It was an art game made as a side gig by some talented artists who just wanted to make a setting they thought was cool and gave no fricks about propriety or marketability.
Accordingly it made zero money and they had to cut loose on it after a couple of years.
Running a game and it has been good.
The game is Lethal as frick so stand offs can happen and normally end in compromise.
Burn drug is bad but the only way to get instant EGO(let you roll extra dice when needed) so there is a place in the game for it beyond just wanting to get High.
Having player work with bad people to make it through parts of the game but them making plans to take them down without just suiciding is great fun.
Getting the hang of how the Cults work and work against each other does take reading (the horror!) but makes a really fun back and forth.
>If you have a group of players that are not kids or man babys try it out.
Yeah, you can still download all of the books and resources for free.
The setting is basically a Post-Post Apocalypse setting set a few hundred years after Asteroids wrecked humanity in the face in the 2070's.
Europe and Africa are the 'Core' areas of the setting as no ones managed to make contact anywhere else.
Essentially Climate Change is causing a second ice age and Europe is a primitive backwater where the technology ranges from stone age to guys running around with muskets or small organizations with higher technology from before the end of the world. (Theres all sorts of ways to get nifty artifacts and old tech.)
Africa is expierencing a renaissance of culture and economic might thanks to a greening Sahara and exploiting Europe.
The two metaplots setting has deals with a hostile lifeform that hitched a ride on the asteroids and is trying to alter mankind for some higher purpose complete with paracasual abilities.
And the other deals with a MegaCorps pulling a VaultTec and wanting to rule the wasteland by carefully and not so carefully guiding the various post apocalypse societies. (The plans also massively derailed by pissed off Corpo Execs that got backstabbed by their boss who are now nano-liches.)
>The settings wild.
Gets wilder when you swing the theme from investigating why the harvest is so low this season to why is that fat man floating? to you've been conscripted.
As well as seeing the divide between true believers and those who are aware of the hypocrisy of their Cult and willing to use it as a vehicle for their own ambitions.
>Essentially Climate Change is causing a second ice age and Europe is a primitive backwater where the technology ranges from stone age to guys running around with muskets or small organizations with higher technology from before the end of the world. (Theres all sorts of ways to get nifty artifacts and old tech.) >Africa is expierencing a renaissance of culture and economic might thanks to a greening Sahara and exploiting Europe.
So delusional fantasy land, then?
One of the leading devs is a cuckold who likes to watch his girlfriend's PC have sex with men of darker complexion. I think this answers a lot about the direction of the game and its setting.
>Essentially Climate Change is causing a second ice age and Europe is a primitive backwater where the technology ranges from stone age to guys running around with muskets or small organizations with higher technology from before the end of the world. (Theres all sorts of ways to get nifty artifacts and old tech.) >Africa is expierencing a renaissance of culture and economic might thanks to a greening Sahara and exploiting Europe.
This is such a dumb premise because of all the equatorial regions to not be as effected by a global ice age, Africa will probably be the last one to develop. It has no industry, no higher education, no rule of law, no agriculture, much less food autarky. They will be the first to get wiped out if the global supply chain fails.
The places that would probably flourish in a global ice age are places like southern China and maybe SE Asia in general. Brazil too if it can get its act together and deal with its cartel problem.
RPGs are terrible business. It was a side project from an art studio that wanted to try out something different and cool but doing splash art for Riot was a better investment of time and resources. When they got hired to do the entirety of Legends of Runeterra, it was the final nail in the coffin for this money sink.
I'm reading it now, it's a beautiful book but there's no fricking rules. It's literally 357 pages of lore and artwork. Where's the fricking rules and abilities?
It's clear the creators were more interested in worldbuilding than actually making a functional game.
That's the correct set, rebirth edition is just 2e basically, the two books are Primal Pink and Katharsys, primal Punk is like the first half and is all lore, Katharsys or whatever is the second half and has the rules
>It's clear the creators were more interested in worldbuilding than actually making a functional game.
This is the biggest single issue. The company is a design studio that had a really neat aesthetic, and some beat ideas to avt as jumping off points for storytellers. However, they struggled a lot with knowing how to make RPG mechanics that aren't kind of middling at best & slow and clunky at worst, had no idea of a good way to layout this information to make it easy for players to pick up, and they seemed very preoccupied with advancing their own lore for the setting, rather than providing GMs with more vague, entertaining plot hooks to utilize.
They were too focused on making a visually stunning product, and giving lengthy explanations (often disappointing) of their lore, rather than giving players more tools to build their own stories with.
>they seemed very preoccupied with advancing their own lore for the setting, rather than providing GMs with more vague, entertaining plot hooks to utilize.
The last big book they released, Justitian, is literally 600 pages of just setting info and plot hooks about the biggest city in the setting, the adventures being railroady as shit is true but they did at least make a pretty huge effort to cater to the sandbox crowd in the later years. There is still something going on with the setting at least, it's not totally dead yet, there's been some original art published to their new website which wasn't in any of the books or roadmap projects etc. Not sure what it'll turn out to be though other than definitely not a TTRPG.
>there's been some original art published to their new website
You wot m8?
