So I was reading Imperial Mysteries for Mage: The Awakening and all I can say is, I'm not disappointed. It offers an endgame of sorts for Awakening, but it also recasts the good old days of Ascension's giant Chantries in the Horizon (like Doissetep), the open warfare for reality that took place there, and the wacko archmages behind it. Those who like Awakening but miss Ascension's epic, cosmic scope will love this book.
There's this bit about how, since the Fallen World exists merely as a sympathetic shadow of the Supernal Realms, destroying something in the Supernal completely erases the thing (or rather, the thing's equivalent in the Fallen) from existence (i.e. as if it had never existed in the first place). It's like you wander into the world of Platonic ideals, and kill (e.g.) the Platonic ideal of dinosaurs, and poof, dinosaurs go extinct. This is one of the examples they give:
Quote from: Imperial Mysteries (for Mage: The Awakening), p. 44 sidebarThe Libertine Basileus claims that Europe's leading religion used to be the cult of Sol Invictus. In 1977, the archmage Hyperion Ascended in union with the God Mithras. This erased much of the deity's history, so that the world now believes Christianity, not the Unconquered Church, spread throughout the West. Basileus points to the common sign of the cross, and the apparent contradiction of a Roman ritual official (the Pontifex Maximus) controlling an
Abrahamic sect.
I love it because this is just the sort of Ars-Magica-meets-Unknown-Armies thing that makes me love Awakening.
So, if you have any awesome passages you want to share from recent RPG readings, post it here.
"My only advice to you is simple: Do as much good as you can in this world for as long as you possibly can." - Nikolai Federick, Reclamation
I love this quote because it helps set up Reclamation as something I'm not used to: a post-apocalyptic setting with a sense of hope. I reviewed it on my blog (http://mostunreadblogever.blogspot.com/2012/07/tommys-take-on-reclamation.html) recently.
"It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks-room lawyer to force qutations from the rule book upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game."
Some book I picked up Tuesday. I grabbed three RPG books that day so who knows ;)
Quote from: thedungeondelver;562143"It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks-room lawyer to force qutations from the rule book upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game."
Yeah, if the players get uppity just force this quotation from the rule book on them! :D
Things We Think About Games by Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball is a collection of quotes about games. All kinds of games: RPGs, CCGs, board games, video games, even poker.
My favorite: (may or may not apply to RPGs; I think it does)
QuoteWe should fix the fact that the average cartoon does a better job of portraying the human condition than our games do.
--Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design
...and I'm probably gonna catch some hell for posting a quote here with the words "human condition" and "game" in the same sentence.
"Decide on the campaign tone you want to have, and discuss your decisions with your players."-D&D Cyclopedia.
Emphasis mine.
QuoteThe main thing that described old school gaming
as compared to "new school?" The game is your own.
A simple sentence, but it has many attributes that fall under its
umbrella. The first of which is that any rule that you don't feel makes the
game more fun for you should be ignored or changed. Talk with your
players and get a consensus of how you want to the game to be from a
mechanics standpoint, and go for it.
The second attribute is fun. This is the most important, and why we
play the game. If the game is not fun based on rule or something, then
get rid of it. That's why we play the game. HAVE FUN!
Altus Adventum forward
"By ordering things as they should be, the game as a WHOLE first, your CAMPAIGN next, and your participants thereafter, you will be playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons as it was meant to be."
"Use care, caution and common sense. This book is not for children or morons."
-William Powell, The Anarchist's Cookbook
I was looking up some items in my RPG bible, Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games by Lawrence Schick (Prometheus Books, 1991), and I came across this article by one of the first Game Masters:
"In the old days, I had plenty of time to sit down and design things. Today most people, if they have the spare time, would rather be playing than designing. It is easier for a game master to take an already worked-out scenario, modify it, and refereeit than to try to create the same thing from scratch. With a few exceptions, most scenarios are pretty bland, but add a vew ideas or emphasize the scenario's best points, and voila!--you are off and running. You and your group will be happy for several sessions.
