Song of Swords: The Ballad Continues

Ballad is a cartoon version of reality where every country is somehow worse than it was historically in the 1940s. America fell off the satire tree and broke every branch on its way down by becoming Rahoo, where the capital has no streetlights because the government pours amphetamines into the water supply and subsidizes fireworks instead of building street lights.

Bless them

> now possible to magdump a not!1911 in a single phase at no penalty with just two talents.

Aw hell yeah.

.45 RFR for life.

I don't think it's even a not!1911, I'm pretty sure its literally just supposed to be a 1911.

I know.

Fair.

I'm surprised there isn't a weapon bond boon or something yet, so you can better wield your gunfu.

Oh shit nigga. I forgot Ballad was even a thing.

>Speaking one more or less mutually intelligable set of languages and sharing much in the way of culture and religion, these countries, often called “The Outer Kingdoms,” were most recently shattered by the Core Islands’ colonial efforts which, while profitable in the short term, ultimately failed, resulting in a massive civil war which grew only more terrible as the Hinamoto became involved, attempting to colonize part of the country for their own benefit.
Didn't your English teachers tell you run-on sentences were bad?

Jimmy learned English from a Serb, as is proper.

>Wealth
>The gold/silver/copper piece currency system has been replaced with a flat dollar amount, $1 being 1 sp. For conversion to SoS, just remember $20=1gp and $1=1sp. Copper pieces can be converted to $.09 (or 9¢), but this isn’t an equal conversion. Blame inflation! The $ represents a Rahoo Dollar, which is backed by silver and is the only stable currency in the Void. Chironite Riechsmarks are worth about $2 each, while the Albish Pound is worth about $2.2.
So the country that's balkanized and explicitly made up of several different countries who all go to war with each other regularly...
...is the only country in the Void with a stable currency

>New Ballad version is out, has a new intro
Nice.

>Libertarians after Rand Paul was attacked

I miss the one with the racist half-zell personally.

If I was to model the difference between the 1928 Thompson and the M1 as the Blish, would it just be a cost reduction or would I apply anything else?

Also, 100 round drums? I thought 50 was the upper limit.

Explain this, skeleton!

Well, the simple way would be to make the 1928 a touch more expensive (representing the M1A1's simplified manufacture), perhaps $350 over the standard Blish's $300, and to equip it with a Foregrip by default.

Also, yes, 100 round drums exist, they are just big, shitty, and rare, as most large capacity drums are.

youtube.com/watch?v=3d7rmZ09E5I

I am beholden to no mortal's views of economy. In all seriousness, that is Jimmy's area of expertise, I don't know his views on the fiscal situation of the various powers of the Void.

How many of you are going to use Ballad's default setting?

I'm excited for historical campaigns but some espionage/mercenary stuff working for the great powers of the Void and aping Traveller sounds fun to.

Almost exclusively in my case. While I love history, there's not many situations in IRL world I think would give me as much creative freedom to run with.

She was too explicitly the best girl.

Nonsense, if there is one thing Jimmy loves doing, it's presenting his waifus as flagship characters.

The Rahoos' shtick is that they hold trade to be sacrosanct to the point of selling weapons to their enemies while at war with them. They see no contradiction there.

So it'd make sense that people that dedicated to finance would keep a stable currency backed by some precious metal.

Anyone have some favorite guns in Ballad? I'm making a character and I'm not sure what to pick up.

All weapons are equally inferior to the Volksverteidiger.

>not the superior Rahoo Assault Sturmgewehr Rifle

>hey guys we took your assault rifle and chambered it in a pistol cartridge lol

Nonsense! If .357 is 9x33mm, and 8mm Kurz is 7.92x33mm, that means .357 has a whole 1.08 millimeters over 8mm Kurz! That means it's more powerful, right?

Right?

...

>MTN 8
It may as well be a melee weapon for all the people you'll shoot with it

>So long as a Zell is using a missile weapon with a rotating part (Revolvers, most commonly) they always add their Perception to their dice for missile attacks. This is cumulative with the effects of Aim and other modifiers.
This would include all bolt-action rifles too, right? Even straight pull ones have some kind of rotation to load new cartridges.

