Simlasa

I bought it, but have been told not to read it yet... looks like it might get into play sometime soonish.

I only just heard about this today. Has anyone been playing it? Definitely going on the 'must have' list...

I've had Rubble and Ruin for a while but didn't do more than a quick flip through. Probably because it outwardly seemed aimed at a grittier 'mad max' type of PA setting than I was in the mood for at the time. Gamma World was one of my longest and most successful campaigns back in the day, I felt a lot more comfortable with it than I ever did D&D fantasy... I could load it with all sorts of disparate influences from the Heavy Metal comics and kooky movies like Hell Comes To Frogtown. When Rifts came along it felt like THAT was the kitchen-sink setting I'd been aiming for... too bad about the system. Now, playing just a bit of Fallout 4 (I'm always behind the trends), I'm back onto wanting to try a bit of gonzo post apocalyptic adventure... so it's nice to hear that Rubble and Ruin might fit with that motive after all. I need to give it a closer look.

(written under the influence of something something) Big Talking Animal A Toad/Rat/Spider/Snake that begs the PC to help them. 1. THE GIANT TOAD tells the PC that it is a powerful wizard (or a virtuous princess/prince... who was tricked into kissing the toad, as often happens to royalty), trapped in the toad's stomach. It asks that the PC climb into the toad's mouth and help them get out. It will insist the PC not attack the toad because they might harm the wizard (please leave sharp objects outside). Option A- If the PC climbs into the Toad's mouth, the toad eats him (clue more giant toads with the voices of various bogus victims calling out for help). Option B- If the PC climbs in they will find a doorway to another world, where the evil wizard/queen/king will attempt to enslave them. Option C- If the PC climbs in they will find the hand of the wizard/princess/prince a short ways down the toad's throat. Grabbing on and pulling hard will free the wizard... or not. The PC might get pulled down into the toad's stomach and join the wizard/princess/prince (ST vs. ST to see who get's pulled, unless the PC tied themself off before crawling in). If successfully rescued the wizard/princess will: Sub option C1. Offer the PC a spell/blessing of their choice. Sub option C2. Offer to serve as a Patron for the PC (some princesses/princes can do that). Sub option C3. Attack the PC (turns out the Princess/Prince is a hag/bog devil in disguise!). Option D- The toad king (because that's who this really is) will promptly swallow the PC and hop away. It will carry the PC off to be part of its boggy harem, a servant in its soggy castle or an swamp serf assigned to raising herds of flies (let's assume the PC will try to escape). 2. A LARGE RAT calls out to a PC and insists they are a powerful wizard/princess/prince who was turned into a rat. If the PC will lovingly kiss it on the lips, the curse will be lifted and return them to normal. Option A- The rat will bite the PC. It turns out it there is just a clever goblin in the walls, throwing its voice onto an ordinary (or diseased/rabid!) rat. (roll 25% or lower to let the rat be diseased/rabid... or have the PC make a luck roll, maybe it was a wererat!). Option B- The rat was telling the truth! The wizard will offer a spell or magical aid (or offer to become a Patron if they like the PC enough), The Princess will offer a blessing or to become the PC's Patron (if she really is that virtuous), The Prince will offer the PC a knighthood and some land (but is is close or far away?) Option C- Before the kiss can happen, the rat will attempt to squirm into the PCs mouth. This is more of a magical situation than a physical one, so POW vs. POW, which the PC is very likely to lose). If the rat successfully squirms its way in, it will go all the way down to the PCs stomach and begin to possess them... forcing their spirit into the rat (usual possession rules). If the rat's spirit wins... Sub option C1. The PC is now playing THAT character... which could be a magical rat, a powerful ancient wizard, an evil Queen, an evil King. Sub option C2. The PC has the option of gnawing its way out of the body its in (likely trapping it in the rat form because its former body is not all chewed up and bled out). Or it can stay in the stomach till it things of something (the rat body cannot be harmed by mundane weapons... or stomach acid). Option D- The rat was telling the truth (surprise!). The wizard will offer a spell, magical aid, or Patronage. The Princess will offer a blessing or Patronage (again, if she is truly virtuous). The Prince will offer the PC a knighthood and some land (but is is near a war zone?) 3. A REALLY BIG SPIDER tells the PC that they were once a powerful wizard/virtuous princess/valiant prince. They angered a god/fairy/dragon who turned them into a spider. The curse was worded such that they had to spin 1001 