We'll Temporarily Have Paris

Not anyway directly involved in this, just getting the topic ready for when it gets released and in our hands based on the the past two published adventures topic discussion :wink:

1 Like

Soooooon....

1 Like

I saw the email release yesterday and picked up my copy. I see it is two items - a pop-up juncture and an adventure

I can only read the juncture part of the book for now as I will be a player in the adventure and don’t want to spoil it for myself or other players

There are some items I will want to ask and share personal opinions about the juncture but will come back when I finished reading it.

1 Like

Flipped through the new book tonight. There's a lot of great stuff there: the adventure and pop-up juncture in general, plus 4 new Archetypes(!), and an armory of WWII weapon and vehicle stats.

I am super happy and excited to have access to all this, but there were also a few math-related things in the book that seem potentially problematic...

WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS

  1. Young Doctor Archetype: Has Toughness listed as "?" instead of a number, which I assume is an error.

  2. The Young Doctor's very-expensive Code Blue schtick is almost always going to be less useful than just a normal Medicine roll, since if you get the patient down to 34 or fewer Wounds with a Medicine roll they don't have to make the Death Check (main rulebook, pages 106-107). There are situations where Code Blue will be better than normal Healing, but I think they'll be really rare, especially given how much Fortune it costs to activate Code Blue.

  3. There are Mooks in the adventure armed with melee weapons that have a Damage rating of 21, more than double the deadliest standard weapon from the main rulebook. That's going to be a real nasty surprise should a Mook roll high enough to hit a Hero, and I can only assume every Martial Arts -based PC is going to want to pick up and keep those weapons after they've KO'd the mooks. I'm wondering if maybe it's supposed to be "12" and the digits got transposed.

  4. There's a Boss with a melee weapon that has a Damage rating of 4. So 3-points lower than he'd do if he just dropped it and started punching. That seems like a mistake as well. (Edit: Unless it's intended as a throwing weapon. A lower damage attack that has the advantage of being used at range could make sense, and has precedent in the rulebook. So maybe that's what's going on here?)

So having read only the non adventure part of the book, have some points and observations:

  1. That big red blurb, rather the crass where to stick it I would recommend in being the better and bigger gamer in stating you will never be welcomed here to any far-right neo-nationalist. I

  2. I was hoping for a small blurb on a why did you create this pop juncture - especially as this juncture challenges the initial ideas and points made on page 263 of the core rule book. Something which I do agree on.

  3. A lot of information has been given on la resistance, occupation and Paris but I don’t see any tips tying back to the feng shui factions (especially on the Ascended) and their influence in the area

  4. Missed opportunity to describe some of the vehicles in their Hollywood stand ins - like the Tiger 1 looks like a modified soviet T-34 (Kelly’s Heroes) or the SDZ armoured cars look like M8 Greyhounds painted grey (Guns of Navarone)

  5. Dude/tte- where is my Kübelwagon ? And my Opel Blitz?

Only have a few minutes, but to briefly address #2: We actually took efforts to make it consistent with p. 263 of the rulebook. You'll note on p. 14 of Paris that we've explicitly established the Nazis as disrupting the Ascended's influence: The Nazis aren't Ascended and the horrors they perpetuated in the real world are not the result of anyone except the Nazis being Nazis.

With that being said, I'm personally fairly skeptical of the idea that you can have any setting with supernatural conspiracies secretly in control of everything... except any real world atrocity. I understand the desire to not suggest that racism exists because of vampires or whatever, but I think there are significantly problematic elements of saying "Evil, Inc. is responsible for everything good in the world history; humans are responsible for everything bad in history."

But I digress.

For Feng Shui the Ascended are not responsible for the Nazis. The Nazis are responsible for the Nazis.

3 Likes

That is fine, I was just expressing some first look opinions against some preconceived ideas when I heard of the project

We haven’t started the adventure for tonight but we have already started loading up on ‘allo, ‘allo lines

2 Likes

And now they have started the adventure with the fight in the aeroplane. The fact that one of the officers in the transport is "Lieutenant Grueber" lead to no end of "little tank"ery.

The players had fun blazing away with firearms in a plane made of tinfoil so I had fun blowing up the engines one by one. Luckily it's a trimotor so they had a half extra on what they might have expected.

At one point the co-pilot took the opportunity of the engine on his side catching fire to bail out. Later one of the remaining officers decided that discretion was the better part of valour and went for a 'chute. He was then shot by the other remaining officer for desertion. It always confuses the players when the GMCs start shooting each other.

So now the PCs are face down in the mud of a French field, illuminated by nothing but the fireball of an exploding medium transport plane. Except for the one clutching the cargo netting in the separated tail section sitting atop a king's ransom of Wehrmacht luggage. That and a portal to the Netherworld.

3 Likes

Any word on this? Official or from anyone who has run it? What would be a reasonable value?
Or should I just pick something and move on :sunglasses:

1 Like

Any word on this? Official or from anyone who has run it?

As far as the toughness of the Young Doctor, I would pick 7 or 8 and get on with it. My players are bringing their characters from Burning Dragon and Apeworld to the adventure so I've not had to deal with it.

Our killer was very happy to procure himself a pair of MP-40s with which to blaze away at all comers. Something about fine German craftsmanship I think.

