Song of Swords: Dishonored Graves

Sounds like a hentai series.

>Beautiful magical elf girls living in flying magic city
>Thousands of warriors compete for the right to gangbang them
>Also they have intelligent pet moths who can shoot lasers out of their eyes

M A G I C A L R E A L M
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I agree, the moths are pure fetishistic wankbait. Remove them post-haste, it's sickening to see such perversion in an otherwise pristine setting.

I want lore and drawfags to come back.

You get neither.

...

reposting request from last thread. any of you more experienced anons feel like running me through SoS on roll20? i'm planning on running a campaign in a few weeks. any time is fine

Not a single one of them is above 6/10

I can possibly help tomorrow. What time are you free?

You're apparently way too sober to fully appreciate Slavic girls.

To be fair, they're willing to parade around in armor, I can lower my standards a bit.

Yeah right, like I have standards.

>armor
It's costume armor. Not even well-made costume armor, it's bargain bin shit.

Hey, no standards, it's an easy life.

Explain this image to me.

Is Dace supposed to be a parody of something? It isn't just a medieval republic that sucks because it's full of black people, right?

They're all from some mid or high school, at best 16.

Give them time to blossom user.

If I remember correctlyAnd I can't be bothered to check right now this is Bulgaria during the second Balkan war in 1912(?)
They had the most gains and overall were in best position after the first anti-Turkish Balkan war.

And then they immediately triggered the second one by pushing claims and attacking the neighbours (i.e Bulgaria's allies in the first war).

They got curb-stomped, losing most of what they gained before.

I think it's a jab at the idea of progressive politics. Dace is a country with almost 19th century political apparatus that is just as shitty and dysfunctional, or MORE so than the feudal states that surround it. Their political system might be representative but their society is still medieval.

I think the fact that they're brown is more due to the fact that Gizka is one of them and she was established to be brown already, so it made sense for them to be as well. I'd like to point out that Tattered Realms tends to be very good in this regard, when you have ethnic groups who look dramatically different from their neighbors, there's always an explanation of why, and where they came from. It isn't just tossed in there to fill a diversity quota, it's a part of the lore and it makes the setting feel more alive.

>You will never have to calm your Polish Pan-waifu down after she gets angry and starts smashing your house up with her mace of office

What is the -Punk in Ballad of the Laser Whale's Dieselpunk? So far all of the focus seems to be on the nations. You've got fascists and commies and capitalists all sort of jockeying for position, but who's the little guy throwing molotov cocktails through everyone's windows?

Who is the Dieselpunk riding the whale?

The free void sailors

cross-posting from gamefinder
>>GM/Player
GM
>>System Preferred
Song of Swords
>>Times Available (with timezone!)
Wednesdays, 11am EST
>>Method of Play (Skype, IRC, roll20, etc)
Discord with Voice, rolz for dice
>>Contact Info
[email protected]
>>Additional Notes
I have been running a Song of Swords campaign for about six months, but some of the players have decided they'd rather go full dungeons and dragons and become memey monster slayers or something. I wish them well, but I've decided to pull a timeskip and continue the campaign without a major shift in theme.

Song of Swords is a Riddle of Steel successor and comes with all of the delightful weapon-autism and mutilation that that entails. My game is set in my own world that I would best describe as faux-historia. It is fictional but the setting and characters are all 'realistic' for an early 16th century world, with the caveat that subtle, dark fantasy elements may creep around the outskirts of civilization.

I do not require a mastery of SoS to play, but players will be expected to learn the system and try to learn quickly. I'm usually available outside of game time to run practice fechts to help players learn combat.

One of my favorite pictures bump

>yfw She will never fuck you up with the aformentioned mace. Like Rzedzian got in with fire and sword.
>She won't then nurse you back to health.

...

Rzedzian was the funniest part of that movie.

Aside from the pirates, void sailors etc, there's the Rahoos, who are pretty anarchic sounding.

Where can I get the old school insanity rules that went with increasing grit? I miss them and want my players to go insane.