2 years ago
Anonymous
www.sixmorevodka.com , go check around the Degenesis Concept section. That's where they're showing off their new IPs too, Titankill and WW0, although neither of those have any information about what they're going to be as far as I can tell.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Some of that stuff is rad.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Almost 600 pieces of Degenesis art. Some of which I have never seen before
Holy frick. Degenesis as a business prospect may have been destined to fail and burn. But you cannot deny that it had vigor.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Some of them will be from the cancelled projects, like the Enemoi trucks being from the Enemoi booklet, but there's definitely something going on too, there's lots of illustrations of characters from Justitian. I wanna know what this one was for though, Hellvetics are badass...
>This post is fricking delusional.
I don't think that anon is wrong, business acumen aside. This would have worked better as a wargame or a video game. Tabletop RPGs in general aren't big on setting since it's assumed the DM will be using his own setting if he's not running a module. Having a prebaked setting for a game system just discourages people from using that game system.
>Creators had no business sense. They really should have capitalized on their incredible designs by courting a niche market with terrible profit margins.
This could have worked. The factions are distinct enough to have a variety of teams, metaplot campaign books, etc. and their skill tree style rules converted over to cards with abilities for a synergy styled skimish game and filled in the terrible void in my life of having not bought enough Dark Age models when that was a thing.
Game defined by the lore and interactions of people trying to survive against a world that it Terraforming itself into something that is hostile to human life. All the while people do what people do and frick over their fellow man for a leg up the pyramid of suffering.
The stories you make are at its core human one with all that failed logic that goes with it.
That is what you want to be a toy soldier game?
What the frick is wrong with you?
>That is what you want to be a toy soldier game?
...yes? Sounds based.
28mm models of various cults fighting off zulu stuff with roaming random fungal bloom infected monsters in a post apoc table with blown out european villas would look dope af.
This is Not A Test will likely do as a base given this game is done.
>That is what you want to be a toy soldier game? What the frick is wrong with you?
Not that anon but yes? You have a very strange understanding of war games. War games benefit much more from lore than RPGs do since RPGs must tell a story that often comes at odds with the world's lore. Whereas with war games, the lore is the main draw.
This is one of those things where the accusation "do you even play war games" is appropriate. Why do you think 40k is as popular as it is? It is 100% because of the lore that is often backwards derived from the cool looking minis. This is exactly how Degenesis was created by the way. The artists were clearly an aesthetic first, lore second type of team.
I'm baffled how you can't see that a medium which is driven almost entirely by lore and aesthetics, to the point where its fans will spend weeks just painting minis, wouldn't be the best fit for a game world whose main draw is its aesthetics and lore.
Unfortunately the "War Game" crowd I have personally seen don't give two shits about lore and just make lists to win the games in their tournaments.
I have seen people online passionate about the lore but at the game itself that is all second to the +and - to win.
I know personal experience is not much more then a drop in a ocean but what I have seen is the lore seems to affect and have a greater impact in RPGs then in War Games.
I strongly disagree with that statement. How many DnD players actually know or care about supposed DnD lore? I principally play tabletop RPGs and have been DMing myself for over 10 years. The only lore that people seem to care about is the following: >Monsters >Specific modules (eg Strahd) >Some notable villains like Xanathar or Vecna >Specific places like the Underdark
A lot of the setting and world is inconsistent between DMs and your average DM will pick and choose stuff he likes from official lore and homebrew the rest. Unless you're playing in something like adventure league, you're never going to get a consistent lore experience between tables. And all of that is assuming you don't get a high effort DM who just homebrews his own setting.
War games like 40k or Battletech is different. Sure the lore isn't talked about in your average game, but it's 100% consistent, to the point where people will get in Star Wars style arguments over it. No one gives enough of a shit about DnD "official lore" to do this.
>DnD players actually know or care about supposed DnD lore
DnD has lore?
>RPG's does not only mean the generic bore fest that is DnD
Completely agree, frick that game and the shit that think it is anything but meh.
2 years ago
Anonymous
DnD has more officially published lore than most tabletop RPGs. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is World of Darkness. Hell, GURPS explicitly does not have lore.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Hell, GURPS explicitly does not have lore.
It has over a dozen original settings (and four times as many historical and licenced ones) and a metasetting called Infinite Worlds that links them all and has lore.
But it is certainly all OPTIONAL stuff, they aren't forcing it on you.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>DnD has lore?
Dark Sun, Eberron, Planescape, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance and more all have lots of sourcebooks and some have a bunch of novels.
DnD has more officially published lore than most tabletop RPGs. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is World of Darkness. Hell, GURPS explicitly does not have lore.
>It's clear the creators were more interested in worldbuilding than actually making a functional game.
This is the biggest single issue. The company is a design studio that had a really neat aesthetic, and some beat ideas to avt as jumping off points for storytellers. However, they struggled a lot with knowing how to make RPG mechanics that aren't kind of middling at best & slow and clunky at worst, had no idea of a good way to layout this information to make it easy for players to pick up, and they seemed very preoccupied with advancing their own lore for the setting, rather than providing GMs with more vague, entertaining plot hooks to utilize.
They were too focused on making a visually stunning product, and giving lengthy explanations (often disappointing) of their lore, rather than giving players more tools to build their own stories with.
Comparing any lore thing to D&D is futile, because it is the default entry point to the hobby and that fricks up the proportions of anything. You can't compare it to anything in terms of why people play it.
Compared to other games, people absolutely do play games because they want to exist in the world of the game, and the mechanical cohension of the game is a barrier to be overcome rather than an invitation. Shadowrun is a mess but people want the world. CoC and Delta Green are played for their worlds and the mechanics don't turn most people off. GURPS is mechanically good for most games but without a world people want to inhabit very few people play it.
