does anyone want to kungfu an uproar in heaven

Also your role as a player is as a deity. Of any of the kinds I listed above. We're trying to cause an uproar in Heaven. Shake up the natural order a bit. GIVE IT THAT JAME TOUCH.

 

And now for a cheat sheet on the "races" basically. Which we call incarnations:

Tianshen: Pretty stone people with LOTS OF ARMS. the upper class. got bling. obsessed with ONE EMOTION.
Asura: GIANT ROBOTS, aka literally transformers more than meets the eye. quickly changing moods.
Devils: SPOOKY HORNED BROS and furries. weird foreigners we just kind of accept because I GUESS you're deities. URGH
Beasts: literally furries. the second class citizens. always working. basically kendar.
Immortal: KUNG FU MASTER. super daoist.
Bodhisatta: like a saint seiya character. wears badass armor. super buddhist.

 

thank you, this is much easier to understand!

ah i was googling the wrong terms and only getting either pretty pictures of real mountains or tiny little pixelated images of ornate artwork. the linked picture is much more helpful

thank you. and thanks for the reassurance too.
i think i felt like an asshole because i was

1. outside of my otherwise too nerdy realm of experience and i was feeling lost again for the first time in a long time, and
2. cranky from meatspace issues that have since been resolved

good point. i think my issue is that i tend to panic so the more information i get beforehand the better. that and while i have done some RP before, it wasn't much and im still woefully underexperienced and feeling twitchy about it

but the explanations you're giving me are helping a lot with that feeling of being lost. ive also been trying to sketch out some simple images of what i'm getting from the text so i have a visual reference. once im mostly done would it be alright to post them here and see if im off-base?

 

Ahhhhhh. Ok that makes sense. I wasn't sure if like you were getting panicky because SO MUCH SHIT I NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING. Also if it helps any this will be my first time running this game. And the others are new here with the system too.

And sure! Feel free to post and ask if they're on point. And don't worry. Even I've messed things up with it too. See the earlier sorcery talk and my moment of OH GOD I FUCKED IT UP.

Happy to see you're in a good place now though.

 

well maybe a little bit of Must Have All The Info...but thats more the 'tisms than anything else
and it is reassuring to know i'll be with other relative noobs :]

and suddenly the scene from bruce almighty comes roaring back. i didn't know post-its were a form of currency XD

 

Religion is exceptionally bureaucratic at every level. Reason why tianshen Tori in the spr has all his talismans described as form letters. Becauae they are in fact standard form letters! So much paperwork for him while Jame goes and blows things up dammit dammit TOO MANY PRAYERS TO SORT.

 

im getting a lot of the same vibes as kill 6 billion demons

like the celestial seat is a lot like the red city but bigger, tianshen are a lot like the angels in that, the asura are a lot like the devils, the beasts are like the uh...well in k6bd you got 4 groups of people: angels, ???, humans, and devils. all on a scale from "coldest" to "hottest" and the beasts of sutra stories remind me of the ??? (who's name i can't think of atm) in the whole "meant to labor for the gods in the holy city" bit

which is helping a bit with understanding everything

but i get the feeling the beasts in SS is like the ??? class from k6bd combined with the animal lords from Princess Mononoke? is that kind of in the right ball park?

 

It is in fact inspired partly by Kill 6 Billion Demons apparently! I don't know much about that comic though. Like it's super fucking Buddhist and Chinese. The idea of Heaven being a massive celestial court with a bureaucracy is actually playing Heaven in China very straight. But there's definitely influences from Kill 6 Billion Demons. I don't know them though.

Also...Maybe you are right? Basically the Beasts are in actuality the same kind of deity as the Tianshen. But they're not as meritorious. And they get viewed as little other than animals that have gained sentience by many, as opposed to deities in their own right. So they're treated as the labor and servants of Heaven. Need some masons? Go to the Beast clans! Need a janitor? Go to the Beast clans? Why till your own fields and pick your own fruit when you got Beasts? Soldiers? Yeah we got asuras and what not too but boy howdy let's treat the Beasts as canon fodder! Your purpose in Heaven as a Beast isn't to enjoy the fruits of your hard labor as a human. It is to serve the elite of Heaven. And as the Tianshen motto goes, "Only I Am The Most High". The Beasts? Theirs is "Working Hard, or Hardly Working?"

 

i highly recommend k6bd! the art is amazing and the lore is given in small and rather direct chunks with pretty art to visually organize it. the chat below each page has some nice stuff too. its basically a giant kung fu/mafia movie. like the whole tagline for the comic is "reach heaven through violence"

so its very similar thematically but seems to come from a different place than the PCs of SS. like in K6BD the protag is basically a sword-saint in training on the immortal path, while in SS you're already a member of heaven getting ready to fuck shit up

quick question about the "races" of SS: it says there are 8 but your write up earlier only had 6. also the rules mentioned a possible 9th. are the other 3 not included because they're not complete enough to play yet? i partially ask this out of curiosity and part out of finding Corpses a very interesting prospect for a character so i want to know if they're available or i need to look in another direction?