>11 AM
Why must you tease me so?

I think there are dissident movements in each faction, possibly sponsored by the other factions.

Didn't those terrorists that we played as shoot up a socialist protest or something?

sorry 2m80

True that. Even though I liked the Zagloba also.

They're called winged hussies for a reason.

>It isn't just tossed in there to fill a diversity quota, it's a part of the lore and it makes the setting feel more alive.
You just got done saying Dace is brown because Gizka was brown.

Wednesday mornings? Eesh. Can't make that.

Dace is ambiguously brown. not black.

The two are not incompatible, there's an actual explanation rather than a hand wave.

What would happen with spears in a world with no horses?

They still get used because a spearman will beat an equally skilled swordsman 90% of the time

That sort of assumes no other factors. Shields still exist in a world with no horses, and as the Romans showed, heavy shield and sword infantry are very viable against spearmen, or even pikes.

There's underground transhumanist death cults, three or so different varieties of communist revolutionary, space pirates, the Free Men of the Void, religious dissidents, and all the resistance cells against the various countries, especially Chiron. Right now though, I'm running Ballad as a heist game set in Russia-Dubai-Prague-Yharnam. The players are a bunch of mercenaries doing small, somewhat legally ambiguous jobs around town.

Little trip back in time, Jimmy released a set of Way of Five axioms that included references to some of the religious groups. He also posted brief descriptions.

Pilgrims: Anarchists who think battle is the best place to find enlightenment.
Paladins: Radical Nationalists who think that God is literally [Insert their Nation here]
Clerics: Ultra-Religious radicals, pursue the ends of the church rather than specifically any government
Templars: Similar to Pilgrims, but disdain firearms because they feel that it distances too much from the violence

Now I know this is baseless but I really, really want the Pilgrims to dress like American Pilgrim settlers, complete with the stupid buckled hats, but fight Equilibrium style.

Speaking of Dishonored, Jimmy has been playing Dishonored 2 for like 12 hours at a time for the last few days.

Sword and Shield and Spear and Shield would be huge due to the increased prevalence of ranged units.

On the plus side this probably increases our chances of a BoLW update after he's done.

Spears still have reach, which is fantasticly important. Other polearms ei still supplant them but they will rule the earlier battlefields as normal.

There were other factors besides pure battlefield dominance behind Romans beating the phalanx.

The other factors, I imagine, would be shields and armor. Once those are in play, the reach advantage of spears seem to matter a lot less. There's still nothing wrong with the weapon, but the claims of its dominance (in terms of effect rather than ubiquity) really seem overstated when you look at actual accounts of the battles. With the exception of Pydna, there's no account I can think of where sword-armed infantry in the ancient world just got steamrolled by spears, it just didn't happen. In every case where one side was decisively defeated, it was because the infantry held the opposing infantry in place long enough for cavalry or other troops to outflank them.

It isn't until the medieval period and the renaissance that you start seeing pike simply flatten everything that isn't pike that it encounters, and a part of me wonders if that wasn't because large shields had simply fallen out of vogue.

Does anyone know anything about the ergonomics of old pistols? The grips are so sloped compared to the grips of pistols today, it seems like they'd be impossible to aim. Was there a reason for this to due with the nature of powder or was it just that they had been used to making arquebuses at that point and were just building what they knew?

I've noticed that a lot of target pistols have sloped grips like that, though I've never seen one that extreme before. It might feel more natural shooting like that at full extension.

How's it feel to be a part of the super secret skype group while us true fans are left in the threads starving for any kind of update to this dead game?

I'm not in any skype, I just found him on Steam months ago.

My flintlock pistol feels so so natural to point, and it has the highly sloped pistol grip as pictured.

It's more natural than one might expect.

This is true. Anyone who wants to know what I'm doing instead of working is welcome to find me. You can guess my name.

For now have a sneak peek at our far cleaner and more functional update of the Way of Five.

From the older stuff, the templars' thing is that they use swords, right? Is this why their ability is so much stronger than everyone else's, because they have to use a sharpened piece of metal while everyone else has SMGs and rifles?