When I design a scenario, sometimes the plot or situation will come from books I read, and sometimes it just pops into my head. Then I draw my maps (I love maps) and think about the setting by running possible adventures through my head. I thin fill in the plot-line and either run a few friends through it or talk it out. Changes are made, and then the work is sent off to be butchered-er, ah, edited, I mean.
Most referees change a published scenario as it is being played. This is done for several reasons. Perhaps the demands of their own campaigns require changes to be made. Usually the changes are the result of the way the adventure develops during play. Many of these modified scenarios are far better than the originals.
The original Blackmoor supplement included what was the very first published scenario. My intention was that it would serve as a guideline for other GMs to design their own. Instead it spawned an entire "service" industry. Oh, well..."
David L. Arneson
From ICONS:
QuoteBatman to all points: I could use some air support, since I can't fly ...
At all ... Now would be good
Okay, so this totally misses the point of the thread, but anyone who has seen the animated Justice League series will understand how awesome this quote is.
Quote from: Soylent Green;562332Okay, so this totally misses the point of the thread, but anyone who has seen the animated Justice League series will understand how awesome this quote is.
"Sorry I'm late - there was a landslide in Peru. What did I miss?" is my personal favourite.
Quote from: thedungeondelver;562143"It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks-room lawyer to force qutations from the rule book upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game."
Some book I picked up Tuesday. I grabbed three RPG books that day so who knows ;)
Well, my most awesome quote would come from real life then:
ASPIRING DM: I want to learn the rules, first. You know me: I'm a by-the-book type.
ASPIRING DM AFTER HER FIRST SESSION: Well, I made up 75% of the rules... and of the rolls, too.
ME: That's good. You have taken your first step into a larger world.
Well, regarding game design:
QuoteThe game's designer, Jason Bulmahn, did an amazing job creating innovative new mechanics for the game, but he started with the premise that he already had a pretty good game to build upon. He didn't wipe the slate clean and start over. Jason had no desire to alienate the countless fans who had invested equally countless hours playing the game for the last 35 years. Rather, he wanted to empower them with the ability to build on what they'd already created, played, and read. He didn't want to take anything away from them—only to give them even more.
- Monte Cook, Pathfinder's Introduction
Quote from: Reckall;562413Well, my most awesome quote would come from real life then:
ASPIRING DM: I want to learn the rules, first. You know me: I'm a by-the-book type.
ASPIRING DM AFTER HER FIRST SESSION: Well, I made up 75% of the rules... and of the rolls, too.
ME: That's good. You have taken your first step into a larger world.
That is a good one.
JG
From
Races of War, a 3.5 fan supplement.
Fighter quote:
"I've seen this kind of fire-breathing chicken-demon before. We're going to need more rope. Also a bigger cart."
On the Goblins:
QuoteIndeed, while the average Goblin on the street doesn't even know that there's an ancient rivalry between his people and the Dwarves, the list of usual suspects for evil overlords is a laundry list of people who actually also know the whole deal. Liches, Fiend Lords, and of course Maglubiet and Hruggek all know that Dwarves spend large amounts of time training and preparing for battle with the goblin people, and they don't tell the goblins. The thought is that by not telling the goblins that the Dwarves are totally ready for them and have been for thousands of years, that goblins will fight more bravely – they literally don't know how very unlikely each individual goblin is to make it out alive from any conflict.
Quotehen a wizard or demon decides to make a new form of super soldier – chances are good that they use Goblins as a base. Heck, you don't see any halflings with rhino horns on their face, and you don't see any dwarves transformed into undead monstrosities with bone-sucking tentacles popping out of their nipples. That's all the dubious pleasure of the Goblin people.
QuoteIf a goblin needs something, he'll take it and use it. Goblins aren't socialist utopians or anything, they simply don't respect property rights of others. Oddly enough, the end result is pretty similar to Goblins being really cooperative.
