Bionicle RPG Thread

Previous thread: Useful links:
Lost Chronicles RPG
>dropbox.com/s/61f6a68645pwx8o/Bionicle RPG Lost Chronicles.pdf?dl=0
Comics/animations
>biomediaproject.com/bmp/
Deepest lore
>biosector01.com/wiki/Saga_Guides

Other urls found in this thread:

brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=166956
cross-wired-freak.tumblr.com/post/68472919868/bionicle-chronicles-bionicle-adventures-bionicle
youtube.com/watch?v=3CIJ_MjIOHM
youtube.com/watch?v=Dov-FYiuhhU
youtube.com/watch?v=9SgQAUBglJE
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I have a great feeling about this.

Man, I played the fuck out of that game. I fell off after that , but I heard the story goes batshit insane after that

>This Nostalgia Train has no brakes
WHOOOT WHOOOT MOTHERFUCKERS

it actually does, not all of it is good tho.

Nuparu is my favorite Matoran.

I bought the Boxor and the creature builder sets just so I could have Onua's mask in orange

motherfucking "I'm going to use these corpses and turn them into a mecha" nuparu.

I melted Nuparu's mask on a lamp lightbulb.

...

Yes

I was playing with him in the sink and wanted to dry him quickly.

>legos
>near the sink

>HERE COME THE RAHI!

Damn that image looks good

I melted the tip of Tahu's sword when I played in front of the fireplace. The glowing coal and ash made for such a cool backdrop for him.
Got a replacement later.

>Tahu melted

Who has source on this?

brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=166956

toa-ju works, you can find pretty much all his stuff here: brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=166956
He's inactive since 2012, and most of his stuff on his old blog is 404.

I'm so glad others have thought about this. I wanted to run a pre-schism dark hunters campaign. But none of the guys I do tabletop with have done anything with bionicle so I think it would be just a nostalgia jerk off for me.

you can still use the bonkle lore and hide it beneath a standard fantasy/sci-fi setting, just don't tell them they are playing bonkles.

Just make sure it involves Piraka.

you mean adding orcs that are not treated as just generic monsters and the PCs have to get really ingenious to outsmart them entirely?

toa-ju is a chick actually. believe it or not

I would play the shit out of that.

Yes.

Afterman guy here. Someone posted that they thought some of the character designs were too sexualized. How so specifically?
Our artist is kind of a robophile so that may be a factor, though I told him not to do anything too crazy.

proofs? I would definitely believe it with any real evidence, I mean most hentai artists are females too.

>Afterman
I want to play this badly.

Bionicles, fuck ya

>he's actually saying "Oh bother"

Their breasts and asses were not big enough, I find that flatness is disgustingly sexualized.

I used to play with my Mahri in the pool.

>always had bionicle toys when growing up
>used to play that story flash game in the computer lab at school, but gave it no real mind.
>never got into the lore because I was too young to enjoy reading, so I just made up my own stories

>reading the lore now
>all this shit.

Holyfuck, it's like finding out that furby you left in the closet to die a slow death as its battery died was actually a veteran of an angelic war in heaven.

I had no clue they put so much time and thought into world building just for a toyline.

It's amazing innit? Imagine what kind of pop cultural following the franchise could have gathered if all this lore and story was actually published in more accessible outlets, rather than being spread out over obscure web games, shitty freebie comics, barely marketed children's novels and some autistic, insufferable fan forum.

Pohatu is best boy
the series was still amazingly popular, and did a pretty good job telling the story in it's first half, they just fucked it up later on

Which Bionicle event will work as a good base for a skirmish wargame?

Bohrok invasion.
Boxors, Toa and Exo-Toa vs the Bohrok hordes

It's not hard to read

Seconding Bohrok invasion.

Matoran as light infantry, Toa as heavy hitters, Boxors as artillery.

Bohrok Va as scouts, Bohrok as infantry, Bohrok-Kal as heavy infantry (if you don't care about canon settings too much).

Add in all the mask, krahna, and elemental powers and baby you've got a game.

Didnt they kinda give the gladiator line a minigame or something like that? Where you take turns shooting the opponents gladiator and his box? You move where the ball lands, if you hit the can, your opponent loses 1 lifepoint, if you hit his bot, they lose two lifepoints.
You could use the weapons on the figure to try and repose your guy every turn so you could shoot and try to deflect your opponents shooter with your weapons.
>tfw had gotten skrall
>tfw all the other kids said I was OP because I had a shield to block their shooters
>tfw things got even more crazy when we started inventing custom rules and building our own gladiators and shit

I REMEMBER THAT BOARD GAME

I still have it.

