Song of Swords: Going Hunting

a knife fight

Anyone know if there's a framework for SoS on Maptools? Roll20 is literally trash
I might just try my hand at making a framework myself

>Looking back to Jimmu's monster dump
>Fasci Trolls
>All have goofy pale faces and yell shit to bait people

>Faggot troll lures you into a sticky situation
>This is the last thing you see

...I am saving that image, because it's going to be surprisingly useful for a character concept I have. What the hell has my life come to?

____________Fun_________

I hope the edited version is coming soon(tm). That would maybe revive the thread a bit as it probably lowers the entry barrier to the game.
Until then we seem to be deder day by day.
bamp

Me and another user are looking to play some Song of Swords, with me as the GM, and were hoping to find 1-2 more players. We want to play online, using voice, sometime between 11am-5pm EST on Wednesdays. If anyone thinks they might be interested in hearing more, contact me via email or on skype at [email protected]

Why do you think I saved it? Well, wasn't for a character concept actually, but still proved quite useful.

I think he specifically wants monsters with fantastical aspects that make them unlike fechting a regular human bean. Shit like distorting space in front of it, having invisible limbs (think Rayman), being 4-dimensional, all that kind of goofy shit

Probably wouldn't hurt to set up a Category: Homebrew Monsters in the Wiki

Club vs Whip spectator sport fight? To serious injury but not death.

"Escape the bar fight". Have a bad bar fight with lots of participants. We play someone with shit combat skills that's just trying to escape through the front door. Have a "choose your adventure" routes to the door and people we get close to throw bar attacks at us. Once we get past them they get involved with other participants. Call it the "Rincewind scenario".

Primordial hunter with spear vs wolf. Does our caveman hunter get food, pelt, and trophy. Or does he get eaten.

Perhaps not, but the lack of powerful magic and the grittier aspect of the game, I think, makes it more suitable. In SoS you expect a monster to be something close to insurmountable, which is what a False Hydra would generally be.

I wouldn't say this is the case, monsters seem tough, and untested, but it seems like quick wits and skill ought to beat them. That or you just fire a volley of cannons at the fucker.

you could say the same about human enemies, but history shows that despite better judgment, we rarely have cannons on hand at all times

Some of them seem like they could be killed with simple firepower, but the Giants don't even really sound like antagonists, they're just terrain that sometimes act weird.

It's shit like the invisible panthers and shapeshifting mimic trolls that you have to worry about. There's probably a Moonlit Butterfly analogue in the setting somewhere, I think moths that can shoot lasers out of their eyes are canon. Shit that can just come out of nowhere and kill you.

Question for Jimmu:
Historically castles were generally built pretty small, so that they could be easily defended and supplied. In Tattered Realms the opposite seems to be true, with fuckhuge fortresses being the norm, in part because of the labor-cult of Genosus and also because everything just seems to be bigger in SoS.

Was this intentionally, or is it something that was just shrugged off for the sake of thematic aesthetic? Big castles are cool. ASOIAF also does this a lot, with ridiculously huge castles everywhere.

Fuckin Orredin man.

Supposed to link to>Laser moths

Well, first I'd point out that Game of Thrones' universe has a very good reason to have unusually large castles. Winter in that setting can last for decades. Winter lasts long enough that there are adults who have never even seen an autumn. In that context, a fortress is more than just a defensive position, it is the hub of what be an enormous agricultural preservation and distribution center. Consider how bad winters could get in our own history--then imagine that winter lasts ten years at a time. Oh sure, so does summer, but this is before preservatives and canning, how long can grain last in a cold, wet climate, no matter how good the storage, before it starts molding?

There must be an enormous process of which we are unaware which goes into preserving a portion of each year's crop for the winter. Frankly this is a part of the series that bugs me, because you never hear about, say, the 50,000,000 cats which would have to be kept in Winterfell to prevent the rats from eating into what must be a thousand tons of fucking grain required to sustain the people for the coming decade-long winter. This would easily be the most interesting part of the series for me--how the hell does agriculture work in this setting?

But enough about that. The fortresses in Tattered Realms are ornate, but they are rarely so huge as to be difficult to defend. Their size is usually vertical rather than horizontal, they are built to be splendid, but also defensible. The exceptions are things like Tenja, which was built at a chokepoint and can be easily resupplied pretty much indefinitely, so long as they get ample goods before winter closes off the pass behind them. And of course, even an impractically large defense around a city is better than no defense. Unwalled cities basically don't exist in Western Vosca outside of parts of the Krajina, where all of the walls were torn down to ensure obedience to the new regime.

