Sounds to me like the Angel version of CineUni would work for the type of setting you have in mind. Just have everyone design their own "demon" characters. For further inspiration the All Flesh Must Be Eaten line is generally compatible, and usually has new powers for building monsters. Any of which could then be used for PCs or antagonists.

Either that, or a supers system with street level (or slightly above) caps. M&M could work, as could a tweaked Aberrant. Just make sure the special effects for powers are all appropriately urban fantasy monster based.

From a roleplaying perspective, I go with devils = corruptors, demons = destroyers.

Wily behind the scenes manipulative antagonist? Devil.

Ravening monster ripping things to pieces? Demon.

Yeah, I've ended up with many islands larger than Britain.  Here is a link to a better map (my linked uploads sux).  This is just a the section of the larger one, but it gives you a scale at the bottom.  I crudely set it up on one of my sites, so apologies.  And yes, for some reason when I export form FT3 to Campaign Cartographer, the rivers don't connect to the coast.  But you get the idea.  As Sponge Bob says, "Use your imagination" : )

http://thenewshadow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/test5.jpg

I'm going to roll with it at this point, as I would rather work out the implications of larger land masses than redo the map.  One is easier than the other IMO.  I'm trying to upload the full map, but I am running into loading errors - damn you wordpress!

Cheers,

Mark

Just reduce the scale and make it a regional map. It doesn't have to be global.

Location is another factor. Heavy armour and hot tropical climates do not mix.

Metal purity may be a problem too. Rust is going to make keeping low grade irons intact a hassle.

Bronze ftw.

Or exotics, like orichalchum, mithril, etc., that aren't going to rust.

Democracy was still considered a bad form of government over a century past the creation of the US (ditto republic).

That would be post creation,

Do you really think that the advent of the US has changed that attitude everywhere:D? Because I happen to know people that use the US as proof that it's so.

I'd say a change from very few proponents of democratic government to the present where a majority of the world's population would be in favor of democracy is a significant change, even if there are millions who hate the U.S. for one reason or another.

The U.S. is a republic with a House and Senate, not a democracy with a popular assembly. The government was set up as a not-democracy to explicitly limit the ability of demagogues and to preserve the interests of the [strike]Patricians[/strike] large landowners.

I tend to rain on their parade by pointing out that the US is a republic, but it doesn't actually end the conversation;).

Unless the parade is a junior high playground, of course it wouldn't end the conversation.

Let's see, JSTOR search, democracy, limited to political science journals:

RESULTS

Huh, only 100,274 hits.

Let's try 'Advanced Industrial Democracy', a term that should be familiar to anyone who has taken an intro to comparative government or intro to international relations course:

RESULTS

A lot less, only 295,579 hits.

Man, maybe you'd better tell those poli-sci professionals, the grad students and professors, that we're doing it all wrong.

Gotta ask, because it seems to me like you're falling into a relatively common fallacy, often used with Star Wars Lightsaber arguments, where they claim one side has all the advantages, but forget to see what the enemy side is doing (like the whole, thrust blade into person and wiggle.  What exactly is your foe trying to do?  Or right.  THAT SAME THING!  So that argument doesn't exist.)

People were arguing Aldis was helpless because they are naive and not nearly brutal enough, I was pointing out it isn't naive and has advantages of it's own. It's okay for both sides to be strong, it isn't one or the other.

Emphasis mine.
One of the best Arthurian games I've ever been in, ran it completely different. Mordred, as the youngest brother of Gawain, has grown up his entire life hearing stories of Camelot and the Round Table, and is an honest, "goody-good" zealot. He discovers the affair between Lancelot and Guiniverre, and unlike his fellow knights (wise enough not to destroy the Kingdom), he pushes the King to live up to his ideals and commitments. It's Mordred's disillusionment with how the Knights he heard stories about all his life, in the face of "true betrayal", that cause him to rally younger, more idealistic knights to his banner, to oust Arthur and his "old men", seeking to truly create a Kingdom that lives up to the ideal of Camelot.

In a different age, Mordred would have been a hero; the problem was, that by his time, the only villains left were his peers, for the crime of being *slightly* less heroic than he.

So he's the knightly equivalent of an SJW? A chivalric fundamentalist, if you will. Sounds like a particularly frustrating villain to deal with.