 

Urgh. You and Morven both. She keeps showing me shit from it like the cheeky bitch she is. IT ISN'T LIKE KENCYRATH THOUGH. SHE CAN'T THROW THE BOOKS AT MY FACE BECAUSE IT IS A WEBCOMIC. HAH. I WIN.

Also with the others...I forgot the corpses in my list with the others. Whoops. You can make a Corpse in three stages (Larval, Pupa, and Imago). Ghosts aren't sapient so you can't play a ghost. I'm blanking on what the eighth is at the moment. But these are the playable ones. Tianshen, asura, beast, corpse, devil, immortal, and bodhisatta. You can find information on what you must do when making a character of a particular incarnation in chapter 2 in the incarnation section. The information about how gameplay goes about and what these weird terms like aspect and special effect mean are there too.

 

oops. my bad. i'll drop it then

i think they're called Rakshasa? i haven't found any other info on them yet so i figured they were either incomplete at this stage or something like the secret hidden characters in a video game

cool i'll make sure to check that part out next and not worry so much about chapter 1 then

 

Oh no it's fine. I'm just a brat and like to dramatize things. Really the more people tell me about it the more I go ooooooooooh I should read this. I just...need to work up the motivation to do so. Fuck.

OHHHH. God dammit now I feel dumb for forgetting about rakshasa. Yeah there isn't anything on them as a playable race and just going off what I know about Buddhist lore rakshasa are kind of just...mindless horrible monsters anyway. Not sure what krack means to do with them though. Will have to poke him about it.

And on that note Kracken thanks you for your critique. Said it's been really helpful because he is just kind of going off the cuff with how to organize and write the book.

 

Also as a word of advice with aspects. Feel free to go wild with those. Get weird and creative with the things. Aspects should be a few things

• Flexible, it can mean many things in many contexts
• Beneficial, it can help you out in the right context
• Harmful, it can be used against you in the wrong context
• YOU, it's got say something about your character as a person

So we'll look at Jame for a bit because we both know her. Her past aspect is I Was A Devil's Protegee, Plaything More Like. Which is to say that she was, as a human, the student of a devil king called High King Perimeter of Darkness aka Gerridon. Now this says something about Jame. We know that she worked for a devil and that he said he'd teach her things. We also know that she was played with and we know that she knows she was played with. She knows she got a raw deal. Now on a good note? Think of all the things she might have learned from this. Weird devil martial arts and magics. She also might know not to trust people like Gerridon as a result too. And she might know how to influence and get around the sort of circles he works with because she was part of it. Buuuut. Gerridon's a petty douchebag. He realistically might have it in for her and I as the gm might go ok yeah we're gonna have Gerridon be a big player and we're gonna have him fuck with her. Maybe she's got issues from it. I mean yeah Jame's issues aren't as bad as her brother's issues but she's probably got issues with shit. And man what if people find out what she was? Would you trust that shit? This bitch is part of a weird strike team that's always blowing shit up and she used to be the star girl of some devil that we all know is up to some super illegal shit? No. You wouldn't trust her with a ten foot fucking pole between you. And with that we see that it's flexible. It says something about her physical and emotional skillsets, but also her contacts and how people might view her. There's a lot we can do with I Was A Devil's Protegee, Plaything More Like.

 

oh okay. i just tend to err on the side of caution when im not sure if i done goofed a thing or not. as i get to know someone better i can read their serious/exaggerating modes better

well im glad to be of some help
one other bit of advice i'd suggest, if i may: keep the terms used for things consistent. like in the parts where its explained what a tianshen is would be where you bring up the alternate names for them, and alternate origins, but the rest of the rules (including the history/lore) would just use tianshen so even people not super familiar with the source language can keep up

so yeah:

• geography before history
• consistant labeling and spelling
• some kind of visual aid for complex things (a simple diagram or a spreadsheet will work just fine)
• keep the mechanical explanations of similar things similarly structured (ex. name of incarnation first, then nature, then lore fluff, then forms. but for each incarnation. makes it easier to tell what part relates to what, when applicable)
• maybe relate the categories of things to their game equivalents? like saying in the description of incarnations that they're the game equivalent of "races", the offices the equivalent of "factions/guilds/families/etc."

uh...if i think of anything else is it alright for me to suggest it?
i know game development has got to be hella hard and i don't want to be presumptuous

 

Oh yeah it's definitely fine for you to suggest things as they come up. He wants feedback.

 

This has been passed on just so you know.

 

cool. thanks :D

 

If you have anything else please feel free to ask!

 

right now im catching up on the info in the ruleset docs since i have a better grasp of the basics

im reading about the officies right now. so far deaths is a dead ringer (XD) for one of my OCs i tend to use to experiment with new things so they might wind up being my test subject during character creation

but yeah, i'll post here again if i have any other questions or suggestions

 

Feel free to use OCs or even like existing fictional characters. Chief of the Horned Herd is literally Aradia Megido after all.

And alright.