On Perceptions (Fate/Heresy Character Review)

 With Legend of Korra and Fate/Zero wrapping up this past weekend, I was left in a rather contemplative mood, and felt like doing something constructive.  And this is LIKE being constructive, right?

Anyway, because I know you AALLLLL wanted to make these for your Fate/Heresy characters, and were just being hobbled by me being slow with my "What the DM Saw" images, right?



Lancer:

 Berserker:

Isaac:

Ishmael:

Caster:















Revisionism Bonus: Guest Boss The Fiery Night Drake (HTMC)

Incomplete:

My Completed Version (for lulz):

Anyway, the epilogue is on its way whenever I happen to finish polishing it and integrating Kory's section.  So, you know.  At a point in time.

-Stormshrug

On What Stands Out (2011)

Or, A Year of Media, Regurgitated.

So, what the f*ck did I even consume in 2011?  For fun, that is.  I'm not including class work from the Spring or work work from the Fall.  Except Pluto, because I read volume 1 and then found the rest on my own for curiosity's sake, and it was great.  Also not counting anything that I re-read or re-watched, because that's too much trouble to track.  No more questions!

Also, instead of reviewing, I am doing haiku.  Do not expect me to properly employ the kireji, because lolEnglish. Nature allusions will be strictly hit or miss.


Television:


Completed 2010 Carry-Overs:

Broken Blade

Giant robots fight,
Fate is cruel and random
Naked Sigyn time.


I've written a bit about Broken Blade here before, and I will probably do so again, because it's a really interesting series and it is SOO CLOOOSE to being my perfect show.  So much so that I actually preordered the DVDs when I saw they were coming out.  It really has it all, for me:  Giant robots, check. Medieval setting, check.  Strong character dynamics, check.  Pacing... not so much, especially towards the end.

On a tangent, one fascinating theory I've heard: "Delphine" is in fact a double-localization of "Tyrfing." Does this make the series' complex mythological allusions more or less muddled?  I'm not sure, but I'm still enjoying the ongoing manga, even if it's SLOOOOOW.

Completed New Stuff:

Wakfu (Season 1)

Come for the heroes,
They were in your last campaign,
Stay for the villains.

Wakfu was a real surprise for me, flying out of left field in the middle of a busy finals week and hitting my unsuspecting productivity square in the head. I had the whole series spoiled for me before watching it, but it still managed to surprise me on numerous occasions.  Its slick animation style (barring a few episodes in the mid single-digits) and self-awareness drew me in, but it was the dramatic arc (and amazing battles) of the first season's secondary characters that really convinced me.

Blood-C

Noodle people fight
The most Freudian vampires
Surprise! The Truman Show!

Blood-C was bad, and it made me feel bad.  Odd and creepy confluence of sex and violence aside (well, MOSTLY aside), it had the single worst "twist" in the history of sh*tty twEEEEEEEEEEEEsts and it took itself seriously the whole time.  Unless it's all just CLAMP trolling us...

Legend of the Millennium Dragon

Time travel hijinks,
I don't remember much but
It looked very nice.


Ongoing into 2012:

Guilty Crown (aka Guilty Geass)

Starts as Code Geass,
But bad, things happen and then
Lannisters ensue.

Fate/Zero

IT CAME FROM... THE INTERNET... IF THIS IS YOURS, FEEL FREE TO CLAIM IT

Mythical heroes,
Tale of despair and (a) man,
Shirou was a drag.

Gundam AGE

Gundam for children?
Cutesy character designs
All of the murder.

Here's one I did not expect to be good.  AU Gundam is, in my mind, pretty much crap; the only thing I like about it is that Sunrise has the decency to create alternate universes for all of it, so that I don't have to live with things like Gundam Seed crapping up the Universal Century timeline.  This series, however, has been solidly enjoyable so far, and the second arc has been even better than the first.  Of course, it's Sunrise, so now that I've written something positive, a third-act ball-drop might be in the works, but still.

Gundam Unicorn

Okay, yes, it's true,
Get it out of your system,
The title is lulz.

I think I accidentally caused a My Little Pony: FIM fan to watch this show by a casual mention of the title alone.  Not sure what just happened there...

Gunparade March (failure to finish)

Schoolkids pilot 'bots,
Fight angry metaphor bugs,
Sans plot armor, though.

I'm not done yet, blah blah.  Sue me, it's pretty good, but it's just kind of slow. Too much school, not enough killing metaphor bugs.

Metal Armor Dragonar (Failure to Finish)

Great animation
From the year 1988,
Totally "meh" now.

It's a fairly blatant Gundam clone, but in theory, I should like that.  And if the animation was just a bit more up to date, or if the fansubs were less comically awful, I could probably swing it more easily.

