Malsqueek

Coppelius is probably the most beastly scheme runner in the game. I use him as my Teddy alt when I don't feel like running Teddy.

I'm excited for the new Lelu and Lilith models.

The two of them basically share pretty much any model beautifully. Anything good for one fits nicely with the other.

I have an alternate means of recharging them with ny custom soulstone rules, which is necessary because I believe that quality and storage should not be linked. Well post them when I get home and have the notes in front of me.

Just remember, magic is powerful, but the Guild is more powerful.

I would adore a good custom weapon spread for ranged weapons, but it turns out that is HARD to put together.

I've been toying with the idea of adding more triggers to skills, and have been trying to figure out how to work it. This would be a pretty slick way of doing it. In terms of making a specific list of a bazillion new weapons, I'm not a big fan. We can already do a lot of this stuff with the custom weapons rules. Let the Fated buy a light blade and TELL you they use a rapier, and then use triggers on skills to help differentiate. Having triggers be a thing that you add to skills with 1 SP (let's be honest, there's a lot of these things flying around) seems pretty awesome, though I would generalize them a bit more. Precision Strike (req: Light Piercing Blade, Melee 4+) A successful Ml attack with a Light Piercing Blade gains the following trigger [Mask]: This Attack Ignores Armor and Hard to Wound Riposte: (req: Non-Heavy Melee Weapon, Melee 4+) A successful Df against a Ml attack gains the following trigger [Tomes]: Immediately make a single attack action against the attacker using the Df flip as the attack value. If you buy these at 1 Sp per, have requirements, and probably limit them to 1 per fate step, you'd be able to really flesh out a character nicely. (I've been thinking of attaching them to Aspect improving fate steps as well to up the perception of value on non-manifest powers)

Was giving this some thought today. If tradition magic is a thing passed down through the family which has a somewhat uniform form that the practitioners try to expand, tying it to the grimoire is a perfect idea. Check this out: Tradition Magic Practitioners of Tradition Magic have strong ties to their core magic principles. In some ways it is more a science than an art. As a result, the grimoires held by Tradition casters are unique and tend to hold quite a bit of history. Ultimately, the "Grimoire" is just a focus, as the caster fundamentally knows these Magia and Immuto by heart. They tend to be Rings, Wands, Tarot Cards, Rosarys, or Baubles manipulated while creating magic. Tradition Grimoires are less tomes and more focus objects which a caster has such familiarity that they need only to hold the object to recall its power. A Tradition Magic Practicioner may have two active grimoires at a time, one of which must be their Tradition Grimoire. The caster may use Magia and Immuto out of either of these grimoires. While only having their Tradition Grimoire active, a caster gains the benefits of a Focus Object (-2 TN) without applying the Immuto of the same name. A Tradition Magic Practicioner is so thoroughly tied to their Tradition Grimoire that they are unable to create magical effects from any grimoire without holding their Tradition Device in their hand.

What I've done for things like grappling is doing opposed might tests, and then take a note from our favorite classic fantasy. First success grabs 'em. Second success locks them in, then you can start kidney punching. They make tests to break your hold, and then to get free, or to apply their own hold. Similarly, kicking someone out of a chair would effectively be an opposed Grace test. You re trying to do it fast and smooth enough to turn them on their butt. They are trying to end up on their feet instead of butt. Heck, I'd even let my Fated do foot sweeps to knock prone with a simple opposed Grace test if they felt so inclined. Alternately, if someone who is a big beefcake wants to put someone on their behind, but their Grace is terrible, treat it like a bull rush. Opposed Might v. Grace for a knockdown. You really just need to determine 3 things: 1. What Aspect and or Skill best fits the attempted action. If there is an arguable tie, let the Fated choose (Engineering v. Artifacting for manipulating a strange console for instance) 2. Based upon how well the skill fits, how hard is this going to be (use the difficulty chart, or apply +/-2 modifiers as reasonable) 3. Is this a thing that is going to be an immediate or ongoing challenge? Once you have those three things, there really isn't much of anything that the system doesn't do well (aside from crafting... yet). TTB is very powerful for setting good dramatic scenes, if you are unsure of how to do a thing, try making your player suggest the appropriate skills.