>since RPGs must tell a story that often comes at odds with the world's lore
You use a setting BECAUSE you want to use it to facilitate your own plot. That's the point to it being an RPG setting in the first place.
Now, would Degenesis be a frickin kickass skirmish wargame? Sure, absolutely. But the setting and lore were much more conducive to a proper RPG campaign than a wargame.
If you are in a Cult there are some items at are only made by them and if you have points in Resource background they will give you said item to use.
Background shit is your charterers knowledge/trust they have gained in their Cult.
Having a lot of points in Resources means you have gain a ton of trust in the Cult and they will give you the good shit to get missions done.
Need a horse to get to x location that is time sensitive? If you have the trust of the right people you can borrow one.
>007 did not pay for his gear but was trusted with the best. >A starting out agent just get basic shit
One of the best RPG out there.
Pretty complicated to run, campaigns are hardcore, ennemies are very lethal... But lore is amazing, and the world is amazing.
Try it and get hooked.
Which you can fight with the help of Time Oracles in Spain.
Fighting the African slavers and burning their tanks and boats Wolverine style is fully in lore and fun as frick to play.
>people don't read the books >just the wiki >b***h and moan about not problems with the setting
Hellvetics get literally two bullets per 20 decades of gameplay and Judges are better of throwing their hammers away after a single swing and then trying to to stab something awkwardly with knives like everybody else.
That whole system was a huge clusterfrick and no wonder that nobody ever gave a single shit about it.
Nod an argument. There's nothing to do, you either play the generic post apo or don't play at all because every official adventure was about sitting on your ass while DM reads the deep lore about the ancient israelites while you have no input whatsoever and npcs do everything anyway.
Nobody played it and nobody cared because it was garbage all around. You had the pictures of hot girls and ripped dudes and nothing behind it.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Nod an argument. >DM reads the deep lore about the ancient israelites
Good luck on the GED chief, you're going to need it.
It was a very nice setting with great art but very poor mechanics, so it didnt sell and they scrapped it.
My only regret is they scrapped it just before the Enemoi supement, which I was loking forward to. You can find some concept art for it on their site and it looked neat as frick.
>Pros:
Best art and aesthetics any RPG has ever had.
Intriguing, complex and relatively original setting.
Detailed factions with lots of depth and interplay. >Cons:
Slow and clunky system with awkward combat.
Bad editing makes it difficult to track down rules.
Railroad adventures with controversial narratives.
Cult-like community that worships the creators.
He another tech-bro who thought he could rule the world and got shafted by crazier Not-Musk.
His goal as a Bosnian was to make Islam but focused on him and his Classic studies.
He is also the crazy heresy for that religion which is really him existing as a diffused nanoswarm across all his Hassasin-like cultists on Crete.
There's a decent amount of substance, there's a lot of books available and they all contribute something to the game, even if a lot of people hate the adventures for being pretty difficult to run as anything but a railroad (the authors for whatever reason decided to only write one pathway through the adventures which assumes certain actions by the PCs, and while it's not untrue that the NPCs aren't detailed enough etc that you can adapt to the actions of players, it's not as easy to handle as a more traditionally modern adventure). I definitely don't think it's unplayable, the system has nowhere near as many moving parts as something like Shadowrun or Storyteller/WoD.
>while it's not untrue that the NPCs aren't detailed
*while it's not untrue that the NPCs ARE detailed. They each usually get a full page of bio with their motivations and personality etc, plus the backstory is usually pretty detailed so you can make shifts work, but there's little direct support for it.
Was confused and had to read that several times before I noticed the correction.
They had the right mindset, most players are incapable of taking their own path and would rather wait around for the next thing in the story to happen.
The roadmap adventures seemed to be on a bit of a different path, one of them even had a "roll for which encounter you get" section, although I think that one had a different writer. Makes me wonder what would have happened if they'd kept going... Bros... I miss it.
>They had the right mindset, most players are incapable of taking their own path and would rather wait around for the next thing in the story to happen.
No, they really don't.
One of the adventures is presented as a multiple choice "choose which faction to side with," with the book assuming that you will side with the money-grubbing African invaders instead of the noble Frankan Resistance, the techpriest conspiracy, the hard-done-by union of scrappers and scavengers and the Jokeresque gangster who just wants to watch the world burn. Everything but the first couple of pages of the adventure is written under the assumption that the players will remain absolutely loyal to the Africans throughout it.
I thought they were being weaponized by their priestly class, which in turn are agents of their own Asteroid entity to remove the other Asteroid entities in Europe since they were all competing to shape the Earth in their own unique alien image.
The solution isn't what they proposed in the first module book. >this doctor NPC will follow the players around while they are in the anabaptist town >if they get stuck, he will come to whatever conclusion will drive the party forward >if the party all fail a necessary skill check to progress, he will perform the action needed to pass and will succeed so they can proceed >if they try to wander off script, he will berate them until they return to following the module's plot
They literally tell you "use this DMPC to make sure they don't deviate from the module's story at any time, and do anything to ensure they aren't moving from scene to scene. That's quite masturbatory, and goes well beyond keeping players on track, that's strapping them down into a carnival ride and driving them through a guided tour.