Get a revolving rifle.

Axeman and Redrum talents are boring. Both are just +1 damage said in a fancy way. But the first talent of the tree is already +2 damage. Why not something cool like stabbing a guy with a bayonet and being able to immediately shoot him, or make it so anyone shooting into the melee is much more likely to hit him instead of you?

I'm assuming they mean 360º rotation, but we'll have to wait for word from Jimmy.

It would need to do a complete revolution. A planned inclusion was a sick Karl May reference—a rifle with a spherical magazine.

Also, rifles with a bolt that used some mechanism to turn a complete circle instead of working back then forward (hard to describe by easily visualised) would work.

I imagine there are companies that design rifles specifically for Zells knowing this. There’s probably an entire industry built up around designing automatics to have rotating wheels for no other reason than to sell them to the squeakers.

Is this a deagle? Why would you shit this hard on the Desert Eagle, it's a meme gun but the weight actually makes it pretty easy to control.

>sick Karl May reference
I'm actually surprised there aren't more of these already. Hitler was a huge fan of Karl May, and officially declared Native Americans to be an Aryan race. He was probably on meth at the time.

Did this happen in Balladverse?

Despite what people claim about MTN8, it's not shitting on the gun. MTN8 is fine, just a little harder to use. MTN9 is when shit gets bad.

>Hitler... officially declared Native Americans to be an Aryan race.

Christ, I used to chalk up the "Hitler was a crackhead!" thing to war propaganda, but he must of been smoking something.

Sort of. Richtofen doesn't even really know what the "Old Nations" are, he's never even been to Rahoo. Sternfleischer however worked in Rahoo extensively, and has a very romanticized view of the Rahoos and of the "Vads," (Vadians is essentially the Balladverse term for Indians) and wanted to fund their nationalist movements as a way to keep the Rahoos preoccupied.

This plan was sort of successful, but also sort of pointless. Angela Boden correctly pointed out that there was zero chance of the Rahoos meaningfully impacting the war because they were too busy murdering each other in the millions over patent disputes and border claims. Richtofen vetoed Richtofen's plan of sending panzer divisions to support Vad nationalist revolutions in the chain, but Sternfleischer still donated about ten million reichmarks of his own money in arms, ammunition and supplies to said movements, in the hopes that someday his compatriots would come around and support them.

He wasn't smoking it, he took it in pill form. He was prescribed friggin' meth by 1936. Take a look at him during the Olympics sometime, he's literally rocking back and forth like a fucking tweaker because he's strung out on so much dope that he can't even sit still.
There's a pretty amazing story about a Finnish soldier who panicked while fleeing some Soviets and ate an entire platoon's supply of German military speed because his mittens made it too hard to eat one. He was the first Finn to overdose on meth. They found him a week later, he had lost like 60 pounds and had survived by eating pine nuts and catching birds with his hands and eating them raw.

I thought the Ballad injuns were Kimarkians. Is that just a specific tribe?

That’s a specific tribe, Vadians refers to the mythical continent of Vadinia (Wadina) which was what everyone thought the adagio Chain was initially.

Rahoo Chain. Fucking autocorrect.

What was so mythical about Vadinia?

>MTN8 is fine
No it really isn't. You need 12 dice to have a 50/50 chance of hitting a stationary guy within your weapon range. That's 12 dice to hit a stationary man within 10 meters, in good lighting, with no other penalties. But wait, if you get just 4 RS you'll only do a level 1 wound. That's not really a hit. So you need 5 RS, which is roughly another three dice. So you need 15 dice to have a 50/50 chance of hitting a stationary guy within your weapon range, with no other penalties. How are you going to get 15 dice? You're either going to have to be Delta Force or you'll have to have to stay still and spend a long time Aiming. If you're fast you can get +6 dice in one Phase, which is great, but probably not enough to reach 50/50 odds. And while you're spending time aiming, if that guy gets into cover, you're done for. You'll need 22 dice to reach that 50/50 mark.
For a rule of thumb, every added RS needs 3-4 more dice from a TN 8 weapon to keep the same hit chances as not adding that RS. In a game with static fixed penalties where it's difficult to accumulate dice, a TN 8 semiauto pistol is awful.