I'm thinking about an easy ruleset like the AoS one. I have plenty of spare bases so I can just print stickers and have some fun with making up new rules and stats

2001 bonkle actually had a simple game attached to it too
each set had some kind of attack function that was meant for knocking off the enemy's mask

the rahi sets even came in pairs for maximum play value

actually, according to the rules no matter where the glatorian is hit it counts as -2hp, so skrall is pretty shit.
>tmw they expanded the rules to implement the vehicles, agori and glatorian team fights.

The fuck is Pohatu doing in Ko-Koro?

Really? We always counted weapons as being able to deflect shots.
We also introduced the rule that you can only repose once, before you shoot. That way, Skrall was "kinda" nerfed since you could only use his shield to block since his sword was usually to unflexible to aim and block at the same time.

well that's some good homebrewing, do you realize you basically invented a complex joust system with a skill-based rng for hits?

Visiting his boyfriend

>well that's some good homebrewing, do you realize you basically invented a complex joust system with a skill-based rng for hits?
Thx mate :D I just love all the good vibes and nostalgia feels I've been getting from the bionicle threads.
We invented the whole "weapons deflect attacks" rule because
A. it stopped the game from becoming a "I go first I shoot first I win"
B. It's just cool to have them deflect bullets

I cant remember correctly, but I think we even had some kind of rule for melee combat when the bonkles got close enough to eachother. I think it was something like "you're allowed to move one leg and one arm per turn, if you get (x) hits on your opponents bonkle he dies/loses HP. We even had a rule for "weapon locking" so you could tie up your opponents weapon for a turn by hitting it with your own or something.

We also made some system for team games, multiplayer, and castle modes and shit. Also, when we started using custom glatorians, we started using rules like "only 2 weapons max" "no more than 1 shooter" (we did go a little crazy sometimes, like once we built a huge monster and gave it 3 shooters and 15 hp, and went three glatorans VS. one giant monster.
but honestly, the most fun we had with our bonkles was just forgetting all the rules and going all-out robo-smashfight

I showed up at a toys or us with a friend of mine to play a bionicle trivia game to win this. Only one other girl showed up and none of the staff knew it was happening. They begrudgingly set up a table and what follows is some deep ass bionicle lore questions we me and my friend are stumpted on. The Girl proceeds to ace it and fucking win everything.

They ended up just giving us the game since no one else showed up though.

>deep ass bionicle lore questions
could be pretty glorious
>Which matoran was actually a Great Being in disguise?
>Which Toa created a totalitarian dictatorship in an alternate universe?
>Which Matoran secretely worked for Makuta Teridax both on Metru and Mata Nui?

To be fair, those boxers were basically a remake of the older Technic 8257 Cyber Strikers.

I knew all of those off the top of my head, step up your lore game.

well the step up is half-finished stories and shitty stuff, we better stay on this one, or just dive into some really meaningless details like some trivia.

>ywn learn the deep lore of Papu and Rangi

>what were the only non-matoran words in the mnog backgrounds?
>how was the pocket dimension city takanuva encounters called?
>what was the prototype name of takua?
a bit higher level but you can do this, right?

those are just maori gods.

You know, I envied people like you as a child.

Don't

Where did you people find these friends that where ok with fucking rules in your games?
When yugioh was a rage at my school people just played all their biggest cards and the rich kid always won.
And with fucking bionicle they just smashed them against eachother >_

>And with fucking bionicle they just smashed them against eachother >_

Any other good source of the lore and stuff?

cross-wired-freak.tumblr.com/post/68472919868/bionicle-chronicles-bionicle-adventures-bionicle

The chapter books. Sadly there's no good scans/photos of the guidebooks yet.

The books were phenomenal for the 10-year-old me.

I still can't believed they teased the giant robot twist from 2001 onwards

Same here
It's the source of my only D8 and 12

>not marrying her first chance you got
I'm Bionissapointed

So what happened to the Krana Kal?

Kohrok was confirmed alive and Lehvak was confirmed a brave and heroic astronaut, but we never got anything concrete on the others.
I'm willing to assume that Nuhvok and probably Pahrak are just fucking dead, but Gahlok had a chance to eject and Tahnok could just leave when it ran out of power.

dose niggas ded

Bionicle/lego was very popular in my neighborhood when I was a kid.
We also used to build these huge castles in the sand of our playground to make epic castles and arenas and shit for our dudes to fight over.
The rules thing was more that we were inspired by the minigame they put in the box, and cause it was fun to have an actual solid ruleset for fighting with our bonkles. We'd split up into tribes of similiar colors and then fight for the desert castles of our playground.

>Bionissapointed

Matoran civil war
We know pretty much nothing about it other than that it happened and which metru were on which side.

Nuhvok-Kal's Krana survived in the Flash animation when the rest of him turned into a black hole. Though the canonicity of the animations can be questioned.

I always adored the style of the old flash animations.

Yeah they did a lot with what little they had. Balanced out the minimalist animation with style, which was best achieved in the Vahki animations.

