interested keep an eye out on the Virtual Table tops forums here when we announce when we are starting them up.
@ocelot I can recommend Dark Heresy - the rules fit the grimdark setting really well- psyker powers are extremely dangerous and the possibility of getting attacked by some warp-spawned entity is real - the critical hit table is also brutal 
I think they did a good job of making rules that fit the 40k universe. All the books and add-ons etc are a lot of cash though and we only tried it because a bunch of us were 40k fans and chipped in.
@Ryukan Immediately on reading the character idea and thinking “darkvision, light sensitive, sci-fi setting” I thought of Pitch Black - seemed like it would make for some good stories/plotlines.
I’d love to give Starfinder a try, but being an Aussie, it’s usually difficult to gel with a lot of other people’s timezones (not always, but often).
If there’s a start date and time (even roughly) I can try and work towards it - been looking up a lot of free online materials/info for SF at the moment.
The bullet points on the drow character who will never be played:
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yes it’s Ryu’s campaign, but my head canon says elves sound French and therefore Drow must sound German; I was watching The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime at the time in which there’s a German character played by an Australian actress, Bella Heathcote; that’s what the character would look and sound like, but obviously drow-ified
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the major drow nobles “houses” of fantasy (Pathfinder and D&D) have been replaced in Starfinder with cyberpunk-like mega-corporations; typical drow behaviour from fantasy is common, the means of advancement mean murdering family to get ahead, females rule the roost over males, the nobles houses/mega-corps control everything including who gets air, water and food, as that stuff isn’t readily available on Apostae; if you are not useful you don’t eat or breathe; since the drow live so long the upper management of the drow mega-corps remain stable for hundreds of years - unless bumped off
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the chaotic evil drow of Golarion sometime in the past (perhaps during the Gap) colonized the planet Apostae; there is evidence to suggest that Apostae is entirely artificial in origin; digging below the surface yields caches and discoveries of alien technology upon which the drow megacorps base their business, particularly arms manufacturing
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the grimlocks, orcs, bugbears, and other sentient species that used to suffer in the Darklands (the Underdark of Pathfinder) under drow oppression now suffer on Apostae instead; they are still third-class citizens (after noble drow, then common drow) and are essentially farmed out as mercenary slave labor to clients of the drow mega-corps; after playing a bunch of Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor, my head canon says the orcs (and half-orcs) of Apostae speak in east London or Cockney accents
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as a rebellious post-teenager (in drow terms), the character would have been the apple of her great-grandmother’s eye, being almost her spitting image; a rebellious teenager in chaotic elven drow mega-corp society doesn’t mean listening to Eoxian (literal) death-metal or shaving your head or dating an alien, it means pretending to be lawful good and patterning your behaviour off of the holo-broadcasts of Naradu the Starnight (who may or may not actually exist), a lashunta solarian “paladin” who travels the pact worlds righting wrongs, saving princesses, and fighting tyranny and oppression; it means hanging out and training with the grimloks, orcs, and other slave soldiers of the mega-corp as a soldier and comrade-in-arms and trying to organize a slave revolt; the orcs and grimloks play along 'cause you don’t say no to the CEO’s great-granddaughter but eventually some of them rat her out 'cause it’s their lives on the line
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great-grandma is in a bind; the mega-corp isn’t amongst the big players and has recently taken hits both from within (a power play was put down) and from without (an extremely hostile takeover from a larger house/mega-corp); the family is hurting and every body is relevant; though far down in the line of succession great-granddaughter is still important and must be protected; it’s suggested she leave Apostae and go to Absalom Station where the holo-broadcasts of Naradu the Starnight originate
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character would be an LG soldier who could then transition into almost anything after experiencing freedom on Absalom Station from the influence of her family and Apostae society; she would speak with a german accent some of the time but would speak Common in the colloquial east London accents of her former “comrades” most of the time; she would literally be doing the mental calculations in her head in any social interactions, “What would Naradu the Starnight do in this situation?” and so while only “pretending” to be an LG “paladin” (instead of a CE drow) she actually would be (an LG “paladin”)
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the one-off adventure I was planning would have been the hiring of a party of adventures all cyberpunk style to break into the family compound on Apostae to extract the character, escape by starship including an obvious space chase and battle, and then arrive on Absalom Station
But I’ve moved on.
Just saw a video (https://youtu.be/AQgCYV-NUOM) by some GMs with deep roots in Paizo-land, and at 1:29:00 they start talking a bit of StarFinder. One guy raves that “the Chimera Mystery” is one of the best adventures he’s ever seen.
I may or may not have bought The Chimera Mystery.
I may or my not have read the adventure path overview section and gone, “Hey wait a minute, I saw that episode of the X-Files! Oy, hang on a sec, I saw that episode of Star Trek: TNG! Hold up, I saw that episode of Star Trek: Voyager!”
I have no idea how the actual module plays nor how the rest of the modules will play, but the overview was Awesomesauce™!
P.S. For context, I didn’t get any sort of similar reaction from reading the Age of Ashes overview, it was sorta ho-hum with one minor blip of something being mildly interesting near the end. sad-panda-face
Well if you bought the adventure path, then you are officially on the hook for running it! You and Ryukan can arm wrestle to decide which path we will be playing first.
Well going over the story and adventure notes and such for the first two modules of Dead Suns I thought the first module started off kind of mundane, but gets better quickly and the last part of the first module ends pretty decently. There is some gang turf war and faction dispute to start off the first module and soon adds in some introductory starship combat before going a bit Aliens/Event Horizon with some sci-fi horror in there. There’s some creepy stuff in there I can’t wait to do sound effects for, just to add to the creep factor. I haven’t looked too far into the second module yet, but there is definitely some planet based, sorta Indiana Jones-ish artifact hunting going on at one point…with plenty of freaky alien jungle beasties.
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Eventually you end up going up against the Undead Fleet ala the space version of any Pirates of the Caribbean movie (seeing as how every main antagonist in those movies is undead) only it’s a fleet and they are more than just pirates.
Slightly off topic and regarding Event Horizon/Aliens/etc, Event Horizon is one of my favorite movies ever. The horror in Alien/Aliens was very physical in nature whereas the horror in Event Horizon was much more psychological, this idea of a ship that is somehow “possessed”. Plus the black hole drive was conceptually a very interesting (and perhaps disturbing) idea as well. Hope they make a remake of that movie someday. Though it will be hard for somebody to fill Sam Neil’s shoes.
Apparently, Amazon is working on doing a TV show based on the Event Horizon movie.
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This happens every single time I start thinking about cancelling Amazon Prime 
.
Oh I’m sure you could cancel it for awhile, feels like that Event Horizon show is a loooooooooong ways out still.