Song of Swords: Cities

That's too cryptic! Now I expect shape shifting titans.

1) Shaken belief and a reduced power structure for Christianity have made way for a resurgence in not only converts to witchcraft but existing practitioners as the church is now less able to continue their hunts and people are looking for new sources of protection.
2) Witches and sorcerers' powers depend on their discipline I suppose. Druids may have control over nature, blood and foresight. Some witches might commune only with demons and monsters of the forest as part of their pact. An educated and well learned Italian sorcerer might deal only in cosmology, hell some sorcerers might be Christian occultists.
3) Blessed oils, anointed weapons and religious icons may be all that can combat particularly powerful demons, silver and blessed weapons are the only things that pierce the hides of the forest's beasts. Consecrated ground might sap witches and sorcerers of their power as they cannot draw upon the arcane or demonic magics. That said particularly magical areas or corrupted and evil places may smother the power of holy warriors to almost nothing. No one wants to fight a druid in the center of his standing stones.

I think you would really enjoy looking at Clockwork & Chivalry, an RPG about a weird English Civil War using the Renaissance D100 system.

It has three magic systems. Hedge magic practised by Cunning Men and Wise Women. Alchemy and theurgy practised by hermetic philosphers. And full on Satanic witchcraft, offering power far beyond mere wise women at the cost of your immortal soul.

It's evocative and well grounded in period beliefs.

I actually wanted to do a similar game minus the focus on religion and instead focused on an American Gods and The Wolf Among Us concept of gods and legends traveling with people. It was going to be set in the Americas in the 16th century, with the players coming from the old world which was every bit as fantastic and alive in the forgotten places as legends suggested. In the new world both they and the monsters they've brought with them need to work to survive and thrive against or with the native mortal population and the native legends and monsters.

But *why* is his world seeing this resurgence? Your post just sounds like genetic fantasy magic, not anything based on actual Catholic belief.

If you want actual catholic belief then god is perfect and everyone else is a fucking snake oil salesman. Satan both is and isn't lord of hell and both is and isn't responsible for the schisms and reformation as a way to increase the influence he does and doesn't have on the world through magic. The reformations happen, satan takes the time of strife and questioning of dogma to corrupt people. So people are now fucking around sucking goat cocks and sacrificing babies in his name so that they can fuck a demon and learn magic.

Jimmy what happens when Thaumaturgists from the same patron or discipline fight. Is it a popularity contest with the being they're communicating with?

...

I'm actually interested in doing a similar game, but in Bronze/Iron Age Israel. I'm not sure if I'll want to have magic outside of religious stuff though, if at all, like Canaanite worship, Yahwism, and other surrounding religions

...

1) We are being tested, the rules underlying His creation have been changed to facilitate this.
2) Pry the cracks of creation open a little wider and let the stuff that make up the divine seep through. It's buggery hard to control and man was absolutely not meant to know what it looks like till he was dead and in heaven, it could summon fire or disease, render time immaterial in a local area or manifest beings not of this reality but it will never be predictable.

Blame the protestants. Or alternatively Luther/Huss discovered that the church was being undermined by a cabal of Satanists in the college of cardinals and the church itself is at fault.

Judeo-Christian rituals and prayer are two of the inspirations for the generic ritual and divine magics in fantasy. It's all fantasy anyway man.

It's the countdown to the apocalypse but most don't know it yet. Witchcraft, monsters and demons are flooding back into the world as Armageddon looms. It's not going happen tommorow but on a cosmic timescale we are 15 minutes to midnight.

There was always a smidgeon of witchcraft and a few monsters lurking at the edges through the Middle Ages but now it's picked up a notch.

>protestants
I bet this is what kicked it all off though.

To the Bronze Age mind, magic and religion are the same thing anyway.

What would be a good into adventure for ballad?

I was thinking of having my players be members of a para-regiment assaulting an isolated lab-complex, they'd be some awful tar monster locked up somewhere.

Basically, yeah

Sounds dope.

The best part is if I give them all SMGs as their primary weapons then they'll be trying to gun down the monster using 9mm unless they find something else.

People overemphasize the military aspects. Start them on a civilian ship under attack by pirates. Or as the pirates. PR my traditional introduction adventure, stealing a truck from a warehouse in a city somewhere in Rahoo.

Or go the paranoia route.

Everyone takes "you're a nazi!". You're all pizza delivery guys in rahoo. You're all also secret agents of different parties with myriad of interests.

Your mission is to deliver a pizza.

>You're all pizza delivery guys in Rahoo.
>Rahoo

The pizza is Potato slaves.