Fucking shame Lego stopped working with the team that made these, Templar Studios. They made the Mata Nui Online Game great in the first place and contributed a lot to the franchise's popularity and appeal, and they defined its atmosphere in the classic years. No other company that came afterward really "got" the universe as much as they did, and I think that's one of the main reasons why the franchise felt so disjointed. At least they kept Advance and Ghost, who did the promos and 3D stuff.

>that pic

THOUGHTS
CAN BE
DANGEROUS

What if we make a 'legalily distinct' bionicle rip off setting thats different enough for players to not notice they are in a bionicle game, but has the same 'world within world' level of crazy spoilers.

I'm down, but I'd also resent the blatant plagiarism.

it all starts on a island (catch is its actually a crashed Generation ship that is covered in dirt and plant life now.)

I think I got to where they announced that Mata Nui was dying before Lego stopped sending me comics. What happened after that?

youtube.com/watch?v=3CIJ_MjIOHM

youtube.com/watch?v=Dov-FYiuhhU

youtube.com/watch?v=9SgQAUBglJE

These three should be added to the OP.

lots of adventures with a living genocide device, which decided to get some western gladiator adventures on a desert planet after that.

hunt for the Mask of McGuffin
Mata Nui fucking dies
Matoro becomes Jesus Christ
Makuta becomes pantheistic God

all the bullshit after that should just be ignored, Makuta won, that's it

Takes me a minute, but I can still read it.

I've never really cared much for the world within a world thing. Bionicle was always most enjoyable when it was mythological, mysterious, and magical. I think that from 2005 or 2006 onwards, it started to lose that feel.

It figures, since that was when they shifted gears and made Bionicle more of an action oriented soft sci-fi, dropping the early fantastical mysticism. Bob Thompson left and Greg Farshtey was made the new head of the story team, and he was more into generic edgy capeshit stories.

But technically the mythological aspect in the beginning was always meant to be just a guise for the giant robot twist. According to Greg, the universe bible maintained that there never was magic in the story, just fantastic technology.

I don't deny that it may have been intended from the start, but it was certainly better before to came to light in the public eye.

I agree, I liked the early tone better myself, even though the storytelling was often weak. What I would have liked is if they had kept most of that mythical tone even after the more technological sci-fi stuff started pouring in. Instead of the sharp tonal divide we see around 2005-06.
However, this is the stuff we have to put up with when we're dealing with an always changing toyline that constantly has to adapt to marketing trends and the whims of all the different writers who laid hands on it.

I always thought Nidhiki is a chick

I thought so too when I first saw the set in a catalog.
Being a Bonklefag now, it's strange to think back to times when I knew so little about the lore and had to piece together the story through scraps of (oftentimes false) information and my own imagination.

My only lore back there were 3 movies, I had no idea about half of the characters

I was fucking mindblown when I discovered some wiki with all the stuff that I never knew about

I only had the promo CDs that came with the Toa and some cereals, and sometimes my dad would let me go on the net at his workplace to look up the Flash animations. I didn't know what Matoran actually were till the first movie, and had no idea about Takua, Jaller and basically anyone outside the mainline sets, Makuta and Mata Nui.
It took me multiple years of browsing the net to get a solid grasp on the lore, and some parts of the story I'm still unsure on. I used to think the Toa got sent back from where they came from at the end of MNOG (kinda like the ending of G2) and had to be called forth again to fight the Bohrok. It also took me a long time to understand the Metru Nui arc was a flashback.
In retrospect, this makes me realize the story could have been told a lot more clearly and it's no wonder kids who came in later were completely lost.

>the story could have been told a lot more clearly
It was at least a hell of a lot clearer in the novels. Getting my hands on a few of the books about the third movie's story arc blew my mind and answered a fuckton of questions. "Why was the sea silver? Where is Metru Nui in relation to Mata Nui? What the fuck were those big insect vehicle things? Why the hell did they go back to the city they just left?" I knew, and I wished they made an actual TV series instead of a bunch of movies that ran on knowing the setting and story beforehand to get what the hell was happening.

The movies are canonically very loose, glossing over entire arcs.

they are, but they are still very memorable and at least give you a starting point to dive deeper into the lore

Yeah a tv show would have definitely reached a wider audience. It's interesting how many normies still remember the first movie cause it was promoted all over the place, but the other ones fell by the wayside. A cartoon would have had more visibility and touched on more stuff, like pointed out. If made by a competent team, it could have been big. Not Pokemon or Digimon-tier big, but it could have held its own against stuff like those crappy Transformers animes that were on tv at the time.
Only a few books were sold in my area, so I spent hours combing through BZPower's book review threads every time a novel came out, just to sip up some storyline info. I got most of the novels later and now you can read them online, but the intricacies of the story were hard to delve into back then.