They make money doing advertising and concept designs for other people. As a game studio, they are pretty mediocre. Yes, have a flashy production design and illustrations. On the other hand, the background and game system are very weak.
I imagine they have also cancelled their other RPG project.
Basically what is happening here right now. Tens of randos with little to no knowledge of the game's content started to shoot their opinion about one aspect of the game they had managed to isolate and blew things out of proportions giving the whole thing a bad rep.
Take the system for instance. It's presented on this board as being terribad which is a blatant lie. Is it perfect? Far from it. But it works just fine without any need for tweaking but hardcore simulationists hate it.
Since the game had a very narrow target audience this constant smear by clueless randos killed its chances for succes. With such a costly production process it had no way to work on the long run.
That being said, the IP isn't dead.
>Pros:
Best art and aesthetics any RPG has ever had.
Intriguing, complex and relatively original setting.
Detailed factions with lots of depth and interplay. >Cons:
Slow and clunky system with awkward combat.
Bad editing makes it difficult to track down rules.
Railroad adventures with controversial narratives.
Cult-like community that worships the creators.
was correct when he mentioned a cult-like community that worships the creators.
I appreciate the darkness and complexity of the setting. Some pretty great fiction and lore surrounding it.
Also a ton of nudity in the artwork. Great fun to see art of a redhaired warrior gunslinger girl on one page, then come across art of her literally sucking on a wiener a chapter later.
Now you made me horny. Where can I see her suck on it?
I'd like to know as well, since I don't recall anything like that in the books at all. Like, sure, there is some really weird shit in Black Atlantic, especially when it comes to the character Eris, who is seemingly never depicted in the art unless her ass, breasts, or pussy are on display (which, afaict, even people on the Discord found a bit off-putting), but I don't remember any blowjobs, let alone ones featuring redheads.
Would it really benefit if it kept going and reached Pathfinder levels of bloat? Or if they merely released more railroad adventures?
Can't you just play it neatly with what exists already?
It was a good setting, though I never managed to get anyone to play with me. Shame it died. Sad they never did anything with Campobasso.
I also kinda like the idea of the jehammedans and how their supreme evil (or the closest thing to) is literally just a fisherman its apostle peter
>Muh art! Muh setting! Muh metaplot? >But what do you do in this game? Uuh you make skill rolls and sometimes fight stuff I guess.
It's the same as every other Trad RPG. Why would anyone buy the expensive one?
Magic is more believeable to me and easier to suspend disbelief for than an ascendant africa.
I appreciate devs with some passion for their work more than caring about marketability but I just can't begin to care about degenesis.
My homebrew has no blacks at all
C'mon anon, you already know that there's no in universe explanation, no matter how reasonable, that's going to get these sorts of people to stop seething and coping about Africa in the game.
People seething about an ascendant
afriday conveniently forgetting its mainly restricted to the mediteranean coast and spain, with the psychovores inevitably going to drive them out, alongside psychological devilry phenomenon surging throughout their culture that only the anubians seem to understand, and whatever the end game entails, they arent telling
All signs point to "not built to last", which is why they started inviting Spitalians over to figure out a way to stop the murderous alien mega kudzu
I'm racist but it's still kind of frustrating to see shit like that.
People seething about an ascendant
afriday conveniently forgetting its mainly restricted to the mediteranean coast and spain, with the psychovores inevitably going to drive them out, alongside psychological devilry phenomenon surging throughout their culture that only the anubians seem to understand, and whatever the end game entails, they arent telling
All signs point to "not built to last", which is why they started inviting Spitalians over to figure out a way to stop the murderous alien mega kudzu
I personally like how no region is really in the best shape, civilization seems to be crumbling everywhere except maybe Italy and the Balkans.
Very cool setting, but it is impossible to play it. We've started multiple times and recovering from injury makes the characters unplayable for a long time. Great arts.
>getting your posts from other threads
It was an art game made as a side gig by some talented artists who just wanted to make a setting they thought was cool and gave no fricks about propriety or marketability.
Accordingly it made zero money and they had to cut loose on it after a couple of years.
Interesting, it looks cool but I can't imagine the kind of game I'd even run in it. Are the rules interesting at least?
Running a game and it has been good.
The game is Lethal as frick so stand offs can happen and normally end in compromise.
Burn drug is bad but the only way to get instant EGO(let you roll extra dice when needed) so there is a place in the game for it beyond just wanting to get High.
Having player work with bad people to make it through parts of the game but them making plans to take them down without just suiciding is great fun.
Getting the hang of how the Cults work and work against each other does take reading (the horror!) but makes a really fun back and forth.
>If you have a group of players that are not kids or man babys try it out.
Personal project with bad business model and little marketing research.
What was it, and is it worth checking out?
Yeah, you can still download all of the books and resources for free.
The setting is basically a Post-Post Apocalypse setting set a few hundred years after Asteroids wrecked humanity in the face in the 2070's.
Europe and Africa are the 'Core' areas of the setting as no ones managed to make contact anywhere else.
Essentially Climate Change is causing a second ice age and Europe is a primitive backwater where the technology ranges from stone age to guys running around with muskets or small organizations with higher technology from before the end of the world. (Theres all sorts of ways to get nifty artifacts and old tech.)
Africa is expierencing a renaissance of culture and economic might thanks to a greening Sahara and exploiting Europe.