Doesn't Krajina have like a ridiculously tall tower though? Like, taller than anything to ever exist in medieval England? Was that an intentional part of this "vertical size" theory?

It sounds a bit American. European culture generally didn't do big skyscrapers.

It does, but this was a reference to the fact that the ruling family and ethnicity that conquered Albion were not Normans, but essentially Cosmopolitan Slavs who had been dwelling in exile for a long while.

The inspiration for the Tower of Kralchester, as I have mentioned before, was the towers of Genoa (I think it was Genoa? It was a while ago) which had a skyline that frankly almost looked modern.

The technology existed to create huge towers, but the cultural impetus didn't. The Nemecek family brought that cultural impetus with them, and paid a lot of money to build a fucking huge tower on top of a huge hill to prove that they had the biggest dicks on the island. Oh, and also because the Big G would probably approve. You know. That's always a plus.

I believe the tower was about as tall as some Italian towers that do exist.

Is it just me, or are the nations of the tattered realms internally homogeneous?

Honestly I feel all of Westeros should be populated by hunter-gatherers. It seems more sensible than attempting to do agriculture when you have a massive reset button coming in every so often.

Dace has enough cultural divergence within the country that its basically in a cold war against itself. I don't know about the rest.

Dace is the only country with any real development, and even then there's pretty much just the sich and the cities. Each city dislikes the others, but this conflict is homogeneous as well.

There's Vedrim and Pishka, which were detailed in the Vlatko fecht. The Sich is sympathetic to Pishka, I think, but it's never been gone into deeper than that.

Maybe you should be clear as to what your complaint is exactly.

Krajina is about to have a race war, Dace is recovering from two civil wars, Kaselreich is hopelessly divided into a thousand kingdoms, Ruscovy sells slaves by their souls, Eternal Karthack is divided by ethnicity and location into distinct rival groups, the iber can't even make a state yet. Most of the countries actually have more conflict inside them than with external threats.

>GoT has very good reasons to have unusually large castles

isn't this the GRRM-approved version of the Iron Throne?

aber warum

An old friend of mine has been killed in a car crash in Texas. Some moron in a truck didn't stop in time and flattened his car in a pileup.

He was a good kid and didn't deserve to eat it like that. In remembrance of my old boy:

youtube.com/watch?v=ec0XKhAHR5I

In honor of Brexit's success, I have decided to run a fecht in the vain of Sharpe tomorrow night, Friday. A good mix of guns, swords, and British might.

Rule Britiannia.

Britons shall never be slaves!

If I were to run a campaign of Ballad of the Laser Whales for a trio of normies who're cool guys but know absolutely nothing about P&P (I'm thinking a 3-5-session-ish short MacGuffin-based Void Sailor campaign), what

Mostly I'm concerned what happens if they fuck up at the start, so I'll be using the first two sessions to gauge their combat-capabilty to design the "finalé" so that, by my expectation, one of them will die. Hopefully they'll pull through and all survive, but I feel like I should pull the punches until it doesn't matter if one of them actually does die. Dying before "completion" would just ruin the campaign since a replacement would be basically impossible.

Anyone got any suggestions on how to handle player lethality with normies? Maybe go with Cinematic rules? I'm thinking of giving each of them one free 3-point expenditure of Luck for the entire campaign (apart from what they buy with PCP), so that they'll feel the threat of death but still allow the game to go on until the campaign's climax.

Also are there any rules I should be careful with? I have no experience at all with SoS or Ballad.

Any general GM tips? Stuff like how much Arc to pass out, how to evaluate how much Comedic Timing should cost, how to make Roll20 not be such a steaming pile of garbage? (I'd use Maptool but I've not used it before and it's wonderfully flexible, so I have to learn it properly before using it)

I'm going to make the campaign about a map over that flipped island's tunnels to the gold mines on the other side

addendum: there's a very strong possibility I just use Maptool despite not knowing it because of how Roll20 only handles derived attributes if you make a character sheet which you can only do if you are a fucking pro member or try to get it through the official repo

Don't give anyone rifles. After that, give them luck back for doing cool shit. Comedic timing's cost should be tied to the actual effect they are going for. Roll20 is good, you just need to learn how to work it.

The campaign idea is good, I ran a similar session, and it was hype.

>Don't give anyone rifles
Too effective? I'm going to be running a campy campaign, I don't really mind if the players are OP.