I was under the impression that 4 RS is to hit an active combatant who is aware you're trying to shoot them, not just a stationary man, especially since in the same conditions you describe, the RS is 0 if the guy simply has his back to you.

Well one must understand: The Rahoo islands are not distant laterally. It isn't that you have to fly a million miles onto the horizon to get to them.

The problem is that the Rahoo chain is higher altitude than the rest. So for thousands of years, everyone could SEE the Rahoo islands, but nobody knew what they were. Every so often something would fall off of one and by chance land on one of the Core Islands. They found arrowheads, gold, animals from time to time, pieces of culture. Things they had never seen before.

Wadania, or Vadania (both are correct) was considered at one time to be a sort of Shangri-La, a country of infinite treasure and culture, inhabited by gods.

The first explorers brought disease with them when they rose up to the islands in balloons. The natives were largely exterminated by these diseases. When, hundreds of years later, actual colonists in ships arrived, they did not find the mythical continent they had imagined--they found Rahoo. A country whose coasts were now largely populated by blue-eyed natives, the descendents of explorers who had adopted hunter-gatherer lifestyles, the repeated waves of explorers gradually blending into the local native tribes. The great cities had been forgotten as disease turned them into graveyards, and consumed by the jungles and prairies and snow.

Many believe that the "real" Vadania still exists, it's just hidden somewhere, while others believe that Rahoo is Vadania, and its ancient cities still wait to be discovered somewhere in the endless island chain.

Yes, an active combatant who is aware you're trying to shoot them, but "The RS to hit a stationary man-sized target not in cover is 4." So you're both a stationary man and an active combatant.

>Richtofen vetoed Richtofen's plan
He was having a self-doubt attack.

Sternfleischer, you know what I mean. Lotta friggin German names here man. All this sch and flei and chtof, where I'm from the closest thing you find to a dipthong is the sound someone makes when they spit out tobacco juice.

How the hell do you apply Terrain modifiers to Athletics checks? Terrain modifiers affect the TN, but skill TNs are always 7. Just re-purpose them as RS mods?

Do you take extra Fatigue points from fucking up on Athletics checks (i.e., jumping in combat), beyond the one for taking an action? Is the Fatigue skill penalty meant to be a dice pool penalty like all the others, or is it an RS modifier?

Sleeping in your armour for multiple days like an escaped D&D character, does that keep doubling its effective Weight (1x, 2x, 4x, etc.)?

>t. your humble autarch, Richtofen a Muirebe

Armor weight is not supposed to keep doubling eternally. It's supposed to double once and stay there.

So wait, you buy talents for 3 arc? You don't get them automatically anymore?

You get them automatically, but you also have the option to just straight purchase them

>Once you have at least one proficiency at level 4 or higher, you may opt to buy talents individually. As long as you meet the requirements for said talent, you may purchase it for 3 Arc. This represents focusing on a single aspect of your shooting style, rather than getting better overall.
I don't see anything here that says you get talents automatically. It looks like you can buy one talent for every 4 proficiency levels.

...

I read that as you earn the ability to purchase your first talent.

I mean, nothing in the original text changed, it's just the buying clause was added, so I'm going to assume it works the same way it did, a free talent per 4 prof levels; the only difference is now you can just buy them if you so choose.

It's shit. The Hector Arms Mustang .357 blows it out the water. Lower TN, option to reduce TN further if your enemies aren't expected to be armored, and Reliable to boot. However I admit the Suncrusher .357 remains the coolest name for any gun in the book.

What is it, not!1945? Bit early for the Deagle brand deagle to have hit the market

Not only that, but the Space Nazis used black magic to exterminate the Space Jews in like 1936. So there obviously isn't a Space Israel, which would mean there isn't a Space Magnum Research.

