So, I just picked up the PDF of Red Tide from Sine Nomine Publishing and it is a pretty nifty read so far. I haven' read Stars Without Number so I can't compare the two. Anyone else picked this one up?

I have it, but I've only skimmed it so far.  I liked what I saw enough that I'll probably order a paper copy of labyrinth lord as well.

Grognardia does a better review than I could, so I'll just link to it:

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-red-tide.html

Quote from: Brasidas;460639I have it, but I've only skimmed it so far.  I liked what I saw enough that I'll probably order a paper copy of labyrinth lord as well.

Grognardia does a better review than I could, so I'll just link to it:

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-red-tide.html

I am definitely digging Labyrinth Lord too. With the Advanced Edition Companion it is like a cleaned up, simpler AD&D.

I read James' blog but his 'the old way or the highway attitude' can sometimes be grating.

Sounds bloody awful.

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Quote from: RPGPundit;460868Sounds bloody awful.

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Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I am loving it so far. The eastern touches make for a welcome change from generic fantasy settings and the amount of STUFF included is just fantastic. You get a detailed setting, suggestions on how to set up and run the campaign, overland and encounter maps and TONS of tables for generating cities, encounter sites. etc.

It's fantastic.

Well, I haven't actually read it or anything, just read the description of it in the link provided.  Maybe they take the premise (which is what I dislike) and move it in a really great direction.

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Quote from: RPGPundit;460908Well, I haven't actually read it or anything, just read the description of it in the link provided.  Maybe they take the premise (which is what I dislike) and move it in a really great direction.

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What in particular? The cataclysm, the China-lite, the friendly orcs?

If I pick this up I would be more likely to strip it for parts than to use the setting as-written, but I'm still kind of interested what the execution of the Red Tide setting is like.

I agree, the parts sounds interesting. They also sound like they might naturally complement Vornheim. (I don't own either.)

What I don't care for about the setting-as-pitched is that it sounds all too much like the game is "about" the cataclysm. Here's the quote from DTRPG:

QuoteFor three hundred years, the last remnants of humanity have clung to the wild green jungles of the Sunset Isles. They have watched the red mist that consumed their world roil a hundred miles off the coast, waiting, a beast at bay. But now the crimson dreams are becoming stronger, and the wild Shou tribes of the west howl their hate at the human invaders. Who shall rise to save a world quenched in blood?

To be honest, I'm not interested in saving the world, and I dislike the idea that some sort of bad thing is going to wipe out the setting unless my PC does something about it.

To borrow from something I wrote about Dragon Pass in Glorantha, there you've definitely got a major conflict, and you could opt to take sides, but unlike Red Tide you don't necessarily have to, and the campaign will go on regardless.

Or consider Talislanta, which had a cataclysm in its past, or Tales of Gargentihr, where you have something like colonial settlers who've been cut off from their home continent. They give a reason for the contrasts and conflicts, without forcing anything.

Reading some more about the Red Tide setting, it sounds a little less like the opening blurb, but not enough to overcome the initial impression.

Sounds pretty cool. Kevin + LL sounds good, and I do like East meets West when done right (read: without anime BS). I also do like when familiar setting elements get a twist that makes them potentially fresh again (i.e. the Shou). I might check it out when I get the occasion.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;460916What I don't care for about the setting-as-pitched is that it sounds all too much like the game is "about" the cataclysm. Here's the quote from DTRPG:To be honest, I'm not interested in saving the world, and I dislike the idea that some sort of bad thing is going to wipe out the setting unless my PC does something about it.

Well, like I say in "The role of the Tide" section of the book, if your players aren't interested in the Tide, then the GM shouldn't make the game about it. Ultimately, it and the other structural conflicts in the setting are designed to serve some very specific functions for a GM. Every conflict in the book is there to make it easy to generate a particular type of game focus. Just to go down the list of the bigger hot spots:

The Red Tide: It's there to provide an entry point for Lovecraftian play. It offers Eldritch Horrors from Beyond in a rules set that pretty well typifies the die-like-flies aesthetic popular in those gaming circles. At high levels, it provides a baked-in menace for your world-conquering heroes to go up against. In a structural sense, it also provides a reason why all these disparate cultures are packed closely together in an area small enough to be managed comfortably by a DM.

The Shou: Want to kill orcs and take their stuff? Well, there are the Shou: old-fashioned humanoid-slaughtering targets with a structural reason why they have to die. If your players want to deal more with the idea of clashing cultures and the moral ambiguity of killing a bunch of natives so their own people can avoid starvation, well, then you emphasize the more human-like traits of the Shou and how they really never asked to have a bunch of desperate foreigners turn up on the beach with a "good for one free genocide" coupon.