The two metaplots setting has deals with a hostile lifeform that hitched a ride on the asteroids and is trying to alter mankind for some higher purpose complete with paracasual abilities.
And the other deals with a MegaCorps pulling a VaultTec and wanting to rule the wasteland by carefully and not so carefully guiding the various post apocalypse societies. (The plans also massively derailed by pissed off Corpo Execs that got backstabbed by their boss who are now nano-liches.)
The settings wild.
>The settings wild.
Gets wilder when you swing the theme from investigating why the harvest is so low this season to why is that fat man floating? to you've been conscripted.
As well as seeing the divide between true believers and those who are aware of the hypocrisy of their Cult and willing to use it as a vehicle for their own ambitions.
>Essentially Climate Change is causing a second ice age and Europe is a primitive backwater where the technology ranges from stone age to guys running around with muskets or small organizations with higher technology from before the end of the world. (Theres all sorts of ways to get nifty artifacts and old tech.)
>Africa is expierencing a renaissance of culture and economic might thanks to a greening Sahara and exploiting Europe.
So delusional fantasy land, then?
Africa got near hit by an asteroid that changed the Flora. Europe took five meteorites which are now spitting angry creatures not very human friendly.
I hate those stupid scenarios of forcing Africa into world power. I was kinda interested reading this thread but now I lost my interest
>He got filtered by literal spear-chuckers
Lel.
One of the leading devs is a cuckold who likes to watch his girlfriend's PC have sex with men of darker complexion. I think this answers a lot about the direction of the game and its setting.
Pretty gay of you to be thinking about men of darker complexion so much anon, I think this answers a lot about the direction of you and your sex life.
Did you think that was going to be a sweet zinger? You just come off as pathetic, like you took his post personally.
Cute bawd though
>Essentially Climate Change is causing a second ice age and Europe is a primitive backwater where the technology ranges from stone age to guys running around with muskets or small organizations with higher technology from before the end of the world. (Theres all sorts of ways to get nifty artifacts and old tech.)
>Africa is expierencing a renaissance of culture and economic might thanks to a greening Sahara and exploiting Europe.
This is such a dumb premise because of all the equatorial regions to not be as effected by a global ice age, Africa will probably be the last one to develop. It has no industry, no higher education, no rule of law, no agriculture, much less food autarky. They will be the first to get wiped out if the global supply chain fails.
The places that would probably flourish in a global ice age are places like southern China and maybe SE Asia in general. Brazil too if it can get its act together and deal with its cartel problem.
Creators had no business sense. They really should have capitalized on their incredible designs by making a miniature wargame line.
RPGs are terrible business. It was a side project from an art studio that wanted to try out something different and cool but doing splash art for Riot was a better investment of time and resources. When they got hired to do the entirety of Legends of Runeterra, it was the final nail in the coffin for this money sink.
This post is fricking delusional.
I'm reading it now, it's a beautiful book but there's no fricking rules. It's literally 357 pages of lore and artwork. Where's the fricking rules and abilities?
It's clear the creators were more interested in worldbuilding than actually making a functional game.
You might be reading the setting book instead of the rulebook. There's two core books.
>two core books
I picked up Degenesis: Rebirth edition. Why would you call it a core rulebook if it's a setting book?
Yes.
That's the correct set, rebirth edition is just 2e basically, the two books are Primal Pink and Katharsys, primal Punk is like the first half and is all lore, Katharsys or whatever is the second half and has the rules
>It's clear the creators were more interested in worldbuilding than actually making a functional game.
This is the biggest single issue. The company is a design studio that had a really neat aesthetic, and some beat ideas to avt as jumping off points for storytellers. However, they struggled a lot with knowing how to make RPG mechanics that aren't kind of middling at best & slow and clunky at worst, had no idea of a good way to layout this information to make it easy for players to pick up, and they seemed very preoccupied with advancing their own lore for the setting, rather than providing GMs with more vague, entertaining plot hooks to utilize.
They were too focused on making a visually stunning product, and giving lengthy explanations (often disappointing) of their lore, rather than giving players more tools to build their own stories with.
>they seemed very preoccupied with advancing their own lore for the setting, rather than providing GMs with more vague, entertaining plot hooks to utilize.
The last big book they released, Justitian, is literally 600 pages of just setting info and plot hooks about the biggest city in the setting, the adventures being railroady as shit is true but they did at least make a pretty huge effort to cater to the sandbox crowd in the later years. There is still something going on with the setting at least, it's not totally dead yet, there's been some original art published to their new website which wasn't in any of the books or roadmap projects etc. Not sure what it'll turn out to be though other than definitely not a TTRPG.
>there's been some original art published to their new website
You wot m8?
www.sixmorevodka.com , go check around the Degenesis Concept section. That's where they're showing off their new IPs too, Titankill and WW0, although neither of those have any information about what they're going to be as far as I can tell.
Some of that stuff is rad.
>Almost 600 pieces of Degenesis art. Some of which I have never seen before
Holy frick. Degenesis as a business prospect may have been destined to fail and burn. But you cannot deny that it had vigor.
Some of them will be from the cancelled projects, like the Enemoi trucks being from the Enemoi booklet, but there's definitely something going on too, there's lots of illustrations of characters from Justitian. I wanna know what this one was for though, Hellvetics are badass...
>This post is fricking delusional.