And that's the problem.  The Blue Rose Kingdom with their newly elected queen, has no guile, no cunning and no willingness to understand that their foes are just waiting to pounce on them.  And given just how likely those two factions are described in the old RPG, it's only by Plot Armour that BR hasn't been crushed and divvied up like sandwiches on a platter.

Simply because the enemies are ruthless, murderous bastards that want nothing more than to crush them, and neither of them are of the 'Warlord' variety.  Meaning they'll use things like assassinations, sabotage and other tricks to weaken it.  There will be no brute force invasions until after their prey has been softened, which would likely end up in a two and half way war that would decimate all three kingdoms.

And the only reason they haven't done it?  Because of Plot Armour.  Sole reason, and I simply cannot reconcile that in my head.  It's either that, or that the other two factions are so 1960's Batman incompetent that they're living jokes, and no country can survive that.

Or their enemies are a lich dictatorship in which no initiative is permitted and everything is micromanaged by the top, and a paranoid theocracy so focused on rooting out internal corruption that anyone with talent is eventually caught up in a purge. Meanwhile in Aldis, by far the largest and richest of the three, small rapid response special forces units (the PCs) hunt down attempts by shadow to infiltrate, while military units can train and prepare, rewarding initiative and ability, secure in the knowledge their cause it just, their citizenry support them, and they won't be subject to injustice from a paranoid leadership.

Yeah, sounds like an easy nut to crack.

My only issue is two fold.  A magical deer gets to select the leader...

I've never really understood this objection. If the objective is good, by which I mean beneficent and effective, governance, then vesting authority in someone you know is good, because a divine being has demonstrated they are, gives you both beneficence and the ability to quickly respond to situations.

It's a fantasy system; it's not possible here, where modern* democracy is "the best of bad choices", since it minimizes corruption and arbitrariness, but at the expense of response time and efficiency. Aldis has a good choice, we don't. That's what makes it "utopian".

*Prior to the U.S., democracy was thought to be a particularly warlike and arbitrary system, subject to the whims of a populous led hither and yon by demagogues, e.g. Athens at various times, and the worst of bad choices.

This is wholly incorrect. There is no "thing I want them to say". I want to understand why someone did a bad thing--this is something I do not understand to begin with so I cannot possibly have a desired explanation. They have already gone far outside "what I want", usually by lying or talking smack without fact-checking first.

The only wrong answer would be evading the question entirely--which is so obviously not ok that it's not even allowed in courtrooms.

For example:

I will ask you right now--

Can you, Apparition, provide a real life example of me asking a leading question with a desired answer I am badgering a person to provide? If so, provide a link.

There is no preferred answer here:

A "no" is terrible--it means you are accusing me of wrongdoing with no evidence.

A "yes, here's a link" is likewise terrible--it means i have to go through the tedious process of explaining the mistake in your interpretation. But it still illuminates how you came to have such an inaccurate view.

Either way, the point is to figure out how you ended up saying something stupid, and whichever answer you give we presume must be true.

The only undesirable answer would be not answering the question and changing the subject.

Why yes I can. How about this right here:

"A "yes, here's a link" is likewise terrible--it means i have to go through the tedious process of explaining the mistake in your interpretation."

You've just blatantly said that there can be only one correct interpretation, yours. And notice this bit too:

"Either way, the point is to figure out how you ended up saying something stupid, and whichever answer you give we presume must be true."

This is just "have you stopped beating your wife?", since either of the two answers you appear to think are the only possible ones result in my "saying something stupid". "Zak might be wrong about this" isn't an option.

See, that's the thing, it's (almost) always you having to go through the tedious process of explaining to others how they are wrong, not you having to go through the tedious process of trying to see something through someone else's viewpoint. And maybe ask them for more information. Maybe they hang themselves (like you just did), maybe you change your mind (I certainly don't need to on this evidence).

*****

But motivated reasoning and confirmation bias are so much easier than giving someone the benefit of the doubt, trying to see things from their viewpoint, looking for independent evidence, etc. Hey, I can understand your defensiveness, you've been attacked for stupid reasons and can justifiably be suspicious. But not every disagreement is an attack. You don't need to declare jihad on the "bad people" every time someone thinks you're wrong or in the wrong. Sometimes they will have a point. Sometimes they won't and are hypocrites who say "denying the experience" is bad while denying Mandy and Satine's experiences. Sometimes it's even more egregious, like the consultancy mess, and your pushback is fully justified.