>tossing out the Audatia plug for your poem

We also play Guy Windsor's card game Audatia in the room, but now we have a much better way to play Audatia: Tabletop Simulator! The (official!) mod for Audatia is now up and running!
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=904774480

>as we pass
>in the arse

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Has anyone made an effort to stat modern small arms, vehicles or ordnance for ballad? Can I fire a wire guided missile from my bradley? Do we have auto cannons, main battle tanks or self propelled artillery yet?

just play GURPS or Phoenix Command. Ballad is about being space pirates in confined spaces

Interesting phat loot could be hot-loaded ammunition.

Good talk.

Essentially, but personal skill in directing the powers involved comes in as well.

Small arms from the 70's and 80's, not quite modern but it's something.
archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/48673997/#48767014

Pretty fantastic thread all in all.

Jimmy, how would you stat out the MP7?

But what about the pizza, or the delivery, has drawn so much intrigue and attention?

It's the special sauce.

One of my GMs made a bunch of Cold War weapons. I'll ask him for them.

Didja finally figure out what to do with them ogres?

I don't know what to do with the round, I'd probably stat it similar to a 9mm.

>Jimmy ignoring the fact that God was beaten in a wrestling match.

What, by Jacob? That was just an angel he put in the Cobra Clutch.

Eh. Seems he's trying too hard to make a point that's ultimately pretty sophomoric. Trying to merge a silly political point with a literary generalization.

God's angels are shit at SoS

The angel wasn't beaten either. Since Jacob wasn't going anywhere the angel dislocated Jacob's thigh by a simple touch

"You have struggled with God ... and have oevercome"
— Genesis 32:28

"I saw God face to face"
— Genesis 32:30

Do you hold that the words of the Bible are untrue?

You're talking to a man who also thinks Crowley had actual magical powers. It's impossible to derive a logical worldview based on outside sources because he's making shit up as he goes along. The reason he's good at writing this stuff is that he's crazy.

Well I was drunk--but I stand by the claim. The modern equivalent of lovecraftian horror, the confrontation of smallness of humanity and everything we cherish, must necessarily look very different from how it looked in 1920. That isn't to say that old-school lovecraftian horror isn't cool, and some more cerebral people obviously still enjoy it, but the culture, I think, has changed.

>Do you hold that the words of the Bible are untrue?

I'm Catholic, we're allowed to do that. But many times in the bible people reference themselves as having seen God, when earlier it said that they met an Angel. The angelic messengers were, for whatever reason, considered surrogates for God, Metatron being his voice, etc.

I think that Crowley was half scam artist and half genius occultist. It still amazes me that there was a time when just by being rich and British you could spend the night in the fucking tomb of the Pharoah with your wife in Egypt.

>must necessarily look very different
That claim is obvious enough to not need stating. It's everything else you say that is, perhaps, representative of your inebriation at the time.

>Well I was drunk

When have you actually been sober during the long, torturous years of SoS's crafting?

Context matters! The thread was literally someone claiming that Lovecraftian horror seemed passe, and rather than try to convince him that he didn't feel the way he felt, which would be sophistry, I attempted to suggest WHY he found it passe, and what he could do to recapture the sensation of horror that he clearly desired.

I've sobered up considerably, I drink weekly now instead of daily. I've also lost a lot of weight, big changes. Soon I'll be able to get that suit of armor I've always wanted without needing one of those big goofy beer-belly cuirasses.

Elohim can also be attributed to angels, you know.

>ou could spend the night in the fucking tomb of the Pharoah
Didn't Karl Pilkington do that with some weird hippies for An Idiot Abroad a few years back?

Glad to see you've found something to spend that booze money on.

He did.

Wait, the point of 4.6x30 was to penetrate armor, so what... Hold on let me do some research I'll stat out the round.

At some point we're going to make Ballad but set in the 1980s equivalent. Fighter jets and all that good stuff.

Yeah, what I'm seeing here does not paint a good picture of this round, the idea was that a super high-velocity lightweight round would penetrate armor better, but the data just doesn't support that being the actual case. I've always been very skeptical of high pressure rounds and platforms built for them but I imagine the weapon's chief function is to provide vehicle crews with a small but effective weapon, and this thing is definitely small. MP7 Might be serviceable as a standard SMG. I guess these days OpFor is never well equipped enough to have body armor anyway, so it's not like you'd have to penetrate SAPI plates or even kevlar.

Don't know what to say. Maybe 5 damage 2 AP.

>Hold on let me do some research I'll stat out the round.
You are like little baby
Watch this
gamingballistic.com/category/features-on-gb/reloading-press/

Question Jimmy, if COTV is divided up into islands, how exactly did the WWII analogue happen? Germany was able to crush France through tank power, how does that work when France and Germany are literal islands?