Transformers Prime
Giant robots fight,
Mostly to save reckless kids,
God dammit Leeroy.

To the reckless kids' credit, they're pretty compelling characters as human sidekicks in Transformers go.  But this show is about Optimus Prime, Megatron, and, of course, Steve Blum.  I mean Starscream.  Steve Blumscream.

Hellsing Ultimate
So, you know that he
is called the Count. Because he
really loves to @#$#.


Towa no Quon

Sad backstory contest
Quon "won" with endless life
but everyone lost.

This is one I didn't expect, but ended up loving. The best of shows like S-Cry-Ed but with a much more compelling narrative and interesting characters.  I am waiting to get a new computer before watching the last episode (because watching it without the projector seems wrong).  Here's to hoping it isn't a total BONES ending.

Tiger and Bunny (dropped)

Buddy cop series
With superhero trappings
Boring villains abound.

Young Justice

Gargoyles' writer?
Justice League's animator?
Just take my money!

Young Jusice was in interesting show to start alongside Tiger and Bunny, because they both took a slightly more "realistic" take on the concept of the superhero - T&B tackles the capitalization of the super in a world dominated by corporate politics, while Young Justice deals with the militarization of the super in a world where superheroes are political actors as much as vigilantes.  Young Justice, however, is vastly more successful in several regards: its meta-plot is interesting and its villains are complex and clever (they are, after all, from the guy who brought us David Xanatos), but more importantly, the heroes really have heart.  Also, the show addresses my primary pet peeve with its teen hero series predecessor, Teen Titans - it answers the all-important question: "WHERE THE F*CK IS THE GODDAM BATMAN IN ALL OF THIS?" The teen superheroes exist - and struggle to exist - in an adult superhero world, which works very well for the series.

Wakfu Season 2

New journey, same lulz,
Great action, and makes you think,
Season three, perhaps?


Nurarihyon Season 2 (failure to finish at its finest)

Expected more of
the same, got more of the same
I'll watch it later...



Games:


Completed in 2011:

Mass Effect

Shepherd. Wrex. Shepherd.
Wrex is a boss and if you
let him die, redo.


Mass Effect 2

Martin Sheen, king troll,
Decides to play God with YOU!
Also, dialogue.


Bulletstorm

HA HA, F*CK YOU, I'M
STEVE BLUM AND I AM HERE TO
BLOW SH*T UP AND CURSE!


This was the greatest game ever.

Space Marine

In the grim darkness
of the far future, there is
only war and stuff

This game may not have been the financial success the ailing THQ needed it to be, but it was the artistic success that I wanted it to be. Captain Titus was a surprisingly interesting protagonist, but, in all regards, he felt like the Emperor's Angels of Death are supposed to feel, both in conversations and on the battlefield.  Especially on the battlefield.  While plowing through hordes of charmingly British Orks.  I really need to replay this game.  And we need to play Exterminatus Mode FFS, Bearmetal.

Gears of War 3

Raised questions, answered
none. Would be disappointed,
busy chainsawing.

Gears of War ended as it started, with no answers except a chainsaw in the face and no narrative closure except murder.

I can deal with that.

Ongoing into 2012:

Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (or, as all my friends know it, "F*CKING FRUSTRATINGLY HARD RPG RPG")

Be a dragon they
said, and it's pretty sweet, but
you can't burn it all.

The above haiku covers this game.  Although it's sans-DLC ending is WAY more aggravating than Mass Effect 3's ending.  The DLC clears it up, though (and was fairly obviously just content cut from the original release due to time).  It'll be interesting to see if the ME3 DLC does the same thing for that game.

Literature/"Literature":


Pluto

German Robo-cop
(not Robocop) is the best
hero in ages.

This comic blew my mind. Do want anime adaptation.

(YEAH YEAH, I'LL GET AROUND TO WATCHING MONSTER SOONER OR LATER.)

A Dance with Dragons

A long time coming
but great, Martin, your book six
MORE YEARS? FUUUUuUUUUuUUUU!

Gaunt's Ghosts: Traitor General


How do you deal with
complex moral issues in
war? BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Empire

Useful images on Wikipedia?
DRDRDRDRDRDBULLSH*T!

What if Lex Luthor
won? Well for starters it would
not make him happy.

Empire is a comic book series, published by DC, that posits: what if a very Lex Luthor-like villain (who cribs heavily from Iron Man's wardrobe) took over the world using the power of drugs and raw, unrelenting F*CK YOU?  What would a society that he ran be like? Would people be happy? Would he be happy? (spoilers: no).

Empire's crowning success is that Gogotha is a terrible person, and yet it makes him relatable, in certain, small ways, without ever revealing the full backstory that made him the way he is. It's a work with a lot of subtlety, a lot of nuance, and a lot of people getting blown up / eviscerated / atomized.