victims in its web before the curse would be lifted. The spider tells the PC that they would be the 1001th victim... and if they will just let it spin them in its web the curse will be lifted. They claim they only have to spin the PC up, they promise not to bite/eat them. Option A- The spider is lying of course. It spins the PC up in its web, bites them and sucks out their liquified internal organs. Option B- The spider spins the PC into its web. Then, suddenly (or not) the god/fairy/dragon that cursed the spider appears. It lifts the curse (and then kills?) and the spider turns into its true self. Then this wizard/Evil Queen/Evil King will laugh and wave goodbye to the entangled PC... leaving them to find their own way out of the web before something hungry finds them. Option C- The spider is the familiar of the real Wizard/Evil Queen/Evil King who is creating a web to cast some sort of spell. All the bodies in the web are a form of sacrifice. Sub option C1. The PC is not the last component and will have to wait for one/two/three more victims to get ensnared in the same trap... this might take a while. Sub option C2. The PC is whisked off to another realm to serve out their days under the boot of the Wizard/Evil Queen/Evil King (or not). Sub option C3. The spider is spinning a magical doorway to let the Wizard/Evil Queen/Evil King out of an astral prison (or a mundane prison somewhere). Once they arrive they will drop their control of the spider and it will go about having its dinner (the PC... unless they manage to do something to stop it.) Option D- The spider was telling the truth! Once the PC is all rolled up in the web, the spider will transform into its true self. The web will fall away and all the forms spun in the web will be set free... Sub option D1. and ALIVE! This means one thousand random specimens of local wildlife (maybe a farmer's daughter, maybe an angry bandit, maybe the mayor's young son)... will suddenly be swarming. Let's hope there are no lions, tigers or bears! Maybe they're all bats/rats!) Sub option D2. but except for the PC they are all dessicated corpses. If there are any human victims the PC can loot them. Sub option D3. and they're almost all the dessicated remains of a sort of rare beetle whose shell is prized by jewelry makers, they're worth a fortune! (but how big was the spider? How big are these beetle shells? Are there more of these 'rare' beetles nearby? Can they fly?) 4. AN ENORMOUS SNAKE tells the PC that it is a magical ring/ribbon/hat pin that the snake has swallowed. If the PC will tell the snake a story that puts it to sleep, they can crawl inside and retrieve it... saving the item from its loneliness. 1. Lying snake! It swallows the PC whole and alive. The PC can try to carve their way out of the snake before they suffocate or get crushed/dissolved in the snake's stomach. 2. The voice is actually that of a not quite as enormous snake that the bigger snake has eaten. It tells the PC that it's actually a wizard who has swallowed a magic whimsy bean that turned it into a very large snake. If the PC will climb down its throat and retrieve the bean the curse wil be lifted. This leads to a series of snakes... each slightly smaller (the PC is shrinking as well, a point of SIZ per snake? If they continue till their SIZ reaches zero they wink out of existence... or turn into a star... or maybe turn into the last snake in the infinite chain of snakes inside the ENORMOUS SNAKE) and each with a different story of why they need the PC to climb inside... If/when the PC finally decides to give up and leave, they return to the real world at the size they'd been reduced to when they made the decision to turn back. 3. The snake/enchanted item was telling the truth! Figure out what the ring/ribbon/hat pin can do, or what it's worth. Also... Sub option 3A. The magical item is bossy and makes all sorts of demands on the PC in exchange for its aid. Sub option 3B. The magical item alters, physically, according to the mood of its bearer... unfortunately this works both ways. (2-way magical mood ring). Sub option 3C. It's all good! The item is ancient and knows all sort of forgotten lore and the secrets of its former owners... but it won't speak much unless spoken too. 4. The snake/enchanted item is just as self-described. But... Sub option 4A. Its previous owner is a powerulf wizard/witch/rat demon/evil queen/evil king who will stop at nothing to get it back (and its a big gawdy thing that's attracts attention, and the previous owner has a small army of wizards out tracking it down). Sub option 4B. It's a very powerful item that attracts a lot of attention from magically sensitive types and various sort of ethereal beings... like a minor god/demon/giant snake wizard that eats magic items. Sub option 4C. Not always being fully aware of the current situation. The item sometimes gets bored and absent-mindedly hums/whistles/sings ancient sailing tunes... this can happen at inopportune moments.