Complicated, let me explain.

Chiron at the time was believed to be a weak nation in terms of maritime power. During CW1 they had deployed most of their troops via high altitude Zeppelins which could not be shot by ground-based guns, but now fighter plane tech had reached the point where planes could fly to their level and shoot them down. The CIS fleet was double the size of the next two competitors (Arlon and France) combined, and it was assumed that the war would essentially boil down to a blockade around Chiron and their inevitable defeat.

The Arloni Navy, thus, went about its business suppressing UC-backed communist revolts in Biskra and other colonies, while the Albish were assumed to have the war in the bag.

What they did not anticipate were Rudolph and Richtofen. CRS Freundlichen Rudolph and CRS Richtofen, to be precise. Two Leviathan dreadnoughts--the two largest warships ever built, in fact--constructed 50 miles inland in a gigantic naval base disguised as an under-construction amphitheater. A 50 mile underground tunnel was dug as well, so that the ships would not be detected while deploying. This, combined with a very competent disinformation campaign by the Abwehr, who successfully convinced both Albish and Arloni intelligence that their plan was to construct a gigantic cannon capable of firing 5-ton shells into Arlon from a mountain in the Reich, allowed the development of a surprise amphibious assault on Arlon through Devinter territory, which of course required that several divisions be diverted to conquer that country as well.

This was totally unexpected. The maritime defense was supposed to be completely airtight, but the Chironites were able to bypass it and sweep through the largely undefended country, prompting a panicked response by the Albish to deploy their own ground forces to try and counter the invasion.

>(Arlon and France)
>France and France

Sorry it's hard, Arlon and Albion both start with A.

Whose the immortal? Ricthoffen?

Pardon? In what context? I mean yes, Richtofen is immortal, because he fell into the Babel Pits, but are you referring to the poem in the OP? That's from Blackbird Raum's "Cities." Great song, they're a local band in SC.

Genosus drowned Thor in a reflecting pond.
More news at 11.

>Jimmy Rome, Catholic Mystic Witch, defends his heretical views by literally shrugging and going "eh sola scriptura's for fags"

This is by far the best community on 4gag.

Makes sense, he's the God of Italians.

...

Jimmy's stupid when it comes to guns, don't hold it against him. His stat block here () works, except the RoF should be 30, and the round's stats would be 5 Damage, 7 AP.

Is the discord that was posted in the kickstarter comment section the one that people here use or a new / different one?

And who is Thor in CotV? Is he pretty much just mythological Thor?

>CRS Freundlichen Rudolph
That should be "Freundlicher Rudolph"

I love shit like this

There are two Discos, the one in the KS comments is probably the "unofficial" one which is overrun with /pol/acks and arguments about religious minutia.

The new one is much more professional, I'll see about having Bones add it to the KS. I'll also link it here, give me a minute.

>That should be "Freundlicher Rudolph"
Thank God, my German guy has been offline for weeks. I've been trying to get a proper spelling forever, it used to just be Freundlich Rudolph but I knew that sounded wrong.

Genosus gets more appealing every day. The guy doesn't fuck around at all.

>My German guy
Imagine how stressed that poor man must be that some American is asking how to say increasingly weird shit in German.

"Hey how do you say Hitler did nothing wrong in German?"
"Uh... Six to twelve years in prison. Jimmy why"

>Drowning someone in a pond while they're watching ducks is the closest analogy you could draw
Are the ducks people? My urge to know more intensifies

Without that brave man's sacrifice, we'd have ship names like CRS Seen Kyle.

For context, it was the battle of "Black Day" where the Krajini royal family agreed to get ZELLED in return for the help of some Zell warlord in kicking the fuck out of some vikings.

They crushed them so hard that the norse literally believed that their gods had died. Genosus then went and killed Thor.

I like to think of it as Thor having seen the utter defeat of his people, and resigned himself to death, so he goes and watches his pet duckies and waits for Genosus to show up and kill him.

Why is the fucking ship called "Friendly Rudolph," that's the gayest name for a warship ever.

it makes the enemy expect hugs

and then he is surprised when he gets APCBC shells instead

You're fucking gayer than it is, you shouldn't talk.

Nobody is sure. Chiron has three Leviathans. The first, Das Schwerez Aug, is the oldest and also the most powerful because at the time of its building, Chiron had the most Moonstone to work with.

The other two were named by Hermann Sternfleischer and Richtofen. Sternfleischer named his after Richtofen--perhaps expecting that his counterpart would name the other one after him, but instead Richtofen gave it its strange name of Freundlicher Rudolph.