Halcyon

How do you stop those
Superheroes for all time?
World peace and trolling.

Halcyon was another interesting comic book series I picked up for free from the break room. The premise is that, one day, humanity's urge to commit violent acts instantly disappears.

So, yeah, it's pretty much Bearmetal's personal circle of Hell. Also, superheroes have to deal with being... useless.  It's interesting, but ultimately a much weaker work than Empire, because it requires more suspension of disbelief and has a much less well-developed villain.


Well, I'm sure I forgot some stuff, but that's my media year-in-review.

ONLY FIVE MONTHS LATE.

-Stormshrug

On GRIMM Dark Adventure

So, because a friend was curious what it was like and I had access to a copy lying around, I decided to take a look at Grimm.  This post is not a review; it is more of an examination of some of the concepts contained in this game, which are of interest to me as a student of literature and a guy who wants to post more stupid infographics (see below - only one of them is my fault this time, though!)

First, let me give a brief summary of Grimm.  I will keep it to one sentence, but I make no promises about semi-colons:

Grimm begins in a world much like our own but rapidly shifts to an attached a fae dimension where fairy tales (and indeed, perhaps all stories?) end up once they have been completed; this alternate realm is called "Grimm" because it has gelled around the stories of the Brothers Grimm, who intentionally finished many folktales to get the monsters there-in out of our world and into this convenient pocket dimension, and your PC, a child (with a class like Jock, Bully, or Nerd), has been sucked into this realm '80s cartoon style (complete with nigh-impossible escape quest).

Grimm wrestles with competing impulses throughout.  On the one hand, it is the only RPG I have ever read that not only tells you that PCs should never die, but spells out that they should be revive-able if they do somehow die. On the other hand, Grimm stays fairly close to the dark origins of the stories; your characters are children being faced with fairly non-watered-down fairy tale eldritch horrors.  I draw one conclusion from this:

It was this or an image from Madoka.  I'm saving Evangelion for a later stupid infographic.

Grimm is also fascinatingly meta.  Any work that focuses on Story, Myth, or Legend (ohai Fate/Zero, how are you?) is going to be this way, of course, but Grimm really steps up to the plate in this regard.  The local equivalent to your usual "tell a cockatrice from a regular, mundane giant chicken" skill is, of all things, Gaming, and the game even calls out that, because of this, knowledge from a theoretical not-quite-D&D's monster manual is directly applicable to your character.  So not only is the game essentially putting a stat on Genre-Savvy, it is actively telling you that the "skill" with which you are playing the game is the skill with which your character is doing things... in the game... when you do those things.

But wait, it gets better.

A role-playing game is a form of collaborate story-telling.  As is a folk-tale.  And although the story focuses on folk tales, it implies that all stories from the game's version of our world become a part of Grimm, and that many of those stories were true (as in, took place in "our" world) before being sequestered into the fictional pocket-dimension.  So... your story that you are telling through the campaign will become a part of Grimm... which means that you could run into one of your very own past campaign sessions playing out within Grimm...

-Stormshrug

On the Holiday Spirit

People asked for the higher def stand-alone, and in the spirit of the holidays, I am delivering all your sunglassed Gilgamesh needs (okay, just this one picture, actually).

Tangentially related note: Santa Claus as a Rider Servant.  Thoughts?

I suspect at least one of his Noble Phantasms buries you in coal if your alignment is Evil.

-Stormshrug

On Crossover Memes

This is an object lesson on the single but glaring advantage Photoshop has over Paint.net.

The Blur Tool.

See those edges?  Those would be cleaned the f*ck up with the Blur Tool.  I would be like "those edges need to be less harsh" and the Blur Tool would be like "Can Do!"  It would be great.

There's a least one more silly Fate/Fu picture in the works, so stay tuned if you haven't left already.

-Stormshrug

On Being Late to the Party

Flask, your post inspired this, so it's your fault.  That's my line of logic, and I'm sticking to it.  The textless version will be available upon demand.

Expect at least one more stupid photoshop post in the next few days.  I've been feeling "creative," and you all know what that means!

-Stormshrug

On RPG Campaigns/Settings I Would Totally GM

[As-Yet-Nameless Mecha Setting]

My vision for this setting is as follows:

One part Dune (Space politics, feudal domains, long-standing rivalries, bloody plots in the night)

One part A Song of Ice and Fire (as above, but with less mysticism and even more GRIMDARK and trolling)

One part Gundam (for the giant robots, naturally)

I freely admit, this setting is totally just my fiction fetishes rolled into one sexy package full of gritty violence and PTSD.  I do love the idea of giant robots not just as weapons of war, but as ancestral symbols of authority (The Five Star Stories, Knight Titans in the old Warhammer 40,000 Epic fluff).