This is sort of like of Germany had never existed but Tiger IIs were still driving around.

Wait wait, they have the power to destroy entire races, but they used it on the fucking Hebrews instead of, I don't know, the Russians? Or the British? Or the Americans?

That's a lot of ammunition to blow on some people you were just going to murder anyway.

WWII Germans weren't exactly known for their sagacious strategic planning.

They won the second war really quickly and really decisively. How is this possible? Easy: there were no void-Hebrews.

Why do you lose your talents when defaulting? You know those talents that let you make better use of cover, or run with a higher defense RS than normal, but you forget how to do it when you drop your SMG and pick up a pistol?

That's actually a plausible answer. You'd have wiped out a significant portion of the USSR's leadership, and many prominent inventors, scientists, bankers and writers in the US and the UK. You'd have killed friggin Einstein. Hollywood would cease to exist overnight. And it didn't just kill them, it erased the memory of them, which presumably includes everything they wrote or were working on at the time.

If 5% of the population simply vanished and erased all memory of their existence, forget just the material damage, it would take fucking DECADES just to sort out all the bank accounts and property disputes that would arise.

Oh God, you'd have killed Mel Brookes. THEY KILLED MEL BROOKES

This is truly worse than Wolfenstein.

>The Jews have been wiped out in both of Jimmy's settings

What does it mean?

Opaque industries is a strange bunch of people. Jimmy has Bones playtrough of DS2 up in his channel, and the fucker manages to skip everything, almost kills the girl who gives level ups, and the first fucking enemy he fights is the fucking first boss, only because Bones isn't allowed to skip that too.

It's probably a Christian thing. The Jews got zapped so the messiah can't come, so the world is doomed.

>No trace of Jews in either setting
>2.0 for both Ballad and SoS roll around
>Reveal shows that the Orredin and Chironites just made their jews switch places

I don't know which setting's reaction would be funnier. You'd just have space hitler throw his hands up and retire. "Whelp, we tried it guys, time to pack it up. See you at Oktoberfest."

One of them brings horrific arcane magic of incredible power into the Void, and the other means that a bunch of Hollywood actors with Galils are squatting somewhere in Berkukha. Both are extremely interesting results.

>Reveal shows that the Orredin and Chironites just made their jews switch places
Jews are eternal

"Push the button again, Petrokolos".

Holy fuck another SoS thread, I thought you guys had died.

The legend never dies!

Please respond

So SoS covers up til maybe 1600 or so, right? And BoLW covers 1900+

So what covers 1601-1899? When do we get Symphony of Shakos?

What a boring time period. No, we should jump to 3200 for Mixtape of Mechas.

SoS can be reasonably stretched all the way up to 1900, using Ballad to patch the various gun shaped holes in the system. Basically, just use SoS if you expect an emphasis on melee, and Ballad if you expect an emphasis on guns.

>Symphony of Shakos
That reminds me. I'm calling dibs on 'Serenade' for whenever my STALKER shit is done.

Allegedly, someone once said that SoS stretches until the middle of the American Civil War. And, in that twilight connecting period as the lever action arrives, the systems merge until Ballad takes over with the Gatling.

Wasn't there a napoleonic fecht last year?

Napoleonics are just people with muskets and sabers. It doesn't require special detail to handle that just like earlier period weapons.

I'm actually more interested in SoS/BotLW brand lore madness than rules.

I am also much more interested in the lore. I'm worried the SoS finish product won't contain nearly as much lore info as it should.

Jimmy mentioned that this is a problem largely because they core book is on massive page overload as it is. I fear that the core book will probably be pretty sparse in that regard.

Wasn't one of the stretch goals a dedicated lore book?

Kind of. Tales from the Tattered Realms "will provide an introduction to campaigning in the Tattered Realms" and contains "a number of introductory stories and plot hooks". Dunno what the difference between an introductory story and the adventure module will be.

I really hope they have a PoD option for the stretch goal books.