I don't think that anon is wrong, business acumen aside. This would have worked better as a wargame or a video game. Tabletop RPGs in general aren't big on setting since it's assumed the DM will be using his own setting if he's not running a module. Having a prebaked setting for a game system just discourages people from using that game system.
That anon was wrong, but you're even worse.
Okay moron
>RPGs are terrible business.
This is unfortunately true. Do not get into Tabletop game design as anything besides a hobby.
>Creators had no business sense. They really should have capitalized on their incredible designs by courting a niche market with terrible profit margins.
lel, tabletop miniature games are making absolute bank right now, moron. Literally more than ever before, to a far larger audience than ever before.
This could have worked. The factions are distinct enough to have a variety of teams, metaplot campaign books, etc. and their skill tree style rules converted over to cards with abilities for a synergy styled skimish game and filled in the terrible void in my life of having not bought enough Dark Age models when that was a thing.
And you have even less.
Absolutely this. A de genesis war game would’ve been great
Lol it's like you're trying to entice the devs with bad ideas on purpose.
I mean, financially it’s a bad move. But in a perfect world Degenesis is perfect for a skirmish wargame
Or video game
Would have been waaaay better as a miniatures skirmish game than as an rpg.
Game defined by the lore and interactions of people trying to survive against a world that it Terraforming itself into something that is hostile to human life. All the while people do what people do and frick over their fellow man for a leg up the pyramid of suffering.
The stories you make are at its core human one with all that failed logic that goes with it.
That is what you want to be a toy soldier game?
What the frick is wrong with you?
>That is what you want to be a toy soldier game?
...yes? Sounds based.
28mm models of various cults fighting off zulu stuff with roaming random fungal bloom infected monsters in a post apoc table with blown out european villas would look dope af.
This is Not A Test will likely do as a base given this game is done.
>That is what you want to be a toy soldier game? What the frick is wrong with you?
Not that anon but yes? You have a very strange understanding of war games. War games benefit much more from lore than RPGs do since RPGs must tell a story that often comes at odds with the world's lore. Whereas with war games, the lore is the main draw.
This is one of those things where the accusation "do you even play war games" is appropriate. Why do you think 40k is as popular as it is? It is 100% because of the lore that is often backwards derived from the cool looking minis. This is exactly how Degenesis was created by the way. The artists were clearly an aesthetic first, lore second type of team.
I'm baffled how you can't see that a medium which is driven almost entirely by lore and aesthetics, to the point where its fans will spend weeks just painting minis, wouldn't be the best fit for a game world whose main draw is its aesthetics and lore.
Unfortunately the "War Game" crowd I have personally seen don't give two shits about lore and just make lists to win the games in their tournaments.
I have seen people online passionate about the lore but at the game itself that is all second to the +and - to win.
I know personal experience is not much more then a drop in a ocean but what I have seen is the lore seems to affect and have a greater impact in RPGs then in War Games.
I strongly disagree with that statement. How many DnD players actually know or care about supposed DnD lore? I principally play tabletop RPGs and have been DMing myself for over 10 years. The only lore that people seem to care about is the following:
>Monsters
>Specific modules (eg Strahd)
>Some notable villains like Xanathar or Vecna
>Specific places like the Underdark
A lot of the setting and world is inconsistent between DMs and your average DM will pick and choose stuff he likes from official lore and homebrew the rest. Unless you're playing in something like adventure league, you're never going to get a consistent lore experience between tables. And all of that is assuming you don't get a high effort DM who just homebrews his own setting.
War games like 40k or Battletech is different. Sure the lore isn't talked about in your average game, but it's 100% consistent, to the point where people will get in Star Wars style arguments over it. No one gives enough of a shit about DnD "official lore" to do this.
>DnD players actually know or care about supposed DnD lore
DnD has lore?
>RPG's does not only mean the generic bore fest that is DnD
Completely agree, frick that game and the shit that think it is anything but meh.
DnD has more officially published lore than most tabletop RPGs. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is World of Darkness. Hell, GURPS explicitly does not have lore.
>Hell, GURPS explicitly does not have lore.
It has over a dozen original settings (and four times as many historical and licenced ones) and a metasetting called Infinite Worlds that links them all and has lore.
But it is certainly all OPTIONAL stuff, they aren't forcing it on you.
>DnD has lore?
Dark Sun, Eberron, Planescape, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance and more all have lots of sourcebooks and some have a bunch of novels.
Comparing any lore thing to D&D is futile, because it is the default entry point to the hobby and that fricks up the proportions of anything. You can't compare it to anything in terms of why people play it.
Compared to other games, people absolutely do play games because they want to exist in the world of the game, and the mechanical cohension of the game is a barrier to be overcome rather than an invitation. Shadowrun is a mess but people want the world. CoC and Delta Green are played for their worlds and the mechanics don't turn most people off. GURPS is mechanically good for most games but without a world people want to inhabit very few people play it.
>since RPGs must tell a story that often comes at odds with the world's lore
You use a setting BECAUSE you want to use it to facilitate your own plot. That's the point to it being an RPG setting in the first place.
Now, would Degenesis be a frickin kickass skirmish wargame? Sure, absolutely. But the setting and lore were much more conducive to a proper RPG campaign than a wargame.
How the frick did wealth work in this game?
If you have the score you can buy it or it's fre
You can buy shit with Drafts(money) like normal.
If you are in a Cult there are some items at are only made by them and if you have points in Resource background they will give you said item to use.
