WritesNaughtyStories

This is one of the few RPG Kickstarters I didn't back, but the Kickstarter funded before Dire Wolf bought Cortex. I didn't follow the project closely (the whole Smallville, Leverage series of IP games kind of put me off the product a bit and only bought Xadia because the kids liked the show) but while I don't think any of their toolkits were licensed, is there, maybe, some snag with who owns what after the sale?

*remembers that profile pic* "Fuck." However, I stand by it. Like what you want, but you're never going to sell me Supes. I won't dog you for liking him, but I will dog him. I like my own, deeply goofy shit, that I completely get people ragging on. Have at it.

I got a chance to reread some of Xadia last night - I think there are a few things muddying the waters with Heritage Distinctions. One is (fuck I hate this character) Superman. He's completely invulnerable - in order to humanize him a little bit, her needs to be stripped of that from time to time. That's part of the reason that Smallville has the requirement to suspend Heritage Distinctions. I appreciate that superhero fight scenes are not what Smallville has at it's heart, but Supes breaks everything (except Ambush Bug). Best Superman story remains Niven's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, Tales of Xadia doesn't require (or have a mechanism to) disable Heritage Distinctions. It's just a distinction tied to the kind of elf you are or where you're from (socially and geographically) as a human. But the playing field is much more level than in Smallville. Another complicating factor may be both games were (originally) published before Cam Banks and the Cortex team sat down with the Cortex Plus line of games and unified it into Cortex Prime. My copy of Xadia still has the Fandom imprint, so it goes so far as to predate the sale to Dire Wolf (who you should all support by buying Dune: Imperium).

I agree, keep the sex scenes to a few posts. I'll go a step farther and suggest that you can link the side-line continuing sex scenes to a thread in Public RP rather than clutter up TTRPG with a bunch of random porn loops.

That is precisely who Ashborn is; Prudence Lawton, post revelation.

I'm unclear on the interaction of Heritage Distinctions with rules (I only have Tales of Xadia as a reference) but, could it be a matter of their Faith making me question mine? The reference guide on Dire Wolf's Cortex site is the barest of bare-bones and Xadia doesn't dig into meta-logic much, so I'm really working from little more than guessed and inferences.

I think the influence of the established churches might fill in nicely there. The New Church might haul them to the dias for Judgement using the dame kind of enforcers Prudence was. The Old Church might try to get the Unbound run out of town. Push either hard enough and they might call for a trial for heresy - which generally ends badly.

At this point, adding this as a Heritage Distinction doesn't change anything, does it? What do we need to define, the Ash-Walkers or the Unbound (I can see a strong argument for both)? Do we want to see if any of that comes out in the rest of the Pathways? Oh, and since Resource starts at 2d4, does it step up to 2d6 Hearthkeeper? And what kind of specialties are we thinking, Healer and Safe House?

Can we soften the focus to: Ash-Walker You are one of Ashborn's wandering adherents, providing succor and guidance when possible and protection when necessary. d4: Earn a Plot Point when you choose the harder road or refuse comfort that would be easier to accept. d8: Spend a Plot Point to step into a scene and immediately intercept harm meant for another. d12: Spend a Plot Point to Reroll a die when you turn your healing skill into a weapon (nerve strikes, pressure points, improvised defenses). [I could see taking this as an act of healing too] I hate that it's so scatter-shot, but I think configuring it this way leans into the broader intent of the Ash-Walkers. A more tightly focused alternative might be: Pilgrim of the Ash Road You walk lightly upon the world, carrying little but your will and your fire. The road is both your teacher and your sanctuary. d4: Earn a Plot Point when you choose the harder road or refuse comfort that would be easier to accept. d8: Spend a Plot Point to step into a scene and immediately intercept harm meant for another. d12: Add a d6 to Trouble to Reroll a die when you act as guide or protector for an outcast. For the resource, I like the idea of Hearthkeepers. That would add a resource to the Pathways map, right?

I'm about half way through step 1 but I'm stymied by a Distinction and a Resource. What I have so far is from Outlandish: +2 Power (power seems crucial to an Ashborn Missionary, but framed as "Power is required to fight oppressive power") d6 w/ Ashborn (She made me what I am) My thought for Distinction is something connected to being one of the Unbound - I live the idea of pushing this toward a Shaolin style monk, but don't have a clear vision of what that would look like. There's definitely a "Wanted" element to it - the Unbound are heretics to the New Church and a populist new schism to the Old Church - but I feel like it encompasses a duty to the disenfranchised and a defense of the weak as well, It feels all over the place. I understand that a Resource is something more than just a bank account, My thought is something like the good will of the local poor? But how to quantify that?

I went ahead and added a Characters thread for the game.

A place for everyone to keep their characters.

Millie looks great. I give you Saha Sky Eyes:

@StarlitSiren, check Sexy.ai or OpenArt.ai

Wall of text ahead. tldr: Sarah's family gets killed. She's adopted by the First Nation band that killed them. Lives happily for years. Army kills her clan, tries to repatriate Saha to settlers life. She escaped, starved, beaten and exhausted then gets found by Ashborn. I guess becomes a kind of monk.

The King in Yellow and Erich Zahn meet Roy Rogers, it sounds like. Has he stopped performing?

Welcome, @AsBloodTurnsEverCold! Glad to have you with us.

The last question is a "pick one" list.

She's good at that.

I think we need to talk about this. The story seems to be taking a long, hard look at the human condition and the weight of expansion, technological advancement, wealth and power - slavery and its echoes are certainly part of that. I, for one, think if we're going to talk about the Army and the First Nations, enslaved people also need to be included.