I never think in terms of 'story arc'... just situations and consequences. I've had Players ask for the equivalent, in the setting, of an atomic bomb... and let them have it, knowing that other people will react to them accordingly... fear, anger, envy. There is always some downside to getting what you wished for... but if they can make it work despite that? Good on them. I'm not sure about that polar bear though... I have friends with kids. Just because you raise something from a baby doesn't make it tame. Roll20 is OK, I prefer its most basic form... with something else for audio (why can't they make that work better?). Discord has been working great for most of the online games I'm in... Google Hangouts have been good too.

I wonder what the legal hurdles of doing a basic 'zine would be... focused on Magic World, but without the name or logos. Just thinking of all the Dungeon Crawl Classics 'zines... as well as other OSR zines. I've just always had a thing for digest sized 'zines...

Yeah, the idea of island hopping is very appealing... like myriad little kingdoms to visit without so much concern for having to cross mountains/deserts/enemy terrain. Lots of possibilities for aquatic monsters, storms to blow you 'somewhere else'.

Not the premise of what? CoC? or Nephilim? IMO it is kinda the premise of CoC... human perspective/awareness coming up as narrow and irrelevant to a larger, expansive one. I never interpreted Nephilim as 'body rape'. Though the show I just got done watching, the old BBC show 'Intruders', is. It's pretty much the sort of thing old Mythos sorcerers get up to, and the nutty cult in Get Out... forcing their way into other people's minds/bodies.

That seems like the 'obvious' approach to me. Not all poisons poison all things. Rat poison isn't going to kill a skeleton or a zombie... but something else might strike at the animating force of the thing. Holy water and garlic traditionally keeps vampires at bay, for whatever reason... so quest to find out what works on other pesky undead.

"Suggest there might be something higher or beyond the human condition, and sales suffer." Well, it works for Call of Cthulhu... of course the 'higher and beyond' there is the nemesis of humanity... or is it?

This sounds cool. I look forward to seeing it.

Beauty and the Beast is a good pick. Was there ever an RPG based on that setting? I know there was something, 'Underworld', that was a take on the setting. How about Supernatural, since the Winchester Brothers are usually sporting a variety of occult powers and weapons vs. various powered villains. I've got a love/hate thing with the show but it's still more my speed than guys in capes (unless it's The Boys).

I'm loving these write ups! A bit of a non-sequitur but if you've ever seen the RPG Mystery Men (based on D&D) the author uses public domain supers from the early 40s as example builds (at least in its first edition). I've not played the game, but really like that retro approach... and the relatively 'street level' heroes it focuses on.

Annoying. I did it for an online convention and, I think I could have pretty much ignored it... but the other fellows seemed to feel a need to ham up their 'performance' and it became one of the weirder RPG experiences I've had. EDIT: I misunderstood the question. I thought it was about being recorded for broadcast online... doing a 'live-play'. THAT is the experience I found irritating. As for just playing online, with video. Two of the groups I'm in do it, and it's OK... doesn't bother me. Our local F2F group moved online because of the virus and have NOT been using video, and that has been just as good IMO... though maybe because I've already played with those people in person for years so I can picture them easily in my mind anyway.

Nonsense! I respect other people having a right to have an opinion, but I don't need to respect the opinion itself. If some guy starts telling me the Earth is flat, or how some group of people are subhuman, or outright falsehoods about how some game system works... I don't need to 'respect' that. Also, from what I've read, Atgxtg has been VERY patient with RogerDee and refrained from personal attacks... whereas RogerDee HAS crossed that line. Atgxtg might want to step away to save their blood pressure, because it seems to be like arguing with an stone... but otherwise I think it's RogerDee who needs to get a clue and be a bit more polite.

