Do you think Made in Abyss's Abyss would make a good campaign setting?

yes, but that doesn't change the basic idea behind the setting. it's a vertical Stalker campaign

It could be awesome but it would take a bit of fandangleing.

As written MiA has no magic except for Magic Items. So it would limit your classes to Fighter, Rogue, Barbarian, Ranger and Artificer. You'd be completely dependant on item healing so you'd have to account for that.

Just as a setting for vanilla DnD would have you carefully curating your mages' spells so the can't just cakewalk down Uncle Lovecraft's Happy Fun Murder Hole .

So you don't think the physiological and psychological effects of ascension would completely change how the characters interact with their environment?

The biggest difference is that the Abyss is a giant trap. Everything about it makes going down easier than going back up, including a curse that fucks you sideways every time you ascend more than 10 meters in the Abyss, the effects of which are worse the farther you go down.

In the early layers, it just makes you sick or dizzy or hallucinate for a bit. Then you start bleeding from weird places. Deeper still and you start risking things like your very humanity, and can end up fleshwarped into some pathetic mess or organs that refuses to die.

No one knows whats past the 6th layer of the Abyss. Not because people can't get down that far, but because no one that goes down that far ever survive coming back up to tell anyone about it.

Even things like magical effects and radio can go down but not up. You can't radio people higher up in the abyss than you are. The radio waves cant escape.

I tell you what, Constitution would be the most important stat for every character to invest in.

I actually tilts the creation so hard that it could make some unique builds.

This world is so goddamn cool.

yes I do, that's why I said Stalker

exactly, that makes dungeon delving a balancing act of risk vs reward
just like in standard d&d really

Not really. In DnD, the only risk is whether you are strong enough to fight your way through what you assume are level-appropriate encounters. You go into dungeons with a realistic expectation that, unless there is some kind of curveball, you can handle everything in there as long as you play your cards right.

No amount of leveling will make the curse of the Abyss not be lethal past layer 6.

it would be if you picked the good parts and excluded the animu shit

>hole in the earth where no light penetrate
>it has a curse which no one understand
>it deforms you
>time is strange inside it
>mentions of a cycle

things you could do with these parts of this anime are truly amazing

if you could make this a intriguing history how would you do it user?

everytime i see this pic i think how the near bottom of the abyss looks like a throat, could the abyss be in truth be the mouth of a monster?

It definitely looks like eyes on the edges of the map.

>it would be if you picked the good parts and excluded the animu shit

What about the setting do you consider "animu shit?"

Read the manga

>hole in the earth where no light penetrate

I think it's much more interesting that the light DOES penetrate down through the depths. The monsters aren't creepers in The Abyss. They're apex predators who cavort around in broad daylight. They have no need to hide.

You're the prey who sneaks around and hides in the shadows.

i mispoken, i meant that light enters but never comes out, if you fly and try to look at the abyss you only see darkness.
i mean since its a animu-inspired setting chances are that some fags will try to adapt the cute parts as well like the ecchi moments and cuteness moments, abyss would make a perfect grimdark setting.

i am not saying the anime is cute but it has cute parts which pottentialy can destroy the grimdark atmosphere.

last time i read it the crazy mott raped the robot, did any chapter got translated since it?

OP image reminds me of the Cauldron setting that was detailed in Dragon magazine years ago....

>i mean since its a animu-inspired setting chances are that some fags will try to adapt the cute parts as well like the ecchi moments and cuteness moments, abyss would make a perfect grimdark setting.

Are you the kind of DM who tries to strongarm your players to match the tone you want for your setting?

so don't go beyond level 6, or stay down there if you did? how is this complicated for you

You are a child who doesn't understand how tone works. The grimdark parts of the anime hit all the harder precisely because it isn't grim and dark all the time.

The fact that the show can go from a relatively comfy exploration sequence to 'oh shit, this kid is dying and begging you to cut off her arm before the poison reaches her heart' from a single stroke of bad luck drives home just how savage and dangerous the place is. You let your guard down for even a moment and you are fucked.

Its not complicated. Its just nothing like the traditional dungeon delving experience in DnD.