Though if you mean not giving any NPC rifles, I was already wary of that given how accuracy seems pretty deadly, even with high PCP

>Give them luck back for doing cool shit
Like Bennies or Fate points, I like it. Will definitely be doing that. Good tip user.

>Comedic timing's cost should be tied to the actual effect they are going for
I'm sorry for being rude user but yes I am aware. I was asking how to evaluate what effect constitutes what cost so as to keep it from being an arbitrary "ehhh, that's like medium unlikely, give me a 3"

>Roll20 is good, you just need to learn how to work it.
I know perfectly well how to work with it, and that's why I know it's absolute trash. Not even having basic "if, then" functionality without Pro is a travesty, not to mention its myriad technical faults (I used the default template in a call macro once and the chat broke irreversibly. When inquiring how to fix it, the only answer was to completely delete the entire chat archive.
Nothing against you, user, but roll20's flaws make me consider it equivalent to software garbage.

It's not so much the accuracy, so much as the massive damage and AP. One good (1 BS or more) hit means Level 4 or 5s. For Comedic, I'd say 2 for a minor benefit (shoot something in such a way that it falls and gives you cover), 3 for a immediate save my ass (the example in the book), 4 for taking someone out of the fight somehow, 5 for outright solving a situation.

I've never had problems with Roll20, and I've 1050 on it, but hey, use what works for you and yours.

1050 hours even. Fuck.

Ah, so when you said effect, you meant the narrative effect and not the unlikeliness (or the amount of fortune it would take) of the event being true. That's an interesting way to do it. Not what I'd intuit myself, but definitely a very orderly way of doing it, so I'll roll with that. Thanks mate.

As for Roll20, it's honestly mostly just annoying that there's so many things I have no control over. I -have- to use Soundcloud or pre-made ambient tracks, I -have- to use the default character sheet and can't edit it to be less idiotic (particularly pisses me off in Hackmaster), I -have- to do a lot of finicky shit to make things work (adding/modifying initiative requiring a selected token as opposed to just adding a Journal's name and image if used as an %Ability), etc.

Not being able to make an Attribute for Adroitness that could then be used in calls is just the latest in annoyances. I'd have to essentially make an %Ability that's just [[@({char_name|agility}+@{char_name|agility})/2]] and then watch as it breaks completely because Roll20 cannot handle nested macros properly even when you replace } with } etc., and all I want to fucking do is make a derived attribute without having to make an entire character sheet and be forced to give it to a bunch of cockwads who refuse to provide basic customizability or software freedom, and then hope they'll approve it without modifying it so it's no longer useful for me, ugh.

But hey, different strokes for different blokes.
I am not autistic

Yeah I gotcha, pic related.

I really, really like that pic OP. I'll go make it into a poster and put it in my kitchen

This is sorely lacking in nutrition information about various organs. Eyes, kidneys, the heart, all the good stuff.
Anyone got something more comprehensive?

So, is Song of Swords actually in a state that a campaign could be ran around it? I was contemplating Blade of the Iron Throne, but there are a lot of little things that are bugging me about it.

In honor of Brexit's success, I have decided to scramble madly to decide whether to offload or keep my euros.

Fuck Britiannia.

It is, it's just a bit of a hassle because the resources aren't all together, but the editing pass to fix this is taking an inordinate amount of time, so you could just start with the current mess and marvel at the ease of using a single professionally compiled book once Jimmy's buttfucked unprofessional supply chain stop stroking their dicks for long enough to actually communicate and get things done.

Wait, the missing bits are available somewhere? Thinking of magic, missing maneuvers etc.

Oh, yeah there are some things that aren't there. The available stuff is all in the rar archive. Magic isn't really in, but depending on what you want to run, you could crib from Ballad of the Laser Whales, or just make your own. Jimmy's magic is going to be quite setting-specific anyway.

We honestly need to get someone else to manage the archive.

What is missing, in all?

Latest ballad, grappling, blood magic, and monster beta as far as I can remember

There's an older version of blood magic. But the newest one is missing.

So you're volunteering, right?

Yeah he is.

>So, is Song of Swords actually in a state that a campaign could be ran around it?
Yes, it is, and has been for a long while.

well the second part is redundant since Song of Swords has literally not changed at all in forever

Where can we find these things then? Wiki?

You basically have to ask in the thread and wait until someone posts them.

The wiki is only for setting stuff.

that seems sort of retarded when literally anyone could just .zip up that shit and put it in the opening post
Heck, I'll make a new .zip as soon as I have all the extra material

why are we even using .rar, .rar sucks

>.rar sucks
>suggests .zip as the alternative
Not to get too /g/ in a thread about things that lost relevance before anything on /g/ was invented, but that's fucking retarded.