System of Choice: Probably Rogue Trader, either using the internal vehicle rules (in Into the Storm) or, more likely, doing a partial homebrew system for the mecha (possibly based on that of Adeptus Evangelion, though I'm not familiar enough with it to feel terribly comfortably to saying with any certainty that I like its mecha combat rules).  I have been meaning to take a closer look at Heavy Gear, and I could probably cull some fun rules and tables from Mekton, if it came down to it, even if I'd prefer not to grapple directly with its rather '80s rules.


Bleach

This may sound like a weird one because I frequently disparage Bleach, but roll with me for a second.  Bleach is a mediocre to bad story set in a really cool, fairly fleshed-out universe with reasonably consistent but not overly restrictive or arcane, or full of exceptions created purely for the purpose of creating exceptions (cough*NASU*cough) rules.

Besides that, for all the plot of Bleach lacks, its characters are pretty cool, in generally, and set some pretty creative precedents for powers.  The fact that Bleach would lend itself very well to an easy mission-based setup (Soul Society and the Thirteen Court-Guard Squads were basically built to provide structure for roving bands of adventuring PCs who hunt Hollows, deal with ghosts' problems, get up to shenanigans in the mortal realm, etc) is just gravy.  It's relatively low on my list of things I want to run, to be sure, but it's still nice to know it's out there as a possibility.

System of Choice: D&D 4th Edition, probably.  In Bleach, stuff pretty much just happens - martial techniques and magic usually work as intended (though they may not be effective against a given target, they WORK), so DH/RT/DW/BC's systems that operate around a fairly high failure percentage and spells going wildly and hilariously wrong run a bit counter to the setting.  What's more, zanpaktou limit levels (Shikai, Bankai), powerful kido (spells), and other techniques fit far better with the Encounter Power/Daily Power dynamic than DH/RT/DW/BC's high-failure-but-infinite-attempt* model for magic.

Finally, nobody ever dies in Bleach.  Just like in D&D 4e.

As an alternative, I would consider Deathwatch or Black Crusade (since Battle-Brothers and Heretics are far less subject to the high failure rate than Explorers and especially Acolytes), but for the above reasons, I think these systems fit a bit less well with the setting.  Interestingly, Orpheus could work very well for Bleach simply based on how much thematic (and thus mechanical) overlap there is between the two settings.  But Orpheus is kind of a rules trainwreck, and what's more, just doesn't have the raw breadth of content that I'd like to see for Bleach (which D&D 4e probably exemplifies best - each class has assloads of options for powers, further opened up by multiclassing, etc).  I'd consider looking at Geist: The Sin Eaters, the spiritual if not direct successor to Orpheus, but that said, I'm generally not a fan of the way World of Darkness handles dice, even if New WoD is less broken.

*(infinite until you get eaten by daemons)

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Despite lacking any real giant robots, Avatar is hands-down my favorite TV series, and I'd love to run a campaign set in the Avatar-verse.  As such, I think it hardly needs an explanation for why I want to run it.  That said, I will expound a bit more, but I'll keep it brief:

-Avatar's timeline is COLOSSAL, judging by how many Avatars statues were in the Eastern Air Temple.  What's more, the Avatar, the one of the few lore characters who spans this timeline can (and indeed, must, many, many times) die, meaning that nobody (excluding a few Spirits) is necessarily protected by causal plot armor.

-The series opens many doors but leaves many potential plotlines untapped.  In other words, free content for side-quests, if not the whole campaign.

-I want to make up my own horrible new abomination animals.  Shark-Bees, anyone?

(Edit: KillHammer beat me to this one, apparently.  I must grant props where props are due.)


System of Choice: This one would be a lot of work no matter how you slice it, because I like the idea of using D&D 4e's power scheme for Bending, but, unfortunately, because of the way powers are tied to classes, it would really mean creating at least four whole new classes (which would not be available on the Character Builder - no small downside), balancing them, creating feats and items to support them, etc.  Realistically, I would probably handle this by simply working with players to create appropriate powers for their characters as they needed them, but even that would mean a fair chunk of extra work that usually isn't necessary.

I would actually pretty strongly consider trying to find a new setting that had specific rules for custom-created powers if I had concrete plans to run an Avatar campaign, since this would allow me to leave new powers almost entirely in the hands of the players.

Ork Trek

Rogue Trader.  But everyone plays an Ork.

"Spoice.  Da foinal frontier.  Deez a' da voyagez of da Kill-Kroozah Dedkrusha. Da mission: to WAAAGH new woilds, an' ta seek out new loife and KRUMP IT GOOD!"

System of Choice: Rogue Trader.  Duh.


There are others, of course, but these are the ones I felt like about writing about right now.

-Stormshrug