I'm not sure how many times I have to say it before you understand? Its not rocket science.

>so don't go beyond level 6, or stay down there if you did? how is this complicated for you

Level 5 can still easily kill you and you have to climb 12000 meters while bleeding out your eyes, suffering from sensory deprivation, nausea and numbness.

Yeah, you solve puzzles and fight baddies like a typical DnD dungeon on the way down but how often do DnD dungeons force you to expend most of your resources after you decide to leave the dungeon while crippled and disoriented?

And how many DnD Dungeons have your characters just decided to not return from?

except is is? you go to a dungeon and come back with loot while facing monsters and other wildlife

Yeah and stars are just Hydrogen + Time.

That's an incredibly oversimplification.

>making Made in Abyss entirely grimdark
You're a fucking retard.

>And how many DnD Dungeons have your characters just decided to not return from?
I bet there is plenty.
tomb of horrors comes to mind, and a lot of osr like death frost doom.

"Decided"

>In DnD, the only risk is whether you are strong enough to fight your way through what you assume are level-appropriate encounters
It's more surprising that you are using 3.PF as your measure of metri.
You also need to stop it.

That works for a tv show where a single entity controls all interactions and can manipulate them for effect, , not a cooperative pnp game where you have very different people playing a very different cast.

well I thought it was meant on the meta sense.

if the abyss is a place you can't come back from. obviously PC character have the personality traits that would make them biased towards the no return choice.

a player would make a character that chose not to return just as he would make them for tomb of horrors and death frost Doom.

I've played a "roguelike" campaign where the party went into a labyrinth that they knew the only escape from is reaching the end (the way seals behind all those who enter), which nobody has ever been known to accomplish. This doesn't sound much different.
Maybe not "typical" D&D but hardly foreign to D&D. Sometimes adventurers will challenge the undefeatable.

I started reading the manga. There was a lot of cool stuff in the first chapter! Until the fucking paedo shit they threw in for whatever reason, at which point I gave up, because seriously?

I was prepared to suspend disbelief and accept small children adventuring into a vertical dungeon-crawl version of the zone, but when that stuff's in the first chapter, I'll skip it. There's plenty of other stuff on my to-read pile.

Watch the anime. They tone down most of that shit.

Oh to be so easily offended, I don't care for the loli shota stuff but goddamn at least I don't get triggered by it.

I've been working on a Torchbearer conversion, as of now it's more or less functional if you have the book opened also.
docs.google.com/document/d/1hQlfMcAbHLvzogxY_FCJm0l7bQMB7Prr-3nm-4isBE0/edit#heading=h.g89d6q85fnna
I need to refine it, but I'm not sure how. There are also still a few things I don't understand about Torchbearer, so it's tough.

No no, down SHOULD be a cakewalk.
Down is how you bait them into overextending.
Up is when you break out the Happy Pills.

>Level 5
The curse is potentially lethal from layer three down. Hell, layer two's curse and an ambush could fuck you right up.

i am talking about animu like things in the game, i mean o you want the same things like whar the robot do with the rabit happen in your table? i dont

If you want to call any setting where you enter into a hostile, strange other world for artifacts while dealing with monsters and a dangerous environments STALKER, you are correct.

For a board that prides itself on storytelling ability, Veeky Forums sure does suck at understanding basic tonal shifts

No you idiot, that's not the problem. Made in Abyss is meant to be nobledark at the core. Despite how twisted and dark it gets at times, it's ultimately hopeful. The exploration isn't meant to be just a harrowing horrible experience, but also a wondrous adventure full of incredible miracles and unimaginable mysteries.

The moment you make it just a tale about greedy mercs trying to get rich quick, you've missed the point entirely.

It's the classic "what's on the other side of that hill" plot adapted to a more threatening environment. It's about "what next" and "where next", in a setting where bad is as common as good.

It's also about perseverance and overcoming adversity. Every single god-awful thing has had a silver lining afterwards.

That depends on if you're one of the Bondrewd kids or not.