The PCs then decided to head straight for the château. I think this was my first major misstep. I should have engineered things so they end up in Paris anyway. If they skip the Eiffel tower you're loosing a lot of the adventure. I think it best to keep it in but also keep it short.

They stole a truck from the soldiers who came to investigate the crash and would have driven straight to the objective if I hadn't thrown a resistance ambush in.

They hooked up with the resistance and were lead across field and down lane towards their objective. I had two fight scenes to include, the ambush or the checkpoint. I decided to use the ambush first in order to bring the idea that other factions are abroad. The GMCs have grenades so grenades were used. I chose to set the fight in the town square of a small French village. Cafe Renne was blown up.

After more fields and lanes they came across the checkpoint. This doesn't work well on a country rode. The Gestapo officer has only a blackjack so give him some ranged attack or he will be butchered from far away.

The players did consider just using hedgerows to sneak past but I waved the carrot of an MG-42 mounted on motorbike and sidecar. So now our Killer has MP-40s akimbo and a light machine gun. Our Maveric Cop also has wheels.

I think this encounter works better in its intended location of Paris where it can be just round the corner so range is not an issue. Also the mooks are given as one officer and one soldier per PC. Leading my players to wonder what sort of punishment detail this checkpoint was given that it had 4 officers and a member of the Gestapo at it. They also noticed that it was the same setup as the 'plane interior wondering if they too were going to a party.

This week, the château.

Young Doctor's Toughness should be 6.

2 Likes

The final session saw our plucky band of misanthropes pitch up at the château ready to cause some damage. I was surprised to find only 2 pages of material, most of it stat blocks, for the climactic fight. I could have gone for some more.

For example there's a whole load of back story to the crazy engineer and her tank but I didn't notice any stats for her or any guidance on what to do with her. In the absence of anything else I treated her like a mook and given that she's on her own in her barn she went down fast.

Then there were the communist resistance. They are mentioned in the setting material and the players found their leader in the pantry but there doesn't seem to be anything else. No obvious mechanism for the PCs to meet the communist resistance to be asked to rescue this person. Nor anyone to re-unite them with.

Our killer was happy to see that his newly acquired MG-42 and the one on the tank both have pistol grips and I saw no reason to say no to him dual wielding them. After all, one was mounted to the tank and the other had a bipod and could be set up on the turret. Not surprisingly the chief Nazi went down hard from both guns blazing LMGs.

The art work was located and a bloody swath cut through the garrison. The tank was used to flatten the building and the plastique to flatten the tank. Then it was off home for tea and meddles.

Polling my players we felt this was the least successful of this years run of adventures. It seems that it is trying to emulate war films in the vein of "A bridge Too Far" and "The Great Escape" but it didn't land for us. It never sang and we never felt really engaged with it.

Despite the "why aren't we just leaving now?" problem "Burning Dragon" gave us the best experience. It was easy to overlook the structural problem because it was brimming with stuff. "Apeworld On Fire" was also well filled but just not as compelling. "Temporary Paris" just seemed a bit thin. This probably has much to do with the fact that it seemed to be more interested in being a source book than an adventure.

And who was the character I came to know as "Electrob*stard" depicted towards the end of the book? He doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere.

Why to not correct the pdf file at least?
I bought it the last week, downloaded and find it still as '?'.

Ciao from Italy
Marco

We'll do a wrap-up of all first phase errata in one update. It's a balancing act between repeatedly spamming people with updates and getting corrections out.

1 Like

That's great!

Thank you very much

(Please, do not wait for too long... :wink:)

Ciao from Italy
Marco

Yeah. My copy of WTHP (which I just bought) had the ? for the Young Doctor's Toughness as well.

Also, I noticed some discrepancies with the guns from the adventure in question:

  • The Luger P-08 should be a 10/2/4 gun rather than 9/1/3 -- 9mm weapons like the Luger always do 10 base damage, the Luger weights 871 grams according to Wikipedia, which disqualifies it from a Concealment of 1, and it has an eight-round mag.
  • The Walther PPK should have the same stats as its FS2 counterpart, 9/1/5, instead of 8/1/3.
  • The MP40 should be a 10/5/1 weapon instead of 9/5/1 due to using the same ammo as the Luger, and as it so happens, it's also listed as such in the FS2 main rules.
  • The two white skulls that mark the MG42 as granting you +2 to attacks vs. Mooks are down a ways, concealing the words "the MG42" in the description of the weapon instead of being next to the 13/5/1 stats as normal. Though this may be a problem with my PDF reader (I use Foxit).

Also, another popular Nazi gun from the WWII era was the Mauser C-96, a.k.a. the Broomhandle Mauser. Many of these guns had to be loaded with old-style "stripper clips" which loaded from the top rather than the bottom like many mag-loaded guns today, but the select-fire M-712 Schnellfeuer variant used the standard detachable mags. For simplicity's sake, the C-96 would have stats of 10/2/3 due to its ten-round clip, while the Schnellfeuer would have stats of 10/2/2 due to its 20-round mag.

4 Likes

All good stuff although I wouldn't be too worried about things not matching across different books.

Genre emulation is the key here and the genre being emulated is war films. So if weapons seem to do less damage in war films than the core book would suggest then hey, would you look at that, they do less damage in this juncture.

Also if Gestapo officers are always suddenly manifesting unlikely Luger's from their under-crackers then I guess they are more concealable in this juncture.

2 Likes