Not all of them use swords, some prefer spears or even bayonets, though it's a tradition for those who use rifles to ceremonially empty their weapons (usually by cycling the action over and over slowly) before entering battle to avoid the temptation of stopping and shooting at an enemy instead of charging.

The Templars began as a sort of religious reactionary movement against industrialized warfare, with chapters springing up in several major nations (including Chiron and Albion) and demanding that new rules of war be implemented to prevent the carnage they witnessed in some of the earlier wars at the beginning of the era. These movements were quashed, but several times resulted in revolts which had horrific effects, as the Templars could blend into the regular population and then spring upon and brutalize groups of soldiers with whatever was at hand.

Famously, Chiron almost suffered a coup when 500 members of the Ximbri Brotherhood (the local chapter) walked into the capital in plain clothes, and then wiped out the entire police force and much of the Autarch's Foot Guard Division with cooking knives, shovels and fencing posts. They were only stopped from breaching the Imperial Palace by the Sternwaffe with strafing runs and firebombs.

After this narrowly avoided coup, the Albish, Gallians and Chironites came together to avoid a similar disaster in other countries by establishing some rules of war. Poisonous gas, the use of Whaleblood Fire on cities, and certain other "unnecessarily savage" acts of war were made illegal. This accord (called The Treaty of Painted Swords) was held to during CWI and CWII. Since then, the Templars have begrudgingly agreed to cooperate with their governments. Many serve as NCOs in the military, though they rarely rise higher because of their regressive attitude towards modern war.

I can't tell whether I'm supposed to like these guys or hate them. Bunch of luddites, but with good intentions.

youtube.com/watch?v=OSxFY917UH8&t=384s
PEW PEW PEW

They're sort of the antithesis of General Sherman. The Templars are a war-cult, they believe that war is beautiful and that violence is art. It's something that a society SHOULD have, it's the most noble profession, etc. At the same time they believe that if you're going to fight a war, it should be decent. There have to be rules to protect the innocent, to avoid screwing up society too much, to facilitate the beauty of combat that they love.

On one hand, it's a noble sentiment. War fought with rules and dignity to spare the innocent, well, that's a good idea, right? It's humanitarian.

But on the other hand, they're the worst sort of people. They're perfectly okay with millions of people dying. Hell, they WANT it to happen, but only if it happens in their very specific way.

So depending on how you play such a character or the perspective you view him from (or indeed his personal sentiments on the matter) they could either be very sympathetic or the most sick, evil motherfuckers in the setting. Luigi Cadorna could have been a Templar. So could Jack Churchill.

That armor did surprisingly well.

New Way of 5 rules. Much less crazy than the old ones, and more practical.

Jesus fucking Christ. How are characters without this ability supposed to compete with those who have it?

Suck it, bows.

t. Lamellar Armor

Higher CP?

>Jesus fucking Yamato. How are characters without Space Autism/Stormtroopers supposed to compete with Newtypes/Jedi?
They aren't, unless they have big enough advantage in combat experience.

Grenades.

Does Precognition work if you've got a Bayonet attached?

MY MATEYS

In the past, we had a small discussion about the ubiquity of feudal government across the globe, and the remarkably similarities held despite the differences in culture and circumstance.
One of you promised to write a thesis paper on the idea that Feudalism is a natural resting point of human society.
Is this fulfilled, or abandoned?

Same way normal humans compete with Ohaenadin or the King's Ravenkeepers:
Gitting Gud, and the judicious application of explosives.

That would be an interesting read.

I certainly think it would be.

In the mean time, are there prominent examples of African feudal societies? I will admit to ignorance of the societies of that continent, but it would be good to have another sample to compare to the Central American, European, and East Asian varieties I am familiar with.

So, I've been lurking for some time. I have a few questions, because I plan to run an SoS game, and my friends favor the idea of a combat system where combat doesn't take fucking ages and where characters could legit die in a round or two.