Okay gang, lets come up with potential PC ideas;
>Praying Hands member who fled to another layer after panicking and realising he was becoming a soulless monster and that he made a huge mistake
>Foreign black market delvers
>Moon Whistle in heavy debt and forced to stay on the 3rd Layer frequently to avoid his debt collectors.

What systems would be good for a game like this? GURPs would be fucking shit anyway. I think Mouseguard could work or maybe Nechronica.

Some user already did some mouseguard tweaks for it.
pastebin.com/JDkDMKTP

Torchbearer, see above Really looks to me like the ideal system because of the emphasis on actually delving (normally in a dungeon, here in the Abyss) and on the Conditions.

>Nauseated
>All those demerits
>Will spend a good amount of time in the first two layers nauseated
Hoo boy

Well, it only happens when you climb up, which is the end of your journey. And there is a chance to avoid it with a strong enough Body and some luck.
In Torchbearer, a Healer can also remove it during the Camp phase. The difficulty is 4 because in TB, it alludes to actual sickness, but I suppose I would make it 3 for layer 2 and 2 for layer 1. So it's really not that bad.

different guy, and I don't get triggered by it, but I've got a lot of cool shit I can spend my limited amount of free time reading/playing.
And if your going to throw shit I hate in there, like loli, then it's going to go down the list under the stuff that doesn't include that shit.

Like I stopped reading King because I've got plenty of books that don't have an extended overly explicit sex scene that King insists on putting in his books.

You should stop reading King because he's a hack, not because there are two pages per book of mildly graphic sex

What is Torchbearer?

Stephen King is a hack tho user. MiA has amazing characters, world creation, emotive scenes, excellent fights and creative ideas. It would be more fair to compare it to Lolita in regards to uncomfortable content that ultimiately works for the stories.

Also who the fuck wants to read Stephen King? baka

Still working on how to represent layer 5, huh? Looks pretty good overall though, kind of neat that you basically need to take into account that half of your trip is going to be spent with all these terrible status effects and shit, can't let yourself get too cocky or you're fucked. Very representative of the Abyss

It's a system designed to emulate old-school adventuring. It's based on the same "burning wheel" philosophy present in Mouse Guard, with the same way more or less of resolving encounters and an emphasis on Traits and stuff.
I think it's appropriate because it focuses heavily on the adventuring itself, which is usually glossed over in favor of moving from scene to scene in most other RPGs.

>Still working on how to represent layer 5, huh?
Yes, I'm far from finished. And thank you, I thought it necessary to make the ascension a huge trial in itself where it's easy to die if you let Conditiosn pile up.

He's a professional writer, which means he puts out a book a year. Most of those are just formulatic clap which fills out his contract. Once in a while he gets an actual good idea and puts extra work into it and makes something cool.
But those actually cool books inevitably involve of overly detailed sex scenes.

As for comparing to Lolita, that comparison I'm going to bet is way off, because the the discomfort of the underage sexual content is the point of the work, and removing it would cause the whole thing to come apart.
From everything I've read in this thread, MiA could have the loli removed and still work fine.

He just went to shit when he got his shit together desu
His coke and booze years have produced infinitely better books than what he writes today, now that he's more or less clean.

There's other systems out there then DnD. In no-little magic settings DnD is a poor fit.

It really wouldn't because the nudity is like the cooking.

In Orth, it emphasizes the Spartan Way nature of the Orphanage but they can't beat/whip/torture the kids because they need them to delve and the Abyss is lethal at the best of times, so instead they put them in a stress position and humiliate them to make them stop. This is also why Riko is made to sleep in a torture chamber.

In the Abyss, the nudity emphasises both the childish innocence of the characters, because they don't give a fuck about being naked around one another besides the common silly embarrassment and teasing. Like what you'd expect from kids. But it also shows how harsh the setting is and how they simply can't afford to be modest.

There was no need for Humbert Humber to jerk himself off using Dolores' feet but there's still an entire chapter pretty much dedicated to it. You don't always have to depict scenes but not doing it loses you power.

The same could be said of Kingdom Death as well and how the sheer *amount* of nudity and genitalia isn't needed...But it's important to the vision as a whole.

>Kingdom Death, MiA and Lolita
You have great taste user. But kids at the orphanage do get flogged, you know, there's a panel of it in the early chapters.