Everything you need to know can be learned from the Wild, Wild West TV series with Robert Conrad. 3 episodes should cover you. OK, so maybe a couple of episodes of Kung Fu too.

I'm pretty much on board with Izzy's list. I want to campaign for having the discussion about First Nations and the Army - those both loom large in most westerns.

Does this mean the New Church has bounties out for Ashborn and her blasphemous cultists? Now that I'm actually on deck, I can slack off on the lines and think. Picking up where I left off in my earlier post this morning, ball, promiscuity, lawlessness and blue coal. Balls. It sounds like we all agree, there need to be occasional galas, where what passes for wealth in town, shows up in their frontier finery and parades about in desperate attempts to seduce each other, impress the common folk and angle for alliances and influence. How big of a deal is it when the musicians come into town for these balls? Do they happen on the solstices and equinoxes? I feel like there's powerful symbolism there that the churches don't much like, and those cults (maybe the First Nations too?) @MagnificentBastard mentioned use the townsfolk's distraction to have big gatherings of their own. Promiscuity - I feel like this is frowned on by society (much as it is now) but debauchery has a long and happy history behind the scenes. Saha Sky Eyes, Who Walks Between The Rivers, (who I have just found a name for) makes no effort to hide her promiscuity though. She loves freely as Ashborn teaches. She loves the balls because it encourages everyone to be more open. This unobtainium, I feel like needs to be some kind of energy resource. Zeppelins, automatons and crazy experiments all need power. Is it some kind of low temperature, high output "blue coal"?

I think I'm going to come at this in three steps. First, @Chiyako's biologist, then @IsabellaRose's religions and then a combination of @MagnificentBastard, @StarlitSiren and @WickedCadrach's balls, promiscuity and promiscuous balls. So, @Chiyako, it seems the REALLY important thing is being in hiding, on the run and doing these shady experiments. That's more Doctor Frankenstein than vampire. The look is easy to achieve. Anemic and pale, or straight albino, and the experiments and history (removed from the big, fancy hospital back in Saint Linus for unapproved surgeries that revealed your experiments? Maybe to cure your hereditary anemia or perfect that animal soldier idea the army pulled the plug on?) mean you have to hide who you are and what you do. Just trying to find how to get the most important parts to fit the setting. I still have concerns that this could become 'you vs. us' which gets out of the rivalry business and into conflict. @IsabellaRose, I was wondering how we got to the simple padre, in his dusty white cassock, helping the wounded gunfighter to the angry castigations Prudence delivered, and endured. I think your Puritan squared schism from the older church handles that well. But what are the Daughters of the Unbound's feelings about the Old Church? It feels like they don't like them, but aren't as vehement in their desire to tear it down. Not until the bigger problems are taken care of first. There's probably a new church, here in town, dragging people in front of their Judgements, shaming them, demanding their saloons be closed, I guess? The Old Church mission is probably out of town a ways, where the humble priest and tasty (there we go with the part you don't say aloud) nun try to shepherd settlers and save the heathen savages. Sound about right, or did the town run the new church out and they have a little white, clapboard square meeting house where they rail and rant at the evils of man? Work, calls, me hardies (it's talk like a pirate day - go nuts) time to trim the mains and hoist the gallants!

This is an important thought. What kind of story are we thinking about telling? Are we a band of outlaws running from hideout to hideout? Are we the folk who inhabit some frontier town or or the area of little villages, small farms that have cropped up around a fort or mission? Isabella had suggested a couple of traveling groups, a circus, refugees of a caravan of settlers pushing forward into the unknown? I personally kind of favor the idea of a slightly larger town, perhaps built up around the church, with a sheriff and their deputy, a few shop owners, two saloons and a brothel that draws in enough visitors to the town from the nearby fort, mining claims and mountain trappers that everyone knows they need it. @StarlitSiren, would Millie have her own little workshop, over by the train station where locals come to get things fixed or is it secreted away in some mine that didn't pan out or remote little box canyon? Part of the upside of this kind of town is that it gives enough infrastructure for the growing class and technological divides to show and gives us as players a place to get in trouble. And for there to be enough wealth that there could be balls to attend (or disrupt in a drunken ploy to win Annabelle's hand away from Beauregard's thieving hand). The down side is it's stable, and there's a lot going on, so what kind of trouble might face this town that we'd all have stakes in fixing together? Maybe not as part of the 7 Samurai kind of defense (maybe that too) but something we might all interact with and cause is to interact with each other? A thought I'd like to suggest is displacement creating trouble. Native tribal groups, uprooted and forced into other tribal lands, new settlers, perhaps workers forced out of jobs in big cities by automatons and relocated to the frontiers by tiny buyouts and inadequate government grants. Is there some kind of tent city? Some of that might come out in Pathways, but it's worth at least beginning to think about now. An alternative is boom town that's grown up around lumber and gold, with a mission a few hours off and little else? @Chiyako, a vampire scares me a little. They are, by definition, predatory which makes them very likely to be a problem for the rest of the players to "solve". Could I convince you to go with the mysterious eastern European noble, with wealth, strange manners, and albinoism who many locals think is a vampire? Horses are a must. While automobiles exist historically in this time frame, they were incredibly rare and unreliable. I think we should have one. Maybe Millie built it, inspired by a story in the newspaper brought from New Amsterdam via the long trip of train, postal riders and the Army Captain at the fort?