Hey all, one thing that I'm sure many of you have noted is that our Fated have an infuriating capacity to kick out extremely high volumes of damage on a focused target. This can make it challenging to craft a good combat, as has been noted several places. I took a note from one of my other favorite RPG's and worked out a similar concept for TTB, which should help allow for fights that are more objective centric. Mobs of Things The idea of Mobs is that there are piles of a thing that would be irritating on its own, but perhaps not outright dangerous. However, in a seething mass, they are significantly more concerning. A Mob has four fundamental stats. Movement, Wounds (how many hits it can take before it dies. No crits here), Defense (TN to hit), and Attack (TN to Dodge). A Mob takes up an area of space, and can engage anything that it touches. It has a single move action, and then automatically hits anything it is touching. It is relatively mindless (yes, even a horde of villagers), and as a result is not affected at all by anything that requires sentience. Anything that defends on Wp, but would affect a mindless thing uses its Df value instead. Dealing damage to a Mob: Mobs take damage differently than normal creatures. They are a mass of things together, so it is more about how well you hit, rather than how hard. A Mob of Things will take 1 Wound for each successful attack, and an additional wound for every full margin of success that an attack succeeds by. Succeed by 6? That's 2 wounds, kids. Taking Damage from a Mob: Mobs automatically attack anything they are touching. They will deal 1 point of damage, plus one for every margin of failure on the Defense flip that cannot be reduced. Mobs will suffer 1 additional wound for every blast marker an attack inflicts upon them. As a generality, Defense and Attack TN can be pretty well similar (9-12 are good values) and should be related to how nasty the things are in general. 7 for rats, 13 for villagers for example. Wounds should be a multiple of this number, and related to the size of the mob. I like these for encounters where you are looking to apply pressure to a task which has to occur WHILE you are fighting, and to help mitigate those particularly nasty min/max combat characters and allow your less combat oriented to shine a bit.

Provided that a Fated had a Grimoire with all of those things in, OR had Mastered a couple of them, yes. Every one of those is possible.

In short, the reasoning was "Malifaux is a circa 1920's 'company town'". Anything that was required for a person to stay alive was the correct economic value. Anything that would enable a craftsman to make a living outside of bashing soulstone out of a hole in the ground was ridiculously expensive in order to keep the common man where they were wanted. Anything that would allow said common man to overthrow the Guild (eg. Firearms and Explosives) was purposefully made brutally expensive to limit their availability. I whole heartedly support that The pricing on Soulstones was bizarre even by that reasoning. I get the Lade 6+ stones being costed at "We will take Geogria in trade", but the lade 1-3 stones especially shouldn't have been costed as they were.

This is exactly right. One thing that is helpful to do is to open up the magic section and practice making some Manifest Powers. I found that trying to tinker with what was possible without the limits of a grimoire let me really understand how the magic system works. As an example, one of my Fated has what amounts to Hyper-Powered Suggestion in the form of Mind Control with a Delay (keyed off of a trigger), and a +1 AP bump and shackling it to Living to help reduce the required TN. There are some character-requested limitations as well, where he has to be able to speak, but the recipient does not need to understand him for the effect. What this allows him to do (in effect) is spend his turn verbally engaging an opponent to do his bidding "Are you sure that it is me that you want to shoot? What have I ever done to you? Maybe the next time you want to shoot someone, you think about your buddy over there who cheated you at cards last week". Hilarity ensues. If you practice by building a couple manifested powers by starting with the desired result, you'll have a really good grip on the system as a whole.