It's been a while. Sorry user. But that just further demonstrates why it makes sense for kids to be hung naked; it's cruel but you won't fuck them up as much as you would flogging them.

No. That's dumb. Like
says, you need moments of levity for the moments of horror to matter in the slightest. Think of Shadow of the Colossus. The moments when you are riding your horse around a massive sprawling landscape is as equally important as when you are fighting the only 16 enemies in the game. If you only fought the colossi than it'd become a boring slog with no impact. The reprieves from the battles increases their impact, rather than inoculating you to them. The same thing goes with literally any horror piece with any iota of good writing.

The cute parts make the dark parts matter. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll improve as a writer.

>Kingdom Death
way to highlight the point while still missing it.

The makers of kingdom death basically didn't realize when they went from making a pinup/fetish model series to making a dark magical horror setting with elements of body horror and gorish survivalism.

Some of the sold stuff still fits, but they they still put dicks on the end of the Sun Eaters tentacles, and the is completely unnessary and doesn't fit the new tone they'd shifted too.

In Lolita it's not because Humberts actions emphasize parts of the character, but that making the audience uncomfortable is the intent.
When the work intent is not to be transgressive against the audiance, then those elements can be cut away from, or alluded to rather than shown, when not strictly for the progression of the narrative or the development of the character.

>When the work intent is not to be transgressive against the audiance, then those elements can be cut away from, or alluded to rather than shown, when not strictly for the progression of the narrative or the development of the character.
That's exactly how it's done in Lolita. The motel sex scene is described in terms of a mural for example. Compare that to any sex/violence/sexviolence scene in B.E. Ellis' books, for example.
And come on, even then the scenes where Humbert get dirty are extremely meaningful in terms of character development, for both Dolores and him.

>but they they still put dicks on the end of the Sun Eaters tentacles
That's pure body horror/grotesque though. No one believes that's sexy.

and before someone talks about be hating sex, I think sex should be more normal in media, but that involves also knowing when it's unecessary or distracting.

Take Deadpool. I fucking love that it points out that people in a relationship like having sex. Really like having sex. And find each other hot.

But also notice that when we go back and find Deadpool's girlfriend in a strip club, it doesn't spend a ten minute sequence of the camera going over every inch of her near naked body. Because at that point at that point the sexualizing of her body would detract from the progression of the narrative and the development of the characters.

Basically, have a point.

it's not body horror. It's just 'hey look dicks everywhere'.
It's gratuitous.

It's body horror on the level of the human centipede. The lowest and most boring form.

If they'd been tongues, or lips, or something that had an ability to be offputing and insidious it would work. Instead it's just dicks.

Correct, they are lucky to live such privileged lives because Bondrewd is the best DAD ever.

I haven't played the system, but it looks pretty good to me, just whip up all the content, like relics creatures, and whatnot, and you'd be good to go. I think at the point you're at, any hiccups would have to be found by playtesting than anything else

So whatever part of the body they use to elicit revulsion is fine, but not a dick? Dicks are just too sexual and never off-putting or insidious?
Come on now, you're just using your own sensibilities as a rule of good taste.

>just whip up all the content, like relics creatures
You make it sound not like the Sisyphean endeavor it'll be, haha.
>any hiccups would have to be found by playtesting than anything else
Yeah, I do want to find a group but it's going to be tough. I guess now that the anime is pretty hype, I got my best chances.

What is actually at the bottom?

We just don't know

It was just the planet's butthole all along

The abyss is actually a prison for x that revolted against the gods which is why it is so punishing to ascend

The nudity scenes are meant to make you feel uncomfortable. Nudity always is. It highlights innocence and vulnerability, especially when it occurs in children.

Also, all of the design directs of Kingdom death were fully and completely intended. You clearly don't know what you are talking about if you think the distortion of the human body and the idealised male and female figures are not intended.
As this user has pointed out, yonic imagery has been used in horror for a long, long time. The alien is one of the prime examples of this, with how its different forms mesh and intermesh yonic and phallic imagery.