.zip is shit too but most people are fucking morons and I doubt Veeky Forums is particularly computer-literate

I'm used to .7z or .tar.gz but I imagine there'd be some head-scratching on how to open that with winrar (yes people still use that, I don't know why)

note: Mostly I dislike .rar because I can't even open the damned files on my phone, unlike .zip which is at least functional even if just as deprecated

.7z is easy as fuck to open, ancient programs can handle it.

Get a better file management app.

Well, the latest Ballad is in the op. Blood magic is pdf related. Not sure if it's the newest though.
And then there are two PDFs containing the term grapple in the zip. Not sure if they are outdated or not what he was talking about.
Never heard of, or seen monster beta though.

No it isn't. It has homebrew on it already. There's even a category for it.

Fuck Sharpe, do Flynn.

As I have spent the day packing for my move, I'm shoving the Sharpe fecht to tomorrow. Gotta prepare properly to run a good fecht.

That sucks, Jimmy. Losing friends is never easy.

Frog detected.

Cane toad is more accurate

>why are we even using .rar, .rar sucks
>Heck, I'll make a new .zip
Are you living in opposite land?

Cool. I might give it a look over then. Blade of the Iron Throne seemed good on the surface, but there are a lot of things hand-waived because they don't fit the S&S theme. Also, I couldn't find rules for drawing one's weapon, in a game that touts a badass combat system. Hggnn.

Surely you did not think that the Eternal Anglo would be content MERELY to shed rivers of Aryan blood? Their dreams must be crushed as well.

Human kidneys are so fucked that they kill pigs. Don't eat them.

Heart is literally just a huge lump of ultra-exercised muscle tissue. It'd be like eating a rock.

>Play SoS
>Have to explain the setting to my group because reading a wiki is hard
>They don't know shit about medieval Europe
>None of them get any of the historical jokes but still think it's a cool setting
>Only thing they do notice is that Dace is a shithole, casually conclude that it's because they're not white
>They literally all make dudes in heavy armor with zweihanders and no helmets, except for one who has a stechhelm

Just fucking kill me Veeky Forums.

The euro has stabilized already, let this meme die.

investing.com/analysis/euro-stabilised-at-balance-line-200126418

>>irrelevant island barbarians joyfully make themselves even more irrelevant.
>>ohohoho we're crushing your DREAMS oh superstate that outmatches us in every single way!
You're in for a rude awakening and i can't wait. Britistani tears will be fucking delicious.

It's what you deserve for your sins.
I have no idea what sins you could have committed but you must have been a real asshole.

Yes, very good Germany, very good.

HOWEVER

Not even german, pal friend amigo home slice bread slice.

I'm german, and I applaud the Brits. I hope more European nations follow suit.
The EU is a failed project that needs to end.

But lets not turn this thread into /pol/

/sos/ is literally a /pol/ infiltration gone native. It's like the Wolf's Dragoons of Veeky Forums.

It's alright to be little bitty, bitch.

Yeah, I'm pleasantly surprised by how fucked I'm actually not. Still probably not much point in keeping a year's worth of income in a foreign currency though, for the small amount of money that my year's income is worth.

>reading a wiki is hard
To be fair, it needs a lot of work and doesn't have a good overview bit. I'm hoping Jimmy will write a little twenty to 100 page booklet on the setting to address this, but though he liked the idea when I pitched it like a year ago, he hasn't bothered yet.
>casually conclude that it's because they're not white
They must be familiar with Jimmy "The Holocaust was the best day of my life" Rome's other work, "Ballad of the Laser Fuhrer: NatSoc is the Least Evil".
>They literally all make dudes in heavy armor with zweihanders
Sounds fine to me.
>and no helmets
The first one who dies to a blow to the head will put the rest in their place.

No one took pistols?

I fight with a zweihander in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Remind them, out of character, that medieval sword control exists and that they won't be able to walk around casually like that in any town or most villages.

Also, demonstrate to them glory of Invincible Republic of Dace by shooting one of your players (not the PC, the player) with a crossbow and accuse him of being a Marju infiltrator while serving the others a solid block of hardtack soaked in ghost pepper sauce.

Don't forget to sell him/her a hand knit sweater after shooting him/her

Must support Invincible Glorious Tophonamy Bay Tourism Board somehow, friend.

Fecht when?

>I'm uneducated and don't understand economics

Raus, Schweinhund

The Holy German Empire will consume all