The Magocracy of Tien Lung: Cackling sorcerers dabbling in blood sacrifices that grant them untold power at a terrible price? Ornate palaces of gilded brass staffed by lobotomized slaves and poison-minded lickspittles? This place is for providing a steady supply of wizards who need to have their brains repurposed as floor varnish by pantherish barbarian heroes. Optionally, it also gives a location for crazy-wizard-academy play, where everyone's trying to murder their colleagues in the safest possible way. Need some horrible magical MacGuffin or decadent over-civilized sociopath? They came from Tien Lung.

The Shogunate and the Hell Cultists: Here's where your players get to put on their Puritan hats and play witch-hunter. The Red Tide does Cthulhu-esque foaming zealots, while the Hell Cults provide the more rational, brutally self-interested types that are more amenable to political play and court intrigue. The Shogunate is also set up to start an all-fronts war at any moment, for those occasions when you want to add military play to your game.

The Westmark: Archetypal borderlands territory full of petty warlords, bandits, ruined cities, goblinoids, and scrappy settlers trying to make a better life for themselves, but who would never dream of trying to homestead the place if the humans weren't desperate for more land. This is where players go when they just want some old-fashioned low-level hexcrawly exploration play that doesn't take them too far away from civilization. As they ramp up in competence, they can start checking out some of the numerous unexplored islands in the archipelago, each of which is self-contained enough to stick something weird there without having to worry about rationalizing its effects on the rest of your sandbox.

Aside from that, I also intentionally made the site generation and resource sections largely setting-agnostic so they could be used in other fantasy campaigns. The name tables in the Resource section, for example, are almost all calqued on real-life cultures, so you can use the Eirengarder name table either to provide Eirengarder names or to provide names for the Teutonic types in your own game. The tong court generator that provides a power structure and VIP cast for a local tong can just as easily be used to flesh out a peasant brotherhood in a different game. The sixty different site tags I flesh out are almost all applicable to just about any fantasy setting, with only a few of them specific to Red Tide.

The book and its contents are really very instrumentally designed. Unsurprisingly, I like the Red Tide setting and I think it's got a lot of potential to keep a group occupied through quite a few sessions. But I didn't write the book for its sake- it just serves as the framework for providing a big chunk of sandbox tools and GM resources.

Hm. That summary sounds more appealing to me than James M's.

Are Shou literal orcs, goblins, etc., or are they human-types given those names, like Eddison's Demons and Witches, etc.?

Quote from: Cole;460951Hm. That summary sounds more appealing to me than James M's.

Are Shou literal orcs, goblins, etc., or are they human-types given those names, like Eddison's Demons and Witches, etc.?

I left it intentionally ambiguous in the section where I explain their origins to the GM. A Shou that hasn't gone in for the tooth-sharpening, ear-clipping, ritual scarification, and other tribal customs is usually indistinguishable from a human, save for those tribes that have odd skin colorings. They're interfertile with humans and the offspring can often pass as full human if they're not orange or green- and usually try to, given the predictable amount of loathing for all things Shou. Stat-wise, they generally use the same statistics as LL's standard orcs/goblins/bugbears/hobgoblins.

Why leave it ambiguous? Because some players just want good humanoid targets in the classic tradition, and I don't want to force GMs to explicitly ignore what they've paid for. On the other hand, some players will want to be in a game that explores what it is to be Cortez with fireballs, and in that case the GM can leave it pretty much as a given that Shou tribes are just engineered kinds of humans. The goal is to make the element as cooperative as possible with either angle, providing support for the GM either way he takes it.

Quote from: SineNomine;460952I left it intentionally ambiguous in the section where I explain their origins to the GM. A Shou that hasn't gone in for the tooth-sharpening, ear-clipping, ritual scarification, and other tribal customs is usually indistinguishable from a human, save for those tribes that have odd skin colorings. They're interfertile with humans and the offspring can often pass as full human if they're not orange or green- and usually try to, given the predictable amount of loathing for all things Shou. Stat-wise, they generally use the same statistics as LL's standard orcs/goblins/bugbears/hobgoblins.

Why leave it ambiguous? Because some players just want good humanoid targets in the classic tradition, and I don't want to force GMs to explicitly ignore what they've paid for. On the other hand, some players will want to be in a game that explores what it is to be Cortez with fireballs, and in that case the GM can leave it pretty much as a given that Shou tribes are just engineered kinds of humans. The goal is to make the element as cooperative as possible with either angle, providing support for the GM either way he takes it.

Interesting; thanks.

The description here does more service to the book than what's on the link.  In any case, yes, the thing I'm wary of is "the evil humans are wiping out the poor native orcs"...blah.

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I was so-so on it (mainly b/c I don't play LL) until I read about the sandbox stuff. If it's a fantasy version of the setting generation stuff in SWN, I'm extremely interested.