Deadpool is not about sex and it reduces their relationship to a 5 minute sex scene and dumb jokes about their childhood. It's very well done and suits the tone of the movie but if you're acting like that's higher artistry then things like the Oblivion Moth, the Phoenix or the Beehive Keeper, you're out of your tree.

Why are people so okay with children being graphically killed on screen and yet hate them being naked on screen. Neither are *necessary* because both could be handled via implication but I never hear people whining about the former and not the latter. It's insipid.

What you're basically saying is that scenes like the elevator don't lose their power if they are told merely through implication and references nad not shown directly.

I know that in addition to me, there have been more anons that showed interest the times you've mentioned your work on /a/, so I honestly don't think you'll have too much trouble. I can't see running this game for more than four people, and three would probably be ideal in my mind

>but I never hear people whining about the former and not the latter.
To be fair it's also a taboo, like in vidya (I'm looking at you, "Every Bethesda Game"). But yeah the latter is definitely much much more taboo.

Yeah, I suppose so, though I couldn't really tell if they were different persons and I'm not going to recruit on /a/ anyway.
I'll probably post on the Game Finder thread within the next few days.

>If they'd been tongues, or lips, or something
You mean like Lady Satan's skirt of tongues? Or the creepy goat thing made purely out of hands

Nigger, MiA has kids being literally fucking Unit 731'd and nobody gives a fuck. All I hear about is the nude kids bits.

>pedoshit molestation and piss simulator
>good inspiration for anything
I want /a/ to leave

It's a straightforward black Ryuutama campaign setting. Even the amount of objects in each combat scene are pretty much the same as RAW, so there's no need to pull the red dragon artifacts. There is also a very strong sense of the front and backlines, with utility characters like Riko definitely being in the back while Nanachi would be a backline support. And of course Reg is the frontline fighter.

The campaign probably fits the Chalice artifact best. For the amnesiacs, the GM should fill in bits and pieces as they descend, grabbing feedback from the player as the campaign goes on. As for the other characters, probably root all of the backstories in "this is why you belong in the abyss."

If you want to run it grittier, you can run the Mirror artifact instead.

Yeah, some of the stuff works really well.

The dicks don't. This isn't aliens imagry suggesting vaginas and penis, it's just dick tentacles. It's poorly done.

No, unless you want to use it to jerk off to loli piss and SUFFERING.

>genocideedgy racism and rape simulator
>good inspiration for anything

Anything is bad if you try to make it sound bad!

I would agree with you on some of the first run of Kingdom Death. Things like the Lion God, the Forge God and the Sunstalker aren't great.

But if you look at 1.5, you can see that their art conception has really improved and besides the now-being-redesigned griffin, is becoming much better.

Also anons, kinda curious. How can you make phallic symbols scary like we can yonic symbols?

not being blatent and boring. Also taking a bit to look at where they have already been present symbolically everywhere (see Obelisks, scepters, etc).

A spike that punches through the back of the head is phallic. See it slowly extend and then thrust, resulting in gruesome death, then in the future show the spike peaking out or slowly growing as foreboding.

Or use classic real images, the impaling pike, the stake which people are tied to and burnt.

Don't use dick tentacles.

Those are extremely simplistic and reductive. That's like saying "a door" is a yonic symbol. It is but only in the most basic way in that they're both openings.

A pole/spike/carrot are mildly phallic but they are not phallic imagery.

it's 90% in how you show it and what you do with it.
A big dick tentacle just hanging out there is relying on it being visually near identical to carry the symbolism. Which is bad.

How it's shot, how it moves, how it's treated. Hence my extended spike punch example. Just stabbing a guy through the head isn't using a phallic symbol well.

Again, you're giving me very general responses. I was asking anons if they had any particular ideas. Sure, Pyramid Head penetrating lying figures and mannequins with his Great Knife is Freudian as fuck but it's still not the same as the facehuger's opening be a LITERAL vagina.

The closest I can think of are the crest worms from F/SN but even those are tacky as fuck.

Welcome to the West, where a nipple slip is worse than murder.

A good one, as much as I hate to bring it up, is Soundwave in the Transformers movie practically raping that satellite with his hacking tentacle dongs.