I'm 100% OK with great quotes from actual sessions, and actually it's only to be expected that actually playing a game will be more fun, and generate more memorable content*, than reading the book. But I
was hoping for a few more book quotes...
*
Just don't call this content "story" and you'll do fine around here. :DQuote from: OgreBattle;562641On the Goblins:
Loved those!
The ANGEL RPG corebook gives me a new laugh almost every time I read it.
From the Glossary (p. 252):
Powers That Be: Otherwordly do-gooders (at least as far as we know) who give vague visual assignments to their chosen few via direct cranial insertion (causing wickedly power headaches in most). Memo To: Text and graphic emails would be much faster and save much wear and tear on recipients.
Was it Cyberpunk 2020 that said "it's not about whether you succeed or fail but how good you look doing it"?
Quote from: Fiasco;563237Was it Cyberpunk 2020 that said "it's not about whether you succeed or fail but how good you look doing it"?
The more memorable one from CP2020 to me was
"it's not who you know, and it's not what you know, it's what you know about who you know."
Some of my very favorites are the sidebar quotes from Living Steel, especially the ones attributed to the Red Targa, Axly:
Quote from: Axly"I didn't do it."
"Well, yes, I did it... but it's not my fault."
"Alright, it is my fault... but I'm not responsible."
"Well, maybe I am responsible... but I'm not to blame."
"Yes, I am to blame... but they made me do it."
"Just because it's my gun doesn't mean I'm the one who fired it."
"Ok, I fired it, but I didn't think I'd hit any civilians."
"Well, yes, it did occur to me that I might hit one or two civilians. But I really never thought I would hit all of them."
And it goes on and on, every page has something...
Oh wow, Living Steel, that brings back memories. Sadly I lost my Internet Archive link with the (reasonably) complete list.
Here's some love from Gil the Treacherous.
Quote"Give you one good reason? I'll give you .45 good reasons."
Quote"I don't think he is going to talk. We'll have to kill him."
"Maybe you should remove the gag first, Gil."
i'm going to cheat a little, and post a quote from a Q&A with Rob Daviau regarding his running Tomb of Horrors over a weekend and tweeting the results (http://defectiveyeti.com/2012/05/28/tweets-of-horror/).
In the Q&A at the bottom, when asked "Why 1st edition Tomb of Horrors", Rob says:
QuotePlaying Tomb of Horrors came after reading Ready Player One, where the 1e Tomb has a prominent role. After finishing the book I went back and read the module for the first time in 30 years. It seemed unfair, biased, and kind of crazy. My guess is that future editions make it more "fair", so I wanted to go back to Gygax's original vision.
(emphasis mine)
...and i think that right there sums up what i love most about old D&D.
Thinking about it, my most awesome quote perhaps comes not from an RPG, but from an Italian gaming magazine that did a piece on Traveller starting with this quote:
Quote"...Even though he had lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a star at the edges of the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no place in the Galaxy was. There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets in the Galaxy then, and not one but owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor..."
- Isaac Asimov, Foundation
I was 12 at the time, and on the verge of discovering... something new, something that my normal games weren't giving to me. I was too young to really understand what Traveller was (no elder brother or dad to teach me about RPGs). But that quote, more than the feature itself, was my first hint that there was, indeed, a bigger world out there.
Quote from: Dark ContinentSome of your players might be disturbed by the prospect of killing and stuffing big game for fun and profit. Remind them that the Victorian idea of nature was 'red in tooth and claw', that to Speke or Baker pitting yourself against a wild beast armed with only the latest breech loading elephant gun wasn't being sadistic or ironic but heroic. Then attack them with rabid bushbabies. Try to nip this kind of woolly liberalism in the bud, lest before you know it you'll all be playing Furry Pirates or GURPS Bunnies and Burrows.
From the
Dark Continent GM's Guide, pg 22. Made me laugh.