Nacarbac

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It was part of the series of prototypes for 4E. As they were near the end of the 3.5 run they started loosening up and experimenting, though of course someone (Mearls? I forget) got into power and scrapped the entire 4E project for their own pet idea.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It's an old one, but Roadside Picnic and its loose movie adaptation STALKER are both very good. Not quite a "true" post-apoc as it'd be today, in that The Zone is a small place in a "normal" world that the protagonists choose to enter, but they certainly confront the ending of "what came before" through an Event of sudden and total alienation.

The Earth Abides is also good, a very early story about the aftermath of a superplague. Life goes on, and humans remain human.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Yeah, Station Eleven is good. Just the backdrop of "traveling storyteller caravan that has a regular circuit of villages who support them" being a thing that can exist is such a dramatically optimistic (realistic, even) view of humanity compared to the norm.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

And "parts" also includes whatever salvage piles they have, to see if they can rig up a compete thingumabob.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It just became a way of admitting to their being all talk, but that being good actually. Not even incremental material change, just incremental change in the "discourse", which will (if you're a good voter) lead to it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Storywise, Keanu Reeves fucked it up. Playing it again after getting bored, for the Phantom Liberty expansion, I liked his character a lot more - while it barely ever tries to do more than a surface-level "I hate corpos because they're mean and not cool, which is why I'm mean and cool", it's not like he's actually wrong.

But having him there surely took away vast amounts of care from everything else - the really easy example being how Jackie, the starting Best Bud, is totally sidelined by wanting him out of the way for More Keanu.

spoilerwell, flatlined
But what they do with More Keanu is mostly just More Bitter Quips with V slowly going from "you're literally the biggest loser in history, you fucking nuked Arasaka and it did nothing" to "hmm, interesting" - while Jackie's dream was a nihilistic heroic fantasy, it's one that actually could change into something pretty cool over the game, and unlike V he has an actual personality and sense of the world, which is vital to cyberpunk. Even JC Denton had something of a soul, and his flatness and distance were deliberate things done to him by his childhood and training - he could carry a conversation and be the one saying the most interesting part of it.

Phantom Liberty is a big step up in writing and delivery, and it even manages to give V some vague ideology... alas not particularly good ones.

spoilerA: I'm a cool mercenary but I will DIE for the President of the New United States. Being CIA-ish is cool, sometimes you gotta make hard choices and stuff.

B: I'm too cool to be trusting, but like, I'll kill a lotta people for you Madam President. Being CIA-ish is cool, but none of you seem happy.

Optional: Songbird, I have known you for about five minutes of conversation and I wuv you, your very obvious lies are a Big Surprise somehow.

The ending was kinda neat, albeit totally stupid. Killer end credits song. Would have been a great movie (since it's basically Escape from Night City), and they used Idris Elba with much more restraint. Needed a Snake Plisken cameo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

One of the Comedy Bang Bang regulars does a good Werner Herzog.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The nitty-gritty of Shadowrun's version is actually pretty good - it's not actually the soul that is harmed by augmentation, it's "the ability of the soul to recognise its material-plane anchor". Thus most purely restorative things like cloned limbs or corrective surgery, and such don't have an Essence cost (or it's minimal), as there's no sudden disjoint - the astral form was always that way, or organically changes at a rate it can follow.

Essence loss has no real effect on characters IIRC (some effects on getting magic to work on you, maybe a bit of social stuff but with the same "probably the social phenomena of being a walking killing machine, and forgetting to turn off your Wired Reflexes in public" rather than soul damage), until the point that your astral form no longer recognises your body and falls off. This isn't presented morally, it's just a metaphysical phenomenon that can be understood in-setting and therefore addressed.

Advanced tech and magic was slowly beginning to understand how to create augmentations that respected this - geneware, symbiotes, nanotech, to begin with - and had even begun to work on a way to restore that connection (via using the Metahuman Vampiric Virus, which is capable of Essence restoration somehow).

The only real EEEEVIL cyberpsychosis was from the Cyberzombies, a crude and classically corporate black project on "we wanna make supersoldiers but they die if we stuff too many guns in their skull" where they "solve" the problem by getting Blood Mages to staple their dissolving astral form back into their should-be-corpse and add Forced Memory Stimulators to try and constantly trick them into thinking they're alive in between killing sprees. It's pretty fucked.

But I stopped caring about keeping up with Shadowrun with 4E (because of the embezzlement from writers, and subsequent scab takeover of the setting), so who knows how they present it nowadays...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I have vague memories as a teenager reading The Night's Dawn books under the desk at school, getting really embarrassed by the multi-page hardcore sex scenes and the protagonist being, uh, a pretty bad person.

There's just something about Doorstop Sci-fi books that seem to lead their writers into trying their hand at fancy space smut.

It contrasted to Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince series, which I read around the same time, where (IIRC) it's either wholesome romance or very obviously intended as something deeply unhealthy... although there was a lot of that!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

If there's anything Star Wars loves it's an excuse to rerelease something - they can do the New Digitally Remastered Rogue One, with frame-by-frame AI-aging effects added on.

...it won't look great though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

The perfect TTRPG worldmap.

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