But then you go on one of your Zakratic Diatribes, and even if I agree with you I wind up thinking "holy crap, why does he have to act the part of such an asshole all the time; he's just turning everyone undecided against him". Now if you get off on playing the martyr card awesome!, have fun with that. But if you're trying to change opinions, coming across as an ad hominem on yourself isn't helping.

Really? Out of all of the thousands of RPG blogs out there what makes you or zak relevant?  Zak is easy.  He games with porn stars.  If his blog was dndwithmyhighschoolbuds no one would give a flip.

People didn't stay for the porn stars, they stayed for the content.

This construction (Ent and Apparition) has an inaccurate premise:

The premise is that the thing at fault is the question.

No, the presmise is the thing at fault is the questioner, who knows what the answer is and will keep badgering someone until they say exactly what he wants them to say.

Well, for years, people very much like Apparition and Ent (though in many cases more influential than them) above have promoted an online culture of "don't ask questions, don't demand evidence"

Don't demand evidence?

Pundit: instead of repeating yourself over and over again, add a citation. The wikipedia article does a good job of supporting your definition.

Critics of "civilization" as a concept: get off your (deconstructionist and critical theory derived) high horses (the concept is bad because it's *barbarianist*, not that there is any need to provide evidence as to whether or not that is the case, or even if it is, if it's relevant) and provide your own evidence why the Celts or other group of your choice count as civilized. Look: some criteria in the article. Do they fit the criteria? Why or why not? And just saying so doesn't count, back yourself up with evidence.

Everyone: you're smarter than these arguments where everyone is just presenting their opinion as fact. You have the knowledge of the world at your fingertips. Do a perfunctory internet search and find some evidence to support (or perhaps change your mind about) your view. Use it to ground your claims. That way we might have more (in number as well as quality) productive discussions than these tedious definitiopinion* squabbles.


*Yes, these are deliberate neologisms.

Looks like asking for evidence to me.

But that supports my point that Zak is engaged in Socratic questions. Though perhaps more the sort of questions that pissed off his listeners and that earned him a cup of hemlock as his reward for his 'service' to his fellow Athenian citizens.

They kinda look like Socratic questions, but Socrates would build off of the answers he received, while Zak just keeps doing repeating his questions over and over, pissing people off and eventually getting hemlocked by rpgnet. Though they do seem to be in a hemlock mood the last few years, so that's not saying much.

Pretty much every person I've seen online who goes apeshit over the "Zak Question Thing" is someone who was asked very simple straightforward questions and then turned themselves into knots trying to make it seem like they were being interrogated by Satan's own Lawyer.

The reason I said "Zak's shtick" is that it typically goes like this:

Poster Zak disagrees with (pzdw): says something Zak doesn't like.

Zak: Jumps in with a way over the top numbered list of a dozen or so questions, some with sub-questions, many with follow ups further down the list, many of them leading "gotcha" questions, by which I mean Zak implies a certain answer is correct, and a "wrong" answer is unethical, and gets in pzdw's face on that point.

pzdw tries to engage, and answers the questions as best they can.

Zak gets pissed off at the answers because they aren't what he was looking for (saying pzdw [strike]is an idiot[/strike] misunderstood the questions), and re-states the questions, rewording them and becoming more aggressive.

pzdw is confused, and tries again.

Zak is unsatisfied, and [strike]pixel bitches[/strike] asks again.

pzdw get frustrated because it doesn't seem to matter how they answer the questions, they always seem to get it wrong. Like being interrogated when you don't know what they hell the interrogator wants you to say, and they are going to keep asking until you say it. Pzdw gives up after this or a couple more fruitless cycles.

Zak declares pzdw is a liar.

After seeing this exact scenario play out over and over again, I now just skip those posts since the signal to noise ratio in them is all noise and no signal.

But like I said, when the signal to noise ratio is much higher, when he's not doing this and he's talking about rpgs (or sometimes on art) he frequently has useful and interesting things to say.


*Except maybe that one time when he seemed to eventually figure out what multiple pzdw's were saying over the course of a couple hundred posts. Maybe in the rpg.net thread that he eventually got banned in? I can't quite remember. But then again it was an rpg thread, not one like this.