I'm mostly curious about the setting, how geographically specific it is and how closely it follows history vs. myth.

Centaurs seem to have escaped their Mediterranean corral and spread into general euro-fantasy. They seem pretty common in modern fantasy settings, along with a lot of the rest. I blame D&D for just tossing in everything/anything without any attention to provenance. I can see the Dune-ish aspect now that SDLeary mentions it... a valuable if remote area for the Empire that has an inherent mystical aspect that is going to put a wrench into their plans. Lots of room for intrigues between factions, high weirdness and, eventually, epic battles. I'd probably want to delve into it deeper and define the fey presence... move the various races away from their bog standard versions, such as making dwarfs either more like old folklore (spooky cave-dwelling elves) or more like earth elemental constructs of the gods (Warcraft).

I'd long been pondering using the Warhammer setting for Magic World, but recently I realized I wanted to tweak its take on fantasy races. First off... the various sorts of elves it has (wood, high, dark, sea) are not particularly like the old folklore and WAAAYYY too much like Tolkien. So I decided that the 'real' elves are straight up fae... pretty much nature spirits and seldom seen. The peoples referred to as elves are actually 'half elves' and being a half elf means you have some sort of hereditary feature that reveals a bit of fae heritage... but it's variable (I've made random table) and doesn't imply physical mating so much as some sort of magical/spiritual interaction... such as ancestors who received a blessing/curse from the fae, lived close to a fairy hill, made some sort of pact with the fae. The same thing goes for 'goblins', which are fae as well... so all the 'goblinoids' (goblins, orcs, bugbears, ogres, trolls... and halflings!) exhibit some degree of that heritage. There's a different random table for those fellows. But basically, 'halflings' are magical mutations... and a bit random, not a 'race'. It all kinda fits with Warhammer's use of things like centaurs, minotaurs and other classical creatures as 'chaos' mutants.

Does that mean Chaosium will be moving off this site as an official presence? (I hope).

Which also implies, or would want for, impunity for related situations... such as running at high speeds and accurately dodging (or not) bystanders/traffic/large bugs/small dogs. Either he's invulnerable, but dangerous... or he has incredible reflexes. Also, the guy who can lift a car has more than just strength, he's got a skeleton that can support that weight and whatever other abilities/complications that might convey. Unless you want to do what the comics do and not think about these things, until you do, and then forget about them until you do again.

My only qualms about that, and possibly peculiar to me, is that I'm generally not that hot about playing as teenagers or younger kids. Maybe because I spend my days among hordes of middle-schoolers. I can see the potential though... there's that sequence in Stranger Things where Eleven ends up with a group of street punks and their psychic friend Kali, and go after the people who worked in the lab experiments.

I wasn't thinking in terms of those limitations. Just a hero with a big (related somehow to John Carter's?) jump vs. some other thing that might be able to fly or leap or teleport... or throw a captive a long distance. Or maybe just the need to jump between two hot spots... like simultaneous bank heists, while being shot at, with a monkey on his back... or something. It's also a good ability to get out of a fight that's going badly for him.

That might depend on who/what he's in combat with.

I've had similar thoughts, thinking also of The Whispering Vault (someone described it as Clive Barker's 'Super Friends')... or some less kludgy take on Exalted, by which I mean a fantasy setting with some 'super-ish' races/species/factions. Mentioning The Whispering Vault reminds that it's also been compared to Sapphire & Steel... which had various powered agents mending bizarre temporal anomalies (that often bear a resemblance to hauntings). Not particularly action-packed though. I've never read The Nocturnals, how high-powered do their stories get? I always thought they looked cool...

Am I limiting myself to pulp? I wasn't aware of that... I just mentioned that I knew Superworld worked well for those pulp-era proto-supers. Otherwise, I'm not sure what your on about... if you're even responding to me... I've got no issues with Doom Patrol since I don't know much about it, except for the oddball characters.