Nobody knows why. There are two Rudolphs in the high command of Chiron but neither of them are particularly friendly with Richtofen. Most people assume it is a reference to someone in the Autarch's past, but he has never explained himself.

does it have a red nose

Because the smokescreen for the construction was meant to be completely non-military. They couldn't really have an official name of "Doom Weapon MK. 2" for something that is built around amphitheater.

Anyway, each of the three is equipped differently.

Das Schwerez Aug is equipped with a Babel Field Generator, which makes it basically impossible to hit, and simply flying close to enemy ships can destroy them. It has to turn off the field in order to fire its cannons, but they are fucking huge, to the point that smaller ships can be obliterated in a single shot at close range.

Richtofen is equipped with a massive C&C suite and a Moonstone Cannon powerful enough to slice battleships in half.

Freundlicher Rudolph is a carrier. It carries hundreds of fighter-bombers, and is also faster and more maneuverable than any other leviathan ever built, except the Albish Ironside Invincible, which is slightly faster but fairly light armed. The Rudolph's launch system is also enormously effective, to the point that if the directors are not careful, it could be impossible for all of the planes launched via catapult to land before they run out of fuel and start crashing.

And yet it all still seems less deutschaboo than whoever translated this article that got posted in /nwg/ today:

>gwpda.org/naval/foeseyd.htm

This is actually a perfectly good explanation. "Friendly Rudolph" doesn't sound like a weapon, it sounds like an ice cream truck or something. That might've been the reason.

>Oi Gen'ral, why d'you thinkin' the Cherries need 700 ton-a-steel an' moonshines for som'thin' called Friendly Rudolf?

>This, combined with a very competent disinformation campaign by the Abwehr, who successfully convinced both Albish and Arloni intelligence that their plan was to construct a gigantic cannon capable of firing 5-ton shells into Arlon from a mountain in the Reich

It's funny because this is EXACTLY the sort of thing that Hitler would've actually built. Did the Albs bomb a mountain in the alps over this, did they set up a fake construction site?

Sternfleischer is obsessed with building ridiculously huge public works projects--it's entirely believable that he'd build an stadium entirely out of steel and moonstone for no reason. The chink in the armor is that Richtofen ordered its construction--Richtofen is the sort of guy who believes that every Chironite should be a farmer living in rural countryside, and that cities should be demolished to make more room for nature. He would never command the construction of such a gigantic, stupid building.

Unfortunately propaganda had sort of conflated the two leaders of Chiron with each other, so Albish intelligence didn't notice the discrepency in motives.

They didn't have to set up a fake construction site, Sternfleischer had been building the cannon since 2135, Angela Boden leaked its location to the Albish because A, she hates him, and B, it made for a good distraction for the real plan.

Richtofen sounds like a pretty cool guy actually. Why's he allied with literally hitler and a witch?

Well, it's complicated, and let's not sugercoat it, none of them are angels. All three agreed upon the necessity of genocide and racial purity--but they agreed for different reasons, and their visions of Chiron were different.

Richtofen saw foreign influence as a cancer destroying the soul of the Ximbri people. He wants a return to tradition, to build Chiron as a nation of happy farmers living in peace.

Sternfleischer believes that the Chironic destiny is to conquer the fucking world and McLiterallyFuckingKill everyone who resists them. At minimum he would kill the rulers of each country, install Chironites in charge of them, and then leave them alone. At most, he would advocate the extermination of entire races and the resettling of countries with people of Ximbri stock.

Angela Boden is an occultist who believes that only those of Void-Sensitive blood (Zells and Void-Users) are worthy of existence, and wants to set up a massive eugenics program to breed everyone else out of existence. She sees Chiron as a useful tool to this end but she doesn't really care about Chiron itself. Ironically her vision is probably the most practical.

Wait, the cannon was real?
Did the Albish neutralize it?

Oh yeah, thye bombed the living shit out of it. The problem was it was very far inland, and heavily defended. The plan to destroy it required hundreds of planes. No Albish bombers or fighters had the fuel capacity to go that far and back, so hundreds of fighters and bombers were sent with the expectation that they would have to bail out on the way back and be picked up by a second task force landing at a temporary airstrip.

Some of them made it out, but most were killed or captured in the attempt--still, they punched through and obliterated the cannon and the base built up around it using specialized bombs intended to penetrate through deep earth and stone. Despite the losses it was one of the greatest air operations ever mounted, Chiron's High Command was dumbfounded that they had even attempted it, to say nothing of succeeding. According to reports, Hermann Sternfleischer had to be physically restrained from killing the man placed in charge of the air defense via injections of valium.

To clarify, Sternfleischer had to be sedated to stop him from strangling Gierhart Muller, a Sternwaffe General who had been placed in charge of the defense.