So my questions are:

On average, how long does a bout take to resolve in real time? With rolling and the like?

And how easy is this game to run, once the person running it is familiar with how the system works?

I just really want to get in to it, I've read most of the rulebook, and I'm pretty ecstatic just to make some characters and pit them against each other to get familiar with combat.

>On average, how long does a bout take to resolve in real time? With rolling and the like?
I took about 45 minutes for me to run two tutorial duels for my friends who were learning.
That, of course, does not include the time for character creation.

>how easy is the game to run
Mechanical proficiency is key to running the combats well, and it would help if the edited documents were released, Jammu but since the fundamental method of play is simple to learn, things speed up greatly once the people involved learn to focus on only keeping track of the maneuvers they intend to use.
The skills system is still a bit unwieldy, but it's easy enough to use it like most dice games, of just calling for ATR + SKL for a dice roll, and winging the number of required successes. Use the tables in the book as a guide, not a measure.

Us assholes around here are often more than willing to help, and run murders- er, combats, in the roll20 room for educational purposes.

Once I get more acquainted with the rules and stuff, I'd love to witness, uh, "combat" in a Roll20 room for sure.

I'm pretty passionate about learning how to play this shit and running a game for my folks and telling stories of their successes and failures. Cause I've loved reading stories that other people have told in these threads.

Okay what the fuck does this even mean? Or am I an idiot?

"When Maneuvers in a Bout resolve, all Maneuvers made with Initiative resolve in the reverse order that they were declared, (unless a Steal Initiative attempt is made), and then all Maneuvers made without initiative resolve in reverse order of declaration."

If that's from the SoS rulebook, ignore it and look at the initiative system in Ballad of the Laser Whales. It's way better and completely compatible.

Basically, people with lower initiative declare their maneuvers first, but people with higher initiative resolve their maneuvers first. Unless someone steals initiative, which is a special maneuver that if you win puts you at higher initiative.

Also this.

I have a fair knowledge of several Savannah states.

The unhelpful answer is it depends entirely on how you define feudalism. Heck, some scholars argue that feudalism as it usually understood didn't even really exist in Europe let alone anywhere else.

I don't suppose you could find archive links to that discussion? That would set the benchmark and background to the question.

warosu.org/tg/thread/S46650087#p46715972

Now I feel embarrassed as I was the guy doing the fyrd info dump. Although I still feel kinda bad I left out the bit where freeholding ceorls with less than 5 hides were grouped together in order to split the costs between to make sure that smaller estates did not get out of providing money and men.

Although there is still not a great deal of elaboration on how feudalism is the natural state of man.

I think there was something that triggered that in prior threads. Maybe my discussing aztecs?

Let's call feudalism as "the sovereign entity invests a warrior class and establishes the government as a protection racket over the other classes," and see where that takes us right now.

Like I said, I want to see that other user's thesis.

This is also how it works in Ballad, mind you. Low declares, high resolves.

Seems more user friendly in ballad though.

Much more. It's also clearly stated, and makes sense. The only thing I don't like about it is that it makes having 7 ADR or better so vital.

sorry for the late response. anytime after noon is fine. EST time period

>I was the guy doing the fyrd info dump
That was awesome, thanks.

Or you can just take penalties to act in higher rounds if it is that crucial.

should be noted that this is the legendary gamefinder lottery group.

who?

This guy () is like, a quarter right. In reality, Dace is exploring the idea of a modern democratic state, but one that came about too early, without the groundwork. Without the ideas of the Enlightenment and other western philosophies, a democracy like Dace becomes a hellhole of pragmatism and fatalistic capitalism.

This Guy: archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/48772472/#48805991

archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/49447626/#49452055

Did we ever find out who had the vote in Dace? There is information on the structure and rival factions of government but less on the extent of the franchise.

I'd guess votes are given as rewards. So soldiers get a vote, officers get more votes (or a weightier vote, but that's less abusable), Zell officers get a vote, stuff like that.

Been away for some six months. Are we any closer to that kickstarter and/or finished product than back then?