Background shit is your charterers knowledge/trust they have gained in their Cult.
Having a lot of points in Resources means you have gain a ton of trust in the Cult and they will give you the good shit to get missions done.
Need a horse to get to x location that is time sensitive? If you have the trust of the right people you can borrow one.
>007 did not pay for his gear but was trusted with the best.
>A starting out agent just get basic shit
Hope that explains it well enough
One of the best RPG out there.
Pretty complicated to run, campaigns are hardcore, ennemies are very lethal... But lore is amazing, and the world is amazing.
Try it and get hooked.
>. But lore is amazing
BBC and tha joo.
Which you can fight with the help of Time Oracles in Spain.
Fighting the African slavers and burning their tanks and boats Wolverine style is fully in lore and fun as frick to play.
>people don't read the books
>just the wiki
>b***h and moan about not problems with the setting
Hellvetics get literally two bullets per 20 decades of gameplay and Judges are better of throwing their hammers away after a single swing and then trying to to stab something awkwardly with knives like everybody else.
That whole system was a huge clusterfrick and no wonder that nobody ever gave a single shit about it.
Damn must have left school around 5th grade huh chief?
>Your mom yell at you to get your GED stuff done this week?
Nod an argument. There's nothing to do, you either play the generic post apo or don't play at all because every official adventure was about sitting on your ass while DM reads the deep lore about the ancient israelites while you have no input whatsoever and npcs do everything anyway.
Nobody played it and nobody cared because it was garbage all around. You had the pictures of hot girls and ripped dudes and nothing behind it.
>Nod an argument.
>DM reads the deep lore about the ancient israelites
Good luck on the GED chief, you're going to need it.
It was a very nice setting with great art but very poor mechanics, so it didnt sell and they scrapped it.
My only regret is they scrapped it just before the Enemoi supement, which I was loking forward to. You can find some concept art for it on their site and it looked neat as frick.
Not enough people were buying their super expensive books. The system, art and setting were good but the price was too high.
>Pros:
Best art and aesthetics any RPG has ever had.
Intriguing, complex and relatively original setting.
Detailed factions with lots of depth and interplay.
>Cons:
Slow and clunky system with awkward combat.
Bad editing makes it difficult to track down rules.
Railroad adventures with controversial narratives.
Cult-like community that worships the creators.
Alright OP, you scheming little israelite, I'll download your RPG book. If it's good, I'll apologize for calling you a scheming little israelite.
I'm so sorry OP.
Who the frick was the ram god and what does he want
He another tech-bro who thought he could rule the world and got shafted by crazier Not-Musk.
His goal as a Bosnian was to make Islam but focused on him and his Classic studies.
He is also the crazy heresy for that religion which is really him existing as a diffused nanoswarm across all his Hassasin-like cultists on Crete.
Man this game always sounds so cool I wish it hadn’t died
Does anyone have that fan made supplement set in America? I’ve always felt the USA is a better setting for postapoc
Literally just go and play Fallout.
Based and GURPSpilled
>Fallout tabeltop
>Not S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
Go die from autoerotic asphyxiation.
God what a cool looking, unplayable, nonsensical mess that game was.
Is this like Alpha Omega - all style no substance?
There's a decent amount of substance, there's a lot of books available and they all contribute something to the game, even if a lot of people hate the adventures for being pretty difficult to run as anything but a railroad (the authors for whatever reason decided to only write one pathway through the adventures which assumes certain actions by the PCs, and while it's not untrue that the NPCs aren't detailed enough etc that you can adapt to the actions of players, it's not as easy to handle as a more traditionally modern adventure). I definitely don't think it's unplayable, the system has nowhere near as many moving parts as something like Shadowrun or Storyteller/WoD.
>while it's not untrue that the NPCs aren't detailed
*while it's not untrue that the NPCs ARE detailed. They each usually get a full page of bio with their motivations and personality etc, plus the backstory is usually pretty detailed so you can make shifts work, but there's little direct support for it.
Was confused and had to read that several times before I noticed the correction.
They had the right mindset, most players are incapable of taking their own path and would rather wait around for the next thing in the story to happen.
The roadmap adventures seemed to be on a bit of a different path, one of them even had a "roll for which encounter you get" section, although I think that one had a different writer. Makes me wonder what would have happened if they'd kept going... Bros... I miss it.
>They had the right mindset, most players are incapable of taking their own path and would rather wait around for the next thing in the story to happen.
No, they really don't.
One of the adventures is presented as a multiple choice "choose which faction to side with," with the book assuming that you will side with the money-grubbing African invaders instead of the noble Frankan Resistance, the techpriest conspiracy, the hard-done-by union of scrappers and scavengers and the Jokeresque gangster who just wants to watch the world burn. Everything but the first couple of pages of the adventure is written under the assumption that the players will remain absolutely loyal to the Africans throughout it.
They aren't even money grubbing. They're just buttholes who came there to be buttholes for sake of being buttholes. It's quite bizarre.
I thought they were being weaponized by their priestly class, which in turn are agents of their own Asteroid entity to remove the other Asteroid entities in Europe since they were all competing to shape the Earth in their own unique alien image.
The solution isn't what they proposed in the first module book.