I do a plenty good job of ensuring that enough Bad Things Happen. muahahahahahaha

The gamers in the Seattle area are pretty good folks all around. Card Kingdom is definitely the best space around, but it is way out of the way. I live down south for the next couple of weeks, and will be moving close® to Games and Gizmos soon. I'd love to see more M2E players here, and have a prayer of getting more than a game or two every couple months.

Oh, man. That's a great idea! Time to have an adventure down in the belly of a soulstone mine.

Another thing that may be of value, when you consider that carbines are meant to be useful for the low-skilled combat character, and I thin kit's valuable to have that tool. Maybe the appropriate thinig for a carbine is to change its standard Carbine ability from [+] to "Ignore the first [-] when attacking with a Carbine in two hands". Very similar effect, but with less ability to blow stuff up.

You can definitely set up a character to break the game, and that's what a good fatemaster is for. You want to challenge your players, so setting scenes which complicate their expertise is totally fine. Your an excellent gunman, but how do you do a gun chase when you also have to drive the wagon.

So, I've got one of those nice Malifaux bags which are great for my normal miniatures, but I've found that I can't really fit anything above a 40mm base into it in a way that I feel good about. What do you guys do for your 50mm critters to carry them around? I'd like some non-magnet solutions if possible as I use resin bases for some of my stuff.

I completely agree with your reasoning here. Player Agency is one of the things I try to put forefront as well. My group tends to do a lot of social interaction stuff, which leads me to make the more infrequent combats grittier. They seem to respond to it pretty well also.

So, Shine, I have a buddy who just adores probabilities who actually ran the numbers on the difference between a positive twist and a static modifiers. IF you assume a fresh deck (which we really never can), the first positive twist is the rough equivalent of about a +2.5. Which is to say that a person with a positive twist going up against a person with a static positive 2, the positive twist will flip a higher card ever so slightly more often. The second positive twist is the rough equivalent of +3.5, and the third is roughly +4.25. Useful stuff to know when designing an encounter or trying to set modifiers. That said, I have not found the negative twist to defense a huge problem for two reasons. First is that the Fatemaster is in direct control of the story, and you don't always need to take those actions. In fact it is useful to have that tool in your arsenal for "serious" fights. On top of that, our Fated can take a SERIOUS beating before actually dying. It's not hard to knock them unconscious, but killing them? Pretty tough. Also, remember that there are things like the Pioneer's Talent which allows them to discard a card and have all of their party dive into cover (as a reaction). Pioneer discards a card and everyone in the group can now offset a single negative twist and still cheat. At the end of the day, it's your hot body and you can do with it as you will, but I would suggest retaining the negative twist because you can use it to communicate the seriousness of an enemy with their first swing.

I disagree. It does take a bit of getting used to (especially the idea that the red joker on damage targeting the Fated actually means "0", and the Black Joker is the big hit), but once you learn to consider all bonuses in light of the Fated being the one flipping, it really is quite easy. Enemy have paired weapons? Negative twist on defense. Fated in cover? Positive twist on Defense. Enemy with Calm and Collected takes a focus action before firing a rifle? Your fated needs to take a double negative twist on their Defense. And so on. Enemy bonuses are debuffs. The single flip makes the game WAY faster. You hardly have to break stride in your storytelling once your players get a good feel of the system. Me: "The drunken Gunslinger whips his revolver from its holster and trains its barrel on your chest. He squeezes the trigger" Fated: "I try to dive behind cover" Me: "Positive Twist" Fated: "Two cards and...... Twelve" Me: "You barely manage to scramble behind the crumbling cobblestone wall when the flurry of bullets from the gunslinger peppers the stones. You are quite shaken, but otherwise unhurt"

The way I handle the stuff is that a single "charge" of soulstone dust is frequently contained in little phials about the size of a cologne sampler.

Me too, and I'm sincerely torn. I have little desire to actually PLAY Marcus, and have no supporting Arcanist models, but the models are so damn tasty that I kinda have to paint them, and it would be a shame to paint them and then not play.

I thought those were pulled off the fated attack flip.