Today’s Penny Arcade is a near perfect commentary on the Unity debacle.

Whole comic linked above, but here’s the one-panel that is perfect.

  • Cylusthevirus
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    2210 months ago

    CEO as cosmic horror is a concept with legs. This’ll spice up my next cyberpunk campaign.

    • Match!!
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      710 months ago

      I’m a proponent of the idea that company charters and financial reports are world-warping rituals that turn the company itself into a self-aware, self-serving horror

      • Cylusthevirus
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        410 months ago

        I love that setting, but those mechanics. Ooof. Way too heavy. I actually meant the genre not the system. In reality I’ve been running The Sprawl but I’m looking for a narrative forward cyberpunk game that can accommodate urban fantasy.

        • Nom Nom Nom
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          110 months ago

          I use ICE’s Cyberspace and throw out everything that slows down the story. Works well enough. It was written before most of the world was online, so still has a lot of the quaint charm of early cyberpunk.

          • Cylusthevirus
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            110 months ago

            Lol, one of the two options listed is what I’m using. Need to find something with support for fantasy stuff and if possible, alternative hacking rules. Hamish who wrote it mentioned he wasn’t super happy with how it turned out.

          • TwilightVulpine
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            10 months ago

            I still need to try Forged in the Dark, but Powered by the Apocalypse just makes me run back to Shadowrun as it is. It’s way too far the other way, barebones and genre-centric to a limiting extent. For all its issues, maybe even because of its bloat, it never leaves you out of options for any assortment of scenario themes.

            • M. Orange
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              210 months ago

              I would actually highly recommend the [World, Star, Citie]s Without Number systems. They’ve been going for about ten years, and while the individual systems themselves are genre-centric (fantasy, sci-fi, and cyberpunk respectively), they’re all inter-compatible and offer a good midpoint between crunchy systems and rules-light.

              Also, I think Savage Worlds is setting agnostic and a little bit crunchier than most rules-light systems, but I have little experience with it.

              • TwilightVulpine
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                110 months ago

                I did have good experiences with Savage Worlds. It’s system is a little strange, but it manages to be simple while still offering a good variety of mechanics for different themes, though it isn’t itself narratively-oriented if that’s what the group wants.

        • @[email protected]
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          110 months ago

          I don’t remember much of angel but in supernatural it’s eldritch creatures posing as billionaires to control and dumb down humanity to use them as a perpetual food source. Actually pretty deep and prescient for an older show.

      • M. Orange
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        110 months ago

        Charmed did the reverse in that Hell is basically a bureaucracy.

    • @[email protected]
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      110 months ago

      Nah, comparing them to cosmic horrors is giving them too much importance, I think.

      I’d rather compare them to, say, the diarrhea that forced that plane to turn around a while back.

      No cosmic anything, just a foul horrid unending flow of liquid excrement purposelessly ruining everyone’s day, making everything shittier, and stinking the whole place up for decades to come.