>this doctor NPC will follow the players around while they are in the anabaptist town
>if they get stuck, he will come to whatever conclusion will drive the party forward
>if the party all fail a necessary skill check to progress, he will perform the action needed to pass and will succeed so they can proceed
>if they try to wander off script, he will berate them until they return to following the module's plot
They literally tell you "use this DMPC to make sure they don't deviate from the module's story at any time, and do anything to ensure they aren't moving from scene to scene. That's quite masturbatory, and goes well beyond keeping players on track, that's strapping them down into a carnival ride and driving them through a guided tour.
Literally learned about this RPG from this thread ... immeasurably sad that I didn't know it before.
Feels bad, man.
They make money doing advertising and concept designs for other people. As a game studio, they are pretty mediocre. Yes, have a flashy production design and illustrations. On the other hand, the background and game system are very weak.
I imagine they have also cancelled their other RPG project.
Basically what is happening here right now. Tens of randos with little to no knowledge of the game's content started to shoot their opinion about one aspect of the game they had managed to isolate and blew things out of proportions giving the whole thing a bad rep.
Take the system for instance. It's presented on this board as being terribad which is a blatant lie. Is it perfect? Far from it. But it works just fine without any need for tweaking but hardcore simulationists hate it.
Since the game had a very narrow target audience this constant smear by clueless randos killed its chances for succes. With such a costly production process it had no way to work on the long run.
That being said, the IP isn't dead.
I see that
was correct when he mentioned a cult-like community that worships the creators.
Frick off samegay
Case and point, none of the cons quoted here hold on against an actual GMing or playing of the game. But know that you'd have to try it at least once.
I appreciate the darkness and complexity of the setting. Some pretty great fiction and lore surrounding it.
Also a ton of nudity in the artwork. Great fun to see art of a redhaired warrior gunslinger girl on one page, then come across art of her literally sucking on a wiener a chapter later.
Was it a darker wiener?
You better believe it.
Now you made me horny. Where can I see her suck on it?
I'd like to know as well, since I don't recall anything like that in the books at all. Like, sure, there is some really weird shit in Black Atlantic, especially when it comes to the character Eris, who is seemingly never depicted in the art unless her ass, breasts, or pussy are on display (which, afaict, even people on the Discord found a bit off-putting), but I don't remember any blowjobs, let alone ones featuring redheads.
i miss it bros
Would it really benefit if it kept going and reached Pathfinder levels of bloat? Or if they merely released more railroad adventures?
Can't you just play it neatly with what exists already?
Yeah, it's art and foremost. Reading the damn thing feels like trying to power through a brick wall with your head.
never heard of it redpill me
Style over substance.
They should have followed D&D's success and made monster manuals and new Classes and alternate planes to keep on milking their cows.
No would impregnate the Pregnostic. Cowards.
It's written in the shells, anon, you have to give me your seed, the future/past/present depends on it.
I raided their art for my online sessions, having used it in mecha-based scifi and fantasy both.
Good shit, shame it didn't work out.
>gossamer filaments
>cusps
It was a good setting, though I never managed to get anyone to play with me. Shame it died. Sad they never did anything with Campobasso.
I also kinda like the idea of the jehammedans and how their supreme evil (or the closest thing to) is literally just a fisherman its apostle peter
>Muh art! Muh setting! Muh metaplot?
>But what do you do in this game? Uuh you make skill rolls and sometimes fight stuff I guess.
It's the same as every other Trad RPG. Why would anyone buy the expensive one?
The game is free
Yet print copies were expensive. That doesn't sound like a good business model.
It wasn't. But it was the side project of a very prolific art studio.
Never looked much into the studio that made it. By "prolific" you mean obscure art studio in Sweden or...?
They're the preferred concept artists for Riot, the studio behind the most popular game in the world.
Oh you
Magic is more believeable to me and easier to suspend disbelief for than an ascendant africa.
I appreciate devs with some passion for their work more than caring about marketability but I just can't begin to care about degenesis.
My homebrew has no blacks at all
Even if Africa has been fricked with so much by the various events that it's basically incomparable to Africa as we know it?
C'mon anon, you already know that there's no in universe explanation, no matter how reasonable, that's going to get these sorts of people to stop seething and coping about Africa in the game.
As the anon you're talking about, yes, unfortunately that is correct.
What about non-black Africans? Arab, Berbers, Copts, israelites?
People seething about an ascendant
afriday conveniently forgetting its mainly restricted to the mediteranean coast and spain, with the psychovores inevitably going to drive them out, alongside psychological devilry phenomenon surging throughout their culture that only the anubians seem to understand, and whatever the end game entails, they arent telling
All signs point to "not built to last", which is why they started inviting Spitalians over to figure out a way to stop the murderous alien mega kudzu
Stop explaining logic to people whose cannot grasp the idea of someone whose shits are lighter than their skin being able to count past 2.
I'm racist but it's still kind of frustrating to see shit like that.
I personally like how no region is really in the best shape, civilization seems to be crumbling everywhere except maybe Italy and the Balkans.
There was some hope earlier in the timeline. But it felt like a false hope, borne solely from ignorance of how bad things truly were.
>Jehammed = Jyh(ad)+(Mu)hammed
Bravo, Marco, bravo. Peak professional worldbuilding, exemplar to us all.
Seethe.
Very cool setting, but it is impossible to play it. We've started multiple times and recovering from injury makes the characters unplayable for a long time. Great arts.
Kinda said nobody posted sexy Anubian sorceress but what else can you expect with cucks who love manmeat?