Emlia + Waylights - Homebrew System and Setting

[spiritplumber]

Hello!

I've written this over the course of a week in order to do something that wasn't related to electronics or robotics.

http://emlia.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Waylight.Waylight

I tried to take it to /tg/ for evaluation but was universally mocked.

The problem I have is that I want to use Riley's Emlia system for play, but it's mostly a miniatures game, and he never quite finished the RPG rules. And now he's depressed about nobody having ever played Emlia since 2009, and won't touch it :(

http://www.emlia.org/

I'll try to talk to him... In the meantime, how does the setting look?

[spiritplumber]

Guess /tg/ was right eh?

[Rizban]

You barely gave it two hours. It usually takes at least a day before someone notices your thread and has time to review it, especially if it's something with some content to it as opposed to a single homebrewed D&D class or similar. I know that I've posted threads here that never got a single response to them.

Also, you don't really say anything about this other than that you wrote something and provided a link. Honestly, I thought this was a bot post advertising something at first glance. If you'd like to get some honest critique, it's usually best to do something to "sell" us on what you've made, some blurb about it to make someone want to read it instead of just posting a link.

All that said, don't get discouraged so fast. It was just two hours. This may be the internet, but that doesn't guarantee you instant gratification.


Anyway, I'm going to go take a look at it and see what you've got there.

[spiritplumber]

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be rude.

About a blurb, this is what I have - it can be done better for sure, but doing it better is beyond my skills.


Humanity, both Prime or non, has recovered in the fifty generations after the botched Alien Invasion. Despite the world's massive retaliatory xenoforming by the now-gone Invaders, life as we know it survives and even thrives thanks to the Slipstream, the massive weather formation that keeps the upper atmosphere free of the fungal forests and corrosive fogs that have colonized the surface. Thanks in part to pervasive psi, civilization has managed to reemerge, both in the Gray Plateau of Tsuxia and in the high-altitude lands that emerge like islands from the mists.

Also known as: What if Nausicaa and X-Com's bad ending had a baby and it came out looking a lot like Crimsom Skies / Storm Hawks? (It' not plagiarism, it's research, dammit!)

[Bhu]

Guess /tg/ was right eh?

Dude, /tg/ mocks most people. Don't feel discouraged. I like the setting so far :smallsmile:

[Rizban]

The setting seems interesting, though not something I would personally play. I've never much liked the everyone's a psi-evolved human settings.

Most of the races seem pretty much meh. The fact that Lemlins and the other alien species survived only by breeding with earth lifeforms is kinda squick. Seems odd that they xenoform the planet and then can't live on it except by effectively obliterating themselves genetically and socially.

The timeline is kinda wonky, but you say it's supposed to be. Still makes figuring out what actually happened a bit odd. From what I gather, they land in force pre-Crusades, xenoform the planet to obliterate native life and make the planet suitable for them, then they all die off and humans win. Except that they didn't land pre-Crusades and 999AD isn't 999AD and then MORE Crusades happened in the 1000s-1100s. Or something like that...

I don't really have any comments on the setting besides that.


I skimmed through some of the system information. It has promise, but finding the relevant information to actually sit down and play is kind of difficult. It could really use some organization and explanation beyond the sample sheets and quick blurbs... or maybe I just missed where it's written out. I guess to really understand what's happening with the system, I'll need to read up on the emlia site.

Anyway, it seems like a good basis for a game setting, but I just am not seeing an easy point to jump in and learn the system.

[spiritplumber]

Thanks, you're right about history - I cleaned it up. The idea is/was to have dates roughly match real-world history, for ease of immersion. "Oh, yes, there was a world war in around 1915. The industrial revolution was around 1850." This is still the case, one just has to add 1000 to the year.


About psi, that's the part that is really in flux -- we mostly play 3.5 and I was faced with the problem of nobody wanting to play non-caster. The solution was to say that even pure warrior builds have enough psi to at least use magic devices reliably.


About the interbreeding, thing is, the Invaders -lost- the war after escalating it. By then however they had already launched their bioweapons. The expectation was that they'd wait in orbit while the new ecosystem took hold, but it didn't work.


I pretty much went with X-Com alien races here. Lemlins are roughly what's left of the Sectoid technicians. Gorks are Mutons (I think it shows in the picture). The alien "master" caste was Ethereals, and Geeps are originally Ethereal/human hybrids just as womps are originally Muton/human hybrids. Streamies are mostly human with a bit of everything mixed in, which is really why they're the default race.

I was trying to generate a story reason to cover the usual fantasy races basically. Very roughly, Streamies=humans, Geeps=elves, Plats=dwarves, Womps=halforks/orks.

[Bhu]

Are the Meganeura inspired more by godzilla or nausica?